sublime a feeling brought about by objects that are infinitely large or vast (such as the heavens or the ocean) or overwhelmingly powerful (such as a raging torrent, huge mountains, or precipices). The former (in Kant’s terminology) is the mathematically sublime and the latter the dynamically sublime. Though the experience of the sublime is to an important extent unpleasant, it is also accompanied by a certain pleasure: we enjoy the feeling of being overwhelmed. On Kant’s view, this pleasure results from an awareness that we have powers of reason that are not dependent on sensation, but that legislate over sense. The sublime thus displays both the limitations of sense experience (and hence our feeling of displeasure) and the power of our own mind (and hence the feeling of pleasure).
The sublime was an especially important concept in the aesthetic theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reflection on it was stimulated by the appearance of a translation of Longinus’s Peri hypsous (On the Sublime) in 1674. The ‘postmodern sublime’ has in addition emerged in late twentieth century thought as a basis for raising questions about art. Whereas beauty is associated with that whose form can be apprehended, the sublime is associated with the formless, that which is ‘unpresentable’ in sensation. Thus, it is connected with critiques of ‘the aesthetic’ – understood as that which is sensuously present – as a way of understanding what is important about art. It has also been given a political reading, where the sublime connects with resistance to rule, and beauty connects with conservative acceptance of existing forms or structures of society. See also AESTHETIC PROPERTY, AESTHET — ICS , BEAUT. S.L.F.