The Sense of the Sublime PART ONE: Ch. 1 The Discourse of the Sublime: Lexis, Semantics, Rhetoric, Style (original) (raw)
The Sublime, Nature's Eloquent Gift
Eirene. Studia graeca et latina, 53, 2017, pp. 9-75., 2017
Discussing two recent books on the sublime (James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, and, in part, Robert Doran, The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant), the review essay takes a closer look at the theoretical implications of, especially, Porter’s reading of Longinus. The main virtue of this reading is found to be twofold. First, avoiding the trap of a too narrow conceptualization of sublimity, it brings in an unusually broad range of texts that deal with sublime phaenomena from all the relevant points of view. Second, emphasizing the place of Longinus in the rhetorical tradition, it offers an archeology of the sublime’s fundamental relation to language. Demonstrating that no experience of sublimity is possible without speech that makes it articulate – and therefore shareable and teachable –, Porter enables us to rethink what Longinus has to say about nature, human nature, and art. The sublime emerges here as a unique yet variegated mental habitat where superhuman nature and the art of eloquence can connect and make us “see” what is incomparably greater than our shape and size that usually limit both our experience and the way we analyze it. The sublime reverses this experience and makes the universe bounce back on us by suddenly revealing its most distance vistas, but also its possible internal cracks and ruptures. Longinus himself does not theorize this situation as such: if he quotes and discusses a number of sources (Homer’s sublime mind looms large in his account), he is equally open to a form of Platonism and to those cosmic intervals or voids that originate with Lucretius whose theoretical stance is the most anti-Platonic imaginable. This is no contradiction: at the heart of the expressible sublime, there is a subtle and ongoing negotiation between what Porter labels the material and the immaterial sublime. If the former finds its expression in the poetics of the Presocratic authors and also in Lucretius, whereas the latter reaches its peak in various Platonic images of the soul’s ascent, neither kind of the sublime is a pure form and their difference is a matter of degree and scale. Regardless of theoretical orientation of different authors, the projection of their premises into the material universe leads the reader’s imagination towards the unachievable whole of reality as “sublime reality” (Porter). Compared to Porter’s enterprise, Doran’s book is less concerned with the rhetorical issues and focused on the sublime as a self-transcending psychological state that is more or less independent on the rhetoric of its expression. Instead, Doran’s sublime has a history that is intertwined with the culturally co-determined morality: especially the modern sublime thus shifts towards bourgeois rather than aristocratic values. The question is to know whether we find such a shift anticipated in the last chapter of Longinus’ treatise, which offers various views on the progressive disappearance of truly great and sublime natures. Longinus himself connects this process to the issue of political freedom and the world (imperial) peace, but leaves the matter of the true cause of the decline unresolved. Political progress or decline notwithstanding, to learn the appropriate rhetorical art of the sublime enables us to recover sublimity through the imitation or re-enactment that helps us to literally saturate our soul with the effluences of the great minds of the past.
The Aesthetic Category of the Sublime as a
The aesthetic category of the sublime, as expounded by Western discourse, is built upon the precultural experience of awe and the idea of greatness derived from that experience� Accordingly, it may be treated as a potentially universal category that comes in several cultural variants� The aim of this study is to present a methodology in which the material sublime is used to systematise and analyse a variety of literary techniques that constitute the persuasive force of Sanskrit grand narratives (itihāsas, purāṇas, and mahākāvyas)� The model of the material sublime described here is meant to be compared and supplemented with elements of Sanskrit literary theory�
The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime, ed. Cian Duffy, 2023
This chapter traces the use of the sublime in ancient Greek and Latin literature from Homer through Augustine. Starting from the basic premise that the study of the classical sublime cannot be restricted to a reading of Longinus, it demonstrates that the sublime was a recognizable phenomenon, an ethical stance, a marker of ideology and value, and a topic of debate from at least the fifth century BCE. Ancient writers make sublime spectacles out of practically anything, from the starry sky to the gemstone, from monumental architecture to architectural ruins. Numerous texts imbue human subjects, such as mythological figures and natural philosophers, with a greatness of soul that electrifies readers with the thrill of the sublime, and when such figures falter or collapse, their fall from greatness is equally spectacular. The chapter concludes with a sample of texts that reject or problematize the value of the sublime or that police its use.
"Sublime," in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, 2020
What is the sublime? This entry defines the "sublime" and presents its historical context, focusing on its conceptual and philosophical aspects. The sublime denotes an intense, charged emotion with high arousal and containing a mixed valence (i.e. negative-to-positive). A sublime experience is an aesthetic experience of uplift and elevation in response to a powerful or vast object that is otherwise often experienced as menacing or overwhelming. Yet the experience is overall positive and pleasing. Second, this entry surveys several themes disputed in the literature: the sublime's relation to beauty, fear, and awe, why it is pleasing, and its being self-referential or reflexive. Third, the entry summarizes recent empirical research on the topic. The sublime has received relatively little scientific attention, only beginning in the past decade. A prominent empirical approach to the sublime conceptualizes it as having a fear component, although some recent studies have begun to question this. Finally, the entry concludes with a reflection on the sublime and the possible.
Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2023
Longinus introduced sublimity as a type of eminence or excellence of discourse, especially in literature and oratory. In ancient times, poetry was believed to be the finest product of art and this can be traced in the writings of great Greek thinkers like Aristotle, Plato and Longinus. Longinus advocates for the assimilation of certain qualities which, together, produces sublime feelings or expressions. It should be noted that there is distinction between grandeur and sublimity; grandeur produces amazement and wonder, but sublimity encompasses a combination of wonder and an ability to transport the mind with an irresistible power. Longinus declares that Sublimity, if produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s whole power as a single blow. This paper will try to investigate different stages of the ‘sublime’ as a style in poetry within the rhetorical tradition of the ancient Greco-Roman world, its core nature, and the way it operates to build the soul of a lofty art product. It will also try to re-understand Longinus’s theory of sublimity, its importance and relevance.
Transcendent Subjectivity- The Sublime....pdf
Philosophy as a method tries to identify – through logical analysis and phenomenological description – the conceptual basis of different modes of knowing and valuing. It is orientated towards constants in human experience, those features that enable the very possibility of knowing and valuing. However, whilst there are constants in experience, these are often realized differently, under different historical and cultural conditions. The realm of aesthetics is rich in such examples. In the present Chapter , it will be explored in relation to the sublime and pictorial art (with a few references to other media). I start from a radical adaptation and revision of theories set forth by Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. It is then explained in detail why – despite its grounding in experiential constants - the sublime only emerges as an overt and sustained feature of aesthetic sensibility from the late eighteenth-century onwards. I then go on to consider why the sublime seems to disappear from European sensibility, only to re-emerge with great force in the postmodern era.
The role of imagination in the sublime
Kant: Making Reason Intuitive, 2007
In the aesthetic texts of Friedrich Schiller, undoubtedly one of the most perceptive readers of Immanuel Kant, we come across the first traces of a reception of Kant's theory of the sublime which tends to completely bypass its critical and transcendental texture. This resulted in the formulation of the conditions for a metaphysical appropriation of the relevant Kantian analyses. By understanding the feeling of the sublime [Erhabenes] as an elevation [Erhebung] above the limit of sensibility, this appropriation prepares the ground for a dialectic sublation [Aufhebung] of the limit at issue. Especially in his essays on the sublime, Schiller categorically detaches himself from the formal and subjective character of the Kantian approach, while at the same time he transfers the feeling of the sublime, which, in Kant, is caused mainly by natural phenomena, to the sphere of art. This allows him to define as sublime not only the subject's feelings but also the objects that appear to cause them. But if the feeling Kantian distinction between the mathematically and the dynamically sublime is rejected as minimally enlightening: "But because the concepts dynamically and mathematically can shed no light on whether the sphere of the sublime is exhausted through this classification, for this reason I have given preference to the classification into theoretically and practically sublime." 1 What is remarkable in this case is that Schiller concentrates exclusively on the dynamically sublime, which he names practically sublime and also "the sublime of praxis," 2 because here the comparison between the subject and the natural phenomena that threaten its biological hypostasis activates practical Reason. Indeed, in his theory on art and tragedy, the German dramatist completely ignores the mathematically sublime, which he renames theoretically sublime. But this should not surprise us. Schiller studied the phenomenon of the sublime mainly from the standpoint of one who was interested in the conditions that govern the process of artistic creation. 3 From the point of view of the artist, sublime nature as the object of the mathematically sublime is simply a metaphor for the absolutely unique sublime object that exists in the universe, i.e., moral law, the sublimity [Erhabenheit] of which acquires a sensible form through the hero of the bourgeois drama. But this is possible because the sublimity of the hero finds its ideal expression in its moral integrity, which remains intact, even after his fall. This is also the source of the peculiar passion which characterizes bourgeois dramas, since it is through them that "the mechanism for the elimination of social evils" 4 is vividly illustrated. This mechanism consists of the symbolic salvage of the hero's moral dignity, even at the instant of his tragic destruction. However, Schiller's main objection concerns Kant's attempt to differentiate the sublime from the beautiful. At first sight, he seems to wish to preserve the Kantian distinction: "Without the beautiful there would be a continuous dispute between our natural determination and our rational determination… Without the sublime, beauty would make us forget our dignity." 5 Soon, however, it is revealed that, in essence, he is aiming at a fusion of these two aesthetic categories: "Only when the sublime comes 1