What is the sublime?
It’s a question that has occupied philosophers for millennia. Here I throw in my tuppence-worth, arguing that it’s a complex interaction between nature’s greatness and our own perceptual capacities
This post was inspired by an article on Psyche, How to think about the sublime. The article talks about whether the sublime is something that is within the observer or is a property of the observed. I want to argue that it is a complex combination of both.
A short disclaimer, though. This piece is very much unresearched. I haven’t reread Kant and I’ve never read Burke or Murdoch on the subject. What I’ve written here are just my own musings. I shall also only talk about the sublime in nature, not in art. The question of whether the sublime exists in art is a whole other subject.
The sublime experience
The sublime is an experience of awe and wonder. It evokes feelings of being overwhelmed by something immense and powerful, something far greater than oneself. An experience of the sublime transcends ordinary understanding.
Examples of the sublime include contemplating the millions of stars in the night sky, standing on a cliff and looking out over a stormy ocean, standing outside in a huge thunderstorm. The sublime is found in the most terrible and most beautiful of nature’s elements.
It’s more than a simple feeling, emotion or sensation. An experience of the sublime is something much more encompassing. It seems to involve the whole body – it’s physical, emotional and mental. I would say it’s spiritual as well. It exists at the very edge of experience – it expands the very limit of your experience and sits at the very edge of comprehension.
Experiencing the sublime means to push the boundaries of experience. It’s something that, paradoxically, feels like it’s beyond the capacity of human experience.
This sense of expansion is essential to an experience of the sublime. The sublime-experience has a quality of greatness that far exceeds normal human experience. It’s something we can’t measure, something we can’t quite comprehend. We feel small and insignificant in the face of the sublime. It reminds us of our place in a universe that is vastly bigger than us; vastly bigger than we can even comprehend.
Emotional reactions
The sublime inspires a range of feelings – wonderment, vulnerability, awe, anxiety and even fear. It demonstrates how ill equipped our perceptual faculties are to capture the enormity of nature. Nature, in all its power, is both awe inspiring and terrifying. This combination of pleasure and pain is essential to the sublime-experience and produces an effect that is strangely enjoyable.
The sublime-experience isn’t the same as beauty, although the sublime thing might also be beautiful. Take for example the difference between a babbling brook and Niagara Falls. While the first is no doubt beautiful, it lacks the sheer power and immensity of the latter.
Experiencing a babbling brook is an enjoyable experience. One that will elicit certain feelings, such as joy and happiness. Maybe a sense of tranquil calm. But it won’t evoke the feelings of being overwhelmed, of having your faculties pushed to their very limits, that seeing Niagara Falls for the first time will.
But where does this experience come from? Is it inherent in the ocean, the mountain, the starry sky – that is, in nature itself? Or is it something that comes from inside of us? This is, of course, a false dichotomy. There’s no either/or here: something as complex as our experience of the sublime can’t be boiled down and simplified in this way. Most things in human experience can’t.
What it is
A sublime-experience is a complex interaction between our perceptual capacities, the thing being perceived, and our own thoughts, beliefs, previous experiences, emotions and so on. This means that the experience can be different for each one of us and can be inspired by something different. I might experience the sublime in the crashing waves of the ocean, for example, while you experience it in ever-shifting desert sands.
It requires us to have certain perceptual abilities which may be limited to human beings. While I have no doubt that my cat has certain perceptual capacities, and that she can feel fear, joy, anger and other emotions, I’m not so sure that she can experience awe or feel overwhelmed by the night sky. I don’t think she can have a sublime-experience.
But the sublime-experience also requires that the thing being perceived has certain qualities. It has to be the kind of thing that inspires awe and terror. Going back to my cat, she can be very cute, but she’s never going to elicit a sublime-experience in someone – she lacks the necessary qualities.
What those qualities are is somewhat vague, but they include things like vastness, timelessness or a sense of eternity, infinity, immensity, greatness, power. All qualities that defy our ability to fully comprehend them.
It’s not that the sublime-experience is incomprehensible, rather that it’s beyond our comprehension. For this reason it doesn’t just have to be the vastness of the ocean that elicits the sublime-experience, the very tiny things that are the subject of quantum science could also cause this experience.
It’s complicated
The sublime-experience then requires a complex interaction between our perceptual faculties and the awe-inspiring qualities of certain aspects of nature. It requires nature’s ability to overwhelm those faculties to produce a certain response in us; we are overcome with emotion. We also have to be the kind of beings that are capable of such a response.
What differentiates the sublime-experience from the merely beautiful is nature’s ability to overwhelm our sense perceptions, eliciting a response of fear and awe, while also forcing us to contemplate our own place in the world. In the face of this awesomeness of nature, we feel insignificant.
Paradoxically, we’re also reminded that we are part of nature, a – admittedly very small – part of this awesomeness. An experience of the sublime makes us question the meaning of our lives while at the same time giving meaning to our lives.
For the sublime-experience to happen, it requires both nature’s capacity to overwhelm and our ability to be overwhelmed. It’s this interaction between the internal and the external that gives rise to the sublime-experience. It’s a unique experience and possibly one that not many of us ever have. Have you ever had that overwhelming, awe-inspiring, fear-inducing encounter with the sublime?