Ashley Thompson Blog 1

Class Discussion: Sublime

In today’s class we touched on the topic of the sublime. Sublime was explained to be “wonderful”. This idea of wondering is a certain type of wonderful, almost frightening. Experiencing this phenomena is supposed to be an extremely humbling experience. I understood it to be a term which specifically refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared. We also looked into the topic more via philosopher Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime was developed in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). Burke was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. Burke described the sensation attributed to the sublime as a 'negative pain' which he called delight, and which is distinct from positive pleasure. Delight is taken to result from the removal of pain (caused by confronting the sublime object) and is supposedly more intense than positive pleasure. Though Burke's explanations for the physiological effects of the sublime experience (such as tension resulting from eye strain) were not taken seriously by later writers, his empiricist method of reporting from his own psychological experience was more influential. The example given of a sublime is experience, is the one felt when arriving at Niagara Falls. It was said to be a combination of beautiful, scary and overwhelming.