Sublime (philosophy)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis (under the lintel, high, exalted)) is the quality of transcendent greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.
The first study of the value of the sublime is the treatise ascribed to Longinus: On the Sublime. For Longinus, artistic genius was the skill of metaphor.
Prior to the eighteenth century sublime was a term of rhetoric predominantly relevant to literary criticism. Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant both investigated the subject (compare Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, 1756, and Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1764). Both men distinguished the sublime from the beautiful. Later writers tend to include the sublime in the beautiful.