What is the Sublime?

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt” - Immanuel Kant

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For here a feeling comes home to him of the inadequacy of his imagination for  presenting  the  idea  of  a  whole  within  which  that  imagination attains  its  maximum,  and,  in  its  fruitless  efforts  to  extend  this  limit, recoils upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight.

Immanuel Kant, Analytic of The Critique Of Judgement

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Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, c. 1508–1512, fresco.

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Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1875, oil on canvas.

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Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

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#1 - Heart Of The Lagoon Nebula - NASA

#2 - Center of the Tarantula Nebula_R136 - NASA

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Sublime imagery conjures our minds to engage with the great, mysterious and unknown. It compels us to participate in its existence and in turn our existence. It is a mirror that reflects the depth of human emotion and experience.

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The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough, 1770, oil on canvas.

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Portrait of Louisa Montagu, Viscountess Hinchingbrook, later Countess of Sandwich (1781-1862), full-length, as Hope, Sir Thomas Lawrence, oil on canvas.

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When we see the sublime, it elevates the soul, gives her a higher opinion of herself, and fills her with joy, and a noble kind of pride, as if herself had produced what she is admiring.

Jonathan Richardson, Of the Sublime

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Repentant Magdalen, Antonio Canova, 1796, marble.

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For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

William Wordsworth

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798

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Still-Life with Flowers, Rachel Ruysch, c. 1664-1665, oil on canvas.

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Mt. Lefroy, Lawren Harris, 1930, oil on canvas.

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What are men compared to rocks and mountains?

Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

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Black Sand Beaches, Vik, Iceland. July 2018.

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When we encounter something that is sublime it forces us to come to terms with our insignificance, and prompts us to try to understand our frailty as well as the meaning of our existence in a world where we truly have no control. It is overwhelming and yet awe-inspiring when we come to realize this.