There is no single way to elicit this peculiar feeling.
Perhaps you have felt it on a hot summer’s night, lying in the grass, scanning a leaden sky for shooting stars, satellites and planets. You are struck by the vastness of the Universe, its infinite measure. There is an anxious and humbling sense of awe and underlying fear.
Maybe, while on a hike, you are struck by unending skies, and the vast sweep of a spectacular and somehow terrifying mountain range, unable to absorb its full size. Perhaps it’s a mountain range like the Alps that you can’t take in all at once but only in parts. Its grandeur is staggering and somewhat frightening.
Maybe you have read a line of poetry that captures an exquisite coming-together of pleasure and pain, or that invites you to see your life in a new light, which throws into relief the delicious strangeness of existence. Or perhaps you have felt unexpectedly transported by the immersive grandeur of a painting.
It’s a sense of being overwhelmed, of impending terror, of encountering the unending incomprehensibility of infinity or a natural force: a phenomenon that shows the limits of the human mind while arousing contemplation. This is the sublime – a pleasurable but unsettling feeling.
A feeling that is at once pleasurable and unsettling is exceedingly paradoxical and difficult to account for, as we will see. But that doesn’t take away from its ability to influence and inform us about our place in the world, and our relationship with nature. While the concept is often linked to cultural, social or political dimensions, the focus of this Guide is primarily on the natural world. What role, then, might the sublime play in how you relate to your natural environment?
We’ll cover the role of sublimity and its connection to the natural world. We’ll learn to better appreciate and understand a feeling that is so often treated as ineffable or incomprehensible. And, hopefully, by the end you’ll have a little more insight into what you’re feeling when you gaze into that immeasurable and starry night sky.
Think it through
The sublime is hard to define
In the writings of Longinus in the 1st century CE, the sublime captured the greatness or elevation of the soul to be found in literature, poetry and rhetoric, bringing out the importance of transcendent or transformative experience. John Dennis, in the early 18th century, contemplated how poetry can capture the sublime in the natural realm. He wrote at a time when scientific discoveries turned human attention to astronomy, the sea, the vast emptiness of space – all of which might be considered objects of sublime experience. In artistic practice, the sublime has also related to landscape, and more recently sculpture and installations, provoking questions about the extent to which artworks can represent or prompt experiences of the sublime.
However, it is Edmund Burke’s work on the sublime, along with Immanuel Kant’s, that continues to be influential to this day. In APhilosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke wrote: ‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible … is a source of the sublime…’ Kant in The Critique of Judgment (1790), meanwhile, distinguishes between two different versions of the sublime. The first is mathematical. This is the kind of sublime you experience when confronted with immeasurable distance, with infinity: the night sky, or what Kant calls ‘the starry heaven’, is a case of the mathematical sublime. The dynamic sublime, meanwhile, is evoked by extraordinary power rather than unimaginable vastness. Kant gives the example of an erupting volcano.
Because the sublime relates both to internal, subjective experience and to the external, objective world, it can often seem to resist definition: what are the principles that guide its use or application? Should we experience it as emerging from human experience, or from the world ‘out there’? In The Sublime Reader (2018), Robert Clewis writes that there is ‘an ambiguity in theories of the sublime, an ambiguity that may well be unavoidable’. He says that ‘the sublime can refer to a person’s or subject’s feelings and experiences, and it can be applied to the object that elicits those responses.’ This way of thinking places the subject in a position of distance from the object eliciting the experience of the sublime, making it difficult to pin down if it is psychological, or emotional, rather than an objective feature.
So, the concept is no doubt perplexing, and some have thought that no coherent theory of it is even possible. Although we can identify the sublime, it seems to follow no principle or rule. While it brings pleasure, that pleasure is associated with pain or fear. While linked with nature, it also applies to art, even if derivatively. And though it is associated with religious experience, it also maps onto scientific wonder and discovery. A pessimistic view would be to suggest that, since we are not fully able to explain the concept or categorise our emotional responses, we might as well give up on it.
A more positive approach would be that, even if the sublime in some sense defeats our reasoning abilities, yielding to the unknown is a creative act. It is generative of ideas that can orient us towards acknowledging our profound connection with the natural environment, which is not always harmonious or comfortable. It’s difficult to pin down exactly what the sublime is – but that doesn’t mean we should do away with it.
The sublime is distinct from beauty
With the natural sublime, which emerged in the 18th century, also came its distinction from the concept of beauty. Indeed, a better understanding of the sublime can be achieved by contrasting it with beauty, a thought that was central to Kant’s aesthetics. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant emphasised the roles of form and formlessness in distinguishing beauty from the sublime. An object’s form structures its beauty, so to speak: we can perceptually grasp the beauty of a flower because of its size and bounded structure. Beauty appeases and leads to tranquility. It ‘carries with it a purposiveness in its form, through which the object seems as it were to be predetermined for our power of judgment, and thus constitutes an object of satisfaction in itself …’ In beauty, our understanding achieves harmony with the imagination as it is able to grasp the way an object presents itself to perception.
This is not so where the sublime is concerned: the concept of infinity, or the expanse of a stark mountain range, or the surging power of a monumental waterfall, are not bounded in their structure in such a way that we can perceive or conceptualise them as fully accessible to us. The sublime stretches and overwhelms the imagination, revealing the limits of our power of reason. That is why it is perceptually frustrating: your capacity for fully understanding the sublime is overridden or interrupted by the ineffable. In the sublime, we seem to come up against some kind of obstinate limit to our understanding.
According to Kant, our capacity for reason seeks harmony with our capacity for imagination in trying to understand the world, but the formlessness and unboundedness of the sublime are beyond our capacity for both perception and reason. We are therefore unable to fully grasp the object of sublime experience, yet we gain, Kant says, an awareness of our freedom and capacity for reason, both of which are foundational to moral action in his philosophy.
The sublime doesn’t seem to be located anywhere
Where does the sublime come from: our minds or the objective world? Is it human or does it somehow inhere in nature? Where is the sublime located? At first blush, it doesn’t seem to originate in the mind or in our emotions, since the grandeur and vastness of the sublime can be experienced only in part, as Kant observes. However, it doesn’t seem to be in the external world either, since it is unclear what it might mean for something to be sublime if no one is there to name it as such.
We might compare the sublime with another emotion: sadness. The weeping willow tree is often considered to be a symbol of sorrow and grief, and it’s common to feel a sense of sadness when looking at one. How come? Of course, we do not take the willow tree itself to be in the psychological state of being sad, but it nevertheless seems to possess the quality of expressing sadness. Consider the range of aesthetic qualities we attribute to places such as a ‘raging sea’ or a ‘peaceful meadow’ or, as the philosopher Emily Brady has argued, certain animals who may be thought to have psychological dispositions, such as a ‘mighty tiger’, a ‘joyous robin’, an ‘exciting falcon’. These questions are complex and call to mind contemporary discussions about how best to account for nature’s beauty, and how best to respect it given the richness of human response and moods.
A better way of thinking about the sublime, unlike many other aesthetic concepts, is to stress its relational dimension in terms of how human experience and appreciation relate to awe-inspiring landscapes, majestic mountains, raging storms, formidable waterfalls. As Brady writes in The Sublime in Modern Philosophy (2013), it is ‘the self’s relation to something greater’ and it is less identifiable than beauty because it overwhelms us and moves us into a metaphysical or transcendental realm. Its ineffability opens us to scientific curiosity and cultural expression. Through the humility we experience in its presence, the sublime conjures understanding of the moral and aesthetic obligations we have towards nonhuman and human entities.
The sublime involves a negative aesthetic force
Brady goes on to link the sublime’s aesthetic dimension with perception and imagination. The actual experience of the natural sublime ‘is not a delightful or contemplative experience, [it] does not define a relationship of loving nature, or even a friendly relationship with nature. Rather, it is uncomfortable, even difficult – an imposition on environmental events.’ The sublime as experienced through its distinctive aesthetic qualities overwhelms by its unknowable nature in the expression of vastness and infinity: those aspects to which we don’t have sensual or perceptual access. This is a distinctly negative aesthetic aspect of sublime appreciation that is importantly ‘unsentimental’ and ‘complex’, as Brady writes in ‘The Environmental Sublime’ (2015). Here is Brady’s fuller list of the aesthetic qualities of the sublime: ‘mysterious, dark, obscure, great, huge, powerful, towering, dizzying, blasting, raging, disordered, dynamic, tumultuous, shapeless, formless, boundless, frameless, and so on’.
This emphasis on the sublime as a negative, potentially alienating aesthetic quality renders it both profound and anxiety-inducing to the extent that it invites humility and self-reflection. In other words, we need to consider the fundamental and unknowable force of sublime experience to arrive at human (cultural or scientific) intellect, reason, and our capacity for freedom, and moral and artistic judgment. Indeed, the anxious discomfort evinced by the sublime reminds us of how we relate to nature. It does so in such a way that not only excites us, but that can also create a sense of outward-seeking empathy, understanding and respect for nonhuman entities of the natural environment. It’s another paradox of the sublime that this discomfort can bring about benevolent consequences.
The sublime makes us humble – and potentially moral
According to Kant and, later, Iris Murdoch, our own feelings of humility and insecurity emerge when faced with sublime experience. As Murdoch wrote in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959):
Confronted with some vast prospect, the starry sky, or the Alps, the imagination and the senses cannot properly take in what lies before them, that is they cannot satisfy the reason, which demands a total complete ordered picture. Yet in being so defeated the reason gains a fresh sense of its own independence and dignity. Since reason is the moral will, the experience of the sublime is a sort of moral experience, that is, an experience of freedom.
Murdoch holds that, while the sublime can be a source of terror and conflict, it can also be the origin of our self-understanding as moral beings capable of exercising reason and freedom. The formlessness and disorder of the sublime compel us to seek moral order or purpose. For Kant, pleasure in the sublime is linked with the recognition of our internal and abstract capacity for moral reason, the moral law. For Murdoch, this feeling is less about timeless and abstract reason, and more about seeing others as moral individuals in themselves with whom we connect and seek understanding.
At the heart of the matter lies the idea of humility. The philosopher Tom Cochrane connects the idea of humility to feelings of self-negation. By this, he means a feeling that ‘may be less physiologically intense than everyday instances of fear’ and that has ‘psychological profundity that coheres well with our intuitions of the sublime’. We look away from ourselves, our desires, our inclinations and, through the moral will, act in awareness of the existence of others. In the context of today’s climate crisis, the freedom we have in being able to reason should lead to the conclusion that we ought to care not only about how we engage with each other, but how we engage with the natural world. This way of thinking recalls Aldo Leopold’s ‘The Land Ethic’ in A Sand County Almanac (1949), in which he calls for us to not seek to dominate nature, but to respect it. We should care about our place within, or our interconnectedness with, nature’s system and thereby contribute to its flourishing.
Environmental sublime versus cultural sublime
So far, we have mostly been considering the sublime as it is encountered in the natural world and how this experience does not reduce to pleasure, but reveals complex, deeply felt emotions that contribute to growth in emotional intelligence, character and a life worth living. What does the natural sublime have to say about the sublime encountered in the arts?
Portrait of a Lady (c1460) by Rogier van der Weyden. Courtesy the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
To a certain extent, I agree with Brady, who argues that it is difficult to see how the arts can fully capture the natural sublime, or the humility that accompanies it. This is because a combination of externally imposed power, formlessness, unboundedness, unpredictability and disorder feed into our vulnerability, heighten our emotions and expand our imaginations. The arts, while they of course heighten our emotions and expand our imaginations, cannot do so in quite the same way, or to the same extent. As the poet and playwright Hildebrand Jacob wrote in 1735, the objects of human creativity can offer only ‘a very faint notion of what is not so easily described, or taught, as conceived by a mind truly disposed for the perception of that, which is great and marvellous’. Oceans, moonlight and mountains are the ‘real’ of sublime experience, whereas cultural representations use different cues to guide the mind in that direction. By their very limitation, artworks can’t offer the existential experience with the unknowable aspects of the natural sublime.
But even if the cultural sublime does not occasion the sublime in the same way as experiencing it in nature does, we of course shouldn’t dismiss its artistic, social or cultural worth. Consider examples of soaring architecture meant to instil a sense of the beyond, like the nave of a great church, or the dynamic sublimity of massive structures like dams, high-speed trains, rockets blasting off.
The arts are replete with the sublime. Anish Kapoor’s Descent into Limbo (1992) – a pitch-black eight-foot hole – ‘triggers the experience of an unfathomable black hole in the ground’ that causes a feeling of indefinite smallness, according to one critic. Or take Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poem ‘A Summer Evening’s Meditation’ (1773), in which she captures the breadth of human imagination through poetic description of transcendental experience of the skies, cosmos, planets and stars. The poem ends:
And ripen for the skies: the hour will come When all these splendours bursting on my sight Shall stand unveil’d, and to my ravish’d sense Unlock the glories of the world unknown.
The mid-20th-century artist Agnes Martin aimed to express – through her universal 8 foot x 8 foot paintings depicting horizontal lines – the sense of the universal, the atemporal, the endless. These works – of course there are many more – address the boundlessness of form, while at the same time relating to the bounded body. But, while they incorporate a sense of the sublime, it often lacks the existential vigour of the natural sublime, which is more likely to trigger in us a sense of awe and humility.
Key points – How to think about the sublime
The sublime is hard to define. Philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant have tried but, while the sublime can be identified, it follows no principle or rule and defeats our reasoning abilities.
The sublime is distinct from beauty. While beauty has form and bounded structure, the sublime is formless and unbounded. It is ineffable and resists rational understanding.
The sublime doesn’t seem to be located anywhere. It overwhelms and moves us into a metaphysical or transcendental realm. The grandeur and vastness of awe-inspiring landscapes, majestic mountains, raging storms or formidable waterfalls can be experienced only in part.
The sublime involves a negative aesthetic force. The anxious discomfort it evinces invites humility and self-reflection. It’s another paradox of the sublime that this discomfort can have benevolent consequences.
The sublime makes us humble – and potentially moral. For Iris Murdoch, while the sublime can be a source of terror and conflict, it can also be the origin of our self-understanding as moral beings capable of exercising reason and freedom.
Environmental sublime versus cultural sublime. Artworks can’t offer the full existential experience of the unknowable natural sublime – those oceans, moonlight and mountains that trigger the terror and awe of sublime experience.
Why it matters
The environmental sublime provides us with an understanding of the complexity of humanity’s connection to nature. It opens up fresh possibilities for our imagination to explore, new outlets for our creativity, and a means by which to generate scientific, literary and artistic ideas. It allows us to cultivate a deep respect for nature. And the experience of the sublime illuminates other concepts such as the beautiful, the ugly, the grotesque, the fearful, the disgusting, all of which are more accessible.
The aesthetic force of the sublime locates human thought and emotion primarily in the natural environment and intertwines it with moral concerns about that natural environment. It connects us to the environment, not as coldly distant, rational beings, but sensitively – which is why it is able to stretch our empathy and care to include others, including nonhuman others. That experience is other-regarding and self-regarding, pronouncing a deep form of respect through humility. That respect is achieved not only through scientific understanding, although, as we have seen, scientific understanding and imagination both contribute to the flourishing of natural environments and of the humans who reside in those environments.
However, so do many cultural and literary approaches. Consider the deep connections with the natural environment that are manifest in some First Nations communities: Alexis Wright’s impressive novel Carpentaria (2006) is one such literary example that should be valued for its insight into Australian Aboriginal sensibility and wisdom. Many more examples abound, and they should be integrated into how we conceive of the natural environment, points of view that ought to be taken into consideration in formulating legislation that intends to protect it.
The aesthetic force of the sublime merits careful attention and integration in our engagement with sublime and non-sublime environments. This means that we recognise ourselves as moral beings who contribute to the flourishing of people, ecologies and environments the world over, even those we may not know or properly understand. What that means is coming up with an aesthetic moral framework that respects descriptions and evaluations that are true to those local communities, ecologies and environments. These considerations can focus our attention on how to act. The sublime, then, while transcendent, complex and disturbing, just might contribute to ecological, environmental and human flourishing.
So on that hot summer’s night looking into the night sky or on that hike across the vast mountain range, you might contemplate your connection to the natural environment. You might consider how you might feel, reflect or act in such a way that contributes not only to your capacity for reason, but to your imaginative and creative potential too. You might consider that, indeed, the friend you’re beside on the grass and gazing up at the stars with similarly has imaginative and creative potential. You might even consider non-sublime, non-classically beautiful nature and your responsibilities to it, since they, too, merit our moral and aesthetic understanding.
Links & books
In the episode ‘The Sublime’ (2004) from the BBC Radio 4 series In Our Time, the host Melvyn Bragg asks literary historians why the great minds of the Enlightenment invested so much in trying to define this state of awe.
For a sparkling anthology of the classics, take a look at The Sublime Reader (2018) edited by Robert Clewis, which brings together all of the most important contributions towards our understanding of the sublime, from Longinus to Emily Brady.
A wonderful and illuminating lecture, ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’, delivered by Iris Murdoch herself in 1959 is well worth a listen. It’s fascinating to hear her speak.
Interest in the sublime has grown in recent years and there are plenty of monographs and academic studies to explore. In particular, check out The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (2013) by Emily Brady and the essays contained in The Sublime Today: Contemporary Readings in the Aesthetic (2012) edited by Gillian Pierce.
Several years ago, Tate initiated a research project called ‘The Art of the Sublime’, which brought together a number of paintings throughout history that are thought to represent the sublime. I recommend browsing how different periods sought to convey this nearly inconceivable emotion.
