How to Think About the Sublime
March 19, 2025 at 10:00PMWe’ve all felt it at one time or another: an intangible state of pleasure, awe, perhaps even a slight fear that puts being human in stark relief, our smallness suddenly writ large in the face of something infinite such as a sweeping landscape, or a starry sky. In this comprehensive guide for Psyche, Nicole A Hall explores and attempts to describe the sublime, asking: “What role, then, might the sublime play in how you relate to your natural environment?”
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.
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/19/how-to-think-about-the-sublime/
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