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What is this feeling we call "sublime"?

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/ideas/at-once-tiny-and-h...ll-sublime

EXCERPT: Responses to the sublime are puzzling. While the 18th century saw ‘the beautiful’ as a wholly pleasurable experience of typically delicate, harmonious, balanced, smooth and polished objects, the sublime was understood largely as its opposite: a mix of pain and pleasure, experienced in the presence of typically vast, formless, threatening, overwhelming natural environments or phenomena. Thus the philosopher Edmund Burke in 1756 describes sublime pleasure in oxymoronic terms as a ‘delightful horror’ and a ‘sort of tranquility tinged with terror’.

[...] It became a problem to explain why the sublime should be experienced overall with positive affect and valued so highly, given that it was seen to also involve an element of pain. Deepening the sense of paradox is the view that the experience of the sublime is actually more profound and satisfying than that of the beautiful. Some believe such sublime aesthetic experiences constitute religious or spiritual experiences of God or a ‘numinous’ reality.

There are two kinds of response to the sublime: what I call the ‘thin’ and the ‘thick’ sublime. Burke’s physiological account understands the sublime as an immediate affective arousal, which is not a highly intellectual aesthetic response. This is the ‘thin sublime’. Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer meanwhile offer transcendental accounts – that is, accounts that involve putatively universal cognitive faculties – and understand the sublime as an emotional response in which intellectual reflection on ideas, especially ideas about humankind’s place in nature, play a significant role. This is the ‘thick sublime’.

Thin sublime, then, is akin to an immediate reaction of awe, and this bare cognitive appraisal that kind of stuns and overwhelms the appreciator might very well be the first moment in all sublime aesthetic responses. But when one lingers in that experience of awe, and the mind starts to reflect on the features of the awe-inspiring landscape or phenomenon, and the way it makes one feel, then this cognitive-affective engagement constitutes thick sublime experience.

Why do these sorts of sublime experiences matter? For Burke, the experience matters insofar as it is the ‘strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’. But for Kant and Schopenhauer, the experience is profounder still. [...] For Kant, this experience of the irresistibility of nature’s power prompts us to realise that we are weak and existentially insignificant in the grand scheme of nature. And yet, it also reveals that we transcend nature as moral agents and systematic knowers. Insofar as we are morally free beings capable of comprehending nature in a systematic way, we are in a sense independent of and superior to nature.

For Schopenhauer too, the objects of aesthetic contemplation in the feeling of the sublime bear ‘a hostile relation to the human will in general (as it presents itself in its objecthood, the human body) and oppose it, threatening it with a superior power that suppresses all resistance, or reducing it to nothing with its immense size’. But sublime pleasure results when a person is able to achieve calm contemplation of an object or environment despite the fact that it appears threatening to the person’s bodily or psychological wellbeing....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/at-once-tiny-and-h...ll-sublime
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
There is always a fear element to my sublime. Standing on the verge of the Grand Canyon, there was that amazing energy, but also a background fear of falling. The dark thunder cloud looming high overhead, interlaced with dangerous flashes and booms. One is bedazzled by the vastness of outer space while gazing at the night sky, but not without an underlying terror of all that black emptiness. The manifestation of transcendence always occurs against the context of our vulnerability, of our contrasting finitude to such infinite magnitude.
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#3
Syne Offline
(Dec 13, 2018 06:19 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: The manifestation of transcendence always occurs against the context of our vulnerability, of our contrasting  finitude to such infinite magnitude.

Again, that is awe, not transcendence. Both the "thin" and "thick" sublime described fall squarely in the category of awe...merely reactive and contemplative experiences of awe.

The "transcendental" of Kant and Schopenhauer is not transcendence, as Kant himself made a distinctions between them.

In modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant introduced a new term — transcendental, thus instituting a new, third meaning. In his theory of knowledge, this concept is concerned with the condition of possibility of knowledge itself. He also opposed the term transcendental to the term transcendent, the latter meaning "that which goes beyond" (transcends) any possible knowledge of a human being.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcende...philosophy


And Schopenhauer "endorses Kant’s approach to metaphysics in Kant’s limiting the sphere of metaphysics to articulating the conditions of experience rather than transcending the bounds of experience." - https://www.iep.utm.edu/schopenh/#SSH2ai
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#4
Magical Realist Offline
(Dec 13, 2018 07:07 PM)Syne Wrote:
(Dec 13, 2018 06:19 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: The manifestation of transcendence always occurs against the context of our vulnerability, of our contrasting  finitude to such infinite magnitude.

Again, that is awe, not transcendence. Both the "thin" and "thick" sublime described fall squarely in the category of awe...merely reactive and contemplative experiences of awe.  

The "transcendental" of Kant and Schopenhauer is not transcendence, as Kant himself made a distinctions between them.

In modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant introduced a new term — transcendental, thus instituting a new, third meaning. In his theory of knowledge, this concept is concerned with the condition of possibility of knowledge itself. He also opposed the term transcendental to the term transcendent, the latter meaning "that which goes beyond" (transcends) any possible knowledge of a human being.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcende...philosophy


And Schopenhauer "endorses Kant’s approach to metaphysics in Kant’s limiting the sphere of metaphysics to articulating the conditions of experience rather than transcending the bounds of experience." - https://www.iep.utm.edu/schopenh/#SSH2ai

"sub·lime
/səˈblīm/Submit
adjective
1.
of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe."

https://www.google.com/search?q=definiti...e&ie=UTF-8
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#5
Syne Offline
(Dec 13, 2018 07:12 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:
(Dec 13, 2018 07:07 PM)Syne Wrote:
(Dec 13, 2018 06:19 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: The manifestation of transcendence always occurs against the context of our vulnerability, of our contrasting  finitude to such infinite magnitude.

Again, that is awe, not transcendence. Both the "thin" and "thick" sublime described fall squarely in the category of awe...merely reactive and contemplative experiences of awe.  

The "transcendental" of Kant and Schopenhauer is not transcendence, as Kant himself made a distinctions between them.

In modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant introduced a new term — transcendental, thus instituting a new, third meaning. In his theory of knowledge, this concept is concerned with the condition of possibility of knowledge itself. He also opposed the term transcendental to the term transcendent, the latter meaning "that which goes beyond" (transcends) any possible knowledge of a human being.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcende...philosophy


And Schopenhauer "endorses Kant’s approach to metaphysics in Kant’s limiting the sphere of metaphysics to articulating the conditions of experience rather than transcending the bounds of experience." - https://www.iep.utm.edu/schopenh/#SSH2ai

"sub·lime
/səˈblīm/Submit
adjective
1.
of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe."

https://www.google.com/search?q=definiti...e&ie=UTF-8

Exactly, awe, not transcendence. Glad you seem to agree. Smile
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#6
Magical Realist Offline
(Dec 13, 2018 07:23 PM)Syne Wrote:
(Dec 13, 2018 07:12 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:
(Dec 13, 2018 07:07 PM)Syne Wrote:
(Dec 13, 2018 06:19 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: The manifestation of transcendence always occurs against the context of our vulnerability, of our contrasting  finitude to such infinite magnitude.

Again, that is awe, not transcendence. Both the "thin" and "thick" sublime described fall squarely in the category of awe...merely reactive and contemplative experiences of awe.  

The "transcendental" of Kant and Schopenhauer is not transcendence, as Kant himself made a distinctions between them.

In modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant introduced a new term — transcendental, thus instituting a new, third meaning. In his theory of knowledge, this concept is concerned with the condition of possibility of knowledge itself. He also opposed the term transcendental to the term transcendent, the latter meaning "that which goes beyond" (transcends) any possible knowledge of a human being.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcende...philosophy


And Schopenhauer "endorses Kant’s approach to metaphysics in Kant’s limiting the sphere of metaphysics to articulating the conditions of experience rather than transcending the bounds of experience." - https://www.iep.utm.edu/schopenh/#SSH2ai

"sub·lime
/səˈblīm/Submit
adjective
1.
of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe."

https://www.google.com/search?q=definiti...e&ie=UTF-8

Exactly, awe, not transcendence. Glad you seem to agree.  Smile

Exactly. Sublime = awe. Awe = emotional response to surpassing power, size, or grandeur, which is transcendence. We've already been over this, where I showed thru numerous citations the equivalence of awe-inspiring with the transcendent.
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#7
Leigha Offline
It's a fleeting feeling, like all feelings. Probably more fleeting than other feelings, honestly.
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#8
Syne Offline
(Dec 13, 2018 07:25 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:
(Dec 13, 2018 07:23 PM)Syne Wrote:
(Dec 13, 2018 07:12 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: "sub·lime
/səˈblīm/Submit
adjective
1.
of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe."

https://www.google.com/search?q=definiti...e&ie=UTF-8

Exactly, awe, not transcendence. Glad you seem to agree.  Smile

Exactly. Sublime = awe. Awe = emotional response to surpassing power, size, or grandeur, which is transcendence. We've already been over this, where I showed thru numerous citations the equivalence of awe-inspiring with the transcendent.

Really? So you quote the definition for "sublime" and then just proclaim that awe means transcendence without even citing the definition for awe, huh?
As usual, I assume you completely fail to see how intellectually dishonest that is...with yourself.

No, you never showed citations of the equivalence. You only failed to understand the very simple concept that transcendence can include feelings of awe while awe doesn't entail transcendence. You just keep hammering on your complete misapprehension of transcendence...a blind man trying to describe color.
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