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The Sublime: Awe, Terror, and the Limits of Aesthetic Experience

“I have found that the mind is the seat of the sublime.” — Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, §23, 1790

The sublime was one of the central concepts of the Romantic period and one of the most influential in the entire history of modern aesthetics. The Romantic theorists and artists found in the sublime a way of thinking about the experience of awe, terror, and exaltation — in nature, in art, in the moral life, and in the inner world of the human being — that went beyond the inherited categories of the Enlightenment. The sublime, in the Romantic conception, was the experience of an overwhelming or transcendent object that revealed the limits of ordinary perception and gave access to deeper truths.

The Philosophical Background

The philosophical concept of the sublime emerged in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first modern treatment was the anonymous treatise attributed to John Dennis, who used the concept to describe the experience of the Alps. Joseph Addison wrote on the “pleasures of the imagination” in The Spectator essays of 1712, distinguishing the great, the uncommon, and the beautiful as distinct objects of aesthetic pleasure.

The breakthrough work was Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke distinguished the sublime from the beautiful and analyzed the mental states — astonishment, awe, terror, even a kind of pleasurable pain — that the sublime evokes. For Burke, the sources of the sublime included vastness, infinity, obscurity, power, terror, suddenness, and the experience of privation. The sublime was for Burke essentially a matter of self-preservation: the experience of the overwhelming reminds us of the dangers we have to face in life.

Immanuel Kant, in the Critique of Judgment (1790), gave the sublime a more rigorous philosophical treatment. For Kant, the sublime was not just a feature of certain objects, but a quality of the mind’s response to them. In the face of an overwhelming object, the imagination reaches its limit; the mind is brought to a heightened awareness of its own rational and moral vocation. Kant distinguished the mathematical sublime (the experience of the mind’s ability to conceive the infinite) and the dynamical sublime (the experience of the mind’s superiority to the overwhelming power of nature).

The Romantic theorists developed the concept still further. Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, and the Jena circle gave the sublime a central place in their philosophy of art. For Schelling, the work of art was the supreme manifestation of the absolute, and the sublime was the experience of the infinite in the finite. The late Romantic and Idealist philosophers extended the concept into the moral, religious, and historical spheres, treating the sublime as a category that applied to the experience of God, of freedom, and of history.

The Visual Forms of the Sublime

The Romantic visual artists developed a distinctive vocabulary of the sublime. Among the most common visual forms were:

Mountains, chasms, alpine passes, and vast natural scenes
Storms, tempests, hurricanes, and the overwhelming power of natural elements
Ruins, both ancient and modern, as emblems of the transience of human power
Burning cities, battles, and apocalyptic scenes
The lone figure in the face of the overwhelming — the “sublime figure”

Our page on The Sublime in Art explores these visual forms in more detail.

The Sublime in Literature

The sublime was a central concept in Romantic literary theory and practice. The Romantic poets sought to produce a literary sublime, marked by vastness, obscurity, power, and the experience of the transcendent. Some of the great works of Romantic literature that can be read as exercises in the literary sublime include:

Wordsworth’s The Prelude, with its visionary experiences of nature, its scenes of mountain and storm, and its account of the growth of a poetic mind.
Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, with its cosmic scope, its invocation of vast natural and historical forces, and its vision of a transformed humanity.
Byron’s Manfred, with its brooding hero in the Alpine solitude, addressing spirits and powers that even he cannot fully comprehend.
Keats’s Hyperion, with its cosmic scale, its invocation of the Titans overthrown by the Olympians, and its unfinished vision of the new age.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with its scenes of arctic desolation, its account of the scientist’s overreaching ambition, and its vision of the creature as a kind of monstrous, sublime figure.

The Sublime in Music

The Romantic composers developed a powerful musical sublime. Beethoven’s Eroica and Ninth Symphonies, with their length, their dynamic and harmonic range, and their cosmic ambition, were central works of the new musical sublime. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, with its unresolved dissonances, its vast length, and its visionary intensity, became a central work of late Romantic musical sublime. Bruckner’s slow movements, Mahler’s symphonies, and Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and Eine Alpensinfonie are all major examples of the Romantic musical sublime.

The Sublime in the Modern World

The Romantic sublime has had a long afterlife. The great landscape photographers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the cinema of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the contemporary experience of the vast and the overwhelming in nature, and the philosophical discussions of the sublime in contemporary aesthetics — all draw on the Romantic tradition. The aesthetic category has also been extended to new areas: the sublime of the technological, the sublime of the cosmic, the sublime of the ecological. Our page on twentieth-century echoes traces some of these continuities.

In This Section

Romantic Irony

An exploration of Romantic irony, the central concept of the Jena Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel.

What Is the Sublime?

A focused guide to the sublime, the central aesthetic concept of the Romantic period, with its philosophical background, its characteristic forms.