Sublime > Intro
Edmund Burke’s “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin
of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” (1758) spends much
more time defining the Sublime than the Beautiful. Burke and all
those eighteenth-century artists he influenced considered the Sublime
a much more important aesthetic category and effect. The Sublime,
Burke said, is a pleasure that arises, paradoxically, from pain or
fear: “The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn
on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately
affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger,
without being actually in such circumstances…Whatever excites
this delight, I call sublime.” Being terrified or
overwhelmed, or having an experience of awe or transcendence, are
all experiences of the Sublime.
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