Thread by @VeraCausa9

The Irish statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke was born #OTD 1729.

Unlike the beautiful, Burke's aesthetic concept of the Sublime required the spectator to experience the awe of sublimity through terror, power, darkness, vastness & infinity thus overwhelming our finite mind.

Burke’s define the Sublime in his treatise "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" (1757) anticipating the Romantic movement's idea of the transcending power of Nature as a source of inspiration [1]

Nature's sublime experience with its terrifying beauty of incomprehensible power threatens our human finiteness with the infinitude of spaces. Human speech fails to fully describe its vast power likewise it cannot be defined ethically [good or evil].

Frederic Edwin Church- Aurora Borealis-1865 [1]

Burke's sublime has a moral dimension, serving as a corrective to the vanity of human centerness. That is, if we feel small through the magnitude & intensity of the sublime experience whether physical or metaphysical then it's possible to accept man's fallible and finite nature.

Earth Rise: This photographic view from the Apollo 11 spacecraft shows the Earth rising above the Moon's horizon-July , 1969 [1]

Three essential philosophical readings on the aesthetic concept of the Sublime:

Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful [1757]

Kant's Critique of Judgment [1790]

Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. Vol. I [1818]

This is an excellent short video on Edmund Burke's concept of "The Sublime"- via @TheSchoolOfLife

Due to our finite senses neither poetry nor art can't fully capture a sublime experience only evoke it as William Blake once wrote "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite."

William Blake-Song of Los-1795

In the "Snowstorm" Turner sought to capture the sublime experience of a snow vortex. Metaphorically, the boat is a symbol of man's insignificance and helplessness when confronted with overpowering forces of nature.

J.M.W. Turner-Snow Storm-Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth-1842

Albert Bierstadt's paintings are a vision of the sublime, of man's awe at the majestic vastness of the American landscape.

Albert Bierstadt's paintings:

1-Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains,Ca.-1868
2-Mount Corcoran-c. 1876
3-Looking Down Yosemite Valley-1865
4-The Falls of St. Anthony-1887

Albert Bierstadt was one of the foremost painters of the Hudson River School in New York celebrating the transcending beauty of the American landscape [2]

For Schopenhauer, the fullest feeling of the sublime is "sheer vastness in space & time-immeasurable vastness which reduces the individual to a nonentity...as transient phenomena of will...disperse into the void"

Hubble Space Telescope: A "Rose" made of Spiral Galaxies

Yet Schopenhauer tells us [citing the Vedas] the observer's insignificance compared to the Universe's boundlessness can be transformed when our individual will is liberated by identifying with the eternal subject of pure knowing, thus realizing our oneness with the Universe [1]

Finishing this thread on the Sublime with this awe-inspiring choir piece which evokes the transcending power & mystery of the Universe, György Ligeti: Lux Aeterna-used by Stanley Kubrick in his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey-Enjoy!