The aesthetic experience of overwhelming greatness, vastness, or power that strikes the mind with grandeur.
The aesthetic experience of overwhelming greatness, vastness, or power that strikes the mind with grandeur — mingling pleasure with awe and even terror.
Distinct from pure awe or wonder (which can be untroubled marvel) in that the sublime characteristically mixes pleasure with a frisson of fear or threat felt at a safe distance — Burke's “tranquility shadowed with horror.” Unlike rapturous ecstasy or the quiet, mysterious profundity of Japanese yūgen, the sublime is specifically about overwhelming magnitude or power overpowering the senses: a towering storm, a vast range, the night sky.
From Latin sublimis “uplifted, lofty, exalted,” possibly from sub “up to” + limen “lintel, threshold.” The adjective entered English in the 1580s; the noun “the sublime” by the 1670s.
A central category of 18th-century aesthetics: Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry (1757) located the sublime in terror, vastness, and power experienced at a safe remove, contrasting it with beauty; Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) analyzed the “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublime. In loose modern usage “sublime” has weakened toward merely “wonderful, delightful.”
Theoretical accounts differ — Burke's empiricist/physiological account vs. Kant's, which locates the sublime in the mind's faculties rather than the object. Popular usage often dilutes it to “excellent.”