The Sublime refers to the simultaneous feeling of attraction and repulsion that everyone experiences when faced with certain situations. For example, a person who stumbles across the body of a dead animal may be repulsed by the sight of death, yet he is also attracted to it and finds it difficult to turn away from the gruesome sight. The theories of early Greek philosophers clearly define beauty. The sublime clouds such a straightforward delineation of beauty and ugliness. It questions the early conception of beauty by hinting that beauty goes beyond the definitions of these philosophers. In essence, can something that is considered to be ugly also have some sort of beauty?

The philosophies of people like Plato and Aristotle were based on the idea that beauty was linked to goodness and ugliness was linked to evil. Divine truth was found through beauty. Therefore, an ugly object could serve no practical purpose as it was automatically associated with evil. The idea of the sublime was ignored as it points out a major flaw in the beliefs of these philosophers. It is only through a redefinition of aesthetic theory by Kant that the sublime is dealt with in any satisfactory terms.

Kant defines beauty generally as ‘that is beautiful which pleases in the mere act of judging it.' He says that beauty exists without outside interests and places the morally good in the category of an interest. This effectively destroys the previous conception that beauty and goodness go together. Unlike the broad general idea of beauty instituted by early philosophers, Kant breaks beauty down into three types; the arts of speech, the formative arts, and the art of the play of sensations. As the first one refers primarily to literature, I will not discuss it. The formative arts give expression to sensible intuition where ideas are expressed by figures in space. Here, he refers to sculpture and painting as they can express ideas that represent the concepts of things and are aesthetically purposeful. The play of sensations refers to the pleasure that comes from sensory stimulus. I find it interesting that Kant considers sensation to have potential to be beautiful as previous philosophers discouraged use of the senses to find beauty. They felt that the senses were a distraction from the truth rather than a path toward the truth.

I think that this point is important in accepting the sublime as an aesthetic experience of worth. The sublime feeling relies totally on sensory perception in this sensational aspect. Without the sensation, there is no sublime experience. Kant's theory gives the sublime a place within beauty and its own aesthetic purpose.

Reason also plays a role in the experience of the sublime. Reason is defined by Kant as existing outside of experience and is the realm of freedom. It is separate from nature and can be the grounds for a unity of experience through transcendental laws. For Kant, reason is what makes us all human. The sublime seems to point beyond; that man can, in feeling and in speech, transcend the human. He uses the term Dich an sich to refer to what lies beyond reason. The sublime points towards a knowledge that is beyond human reach, but leads to intellectual mastery.

Although there is an inaccessible knowledge, the sublime experience is worthwhile. The experience facilitates ideas of a higher purposiveness, where the subject discovers his superiority over and above nature. This higher purposiveness is Kant's main justification of the sublime experience. I think that this does essentially point a person toward the truth and divinity the Greek philosophers were advocating. Similarly to Plato, the sublime experience places reason as the main driving force to truth. The higher purposiveness becomes a universal, perhaps even as far as an ideal, state. After this realization, the mind imposes itself on sensation which brings everything back in control of reason and intellect.

For the sublime experience to occur, a few conditions have to be fulfilled. First of all, there must be a careful positioning of the person to the subject in order to create the feeling of repulsion and attraction that happens when the imagination is unable to initially comprehend an object. Kant uses the Egyptian pyramids as an example of this. The vast scale of these monuments is difficult to comprehend and it is only if the person is not too near or far away from the pyramids that the sublime experience occurs. In one way this supports Aristotle's warnings about scale playing an important role in the aesthetics of an object. Yet, Kant twists this by using such a vast scale that the creation of the sublime experience is the exact thing that Aristotle warns against.

The second thing that is important in the sublime experience is that it has to be experienced from a position of safety. Kant uses the fury of nature as an example of :

Kant uses a vast scale to try and represent the sublime experience. Can the sublime be represented on a smaller scale? The only fine art to deal directly with the idea of the sublime experience that comes readily to mind are the paintings of Barnett Newman, Yves Klein, and other painters who dealt with the sublime through the concept of the void. The void is a limitless space, where one can become engulfed and lost within its vastness. Because of this, the void can be a subliminal experience. Using Kant's analysis of the sublime, a person who becomes lost in the void should experience the sublime, then transcend the experience to attain a higher purposiveness and the truth. Barnett Newman wrote, in reflection on Vir Heroicus Sublimis, that the ‘artist tries to wrest truth from the void by understanding the reality of his world and by rendering that truth in pictorial form.' The artist presents the viewer with an opportunity to experience the sublime and gather truth from the experience. It could be debated whether the truth that the artist tries to reveal and the truth gathered from the experience of the piece by the viewer is the same.

This paper originally asked if something that is ugly can have a type of beauty. Since this is the most common example of a sublime experience, it would seem that the answer would derive from an examination of the sublime. Instead, I have found that the sublime experience tries to answer much more complex issues about beauty and truth. It is simply an alternative method of truth seeking that started with the theories of Plato. In the end, all of these philosophies reflect the search for the ultimate and definitive truth of existence.

Bloom, Harold. "The American Sublime: Gregory Botts, the Painting as Icon." Arts Magazine 64 Summer 1990

Hofstadter, Albert and Kuhns, Richard (eds.) Philosophies of Art & Beauty. University of Chicago Press. 1964.

Lang, Karen. "The Dialectics of Decay: Rereading the Kantian Subject." Art Bulletin 79 Sept. 1997

Zakian, Michael. "Barnett Newman and the Sublime." Arts Magazine 62 Fall 1998