Idea Entry #9: Sublime

While doing some research for the presentations next week on awe, I came across Edmund Burke's treatise on aesthetics, in which he stated that the sublime and the beautiful were mutually exclusive. Sublime was mentioned quite frequently with awe, so I was curious to do some research on it.

From dictionary.com:

sublime (səˈblaɪm)
—adj
1.	of high moral, aesthetic, intellectual, or spiritual value;noble; exalted
2.	inspiring deep veneration, awe, or uplifting emotion becauseof its beauty, nobility, grandeur, or immensity
3.	unparalleled; supreme: a sublime compliment
4.	poetic of proud bearing or aspect
5.	archaic raised up

“I know several who admire and love painting, and yet who regard the objects of their admiration in that art with coolness enough in comparison of that warmth with which they are animated by affecting pieces of poetry or rhetoric.”

“It is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions.” Burke “On the Sublime and Beautiful” part 2: 5

“There is something so over-ruling in whatever inspires us with awe, in all things which belongs ever so remotely to terror, that nothing else can stand in their presence.” “On the Sublime and Beautiful” part 4: 24

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Routledge and Paul, 1958. Print.