A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Just like reason and passion are never really two separate concepts, neither are beauty and sublime two opposing concepts as Burke notes - at least not to me.  While in class, we talked a lot about sublime of the natural world, of losing one's self in nature's vast expanse.  I understand and love that feeling.  It is good to lose one's self sometimes.  There are certainly therapeutic effects of the natural world and of the sublime.  "It's good for the soul." - whatever that means.  I am not sure that it can be put into words.  "Who feels it knows."

What surprised me is that in class, no one talked about the sublime of the "everyday" but rather of being in beautiful natural surrounding and we briefly touched upon sublime from the arts.  Perhaps my definition of the sublime is different from Burke's...   I am not sure but since we talked about the feeling of sublime from music and other art forms in classs, I take sublime to mean the feeling of losing one's self, of great emotion (happiness and pain/terror at the same).  I feel this feeling when I am around Kaslo, my canine companion.  She moves me to great depths of pleasure and sorrow.  I am in awe that such an amazing creature exists, of the immense emotions that stir up in me when I am with her, of the connection I feel to her and other fellow animals on this planet, of how humans are merely one of many, many creatures on earth (insignificance of the human-animal in the bigger scheme).  If this is not the feeling of the sublime, then I don't know what is. This sublime feeling that I have when I am with Kaslo moves me just as much the sublime feeling of being in the beautiful forests of Britsh Columbia.

I do think that the feeling of sublime sometimes has to be learned.  In this manner, one can argue that it is not a natural or instinctive feeling.  For example, I have listened to the song, Rivers of Babylon since I was a child but it wasn't until I was in my mid 20s that this song moved me to tears in a shinsanken ride in Japan.  It was only then that I was able to feel the sorrow inherent in the lyrics of the song.

Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

Mary Wollenstonecraft's A Short Residence is beautifully written!  This text reminds me of travel narratives like On the Road by Beat authors such as Jack Kerouac.  I am impressed by the self-reflexivity of Mary and her ability to make connections and to empathize with the 'Other'.  In many ways, this text reads like fieldnotes and/or an ethnography on the various societies and cultures she visits, gender issues, capitalism, the environment, etc.  She makes observations of particulars (individuals) but does not make the mistake of applying particulars to the general (the whole nation).  In many ways, this writing from 1796 is much more relexive than many of the anthropological writings from the early 20th century.

ASR demonstrates the importance of narratives as a literary form to understand the human condition, political and social issues.  Narratives allow us to understand the entwined ensembles of relations and to bind events and past knowledge into a coherent framework.  Narratives are also invaluable in their ability to communicate embodied experiences and to evoke memories, thus producing a re-experiencing of performance and context.

I enjoyed this text much more than Burke's text.  A book theorizing ideas of the sublime just took the beauty of the sublime for me.  The sublime is a whole body experience to me which cannot necessarily be put into words.  As I have mentioned in an e-mail to the class in week 2, there is a tendency as humans to overanalyze and I feel like the sublime is just one of those issues that must be felt and enjoyed, not overanalyzed and overtheorized.  "Who feels it knows".

The sublime at Zao, Yamagata, Japan