Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. xviii-6
Author(s):  
Robert L. Wicks
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
The Sublime

This Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer begins with a brief overview of Schopenhauer’s life and philosophical interests, emphasizing how the experience of compassion is central for understanding his philosophy. It highlights Schopenhauer’s profound distress about the amount of suffering in life and how this inspires his pessimism about the ordinary world and his subsequent hopes for transcendence through the minimization of suffering. The Introduction continues with a summary of the volume’s thirty-one essays that together address (1) influences on Schopenhauer; (2) Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will and empirical knowledge; (3) aesthetic experience, music, and the sublime; (4) human meaning, politics, and morality; (5) religion and Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and (6) Schopenhauer’s influence.

The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Moral Theory ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Scientific Explanation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Central Claim

This collection of thirty-one essays written by contemporary Schopenhauer scholars has six sections: (1) Influences on Schopenhauer, (2) Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Will and Empirical Knowledge, (3) Aesthetic Experience, Music, and the Sublime, (4) Human Meaning, Politics, and Morality, (5) Religion and Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, and (6) Schopenhauer’s Influence. Some of the issues addressed concern the extent to which Schopenhauer adopted ideas from his predecessors versus how much was original and visionary in his central claim that reality is a blind, senseless “will,” the effectiveness of his philosophy in the field of scientific explanation and extrasensory phenomena, the role of beauty and sublimity in his outlook, the fundamental role of compassion in his moral theory, the Hindu, Christian, and Buddhistic aspects of his philosophy, the importance of asceticism in his views on how best to live, how pessimism and optimism should be understood, and his impact on psychoanalysis, as well as upon music, the visual arts, and literature. The collection is an internationally constituted work that reflects upon Schopenhauer’s philosophy with authors from a variety of backgrounds, presently working in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, and the United States.

Schopenhauer and the Paradox of the Sublime

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-255
Author(s):  
Bart Vandenabeele
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Schopenhauer explores the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic experience of the sublime in a richer way than his predecessors did by rightfully emphasizing the prominent role of the aesthetic object and the ultimately affirmative character of the pleasurable experience it offers. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime does not appeal to the superiority of human reason over nature but affirms the ultimately “superhuman” unity of the world, of which the human being is merely a puny fragment. The author focuses on Schopenhauer’s treatment of the experience of the sublime in nature and argues that Schopenhauer makes two distinct attempts to resolve the paradox of the sublime and that Schopenhauer’s second attempt, which has been neglected in the literature, establishes the sublime as a viable aesthetic concept with profound significance.

scholarly journals Nature versus art as elicitors of the sublime: A virtual reality study

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. e0233628
Author(s):  
Alice Chirico ◽  
Robert R. Clewis ◽  
David B. Yaden ◽  
Andrea Gaggioli
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Emotional Responses ◽  
Subjective Response ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
Sense Of Presence ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Before And After

The sublime–the mixed aesthetic experience of uplift and elevation in response to a powerful or vast object that otherwise is experienced as menacing–has nurtured philosophical discourse for centuries. One of the major philosophical issues concerns whether the sublime is best thought of as a subjective response or as a stimulus. Recently, psychology has conceived of the sublime as an emotion, often referred to as awe, arising from natural or artistic stimuli that are great, rare, and/or vast. However, it has not yet been empirically demonstrated whether two major elicitors of the sublime–nature and art–differ in inducing this state. In order to experimentally compare nature and art, we exposed 50 participants to sublimity-inducing content in two different formats (nature-based and art-based) using 360° videos. We compared Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night with a photorealistic version of the actual place depicted in the painting, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. We measured participants’ emotional responses before and after each exposure, as well as the sense of presence. The nature-based format induced higher intensity emotional responses than the art-based format. This study compares different sublime stimuli (nature vs. art) for eliciting the sublime.

scholarly journals Sublime in the aesthetics of Nicolai Hartmann and Edmund Burke

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-120
Author(s):  
Sasa Grbovic
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Nicolai Hartmann ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Sensible Qualities

This article is dedicated to the interpretation of the aesthetic thought of Nicolai Hartmann and Edmund Burke, that is, the interpretation of their different understandings of the sublime, and its relation to the beautiful. While Hartmann?s sublime is an aesthetic value that is subordinate to the beauty, Burke defines the sublime as a form of aesthetic experience that is on the same level as beautiful. Burke forms an understanding of the sublime based on his analysis of the aesthetic experience, which includes his understanding of passions, states of the soul and the analysis of the sensible qualities of the aesthetic objects, while Hartmann formally considers sublime as one kind of beautiful, and reaches his understanding of it based on his inquiry of the aesthetic object and his definition of beautiful.

Sublime, the

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Crowther
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Ancient Philosophy ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Self Transcendence ◽  
The Way

The origin of the term ‘the sublime’ is found in ancient philosophy, where, for example, Longinus linked it with a lofty and elevated use of literary language. In the eighteenth century, the term came into much broader use, when it was applied not only to literature but also to the experience of nature, whereafter it became one of the most hotly debated subjects in the cultural discourse of that age. The theories of Addison, Burke and Kant are especially significant. Addison developed and extended the Longinian view of the sublime as a mode of elevated self-transcendence, while Burke extended John Dennis’s insight concerning sublimity’s connection with terror and a sense of self-preservation. While Addison and Burke encompassed both art and nature in their approaches, Kant confined the experience of the sublime to our encounters with nature. In his theory, the sublime is defined as a pleasure in the way that nature’s capacity to overwhelm our powers of perception and imagination is contained by and serves to vivify our powers of rational comprehension. It is a distinctive aesthetic experience. In the 1980s and 1990s Kant’s and (to a much lesser extent) Burke’s theories of the sublime became the objects of a massive revival of interest, in the immediate context of a more general discussion of postmodern society. Kant’s theory, for example, has been used by J.-F. Lyotard and others to explain the sensibility – orientated towards the enjoyment of complexity, rapid change and a breakdown of categories – that seems to characterize that society.

‘Contempt for the world’ – Kant’s Aesthetics and the Sublime1

Sublime Art ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 14-47
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World

A book on sublime art must begin with Kant’s theory of the sublime. First, because it is the focus of our central authors (Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Rancière and Derrida), whether they affirm, deny or deconstruct it. Second, because Kant’s description of ‘aesthetic’ experience is foundational for ‘aesthetics’as a philosophical discipline and has been central to the theorisation of art from Romanticism until today. Third, because of the not always simple pleasure of exploring Kant’s amazing system. And finally, fourth, because the sublime provides irresistible drama as it emerges in all its monstrous ambiguity, the paradoxical– but no less necessary–Collapse and fulfilment of Kant’s system in an experience of the supersensible rising from the ashes of human experience.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-54
Author(s):  
James Uden
Keyword(s):  
Original Composition ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Classical World ◽  
Edward Young

This chapter examines the dynamic and evolving relationship between conceptions of “Gothic” and “classical” in mid-eighteenth-century criticism. It argues that both terms were highly changeable in their content and were rarely imagined as mere opposites. The chapter focuses on three authors, all of whom reinterpreted the classical world as an object of private aesthetic experience rather than as a source of political or ethical examples. In his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Edward Young imagines the Roman poets as a giant “spectre,” which threatened to overwhelm modern poets, inhibiting their capacity for original creation. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke describes a frightening descent into the Underworld of Virgil’s Aeneid as an opportunity to form homosocial bonds with other male readers. Finally, Richard Hurd in Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) describes the classical world as a distant forerunner to a more modern preoccupation with enchantment and imagination. In all three of these authors, the classical world is shifting its meaning and significance. It is becoming, paradoxically, increasingly Gothic.

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