The word sublime has been used in many different ways across many different disciplines. In chemistry, sublimation is the process where a solid immediately turns into a gas when heated, likely due to its melting and boiling point being very close to each other. In aesthetic philosophy, the sublime refers to a sense of grandeur or awe when in the presence of something with that quality of greatness. In Freudian psychology, sublimation refers to a “mature type of defence mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealisations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behaviour, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse.”
If we were to get to its etymological origins, the word ‘sublime’ stems from the Latin word ‘sublimis’ which means ‘uplifted, high, borne aloft, lofty, exalted, eminent, distinguished’. If we were to dig even deeper, ‘sublimis’ likely took influence from the words ‘limus’ and ‘limen’ which means transverse and threshold respectively.
We understand the prefix ‘sub-’ as under or below, but it concurrently held the adjacent meaning of close to, up to, toward. This makes the origin of the word sublime approximate ‘up to the threshold’.
The sublime, outside of its scientific definition, has been used by philosophers, psychologists, and political pundits for numerous years. I would love to dedicate this piece to covering a brief history of the sublime, but that work has already been splendidly done in a piece in the MIT Press Reader.
What I would like to do is bring attention to our modern understanding the sublime, being a vague cesspool of definitions that intriguingly share a common thread. The idea of the sublime, while referring to a sense of rising and transcending, also point to our capacity as humans to imagine.
The sublime has been used as a marker or a naming convention to point towards something which has obvious depth, so much so that one faces tremendous difficulty using the English language to adequately capture. To say that something is sublime is oftentimes an attempt to give structure to something a thinker or an artist finds so deep that there is no other way to put it. This word, along with the word ‘ineffable’, are the most common ways of pointing towards a concept or idea that one finds difficulty in pinning down.
It is because of this that most philosophical or psychological definitions of the sublime share the commonality that is the reliance of human imagination. The sublime will never refer to something in the physical world. Even the more superficial uses of the word sublime refer to depth and transcendence on an interpersonal or individual level.
Of course, a thing that exists in the physical world can cast a shadow on the sublime. Take for example a piece of art. The art evokes the sublime if it is very good and stirs something within us. This very sentence implies that there is more than the piece of art itself, there is the canvas and the paint, there is the semantic sensory meaning that the physical pieces produce, and in the case of good art, there is the sublime. The fact that there are 3 entities in a sublime piece of art indicates that the sublime cannot exist without the human observer.
It is not so much the quality of something deep or transcendent that exists out there. Just like the rules of a chess game or the idea of the ‘conventional practice’ (in the sense of something having been done a certain way for very long making deviations seem strange), there are non-physical categories, ideas, and entities, which for some reason or other, influence behaviour and the happenings of the physical world.
This is the first quality of the sublime that I would like to cover, the fact that it exists in the same group as imaginary entities like the ‘Symbolic’ in the Lacanian sense or the ‘Other’ in the psychoanalytic and existential sense.
The second quality of the sublime I would like to explore has been mentioned already - its ineffable quality. The sublime is a concept which centers around the feeling of being overwhelmed by something bigger than oneself, be it fear or awe. Philosophers have always used this definition and built off of it. Kant viewed the sublime as evidence that the power of our own minds are greater than we think. Nietzsche viewed the sublime as an opportunity to find strength and joy as one continues to transcend their current position. Freud saw the sublime as a clue to the world of hidden emotions and secret fears, and that every time we feel subject to the sublime, we are letting these powerful entities rise to the surface.
The sublime being difficult to describe due to its magnitude seems to add to its enigma and mystique. Tethering on the boundary of language and description is an intrinsic property of the word sublime. This concept is quite intriguing as it makes for further work on this concept takes us straight to the limits of human imagination and comprehension. The small group of words which mark the edge of knowledge and emotion prove to be endlessly intriguing to me because it invites so many more unanswerable questions.
Again, this was another quick exposition on my thoughts on the sublime, not just as an idea, but also as a word that proves both conceptually and linguistically difficult to grapple with.