Sublime (philosophy)

"Sublimity" redirects here. For other uses, see Sublimity (disambiguation).
See also: Sublime (literary)
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1817, Kunsthalle Hamburg. Romantic artists during the 19th century used the epic of nature as an expression of the sublime.

In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublīmis) is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.

Since its first application in the field of rhetoric and drama in ancient Greece it became an important concept not just in philosophical aesthetics but also in literary theory and art history.[1]

  1. ^ Doran, Robert (2017). The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-1-107-10153-1.