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Articles

Encounters With The (Post) Sublime

Siobhan Lyons asks where we can find the sublime in the modern world.

Imagine watching a storm at sea. Imagine standing on a towering, vertiginous mountain peak. ‘The sublime’ refers to an experience of magnificence that nearly, but not quite, invokes fear. Does the sublime still exist in the twenty-first century? Or have we become desensitised to the very concept in a post-nature, mediated world?

A concept widely discussed by philosophers from Burke to Kant, Schopenhauer to Hegel, in recent years its linguistic potency seems to have become diluted through misuse of the term, as ‘sublime’ has been used increasingly to refer to something that is simply beautiful. But the sublime, distinguished from beauty, carries with it more negative connotations of awe, terror, even the threat of death, often at the hands of a savage natural world.

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