Sublime

Aesthetic experience associated with being overwhelmed—for example, in terms of size (the mathematically sublime) or in terms of power (the dynamically sublime). For Immanuel Kant(1724-1804), this involved the sensation that our powers of reason surpass our sensory perceptions. In his A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), Edmund Burke (1729-1797) argued that beauty and sublimity are mutually exclusive, but, in a work of art, can both nevertheless be pleasurable. In modern art,the sublime is associated with the limits of traditional artistic expression.