To delineate something mighty beyond spatiotemporal thresholds—which is the essence of the sublime—has not yet reached a true consensus. Edmund Burke explores the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful in his 1757 work A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke defines the sublime as that which “excites the ideas of pain and danger,” encompassing notions of pain, awe, and terror. However, to expand the concept of the sublime within art, one must consider its historical background, the evolving relationship between humanity and nature, and the philosophical pursuit of transcendence.
During the Industrial Revolution, Romanticism emerged as a counter-reaction to the prevailing industrial, capitalist, and mechanistic worldview, which emphasized reason, rationality, and a fully knowable universe. Romanticism proposed a new approach to understanding nature through epochē—an attitude of suspension or noninvolvement—allowing individuals to step beyond the confines of the industrialized world. This movement sought to evoke the ungraspable and limitless emotions of humankind by challenging the mechanical mindset of the era. Beauty is pleasure, calm, symmetry, harmony, serenity – the ideal one; Sublime is awe, vastness, irregularity, terror, obscurity, power. The sublime does not oppose beauty but intensifies emotion—not with gentleness and civility, but with grandeur, spirituality, and transcendence. Through this scientific and industrial epochē, the mechanistic view of humanity as separate from nature can be replaced with feelings that are undefined, indeterminate, and deeply moving.
Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is a powerful representation of esoteric allegory and an entrancing landscape experienced through individual perception. This is made possible by suspending preconceived constructs of nature to approach it in its pure form. Although the painting depicts a single figure, one could argue it contains two: the infinite, unconditioned, conscious subject, and the finite, determined, unconscious object. The central figure—the wanderer—can be interpreted either as subject or object. As the viewer gazes upon the painting, a dynamic shift occurs: the wanderer becomes the observer, and the observer becomes the wanderer. In this exchange, the subject of the painting merges with the viewer, while also withdrawing. If the man is the subject, the viewer is drawn into the landscape to gaze alongside him; however, if nature is the subject—unconditioned, infinite, and conscious—then the man becomes the object. The untouchable, immeasurable awe evoked by the sublime is not a product of civilized or gentle nature but an expression of wildness and transcendence.
Burke emphasized that the sublime and the beautiful can coexist: “We have found them in a state of much sobriety, impressed with a sense of awe, in a sort of tranquillity shadowed with horror.” This duality—where the sublime turns upon pain and beauty upon pleasure—is evident in Laocoön and His Sons, a masterpiece that synthesizes transcendental aesthetics through artistic creation (poiesis). The sculpture embodies tragedy, as Laocoön suffers immensely for revealing the truth about the Trojan Horse. His expression conveys agony and despair, yet there is a serene beauty underlying this pain—a reflection of the idealized aesthetics of Ancient Greek and Roman art. Without needing theoretical explanation, the sculpture elicits a sublime feeling through its form. As Schelling writes, “Nature is sublime not only in its greatness, to the extent that it is inaccessible to our powers of comprehension, and not only in its power, to the extent that it remains absolutely impervious to our own physical strength. It is also sublime in a general fashion within chaos.” In the Romantic tradition, Schelling introduced a new philosophical system wherein art reconciles contradictions—uniting sublimity as a transcendental sentiment with beauty as aesthetic experience. From Burke to Schelling, the inquiry into the sublime and its synthesis with beauty marked a departure from the Neoclassical and Enlightenment emphasis on ideal beauty and rational clarity.
