The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Self

The sublime emerges in the history of philosophy as the object of an aesthetic experience very often contrasted with the aesthetic experience of the beautiful. While the latter experience is mainly positive and pleasurable, the former experience is characterized by ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, the sublime involves an overwhelming vastness, or power, which disturbs and unsettles. On the other hand, the sublime poses a challenge, which is enlightening and elating. The overall experience of the sublime is also frequently associated with the feeling of the insignificance of human life, of our smallness compared to the grandeur we are confronted with. In the light of recent psychological and neuroscientific studies, we claim that the sublime gives rise to an aesthetic experience that, contrary to the experience of the beautiful, involves a diminished sense of the self. More precisely, sublimity experiences are immersive and tend to blur the distinction between the self and the world. Our claim has implications for a vexed question about the sublime, namely, whether it is restricted to natural scenes or extends to artworks. We suggest that in favorable conditions, art can elicit sublimity experiences. We then offer a roadmap to test our claim within an experimental setting, with special focus on music and virtual reality devices to deal with the immersive character of sublimity experiences.