A Sublime-Filled Existence
How the tension of the sublime encompasses our lives
Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live the “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.
This month we’re exploring the theme of the sublime.
We believe ourselves to be self-sufficient rational creatures. We believe we can control our lives and the circumstances we encounter. We believe we are individuals of mass strength that bend the world to our will.
But then we experience the sublime and we’re quickly reminded of just how limited we are.
The sublime has a long history whose meaning has shifted over the years. As we know it today, it is about how limited we as individuals are, how small we are to the greater whole, to the beauty and perfection of things around us. The sublime is like awe on steroids, it represents both the pleasures and fears of existence, the magnitude of life and our limited capacity for understanding it.
The Irish philosopher Edmund Burke explained that these experiences, which he termed the sublime, were created through the dual nature of both terror and beauty.
“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully is Astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror … No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear, being an apprehension of pain or death, operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too … Indeed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime.”
We’re amazed by the fact that we’re one of billions, if not trillions of galaxies within the universe, yet are reminded of just how small we are in that landscape. We are, in essence, the bacteria that crawls on the surface of the floor, and yet, experience the entirety of existence—love and heartbreak, pleasure and pain, pure existential and existential heartbreak.
A snow covered mountain is breathtaking to see up close, but also terrifying when one realizes the destruction it would cause with an avalanche.
It is through the experience of the sublime, when we are captured by its immensity and beauty, that we are transformed. The beauty of the experience and emotions arising within us is but the surface of the true experience.
To experience the sublime, to relish in its glory, is to turn the experience and the emotions into a transformative one. It is to move from the self to the collective. It is to move from the me to the we. It is to be captured so tightly by our insignificance that we cannot help but see we are not individuals in society but a collective, strung together by existence and experience.
We don’t all see it. The sublime is very much a unique experience for the individual having it. Many of us are often too busy or caught up in the day to day to truly appreciate the sublime’s impact on our lives.
Being enveloped in the sublime is learning that reason is but a single aspect of human life and that even that cannot explain it all. That life is made of much more than just rational thought, it is also emotion, experience, all of it, building together to provide us an understanding of what it means to be alive.
When we experience the sublime, we’re returned to a degree to what it means to be alive, outside of our day to day existence. We’re reminded of those around us. We’re reminded of the vastness of life, the microscopic magnitude of existence while simultaneously understanding the power of our existence. We’re swept away in the beauty of it all while understanding the crushing nature it holds.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus often referenced the paradoxically competing natures of existence writing things such as “the way up is the way back” and “the beginning is the end.”
Perhaps the quote of his that best captures the sublime, and one we can readily keep handy in our minds is this:
“The cosmos works by harmony of tensions, like the lyre and bow.”
The sublime contains both beauty and terror, best capturing the human condition of what it means to be alive, in a constant tension pull between the beauty and terror of existence.
It is from this remembrance that we can keep ourselves centered in the world.
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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