Abstract
The concept of the sublime has fallen out of favour. Over the last decades, the topic of the sublime has been sadly neglected by analytical philosophers and shamefully abused by poststructuralist thinkers. Many Anglo-American philosophers have judged the sublime to be an outmoded concept with nothing more than historical significance, whilst many poststructuralist approaches have turned it into a concept which is only vaguely reminiscent of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century original, and have used it merely to fit their postmodernist agenda, thus tarnishing its universal aesthetic value. The present book argues that a return to and revision of Arthur Schopenhauer’s subtle and highly-sophisticated theory of the sublime offers an invaluable contribution to a much-needed re-appraisal of this important aesthetic concept.
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Notes
See Moses Mendelssohn, ‘On the Sublime and the Naïve in the Fine Sciences’ (1758), in Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 195.
Kant’s examples of sublime objects include objects that can be both mathematically and dynamically sublime. See Robert R. Clewis, The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 67.
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© 2015 Bart Vandenabeele
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Vandenabeele, B. (2015). Introduction. In: The Sublime in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137358691_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137358691_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-57829-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-35869-1
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