beauty and the sublime

Beauty is that which produces a pleasure that does not necessarily engender a desire to possess or consume the thing that pleases. The horror bound up with the Sublime is the horror of something that cannot possess us and cannot harm us. In this lies the deep relationship between Beauty and the Sublime.

Kant distinguishes between two sorts of Sublime, the mathematical and the dynamic variety. A typical example of the mathematical Sublime is the sight of the starry sky. Here we have the impression that what we see goes far beyond our sensibilities and we are thus induced to imagine more than we see. We are led to this because our reason (the faculty that leads us to conceive ideas such as God, the world, or freedom, which our intellect cannot demonstrate) induces us to postulate an infinity that is not only beyond the grasp of our senses but also beyond the reach of our imagination, which cannot manage to harness it to a single intuition.

A typical example of the dynamic Sublime is the sight of a storm. Here, what shakes our spirit is not the impression of infinite vastness, but of infinite power: in this case, too, our sensible nature is left humiliated and, again, this is a source of a feeling of unease, compensated for by the sense of our moral greatness, against which the forces of nature are powerless.

- Umberto Eco

Caspar David Friedrich - The Moon Rising over the Sea (1822)