The Sublime

[TC_Halogen]

After going in-depth on this subject in my Honors World Literature class, I was a bit upset that we didn't have enough time to cover the topic fully. For those of you who do not know what this is about, let me give you a little bit of background information.

Aesthetics is commonly perceived as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, culture and nature." Aesthetics is a subdiscipline of axiology, a branch of philosophy, and is closely associated with the philosphy of art. Aesthetics studies new ways of seeing and of perceiving the world.

What do you call a feeling so powerful it cannot even be explained?
In aesthetics, the sublime (from the Latin sublimis ([looking up from] under the lintel, high, lofty, elevated, exalted)) is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, or artistic. The terms especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.

There were three passages that explained certain scenarios, but I see this one to be the most beneficial to the argument that I am about to propose:

Passage taken from Dr. Clare Colebrook's Lecture (University of Edinburgh)

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that, is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the, strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body, could enjoy. A pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure, so death is in general a much more affecting idea than pain.

During our lecture in class, arguments were brought up about pain, death, and terror being less of a feeling than love and pleasure. I argued that love and pleasure is something every person who has lived beyond their birth has had; they had to have had someone nurture them and care for them when needed the most. I also argued that since death has an unexpected, yet determined finality, it is much more powerful of a feeling/emotion than love and pleasure can give.

What do you guys think? According to the passage above, do you believe that love and pleasure has pain equal to or better than pain, terror, or death?

[Xx{Midday}xX]

Re: The Sublime

That's like asking which quantity has a greater magnitude: 1km or 1kg? There's no answer.

The magnitudes of the various emotional values are as different between each other as the magnitudes of the various quantitative values. You cannot compare a km to a kg valuewise, because there is no standard for comparison. There is no standard for comparison amongst the emotional values either.

The only way to measure emotion is through the amount of influence it inflicts on the subject. A happiness can make you smile, or it can make you jump up and down. A sadness can make you frown, or make you cry. You are asking whether crying from sadness is stronger than jumping up and down from happiness. Can you truly answer that question? It is completely subjective.

Happiness and sadness (just using these two as examples) are not inverses, converses, or contrapositives. They cannot be compared to each other through absolute value or magnitude. -3 is greater in magnitude than 2. 1km is not necessarily greater than or equal to or less than 1kg. A certain degree of happiness that makes you smile is not necessarily greater than or equal to or less than a certain degree of sadness that can make you frown.

Considering other emotions. Emotional pain (or hollowness, as I feel it), melancholy, fear, rage, pleasure, are all different kinds of values analogous to the various SI units such as distance, mass, time, etc. They cannot be compared to each other, because there is no set standard for comparison.

In my thoughts, emotions are just a bunch of chemical reactions inducing a physical result anyway. They are not source material, but the result of another cause.

[rzr]

Re: The Sublime

I think there is an equal yet opposite emotion/feeling, yes. Given that we live on a planet, in a solar system, whose entire current existant relies on the magnetic pull of gravity, I can infer that the emotions are solar opposites. So, if there's a '+' and a '-,' then there's a 'happy.' and a 'sad.'

[devonin]

Re: The Sublime

Why would you infer something with regards to the subjective experience of emotion based on the way the objective laws of motion for planetary bodies operate?

(Also, I think you mean polar opposites)

[Cavernio]

Re: The Sublime

Currently, my most 'sublime' moments seem to be a mix of joy and pain. I perhaps may even put a word to the feeling, longing. Does that make it not sublime anymore? (Kinda stupid eh, I want longing??)
Yet with that said, I still do think that there are 'opposite' feelings, if only because I think there's such a thing as no feeling. I can justify that I can feel more than '1' emotion at once is that the emotions I feel at the same time aren't polar opposites. If we were to map emotions to a scale, that scale would be multi-dimensional, and we'd need vectors to describe them. Because of the multi-dimensions, and because of the enormity of different varieties of emotions we feel, it'd be impossible to pinpoint an opposite feeling anyways, because there's just too many of them. ie: given nearly infinite possibilities, how likely will you get 2 opposite ones? (and then be able to describe them as opposite!)
Midday: If you think that emotions have nothing in common such that we can't compare them, you are very wrong for one nit-picky thing. Emotions are all categorized as emotions. Maybe you wouldn't agree with this next statement, but I think you will, in that we can experience varying degrees of a single emotion. Like angry and very angry. If each individual emotion has varying degrees, can we then not attempt to remove the emotional element itself, and just focus on magnitude?
However, even with that said, I'm doubtful that even doing that is necessary to answer the question about what emotions are the most sublime, because to ask about subliminalness isn't asking about magnitude. You still have personal experience to draw from, and at some point you think you may have felt the most sublime.

As far as specifically saying that pain, fear, etc. are the most sublime emotions a person can ever experience, I disagree, if only for the reason that even if they ARE the most subliminal emotions someone can feel, that in no way guarantees that a person will ever experience them. And if they're never experienced, do they actually exist for that person?
Another point, 'death' itself is not a feeling, but rather fear of death may be. You're example about death being final makes fear of death much stronger than anything, can also be said about any given moment in time because each moment is also final. This doesn't have to make you feel sad or scared though. You might instead revel in being alive at that moment in time if only because you're alive for it.

[-zeroSKILL-]

Re: The Sublime

What do you guys think? According to the passage above, do you believe that love and pleasure has pain equal to or better than pain, terror, or death?

AJ... Rephrase the question please .

I don't know how anyone else even answered this o.o

"do you believe that love and pleasure has pain"
"equal to or better than pain, terror, or death?"

Sorry, I read stuff very literally :/. The first time I read it, it made sense somehow. I got what the question was in other words. I re-read it to try and answer your question better, and that first bit I quoted just made me go "wha----??".

And now I can't make sense of it again D:

The answer to your question (as written) is a definite no.

Please re-word it so I might give an *insightful* answer

[igotrhythm]

Re: The Sublime

I believe that if an experience, positive or negative, is intense enough for a person, that they will have no choice but to remember it. (Of course, then we get into the instance of the people who faint when exposed to events that are too intense for them and thus they have no personal memory of the event, but I will ignore this instance for the purposes of the argument.)

However, there is no objective way to quantify "how much" emotion is in a given memory, so the question of whether pain or pleasure is more strongly felt is impossible to answer definitively. However, as can be observed from the fact that you spent the rest of the period discussing the question, everyone has their own opinion of what the answer is. Therefore, the best I can hope to do is give my 2 cents:

While I have had some pretty good things happen to me over my lifespan, recently a lot of bad stuff has begun to happen. I lost my grandfather in February of this year, and last week I found out that my dad has brain cancer. And don't get me started about the time back in '03 when I was asked to help moderate a certain part of a forum and ended up getting demodded after about 3 weeks because, the way I remember it, I let it go to my head. That was a pretty turbulent period, though...it coincided with my first semester attending college, taking a full load on a full ride while simultaneously discovering the wonders of the Internet. It still hurts to think about to this day. But I digress.

Basically, whether pain or pleasure is more strongly felt depends on the individual and the circumstances behind the experience. For example, if you're a Detroit Lions fan right now, you're probably ready to gather up some people and petition outside the workplace of William Clay Ford Sr. (the current owner of the team, if memory serves) for him to sell the team because in the history of the Ford family owning the team, they have driven the franchise into the ground and then some. I, on the other hand, delight in these missteps; I want the Lions to go down in history as one of the worst teams in the NFL since the inception of the 16-game regular season. One person's pain is another's pleasure. There is no event that can be truly considered universally appealing or appalling, except perhaps in the latter case unabashed assaults on basic human dignity (the Holocaust comes to mind).

Because what may be offensive to one may not be to another, it's like trying to determine whether one number is greater than another when you don't even know of the numbers in question are positive or negative. It just can't be done without additional information.