On the Sublime

"I think you have to put him at the top of the list, just because he sort of got it all going. We have no treatises on the sublime without his work on the sublime. I don’t know if it’s accurate to say he wrote the first one, but it’s certainly the one that has survived the longest, so I think he’s significant for that reason alone. As a little aside: it’s sometimes thought that Boileau, Nicolas Boileau, was the first translator of Longinus in his work of 1674. But that’s not completely accurate. Boileau did a lot to bring the sublime into mainstream intellectual discourse, particularly in continental Europe, but he wasn’t the first. Translations of Longinus started around the 1550s and 1560s; the treatise seems to have been published in Greek and Latin around the same time. So it was around for many decades before Boileau. “The sublime is a complex but ultimately pleasant feeling of exhilaration, excitement, or uplift, before an object that is considered to be powerful, vast, or awe-inspiring” As for the content, his main contribution there I would say was to break the sublime up into its sources, and he named five sources. The first two were really influential and stayed with us; the last three less so, they had more to do with rhetoric. One of his aims was to help orators stimulate and move an audience, so it was a kind of advice for orators. But, he says, first and foremost is the power to conceive great thoughts. That’s the first source of sublime power. The second is strong, inspired emotion—the Greek he uses is ‘pathos’. Then thirdly, certain kinds of rhetorical figures; fourthly, noble diction; and fifth, dignified word arrangement. So: ‘greatness of thought’. This seems to be a kind of Stoic idea, in other words, it is reason that is ultimately sublime, or elevated over nature. He says “sublimity is the echo of the great soul.” That is, I think, an idea that Kant later extends. The strong and powerful emotion—this, of course, is very important to the psychological approach and to Burke. So I would say greatness of thought and powerful emotion are the two elements you can find in the Longinus work that have really stayed with us. You’ll quickly find all sorts of adjectives put before the word sublime. My understanding is that, from a grammatical point of view, it’s just putting the elicitor of the experience there. The natural sublime is the sublime response elicited by nature, the technological sublime is the sublime response in response to technology, and so forth. I’m not too troubled by this. I think it’s perfectly fine for the concept to be applied in many ways."