The Sublime and Education
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Introduction
The sublime is a theory of aesthetics that reached its highest popularity in British literature during the Romantic period (c. 1785-1832). Although it has historically been associated with art and literature, when applied to education it can enhance the aesthetic conceptual understanding of all subjects while fostering the aesthetic sensibility of the student. Three philosophers who have written most extensively on the subject and who are probably the most quoted are Longinus, Edmund Burke, and Immanuel Kant. Longinus wrote about it during the first century and described it as the ability to transport one's audience in public speaking or writing. In the eighteenth century philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant expanded the domain of the sublime to other areas of thought besides rhetoric, namely aesthetics. For Burke the sublime is terror—the possibility of danger with no immediate harm. For Kant the sublime is infinitude—the inability to grasp the immeasurable combined with the awareness of one's inability to grasp it. This article will (1) explicate these philosophers' different meanings of the sublime, (2) show how the sublime is relevant to education, and (3) show how the sublime "works" in literature by analyzing William Blake's "Jerusalem," and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
Reading the poems "Jerusalem" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" prior to or in conjunction with this article will aid the understanding of it. "Jerusalem" is located on page 88 of this article, and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in its entirety can be found in most British literature anthologies or at http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem530.html. [End Page 79]
Three Foci of Aesthetics
Theories of aesthetics typically converge on three foci.1 The first focus is the practice, activity, or object that directly or indirectly conveys or produces a property that is or is perceived as aesthetic. This focus also may be understood as the medium the property travels through: for example, nature, a speech, music, art, architecture, or literature. The second focus is the specific property, feature, or aspect of a thing that is considered aesthetic. The sublime is the aesthetic property considered in this article as well as its variations: transport, terror, and infinitude. The third focus is the ontology or existence of the property. Ontology asks the question, What exists? Therefore, the ontology of the sublime asks if the sublime exists inherently in the object of consideration or if the subject produces it as one considers the object. The former is aesthetic objectivism; the latter is aesthetic subjectivism.2 These three foci are the how, what, and where of an aesthetic property. Each of the following theories of the sublime will be discussed with respect to these three foci.
Three Theories of the Sublime
Longinus. The earliest account of the sublime is attributed to an unidentified Greek writer of the first century, commonly referred to as Longinus. In On the Sublime (Peri Hupsous), a treatise on rhetorical style, Longinus defines the sublime as the form and content of great writing and speaking, or "a certain superiority and preeminence in discourse."3 Its features are loftiness, dignity, grandeur, and eloquence, but its most essential characteristic is its ability to "transport" the reader and hearer to the plane of great thoughts and passions. Longinus says, for example:
[T]ranscendent genius produces in the hearers not persuasion, but transport . . . [S]ublimity brought forth at the right moment scatters the subjects like a bolt of lightning, and immediately reveals the whole capacity of the speaker at a glance . . . The sublime is always powerful regardless if it is experienced the first time or after several times . . . Its power does not diminish, or else it would not be sublime . . . Moreover, it should invite reflection . . . Its appeal is universal.4
The primary medium of the Longinian sublime is rhetoric. This is a fundamentally different medium from Burke's or Kant's sublime, who discuss it as something that is part of a visual medium. The Longinian sublime is heard and imagined in speeches by legendary orators such as Cicero, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, and...
