Sublime

Dialectical relations between culture and religion in self-transcending experiences of sublime and awe: The exemplar case of religious paintings.

“…So, although an esthetic judgment of the sublime cannot directly actualize morality, it can do so indirectly by having phenomenological, structural affinities with the moral feeling of respect. Thus, the sublime “mental state” prepares us for moralagency (Clewis, 2019). This option may well be embedded in a distinct cultural frame that taps the correlating disposition to inwardness and self-directedness of experience that originates from the dominant version of Protestant piety in the 18th century according to its religious ethics and religious individuation, which stresses the contribution of the esthetics experience’s sublime to morality—moral order (Schlette, 2019).…”

“…It is not uncommon, according to Clewis (2019), to connect aesthetic sublime/awe with the moral. The sublime is a manifold thread with two strands: the transcendent thread—the ineffable and unnamable (religious sublime)—and the immanent (aesthetic) that tends to focus on the emotion, the perceptual and imaginative play in the experience stimulated by vastness or powerful leaders.…”

“…Moreover, throughout all theoretical accounts, either of the sublime or of the awe, an implicit or more explicit idea pervades through two strands: (a) the moral (religious) and (b) aesthetic threads which are crisscrossed by the “negative and the positive” axe. Psychological research has taken a mix of both threads (Clewis, 2019; see also Yaden et al, 2016), while the dimensional quadrants may not always be interconnected. If we look at the difference between the unnamable and the affirmative–immanent sublime, the latter involves the supremacy of control–that is, it provides those existing cognitive structures of understanding or assimilating it; thus, reducing the need to accommodate.…”