The Sublime, Revisited
Jeanette Bicknell · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2009
Throughout this book we have been trying to make sense of responses to music like the one recounted by the unnamed volunteer in the first epigraph to this chapter. I have described these as “strong emotional” and as “sublime” responses, thereby placing them in a philosophical tradition extending from Longinus to Kant and beyond. In doing so, I have used “sublime” in a way that, while not opposed to traditional usage, does not fully cohere with it either. Steering clear of value judgements and ontological commitments, I have remained neutral as to whether the musical works that seem to arouse such responses were themselves “really” sublime or not. In this chapter we face these more normative issues squarely. What is the relationship between the sublime and beauty, and between the sublime and artistic greatness? How are feelings of the sublime related to other possible types of responses to music? What is gained and what is lost in treating sublime responses as fundamentally emotional in nature?