The sublime and the limits of human figuration

 

 

 

 

The sublime was for Burke an experience bordering on terror, the fitful glimpse, in

astonishment, stupor and awe, of what was so enormous as to crush human life altogether: a description then refined by Kant to include the question of representation itself, so that the object of the sublime becomes not only a matter of sheer power and of the physical incommensurability of the human organism with

Nature but also of the limits of figuration and the incapacity of the human mind to give representation to such enormous forces.