The craving for the sublime is basic, embedded within us. What Burke does not explicitly address is human nature. An essential caveat he later adds: вЂњNor is it, either in real or fictitious distresses, our immunity from them which produces our delightвЂ¦it is absolutely necessary that my life should be out of any imminent hazard, before I can take a delight in the sufferings of others, real or imaginary.вЂќ 4 Ultimately, he would argue that we all have a death wish, as long as actual death and destruction stays imaginary. 2 In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Part I, Section VII, Burke elaborates, вЂњWhatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.вЂќ 3Д«urke alludes to the prospect of death.

Instead, the sublime produces a вЂњnegative pleasureвЂќ or вЂњdelightвЂќ. To Burke, the sublime is more powerful and intense than the classical Platonistic pure pleasure notion of beauty. 1 Edmund Burke was the first to establish a visceral-aesthetic parallel between the beautiful and the sublime. The earliest 18 th century definitions involve the experience of being struck by the boundlessness of nature, mingled with an вЂњagreeable kind of horror,вЂќ as in the Italian Alps. Today the word вЂњsublimeвЂќ has been decontextualized to the point where it has lost its original meaning. Recently I overheard a vociferous diner in a restaurant on the Upper West Side describe his dessert as вЂњdelicious, simply sublime.вЂќ That must have been some chocolate cake to make him suddenly aware of the fragility of his own life within natureвЂ™s overwhelming power. вЂњвЂ¦that echo beyond time, anguish or caressвЂ¦ДЄre we near to our conscience, or far from it?вЂќ вЂ“ Stephen King as Richard Bachman, The Long Walk, 1979 вЂњвЂ¦somehow they understood that the circle between death-worship and death-wish had been completed for another year and the crowd went completely loopy, convulsing itself in greater and greater paroxysms.вЂќ

The sublime