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Philosophies of aesthetics have posited that experience of the sublime-commonly but not exclusively derived from scenes of natural grandeur-is distinct from that of beauty and is a counterpoint to it. We wanted to chart the pattern of brain activity which correlates with the declared intensity of experience of the sublime, and to learn whether it differs from the pattern that correlates with the experience of beauty, reported in our previous studies (e.g., Ishizu and Zeki, 2011). 21 subjects participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment. Prior to the experiment, they viewed pictures of landscapes, which they rated on a scale of 1-5, with 5 being the most sublime and 1 being the least. This allowed us to select, for each subject, five sets of stimuli-from ones experienced as very sublime to those experienced as not at all sublime-which subjects viewed and re-rated in the scanner while their brain activity was imaged. The results revealed a distinctly different pattern of brain activity from that obtained with the experience of beauty, with none of the areas active with the latter experience also active during experience of the sublime. Sublime and beautiful experiences thus appear to engage separate and distinct brain systems.

A widespread view denies that there is a concept of the sublime in Chinese thought and philosophical aesthetics. This denial is a mistake. We examine texts and artworks that indicate that the experience of the sublime can be found in Chinese aesthetics and theories of art and aesthetic experience. To show this, we first present an overview of the sublime extracted from western writers: we describe the sublime experience’s structure, objects, and status as a mixed (but ultimately pleasant) experience. These themes are then taken as a guide for the analysis of Chinese terms relating to the sublime (such as chónggāo 崇高). We then examine Chinese sources from both the classical and late modern periods. Moreover, we respond to two objections. We conclude that the sublime is not confined to western or European experiences or to movements within those traditions, such as Romanticism.

Scholarly discussion on Bonaventure’s Christology has tended to favor its Trinitarian, historical, and epistemological dimensions. Of note is Bonaventure’s notion of Christ as medium metaphysicum: the very depth and center of history according to knowing, learning, and mystical desire. What is perhaps less considered with respect to these topics, but nevertheless evident in contemporary scholarship, is the extent to which Bonaventure’s Christological structure informs an essential relation between creation and glorification. This essay explores these topics with attention to contemporary Bonaventure scholarship to offer insights on the ongoing importance of Bonaventure’s Christology for posterity, especially as it relates to a Bonaventurian theology of creation.

Totemic art, as the fundamental medium of the spiritual realm of primordial societies, employs its distinctive symbolic system to communicate and articulate humanity’s spiritual understanding and sacred quest for nature, the cosmos, and the essence of existence. This article centers on totemic art, which, through the three dimensions of sublime beauty, humanistic beauty, and artistic beauty, establishes a spiritual dialogue system between primitive tribes and supernatural forces. The core principle is the aesthetic metamorphosis of the spiritual realm through material carriers. It explores how it functions as a potent medium for articulating both personal and communal spirituality: sublime beauty manifests and materializes the intangible divine force through the “presenting the unpresentable,” thus establishing the spiritual basis of primal reverence; Humanistic beauty, rooted in familial connections, the celebration of life, and community unity, facilitates the awakening and elevation of both individual and collective consciousness, promoting the integration and symbiosis of personal spirituality and communal sanctity; Behind the evolution of styles and the characteristics of anti-aesthetics in the artistic beauty, there remains the fundamental logic of serving spiritual expression. Research indicates that totemic art serves as the fundamental aesthetic practice of primitive societies for comprehending the world, engaging with the divine, and achieving mental tranquility. The three dimensions of its spiritual expression collectively form a spiritual monument of early human civilization.

The period between the Han and Tang dynasties was a crucial time in the development of the Daoist cosmic concept. During that time, Daoist believers needed to place important deities properly in the newly created heavenly realm. Faced with placing the great deity Lord Lao in a specific place, different Daoist believers made various attempts with some complex adjustments, which eventually reached the consensus during the Tang Dynasty at the latest that “Lord Lao lives in Great Clarity Heaven”. The investigation of this adjustment process would present multiple possibilities in the development of the Daoist cosmic concept.

This article explores the perceived opposition of beauty and utility in music as traditionally regarded in Western thought. It first provides evidence of this binarism and discusses its nuanced interpretations. It then argues that the relationship between utility, the abject, and the sublime, along with the opposition between beauty and the sublime, supplies a catalyst for this perceived dichotomy. So doing, the article strives to challenge the perception of the beauty-utility dialectic and invite novel comprehensions.

This essay is an exploration of the historical and theoretical relations between the ridiculous and the sublime. Leaning on concepts from Friedrich Schiller, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Mann, and Norman Mailer, it seeks to place John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday into a broader tradition. The main focus is the narrative function of the character Hazel, the village idiot turned suffering hero.

In the past two decades, the sonification of scientific data - an auditory equivalent of data visualization in which data are turned into sounds - has become increasingly widespread, particularly as an artistic practice and as a means of popularizing science. Sonification is thus part of the recent trend, discussed in public understanding of science literature, towards increased emphasis on 'interactivity' and 'crossovers' between science and art as a response to the perceived crisis in the relationship between the sciences and their publics. However, sonification can also be understood as the latest iteration in a long tradition of theorizing the relations between nature, science and human experience. This article analyses the recent public fascination with sonification and argues that sonification grips public imaginations through the promise of sublime experiences. I show how the 'auditory sublime' is constructed through varying combinations of technological, musical and rhetorical strategies. Rather than maintain a singular conception of the auditory sublime, practitioners draw on many scientific and artistic repertoires. However, sound is often situated as an immersive and emotional medium in contrast to the supposedly more detached sense of vision. The public sonification discourse leaves intact this dichotomy, reinforcing the idea that sound has no place in specialist science.

Emmanuel Levinas’s doubts about the ethical value of artistic beauty have been widely acknowledged by the vast majority of Levinas’s commentators. However, though it is true that in “Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas persistently rebukes artistic beauty for its nonethicality, it is undeniable that he at least upholds the value of artistic criticism and modern literature. In this article I intend to relate Levinas’s exploration of the possibility of spiritual–ethical teaching in literature to Immanuel Kant’s reflections on the relation between the feeling of beauty, that of sublimity, and sensible feeling in his third Critique. This up-close comparative examination fosters understanding of Levinas’s religious and philosophical approach to the sublime elements in some literary works, especially those of Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The method - an apprehension of its size and power, of its ability to terrify - through introspections, reflections and intellections that had the potential to comprehend the vastness of the object, to reduce it into a capsule, a subject of moral superiority from its apocalyptic inferiority - an attempt to invert the fear of death, bom from experience coupled with ignorance, into death of fear, bom from knowledge and conscientiousness - a spiritual and mental itinerary creating an aspect truly Sublime. While the author would soon descend from the mountain terrains of Bhutan to the sacred plains of India, the methods of revealing, comprehending and generating sublime knowledge from apocalyptic experience continued to war with the human intellect until this day, lingering further on. To cite one specific example, when Swami Vivekananda describes an incident from the Mahabharata involving Yudhisthira in his famous 'Paper on Hinduism', he seems to coagulate the 'grand' with the 'beautiful', using them simultaneously to describe the sublimity of the HimalayasHt does not define a mistake in his eloquence; it gives rise to a genuine contradiction, a working oxymoron of ideas against pleasure, a true ambivalence in the Indian understanding of the Sublime, to be identified by Hegel in Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art.2However, this interesting aspect ascends through the lack of clear-cut distinctions between the symbolic and the natural - something crucial to Western methodologies of the Sublime. Since one lives in a world of interpretations and not hard definitions, is it incumbent upon the individual to appreciate through distinctions only, yet not through an acceptance of honest assimilations by being amused at their fluid co-existences?