This practice based MRes project examines the physiological terror-sublime proposed by Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Using the Enquiry as a manual for artistic production, and employing word charts to map the territory, this project looks to embody ideas of the Burkean sublime in contemporary practice. Simon Morley, in the introduction to The Sublime, broadly describes the subject as ‘…fundamentally transformative, about the relationship between disorder and order, and the disruption of the stable coordinates of time and space…in looking at the relevance of the concept to contemporary art, we are also addressing an experience with implications that go far beyond aesthetics… Awe and wonder can quickly blur into terror, giving rise to a darker aspect of the sublime experience, when the exhilarating feeling of delight metamorphoses into a flirtation with dissolution and the ‘daemonic’’ (Morley, 2010:12) This project uses Burke’s Enquiry as the premise for the creation of gallery-based film and installation, alongside a written comparative analysis of relevant literature and artworks, in order to identify a proposed nihilistic turn in the Burkean terror sublime. In the sublime experience, the reveal of an external annihilating power, a shift in perception or a realisation of great depth or distance, leaves us newly aware of our physical limits and the limits of our rational capacities. The possibility of art to discuss an experience at the edge, where conventional language falters, has resulted in a range of artwork, across mediums, which can be identified with the sublime. Distinct from beauty and containing feelings of awe and reverence, the rush of the sublime can be discerned in the installations of Finnish duo IC-98, Anish Kapoor’s deep, dark voids and Bruce Conner’s apocalyptic Crossroads (1976). Through a process of making and reflection focusing on the dynamics of the Burkean sublime, and with reference to contemporary writing on the subject in both aesthetics and philosophy, this MRes asks - how is the sublime in Burke’s Enquiry distinct from the Kantian transcendent sublime, what is the pleasurable terror at the heart of the Enquiry and, by addressing Burke’s ideas through the artistic process, can a pessimism at the heart of Burke’s system be traced?

Shades of Sublime, 2018

Historically, the idea of the sublime is often associated with grand and astounding natural scenery. This thesis investigates a twenty-first century idea of the sublime that includes dissonant phenomena such as ecosystem disruption and climate change. The subject of the sublime is symbolic of how unprepared the general audience is for dealing with the inherent disorders that arise when confronted with ‘negative’ aesthetic engagement. Landscape design, however, can mediate this experience to facilitate a creative act of imagination and identification with contemporary sublime phenomena. This in turn provides an opportunity to speculate on a future landscape architectural repertoire.

The Sublime Reader (ch. 37), 2019

This paper sketches my theory of the sublime and aesthetic awe. The chapter is found in the first comprehensive, historical anthology containing representative readings on the sublime: The Sublime Reader (Bloomsbury, 2019)

Do not talk about or use the misleading,‭ ‬umbrella-word like mind and consciousness,‭ ‬or mental processes and phenomena.‭ ‬Even Hume realized this and emphasized the need for accurate definitions of those words and processes we wish to investigate.‭ ‬Talk about and investigate specific processes or‭ ‬‘notions and activities‭’‬ like thinking,‭ ‬reasoning,‭ ‬sensing and experience/ing,‭ ‬arguments and argumentation,‭ ‬etc‭ ‬.I intend to explore the notions of thought‭ (‬thinking‭)‬,‭ ‬sensation,‭ ‬feeling,‭ ‬understanding and insight,‭ ‬reason/ing and argumentation,‭ ‬emotion and experience,‭ ‬as features of so-called‭ '‬consciousness‭'‬. Information about these things are collected as data collection,‭ ‬brain dumping or storming or one of the first or preliminary steps or stages of the process/‭ ‬es of theorizing.‭ ‬But each section itself is also a mini theorizing concerning the ideas‭ ‬dealt with in it.The aim of this writing is on the one hand dealing with these notions to show that they are not mental processes or indications of the existence of‭ ‬‘the mind‭’‬,‭ ‬but that they can be located in the brain.‭ ‬On the other hand each section and the entire piece are features of the doing of philosophy as steps or stages in the process/es of theorizing. Philosophy‭ (‬philos Sophos,‭ ‬love for Sophia/wisdom‭) ‬begins with‭ (‬a passion,‭ ‬a desire and need for‭) ‬wisdom‭ (‬alone‭) And ends with‭ (‬a life filled,‭ ‬realized,‭ ‬experienced and lived for and by‭) ‬wisdom alone 04/04/2017‭ ‬U

Meta-philosophy investigation of the DEATH of philosophy as subject-matter and the doing of philosophy. Meta-metaphysics, meta-ontology, meta-epistemology, art, religion and other subjects

Both for Kant and for Nietzsche, aesthetics must not be considered as a systematic science based merely on logical premises but rather as a set of intuitively attained artistic ideas that constitute or reconstitute the sensible perceptions and supersensible representations into a new whole. Kantian and Nietzschean aesthetics are both aiming to see beyond the forms of objects to provide explanations for the nobility and sublimity of human art and life. We can safely say that Kant and Nietzsche used the dualities of the beautiful/sublime and Apollonian/Dionysian to advocate their general philosophical worldview, and that the initial formation (in Observations and The Birth of Tragedy) and final dissolution (in the Critique of Judgment and Zarathustra and other later works) of these dualities are determined by the gradually established telos of their philosophical endeavor. Therefore, by observing the evolution of these so-called dualities, Kaplama gathers important clues as to how Kant's and Nietzsche's aesthetics transformed into different ways to affirm human art and life. On the one hand, Kaplama argues, the Dionysian came to be the heart and soul of Nietzschean aesthetics and ethics, and the Apollonian (or the formal drive of individuation) was reduced into a mere aesthetic criterion. On the other, Kant treats the sublime (which is originally an idea-producing feeling and/or judgment) as a mere appendix to his Critique of Judgment and aesthetic theory teleologically reducing it into its possible moral consequences. This is why Schopenhauer calls the sublime " by far the most excellent thing in the Critique of Judgment " which touches on the real problem of aesthetics very closely but does not provide a real solution for it. Kant's forced teleological move is to make his theory of aesthetic judgment stand as a 'reaffirmation' of the www.cosmosandhistory.org 166

Richardson J E - The Great Work - The Philosophy of Individual Life - 1911