The place of the works of art in the sublime’s philosophy of the 18th century

Abstract

The connection between art and sublime, at first sight, sounds like a certainty, but throughout the 18th century some theories separated this category from the several art forms. Those were the decades in which the matters on the sublime were notably fruitful, times where not only the sublime earns its title as an aesthetic category, but also outstandingly takes part on the epistemological debates at the time where the term Aesthetics were just recently coined. It is in this scenery that some thinkers were especially worried about the natural sublime only. This article intends to show the path travelled by this concept from the 1^st century, with Longinus’ literature treaty Peri Hypsos, translated by Boileau-Despréaux as Du Sublime to its reception by the English in 1689. From that reception on, the text goes through philosophers such as Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, who developed the natural sublime theory, arriving to the reinsertion of the tragedy in this category by Friedrich Schiller. Thus, what we call here “the cycle of the natural sublime”, which originated in literary production and moved away from it with the Empiricism and the Transcendental Idealism, comes back again within the sphere of literature in the German poet’s work.