Sensation and the Sublime: Revisiting the Physiological Basis of Aesthetic Encounters

Abstract

The aesthetic concept of the sublime has long been a part of Western landscape architectural discourse and design. Both the sublime and this distinct practice of landscape design and planning emerged as entwined forms of experimentation with the world in 18th- and 19th-century Europe. The sublime came to be understood as an encounter that produced a pleasurable yet intense sense of disturbance, terror, or difference. It made clear how we, as living beings, are connected to something greater than ourselves. Alongside the beautiful and later the picturesque, the sublime was a central topic of societal discussion within a landscape context and beyond. Many designers in the 18th and 19th centuries took up the challenge of designing with and for the sublime, seeing it as a definitively practical challenge. Since then, it has fallen by the wayside within landscape discourse due to philosophical arguments over its definition and operation; the term now tends to be used as a descriptor for scale, magnitude, and rugged form. This article argues that the sublime is worth returning to as a designerly concept for landscape architecture because it can reveal our interconnectedness to the world. The sublime is reconceptualized here as being a physiological event that occurs between one’s body and the landscape, as opposed to the commonly held psychological or subjective understanding. By returning to the work of Edmund Burke, Thomas Whately, Uvedale Price, and Frederick Law Olmsted, we can see that the original thinkers considered the sublime to be remarkably concrete.