Edmund Burke on the Sublime: A Philosophical Inquiry

Romanticism in art is exemplified by Caspar David Friedrich's paintings, which depict solitary figures seeking heights and transcendence above mundane existence. In literature, Heinrich Heine's poetry captures the romantic spirit through longing for escape from the 'cursed world of merchants' and yearning for distant lands like Lapland or Africa, reflecting the romantic rejection of conventional society.

Romanticism was an artistic and literary movement that emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, challenging the dominant Neoclassical style. Unlike Neoclassicism, which emphasized reason, order, and idealization, Romanticism emphasized emotion, imagination, personal feelings, and the senses. This movement influenced how artists and writers depicted historical and literary subjects, including tragic love stories like that of Francesca and Paolo.

Romanticism (late 18th-early 19th century) emphasized nature's power and sublimity beyond reason's capacity to capture it, heroic themes, and powerful emotions. In visual arts, Théodore Géricault's 'The Raft of the Medusa' (1818-19) exemplifies this through dramatic elevation of reality rather than faithful depiction. In literature, Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' portrays nature as tranquil and restorative, yet still possessing overpowering sublimity that exceeds reason.

Romanticism emerged early in the 19th century as a movement in literature, art, and music. It was concerned with emotion rather than reason, atmosphere rather than form. The dominant overarching theme was the pursuit of an unattainable ideal, and Romanticism includes preoccupation with death and dying and by extension with the supernatural.

Romantic artists explored themes of madness, emotion, and nature through groundbreaking works. Henry Fuseli's 'The Nightmare' (1782) pioneered exploration of human psychology during the Age of Reason, depicting a woman with a demon and spectral horse to capture the limits of reason and power of the irrational. Goethe's 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' (1774) created the romantic hero archetype—artist at odds with society, doomed to self-destruction through passion. The novel sold three million copies and changed attitudes toward love by privileging emotional outpouring over rational concerns. Wordsworth's poetry celebrated nature as salvation from industrialization, depicting humble landscapes as moral edens. These works collectively established Romanticism's emphasis on intense emotion, individual experience, and rejection of Enlightenment rationalism.

Gothic literature draws on sophisticated theoretical frameworks of fear and awe. Edmund Burke's 'Philosophical Inquiry' (1756) distinguished beauty (superficial pleasure) from the sublime (profound fear from overwhelming force—mountains, storms, desolate ice). Anne Radcliffe extended this by distinguishing horror (sudden fear like being spooked) from terror (lasting, solemn fear linked to the sublime). Using Shakespearean examples, she argued that Macbeth's ghost represents horror while Hamlet's ghost represents terror because it connects with cold, darkness, and expectation-building. Sigmund Freud's concept of the uncanny—'that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well-known and had long been familiar'—explains how Gothic literature transforms familiar domestic spaces into sites of terror, where the home meant to provide security becomes threatening.

Gothic literature distinguishes between horror and terror. Terror is a negative sensation that paralyzes creativity and perception, while horror is an experience that intoxicates and possesses the mind, leading to superior understanding of unknown experiences. This distinction, developed by Ann Radcliffe, represents a key theoretical contribution to Gothic literary analysis and understanding of emotional responses to supernatural narratives.

Ann Radcliffe pioneered 'terror' - the anguish before something incomprehensible or wrong that isn't yet clearly visible. In her works, supernatural elements receive rational explanations at the end, focusing on the heroine's psychological experience. Matthew Lewis, in 'The Monk', pushed to 'horror' - explicit crimes, demonic pacts, graphic violence, and sexual content. Terror prolongs expectation while horror shocks and produces repulsion. These two effects, combined with different doses, have accompanied Gothic literature throughout its history.

Gothic literature distinguishes between terror and horror as different emotional experiences. Terror is linked to the obscure—that which cannot be fully seen, grasped, or understood. This obscurity creates a sense of being overpowered by an external force. Horror, in contrast, is more like being spooked by something visible and tangible. The strategic obscuring of specificity in descriptions creates terror because readers' imaginations fill in the gaps with their own fears, which are typically more horrible than any specific description could be.

Ann Radcliffe distinguished between terror and horror in Gothic literature. Terror expands our sensibilities and draws us to obscured places as we listen desperately to what's happening, relying on the unseen and impending threat. Horror overwhelms us, confronting us with shocking, grotesque, or obscene images that disturb our complacency.

We maintain a confused relationship with aesthetics without considering environmental ethics of such confusion. Recognizing aesthetic choices' negative impacts enables directing thinking toward environmentally sound ends, representing ecological literacy. Aldo Leopold fused aesthetic and ethical value, defining right actions as those preserving biotic community integrity, stability, and beauty. Environmental aesthetics extend beyond vision to include hearing (noise pollution), smell (unpleasant natural odors), and taste (meat preferences contributing to greenhouse gases). This multi-sensory approach reveals how aesthetic appreciation of nature inherently involves caring for it, as pollution is criticized not just for harm but for being unsightly.

Environmental Aesthetics emerged in the 1980s as a response to environmental crises, with two main branches: the Anglo-American tradition led by Arnold Berlin and Alan Carlson, and the continental German tradition pioneered by Gernot Böhme. This lecture focuses on Böhme's work because it is underrepresented due to language barriers and offers productive insights for questions about ideology and aesthetics in the Anthropocene. Böhme introduces environmental aesthetics as ecological aesthetics of nature, moving beyond classic nature aesthetics to encompass broader environmental experiences. The field addresses how humans perceive and relate to the natural environment, challenging traditional aesthetic theories that focused primarily on artworks and disinterested pleasure. Böhme proposes that perception should be understood as beginning not with the subject-object distinction but with a sense of being in the world or presence, introducing atmospheres as preceding objects in perception. In Böhme's expanded conception of aesthetics (eistices), art serves as one means among many for experiencing atmospheres. New materialism approaches (associated with Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett) share similarities with Böhme's work but add emphasis on ideology and constructivist questions. Böhme introduces 'ecstasis' (stepping outside) to denote how things literally step outside of themselves into the sphere of their presence, becoming palpable as present. Using early automobility literature as an example, environmental representations are shown to be ideologically underpinned, connecting to contemporary environmental politics including class distinctions and millennialist narratives within the ecological movement.

Environmental aesthetics is a distinct philosophical subfield that studies aesthetic appreciation of natural and modified environments, distinguishing itself from artistic aesthetics by emphasizing immersive, multi-sensory engagement with nature rather than distanced artistic appreciation; this field explores how aesthetic values interact with ethical values and addresses the significance of developing intergenerational thinking in response to climate change, moving beyond the limited 'scenery model' of picturesque landscape appreciation to embrace diverse aesthetic experiences including non-beautiful elements like wetlands and challenging landscapes.

Environmental aesthetics is the philosophical study of aesthetic values in the environment, which emerged in the 20th century to address environmental issues; it evolved from classical philosophers like Emmanuel Kant's concept of disinterested pleasure in nature's beauty and sublimity, through Romanticism and transcendentalist movements, to modern thinkers like Aldo Leopold who combined ecological knowledge with aesthetic sensitivity, ultimately promoting environmental education and responsibility for well-informed aesthetic appreciation of natural environments.

Contemporary art increasingly engages with environmental and ecological issues as active sites where concepts are deformed, reconsidered, and contested from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Ecological aesthetics have evolved beyond research framing to become operational across domains, mobilized in service of policymaking. The atmosphere functions as both material space and representational schema, creating distinct problems for political theorization as it becomes a medium through which control and dominance is enacted. Three aesthetic strategies emerge: transparency (marking completion between private and public spheres), reflection (working with cloud physics to create provocative gestures), and socio-environmental processes (using social relationships as laboratories to refashion skills and tactics of power). Non-documentary landscape photography uses still photographs to create images without documentary intent, where photographs made at sites of great phenomenological power paradoxically cannot adequately embody presence. Non-scientists experience imaginative lacunae when confronted with abstract ideas associated with fundamental science, where extremes of macro and micro scale operate beyond human perception.