An Empirical Aesthetics of the Sublime and Beautiful

The sublime and the beautiful are two of the oldest, most discussed categories of aesthetic experience. In their most basic of descriptions, the sublime refers to an aesthetic experience of fear and delight, and the beautiful refers to an aesthetic experie nce of pure pleasure. explores them empirically, theoretically informed by Edmund Burke’s This thesis A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1) What are the physical characteri of 1759. Three questions are asked: stics of objects considered sublime, particularly size, height, colour, brightness, and contrast in photographs, and modality, style, and tempo in piano music? (2) What are the emotional characteristics of sublime experiences, especially in relation to fea r? 1 5 and (3) What is the relationship between judgements of the sublime and beautiful in various contexts? In separate studies involving 76 8 participants, sublimity and beauty are related but separate experiences with distinct visual and auditory mechani sms. For images, although subjective sublimity and beauty ratings of images often show moderate correlations, sublimity is more influenced by presentation size than is beauty, while beauty is relatively more sensitive towards the presence of colour, and su blimity and beauty are both increased by higher presentation of images. Although subjective sublimity often correlates with subjective fear finding replicated in various studies and tasks correlates of fear meathere is no evidence that physiological sured by skin conductance responses (SCR) and faciala electromyography (fEMG) are activated at the same time as subjective sublimity. Together , these findings show that the associations of sublimity with size, height, and fear which are found in various cultures and languages, and especially in Burke’s text, of large number of stimuli and partici are realistic. Methodologically , pants makes the findings generali s the studies’ s use able, which is often not always the case in the literature of empirical aesthetics. In conclusion, sublimity is an important and separate component of aesthetic experience, beyond the mere study of beauty alone, which meri ts further study in aesthetic science.