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A
Wittgensteinian Approach to Discerning the Meaning of Works
Introduction The sublime is a theory of aesthetics that reached its highest popularity in British literature during the Romantic period (c. 1785-1832). Although it has historically been associated with art and literature, when applied to education it can enhance the aesthetic conceptual understanding of all subjects while fostering the aesthetic sensibility of the student. Three philosophers who have written most extensively on the subject and who are probably the most quoted are Longinus, Edmund Burke, and Immanuel Kant. Longinus wrote about it during the first century and described it as the ability to transport one's audience in public speaking or writing. In the eighteenth century philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant expanded the domain of the sublime to other areas of thought besides rhetoric, namely aesthetics. For Burke the sublime is terror—the possibility of danger with no immediate harm. For Kant the sublime is infinitude—the inability to grasp the immeasurable combined with the awareness of one's inability to grasp it. This article will (1) explicate these philosophers' different meanings of the sublime, (2) show how the sublime is relevant to education, and (3) show how the sublime "works" in literature by analyzing William Blake's "Jerusalem," and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
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