In a lecture series I’ve been going to at the art gallery philosopher Damien Freeman has been discussing the changes in history’s view of the sublime; from antiquity to the enlightenment, romantics and abstracts to the modern; as well as his own philosophical views on the sublime in art, literature & oratory.

He ended today’s lecture with many questions on whether it is still possible for those of us living in the technological age to experience the sublime. Can we ever feel overwhelmed or in awe of something now we have made the world so much smaller, now we can tap into the internet and see a God’s eye view of the earth, now we have more devastating power than a volcano with the bombs we’ve built for ourselves?

Do modern atrocities make us unable to take pleasure in the sublime, in feeling a reverence for life and nature? If you had seen a plane fly straight into a towering skyscraper, causing the whole building to collapse, could you ever be overwhelmed again, and if you could, would that be enjoyable or would it feel wrong?

(He is a philosopher after all, he’s got all the questions, not the answers)

Freeman suggested that maybe what’s happening now is just another transition in the way we view the sublime. Rather than seeing it in the grand scale of landscapes and the power of nature, we can see the sublime in a grain of sand, or under the microscope. “Not in the earthquake, the fire or the great wind, but in the still small voice.”

A friend makes beautiful use of fish scales to show the beauty in the smallest of details. Things too minute for us to notice with our own eyes. Well worth checking out her results here.

I think I agree with Freeman’s idea that our experience of the sublime is changing, but perhaps not as dramatically as he suggests. I may have flown over mountains and continents but I was still able to feel awed at the vastness and cruel beauty of the Australian outback.

I may have studied the affects and devastation of modern warfare but I was still swept up in the tragic beauty of the film, Hiroshima Mon Amour, which made me believe that there is a sublimity in our memories and our connections with others. And I may have been daily over-saturated with pop culture but I can still be moved by the spirituality of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. 

There is the simple fact that people still travel the world over to see first-hand the artworks and sceneries, the countries and cultures we could comfortably view on a screen from our armchairs, we still pour into the galleries to see artworks we can easily find pictures of online.

We have brought the world closer together, but we haven’t completely minimised the grandeur of the natural world, we can still feel wonder at an artist’s vision of the world. We do still need to experience these things in the flesh. Otherwise they can’t truly overwhelm us.