A Brief History of the Sublime

Abstract In his first book Nietzsche had used the term ‘sublime’ enthusiastically—as an elevated expression of praise—but was keen, too, to distinguish the sublime in that sense from what he called the ‘morally sublime’, the sublime of Kant and Schopenhauer. Quite quickly, though, he came to feel that his predecessors had in fact spoiled the term beyond retrieval—that it had been moralized through and through—and so he more or less gave up on it, except in an ironical use to signal that life-denial is either in prospect or in progress. Yet he continued, or so the author argues here, to celebrate very much the things that he had celebrated as ‘sublime’ in The Birth of Tragedy, but now under other labels. One of those, indeed, is ‘beauty’, so redeeming the term from the realm of mere delight to which it has more usually been consigned.