O
... It can also be shown very easily that sublimity rests upon the same
contradiction as that on which beauty rests. For whenever an object is
spoken of as sublime, a magnitude is admitted by the unconscious activity
which it is impossible to accept into the conscious one: whereupon the self
is thrown into a conflict with itself which can end only in aesthetic intuition,
whereby both activities are bought into unexpected harmony; save only
that the intuition, which here lies not in the artist, but in the intuiting subject
himself, is a wholly involuntary one, in that the sublime (quite unlike the
merely strange, which similarly confronts the imagination with a contradiction,
though one that is not worth the trouble of resolving) sets all the forces of the
mind in motion, in order to resolve a contradiction which threatens our whole
intellectual existence.
F.W.J.Schelling
