The Sublime Issue In Natural Aesthetics

As an ancient literary term,the word sublime has been closely associated with natural things since its inception.The Roman writer Longinus’ Peri Hupsous unites the complex feelings that man has long felt in the face of something huge,and extends these feelings to the creation of literary works,trying to get rid of the pomp and pretension that existed in the Roman literary world.Peri Hupsous is undoubtedly a work of rhetoric that teaches one how to plan and formulate words,and while Longinus valued the talent of the writer,the technique of the creative process was even more important.In this period,the sublime existed as a great style,a literary rhetoric.It was not until the seventeenth century,when Peri Hupsous was translated by the French literary theorist Boileau,that it gradually came into the view of European scholars.In his analysis of the sublime,Boileau preserved the rhetorical tradition of Longinus on the great style.In the Western aesthetic world,where empiricism was prevalent,the concept of the sublime was extended to the broader context of everyday life.The shift from rhetorical style to aesthetic experience is reflected not only in the widening of the scope of the sublime description,but also in the establishment of the subject-object relationship in the experience of the sublime,and in the specific analysis of the aesthetic subject’s sensory feelings.In the eighteenth century,after the systematic and rationalized interpretation of the sublime by Burke and Kant,the sublime formally became an independent aesthetic category.Since the close relationship between nature and the sublime was made clear by Longinus,scholars in different periods have always,by default,elaborated the sublime in a dualistic framework of self and nature.In ancient Roman sublime theory,nature existed as a mediator through which the ineffable complexity of the sublime was expressed and further applied to the realm of literary creation.Although the sublime in the ancient Roman period was a literary style,it began with the intuitive response of human beings to nature,and already had a preliminary aesthetic sense of nature.The eighteenth century was the heyday of the sublime,and the doctrine of the sublime in this period had a "naturalistic" tendency,both in British philosophy and in the continental school represented by Kant.It became an aesthetic category recognized by the public.After the nineteenth century,people gradually lost interest in the philosophical connotations of the sublime,while studies of the literature,art,and personal experience of the natural landscape began to emerge,and the natural sublime began to transform into the artistic sublime,with the rift between the sublime and nature becoming more and more apparent.In fact,nature in the modern sublime has never completely left the scene.Even though the environment of postmodern theorists is far from that of the 18th century,the ungraspable nature in contemporary society is no longer crude,and the huge,disorderly and uncontrollable objects have become "second nature".In the postmodern sublime,although natural things are rarely mentioned,they still exist as the inner thread of the sublime.After Hegel,who exalted artistic beauty,natural beauty became marginalized in the process of modernity of Western aesthetics,and the sublime category,which is closely related to natural things,also declined and lost its beauty.The third category"picturesque",which refers to the variability and irregularity,neutralizing the beautiful and the sublime,is another aesthetic term that unifies the aesthetic field of nature after the sublime.The aesthetic appreciation dominated by the pictorial tradition frames the aesthetic object from the three-dimensional natural environment,then transforms it into a series of two-dimensional scenes,judging its formal aesthetic qualities and giving it a certain subjective and romantic quality.The aesthetic activity of nature driven by picturesque implies an anthropocentric tendency,obsessed with the scenery rather than the environment,while ignoring aesthetic objectivity and value judgment,with a strong tendency toward aestheticism.At present,the contemporary environmental aestheticians have noticed the bad direction of the picturesque category to the natural aesthetic appreciation activities,and try to find a more suitable,rigorous and convincing new model for the natural aesthetic appreciation from the criticism of the picturesque aesthetics.The sublime category,which has been dusty in the aesthetic world for a long time,may be the antidote to the dilemma of anthropocentrism and picturesque.To break the rigidity of nature aestheticism,we must first address the limitations of the previous aesthetic objects.In order to properly appreciate the unscenic nature,it is necessary to pay full attention to its special nature and shift the focus of aesthetic activities from the understanding of "beauty" to the understanding of "sublimity".In the previous attempts of the academic circle,scholars such as Saito Yuriko and Sandra Shapsha have always delineated the location subject of aesthetic activities on"human".The aesthetic activity of nature,driven by the sublime,has a dualistic mode of thinking in which the aesthete and the aesthetic object are both important,and the aesthetic appreciation is based on the elaboration of the inter-subjectivity between humans and nature.This nature aesthetic model respects the objective properties of things,continues the scientific cognitivism’s reliance on ecological knowledge,leads to nature aesthetic education on the basis of aesthetics,and elaborates the ethical implications of nature aesthetics.