The ocean and space and “Ode to Joy” are sublime, of course… but what about an excellent lentil soup?

In a confusing twist of etymology, where one would expect “sub” to mean “below,” in the word “sublime” it indicates something above or even beyond. We use it as a superlative, but a superlative of what?

Edmund Burke argues that the experience of sublimity is related to fear in the extreme, even terror– and  Immanuel Kant’s not far from this understanding– so when someone says the lentil soup they’re eating is “sublime,” are they just making a category mistake? This week, the HBS hosts dig into the concept of the sublime, and test the limits of not only our imagination and understanding, but also language itself.

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

•  Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Harper Collins, 2024)
• Jimi Halloween (aka, the Japanese celebration of “Mundane Halloween”)
• Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756)
• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790)
• Our Season 9, Episode 122 on “Deconstruction”
• Romanticism (literature and art)
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
• Mathematical vs Dynamic sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgment
• Gil Morejón, The Unconscious of Thought in Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hume (EUP, 2022)
• The Perfect Storm (Film, 2000)
• “jump scares” in horror films
• Analytic philosophy and dreams/dreaming
• Aristotle, Poetics (c. 350 BCE)
• The Zone of Interest (Film, 2023)
• Eli Weisel
• Photographer Steve McCurry
• “Ode to Joy” (aka, Beethoven‘s Symphony No. 9 in D minor) conducted by André Rieu and performed by the Johann Strauss Orchestra
• Sublimity in mass protests and celebrations
• Jacques Derrida on the “undecideable”: “The Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority'” (in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Ed. Drucilla Cornell et al, 1992)