ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the sublime and explores its relationship to other aesthetic qualities which, arguably, lie toward the negative end of the scale of aesthetic values: ugliness and "terrible beauty". Philosophical discussion of the sublime reached a pinnacle in the eighteenth century, when it was considered a major category in aesthetic theory. While the sublime was taken up in Romanticism and in some later philosophical and literary discussions, it has since not featured as a major category of aesthetic value. Many theories of ugliness, importantly, distinguish it from the non-aesthetic reaction of strong repulsion or disgust. The chapter explains the disordered heap of rocks versus rocks high above on a mountain, or rocks blasted into the sky in a volcanic eruption. The only objects visible were rocks and snow, and far-away thin clouds of steam rising from the craters to the blue sky.
