ABSTRACT
As the literary and cultural critic Elaine Scarry has noted, the juxtaposition of the sublime and the beautiful, a 'fashion' dating back at least to Edmund Burke, has had the unfortunate effect of blocking the mind in its ascent from the sensible to the transcendental. Though the sublime, as Immanuel Kant insists, is concerned with the unlimited it ought not to be confused with the infinite. As John Milbank intimates, the sublime ought not to be uncoupled from notions of harmony and correspondence. Sublimity, in other words, was regarded as a mode of beauty, not as an exception, and truth was thus available for apprehension by the individual. It is only with the dawn of the Enlightenment that truth is figured as inaccessible and the sublime is reconceived as a category of cognitive failure. For J. M. W Hegel, the sublime is revealed in the mountain's appearance but this 'outward shaping is itself annihilated in turn by what it reveals'.
