ABSTRACT
This chapter reconsiders Schopenhauer's account of sublime aesthetic experience. It has two aims: (1) to elucidate the ways in which Schopenhauer's broader philosophical commitments inform a decidedly existential account of the sublime that is interestingly distinct from competing accounts (e.g., those of Kant and Burke); (2) to determine to what extent this account of the sublime offers the conceptual resources for the more characteristically Nietzschean project of affirming life as good and meaningful. Both of these aims, it will turn out, depend crucially on comprehending the importance of the concept of “nothingness” [Nichtigkeit] that Schopenhauer deploys as a part of his theory of the sublime. The chapter ends by briefly considering how this account casts doubt on prevailing assumptions about theism's exclusive claim to fundamental human experiences such as humbling reverence or “sacredness.”
