Pretention and 'The Sublime and the Beautiful'

It is void of debate in consequense of its inefibility. In otherwords it’s a convorsation killer. What better way to feel full of yourself than by capitalizing on the final word.

Awhile back, a good friend of mine told me of a jackass in her English Lit. Class that never seemed to be able to shut up about the “sublime and the beautiful”. She had deduced him to be a fourth year student making up a credit in her first year class. He would proclaim the phrase with a kind of astuteness that made all the ignorant beginners about him feign with envy, or at least he seemed to have this in mind. Naturally his pretension just made everyone despise him.

I made special note of this, concluding in my typically knave mind, that this! Yes, THIS must be the ultimate path to pretension (I’m not sure whether finding this inspired me to avoid it so as to not become a dick, or on the contrary, to use it in convincing mankind to despise me.) If only I had a clue of what the sublime and the beautiful were. I don’t mean that I wanted to figure out some kind of age-old debate on what are the good things in life. I mean that I had to look up sublime in the dictionary. Although it was useful to know that it was something “Characterized by nobility; majestic," (Dictionary.com) this didn’t seem to elevate the statement to the kind of prolific meaning that would cause such a feeling of status in the mind of the speaker.

Time past, and the terms came up together often in many academic and literary texts however there never seemed to be a common bind between them. I was beginning to give up hope until today. While passing time dodging through the Wikipedia: The Free Encyclodedia I came across the term under “gothic horror.” Upon clicking the link this poped up:

“For Immanuel Kant, the sublime represented a feeling derived from aesthetic judgment, in which we realize the limits of our human nature: that is, we realize we cannot conceive of something because it is part of the noumenal realm. Much like being next to a brick wall, we know the wall is there and that, presumably, there is something inaccessible on the other side. For Kant, the thrill we get from this realization is true sublimity; the realization that we cannot fully comprehend our own nature. (Wikipedia)"

Naturally it dawned on me right away. How could I have missed this? Obviously the sublime and the beautiful, being as grandiose as they are, must be completely and totally beyond classification or witness. It is all encompassing and hence empty. It is void of debate in consequense of its inefibility. In otherwords it’s a convorsation killer. What better way to feel full of yourself than by capitalizing the final word.

An image of several intellectuals gathering at a table in silence. Like a dewl, once the last actor is seated they simultaneously as quickly as possible, blurt out the coveted words. The first to bleat them out completely wins the debate. Naturally, since they are of a supurior moral quality, he silently rises and leads the others out of the room. They disperse into the night. The great debate is over.