Wordsworth の崇高について

Abstract

Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1757. According to his Enquiry, there is a distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime is the property of an object which appeals to man's instincts of self-preservation and arouses a feeling of terror, while the beautiful is the property of an object which appeals to man's social instincts and arouses a feeling of love. Enquiry's characteristic is Burke's psychological and physiological analysis of the effects on man in his aesthetic experience. He restricts his study to sensible qualities of things and refuses to attach importance to imagination and attribute the ultimate cause of aesthetic experience to religion. There is an affinity between Burke and Wordsworth. But Wordsworth is not Burke's disciple. Although Burke finds the distinction, Wordsworth finds the unity based on religion by the imagination. According to Wordsworth's subjective point of view, though feelings aroused by sublime or beautiful objects are different, the same object can become sublime or beautiful, depending on the condition of the subject. When we face sublime objects, we can experience the unity between the objects and the subject which is shown with infinitude by the imagination.