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On the Sublime and Beautiful

            Edmund Burke's idea of the sublime contrasted from the other critics with his belief about the opposition between the beautiful and the sublime. While Longinus' idea of the sublime had an asterisk, which stated that the truly great cannot be despised, Burke believed the sublime was founded in pain and obscurity. Sublime is based in pain because it is so overwhelming it passes over beauty into powerful emotion. It seems the opposition between the two arises from Burke's definitions of joy and delight. Beauty is reminiscent of joy because it creates pleasure smoothly and arises daintily on its own, while the sublime arises from delight, which is pleasure from the loss of pain, in two ways. The first is that sublimity can arise when one goes through pain in order to exacerbate beauty into the overwhelming emotion that he or she has been striving for, and the second comes in the form of positive pain, which is a thought process in which the individual enjoys thinking about the pain that was suffered but is not being suffered currently because pain is a more powerful emotion than pleasure, so one can find pleasure in not having pain. .
             The first definition of sublimity through pain can be expressed through the eyes of a someone who is addicted to a drug because the he or she experiences pain all the time that he or she is deprived from it, but that moment when they get their hands on it creates a feeling of sublimity through the knowledge that they will be able to escape the pain and move into sublimity. The achievement of finding the drug is almost better than the drug itself because the individual can imagine what lies ahead at least for a little, but then the cycle will restart again. The idea is also similar to Smeagol in The Lord of the Rings series because just holding onto the ring without slipping it on is enough to keep him in a pleasurable state because he knows the pain that he will endure if it is taken away from him.


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