Where does sublime collide?

In rhetoric and literary criticism the sublime, in Greek hypsos or height, is the quality of grand and elevated language that lifts an audience out of itself and leaves it transported rather than merely persuaded. The first minter is the Greek treatise On the Sublime (Peri Hypsous), traditionally ascribed to Longinus and dated to roughly the first century of the common era, which located this power in great thoughts, strong feeling, figures, and the commanding arrangement of words. Here the referent is a property of speech and writing, judged by its effect on a listener, and it is distinct both from the later feeling stirred by vast nature and from the chemist's passage of a solid into vapour.[1]

Unit

A stretch of discourse that produces transport in an audience, present or absent by its effect

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Judged by critics through close reading of thought, feeling, figures, and arrangement, in the tradition of Longinus

In philosophy and aesthetics the sublime names an experience of things so vast, powerful, or formless that the imagination cannot take them in, an experience that mixes awe or dread with a strange pleasure. Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) set it apart from beauty and tied it to terror held at a safe distance, and Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) recast it as the mind's own greatness felt when nature overwhelms perception. The referent is a mode of aesthetic response to objects, above all in nature, and it differs from grandeur treated as a quality of speech and from the physical change of state that chemistry calls by the same root.[2][3]

Unit

An episode of aesthetic experience before something vast or overwhelming, described rather than counted

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analysed philosophically by its felt structure, and in empirical aesthetics through ratings of awe and of being overwhelmed

In chemistry sublimation is the direct passage of a solid into vapour without first becoming a liquid, together with its reverse, deposition. The operation was named and practised by early alchemists, from the Latin sublimare, to raise, long before it was measured; Irving Langmuir's 1913 study of the vapour pressure of solid tungsten put the process on a quantitative footing, and Chickos and Acree's 2002 compilation gathered enthalpies of sublimation for thousands of compounds. The referent is a physical change of state set by temperature and pressure, counted in energy per mole, and it shares only its Latin root, the idea of raising up, with grandeur of speech or the awe stirred by vast nature.[4][5]

Unit

A solid turning to vapour, scaled by the enthalpy of sublimation in kilojoules per mole

Recovery means

The reverse process, deposition, returns vapour directly to solid

Measured by

Determined from the vapour pressure of the solid against temperature, and by calorimetry