On the Sublime and Beautiful/Part I/Chapter 17 - Wikisource, the free online library

In 1757, the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke revolutionized the intellectual contemplation of awe with his celebrated “Philosophical Enquiry,” in which he described the distinction between beauty and “the sublime,” a de facto synonym for awe. Burke argued that the sublime was “our strongest passion.” It could often

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Responses to the sublime are puzzling. While the 18th century saw ‘the beautiful’ as a wholly pleasurable experience of typically delicate, harmonious, balanced, smooth and polished objects, the sublime was understood largely as its opposite: a mix of pain and pleasure, experienced in the presence of typically vast, formless, threatening, overwhelm

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We began with the idea that underpins all of Girard’s theories––imitation. Conflict between people, he believes, is rooted in our propensity for imitation or in what he calls “mimetic desire”—an idea that began to take shape for him through his study of the great European novelists.