London Aesthetics Forum | Grazia Pulvirenti (Catania): “The Sublime as a Brain-Body Sensory Experience”

The Sublime as a Brain-Body Sensory Experience

Grazia Pulvirenti (Catania)
 

I am interested in exploring the sublime as a unified and intricate sensory experience rooted in the unitary complex of the brain-body. I hypothesize that adopting a neuroaesthetic perspective challenges the traditional view of the sublime as a quality inherent in objects, offering instead an alternative view of the sublime as a faculty of the human brain and its capacity to acquire knowledge beyond previously known or experienced limits. This shift in perspective enables us to reinterpret the genealogy of the sublime, framing it as a state experienced by the subject, rather than as an attribute of external objects. Sublime objects then become catalysts for experiences that overwhelm sensory abilities, and prompt the overcoming of primal phobic emotions, thus endowing the subject with feelings of empowerment and enhancement of the imagination.

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