Foreword

Abstract

Even if the story of the concept of the sublime is, as Marek Kulisz argues in one of the papers in this book, a story of a certain mistake or mistranslation of the Greek peri hypsous into its Latin equivalent, yet the sublime remains an intriguing notion penetrating the areas of both aesthetics and ethics. And the very fact of a possibly erroneous choice of name for a concept does not interfere with the concept’s productivity; in this respect the sublime would provide another proof, after Heidegger’s unconcealment of the interlingual distortions of logos forcefully confined to the place of ‘reason’, of the profound indebtedness of Western philosophy to the Babelian operation of (mis) translation. It is perhaps for this reason that this volume, from the very outset, falls short of any precise definition of the sublime. Rather, it (mis) translates this category into a number of discourses ranging from philosophical, via literary, to a cross-cultural look into the domains of art and arts.