Dr. Annika Schlitte (Post-Doc)

The project deals with the role of place in the experience of the sublime in nature. It is to be worked out how the particular configuration of the relationship between man and nature, which can be experienced in the sublime, is dependent on a local mediation, as considered in more recent approaches to the philosophy of place. Although the branch of philosophical theory, which distinguishes “place” from physical “space” and emphasizes its fundamental importance for our experience of the world, receives increased attention in the context of the Spatial Turn, there are only a few detailed studies aiming at the analysis and systematization of place-experience in various areas of the life-world. This would mean, for example, to examine which role the local dimension of experience plays in terms of our understanding of nature. In the context of such a scheme, the sublime represents a suitable object of investigation, provided that the reference to nature, that was crucial for the philosophical treatment of this experience in the 18th century and which somewhat disappeared from view in the postmodern debate of the 1980s, takes centre stage again. A new version of the natural sublime, that emphasizes the place-aspect, could be interesting, especially with reference to the efforts to create a new, non-reductionist understanding of nature. Parallels emerge here to the way the phenomenology of religion approaches religious experience of holy places, and to the engagement with place and landscape in the Land-Art-Movement of the 1970s. The inclusion of these theoretical contexts will contribute to characterizing the feeling of the sublime as a kind of experience of transcendence, which originates at a specific place and provides an experience of nature as the other to man. Such an investigation would pursue two objectives: First of all, the current, Anglo-Saxon philosophy of place is brought together with a traditional concept in the history of philosophy and thereby scrutinized as to its fruitfulness, secondly a new systematization is proposed for the puzzling history of the sublime.