The Sublime and the Beautiful - On Ontology and Creative Imagination

Since the 18th century, after two millenniums of relative harmony, the Sublime and the Beautiful have gone their own way. The Sublime manifests itself by preference as intensity, silence, emptiness, absurdity, even violence; the Beautiful as harmony and order. The Sublime and the Beautiful derive their inspiration from two innate, unconscious desires: death and Eros. Creative imagination and ontology are their two sources. Today, the Sublime dominates the Eros-principle. The violence of the Sublime, no longer united with the Beautiful and Eros, has led to the destruction of the two greatest Buddha statues in Afghanistan and the Twin Towers in New York. The plea of the author is to search for a renewed relationship between the two sources of the creative imagination.

Fons Elders is author, president of the Forum 2001 Foundation; research fellow of the University for Humanist Studies, Utrecht, and director of Elders Special Productions, Amsterdam