Burke’s sublime prefigures a modern secular understanding of the sacred

Evidence

Although Burke does not say this, we can see that this submission to the experience of horror-and-delight opens the way to a modern understanding of “the sacred” as well as to an aesthetics of excess. The implications of such an aesthetic for secular self-fashioning, both individual and national, are intriguing—especially in a culture whose moral and legal domains valorize measure and calculation. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 602

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that the ‘sacred’ is itself a modern secular construct, born from Burkean aesthetics, is the precise Asad maneuver that corroborates how ‘secular modernity’ quietly generates its own religious categories.
• SEED: Essay angle: the sublime as the secular west’s covert channel for the sacred — imperial, non-utilitarian, excess-driven — against the legal-moral regime of measure.