A quality a concept, object, or experience may be said to have if it is breath-taking, unique, incomparable, and beyond words. As several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travellers noted, the Alps are sublime in this sense because nothing at ground level prepares one for the view from their austere peaks, where earth and sky seem to meet (e.g., Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1817)). Western aesthetics has been interested in the concept of the sublime since at least the first century, when the Greek scholar of rhetoric Longinus wrote his treatise On the Sublime. But it was not until the publication of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) that it became a topic of philosophical interest. Burke’s opposition between beauty as that which is well-formed and pleasing and sublime as that which is ugly, fearful and desirable all at once continues to inform thinking on this subject still. In effect, Burke’s distinction is between that which we perceive with simple pleasure (the beautiful) and that which truly moves us (sublime). German philosopher, Kant, Immanuel adopts Burke’s opposition and uses it to discuss the limits of the imagination and the senses in contrast to the power of reason. In the postmodern era, French philosopher Lyotard, Jean-François has utilized the concept of the sublime to describe his vision of what political art should do. For Lyotard the sublime is the presence of the necessarily failed attempt to say the unsayable, to bring forth and articulate the wrong inherent in a differend. It is this kind of sublime that Daniel Libeskind was no doubt aiming for in his design for the extension to the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Further Reading: P. Shaw Sublime (2005).