  Schopenhauer offers a phenomenologically-complex account of how we may take aesthetic pleasure in such fearsome or overwhelming scenes. In order to contemplate the Ideas in hostile objects aesthetically, the subject must first acknowledge the fearsomeness or the sheer vastness of the object, but then “consciously turn away” from the threat, “violently wrenching himself free from his will” (WWR I, 226). If the subject can do this, and achieves will-less contemplation of the Ideas which express themselves in these threatening things, then the subject experiences a “state of elevation”—this is the feeling of the sublime. 