The sublime and consumer behavior: Consumption as defense against the infinite

Given the loss of traditional structures, people now face the sublime, defined as feeling of imminent and frightening contact with the boundless and unpredictable. Using convergent qualitative sources, this article suggests that certain consumption strategies can provide some feeling of protection formerly offered by traditional social structures. The article then explores the possibility that more consumption may be sacred than secular, perhaps more than acknowledged previously.

Everything goes past like a river and the changing tastes and the various shapes of men make the whole game uncertain and delusive. Where do I find fixed points in nature, which cannot be moved by man, and where I can indicate the markers by the shore to which we ought to adhere? [A handwritten note by Kant in his copy of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, noted in Schillp (1938).]

Notes

* Graduate School of Business Administration, Fordham University, 113 West 60th Street, New York, NY 10023.