Editorial notes: This Essay[I] was found as a ‘draft’ entry in Everything2 and it is not clear whether it was complete and ready for publication. It is published here with minor changes. A follow-up draft was recorded a number of days later, containing further thoughts on this matter.
Beauty.
The grandest of human values is beauty. It is the experience of the beautiful that brings that ineffable admiration to so much that gives us meaning. The desired, the good, the perfected. But it is also the most difficult to describe. It stands at a polar extreme from such treasures as pleasure, for pleasure at least is so easily and tangibly imagined. But the feeling that is the present of the aesthetic is so ethereal and of a dimension too strange to measure.
We find the beautiful in so many experiences, whether as the focus of longing, or found in virtue’s blossom, or as one marvel at the sublime. But that is no easy-path towards identifying beauty. These examples can only hint the way, a journey made so difficult by its indeterminate conception, too foreign for us to recognize, as we can the simpler sensations. It is as if we were plotting the shape of a cloud with ever-shifting, porous boundaries.
It is a great forum that includes all those souls who interrogated their wonder at the aesthetic experience. Such a collection includes the giants Aristotle and Kant – I only mean to convince you that this is a question that has been faced by the Greats – and includes also many other strong men of philosophy and the mind. These include in their ranks one Edmund Burke PC.
The famous Irish politician and thinker, Edmund Burke, is remembered primarily for his political works and astute speeches. But very early in life, Burke was fortunate enough to discover an apt and appreciation for the pursuits of philosophy. The title of one of Burke’s very first works was A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.
History.
The history’s setting is this. Published in 1757, Edmund was 28. Early adulthood experienced university at Trinty College, Dublin, very much an outpost of the Anglican Church. Then London, to qualify for the bar. Having preferred the intellectual climate, but mostly prevented from occupying an academic post for want of a priesthood, Burke pursed personal projects. He wrote and was also the editor for The Annual Register. That is a boring title, and surely the reference publication is better described by its original title A View of the History, Politicks and Literature of the Year*. His political career was soon to find its roots.
What else does history remember of 1757? Most obviously the ongoing, global Seven Years War. This war (1756-1763) bloodied the grounds of Europe, North America, Central America, the West African coast, India, and the Philippines. It has many other names and was terrible. It foreshadows two other upcoming bloodbaths. The French Revolution(1789-1799) and the smaller American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). Both were of great interest to the older Burke, a fact for which he is still famous.
Now that we have met the man, you may ask why I have called him. I have just another brief tale of history, as it helps to know when to look. Burke’s contribution to the philosophy of beauty stands in a peculiar historical crux. He clearly followed beneath the long shadow of Aristotle, who’d explained that the aesthetic experience lies in imitation and its recognition. This was followed by a long period during which originality was scarce, although there were at least those who critiqued beauty. Notably, this was a culture (continuing into Burke’s day) that appreciated poetry as the most elevated of the arts (a fact to which I shall return). Aside from a few sporadic lights, only the Cartesian birthing of modern philosophy could reassure thinkers that they had the right (authority be damned) to ask the question for themselves. The result was a chorus of answers.
On the heels of Burke wrote Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Reid. These three were internal state theorists (by today’s jargon). In brief, they believed that aesthetic value is sensed, as if it is a mode of perception, like sight no matter that it is far more obscure. And at the other end of this pincer that holds Burke in this history’s vise sits most prominently Kant (but note the horde that follows him). Kant could not understand beauty before he could explain the mind’s reception of the world, describing it as a sort of pleasurable juggling within the transcendental categories of the mind.
So let me ask again, more clearly, What does this young man have to say? What, dear Burke, is the origin of our ideas of the beautiful and the sublime?
*The publication that Burke had initiated into the world through his editorship and writing, as a young man (who is remembered and admired since his death twenty-two decades ago) is still being produced regularly. If I may wind back the clock, Have you heard of Voltaire’s final days? I had never heard of Reine Philiberte de Varicourt, a girl Voltaire adopted away from being “destined” to a convent. She was educated by Voltaire’s niece. Link
Reading.
To read this work from another century is to visit the parlour of a stranger in a strange land. But if we listen respectfully and ask the right questions… there is always so much to learn.
[I] A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a 1757 treatise on aesthetics written by Edmund Burke. It was the first complete philosophical exposition for separating the beautiful and the sublime into their own respective rational categories. It attracted the attention of prominent thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant. For further details see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Philosophical_Enquiry_into_the_Origin_of_Our_Ideas_of_the_Sublime_and_Beautiful.
