Editorial notes: This Essay was found as a ‘draft’ entry in Everything2. It seems to be a continuation of the thought process recorded a few days earlier in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and it ends with a number of points for future consideration. It is published here with minor changes.
I had first considered illustrating the beautiful with words like “ineffable” as if it convinces you that it is worth wondering. Instead, let me posit that it is.
Here’s a story.
I came across A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful while tracing the name of Edmund Burke in the history of philosophy. The book appears as a curious flower in the garden of Burke’s oeuvre. Burke is remembered best for his life as a politician, with its speeches and writings. My own interests have led me to wonder about the question What is beauty, whether as an experience or as something that we discover in the world. Or both. And it doesn’t take very far into the book before I appreciate that Burke has his own approach to the question. Kant accuses Burke of being a mere empirical psychologist, but the attention allowed to experience in a philosophy book can be refreshing. Burke’s written thoughts get me thinking too…
I shall return to dialogue with Burke on beauty. But first, to talk to the dead I need the directions of a history book.
A Philosophical Enquiry was published in 1757. Edmund was 28. I want to see what he sees when he says what he writes.
How to place oneself in a foreign milieu. I instinctively start with appearances, fashion (powdered wigs and hooped dresses) and technology (power is mostly animal and water, clocks existed but were inaccurate curiosities). Then I wonder about social structures (wealthy landowners) and those excluded from it. I imagine fighting for a copy of French-bad-boy Voltaire’s newest novella on the day of its international release.
The year of 1757 lay in the midst of the European’s latest power-balance stranglings. Russia and Austria wanted to split Prussia, France and Britain took sides. And colonies. The war bloodied the soil of every continent except the new one (Cook wouldn’t sight the Australian coast until 1770). The war set the stage for the French and American revolutions and bloodletting. Similarly but even harder to conceive, is the transatlantic slave trade, the African holocaust was flourishing.
So what does it mean to put myself in Edmund Burke’s shoes?
Burke was born to the right family. He was able to go the Anglican outpost that was the university in Dublin (Catholics and others were excluded). Studied law in London. And although he was excluded from academia (for want of a priesthood), Burke pursued personal projects for a few years before what became his political career. I hardly trust politicians, and I strongly suspect that power corrupts. That leaves me with the problem of listening to another rich racist sexist white man. On the other hand, Is Burke already too guilty at age 28 for me to even listen to him, as I’m faced with an opportunity of hearing the words of another culture. Complicated.
Censorship as priorities? Anyway, allow me and I’ll continue to story.
I see Burke as a witty, intelligent, and fortunate product of his time. His time was exciting, the “new” philosophies had opened the door for originality and creativity. All the questions, especially the old ones, could be asked again, as if for the first time. What is beauty, asked a young wide-eyed Burke, still warm from the learnings of college. Other Englishmen had wondered this way. The greatly respected John Locke presented all knowledge as the etchings of experience upon a canvas born blank. And in Locke’s wake, others considered that beauty is a quality of things that is sensed, an ephemeral and obscure sense, different-from but analogous-to our sense of smell.
That, more and less, is the tradition within which Burke was writing. So, What is it like to read?
I easily acknowledge that Burke is more than capable of tuning an eloquent and expressive phrase, and although I’ve seen his writings lauded for their style, to me he sounds most simply as an old-fashioned early-modern philosopher. What exactly that style entails is harder for me to express. So I hope the following excerpt helps you feel what I mean, a taste of Burke’s idiolect. The following quote was selected, not for any pithy or gnomic virtue, nor for any brilliant insight (although it is not dull in that respect). Instead, I hope you gain some familiarity with Burke’s phrasing, cadence, and sentences that keep going; and going.
“It is no small bar in the way of our inquiry into the cause of our passions, that the occasions of many of them are given, and that their governing motions are communicated at a time when we have not capacity to reflect on them; at a time of which all sort of memory is worn out of our minds. For besides such things as affect us in various manners, according to their natural powers, there are associations made at that early season, which we find it very hard afterwards to distinguish from natural effects. Not to mention the unaccountable antipathies which we find in many persons, we all find it impossible to remember when a steep became more terrible than a plain; or fire or water more terrible than a clod of earth; though all these are very probably either conclusions from experience, or arising from the premonitions of others; and some of them impressed, in all likelihood, pretty late.”
(A Philosophical Enquiry Part IV Ch 2)
Biography, history, language. Surely the punchline is due. What does Burke say, What is the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful?
In a nutshell. Beauty is an idea that derives from a type of love, and the sublime from a type of terror.
Burke’s approach is to investigate the likely causes of the beautiful and the sublime. The reader is gifted chapter titles such as Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in Vegetables, Magnitude in Building, Why Darkness is Terrible, and The Effects of Succession in Visual Objects Explained. Moving through the book as a whole, Burke begins by describing the system of human passions. In part II he explores the sublime, finding its close association to terror – a sort of dissociated apprehension of pain – and by consequence with properties like magnitude and power. Next, he applies his method to beauty, ruling out its dependency on proportion or perfection in themselves, and instead associates it with properties like smallness and graduation (e.g. of colour or contour). Having completed his main mission, part IV delves into some technical details. For example, he asks Why Things not Dangerous Produce a Passion Like Terror (e.g. sublime visuals strain the optic nerves by their intensity) or Why Smoothness is Beautiful (because it soothes and relaxes the nerves and muscles), often producing unconvincing answers, but which thankfully are not absolutely necessary to the total’s worth.
A final part on aesthetic language feels like an appendum. In it, Burke notes that poetry’s effect is not merely by raising ideas, which it does in an indefinite manner. Rather it achieves its art by prompting: sympathy for others’ passions, appreciation of the abstract, and imaginations.
I should say a few more words on what Burke means by linking love and fear to the beautiful and sublime. And then I can close with some thoughts of my own.
{
A little more explanation.
My own thoughts on Burke. Saying that I appreciate elements of his methodology. My own route via his method. Then consideration of his relating passions to aesthetics.
Caveats include: I’m ignoring most of what makes Burke unique, and conflating him with other 18th century British aestheticians, which isn’t the worst possible thing for non-specialists.
}
