Edmund Burke and the Sublime

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

It is a treatise of aesthetics, published in 1757. For Burke, it is the passion, not reason, which determines how and what we see, hear and feel in the world. In the Enquiry he undertakes a scientific investigation into our various passions, and uses the collected evidence to explain the nature and power of the sublime. The beautiful and the sublime as opposed. it also includes a repertoire of sublime objects (natural and artificial) and events or situations.

The book is divided in five parts. It is clearly a text conveying a formal and systematic discourse on a certain topic. Each part is divided into sections and each section is generally very short and focused on a certain topic.

Part two is mainly devoted to the sublime, while the others are devoted to the beautiful.

Main Points

Burke asserts that ideas of pain are much more powerful than those of pleasure, and that the strongest pain of all is the fear of death.

which causes terror. The sublime, then, is our strongest passion, and it is grounded in terror. Yet it is not exclusively an unpleasant emotion, for danger or pain can, in certain circumstances, give us delight. This heightened state of astonishment, where reason is driven out by "an irresistible force", and "the mind is so entirely filled with its objects, that it cannot entertain another", is more terrible to us when it is accompanied with a sense of the unknown (or what Burke calls obscurity). For Burke, obscurity is an absence of clarity, whether in the sensory darkness of sight (or blinding lightness), or mental uncertainty of thought. It is vastness, or "greatness of dimension", which is "a powerful cause of the sublime", (the sublime is created by different objects and situations which are able to cause pain and terror, but also kind of delight) where "looking down from a precipice" on a mountain has greater impact depending of

its depth and steepness, and where “the effects of a rugged and broken surface seem stronger than where it is smooth and polished”. A smooth and polished surface has not the effect of a rugged and broken surface. So this rugged and broken surface creates the sublime where the other creates the beautiful.

Another source of the sublime is what Burke calls infinity, where the eye is not able to “perceive the bounds” of something, or “see an object distinctly”, and this gives rise to a “terrible uncertainty of the thing” perceived. Terror, horror, darkness: Burke’s elucidation of the emotional power which these qualities of the sublime hold on us contributed to the later 19th-century English Gothic literature.

INTRODUCTION ON TASTE

Burke indicates how taste begins with the senses, but refined judgment and moral action begin with one’s capacity to reason upon those sense experiences within social contexts. This introduction focuses on taste.

but also refers to the fact that judgment and moral action start from the senses and then develops in a social context. This question concerns the aesthetics, when we consider judgment and moral action we start from our experience of the senses and then we should consider the social context, but Burke is just focusing on the role of experiences, because social context comes after the sense of experience.

Social contexts are the "manners, the characters, the actions, and designs of men," whose "relations, their virtues and vices ... come within the province of the judgment, which is improved by attention and by the habit of reasoning". From the senses to the reasons. As people reflect upon a particular sense experience and relate it to social customs and manners, they use reason, and as they reason, they polish and refine their judgments. What is important for Burke is the first level: the level of senses because this aesthetic experience exists before the reason activity.

So taste begins with senses and then comes the imagination. However, the aesthetic experience of the sublime exists before this reasoning activity. Taste itself begins with the senses, then the imagination, and finally ends with sympathy; this occurs prior to the subject's use of judgment and reason.

PAIN AND PLEASURE

The strongest passions, "whether simply of Pain and Pleasure" may be reduced to two points: "self-preservation and society". Self-preservation refers especially to the individual, and the other is society.

Those passions related to self-preservation "turn mostly on pain and danger" and they prove the most powerful because "ideas of pain, sickness, and death, fill the mind with strong emotions of horror". Pain, sickness and death are connected with self-preservation and they fill the mind with strong emotions of horror. (Look at Section VII "Of the sublime")

SOURCE OF THE SUBLIME

Passions that create pain mark the first

steps of the sublime: “Whatever is fitted in anysort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sortterrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous toterror, is a source of the sublime”.

Since pain and danger are the strongest passions and create the most terriblesensations within the mind, they fall clearly within the sublime because they generatean “unnatural tension”.

An “unnatural tension” occurs when we experience pain or danger, and terrordevelops when the mind affects the body through the threat of danger.

ASTONISHMENT

Pain or danger affects us when our imagination cannot completely grasp the“magnitude” of an external object (or landscape). Astonishment is a feeling, asensation created by particular objects or natural features (look passage section I ofpart 2 “Of the passion caused by the sublime”). Animals are objects of terror.Astonishment is connected

with horror and it is a state of the soul in which all emotions are suspended. Burke states that the "passion caused by the great and the sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it". BOUNDARIES The mind is "entirely filled" with the perceived object because it cannot take in all of the experience; our experience of the object is disrupted or obscured. The object is not clearly perceived, it is strange or obscure or so vast (boundaries). The subject fails to perceive its boundaries: "hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness, which does not make some sort of approach towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able to perceive its bounds; but to see.

"An object distinctly, and to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing”. This idea of boundary is important in this theory of the sublime because the boundaries are connected with the idea of infinity and the unknown.

PROPORTIONS

An important aspect of being impressed with the sublime is our inability to determine the boundaries or limits of that object. On the other hand proportion is one of the quality of the beautiful, so proportions are not too vast or too small. If an object is too vast or too small, it is difficult or impossible for the subject to perceive its proportions. When an object is too vast or too infinitely small, we cannot measure its proportions: “it may not be amiss to add to these remarks upon magnitude; that, as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise”. What is extremely vast or extremely small creates the sublime because the human mind cannot measure these proportions.

GOD

Burke

Takes this notion of magnitude and applies it to our idea of God (God is impossible to understand, limitless and powerful). In our imagination, God's perceived power is limitless and boundless: "to our imagination, his power is by far the most striking" and "to be struck with his power, it is only necessary that we should open our eyes" and "whilst we contemplate so vast an object... we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him". The sublime is also connected with our idea of God and the infinity.

INFINITY

Measured against the magnitude of a sublime object outside of us, we sense our minuteness. Again this is the question of oppositions. Burke supports this point in noting "To the sublime... greatness of dimension seems requisite; for on a few parts, and those small, the imagination cannot rise to any idea of infinity". The sublime experience occurs when the imagination fails to

Grasp the dimensions and scope of the external object. The sublime is structured when the human imagination fails to grasp the dimensions of the external object. Failing to gauge the boundaries of the external object, the subject's passions are affected, and they produce a sense of fear because we feel our own finitude. Infinity and our small subjects. Boundaries and the idea of God and infinity as objects that have no boundaries, and so they produce our own sense of fear because we feel our finitude, our limits.

WORDS

The fifth section refers to words. 'Eloquence and poetry are as capable', Burke writes, distinguishing them from philosophy and natural science, 'nay indeed much more capable of making deep and lively impressions than any other arts, and even than nature itself in very many cases'. Language is uniquely powerful, Burke suggests, because it is non-mimetic, what we would now call an arbitrary system of signs. The power of language suggest and creates this feeling.

of terror, of pain.

A MIXTURE

The Sublime, which always includes something of the terrible, is an important category for Burke because it is such an odd mixture, revealing, as it can, the overlap between pain and pleasure. The subject who perceives feels terror when he/she is in particular scenes, but feels also pleasure because he’s not involved in these scenes.

Terror, which is the heart of the Sublime, is a passion which, Burke writes, 'always produces delight when it does not press too close'. This is the heart of the theory of the Sublime, this is the reason why we are considering at the begging of the course. And it is this that makes artistic representations, like tragedy, the tolerable and even thrilling Sublime. Tragedy is very much connected with this Sublime.

SUMMING UP

• No emotion is stronger than fear, not even pleasure.
• Fear is the true source of the sublime
• The sublime is always founded