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

“Thus the pleasure of all the senses, of the sight, and even of the Taste, the most ambiguous of the senses, is the same in all, high and low, learned and unlearned.”

Burke here suggests that all people have the same taste. How well these tastes develop is dependent upon the level of their experience. A person can help their tastes evolve by increasing their sensory experiences and education. Burke points to beer as an example of this. Many people do not like the taste of beer when they first start drinking it. However, as they increase their experience with the beverage—and their encounters with pleasure—their taste for beer develops.

“The principle of this knowledge is very much accidental, as it depends upon experience and observation, and not on the strength or weakness of any natural faculty.”

Burke professes that any individual may have sophisticated taste by increasing their experiences—a radical idea for his period. His argument denounces the notion that some people are born with better taste or breeding that contributes to their more sophisticated palate. Instead, experience is an equalizer for all people: Anyone may increase their taste by amplifying their experience.

“I can discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend upon each other.”

In this passage, Burke explores The Role of Pleasure and Pain in the Arts. Previous notions about pain and pleasure suggested each indicates the other's absence, with a person feeling pain when pleasure is taken away, and vice versa. Burke argues that, while pleasure and plain have a complex relationship, they are not dependent upon one another. A person can experience pain with no relativity to pleasure.

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

Here, the reader encounters Burke’s first attempt to define the key difference between Beauty and the Sublime. While beauty is associated with pleasure, the sublime offers a mix of pleasure and pain through the experience of awe and terror. The terror he describes in this passage is later explained to have no immediate connection to danger. A person experiences the sublime when the person can feel the danger without feeling the immediate threat of it.

“I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.”

In this passage, Burke associates the sublime with power. Power and terror go together. When a person encounters the sublime, they must face a complete expression of power and feel humbled by it.

“But darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light.”

Here, Burke draws further distinction between Beauty and the Sublime. Rather than fixating only on beauty—the subject for many philosophers—Burke emphasizes that the sublime is more powerful and more arresting. Humans are drawn to darkness in their aesthetics and have greater feeling when faced with darkness than they do with light.

“We shall have a strong desire for a woman of no remarkable beauty; whilst the greatest beauty in men, or in other animals, though it causes love, yet excites nothing at all of desire.”

Burke here separates desire and love. The former, he argues, has little to do with pleasure or beauty. While someone may feel desire toward someone beautiful, they may also feel desire toward someone who is not beautiful. They may also feel pleasure in their desire, but the same can also make them feel tortured. Instead, beauty is about love. It creates a feeling of affection, and that feeling may or may not be connected to lust.

“Beauty demands no assistance from our reasoning; even the will is unconcerned; the appearance of beauty as effectually causes some degree of love in us, as the application of ice or fire produces the ideas of heat or cold.”

This quotation is an example of Burke’s misalignment with the aesthetics of the Enlightenment movement. At a time when everyone applied rationalism to their work, Burke maintained that there were some aspects of aesthetics that could not be quantified: love is one, pleasure and pain are others. He rejects the idea that Beauty and the Sublime are products of the rational functioning of the mind. While they involve the mind in their processes, they are more evocative than strictly scientific.

“For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views, and their works, the measure of excellence in every thing whatsoever.”

Burke suggests that some view beauty through a lens of their own humanity. They take their own ideas and try to make them fit into the natural world. Burke argues that a better system is to consider the beautiful and awe-inspiring qualities of the natural world and try to apply them to Aesthetics and Sensory Information.

“Indeed beauty is so far from belonging to the idea of custom, that in reality what affects us in that manner is extremely rare and uncommon.”

In this passage, Burke asserts that real beauty is difficult to find, and that beauty is also made more beautiful by its imperfections. He denounces the idea that perfection and proportion are the only contributors to beauty, because many imperfect and disproportionate individuals and objects still hold the title of “beautiful.”

“Works of art are the proper sphere of their power.”

Here, Burke suggests that art is relative to power. Beautiful objects hold low degrees of power. Objects of the sublime, however, hold greater amounts of power because they evoke more powerful feelings in the reader or viewer.

“Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty.”

What makes the sublime more engaging and affecting is the way it combines terror with beauty. Burke reiterates this idea when he proposes that women who have an apparent weakness are more beautiful than perfect women. The contrast of good with bad, beauty with ugliness, makes the lovely far lovelier.

“They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure.”

This idea forms the foundation of the distinction between Beauty and the Sublime. When a person encounters another beautiful person or a beautiful object, the person feels pleasure. However, when a person encounters the sublime, the person feels the pain of danger or a mixture of pain and pleasure. The Role of Pleasure and Pain in the Arts is to define and determine the degree of beauty and the sublime.

“That great chain of causes, which linking one to another even to the throne of God himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.”

At many points in his work, Burke brings his ideas back to the idea of a divine being, reflecting his adherence to traditional Christian religious beliefs. Burke proposes that, if one were to trace the origins of beauty and the sublime, one would find God at the beginning.

“I observed too, that whatever produces pleasure, positive and original pleasure, is fit to have beauty engrafted upon it.”

Burke sees beauty and pleasure as intrinsically linked, reflecting The Role of Pain and Pleasure in the Arts. Unlike Aristotle, who believed that too much pleasure led to vice, Burke observes that any amount of positive pleasure is directly associated with beauty.

“As common labour, which is a mode of pain, is the exercise of the grosser, a mode of terror is the exercise of the finer parts of the system.”

Burke compares the development of beauty and the sublime to the inner workings of the body. Exercise helps the organs to function more properly. Burke argues that the same is true for Aesthetics and Sensory Information. Developing sensory experience leads to better taste and a greater appreciation for beauty and the sublime. By engaging with terror, a person develops a finer taste that positions the sublime over beauty.

“To produce therefore a perfect grandeur in such things as we have been mentioning, there should be a perfect simplicity.”

The shared quality of both beauty and the sublime is simplicity. Burke uses the example of repeating columns to illustrate the infinite in the sublime. They make an effective illustration because of their simplicity, whereas a more complicated pattern stops the eye and moves away from the sublime.

“The beautiful is founded on mere positive pleasure, and excites in the soul that feeling, which is called love.”

Here Burke talks again about the intrinsic connection between beauty and pleasure, invoking The Role of Pleasure and Pain in the Arts. He adds that beauty inevitably excites feelings of “love” in the beholder, reflecting the invariable pleasant sensations Burke believes any beautiful object inspires.

“Natural objects affect us, by the laws of that [connection], which Providence has established between certain motions and configurations of bodies, and certain consequent feelings in our minds.”

Burke suggests that there are multiple ways in which human bodies and minds experience pleasure. He shows how images from nature, architecture, and paintings can elicit different feelings of pleasure and bring to light certain aspects of the human condition. However, he closes his book by arguing that words contribute more than any other art form to Beauty and the Sublime.

“For put yourself upon analysing one of these words, and you must reduce it from one set of general words to another.”

In this passage, Burke references complex abstract words like “virtue” or “liberty.” He proposes that humans have no understanding of what these words mean until they have experiences that associate these words with either pain or pleasure. This idea stands in direct contrast to the classical theory of innatism, the idea that humans are born with innate understanding of concepts like “good” or “bad.”

“But strange as it may appear, we are often at a loss to know what ideas we have of things, or whether we have any ideas at all upon some subjects.”

Throughout his work, Burke conflates ignorance with poor taste. In this section, Burke aligns ignorance with the disgraceful act of repeating ideas one does not understand. He claims it is very possible for individuals to talk about and even share ideas that they do not fully conceive. This is especially true for concepts of the sublime, which are more complex and require greater understanding.

“Words undoubtedly have no sort of resemblance to the ideas for which they stand.”

Burke devotes the entirety of Part 5 to words and how they manifest in art. He suggests that words are the highest form of art, because they are the most challenging to the imagination. A person can substitute entirely unrelated words in a poem, creating a new concept. This is something that Burke argues cannot be done with other art forms.

“Uncultivated people are but ordinary observers of things, and not critical in distinguishing them.”

Burke bookends his notations on taste by reiterating the importance of developing personal experience and sensory impressions to develop one’s appreciation of beauty and the sublime, reflecting the theme of Aesthetics and Sensory Information. He argues that uncultivated people will love and appreciate everything and that they feel more emotional about art. Over time, as their taste develops, they learn to apply judgement.