In his aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke (1729-1797) proposes his concept of the sublime. Although several eighteenth-century commentators had attempted the same thing, Burke's Inquiry far surpasses the others in both scope and intellectual acuity. The sublime has a long history, dating back to the 1st century AD, when the Greek critic Longinus first presented his concept of the sublime in his aesthetic treatise On the Sublime (Peri hypsous). The root of the word is the Latin sublimis, a portmanteau of “sub” (up to) and “limen” (literally, the top piece of a door). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay According to Tom Furniss, the central task of Burke's Inquiry is to develop a set of theoretical principles to demonstrate that the sublime and the beautiful are extremely repugnant to each other. This idea leads to the conventional distinction between pleasure and pain. Burke also makes another significant and controversial distinction between pleasure and delight; he characterizes the former as the enjoyment of some “positive” stimulus of the senses, while the latter emerges for him from the diminution of pain or danger. According to Burke, it is the idea of ​​self-preservation that gives rise to pleasure, provided that the pain and danger inexorably associated with the former "do not begin too much" but involve us only through the effects of empathy, curiosity, or imitation. The second division of passions – those linked to the "society of the sexes... and to society in general" – are accompanied by positive pleasure. This distinction between the passions of self-preservation and society is fundamental, because it leads him to define his main aesthetic categories and the distinction between them: Then the passions that belong to self-preservation turn to pain and danger... they are delightful when we have an idea of ​​pain and danger, without actually being in such circumstances... whatever elicits this joy I call sublime. Beauty... is a name which I will apply to all qualities in things which induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness, or some other passion which they most closely resemble. The passion of love has its origin in positive pleasure. Furthermore, for Burke the effect of the sublime in the highest degree is astonishment – ​​"that state of the soul in which all its movements are suspended, with a certain degree of horror". Sublimity can be said to refer to a state in which the ability to understand, discern, and articulate a thought or feeling is defeated. However, precisely through this defeat, the mind perceives what lies beyond thought and language. Furthermore, Burke's emphasis on the negative aspects of the sublime marks a significant departure from previous commentators on the sublime. While Addison sees the sublime as “liberating and exhilarating, a kind of happy exaltation,” Burke sees it as “alienating and shrinking.” It works in a similar way to terror... that is, it produces the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling. The consideration of terror as the root cause of the sublime reflects a move away from “literal” causes of elevated responses, such as the qualities inherent in natural objects, towards the possibility that the sublime effect can be produced through figuration. Furthermore, as Philip Shaw suggests, the sentence itself becomes vague and unfathomable, which conveys the sense of sublimity through “a formal demonstration of expressive uncertainty,” which in turn seems to suggest that the origins of the sublime lie in words rather than in ideas. . Even if Burke does not admit that this radical possibility of sublimity simply isa language effect, repeatedly seems on the brink. As an empiricist, Burke claims that our knowledge of the world is obtained exclusively from the evidence of the senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. While Baillie's influence is palpable in this, the latter limits the importance of the senses to sight and hearing. According to Boulton, “despite the resulting absurdities, Burke at least seeks to produce an aesthetic theory that takes into account the full range of human responses.” Furthermore, Burke's argument makes it entirely secular, unlike his predecessors, since God is no longer necessary to guarantee the genuineness of our experience. Burke, for example, sees the ocean as a source of terror not because it is an expression of God's magnanimity, but because in contemplating a large body "the eye is struck by a vast number of distinct points." With its capabilities brought to the limit, the eye "vibrating in all its parts must approach the nature of that which causes pain and consequently must produce an idea of ​​the sublime". Furthermore, throughout the Inquiry, Burke's distinction between the sublime and the beautiful is gendered; he associates the former with vigorous male power and the latter with his inert female counterpart. This distinction, however, is not new to Burke, since even in Longinus the sublime speech "raptures" the listener. While the sublime focuses on “large and terrible objects” and is linked to intense sensations of awe, pain and terror, the beautiful focuses on “small and pleasant objects” and appeals primarily to the domestic affections of love, compassion and pity. . With the sublime "we submit to what we admire", while in the case of the beautiful "we love what submits us". Furthermore, for Burke beauty is of a lower ethical order. Burke's Freudian biographer, Isaac Kramnick, observes: In the Inquiry the sublime virtues are embodied in the authority of the father, venerable and distant... mothers and women in general are creatures of "compassion and amiable social virtues". . the male kingdom is associated with pain and terror; the feminine is affection: friendship and love associated with pleasure and compassion. Another critic, Ronald Paulson, goes so far as to use Freud's formulation of the Oedipus complex in Burke by citing a series of passages from the Inquiry, where the father and the son compete for the person of the mother. (Paulson uses Burke's allusion to Milton's portrayal of Satan in Book II of Paradise Lost, the description of Death in Book II itself, and so on, to prove his point.) In this vision, while the father (Satan) and the son (Death) compete for power, the role of Sin – “the Death-loving mother” and the “Satan-loving daughter” – is limited to that of a mediator and a peacemaker, one who intervenes to pacify the sublime anger of male principles. However, deeper investigation reveals that the role of the mother in Burke is more ambivalent and complex than Paulson admits; the feminine in Burke is “defined not so much by its passivity as by its capacity for material excess”. Recognizing that “the cause of beauty is a certain quality of bodies…acting mechanically on the human mind through the agency of the senses,” Burke argues for a conventional difference between female matter and male intellect. While the dark and mysterious power of the latter inspires awe and wonder, the former merely entertains. However, as Shaw suggests, in practice the relationship between beauty and convention is not as benign as it might at first seem, since in a sense repeated exposure to the sublime runs the risk of draining its intensity. Therefore, the capacity of the sublime to provoke awe and fear is reduced by being subject to convention. In this sense, the sublime always seems to be in danger, on the threshold ofconversion into usual beauty. At times, however, the undefined nature of Burke's distinction is such that beauty "too often presents a disconcerting, even excessive, face to the eye of the beholder." Burke writes: Observe that part of a beautiful woman in which she is perhaps the most beautiful, as regards the neck and breast; softness; the softness... the variety of the surface, which is never the same in the smallest space; the deceptive labyrinth, through which the unstable eye glides dizzily. Furthermore, for Burke, beauty almost carries with it an idea of ​​weakness and imperfection and women, as agents of it, learn “to counterfeit weakness and even disease”. It is evident that, like the sublime, beauty is also endowed with power, but it is of a subtle and uncertain nature. While in the first case "we are forced to submit to what we admire", in the second case "we are flattered to obey". Thus, although the sublime can instill fear and terror in its subjects, it at least has the virtue of not deceiving. However, for all Burke's denial of beauty, a constant threat from it to his privileged category of the sublime becomes visible. As Shaw states, “the phallocentrism of his treatise is constantly threatened by the excluded feminine other.” This becomes very evident in Burke's attention to the vitiating effects of beauty. Writing of “love,” Burke notes how “the body falls into a sort of stupor accompanied by an inner sense of melting and languor.” The tension and fatigue of the sublime is opposed by the imperturbable mediocrity of love, "a modality of beauty in which the rigors of identity soften, relax, enervate, dissolve, dissolve in pleasure". Thus female amazement regains the upper hand over the male authority of the sublime. However, Burke's example from Homer's Iliad shows his non-acceptance of the previous statement. According to him, since Homer wants to arouse our compassion for the Trojans, he gives them more amiable and social virtues than the Greeks, thus attempting to arouse pity for the former. On the other hand, the Greeks are made superior in military and political virtues, which make them admired and venerated but not lovable. So while one may pity the vanquished, it is the victors who are venerated. For Burke, then, the problem with love is that it encourages identification with the weak, while sublime admiration maintains the noble virtues of valor and honor. Furthermore, the sublime "acts as an antidote to the dissolution produced by beauty. All his effort follows the dictates of work ethics. The best remedy for these evils (produced by beauty) is exercise or work”. His text seems to be in an interminable war with female indolence. That society must ally domestic or feminine qualities and self-preservation with the masculine values ​​of heroic exemption presents Burke with a fundamental problem, for it implies that everyday life is based on deception. As Fergusson comments: While tyrants are sublime in the Inquiry, only the beautiful, with its commitment to friendly resemblance between human beings, masks the imbalance of power so effectively that we all, like Adam, become complicit in our own same death. Although the sublime dominates us while we are superior to the power of the beautiful, the Inquiry suggests that we invariably misunderstand those power relations by failing to recognize that what we call the weaker has a greater influence on us than the sublime with its strength palpably impressive. Burke's aesthetic theories can be linked to his political doctrines. As Neal Wood suggests, “Burke's two fundamental aesthetic categories, the Sublime and the Beautiful, inform and shape many of his political ideasfundamentals." That Burke's most significant political treatise, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), was influenced by his earlier aesthetic treatise, can be seen from his 1789 letter to Lord Charlemont. For him, the revolution is an event of sublime theatricality – “a marvelous spectacle... an enigmatic thing” that leaves those who watch it paralyzed with “astonishment”. However, Burke also realizes the threat: "the old Parisian ferocity has exploded in a shocking way" not only towards France, but also towards England. As Shaw states, “the possibility that such ferocity might cross national borders, infecting our English home with the germ of insurrectional violence, provides a disturbing counterpoint to the general attempt at contemplative detachment.” Also in the Inquiry the distinction between theatrical and real manifestations of violence is addressed, and although Burke gives primacy to the latter, the response aroused in the minds of the spectators is the same in both cases. In the Reflections, Burke still considers the Revolution to be “surprising and wonderful,” but here it is shown to be brought about by the most despicable “means,” “ways,” and “instruments,” thus linking the sublime and the ridiculous. Tom Furniss and Terry Eagleton have argued that in both Inquiry and Reflections it is possible to see allegories of the emergence and persistence of modern bourgeois identity. As Shaw argues, “the Reflections sets out to achieve a vindication of the Sublime, based on a distinction between the pernicious inflation of revolutionary discourse and the “natural” hierarchy embodied in the British constitution.” For Burke, “the spirit of liberty, which in France leads to misgovernment and excess, is tempered (in Great Britain) by a terrible gravity.” Unlike the French "citizen" who bases his enthusiasm on the false ardor of revolutionary fervor, the British "subject" is bound by indestructible bonds to ancient and noble traditions. In other words, the British constitution is sublime because it maintains “awe, reverence and respect” in its subjects, while the French system is insidious because it encourages a “multitude” to revolutionary intemperance. Keep in mind: this is just one example. Get a custom article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay Burke raises important questions in his account of the sublime about the relationship between mind and matter, asking whether the sublime is a quality that exists in objects of natural magnificence, whether it has an entirely subjective origins, or whether it is produced by interaction of the two. Another radical possibility it raises is whether this is simply an effect of language. As Peter De Bolla argues, while Burke makes no explicit claim about the discursive origins of the sublime, both the Inquiry and the Reflections operate beyond the author's conscious control to suggest this as a possibility. It is true that greatness of size had been considered a source of sublimity from Longinus onwards; Addison, Hume, and others had attempted a psychological explanation, but it was only Burke who attempted a physiological one. According to Boulton, although the association of the sublime with terror was found in Dennis and slightly in Smith's comments on Longinus, as a whole his theory was unprecedented. Although Burke's treatment of the sublime differs somewhat dramatically from that of his British contemporaries, he has come to represent eighteenth-century British thought and is often compared to the Kantian sublime. However, as Vanessa Ryan argues, “even where the British tradition comes closest to the Kantian one, namely in Burke's writings, it also most clearly marks its distance from it.” The essential difference/750333).