Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Edmund Burke is best known as the father of modern conservative political philosophy. Yet when he was a young man, he wrote a treatise in a branch of philosophy we now call aesthetics.
Ever since Longinus, the sublime had been used to describe the standard of the utmost beauty. The Quarrel of the Ancients of the Moderns was waged accordingly. Burke broke with that consensus however, suggesting that the sublime was associated with sensations entirely opposite to those of beauty. There was no common ground between beauty and sublimity whatsoever.
Furthermore, he assigned the two distinct experiences two different creaturely purposes, notions that formed the foundation of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian philosophy and its calculus of pain (the sublime) and pleasure (the beautiful). The sublime, the more powerful of the two, served the individualistic purpose of self-preservation; the beautiful, on the other hand, served the social purpose of the propagation of the species. Yet in both cases, the feeling was a consequence of power.
The effect of Burke's dissociation of the sublime from beauty cannot be understated. Immanuel Kant followed him in his dissociation, and what C.S. Lewis later called 'the abolition of man' had begun. The self-preservation characteristic of the sublime paves the way for Darwin's mechanism for evolution, the 'survival of the fittest'. In hindsight, postmodern literary theory and the hermeneutics of suspicion could be argued to begin here as well.
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[@thenatureofwriting9222]

Listened to the first half of the lecture and enjoyed it very much. I like how you highlight the influence of Locke on Burke's empiricist approach. Well done!

[@LitProf]

Glad it was helpful!

[@robertafogagnolo3811]

This is of paramount importance to understand the Romantic movement and the origin of politics in the UK and in Europe. Thanks for being so clear in your statements!

[@tbthcrm]

Just wanted to say that a lot of these lectures + the talks & podcasts are really getting me through my "academically stale" phase of lockdown, really appreciate them!

[@LitProf]

Glad to hear it!

[@hansooled]

im so so thankful to you. my profs speed through everything and i don't understand or can take a moment to absorb anything so i study with you.

[@LitProf]

Glad it’s helpful.

[@sarfrajkhan9638]

Your way of teaching is too good sir!

[@tiantian9434]

That's a very informative lecture, thank you sir for putting these online! I enjoy it (actually, all of them) so much.

[@dalethompson5796]

Sending appreciation from California! Love the lecture professor!

[@LitProf]

Glad to hear it.

[@kentuckyburbon1777]

I’ve been reading Burke’s “ on the Sublime” for the past few days 😅 thanks for posting the lecture

[@LitProf]

Very influential work.

[@calebpippin6544]

Got to be edmonde burkes masterpiece

[@aniquarakshi5316]

wow! it really helped me get clear about the topic. thank you so much!

[@papajay111]

It all depends on how these vague terms are DEFINED in usage!!! An "Aesthetic" or the property of being asthetic could refer to either "pure beauty" one who disregards science and logic for the belief that beauty itself is the measure of all things!

[@LitProf]

The eighteenth century is very much an age of definitions. I agree that these ones had far-reaching consequences.

[@janepowers8741]

Whence does Burke derive his association of beauty with the sensation of dominion, or “having power over something”? Is that a conceptual linkage he inherited from another thinker or an original theory?

[@papajay111]

But as humans develop most begin to actually experience many of these things "within themselves" without any outside stimulus of the senses. Meditation, fasting, prayer are ways of this direct experience where pleasure becomes a thing in itself yet pain is still very much a part of it. The pain of hunger, the pain of stress on the body's unmoving position are all still present. But the pleasure of this inner communion with our pure deep inner being begins to grow and the pain is dwarfed to a point that it is there but not even noticed. So the most or strongest pleasure is not the absence of pain at all but the never ending increase in pleasure one experiences approaching that of total communion with the most high or the sublime.

[@LitProf]

Burke does not acknowledge what you are describing at all. And I can’t think of a writer who claims as you do.

[@papajay111]

@@LitProf Just read authors who write about meditation, or deep prayer , or highly creative people like musicians, artists or even inventors, designers, people who create. They all touch that realm of experience that is actually available to all who develop their creative side.

[@edwardrichardson8254]

Burke anticipates Freud’s idea of the sexual excitation in fear (“Terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close.”). This is why you see lithographs from the era of the Gothic novel that followed satirizing wide-eyed women gathered around reading "The Monk" surrounded with gothic bric-a-brac. Camille Paglia brilliantly & hilariously extrapolated this to the modern horror film in "Sexual Personae": "The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force. The vast audience of the Gothic novel was and is female. Men who cultivate the novel or film of terror seek sex-crossing sensations. Horror films are most popular among adolescents, whose screams are Dionysian signals of sexual awakening. Reviewers often wonder why the packed audiences of bloody slasher films are sedate couples on weekend dates. Shared fear is a physically stimulating sexual transaction. Freud’s use of the word “shuddering” shows the common area between fear and orgasmic pleasure. In Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” the “shudder in the loins” is both the rapist’s climax and the victim’s fright. Violent horror films, of the splattering kind now so common, seem to me a most pedestrian taste. A classy genre of vampire film follows a style I call psychological high Gothic. It begins in Coleridge’s medieval Christabel and its descendants, Poe’s Ligeia and James’s The Turn of the Screw. A good example is Daughters of Darkness (1971), starring Delphine Seyrig as an elegant lesbian vampire. High Gothic is abstract and ceremonious. Evil has become world-weary, hierarchical glamour. There is no bestiality. The theme is eroticized western power, the burden of history. The Hunger (1983) comes close to being a masterpiece of this genre but is ruined by horrendous errors, as when the regal Catherine Deneuve is made to crawl around on all fours, slavering over cut throats. Please. Butchery is not the point of vampirism. Sex-domination and submission-is. Gothic horror must be moderated by Apollonian discipline, or it turns into gross buffoonery. The run-of-the-mill horror film is anti-aesthetic and antiidealizing. Its theme is sparagmos, the form-pulverizing energies of Dionysus. Horror films unleash the forces repressed by Christianity-evil and the barbarism of nature. Horror films are rituals of pagan worship. There western man obsessively confronts what Christianity has never been able to bury or explain away. Horror stories ending in the victory of good are no more numerous than those ending in the threat of evil’s return. Nature, like the vampire, will not stay in its grave."

[@LitProf]

Camilla Paglia is hilariously ignorant of Christianity but as a disciple of Harold Bloom good on Freud and American culture.

[@edwardrichardson8254]

​@@LitProf She was raised Roman Catholic, which, the Ur-Christianity, which begs the question given that 1 out of 4 American Christians are Catholic: what exactly is "American Christianity"? Her magnum opus "Sexual Personae" brilliantly exposed the overt paganism inherent in Catholicism, here's a quote from it: "Judeo-Christianity has failed to control the pagan western eye. Our thought processes were formed in Greece and inherited by Rome, whose language remains the official voice of the Catholic church. Intellectual inquiry and logic are pagan. Every inquiry is preceded by a roving eye; and once the eye begins to rove, it cannot be morally controlled. Judaism, due to its fear of the eye, put a taboo on visual representation. Judaism is based on word rather than image. Christianity followed suit, until it drifted into pictorialism to appeal to the pagan masses. Protestantism began as an iconoclasm, a breaking of the images of the corrupt Roman church. The pure Protestant style is a bare white church with plain windows. Italian Catholicism, I am happy to say, retains the most florid pictorialism, the bequest of a pagan past that was never lost." The Southern Baptists I was raised w/ always regarded our Catholic cousins or Catholics in general as pagan, kissing the feet of Mary statues, and whatnot. Just HAVING the statues was pagan to us and I had friends in non-denominational Protestant churches in the Nineties who took to wearing the Star of David. She's brilliant on religion, and "Sexual Personae" is loaded wo the hilt w/ her comments on European and American writers in the battle between paganism and Christianity, such as: "Protestant rationalism is defeated by Gothic’s return to the ritualism and mysticism of medieval Catholicism, with its residual paganism. Art withdraws into caverns, castles, prison-cells, tombs, coffins. Gothic is a style of claustrophobic sensuality. Its closed spaces are daemonic wombs. The Gothic novel is sexually archaic: it withdraws into chthonian darkness, the realm of Goethe’s Mothers. Mother night pervades Romanticism, from Coleridge and Keats to Poe and Chopin with his brooding nocturnes. The ghosts released by Gothic will stalk through the nineteenth century as spiritualism, whose séances continue today in Great Britain." She blew open the lid on American Late Romantics whom she classified (rightfully) as DECADENTS, who were ostensibly Protestant but inwardly utterly pagan latecomers to English Gothic and Romanticism. This is PHENOMENALLY INSIGHTFUL from SP as she begins to discuss this: "America’s sex problem began with the banishment of the maternal principle from Protestant cosmology. Medieval Mariolatry was and is a pagan survival that Protestantism, faithful to early Christianity, correctly opposes. But the absence of the mother from pioneer American values imaginatively limited a people living intimately with nature. A society enamored of the future sweeps away the mother, because she is the past, the state of remaining. As I said of Byronism, America is a land of transients and transience, of movement to and across. In its Enlightenment self-fabrication, America rejected the archaic, leaving a symbolic vacuum partly filled by Indian and Negro. English Romanticism, a neo-pagan cult of the sexual archetypal, arrived as a second revolution, daemonizing American literature. The first artist to register this fully is Poe, who introduces the numinous woman to America. His best tales are redramatizations of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Christabel, which was inspired by Spenser’s Faerie Queene. So what we will be tracing in the American Decadents is the action-at-a-distance of Italian Renaissance paganism, a style exploited by Emily Dickinson in her wanton Catholic corruptions of her family’s New England Protestantism." I assure you, you will never write anything 1% this brilliant and original in your lifetime.

[@edwardrichardson8254]

@@LitProf Yeah I always get invited to colleges and universities across America to give lectures on religion recorded by CSPAN and TVO. There's is just one of hers. Send us one of yours! And the 700 page tome you wrote on art & religion that became a bestseller while you're at it. kzbin.info/www/bejne/Znutm6WHoruHftk

[@cloudbusting_]

Doesn't philosophical materialism begin all the way back with the atomists? And not Locke and so forth as you assert here. Aristotle aside (as your pupil brings up).

[@LitProf]

It begins with Democritus, as you say, and is revived in the Renaissance.

[@2msvalkyrie529]

Beautiful women exert " power " over Men NOT vice versa ! Though there is a risk of conflating ' power' with sexual attraction : a risk which you are either unaware of or chose to ignore ?

[@LitProf]

I am presenting Burke’s view about beauty, not my own.

[@2msvalkyrie529]

Good point ! Perhaps you might consider sharing your views on the subject on a future occasion ? ( much obliged for response . )

[@duckwithat]

😅