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A review by virtualmima
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke
3.0
It's too bad that aesthetics as a philosophy is not taken very seriously at all when art has a stronger connection to life than the majority of science. In the West art is mindlessly dismissed as a mere hobby or source of entertainment. The casual disconnected consumer believes either in the relativism of aesthetics or some archaic view of Forms. Edmund Burke initiated the break from these antiquated views and like many other thinkers of his time he gravitated towards lazy categorical thinking because it was more important to introduce the subject and question commonly accepted ideas for future thinkers to expand upon than it was to identify the full truth. This never really happened, and even two centuries later people like Croce and Artaud were only slightly ahead of where Burke left off.
I find myself mostly in agreement with what Burke says of the sublime; simplistic as his ideas may be they form a strong backbone for further exploration in that subject. Where I differ from him most is in his conception of the beautiful. I do find it productive to distinguish the sublime from the beautiful but his analysis of the beautiful suffers from much of the same problems as the formulaic approach he criticizes. After emphasizing for so long that beauty cannot be measured by proportion and other such qualities, he says that smallness, smoothness, and fragility among other qualities are what make something beautiful. For one I think he's conflating "beautiful" with "cute" but even so these are not generally true. Even defining beauty as he does, he should be saying what it is not, so if something is beautiful/cute it is not big, not rough and wrinkled, and not tough. Otherwise we'd have to say that insects are beautiful, as are turds and pebbles. Even with humans, there are so many ugly babies. What surprises me is that someone living in the baroque age would be describing beauty as something small, smooth, and simple when all of the baroque and rococo art and architecture of the era were full of lush, complex designs intended to maximize pleasure. In distinguishing beauty from the sublime I would place more emphasis on feeling than form. In form they may follow much of the same rules, but if the sublime embodies terror, the beautiful suspends time to create a state of ecstasy.
I find myself mostly in agreement with what Burke says of the sublime; simplistic as his ideas may be they form a strong backbone for further exploration in that subject. Where I differ from him most is in his conception of the beautiful. I do find it productive to distinguish the sublime from the beautiful but his analysis of the beautiful suffers from much of the same problems as the formulaic approach he criticizes. After emphasizing for so long that beauty cannot be measured by proportion and other such qualities, he says that smallness, smoothness, and fragility among other qualities are what make something beautiful. For one I think he's conflating "beautiful" with "cute" but even so these are not generally true. Even defining beauty as he does, he should be saying what it is not, so if something is beautiful/cute it is not big, not rough and wrinkled, and not tough. Otherwise we'd have to say that insects are beautiful, as are turds and pebbles. Even with humans, there are so many ugly babies. What surprises me is that someone living in the baroque age would be describing beauty as something small, smooth, and simple when all of the baroque and rococo art and architecture of the era were full of lush, complex designs intended to maximize pleasure. In distinguishing beauty from the sublime I would place more emphasis on feeling than form. In form they may follow much of the same rules, but if the sublime embodies terror, the beautiful suspends time to create a state of ecstasy.