Garnett

Frankenstein

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke’s Sublime and Beautiful

A General View

Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is an examination of how sensation, imagination, and judgment are interrelated in the experience of art. Burke explains how sensation, imagination, and judgment determine the experience of pleasure and pain, and how pleasure and pain are represented by the aesthetic concepts of beauty and sublimity.

According to Burke, pain may be a more powerful emotion than pleasure, and may have a stronger influence on the imagination. However, the idea of pain, or of danger, when the individual is not actually in pain or in danger, may yield a pleasurable form of fear, which is described as delight. This delight is caused by the sublime.

Some Excerpts from the Sublime and Beautiful

Part I Section I: Novelty

The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity. By curiosity, I mean whatever desire we have for, or whatever pleasure we take in, novelty.

…curiosity, is the most superficial of all the affections; it changes its object perpetually, it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied; and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness, and anxiety.

Part I Section II: Pain and Pleasure

…in all the several senses, of hearing, smelling and tasting, you undoubtedly find a pleasure…

Part I Section VI: Of the Passions Which Belong to Self-Preservation

The passions which concern self-preservation turn mostly on pain or danger. The ideas of pain, sickness, and death, fill the mind with strong emotions of horror; but life and health, though they put us in a capacity of being affected with pleasure, make no such impression by the simple enjoyment.

Part I Section VII: Of the Sublime

…the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasure…

Part I Section XI: Society and Solitude

…but absolute and entire solitude, that is, the total and perpetual exclusion from all society, is as great a positive pain as can almost be conceived. Therefore in the balance between the pleasure of general society and the pain of absolute solitude, pain is the predominant idea.

…since solitude as well as society has its pleasures; as the former of the observation we may discern, that an entire life of solitude contradicts the purposes of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.

Part II Section I: Of the Passions Caused by the Sublime

The passion caused by the great and 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.

Part II Section II: Terror

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror be ended with greatness of dimensions or not; for it is impossible to look at anything as trifling, or contemptible, that may be dangerous. 

Part II Section III: Obscurity

To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.

Part II Section V: Power

…I know of nothing sublime, which is not in some modification of power…For first, we must remember, that the idea of pain, in its highest degree, is much stronger than the highest degree of pleasure; and that it preserves the same superiority through all the subordinate gradations.

Part II Section XIII: Magnificence

Magnificence is likewise a source of the sublime. A great profusion of things, which are splendid or valuable in them selves, is magnificent.