Marta Shcherbakova

English 240

April 28, 2010

Beautiful and Sublime The most two conflicting philosophical versions of the relationship between beautiful and sublime in aesthetic, and touchstone for almost all later philosophical works dealing with the subject, lay in the theories of two legendary philosophers of 18th century, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Burkes Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful shows a distinction between what is beautiful (and pleasant) and the sublime, concluding that an experience that might be considered terrible may instead inspire a peculiar sense of pleasure, a delight derived from terror. After about thirty years, Kant in his famous Critique of Judgment thoroughly analyzes the connection between beautiful and sublime by comparing and contrasting these terms but highlights the difference between them by applying the sublime aesthetic to the nature only. In this paper I will compare Burkes and Kants theories about beautiful and sublime, in order to show that there is no standard viewpoint on defining the beautiful and the sublime. The eighteenth century was an active period for investigation of the beauty and the sublimity. In 1757 Edmund Burke, British political theorist and statesmen, published one of his famous works Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He was the first philosopher to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are mutually exclusive. The difference is a contradictory to the same degree as light and darkness. Beauty may be emphasized by light, but either intense light or darkness is sublime to the degree that it can eliminate the sight of an object. Burke's concept of the sublime is an antithetical contrast to the classical notion of the aesthetic quality of beauty as the pleasurable experience. He suggests ugliness as an aesthetic quality in its capacity to instill feelings of intense emotion, ultimately creating a pleasurable experience. According to Burkes theory, in order to understand these two terms, people have to analyze their causal structures. For instance, the formal cause of beauty is the passion of love; the material cause concerns aspects of certain objects such as smallness,

Marta Shcherbakova

English 240

April 28, 2010

smoothness, delicacy, etc. As Burke states, beauty cannot be understood by the traditional bases of beauty: proportion, fitness, or perfection. The sublime also has a causal structure that is unlike that of beauty. Its formal cause is thus the passion of fear; the material cause is an equal aspect of certain objects such as vastness, infinity, magnificence, etc. In other words, Burke's sublime is achieved through a type of indirect or derived terror, in which one experiences pleasure in the face of pain or terror. Burke concentrates on the point at which sublime is understandable through peoples senses of feelings and imagination. He assumes that all our knowledge comes by way of sense experience, combing simple impressions into more complex ones. Burke directly connects imagination to peoples senses of feelings, saying that by "representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses" and by "combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order." Therefore, according to Burke, the imagination cannot create anything "new"; it can only reorder and combine basic sense perceptions. So, according to Burke, in order to understand the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, we must examine the experience of pain and pleasure, that in turn can be examine by all humans senses of feelings. In 1790, Kant finished his critical enterprise with the Critique of Judgment. To this day, however, the third of these three Critiques has remained the darkest of Kants published works and the most inaccessible to the philosophical reader.1 In this book, Kant follows the eighteenth-century convention of grouping together the notions of the beautiful and the sublime. He regards them as constituting jointly the aesthetic aspect of nature and essential qualities of fine art. When Kant starts to talk about beautiful, he sounds very familiar to Burke by saying that If we wish to decide whether something is beautiful or not, we do not use understanding to
1

Guyer, Paul. Taste, sublimity, and genius: The aesthetics of nature and art. The Cambridge Companion

to Kant. Cambridge University Press, 1992 (367-394)

Marta Shcherbakova

English 240

April 28, 2010

refer the presentation to the object so as to give rise to cognition; rather, we use imagination (Norton Anthology, 505) But then, he describes beauty as "an object's form or purposiveness insofar as it is perceived in the object without the presentation of a purpose", meaning that beauty is a property of the object, serving as a purpose to the object, but not as an answer to the need or interest of the person beholding the object. Therefore, beauty is not a thing that happens to us, it is a thing that belongs to the object that is beautiful. When Kant tries to define beautiful, he also mentions the taste. We argue that some object is beautiful - we express our taste, and support it with evidences, hence, we make a judgment. According to Kant, having taste is not like having an extra sense, nor like exercising a special intellectual power. It is ability to respond with immediate pleasure and crystal vision to the beauty in the world that around us. Even Kant lived during the time when people followed to uniform rules and were too afraid of their authorities to express themselves in any ways, he understood that the taste is an individual concept, and everyone sees things how he or she wants it to be seen. In todays society everyone will agree that defining beauty is out of the capability of anyone, due to individuality of every persona and high comprehension of beauty in their own reality. At the beginning of the Analytic of the Sublime, Kant both compares and contrasts the experience of sublimity with that of the beautiful. While he compares them, he finds enough to argue for the inclusion of the judgment on the sublime together with the judgment on the beautiful. These two terms both are estimated in judgments of reflection and not cognized in determinant judgments; the gratification in both rests on correspondence of imagination with faculty of concepts that belongs to understanding or reason. While Kant contrasts beautiful and sublime, he claims that The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in the objects being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness, ether as in the object or because the object prompts us to

Marta Shcherbakova

English 240

April 28, 2010

present it, while yet we add to this unboundedness the thought of its totality. (Norton Anthology, 520) Using more simple language, the beautiful can be related to art or some sensory experience; sublime cannot be related to an experience, rather it refers to humans responses to everything that is too overwhelming to comprehend. For example pyramids, from Kants perspective would see as a sublime because of its greatness, its power, and also because of the fact that peoples just imagination fails to comprehend it. From my perspective, both philosophers, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant made very interesting points, but Kant did more thorough analysis. When he discussed the term beautiful, he mentioned that there are no rules to which we can appeal to spell out when a thing ought to be judged beautiful. And I totally agree with him. The same concept can be applied to the sublime. I think it is very important that Kant also mentioned taste because in todays society people have their own tastes, concepts, and ideas on perceiving the world. Some people might perceive the sublime as something powerful with terror and some might see it just from the point of greatness. Some people can consider art as a sublime, because it is a unique creation, and some as a beautiful, because there is nothing overwhelming, its just a work of a particular person. After the reading of the Critique of Judgment, and few parts of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, I just one more time concluded that there is no standard viewpoint on defining the beautiful and the sublime.
Works Cited Leitch, Vincent B. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgment. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W.W. Norton & Company, 2001 (499-535) Leitch, Vincent B. Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. W.W. Norton & Company, 2001 (536-551)