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A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
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BetaPart 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4, Pages 103-112 Summary
In Part 4, Burke draws a distinction between the sublime and beautiful. The importance of defining these two qualities is inherent to understanding how human passion and the mind function. Humans are limited in their understanding. If they could follow the chain of all thoughts, they would discover everything leading back to God. However, humans can only conceive what they can take in through their senses. Therefore, any understanding of beauty and the sublime must be developed through the senses.
Association is a powerful way that humans interpret something as beautiful or otherwise. They find it difficult to separate their connections from the object. However, associations are not what makes something beautiful or sublime, because many things are first thought to be agreeable or disagreeable and then later discovered to be the opposite. Instead, Burke feels it is a better method to examine pain and how it manifests. While fear and terror are related, they have a different relationship to both pain and the sublime. Concepts which cause terror are related to the sublime. Fear, however, is more connected to pain and the body. Humans and animals often have physical reactions to fear, associating the emotion with pain. Terror, however, affects only the mind, merely hinting at danger. Burke argues that the workings of the mind are more closely related to the body than many people realize, and that pain and pleasure are often closely related to each other.
What separates fear and the sublime is danger. Fear is attached to the natural tension of danger, while the sublime only hints at danger. Since the body and mind are closely related, exercise can be used to alleviate fear. This is an example of positive pain. Unity, vastness, and great dimensions also contribute to the sense of the sublime. Burke suggests that this has to do with the amount of light the eye receives when looking at an object. When an object is more uniform or larger in scale, this affects the amount of light the person takes in—bringing in more darkness and a sense of the sublime.
Part 4, Pages 113-128
In the last half of Part 4, Burke returns to his earlier ideas about beauty and determines that they are still applicable. Humans are more taken in by the sublime than the beautiful. He illustrates his ideas with the image of repeating columns along an infinite plane. The eye continues to carry along the columns, giving a sense of the infinite and, therefore, the sublime. If this is interrupted with succession—such as the introduction of a repeating pattern of one column and one large block—the eye stops at each block, stopping the infinite nature of the image. For the image to have grandeur, it must have simplicity of design.
Burke then looks at darkness and blackness and their relation to beauty. Darkness gives the individual a sense of danger, conjuring feelings of pain, fear, and terror. Burke views blackness as eliciting the same emotions as darkness, and he remarks that black objects can cause uneasiness. At this point in Part 4, Burke begins to equate beauty with what makes someone feel relaxed. He argues that, while darkness can cause someone to be sleepy, true darkness makes someone feel the opposite of relaxed. His critique of Black bodies reflects the biases of his historical period. Burke suggests that Black bodies will always make observers feel uneasy and fearful.
Love is connected to relaxation; it evokes a sense of melting. Burke identifies the bodily reactions of love: half-closed eyes, parted mouth, idle hands. He suggests that the greater the beauty of the object, the greater the bodily reaction of relaxation. The qualities that Burke identified earlier as being related to beauty—smoothness, variation, smallness, etc.—also contribute to relaxation.
Part 4 Analysis
Part 4 of Burke’s text is a conglomeration of many disparate ideas related to Beauty and the Sublime. He begins by distinguishing the two and emphasizing once more the greatness of the sublime over beauty. Burke’s work is distinguished from that of other philosophers in this section by his development of the relationship between the body and the mind.
Burke begins by asserting that all taste is developed through sensory experience. Like Locke, Burke professes that humans formulate ideas based upon the information they receive from the senses. Aesthetics and Sensory Information are thus closely connected. All perceptions of good art or bad art, beauty or ugliness, are derived from sensory information. However, Burke’s philosophy differs after this point. Locke proposed that contemplation upon sensory experience produced thought and judgement. Burke suggests that imagination and judgement are applied to sensory experience, producing taste.
He also states that the body and the mind are intricately related and that one is incapable of pain or pleasure without the other. Burke touts The Role of Pleasure and Pain in the Arts and in human perceptions of beauty and the sublime. The link between the mind and the body is so close that humans may exhibit qualities of either pleasure or pain from a visual stimulant alone. Imagine, for example, that a group of people have been asked to watch a video of a car crash. While watching, some viewers squirm in their seat or clutch at their arms, as though experiencing pain. Others may feel the need to shield their eyes or cry. Their feelings elicit real bodily responses to the stimulant. Burke suggests that this is what great art does: It invites the viewer or reader to feel. Beautiful things invite pleasure. The sublime invites both pleasure and pain.
It is also important to note in this section the way Burke’s views represent a larger cultural bias of his period. His skewed beliefs feature predominantly in his discussions of darkness and, later, blackness. He relates his ideas to Black people, claiming that anyone viewing a person of color may feel a sense of uneasiness. Burke’s views on beauty are strictly rooted in Eurocentric, patriarchal, and colonialist perspectives. Although Burke professed support for the abolitionist movement, he also argued that it was the role of white colonists to educate others and form others in their own image. Burke perceives white skin as more attractive than dark skin, and he argues that women are more beautiful when they are more submissive. Burke also expresses admiration for women who falsely limp or take on other affectations to draw attention to weaknesses, knowing that these weaknesses will make them more attractive to their male counterparts. Burke’s views on aesthetics are not immune from the cultural attitude of his period; instead, they are one point on a complex and nuanced timeline of ideas about the arts and beauty.
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