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Conservative Political Thought · Treatise
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
by Edmund Burke · The Prophet of Prudence · Age of Revolution, 1729-1797
Burke separates the sublime from the beautiful by tracing their passions, objects, bodily effects, and rhetoric.
- Brutal
- ~4 hr read
- 8 chapter guides
- Public domain
Start reading · Read the SECTION VIII. guide free
Before the text
Editor's Prelude
Terror, Delight, and the Limits of Beauty
A darkened building or a few words in a poem can seize the mind before it has decided what to think. Burke wants to understand that force: why an experience can overwhelm us, why another invites tenderness, and why pleasure is too simple a name for everything we willingly feel.
Beauty does not simply rank below sublimity. The two operate through different relations—love and social attraction on one side, astonishment and danger apprehended at a distance on the other.
The enquiry brings poems, animals, architecture and bodily sensations into the same conversation. Its confidence in a common human nature sits beside an insistence on careful comparison and the possibility of error. Burke’s physical explanations and judgments about gender, race and cultivated taste make that tension consequential: an illuminating distinction need not make every example or proposed cause convincing. The book’s energy lies in the attempt to understand feelings that seem to arrive before explanation.
The opening pages
PART I.: SECTION I.
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. We see children perpetually running from place to place, to hunt out something new: they catch with great eagerness, and with very little choice, at whatever comes before them; their attention is engaged by everything, because everything has, in that stage of life, the charm of novelty to recommend it. But as those things, which engage us merely by their novelty, cannot attach us for any length of time, 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. Curiosity, from its nature, is a very active principle; it quickly runs over the greatest part of its objects, and soon exhausts the variety which is commonly to be met with in nature; the same things make frequent returns, and they return with less and less of any agreeable effect. In short, the occurrences of life, by the time we come to know it a little, would be incapable of affecting the mind with any other sensations than those of loathing and weariness, if many things were not adapted to affect the mind by means of other powers besides novelty in them, and of other passions besides curiosity in ourselves. These powers and passions shall be considered in their place. But, whatever these powers are, or upon what principle soever they affect the mind, it is absolutely necessary that they should not be exerted in those things which a daily and vulgar use have brought into a stale unaffecting familiarity. Some degree of novelty must be one of the materials in every instrument which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself more or less with all our passions.
SECTION II.
PAIN AND PLEASURE.
It seems, then, necessary towards moving the passions of people advanced in life to any considerable degree, that the objects designed for that purpose, besides their being in some measure new, should be capable of exciting pain or pleasure from other causes. Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings about them. Many are of opinion, that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affecting, are each of a positive nature, and by no means necessarily dependent on each other for their existence. The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference. When I am carried from this state into a state of actual pleasure, it does not appear necessary that I should pass through the medium of any sort of pain. …
Chapter guides · 8
SECTION VIII.
Feeling before classification
Burke grounds taste in shared faculties, then separates positive pleasure from the relief he calls delight.
A common ground for taste
Burke treats taste as the work of sense, imagination and judgment, rather than a special instinct beyond explanation. People may disagree because their knowledge, attention and sensibility differ. The shoemaker notices a painted shoe’s faults; the anatomist notices a muscle. Neither example requires a different natural principle of pleasure.
Pleasure is not merely pain removed
A person can pass from indifference into pleasure without first suffering. Relief from danger has a different character: it leaves a gravity and awe that Burke distinguishes from ordinary enjoyment. He reserves delight for this relative satisfaction. Note 10 makes explicit his disagreement with Locke about pleasure and the removal of pain.
Two concerns of the passions
Self-preservation turns chiefly on pain and danger, which Burke takes to be more powerful than pleasure. Danger can yield delight when sufficiently distant or modified; when it presses too closely, it is simply terrible. Social passions open a different line of inquiry. A forsaken lover dwells on an enjoyment lost, which Burke distinguishes from positive bodily pain. The distinctions begin with the character of a feeling, before asking what produces it.
PART II.
Why distress draws an audience
Sympathy, imitation and ambition connect the passions to social life; astonishment then names the sublime’s strongest effect.
Affection and fellow-feeling
Burke connects beauty with tenderness and a wish for relation, extending it beyond sexual desire to other people and animals. Sympathy puts us imaginatively in another’s place and may turn on pleasure or pain. His account of distress is deliberately unsettling: the attraction of a calamity brings us close enough to witness it, while its uneasiness prompts relief of the sufferer.
Safety is a condition, not the cause
The imagined execution outside a theatre tests the claim that tragedy pleases mainly because it is fictitious. Burke thinks real suffering can draw the audience more powerfully. He distinguishes wishing a disaster to happen from wishing to see its consequences. Freedom from immediate danger makes such attention possible; it does not by itself explain the attraction.
From social links to astonishment
Imitation helps transmit conduct, while ambition prevents life from becoming an endless copy of what already exists. Burke locates the arts’ standard in common nature rather than in works imitating other works. At the opening of Part II, astonishment is the state in which a sublime object fills the mind so completely that reasoning about it is suspended; admiration, reverence and respect are weaker effects.
SECTION XII.
When the mind cannot find a boundary
Obscurity, power and apparent infinity give Burke different ways of explaining sublime force.
SECTION II.
From overwhelming force to beauty
Burke finishes the sublime’s sensory examples and challenges proportion as an explanation of beauty.
SECTION XIII.
Beauty without a measuring rule
Burke separates being well formed, useful or admirable from the affection he calls beauty, then turns toward its sensible qualities.
SECTION XXV.
The qualities of a gentle impression
Smoothness, gradual variation and delicacy give Burke a pattern he follows across sight, touch and sound.
SECTION IX.
A proposed bodily cause
Burke turns from qualities of objects to a speculative account of tension, relaxation and the connection between body and passion.
SECTION XXI.
From repeated strain to relaxation
Burke explains uniformity and darkness through his theory of the senses, then gives beauty an opposing bodily action.
Questions readers ask
- How long does it take to read A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful?
- About 4 hr in total.
- How difficult is A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful?
- Brutal. A mid-length treatise; about 4 hours of reading.
- Can I read A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful for free?
- A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is part of Nexus Premium, so reading it needs an account and a Premium subscription. The opening above and two chapter guides on this page are free to read.
- How many chapter guides are there?
- 8 chapter guides, written by the Nexus editors. Two open in full here; the rest show their opening line.
About Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke was an Irish-born statesman and political writer best known for his critique of the French Revolution. His thought emphasizes tradition, prudence, inheritance, reform, and the dangers of abstract political schemes.
“What do revolutionaries destroy that they do not understand?”
Burke gives Nexus the counterweight to revolutionary optimism: a warning about fragility, inheritance, and political arrogance.
Source text: public domain. Chapter guides: original Nexus writing. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is part of The Nexus Archive, guided Quests through the great works.