That Very Disturbing Burke

One of the most important ideas in Edmund Burke’s book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, is that very distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Mountains, crashing waves, thunderstorms – such things have a grandeur that humbles us and reminds us of our precarity and impermanence as frail humans. This is the sublime. Beauty, by contrast, seems to Mr. Burke to be more about superficial pleasure. He makes some telling comments about the areas of bare flesh that were displayed in women’s fashions of his day. Perhaps these comments now seem more silly than disturbing. Ideas of either profundity or superficial prettiness were out of the window when it came to ladies’ shoulders. Mr. Burke could only swoon! What to make of all this? For one thing, almost all philosophers who have sought to define aesthetics have tended to do so by means of categories, like our own Mr. Burke (except in the case of the aforementioned shoulders). Thus, another human list, that seeks to add some kind of material reality to something that can only ever be aesthetic. I mean the idea that something can possess beauty rather than just being beautiful. There are many such lists or groupings along these lines. Thus: There is not a thing called existence, things just exist or they don’t. And: There is no quality of truth that things can possess – things are either true or they’re not. And: There is no list of moral rules to which things in the universe try to conform – no possession of being morally correct. Values – leading to ethics and morality – are rather innate to the universe or innate to people and other conscious beings. AGENCY defines us. CHOICE defines us. These are the results of emergence – simply from what defines a conscious being – mind plus body plus way of being in the world. And so: It’s easy to see that the same applies to aesthetics. In fact, morality is just a special case of aesthetics. It is about AGENCY and CHOICE. But perhaps we could say that ethics and morality carry a burden of responsibility, whilst aesthetics, more generally, is about pleasure. The interesting thing about aesthetics is that, for the most part, we don’t take it too seriously. We say such things as, ‘well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ – meaning that, generally speaking, we are fairly tolerant of another’s tastes and preferences. I guess it is the burden of responsibility that make it different for morality. Bad behaviour can obviously harm us or even kill us, so yes, on this reading, it matters more. But is there something else? Well, for some reason, people don’t get moved in quite the same way about moral issues as they do about aesthetic issues. Remember Mr. Burke and the shoulders! All rationality is abandoned for a while and Burke is in a state of adoration! And it goes the same for what we might describe as sacrilege, or desecration, or profanity. These things are often about aesthetic rather than moral issues. Why so, we may wonder? One reason might be that there needs to be a certain level of analysis in morality – we need to think things through – use our rational minds. Aesthetics – either of a positive or a negative kind – gets us much sooner. Gets us in the gut, touches our emotions, makes us feel things in our bodies. Aesthetics is visceral. And it’s important to note that some of our values spring directly from aesthetics – they are about seeing how things are – and they are often from our evolutionary past. It is only our later and more sophisticated values that spring from our uniquely human ability to rationalise – which springs, in turn, from our language. But rational thought is still a hard-fought battle. That’s part of the reason that Burke’s contrast of the sublime and the beautiful makes sense to us. The sublime invites us to think a bit, whilst the beautiful just hits us – hits us like a fine pair of shoulders! We may feel that we have to fight visceral outbursts of rage of swooning. But I’d suggest instead that we should rest a while in those strong emotions that aesthetics can evoke. These, too, are part of us. In fact, they are probably more like the real us than anything else that we may wish to project of ourselves onto the world. Mr. Burke was all about the shoulders. What are we all about? It’s worth finding out – finding, if possible, where our true pleasures lie.