Exploring Burke and Kant's Aesthetic Ideas

We're going to move on in the 18th century to the pre-romantic writers. Foundations of romantic aesthetics are laid in the writings of Edmund Burke and of Immanuel Kant. And I had them in the syllabus doing Kant. first and then Burke that would be ridiculous in the sense that Kant is responding directly to Burke cites Burke in fact so if I'm going to do the course historically which I have been pretty much it would be obvious to do it that way in fact there's no reason to do Kant before Burke at all so I don't even know how it got on the syllabus like it is but we're going to look at Edmund Burke and this philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. That's the title, a typical 18th century title, very long-winded and descriptive. Before word searches and libraries existed, the 18th century existed and gave you exactly what's going on there. And every word of that is useful. So it's not just the philosophical inquiry, it's into the origin. of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. So all of those, origin, ideas, sublime, beautiful, those four things are all significant. And he is using that word that we've already talked about repeatedly, this word sublime, which I said even early on when we looked at Longinus, that although Longinus is the man who first uses the term, perihupsos, on the sublime, the elevated in... Longinus'sense, it's not really that influential in terms of the history of critical thought on art. It's more Longinus picks up his influence come the early modern period, which we talked about last time. So in the debate between the ancients and the modern, that quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, they cite... Longinus and his reference to the sublime, that's when it starts to become significant and that it increases in its significance as the 18th century progresses to the point where it becomes the category of all categories, the sublime. And what we will notice has just a broad tendency, and I'm reiterating what I said when we talked about Longinus. is that for Longinus the sublime is a degree of the beautiful. The most beautiful thing is the sublime. So there's beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful, right? In English we talk about that as the comparative and the superlative, you know, more beautiful, most beautiful. That's the general gist of what the sublime is historically. It's degrees. This is the most beautiful of all things. But come the 18th century, and particularly beginning with Burke, they are not degrees of the same thing. They are absolutely diametrically opposed, effective judgments, effective sensibilities. So it's Burke that makes them opposed to one another. And that is decisive. for what will follow. Because at that point, and this is my commentary before I even come to it, is that at that point we have a severance of aesthetic sensibility from truth and goodness. Beauty is no longer connected to truth and goodness in the same way. So although Edmund Burke is the founder of modern political conservatism, I think the beginning of in aesthetics, the decline of the humanities begins with Edmund Burke. This is my charge. You're not going to hear it anywhere else. I'm right by the way. Minority of one on an opinion that's correct doesn't it overweighs all the false opinions on it now and so I'm throwing the gauntlet down so you can prove me false right but you won't because I'm right when you connect beauty as a superlative, and it's a degree, and you're connecting it to other things. That's one thing, but Burke severs the two entirely, and with that, he opens up a whole different discussion. We're going to see where this goes, but I'm just laying that out, that it's no longer connected to beauty, and in the Middle Ages, beauty, goodness, and truth are attributes of God. He is the beautiful one. He is the kalos hupoumenos, the beautiful shepherd. You know, when it says in most English translations, Jesus says that he's the good shepherd, it doesn't say good actually, it's kalos, it's beautiful. How beautiful are the feet on the mountains of him who bears the gospel of peace. It's how beautiful, right? So there's a beauty to God. And it's expressed in the temple architecture, it's the beauty. So beauty is an aesthetic quality, and it matters to God as well. There's things that are solely there for beauty. Even in the temple, there's no purpose to it, it's just for beauty. And goodness is a part of God's essential characteristics as well. He calls creation good, suggesting that goodness is a part of his character, not only to determine it, but to be important to him. Goodness matters to God. It's part of his holiness. He creates the world and he does it as a holy God, and the creation bears that mark until it's defiled by sin. So goodness and truth, I don't even need to defend truth in that sense. The Enlightenment upholds truth, but it separates truth from goodness and beauty, and it relegates goodness and beauty to secondary status. Goodness becomes relativized, subjectified, and so that goodness is a matter of opinion, and likewise beauty. So we hope we have held on to the idea that truth marks the academy until recently, until very recently. But we have thrown under the bus goodness and beauty as objective assessments for a few hundred years. And C.S. Lewis describes it in his book, The Abolition of Man. And that's the case he's making. It is the, we regard moral judgments and aesthetic judgments as subjective impressions. He doesn't trace it to what I'm telling you today. He doesn't trace it to Edmund Burke, but that's where it begins. I say this with confidence because this is my stuff. other stuff I know about but this is my area of expertise. It doesn't mean I'm right, I just happen to be right but it's not right. I'm overstating my case on this. I feel in the minority of one on this to some degree but I think I think it is in there it is cannot be disputed. There are signs of this by the way. One of the signs is that for the first time This word aesthetics as a branch of philosophy appears. It's an 18th century phenomena. It's not even used before the 18th century. It's used by a German writer. I think it's Baumgartner. I'm not forgotten now. I think it's Baumgartner. He uses the term sublime. Das ist eine Habnung. For the first time. Or aesthetics rather. Uses this word. It's from a it's got a Greek root as than aside to perceive It's there in Greek, but the but the discipline of aesthetics does not exist Remember we've done Aristotle now in his poetics does he talk about aesthetics? No does Plato talk about aesthetics? No, it's not a branch of philosophy at all It just isn't there come the 18th century and ever after Aesthetics is the discipline You won't know that from listening to my colleagues in the philosophy department because analytic philosophy is not bedeviled by the problem of the continental tradition. In the continental tradition the third critique of Kant, the critique of judgment, critique de Urteilskraft, is about aesthetics and he, that is Kant, regarded as his most important critique. In the analytic tradition they disagree, they say it's the first one. Who's right? Kant's with me on this. The continental tradition is with him and his judgment. Kant's judgment is that the critique of judgment, the third one on aesthetics, is the most important one. Whether you like it or not, that's where the continentalist tradition of philosophy goes. It follows Kant. The analytic tradition, the Anglo-American tradition, doesn't go with him, and there's goodness in that. But you can't understand Kant without understanding how important aesthetics is in his whole philosophical corpus. It is it. It's the linchpin. So we'll come to that next time, but I'm just sort of setting the stage for the next two classes. We'll start with Burke, and then we'll move on to Kant, but they're both talking about the same sorts of things. And when Kant does this, I think there's a serious problem with what he does. But at this point, I'm just stating that aesthetics as a philosophical branch or as an area of expertise and study emerges in this period for the first time. Whenever something emerges as a new branch of learning. It makes us perk up our ears and say what's going on there? Like why has this like everyone knows what aesthetics is now right? If you're an aesthetician then you do nails and you know beauty right? And if you think about aesthetics you think about beauty right? Do you think about the sublime when you do aesthetics? Never. If you're an aesthetician, you're there to beautify. But that's not what, when aesthetics begins in the 18th century, it's about delineating the sublime from the beautiful, and the most important of the two is the sublime. So with all that said, this is just to highlight the importance of this period in our whole discussion and this will influence what comes in the next semester when we do contemporary lit theory. Because all of these, I think what follows on from this discussion, if you make a mistake here in the concepts, then you can't get to the right outcome later on. So if you have a faulty presupposition early on, and yet you presuppose it yourself, you're going to be trying to fix problems that are there because of the conceptualization. And that's my contention. the problems of post-modern literary theory begin in the 18th century they're just not perceived in the 18th century they're perceived in our day but i will come to that but this is my great content and as I said I'm right on this but now I'm overstating it and it looks a little bit too much but so let me juxtapose the two of them and before I'm going to get right into Burke then and I'll spend the rest of the class looking at Burke We already saw the sublime when we looked at Addison last time. Remember he mentioned the sublime? And it was also Boileau, again referring to Longinus, and both of them mean something like what Longinus meant. It's the most beautiful thing. That's what they mean by it. And nothing else. But come Burke, it gets, as I say, juxtaposed. And so these two works are required reading on this course because of their influence. And though they agree that the sublime is here and the beautiful is there and there's no overlap. So in a Venn diagram, there's no overlap at all. They mean something very different by it all the same. And we'll have to talk about that. But they agree on one thing, sublime's this, beautiful's that, and there is no common ground at all. And that's Burke's doing. So we'll look at Burke first. Burke's position can be called the effectivist or the effectivist. or the sensationalist position. As in it's about how it affects the audience, it's subjectivism, it's how it's perceived. And same with sensationalist, it doesn't mean that he's sensationalist in his language, it means that it's how it affects our empiric... Burke is affecting an empiricist in the Lockean sense. It's how our empirical senses perceive things. That's what he is. So he's talking as a good Lockean when he's thinking here. And remember he's interested in the ideas, which Locke is also interested in. What's the origin of our ideas? Where do ideas come from? So you have to see Burke in the light of Locke. I haven't done Locke on the course. I think my colleagues in philosophy probably do Locke, but in Locke the key faculty is the imagination, which is interesting, because that's the faculty we associate with the Romantic poets. but Locke is the one who originates. The imagination is what holds our reasoning and our understanding together. It's this faculty of the imagination. So all of these terms which become really crucial later on are laid down in the Enlightenment, and the Romantics inherit them and do things with them. And my question and my dispute with the Romantics originates in the Enlightenment, not the Romantics themselves. I'm already saying I'm disputing them, so I'm displaying my prejudice up front. But we'll come to that in a minute. But he is going to set out the effectivist position on the sublime. Where does the sublime originate? What's the origin of it? If you're a Platonist, the origin of our ideas of the beautiful, the sublime, are in a numinal realm. It's a transcendental, right? They talk about the realm of ideas. Remember the philosophy? We looked at the allegory of the cave, and so there's this realm of the ideas. He talks about justice. We appeal to a transcendental notion of justice. Everybody in... Intuitively knows what it is. You don't have to explain it. They know it. A small child, that's not fair. What are they appealing to? C.S. Lewis talks about this in Mere Christianity. When we say that's not fair and children argue about fairness, what are they appealing to? A category they already both understand. And that's why they're arguing about it, because they both know what justice is. That's Plato's point. We all have a sense of this realm of ideas or the forms of things. What's the form of justice? What's the form of the good? What's the form of truth? What's the form of beauty? He talks about that throughout his dialogues. That's not what Burke's doing here. He's saying what's the origin of our ideas? He doesn't appeal to Plato's categories. So despite the language, he's not a Platonist. Where do these things originate then? If there's not in a transcendental realm or a metaphysical realm, if it's not that, where do they originate? Well, I've already explained. He's an affectivist. They originate in our sensations, empirical, in our eyes, so our sense of sight, our sense of hearing, our sense of smell, our sense of taste, our sense of touch, those five. That's where it's those sensations. So he's a materialist, effectively. there's a material origin to our ideas. So he flips Plato around. Plato says it's no, it's that, and from that, that, and we can be sure of the truth because there's something that preserves it and maintains it, and that's the idea despite appearances. We can be wrong about the empirical evidence. We can misjudge that, but the truth will hold on to the ideas, or the idea will hold on to the experience that we perceive. Burke does it the other way around. So we're going to, it's going to come through our senses. So this is the beginning of materialism. Philosophical materialism begins with Locke and with the empiricist philosophers. And they're skeptical as a consequence. So skepticism is rampant in this. So let me go to Burke here. Comments or questions at this point? I've laid a lot there. I've said where it's going to go, and I won't get, I will pattern that out next semester, but I wanted to give you a sense of an overview at the outset. Yes, sir? I thought you said that, like, when I said Aristotle was also like a way where you could see in a material way. Yes, but he sees the metaphysical within. the material. He doesn't reject metaphysics. He doesn't think it exists in that. He thinks that the excellence of the thing is in the thing, whereas Plato posited it as a different realm. Aristotle's question is what's the essence of a thing, so that it's the nature of that thing, but it's within the thing. It's not totally separate from it. So he doesn't reject the realm of ideas. He does reject the realm of ideas, but he doesn't reject, in a sense, what Plato means by ideas. He says that it is there and it's just not as Plato presents it. The one's true and the other's false. He unites the two. There's truth even in the appearances. And for Plato, those things don't work. One's true and the other is fallacious, the allegory of the cave, right? And he sets them in opposition. Aristotle's not having that. Our senses do, but give some sense of truth. I think it's unfair to see either Plato, they're in disagreement with Plato and Aristotle, because Aristotle sees that there is truth, goodness, beauty, justice in the individual things. They don't see that. They begin with the sensations. Aristotle would never begin with the sensations. He assumes the truth of Plato's position. He thinks the way he's presented it, that's false. Get it? Everything's through your senses for these guys. And not for Aristotle. And it's hard because we tend, because we are in the English-speaking world, we operate under the auspices of John Locke and the Romantics. That's just the way we look at things. We're empiricists. And that means materialists, actually. Materialism is rooted in the whole system. That's not Aristotle and it's not Plato. They both reject that. Aristotle is no more a... he's not an idealist, but he's certainly not a materialist. He's a different thing. Okay, so these guys are not Aristotelians. No way. Never. But they're going to place the emphasis on their senses or their perception. And again, aestheticia is the passive sense of perceiving something, being affected by it. And really it is a passive sense. So in Lockean imagination, it pulls together what is otherwise a thoughtless process. So I touch something and it's hot. It's the imagination that unites that into a comprehensible thing. Otherwise, it's just pure sensation. There's no thought going on at all. Anyway, so Burke, does that explain a little bit? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So the effectiveness position is there, and he emphasizes the power of experience. So in the intro on taste, which is in the second edition, I think it's at the outset here. Yes, it is in page 11. But it's not there on that page because that's just a summary. If I can find this. In the intro on taste, he talks about, he makes two claims about the importance of taste. Now this is, so taste also takes on real significance in Burke's aesthetics. You can have good taste, you can have bad taste, you can also have no taste in English. We use those three phrases. Somebody who has good taste, we know what that means. Bad taste, we know. No taste at all, what is that? It's worse than bad. They seem not to have the critical faculty to be able to... Perceive the matter at all, right? Somebody says no taste, like the ugly Christmas sweater. It's not in bad taste, it has no taste. It's not the superlative, it just seems to be indifferent to taste matters. Right? We say that in English. Burke makes two claims for taste. First of all, he talks about how the senses operate regularly and they make taste meaningful and also you can make general statements. As general as reasoning. And I quote, so, as the conformation of their organs are nearly or altogether the same in all men, so the manner of perceiving external objects is in all men the same or with little difference. Our sensation of that's sweet, that's bitter, so sugar is sweet, that's bitter, is basically universal. There's a general agreement on almost all things. If you don't have that, it's because you have some sort of a defect. You might be colorblind. That's green, that's red, but if you're green, red, colorblind, then you don't distinguish them. That's the exception that proves the rule. Everyone says, Joseph, that's a red and black. shirt, right? It's not, no, and everybody agrees, that's his point. We, this is the first thing. So on taste, and when he's talking about taste, he's not talking about whether the shirt's in good taste. He's saying that's the subject matter. I'm not, by the way. Yeah, you're not tasty. But the perception, the effect is called the same thing by everyone, and without... any disagreement for the most part. That's the first thing. And the second thing is that the origin of the passion treats taste as a field of determinate knowledge. in which, and now I quote, the remembrance of the original natural causes of pleasure can be distinguished from the acquired tastes that fashion has determined, or habit has determined. So there's the original impression, which we can notice, and then we can talk about the cultural experience of it and often that's presented in language, in terminology. So if you look in a dictionary and you're defining a term, the first term tends to be the most literal meaning, often the Latin root of a word, it uses a sense, and then gradually over time a culture will use that word in different ways by cultural determination. Augustine talked about this. Right, so we might call some practices good. We know what goodness means, but a culture can determine, can change the assessment of what constitutes a good practice just by cultural agreement. And he says it's in conjunction with the doctrine of demons if it deviates from the natural law. Furthermore, but that's, and Burke's not. making the doctrine of demons argument, but he's saying that the taste is a field of determinate knowledge first of all, but then we can deviate from it. So we're not likely to be confused on the sensation, like of sweetness in sugar or bitterness in I don't know. What's bitter? Pepper. Arugula. Yeah, it's bitter. You're right. Everyone tastes the bitterness there. And we're not likely to be confused on that, but we may be confused in our reasoning about it. And Burke is going to now trace the beautiful and the sublime to utilitarian impulses. So this is the first point about Burke, is that he's an effectivist and a sensationalist. It's all going back to the senses. The second point is that he's a... utilitarian. These serve a function. Why do we perceive the beautiful to be beautiful? It serves a purpose. How about the sublime? Why do we perceive the sublime to be the sublime? It serves a purpose. So that is also a feature of his. I'm giving you general descriptions, then we'll get down into the substance of the argument. But that is the second thing that we have to note about that. So it's utilitarian. I'll give you the outline and then we'll go to his illustration. So what is the beautiful? What's the use of beauty? The beauty is a manifestation of the instinct to be sociable. And the purpose it serves is the propagation or continuation of the human species. What's the purpose of beauty? It attracts us to the opposite sex and that makes us procreate, continue the... so it serves a biological purpose. He's using the term before biology exists as a discipline. That's why we call things beautiful. That's the function, the utility, the telos of beauty is to, it serves the social purpose. Whereas the sublime is the instinct for self-preservation. So the one is the promotion of the social good, the continuation of the species. The other is, the sublime is for the purposes of self-preservation. It's a feeling of terror that, quote, anticipates our reasonings and hurries on as an irresistible force. And this is useful for law and order. Terror as a social utility. And the final bit, and this is the bit which I think is really evident come postmodern literary theory, is the beautiful is the sensation we have over something we feel powerful towards. We sense our power. This is why we perceive it to be beautiful. We sense that we have power over it. We love something that submits to us and flatters that our own sense of our power. So for example, and I'll get to his example, but we think that a little baby kitten is beautiful. Why? Because it's helpless. Or a little baby. Why is a baby beautiful? Oh, we're so cute, right? It's helpless. Burke digs down on that and says, well, it's not that. It's because, remember, it's its effect on us. Why does it have this effect on us? Because it's really all about us. It's not about the thing. It's about how it makes us think about ourselves. It makes us feel powerful in relation to that. Makes us think about our power. Thinks about its weakness and our power. Same thing with why men find women beautiful. What's the difference between male and female beauty? Women are softer, smoother, rounder, says Burke. Men are harder, less, more angular, more muscular, more whatever. Less, less. And smoothness is a feature of beauty. And men find women beautiful because they sense their power. That's why they find them beautiful. Now you can see where this is going to go with feminist literary theory. It's all about power. That'll be not only feminist, it'll be Michel Foucault. And he will talk in Discipline and Punish and in his other works about the importance of power in all things. Power becomes the motivation in Foucault's writing. It's all about power. And furthermore, Nietzsche, same thing. Nietzsche will talk about power. This is all falling out from this tradition, I'll submit to you, but we'll come to that. I'm just flagging up from this presupposition that beauty means feeling powerful in relation to something that we call beauty is going to come the charge that everything is motivated by power. Even the act in very, in third wave feminism and even in second wave feminism, the very attraction that men have towards women is always about power. Always. And marriage is just legitimized rape. I'm giving the extreme position there. But it's just legitimized, it's legal, but really it's all about men feeling powerful over women. And it goes back to this perception of what beauty is. It's about a power-affective relationship, and it's a subjective one. It should not be legitimized, but it is. We'll get the arguments being made even in the early 19th century in Mary Wollstonecraft and rooted right in this perception here. Yes? So this argument would deny that... Yes. He's sublime. He's not beautiful at all. Burke's going to make that case. God's never beautiful. Because, again, he distinguishes beauty from the sublime. And God being almighty, naturally, inspires the idea of a more ultimately greater and more powerful, infinitely more powerful being than we are. And in the face of that sense of power, we feel small. and terrified. This will also change the theological language of the church, I tell you right now, and how the the tram lines of theological discourse fall. The Enlightenment has a huge effect on every discipline. And I think we're still suffering from the consequences of certain errors, but particularly the severance of beauty from goodness and truth, and all three of them being attributes of God in his own nature and his relations in the economic trinity. So those those things whereas the sublime as I say it represents all that we fear for being greater and more powerful than we are and This also is a social function Which is to restrain? evildoers so power it It keeps people from getting out of line. And then he'll talk about what a sublime experience is like, and he'll describe, we'll come to this in a second. But he will say that regimes that want to project terror to keep their populaces safe, Servile will use sublime strategies. So they will project. So uniformity is one of the features of the sublime. So what do the nation states in the 19th century do? They wear uniforms. What is it about uniformity? They all look the same. That's what the word uniform means. It has one form. What is the consequence or the feeling that one has about people in uniform, particularly in walking in unison, marching in order with their feet falling at the same time? It's like a relentless, implacable machine. It's a projection of power. This is why dictatorial regimes all wear uniforms and they walk in goose step or whatever and their feet fall at the same time and when they do that, you know, they're the military thing it seems mechanistic. It suggests an inhumanity. It suggests a power with which you cannot bargain. You better not oppose this. That's the sublime. It's a feature of the sublime uniformity and power both of them. Is Burke right? He's right in some sense. His observations are dead on. And dictatorial regimes do exactly do this. And he will get into all that, and I'll get into all that in a second here. But the question is whether the sublime and the beautiful are categorically distinct things. And I think the consequences of saying that they are, are devastating. It's the end of the humanities. Where the three are held together in a tapestry of woven goodness and they get popped apart. And so again, judgments of ethics and beauty are separated from truth. and no longer seen in conjunction with God furthermore. Because in the Middle Ages, when they're talking about aesthetics that they don't use that term, they are talking about God as the essence of all three of these things. You alone are good. You alone are true. You alone are beautiful. You alone are just, right? That's even biblical language. You know, we are sinners. We are, you're holy, set apart, and we are as dust, we're worms, whatever, however you want to... present it, right? But God is the essence of all those things. No longer. Now God is the essence of power and sublimity, and maybe truth, because truth doesn't seem connected to beauty and goodness anymore. So God becomes, in that sense, it appears like God is, what's the difference between God as good and God as evil? If he's just power without any goodness towards us, then he's just power. And that sounds like the devil. So a lot of the, I think modern atheism and agnosticism originates in this error. God is almighty, but he is not all good. And he has no compassion, because compassion is weakness. The cross likewise gets implicated in all this. This is a case of weakness. I hear a contemporary theologian talk about God's weakness at the cross, and God would never have punished his son. This is cosmic child abuse, this sort of language, right? Whereas God is just suffering, he's just weak. He can't connect the suffering of God with the goodness of God. Because he's got different categories there. There can't be a unity between weakness and power. Because there's no connection between good, better and best. Beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful. They're opposite things. It has to be weakness or it has to be power, but it can't be both. But the cross is both. That's my point. When God is at his weakest, he's at his mightiest. At the cross, when he's naked, outside the city garbage dump, with his people having abandoned, with his enemies jeering and cheering him and spitting on him and flogging him, that's when God redeems humanity from its sin. When he's at his weakest, that's when he works out his strength. That unity there, that's not modern theology diverges the two. He's either powerful or he's weak. If you take either extreme, you've got it wrong. Have I made my case strong enough? Now the question is whether Burke endorses what I've just said. So let's go to that. Comments or questions before I do that? Okay, so let me do that. I'm not sure this is going to be useful. I tried to find it here. So I will start with... So there's four sections to Burke's account of the origin of our philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. Oh by the way, just a biographical note, so he writes this when he's a young man, 1757. So he's just cutting his teeth as an intellectual, as a public intellectual, and he's writing in this field of aesthetics. He wants to show that he has taste. He wants to show that he's a gentleman. So he writes about matters of polite interest. These are things that everyone will take interest in. It's not politics. We know Burke for his politics. 1790 writes his reflections on the revolution in France and Announces himself as the father of modern conservative philosophy, but this is written 1757 33 years before that So he's a young man and writing on this and it really is a great work, and I think it's actually more important than his reflections on the French Revolution, if that's possible, because I think that's hugely important. But this is important because he destroys the very things that he tries to preserve in the political treatise. Unwittingly, unwittingly, he destroys it. Section two, pain and pleasure. Let me see if I can find this online here so I can stick it up on the screen. But I'll read while I search for it. If I can do that, I don't know if I can do that. Can I walk and chew gum at the same time? Maybe it's here. I'll read it. It seems then necessary. I don't think. It used to be online. I cannot find it here. So if you've got your... thing nobody has their books is it in there i should have brought it with me shoot i brought my actual edition oh well hope uh it's it's okay i mean it's the same it's the same text so uh section two of part one on pain and pleasure It seems 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, because he's just talked about novelty, should be capable of exciting pain or pleasure from other causes. Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. So there's no other thing. You have pain, you have pleasure, you can't explain it, but this is a simple idea. Do you understand the philosophical idea of a simple idea? There's nothing more that it is. There's nothing behind that. But it's from John Locke's essay, number 2, section 7.1, if you're interested. This is where he's getting it from. 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 the opinion that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure. That's the Epicurean position, by the way. It's the absence of pleasure. That's what pain is for the Epicurean. We think of Epicureans as pursuing pleasure, and there's some truth in that, but they think that pain is the removal of a 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. So here he's going to posit what will eventually become the sublime and the beautiful because the sublime is painful, the beautiful is pleasurable. I'll read over this, give some of his examples. I'll just read the whole thing. It's really hard. He builds a case. For my part, I'm 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. So it's not a continuum. You go from indifference to pleasure. And so he's disputing, this is the basis for disputing the beautifulness of life. So you don't go from one to the other. They're totally distinct. There's opposites. So I don't go from one to the other. If in such a state of indifference, or ease, or tranquility, or call it what you please, you were to be suddenly entertained with a concert of music, or suppose some object of a fine shape and bright, lively colors to be presented to you, or imagine your smell is gratified with the fragrance of a sweet, of a rose, or if without any previous thirst you were to drink of some pleasant kind of wine or to taste of some sweetmeat without being hungry, in all the several senses of hearing, smelling, and tasting you undoubtedly find a pleasure. Yet if I inquire into the state of your mind previous to these gratifications, you will hardly tell me that they found you in any kind of pain. Or having satisfied these several senses with their several pleasures, will you say that any pain has succeeded, though the pleasure is absolutely over, so he's going after the Epicureans? It's not the absence of this or the absence of that. So pleasure is not the absence of pain and pain is not the absence of pleasure. This is the wrong way of looking at it. Suppose on the other hand, let me skip down, the same may be held of pain and with equal reason. I've skipped down about 10 lines. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted. But I think I can clearly discern, discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend on each other. Nothing's more certain to my own feelings than this. There's nothing which I can distinguish. in my mind with more clearness than the three states, indifference, of pleasure, and of pain. Every one of these I can perceive without any sort of idea of its relation to anything else. So, section three, it's on the removal of pain and pleasure. I'm going to skip over that, and I'm going to skip over section four, delight and pleasure as opposed to each other. Joy and grief. Let me come to section six. Because I talked about self-preservation in conjunction with the sublime. So let's go to that section. So Burke, book one, section six of the passions which belong to self-preservation. I might've put that up earlier. Oh, don't pull that all down. I don't think, no, that's not it at all. Sorry. There it is. I do have it. Most of the ideas which are capable of making a powerful impression on the mind, whether simply of pain or pleasures, or of the modifications of these, may be reduced very nearly to these two heads, self-preserving and self-reliant. Preservation, sublime. And society, beautiful. So one's individual, self-preservation, self. Society, corporate. Individual, society. Individual, society. If you look at modern sociology, it's all about the individual in relation to society. What's the right relation? These are Burkean categories, modern sociology, modern psychology. Modern sociology is all rooted in Burkean distinctions here on individual and society. Self-preservation society. To the ends of one or the other of which all our passions are calculated to answer. 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, they make no such impression by the simple enjoyment. The passions, therefore, which are conversant about the preservation of the individual, turn chiefly on pain and danger, and they are the most powerful of all the passions. So, you There are two affections, two feelings. One is of the sublime and one is of the beautiful. Which is more powerful? The sublime. Every day. Much more powerful. That's because it's rooted in power. A feeling of power. A feeling of our powerlessness, in fact. But let's come to that. Section 7 of the sublime. Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime. That is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion because I am satisfied 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 pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest. or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body could enjoy. Nay, I am in great doubt whether any man could be found who would earn a life of the most perfect satisfaction at the price of ending it in the torments which justice inflicted in a few hours on the late unfortunate regicide in France. Now you can tell this is a late edition in my... Have you got that in your text? The late regicide in France? Well, that's after... French Revolution then 1789 the 1757 version has not got that bit needless to say because the late regicide and pants he's talking about as a past event he wasn't prophesying it was going to come so this is an amended version of the text still but as pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure so death is in general a more affecting idea than pain Because there are very few pains, however exquisite, which are not preferred to death. Nay, what generally makes pain itself, if I may say so, more painful, is that it is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors. Death is coming. When danger... You want to see that portrayed in literature, read, gosh, what's it, Tolstoy, where, gosh, what is it, the death. Ivan Ilyich, where he's terrified of death and the pain as an emissary for it. He's portraying that experience and that the reason he's so horrified by this is because he's in pain and the pain reminds him of his mortality and want to think about his mortality. And mortality is the most horrible thing imaginable. He can't face it. He's never had to think about it. And his society totally rejects it. They don't talk about it at all. They act as if it happens to other people, but never to them. That's what he's talking about here. It's an emissary of death, and death is the most terrifying and thereby sublime of all things as an experience. So it's the king of terrors. When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight. Now this, I think Burke is what Burke is describing here of the sublime, is how an animal experiences death. Have you ever put an animal down in a vet? You ever had to do that? What did your animal do? Well, squirmed. Funny thing. How come? How do you know? You go to the vets a hundred times. How come? I remember taking my cat, put my dear cat down and took him in and he put his head under my arm. He's hiding his head. He's terrified. I'll never forget it. I felt awful. Everyone else felt awful, that's why they sent me to do it. They couldn't face it, it was a terrible thing. They were going to take the beloved pet and put down the pet. And they, you know, I'm rational enough to realize that I was putting it out of its misery. That's why we did it. But still, it hit its head. It had a sense. A funny thing. Because it'd go to the vets all the time. Like, what's going on here? And never this response. But it knew. Creaturally, it had this. What Burke's talking about here is the creaturely response. And that's the point. It's a sensationalist thing. It's what we would have in common with, and he's thinking of mankind as an animal here almost, not that he's using those terms, but. So when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight and are simply terrible. But at certain distances and with certain modifications, they may be and they are delightful. As we every day experience the cause of this, I shall endeavor to investigate hereafter. Now, so he just lays out the sublime, and now he's going to go to the passions that belong to society. So he, in section 6, it's of self-preservation, which is, then he comes to the sublime and it's connected with that. Now he'll go in the passions of society in 8, and then he will move to beauty in 10, and they're linked. Just to, I gave you this sort of the pre-C at the outset, now I'm embellishing this. Section 8, the passions which belong to society. The other head under which I class our passions, that of society, which may be subdivided into two sorts, the society of the sexes, which answers the purposes of propagation, and next that more general society which we have with men and with other animals, and which we may in some sort be said to have even with the inanimate world. The passions belonging to the preservation of the individual turn wholly on pain and danger. If you come to Darwin's preservation, what's Darwin's title? What's the point of the origin of species? How is the species preserved? Yes, but it's through survival. Motive to survival, it's afraid of this, right? So it sees the species as thinking like an individual. It's preserving the selfish gene, to use Richard Dawkins phrases. It's thinking of it in the that way that never it would occur to to Burke that but still that direction it's wholly on pain and danger those which belong to generation that is the propagation of the species have their origin in gratifications and pleasures the pleasure most directly belonging to this purpose is of a lively character rapturous and violent and confessedly the highest pleasure pleasure of sense. If you're blanking at this point, you're thinking, what's going on Mr. Burke? And what's with Mrs. Burke? But rapturous and violent and confessedly the highest kind of sense. Yet the absence of this so great an enjoyment scarce amounts to an uneasiness, and except at particular times I do not think it affects at all. When men describe in what manner they are affected by pain and danger, they do not dwell on the pleasure of health and the comfort of security, and then lament the loss of these satisfaction. The whole turns upon the actual pains and horrors which they endure. But if you listen to the complaints of a forsaken lover, you observe that he insists largely on the pleasures which he enjoyed or hoped to enjoy and on the perfection of the object of his desires. so he'll speak of how beautiful she was or how beautiful he was and how wonderful and I know he did this and this that the hope in this or the complaints thereafter and it is the loss which is always uppermost in his mind this the violent effects produced by love which has sometimes been even wrought up to madness Think of Ophelia, think of Dido. Is no objection to the rule which we seek to establish. When men have suffered their imaginations to be long affected with any ideas, it is so wholly engrossed that as to shut out any, by degrees almost every other, and to break down every partition of the mind which would confine it. Any idea sufficient for the purpose, as is evident from the infinite variety of causes which give rise to madness. But this at most can only prove that the passion of love is capable of producing very extraordinary effects, not that its extraordinary emotions have any connection with positive pain. So love is connected with the beauty, but it has nothing to do with pain, per se. And what's the final cause? The final cause of the difference between the passions belonging to self-preservation and those which regard the society of the sexes. What does he mean by the final cause? What's he mean there? He doesn't mean, say, the last cause. He means the telos. Like the direction to which the purpose, the utility, that's what I mean by the final cause. That's what it's going towards, right? That's an Aristotelian terminology. The final cause of the difference in character between the passions which regard self-preservation and those which are directed to the multiplication of the species will illustrate the foregoing remarks yet further. And what is this? Well, it's the relation of the sublime to health and life. And the connection of sex to reasoning. Let me go on to beauty. Sorry, I've just realized that I've now got a short space of time, so I don't want to miss out. I'll skip over beauty, but it's in section 10 there, and you will compare lust to love there, and I'll skip all over that. And skip over his discussion of Aristotle and tragedy in section 14 and 15. And he even gives an explanation in section 15 for what the Germans will call schadenfreude, so the delight in the pain of others, which is a perversity. Only the Germans could come up with a word for that. The delight in others'distress, schadenfreude. schaden is harm and Freude is joy schadenfreude isn't it a deliciously awful word schadenfreude so when you see somebody slip and fall slip and fall and you laugh Schadenfreude. Schadenfreude ist die beste Freude. Yeah, there you go. And then he'll talk about imitation. Now imitation, and this is a second passion belonging to society. Now it's interesting in light of what I said about mimesis and the arts. He now wants to give this a social dimension, so it preserves society and therefore imitation. So now he's going to explain imitation as a principle of art, but he only connects it with a social function. But I'm going to skip over that, but just for your, you might want to look into that. And then he concludes what he has said there thus far, and I want to move on to part two, where he delineates the sublime more particularly. So this is part two. If it's on here. Oh, I think he's only got, I think it's only part one here. Okay, well forget it then. So I'll just read from this. I hope you have your outline there. So part two, section one, the passion caused by the sublime, the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature. those causes operate most powerfully is astonishment, to be rendered as if a stone. So the word astonishment is to be set as if in stone. You're petrified, another word that suggests stone. Petros is a rock. If you're astonished, you're frozen. If you're petrified, likewise, that cause and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror. In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other. It's sensory overload. Or the lack of any sensation, which is the extremity of it, in fact. So we'll come to that right now, but those are exactly his cases. When there's a sensory overload because there's nothing to perceive. Those are the characteristics of sublime landscape. So it is in this case, when it's so filled with this object, it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence, reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree. That's the effect. That's the feeling. To be frozen, petrified, incapable of moving, breathless. The inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect. These are lesser degrees. When somebody walks in who's a war hero, when the prime minister walks in the room, never mind that. The president, no, never mind that. Or somebody that we revere walks into the room. There's a reverence and there's a sort of quiet. We'll quiet down because that is related to the sublime. It's just a lesser degree. But there's a little bit of fear in there, just a little bit mixed in there. Now, what's one of the... some of the causes. Section 2. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible with regard to sight is sublime too, whether this cause of terror be endued with greatness of dimensions or not. For it is impossible to look on anything as trifling or contemptible that might be dangerous. Anything that's dangerous, you do not. You can't diminish. If you thought it was, oh, it's cute, then there's no fear anymore. Even if it's small like a black widow spider, it's still terrifying. It's a small thing, but you realize the toxicity of the spider. Even more terrifying, this is a little bitty thing. I might not even see it. It might be crawling in my bed behind me. Sorry, I'm going to give you all nightmares, but it's a terrifying thing. Worse all, it's in the dark. You can't see it. right? So that you can imagine it. Okay. Yet there are many animals who, though far from being larger, yet capable of rising ideas of the sublime because they're considered objects of terror. Now he does talks just what I said about serpents, poisonous animals of almost all kinds. So the idea of terror that comes with it. And he said, Ken, as far as the idea, you compare a plane, like the planes in Saskatchewan, flat, compare that to the ocean, which is more terrifying. the ocean. They're both flat, equally flat, but one fills us with terror because you can drown it and the other not so much. Good luck with that. So this is owing to several causes, but it's owing to no more than this, that the ocean is an object of no small terror. Indeed, terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime. So terror. What are other forms of this? Obscurity. And now he's going to come to the great example, and he takes it right out of Milton. So here's a sublime experience, and by the way, later writers will refer to this over and over and over and over. All the romantic writers, later authors, will say that this passage in Milton's Paradise Lost, its description of death is sublime. What is it? To make anything very terrible, obscured, seems in general to be necessary, necessary, that we can't see clearly. And so he comments, those despotic governments who rule through fear. which are founded on the passions of men and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye. So they don't allow him to be seen in public because he's the ruler and to see him is to see a man, to see a man is to be less terrified. So when King Jong-il, Rocket Man, appears and Trump diminishes him, people laugh and he's not so scary anymore. He should never have allowed himself to appear in public because now he just looks like a fat guy. Right? A little fat guy. That's not very scary. No, really. So if he were a really good despot, he wouldn't have allowed himself to appear in public, ever. He'd be hidden. And that would have a greater effect. He's allowed himself to be diminished. Never shows. So he's a figure of terror. You speculate, but you can't see him. So despotic, and he says that they keep their chief as much as maybe from the public eye, and the policy has been the same in many cases of religion. Almost all the heathen temples were dark. dark, because their gods were feared. I'm going to come next semester to look at C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, and I will talk about that. But I remember in a church a few years back, somebody wanted me to turn the lights off and it would be really cool to have a church service in the darkness. That's what the heathen temples do. You may think it's cool, and I don't know why you think it's cool, but we're the god of light. Like, Jesus is the light of the world. there's something about the light that is important here. It has a certain effect. I know he's thinking about the effect of it, right? How it has our sensations. Well, we won't look at other people. We'll just think about God and whatever. I think, no, you won't. You'll create this unintended effect. Anyway, but he says, even the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, by which he means the natives, they keep their idol in a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated to his worship. And mystery cults do the same thing. it's in the deep dark back room for this purpose too the druids performed all their ceremonies in the bosom of the darkest woods and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading oaks no person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening or of setting terrible things if i may use the expression in their strongest light by the force of judicious obscurity than milton His description of death in the second book is admirably studied. It is astonishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and coloring he has finished the portrait of the king of terrors. Line 666, by the way, he doesn't mention this, I do. The other shape, if shape it might be called that shape had none distinguishable, in member, joint, or limb. Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, for each seemed either. Black he stood as night, fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell, and shook a deadly art. What seemed his head, the likeness of a kingly crown had on. In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree. And it is. Look at Tolkien's portrait of the Balrog. Same description. Look at the portrait of the nine riders. Shadow right and they've gone to fall into the realm of shadow. All these are aesthetic and terrifying Horror movies depend. You've heard me talk about this before like in jaws. It's the terror beneath the water Okay, and you see this mass of water, you know underneath there is a terrible beast But you don't see it as soon as the fin comes up. It's scary, but not as scary as it when it goes down Why does it go down? Well, you might know that when it goes down, it's going to come back and bite you. But it's more the point, where is it now? It could be behind me because it can go anywhere under the water. So you don't know. You're terrified. The music just makes it. Of course, it's like your pulse is getting faster and faster. Same in all the horror movies, the bad guys around the corner in the dark. Oh, the lights got killed. Uh-oh. It's not just the lights that are going to get killed. And the music, but it's when you come around the corner, and if it's a bad guy, the bad guy will wear a mask. Like Jason, right? The hockey mask. It doesn't matter. He's got his face covered. As soon as he's got it off, yeah, he's just ugly. But it's not... but it's not terrifying. It's terrifying when you can't see what's behind the mask. The mask is what makes them terrifying. Right? So it's the obscurity. The covering of things that makes the imagination run wild and so he's talking about these things So this is really clever stuff in some ways I think but the point is he's talking about is a totally different experience than the beautiful and he's talking about as the the most The question is what happens to the most beautiful thing and how does God get associated with one and not the other? It's a serious problem. Anyway Section 4, I'll skip over. I've got sections 4 over section 5. Power, do I want it? It's really long. I think I've already given you a summary, but the section on power in section 5 is super long. Let me talk about privation, section 6. All general privations are great, he says, because they are all terrible. Vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence. One, two, three, four. Those four mark all romantic poetics, all gothic poetics, all horror novels, all those four things. Vacuity, darkness, solitude, silence. When you read romantic poetry, it's always done in solitude. Rock and roll music is always guys wearing dark stuff, making loud music, and they're always the individual fighting and screaming against society. Right? Stage will be blight and it lights up and the lights come on and flash and so forth. There's a silence and then there's the screaming and then goes back to the silence and so forth. But it's the silence and the darkness and the privation, it's the absence of something that makes it terrifying. So with what a fire of imagination yet with what severity of judgment has Virgil amassed all these circumstances? And there he talks about it in his underworld. Now I'll skip over that. But so all these are instances of the sublime. So privation, vastness, infinity, succession and uniformity, difficulty, magnificence, and even light. If it's too light and it blinds us, overcomes our senses, that's also the sublime. Or if it's too loud, or if the building is too great, all of these are sublime instances. Anything that makes us think about our mortality and our smallness, all these will give rise to that. gives a long lengthy list. And then in part three, where he comes to beauty, I'm going to skip over beauty. And he'll talk about beauty and what constitutes beauty. And he disputes with various other theories. One of them is proportion. So proportion, not the cause of beauty in vegetables. Might sound funny. What a beautiful vegetable. Never mind. Animals, human species. I'll come to the summary where he distinguishes the two because this is the key because I'm coming to the end of my class here and I want to give you his summary statement which is the contradistinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Is it section 3 or section 4? I think it's chapter 4? No. Where have I... oh man. Have you got it there in your book? Yes. I thought it was... It's part three. It's Roman numerals. Yes, it's at the end of section three. That was sublime. Part 3, Section 27, the sublime and the beautiful compared. So we'll just conclude with this. On closing this general view of beauty, it naturally occurs that we should compare it with the sublime. And in this comparison there appears a remarkable contrast. For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small. Beauty should be smooth and polished, the great rugged and negligent. Beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly. So they'll talk about a human face being, you know, if it's too perfect, it's not beautiful. In modern discussions of this, they do mathematical and they'll show the perfect face and so forth, and it's symmetrical and all that. And they say, if it's too symmetrical, it's not beautiful. It has to have a fault. So you put the beauty mark, right? The whatever. It's got to have something that breaks up that, whatever you think of that. Speaker 2 It's not true though. Speaker 1 It might not be true, but that's the idea that lies behind it. Speaker 2 The best is it. Speaker 1 Okay. But that's the perception of it and that's how it's been used. Marilyn Monroe sticks the, you know, I'm not going to have that taken off. Because is it here? No, it's up here or whatever. Anyway. Sublime object, where is it? The great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates it often makes a strong deviation. Beauty should not be obscure. The great ought to be dark and gloomy. Beauty should be light and delicate. The great ought to be solid and even massive. They are indeed ideas of very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure. Now come to the 19th century. There's a whole philosophical branch that's rated on the calculus of pain and pleasure. Do you know what this is? A so-called calculus of pain is called utilitarian philosophy. And it's rooted in this. And then social benefit is derived on the calculation of pain and the aim of society, according to utilitarian philosophy, is to maximize the pleasure. The greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number of people, that's the philosophical bet. But he's rooting this in a Burkean assumptions here. Anyway, so one's found in pain, the other in pleasure, and however they may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, yet these causes keep up an eternal distinction between them, a distinction never to be forgotten by any whose business it is to affect the passions, that is to make the passions feel. In the infinite variety of natural combinations we must expect to find the qualities of things the most remote imaginable from each other, united in the same object. We must expect also to find combinations of the same kind in the works of art but when we consider the power of an object upon our passions We must know that when anything is intended to affect the mind by the force of some predominant property, the affection produced is like to be the more uniform and perfect if all the other properties or qualities of the object be of the same nature, and tending to the same design as the principle. And then he gives it in a little aphorism, if black and white blend, soften and unite a thousand ways, are there no more black and white? If the qualities of the sublime and the beautiful are sometimes found united, does this prove that they are the same? Does it prove that they are in any way allied? Does it prove even that they are not opposite and contradictory? Black and white may be the same, but they are not the same. soften, may blend, but they are not therefore the same. Nor when they are so softened and blended with each other or with different colors is the power of black as black or of white as white so strong as when each stands uniform and distinguished. Final comment. The black and white distinction these make, the sublime beautiful distinction, are binary opposites. Are they complementary opposites or are they simply different and categorically opposed? It's a rhetorical question. They're not complementary. They're not only categorically extinct, they're opposed to one another. There's no unity. Modern structuralist linguistics talks about a binary system of terminology in which there are two opposites and there's no unifying thing. Because they are in fundamental opposition, male and female being one such thing. Black and white, right? Good and right, I'm just saying. They're not regarded as compatible. They're not, there's no common ground. It's just this. taking apart and it's rooted in this effectivist approach to aesthetics which Burke brings into the conscience of the English-speaking world and it has not rid itself of them yet. And it will not for a long time because as I say I'm the one who the one who's saying this and nobody else is. So even if I'm right, it doesn't matter. It has to take hold. Anyway, but I hope I've given you enough there to see why this is an important one. We'll move to Immanuel Kant next time and we'll see what he makes of Burke. And it's more influential on Western thought than even Burke. But for the English speaking world, this is the most important, Burke for sure. Okay, so I'll see you next class.

Before word searches and libraries existed, the 18th century existed and gave you exactly what's going on there. And every word of that is useful. So it's not just the philosophical inquiry, it's into the origin. of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. So all of those, origin, ideas, sublime, beautiful, those four things are all significant.

And he is using that word that we've already talked about repeatedly, this word sublime, which I said even early on when we looked at Longinus, that although Longinus is the man who first uses the term, perihupsos, on the sublime, the elevated in... Longinus'sense, it's not really that influential in terms of the history of critical thought on art. It's more Longinus picks up his influence come the early modern period, which we talked about last time.

So in the debate between the ancients and the modern, that quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, they cite... Longinus and his reference to the sublime, that's when it starts to become significant and that it increases in its significance as the 18th century progresses to the point where it becomes the category of all categories, the sublime. And what we will notice has just a broad tendency, and I'm reiterating what I said when we talked about Longinus. is that for Longinus the sublime is a degree of the beautiful.

The most beautiful thing is the sublime. So there's beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful, right? In English we talk about that as the comparative and the superlative, you know, more beautiful, most beautiful.

That's the general gist of what the sublime is historically. It's degrees. This is the most beautiful of all things. But come the 18th century, and particularly beginning with Burke, they are not degrees of the same thing. They are absolutely diametrically opposed, effective judgments, effective sensibilities.

So it's Burke that makes them opposed to one another. And that is decisive. for what will follow. Because at that point, and this is my commentary before I even come to it, is that at that point we have a severance of aesthetic sensibility from truth and goodness.

Beauty is no longer connected to truth and goodness in the same way. So although Edmund Burke is the founder of modern political conservatism, I think the beginning of in aesthetics, the decline of the humanities begins with Edmund Burke. This is my charge.

You're not going to hear it anywhere else. I'm right by the way. Minority of one on an opinion that's correct doesn't it overweighs all the false opinions on it now and so I'm throwing the gauntlet down so you can prove me false right but you won't because I'm right when you connect beauty as a superlative, and it's a degree, and you're connecting it to other things. That's one thing, but Burke severs the two entirely, and with that, he opens up a whole different discussion. We're going to see where this goes, but I'm just laying that out, that it's no longer connected to beauty, and in the Middle Ages, beauty, goodness, and truth are attributes of God.

He is the beautiful one. He is the kalos hupoumenos, the beautiful shepherd. You know, when it says in most English translations, Jesus says that he's the good shepherd, it doesn't say good actually, it's kalos, it's beautiful. How beautiful are the feet on the mountains of him who bears the gospel of peace.

It's how beautiful, right? So there's a beauty to God. And it's expressed in the temple architecture, it's the beauty. So beauty is an aesthetic quality, and it matters to God as well.

There's things that are solely there for beauty. Even in the temple, there's no purpose to it, it's just for beauty. And goodness is a part of God's essential characteristics as well. He calls creation good, suggesting that goodness is a part of his character, not only to determine it, but to be important to him. Goodness matters to God.

It's part of his holiness. He creates the world and he does it as a holy God, and the creation bears that mark until it's defiled by sin. So goodness and truth, I don't even need to defend truth in that sense. The Enlightenment upholds truth, but it separates truth from goodness and beauty, and it relegates goodness and beauty to secondary status. Goodness becomes relativized, subjectified, and so that goodness is a matter of opinion, and likewise beauty.

So we hope we have held on to the idea that truth marks the academy until recently, until very recently. But we have thrown under the bus goodness and beauty as objective assessments for a few hundred years. And C.S. Lewis describes it in his book, The Abolition of Man.

And that's the case he's making. It is the, we regard moral judgments and aesthetic judgments as subjective impressions. He doesn't trace it to what I'm telling you today. He doesn't trace it to Edmund Burke, but that's where it begins. I say this with confidence because this is my stuff.

other stuff I know about but this is my area of expertise. It doesn't mean I'm right, I just happen to be right but it's not right. I'm overstating my case on this. I feel in the minority of one on this to some degree but I think I think it is in there it is cannot be disputed. There are signs of this by the way.

One of the signs is that for the first time This word aesthetics as a branch of philosophy appears. It's an 18th century phenomena. It's not even used before the 18th century. It's used by a German writer.

I think it's Baumgartner. I'm not forgotten now. I think it's Baumgartner. He uses the term sublime.

Das ist eine Habnung. For the first time. Or aesthetics rather.

Uses this word. It's from a it's got a Greek root as than aside to perceive It's there in Greek, but the but the discipline of aesthetics does not exist Remember we've done Aristotle now in his poetics does he talk about aesthetics? No does Plato talk about aesthetics?

No, it's not a branch of philosophy at all It just isn't there come the 18th century and ever after Aesthetics is the discipline You won't know that from listening to my colleagues in the philosophy department because analytic philosophy is not bedeviled by the problem of the continental tradition. In the continental tradition the third critique of Kant, the critique of judgment, critique de Urteilskraft, is about aesthetics and he, that is Kant, regarded as his most important critique. In the analytic tradition they disagree, they say it's the first one. Who's right? Kant's with me on this.

The continental tradition is with him and his judgment. Kant's judgment is that the critique of judgment, the third one on aesthetics, is the most important one. Whether you like it or not, that's where the continentalist tradition of philosophy goes.

It follows Kant. The analytic tradition, the Anglo-American tradition, doesn't go with him, and there's goodness in that. But you can't understand Kant without understanding how important aesthetics is in his whole philosophical corpus. It is it.

It's the linchpin. So we'll come to that next time, but I'm just sort of setting the stage for the next two classes. We'll start with Burke, and then we'll move on to Kant, but they're both talking about the same sorts of things.

And when Kant does this, I think there's a serious problem with what he does. But at this point, I'm just stating that aesthetics as a philosophical branch or as an area of expertise and study emerges in this period for the first time. Whenever something emerges as a new branch of learning. It makes us perk up our ears and say what's going on there?

Like why has this like everyone knows what aesthetics is now right? If you're an aesthetician then you do nails and you know beauty right? And if you think about aesthetics you think about beauty right?

Do you think about the sublime when you do aesthetics? Never. If you're an aesthetician, you're there to beautify. But that's not what, when aesthetics begins in the 18th century, it's about delineating the sublime from the beautiful, and the most important of the two is the sublime.

So with all that said, this is just to highlight the importance of this period in our whole discussion and this will influence what comes in the next semester when we do contemporary lit theory. Because all of these, I think what follows on from this discussion, if you make a mistake here in the concepts, then you can't get to the right outcome later on. So if you have a faulty presupposition early on, and yet you presuppose it yourself, you're going to be trying to fix problems that are there because of the conceptualization.

And that's my contention. the problems of post-modern literary theory begin in the 18th century they're just not perceived in the 18th century they're perceived in our day but i will come to that but this is my great content and as I said I'm right on this but now I'm overstating it and it looks a little bit too much but so let me juxtapose the two of them and before I'm going to get right into Burke then and I'll spend the rest of the class looking at Burke We already saw the sublime when we looked at Addison last time. Remember he mentioned the sublime?

And it was also Boileau, again referring to Longinus, and both of them mean something like what Longinus meant. It's the most beautiful thing. That's what they mean by it.

And nothing else. But come Burke, it gets, as I say, juxtaposed. And so these two works are required reading on this course because of their influence.

And though they agree that the sublime is here and the beautiful is there and there's no overlap. So in a Venn diagram, there's no overlap at all. They mean something very different by it all the same. And we'll have to talk about that. But they agree on one thing, sublime's this, beautiful's that, and there is no common ground at all.

And that's Burke's doing. So we'll look at Burke first. Burke's position can be called the effectivist or the effectivist. or the sensationalist position.

As in it's about how it affects the audience, it's subjectivism, it's how it's perceived. And same with sensationalist, it doesn't mean that he's sensationalist in his language, it means that it's how it affects our empiric... Burke is affecting an empiricist in the Lockean sense. It's how our empirical senses perceive things.

That's what he is. So he's talking as a good Lockean when he's thinking here. And remember he's interested in the ideas, which Locke is also interested in.

What's the origin of our ideas? Where do ideas come from? So you have to see Burke in the light of Locke.

I haven't done Locke on the course. I think my colleagues in philosophy probably do Locke, but in Locke the key faculty is the imagination, which is interesting, because that's the faculty we associate with the Romantic poets. but Locke is the one who originates.

The imagination is what holds our reasoning and our understanding together. It's this faculty of the imagination. So all of these terms which become really crucial later on are laid down in the Enlightenment, and the Romantics inherit them and do things with them.

And my question and my dispute with the Romantics originates in the Enlightenment, not the Romantics themselves. I'm already saying I'm disputing them, so I'm displaying my prejudice up front. But we'll come to that in a minute.

But he is going to set out the effectivist position on the sublime. Where does the sublime originate? What's the origin of it?

If you're a Platonist, the origin of our ideas of the beautiful, the sublime, are in a numinal realm. It's a transcendental, right? They talk about the realm of ideas.

Remember the philosophy? We looked at the allegory of the cave, and so there's this realm of the ideas. He talks about justice.

We appeal to a transcendental notion of justice. Everybody in... Intuitively knows what it is. You don't have to explain it. They know it.

A small child, that's not fair. What are they appealing to? C.S.

Lewis talks about this in Mere Christianity. When we say that's not fair and children argue about fairness, what are they appealing to? A category they already both understand.

And that's why they're arguing about it, because they both know what justice is. That's Plato's point. We all have a sense of this realm of ideas or the forms of things. What's the form of justice?

What's the form of the good? What's the form of truth? What's the form of beauty? He talks about that throughout his dialogues.

That's not what Burke's doing here. He's saying what's the origin of our ideas? He doesn't appeal to Plato's categories.

So despite the language, he's not a Platonist. Where do these things originate then? If there's not in a transcendental realm or a metaphysical realm, if it's not that, where do they originate?

Well, I've already explained. He's an affectivist. They originate in our sensations, empirical, in our eyes, so our sense of sight, our sense of hearing, our sense of smell, our sense of taste, our sense of touch, those five. That's where it's those sensations.

So he's a materialist, effectively. there's a material origin to our ideas. So he flips Plato around. Plato says it's no, it's that, and from that, that, and we can be sure of the truth because there's something that preserves it and maintains it, and that's the idea despite appearances.

We can be wrong about the empirical evidence. We can misjudge that, but the truth will hold on to the ideas, or the idea will hold on to the experience that we perceive. Burke does it the other way around. So we're going to, it's going to come through our senses.

So this is the beginning of materialism. Philosophical materialism begins with Locke and with the empiricist philosophers. And they're skeptical as a consequence. So skepticism is rampant in this.

So let me go to Burke here. Comments or questions at this point? I've laid a lot there.

I've said where it's going to go, and I won't get, I will pattern that out next semester, but I wanted to give you a sense of an overview at the outset. Yes, sir? I thought you said that, like, when I said Aristotle was also like a way where you could see in a material way.

Yes, but he sees the metaphysical within. the material. He doesn't reject metaphysics.

He doesn't think it exists in that. He thinks that the excellence of the thing is in the thing, whereas Plato posited it as a different realm. Aristotle's question is what's the essence of a thing, so that it's the nature of that thing, but it's within the thing.

It's not totally separate from it. So he doesn't reject the realm of ideas. He does reject the realm of ideas, but he doesn't reject, in a sense, what Plato means by ideas. He says that it is there and it's just not as Plato presents it.

The one's true and the other's false. He unites the two. There's truth even in the appearances. And for Plato, those things don't work. One's true and the other is fallacious, the allegory of the cave, right?

And he sets them in opposition. Aristotle's not having that. Our senses do, but give some sense of truth.

I think it's unfair to see either Plato, they're in disagreement with Plato and Aristotle, because Aristotle sees that there is truth, goodness, beauty, justice in the individual things. They don't see that. They begin with the sensations.

Aristotle would never begin with the sensations. He assumes the truth of Plato's position. He thinks the way he's presented it, that's false.

Get it? Everything's through your senses for these guys. And not for Aristotle.

And it's hard because we tend, because we are in the English-speaking world, we operate under the auspices of John Locke and the Romantics. That's just the way we look at things. We're empiricists. And that means materialists, actually. Materialism is rooted in the whole system.

That's not Aristotle and it's not Plato. They both reject that. Aristotle is no more a...

he's not an idealist, but he's certainly not a materialist. He's a different thing. Okay, so these guys are not Aristotelians. No way.

Never. But they're going to place the emphasis on their senses or their perception. And again, aestheticia is the passive sense of perceiving something, being affected by it.

And really it is a passive sense. So in Lockean imagination, it pulls together what is otherwise a thoughtless process. So I touch something and it's hot.

It's the imagination that unites that into a comprehensible thing. Otherwise, it's just pure sensation. There's no thought going on at all.

Anyway, so Burke, does that explain a little bit? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So the effectiveness position is there, and he emphasizes the power of experience. So in the intro on taste, which is in the second edition, I think it's at the outset here.

Yes, it is in page 11. But it's not there on that page because that's just a summary. If I can find this. In the intro on taste, he talks about, he makes two claims about the importance of taste.

Now this is, so taste also takes on real significance in Burke's aesthetics. You can have good taste, you can have bad taste, you can also have no taste in English. We use those three phrases. Somebody who has good taste, we know what that means. Bad taste, we know.

No taste at all, what is that? It's worse than bad. They seem not to have the critical faculty to be able to... Perceive the matter at all, right? Somebody says no taste, like the ugly Christmas sweater.

It's not in bad taste, it has no taste. It's not the superlative, it just seems to be indifferent to taste matters. Right? We say that in English. Burke makes two claims for taste.

First of all, he talks about how the senses operate regularly and they make taste meaningful and also you can make general statements. As general as reasoning. And I quote, so, as the conformation of their organs are nearly or altogether the same in all men, so the manner of perceiving external objects is in all men the same or with little difference. Our sensation of that's sweet, that's bitter, so sugar is sweet, that's bitter, is basically universal. There's a general agreement on almost all things.

If you don't have that, it's because you have some sort of a defect. You might be colorblind. That's green, that's red, but if you're green, red, colorblind, then you don't distinguish them.

That's the exception that proves the rule. Everyone says, Joseph, that's a red and black. shirt, right? It's not, no, and everybody agrees, that's his point.

We, this is the first thing. So on taste, and when he's talking about taste, he's not talking about whether the shirt's in good taste. He's saying that's the subject matter. I'm not, by the way. Yeah, you're not tasty.

But the perception, the effect is called the same thing by everyone, and without... any disagreement for the most part. That's the first thing.

And the second thing is that the origin of the passion treats taste as a field of determinate knowledge. in which, and now I quote, the remembrance of the original natural causes of pleasure can be distinguished from the acquired tastes that fashion has determined, or habit has determined. So there's the original impression, which we can notice, and then we can talk about the cultural experience of it and often that's presented in language, in terminology.

So if you look in a dictionary and you're defining a term, the first term tends to be the most literal meaning, often the Latin root of a word, it uses a sense, and then gradually over time a culture will use that word in different ways by cultural determination. Augustine talked about this. Right, so we might call some practices good. We know what goodness means, but a culture can determine, can change the assessment of what constitutes a good practice just by cultural agreement. And he says it's in conjunction with the doctrine of demons if it deviates from the natural law.

Furthermore, but that's, and Burke's not. making the doctrine of demons argument, but he's saying that the taste is a field of determinate knowledge first of all, but then we can deviate from it. So we're not likely to be confused on the sensation, like of sweetness in sugar or bitterness in I don't know. What's bitter? Pepper.

Arugula. Yeah, it's bitter. You're right.

Everyone tastes the bitterness there. And we're not likely to be confused on that, but we may be confused in our reasoning about it. And Burke is going to now trace the beautiful and the sublime to utilitarian impulses. So this is the first point about Burke, is that he's an effectivist and a sensationalist. It's all going back to the senses.

The second point is that he's a... utilitarian. These serve a function. Why do we perceive the beautiful to be beautiful?

It serves a purpose. How about the sublime? Why do we perceive the sublime to be the sublime?

It serves a purpose. So that is also a feature of his. I'm giving you general descriptions, then we'll get down into the substance of the argument.

But that is the second thing that we have to note about that. So it's utilitarian. I'll give you the outline and then we'll go to his illustration.

So what is the beautiful? What's the use of beauty? The beauty is a manifestation of the instinct to be sociable. And the purpose it serves is the propagation or continuation of the human species. What's the purpose of beauty?

It attracts us to the opposite sex and that makes us procreate, continue the... so it serves a biological purpose. He's using the term before biology exists as a discipline. That's why we call things beautiful. That's the function, the utility, the telos of beauty is to, it serves the social purpose.

Whereas the sublime is the instinct for self-preservation. So the one is the promotion of the social good, the continuation of the species. The other is, the sublime is for the purposes of self-preservation.

It's a feeling of terror that, quote, anticipates our reasonings and hurries on as an irresistible force. And this is useful for law and order. Terror as a social utility.

And the final bit, and this is the bit which I think is really evident come postmodern literary theory, is the beautiful is the sensation we have over something we feel powerful towards. We sense our power. This is why we perceive it to be beautiful. We sense that we have power over it.

We love something that submits to us and flatters that our own sense of our power. So for example, and I'll get to his example, but we think that a little baby kitten is beautiful. Why?

Because it's helpless. Or a little baby. Why is a baby beautiful?

Oh, we're so cute, right? It's helpless. Burke digs down on that and says, well, it's not that.

It's because, remember, it's its effect on us. Why does it have this effect on us? Because it's really all about us.

It's not about the thing. It's about how it makes us think about ourselves. It makes us feel powerful in relation to that.

Makes us think about our power. Thinks about its weakness and our power. Same thing with why men find women beautiful. What's the difference between male and female beauty?

Women are softer, smoother, rounder, says Burke. Men are harder, less, more angular, more muscular, more whatever. Less, less.

And smoothness is a feature of beauty. And men find women beautiful because they sense their power. That's why they find them beautiful. Now you can see where this is going to go with feminist literary theory.

It's all about power. That'll be not only feminist, it'll be Michel Foucault. And he will talk in Discipline and Punish and in his other works about the importance of power in all things. Power becomes the motivation in Foucault's writing.

It's all about power. And furthermore, Nietzsche, same thing. Nietzsche will talk about power.

This is all falling out from this tradition, I'll submit to you, but we'll come to that. I'm just flagging up from this presupposition that beauty means feeling powerful in relation to something that we call beauty is going to come the charge that everything is motivated by power. Even the act in very, in third wave feminism and even in second wave feminism, the very attraction that men have towards women is always about power. Always.

And marriage is just legitimized rape. I'm giving the extreme position there. But it's just legitimized, it's legal, but really it's all about men feeling powerful over women. And it goes back to this perception of what beauty is. It's about a power-affective relationship, and it's a subjective one.

It should not be legitimized, but it is. We'll get the arguments being made even in the early 19th century in Mary Wollstonecraft and rooted right in this perception here. Yes?

So this argument would deny that... Yes. He's sublime.

He's not beautiful at all. Burke's going to make that case. God's never beautiful. Because, again, he distinguishes beauty from the sublime. And God being almighty, naturally, inspires the idea of a more ultimately greater and more powerful, infinitely more powerful being than we are.

And in the face of that sense of power, we feel small. and terrified. This will also change the theological language of the church, I tell you right now, and how the the tram lines of theological discourse fall.

The Enlightenment has a huge effect on every discipline. And I think we're still suffering from the consequences of certain errors, but particularly the severance of beauty from goodness and truth, and all three of them being attributes of God in his own nature and his relations in the economic trinity. So those those things whereas the sublime as I say it represents all that we fear for being greater and more powerful than we are and This also is a social function Which is to restrain? evildoers so power it It keeps people from getting out of line. And then he'll talk about what a sublime experience is like, and he'll describe, we'll come to this in a second.

But he will say that regimes that want to project terror to keep their populaces safe, Servile will use sublime strategies. So they will project. So uniformity is one of the features of the sublime. So what do the nation states in the 19th century do?

They wear uniforms. What is it about uniformity? They all look the same.

That's what the word uniform means. It has one form. What is the consequence or the feeling that one has about people in uniform, particularly in walking in unison, marching in order with their feet falling at the same time?

It's like a relentless, implacable machine. It's a projection of power. This is why dictatorial regimes all wear uniforms and they walk in goose step or whatever and their feet fall at the same time and when they do that, you know, they're the military thing it seems mechanistic. It suggests an inhumanity.

It suggests a power with which you cannot bargain. You better not oppose this. That's the sublime.

It's a feature of the sublime uniformity and power both of them. Is Burke right? He's right in some sense. His observations are dead on. And dictatorial regimes do exactly do this.

And he will get into all that, and I'll get into all that in a second here. But the question is whether the sublime and the beautiful are categorically distinct things. And I think the consequences of saying that they are, are devastating. It's the end of the humanities. Where the three are held together in a tapestry of woven goodness and they get popped apart.

And so again, judgments of ethics and beauty are separated from truth. and no longer seen in conjunction with God furthermore. Because in the Middle Ages, when they're talking about aesthetics that they don't use that term, they are talking about God as the essence of all three of these things. You alone are good. You alone are true.

You alone are beautiful. You alone are just, right? That's even biblical language. You know, we are sinners. We are, you're holy, set apart, and we are as dust, we're worms, whatever, however you want to...

present it, right? But God is the essence of all those things. No longer. Now God is the essence of power and sublimity, and maybe truth, because truth doesn't seem connected to beauty and goodness anymore.

So God becomes, in that sense, it appears like God is, what's the difference between God as good and God as evil? If he's just power without any goodness towards us, then he's just power. And that sounds like the devil. So a lot of the, I think modern atheism and agnosticism originates in this error.

God is almighty, but he is not all good. And he has no compassion, because compassion is weakness. The cross likewise gets implicated in all this.

This is a case of weakness. I hear a contemporary theologian talk about God's weakness at the cross, and God would never have punished his son. This is cosmic child abuse, this sort of language, right? Whereas God is just suffering, he's just weak. He can't connect the suffering of God with the goodness of God.

Because he's got different categories there. There can't be a unity between weakness and power. Because there's no connection between good, better and best. Beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful.

They're opposite things. It has to be weakness or it has to be power, but it can't be both. But the cross is both.

That's my point. When God is at his weakest, he's at his mightiest. At the cross, when he's naked, outside the city garbage dump, with his people having abandoned, with his enemies jeering and cheering him and spitting on him and flogging him, that's when God redeems humanity from its sin.

When he's at his weakest, that's when he works out his strength. That unity there, that's not modern theology diverges the two. He's either powerful or he's weak. If you take either extreme, you've got it wrong. Have I made my case strong enough?

Now the question is whether Burke endorses what I've just said. So let's go to that. Comments or questions before I do that? Okay, so let me do that. I'm not sure this is going to be useful.

I tried to find it here. So I will start with... So there's four sections to Burke's account of the origin of our philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. Oh by the way, just a biographical note, so he writes this when he's a young man, 1757. So he's just cutting his teeth as an intellectual, as a public intellectual, and he's writing in this field of aesthetics. He wants to show that he has taste.

He wants to show that he's a gentleman. So he writes about matters of polite interest. These are things that everyone will take interest in.

It's not politics. We know Burke for his politics. 1790 writes his reflections on the revolution in France and Announces himself as the father of modern conservative philosophy, but this is written 1757 33 years before that So he's a young man and writing on this and it really is a great work, and I think it's actually more important than his reflections on the French Revolution, if that's possible, because I think that's hugely important. But this is important because he destroys the very things that he tries to preserve in the political treatise. Unwittingly, unwittingly, he destroys it.

Section two, pain and pleasure. Let me see if I can find this online here so I can stick it up on the screen. But I'll read while I search for it.

If I can do that, I don't know if I can do that. Can I walk and chew gum at the same time? Maybe it's here.

I'll read it. It seems then necessary. I don't think.

It used to be online. I cannot find it here. So if you've got your... thing nobody has their books is it in there i should have brought it with me shoot i brought my actual edition oh well hope uh it's it's okay i mean it's the same it's the same text so uh section two of part one on pain and pleasure It seems 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, because he's just talked about novelty, should be capable of exciting pain or pleasure from other causes.

Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition. So there's no other thing. You have pain, you have pleasure, you can't explain it, but this is a simple idea.

Do you understand the philosophical idea of a simple idea? There's nothing more that it is. There's nothing behind that. But it's from John Locke's essay, number 2, section 7.1, if you're interested.

This is where he's getting it from. 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 the opinion that pain arises necessarily from the removal of some pleasure. That's the Epicurean position, by the way. It's the absence of pleasure.

That's what pain is for the Epicurean. We think of Epicureans as pursuing pleasure, and there's some truth in that, but they think that pain is the removal of a 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. So here he's going to posit what will eventually become the sublime and the beautiful because the sublime is painful, the beautiful is pleasurable. I'll read over this, give some of his examples. I'll just read the whole thing.

It's really hard. He builds a case. For my part, I'm 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. So it's not a continuum.

You go from indifference to pleasure. And so he's disputing, this is the basis for disputing the beautifulness of life. So you don't go from one to the other. They're totally distinct. There's opposites.

So I don't go from one to the other. If in such a state of indifference, or ease, or tranquility, or call it what you please, you were to be suddenly entertained with a concert of music, or suppose some object of a fine shape and bright, lively colors to be presented to you, or imagine your smell is gratified with the fragrance of a sweet, of a rose, or if without any previous thirst you were to drink of some pleasant kind of wine or to taste of some sweetmeat without being hungry, in all the several senses of hearing, smelling, and tasting you undoubtedly find a pleasure. Yet if I inquire into the state of your mind previous to these gratifications, you will hardly tell me that they found you in any kind of pain.

Or having satisfied these several senses with their several pleasures, will you say that any pain has succeeded, though the pleasure is absolutely over, so he's going after the Epicureans? It's not the absence of this or the absence of that. So pleasure is not the absence of pain and pain is not the absence of pleasure. This is the wrong way of looking at it. Suppose on the other hand, let me skip down, the same may be held of pain and with equal reason.

I've skipped down about 10 lines. I can never persuade myself that pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they are contrasted. But I think I can clearly discern, discern clearly that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend on each other.

Nothing's more certain to my own feelings than this. There's nothing which I can distinguish. in my mind with more clearness than the three states, indifference, of pleasure, and of pain.

Every one of these I can perceive without any sort of idea of its relation to anything else. So, section three, it's on the removal of pain and pleasure. I'm going to skip over that, and I'm going to skip over section four, delight and pleasure as opposed to each other.

Joy and grief. Let me come to section six. Because I talked about self-preservation in conjunction with the sublime. So let's go to that section. So Burke, book one, section six of the passions which belong to self-preservation.

I might've put that up earlier. Oh, don't pull that all down. I don't think, no, that's not it at all. Sorry.

There it is. I do have it. Most of the ideas which are capable of making a powerful impression on the mind, whether simply of pain or pleasures, or of the modifications of these, may be reduced very nearly to these two heads, self-preserving and self-reliant.

Preservation, sublime. And society, beautiful. So one's individual, self-preservation, self. Society, corporate. Individual, society.

Individual, society. If you look at modern sociology, it's all about the individual in relation to society. What's the right relation? These are Burkean categories, modern sociology, modern psychology.

Modern sociology is all rooted in Burkean distinctions here on individual and society. Self-preservation society. To the ends of one or the other of which all our passions are calculated to answer.

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, they make no such impression by the simple enjoyment.

The passions, therefore, which are conversant about the preservation of the individual, turn chiefly on pain and danger, and they are the most powerful of all the passions. So, you There are two affections, two feelings. One is of the sublime and one is of the beautiful.

Which is more powerful? The sublime. Every day. Much more powerful.

That's because it's rooted in power. A feeling of power. A feeling of our powerlessness, in fact.

But let's come to that. Section 7 of the sublime. Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime. That is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

I say the strongest emotion because I am satisfied 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 pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest. or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body could enjoy.

Nay, I am in great doubt whether any man could be found who would earn a life of the most perfect satisfaction at the price of ending it in the torments which justice inflicted in a few hours on the late unfortunate regicide in France. Now you can tell this is a late edition in my... Have you got that in your text?

The late regicide in France? Well, that's after... French Revolution then 1789 the 1757 version has not got that bit needless to say because the late regicide and pants he's talking about as a past event he wasn't prophesying it was going to come so this is an amended version of the text still but as pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure so death is in general a more affecting idea than pain Because there are very few pains, however exquisite, which are not preferred to death.

Nay, what generally makes pain itself, if I may say so, more painful, is that it is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors. Death is coming. When danger...

You want to see that portrayed in literature, read, gosh, what's it, Tolstoy, where, gosh, what is it, the death. Ivan Ilyich, where he's terrified of death and the pain as an emissary for it. He's portraying that experience and that the reason he's so horrified by this is because he's in pain and the pain reminds him of his mortality and want to think about his mortality. And mortality is the most horrible thing imaginable. He can't face it.

He's never had to think about it. And his society totally rejects it. They don't talk about it at all.

They act as if it happens to other people, but never to them. That's what he's talking about here. It's an emissary of death, and death is the most terrifying and thereby sublime of all things as an experience.

So it's the king of terrors. When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight. Now this, I think Burke is what Burke is describing here of the sublime, is how an animal experiences death. Have you ever put an animal down in a vet? You ever had to do that?

What did your animal do? Well, squirmed. Funny thing. How come?

How do you know? You go to the vets a hundred times. How come?

I remember taking my cat, put my dear cat down and took him in and he put his head under my arm. He's hiding his head. He's terrified.

I'll never forget it. I felt awful. Everyone else felt awful, that's why they sent me to do it.

They couldn't face it, it was a terrible thing. They were going to take the beloved pet and put down the pet. And they, you know, I'm rational enough to realize that I was putting it out of its misery. That's why we did it.

But still, it hit its head. It had a sense. A funny thing. Because it'd go to the vets all the time.

Like, what's going on here? And never this response. But it knew.

Creaturally, it had this. What Burke's talking about here is the creaturely response. And that's the point. It's a sensationalist thing.

It's what we would have in common with, and he's thinking of mankind as an animal here almost, not that he's using those terms, but. So when danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight and are simply terrible. But at certain distances and with certain modifications, they may be and they are delightful. As we every day experience the cause of this, I shall endeavor to investigate hereafter.

Now, so he just lays out the sublime, and now he's going to go to the passions that belong to society. So he, in section 6, it's of self-preservation, which is, then he comes to the sublime and it's connected with that. Now he'll go in the passions of society in 8, and then he will move to beauty in 10, and they're linked.

Just to, I gave you this sort of the pre-C at the outset, now I'm embellishing this. Section 8, the passions which belong to society. The other head under which I class our passions, that of society, which may be subdivided into two sorts, the society of the sexes, which answers the purposes of propagation, and next that more general society which we have with men and with other animals, and which we may in some sort be said to have even with the inanimate world.

The passions belonging to the preservation of the individual turn wholly on pain and danger. If you come to Darwin's preservation, what's Darwin's title? What's the point of the origin of species?

How is the species preserved? Yes, but it's through survival. Motive to survival, it's afraid of this, right?

So it sees the species as thinking like an individual. It's preserving the selfish gene, to use Richard Dawkins phrases. It's thinking of it in the that way that never it would occur to to Burke that but still that direction it's wholly on pain and danger those which belong to generation that is the propagation of the species have their origin in gratifications and pleasures the pleasure most directly belonging to this purpose is of a lively character rapturous and violent and confessedly the highest pleasure pleasure of sense.

If you're blanking at this point, you're thinking, what's going on Mr. Burke? And what's with Mrs. Burke? But rapturous and violent and confessedly the highest kind of sense.

Yet the absence of this so great an enjoyment scarce amounts to an uneasiness, and except at particular times I do not think it affects at all. When men describe in what manner they are affected by pain and danger, they do not dwell on the pleasure of health and the comfort of security, and then lament the loss of these satisfaction. The whole turns upon the actual pains and horrors which they endure. But if you listen to the complaints of a forsaken lover, you observe that he insists largely on the pleasures which he enjoyed or hoped to enjoy and on the perfection of the object of his desires. so he'll speak of how beautiful she was or how beautiful he was and how wonderful and I know he did this and this that the hope in this or the complaints thereafter and it is the loss which is always uppermost in his mind this the violent effects produced by love which has sometimes been even wrought up to madness Think of Ophelia, think of Dido.

Is no objection to the rule which we seek to establish. When men have suffered their imaginations to be long affected with any ideas, it is so wholly engrossed that as to shut out any, by degrees almost every other, and to break down every partition of the mind which would confine it. Any idea sufficient for the purpose, as is evident from the infinite variety of causes which give rise to madness. But this at most can only prove that the passion of love is capable of producing very extraordinary effects, not that its extraordinary emotions have any connection with positive pain. So love is connected with the beauty, but it has nothing to do with pain, per se.

And what's the final cause? The final cause of the difference between the passions belonging to self-preservation and those which regard the society of the sexes. What does he mean by the final cause? What's he mean there? He doesn't mean, say, the last cause.

He means the telos. Like the direction to which the purpose, the utility, that's what I mean by the final cause. That's what it's going towards, right?

That's an Aristotelian terminology. The final cause of the difference in character between the passions which regard self-preservation and those which are directed to the multiplication of the species will illustrate the foregoing remarks yet further. And what is this?

Well, it's the relation of the sublime to health and life. And the connection of sex to reasoning. Let me go on to beauty. Sorry, I've just realized that I've now got a short space of time, so I don't want to miss out.

I'll skip over beauty, but it's in section 10 there, and you will compare lust to love there, and I'll skip all over that. And skip over his discussion of Aristotle and tragedy in section 14 and 15. And he even gives an explanation in section 15 for what the Germans will call schadenfreude, so the delight in the pain of others, which is a perversity. Only the Germans could come up with a word for that. The delight in others'distress, schadenfreude. schaden is harm and Freude is joy schadenfreude isn't it a deliciously awful word schadenfreude so when you see somebody slip and fall slip and fall and you laugh Schadenfreude.

Schadenfreude ist die beste Freude. Yeah, there you go. And then he'll talk about imitation. Now imitation, and this is a second passion belonging to society.

Now it's interesting in light of what I said about mimesis and the arts. He now wants to give this a social dimension, so it preserves society and therefore imitation. So now he's going to explain imitation as a principle of art, but he only connects it with a social function.

But I'm going to skip over that, but just for your, you might want to look into that. And then he concludes what he has said there thus far, and I want to move on to part two, where he delineates the sublime more particularly. So this is part two.

If it's on here. Oh, I think he's only got, I think it's only part one here. Okay, well forget it then.

So I'll just read from this. I hope you have your outline there. So part two, section one, the passion caused by the sublime, the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature. those causes operate most powerfully is astonishment, to be rendered as if a stone. So the word astonishment is to be set as if in stone.

You're petrified, another word that suggests stone. Petros is a rock. If you're astonished, you're frozen.

If you're petrified, likewise, that cause and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror. In this case, the mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other. It's sensory overload. Or the lack of any sensation, which is the extremity of it, in fact. So we'll come to that right now, but those are exactly his cases.

When there's a sensory overload because there's nothing to perceive. Those are the characteristics of sublime landscape. So it is in this case, when it's so filled with this object, it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence, reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings and hurries us on by an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the sublime in its highest degree.

That's the effect. That's the feeling. To be frozen, petrified, incapable of moving, breathless. The inferior effects are admiration, reverence, and respect. These are lesser degrees.

When somebody walks in who's a war hero, when the prime minister walks in the room, never mind that. The president, no, never mind that. Or somebody that we revere walks into the room.

There's a reverence and there's a sort of quiet. We'll quiet down because that is related to the sublime. It's just a lesser degree. But there's a little bit of fear in there, just a little bit mixed in there.

Now, what's one of the... some of the causes. Section 2. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain.

Whatever therefore is terrible with regard to sight is sublime too, whether this cause of terror be endued with greatness of dimensions or not. For it is impossible to look on anything as trifling or contemptible that might be dangerous. Anything that's dangerous, you do not.

You can't diminish. If you thought it was, oh, it's cute, then there's no fear anymore. Even if it's small like a black widow spider, it's still terrifying.

It's a small thing, but you realize the toxicity of the spider. Even more terrifying, this is a little bitty thing. I might not even see it. It might be crawling in my bed behind me.

Sorry, I'm going to give you all nightmares, but it's a terrifying thing. Worse all, it's in the dark. You can't see it. right? So that you can imagine it.

Okay. Yet there are many animals who, though far from being larger, yet capable of rising ideas of the sublime because they're considered objects of terror. Now he does talks just what I said about serpents, poisonous animals of almost all kinds.

So the idea of terror that comes with it. And he said, Ken, as far as the idea, you compare a plane, like the planes in Saskatchewan, flat, compare that to the ocean, which is more terrifying. the ocean.

They're both flat, equally flat, but one fills us with terror because you can drown it and the other not so much. Good luck with that. So this is owing to several causes, but it's owing to no more than this, that the ocean is an object of no small terror.

Indeed, terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime. So terror. What are other forms of this?

Obscurity. And now he's going to come to the great example, and he takes it right out of Milton. So here's a sublime experience, and by the way, later writers will refer to this over and over and over and over. All the romantic writers, later authors, will say that this passage in Milton's Paradise Lost, its description of death is sublime.

What is it? To make anything very terrible, obscured, seems in general to be necessary, necessary, that we can't see clearly. And so he comments, those despotic governments who rule through fear.

which are founded on the passions of men and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye. So they don't allow him to be seen in public because he's the ruler and to see him is to see a man, to see a man is to be less terrified. So when King Jong-il, Rocket Man, appears and Trump diminishes him, people laugh and he's not so scary anymore. He should never have allowed himself to appear in public because now he just looks like a fat guy.

Right? A little fat guy. That's not very scary.

No, really. So if he were a really good despot, he wouldn't have allowed himself to appear in public, ever. He'd be hidden.

And that would have a greater effect. He's allowed himself to be diminished. Never shows.

So he's a figure of terror. You speculate, but you can't see him. So despotic, and he says that they keep their chief as much as maybe from the public eye, and the policy has been the same in many cases of religion. Almost all the heathen temples were dark. dark, because their gods were feared.

I'm going to come next semester to look at C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, and I will talk about that. But I remember in a church a few years back, somebody wanted me to turn the lights off and it would be really cool to have a church service in the darkness. That's what the heathen temples do. You may think it's cool, and I don't know why you think it's cool, but we're the god of light.

Like, Jesus is the light of the world. there's something about the light that is important here. It has a certain effect.

I know he's thinking about the effect of it, right? How it has our sensations. Well, we won't look at other people.

We'll just think about God and whatever. I think, no, you won't. You'll create this unintended effect. Anyway, but he says, even the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, by which he means the natives, they keep their idol in a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated to his worship.

And mystery cults do the same thing. it's in the deep dark back room for this purpose too the druids performed all their ceremonies in the bosom of the darkest woods and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading oaks no person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening or of setting terrible things if i may use the expression in their strongest light by the force of judicious obscurity than milton His description of death in the second book is admirably studied. It is astonishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and coloring he has finished the portrait of the king of terrors.

Line 666, by the way, he doesn't mention this, I do. The other shape, if shape it might be called that shape had none distinguishable, in member, joint, or limb. Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, for each seemed either.

Black he stood as night, fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell, and shook a deadly art. What seemed his head, the likeness of a kingly crown had on. In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree. And it is.

Look at Tolkien's portrait of the Balrog. Same description. Look at the portrait of the nine riders.

Shadow right and they've gone to fall into the realm of shadow. All these are aesthetic and terrifying Horror movies depend. You've heard me talk about this before like in jaws. It's the terror beneath the water Okay, and you see this mass of water, you know underneath there is a terrible beast But you don't see it as soon as the fin comes up. It's scary, but not as scary as it when it goes down Why does it go down?

Well, you might know that when it goes down, it's going to come back and bite you. But it's more the point, where is it now? It could be behind me because it can go anywhere under the water. So you don't know. You're terrified.

The music just makes it. Of course, it's like your pulse is getting faster and faster. Same in all the horror movies, the bad guys around the corner in the dark. Oh, the lights got killed.

Uh-oh. It's not just the lights that are going to get killed. And the music, but it's when you come around the corner, and if it's a bad guy, the bad guy will wear a mask. Like Jason, right?

The hockey mask. It doesn't matter. He's got his face covered. As soon as he's got it off, yeah, he's just ugly. But it's not...

but it's not terrifying. It's terrifying when you can't see what's behind the mask. The mask is what makes them terrifying.

Right? So it's the obscurity. The covering of things that makes the imagination run wild and so he's talking about these things So this is really clever stuff in some ways I think but the point is he's talking about is a totally different experience than the beautiful and he's talking about as the the most The question is what happens to the most beautiful thing and how does God get associated with one and not the other? It's a serious problem. Anyway Section 4, I'll skip over.

I've got sections 4 over section 5. Power, do I want it? It's really long. I think I've already given you a summary, but the section on power in section 5 is super long. Let me talk about privation, section 6. All general privations are great, he says, because they are all terrible. Vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence.

One, two, three, four. Those four mark all romantic poetics, all gothic poetics, all horror novels, all those four things. Vacuity, darkness, solitude, silence.

When you read romantic poetry, it's always done in solitude. Rock and roll music is always guys wearing dark stuff, making loud music, and they're always the individual fighting and screaming against society. Right?

Stage will be blight and it lights up and the lights come on and flash and so forth. There's a silence and then there's the screaming and then goes back to the silence and so forth. But it's the silence and the darkness and the privation, it's the absence of something that makes it terrifying.

So with what a fire of imagination yet with what severity of judgment has Virgil amassed all these circumstances? And there he talks about it in his underworld. Now I'll skip over that. But so all these are instances of the sublime. So privation, vastness, infinity, succession and uniformity, difficulty, magnificence, and even light.

If it's too light and it blinds us, overcomes our senses, that's also the sublime. Or if it's too loud, or if the building is too great, all of these are sublime instances. Anything that makes us think about our mortality and our smallness, all these will give rise to that. gives a long lengthy list. And then in part three, where he comes to beauty, I'm going to skip over beauty.

And he'll talk about beauty and what constitutes beauty. And he disputes with various other theories. One of them is proportion.

So proportion, not the cause of beauty in vegetables. Might sound funny. What a beautiful vegetable.

Never mind. Animals, human species. I'll come to the summary where he distinguishes the two because this is the key because I'm coming to the end of my class here and I want to give you his summary statement which is the contradistinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Is it section 3 or section 4? I think it's chapter 4?

No. Where have I... oh man.

Have you got it there in your book? Yes. I thought it was...

It's part three. It's Roman numerals. Yes, it's at the end of section three. That was sublime. Part 3, Section 27, the sublime and the beautiful compared.

So we'll just conclude with this. On closing this general view of beauty, it naturally occurs that we should compare it with the sublime. And in this comparison there appears a remarkable contrast.

For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small. Beauty should be smooth and polished, the great rugged and negligent. Beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly. So they'll talk about a human face being, you know, if it's too perfect, it's not beautiful. In modern discussions of this, they do mathematical and they'll show the perfect face and so forth, and it's symmetrical and all that.

And they say, if it's too symmetrical, it's not beautiful. It has to have a fault. So you put the beauty mark, right? The whatever. It's got to have something that breaks up that, whatever you think of that.

Speaker 2 It's not true though. Speaker 1 It might not be true, but that's the idea that lies behind it. Speaker 2 The best is it. Speaker 1 Okay. But that's the perception of it and that's how it's been used.

Marilyn Monroe sticks the, you know, I'm not going to have that taken off. Because is it here? No, it's up here or whatever. Anyway. Sublime object, where is it?

The great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates it often makes a strong deviation. Beauty should not be obscure. The great ought to be dark and gloomy. Beauty should be light and delicate.

The great ought to be solid and even massive. They are indeed ideas of very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure. Now come to the 19th century. There's a whole philosophical branch that's rated on the calculus of pain and pleasure. Do you know what this is?

A so-called calculus of pain is called utilitarian philosophy. And it's rooted in this. And then social benefit is derived on the calculation of pain and the aim of society, according to utilitarian philosophy, is to maximize the pleasure.

The greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number of people, that's the philosophical bet. But he's rooting this in a Burkean assumptions here. Anyway, so one's found in pain, the other in pleasure, and however they may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, yet these causes keep up an eternal distinction between them, a distinction never to be forgotten by any whose business it is to affect the passions, that is to make the passions feel.

In the infinite variety of natural combinations we must expect to find the qualities of things the most remote imaginable from each other, united in the same object. We must expect also to find combinations of the same kind in the works of art but when we consider the power of an object upon our passions We must know that when anything is intended to affect the mind by the force of some predominant property, the affection produced is like to be the more uniform and perfect if all the other properties or qualities of the object be of the same nature, and tending to the same design as the principle. And then he gives it in a little aphorism, if black and white blend, soften and unite a thousand ways, are there no more black and white?

If the qualities of the sublime and the beautiful are sometimes found united, does this prove that they are the same? Does it prove that they are in any way allied? Does it prove even that they are not opposite and contradictory? Black and white may be the same, but they are not the same.

soften, may blend, but they are not therefore the same. Nor when they are so softened and blended with each other or with different colors is the power of black as black or of white as white so strong as when each stands uniform and distinguished. Final comment. The black and white distinction these make, the sublime beautiful distinction, are binary opposites. Are they complementary opposites or are they simply different and categorically opposed?

It's a rhetorical question. They're not complementary. They're not only categorically extinct, they're opposed to one another. There's no unity.

Modern structuralist linguistics talks about a binary system of terminology in which there are two opposites and there's no unifying thing. Because they are in fundamental opposition, male and female being one such thing. Black and white, right?

Good and right, I'm just saying. They're not regarded as compatible. They're not, there's no common ground. It's just this. taking apart and it's rooted in this effectivist approach to aesthetics which Burke brings into the conscience of the English-speaking world and it has not rid itself of them yet.

And it will not for a long time because as I say I'm the one who the one who's saying this and nobody else is. So even if I'm right, it doesn't matter. It has to take hold. Anyway, but I hope I've given you enough there to see why this is an important one. We'll move to Immanuel Kant next time and we'll see what he makes of Burke.

And it's more influential on Western thought than even Burke. But for the English speaking world, this is the most important, Burke for sure. Okay, so I'll see you next class.

Transcript for:Exploring Burke and Kant's Aesthetic Ideas

Transcript for:
Exploring Burke and Kant's Aesthetic Ideas