Edmond Burke's Sublime and Beautiful

All those posts I wrote about “impressiveness” – I didn’t know that a better word might be “sublime.” I just read A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmond Burke. Oh man, I’m no scholar but I should have known the definition of sublime. I’m terrible at Scrabble.

Burke associates the sublime with “terror,” and I think sublime has a wider meaning than that: awe-inspiring, amazing, astonishing, impressive, maybe terrible… heavy, overwhelming. To walk through life with a sense of the sublime is to carry sense of wonder. Okay – all those things have something to do with terror, and maybe Burke’s definition of terror 260 years ago was wider and different than the definition in my head.

My main thoughts are, 1) “sublime” might be a better word than “impressive” for the ideas I’ve been trying to express, and 2) … something about beauty…

I read Burke's old, difficult book (the writing is archaic!) because I wanted to understand what art-books meant when they talked about beauty. Burke writes that beauty is anything that inspires love and the sublime is anything that causes terror.

I wrote a lot of blog-posts saying that impressiveness is what wakes us up psychologically. The cool thing about Burke’s book is that he showed me there’s something else that wakes us up: the alternative to impressiveness / sublimity, which is beauty / love.

I should have noticed that love wakes us up psychologically, but I’ve been so focused on the painful anguish of the sublime that I lost sight of anything having to do with love. Interesting to suddenly see that again.

Here’s a quote from A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful:

“I have before observed, that whatever is qualified to cause terror, is a foundation capable of the sublime; to which I add, that not only these, but many things from which we cannot probably apprehend any danger have a similar effect, because they operate in a similar manner. I observed too, that whatever produces pleasure, is fit to have beauty engrafted on it.”