A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful

"She must have looked at Burke’s other works and most especially, his Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , first published in 1757, a work I absolutely love. There is a passage in which Burke explains why we admire the Greeks but love the Trojans and it is done beautifully. I can’t do justice to it. Anyway, in the book, there is an account of beauty in contrast to the sublime, linking it to weakness, to prettiness, to what is small. Burke says that women realize this, and they use it, pretending to weakness, to totter, to faint and what have you. You can imagine Wollstonecraft reading this!"

"That’s right. I think he belongs on this list as he offers an original scientific—we might say physiological—investigation of the sublime and the beautiful, while at the same time holding on to an objectivist view somehow. So we get both the subjective side and the objective side in one theory. What I mean by that is he gives us a list of qualities that are supposed to elicit the sublime. So: obscurity, darkness, towering heights, irregularity, being hidden and unknown, and so forth. Think of entering a cave, something like that. This idea was very influential on Gothic writers like Mary Shelley and Ann Radcliffe , also included in my Reader . So that was quite influential, particularly in British writing. He also laid the foundations for empirical investigations in psychology today. In other words, he’s widely cited in the psychology literature, and I think that’s no coincidence. That’s a profound question. I got into working with empirical psychologists working on awe after one day hearing an interview with one of my later co-authors. I thought, wait a second, you’re talking about the sublime! So I reached out to him, and we got along really well. We’ve since worked on a couple of papers together. I also published a philosophical paper of my own arguing that the sublime is aesthetic awe. So the sublime is a kind of awe, but not to be confused with what’s called socio-political awe, a response to a powerful leader, nor is it religious awe, which is typically the response to a divine being of some kind. Of course, that raises the question, ‘what is the aesthetic?’ But I think that the basic intuition is right, and that’s why there’s a lot of intersection between philosophy and psychology here. There’s more work to be done, and I’ve found the psychologists to be open to this and willing to have dialogue, so that’s very promising. That’s right. I think you could take the history of the sublime in a very different direction if you looked at religious experience, and focused on religious texts from, say, Taoism and some from the Buddhist traditions. But I didn’t do that in my Reader , partly just for practical reasons—if you did that, you would miss out on the whole approach offered by philosophical aesthetics . Burke does talk about God, actually, and so does John Dennis, who is influential on Burke. In his own way, even Kant does. But by the time you get to Kant, and I think you already see this in Burke, the sublime has already been thought of as an aesthetic phenomenon. So I think it would be misleading to focus on that as if they had equal weight in the history. Since modernity, the sublime has really been an aesthetic concept."