A shock to thought Book

I didn't completely agree with the ideas in this booke, but I rate it five stars because it made me think and it showed me ways of seeing that I didn't notice before. He must have been quite the extrovert personality type, because he entirely associated the sublime and beautiful with external objects - things for the five senses - and he said nothing about beauty being in the eye of the beholder.

Burke mainly equates the sublime with "terror," and contrasts it with beauty which he equates with things that inspire us to love. I can remember a time when love woke me up psychologically. When love failed to continue, the sublime aspects of my anguish continued to wake me up psychologically. So, both ends of the spectrum should be embraced: beauty and love versus the sublime, terror, fear, anguish, impressiveness.

This is where I felt disagreement, because every time he associated the sublime with terror, I wanted to remind myself that sublime is also associated with other things like being impressed, amazed, awe-struck, and even anguished. There is a terror-association in all those, but there's a problem with contrasting terror with beauty: The contrast makes us want to avoid the sublime. Modern thought contrasts love with fear, and encourages us to avoid fear, but if we contrast love-as-beauty with terror-as-sublimity, we can see that the sublime has a wonderful place. Burke writes about such things as the awesome-ness of mountains and the darkness of heavy forests as being sublime and terror-striking. There's wonder in this, and it's heaps more interesting than the modern tendency to avoid fear in favor of love.

"Beauty" is what made me want to read this book, because I wanted to get a clue about what poets and artists mean when they speak so highly of beauty, and… okay, I get it now.

I also understand now, from this book, that being awake psychologically can come from beauty - being in love - as much as from the sublime, being anguished and impressed-upon. Although that wasn't Burke's purpose in writing it, that's what I got from the book.

Here are some quotes from A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful:

"Sympathy: It is by the first of these passions that we enter into the concerns of others; that we are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost any thing which men can do or suffer. For sympathy must be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected; so that this passion may either partake of the nature of those which regard self-preservation, and turning upon pain may be a source of the sublime. … It is by this principle chiefly that poetry, painting, and other affecting arts, transfuse their passions from one breast to another, and are often capable of grafting delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself."

"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 in insensibly; 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 a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure."

"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."