41 pages • 1 hour read
Edmund BurkeA Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1756A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3, Pages 73-88 Summary
In Part 3, Burke explores what makes something or someone beautiful. Things that are beautiful elicit feelings of love. Burkes emphasizes the difference between love and desire. Some women may not be beautiful but still evoke desire; some humans and animals may be beautiful but evoke no desire. Although love and desire are often packaged together, they are not the same concepts.
Burke systematically breaks down philosophical understandings of what makes a work of art, or any other occurrence in nature, beautiful. One of the major arguments he contests is the notion that beauty is relative to proportion. Some thinkers suggest that beauty is determined by having the correct proportions. Burke immediately rejects this idea: Proportions are mathematical and require reason, and beauty has nothing to do with reason.
Burke establishes a system for breaking down the argument of proportions and others. He utilizes four rules to guide him. First, if two properties produce the same feeling, then they must have a similarity that produces a consistent effect. Second, artificial and natural objects must produce the same effect. Third, effects produced by natural objects cannot be tied to their uses. Fourth, if a different measure can produce the same effect, then one cannot attribute the affect to a singular property.
He then uses these four rules to examine proportion. He uses the rose as an example. Roses are beautiful at varying stages and to varying degrees, even when the proportions of the roses are the same. Animals, which come in a variety of shapes, can be seen as beautiful, even when their proportions differ. In humans, any attempt to define beauty by proportion has been consistently refuted by myriad exceptions: “You may assign any proportions you please to every part of the human body; and I undertake that a painter shall religiously observe them all, and notwithstanding produce if he pleases, a very ugly form” (78). Even when multiple humans have the same proportions and identical qualities, their loveliness differs by degree depending on other factors. Deformities are not the opposite of beauty, and one may have a deformity and still be beautiful.
Rather than being attached to beauty, Burke suggests that correct proportions live in the realm of mediocrity, fixated between beauty and ugliness. He argues that advocates for proportions have taken their theory and forced it onto nature, rather than drawing their theory from nature and applying it to art. The same is true for those who suggest fitness is related to beauty. These theorists argue that something is beautiful if it is completing its purpose or is fit according to the standards of its species. Burke argues that humans often find species most beautiful when they are not exhibiting their fitness: A bird sitting on a branch is more beautiful than a bird in flight. He also proposes that humans find many species that exemplify fitness of their kind as ugly—the pig, for example. While proportion and fitness are an important part of art, they are not directly connected to the beauty of a work. Perfection, too, cannot be the reason for beauty, because imperfection often contributes to beauty.
Part 3, Pages 89-101 Summary
Now that Burke has shown what beauty is not, he attempts to define what it is. Greater concepts—such as justice and wisdom—are tied to the sublime. Beauty, however, is attached to softer virtues, such as kindness and compassion. Nevertheless, beauty does not emerge as a result of virtue. In fact, Burke argues that aligning beauty with virtue clouds the understanding of what beauty is. Instead, beauty is the quality produced in the mind by the senses.
Burke identifies several qualities that contribute to beauty. First, Burke suggests that beautiful things are smaller in scale. Humans tend to reference things they find beautiful as “little.” Unlike the sublime, which produces feelings of terror and admiration, beauty draws out affection and love. Second, Burke argues that beauty is connected to smoothness. Third, beauty is not uniform, particularly in color. Instead, beauty uses variations in color; these colors are neither bold nor stark, and they meld into one another. Fourth, beauty requires delicacy, or even fragility. The most delicate plants are the most affecting. While colors can vary, they must be clean, clear, and muted. Beauty can be found also in gracefulness, elegance, feeling, and sound. Similar principles apply in these areas.
Part 3 Analysis
In Part 2, Burke explores the sublime and how to define it. In Part 3, Burke turns his attention toward beauty. It is notable that Burke defines the sublime before he defines beauty. The sublime is the more complicated subject; yet Burke recognizes that defining the sublime is easier than defining beauty—a topic more hotly debated. Plato saw beauty as defined by how well the artistic rendering adheres to Forms. Aristotle believed beauty was derived from the combination of proportion, harmony, and nature. In Egyptian aesthetics, balance and symmetry played a large role in understandings of beauty. Burke provided a new way of thinking about beauty. The Enlightenment emphasized the importance of developing scientific methods for understanding concepts. Burke was interested in seeing if beauty could be quantified—whether he could apply a certain set of standards to any object and establish an evaluation of its appearance and qualities.
An important component of Burke’s text is the separation of beauty from virtue, as he argues for a connection between Aesthetics and Sensory Information instead. For Burke, beauty is a quality produced by sensory impressions, and not something that merely imitates or adheres to ideas of virtue. Classic philosophers, by contrast, always associated the two: One could not be beautiful if one did not have virtue. Aristotle believed that both goodness and virtue were developed through balance, especially the balance of pleasure and pain. Burke, however, argues that beauty has other qualities that are more notable: smallness, smoothness, variation, and delicacy. Rather than a balance of pleasure and pain, beauty is connected only to pleasure. Burke suggests that beauty elicits feelings of love. While love and virtue are closely related, they are not reliant upon one another.
Although many of Burke’s ideas were rejected by the Romantic period, he paved the way for this movement. Burke’s emphasis on the aesthetic experience through the senses and the power of the sublime was carried out in the awesome images of nature produced during the Romantic period, such as “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) by John Keats and Caspar David Friedrich’s landscape paintings. Burke also rejected some aspects of the Enlightenment. In his work, he proposes that some ideas—such as pleasure and pain—cannot be defined. This is counter to the principles of the Enlightenment, which applied quantifiable and evaluative measures to all concepts. Romantic artists and writers responded to the Enlightenment by emphasizing the inspirational and mystical sides of nature, rejecting strict rationalism. Both Beauty and the Sublime became recurring themes in Romantic work. However, counter to Burke’s ideas about taste, the Romantic period championed individual experience and emotion.
