The Sublime and The Beautiful
About this ebook
Burke begins with a section on the senses in relation to human individuality and society in order to illuminate the collective nature of passions—for which we may read emotions—and to argue that the power of the arts is to shape and effect those emotions. In the second part, Burke observes the passions caused by the sublime, including terror, as well as records the effects of certain sensory perceptions—of sound, light, color, and smell—on creating sublime feelings in the mind. Part three follows the same trajectory but describes the beautiful instead before ultimately comparing the two, and part four attempts to ascertain their causes in nature. Burke concludes his treatise with a brief section on the sublime and beautiful in poetry, laying the groundwork for Romanticism’s use of language, among other things, to purposefully invoke feeling in the reader or observer.
With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is a classic of philosophy reimagined for modern readers.
About the author
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was an Irish philosopher and member of parliament in the British House of Commons. The son of a Catholic mother and Anglican father, Burke was raised between Dublin and rural County Cork. In 1744, he began studying at Trinity College Dublin, where he founded a debating society and graduated in 1748. Burke traveled to London in 1750 to become a lawyer, but soon abandoned his legal studies in favor of a life of professional writing. His first work, A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind (1756) was an ironic reworking of Lord Bolingbroke’s infamous arguments for reason over religion. This satire earned Burke the reputation of fearless firebrand and intellectual skeptic which would carry him throughout his career. His two most important publications, arguably, are A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Although a member of the historically liberal Whig Party, Burke is now frequently seen as a foundational figure in the development of modern conservative thought.
