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Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Prairie State Books)

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The categories of the sublime and the beautiful seem, on first contemplation, an 18th-century distinction with little meaning for our own time. I read this book while preparing a course on J.S. Bach's "Goldberg" Variations and Beethoven's "Diabelli" Variations. The idea was to find a way of talking about the difference between the two pieces. At first brush, the Bach is "beautiful", the Beethoven "sublime", but only a little thought leads to a more complicated view. Both pieces have aspects of both qualities. Nevertheless, my students found the question a fascinating one.

Of course, the book goes well beyond the characteristics of the two qualities. It focusses on the interesting question of how human nature leads us to experience the two qualities. To me much of Burke's discussion of this point seems quite contemporary.

Burke's preference for the sublime over the beautiful reflects his time at the beginning of the Romantic period in literature, and anticipates Goethe's (and Beethoven's) celebration of the individual and direct appeal to the emotions. His essentialist views of the beautiful as a feminine characteristic seem gratuitous.

I wonder what Burke would have found to say about, say, the Goldberg, with its formality and artifice. These characteristics would seem to place the piece in the beautiful rather than the sublime. But the piece is clearly not merely a frill, nor is it at all sentimental.

Burke's book is well argued and challenging to the modern reader. Give it a try!

Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry, though it presents to modern sensibilities, so shaped by scientific certainties to which Burke had no access, an extremely dated and at times ludicrous impression, nevertheless is an important document for the historical development of aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century, and indeed is a pleasurable read in its own right, owing to Burke's vigorous and lucid prose. Though no-one to-day will read the Enquiry only on the merits of its ideas, it has undeniable value as a legacy of the history of philosophy.

This edition is very satisfactory. Boulton's lengthy introduction is very helpful and informative despite being some fifty years old, and the apparatus criticus is meticulously complete.