Review of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
Edmund Burke (writer).
Read in 2025.
Burke’s prose is functional and his thinking fairly clear, but this treatise is interesting mainly in what it prefigures. Gothic novelists would soon embrace the sublime, and so would the Romantics a few decades later. More importantly, in attributing beauty to the Aristotelian “formal cause” of literal love, Burke looks ahead to Darwin’s mode of reasoning.
When Burke considers and rejects proportion and “perfection” as the origins of beauty, he displays a rudimentary pre-Darwinian awareness of how aesthetics may have their origin in what is biologically fitting. To his credit, he even talks about how it “acts mechanically upon the mind”, but his mechanistic mindset is not overly reductive. Facile musicologists today can still learn something from the elegant way in which Burke rejects the unconsidered metric formulae of The Book of the Art, without coming anywhere near rejecting art. As for Burke’s conclusions on the Aristotelian “ultimate causes” of the sublime and the beautiful, they are completely wrong and a sign of the Christian myopia that would remain dominant in European philosophy until Darwin.
References here: Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition (1997).