Work · Empiricism, Enlightenment & Liberalism
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Distinguishes the beautiful, which pleases through smallness, smoothness and delicacy and arouses love, from the sublime, which arises from obscurity, vastness and power and produces a “delightful horror” rooted in self-preservation.
Introduction
Burke published “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” in London in 1757, with a second, expanded edition in 1759. The book distinguishes two kinds of aesthetic experience: the beautiful, which arises from qualities such as smallness, smoothness and gradual variation and produces love, and the sublime, which arises from obscurity, power, vastness, infinity and privation and produces a “delightful horror” connected with self-preservation. Burke explained both partly in physiological terms. The book was widely read across Europe; Lessing planned a translation, Garve’s German version appeared in 1773, and Kant discussed it in the “Critique of Judgment”.
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