A Philosophical Inquiry in to the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

    Edmund Burke assumes that all our knowledge comes via sense experience and that we combine the simple ideas of sense into more complex one. For him the "imagination" or "a sort of creative power"(Coleridge's "fancy") operates in two ways.

    One that "represents at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which theywere received by the senses" and the next by "combining those images in a new manner, and according to different order." Thus, for Burke, imagination can never produce any thing "absolutely new".

    Burke believes that the judgment of taste is universal but its universality is not objective, instead it is more subjective. The standard of taste in the sense of a set of universal rules that apply to all works of art is not possible.

    To judge a work of art with these rules would be a logical judgment, but not aesthetic one. Aesthetic judgment is singular, so it can not be generalized. In raising the issue of "taste", Burke is concerned primarily with the problem of 'taste' and whether there is a single logic of taste.

    He gives an example of a painter, who paints shoes, and a shoemaker. Though both different in knowledge they both share the pleasure arising from a natural objects, so far as each perceives it justly imitated. They are satisfied in seeing an agreeable figure.

    Burke also believes that taste improves as judgment improves through increased knowledge, attention and exercise. He finds taste and judgment intertwined in all human activity.

    Burke is also regarded for his explanation on the opposition between beauty and sublimity by a physiological theory. He made the opposition of pleasure and pain -the source of two aesthetic categories, deriving beauty from pleasure and sublimity from pain.

    The pleasure of beauty has a relaxing effect on the fibers of the body, whereas, sublimity tightens these fibers. He says beautiful is something that creates affection or passion.It is playful, light, without great depth. Happiness is linked with beautiful, as it is more surfacial.

     On the other hand, sublime is vast in its dimension.It is something that repels, generates terror, fear, and seriousness and has depth. Since it has great depth, it is associated to sadness, pain and gloomy in its observation.

John Locke       John Locke is one of the influential English philosophers and is best known for his epistemological and political views. He observes knowledge to have begun with simple sense perceptions and combining these in to complex abstract ideas. He is the founder of empiricism with the basic distinction between the primary qualities of experience (measurable things) and secondary qualities (color, smell, sound, taste etc), which held to be produced as the result of the impact of the primary qualities on the passively perceiving subject. Unlike rationalists like Rene Descartes the subject of empiricism is born with no innate ideas; it is a ‘tabula rasa’(blank mind) upon which natural experience is imprinted. Read More...

Immanuel Kant     Kant is a German philosopher whose systematic and comprehensive work in the theory of ethics, knowledge and aesthetics influenced various schools of Kantianism and Idealism. He has tried to bridge the gap between empiricism and rationalism... Read More...

Arthur Schopenhauer      Schopenhauer is a German philosopher who raises question on existing assumption about free will. He stands in favor of the existence of free will. In other words, he means to say that in the state of willlessness, free will operates in the activities of human being. According to him, idea is will objectified. When will becomes object the idea of thing, becomes eminent. Read More...

George W.H. Hegel    Hegelism is a belief that consciousness determines the matter. Hegel, a German idealist, believes in idea or organic unity or "Geist" (his own word) in which every part is dependent on and is definable in terms of every other part and of the whole itself. Man is a part of this whole, and a concrete definition of man must be made in its terms. There always exists the conflictual situation between the two Marxism and Hegelism. Read More...

Friedrich Nietzsche    Nietzsche is the pioneer of deconstruction who posed question regarding the existence of God. He also has question the relation of language to truth. As Greek tragedy developed one impulse came to balance the other, Dionysiac ecstasy being ordered by Apollonian form but in modern life the tragic view has been suppressed in scientific optimism. Every culture that has lost the Dionsiac myth making spirit has lost by the same token its natural healthy creativity. Read More...

Giambattista Vico     Vico is an Italian philosopher and a historian influenced by classical and renaissance writers. He conceive of a heroic age in which men constructed myths, symbols and rituals that served as the basis for the slow growth of the human consciousness of history and reality. Read More...