A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: Edmund Burke

1290 Words3 Pages

To talk about the Enlightenment taking current times into consideration, and more specifically to talk about an enlightened aesthetic, may seem unusual as the concept “enlightened” is usually identify with political regimes and scientific systems. But the truth is a return to the meaning of the concept of enlightenment and its aesthetic has never been so necessary for understanding the world that surrounds us as now. At a time in which "cultural marketing" and culture industries and their products are spreaded, it is inevitable to put back on scene the aesthetic reflection that accompanies the Enlightenment movement of the 18th century. For them, one of the great aesthetic categories traditions will be discussed: the sublime, starting from one of the most influential texts in the history of aesthetics published in 1757 by Edmund Burke, " A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful" -a curious essay on the fundamentally political career of its author that will mark a turning point in the later reflections on the category of the sublime- and make a brief historical and philosophical journey through the term already mentioned for finally investigate the concept of postmodernism and the potential influence between them. But this work is not a compendium of archaeological terms and arid thesis, but rather a crawl over time with a practical purpose: to reflect the aesthetic space as a theoretical analysis to try to understand contemporary society.

1. The sublime
Before analysing the sublime in Burke's work we will try to explain what this term means. The term “sublime” beginning to be used in the late 16th century (in the sense 'dignified, aloof') Comes from Latin ‘’sublimis’’, from sub- 'up to' p...

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...vard Classics vol.24, P.F. Collier and Son, New York.
-Walter John Hipple, The beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque in eighteenth century British aesthetic theory (1957), Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale.
-Baldine Saint Girons, Lo sublime [Trans. Juan Antonio Méndez,] (2008) A. Machado Libros, Madrid.
-Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (1984) [Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi] University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
-Jean-François Lyotard The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982–1985. (1933) [Trans. Don Barry] University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
-Roxana Popelka Sosa Sánchez Postmodernity and its influence on Visual Arts (2009) Arte Individuo y Sociedad, 21: 89-98, Madrid
-Robert Davis Art and enlightenment: aesthetic theory after Adorno (1991) University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln

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