2.1 Introduction: on taste
The inquiry is preceded by an introductory discourse about the taste, which Burke denominated as a quality common to all mankind, although not equal at all those who compose it. After referring to the difficulties in establishing a definition about this quality or feeling of pleasure or displeasure caused by an object, he continues its reasoning from data that provides mere experience. He rejects the commonly accepted belief that considers different the faculty of reason and the faculty of taste. The taste is equivalent to the power to determine or judge the difference between different qualities of an object that impresses our external and internal senses, either by a simple pleasure of imagination or because they provoke an aesthetic emotion. With regard to taste he thinks it is an instinct, an inclination that does not involve any previous reasoning, a “delicate and aerial faculty” that not only cannot be discussed but it is also impossible to define. Since the diversity of tastes is unlimited, the only starting point is the similarity of the organs of the senses and the hypothesis that, as a result, what they perceive or experience should keep some similarity. The supposed equality of taste is based on a similarity in taste perception, which in turn is based on the coincidence established with respect to some basic flavors, like sugar or salt, although preferences in terms of flavors are different depending on a decisive factor: the custom. This equality is due to that in the sphere of reason there are criteria and universal principles that are inherent to our human nature and determine our discussions and arguments, giving us a solid criterion of truth.
The obvious difference of taste is not due t...
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...g sublime is beautiful, though not everything beautiful is sublime. Burke suggests that the sublime and beautiful can be found together in the same object because a great thing may also be smooth or soft, qualities that he attributes to the beautiful, and vice versa. In relation to effects generated by both ideas, Burke differentiates complacency and satisfaction produced by the beautiful, with the upheaval and discomfiture produced by the sublime, which generates a great uneasiness from their terrifying intensity but can produce pleasure too. The explanation of how pain may be a source of pleasure is developed in the fourth part of the Inquiry. According to this explanation, it is only possible to feel some kind of pleasure from the sublime when the pain caused by the feeling of the sublime does not result in a physical ailment, nor terror implies our destruction.
“Out of the north deep waves rolled down upon the island. They broke against the rocks and roared into the caves, sending up white sprays of water. Before night a storm would certainly strike” (O’Dell, 19). This passage from Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins describes the Ocean that surrounds the island and characters in the story. In this description the narrator, Karana, shows the reader that the people on the island fear and respect the power of the Ocean. The Ocean is depicted throughout the novel as something enormous and powerful. The way the Ocean is seen demonstrates an example of the Burkeian Sublime. According to Burke, the Sublime is an experience that comes from authority and power. A common example for the Burkeian Sublime is looking at the power of mountains. Mountains are Sublime because they’re large in size, and have the power to kill people. Therefore, through looking at Burke’s requirements for the Sublime the conclusion is made that Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins contains the Burkeian Sublime.
Burke, Edmund. "Proportion Further Considered". A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909-1917 (New York: Bartleby.com, 2001). http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/305.html
We have spent a good deal of this semester concentrating on the sublime. We have asked what (in nature) is sublime, how is the sublime described and how do different writers interpret the sublime. A sublime experience is recognizable by key words such as 'awe', 'astonishment' and 'terror', feelings of insignificance, fractured syntax and the general inability to describe what is being experienced. Perception and interpretation of the sublime are directly linked to personal circumstance and suffering, to spiritual beliefs and even expectation (consider Wordsworth's disappointment at Mont Blanc). It has become evident that there is a transition space between what a traveler experiences and what he writes; a place wherein words often fail but the experience is intensified, even understood by the traveler. This space, as I have understood it, is the imagination. In his quest for spiritual identity Thomas Merton offers the above quotation to illustrate what he calls 'interpenetration' between the self and the world. As travel writers engage nature through their imagination, Merton's description of the 'inner ground' is an appropriate one for the Romantic conception of the imagination. ...
The nature of aesthetics has puzzled many, where questions and reflections about art, beauty, and taste have intersected with our understanding of what a real art experience truly is. The notion of the aesthetic experience, an experience that differs from the everyday experiences, has been given great consideration by English art critic Clive Bell and American philosopher John Dewey since the beginning of the 20th century. Both have spent much deliberation on the distinctive character of aesthetic experience; yet have complete opposing ideas on how to go about understanding aesthetic experience’s ecosystem. Bell takes a formalist approach, as he thinks that to understand everything about a work of art, one has to only look at the work of art.
Paine’s life in England gave little indication of his later successes. Born in 1737 in Thetford, England as the son of a lower-middle class Quaker, he was not expected to become an important, extraordinary, or outstanding person. After a variety of unsuccessful jobs, he eventually became an excise officer, a person whose job it is to collect certain kinds of taxes and prevent smuggling. This job was also not prosperous. He was fired from this position twice, once for leading a strike for higher wages in 1772. While living in England, Paine married twice. The first of these wives was Mary Lambert, who, one year after they were married, died in childbirth along with their child. Eleven years later, in 1771, he remarried. Elizabeth Olive, his second wife, and he separated legally in 1774, and Paine moved to London. While living in London that year, Paine met Benjamin Franklin, who helped him secure a job as a journalist in Philadelphia.
Romanticism shows realism and the creation of real issues in the society (Punter 79). There is a focus on issues such as emotions, love, horror and sorrows in the Frankenstein novel and this is the major theme as shown from the novel. Burke has similar ideologies which are reflected in Frankenstein’s work. The similarity of the ideologies shown in Frankenstein’s novel and burkes book show different interpretations of romanticism. Sources of “sublime” and sources of the “beautiful” according to burke show that there he was also responsive in most of the activities regarding beauty. Regarding love, burke was able to explain that perfection was not a major cause of beauty in the society and obscurity is created when we see danger clearly. Fear comes out as a result of facing our dangers and this is shown in Frankenstein whereby there is fear of the unknown created by the weather in the novel. However, facing the real danger creates different aspects like love and creation of emotions showing that the fear is not existing in such
In many novels, such as The Turn of the Screw and The Mysteries of Udolpho, the role of the sublime is not to induce a power of nature in a familiar way but to use nature as an agent or conduit o...
There is beauty and there is beauty. The two are not mutually exclusive, but rather represent two poles on a continuum. At one pole is the beauty that is associated with a sense of lightness and balanced order. It has a faintly decorative quality to it. At the other extreme is the much darker form of beauty that we associate with profundity and truth. This latter form of beauty I will analyze in terms of the containment of the sublime. The distinction between these two extremes of beauty has less to do with the objects under consideration, whether a flower, a sunset, a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, than it does with the attitude of the considerer of the object. That is, anything that possesses beauty of the first kind can also be viewed as possessing beauty of the second kind, if the attention of the viewer is directed appropriately. The differential across the continuum is constituted by the degree of awareness of the element of the sublime in the beautiful.
Bourdieu establishes his belief in how taste functions as a type of social structure, a guideline to society’s orientation in education, social ...
Nevertheless, the sublime does not lead us to despair, but to a higher pleasure than beauty affords
What can be said about the sublime? Class discussion led to the definition of sublime as the element found in travel literature that is unexplainable. It is that part of travel literature where the writer is in awe of his or her surroundings, where nature can be dangerous or where nature reminds a human being of their mortality. The term "sublime" has been applied to travel texts studied in class and it is hard not to compare the sublime from texts earlier in the term to the texts in the later part of the term. Two texts that can be compared in terms of the sublime are A Tour in Switzerland by Helen Williams and History of a Six Weeks' Tour by Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. There are similarities and differences found in both texts concerning individual perspectives of travel and the sublime. The main focus of this commentary will be comparing and contrasting the perspectives of Williams and Shelley within their respective texts, the language of the sublime and the descriptions of the sublime.
In this essay Hume creates the true judges who are required to have: delicacy of taste, practice in a specific art of taste, be free from prejudice in their determinations, and good sense to guide their judgments. In Hume’s view the judges allow for reasonable critiques of objects. Hume also pointed out that taste is not merely an opinion but has some physical quality which can be proved. So taste is not a sentiment but a determination. What was inconsistent in the triad of commonly held belief was that all taste is equal and so Hume replaced the faulty assumption with the true judges who can guide society’s sentiments.
In the Critique of Judgement Kant defines the sublime as "that, the mere ability to think which shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense." (1) Such striving for absolute comprehension beyond what the imagination is capable of representing in a simple perception or image may be occasioned by the "rawness" of scenes like the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the magnitude or immensity of which alludes to the Idea of absolute greatness. (2) Imagination's failure to contain this Idea understandably results in pain. (3) But pain is not the end-point; characteristic of sublime feeling is a "movement" of pain to pleasure: "the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital powers and a consequent stronger outflow of them." (4) In other words one is awestruck: nature appears as a "mere nothing in comparison with the Ideas of Reason." (5) From this we realize our superiority to nature "within and without us" and our supersensible destination beyond nature. (6) In this paper I wish to explicate J-F. Lyotard's reading of the Kantian sublime. There are lessons to be learned here, as the title of his recent work (1994), Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, suggests.
Sentiments such as beauty, revenge, pleasure, pain, create moral motivation, and action, and are immune to falsity and truth. They are the foundation for which morals are built, and exist apart from any reasoning. Thesis: In moral motivation, the role of sentiment is to drive an intrinsically instilled presence within us to examine what we would deem a moral act or an immoral act, and act accordingly, and accurately upon the sentiments that apply. These sentiments may be assisted by reasons, but the reason alone does not drive us to do what we feel is necessary.
...portant bases of pleasure. Such as pleasures of reading; ‘Reading may be a compulsion for a school going child, pastime for a retired person, but a pleasure for many. You can discover simile on the face of novel- reader, a gleam in the eyes of the reader of a poem and furrow of seriousness on the forehead of a person reading a newspaper report. Reading disturbs mind and heart. Waves of thinking and emotion are generated by reading. So the pleasure is immediate and it continues to linger in the mind.’ Our emotions controls everything and finding pleasure is all about emotions. Books take us to new journeys and make us smile. “Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.” Harold Bloom. We can found love, friendship, adventure, courage all of the things that make us smile and make us excited. Those are the greatest pleasures in our worlds.