98. A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Wisdom in the Best Books and Films Podcast
Jake Baer explores Edmund Burke's philosophical inquiry into the nature of beauty and taste, challenging the idea that 'beauty is in the eye
Key takeaways
- Burke argues that taste is not purely subjective but grounded in common human faculties like senses, imagination, and reason.
Main topics
- Objectivity of beauty
Notable quotes
'Beauty is for the greater part some quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses.'
Conclusion
True taste, while refined through experience, is ultimately grounded i
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Thank you. Speaker 1 (0:10) Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Wisdom in the Best Books and Films, where we find bite-sized nuggets of truth and use them to become better people. I'm Jake Baer, the host, and this week we are going to be doing something a little bit different. I've had a few conversations with people recently about whether something is objectively beautiful in art or novels or movies. Like, every top... list of movies ever has Casablanca at the top, and I think deservedly so. Casablanca is a fantastic movie. Speaker 2 (0:45) Others that Speaker 1 (0:46) are often put on the top list, I really couldn't Speaker 2 (0:49) care Speaker 1 (0:50) for any less. Gone with the Wind. I have no idea why anyone likes that movie. It's a terrible movie. Super boring, and it's about three and a half hours too long, and I think it's only three hours and 35 minutes or so. I don't know. It feels like it goes on forever. So sometimes there are movies like that or books that people say are great and I just don't understand it. But other times, even if I don't enjoy the book or the movie, I can say, yeah, I see how that's one of the great books, even though I don't particularly Speaker 2 (1:24) enjoy that one. Speaker 1 (1:26) So as I was talking about this with people, I... thought, you know, there's a lot of smart people that have lived, and I figured I should go and look into what some of the smartest people that have lived have said on the objectivity of beauty or goodness in art. And I found a couple of things. I'm going to read today basically a super abridgment of a book called A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, which he wrote in somewhere around 1757. Edmund Burke is a very famous politician in England in the 1700s. He's one of the very few British politicians who actually supported the American Revolution, while also recognizing the horrors of the French Revolution before they came. I have quoted him before recently, as well as a few months to a year ago. on some of his writings about the French Revolution. But he was also just a very smart person and had great foresight. He kind of predicted the eventual problems England would have with the Indian people in India, you know, 150 years before those problems came up. But overall, I just think he was a great guy. He's often called the founder of... conservatism, but he also liked to talk about beauty. And so today we are going to do, I call it a super abridgment. It's really just some excerpts taken from that novel or not a novel. It's a book, a nonfiction book, thoughts on beauty, basically. And I'm specifically taking out the parts that are about taste. And if it is a shared thing between people or if it is, oh, you know, taste is subjective and we can all just agree to disagree on what is good and what is not. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Well, he disagrees that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, at least not entirely. And so let's talk about what he wrote. As usual, if you enjoy the show, please leave a review on Apple or Spotify or Substack or wherever it is that you listen. Give it five stars. Give it a thumbs up and share the show with friends. Send a link to friends or family or coworkers. Please subscribe on Substack. That helps us a lot to grow. And I appreciate you guys sharing it with other people. So this is a philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful by Edmund Burke, specifically the sections of that book on taste. I'm going to give a little bit of a subtitle as we get into different sections. The first section we're going to talk about is how the standard is the same in all human creatures. On a superficial view, we may seem to differ very widely from each other in our reasonings. and no less in our pleasures. But notwithstanding this difference, which I think to be rather apparent than real, meaning Speaker 2 (4:50) it Speaker 1 (4:50) seems that way, but it's not actually that different, it is probable that the standard of both reason and taste is the same in all human creatures. for if there were not some principles of judgment as well as of sentiment common to all mankind no hold could possibly be taken either on their reason or their passions sufficient to maintain the ordinary correspondence of life it appears indeed to be generally acknowledged that with regard to truth and falsehood there is something fixed We find people in their disputes continually appealing to certain tests and standards, which are allowed on all sides, and are supposed to be established in our common nature. But there is not the same obvious concurrence in any uniform or settled principles which relate to taste. It is even commonly supposed that this delicate and aerial faculty cannot be properly tried by any test, nor regulated by any standard. if taste had not been so happily cultivated it was not that the subject was barren but