Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: Is there a Male Gaze in Empirical Aesthetics?

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan A. Ortlieb ◽  
Uwe C. Fischer ◽  
Claus-Christian Carbon
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Social Motivation ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Hieronymus Bosch ◽  
State And Trait Anxiety ◽  
Aesthetic Preferences

In his ground-breaking Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke (1757) presented a comprehensive aesthetic theory based on two types of aesthetic appreciation: the beautiful and the sublime. While beauty inspires us with tender feelings of affection, a thrill of delightful horror attracts us to the sublime. According to Burke these ideas originate in a drive for affiliation (beautiful) and a drive for self-preservation (sublime). He also claims that the sublime is generally the more powerful aesthetic experience. A synopsis of literature on gender differences in aesthetic preferences, personality traits, and social motivation suggests, however, that on average women might be less susceptible to the Burkeian sublime than men. We tested this hypothesis empirically using sixty picture details from a triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. One hundred and fifty participants rated these stimuli in terms of threat (respectively safety) and liking. Besides, they completed standardized scales for state and trait anxiety as well as for state and trait depression. We found a strong effect for gender: on average, safety and liking were more closely related for female than for male participants. In the light of these findings we state that Burke’s concepts of the beautiful and the sublime might in fact be confounded with gender-related aesthetic preferences and that his proclivity to the sublime could reflect a male gaze on aesthetics. Finally, we discuss possible indicators for ‘Burke’s fallacy’ in empirical aesthetics today.

scholarly journals Sublime in the aesthetics of Nicolai Hartmann and Edmund Burke

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-120
Author(s):  
Sasa Grbovic
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Nicolai Hartmann ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Sensible Qualities

This article is dedicated to the interpretation of the aesthetic thought of Nicolai Hartmann and Edmund Burke, that is, the interpretation of their different understandings of the sublime, and its relation to the beautiful. While Hartmann?s sublime is an aesthetic value that is subordinate to the beauty, Burke defines the sublime as a form of aesthetic experience that is on the same level as beautiful. Burke forms an understanding of the sublime based on his analysis of the aesthetic experience, which includes his understanding of passions, states of the soul and the analysis of the sensible qualities of the aesthetic objects, while Hartmann formally considers sublime as one kind of beautiful, and reaches his understanding of it based on his inquiry of the aesthetic object and his definition of beautiful.

scholarly journals Helen’s semiotic body: ancient and modern representations

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-213
Author(s):  
Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Physical Vacuum ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Ancient Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Site

The paper draws on theoretical work on the representation of the female body as an object of the male gaze in modern narrative, in order to decode and analyze Helen’s portrayal as a physical vacuum in ancient literature. I argue that the negation of Helen’s corporeality emphasizes the semiotic duality of her body, allowing it to be deployed both as a sign and as a site for the inscription of signs. The paper, then, proceeds to show how Helen’s Iliadic depiction has provided the eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke with a rhetorical platform upon which to theorize the aesthetic dichotomy between the beautiful and the sublime. I close my analysis by illustrating how the eclecticism, compromises, and pastiches that inform Helen’s cinematic recreations find a parallel in, and thus perpetuate, ancient pictorial techniques.

Gothic and Classical in Eighteenth-Century Criticism

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-54
Author(s):  
James Uden
Keyword(s):  
Original Composition ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Classical World ◽  
Edward Young

This chapter examines the dynamic and evolving relationship between conceptions of “Gothic” and “classical” in mid-eighteenth-century criticism. It argues that both terms were highly changeable in their content and were rarely imagined as mere opposites. The chapter focuses on three authors, all of whom reinterpreted the classical world as an object of private aesthetic experience rather than as a source of political or ethical examples. In his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Edward Young imagines the Roman poets as a giant “spectre,” which threatened to overwhelm modern poets, inhibiting their capacity for original creation. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke describes a frightening descent into the Underworld of Virgil’s Aeneid as an opportunity to form homosocial bonds with other male readers. Finally, Richard Hurd in Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) describes the classical world as a distant forerunner to a more modern preoccupation with enchantment and imagination. In all three of these authors, the classical world is shifting its meaning and significance. It is becoming, paradoxically, increasingly Gothic.

scholarly journals Burke’s understanding of the sublime

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 141-149
Author(s):  
Sasa Grbovic
Keyword(s):  
Nervous System ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Physiological Explanation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Sensible Qualities ◽  
Human Nervous System

The subject of this article is an interpretation and clarification of one part of Edmund Burke?s aesthetic thought that refers to his understanding of the aesthetic experience of the sublime. For Burke, the sublime is one of the two most important forms of aesthetic experience, besides the beautiful. The intention of this article is to introduce and explain the crucial moments of Burke?s aesthetic viewpoint on our experience of the sublime. In accordance with this, the first chapter of the article is an analysis of the passion that belongs to self-preservation. The second chapter examines Burke?s explanation of the state of the soul that is caused by the sublime objects. The third chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the material causes or sensible qualities of the sublime objects. The last chapter of the article is an interpretation of his physiological explanation that is supposed to offer a specific insight as to why do the sensible qualities of the objects cause the sublime and how do they affect the human nervous system.

Challenges and Responses to Everyday Aesthetics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuriko Saito
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Aesthetic Appreciation ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
Popular Appeal ◽  
The Rich

Everyday aesthetics is often criticized for lacking aesthetic credentials. Its legitimacy as a discourse is questioned because proximal senses, experiences gained while engaging in an activity, and qualities other than beauty and sublimity are included in its purview. Inclusion of these items is considered to deny a clear ‘object’ of aesthetic appreciation, the possibility of objective judgments, and profundity of aesthetic experience. Excluding them, however, does not do justice to the rich and multifaceted contents of everyday aesthetic life. Phenomenological description, instead of the judgment-oriented and objectivity-seeking discourse, is more appropriate for exploring some dimensions of everyday aesthetic life. In addition, while possibly lacking the same degree of profundity and intensity of beauty and sublimity, the popular appeal of easily recognizable aesthetic qualities deserves to be investigated because of their prevalence and frequent manipulation for commercial and political purposes.

Schopenhauer and the Paradox of the Sublime

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-255
Author(s):  
Bart Vandenabeele
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Schopenhauer explores the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic experience of the sublime in a richer way than his predecessors did by rightfully emphasizing the prominent role of the aesthetic object and the ultimately affirmative character of the pleasurable experience it offers. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime does not appeal to the superiority of human reason over nature but affirms the ultimately “superhuman” unity of the world, of which the human being is merely a puny fragment. The author focuses on Schopenhauer’s treatment of the experience of the sublime in nature and argues that Schopenhauer makes two distinct attempts to resolve the paradox of the sublime and that Schopenhauer’s second attempt, which has been neglected in the literature, establishes the sublime as a viable aesthetic concept with profound significance.

Art as Information Ecology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason A. Hoelscher
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
American Art ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Information Ecology ◽  
Robert Morris ◽  
New Information ◽  
Theory Of Information ◽  
Gilbert Simondon

In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode—information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from each encounter with an artwork. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation---a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing. Considering the works of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, the Drop City commune, Eva Hesse, and others, Hoelscher finds that art exists within an information ecology of complex feedback between artwork and artworld that is driven by the unfolding of difference. By charting how information in its aesthetic mode can exist beyond today's strictly quantifiable and monetizable forms, Hoelscher reconceives our understanding of how artworks work and how information operates.

scholarly journals Cartographic Sublime

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Hsu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Cognitive Faculties ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Philosopher ◽  
Rational Side

Kant distinguishes two notions of the sublime: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. In the case of both notions, the experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of our own power of reason, as a super sensible faculty, over nature. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) The concept of the sublime was associated with nature in late 18th and early 19th century aesthetics. Political philosopher and states-man Edmund Burke evoked human mortality in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, defining the sublime as experience of the overwhelming magnitude of phenomena in the natural world which causes “a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions.” Kant, in contrast to Burke, defines rationality is an important component of the experience of the sublime: “The sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality.” That is, reason--super-added thought--allows us to comprehend and challenge the entirety of that which is beyond comprehension. He writes that “the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation . . . this feeling renders as it were intuitable the supremacy of our cognitive faculties on the rational side over the greatest faculty of sensibility.” For Kant, in other words, the experience of the sublime was the oscillation between sensation and rationality in the face of the overwhelming-ness of phenomena in the world.

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