Our last two lessons on Edmund Burke will be mostly bonus material. In this
video we'll talk about the efficient cause, which I'll explain in a moment, and
in the last video I'll talk about Burke's views on language, which are
quite interesting. So far, though, we've seen what his core theory is of the
sublime and the beautiful. At the end of his essay he tries to give us a kind of
scientific explanation for how these effects are created at the level of the
body. He calls this the efficient cause, and this comes to us from Aristotle. This
is Aristotelian language. So Aristotle came up with four causes. It
may be easiest if I give a quick example here. If you take something like a chair,
for instance ... right, there's our chair ... Aristotle would say there are four
causes. The first is the material. Every chair needs to be made from different
materials, like wood, or leather, or metal -- whatever you want to use. We also have
the formal cause, which very roughly is the shape of the chair, the
the kind of object it is. Then we have the efficient cause, which is how the
chair was made. Maybe we need a hammer, we need nails maybe, we need to have a
carpenter if we can't do it ourselves! So that's the efficient cause, and the final
cause -- the final cause is the purpose or the goal for which the chair is made,
which might be to sit on, to have a rest, to do work on. Who knows what that final
cause may ultimately be. So let's have a look then at our efficient cause when it
comes to the sublime and the beautiful, how is it created. Well, Burke argues that
the sublime and the beautiful start with the senses. We
experience things like pain and pleasure and then that leads to physical
reactions, and by physical he really means that we have reactions at
the level of the nerves and the muscles.
At this level we have a very physical reaction. Burke argues that the body
tends to react in one of two ways. Either we tense up ... our
bodies actually contract. And having dealt with nervousness and stress myself
I know this is true. Your back tenses up you get a headache -- well, if
your neck tenses up. These things are certainly real. On the other hand, we
sometimes also relax. Burke gives this wonderful example of what it looks like
to fall in love when your body relaxes. He says, your head tilts to one side, your
eyes glaze over, you're weak in the knees, so on and so forth.
It's quite a humorous description actually of what it means to fall in
love. Burke then argues, not surprisingly, that
when we tense up we are more likely to experience the sublime, as we experience
moments of horror and astonishment, and so on. And when we relax we are more
likely to experience beauty, or we could put it the other way: the experience of
beauty is relaxing. So it's not just a one-way street here. It kind
of goes the other way as well. Okay, now Burke complicates this picture
a little bit by also talking about rest and labour. He says both of these things
are good in moderation, and if we don't do it in moderation then when we rest
too much our bodies become weak and when we work too much our minds become weak
(we can't think properly). He suggests that we need both of these and when it comes
to the sublime then the sublime is a kind of labour. It's an exercise of our
finer feelings. This is a kind of theory that might remind you of Aristotle again,
because Aristotle when he talked about catharsis suggests that ... at least
this is what some critics have made of it ...
Aristotle suggests that the experience of catharsis is a kind of
cleansing, purgation, which then trains the feelings so that we become more
adept at recognizing our feelings and more in control of them. Okay, so this is
kind of the basic outline then of Burke's
theory. There's one more thing that we should note before we jump to some
examples and ... this is a problem that Burke does not
really resolve. It's the problem that this reaction to our environment might
be either passive (it just happens to us) or it could be that we actually have
self-control, that we can control our emotions and our muscles. Burke seems
quite conflicted about this. Which one is it? He gives this wonderful example of a
man who could so much control his nerves and muscles that he could face torture
without feeling any pain, because as long as the muscles don't contract and he
doesn't tense up the mind doesn't experience any pain! It seems quite
ludicrous, but Burke seems fascinated by it.
On the other hand, Burke also often argues that our experience of nature and
of our environment is quite passive. These things just happen to us, and we
can't really control them. Which one is it then? Burke isn't always entirely
clear. We said then that this whole theory is rooted in the senses, and Burke
talks about a number of different experiences that the senses have, where
senses tense up or relax, and I'm going to focus specifically on vision here,
because he spends most of his time talking about how sight works. And it's
fairly easy to explain I think, although since I'm not a scientist I'm not sure
how true it is. It would be very interesting to see if any scientists
have taken Burke up on this and have discussed this in more detail. So Burke
argues that if you look at these top two photos, the left one is of Mount Robson
in Canada (very majestic mountain which I've seen myself -- beautiful
mountain) and on the right we have this field of flowers. Burke would argue that
the left photo is much more sublime, and he argues that the way in
which this image hits the eye causes a lot of strain on the eye. Seeing the
mountain like this causes strain. When something is really big the mind
struggles to take it in. The eye has to strain to kind of make sense of all this
information, this large object, and either it focuses on the whole thing or it
focuses on one part of it, which is still quite difficult to deal with. On the
other hand, if we look at the picture on the right, when we have variety, when
we have variety the mind tends to (or the eye tends to) relax.
It can't focus on everything anyway, so it just kind of relaxes and it's a
pleasurable experience. Something similar happens with darkness.
According to Burke, when we are looking at a night sky we find the experience
jarring. His reasoning is quite interesting. He suggests that when
something is dark, first of all the blackness is a kind of absence of light,
which means that at first our mind starts to relax, but then there's this
almost primal fear, where we think we are relaxing too much, and we suddenly jump
out of it. It's startling, it's jarring. Burke gives the example of sitting down
on a chair and suddenly realizing that the chair is lower than we thought, that
change of expectation is what creates this jarring moment, and Burke suggests
that for the eye looking at darkness it's the same thing. By the way Burke, also has
this interesting theory of dreaming. He says dreaming is similar in that your
mind starts to relax. It falls into darkness and then there's this moment
where the body goes, whoa, wait a second! This is scary!
This is way too relaxing. And then because of that jarring moment we start
to have dreams. Certainly an interesting theory. Finally,
when it comes to sight, Burke talks about regularity. These pillars that go on on
and on -- one of his favorite examples of the sublime -- and here again we have an
example of strain, because each one is the same. As we look on, it kind of
builds to a crescendo, right, one after the other. If all these pillars were
different, our mind could relax, but that is not the case here. That gives you a
sense, then, of how Burke treats one of the senses with all these different
examples, but it's really the same theory. It's still the same idea about strain or
relaxing, and that goes back then to ultimately to our muscles contracting or
easing up. We can say the same thing about things like hearing and taste. So
Burke says, for instance, if you listen to a foghorn in the night, that anticipation
where you know the sound is coming again -- that creates strain in your muscles. And
the same thing for taste. Rough textures tend to create strain, and smooth and
sweet food, let's say, that tends to relax us. It sounds quite plausible, but it is
also very simplistic. We just have these two
different experiences and emotions. I think the biggest takeaway here is that
Burke is trying to give us some kind of scientific explanation for what happens
when it comes to the sublime and the beautiful, and in that he probably is
ahead of his time. It's certainly a fascinating insight.