Edmund Burke on Formal, Material and Efficient Causes of Beauty

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Author: Michael Funk DeckardMichael Funk Deckard
Affiliation: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Source: Causation 1500-2000, 2008
Keywords: causation, Burke  [edit]

@inbook{deckard2008e,
    author = "Deckard, Michael Funk",
    title = {Edmund Burke on Formal, Material and Efficient Causes of Beauty},
    booktitle = "Causation 1500-2000",
    year = "2008"}

Synopsis

In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and BeautifulPhilosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund BurkeEdmund Burke wrote:

Such a confusion of [the] ideas [of the sublime and beautiful] must certainly render all our reasonings upon subjects of this kind extremely inaccurate and inconclusive. Could this admit of any remedy, I imagined it could only be from a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts; from a careful survey of the properties of things which we find by experience to influence those passions; and from a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of nature, by which those properties are capable of affecting the body, and thus of exciting our passions. (Preface)

Rehabilitating Aristotelian causation for the new science of aesthetics that was developing in Britain after Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Hume, Burke devotes part I of his text to the formal cause (i.e. ‘a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts’), parts II and III to the material cause of sublimity and beauty (i.e. ‘a careful survey of the properties of things’), and part IV to the efficient cause (‘a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of nature’). By examining specifically the causation of beauty, it is possible to argue that Burke is working from both a typical early modern view of mind/body relations (i.e. whatever effects the mind also effects the body and vice versa) combined with an Aristotelian understanding of object relations (i.e. there are characteristics of an object that are causally uniform throughout nature). In this paper, I will examine closely how Burke argues for formal, material and efficient causes in the terms of subject/object relations such that certain uniform causal events in the human mind occur universally.