A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

“There is in all men a sufficient remembrance of the original natural causes of pleasure, to enable them to bring all things offered to their senses to that standard, and to regulate their feelings and opinions by it.”

Edmund Burke argues that pleasure has a profound role in how humans perceive and think about beauty and art. Pleasure is directly associated with beauty. A person’s taste is determined by how much pleasure or pain the object delivers to them through sensory impression, contributing to the theme of Aesthetics and Sensory Information.

“Thus the pleasure of all the senses, of the sight, and even of the Taste, the most ambiguous of the senses, is the same in all, high and low, learned and unlearned.”

Burke here suggests that all people have the same taste. How well these tastes develop is dependent upon the level of their experience. A person can help their tastes evolve by increasing their sensory experiences and education. Burke points to beer as an example of this. Many people do not like the taste of beer when they first start drinking it. However, as they increase their experience with the beverage—and their encounters with pleasure—their taste for beer develops.

“The principle of this knowledge is very much accidental, as it depends upon experience and observation, and not on the strength or weakness of any natural faculty.”

Burke professes that any individual may have sophisticated taste by increasing their experiences—a radical idea for his period. His argument denounces the notion that some people are born with better taste or breeding that contributes to their more sophisticated palate.