Name: A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Rating: 3.25 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9780192835802

Edmund Burke

The "Philosophical Enquiry" was often dismissed as a piece of mere juvenilia. However, Burke's analysis of the relationship between emotion, beauty and art form is now recognized as one of the first European works on the subject of the Sublime.

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

Tim Pendry

Edmund Burke's influential 'Philosophical Enquiry' (1757) should be considered as an early attempt at phenomenology and the psychology of aesthetics rather than as a full-blown philosophical work. He addresses language, for example, only briefly as a somewhat desultory if fruitful coda. Still, Burke's description of the 'sublime' (the human response to external stimuli that evoke awe, terror or reverence) still stands as a stimulating insight into what remains a psychological mystery - intense feeling that exists without language although it can be triggered by language. His description of 'beauty' is perhaps less successful because he is describing the norms of his time far more than he is doing in the case of the 'sublime'. The modern mind will naturally baulk at the negative associations he gives to 'blackness' and at his essentialist view of simpering women. Philosophy generally only works when it describes things regardless of contingent cultural conditions unless (as in the case of Heidegger) it is fully aware of that contingency and factors it in as part of the philosophy - in other words that the thinker is maximally aware of the conditions of his thinking. Burke is clearly not aware of the conditioning of his thinking. So, for all the acute analysis of the 'sublime ' which has been so influential in Western cultural history, I am afraid we have to say that Burke as philosopher does not quite stand the test of time. Where he does stand the test of time is as a source of insight into the eighteenth century mind as it turns a little from the Enlightenment towards recognising that our responses to the world cannot be encompassed by pure reason but have other more emotional drivers. To his credit, he does not try to rationalise the sentiments underpinning and surrounding both the sublime and the beautiful. He allows them to 'be' as experiences that we can all recognise (even if they are more culturally variable than he seems to think) and then he investigates them. This is the work of an ambitious young man - he was only 28 at the time. A certain earnestness of enquiry is present through the work. He knows he does not know. He is trying to think his way to some sort of understanding that he knows is incomplete. The book is definitely exploratory. The work remains reasonably readable today because eighteenth century prose tends to clarity more than obscurity. The longeurs only come when you see him puzzling through thoughts that were hard to clarify for himself as much as for us. Yet when he lets rip with descriptions of our actual emotional responses to the sublime and the beautiful, then the two and a half centuries that separate us from him drift away. Much that he writes is embedded not in his century but in us. And he writes well when he needs to. Curiously, based on Adam Phillips' notes (it is appropriate that the Editor is a psychotherapist and not a philosopher), the vast majority of Burke's many classical and literary quotations are marked out as 'misquoted'. Evidently Burke was churning this out in his lodgings without access to a library and from memory. One assumes that the bulk of his readers were also school classicists from memory and not from the academy or else this might have been used against him. There is perhaps an insight here into a fluidity in the use of texts that would not be tolerable in later ages and that misquotation was probably regarded as fine so long as it was not the Bible. His audience could read the Latin and scan a line. The misremembered word was not relevant to the project. Phillips refers to the eroticism of the 'Philosophical Enquiry' but that it is too strong. Burke is simply culturally enabled to describe some truths without the dead weight of the Victorian age and still retain some delicacy. Although not a great work of philosophy, this is still worth reading for its cultural importance. It enables reason to be balanced by sentiment but, more importantly, it opens the door to experimental psychology ... exactly what is happening when an external object excites an emotion? He does not answer that question adequately - there is no cause given for the effect beyond the phenomena themselves - but he is asking the right questions. He is also providing clear and credible descriptions of the relationships between observer and phenomena. His 'philosophy of language' is also not stupid. It too asks an important question which he cannot adequately answer. How is it that words alone, which have no necessary link to the reality they describe, can be formed to excite emotions such as awe, delight, desire and pleasure? This is an important question which still has no satisfactory answer. He contributes by pointing out the mystery that we read without forming clear pictures as we read and yet we 'understand' something from the linking of the words rather than any deep consideration of what they portray. Read any line of 'literature' and ask yourself if you actually envision each word and each event clearly rather than construct a meaning internally that, on careful consideration, is seemingly disconnected from the 'pictures' the language should represent and you will see what I mean. These final observations by Burke on language are worth dwelling on although having described the mystery he has only the most limited account of what is going on. As before, he asks the right question, supplies the evidence of the problem and then moves on. The science and philosophy he uses may be state of the art in 1757 (he knows his Locke) and he is a philosopher to the degree that he does what helps to define philosophy (asking awkward questions of the facts of the matter) but he does not do much more than that. What he does manage to do is get his readers to see that abstract ratiocination can only go so far in describing our responses to the world and that our emotional life, especially in relation to core underlying drives like fear and erotic desire, needs to be observed more closely in order to understand it.

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

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