Edmund Burke and the Sublime

Edmund Burke and the sublime

We’re at the end of the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th, we have a shift in sensibility and aesthetics, so clearly when we consider Burke’s work “A Philosophical Enquiry”, we are dealing with aesthetics; thanks to this essay, Burke provides a systematic analysis of what constitutes the sublime and the various qualities which it possesses. Burke is a philosopher who theorises the sublime and the sublime was very much inspiring for romantic poets (especially but not only: the sublime inspires also novelists). We can say that Burke gave to the English Romantics a theoretical foundation. In this work, he emphasizes the role of feelings and of the imagination, that is clearly the antithesis of the neoclassical insistence on form and reason.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

He is best known for his political achievements and in a way, he is, just as Blake, considered as the one who inspired Romantics, but he was best known for his political activities, because at first he was a Whig and then he became the founder of modern conservatism. His most famous work is “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790), the reflection of the Revolution in France and he expresses that he’s mistrusted in the French revolutionaries. He was born in Dublin and then established himself in London, where he wrote this Enquiry, which precedes the publication of the Lyrical Ballads by 40 years. Burke was an empiricist and this implies that he believed that our knowledge of the world comes from the senses, from our sense of experience: our ideas and knowledge of the world derive from sense of experience (feelings, passions, perceptions, senses, and emotions). The role of Burke in romantics poetry focuses on feelings and emotions, passions.

The notion of sublime

His approach was directly inspired by John Locke’s empiricist philosophy (who is the founder of the empiricist philosophy) and the critical writings of Addison, Shaftesbury and others. His Enquiry is steeped in library theory, art criticism and rhetoric. Drawing in particular on Longinus’s “On the Sublime”, Aristotle’s “Poetics and Rhetoric”, Nicolas Boileau’s translation of “Peri Hypsous (On The Sublime)”. He considers these notions of the Sublime and he creates his theory drawing on past ideas concerning the sublime and refers to all these works in literary theory and art criticism and rhetoric.

A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful

It is a treatise of aesthetics, published in 1757. For Burke, it is the passion, not reason, which determines how and what we see, hear and feel in the world. In the Enquiry he undertakes a scientific investigation into our various passions, and uses the collected evidence to explain the nature and power of the sublime. The beautiful and the sublime as opposed. It also includes a repertoire of sublime objects (natural and artificial) and events or situations. The book is divided in five parts. It is clearly a text conveying a formal and systematic discourse on a certain topic. Each part is divided into sections and each section is generally very short and focused on a certain topic. Part two is mainly devoted to the sublime, while the others are devoted to the beautiful.

Main points

Burke asserts that ideas of pain are much more powerful than those of pleasure, and that the strongest pain of all is the fear of death, which causes terror. The sublime, then, is our strongest passion, and it is grounded in terror. Yet it is not exclusively an unpleasant emotion, for danger or pain can, in certain circumstances, give us delight. This heightened state of astonishment, where reason is driven out by “an irresistible force”, and “the mind is so entirely filled with its objects, that it cannot entertain another”, is more terrible to us when it is accompanied with a sense of the unknown (or what Burke calls obscurity). For Burke, obscurity is an absence of certainties.