Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T05:30:11.437Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Burke’s Aesthetic Psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

David Dwan
Affiliation:
Queen's University Belfast
Christopher Insole
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Get access

Summary

Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; expanded second edition, 1759) acts as a sort of midwife at the birth of modern aesthetic theory, but really it belongs to the pre-history of the discipline. Burke never uses the term ‘aesthetic’, and he is unlikely to have known that the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten had recently adopted the word to describe the ‘criticism of taste’ in his treatise Aesthetica (1750). The true etymology of ‘aesthetic’ – the Greek aisthetikos means ‘pertaining to what the senses perceive’ – was much insisted upon by Immanuel Kant in 1781, who pointed out that any such science is by definition empirical, and confined to the mechanics of sensual perception. Modern aesthetics begins with Kant’s disappointment at Burke’s refusal to move beyond such preliminaries in the Philosophical Enquiry. Kant calls for a new a priori or ‘transcendental aesthetics’, one that establishes a synthetic system for how sensible objects ought to be judged, rather than merely reporting how they are judged. Likewise, Hegel declares at the beginning of his lectures on aesthetics that he must break with the old application of ‘aesthetics’ to works of art ‘with regard to the feelings they were supposed to produce, as, for instance, the feeling of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, and so on’. Burke, for his own part, insists that the most interesting effects of sublime and beautiful objects strike us before we can reason about them or judge them. By the standards of his contemporaries, Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry was not particularly philosophical.

And yet the Philosophical Enquiry is much more than a museum piece, consigned to the footnotes of philosophy by the German Idealists. It demands to be read in the context of its own controversies – even though the polemical nature of Burke’s engagement with those controversies is often concealed behind a screen of polite methodicality.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Hegel, G. W. F., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)
Scholar, Richard, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Cronk, Nicholas, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 2002)
‘Longinus’, On the Sublime, trans. W. H. Fyfe, rev. Donald Russell, (Cambridge MA and London: Loeb Classical Library, 1996)
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. Rouse, W. H. D. (Cambridge, MA and London: Loeb Classical Library, 1989)
Porter, James I, ‘Lucretius and the Poetics of the Void’, in A. Monet (ed.), Le Jardin Romain: Epicurisme et Poésie à Rome. Mélanges offerts à Mayotte Bollack (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses de l’Université Charles-de-Gaulle, 2003)
Wilson, Catherine, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Osler, Margaret J., ‘Gassendi on Fortune, Fate and Divination’, in Margaret J. Osler (ed.), Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)
Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London: Blackwell, 1990)
Furniss, Tom, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Cicero, De Finibus, (trans.) Rackham, H., (Cambridge, MA and London: Loeb Classical Library, 1989)
Horace, De Arte Poetica in Satires, Epistles, Art of Poetry (trans.) H. R. Fairclough (Loeb Classical Library 1929)
Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man (Part 1, 1790) in Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Mackinosh, James, Vindiciae Gallicae, ed. Donald Winch (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006)
Wollstonecraft, MaryA Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in Political Writings, ed. Janet Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×