Edmund Burke’s Reflections On The Sublime

Edmund Burke (1729-1797), an aesthetic writer, proposes his idea of the sublime in his 1757 philosophical inquiry into the origins of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful (1757). While many eighteenth-century commentators attempted to do the same, Burke’s Enquiry is far more comprehensive and intelligent than any of them. The history of sublime has been around since the first century C.E. Longinus, a Greek philosopher, first described his idea of sublime in his aesthetic treatise On Sublime. Latin sublimis is its root word, which is an amalgamation “sub” (upto) and “limen [literally, the top-piece of a doors].

Tom Furniss states that Burke’s inquiry has as its central task the development of a set theory principles that show that the sublime is incompatible with the beautiful. This leads to the traditional distinction between pleasure or pain. Burke also draws a distinction between pleasure, or delight as the enjoyment of “positive” stimulations to the senses. For him, the pleasure comes from the diminishing of pain or danger. Burke believes it is self-preservation that gives rise delight. The condition is that the pains and dangers inexorably associated to the former “doesn’t press too close” but are only engaged through empathy or curiosity. Positive pleasure is the companion for the second group of passions. These are those related to “the Society of the Sexes… and General Society”. The distinction between passions of self preservation and society is crucial. It leads Burke to identify his main aesthetic categories and to distinguish between them. Positive pleasure is the passion for love. However, this defeat gives the mind a sense for what lies beyond language and thought. Burke’s focus upon the negative sides of the sublime is a major departure from previous commentators. Burke regards the sublime as “alienating & diminishing” for Addison.

Burke believes that the source of sublime is “whatever makes you feel terrible, conversant about horrible objects, or produces terror-like emotions… This is because we are moving away from the “literal” causes that can cause heightened reactions, such as natural properties, and towards the possibility of sublime effects through figuration. Philip Shaw suggests that this sentence, while vague and unfathomable, conveys the sensation of sublimity by “a formal demonstration the expressive uncertain,” which may suggest that ideas are the true origins of the sublime. While Burke doesn’t admit that sublimity could be a result of language, he is consistent in suggesting it.

Burke is an empiricist who asserts that the only way to know the world is through our senses. He says this in his capacity as an empiricist. This is where Baillie’s influence can be felt, although the latter placed less importance on sight and hearing. Boulton said that Burke tried to make an aesthetic theory that would account for the full range of human experiences, despite its absurdities. Burke’s argument was completely secular, contrary to his predecessors. God is no longer necessary to ensure our experience is authentic. Burke considers the sea a source to terror because of its ability to “vibrate in all its components” to pain.

Burke also associates the sublime with masculine power, while the latter is associated with the inert feminine foil. Burke isn’t the first to make this distinction. Longinus also contains sublime speech that “ravishes” its listener. While the sublime dwells upon “large objects, terrible”, which is associated with intense sensations of terror, awe and pain, the beautiful emphasizes “small ones, pleasing” and appeals mainly at domestic affections such as love, compassion, or pity. The sublime is able to submit to the things they admire, while the beautiful can love what it submits to them. Isaac Kramnick, Burke’s Freudian biographer, observes:

The Enquiry reveals that the sublime virtues of mother and father are represented in the authority of the father, distant and venerable… Ronald Paulson uses Freud’s Oedipal Complex to Burke and references a variety of passages from Enquiry where the father and son vie for the title of mother. Paulson uses Burke’s allusions in Book II and Paradise Lost to show his point. Paulson argues that, while Satan and Death are the father and son of power, Sin is the mother-lover and daughter-lover. Paulson does not admit that Burke’s mother-role is as complex and ambivalent as Paulson suggests. Burke believes that beauty is an inherent quality of bodies that is mechanically influenced by the senses. Burke also maintains a distinction between feminine matter (feminine intellect) and masculine intelligence (male intellect). The former’s mysterious and dark power inspires wonder and awe, while the latter entertains. Shaw suggests that beauty and convention are not always as harmonious as they seem. Constant exposure to the sublime can drain its intensity, so Shaw makes the point. The sublime’s power to cause awe or fright is diminished by convention. The sublime is always under threat in this sense.

Burke writes that beauty can sometimes be a puzzle, even exaggerated, face to the eyes of the beholder.

Notice the beauty of a woman’s neck and breasts. Also, notice the smoothness of her skin. The former case requires us to accept what we see, but the latter is a flattering situation. Despite Burke’s discrediting of beauty, there is still a threat from his elite category of sublime to it. Shaw says that Burke’s “phallocentricism” is constantly threatened by the exclusion of the feminine other. This is evident in his attention to beauty’s harmful effects. Burke writes about “love” and describes how the body “falls into a type of stupor that is accompanied by an inward feeling of melting and languor.” This is in contrast to the tension and the toil involved in the sublime. Burke’s Iliad example shows that he doesn’t accept the latter assertion. He claims that Homer wanted to make us feel better about the Trojans so he gave them more social and amiable virtues than he did to the Greeks. This was to show his compassion. The Greeks are, however, made superior in both military and politics virtues. This makes them loved and admired, but not beloved. Even though pity may be extended to the defeated, veneration is for the victorious. Burke believes that love encourages identification and weakness. He suggests that sublime admiration is a better way to preserve the noble virtues, honor, and valor.

More importantly, the sublime “acts as an antidote for the dissolution caused by the beautiful. All the straining is guided by the work ethic. Exercise or labour is the best way to combat these evils (produced primarily by the beautiful). His text seems like it is in an endless war against female indolence. Burke’s assertion that society should be in alliance with domestic or feminine qualities, and self-preservation must be balanced with masculine moral exemptions is fundamentally flawed. Fergusson says:

The Enquiry shows that tyrants can be sublime, but only the beautiful can hide the disequilibrium between power and human companionship. Adam was a perfect example of this. While the sublime dominates us while the power of those who are beautiful is superior, the Enquiry suggests the opposite. It seems that the beauty with its commitment to companionable resemblance between humans disguises the disequilibrium of power so effectively that all become accomplices to our own deaths. Neal Wood suggests that Burke’s two fundamental aesthetic categories, the Sublime as well as the Beautiful, influence many of his basic political ideas. You can see his 1789 letter addressed to Lord Charlemont how Burke influenced Reflections on the Revolution. Burke sees the revolution as a spectacular spectacle, an “enigmatic thing”, which leaves people stunned and “astonished” at its existence. He also believes that it is a manifestation of sublime theatricality. Shaw also mentioned the possibility that this ferocity might extend its national boundary and infect our English home, with the germ for insurrectionary violent, which provides a disturbing counterpoint. Burke, however, acknowledges the primacy and the responses of the viewers in both cases.

Burke considers the Revolution to still be “astonishingly wonderful” in his Reflections. But, here it’s shown to have been brought about through “means”,’modes, and “instruments that were the most contemptible”, thereby linking the sublime to the absurd. Terry Eagleton and Tom Furniss have both argued that you can see in Enquiry as well as Reflections allegories of the persistence and emergence of modern bourgeois identity. Shaw claims that “the Reflections” seeks to achieve a reclamation and restoration of the Sublime. It is possible to see in both Enquiry and Reflections allegories for the creation and persistence of modern bourgeois identity. The British constitution is superior because it fosters reverence, respect, and admiration in its subjects. In other words, it is more sublime than the French system, which encourages revolutionary intemperance.

Burke asks fundamental questions about mind and matter in his account on the sublime. It is not a property that is found in objects of natural magnificence. Or is it subjective. He also suggests that it could be a result of language. Peter De Bolla asserts that while Burke doesn’t make explicit claims regarding the discursive origins, the Enquiry, and the Reflections, operate outside the conscious control, suggesting this possibility. True, greatness in dimension was considered a source of sublimity since Longinus. Addison and Hume tried to explain it psychologically, but Burke did the physiological explanation. Boulton claims that although there was some evidence of terror in Smith’s Longinus comments and Dennis, the association between the sublime and terror is not a new phenomenon. Despite Burke’s treatment the sublime being different from the British contemporaries, the theory has become the symbol of British thinking in the eighteenth century and is often compared the Kantian sublime. Vanessa Ryan claims that Burke’s view of the sublime differs from Kantian thinking in some ways, and Burke’s more physiologically sublime helps us recognize our limits.

Works Consulted

Arbor, Ann. The Philosophy Of Edmund Burke. Michigan, 1960.

Ashfield, A. and Peter de Bolla (Eds). The Sublime: A Reader on Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge University Press published Cambridge in 1996.

Burke, Edmund. James T. Boulton, Editor. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Source of Our Ideas about the Sublime or the Beautiful. London: Routledge, 2008.

Burke, Edmund. The Works of Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12). (http://www.gutenberg.org/1/5/0/4/15043/).

Cobban, Alfred. Edmund Burke and The Revolt Against Eighteenth-Century. George Allen and Unwin Limited London, 1960-2nd Edition.

Eagleton, Terry. “Aesthetics, Politics and Edmund Burke” (Source : History Workshop No. 28 (Autumn, 1989), pp. 53-62, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4288924).

Furniss T. Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology. Languages, Genders and Political Economy during Revolution. Cambridge University Press published a book in 1993.

Kramnick, Isaac. The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait Of An Ambivalent Conservative. Basic Books published a book in New York in 1977.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost, Editor Gordon Teskey. In 2005, W. W. Norton and Company released publications in both New York and London.

Ian H. Monk is the name. (ed.) Edmund Burke. Ashgate, 2009.

Monk S.H. Sublime: A Study In Critical Theories In 18th Century England. The Modern Languages Association published a work in 1960 in New York.

Quinton Anthony, “Burke on The Sublime and Beautiful”. 36, No. 136 (Jan., 1961), pp. 71-73, Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3748935).

Ryan, Vanessa L.: Burke’s Critique of Reason: The Physiological Sublime. Source: Journal of the History of Ideas. 62, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 265-279, Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3654358).

Shaw, Philip. The incredible, majestic beauty. Routledge published London and New York in 2006.

Karen Swann’s “The Sublime and the Vulgar” (published in College English, Vol. __) examines the relationship between the two concepts and how they have been understood and interpreted over time. 52, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 7-20, Published by: National Council of Teachers of English, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/377403).

Wark R. R. “A Note about James Barry and Edmund Burke” (Source : Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 17, No. 3/4 (1954), pp. 382-384, Published by: The Warburg Institute, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/750333).