… And the beautiful? Revisiting Edmund Burke’s “double aesthetics”

Needless to say, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757, 2nd ed. 1759) – the sole contribution to aesthetics by this writer, whose work is primarily devoted to questions of political history, political theory, and the foundations of the commonwealth – is profoundly indebted to all those British thinkers before him who in the first half of the eighteenth century undertook a critical review of the aesthetic norms of classicism, and of the classicist ideal of the education of a gentleman. Although Burke relied on many ideas found in Francis Hutcheson and Joseph Addison, to name only these, his Enquiry, by declaring, as has been noted, an “open revolt against neo-classical principles,” also thoroughly distinguishes itself from his predecessors. It is true, of course, that all of eighteenth-century British aesthetics is inseparable from the thought of John Locke and David Hume. But Burke was the first to propose an uncompromising empiricist – that is, sensualistic – account of aesthetic experience, and to have radically uncoupled this experience from extrinsic considerations (particularly, moral and religious), which still dominate Hutcheson’s An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). In seeking to account for aesthetic experience on the basis of sober empirical observation alone, Burke stresses the sensualistic nature of aesthetic impressions by conceiving of the beautiful and the sublime primarily in terms of ideas and passions. By the same stroke, the sensual qualities of the particular objects that affect the senses and the imagination in such a way as to provoke these ideas, or passions, acquire major importance. It is on these premises that Burke, in the spirit of Isaac Newton, seeks to establish “an exact theory of our passions.” It is a theory that inquires into their efficient – that is, physiological – causes, and that rigorously coordinates the feelings of the sublime and beautiful with the affections caused by the objects from which they spring. It is precisely the utmost consistency with which Burke applies Locke’s empiricism to aesthetics, as well as his Newtonian methodology for discovering fixed laws regulating the domain of the passions, that allowed him to approach aesthetic experience as a realm of its own.