Burke's sympathy for taste

Eighteenth-Century Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 379-393

  Huhn, Tom ^a  

^a WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60949262287     PISSN: 00132586     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/ecs.2002.0027     Document Type: Review

References (23)

1. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 63; hereafter cited as Enquiry
2. See the dissertation by Martin Gammon, Kant and the Decline of Classical Mimesis (Univ. of California at Berkeley, 1997), for a thorough survey of the history of the term
3. Keith Michael Baker, "Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History," in Main Trends in Cultural History: Ten Essays, ed. Willem Melching and Wygee Velema (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994), 95-120
4. For the eighteenth century, "beauty" appears to have been hardly more stable than "society." See Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain; The Analysis of Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), viii
5. Jones's book seeks to respond to a call made by Ronald Paulson that "a narrative of the Beautiful . . . seems to me, a corrective long-due" (Hogarth, Vol.III: Art and Politics, 1750-1764 [Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 1993], xvi|
6. as well as a need noted by Frances Ferguson for more attention to be paid to the beautiful; see her Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (London: Routledge, 1992), 44-5. Ferguson complained as early as 1981 of an overly hasty "rush to the sublime" (68) by critics in her "The Sublime of Edmund Burke, or the Bathos of Experience," Glyph 8 (1981): 62-78
7. I note the title of a recent volume which nonetheless elides beauty altogether, edited by Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, The Sublime: A Reader in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996)
8. A potentially profitable place to reflect on the relation of Burke's aesthetics to his political writings and political life might well be from within his initial thoughts in the Enquiry with regard to the relation between original and imitation. I would suggest that in these early thoughts Burke is already incipiently concerned with the question of how society appropriately reproduces itself, though the Enquiry's focus - as we shall see - is on how reproduction first occurs in sense, imagination, and taste. A recent book that succeeds in discussing the connections between Burke's aesthetics and politics is Stephen White's Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1994)
9. White is taken to task for such an entanglement by Linda Zerrilli in "No Thrust, No Swell, No Subject? A Critical Response to Stephen K. White," Political Theory 22 (1994), 323-28
10. For an interesting argument as to how the Enquiry might be subversive of the very gendered roles its presents, see Amanda Gilroy, "The Discourse of Beauty and the Construction of Subjectivity in Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry, " Liverpool Studies in Language and Discourse 1 (1993): 45-70
11. see Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. Angus Ross (London: Penguin, 1982), 344-49
12. Peter Melvin formulates this same relation in regard to Burke's conception of politics: "The secret of an enduring civil society is that the natural and artificial, reality and imitation, are so combined as to avoid intense public concern with one or the other" ("Burke on Theatricality and Revolution," Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 [1975]: 447-68; quoted at 461)
13. nd ed. (London: Longman, 1993), 130 ff
14. Although Burke did not yet have the term "aesthetic" at his disposal, of course, we might well take its equivalent to have had the rather broad range of sensuous life in general, just as Friedrich Schiller, for example, condemned Burke's aesthetics as limited solely to the realm of "mere life": "Zum blossen Leben macht die Schönheit Burke . . . ." (On the Aesthetic Education of Man; In a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967[, 102-103; 15th Letter)
15. A similarly sweeping, though perhaps more judicious assessment is offered by Ernest Tuveson: "Paramount for Burke, as for Locke and for Hobbes, is the sense of biological well-being. Our sense of life and health and energy is both the efficient and the final cause of aesthetic response" (The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1960], 170]
16. Steven Knapp notes that "Burke's striking discussion of ambition . .. concludes with the only direct reference to Longinus in the body of the Enquiry" (Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985], 69)
17. David Solkin recognizes the pervasiveness of imitation as both social and aesthetic phenomenon in the eighteenth century and likewise accords Burke a prominent place in having formulated, following Shaftesbury, a kinship among various kinds of imitation; see Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), 220-21
18. Howard Caygill argues for an overarching providential aspect to Burke's aesthetics by emphasizing the calculated character of his account of the passions: "The passions are 'calculated' to contribute to society and self-preservation: the pleasure in the beautiful excites the sociable passions of sympathy, imitation and ambition, while the pain of the sublime raises the self-preservative passions of pain and danger. . . . Pleasure expresses the 'bond of sympathy' by which God binds society, and this bond is ensured by a 'proportionate delight'" (Art of Judgement [Oxford: Blackwell, 1989], 81)
19. Isaac Kramnick comments on the connection between imitation, sympathy, and beauty: "A basic part of beauty is the repetition of form, the lack of sudden deviation. This is the principle of rhythm, as in the delicate smoothness and swells of the female body. The aesthetic principle has its social counterpart, according to Burke. Sympathy with others, a concern with what others feel, leads to a form of repetition, an imitation of what they do. [ . . . ] The imitation of others leads to a repetitious rhythm in life, a smoothness and lack of deviation or abrupt change" (The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative [New York: Basic Books, 1977|, 95)
20. A remark by Raymond Williams, though made in reference to Burke's Reflections, is helpful here: "In [Burke's] view, there was nothing in any way accidental about any particular form [of society]; the idea of society was only available to men in the form in which they had inherited it" (Culture and Society: 1780-1950 [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958], 10). If we substitute experience for inherit and allow a wide meaning to idea, then Williams might concur with our constiruai of artworks - and indeed aesthetic experience - as repositories of whatever it is that constitutes the social
21. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke: occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), reprinted in The Vindications, ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 1997)
22. nd ed. [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986], 99)
23. th ed. (London, 1727), vol. 1, "Soliloquy: or Advice to an Author."