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.