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Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
BURKE’S SENSORY SUBLIME AND HIS ASTONISHING INFINITY
Abstract
The question I ask in this paper is, at least ostensibly, a simple one: what was the
significance of Burke’s incorporation of the category of infinity into his
reflections on the sublime? In allowing that each of the five senses could produce
a sublime passion, and also in advancing the passions as the explanatory basis of
the experiential phenomena of beauty and the sublime, Burke firmly enrolled
the sensory and affective, and their combined workings, as integral to a domain
of experience endowed with its own specific value and irreducible to the
operations of rational judgement. In fact, judgement was key to Burke’s theory
of the sublime, but in a way that was radically different from the role assigned
to it in the main sources he was drawing on: the writings of Shaftesbury,
Hutcheson, Addison and Hume. In this paper I explore Burke’s references to
infinity in his analysis of the sublime with a view to highlighting its significance
for understanding the way in which he stages and conceives the relation
between the sensory, affective and rational.
While Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime
and the Beautiful is expressly focussed on the question of origins, the proverbial
jury is still out on the question of the greater logic presiding over the kinds of
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
experience being examined, their teleology.1 [End Page 157] Although Burke’s
text has always been considered an important chapter in the history of what
would evolve as aesthetic thought, it is this aspect of Burke’s text, that which
relates to the teleology of the sublime and the beautiful, which has most
benefited from recent scholarship examining the text’s intersections with
currents of thought traditionally excluded from histories of Taste or aesthetic
thought, and proper to his own historical moment.2 It is doubly significant that
the first book-length study entirely devoted to this particular text of Burke’s
bears as title The Science of Sensibility. Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry:
the object of study is the text in and of itself, and the collected papers explore
its debts and innovations with respect to the diverse strands of reflection that
make up that broad-based social and intellectual phenomenon we know as the
culture of sensibility.3
As one would expect of a text emanating from such an environment, the
Enquiry teems with references to feelings, affections, emotions, passions, nerves
and fibres. When adumbrating what is the bodily effect of the sublime, Burke
draws on contemporary medical theories (notably those of George Cheyne and
1 All citations from the text in this paper are from the second edition of 1759 in Boulton’s edition (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, edited and with an introduction by James T. Boulton, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987. Hereafter the text will be referred to as the Enquiry. To avoid cumbersome referencing I have limited references to part and section number. In conformity with standard practice, they are indicated in Roman numerals. 2 The complaint voiced by Vanessa L. Ryan to the effect that the physiological basis of Burke’s theory had been “largely ignored and belittled” by the Burke scholars did not go unheard (“The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason”, Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (April 2001), 265-279. It should be pointed out that there is considerable common ground between the reading of the Enquiry advanced in this paper, and that advanced by Ryan. I part company with her on what she identifies as the “moral power of the sublime”. When Ryan argues that the “sublime delight strengthens the bond of sympathy” she singles out a feature of Burke’s analysis that is finally inessential. In II, V, Burke itemises three categories of experience liable to generate the sublime, summarily: danger, mechanical causes, modification of power. In this paper I concentrate on the most neglected of these categories with a view to identifying what is common to all three: what Burke designates as Terror or Astonishment. 3 The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, eds. Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard, Dordrecht, London, Springer, 2012. The text will hereafter be referred to as The Science of Sensibility.
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
of his schoolfellow Richard Brocklesby) as also on what scholars call
“environmentalist” thought: theories about the influence of the environment
on human nature and thus on cultures.4 [End Page 158] Drawing creatively on
medical treatises of the time on the need for diet and exercise, on the role of the
fibres and nerves in ensuring the affective and mental wellbeing of the
individual, Burke also borrows ideas from the literature exploring the ways in
which climate could explain the varying degrees of sensibility associated with
different cultures. In all of these areas of speculation there emerged a body of
thought emphasising the positive benefits of firm nerves and fibres, of vigour
and robustness. There is a “masculinising” turn in the culture of sensibility which
to a significant extent counters the earlier emphasis on delicacy and extreme
susceptibility, and Burke’s theory registers and promotes this turn.
Burke, we know, was committed to severing the experience of the sublime
and the beautiful, solicited by the senses or the imagination or the combined
workings of both, from the operations of rational judgement.5 These experiences
are, with regard to the perceiver, a function of “the mechanical structure of our
4 See Aris Sarafianos, “Hyporborean Meteorologies of Culture: Art’s Progress and Medical Environmentalism in Arbuthnot, Burke and Barry”, The Science of Sensibility, 69-90. See also related studies by the same author: “The Contractility of Burke's Sublime and Heterodoxies in Medicine and Art », Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Jan., 2008), 23-48; and “Pain, Labor, and the Sublime: Medical Gymnastics and Burke's Aesthetics”, Representations, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Summer 2005), 58-83. 5 See the Enquiry I, XIII where Burke explains that the passions excited in the experience of the sublime or of the beautiful are wrongly attributed to the influence of reason. In III, II, Burke points out that “beauty demands no assistance from our reasoning; even the will is unconcerned; the appearance of beauty as effectually causes some degree of love in us, as the application of ice or fire produced the ideas of heat or cold”. Any attempt to translate into modern medical theory and terminology Burke’s understanding of the “violent tension of contraction of the muscular fibres” which causes the “delight” caused by the sublime involves a shift from fibres and muscles to hormones and molecules. Burke’s pleasurable “delight” is analogous in many ways to the phenomenon we understand today in terms of the effects of adrenaline or epinephrine. Like Burke’s delight, the pleasures of an adrenaline rush are “antecedent to any reasoning, by an instinct that works to its own purposes, without our concurrence” (I, XIV). As Burke suggests, human beings deliberately seek out such experiences. Contemporary academic literature on this subject is extensive, and the recent wave of scholarly enthusiasm for the neurosciences is, of course, considerably amplifying the bibliography. My grateful thanks to Renata Jackson and Sarah Hatchuel who alerted me to the mass of scholarly work on the subject: too prodigious to make references meaningful!
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
bodies, or from the natural frame and constitution of our minds” (I, XIII), and,
with regard to the objects of perception, a function of “properties of the natural
object”. The sublime, as beauty, is “some quality in bodies, acting mechanically
[End Page 159] upon the human mind by the intervention of the senses” (III, XII).
The experience of beauty, as of the sublime, is the outcome of a co-incidence:
features of the constitution of the human mind determine a particular response
to certain combinations of properties of objects of the external world. There are,
says Burke:
laws of connection which Providence has established between certain
motions and configurations of bodies, and certain consequent feelings in
our mind by which natural objects affect us (V, I).
Burke privileges the sublime over the “relaxing” beautiful because of the way it
tones the nervous system. A perceived source of danger or pain, pressing closely,
but not too closely, keeping that is a “certain distance”, invigorates the “fine[… ]
and […] delicate organs [End Page 160] on which and by which the imagination
and perhaps the other mental powers act” (IV, VI). Burke surmises that the
passions and the understanding “make use of some fine corporeal instruments
in [their] operation”, and it is these that are provided with salutary exercise
thanks to the sublime (IV, VI).
On the subject of the teleology of the sublime, the editors of The Science
of Sensibility suggest that this physiological exercise has moral consequences.
“Burke’s physiological theory,” they say, is closely tied to his view of morality”
because “it is the sublime, through its tensions and labours that more likely leads
to virtue in contrast to the indolence and relaxation of beauty.”6 That is a very
6 “Preface”, The Science of Sensibility, xv.
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
pithy summary indeed, and potentially misleading. Burke, as we know, was
opposed to all versions of “moral sense theory”, resting, in his view, on
foundations both “visionary and unsubstantial” (III, XI). Morality, or “the science
of our duties” is firmly based on “reason, our relations, and our necessities” and
the sublime and the beautiful affect the individual in ways that are, precisely,
independent of the operations of reason. It is only by a circuitous route, and only
in the most minimal formulation possible – approximating closely today’s “a
healthy body is a healthy mind” – that one could deduce from Burke’s sublime
any moral implications whatsoever. It is true, however, that the sublime has
physiological benefits which explain its privileged status relative to beauty. Burke
doesn’t delve into the nature of the “fine and delicate organs” which ensure
communication between the senses, the imagination and the reasoning faculty,
the “corporeal instruments” by which the different mental powers act and
interact, but the experience of the sublime is clearly something like a work-out,
firming up tone, increasing suppleness, etc. Given that the senses, the
imagination and reason are all part of a single continuum linked together via this
physiological communication, one could deduce that this improved physical
condition of the whole can only be accompanied by positive consequences.7
Burke himself makes the comparison between the physical exercise or labour
necessary for well-being, emotional and mental, and the similar needs of the
finer and more delicate organs necessary to the functioning of the imagination
and the other mental powers.8 It remains the case, however, that while in our
8 Burke’s text reads as follows: “Now, as a due exercise is essential to the coarse muscular parts of the constitution, and that without this rousing they would become languid, and diseased, the very same rule holds with regard to [the finer and more delicate organs, on which and by which, the imagination, and perhaps the other mental powers act]; to have them in proper order, they must be shaken and worked to a proper degree” (Enquiry IV, VI)
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
times we generally suppose that improved physical condition has positive
implications for mental wellbeing, we would hesitate to infer from that
reasoning any very significant consequences in terms of morality; and Burke was
similarly wary.
This physiological theory of the invigorating effects of the sublime as
salutary exercise for the “finer parts of the system”, plays a cardinal role in
Burke’s Enquiry, constituting indeed one of its most characteristic features both
with respect to the reflection on beauty and taste that preceded its publication,
and to the more philosophical aesthetic theories that were developing in
Germany. Important features of Burke’s analysis, however, seem to escape from
the critical purview of today’s scholarship, most notably those bearing on Burke’s
references to what he calls the “principle of Infinity” (IV, VIII). Burke says that:
“The ideas of eternity, and infinity, are among the most affecting we have” (II,
IV). He also says that “hardly anything can strike the mind with its greatness,
which does not make some sort of approach towards [End Page 161] infinity” (II,
IV). In part two, when Burke methodically outlines the various material causes of
the sublime, he announces in section VIII that “Another source of the sublime is
infinity; if it does not rather belong to the last”. When Burke says that infinity is
perhaps the last source of the sublime, he is suggesting that it is perhaps the
ultimate cause of the sublime, the vital and preeminent cause of the sublime.
“Infinity”, he says ”has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful
horror, which is the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime” (II, VIII).
And yet, somewhat surprisingly, it is fair to say that infinity does not figure very
prominently at all in the research agendas of Burke scholars.9 In what follows,
9 In The Science of Sensibility, the word “infinity” does not figure in the index. And that is not an indexation error either because neither the term nor the concept figures in any significant way in any of the excellent critical analyses which make up the book.
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
Burke’s use of this notion of infinity occupies the foreground of analysis with a
view to illustrating the ways in which this dimension of Burke’s thought sheds
light on the specificities of what emerges – tentatively sketched in the text – as
the ends of the sublime. To understand Burke we need to understand what it
means not to make the value of the sublime finally subservient to reason.10
Burke identifies three categories of “motions or configurations of bodies”
liable to provoke in the human subject the experience of the [End Page 162]
sublime. They are respectively: the idea of danger, phenomena producing a
similar effect from mechanical causes, modifications of power (IV, V). In part
four then Burke sets out to explain why the sources of the sublime outlined in
part two provoke the body, and all its nerves and fibres, etc. to become as tense
as they would under the influence of real pain. It is here that he explains why,
under certain conditions, obscurity can generate that tension, or vastness, or
magnitude in buildings, and of course infinity, or what he calls (for reasons we
shall see) the “artificial infinite”. Burke is quite right then when he observes that
“it will require something more trouble to show that such examples as I have
given of the sublime in the second part, are capable of producing a mode of pain
and of being thus allied to terror”: some of the phenomena he has to treat of
10 As is well known, the most important difference between Burke’s sublime and that of Kant lies here. Kant postulates a dynamic relation between aesthetic and rational ideas. Endowed with value of its own, the sublime is finally subservient to the ends of reason, as the experience of the sublime makes the subject aware of the inadequacy of sensibility and imagination. The “aesthetic idea […] serves the […] rational idea as a substitute for logical presentation, but with the proper function, however, of animating the mind by opening out for it a prospect into a field of kindred representations stretching beyond its ken” (Kant, Critique of Judgement, Analytic of the Sublime, § 49, 315, in Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, translation and analytical indexes by James Creed Meredith, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991). In Kant, even if the sublime brings to rational consciousness the limits of its own concepts and in that sense “quickens the cognitive faculties” (§ 49,316), it also brings consciousness of the limits of sensibility and the mind is finally “incited to abandon sensibility, and employ itself upon ideas involving higher finality” (§ 23, 246). The sublime has value, but its ultimate teleology depends on its expediency in terms of the ends of reason.
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
can be relatively easily linked to a mode of pain,11 but certainly not all of them.
Indeed, most of the examples concern particular configurations of objects “from
which we cannot probably apprehend any danger” but which nevertheless “have
a similar effect” and “operate in a similar manner” (IV, III). Paradoxically, the
sources of the sublime which do not “cause terror” outweigh those which do and
it is among these sources that we find his analysis of the artificial infinite, which
is, we remember, perhaps the ultimate source of the sublime. In the category of
sources of the sublime which concern “things not dangerous” but which
nonetheless “produce a passion like Terror”, infinity seems to figure alongside
and on a par with many others, like obscurity and vastness for example, but in
fact infinity does not really figure on a par with those other sources of the
sublime which, without causing terror, have a similar effect. Vastness and
obscurity, to stay with those examples, can in fact become sources of the sublime
only on condition that they conform to what Burke calls the principles of the
“artificial infinite”.12 [End Page 163]
Before looking in more detail at the way in which Burke presents the
experiences in which, via the senses and the imagination, the subject encounters
affectively “the idea of infinity” (II, IX and again II, X), it is worth looking briefly
at the differences between the way in which Burke figures this experience and
the way Addison does. Addison had described the pleasures of the imagination
to be derived from “a spacious horizon”. A spacious horizon is, he says,
11 The explanations bearing on “greatness of dimension” essentially relies on the idea of the strain caused to the muscles of the eye. 12 Vastness, per se, is not a source of the sublime, as Burke explains in the Enquiry IV, XIII. It is only when vastness is conveyed in conformity with the principles of infinity that it can acquire that status.
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
is an Image of Liberty, where the Eye has Room to range abroad, to
expatiate at large on the Immensity of its Views, and to lose it self amidst
the Variety of Objects that offer themselves to its Observation.
These pleasures of the imagination derive from the fact that they figure,
represent visually, the pleasure individuals derive from freedom, a feeling of
freedom. As Addison says, the “Mind of Man naturally hates everything that
looks like a Restraint upon it”. Quite consistently therefore Addison dissociates
these pleasures from the intellectual pleasures of the understanding, those to
be derived from contemplating infinity:
Such wide and undetermined Prospects are as pleasing to the Fancy, as
the Speculations of Eternity or Infinitude are to the Understanding13.
Conversely, in Burke it will be the work of the senses and of the imagination to
access infinity affectively. There can of course be no question of real access to
infinity, but by means of what he calls the “principle of infinity”, which involves
exclusively the senses and the imagination, the individual’s experience of the
sublime replicates affectively what it would feel like to access infinity.
What defines the sublime in terms of its effect is that it places the body in
a state of maximum tension, it causes, that is, an “unnatural tension of the
nerves” (IV, III). In order for this effect to be produced, Burke advances that two
conditions must be met: the phenomena or configurations of objects must
conform to the two principles of succession and uniformity. These are his
principles of infinity. The same sound must be repeated or the same image. The
sounds and the images must be in themselves sufficiently forceful to create an
13 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, number 412, Monday June 23, 1712.
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
initial tension [End Page 164] which is then prolonged by succession or
repetition.
We are not so powerfully affected with any one impulse, unless it be one
of a prodigious force indeed, as we are with a succession of similar
impulses (IV, VIII).
What is important here is that the repetition of the same must allow no
possibility of relaxation of the initial tension and that the impetus caused by
repetition generate a tension which continues on beyond the actual sense
impression. Burke suggests that the second forceful impression has an impact
even greater than that of the first impression (because of the additional tensions
generated both by expectation and surprise, IV, XI), and so on with the third and
fourth, etc. and that the combined effect is to create a kind of momentum which
becomes so strong that even after the forceful impressions cease, the senses
continue on mechanically producing the same reaction as if they had actually
received the impression:
The senses strongly affected in some one manner, cannot quickly change
their tenor, or adapt themselves to other things; but they continue in their
old channel until the strength of the first mover decays” (II, VIII).
Discussing the way in which sound can generate the sublime Burke observes that
“if the vibration be not similar at every impression, it can never be carried
beyond the number of actual impressions” (IV, XII). The same is the case for
visual impressions. We can take the example of a series of colonnades, being of
course one of Burke’s examples. According to Burke, the effect of the first
colonnade is to cause a vibration, which is then increased by the second
colonnade and so on “stroke after stroke” as he says, and until the eye exercised
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
in this “one particular way cannot lose that object” and itself prolongs the
experience beyond the actual sensory impression of the last pillar.
Normally the analysis of darkness should have been conducted along
similar lines. It should have been important here also that darkness as a sensory
experience conform to the principles of “succession and repetition”. Burke
describes the initial effect of darkness when it causes a muscular tension, the
pupil is enlarged and the radial fibres of the iris “come to be so contracted, as to
strain the nerves that compose it beyond their natural tone” (IV, XVI). That is a
description of the [End Page 165] forceful initial impression, but the “repetition
and succession” principle requires a first forceful impression and the repetition
of that impression, whereas darkness is rather a continuum. In fact, we have to
turn back to part two to find the answer because it is there, and not in the fourth
part, that he explains that “a light now appearing, and now leaving us, and so off
and on, is even more terrible than total darkness” (II, XIX). So, finally, the analysis
of darkness observes the same logic as that of other forms of the “artificial
infinite” (I, III and elsewhere).
Artificial infinity is not real infinity, not the absolute space and absolute
time that Burke was familiar with from his reading of Newton. Infinity in those
terms is by definition not accessible to sensory perception. Infinity is, as Newton
had argued, and as Burke had understood, the condition of possibility of our
measures. The artificial unity Burke theorises is not simply endless or nearly
endless repetition or succession of our measures either. Burke is quite clear on
that subject. Via the senses, the mind receives forceful and repetitive
impressions that generate a tension close to that which would be the outcome
of the infliction of actual pain. And those impressions create in the imagination
the idea of the sublime, which is also an imaginative idea of infinity. The artificial
infinity refers to specific configurations that are susceptible of provoking in the
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
imagination of the perceiving subject the impression of infinity and producing
the “same effects as if they really were so”.
This close reading of the text has focussed on lines of argument destined
to fall off the radar of studies situating the text in the context of eighteenth
century discourse on the sublime, but also of those studies situating it more
generally in the culture of sensibility. Concerning the ends of the sublime, its
teleology, it seems clear that Burke is not uniquely interested in the physiological
effects of the experience, the invigoration of the “fine and delicate organs” (even
if that invigoration is a necessary accompaniment). This experience, triggered we
might say by phenomena obeying the “Principle of infinity” depend initially [End
Page 166] on sensory impressions, but the imagination is carried beyond them
and with such force that they render inoperable the activity of reason. That is
how Burke describes astonishment, which is, we remember, the highest degree
of the sublime. Astonishment is:
that state of soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some
degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object,
that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that
object which employs it (II, I).
The individual, we understand, is at first so intensely affected by the sensory
impressions or the imaginary (or the combination of the two) that the reasoning
faculty is suspended in its operations. The mind is so entirely absorbed by the
activity of the imagination that judgement is unseated. As Burke observes:
Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced
by [our reasonings], it anticipates [them], and hurries us on by an
irresistible force.
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
Burke was of course just one of several theorists to have dissociated the
experience of beauty or the sublime from the operations of judgement: in their
different ways Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Dubos, to name only the more well
known of his predecessors in this domain, had all dissociated affect from
judgement, or at least insisted that it was antecedent to judgement. In none of
his forebears however do we find judgment being precisely disarmed in the
experience of the sublime.14
This disarming of reason cannot be dismissed as a fortuitous [End Page
167] element in the overall theory. Indeed, it accounts for many aspects of the
theory that are for us, as they would also be for the German theorists of his own
time, decidedly strange and hard to account for otherwise. Describing the
artificial infinite, the ultimate source of the sublime, and astonishment, the
highest degree of the sublime, Burke describes a sensory and imaginative
experience in which the individual is so wholly and entirely entranced and
enthralled that s/he lives the experience of reason entirely abdicating its hold.
We cannot help noticing the way in which the descriptions of the “artificial
infinite” seem almost to anticipate the techniques of Mesmer. Burke seems to
describe a kind of fearful hypnotic procedure. Mendelssohn regretted that
Burke’s references to the effects of sound as sublime were so essentially
14 One reason why Burke’s sublime of astonishment gets overlooked is that it is often hastily assumed that we are dealing here with a kind of religious awe similar to what we find in Addison. In fact the very significance difference is that just as Burke distances himself from Addison on the question of the pleasure to be derived from scenes of misery, in more or less exactly the same way he distances himself from Addison on the question of the infinite. Burke insisted, against Addison, that the sympathetic pleasures were independent of rational reflection. For Addison the sublime experience relies on conscious reflection on the omnipotence of the creator, and also the feeling of dignity on the part of the perceiver for possessing the mental capacity to comprehend this scale of grandeur. See Richard Bourke on Addison’s sublime, « Pity and Fear: Providential Sociability in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry », The Science of Sensibility, 160.
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
unmusical. And indeed how well he might!15 In Burke it is “excessive loudness”
which is capable of “overpowering the soul, suspending its action, and filling it
with terror” (II, XVII). Or the “shouting of multitudes” which “so amazes and
confounds the imagination, that in this staggering, and hurry of the mind, the
best established tempers can scarcely forbear being born down” (II, XVII). Or a
light piercing intermittently a terrible darkness.
The teleology of Burke’s sublime has been accounted for in different ways.
Many indeed are those who have argued, like Peter de Bolla, that the “figure in
the carpet” is, finally, the Godhead: that properly understood, the sublime is a
religious experience.16 Other readings extrapolate from the text a “theory of
catharsis”.17 More recent criticism has privileged the importance of the
“physiological exercise” that accompanies and is indeed inherent to the sublime.
In fact, it would certainly be possible to argue that when Burke insisted that his
explanations of the “efficient cause” of sublimity and beauty should never be
mistaken for the “ultimate cause” he was quite [End Page 168] consciously
limiting his remit to providing a “more distinct knowledge of our passions”,
piously abstaining from proffering any hypotheses as to the greater logic
underlying why things should be as they are. Or, to give the same idea a more
Lockean formulation, that just as knowledge of nominal essences should never
be mistaken for knowledge of the real essences “of which they are the supposed
15 See, Herman Parret, « From the Enquiry (1757) to the Fourth Kritisches Wäldchen (1769): Burke and Herder on the division of the senses”, The Science of Sensibility, 91-106. 16 Peter Bolla, The Discourse on the Sublime, Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject, Oxford, B. Blackwell, 1989, 63 and infra. It is an ongoing supposition in the reading being presented here that the Godhead remains behind the scenes providentially ensuring the laws of connection that link “certain configurations of bodies” and certain “feelings” in the mind of his creatures. Burke was certainly not going to suggest that the encounter that was “as if” with infinity was an affective encounter with the Godhead. 17 See Richard Bourke, « Pity and Fear : Providential Sociability in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry », The Science of Sensibility, 159-60.
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
foundation and cause”,18 so too, Burke distinguished between knowledge of the
fact that “certain affections of the body produce such a distinct emotion of the
mind”(IV, I) or of the fact that the body is affected by the mind and the mind by
the body, with knowledge of how those reciprocal influences take place. And if
it is beyond the scope of human understanding to ever understand how the body
interacts with the mind, it is surely all the more so to determine why those
specific interactions take place.
What we find, and what we tend to forget, as it seems to me, is the way
in which an Empiricist like Burke occupies a knowable world subtended by an
unknown and forever unknowable infinite universe. Real essences subtend the
world that is the object of sense perception, the world we know and try to know
better in the terms of our measures. Locke’s ideas have the same status vis-à-vis
the real, as Newton’s relative time, space, place and motion have to their
absolute counterparts.19 Indeed Burke’s criticism of Newton on the subject of
ether has to be understood in these terms. While we assume that ether was for
Newton a necessary supposition of the laws of gravity, for Burke, Newton was
stepping out of the domain of “our measures” and advancing an hypothesis
about what lay beyond those measures: the utterly unknowable infinite; it was,
in Burke’s view, a very incautious move indeed.
If we return then finally to the overall structure of the Enquiry, it should
be possible to situate this reading of the sublime within the more general
18 John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, edited with an introduction by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975, III, 6, 6, 35-37. 19 See the scholium to Definition 8 in the Principia (Newton, The Principia. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, preceded by A Guide to Newton's Principia by I. Bernard Cohen, trans. I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999, 408-415.
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
framework of the theory. Burke, we remember, analyses the sublime and the
beautiful from three perspectives:
- Firstly, in relation to the two primary kinds of human passions [End
Page 169] (those related to self-preservation and those related to
sociability),
- Secondly, in terms of the properties or configurations of the objects of
our perception,
- Thirdly, in terms of the physiological effect of the experience
(relaxation or tensing of the nerves and fibres of the body).
We have looked in some detail at the second and third perspectives, but we have
said very little of the first, that which relates to the two headings under which it
was possible, according to Burke, to classify the human passions: those bearing
on self-preservation and society. The use of the term society and its cognates
social, sociability, etc. is somewhat perilous because in fact the scope of the
passions Burke identifies is considerably wider than the term “society” generally
suggests. By “society” Burke does not just mean the society between the sexes,
and that of more general society with “men and other animals”, he also means
that which “we may in some sort be said to have even with the inanimate world”
(I, VIII). It is therefore not wrong to say that the beautiful, which arouses the
“social” passions, emerges as that which communicates to the subject a sense of
being at home in the world of sensory perception. Consider in these terms
Burke’s images of beauty as a “gentle, oscillatory motion”, the “rocking which
sets children to sleep”, “the smell of flowers”, milk as “the first support of our
childhood”, etc (IV, XXII-XXIII). The sublime, on the other hand, constitutes the
terrifying reminder of the limits of our finite measures, the ultimately
phantasmagorical character of this familiar world to which we are bound
cognitively, imaginatively and sensorily. Pascal had said that the “the finite is
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
annihilated in presence of the infinite, and becomes pure nothingness”20 and
Pascal’s horror is here many ways here Burke’s horror, with an important proviso
however: it would, be a mistake to confound Burke’s infinity with the
Godhead. [End Page 170] Burke pointed out that infinite power necessarily
participates in the complex idea our understanding forms of the Godhead, along
with others such as goodness and wisdom, etc. Our affective perceptions, those
derived from sensible images and the imagination, prioritise power, but Burke
was anxious to dissociate this more or less natural tendency of human beings to
imagine a fearful Deity with true Revealed religion. Furthermore, as he points
out, while true religion has and must have “a mixture of salutary fear”, it is the
characteristic of false religions to equate fearful power with the Godhead. It
should really go without saying that the experience of the sublime was not an
experience Burke was willing to contemplate as of a religious nature. He may
have been pluralist in his religious views, but he was also a stout defender of
established churches, and deeply hostile to the “natural religion” of some of his
contemporaries, notably Bolingbroke.21 So, to come back to where we were,
Burke’s horror is in very many ways Pascal’s horror, the terrifying recognition of
our fragile and powerless finitude, our homelessness; although Burke’s sublime
has of course its own very important specificities.
20 The citation is from the famous fragment 233 of the Pensées. “Infini. Rien. –Notre âme est jetée dans le corps, où elle trouve nombre, temps, dimensions. Elle raisonne là-dessus, et appelle cela nature, nécessité, et ne peut croire autre chose. L’unité jointe à l’infini ne l’augmente de rien, non plus qu’un pied à une mesure infinie. Le fini s’anéantit en présence de l’infini, et devient un pur néant. Ainsi notre esprit devant Dieu; ainsi notre justice devant la justice divine », Pascal, Pensées, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 467. 21 See Edmund Burke, Vindication of Natural Society (1756) in Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings, introduction and notes by David Womersley, London, Penguin Books, 1998, 1-48; and Michael W. McConnell, “Edmund Burke’s Tolerant Establishment” in Religious Liberty in Western Thought, ed. Noel B. Reynolds and W. Cole Durham Jr., Michigan and Cambridge, Wm B. Eerdmans, 2003 (first edition 1996), 161-202.
Infinity and Beyond. L'infini et au-delà : Actes du colloque international In Memoriam Paul-Gabriel Boucé, 25-26 juin 2014, Université du Havre, France, dir. Élizabeth Durot-Boucé, Rennes : TIR, 2014.
The specificities of Burke’s sublime are all related to the purely and
necessarily affective nature of this limit experience in which the individual is
transfixed, entirely in the thrall of heightened emotion, mesmerised by sensory
perception, in this world but also momentarily right there on the cusp of this
world of familiar experience. We feel and live this experience in our bodies, in all
the muscles and fibres of our bodies, right down to those very fine and delicate
organs that ensure communication between the senses, the imagination and
reason: the exhilaration is a physiological reality. In all three of Burke’s categories
of phenomena, or more accurately, configurations of phenomena, liable to
produce in the human subject this experience of the sublime – those related to
danger, those producing this effect by mechanical causes, and those involving
modifications of power – we find this same astonishment, terror, horror. Poetry
too can bring us there. In the hands of great writers such as Milton, language can
bring us to a heightened affective state which is an encounter with the beyond
of representation, [End Page 171] to the limits of the world we perceive in our
measures. The mind, says Burke, “is hurried out of itself, by a crowd of great and
confused images; which affect because they are crowded and confused” (II, IV).
In Burke’s sublime we experience our finitude and affectively encounter infinity
as the condition of possibility of our world of representation.
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