Burke's Sensory Sublime and his Astonishing Infinity

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


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.


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!

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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.


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)


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.


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.


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.


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.


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


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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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

9] (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


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 0] 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.


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.

Bibliography

ADDISON, Joseph. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 1711-12. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. 5 vols.

BOLLA, Peter. The Discourse on the Sublime, Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

BOURKE, Richard. “Pity and Fear: Providential Sociability in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry.” Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard, eds. The


Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. Dordrecht, London: Springer, 2012. 159-60.

BURKE, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Ed. James T. Boulton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.

- Vindication of Natural Society. 1756. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, and Other Pre-Revolutionary Writings. Ed. David Womersley. London: Penguin, 1998. 1-48.

KANT, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford, Clarendon, 1991.

LOCKE, John. An Essay concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: OUP, 1975.

MCCONNELL, Michael W. “Edmund Burke’s Tolerant Establishment.” Religious Liberty in Western Thought. Eds. Noel B. Reynolds and W. Cole Durham Jr. 1996. Michigan and Cambridge: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2003. 161-202.

NEWTON, Isaac. 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.

PARRET, Herman. “From the Enquiry (1757) to the Fourth Kritisches Wäldchen (1769): Burke and Herder on the division of the senses.” Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard, eds. The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s [End Page 172] Philosophical Enquiry. Dordrecht, London: Springer, 2012. 91-106.

PASCAL, Blaise. Pensées, opuscules et lettres. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010.

RYAN, Vanessa L. “The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s Critique of Reason.” Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (April 2001): 265-79.

SARAFIANOS, Aris. “Pain, Labor, and the Sublime: Medical Gymnastics and Burke’s Aesthetics.” Representations 91 (Summer 2005): 58-83.

- “The Contractility of Burke’s Sublime and Heterodoxies in Medicine and Art.” Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (Jan. 2008): 23-48.


- “Hyperborean Meteorologies of Culture: Art’s Progress and Medical Environmentalism in Arbuthnot, Burke and Barry.” Koen Vermeir and Michael Funk Deckard, eds. The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry. Dordrecht, London: Springer, 2012. 69-90.

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Burke's Sensory Sublime and his Astonishing Infinity

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