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The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry

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The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D’HISTOIRE DES IDÉES INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS 206 THE SCIENCE OF SENSIBILITY: READING BURKE’S PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY Edited by Koen Vermeir • Michael Funk Deckard Board of Directors: Founding Editors: Paul Dibon†, Richard H. Popkin† Director: Sarah Hutton, University of Aberystwyth, UK Associate Directors: J.E. Force, University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA; J.C. Laursen, University of California, Riverside, USA Editorial Board: M.J.B. Allen, Los Angeles; J.-R. Armogathe, Paris; S. Clucas, London; G. Giglioni, London; P. Harrison, Oxford; J. Henry, Edinburgh; M. Mulsow, Erfurt; G. Paganini, Vercelli; J. Popkin, Lexington; J. Robertson, Cambridge; G.A.J. Rogers, Keele; J.F. Sebastian, Bilbao; A. Sutcliffe, London; A. Thomson, Paris; Th. Verbeek, Utrecht For further volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/5640 Koen Vermeir • Michael Funk Deckard Editors The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry Editors Koen Vermeir Michael Funk Deckard Centre National de la Recherche Lenoir-Rhyne University Scientifi que 625 7th Avenue NE REHSEIS-SPHERE (UMR 7219) Hickory, NC 28603 Rue Thomas Mann 5, Case 7093 USA Paris 75205, Cedex 13 [email protected] France [email protected] ISSN 0066-6610 ISBN 978-94-007-2101-2 e-ISBN 978-94-007-2102-9 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2102-9 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2011940324 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfi lming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifi cally for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Preface Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry in Context, 250 Years Later Michael Funk Deckard and Koen Vermeir The Science of Sensibility ‘The fi rst and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is curiosity.’ In this way, Edmund Burke (1730–1797) begins his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful . ‘We see children perpetually run- ning from place to place, to hunt out something new: they catch with great eagerness, and with very little choice, at whatever comes before them; their attention is engaged by everything, because everything has, in that stage of life, the charm of novelty to recommend it.’ 1 This has been the fate of the reception of the Philosophical Enquiry itself. The book, written in a brilliant style and full of new and surprising insights, has always attracted the curious. Unfortunately, the Enquiry has never received the sustained attention of professional philosophers or historians of ideas. 2 In the academic literature, the work is only treated superfi cially in general histories of aesthetics, or it is treated as the youthful work by the later politician, statesman and author of the renowned Refl ections on the Revolution in France . No scholarly volume has ever focused on the Philosophical Enquiry in particular. ‘But as those things, which engage us merely by their novelty, cannot attach us for any length of time, curiosity is the most superfi cial of all the affections; it changes its object perpetually; it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfi ed.’ 3 It is the aim of this collection of essays not to be so easily satisfi ed and to penetrate the Philosophical Enquiry beyond a volatile curiosity. This volume reassesses Burke’s prominence in the history of ideas, especially with regard to this youthful work. In order to remedy its superfi cial treatment by the scholarly community, this 1 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry , part I, sect. i. [As consistent with other articles in this book, refe rences to this work will be included in the text in parentheses as the following: PE, for the Enquiry , Part and Section number, followed by the page number, referring to a particular edition (which is unique to each contributor).] 2 See F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke, vol. 1: 1730–1784 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 91. 3 PE I.i. v vi Preface collection consists of contributions that study different aspects of the Philosophical Enquiry . It also includes essays that treat the work in its historical context and that place Burke’s early work in a lineage of important thinkers. How can the Philosophical Enquiry be situated in relation to his contemporaries (e.g. Hume and Kant) as well as Burke’s later political thought? Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry was fi rst published in 1757 with a second revised edition in 1759. It is considered a key text in aesthetics and the fi rst text to bring the idea of the sublime into philosophy. Following Locke’s ‘way of ideas’ and expanding upon Humean ‘passions’, Burke built his theory of the beautiful and the sublime upon an empirico-psychological philosophy that delved into the complex mixture of pleasure and pain, delight and terror. Burke’s text is not only a work in aesthetics, refl ecting on what is beautiful or sublime, but it is also concerned with the complex origin of our aesthetic perceptions and ideas. These origins had to be found in the perceptions and sensibilities of the body, and its complex states of tension and relaxation, pleasure and pain. Burke developed his thought at a time when a preoccupation with sensibility had fi rmly taken root in English culture. Physicians and natural philosophers had studied the physiology of the body and the senses, and these results had been connected to the aesthetic sensibility of literature and art. The title of this collection, The Science of Sensibility , refers to the culture of sensibility in which Burke played a crucial part. Sensibility was a key notion in eighteenth-century culture, structuring debates not only in physiology, epistemology and psychology, but also in the arts. It referred to an organic sensitivity that depended on the brain and the nervous structure of the human body. Underlying subtle moral and aesthetic perceptions, an acuteness of emotional and physical feeling and the susceptibility to delicate or powerful passionate arousal, sensibility became a con- stituent part of discussions about music, literature, the visual and the plastic arts. Burke’s fi ne-grained analysis of the aesthetic experiences of pleasure and pain and his notion of the sublime as a mixture of delight and terror was a central contribution to this culture of sensibility, in which natural philosophical and medical studies of the body became part of an artistic and aesthetic discourse. The Science of Sensibility equally refers to Burke’s ‘scientifi c’ inquiry into the physical causes of sensibility and the origins of our experience of the sublime and beautiful. While it may seem as though a science of sensibility is an oxymo- ron, ‘[i]n principle at least’, F. P. Lock, the biographer of Burke, writes, ‘the method of the Enquiry is scientifi c.’ 4 Indeed, at least two infl uences on Burke’s text have been understated. On the one hand, Newton’s Principia and The Opticks were key texts for the birth of aesthetics. On the other hand, Burke followed the empiricist study of psychology that had developed from Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). 5 An avowed empiricist, Burke took 4 Lock, op. cit., i.95. 5 For Newton and Locke’s infl uence on Burke in the context of ‘Anglican Skepticism’, see Iain Hampsher-Monk, ‘Burke and the Religious Sources of Skeptical Conservatism’, in The Skeptical Tradition around 1800 , ed. J. Van der Zande and R. H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 235–259. Preface vii many notions from current scientifi c studies, tested them against his own experi- ence, and refashioned them in new hypotheses. Aspiring to follow the Newtonian method, Burke studied the diversity of passions and sensibilities on which to build philosophy, aesthetics and society.6 Furthermore, Burke’s work should be understood in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment project of developing a ‘science of man’. In the line of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith, Burke aimed at a scientifi c understanding of human physiological and mental processes, in order to derive from these insights about aesthetics, moral- ity and the social world. 7 The phrase The Science of Sensibility also stands, in a more metaphorical fash- ion, for the two defi ning terms that structure the Enlightenment: reason and sensibil- ity. These terms changed meaning and evoked different associations over the course of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, their relation was permanently negotiated and it was as changing, fl exible and evolving as the relation between Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility . As Claudia Johnson remarks: ‘generations of critics have based their readings of the novel on a misap- prehension of the title, and, as if the titular conjunction were […] “versus” rather than “and,” have held that the purpose of this novel is to depreciate “sensibility” and recommend “sense,” rather than to explore their shared vulnerabilities.’ 8 Similarly, in the eighteenth century, reason and sensibility cannot be treated as each other’s contrary. The debates evolve about how much reason is ingrained in sensibility and how much sensibility reason needs in order to be reasonable. Indeed, the Enlightenment cult of reason and the culture of sensibility do not stand in opposi- tion against each other, but they are in fact one and the same movement, looked at from a different angle.
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