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Burke's Philosophical Enquiry and Wollstonecraft's Rights Of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry and Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Men : Aesthetics Applied to the Debate on Manners Sora Sato Introduction This essay1) discusses Edmund Burke’s early aesthetic work, Philosophical Enquiry2) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men.3) Although the Rights of Men is a critical response to Burke’s most famous work, Reflections on the Revolution in France,4) it deserves particular attention that she also discusses Burke’s aesthetics. Actually, the Rights of Men was the first published work to discuss the Enquiry and Reflections simultaneously, as well as the earliest published response to Reflections. The present essay will argue that the Enquiry might have been put into the eighteenth- century debate on manners, especially forming a part of Wollstonecraft’s view of manners by her reading of Burke’s aesthetics, although the intention of Burke in the Enquiry was scarcely linked to such a debate. In order to demonstrate this argument, we will consider I) what Burke intended in the Enquiry, and II) Wollstonecraft’s reception of the Enquiry. Although this paper considers the present particular case, what is important is that the analysis should be closely related to the more general phenomenon of intellectual history, which will briefly be discussed in the final section. Ⅰ. Intellectual Contexts of Burke’s Aesthetics and Politics (a) Philosophical Enquiry Burke had speculated on the subject of Enquiry since he was in college.5) As he 1) The earlier version was submitted to University of Essex (Department of History) as a part of MA dissertation in September 2008. The author wishes to thank Professor James Raven (University of Essex) and an anonymous referee of this journal for their helpful comments. 2) Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757-9), edited with an Introduction by J.T. Boulton (London, 1958). Hereafter, Enquiry. About Boulton’s introduction in this book, hereafter, Boulton (1958). 3) Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd (London, 1989), V. Hereafter, VRM. 4) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, eds., Paul Langford and others (Oxford, 1981-), VIII. Hereafter, Reflections, WS. ― 36 ― mentions in the 1757 preface of Enquiry, ‘it is four years now since this enquiry was finished’: he had completed his treatise as the most ambitious literary project of his early days in 1753.6) In general, Burke was rooted in his empirical age, in which the Newtonian tradition and John Locke’s philosophy were influential. 7) In particular, the Enquiry belongs to the philosophical tradition of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).8) What has often been pointed out is that the introductory section ‘On Taste’, which was added to the second edition of the Enquiry, may be intended to oppose David Hume’s view on taste in his Dissertation on Taste.9) His discussion on ‘sympathy’ also suggests Hume’s influence, although we must take account of a general increasing interest in the significance of sympathy in this period. 10) However, Burke was under the influence not only of Hume, but also the earlier philosophers such as Locke, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson. For instance, the pleasure-pain principle had been a theme discussed by several previous philosophers. Burke may have referred to Hutcheson in his comments on the emotion of sex. 11) Besides, when he discusses the qualities of beautiful objects, his emphasis on sight suggests that he follows the tradition of Aristotle, Locke and Joseph Addison. 12) While sharing a lot of themes of philosophy and aesthetics with his predecessors, Burke criticized or tried to overcome their theories. He criticizes the theories ‘which connect beauty with proportion, with fitness (or utility), and with goodness or perfection’ supported since the time of Plato. 13) Boulton concludes about Burke’s theory of beauty that although Burke agrees with his predecessors in some respects, ‘he departs from orthodoxy’.14) Burke’s theory of words, which attracts many modern researchers, also ‘represents a reaction against the distrust of language among post-Baconian writers in the previous century’. Although such writers claim that ‘words would simply be marks of things’ and ‘emotional and historical associations would be non -existent’,15) 5) F.P. Lock, Edmund Burke Volume I, 1730-1784 (Oxford, 1998), p.91. 6) Enquiry, p.2. Burke continues: ‘during which time the author found no cause to make any material alteration in his theory’. See also Lock (1998), pp.87, 92. 7) Boulton (1958), pp.xxviii, lvii. 8) Lock (1998), p.92. ‘Burke was familiar with Locke’s Essay from his student days’. (p.93). 9) Boulton (1958), pp.xxviii-xxix. 10) Boulton (1958), pp.xli-xlii. 11) Boulton (1958), pp.xl-xli. 12) Boulton (1958), pp.lxxii-lxxiii. According to Lock, the lectures given by the oculist John Taylor, which Burke attended in 1745, ‘could have started him thinking about the physiology of perception, and about the experiences of the blind, which provide important evidence for his theory’. See Lock (1998), p.91. 13) Boulton (1958), p.lx. See also pp.lxii-lxiii. For example, Addison accepted the proportionist theory in the Spectator, and the theory which links beauty with moral perfection was supported by Plato, Aquinas and Shaftesbury. 14) Boulton (1958), p.lxxii. 15) Boulton (1958), p.lxxvii. ― 37 ― Burke asserts that words can excite and convey emotion or ideas. 16) While the younger Burke relied on inherited ideas, he also tried to overcome them. For the discussion of the present paper, it is significant that the early Burke read Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Addison because they were the writers who discussed (male) manners being reformed in the eighteenth century. To what extent would Burke’s aesthetics be linked to contemporary debate on manners? To answer this question, we need to grasp the intention of his book. Lock argues that the purpose of Enquiry is ‘to explain how the mind receives and responds to the categories of ideas that he calls ‘the sublime’ and ‘the beautiful’’: to find out the laws of the operations of human mind. 17) According to Bullard, the particular polemical purpose was to demonstrate the incompatibility of the aesthetic categories of the sublime and beautiful.18) In other words, the aim of the Enquiry was ‘to refute those writers who treated them as synonyms, or at least, to caution those who combined them as a collocation’.19) While the topic of ‘sublimity’ was, as well as ‘beauty’, popular among eighteenth-century critics and aestheticians, only Shaftesbury, before Burke, had brought the two words into the single collocation ‘sublime and beautiful’.20) Burke tried to distinguish the sublime from the beautiful, attacking Shaftesbury’s view of aesthetics. Nevertheless, Bullard also argues that the purpose of the treatise is not absolutely clear. Despite the fact that the project of the Enquiry ‘began as a rejection of Shaftesbury’s moral philosophy, the later stages of its composition had shifted it into the realm of aesthetic and critical discourse’. 21) Although the intention of Burke’s aesthetics is not completely comprehensible, if Burke wrote the Enquiry to search the reaction of human mind to the aesthetic categories, or criticize critics who confuse the sublime and the beautiful, his aesthetics may not be explicitly connected to contemporary debate on manners. (b) Burke’s Political Writings It is also significant to consider what intellectual traditions his political writings relied upon, in order to deepen our understanding about difference between Burke’s aesthetics and politics, or about Wollstonecraft’s reception of Burke, although there is no simple answer to this question. 22) As we will see, the intellectual contexts of Burke’s politics are not the same as those of his aesthetics. 16) See the fifth and final part of the Enquiry, pp.161-177. 17) Lock (1998), pp.93, 98. 18) Paddy Bullard, ‘The Meaning of the ‘Sublime and Beautiful’: Shaftesburian Contexts and Rhetorical Issues in Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 56:224 (2005), 169-191 (p.169). 19) Bullard, p.171. 20) Bullard, p.170. 21) Bullard, p.188. ― 38 ― The earlier studies emphasized the ‘natural law’ tradition in Burke’s thought. The studies of Stanlis, Canavan and Wilkins are the examples of the natural law interpretation.23) In particular, Stanlis and Strauss paid attention to the similarity between Burke and Thomas Aquinas.24) However, several critics today are skeptical of the importance of natural law for Burke’s thought. For example, Lock argues that Burke’s use of the natural law ‘is closely related to his rhetorical needs’. 25) Stanlis emphasizes the intellectual connection of Burke to Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas and Hooker, whereas for Lock, Burke shares the intellectual world-picture more with Montesquieu, Magna Carta, Lord Somers and the Bill of Rights than with Aristotle or Aquinas. 26) The common-law tradition has also been considered significant on Burke’s thought. Valuable studies in this regard are Pocock (1960) and Postema. 27) Burke himself seemed to be conscious of this tradition, 28) and drew upon Sir Edward Coke’s and Sir Matthew Hale’s defence of English common law ‘as the refined embodiment of an inarticulable collective historical experience’.29) According to Pocock, Burke’s prescriptive constitution has two features: immemorial and customary. Burke’s argument of this was used to defend the English Constitution and to oppose the reform of the representation based on the principle of natural right. 30) According to Lucas, however, we should say 22) For instance, Hampsher-Monk argues that there are six intellectual contexts for understanding Burke’s thoughts: Natural Law, Common Law, Utilitarianism, Romanticism, Old Whiggery and Political Economy.
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