Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Edmund Burke is best known as the father of modern conservative political philosophy. Yet when he was a young man, he wrote a treatise in a branch of philosophy we now call aesthetics.

Ever since Longinus, the sublime had been used to describe the standard of the utmost beauty. The Quarrel of the Ancients of the Moderns was waged accordingly. Burke broke with that consensus however, suggesting that the sublime was associated with sensations entirely opposite to those of beauty. There was no common ground between beauty and sublimity whatsoever.

Furthermore, he assigned the two distinct experiences two different creaturely purposes, notions that formed the foundation of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian philosophy and its calculus of pain (the sublime) and pleasure (the beautiful). The sublime, the more powerful of the two, served the individualistic purpose of self-preservation; the beautiful, on the other hand, served the social purpose of the propagation of the species. Yet in both cases, the feeling was a consequence of power.

The effect of Burke's dissociation of the sublime from beauty cannot be understated. Immanuel Kant followed him in his dissociation, and what C.S. Lewis later called 'the abolition of man' had begun. The self-preservation characteristic of the sublime paves the way for Darwin's mechanism for evolution, the 'survival of the fittest'. In hindsight, postmodern literary theory and the hermeneutics of suspicion could be argued to begin here as well.

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