Edmund Burke called his Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful[1] a philosophical enquiry, but some philosophers have disagreed. His treatment of the concept “The Sublime,” for which he became well-known, was suspected of not being philosophical enough. And yet Burke undeniably had some idea of what philosophy is or should be. For one, he conceded that “it is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make it affecting to the imagination” (II,4). The distinction sounds philosophical and suggests obvious Cartesian and Lockean readings. It is however harder to determine which of those two things he was attempting to do in relation to “The Sublime.” His critics have implied that he was merely doing the latter; but he may still have been attempting to do the former—or pursuing both avenues simultaneously, or successively. Several questions arise: (i) can you be at all clear about notions such as “The Sublime”? And, if so, (ii) is it appropriate to be clear about such notions? These questions raise in turn the matters of determining (iii) whether clarity is a style in philosophy, of (iv) whether the lack of clarity is the consequence of our having elected certain topics of inquiry, and of (v) whether anything of philosophical significance is lost when we restrict ourselves to very clear topics, or to clear modes of address. Issues (iii-v), and to some extent issue (ii), are second-degree issues. They have little to do with “The Sublime” though they are relevant to Burke’s idea of what philosophy is or should be. A consideration of the Enquiry might allow us to give a preliminary sense of these metaphilosophical quandaries and put forth an alternative hypothesis.
A good example of the various issues involved comes up at the beginning of Part IV of the Enquiry. Discussing Newton on “the property of attraction,” Berke detects a change in the tenor of his arguments. Initially, Burke notes, Newton “could consider attraction but as an effect, whose cause at that time he did not attempt to trace” (IV,1). Later however, he adds, Newton “began to account for it by a subtle elastic aether” (idem). This change, Burke claims, caused Newton “to have quitted his usual cautious manner of philosophizing” (idem), that is, it seems to have affected his whole attitude. The nature of the change is assessed by Burke in a way that anticipates both Kant and later strands of empiricism: “When we go but one step beyond the immediately sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depth.” On such occasions philosophical explanations tend to become muddled, since we would be dealing with affairs that “can never be unravelled by any industry of ours” (idem). This remark was to be repeated often. Burke himself, in his preface to the second edition of the book, would acknowledge that, not unlike Newton, he should “make use of a cautious… almost… timorous, method of proceeding.” “In considering any complex matter,” he added, “we ought to examine every distinct ingredient in the composition, one by one; and reduce every thing to the utmost simplicity; since the condition of our nature binds us to a strict law and very narrow limits” (5-6).
The Enquiry is however a long love-letter to the opposite attitude. The methodological tension between philosophical caution and the attractiveness of the Great Unwieldy Issues is closely mirrored there in Burke’s notorious distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. Nowhere is this tension so explicitly suggested as in his discussion of the opposition between clearness and obscurity. Beauty, for Burke, belongs together with clarity: philosophy and science, to be sure, but also drawing and painting are or can be beautiful in this sense. The sublime, on the other hand, is a condition affecting certain “verbal descriptions” (II, 4). As Burke writes at the outset of Part V, “words seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural objects, or by painting or architecture” (V, 1). However, since both philosophy and the sciences mostly consist of verbal descriptions, this entails the lingering suspicion that philosophy and the sciences could prove to be more like words than like perspicuous pictures, more like poetry than like painting or architecture. When I make a drawing of a collection of objects, Burke suggests, “I present a very clear idea of those objects” (II, 4). But in such cases, he adds, “my picture can at most affect only as [such objects] would have affected in the reality” (idem). Thus, there seems to be something odd to the notion of philosophical clarity, since to the extent that it is a verbal activity philosophy appears to be hopelessly driven to what Burke calls “sad and fuscous colours” (II, 16), which is to say, attracted to unclarity or at least to unclear objects.
Of course, nothing prevents one to be clear about obscure things; and perhaps one ought to always be clear about such things. But the crux of the problem for Burke is that attempting to be clear about something that powerfully affects your imagination does not seem to do justice to the process through which your imagination is so powerfully affected. Clearness seems to be inadequate to whatever your philosophical descriptions attempt to pick out, and philosophical explanations and the scientific understanding of nature seem to remain short of what they attempt to comprehend or sketch. The contrast Burke is aiming at appears instead to be a contrast between talking about obscure things in a clear way and doing justice to obscure things by whatever means. Now this cannot quite be right, since philosophical explanations are only drawings by courtesy; they remain verbal descriptions regardless of what they take verbal descriptions to be. There might thus be some hope for philosophical justice after all, if not for philosophical clarity: could it be the case that philosophical justice is only to be achieved at the expense of philosophical clarity? And, conversely, that only through lack of clarity is any knowledge to be conveyed by philosophy?
Burke famously claimed that “it is our ignorance of things that causes our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions” (II, 4b). “Knowledge and acquaintance,” on the other hand, “make the most striking causes affect but little” (idem). He hints darkly at “reasons in nature” for this supremacy of verbal description over sensory acquaintance (idem). Burke is not merely suggesting that the success of poetry is owed to the ignorance of “the vulgar”; he is in fact implying that the price we pay for our insistence on “knowledge and acquaintance” is a certain irrelevance of both philosophical and scientific explanations. Since “admiration” would preclude a philosophical attitude, nothing properly philosophical could come from thaumazein. Philosophy and the sciences seem to begin where admiration goes extinct; and would only deal in unadmirable ideas. If “a clear idea,” as he writes, is just “another name for a little idea” (idem), philosophical explanations could only deal in little ideas. Philosophers then would not be able to claim acquaintance with whatever they find to be philosophically relevant; and since they frown at verbal descriptions, what they would call their sketches would remain hopelessly fuscous.
Burke finds himself in a delicate position, since his whole enterprise, admittedly philosophical, overtly favours the sublime over the beautiful. One way out would be to claim that whereas admiration is an acute consequence, or at least the outcome of one’s intense concentration on objects of knowledge, the business of philosophy is not that of either providing or dispensing admiration or pleasure. This notion would prima facie explain why the vulgar are so irresistibly attracted to “what they do not understand” (idem). Gratification afforded by ignorance and obscurity would make up for the shortcomings in matters of knowledge or acquaintance. However, in Part IV of the Enquiry Burke suggests that when we “withdraw entirely from the light” (IV, 16), as in the case of the experience of the sublime, “the radial fibres of the iris . . . come to be so contracted [in darkness, so as] . . . by this means to produce a painful sensation” (idem). This sombre prospect indicates that for him the attraction to the sublime is not explainable as an attraction to a separate, let alone a higher, form of pleasure. Unlike the beautiful, as he had previously argued (III, 27), the sublime is actually “founded on pain.” An account of the sublime as the object of very intense forms of attachment requires not the standard hedonistic explanations but instead that we explain our attraction to painful sensations: “if the sublime is built on terror, or some passion like it, which has pain for its object; it is previously proper to enquire how any species of delight can be derived from a cause so apparently contrary to it” (IV, 5).
At this point in the argument, sensing perhaps how thin the ice is becoming, Burke resorts to analogy. His analogy for the sublime is human labour. Labour, he claims, “resembles pain” (IV, 6). Once labour surprises us in a “languid inactive state,” our nerves become “liable to the most horrid convulsions” (idem). Thus, “labour is not only requisite to preserve the coarser organs in a state fit for their functions, but it is equally necessary to these finer and more delicate organs, on which, and by which, the imagination, and perhaps the other mental powers act” (idem). For these organs to stay fit, Burke drily concludes, “they must be shaken and worked to a proper degree” (idem). The difference between the beautiful and the sublime, for Burke, is therefore not a difference between those passions that are to be understood purposely and those without a purpose or an end. This is very remote from the later Kantian contrast between interest and disinterestedness. Burke’s sublime is not conducive to anything Kantian, and certainly not to any cognitive or philosophical insights.[2]
Subfusc verbal descriptions, as we saw, are a characteristically Burkean, and perhaps also Newtonian, way of doing justice to the sublime. However, for Burke, the most extreme forms of admiration, and so the sublime, are also caused by verbal descriptions. In this way, fuscous may beget fuscous.[3] Burke’s theory implies an understanding of those verbal activities that require us to depart from our “usual cautious manner,” which is to say of those activities that prevent us from resorting to philosophy or science. These include “poetry and eloquence” (V, 2), but also, more surprisingly, “words in ordinary conversation” (idem). Both seem to “affect the mind by raising in it ideas of those things for which custom has appointed them to stand” (V, 2). However, Burke also notes that “it is impossible, in the rapidity and quick succession of words in conversation, to have ideas both of the sound of the word, and of the thing represented” (V, 4). It follows that in ordinary conversation “it is impracticable to jump from sense to thought, from particulars to generals, from things to words, in such a manner as to answer the purpose of life; nor is it necessary that we should” (idem). This theory, as we will see presently, is meant to apply also to poetry. Jumping from sense to thought, or from word to idea, is for Burke not regarded as necessary to fulfill the “purpose of life.” Such purpose may be brought about indifferently by any sufficiently fuscous verbal activity.
This counterintuitive point is developed in Burke’s detailed commentary of two lines from Book II of Paradise Lost: “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shades of death / A universe of death” (621-2). After remarking that the first six words “would lose the greatest part of their effect” if it were not for the ending “of death,” Burke adds that
This idea or this affection caused by a word, which nothing but a word could annex to the others, raises a very great degree of the sublime; and this sublime is raised yet higher by what follows, a “universe of Death.” Here are again two ideas not presentable but by language; and an union of them great and amazing beyond conception; if they may properly be called ideas which present no distinct image to the mind. (V, 7)
The initial problem that had moved Burke, and which has moved many literary critics since, was the relatively jejune matter that of determining what “nothing but a word” could possibly add to an otherwise long verbal enumeration. Burke remarks that the addition “raises a very degree of the sublime,” and indeed that “this sublime is raised even higher” by the phrase “a universe of death,” the first hemistich of the following line. His original version of what takes place in those two lines however comes only at the very end of the passage. In the purple Miltonic phrase “a universe of death,” he claims, we have “two ideas not presentable but by language.”
A roughly similar point had already been made in Part II, namely in the contrast between drawing a sketch and making up verbal descriptions. The novelty here is that Burke claims that in a “verbal description” the ideas presented by language, and by language alone, are not quite ideas, since they “present no distinct image to the mind.” As in ordinary conversation, then, in poetry there is no “jump from sense to thought.” Though caused by verbal descriptions, the effects of poetry do not consist in any added meaning, or any set of accrued or special meanings, and certainly not in any image of anything. The medium of poetry, for Burke, contains no message; what he calls ideas is in the case of poetry not very idea-like. In fact, as he will candidly put it, the effect of words in a linguistic sequence is achieved “without any clear idea; often without any idea of the thing which has originally given rise to it” (idem).
Given the sundry signs of approval of both Descartes and Locke throughout the Enquiry, this anti-Cartesian and anti-Lockean eleventh-hour use of the phrase “clear idea” looks rather striking. It brings us back to our initial contrast between perspicuity and obscurity, and therefore to Burke’s opposition between philosophy and science, on the one hand, and poetry, on the other; as well as to his flagship distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. Just as “the languages of most unpolished people have a great force and energy of expression” (idem), so through poetry “we catch a fire already kindled in another [passion], which probably might never have been struck out by the object described” (idem). This is ultimately the reason why for Burke, and against the received tradition on these matters, poetry is “not strictly an imitative art” (V, 6). “Merely dramatic poetry,” he concedes, can be mimetic or sketch-like: “But descriptive poetry operates chiefly by substitution, by the means of sounds, which by custom have the effect of reality” (idem). Because of this, in descriptive poetry “words undoubtedly have no sort of resemblance to the ideas for which they stand” (idem). The resulting theory was never taken seriously, even by Kant.[4] It seems to rest on two main assumptions: that only certain types of poetry can be truly sublime, and that in sublime poetry ideas are done away with, rather than generated. The contrast with Kant could not have been greater. For Kant, nothing man-made, and so not poetry, can properly be sublime, since the sublime requires a disproportion between the cause of that actual feeling and the multifarious hard-wired faculty contraptions in the affected subject. But crucially, for Kant, the sublime always intimates the “maxims for making the intellectual and the ideas of reason superior to sensibility,”[5] that is, it always translates into thoughts or ideas. For Burke, instead, the sublime does not cause you to think, let alone to think about philosophical things. Whatever else you may get from Milton or from poetry, you certainly get no ideas.
In the Enquiry there is a running deep-seated contrast between thinking, or reasoning, and the sublime. Since “no real picture is formed” through poetry, and so no mimetic or “picturesque connection,” as Burke calls it, is required or effected by it (V, 5), there are no forms of poetic thought, and so no specific contents to poetic intuitions; nor does sublime poetry properly have a meaning. Notorious words such as “fear” and “terror” are employed throughout the book to describe those situations in which “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, 1). Despite their Aristotelian origins they are however less philosophical concepts than household names for philosophically unpromising circumstances. Given that Burke never delivers, or indeed promises, any compromise-solution for the tensions between pleasure and pain, let alone any discussion of the peculiar kind of pain that he ascribes to the sublime it would be a mistake, as many philosophers have suspected, to see the Enquiry as an instance of philosophy. However, contrary to what many of his critics have also often thought, the main interest of the book might lie elsewhere: not in the author’s stated opinions about the sublime, which are after all just a passing episode in the history of taste, as in his professed opinions about the limits of philosophy, that is, in Burke’s metaphilosophy. Burke’s metaphilosophy need not be seen as a kind of philosophy, or as a form of transcendental philosophy. The Enquiry contains too few propositions for philosophical comfort. A couple of them might however provide food for further thought, if not for philosophy proper. Among them is the notion that philosophical analysis is a way of extinguishing fear and wonder; and also the notion that, since the only genuine form of admiration is admiration for the sublime, our inclination to wonder at what lacks clarity is the only genuine form of admiration we may ever feel.
