Vastness Beyond Sensing: The Roleof the Sublime in the Political Thought of Edmund Burke.

With the ending of the Cold War the study of Edmund Burke’s political thought has been freed from simply describing his conservatism. Stephen K. White has begun to chart one of the more promising directions in his 1994 book Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics and Aesthetics, by paying close attention to the “affective-aesthetic” dimension of Burke’s political thought. This study proposes to begin from White’s short study and to further the articulation of the link between affective experience and political ideas, with particular attention to the role of the sublime. In a critical passage of the Reflections Burke wrote that those who hold power must defer to “sublime principles” and “they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid, permanent existence in the permanent part of their nature.” Given the extraordinary attention Burke gave to the topic of sublimity in his only philosophical tract, the Enquiry into Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, we must be alert to Burke’s meaning when he refers us to the sublime in the Reflections and when he adverts to affective experiences throughout his writings. The sublime evokes “Vastness” and “Infinity,” and “Obscurity,” “Uniformity,” “Magnitude,” and “Magnificence” also create in the mind an experience of sublimity. An experience of sublimity “so entirely fill[s the mind] with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.” Such affectivity, this study will demonstrate, ruled Burke’s view of the world and his understanding of politics, and the application of his understanding of the sublime alerts us to how he perceived the limits of politics and human competence. More than a rhetorical flourish or an inconsequential reference to the immortality of the soul and the prospect of eternal reward, his linkage of sublimity to the “permanent” part of our nature hints at a larger understanding of the full participation of human beings in something outside themselves. Politics, for Burke, cannot be reduced to rationality or the individuality of any one human being. Instead politics – and all reality – is built on relations, to which affective experiences alert us in a way that reason cannot. Drawing on a number of Burke texts from throughout his life (some familiar, some rarely cited), this study will claim Burke as more than a conservative, but a critic of modernity offering an intriguing alternative to all-encompassing rationality that is as much rooted in tradition as it is dedicated to substantial political freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]