Edmund Burke - A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Small Works List)

I don’t have a ton to say at the moment about Edmund Burke. I would like to avoid making this publication tinged with the concerns of today. I will be writing this document for perhaps the next 35 years, if I live until I am 70 and so there will be several different epochs of the context that surrounds this document. When I first pulled Edmund Burke’s name, many recent texts popped up that deal with his writing. Most of these texts include Burke in the current debate about conservative politics in America. This may be true, but this is not going to be the focus of my interest in Burke. Because I would not characterize myself as a conservative, there is a certain bit of intrigue that wants to really dig in here and see where that vein goes, but I chose instead to refocus on something directly of interest.

 

I began reading Burke’s Reflections on the Revolutions in France because it was the first thing that popped up on Audible and I listened to perhaps the first 2 or 3 hours of that document. There is some wild stuff in there. Some stuff that I actually found compelling; some I didn’t know enough about like the major events of the French revolution to be able to place the critique. Then I asked a Literature professor I know, and he said to read A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. That is a wild title to type all the way through. This is a shorter book and apparently super influential to the train of literary criticism, especially recently, and so I dug in. I listened to some, I read quite a lot on the physical page, and stopped and reflected often on my own ideas. 

I have heard these ideas before, and many I found intriguing. There is obviously some troubling material in here about the concepts of white and black, and that black is historically thought of as bad. I am not sure what to make of what Burke is saying here. I am not sure if he is simply mentioning that this is the way things are historically understood or if he is endorsing these ideas. This is the same for the idea of the beautiful as small, dainty things that then would become to burden for women, which he often attributes as the gender that bears the weight of beauty more than men, to be dainty in order to be beautiful. It is hard to know if he is simply describing what in his culture is considered beautiful and therefore, he is trying to ascertain why those things are considered beautiful. Nevertheless, it is clear he is not trying to open the door to reconsider what is beautiful but in his descriptive way he instantiates these values in writing.

Regardless, Burke’s work helped me rediscover this idea of the sublime which I think I have always sought after but now have language to describe. I would read something by Burke again if it were on this side of the discussion rather than the political side. The concept of the sublime is probably too broad to approach here, and this blog and reading project is not an avenue for me to get up on my soapbox and preach in any regard. I hope for these entries to be reflections and reactions to what I am reading and not me folding into my own approach set pieces of exposition about what I think about a particular philosophy or movement in art or type of reading philosophy. I read a book, I let you know I read a book and what I thought about it. 

 

 In this case I want to be clear. I have not thought a great deal nor have a read very much about the idea of the sublime. I am coming into this document cold though I have interacted with the echoes of this idea throughout my reading life. This idea of the sublime is interesting to me because it captures a concept that I am enamored with in Yeats' poetry of the long ago and far away, of the mystic, in poems like "Who Will Go With Fergus?" there is this notion that there is this other space that probably isn't attainable but we all know of it and are drawn to it. The poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" strikes me as this, my reading of that poem is that there is a real place Yeats may be referring to but that it has extraordinary quality that it is rather a place of the heart or the mind. It is this otherness that we desire but couldn't find if we searched the world over. It is in this other place that "peace comes dropping slow," and that you "feel in your deep heart's core." This is the sublime to me as I dwell on Burke's idea of it, fancy that these are both Irishmen as well. I wonder about this, and come back to Yeats' poetry often. There is something dangerous about these spaces. Travelling with Fergus may be fun at first, but there is an element of danger just behind this line of trees. And maybe that element of danger is part of the allure, I'm not sure now anyway. 

That's it, that's all I wanted to say about the sublime and Edmund Burke and Yeats for now. I am sure I will get back to Yeats. I will probably reread Burke at some point in my life going forward. I imagine there will be a handful of books that I will reread in the process of this project. Burke is one of them, Philip Sydney's Defense of Poesy is another that I don't think I got all of it the first time through.