From the Sympathetic Principle to the Nerve Fibres and Back Revisiting Edmund Burke's Solutions to the "Paradox of Negative Emotions" (original) (raw)

2020, In Angewandte anthropologische Ästhetik. Konzepte und Praktiken 1700–1900/ Applied Anthropological Aesthetics. Concepts and Practices 1700–1900. Eds. Piroska Balogh, Gergely Fórizs (Bochumer Quellen und Forschungen zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert, 11), Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 139–173.

Similarly to his contemporaries, Burke's »splendid, truly Newtonian system« 5 aimed to explain, through observing how we respond to beautiful and sublime objects, the way certain sensible properties, by striking the senses, produce certain ideas and evoke certain passions in the mind. Just like his contemporaries in the empirico-psychological tradition, Burke held that aesthetic perceptions (i.e. the ideas of beauty or sublimity) are not the products of rational reflexion but of »certain affections of the mind, that cause certain changes in the body; or certain powers and properties in bodies, that work a change in the mind.« 6 However, unlike his contemporaries, as Samuel H. Monk already noted, he went »beyond the passions to the body«: 7 pointing out the close interaction between body and mind, Burke wanted to identify the »efficient causes« of our aesthetic perceptions in the physiological mechanisms of the nerve fibres, while also paying attention to their various functions in human life. 8 Thus, eighteenth-century British ›aesthetics‹, taken in this sense, goes well beyond the philosophy of beauty or the theory of art: the analysis of the sublime and the beautiful is only the first step, followed by revealing our psychological -or, in Burke's case, our physiological -make-up. Aesthetics -both the discipline in Germany and the various British and French discourses running up to it -emerged as anthropology: 9 Burke's theory of beauty and theory of sublimity are engulfed by his aesthetic theory, which is, in turn, engulfed by ›the science of man‹. Read in this light, the Enquiry is not a ›literary‹ enclave within the oeuvre of a genius in political philosophy, and neither, as it is often read, is it political philosophy in disguise, an ›aesthetic ideology‹ reflecting the social changes of the time.