Obscure Judiciousness: Revising Reason and Judgment in Burke's Enquiry

Abstract

Abstract: This essay argues for a reevaluation of the importance of reason and judgement in Edmund Burke's aesthetic theory outlined in the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1759). Situating Burke's aesthetic theory alongside those of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury; Francis Hutcheson; David Hume; and Immanuel Kant, it presents Burke's theory of judgement as a crucial component, one which attempts to hold together the descriptive and normative dimensions of the text. The main point of the analysis is to identify the emergence of a prominent legislative dimension to Burke's account of judgement in his revised "Introduction on Taste." This expanded role for reason and judgement complicates the apparent decoupling of reason and sensation that characterizes many of the Enquiry's most famous descriptions of aesthetic experience, demonstrating how the subsequent reincorporation of these experiences into social discursive practices requires a careful adjudication of where the respective limits of sense, imagination, and reason are to be located creating a far more complex philosophical dynamic within the text as a whole. In tracing the emergence of this rationally legislative dimension in the revised account of taste, this interpretation seeks to highlight several significant philosophical parallels between Burke and Kant's aesthetic philosophies, something which is often overlooked by the two being set in an overly contrastive intellectual relationship.