Pity and Fear: Providential Sociability in Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry

Abstract

Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry has regularly been interpreted as serving either a political or theological purpose. This chapter argues that the work was intended instead as a study of imaginative sensibility, focussing on the emotions of pity and fear as these were stimulated by the experience of the beautiful and the sublime. In investigating these emotions, Burke’s central question became that of how the imagination is drawn to sympathise with situations that inspire uncomfortable sentiments like fear. After posing this question, Burke proceeded to consider it in its religious and social aspects. On the one hand, he examined how the awesome spectacle of divine power could induce a feeling of pride, reviving a question that Boileau had already explored through the lens of Longinus. On the other hand, he considered the old Aristotelian topic, debated in the eighteenth century from Jean-Baptiste Dubos to David Hume, of how the representation of terrible emotions could move an audience to pity. This latter question extended into a wider inquiry into the role of aesthetic education in religious and political life. The chapter argues that while Burke recognised the centrality of aesthetic sentiment to religious conviction and social cohesion, the intention of the Enquiry was to show that although the various departments of life were enlivened by the imagination, they were not simply reducible to taste.