Edmund Burke
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Edmund Burke (1729-1797) British Politician and Philosopher
Edmund Burke looms large over eighteenth-century Romantic British
Philosophy and Politics. Born in Dublin, he attended Trinity College
(Dublin), where although officially studying law, he found himself better
suited to literary and philosophical pursuits. While at Trinity he began
his influential treatise,
A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful while still an undergraduate. Published
in 1756, the work was not only popular, but also admired by contemporaries including Dr.
Samuel Johnson. Before 1776 Enquiry had gone to eight editions.
In
Enquiry Burke asserts that strong sensation and emotion, more
specifically pain and terror, inspire sublimity. Going "beyond" pain and
terror and into a more ethereal state of emotion and experience, is the
essence of Burke's sublimity. Notions of Burke's sublime echo through many
Romantic renderings of the apocalypse, most evidently in the attention
that Wordsworth and Blake give to sensing tha magnificent and terrifying,
and the sublime emotions inspired by those sensations. However, importantly, Burke was quick to note that
"When we go but one step beyond the immediately sensible qualities of things,
we go out of our depth" (243). Hence, this going "beyond the immediately
sensible," a condition that arises from terrible pain and terror, is the essence of
sublimity.
However,
Burke’s philosophical writing comprise only a small part of a career.
Burke was a politician as well as a prolific political writer. Beginning
as private secretary to Gerard Hamilton, the Chief Secretary for Ireland,
Burke rose through the political ranks until serving in Parliament as
representative for Bristol (1774-80) and Malton (1781-94). During this
time
Burke established himself as one of the preeminent forces in British politics. And during
this time he penned major works on the politics of Ireland, the American Revolution, and
finally, the French Revolution.
Reflections on
the Revolution in France (1790) is perhaps Burke’s most famous political
work, and certainly the most pertinent to a discussion of apocalyptic imagery. In
Reflections Burke counters the apocalyptic rhetoric of the French Revolutionaries and
sympathizers, notably Richard Price. Burke portrays the Revolution as a far flung idea
that, when applied to the realities of a political state, must certainly invite
disaster. Steven Blakemore describes Reflections as "a vigorous critique
of revolutionary ideology, which he envisions as a set of abstract ideas removed from
reality. [Burke] accuses the revolutionaries of attempting to force reality to fit
ideas... Burke contends that revolutionaries try to manipulates the ’material
base’ with prior idea" (3). From this perspective, the French Revolution was a
corrupt version of an apocalypse because its leadership lost sight of both the state
against which they rebelled, and the new state they hoped to construct. Burke captures
this spirit in the opening pages of Reflections when he says that
Those who cultivate the memory of our [English] Revolution, and those who are attached
to the constitution of this kingdom, will take good care how they are involved with
persons, who under the pretext of zeal towards the [French] Revolution and constitution
too frequently wander from their true principles; and are ready on every occasion to
depart from the firm but cautious and deliberate spirit which produced the
one, and which presides in the other (3).
As a firm believer in a "firm but cautious and deliberate"
democratic spirit Burke insists that revolutionary thought and
activities must be rooted in the realities of this world. Becoming immoderately enamored
with ideal notions and apocalyptic metaphors of destroying the present, corrupt order in
order to establish a new order too often leads to unjust, wholesale slaughter and the
forfeiture of any opportunity for a better state.
Works Cited
Blakemore, Steven. Burke and the Fall of Language. Hanover: UP of
New England, 1988.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Garland, 1971.
--------------. Reflections on the Revolution in France. New York: E.P.
Dutton, 1950.
Sidney Lee and Lesley Stephen, eds. Dictionary of National
Biography. London: Smith, Elder &
Company, 1908.
Additional Bibliography
Kirk, Russell. Edmund Burke, A Genius Reconsidered. Wilmington: Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, 1997.
Richey, William. "The French Revolution: Blake’s Epic Dialogue
with Edmund Burke." ELH 59:4 (1992) 817-37.
Whale, John C.."Literal and Symbolic Representations: Burke,
Paine and the French Revolution." History of European Ideas
16: 1 - 3 (1993) 343-9.
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