The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry ed. by Koen Vermeir, Michael Funk Deckard (review)

Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was born of his youthful ambitions for literary fame, ambitions he had to compromise by entering politics to support himself and his young family. It is the one work of systematic philosophy from an author whose greater fame derived from his attack on the philosophical politics of the French revolution and its English sympathizers. As such it has held an important place—not only in the history of aesthetics through its influence on Kant—but increasingly for historians of political ideas looking to systematize his otherwise topical political writings. For Burke, neither aesthetics nor “political philosophy” had the distinct genre-identities they now possess: the work was rather a contribution to the recently emerged field of “Criticism and Belles Lettres,” with valences to a range of subject areas we would often now recognize as distinct—physiology, psychology, literary criticism, rhetoric, politics, even, whisper it, cultural studies.

This volume of fifteen essays claims to be the first entirely devoted to the work, and the editors, while drawing attention to the diversity of genres and interpretations with which it has been identified, argue for “a science of sensitivity” as the node of a range of mid-century preoccupations and disciplines—philosophical, medical, and literary—that occasioned a burst of essays on what we now call aesthetics.

In Part I, Science and Sensibility, Steffan Ducheyne discusses the Enquiry’s deployment of Newtonian methodology; Joseph Pippin III identifies a knowable objective metaphysics in the Enquiry, which, he claims, confirms the neo-Aristotelian against the Lockean reading of Burke; Aris Sarafinos’s fine essay shows the wider physiological and even meteorological context of the material grounding Burke gives his concept of sensibility; and Herman Parret pursues Burke’s reputation forward into the German-speaking world, more particularly Herder’s critique of Burke for failing to systematize the somatic basis of sensibility, to which they both subscribed.

In Part II, Sensibility, Morals and Manners, the German reception is further pursued by Bart Vandenabeele’s discussion of Kant’s response to, and differences with, Burke, agreeing with him on the social character of aesthetic experience, but rejecting Burke’s view that any universal claims can be found in, or drawn from, its purely empirical sources. F. P. Locke’s “Politics of Burke’s Enquiry” argues it is a mistake to assume there are any—urging readers take seriously the terms ‘philosophical’ and ‘enquiry’ in the title. It is, in origin and conception, a work of “genuine intellectual curiosity.” Dan O’Neill, by contrast, argues that, even setting aside its possible relationship to later works, the Enquiry is “on its own an important work of political theory,” while Paddy Bullard assures us a scholarly consensus exists denying important connections between Reflections and the Enquiry, before turning his attention to the Miltonic references in the Enquiry.

A preoccupation with the literary features of the work (Bullard, Ryan, De Bruyn, Saint Perinetti, Girons) is not confined to the last section, Aesthetics and the Science of Sensibility. Burke’s claim about the greater power of the Sublime is clearly borne out by its dominance as a theme here, and central to many is the tracing of the filiations of the Sublime from its origins in Longinus—or even earlier (Cressida Ryan), or forward to contemporary aesthetics (Girons: “the revenge of obscurity”). But the classical is not the only literary lineage discussed: K. O’Donnell reads the work as grounded in an oral, Erse culture—a Gaelic sublime; while others draw attention to the Bible and indeed the relation between the Biblical and classical sublime (Paddy Bullard).

Among the best contributions bringing together the literary and the historical are Dario Perinetti’s philosophically subtle and well-contextualized discussion of the relationship between Hume’s essay “Of the Standard of Taste” and...