The Philosophical Enquiry: Science of the Passions, 1757

This chapter focuses on Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Philosophical Enquiry takes up the thread of preoccupations that absorbed him throughout his twenties. It begins with an exploration of the classical theory of mixed emotions, focusing on Aristotle's signature categories of pity and terror. It proceeds to elucidate the affective psychology of manners, probing the feeling of exhilaration unleashed by pride and the instinct for subordination based on fear. Challenging the deist assumptions of a number of predecessors, Burke argues for the dependence of moral taste on duty. In the process, he articulates the reliance of ethics on religion, and traces the origins and development of superstition. The work also recapitulates Burke's antipathy to stoicism, along with his response to the leading moralists of the age, above all the writings of Hutcheson, Mandeville, and Berkeley, as well as Dubos, Condillac, Hume, and Smith. Although the Enquiry is not a comprehensive treatise in moral philosophy, it provides access to Burke's theory of human nature as it sets about accounting for uniform features of the mind.

Romanticism as Modern Re-Enchantment: Burke, Kant, and Emerson on Religious Taste

This essay traces the contours of a trans-Atlantic Romantic legacy of aesthetic, moral and religious taste from its inception in Edmund Burke, through its modifications by Immanuel Kant, to its culmination in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Divinity School Address. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful Burke suggests that religious experience is an aspect of aesthetic and moral taste. Immanuel Kant follows suit in the Critique of Judgment, offering a distinct account of religious taste. Emerson alludes to yet significantly refines aspects of both accounts in his Divinity School Address. Whereas Kant and Burke’s variously stoic accounts depict good religious taste as an experience of alienation from God and from the world, Emerson’s religious agent cultivates a modern spirituality quite at home in the world. Adapting Burke’s re-enchanted moral psychology of taste, Emerson offers a distinctively religious, indeed Christian, form of this modern re-enchantment. Yet for Emerson, refined religious taste allows agents to recognize the full spectrum of normative demands in nature and thus to make a home of such a world.