Edmund Burke on Fear

Abstract: I summarize Burke’s notion of the “sublime” and how it operates with/against “fear” in order to produce political and social solidarity.

In Burke’s thought, fear is linked to the relevance of the aesthetic. Burke’s aristocratic conservatism utilizes the aesthetic as a vehicle of fear in an effort to produce obedience and social solidarity; Burke, as a critic of liberalism and Rousseau’s theory of rights, highlights the way fear may be used and abused by political actors, and offers an important—if not tangential—contribution to liberalism’s self-critique. Long before his Reflections, Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful foregrounded many of the political convictions that would emerge in full later in his career. Though a work on aesthetics rather than politics, Burke’s Enquiry outlines a version of the sublime—taken as a category of the aesthetic—that employs fear in order to create a specific type of social agent and animate civic solidarity. Early in the Enquiry, Burke argues that external objects are knowable only through experience rooted in the senses. For Burke, an agent’s experience of the “aesthetic” is exclusively a physical relation to the external world. And, since there is a distinction between any given agent and the external world, and since every agent is endowed with sensory perception, the external universe presses equally upon each imagination.  While agents may value aesthetic objects differently by dint of cultural differences, an aesthetic object will nevertheless press the senses of each and any agent in the same manner (variations of taste among agents may be considered in terms of degrees rather than types).[i]

From his early reflections on taste, Burke produces a broad taxonomy of emotions, linking “pain” and “pleasure” to the analogous dimensions of self-preservation and social gathering. (Enq. 14, 32) Burke defines the sublime against this backdrop: the sublime emerges from the “idea of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible.”[ii] When an agent confronts the sublime, the sublime has the effect of activating his/her sense of danger. This activation works upon pre-rational faculties, quite literally overpowering an agent’s sensory perspective with awe, compelling a sense of smallness and limitedness in the presence of something so aesthetically grand. (Enq. 45) Not unlike Hobbes’ power of the sovereign to “over-awe” its subjects, Burke links “astonishment” to the sublime as its principle passion; and again like Hobbes, this astonishment causes a suspension in the soul’s activities “with some degree of horror.” (Enq. 57)

Unlike Hobbes, however, the fear associated with the sublime quickly recedes, as the spectator remembers the distance between himself/herself and the spectacle and understands he/she is actually safe. Though the original fear causes the agent pain, the realization of security transforms this fear into a positive sense of pleasure; the sublime comes to be felt as beautiful and uplifting rather than limiting and terrifying.[iii] And, though the sublime denouements into pleasure, it is a rare experience that impacts the agent’s soul enough that the agent still feels the limitedness of his/her own capacities in the aftermath. The limitedness imposed upon the agent’s self-conscience by the sublime is equally imposed upon all those who witnessed it; the individual’s sense of limitedness becomes the grounds for a perceived social interdependence.[iv] The sublime, by making the agent feel his/her own limitedness and the necessary reliance on other subjects, reanimates civic solidarity in a pre-rational and passion-engaged manner. For Burke, the sublime is employed in the service of ruling authorities and stabilizes the status quo; it is only under this light that his observation “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely” can be understood, firstly as an aesthetic statement and secondly as a political one. (Ref. 68)

It is in this manner that the sublime assumes a political import, the idea being that the sublime might act as a grounding for individuals and groups to produce and further coordinate around aesthetic phenomena that operate on all spectators equally. However, the sublime is also threatened by the potential for an opposite political appropriation: Burke’s treatment of the “spectacle” of the French Revolution represents his mature thinking on the subject, and while his earlier treatment in Enquiry was primarily staged in positive terms, by Reflections Burke is far more concerned with the negative impact the sublime—and the terror it includes—may have on the dissolution of political stability.

For Burke, the French Revolution was a spectacle of sublime proportions unto itself.  Burke writes:

out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France, has a arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible she could at all exist… (Reg I. 65-66)

This “phantom” which “despises all common maxims and all common means” is the leveling abstractions—the clamor for rights and freedoms unmoored from tradition and the recognition of authority—of the Jacobins and their unholy priest, Rousseau. Burke believes in the authority of a governing aristocracy and the duty of that governing aristocracy to manage and reform society, limited by the accumulated wisdom of that society Burke terms “tradition.”[v] For Burke, the nature of political action takes the line of reform, not revolution. To this end, Burke privileges a practical logic of expediency, as all problems of governance are local in nature and thus require unique responses tempered by the wisdom of time-honored tradition. In contrast, the Jacobin ideology of universal equality had abstracted from the local basis of politics a radically unworkable political program. The “specter” of the revolution made the fear associated with the awe of the sublime a quotidian and socially diffuse phenomenon, thus depriving the capacity of the sublime to “jar” agents into self-reflection. Instead of using fear for the stabilization of society and the preservation of traditional authorities,[vi] and instead of enabling fear to transition into pleasure, the sans-culottes merely used terror, and did so to their own unsubstantiated ends. To this end, they depleted the aesthetic of its capacity to rejuvenate social belonging and uphold the authority of tradition—in short, the banner of the revolutionaries was etched with the inscription: “All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off,”[vii] signaling how perverted the relation between the aesthetic and politics had become.

For Burke, then, the early reflections that upheld the capacity of the sublime to positively reinforce the cohesion of the status quo were complicated by his later engagement with the Revolution. Still, the sublime’s capacity to “alarm us into reflection” by “purifying” our “minds” with “terror and pity” has the capacity to check and “humble” the politically corrupting “unthinking pride” that stands behind the pursuit of abstract universalisms.[viii] Fear, used sparingly and managed well, may be an instrument that checks the individual’s pride and reconstitutes the political whole; fear, used excessively and under abstractions, corrupts a people and fractures the political world. It is this “purifying” aspect of the aesthetic, which employs fear in the promotion of civic solidarity and remains the most relevant for liberal thought.[ix]

[i] “It is know that the taste…is improved exactly as we improve our judgment, by extending our knowledge, by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise.” See Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. 27

[ii] Full quote: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime.” See Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. 39

[iii] See Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. 46: “…for terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close…”

[iv] To this end, Burke claims he “knows of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.” See Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, p. 64

[v] Burke argues for the marriage of tradition and management: “Nations are governed by the same methods, and on the same principles, but which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals or his superiors; by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious management of it; I mean, whenever public affairs are steadily and quietly conducted…” See Edmund Burke, Present Discontents, p. 117

[vi] Burke’s overly-sentimental and rhetorically hyperbolic defense of Marie Antoinette during the storming of Versailles is telling here. See Edmund Burke, Reflections, p. 62

[vii] Full quote: “All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.” See Edmund Burke, Reflections, p. 67

[viii] Edmund Burke, Reflections, p. 71

[ix] It is beyond the scope of this paper to elaborate here, but in particular see Jason Frank’s “’Delightful Horror’: Edmund Burke and the Aesthetics of Democratic Revolution” for one example of how Burke’s aristocratic sublime has been employed for democratic ends.