Needless to say, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry intothe Sublime and Beautiful (1757, 2nd ed. 1759) – thesole contribution to aesthetics by this writer, whose work is primarilydevoted to questions of political history, political theory, and thefoundations of the commonwealth – is profoundly indebted to all thoseBritish thinkers before him who in the first half of the eighteenth centuryundertook a critical review of the aesthetic norms of classicism, and of theclassicist ideal of the education of a gentleman. Although Burke relied onmany ideas found in Francis Hutcheson and Joseph Addison, to name onlythese, his Enquiry, by declaring, as has been noted, an“open revolt against neo-classical principles,” alsothoroughly distinguishes itself from his predecessors. It is true, ofcourse, that all of eighteenth-century British aesthetics is inseparablefrom the thought of John Locke and David Hume. But Burke was the first topropose an uncompromising empiricist – that is, sensualistic –account of aesthetic experience, and to have radically uncoupled thisexperience from extrinsic considerations (particularly, moral andreligious), which still dominate Hutcheson’s An Inquiry intothe Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725).

In seeking to account for aesthetic experience on the basis of soberempirical observation alone, Burke stresses the sensualistic nature ofaesthetic impressions by conceiving of the beautiful and the sublimeprimarily in terms of ideas and passions. By the same stroke, the sensualqualities of the particular objects that affect the senses and theimagination in such a way as to provoke these ideas, or passions, acquiremajor importance. It is on these premises that Burke, in the spirit of IsaacNewton, seeks to establish “an exact theory of our passions.”It is a theory that inquires into their efficient – that is,physiological – causes, and that rigorously coordinates the feelingsof the sublime and beautiful with the affections caused by the objects fromwhich they spring. It is precisely the utmost consistency with which Burkeapplies Locke’s empiricism to aesthetics, as well as his Newtonianmethodology for discovering fixed laws regulating the domain of thepassions, that allowed him to approach aesthetic experience as a realm ofits own.