Abstract

Burke's often-ignored and much-misunderstood initial venture into political theory, A Vindication of Natural Society , is significant for announcing his lifelong preoccupation with the paradoxical role of reason as both vital to and destructive of, civil-social harmony. The conflict outlined in the Vindication points to the necessity of a "bridge" between the organic constraints of human nature and the transcendental demands of reason. Providing this missing link would seem to be the motivation behind Burke's Philosophical Enquiry on the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful . In this early treatise on the psychology of emotive response, we find Burke's first attempts to uncover the hidden territory of pre-reflective sensibilities in relation to the foreground horizon of interpretation. Burke's early writings of the sublime and beautiful give evidence of an overall aesthetic psychology that forms a continuum with the later writings and provides a framework for analyzing the various dynamisms and structures inherent in familial, tribal and larger social and political attachments. With aesthetics shedding light on human psychology and anthropology, it may also be said to illuminate the ongoing rift between theory and practice. It is perhaps this aesthetic horizon which ultimately connects the "naturalness' of reason and reflective life with the "naturalness" of pre-reflective, ethical-political life