Abstract
Rich frameworks of scientific reference underpinned Edmund Burke’s composition of the Philosophical Enquiry and his physical approach to aesthetic and cultural phenomena. In this paper I argue that, while composing the Enquiry, Burke was already espousing an environmental perspective, which he would redevelop more explicitly on several occasions after the publication of the book. Burke’s environmental perspective was informed by contemporary strands of cultural and medical environmentalism (Winckelmann, Arbuthnot and Dubos) and took an active part in highly-politicized debates about the role of climate and geography in the production of culture. The chief aim of this paper is to explore the rising significance of environmental and earth sciences (and such topics as climate, air, diet, water and soil) in the formation of new materialist approaches to aesthesis. And it seeks to reveal the crucial ways in which Burke re-engineered environmental science, producing a sublime meteorology of culture with far-reaching consequences for the political and ontological redefinition of aesthetic sensation and art.
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Notes
- 1.
I have treated a variety of similar aspects of the Enquiry in two articles “Pain, Labour and the Sublime: Medical Gymnastics and Burke’s Aesthetics,” Representations 91 (2005): 58–83 and “The Contractility of Burke’s Sublime and Heterodoxies in Medicine and Art,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 1 (2008): 23–48.
- 2.
Burke’s significant debts to Montesquieu with respect to environmental theory have already been studied in Cecil Patrick Courtney, Montesquieu and Burke (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963); see especially pages 13, 21, and chapters II and III. For the influence on Montesquieu of the theory of climate supported by John Arbuthnot (a thinker whose environmentalism had, as I will show, a strong impact on Burke), see Courtney, p. 21.
- 3.
All references in brackets come from the 1759 edition of the book. Part and section numbers will be given along with page numbers.
- 4.
Burke repeated several times his commitment to this typically Enlightenment species of interactive materialism which, as he put it, sought to clarify the ‘laws of connection’ that are ‘established between certain motions and configurations of bodies, and certain consequent feelings in our minds’ by which ‘Natural objects affect us’ (v.i.311–2).
- 5.
Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting, vol. 2, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: Printed for John Nourse, 1748), 111.
- 6.
The Enlightenment experience of environmental science is also distinct for its self-reflexivity, historical consciousness and scientific naturalism as well as its growing interest in local context and the micro-description of nature/culture interactions. For a brief sketch of the modernisation of ancient environmentalism, see Genevieve Miller, “‘Airs, Waters and Places’ in History,” Journal of the History of Medicine 17 (1962): 129–140. For the distinct history of British environmentalism during the Enlightenment, see Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
- 7.
For Montesquieu, see Robert Shackleton, “Climates and Causes,” in Montesquieu: a Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 302–19. For Dubos, see Armin Hajman Koller, The Abbé Du Bos: His Advocacy of the Theory of Climate (Champaigne: The Garrard press, 1937).
- 8.
Edmund Burke, “Observations on the Influence of the Different Climates upon the Polite Arts,” Annual Register 8 (1765): 250–253. There has been a broad discussion about Burke’s editorial administration and writings in the Annual Register from its inception in 1758. Although it is accepted that his participation diminishes from the volume for 1766 onwards (and esp. in the 1770s and 1780s), there is a widespread consensus among scholars that roughly between the inception of the periodical and 1765 he was virtually running the periodical on his own, and had almost exclusive responsibility for writing, compiling and selecting the periodical’s different parts, including the remarkably wide-ranging reviews sections. See T. O. McLoughlin, Edmund Burke and the First Ten Years of the ‘Annual Register’ 1758–1767 (Salisbury: University of Rhodesia Press, 1975). In particular regarding the authorship of the anonymous book reviews of the early years of the Annual Register (until at least the volume for 1764 where Winckelmann’s review was published), Copeland’s verdict is also unambiguous. See Thomas Wellsted Copeland, “Edmund Burke and the Book Reviews in Dodsley’s Annual Register,” Published by the Modern Language Association of America 57 (1942): 446–468, esp. pp. 446–447 and pp. 463–464. For a more nuanced analysis, see also James Tierney, “Edmund Burke, John Hawkesworth, the Annual Register, and the Gentleman’s Magazine,” Huntington Library Quarterly 42 (1978): 57–72. The broad conceptual and stylistic affinities, which I will demonstrate between this review and Burke’s early work, add strong internal evidence to the overall powerful case regarding Burke’s authorship of the Annual Register in these years.
- 9.
In the original first edition of the book in 1764 the essay on climate appeared in Part One, Chapter One, Section 3 under the title ‘Causes for the Differences in Art among Peoples’, and it included two sub-sections: ‘Influence of Climate on Appearance’ and ‘Influence of Climate on Way of Thinking’. See Alex Potts, “Introduction,” History of the Art of Antiquity, ed. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2006), 117–23.
- 10.
Winckelmann, History, pp. 117–8.
- 11.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art, trans. G. Henry Lodge, vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1881), 156, 160.
- 12.
Winckelmann, History, p. 121.
- 13.
‘Observations’, ibid., p. 250.
- 14.
Ibid., pp. 251–252.
- 15.
Winckelmann, History, p. 191ff.
- 16.
‘Observations’, ibid., p. 252.
- 17.
Winckelmann, History, p. 120.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 121.
- 19.
‘Observations’, p. 252.
- 20.
Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, p. 121.
- 21.
Courtney, p. 5. For Burke’s extensive epistemic and social relation with Christopher Nugent, see my ‘Contractility of Burke’s Sublime’ quoted above (note 1).
- 22.
Dubos, p. 107.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 120.
- 24.
Dubos citing Sir John Chardin in ibid., pp. 216–7.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 228.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 229.
- 27.
Ibid., pp. 16, 176–7, 199, and 111.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 111 (Dubos here cites Fontenelle).
- 29.
Ibid., p. 16. See also p. 95 and pp. 109–111.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 122.
- 31.
George Turnbull, A Treatise on Ancient Painting (London: Millar, 1740).
- 32.
Ibid., xv–xvi.
- 33.
Golinski, British Weather, pp. 108–110.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 181.
- 35.
Ibid., pp. 158–159 and 138–140.
- 36.
‘Discourses on the Weather’, The Idler, no. 11 (24 June 1758), rep. in Samuel Johnson, The Idler and the Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt, and L. F. Powell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 36–39, esp. 38.
- 37.
Dubos, Critical Reflections, pp. 216 and 226.
- 38.
George Cheyne, The English Malady or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds (1733), ed. Roy Porter (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991), and Richard Brocklesby, Reflections on Antient and Modern Music (London: M. Cooper, 1749).
- 39.
Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art, p. 162. See also the first edition of the book, pp. 120–121 and p. 186, p. 194.
- 40.
Edmund Burke, “An Essay Towards an Abridgment of the English History,” in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vol.1, ed. T. O. Loughlin and James T. Boulton, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 332ff. As has long been noted, Burke’s use in the ‘Abridgement’ of physical and cultural factors to explain the early stages of British history owes much to Montesquieu. See Courtney, Montesquieu and Burke, pp. 46–55.
- 41.
Burke, “Abridgment,” p. 339.
- 42.
Ibid., pp. 412–413.
- 43.
John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (London: Printed for J. Tonson, 1733).
- 44.
Similar misunderstandings also viewed Burke’s critical but modernising approaches to science as anti-scientific. See, for example, Peter J. Stanlis, “Edmund Burke and the Scientific Rationalism of the Enlightenment,” in Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and the Modern World, ed. Peter J. Stanlis (Detroit: University of Detroit Press, 1967), 81–116.
- 45.
David E. Shuttleton, “‘A Modest Examination’: John Arbuthnot and the Scottish Newtonians,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 18, no. 1 (1995): 47–62.
- 46.
John Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Nature of Aliments… (London: J. Tonson, 1731).
- 47.
See “Catalogue of the Libraries of the Late Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke etc,” in Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, 12 vols. ed. Seamus Deane (London: Mansell Information, 1973), vol. 8, p. 216 (original page 17), items 395, 396, 406. The differences, however, between these two epistemes of the environment cannot be overemphasised. The passage from old models of environmentalism in which the study of passions was conducted by medical men, to secular and scientific approaches to emotions of the kind that Burke followed is well explained in Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 62–134. Moreover, in comparison to previous forms of environmentalism, Burke’s eighteenth-century style of environmentalism marked a significant departure from the epistemic model of analogy, loose metaphors and comparisons between microcosm and macrocosm or between botanical or animal worlds and human beings. Moreover, if Hippocratic medicine allowed only general linkages between environmental conditions and the humoural contents of the body, the dependence of eighteenth-century environmental science on combinations of mechanical and vitalist models with their new emphasis on sensibility and motion led to a full medicalisation of the slightest phenomenon of feeling or action within an intricately politicised intricate web of sensitive corporeal interdependences. See Ludmilla Jordanova, “Earth Science and Environmental Medicine: the Synthesis of the Late Enlightenment,” in Images of the Earth, ed. Ludmilla Jordanova and Roy Porter (Chalfont St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1979), 119–46. For a broader but rather brief history of environmental ideologies, see Lucian Boia, The Weather in the Imagination, trans. Roger Leverdier (London: Reaktion Books, 2005).
- 48.
Arbuthnot, An Essay Concerning the Effects of Air, p. 205.
- 49.
See, for example, ibid., p. 191 or p. 187.
- 50.
Ibid., pp. 4ff. and pp. 68ff.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 122.
- 52.
Ibid., p. 153.
- 53.
Ibid., p. 151.
- 54.
Ibid., pp. 148–9, and pp. 153ff.
- 55.
Ibid., pp. 122–3.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 123.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 124.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 151.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Ibid., pp. 152–3.
- 63.
Ibid., p. 153
- 64.
Ibid., p. 156.
- 65.
Ibid., p. 153.
- 66.
Ibid., pp. 148–9.
- 67.
James Barry, An Inquiry into the Real and Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England (London: Printed for T. Becket, 1775), 4.
- 68.
The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. G.H. Guttridge, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 99–100.
- 69.
Ibid., p. 100.
- 70.
Barry, An Inquiry, p. 227.
- 71.
Ibid., p. 160.
- 72.
Ibid., p. 225.
- 73.
Ibid., p. 219.
- 74.
Ibid., p. 227.
- 75.
Ibid., pp. 226–7.
- 76.
Ibid., p. 225.
- 77.
Golinski, British Weather, pp. 140–150 and 155–56.
- 78.
Burke, ‘Preface’ to the first edition of the Philosophical Enquiry (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757), pp. vi–vii.
- 79.
These interfaces are brilliantly explored in Lydia Syson’s Doctor of Love: James Graham and His Celestial Bed (Richmond: Alma Books, 2008); see pp. 62–67, 112–120, 126, 136–38, 150–54.
- 80.
Winckelmann, History, p. 121.
- 81.
For the crucial differences between antique forms of bio-history and modern forms of bio-power, which refl ect the shift from ancient to modern forms of environmentalism discussed in this essay, see M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (London: New Press, 1990 [1976]), 142–3, and idem ., “The Birth of Bio-politics,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (London: New Press, 2000 [1997]), 73–80.
- 82.
The discourse of air remained a powerful way of conceptualising and describing the all-pervasive, and yet exquisitely mysterious action of sensorial environments on human beings and culture alike. Such intersections and their socio-professional implications are analysed in my book in progress, Sublime Realism: Bodies of Sensation, Medical Men and Art Professionals in Britain, 1757–1823.
- 83.
Bruno Latour, “Air,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 104–107, esp. p. 107.
- 84.
Arbuthnot, Essay Concerning the Effects of Air, pp. 1 and 3.
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Sarafianos, A. (2012). Hyporborean Meteorologies of Culture: Art’s Progress and Medical Environmentalism in Arbuthnot, Burke and Barry. In: Vermeir, K., Funk Deckard, M. (eds) The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2102-9_3
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