Abstract
Aisling Gheár - A Terrible Beauty was a poetic cliche in the Gaelic tradition by the time that Burke was composing his treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful.. This article briefly summarises the Gaelic political and cultural background to Burke’s life and details how the genre of politcal poetry known as the Aisling Gheár might be seen to have influenced Burke’s Enquiry.The article is particularly interested in Burke’s focus on the effects of the Sublime and Beautiful on the psyche of the listener and the witness, and it draws on recently developing field of Cognitive Science’s exploration of Affect to discuss this aspect of Burke’s work.
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Notes
- 1.
The definitive discussion of this is to be found in Helen Burke, Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theater, 1712–1784 (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).
- 2.
See Thomas Mahoney, Edmund Burke and Ireland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 17, who quotes letters of Burke where he disparages Lucas’ anti-Catholicism; for a contrary view, see T. O. McLoughlin, “The Context of Edmund Burke’s The Reformer,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 2 (1987): 37–56, and A. P. I. Samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence and Writings of the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke LL.D (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 279–329.
- 3.
The Reformer, 1, 2.
- 4.
McLoughlin, “The Context of Edmund Burke’s The Reformer,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 2 (1987): 44.
- 5.
The Reformer, 2, 1.
- 6.
Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (London: Verso, 1995), 109.
- 7.
Seán Ó Tuama and Thomas Kinsella, eds., An Duanaire 1600–1900: Poems of the Dispossessed (Dublin: Cork University Press, 1994), xxv.
- 8.
Written while serving in Lord Clare’s regiment in Flanders, quoted by B. O’Cuív, “Irish Language and Literature: 1691–1845” in A New history of Ireland, vol. 4, ed. T. Moody and W. Vaughan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 397. Aodh Buidhe Mac Cruitín collaborated on the English-Irish dictionary, published in Paris in 1732, a copy of which was owned and annotated by Burke.
- 9.
Breandán Ó Buachalla, Aisling Gheár: Na Stíobhartigh agus an tAos Léinn, 1603–1788 (Baile Átha Cliath: An Clóchomhar Tta, 1996).
- 10.
Cf. Joe Pappin’s contribution above.
- 11.
Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). See in particular pp. 267–413.
- 12.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions [1817], ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (London: Routledge, 1983), 93, writes: ‘During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. … In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment…’
- 13.
John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ lines 49–50. Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, The Oxford Book of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon, 1919, [c1901]; Bartleby.com, 1999). www.bartleby.com/101/. Accessed 21 Mar 2007.
- 14.
Much literary work deals explicitly with the past and with memory as acts of forgetting, remembering, even dismembering. The tour de force of this literary exploration is to be found in the work of Marcel Proust. The narrator of this multi-volume, lifetime work, In Search of Lost Time marks its genesis from the enlightened insight into time and the realisation of being that was inspired on the occasion of tasting a desert confection: ‘…the sound of the spoon on the plate, the uneven flagstones, the taste of the madeleine, had something in common, which I was experiencing in the present moment and at the same time in a moment far away, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and make me uncertain about which of the two I was in; the truth was that the being within me who was enjoying this impression was enjoying it because of something shared between a day in the past and the present moment, something extra-temporal, and this being appeared only when, through one of these moments of identity between the present and the past, it was able to find itself in the only milieu in which it could live and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say outside of time. This explained why my anxieties on the subject of my death had ceased the moment when I unconsciously recognized the taste of the little madeleine since at that very moment the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being, and consequently unconcerned with the vicissitudes of the future. It lived only through the essence of things, and was unable to grasp this in the present, where, as the imagination does not come into play, the senses were incapable of providing it; even the future towards which action tends surrenders it to us. This being had only ever come to me, only ever manifested itself to me on the occasions, outside of action and immediate pleasure, when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. It alone had the power to make me find the old days again, the lost time, in the face of which the efforts of my memory and my intellect always failed.’ Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again [Le Temps retrouvé, 1927] In Search of Lost Time vol. VI, trans. Ian Paterson (London: Allan Lane/Penguin Books, 2002), 179–80.
- 15.
There has been a wealth of feminist-inflected work on affect recently. See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004); Lauren Berlant, Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) and The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004); Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Sally R. Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003) and Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
- 16.
‘Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal.’ Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8 (2005). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php. Accessed 31 Mar 2007, § 2. C. Daniel Batson, Laura L. Shaw and Kathryn C. Oleson “Differentiating Affect, Mood and Emotion: Toward Functionally Based Conceptual Distinctions,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 13 (1992): 294–326. Batson and colleagues made their distinctions based on functional differences, like changes in value state (affect) beliefs about future affective states (mood), and the existence of a specific goal (emotion). ‘Reserve the term ‘emotion’ for the personalised content, and affect for the continuation. Emotion is contextual. Affect is situational … Impersonal affect is the connecting thread of experience. It is the invisible glue that holds the world together.’ Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 217.
- 17.
Silvan S. Tomkins is one of the most influential theorists of affect in the twentieth century. Building on the work of Charles Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals [1872] (London: HarperCollins, 1998), Tompkins understood affect as the sum of a set of discreet physiological responses that stimulates a distinctive qualitative experience, which causes the organism to care about what is happening. See E. Virginia Demos, ed., Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins, Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
- 18.
Brian Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements,” in A Thousand Plateaus, ed. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xvi. Among the most recent philosophical writing on affect is that of Deleuze. According to Deluze an affect is an intensive neuronal response to external stimulus. Qualitative, not quantitative, it involves the body’s power to absorb an external action and react internally. Typical of his radical post-humanism, affects, according to Deleuze, are not simple affections, as they are independent from their subject. In his later work (from about 1981 onward), Deleuze sharply distinguishes art, philosophy, and science as three distinct disciplines, each analysing reality in different ways. Artists create affects and percepts, ‘blocks of space-time’, new qualitative combinations of sensation and feeling (what he calls ‘percepts’ and ‘affects’), whereas science creates quantitative theories based on fixed points of reference such as the speed of light or absolute zero (which he calls ‘functives’) and philosophy creates concepts. For more on Deleuze in relation to Burke, see Chap. 15 below by Baldine Saint Girons.
- 19.
Some scholars, such as the influential Stanford-based social psychologist, Robert B. Zajonc, argue that affect is primary in it is the first thing to evolutionarily distinguish animals from plants. He argues that affective reactions are unavoidable and involuntary, that affect relies on energy whereas thinking relies on information. People do most things based on affection and justify their choices later with cognition: “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences,” American Psychologist 35 (1980): 151–175; “On the Primacy of Affect,” American Psychologist 39 (1984): 117–123. See also Jan De Houwer and Dirk Hermans, ed., “Automatic Affective Processing,” Special Issue Cognition and Emotion 15 (2001): 113–114. For those who are at the forefront of arguing that cognition comes first in attitude development, see Alice H. Eagly and Shelly Chaiken, The Psychology of Attitudes (Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1993). For an engaging overview of debates and agreements within the field of ‘affective science’, see: Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson, ed., The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, Series in Affective Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
- 20.
See R. J. Davidson and W. Irwin, “The Functional Neuroanatomy of Emotion and Affective Style,” Trends in Cognitive Science 3 (1999): 11–21; R. J. Davidson, “Cognitive Neuroscience Needs Affective Neuroscience (and Vice Versa),” Cognition and Emotion 42 (2000): 89–92; E.T. Rolls, The Brain and Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
- 21.
For an overview of the literature on the brain’s capacity (its ‘plasticity’) to expand, retrain and develop in ‘enriched environments’ that is an environment where the subjects (including rodents) are encouraged to enjoy greater aesthetic pleasure, see Gerd Kemperman and Fred Gage, “New Nerve Cells for the Adult Brain” Scientific American 280, no. 5 (May 1999): 48–53. See also A. Lutz, L.L Greischar, N.B. Rawlings, M. Ricard, and R.J. Davidson, “Long-Term Meditators Self-Induce High-Amplitude Gamma Synchrony During Mental Practice,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101 (November 16, 2004): 16369–16373.
- 22.
PE v.vii, ‘How WORDS influence the passions’.
- 23.
Boulton ed., Enquiry, pp. 23–24.
- 24.
Pádraig Breathnach, “Oral and Written Transmission of Poetry in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland 2 (1987), 59.
- 25.
See Katherine O’Donnell, “Burke and the Aisling: ‘Homage of a Nation’,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 3 (2007): 405–422.
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O’Donnell, K. (2012). Aisling Gheár – A Terrible Beauty: The Gaelic Background to Burke’s Enquiry . 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_7
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