Experience

Abstract

It was noted in the previous chapter how, in Burke’s time, the study of aesthetics, along with the sublime and beautiful, became warranted as a new kind of inquiry. As Martin Jay has noted, once the belief that ‘beauty was an objective quality of objects’ began to lose its credibility, ‘the door was open for the relocation of aesthetic value in bodily responses — and judgments of taste — of those who experience the work of art’.¹ Alexander Baumgarten was the first to use the term in this particular sense as the title of his two-volume Aesthetica in 1750 and 1758, implying ‘gratifying corporeal sensation, the subjective sensual response to objects rather than objects themselves’.² Such an approach matches that of Burke’s Enquiry, and it also provides the ‘Copernican’, subject-tied basis of Kant’s idealism by which his entire plan ‘struggled to find a way to bridge the gap between cognitive and moral judgments and their aesthetic counterpart’:

[T]hat dimension of aesthetic experience Kant followed Longinus and Edmund Burke in calling ‘the sublime’ provided a link with the noumenal origins of practical reason, because it gets us in touch with supersensible realities that could not be grasped by synthetic a priori judgments, helping produce a feeling of respect for the moral law that was also beyond cognitive understanding.³