Political Theory and the Sublime

Edmund Burke, Jean-François Lyotard, and Stephen White

Abstract

In his later work, L'inhumaine: Causeries sur le temps (1988), Jean-François Lyotard advocated the aesthetic political theory under the influence of Edmund Burke's early writing, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759), though little attention has been paid to this point so far. This paper is intended as the examination of Burke's physiological aesthetics of sublimity and Lyotard's postmodern theory of the sublime from the perspective of political philosophy. Indeed, they didn't preach Kantian moral principles, but claimed the necessity of cultivation of the ethical sensibility through the aesthetical experience of the sublime in their theories. We may go on from this to the conclusion that it is what Stephen White called “the sense of responsibility to otherness” and “the world-disclosing function of language” in his work, Political Theory and Postmodernism (1991) that Burke and Lyotard emphasized the importance of.