에드먼드 버크의 미학과 정치

Abstract

This paper explores the intricate interrelationships of aesthetics and politics that are represented in the works of Edmund Burke. Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, expressed his strong aversion and fear against the French Revolution. What interests us about this negative criticism is his conspicuous modifications of the aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime constructed in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. What made him change his perspectives? In order to find the answer to this question this paper reconstructs Burke's aesthetics with its political implications. In doing so, this paper also excavates Burke's hidden desire to be cultural capital as a way to share the political prerogatives with the upper classes. Burke's discussion of taste left a trace of his inner fragmentation that would be vanished when he criticized the Revolution.