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It might be expected that Burke should defer to the unknown higher authority of 'necessity' in desperate defence of the Glorious Revolution. But the role of necessity and will in his definition of what he calls 'the eternal compact of society' or the body politic is similarly fraught. In his best epigrammatic vein Burke can proclaim: 'Justice is grave and decorous, and in its punishments rather seems to submit to a necessity, than to make a choice.'[17] The elegance of that 'seems' is loaded. Having argued
that 'Men cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together',[18] Burke proceeds in the Reflections to a definition of government.
His concern is to counter what he sees in the 'rights of men' as the worst kind of anarchistic individualism which provides an excuse for 'choice' - the free exercise of individual will. What he offers is his characteristic paradox of liberty with restraint. His articulation of it here might be construed as dangerously explicit:
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle. (Reflections, p. 151[110-11])
The central conflict here is between the idea that government is 'a contrivance of human wisdom' and the claim that it depends on a 'power out of itself'. Human contrivance alone is clearly not enough. For this reason Burke is able to claim that the abstract rules of his revolutionary enemies are insufficient. Characteristically, Burke's geographical specificity - the idea that governments are determined by local circumstances - depends on a metaphysical support. The worldly - such as the British constitution in his terms - is allowed to be 'various' and 'mixed' precisely because it is under divine jurisdiction. As long as 'subjection' extends right through from individual to 'mass' and 'body' - to use Burke's terms - moral issues can be described as 'complex' and can be made the subject of relative opinions.
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Similarly, when Burke proceeds in the Reflections to define his binding contract of 'society' in the face of those whom he considers to be parricide primitives, the revolutionaries who would 'hack that aged parent in pieces',[19] he reveals the extent to which this binding contract
cuts against will, whether it belong to the individual, the 'mass', or the 'body'. Burke's contract of society makes choice anathema and its polite guise of 'restraint' can, if necessary, be backed by a terrible 'force':
Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles. It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion, and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things to which man must be obedient by consent or force; but if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow. (Reflections, p. 195[147])
Just as the end of this passage reads like a description of the expulsion from Eden so, ultimately, Burke goes on to argue: 'He willed therefore the state - He willed its connexion with the source and original archetype of all perfection.'[20] With such an original archetype in place politics
can only be 'contingent'. The threat provided by the French revolutionaries, on the other hand, is in overturning the archetype itself with their impious inversion of things. Their energy is clearly degenerative: it turns a beautiful creation back into an aboriginal chaos. In order to point up the threat of revolution, Burke actually creates a stronger link between this revolutionary energy and original authority, even if it is attacked as negative.[21]
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From this point of view - that citizenship is a form of subjection backed by force - the fusion of aesthetics and politics in Burke's texts is far from complete. There is a disjunction in them between consent and force, elegance and power, politics and authority. It is as if the aesthetic, even in the negative form of 'delight', only provides a covering for starker, more punitive, and more heroic possibilities. The Swiftian clothes analogies in the Reflections operate in this way. They offer up a primitive 'other' as a threat to the supposedly civilised and fully clothed reader. If the aesthetics don't make you happy, then the ultimate deterrent of terror surely will. In this way Burke can play off the aesthetics with his binary oppositions of civilised/barbarous sane/mad. There is threat as well as troubled, covert pleasure lurking in these oppositions.
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However, there is also a more integrated version of this apparent dualism lurking in both the Enquiry and the Reflections. Rather than moments of crisis bringing in a self-justifying necessity as in the case of the Glorious Revolution, there is a dynamic of long-term suffering or, in Burke's terms, 'difficulty' at work to set against the epiphanies of spectacular justice.
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When in Part Four of the Enquiry Burke comes to answer the question 'How pain can be a cause of delight' he goes one better than his earlier claim for a natural state of indifference. Here it is apparent that such a state of indifference would be intolerable to him. It would be tantamount to that dangerous aristocratic disease of indolence which he targets in his periodic attacks on luxury. He begins the passage in typical fashion - 'Providence has so ordered it' - and manages to maintain his concentration on the physical aspect of such effects to an extraordinary degree. According to Burke's discourse in the Enquiry, muscle fibre and moral fibre come pretty close together.
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In attempting to describe the basic aesthetic response here Burke could be said to be articulating the coercive power which provides a dynamic for each member of the body politic. That dynamic straddles the extreme poles of Burke's thinking: it is God-driven and muscle- bound. Disorder here is individualism, and individualism is a kind of self-destruction:
Providence has so ordered it, that a state of rest and inaction, however it may flatter our indolence, should be productive of many inconveniences; that it should generate such disorders, as may force us to have recourse to some labour, as a thing absolutely requisite to make us pass our lives with tolerable satisfaction; for the nature of rest is to suffer all the parts of our bodies to fall into a relaxation, that not only disables the members from performing their functions, but takes away the vigorous tone of fibre which is requisite for carrying on the natural and necessary secretions . . . Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body. The best remedy for all these evils is exercise or labour;
and labour is a surmounting of diffculties, an exertion of the contracting power of the muscles; and as such resembles pain, which consists in tension or contraction, in every thing but degree. Labour is not only requisite to preserve the coarser organs in a state fit for their functions, but it is equally necessary to these finer and more delicate organs, on which, and by which, the imagination, and perhaps the other mental powers act. (Enquiry, pp. 134-35)
It is precisely this 'difficulty' which Burke finds lacking in the plans of the French revolutionaries and which disqualifies them, in his view, from a moral legislature. They might be men of ability, but without this fundamental relationship of struggle to support their idea of government, they must inhabit a moral vacuum - that world of exile, madness, and confusion which he has already given us a glimpse of:
Their purpose every where seems to have been to evade and slip aside from difficulty. This it has been the glory of the great masters in all the arts to confront, and to overcome; and when they had overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties; thus to enable them to extend the empire of their science; and even to push forward beyond the reach of their original thoughts, the land marks of the human understanding itself. Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better too. Pater ipse colendi haud facilem esse viam voluit. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. (Reflections, p. 278[215])
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In the realm of the French revolutionaries, 'at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the gallows'.[22] There is no pleasing aesthetic illusion
of power in the form of grace or glory. They have made explicit what should have remained hidden and they have done away with any mitigating aesthetic recompense. Difficulty - a kind of moral muscletoning - provides the underlying tension necessary for human prog- ress.[23] Characteristically, that progress is seen imperialistically as a
constant process of civilisation. Severe instruction has replaced severe punishment in this celebration of difficulty. i i i
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Against this threatening background of necessity and the punitive potential of state power Burke's aestheticisation of the constitution thus operates as a powerful means of apprehending the idea of one's relation to the state and enjoying one's country as itself a beautiful object. This is most famously and powerfully articulated in the text at the crescendo of Burke's lament for chivalry. After quoting Horace, 'Non satis est pulchra esse poemata, dulcia sunto' ('It is not enough for poems to be beautiful; they must also be sweet, and divert the mind of the listener'), and after equating the construction of poems with the construction of states, the paragraph culminates with: 'To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.'[24] The comforting reciprocation enacted in Burke's
pleasingly disposed rhetorical figure precisely captures this circularity of relationship which reconstitutes the fear of power as the authority of beauty. Burke's sentence uses repetition to stress the positive side of the relationship; the potentially coercive power relations reside in the verbs. Referring to the constitution as a beautiful object makes it seem ornamental, even distracting, especially since Burke invokes a metaphysical and religious dimension to the subject's apprehension of the state. At the very least, the aesthetic dimension to the perception of the body politic allows Burke to see it, in keeping with the Swiftian sartorial images, as separable and therefore capable of posing a threat if withdrawn, and a comforting pleasure if maintained.
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Throughout his Reflections Burke does his best to make the British constitution and its consequent British liberty appear beautiful and, more particularly, glorious. The complexity which arises from the nature of man's contract with society, what Burke refers to as the 'artificial limitation upon rights', provides him with the explanation for this aestheticisation of politics. Because of the tension between nature and artifice, man's first and second nature, 'the constitution of a state and the distribution of its powers' become 'a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill'.[25] Given that the 'nature of man is intricate',[26]
would-be legislators need to possess 'a comprehensive connected view of the various complicated external and internal interests which go to the formation of that multifarious thing called a state'.[27] In stark contrast to
his French revolutionary opponents, Burke thus sees simplicity as either impossible or inadequate. Burke's self-professedly humane and liberal perspective on human affairs in the Reflections is given the distinguishing characteristics of aesthetics.[28] The perception of political complexity,
the inter-involved combination of factors, leads on to a discourse of taste evident in his reference to 'distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect':
I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. (Reflections, pp. 89-90[58])
By ascribing aesthetic qualities to the very structure of political life Burke at the same time invokes the appropriate affect through which it can be appreciated. If our country is lovely, the only appropriate response is to love it. This captivated and at times almost religious response is supported by an equally powerful aestheticising aspect of Burke's text which stresses the complex nature of the British constitution and, consequently, the complex minds who created it and who can perceive its complexity.[29] This is typical of the Reflections: the way in
which the text seems able to deploy both sides of an argument. According to Burke's own tactics, the constitution can readily be internalised and reified as natural at the same time as being referred to as a deliberate contrivance, a convention, a construction and as an art-work.
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The circumstantial and human complexity of political affairs and interests is thus transposed into a reified object which will reveal its meaning and working principles only to the most sophisticated of interpreters. By the same analogy, the production of a constitution becomes a question of authorship and genius. At the same time as he refers to the 'beautiful parts of our constitution'[30] as if he were invoking
a revered passage from The Book of Common Prayer, Burke alludes to the want of genius in the authors of the current French experiment. The necessary complexity which comes from the difficulty of mixing first and second natures, of reconciling 'artificial institutions' and 'powerful instincts' [31] turns into an aesthetic of a reified wholeness based upon a
principle of dynamic combination. |
