Edmund Burke’s Moral Imagination: Interpretation and Cultivation

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the faculty of imagination is crucial to Burke’s view of man, the sublime and beautiful, the arts, morality, society, and politics and that, therefore, the cultivation of a moral imagination is likewise crucial to his ethic. It accomplishes its thesis by systematically examining (nearly) every usage of the term “imagination(s)” in Burke’s corpus.

Chapters 2–3 focus on Burke’s view of the imagination as a creative mental faculty with the powers of representation, wit, fancy, and invention. Imagination reflects the senses, interacts with reason, gives rise to emotions, and shapes the will, thereby mediating the person’s faculties and powers. Although Burke lived in the shadow of British empiricism, he affirmed a priori truths of imagination. Additionally, imagination gives form to thought, both representational and non-representational (e.g., memories, plans, and beliefs), and undergirds the expression of one’s thought (e.g., language). The imagination may be deceived, and it may deceive.

Chapter 4 introduces Burke’s enquiry into the sublime, the beautiful, and the arts. The imagination experiences the sublime and beautiful, giving rise to corresponding feelings of terror and love. Whereas the sublime results from causes such as divinity, infinity, and eternity, the beautiful results from loveliness; significantly, Burke rejected proportion and fitness in themselves as causes of beauty, though he recognized that beauty may bear those qualities. These reflections undergird his view of the arts. By imagination, the person observes and produces artifacts, and by the arts, people and societies are formed, making the arts exceedingly important for both the individual imagination and the social imagination. Finally, by imagination, man cultivates taste, which he develops by improving his sensibility and judgment, knowledge and attention, morals and manners, and exercise and labor.

Chapter 5 examines Burke’s articulation of the “moral imagination,” or the sociohistorical inheritance of Christianity, which extols noble equality and chivalry and balances restraint and liberty. Burke characterized the moral imagination as the pleasing illusions, the decent drapery, and the superadded ideas of private and public life that cover man’s nakedness and dignify his nature. While the moral imagination is socially received, it is also individually cultivated in the mind and heart; additionally, it bridges the sublime and beautiful, and it balances universals, circumstance, and perfection. However, Enlightenment liberalism destroys the moral imagination.

Finally, chapters 6–7 evaluate Burke’s integration of the doctrine of moral imagination with the topics of virtue, vice, authority, rights, and social change. The moral imagination is cultivated by the virtues of humility, truth, justice, sympathy, and wisdom. However, the immoral imagination is vain, revealing a faculty that is weak and juvenile, infected and strange, disordered and distempered, unbounded and wild, and revolutionary. Whereas the moral imagination submits to good authorities, such as good tradition, prejudice, community, religion, and government, the immoral imagination does not so submit to them but rather subverts them. Authorities should reflect true natural rights, not false abstracted rights. To the extent they do not, they should be changed, but the method of change should be reform not revolution. In conclusion, the faculty of imagination is crucial to Burke’s view of man, the sublime and beautiful, the arts, morality, society, and politics so that the cultivation of a moral imagination is likewise crucial to his ethic.