Edmund Burke A Philosophical Enquiry

Edmund Burke is not one that often figures in the history of philosophy. This is a curious fate for a writer of genius who was also the author of a book entitled A Philosophical Enquiry. Besides the Enquiry, Burke's writings and some of his verbalizations contain vigorously philosophical elements—philosophical both in our contemporary sense and in the eighteenth century sense, especially ‘philosophical’ history. These elements play a fundamental role within his work, and avail us to understand why Burke is a political classic. His writings and verbalizations consequently merit attention as examples of attention to both conceptions and to history, and of the role of this attention in practical thought. His work is withal, as we optically discern
Burke then proceeded to show that self-preservation and its cognates suggested the complex idea of the sublime, and not least the idea of a God who was both active and terrible. The diverse views rejected by A Philosophical Enquiry were united by the pervasive assumption that human nature in an unschooled condition, as it came from the hand of nature, and understood without direct reference to God, was in some sense adequate to the human condition. Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality was at odds with Burke's view of the naturalness of society, and with his view that solitude, because unnatural, was a source of pain, as well as with Burke's position that sympathy, rather than merely compassion, was a key
This reflects, no doubt, other features of his mind apart from his understanding of complex ideas, such as the skill in seeing the strong side and the obverse of any argument, which Burke had acquired in his undergraduate study of rhetoric; and it reflects, too, a habit of versatility begun in his debating society, for there speakers were called upon to play roles; and no doubt it is reminiscent, again, of Burke's undergraduate interest in the