A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Burkean

I remember trying to get into a grad school seminar about Edmund Burke by saying something smart on the first day. (I was an undergraduate and assumed that grad school was a lot like prison.) I'm not sure why I zeroed in on this passage from the Enquiry:

. . . for nothing can act agreeably to us, that does not act in conformity to our will; but to act agreeably to our will, it must be subject to us; and therefore can never be the cause of a grand and commanding conception. [...] Love approaches much nearer to contempt than is commonly imagined.

My notes say "Therefore it's not surprising that we should find happiness in those things which are contrary to our interests," which was my take on sublimity at the time.* I mention all of this because I sold my copy of the Enquiry to the second-hand bookstore last week, and one thing I do before getting rid of a book is to copy any underlined passages into the master file, and this one from Adam Phillips's introduction to the Oxford Classics edition is a revelation:

It would, for example, become Burke's virtual obsession, from the late 1760's onwards, to found his political beliefs on a story of continuity—a myth of a traditional British Constitution dating back to the magna Carta—that he felt was under continual threat from subversion by radicals and other 'theorists.' In his first and only work of aesthetic theory, the Enquiry, Beauty as a category could be seen as part of a discernible history of Taste: the Sublime was that which ruptured the continuity of experience and tradition, a disordering like 'the spirit of liberty' he would describe in the Reflections in which 'the fixed air is plainly broke loose.' But the Sublime is also bound up with the idea of authority as a species of mystification. 'It is our ignorance of things, Burke writes, 'that causes all our admiration.' The Sublime and the Beautiful, like the (putatively) Traditional and Radical, were not the true contraries that they seemed.

One could teach a class on Burke without touching the Reflections, but a Burke class should always start with the Sublime and the Beautiful.

*A sentence from my notes that I can't quite unpack (help?): "We must make God into a work of fiction, i.e. through liturgy, if we wish to allow ourselves to love him, in the same way that a painting of something terrible is admirable in a way that the terrible thing itself is not."