‘Expressive Uncertainty’: Edmund Burke’s Theory of the Sublime and Eighteenth-Century Conceptions of Metaphor

Abstract

This paper argues that a provocative theory of metaphor is central to Burke’s understanding of the relationship between the experience of the sublime and the linguistic expression of that experience. In the course of his youthful investigation into the orders of experience that give rise to the mind’s “ideas” of sublimity and beauty, Burke questions some of the theoretical premises underlying the 18th century understanding of the relation between thought and language (a relationship understood to be the basis of metaphor and its function). Burke’s provocative claim in the Philosophical Inquiry that poetry and rhetoric oh little of their power to visual and descriptive clarity posed a challenge to accepted a series of metaphor and language in his time.