Едмънд Бърк

The current text is dedicated to the interpretation of Ognyan Kovachev on Edmund Burke’s treatise “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”. This interpretation is to be found in Kovachev’s preface to the first Bulgarian edition of the treatise of 2001, as well as parts of the monograph “The Gothic Novel” (2004). We interpret Kovachev’s introduction to Burke not only in its didactic and propaedeutic dimensions – as a text that introduces the Bulgarian public to the problems of a hitherto unknown author within the framework of its broad cultural, historical and philosophical context (the 18th century), but in view of the specific interpretation of Burke’s aesthetics, offered by Kovachev. The study claims that Kovachev reads Burke through the problem of doubling and duality. At the same time, for Kovachev, Burke’s doubling functions not as a subversive element in the logic of the philosophical exposition, but rather as a constitutive moment of the aesthetic subject of Modern age. The latter is related to the genre of the gothic novel and its interpretation in Kovachev’s monograph on this type of novel.

The article develops Ognyan Kovachev’s observation that in Edmund Burke’s influential Philosophical Inquiry of the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, “[t]he characteristic for modernity device of estrangement turns out to be an active principle.” Although Burke rejects at the outset novelty as an effective resource for aesthetic effects because of the destructive impact of the force of habit on novelty, he distributes its effects over various aspects of the beautiful and the sublime, and thus renders it ubiquitous.