Novelty and Habit in Edmund Burke’s Aesthetics

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.