BURKEAN BEAUTY IN THE SERVICE OF VIOLENCE

Examining the images of war displayed on front pages of the New York Times, DavidShields makes the case that they ultimately glamorize military conflict. He anchorshis case with an excerpt on the delight of the sublime from Edmund Burke’s aesthetictheory in A Philosophical Enquiry. By contrast, this essay considers violence and warfareusing not the Burkean sublime, but instead the beautiful in Burke’s aesthetics, andargues that forming identities on the beautiful in the Burkean sense can ultimately shutdown dialogue and feed the lust for violence and revenge.