Sublime ignorance

[radiantfracture]

Several more inches of snow fell in the night. All this would be perfectly ordinary anywhere even half a league north or a laddersworth higher in elevation, but here we are having our yearly festival of confusion.

I trudged downtown and back to pick up my prescription, so I feel accomplished, not to say enervated.

I will also submit the Indigenous education conference proposal today. That is my useful act for Wednesday. Now I will eat a pot pie and read The Club as the wind shakes its great sails across my shingles.

We have finally got through Boswell (hurray!) and are on to Burke. I have just read this sentence:

It may surprise readers today, who know Burke as a great political writer, that his breakthrough publication was a treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

--which points up my biases, since the sublime and beautiful is what I know Burke best for and I am only vaguely aware of anything else he did. I eagerly anticipate the amendment of my ignorance.

Do you know anything about Burke beyond the sublime? His political theory? Any particular highlights?

The book has to go back in two days and I don't expect I'll be done. I may never make it to Edward Gibbon.

{rf}

Comments

[jazzfish]

Burke's name gets brought up a lot as a foundational writer for modern US/UK political conservatism, and that may be the extent of my knowledge of him.

[radiantfracture]

In that case, the amendment of my ignorance makes me a slightly sadder person. I ought to have known.

[jazzfish]

I mean, these are people who cite Adam Smith and the Bible approvingly, having read both very selectively if at all, so it /may/ not be entirely his fault?

[oursin]

Burke: passionate speech in Parliament about the death of Marie Antoinette, as I recall. Ummm, also something about the trial of Warren Hastings? (Not my period....)

[radiantfracture]

Interesting! Just remind me about Warren Hastings?

[oursin]

He had a lengthy career in India, rising to become Governor of Bengal, which effectively made him Governer-General over the three Presidencies (Bengal, Madras and Bombay) where the East India Company was in power. In 1787 he was accused of corruption and impeached. There was a lengthy trial, and he was acquitted in 1795. The prosection brought together Burke (urged on by a mate who had been wounded in a duel by Hastings) with two men who I would have guessed were otherwise political anathema to him, Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Wikipedia seems fairly solid on him and his ambiguous legacy.

[al_zorra]

Fear not -- there is more Boswell. Always more Boswell.

[radiantfracture]

Do not want.

[al_zorra]

Cannot have Johnson without Boswell. It's a fact. :)

[radiantfracture]

His love of and dedication to Johnson is all that reconciles me to that popinjay.

[sovay]

Do you know anything about Burke beyond the sublime? His political theory? Any particular highlights?

I associate him more with politics more than philosophy of aesthetics, but the only biographical fact that I seem to know well enough about him to recount off the top of my head is his complicated relationship to the American Revolution: he did not want to see the American colonies separate themselves from the British Empire, but he thought the colonists had legitimate grievances and argued openly (and accurately) against the use of force by the British government on the grounds that it would only worsen the rift and the British would probably lose.

[marycatelli]

I've read his work on the French revolution and the speech on Reconciliation with America.

[glinda]

I knew him entirely as a political theorist - he was one of those 'great political thinkers' that we covered in class, I remember that the class was very interesting but not really of any practical use to me with the notable exception of some useful background knowledge when I came to study the American Revolution a couple of years later. But as both those incidients are a decade and change behind me, I cannot say I remember much about his writings other than vastly prefering the work of Thomas Paine on the subject...

[calimac]

Burke is possibly best-known for his argument that voters choose representatives for their judgment and not just automatically to take the positions that the majority of voters want.

"his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. ... Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion"

One of the reasons this statement is well-known is because it's quoted by one of the delegates in the musical 1776 to justify voting in favor of independence.

Burke would say that if the voters find their representative's judgment intolerable, they're free to kick him out at the next election. So it should be no surprise that, at the next election after Burke said this, the voters kicked him out.

[radiantfracture]

I have just got to this bit of the book!

[cybermule]

I have finally googled "pot pie" :)

I hope you do ok in the snow.

[yarrowkat]

the only thing of Burke's I've ever read or even heard of is that selfsame Treatise on the Sublime & Beautiful

[yarrowkat]

reading the rest of the comments, i now wonder if this is because my graduate education was fairly narrowly focused on literature. (and honestly just the one 18th c Brits class - another for American lit of the period but that is certainly its own animal).

[radiantfracture]

I think this is my problem, too. I believe I have taken exactly one history course in postsecondary life, and that was first-year Canadian History. I did study some 18th C literature, but the historical context was mostly limited to what one could glean from the descriptions of everybody's wigs.