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

[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.