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

[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!