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Volume 24:

On Taste (full text) & On the Sublime and Beautiful (full text) by Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke is the kind of writer I had in mind when I decided to read the Harvard Classics. That is, he's a writer I've never read before, a writer I've wanted to read, a writer I feel I ought to have read, and I writer I almost certainly would never have read without a project like this to spur me on. Having finished this volume, I can say that he's also the kind of writer who makes me glad I'm reading these all these books.

Burke is best known as a poltical thinker, but this collection of his work begins with an early treatise on aesthetics. I've always found aesthetics to be among the easiest branches of philosophy to mock. At its worst, it has the same tendency to obscurant pedantry as metaphysics or ontology, but it deals in something less fitting of such treatment. Interpreting the meaning of a work of art is one thing, but trying to explain beauty itself is like trying to explain what makes a joke funny. There is something bathetic about 1000 words on why we like to look at sunsets when compared with, say, a sunset.

Although a few of Burke's chapter titles -- Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in Vegetables, Why Smoothness is Beautiful -- gave me a chuckle, his work -- especially the introductory On Taste -- is actually quite grounded, even useful. He operates on an aesthetic foundation consistent with his conservative political beliefs: It is probable that the standard both of reason and taste is the same in all human creatures. For if there were not some principles of judgment as well as of sentiment common to all mankind, no hold could possibly be taken either on their reason or their passions, sufficient to maintain the ordinary correspondence of life. The key word here, I think, is standard. Burke doesn't pretend that all people have the same taste, only that there is a standard by which differing tastes can be judged. Sensibility and judgment, Burke writes, which are the qualities that compose what we commonly call a taste, vary exceedingly in various people. From a defect in the former of these qualities arises a want of taste; a weakness in the latter constitutes a wrong or a bad one. He elaborates:

The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment. And this may arise from a natural weakness of understanding, (in whatever the strength of that faculty may consist,) or, which is much more commonly the case, it may arise from a want of proper and well-directed exercise, which alone can make it strong and ready. Besides that ignorance, inattention, prejudice, rashness, levity, obstinacy, in short, all those passions, and all those vices, which pervert the judgment in other matters, prejudice it no less in this its more refined and elegant province ... Though a degree of sensibility is requisite to form a good judgment, yet a good judgment does not necessarily arise from a quick sensibility of pleasure; it frequently happens that a very poor judge, merely by force of a greater complexional sensibility, is more affected by a very poor piece, than the best judge by the most perfect; for as everything new, extraordinary, grand, or passionate, is well calculated to affect such a person, and that the faults do not affect him, his pleasure is more pure and unmixed; and as it is merely a pleasure of the imagination, it is much higher than any which is derived from a rectitude of the judgment .. In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty fresh upon all the objects that surround us, how lively at that time are our sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of things? I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most excellent performances of genius, which I felt at that age from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible.

Our own culture isn't all that comfortable with these sorts of standards. We are hesitant to speak of tastelessness or bad taste, let alone wrong taste. In judging art, affect is all. It's considered churlish at best, and probably elitist, to suggest that a passionate response to a movie or to the final installment of a children's novel lacks judgement. I don't think it would help matters much to add that such judgement might be gained through proper and well-directed exercise.

Reflections on the French Revolution (full text) & A Letter to a Noble Lord (full text)

Of course, Burke is remembered not for his aesthetics but for his politics. He is sometimes remembered now -- and was thought of by some in his own time -- as anti-democratic reactionary. But this isn't the picture that emerges here. Burke was a member of parliament during the American Revolution, and he advocated strongly on the colonies' behalf. He was a reformer, but he also had great respect for order and tradition (In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction). Reform, to Burke, meant something different than innovation or change. It meant applying local solutions to local problems within a system, rather than overthrowing the system itself. This belief motivated the harsh response to the French Revolution through which Burke more or less invented modern poltical conservatism. To read Reflections on the French Revolution now is in part to see just how little those who are currently running the show resemble Burke:

If circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom, when we work only upon inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty too, when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber, by sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose state, condition, and habits, multitudes may be rendered miserable. But it seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling heart, and an undoubting confidence, are the sole qualifications for a perfect legislator.

Burke wrote these words years before the Terror made the worst tendencies of the French Revolution painfully apparent. Once the dust had settled, Burke might not have fooled himself into thinking we had cured ourselves of the habit of violently overthrowing the status quo in the name of freedom and democracy, but he might have been surprised to find those most eager to continue the habit calling themselves conservatives.


--CRB, July 21, 2007

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