From the Sublime to the Brooksiculous!
David Brooks ("Big and Little Loves", May 31 2016) is interested in the concept of the sublime!
Brooks is working clearly on pure memories from something like 35 years ago, when he was first curating his self-image as the sort of interesting young man who has a favorite philosopher nobody else in the dorm has ever heard of, Burke, of course, and his lovely distinction between the dreadful revolutionary categorical continentals and the modest, conservative, whimsical, hobbity Englishmen of the 1790s. He wrestled, no doubt, through the first four or five pages of Burke's gnarly and unpleasant treatise on aesthetics—life was so hard in the days before Google!—for an only partly cribbed term paper, and what remains of it in his frazzled, weary brain has gotten divorced from Burke's name:
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| Richard Barthelmess contemplates whacking a policeman with a ukulele in D.W. Griffith's The Love Flower (1920). Via Fritzi. |
David Brooks ("Big and Little Loves", May 31 2016) is interested in the concept of the sublime!
Ever since the days of ancient Greece, philosophers have distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime.
Sadly, no. According to my trusty Wikipedia, while an interest in the sublime goes back to classical antiquity, the dichotomy between beauty and sublimity as exclusive categories was invented in England, in the late 17th century, by John Dennis, who found himself, on a trip to Switzerland, struck by the contrast between his previous experience of the beauty of nature as a "delight that is consistent with reason" on the one hand, and on the other the spectacle of the Alps "mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair". And explicitly argued for the first time by Edmund Burke in his 1756 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.Brooks is working clearly on pure memories from something like 35 years ago, when he was first curating his self-image as the sort of interesting young man who has a favorite philosopher nobody else in the dorm has ever heard of, Burke, of course, and his lovely distinction between the dreadful revolutionary categorical continentals and the modest, conservative, whimsical, hobbity Englishmen of the 1790s. He wrestled, no doubt, through the first four or five pages of Burke's gnarly and unpleasant treatise on aesthetics—life was so hard in the days before Google!—for an only partly cribbed term paper, and what remains of it in his frazzled, weary brain has gotten divorced from Burke's name:
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