Truth HQ by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T R U T H H Q

11. That Very Disturbing Burke

Edmund Burke played a leading role in the way in which questions of beauty and aesthetics are considered today. His writings on the subject are fascinating in what they tell us about the ideas of his time. But they also give away

something of the man himself. The things that Mr. Burke gives away of himself give us, perhaps, a deeper understanding of aesthetics than the things he wanted to tell us!

One of the most important ideas in Edmund Burke’s book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, is that very distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Mountains, crashing waves, thunderstorms – such things have a grandeur that humbles us and reminds us of our precarity and impermanence as frail humans. This is the sublime. Beauty, by contrast, seems to Mr.

Burke to be more about superficial pleasure. He makes some telling comments about the areas of bare flesh that were displayed in women’s fashions of his day. Perhaps these comments now seem more silly than disturbing. Ideas of

82