Monday, February 1, 2010

The sublime and the beautiful (2)

If ethical judgments are analogous to aesthetic ones, then it isn't very far from that to saying that your taste (your habitual approach to aesthetic judgment) is a part of your moral character. And a whole load of people charged right out into the new form of argument that Shaftesbury had opened up here.

Edmund Burke was one of them and Burke was particularly inspired by the concepts of the sublime and the beautiful. Taking them in reverse order. The beautiful for Burke was everything that inspired us love. Again, when considered in a disinterested way. If Allyson Hannigan was your next door neighbour you might be too consumed with actually being in love with her to judge. The sublime inspired terror. Not actual fear. The Matterhorn might inspire terror at its sheer power and scale when seen from distance. You would be disinterested at a distance. If you were standing on top of the Matterhorn, your fear of falling off would prevent you from seeing it in a disinterested way.

The sublime was a lot like religious contemplation. God is really powerful and you don't think of him the same way you would a teddy bear. (Well, you shouldn't; there is no shortage of clergymen keen to reduce God to a cute stuffed animal.)

And, for no particular reason at all, a reminder of the moral implications of thinking of God as a as stuffed animal as opposed to thinking of him as God:


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