The sublime and the beautiful

From there, Mr. Thursday goes off on the sublime and the beautiful. I'm going to use the same two concepts to go back to Jane Austen.

A little history here. Edmund Burke is the guy who made a lot of a distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. He was working in what you might call a new field of logical possibilities. A guy named Anthony-Ashley Cooper but more commonly known as Shaftesbury (because he was the third earl of) had come up with a whole new way to think about ethics. You might think of what he did as being a little like inventing the symphony. Once someone has done it then Haydn and all the others can rush in and compose all sorts of symphonies.

What Shaftesbury did was to treat moral decision making a lot like aesthetic taste. Being able to tell right from wrong was analogous to being able to tell good champagne from 7-Up. The key to Shaftesbury's morality was a notion called "disinterestedness". That is, you look at things and make judgments as if you didn't have an interest in them.

And this is not unlike the situation of a heterosexual man looking at Allyson Hannigan and Megan Fox. You are never going to get within twenty feet of either of these women so no question of an actual relationship, sexual or otherwise, is going to arise. A general judgment about what women should be is implied in any comparison of the aesthetic comparison of this photo and this one.

And Mr. Thursday and I reach opposite conclusions on that. I have a simple test here, could either of these women play an Austen heroine. Yes one could and she isn't Megan Fox. And to me, no woman who could not fill the roll of an Austen heroine is beautiful.