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.

Two women (4)

Last one on Mr. Thursday before we move onto the sublime and the beautiful (yes, that is where Mr. Thursday goes with it too). But let's have a look at this judgment of Mr. Thursday's:

Hannigan is a more beloved, in a way, because she is more attainable. Fox is like some alien creature from some other dimension.

Hannigan is "more attainable"? Not the woman herself—they are both unattainable to most any blogger—but the role she is playing. And even then only in the role she is playing in this carefully-staged photograph.

What he means is that Allyson Hannigan's role is the girl next door type. But isn't a big part of the girl-next-door type not being attainable. You might, if you are blessed, have her fall in love with her but you wouldn't attain her. Attainability is what call girls offer.

And what type is Megan Fox playing here? Seriously, do you look at that photo and think, to be a part of this woman's intimate life would be to join a small and very exclusive club. I didn't. I'm sorry to have to put this so crudely but my first thought was, "She's a skank."

Or, rather, that's the role she is playing. A quick check on Google images was all it took to ascertain that there are also photographs of Allyson Hannigan looking like a skank. (This type of photograph is a high-demand commodity; there is no shortage of men with Tiger Wood's uh, "purely aesthetic" values.)

There are no photographs of Megan Fox looking like a convincing girl-next-door type however. And here we get some sense of why some might prefer Allyson Hannigan. Both women are actors but only one is a dramatic actor. The entire range of Megan Fox's dramatic ability runs from skank to skank and not even from A to B.

Two women (3)

Here is Mr. Thursday's opening remark on the comparison between the two:

As a pure aesthetic judgment, this simply beggars belief. How could anyone find Hannigan, a cute enough girl to be sure, but nothing special, more beautiful than the unearthly Fox?

What do you suppose he means by "pure aesthetic judgment"? Does he mean a judgment on aesthetic grounds alone excluding all moral and practical considerations? That would be the normal sense of such a claim but, as we shall see, Mr. Thursday's ideas of aesthetic have very clear practical connections.

Not unrelated, read this bit," ... a cute enough girl to be sure, but nothing special ...." Really? If we consider that there are millions of beautiful women in the world and many thousands of them want to be actors and celebrities, is it even remotely plausible to think that someone could rise to Allyson Hannigan's level in the profession if they were nothing special?

From my perspective, I'd add a moral question—although this doesn't seem to be a big concern with Mr. Thursday. And it would simply be this, in the universe of rocks, trees, amoebas and&; should anyone look at a picture of a human being and say, " cute enough but nothing special".

Two women (2)

The first point to make here is that we aren't comparing two women here so much as two roles. These two women are actors and celebrities and they are both very much on in these two photos. No one would mistake these for candid shots. (A fact that Mr. Thursday must be aware of, he just doesn't seem to care much about it.)

Two women

You'll just have to trust me that this has something to do with Jane Austen. I landed on another blogger more or less by accident today who gave me something to work with. This other guy, and boy is he a guy, was really upset to find a celebrity rating site. He didn't like the judgment he found there. He was incensed that participants found this woman more attractive than this one.
There will be much to say.

A lecture about stories

Tyler Cowen is unquestionably a very smart guy. The video below shows him talking about stories at a TED talk. He makes some very good points in the video but they aren't about stories. In fact, I'd argue that he doesn't have a very good grasp on what stories are at all.

That's the uncharitable way of putting it. A more charitable way would be to say that this video shows a kind of mistake that is perennially attractive to very smart people.

On to Sense and Sensibility

"We have never finished Hamlet, Marianne; our dear Willoughby went away before we could get through it. We will put it by, that when he comes again.... But it may be months, perhaps, before that happens."

Lines like this are so pregnant with meaning you could spend a lifetime on them. Not all the meaning can have been intended by the author. For example, some Shakespeare scholars nowadays argue that Shakespeare himself never finished Hamlet. That he wrote one play and then rewrote it and kept tinkering with it until he retired.

In any case, we have never finished with Hamlet. It comes back again and again. It really came back in Austen's lifetime. (Shakespeare, although always recognized as an exceptional writer, didn't become "Shakespeare" until the Romantic era.) The line above has been called Hamlet's walk on part in Sense and Sensibility. I think it's more than that. Buckle up, I'm going to make an audacious claim. I think that just as Austen ended up using the story elements from a Radcliffe novel to make a different sort of story in Northanger Abbey, in Sense and Sensibility, she takes the story elements of Hamlet and makes something else of them.

Before doing that, I have to explain what I mean by "story elements". I'm going to do that explanation by picking a fight with a guy named Tyler Cowen starting today.