January 13th– “Introduction on Taste” by Edmund Burke

 In hindsight, there are only so many good 18th century playlists on Youtube. It's also a pain to actually verify some of them are from when/where they say they're from.

"Introduction on Taste" by Edmund Burke

Summary: Edmund Burke explains how, because our senses all work the same, we should all have similar tastes.

Commentary: This was a very dense one. Lots of rereading and stuff. I almost never actually do these in 15 minutes (since I have to set up the blog, do commentary, etc.), but this one took especially long.

Overall, this was a decent piece. Mostly encouraging, and with some good lines:

All the natural powers in man, which I know, that are conversant about external objects, are the senses; the imagination; and the judgment.

This is a fun phrasing of the classical mind/body/soul, Freudian trio, etc. I think it makes it a little more concrete and easier to get a handle on than some of the more abstract versions. It's hard to go "well this is how my id feels about this..." but easy to say, "this is what I can see, taste, etc.," "this is what I think about those things," and "this is how I evaluate them."

This sceptical proceeding will make every sort of reasoning on every subject vain and frivolous, even that sceptical reasoning itself which had persuaded us to entertain a doubt concerning the agreement of our perceptions.  

 If you can't believe in your senses, it's pointless to even think about anything else. I think this is an elegant disarmament of a lot of the "nothing is real/provable" philosophical issues. You gotta accept that things are real, and do you best with that hopefully accurate information, or you'll never do anything.

    On the other hand, I think he doesn't clearly distinguish his three elements (sense, imagination, and judgement) quite enough (or may there's a fourth). He allows some room for people to judge things differently based on their different experiences, but insists that all people's sense and imagination are more or less the same. We'll allow sense for now (obviously people can be color blind, have different degrees of hearing, etc.) but he insists that imagination is, "combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order." I don't necessarily disagree with this idea, but it should be obvious that different people in different places, times, etc. grow up with different stimuli, which would change what they can rearrange. On a super basic level, the books, TV shows, etc. I was exposed to as an American kid in the 90s are totally different from his in Ireland in the 1700s.

Now the imagination is the most extensive province of pleasure and pain

This is true, and speaks so much to our love of fiction as human beings. Also why imagining creating is sometimes more alluring than actually doing the work to make something.

In the last third, he talks a lot about how it can be easier to enjoy things that you don't understand, which I agree with. We tend to be pickier about genres, mediums, etc. that we love and know a lot about because we can find flaws more easily or know how they "should" be. 

Finally, I appreciate in the next to last paragraph his not that art advances. I think we often get stuck in this thought that art has been degrading for decades, centuries, whatever. It's obviously not true, we just look up to the great art from the past and forget about the mounds of crap that have always existed. It's like a mass cultural nostaliga/survivorship bias.