Following the talk last week about Burkian and Kantian ideas of the Sublime Gordon thought it might be interesting if he wrote briefly about Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. 

 

Edmund Burke was born in Dublin on 12 January 1729. He moved to London in 1750 and developed a high reputation as  great statesman and philosopher (including as we head, thoughts on ‘the Sublime’. He served as a Whig MP from 1766 and 1794. From 1774 to 1780 he was MP for a Bristol constituency when Bristol was the second city in England. In his 1774 Speech to the Electors at Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll he argued strongly in favour of representative government against the notion that MPs are mere delegates. He argued that “Parliament is a deliberative Assembly of one Nation, with one Interest, that of the whole; where, not local Purposes, not local Prejudices ought to guide, but the general Good, resulting from the general Reason of the whole. You choose a Member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not Member of Bristol, but he is a Member of Parliament.” This concept has been severely compromised by recent referendums in the UK. 

 

His contemporary, Immanuel Kant, was born on 22 April 1724 in Königsberg, then in East Prussia. He was a brilliant philosopher with a wide range of interests including somewhat different ideas from Burke on ‘the Sublime’. To me his most important contribution to philosophy is his theory that there is a single moral obligation encompassed by ‘Categorical Imperatives’ derived from his concept of duty. He argued that categorical imperatives are intrinsically valid, good in and of themselves and must be obeyed in all situations and circumstances. Two of his principles that remain relevant today are that moral autonomy is central to our humanity and that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as means. Kant’s so called ‘deontology’ (i.e. rules-based morality) is still at the heart of teaching on philosophy and ethics.