Edmund Burke Explains The Dark Knight Rises

埃德蒙·伯克解读《黑暗骑士崛起》

作者: Aaron Swartz | 来源: aaronsw.com | 时间: 2012-08-19

From Corey Robin’s fantastic book The Reactionary Mind:

摘自科里·罗宾(Corey Robin)的佳作《反动派心态》(The Reactionary Mind)：

Great power, [Burke] suggests in The Sublime and the Beautiful, should never aspire to be—and can never actually be—beautiful. What great power needs is sublimity. The sublime is the sensation we experience in the face of extreme pain, danger, or terror. It is something like awe but tinged with fear and dread. Burke calls it “delightful horror.” Great power should aspire to sublimity rather than beauty because sublimity produces “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.” It is an arresting yet invigorating emotion, which has the simultaneous but contradictory effect of diminishing and magnifying us. We feel annihiliated by great power; at the same time, our sense of self “swell[s]” when “we are conversant with terrible objects.” Great power achieves sublimity when it is, among other things, obscure and mysterious, and when it is extreme. “In all things,” writes Burke, the sublime “abhors mediocrity.”1

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