Aesthetic measuring seems a rather dubious idea. Of course, we can measure
the length of a poem (count the letters or lines), or the sound frequency
of a music piece, but that is at best only tangentially related to
aesthetic value. (Possibly unrelated) Greatness complicates things even
more, since it includes aesthetic factors and possibly other ones. If
Tolstoy only wrote one good short story or two and died, say, at the age of
25, greatness would remain in potentiality.
On Sun, Aug 26, 2018 at 12:47 AM Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I would gladly oblige on that one, but I am afraid that I have never read
that voluminous book in its entirety .:) That said, I doubt that many of
Burke's fellow conservatives had. Burke seems to have had a good writing
style, from what I read or glimpsed.
O.K.
On Sun, Aug 26, 2018 at 12:39 AM Steven G. Cameron <stevecam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
**IMHO, please consider consulting Edmond Burke's On The Sublime...
TC,
/Steve Cameron, NJ
On Sat, Aug 25, 2018, 12:08 Torgeir Fjeld <t.fjeld1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Right. Who said we couldn't measure the greatness of literature? Here's
one commentary:
"The problem with a question like "Can we measure greatness?" is that it
seems to assume that the word "great" is merely quantitative in nature. The
word "measure" comes from the Latin via the French. The root Latin word
(mensura) means something like "size or quantity as ascertained by
measuring." And apparently the French derivative (mesure) has the sense of
a limit or boundary.
In short, because the question seems to come loaded with assumptions
that ill fit it to be applied to anything qualitative, you in fact limit
your assessment of the qualitative thing being assessed by even asking it.
This creates problems when we are addressing something aesthetic,
although even aesthetic things have a quantitative aspect that can be
measured. We "measure" a poem, and music has "measure." But, since this is
only one aspect of these things, measuring them seems only to enable us to
capture a part of them, not the whole. There is the more elusive part of
any aesthetic thing which, it seems to me, cannot be encompassed by any
technique we might apply to it. And if it cannot be encompassed, it cannot
be measured."
Quoth Martin Cothran in
https://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/what-does-it-mean-book-be-great-conversation-wes-callihan-martin-cothran-andrew-kern
Yours sincerely, -t
