Edmund Burke was born in the eighteenth century. He was a statesman and a political thinker. His views on government have been cited by conservative thinkers. For Burke, government should ideally be a cooperative, mutually restraining relation of rulers to subjects, with an attachment to tradition and the ways of the past to the degree possible but also with a recognition of the fact of change and the need for a comprehensive and discriminating response to it. Burke fought against the Revolution in France and demanded war against the new state. He believed that the French Revolution had brought about a devaluation in tradition. He saw strength in the English constitution, which offered continuity and unorganized growth as well as a respect for traditional wisdom. He suggested an interpretation of nature and the natural order and thus implied a deep respect for the historical process. Burke also addressed issues such as those raised in his The Sublime and the Beautiful, issues of aesthetics, asking about the nature of beauty, and revealing much about the workings of his own mind as he considered these problems and sought answers.
The full title of the work is A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, and this title indicates that Burke is interested in a psychological element, in how our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful develop in our thinking. He analyzes these psychological factors in the first part of the book. He begins with the "Introduction on Taste," and in this introduction he addresses one of the central issues of his argument, the question of whether or not there can be objective aesthetic standards. In general arguments, there is something called truth and something called falsehood:
For if there were not some principles of judgment as well as of sentiment common top all mankind, no hold could possibly be taken either on their reason or their passions, suf...