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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2019
The first disquisition given to the concept of the sublime, written by the anonymous Greek Pseudo-Longinus, famously mourns the passing of the pagan relationship between gods and men. In his essay on the work of Pseudo-Longinus, the French poet Michel Deguy states that “the question of the sublime was doubtless first of all an attempt to measure the decline of the Orient, to measure the author's distance from the time of gods and heroes.” For Deguy, the Longinian tradition of emphasising the sublime as a key feature of rhetoric must be regarded as an attempt to establish some hope of a truly exalted discourse at a time in which man moves further and further away from his sacred relationship to the highest of origins. Such nostalgia obviously colours every cycle of secularisation; from paganism to Christianity to modernity and beyond. If each period of secularisation generates a more worldly state of affairs, or flatter discourses, it also produces a Longinian longing for a more vertical axis to explain our mortality.
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3 Edward Said, Orientalism; Western Concepts of the Orient (1995).Google Scholar
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11 Franklin, supra note 8. Franklin does suggest, however, that William Jones may have also initiated the society of the “Druids of Cardigan.”Google Scholar
12 1 William Jones, The Letters of Sir William Jones 362 (Garland Cannon ed., 1970) (Letter to Viscount Althrop); Id. at 449 (stating “By rising before the sun, I allot an hour every day to Sanscrit, and am charmed with knowing so beautiful a sister of Latin and Greek” in a Letter to John Macpherson).Google Scholar
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61 Boorstin, supra note 58, at p45.Google Scholar
62 William Jones, An Essay on the Law of Bailments 173 (1998).Google Scholar
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68 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 69 (1844).Google Scholar
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70 Burke, , supra note 68, at 65.Google Scholar
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73 Id. at 56. See Wendy Doniger, The Laws of Manu, at xv (1991) (for comment).Google Scholar
74 1 Jones, supra note 12, at 93 (Letter to Henry Albert Schultens).Google Scholar
75 1 Jones, supra note 12, at 268 (Letter to Viscount Althrop).Google Scholar
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77 Id.Google Scholar
78 Grosrichard, Alain, The Sultan's Court, European Fantasies of the East 92-93 (Liz Heron tr., 1998).Google Scholar
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80 Id.Google Scholar
81 Id.Google Scholar
82 Id.Google Scholar
83 1 Jones, supra note 12, at 483 (Letter to Henry Dundas).Google Scholar
84 2 Jones, supra note 32, at 84.Google Scholar
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86 Id.Google Scholar
87 Pierre Legendre & Peter Goodrich, Law and the Unconscious; A Legendre Reader 262 (Peter Goodrich, Alain Pottage & Anton Schutz trs., 1997).Google Scholar
88 3 William Jones, Ninth Discourse on the Origin and Families of Nations, 1792, in The Works of Sir William Jones in 13 Volumes, supra at 62.Google Scholar
89 James Beattie, Treatise 1783, quoted in Sue Chaplin, How the Sublime Comes to Matter in Eighteenth Century Legal Discourse – An Irigarayan Critique of Hobbes, Locke and Burke, 9 Feminist Legal Studies 204 (No. 3 2001).Google Scholar
90 According to Jones, the “laws of the ancient legislator are obscure when detached, yet clear when connected.” 1 Jones, supra note 12, at 584 (Letter to Edward Hay). It is precisely this process of finding connections that rationalises the Oriental sublime spirit of Oriental law.Google Scholar
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