ABSTRACT
Modern aesthetics owes its defining concepts – at least the concepts that have preoccupied it most – to the eighteenth century. These are the concepts of art and of the aesthetic. It is true that the term “art” was long in use before then, but it was not until the eighteenth century that the art forms now included in what Paul Oskar Kristeller famously calls “the modern system of the arts” began to be grouped together, and that the term thus became linked with the concept that now governs it (Kristeller 1951). The reverse is true of the concept of the aesthetic: though it was not until the nineteenth century that the term began to be linked, in the Englishspeaking world at least, with the concept that now governs it, that concept first took on recognizable shape early in the eighteenth century (Stolnitz 1961: 142-43). It is with justice, therefore, that we regard the eighteenth century as the formative period of modern philosophical aesthetics, since it was only then that its defining concepts assumed recognizable form, and only then, therefore, that the modern discipline itself assumed recognizable form. The writings of eighteenth-century aestheticians thus make a particularly strong
claim on the attention of contemporary aestheticians. Their study promises us the kind of self-understanding that only a study of our origins can provide. In particular, a study of the philosophical forces that forged our central concepts promises both to reveal where they are necessary and where arbitrary, and generally to sharpen understanding of them in something like the way that a study of etymologies sharpens understanding of the meanings of words. One caveat must be kept in mind: to say that our central concepts can be recognized in the writings of eighteenth-century aestheticians is not to say that those concepts, and their attendant perplexities, have not undergone change during the past 200 years. Nothing, it seems, impedes our understanding of eighteenth-century aesthetics more than the tendency to read presentday aesthetics into it. We thus find ourselves in a seemingly paradoxical position with respect to our eighteenth-century predecessors: we will not succeed in understanding ourselves without remembering them, but will not succeed in remembering them without first forgetting ourselves. We owe our concept of the aesthetic particularly to the British aestheticians of the
eighteenth century: their theories of taste are the direct forebears of our aesthetic theories. John Locke and the third Earl of Shaftesbury stand as their immediate
influences. Locke, who took no interest in matters of taste himself, provided the empiricist framework within which they worked out their theories. Shaftesbury convinced them of the philosophical interest of the concept of taste, though the vein he worked in was as Neoplatonic as empiricist (Townsend 1991: 350). We may therefore say that eighteenth-century British aestheticians placed Shaftesbury’s interest within Locke’s framework (Kivy 2003: 23). Their most important works include: Joseph Addison’s papers on “Good Taste” and “The Pleasures of the Imagination” from The Spectator (Addison 1712), Francis Hutcheson’s An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (in 2004 [1725]), David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” (1985 [1757]), Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1958 [1757, 1759]), Alexander Gerard’s An Essay on Taste (1963 [1759]), Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (2005 [1762]) and Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1812 [1790]). Because a summary of the entire period is not possible here, attention will be confined to the two works that continue to exert the greatest influence: Hutcheson’s Inquiry and Hume’s essay.
