Art and Enlightenment: Scottish Aesthetics in the 18th Century

249 Pages·2004·0.84 MB·English

by  Jonathan Friday

Contents
Series Editor’s Note iii
Introduction v
One: Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) 1
Reading I: An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order,
Harmony, Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Two: George Turnbull (1698–1748) 29
Reading II: A Treatise on Ancient Painting . . . . . 30
Three: David Hume (1711–1776) 38
Reading III: Of Beauty and Deformity . . . . . . . 40
Reading IV: Of Contiguity and Distance in Space
and Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Reading V: Of the Standard of Taste . . . . . . . . 53
Reading VI: Of Tragedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Four: John Baillie (Date of Birth Unknown–1743) 81
Reading VII: An Essay on the Sublime . . . . . . . 83
Five: Alexander Gerard (1728–1795) 103
Reading VIII: Of the Standard of Taste . . . . . . .104
Six: Adam Smith (1723–1790) 118
Reading IX: The Influence of Custom upon Notions
of Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .119
Seven: Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) 127
Reading X: Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .128
Reading XI: The Standard of Taste . . . . . . . . .139
Eight: Thomas Reid (1710–1796) 151
Reading XII: Of Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . .152
Nine: James Beattie (1735–1802) 177
Reading XIII: Illustrations Of Sublimity . . . . . .178
Ten: Archibald Alison (1757–1839) 196
Reading XIV: Analysis of the Exercise of Imagination 197
Reading XV: Of the Effect of Sublimity and Beauty
upon the Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . .202
Eleven: Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) 210
Reading XVI: On the Beautiful . . . . . . . . . .212
Also available 227
Art and Enlightenment
Scottish Aesthetics in the
Eighteenth Century
Edited and Introduced
by Jonathan Friday
Copyright © Jonathan Friday, 2004
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
No part of any contribution may be reproduced in any
form without permission, except for the quotation of
brief passages in criticism and discussion
Originally published in the UK by Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally published in the USA by Imprint Academic
Philosophy Documentation Center
PO Box 7147, Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147, USA
2012 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www andrewsuk com
Series Editor’s Note
The principal purpose of volumes in this series is not to provide
scholars with accurate editions, but to make the writings of Scottish
philosophers accessible to a new generation of modern readers In
accordance with this purpose, certain changes have been made to
the original texts:
• Spelling and punctuation have been modernized
• In some cases, the selected passages have been given new titles
• Some original footnotes and references have not been included
• Some extracts have been shortened from their original length
• Quotations from Greek have been transliterated, and passages
in foreign languages translated, or omitted altogether
Care has been taken to ensure that in no instance do these
amendments truncate the argument or alter the meaning intended
by the original author For readers who want to consult the original
texts, full bibliographical details are provided for each extract
The Library of Scottish Philosophy was launched at the
Third International Reid Symposium on Scottish Philosophy in
July 2004 with an initial six volumes Attractively produced and
competitively priced, these appeared just fifteen months after the
original suggestion of such a series This remarkable achievement
owes a great deal to the work and commitment of the editors of
the individual volumes, but it was only possible because of the
enthusiasm of the publisher, Keith Sutherland, and the outstanding
work of Jon M H Cameron, Editorial and Administrative Assistant
to the Centre for the Study of Scottish Philosophy
Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Carnegie Trust for
the Universities of Scotland for generous financial support for
the Library of Scottish Philosophy in general, and to Mr George
Stevenson for a subvention for this volume in particular
Acknowledgement is also made to the University of Aberdeen
Special Libraries and Collections for permission to reproduce the
engraving of the Edinburgh Faculty of Advocates from Modern
Athens (1829)
Gordon Graham, Aberdeen, June 2004
Introduction
There is something anachronistic about referring to the contents
of this book as concerned with aesthetics in eighteenth-century
Scotland For although the term was coined in the eighteenth
century—derived from the ancient Greek word aestheticos, meaning
that which pertains to sense perception—it did not come into
widespread use in Britain as the name for a particular approach to
the philosophy of art until the 1830s However if we disconnect the
particular history of the concept of the aesthetic from what the term
has come to mean, there is an important sense in which aesthetics
as a subject of philosophical inquiry has its origins in eighteenth-
century Britain, and in particular Scotland Whenever claims such
as this are made about the origins of a subject of study, particularly
in the context of enlightenment Europe, care must be taken to
remember that intellectual history is far too complex to allow for
neat identifications of national origin Many of the thinkers whose
work is collected in this volume saw themselves as involved in a
debate that extended well beyond the Scottish or British national
boundaries, and all took inspiration from the continent, and in
particular French thinkers At the end of the eighteenth century
we do find Dugald Stewart expressing a certain patriotic pride in
the achievements of Scottish philosophy and learning, and indeed
drawing a contrast between the empiricism and inductivism of
British philosophy and the rationalist traditions of continental
Europe Nevertheless, the enlightenment ideal of a trans-national
‘republic of ideas’ to which the learned belong and contribute
has a far more important role in the period than narrow national
concerns
In the light of such doubts about the suitability of applying the
word ‘aesthetics’ to the great discourse about taste, beauty and the
imagination that occurred in eighteenth-century Scotland, and
about identifying the study of such subjects in terms of national
boundaries, what does it mean to say that modern aesthetics has
its origins in eighteenth-century Scotland? If we try to distil some
shared general characteristics from the many kinds of distinctively
aesthetic theories from the past and present, one of them would
be that aesthetics is concerned with a broad category of human
experience For the modern philosopher this typically means trying
to understand art and its value through reflection upon the nature
of experience of art Much of our ordinary experience of the world
is evaluatively neutral, but our experience of art usually has an
evaluative quality in the sense that we respond with pleasure or
dislike, interest or boredom, attention or repulsion Our experience
of art is like this, but so too are many experiences of the natural and
built environment, and so we speak of there being an aesthetics of
each of these But just as familiar are other contemporary extensions
of the range of aesthetic experience beyond that of art and the
environment to the various objects that make up what is sometimes
called ‘mass culture’ In this extended sense, aesthetics is concerned
with understanding the nature and value of certain objects through
consideration of a distinctive kind of appreciative and evaluative
experience of them, and those of their properties that are important to
appreciation In the eighteenth century this experience was thought
to be produced by a mental faculty called ‘taste’, and the contents
of this experience were qualities like beauty, sublimity, novelty and
wit Indeed, these qualities were typically identified with particular
sentiments aroused by experience of objects possessing them Art
and nature were certainly thought of as paradigm possessor’s of
these qualities, but in general eighteenth-century philosophers of
taste conceived of their investigations into the operations of taste
and the experience it gives rise to as extending well beyond art and
nature What we now call aesthetic experience was understood in
the enlightenment to be a pervasive and important force in the daily
lives of educated human beings This understanding of the extensive
scope of aesthetic experience is one of the connections between the
position of those author’s gathered together in this collection, and
the contemporary belief in a wide application of aesthetic reflection
It is true that another general characteristic of aesthetic theories
that can be extracted from traditional and contemporary versions of
such theories is that aesthetic experience is ‘disinterested’ in some
sense or other The notion of disinterestedness is nicely captured
by the familiar expressions ‘an interest in a work of art for its
own sake’ or as ‘an end in itself’ In effect aesthetic experience is
supposed to be a distinctive kind of unself-motivated contemplative
attention to an object merely for what it offers imagination and
the emotions The way I have characterised disinterestedness
conceives of it as a property of aesthetic experience that would
not have been recognised by the philosophers of the Scottish
enlightenment Indeed, my characterisation owes more to that
other supremely great enlightenment philosopher and founder of
aesthetics, Immanuel Kant, whose Critique of Judgment (1790) did
a very great deal to shape aesthetics after the eighteenth century
Kant’s method, terminology and philosophical orientation is very
different to that of the Scottish philosophers, none of whom would
have known anything of Kant’s writings on aesthetics Nevertheless
there is a good deal of overlap between the concerns of both, and
some aspects of their conclusions So although the Scots would have
rejected the thought that aesthetic experience is disinterested in the
Kantian sense, they nevertheless incorporate a different sense of
disinterestedness into their philosophy of taste Judgments of taste,
or aesthetic judgments, are thought to be disinterested in the sense
of unprejudiced To avoid having an idiosyncratic and unreliable
taste, we have to set aside our personal interests to judge fairly and
objectively Moreover, none of the Scots would have agreed with the
Kantians that this feature of aesthetic judgment exhausts, or is even
the most important element in the account of aesthetic experience
A number of philosophers of the age give the most important role
to what they call ‘delicacy of taste, or the capacity to make fine
distinctions in the causes and pleasures of beauty and the other
aesthetic properties
This orientation of eighteenth-century philosophers of taste
toward a distinctive kind of multi-faceted and multi-valenced