from shaftesbury to kant the development of the concept of aesthetic experience.pdf

8/11/2019 From Shaftesbury to Kant The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience.pdf

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From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic ExperienceAuthor(s): Dabney TownsendSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1987), pp. 287-305Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709559Accessed: 28/07/2010 16:23

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FROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT*THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF

AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

BY DABNEY TOWNSEND

It is widely recognized that although reference to aesthetic experi-ence is anachronistic prior to the nineteenth century, the concept hasits foundation in the emerging empiricism of the late seventeenth andeighteenth centuries in England. Under the influence of Locke and New-ton and a host of others, the decisive break with medieval hierarchicalontology which had been emerging since the fourteenth century took aclear conceptual form. But for the purpose of aesthetic theory, the waythat the primacy of experience developed created difficulties whichhave gradually isolated aesthetics form the mainstream of epistemologyand ontology. In the eighteenth century this was not yet the case. Hutche-son, Hume, Burke, Hogarth, Gerard, and Alison all take for grantedthat a discussion of beauty, the sublime, and taste are central to philo-sophical discussion. From their discussions there emerges a concept ofaesthetic experience which, in one form or another, dominates subsequentaesthetic theory. The form and some of the consequences of these com-mitments may not be so clear, however. Thus it is worthwhile to re-examine some of the underlying commitments which inform the discus-sions of taste from Shaftesbury to Kant.

The history of the discussions of taste in the eighteenth century isvery complex. Rather than trying to trace it in detail, I will single outa series of significant points. At the beginning is Lord Shaftesbury, thepupil of John Locke. In the middle are Francis Hutcheson, who hasShaftesbury explicitly in view, and David Hume. Hume states the paradoxof critical judgment-aesthetic judgments are subjective, but the criticaljudgments which follow from them cannot be subjective without com-mitting us to absurdities and defeating our attempt to say what we holdto be objectively the case about some works of art-but essentially heevades it. At the end stands Immanuel Kant who sums up the movement.The initial question, then, is how one gets from Shaftesbury to Humeand in the process commits aesthetics to a concept of aesthetic experienceand taste which creates this paradox.

I. At the very beginning of the eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley

* I have benefited from the criticisms of two readers for the Journal of the Historyof Ideas who identified a number of obscure passages in this paper; in several instances,I have adopted wording suggested by them. I have also been greatly aided by conversationwith my colleague, Mark Strasser, especially on Locke and Hutcheson.

287

Copyright 1987 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.


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288 DABNEY TOWNSEND

Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, rovides a convenient referencepoint. Shaftesbury s one of those Janus figures of philosophy who looks

backto an ordered Neo-Platonism while he

simultaneously eginsto use

empirical concepts. If we compare Shaftesbury's esthetic philosophy olater eighteenth-century evelopments f the same basic concepts, t willhelp to clarify what is taking place.

Let us consider irst the concept of aesthetic xperience tself. Shaftes-bury's language s firmly Neo-Platonic, but he requires he testing ofjudgments n a way which gives his Platonism a new content. Thus onthe one hand we find Shaftesbury ndorsing a traditional hierarchy offorms: first there are dead forms, then the forms which form, thatis which have intelligence, ction, and operation, and finally the forms

which form not only such as we call mere forms but even forms whichform. ' On the other hand, Shaftesbury efends both criticism and rail-lery. He distrusts ntrospection,2 nd he defends a public test of time:

The public always udges right, and the pieces esteemed or disesteemedafter a time and a course of some years are always exactly esteemedaccording o their proportion f worth by those rules and studies. 3WhatI draw from this is that Shaftesbury, ike the empiricists who followLocke, finds experience he only reliable est. But Shaftesbury s pri-marily a public man, and he never separates his interests n art from hismoral theory. For Shaftesbury, herefore, experience and the tests itprovides re matters of common udgment. They do not begin with privatesense but in medias res where we find ourselves.

Shaftesbury s as distrustful f mere sense as he is of an uncriticalintrospection. or example, he holds that Never can the form be of realforce where it is uncontemplated, njudged of, unexamined, nd standsonly as the accidental note or token of what appeases provoked sense,and satisfies the brutish part. 4 He extends the necessity for criticalreflection o practical udgment as well: Nothing is more fatal, eitherto painting, architecture, r the other arts, than this false relish, whichis governed rather by what immediately trikes the sense, than by whatconsequentially and by reflection pleases the mind, and satisfies thethought and reason. 5 Shaftesbury s not systematic, and he does notseriously consider how this reflection s possible. Unlike Locke, he is notprepared o give up innate deas, and there s no question hat Shaftesbury

IAnthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times,

ed. John M. Robertson (Indianapolis, 1964), The Moralist, A Philosophical Rhapsody,II, 132-33. Throughout the quotations from Shaftesbury, I omit italics.

2Ibid., Soliloquy or Advice to an Author, I, 113.3 Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Second Characters or The Language of Forms, ed.

Benjamin Rand (Cambridge, 1914), Plastics or the Original Progress and Power ofDesignatory Art, 124.

4 Characteristics, The Moralists, II, 142-43.5Second Characters, A Notion of the Historical Draught of Hercules, 61.


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FROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT 289

remains a much more traditional, superficial thinker on these points thanhis family friend. But what he does hold is instructive: character and

judgment are shaped from experience by a process of critical reflection.In this context, innate ideas are an unnecessary residual which Shaftes-bury is unwilling to give up, but which his theoretical stance does notin fact require. His writings are personal, didactic, and, one suspects,autobiographical. Instead of experience writing on a blank slate of themind, Shaftesbury finds the mind being formed by a continual processfrom life's experience. His motto might be what he says of taste: thegreat business in this (as in our lives, or in the whole of life) is 'to correctour taste.' For whither will not taste lead us? 6

Shaftesburynever frees

himself from the language of a pre-existing mind which his Neo-Platonism allows, but he makes little use of that concept either.

In contrast to Shaftesbury, Locke separates ideas in the mind fromqualities in the object. He thus introduces a separation between ideas andthe powers of objects which produce those ideas. Shaftesbury s not awareof such a separation. Locke must try to distinguish the ideas of primaryqualities which bear a real resemblance to their causes from the ideas ofsecondary qualities which do not have a real resemblance. In order toretain a connection and account for the difference, Locke thinks in termsof the mechanics of Newton and the corpuscular theory of Boyle.7 ThusLocke's empiricism is atomistic, and it opens a host of problems abouthow ideas are related to the real world which will trouble subsequentempiricists. Shaftesbury, in some ways, suggest a simpler and more hol-istic empiricism. Mind, character, and self are formed from experience;they are not ideas of something else but the sum of our existence. Thismay be only a failure on Shaftesbury's part to perceive the problemswhich Locke addresses. However, one can imagine Shaftesbury sayingwith Wittgenstein, The world and life are one. I am my world. (TheMicrocosm.) 8 In his famous analogy, Locke asks us to suppose theMind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all Characters, without anyideas. He then asks us how it comes to be furnished.9 I am suggestingonly that Shaftesbury, perhaps because he thinks of the mind as alreadyfurnished with ideas, is free to conceive of that mind as a whole as anempirical entity which is known as the sum of its own experience. A

reflective aesthetic experience-good taste-is the means by which themind knows itself. 10

6 Second Characters, Plastics, 114.7See Peter Alexander, Boyle and Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities, in

Locke on Human Understanding, ed. I. C. Tipton (Oxford, 1977), 62-76.8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, rans. D. F. Pears and B. F.

McGuinness (London, 1961), 5.621, 5.63.9John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch

(Oxford, 1975), II, i, 1; 104.0 I do not want to press this comparison. It overstates Shaftesbury's empiricism in


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290 DABNEY TOWNSEND

In aesthetics, the direct consequence of following Locke is found inFrancis Hutcheson. Shaftesbury anticipates Hutcheson who begins An

inquiry into the Originals of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue as a defenseand explanation of Shaftesbury's principles. Shaftesbury provides groundsfor Hutcheson's immediate sense of beauty and provides a statement ofthe theory of an internal sense which sounds very much like Hutcheson'stheory:

The shape, motions, colours, and proportions f these latter being presented oour eye, there necessarily esults a beauty or deformity, ccording o the differentmeasure, arrangement, nd disposition of their several parts.... It [the mind]feels the soft and harsh, the agreeable and disagreeable n the affections; ndfinds a foul and fair, a harmonious nd dissonant, as really and truly here asin any musical numbers or in the outward orms or representations f sensiblethings. Nor can it withhold ts admiration nd ecstasy, ts aversion and scorn,any more in what relates o one than to the other of these subjects. So that todeny the common and natural sense of a sublime and beautiful n things, willappear an affectation merely, o any only who considers duly of this affair.

Compare this to Hutcheson's claim that some objects are immediatelythe Occasions of this Pleasure of Beauty, and that we have Senses fittedfor perceiving it. 12 But Hutcheson is concerned to take the sense ofbeauty in a different direction. His defense of Shaftesbury is designedto show that this moral sense has no relation to innate ideas. 3 ForHutcheson, the moral and aesthetic senses produce ideas in the mindlike those produced by the external senses of sight, taste, smell, andtouch. They correspond to Locke's ideas of sense rather than ideas ofreflection, and they have the same kind of immediate incorrigibility which

other ideas of sense have. For Shaftesbury, reflection is part of taste.Mere sense is not reliable. Hutcheson reduces reflection to temporal delay:

It is probably some little time before Children do reflect, or at least letus know that they reflect upon Proportions and Similitude. 14Hutcheson

at least two ways: 1) Shaftesbury does not try to make Locke's distinction because hisown Neo-Platonism offers an apparent alternative-ideas are real. My point is only thatthis realism is compatible with an empirical interpretation of much else that Shaftesbury

says. 2) The same Neo-Platonism includes an innate character ; one is born into acertain place in the cosmos which one must live up to in Shaftesbury's thinking. BeingLord Shaftesbury carries with it moral and social responsibilities which are givens. Iwould maintain only that neither the innate ideas nor the class consciousness are necessaryto Shaftesbury's aesthetics of taste. Taste is a sign of moral and aesthetic character, andthe formation of taste, in practice, if not always in theory, is the result of experienceshaped by reflection.

1 Characteristics, An Inquirey Concerning Virtue or Merit, I, 251-52.12 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,

(London, 1725), 11.3 Ibid., vii.4Ibid., ix.


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takes the internal sense to be a form of perception and its qualitativeaccompaniment is pleasure. Moral pleasure follows from good actions;aesthetic

pleasurefrom beautiful

objects.In

both cases, the perceptionis an idea in the mind and the pleasure is likewise the experiencer'sinternal feeling.

It is not important that Hutcheson misreads Shaftesbury and that hisdefense is misguided. Shaftesbury certainly does not find pleasure a re-liable sign of moral or aesthetic quality, and Hutcheson provides so manyteleological qualifications that he evades most of the consequences of hisimplicit hedonism. The significant point is that for Hutcheson, bothexternal and internal sense are immediately reliable (if not

whollyin-

corrigible.) External sense shows us the physical qualities of the world.Internal sense shows us the moral and aesthetic qualities of the sameworld. Hutcheson is a much more systematic thinker than Shaftesbury,so he works out the internal sense on a strict analogy to Locke's ideasof sensation. Mistakes about beauty are due to a failure of perception orto accumulated associations. Beauty must be an objective correspondenceof the mind to some external thing just as our ideas of sensible qualitiesare. Hutcheson thinks that he can identify the ideas which correspondto the qualities necessary for beauty in the same way that one identifiesthe ideas of color which correspond to color qualities: The figures thatexcite in us the ideas of Beauty, seem to be those in which there isuniformity amidst variety. 15 But equally, the presence or absence ofthose qualities is a matter of experience: As to the universal Agreementof Mankind in their sense of Beauty from Uniformity amidst variety, wemust consult experience. 16 Hutcheson's concern is to defend the moraland aesthetic sense against charges that it is interested and thus ca-pricious and subjective in the absence of innate ideas. He does so byproviding an apparatus of sense which will place morals and aestheticson the same footing as perception and by appealing to the commonexperience (the universal agreement of mankind.)

Hutcheson does not spell out the requirements for internal sense.However, Alexander Gerard offers a concise argument along the samelines that the power of the mind which is called taste should be properlycalled a sense. Gerard's evidence comes from the phenomenon of our

faculties. 17A sense supplies us with simple perceptions; they are givenimmediately; and they are independent of volition. Gerard concludes:

These characters vidently belong o all the external enses, and to reflection rconsciousness, y which we perceive what passes in our minds. They likewisebelong to the powers of taste: harmony, or example, s a simple perception,

15Ibid., 15.16Ibid., 68.17 Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (third edition, 1780; repr. Gainsville, 1963),

145.


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292 DABNEY TOWNSEND

which no man who has not a musical ear can receive, and which every one whohas an ear immediately nd necessarily eceives on hearing a good tune. 8

Gerard goes on to argue that an internal sense need not be ultimate. Justas white can be decomposed into colors, so internal senses may be basedon external sensation. As Locke argued concerning secondary qualities,it is still the data of the senses-sight, etc.-which makes possible per-ception. The ideas may belong to the mind and not be resemblances ofthe quality in the object, but that does not make the ideas unreliable.For Hutcheson, the perception may be either of the objects of sight orof the beauty of those objects. There is a quality of the object which has

the power to produce our felt perceptions of beauty. One does not requiresome new organ of sense for an internal sense to be a sense. Gerardclearly follows Hutcheson here, but he is explicitly concerned to defendtaste as a direct operation of the mind-a faculty of imagination inde-pendent of reason.

The problems of sense understood along the lines Locke lays downlead to the increasing skepticism of Hume. But it is not skepticism about

sense in general which creates the difficulty for Hutcheson's line of

development in aesthetics. Hutcheson would be successful if he couldmaintain that beauty has the status of a simple idea of sense. The problemis whether he can do this. For there to be an aesthetic sense, it must notbe reducible to the external senses (though, as Gerard argued, it neednot by wholly independent of them). If it were, then beauty would becomea complex product of reflection or an association of ideas (as it does forArchibald Alison) and thus a product of education. It would lose thequalified kind of objectivity as a simple idea of sense which Hutcheson

seeks to win for it. To achieve this, Hutcheson attempts to follow Lockeby treating aesthetic experience as something acquired directly and indiscrete units from things. But there is no organ of internal sense. So, inspite of Gerard's argument, it is unclear how the ideas of an internalsense are to be identified. External sense can be defined causally. A simpleidea of sight is produced by corpuscular action on the retina of the eye.If we do not know the quality, we know the power that it has on us.Whatever skeptical problems arise from that causal connection, external

sense has a kind of common-sense biological basis. A comparable hy-pothesis is not available for an internal sense, however. Thus, it is notjust incidental that Hutcheson must supply some criteria for aestheticqualities in the object even though he acknowledges that the pleasure wecall beauty is an idea in the subject. He need not settle on the pleasurewhich follows from uniformity amidst variety, but he must supply somedefining properties which link the idea-pleasure-to the object if thesense of beauty is not to lose the objectivity which simple ideas of sense

'8Ibid., 146.


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can claim according to Locke. The seemingly obvious move to an ex-periential sense on a direct analogy with external senses thus ends by

committing aestheticsto

twotheses:

1)The aesthetic sense is

qualitativelydistinct and not reducible to any other sense, and 2) there must be somequalitative characteristics which are uniquely aesthetic.19 The first thesismight be called the aesthetic experience thesis; it is most commonlyconceived of as a uniquely aesthetic delight or pleasure. Much of sub-sequent eighteenth-century British aesthetics is occupied with supplyingalternatives to satisfy the second thesis. Hogarth's sensuous line andrevivals of the classical golden section are among the proposals. Toward

the endof the

centurythe

qualitativeidea shifts from

pleasureto a

more religious ecstasy or awe as romanticism gradually takes hold.20I want to emphasize how different Hutcheson's concept of aesthetic

experience is from the kind of experience to which Shaftesbury refers.When Shaftesbury speaks of an immediate sense of beauty, the emphasisfalls on immediate. It is unmediated by rules or interest. The senseof beauty is not a sixth sense, however, because Shaftesbury is not com-mitted to Locke's process of acquiring experience. Shaftesbury's opponent

is Hobbes, and it is the isolated individual that Shaftesburymust counter.

Or rather, it is the consequence of being an individual, for Shaftesburyis enough of a follower of Locke and far enough from real Platonism tothink of individuals as primary. Shaftesbury wants to show that experienceis public and that some senses are not restricted to Hobbes's individualinterest. The moral and beautiful are themselves empirical evidence whichShaftesbury can cite against Hobbes, and his reference to a sense of thesein men implies only that to be a man is not to be a brute living in a state

of nature. Shaftesbury s thus not committed to a simple sense unqualifiedby reflection, nor does his aesthetics need the kind of defining qualitieswhich Hutcheson must supply. For Shaftesbury, art is bound up withboth history and morality, and beauty remains an essentially higherform.

We cannot get from Shaftesbury a new aesthetic, therefore. He retreatsback into the language of Renaissance Neo-Platonism at this point. Whathe shows us is a different way of relying on experience, however. He

points to all of the empirical evidence of character being formed byaesthetic and moral taste (and the aesthetic has the priority because itis free of interest). Aesthetic taste is formed immediately, without theintervention of calculation and interest. Yet Shaftesbury allows fully forthe need to reflect, judge, and correct taste. Rather than simple ideas of

19I am leaving aside the moral side at this point because it is ultimately worked outon different grounds and does not concern us directly. Hutcheson does not use aestheticof course, but that anachronism should cause no problems.

20 The subsequent idealist development of these beginnings in Continental aestheticsdoes not affect the point I am trying to make.


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sense, Shaftesbury shows us an experience which is always public in somesense. His aesthetic follows; it is moral, neo-classical, and conventional.But it has a

placefor all of the

thingsthat Hutcheson finds difficult to

account for: deformity, criticism, and higher and lower forms. And itdoes not have to supply what no eighteenth-century writer-or anyonesubsequently, for the matter-has been able to supply: a set of definingqualities for the aesthetic sense.

II. Without defining qualities, aesthetic experience undergoes a met-amorphosis into a pure theory of taste. The shifts which take place canbe illustrated

by comparing Shaftesbury's positionwith that worked out

by Hume in Of the Standard of Taste. Shaftesbury s a long way fromthinking that there is no disputing about taste. As we noted, a centralmotive for Shaftesbury's study is the correction of taste. He is also willingto provide rules for the artist drawn from moral and historical sources.In this, Shaftesbury clearly shows the neo-classical direction of histhought. Ultimately, taste is a moral quality of character; the task ofphilosophy is to teach us ourselves, keep us the self-same persons, andso regulate our governing fancies, passions and humours, so as to makeus comprehensible to ourselves and knowable by other features than thoseof a bare countenance. 21 The development of taste is thus one of theelements in moral education.

The enemy of taste is fancy which Shaftesbury generally condemns.He writes:

As long as we enjoy a mind, as long as we have appetites nd sense, the fanciesof all kinds will be hard at work: and whether we are in company or alone they

must range still and be active. They must have their field. The question swhether hey shall have it wholly to themselves, r whether hey shall acknowl-edge some controller or manager. If none, 'tis this, I fear, which leads tomadness.... For if Fancy be left judge of anything she must be judge of all.Everything s right, if anything be so, because I fancy it.22

An uncontrolled taste is the subject of fancy. A controlled taste growsfrom internal mastery of the self. Shaftesbury's advice to authors leadsfrom internal mastery to the external exercise of taste: That their com-position and vein of writing may be natural and free, they should settlematters in the first place with themselves. And having gained masterythere, they may easily, with the help of their genius and right use of art,command their audience and establish a good taste. 23 Good taste, then,is something to be established. It is subsequent to judgment, not the basisfor judgment.

21 Characteristics, Advice to an Author, I, 184.

22Ibid., 207-8.23Ibid., 180-81.


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Much of David Hume's treatment of taste is consistent with Shaftes-bury's. Hume begins by acknowledging a problem which finally leads to

Kant's antinomy of taste. Agreement is only about generalities, andjudgments of particulars vary from individual to individual, nation tonation, and age to age in a way that seemingly cannot be reconciled.Over against this must be set the obvious justice of some judgments:

Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance betweenOGILBY and MILTON, or BUNYON and ADDISON, would bethought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained amole-hill to be as high as TENERIFFE, or a pond as extensive as theocean. 24 Hume then

proceedsto try to

mitigatethe effects of this

antinomy. His strategy is to provide enough qualifying factors to accountfor diversity of taste. These include practice, experience, and delicacy oftaste. Whenever possible, matters of fact must be substituted for sen-timent. Only then can the appearance of disagreement be mitigated.Hume rejects Hutcheson's dependence on a unique sense as decisive indisputes about taste. Whereas for Hutcheson an internal sense providesempirical warrant for a form of aesthetic feeling, Hume's skepticism about

ideas requires that only matters of fact will be sufficient for objectivity.It is not the feeling but the fact that many feel it which testifies to astandard of taste.

In reality, he difficulty of finding, even in particulars, he standard f taste, isnot so great as it is represented.... Theories of abstract philosophy, ystems ofprofound heology, have prevailed during one age: In a successive period, hesehave been universally xploded: .. And nothing has been experienced moreliable to the revolutions of chance and fashion than these pretended decisionsof science. The case is not the same with the beauties of eloquence and poetry.Just expressions f passion and nature are sure, after a little time, to gain publicapplause, which they maintain or ever.25

Thus Hume comes around to a practical standard of taste based on publicagreement and critical skill: Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment,improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prej-udice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the jointverdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of

taste. 26Hutcheson's dependence on a direct perception of beauty is main-tained, and Hume acknowledges qualities in objects as the causes ofsentiments of beauty: Some particular forms or qualities, from the

24 David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, in The Philosophical Works of DavidHume, III, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London, 1925), 269. The irony of history'sjudgment on Hume's comparison of Bunyon and Addison only makes his whole pointmore strongly.

25Ibid., 279.26 bid., 278-79.


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296 DABNEY TOWNSEND

original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, andothers to displease; and if they fail of their effect in any particular nstance,it is from some

apparentdefect or

imperfectionin the

organ. 27At the

same time, Hume never withdraws from his acknowledgment that beautyis not in the object but in the sentiment, and he seems to accept Hutche-son's kind of link between ideas and objects: Though it be certain,that beauty and deformity, more than sweet and bitter, are not qualitiesin objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment, internal or external; itmust be allowed, that there are certain qualities in objects, which arefitted by nature to produce those particular feelings. 28 But much of thisagreement is superficial. Hutcheson follows Locke; qualities are powers(or at least we know them as powers). For Hume, qualities producefeelings according to the associations we establish with them. Thus onecan identify aesthetic qualities only by examining practices relative toperceivers. Hutcheson distinguishes an original or absolute beautyfrom comparative or relative beauty. In Hume's essay this distinction,like that between primary and secondary qualities, disappears. One canonly compare actual judgments. Absolute beauty plays no role. Hutchesonexplains how things can interfere with the internal sense; the sense itselfneeds no education. Hume's taste must be educated or at least acquiredculturally, though some aspects of it may turn out to be universal tohuman-kind. In fact, beauty gives way generally to taste in Hume's essay.The facts Hume has reference to are mostly facts about the judgesand not about what is judged. Thus Hume shifts the ground for aestheticsfrom the aesthetic experience itself to the factors which form our per-ceptions. We have taste, but not a sense of taste in Hutcheson's stronguse of sense. This allows Hume to maintain a standard of taste without

having to actually confront its subjectivity.In many ways this moves Hume back toward Shaftesbury n practice.

Hume's essay is a defense of the practice of criticism against the claimsthat anyone can judge as well as anyone else. It is sufficient for ourpresent purpose, if we have proved, that the taste of all individuals isnot upon an equal footing, and that some men in general, however difficultto be particularly pitched upon, will be acknowledged by universal sen-timent to have a preference above others. 29This leads him to link taste

and understanding in a manner which Shaftesbury would approve: Itseldom, or never happens, that a man of sense, who has experience inany art, cannot judge of its beauty; and it is no less rare to meet with aman who has a just taste without a sound understanding. 30But Hume'spractice stands on the opposite side of a chasm opened by Locke and

27 Ibid., 272.28 bid., 273.

29 bid., 279.30 bid., 278.


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Hutcheson. Whereas for Shaftesbury taste follows education and judg-ment, for Hume taste is simply a phenomenal reality. It may need ed-

ucation andcorrection in a sense of refinement which Hutcheson's

theoryof direct sense did not allow, but Hume has no other basis for our aestheticjudgments than taste itself. However, Hume conceives of experience itselfin a Lockean fashion and so taste still depends on a sentiment or

idea discrete in itself and linked to the organs of perception. Hume'scritique of the connections between ideas and that of which they areideas and his skeptical doubts about our ability to justify our inductiveprocedures apply to any individual judgment of taste. He acknowledgesrules in art: But though poetry can never submit to exact truth, it mustbe confined by rules of art, discovered to the author either by genius orobservation. 3' But such rules are discovered; they have the status ofinductive generalizations and are subject to the same doubts. Hume'sadvice to the individual critic is a counsel of modesty, therefore, sincethe critic can appeal beyond the foundations of his own taste and per-ception only to other judgments similarly formed. There is no otherstandard than the joint verdict of ideal critics. Only agreement over timecan validate either the critic or his judgments.

Thus, Hume has raised a whole new set of problems which Shaftesburydid not address. Shaftesbury's rules are not the kind that judge Miltonbetter than Ogilby but that judge history painting better than landscape.A particular history painting will be judged rightly by a right character,and that judgment will be confirmed by time as it will be according toHume. But Shaftesbury's view of judgment here is more Greek; only acompleted character can be judged, and it is the whole of life whichmatters. When Shaftesbury gives advice to an author or guides the ed-ucation of a young gentleman, he has a view already to his effects -his standing in the history of his family and nation. Shaftesbury doesnot forget the individual, but he is not primarily concerned with individualjudgments. Individual taste plays a correspondingly lesser role in histhought. One bases taste on judgment, not judgment on taste. Good taste(like grace) is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritualstate.

III. There are many objections to Shaftesbury's concept of taste. Humecould certainly reply that it begs the interesting question of how we knowspecific judgments. Shaftesbury provides no answer. We thus reach animpasse. We may judge the judges by matters of fact, but the aestheticexperience upon which their judgment is based is unique and mysterious.This separates aesthetic judgment from other empirical judgments inscience and morals and thus undercuts the original motives for Hutche-son's work. A form of aesthetic attitude theory results directly from the

31Ibid., 270.


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298 DABNEY TOWNSEND

attempts to escape the antinomy to which Hume is led. What resultsfrom these attempts is an aesthetic subjectivity which resembles modern

aesthetic attitude theories in important respects. Again,we

maytake

Shaftesbury at the beginning of the movement as one point of reference.At the other end, Kant's Third Critique stands as the outstanding cul-mination. The basic theses remain; aesthetic experience must be quali-tatively different, and its qualities must have some defining characteristics.But the development of the theory of taste is unable to link an internalsense to objective qualities. It seems to follow that the one who experiencesmust help to produce the qualitative difference. We are led from a sense

of taste to the formation of aesthetic judgments by the beholder's attitudes.By the end of the eighteenth century, Archibald Alison had given up the

quest for specific properties which produced beauty and concentratedattention on the formation of ideas by association, imagination, and

expression. In itself, this may not yet be fully an attitude theory, butonce again the ground for judgment is being shifted.32 It is a short stepfrom there to the more recent claims that it is an attitude of the perceiverwhich is the necessary condition for the expressive properties of the things

to be felt.The single most important concept which emerges is disinterest-edness. Shaftesbury opposes disinterestedness to private interest as partof his rejection of Hobbes's egocentric position. Disinterestedness is oneway that we know that private interest is not paramount. For example,Shaftesbury asserts that in all disinterested cases, [the heart] mustapprove in some measure of what is natural and honest, and disapprovewhat is dishonest and corrupt. 33 he contrast to this disinterestedness

is the kind of private pursuit of one's own ends which some senses ofinterest imply. Disinterestedness becomes a particularly important

moral and aesthetic state since only then can the heart be trusted.Shaftesbury is not rejecting interest as a legitimate motive for

action, however. There are three levels of interest for Shaftesbury. Thereis a private interest which is good and natural. We know that anycreature has a private good and interest of his own, which Nature has

32

George Dickie has argued that Alison is not an attitude theorist while JeromeStolnitz classified him that way. The debate between them has been re-engaged recently-George Dickie, Stolnitz Attitude: Taste and Perception and Jerome Stolnitz, TheAesthetic Attitude in the Rise of Modem Aesthetics-Again, The Journal of Aestheticsand Art Criticism, 43 (1984), 193-208. The problem with their way of arguing is that itputs too much emphasis on classifying someone like Alison who is a complex, transitionalfigure. I think that Dickie is right that Alison is not an attitude theorist in the way thatsome later nineteenth century figures are. However, Alison's insistence that the emotionof taste is complex moves him away from earlier theories of taste in a decisive way. ThusStolnitz is also correct to insist that Alison should be seen as breaking with the earlier

theories of taste. There is no need, however, to place Alison in one box or the other.33 Characteristics, Advice to an Author, I, 192-93.


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compelled him to seek. 34 We also recognize the public interest whichfollows. Everyone discerns and owns a public interest and is consciousof what affects his

fellowshipor

community. 35And

finallythere are

disinterested cases when the heart can be trusted to respond directly andrightly. The three are related, and the object is to discern one's own trueinterest. In other words, in spite of his rejection of Hobbes's egocentricposition, Shaftesbury is still concerned with the formation of the indi-vidual character and taste. Public and disinterested judgments serve thecause of educating taste. Rather than opposing interested and disinter-ested judgment, Shaftesbury uses disinterested udgments as evidence thatwe have a true interest to be discovered beneath the shifting ground ofpleasure and fancy.

Hume's use of the concept of interest is similar in many respects toShaftesbury's. Hume notes that in ethics, the fundamental controversyturns on whether the foundations of morals are derived from reason orsentiment. The latter position he attributes to the ancients and toShaftesbury, although he notes acutely that Shaftesbury can be foundarguing on both sides of the issue;36 Hume is aware that if morality isbased on taste, there will be difficulties: Truth is disputable; not taste:what exists in the nature of things is the standard of our judgement;what each man feels within himself is the standard of sentiment. 37 Theresult is that Hume separates morals from aesthetics. Morals should befounded in reason and the nature of things, but aesthetics can remain amatter of taste. In Of the Standard of Taste, Hume argues that moralprecepts are already clearly identified by language itself. We know whichsentiments to approve without need for maxims. But that is not the casein aesthetics. There the need for a standard of taste is essentially a needfor a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciledso that one may know which sentiment is to be confirmed and whichcondemned. 38

Hume does develop a contrast between public and private interest aspart of a refutation of ethical egoism which he identifies with privateinterest.39 But for Hume, as for Shaftesbury, the argument against self-love as the sole ethical motive turns on the existence of a competinginterest whose existence cannot be denied. This is a general affection

which is aroused when no advantage or even presence of one's self is atissue. Also, as Shaftesbury does, Hume contrasts one's real interest with

34Ibid., Concerning virtue or Merit I, 243.35Ibid., 252.36 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Enquiries Con-

cerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A.Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1963), 170-71.

37Ibid., 171.

38Hume, Of a Standard of Taste, 268.39 Hume, Enquiry, 215.


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300 DABNEY TOWNSEND

an imagined interest.4 Hume then goes on to argue that public interestis not reducible to private interest. The claim for self-love is that the

interest of the individual is so identified with that of the community thatour concern for the public might be resolved into a concern for ourown happiness and preservation. 41 Hume's reply is, in part, that thisexplains something obvious-the existence of a public interest-by some-thing abstruse and unobservable.

A public interest is virtually identical to disinterestedness provideddisinterested sentiment is not understood as a lack of interest but as aninterest which does not refer to the self. Even in art, it is a type of interest

which is aroused. The theater is an example of shared sentiment, not ofthe absence of sentiment. In poetry, no passion, when well represented,can be entirely indifferent to us. 42 Hume speaks of disinterested passionas an alternative to self-love,43 but his point is that even the egoistdistinguishes the vicious and merely interested 44 from the virtuouscharacter. The hypothesis of an omni-present self-interest is metaphysicaland has no foundation in reality.45 Disinterested benevolence is nothingmore than a sentiment which does not require any reference to the self

to explain the phenomenon. In such cases, these and a thousand otherinstances are marks of a general benevolence in human nature, where noreal interest binds us to the object. And how an imaginary interest knownand avowed for such, can be the origin of any passion or emotion, seemsdifficult to explain. 46The argument, then, claims that only a real interestcan be the origin of a passion or emotion, but there are cases where noreal interest binds us to the object. Disinterested benevolence is thus areal public or communal interest free of any individual bonds.

This has considerable ethical importance for Hume, but he does notmake the aesthetic extension which both Shaftesbury and Kant do. (BothShaftesbury and Kant move from the aesthetic to the moral; Hume doesnot.) For Hume, it is important to establish whether the moral sentimentis founded in reason and the nature of things. Aesthetic taste can remainmerely a matter of sentiment. While it needs a standard, Hume does notclaim the universality for it that Kant does. The closest that Hume comesto a Kant's sense of disinterestedness is in his list of the characteristicsof true judges in Of the Standard of Taste which includes a freedomfrom prejudice. 47This requires that a work must be surveyed in a certain

40 Ibid., 217.41Ibid., 218.42Ibid., 222.43 bid., 296.44Ibid., 297.45Ibid., 300.

46Ibid.47 Hume, Of A Standard of Taste, 277.


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point of view. 48 This point of view turns out to be the conformation ofthe interests of the audience and the work. It is a general view-one in

whichI

must departfrom this

situation [friendship or enmity with theauthor], and considering myself as a man in general, forget, if possible,any individual being and my peculiar circumstances. 49 In the light ofthe arguments about public interest, it is important not to misunderstandthis criterion. Hume's critic, if he is a true judge, is a critic rather thana private person. His real interest is defined by that role, and the sentimenthe feels will be correspondingly indicative of the judgment of the generalview of human nature.

By the time Immanuel Kantincorporates

disinterestedness intothe Third Critique, the whole problem of aesthetic experience has shifted.The limited role which Hume assigned to sentiments of taste is no longerpossible in the system established by the First and Second Critiques. LikeShaftesbury and Hume, Kant's use of interest primarily concerns one'srelation to the world and one's attitude. But Kant greatly widens thescope of disinterestedness. To be disinterested is to be without interestin the object's existence while an interested state involves one with theexistence of the object. Thus disinterestedness does not pick out a classof general or public judgments. Both practical and conceptual judgmentsimply the presence of a prior intuition, and disinterestedness is charac-teristic of that prior phase. The aesthetical judgments precede theobjective and practical.

The consciousness f the mere formal purposiveness n the play of the subject'scognitive powers, n a representation hrough which an object s given, is thepleasure tself, because t contains a determining round of the activity of the

subjectn

respectof the excitement of its

cognitive powers,and therefore an

inner causality which is purposive) n respect of cognition n general, withouthowever being limited to any definite cognition, and consequently ontains amere form of the subjective urposiveness f a representation n an aestheticaljudgment. The pleasure s in no way practical, neither ike that arising rom thepathological ground of pleasantness, or that from the intellectual ground ofthe presented good.50

This interweaving of the cognitive and aesthetic places Kant somewhat

beyond the scope of the present comparison. Yet it is Kant's formulationswhich provide the most telling separation of aesthetic disinterestednessfrom the practical and conceptual realms. Once disinterestedness s madecentral, it completes the separation of the aesthetic from its primaryphenomena-works of art-because it is not the work but the perceiver'spleasure which becomes the subject of aesthetics. If A disagrees with B

48 Ibid.49 Ibid.

50 mmanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1974),57-58.


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302 DABNEY TOWNSEND

about a work of art, they are really disagreeing about the kind of pleasureeach has, and that is a function of the epistemological position of eachobserver. Kant assimilates aesthetic

experienceto all

experience as itstranscendental basis. Croce concludes, in that case, that anything isbeautiful if it is known. Other attitude theorists make the attitude of thespectator the sole determinant of aesthetic judgment. Aesthetics reallybecomes a matter of how one looks at things.

The kinds of attitude theories which follow differ greatly from Kant'scomplex aesthetic theory, but they can be traced back to it. Considertwo illustrative points. The first is disinterestedness itself. The FirstMoment of the Aesthetic of the Beautiful culminates in

the descrip-tion of taste as the faculty of judging of an object or a method ofrepresenting it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfac-tion. 51 Interest is always connected to desire, and desire requiresexistence. To be disinterested then separates the judgment from the ex-istence of its object. We must not be in the least prejudiced in favor ofthe existence of the things, but quite indifferent in this respect, in orderto play the judge in things of taste. 52 The key point here is that dis-

interestedness has become the opposite of interest. The pleasure andsatisfaction which accompanies interest has to do with the object and itsexistence. The object, Kant says, gratifies me.53 That which can becalled beauty, in which we take a disinterested pleasure, is altogetherdifferent; to be pleased by the beautiful is a wholly subjective, non-cognitive feeling for the object as it is contemplated. Taste in thebeautiful is alone a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest,either of sense or of reason here forces our assent. 54 To move from the

disinterested to the interested is to go from one kind of satisfaction toanother.It distorts Kant's position to take this out of context. While the

disinterested contemplation is non-cognitive, that is because it precedes(logically) the cognitive phase. Kant ultimately links the aesthetic toboth practical and theoretical judgments. But disinterested judgments oftaste belong wholly to the beautiful, and in so far as beauty itself providesthe satisfaction in the subject, there can be no intermixture of interest.

While for Kant the aesthetic may eventually be the keystone upon whichthe practical and theoretical depend, the contemplation of the beautifulis not and, according to Kant, for a priori reasons, cannot be taken intoeither the practical or theoretical. When Kant comes to link the beautifulto the moral, the link can be only symbolic. 55 Thus any actual ex-

51Ibid., 45.52Ibid., 39.53 bid., 41.

54Ibid., 44.55Ibid., 59.


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perience of an object as beautiful will be apart from all of the other waysof experiencing that object. Since this aesthetic experience rests solely onthe

subject,it follows that if we wish to restrict

contemplationto aesthetic

contemplation, we must assume a disinterested attitude since anythingelse would belong to a practical or theoretical judgment.

This disinterested attitude in the Third Critique seems to me a directconsequence of the way of taking aesthetic experience which has emergedfrom the position of Hutcheson and Hume. Even if we grant that Kant'sposition is more complex than subsequent aesthetic attitude theories, wehave a complete separation from the starting point represented by Shaf-tesbury. For Shaftesbury, interested and disinterested awareness are twoaspects of the same phenomenon. Far from making disinterestedness thesole possibility for aesthetics, Shaftesbury uses it only as evidence forfinding where our real interest lies. Rather than three different pleasures(gratifying, pleasing, and esteeming), Shaftesbury inds only one pleasure.His problems are fancy, flattery, and the transient pleasures of the ap-petites (mere sense). His solution is to correct taste. Kant moves theconceptual and practical to a different kind of judgment and leaves themanifestation of the aesthetic in art isolated. The solution which follows,even if it is not one that Kant directly embraces since he is not veryinterested in actual works of art, is that disinterestedness must be cul-tivated as a stance or attitude by the subject.

A second point concerning common sense also illustrates the shiftfrom judgments about objects of taste to the subjective vision of thebeholder. I have emphasized Shaftesbury's concern for a public interestas well as a private interest, and I think it is instructive to see whathappens to this public presence. Kant begins from much the same pointas Shaftesbury. Objective principles are ruled out, but so is mere sense:

If they [judgments of taste] were devoid of all principle, like those ofthe mere taste of sense, we would not allow them in thought any necessitywhatever. 56 Kant concludes from this that there must be some subjectiveprinciple with universal validity which he calls a common sense. Theground for assuming a common sense is the universal communicabilityof feeling which cognition presupposes. The common sense is the nec-essary condition of non-solipsistic knowledge. It allows us to claim for

taste a universality based on our feeling because we identify that feelingas common and not private. Thus Kant begins with the fact that ourjudgments of taste are universal and combines that with the necessarycondition for knowledge that feeling be intersubjective. He concludes thata common sense must be presupposed. We are justified in presupposingit on the basis of the possibility of knowledge itself. We do not requireactual agreement with our judgments of taste, and we leave open theactual nature of the common sense.

56Ibid., 75.


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When Kant comes to resolve the antinomy of taste,57 he does so bytrying to remove the appearance of contradiction. He does not appeal

directlyto

disinterestedness,a common

sense,or an aesthetic

attitude,but he does conclude in part that the judgment has validity for everyone(though, of course, for each only as a singular judgment immediatelyaccompanying his intuition). 58 Thus we are in fact forced back on anindividual judgment and the possibility of assuming a stance and makingthe judgment ourselves. This must be set over against Shaftesbury's pro-cedure which is to expose the individual judgment to public scrutiny bysoliloquy, criticism, and even raillery and Hume's inductive general-ization over time. We have moved from Shaftesbury's concept of aestheticexperience as open, moral, and common in the sense of public toKant's position which makes the aesthetic experience subjective, singular,and common only as a necessary condition to knowledge. In Kant'stheory as a whole, aesthetic judgment remains intersubjective because itis the foundation of cognition. But it has no practical side. Subsequentversions of aesthetic attitude and taste recover the practical by forgettingthe cognitive limits.

Shaftesbury represents a relatively naive starting point for modernaesthetics. He has not shed medieval Neo-Platonism fully, but he beginsan empirical examination of art and taste which subsequently developsinto what we know as aesthetics. His empiricism, perhaps because it isundeveloped, is holistic. Taste is a taste for actual works of art; aestheticsis an essential part of one's moral and epistemological practice, andjudgments of taste are practical as well as personal. In the eighteenthcentury, the empirical foundations of this view are explored. But theyare also pulled apart. Hutcheson tries to place aesthetics on a more

satisfactory Lockean basis. But the sense of aesthetic taste cannot beestablished on the same ground as other secondary qualities. The questfor specifically aesthetic qualities and identity criteria opens the way forthe criticism of Hume and the re-construction of Kant. Yet each moveincreases the separation of the subjective and practical aspects of aestheticsand makes it more difficult for aesthetic judgments to be related to otherclaims about knowledge and value. Modem aesthetic theories based onan aesthetic attitude and a unique aesthetic experience are the heirs of

this tradition.

University of Texas at Arlington

57 The judgment of taste is not based on concepts and does not admit of controversy(i.e. everyone has his own taste); the judgment of taste is based on concepts (i.e. we do

quarrel about these judgments and claim for them universal validity). Ibid., 183-84.58 Ibid., 185. Italics mine.

from shaftesbury to kant the development of the concept of aesthetic experience.pdf

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