Abstract
In issue 409 of his renowned London daily The Spectator, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) hypes his imminent “Pleasures of the Imagination” by assuring his readers that he has something “entirely new” to say about “what it is that gives a Beauty to any Passages of the finest Writers both in Prose and Verse” (Addison and Steele 1891, vol. 2, p. 710; see also Stolnitz 1961, p. 188). There is reason to receive his claim of founding a new discipline as something more than hyperbole. The eighteenth century is distinguished as a robust repository of a heretofore suppressed and distracted aesthetic discourse (Cassirer 1955, p. 312). For the first time since Plotinus (204–70 AD), a systematic effort is undertaken to distinguish the essential attributes of beauty itself. The culmination, of course, is Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) Critique of Judgement (1892 [1790]). And aesthetics, finally, is thought to have a field of its own.
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- 1.
“The Germans are the only people who at present use this word to indicate what others call the critique of taste. At the foundation of this term lies the disappointed hope, which the eminent analyst, Baumgarten, conceived, of subjecting the criticism of the beautiful to principles of reason, and so elevating its rules into a science” (Kant 1943 [1781], p. 22 [Critique of Pure Reason, Part I, Introductory, note]).
- 2.
Although I am indebted to Terry Eagleton for concentrating on the environmental influences on concepts like beauty, it will become clear that I do not accept his conviction that aesthetics is “ideology” in the Marxist sense. I think that complex permutations of “disinterest” are available, indeed indispensable, to humans, and that Marx and his successors are at their most challenged when confronting this issue. I should also say here that I am mystified by Eagleton’s claim in the Introduction of his The Ideology of the Aesthetic that “almost all of the thinkers I discuss in this book are in fact German, even if some of the concepts I bring to bear upon their work stem from the intellectual milieu of modern France” (1990, p. 2). Perhaps he had not yet conceived of his next chapter, “The Law of the Heart: Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke,” which sets the stage for his materialist interpretation of beauty.
- 3.
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“Qu’est-ce qui peut le rendre légitime?” (Rousseau 1797, p. 3).
- 5.
“If I consider him, in a word, such as he must have issued from the hands of nature; I see an animal less strong than some, and less agile than others, but, upon the whole, the most advantageously organized of any: I see him satisfying his hunger under an oak, and his thirst at the first brook; I see him laying himself down to sleep at the foot of the same tree that afforded him his meal; and there are all his wants completely supplied” (Rousseau 2002 [1755], p. 90 [Second Discourse 1]).
- 6.
There is one reference to “the Temptation” (Locke 1988, p. 190 [1.5.44]).
- 7.
“In all things of this kind there is little need or use of revelation, God having furnished us with natural and surer means to arrive at the knowledge of them.”
- 8.
- 9.
I should admit that scholars continue to debate the extent to which Locke segregates reason from revelation, and the extent to which he embraces the latter (see Brown 1999).
- 10.
Locke approaches playfulness, invoking a delicious ambiguity regarding human reason, which renders its aficionados “almost equal to Angels” (Locke 1988, p. 200 [1.6.58]).
- 11.
I intentionally sidestep an important, but treacherous, debate regarding Locke’s piety (for a taste of its bitterness, see Yolton 1958). Here, I am arguing that he depends in unprecedented ways on the faculty of reason. I will leave it to Leo Strauss, John Dunn, and their respective adherents to specify just how much human reason owes to God. A superb inventory of such scholarship is undertaken in Rabieh (1991), where even Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1999 [1695]) is contemplated as a refutation of theistic natural law. Fortunately, Locke’s embrace of sense and reflection can be considered without entering the debate about his piety. Certainly that is how Shaftesbury, who is discussed below, undertakes his own critique of Locke.
- 12.
Lawrence Klein, editor of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, footnotes a letter of 3 June 1707, in which Shaftesbury explicitly makes the connection: “credulous Mr. Locke, with his Indian, barbarian stories of wild nations that have no such idea (as travelers, learned authors and men of truth and great philosophers have informed him)” (Shaftesbury 1999, p. 154, note EEEE), quoting Cooper (1716, pp. 39–40).
- 13.
“The brain certainly is a great starver where it abounds, and the thinking people of the world, the philosophers and virtuosi especially, must be contented, I find, with a moderate share of bodily advantages for the sake of what they call parts and capacity in another sense.”
- 14.
This helps explain the intriguing title of Shaftesbury’s essay, which promises advice to authors (Shaftesbury 1999, pp. 70–162).
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I will here only briefly indulge the nonetheless ambient temptation to discuss Kant. Despite scholarly efforts to distinguish him (see Townsend 1987), Kant is clearly seduced by the Burkean inclination to elevate the sublime to parity with the beautiful. Kant’s practical reason, based on the imposition of shared meanings on an inscrutable natural setting, is celebrated and elevated by classifying the reveling of its success as an experience that is just as rewarding as encountering a monumental poem would be. Kant embraces Shaftesbury’s circumscribed disinterestedness, with its hidden bias, thereby elevating the sublime to the status of the beautiful. He specifies the waterfall as particularly sublime. It is an aesthetic experience of great intensity because, while representing close up an overwhelming threat to survival, viewing it from a suitable distance allows a very pleasing nonchalance, or disinterest, to turn dread into a celebration of human accomplishment. The connection of disinterest to survival is clear. Kant’s substantiation and reinforcement of Shaftesbury’s reaction to Locke is a tribute to classical liberalism’s influence, an influence that is arguably strongest in America.
- 17.
In 1793, the American geologist Robert McCauslin discovers that the rate of the Fall’s upstream retreat due to erosion is far too small to sustain the biblical account of Earth’s age (Gilbert 1907, p. 6).
- 18.
The barrel, in fact, is eventually swindled from her, and a young man who some years later actually swims over the falls is far less celebrated.
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Lukes, T.J. (2016). Swords and Scabbards: Locke’s Occupation of Shaftesbury and Burke. In: Politics and Beauty in America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-02090-1_3
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