Botond Csuka

The aim of this paper is to situate Addison’s aesthetics within the diverse, transdisciplinary aesthetic communication of the early eighteenth century, through which the new anthropology of sensibility took shape. Like many of his contemporaries, Addison draws on the medico-physiological literature of his time. Aesthetic pleasure is explained as consisting in or being produced by neurophysiological processes described in terms of iatromechanism and animal spirit physiology. These processes, he argues, are beneficial to the health and well-being of the human body and mind, and can prevent and even cure mental diseases such as melancholy, which were thought to be caused by the disordered movement of the animal spirits. This means that aesthetic pleasure functions as a kind of therapeutic in Addison’s aesthetics. A comparison with his essays on therapeutic somatic practices reveals that Addison describes the neurophysiological processes involved in aesthetic pleasure in much the same way as those involved in physical exercise. When he refers to the pleasures of the imagination as “gentle exercise” (Spectator 411), Addison is drawing on the medico-physiological literature on exercise, especially Francis Fuller’s Medicina Gymnastica. For Addison, both physical exercise and the “gentle exercise” offered by aesthetic pleasure share the same normative goal: a “cheerful” mind, i.e. the lively movement and the proper distribution of animal spirits. Exercise, both physical and aesthetic, can achieve this by rearranging the movement of the animal spirits: exercise distracts the solitary, constricted and inert melancholic mind, releases the animal spirits from their confused and disordered movements by communicating to them a Motion contrary to theirs. In a way, both physical exercise and aesthetic pleasure re-connect or synchronise us with our environment: they lead the melancholic mind back to the beauty, novelty and greatness of nature, the delights of social life and the bounties of the providential order itself. For Addison, cheerfulness is much more than optimal neurophysiological functioning: it is a virtuous, sociable and pious “habit of mind” (Spectator 387) that makes us feel at home in our natural, social and providential world. Thus, due to its medical and physiological underpinnings, Addison’s aesthetics takes its place in the tradition of the “care of the self”, still reverberating in the eighteenth century, fusing medicine, aesthetics, morality and piety in the normative goal of the Addisonian quest for self-transformation: cheerfulness.

Volume 74 in the series Hallesche Beiträge zur Europäischen Aufklärung Die vor-autonome und noch nicht auf das Feld der Künste beschränkte Ästhetik des ›langen 18. Jahrhunderts‹ strebte eine interdisziplinäre und internationale Kommunikationspraxis an, die eine universelle Verständigung unter den Menschen ermöglichen sollte. Der Band versammelt Beiträge zu der europäischen Geschichte dieser anthropologisch ausgerichteten ästhetischen Kommunikation. Die Aufsätze der ersten Sektion beschäftigen sich mit der zeitgenössichen Theorie der ästhetischen Wissensvermittlung: Es wird die fachübergreifende (Proto-) Ästhetik Shaftesburys und Addisons, die Sprachtheorie von Coleridge bzw. die schwierige Einbürgerüng der Disziplin ›Ästhetik‹ in Frankreich thematisiert. Im zweiten Teil beschäftigen sich zwei Aufsätze mit der Kommunikation durch Bilder, anhand der Analyse von Gemälden Jean-Siméon Chardins und Caspar David Friedrichs. Die Bedeutung des Bild- und Erzählstoffes ›Herkules am Scheideweg‹ für Wielands ästhetische Kommunikation wird hier ebenfalls behandelt. Die dritte Sektion enthält Untersuchungen zu zwei wichtigen Gattungen der ästhetischen Kommunikation. Es werden zunächst unterschiedliche Varianten des Genres Traumerzählung bei Johann Gottlob Krüger und Mihály Vörösmarty beleuchtet. Der Band schließt mit der Analyse von József Eötvös’ Künstlerroman Der Karthäuser. Die Fallstudien tragen zu dem besseren Verständnis einer Ästhetik bei, die die Bildung der Menschen durch intersubjektive Kommunikation vorantreiben wollte.

The 18th-century emergence of aesthetics has been interpreted as a symptom of the entrance of a new image of man, individuality, a modern conception of subjectivity, a new mode of experience, as well as a new ideology or the modern concept of (fine) art into European consciousness. And even though these narratives all situate aesthetics within heteronomous contexts—from physiology and psychology to morality and politics, from social and economic history to belief and religion—one narrative came out as victorious, which neglects the eighteenth-century interpenetration of various disciplines. It offers instead a teleological history of aesthetics which leads towards the concept of autonomy, aesthetic and/or artistic, as it takes shape, allegedly, in the aesthetics of Kant and then Romanticism. The new volume of the Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, entitled Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics, joins the growing body of scholarship that re-examines the influential narratives of autonomy.

Somaesthetics and Sport (ed. Andrew Edgar, Brill, 2022) is a multifaceted collection of essays: Richard Shusterman’s theoretical framework is robust enough to lend unity to the volume, but it mostly functions as a springboard for the individual papers, never suffocating their theoretical explorations or making the book repetitive or a boring read. The ten essays also communicate with one another through certain recurring notions such as agency, somatic awareness, the Suitsian account of games or the interdisciplinary intertwining of philosophical arguments with the results of sport psychology and physiology. Displaying the various ways Shusterman’s somaesthetics can be used to further the philosophical analysis of the aesthetic experience of watching and doing sports, the volume fills a gap in the scholarship of the aesthetics of sport as well as in the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics.

The paper explores Burke’s twofold solution to the paradox of negative emotions. His Philosophical Enquiry (1757/59) employs two models that stand on different anthropological principles: the Exercise Argument borrowed from authors like the Abbé Du Bos, guided by the principle of self-preservation, and the Sympathy Argument, propageted by notable men of lettres such as Lord Kames, ruled by the principle of sociability. Burke interlocks these two arguments through a teleologically-ordered physiology, in which the natural laws of the human body and mind, secretly working in the depth of the nerve fibres, ensure both self-preservation and sociability. Utilizing both efficient and final causes throughout his Enquiry, Burke argues that the experiences of pain and terror – under certain conditions – are made agreeable (delight) by providence,so that the physiological mechanisms underlying these experiences could ensure the health and strenuousness of the nerve fibres amidst the corrupting pleasures of commercial society (Exercise Argument). Furthermore, due to the ambiguous character of this delight annexed to such experiences, they also function as exercises for our social passions (Sympathy Argument). Te 'egoistic' anthropological drive to remove the visceral uneasiness that dominates these experiences facilitates moral action when it is needed the most: when others in pain need our help. In accordance with the anthropocentric providentialism of the moderate Enlightenment, it is the design of the human frame that ensures the activities essential to our health (self-preservation) and moral conduct (sociability), a design that not only guarantees that pleasure, if exclusive and excessive, is 'inconvenient', and pain, if mitigated and harmless, is aesthetically agreeable, but also that our 'egoistic' drive to self-preservation ultimately improves sociability.

György Alajos Szerdahely, the first professor of aesthetics in Pest, publishes his Aesthetica in 1778, a work, written in Latin, that not only engages with the eclectic university aesthetics of late-18th-century Germany and Central Europe, but also marks the beginning of the Hungarian aesthetic tradition. Szerdahely proposes aesthetics as the doctrine of taste, a philosophical discipline that can polish our manners and social conduct through a sensual-affective Bildung offered by art experiences. Highlighting his sources in both British criticism and German aesthetics, the paper traces the development of Szerdahely's concept of beauty from beauty as form (uniformity amidst variety) to beauty in motion (sensibility). Initially, Szerdahely argues for unity and variety as the two main constituents of a beautiful object, evoking disinterested contemplation, but he then turns to sensibility as the third necessary condition of beauty: an object becomes aesthetically beautiful only if it has the power to strike the senses (Lux) and stir the affections (Vivacitas), enlivening the whole embodied person. The paper argues that this third principle of sensibility proves to be more emphatic than the first two, leading to (1) the aesthetic conception of beauty as an experiential quality; but more interestingly to (2) the incorporation of the element of self-preservation and self-love into aesthetic experience. The reason for the latter development lies in Szerdahely’s anthropological argument, which traces back every affection to the instantaneous apprehension of good or evil concerning ourselves, implying desire (Adpetitus) or aversion (Auersi) in our reactions.

Authors, especially “advocates for virtue,” writes Samuel Johnson in one of his Rambler essays, might consider following the example of monarchs, who, hiding themselves from the public, “avoid the conversation of mankind […], for men would not more patiently submit to be taught, than commanded, by one known to have the same follies and weaknesses with themselves.” It is easy to see, continues Dr. Johnson, that writing well is easier than living well: teaching navigation on land is not the same as actually commanding a ship on sea, just as designing a life in “solitude, safety, and tranquility, with a mind unbiased, and with liberty unobstructed” is easier than actually living by that design “amidst tumult, and snares, and danger.” It is no surprise that allegedly even Milton was pleased that he did not disappoint an enthusiastic visitor and was “found equal to his own character”—a character born out of his textual world (Samuel Johnson, “The Rambler No. 14. (5 May, 1750)”, in Selected Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler, ed. W.J. Bate. Yale University Press, 1968, 39, 40, 38). Johnson’s essay speaks of his deep insight into the chasm between the thinking, breathing, embodied self and contingent life of a writer and the textual self and models of life sculpted in her works. This insight, needless to say, has become a cliché in twentieth-century criticism, which dispensed with the naive view that literary discourse, including autobiographical works, is somehow transparent, a reflection of the writer’s self. For this reason, it might seem odd to look at literature from the perspective of a tradition that considers writing a crucial technique of examining and cultivating the self—something the ancient Greeks termed epimelesthai sautou, “the care of the self,” which was once understood to be the true goal of philosophy itself, conceived as the “art of living.” Richard Shusterman’s latest book, Philosophy and the Art of Writing revitalizes this ancient tradition of philosophy as an embodied way of living, and examines the various ways the process and product of the art of writing can contribute to the philosophical life dedicated to self-examination and self-improvement, while also pointing out the ambiguities of such an enterprise.

The paper is meant to introduce a symposium on aesthetics in Hungary today. Through a brief survey of the Hungarian aesthetic tradition, which goes back to the eclectic “university aesthetics” of the late 18 th century and produced a number of prominent figures such as Georg Lukács and his disciples in the “Budapest School” in the 20th century, the paper seeks to point out some key characteristics of this tradition and to reflect on the intellectual landscape of contemporary aesthetics in Hungary, diversified by many fields of study, methods and subdisciplines.