Eduard Ghita

The large extent to which aesthetic terms pervade Adam Smith’s discussion of ethics would seem to suggest, in the least, that the spheres of aesthetics and ethics are interwoven in a way hardly possible to conceive in the wake of Kant. Despite this recognized closeness between the two areas, one account in the literature has claimed that Smith’s understanding of beauty anticipates Kant’s modern notion of disinterested pleasure. It is claimed that according to Smith, disinterested pleasure is aroused by the harmony of our moral sentiments as well as by the beauty of “productions of art.” By analyzing the relation of beauty to utility in Smith’s aesthetics and ethics, I will be arguing against the attribution to Smith of a specifically disinterested pleasure in our judgments of the beauty of the productions of art, as well as in the beauty of moral objects, such as virtuous character and conduct.

Joseph Addison’s 1712 collection of papers on the Pleasures of the Imagination has been read extensively as a founding statement of modern aesthetics. The great majority of studies take Addison’s essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination to be a self-contained document which prevents their authors from turning their attention to The Spectator at large. As I turn my attention to the periodical at large, my aim in this paper is to show how the urban experience of Mr. Spectator was consequential in the emergence of a modern aesthetic discourse. First, I will present the views of Donald Newman, Martha Woodmansee, John Brewer and Wilhelm Dilthey, in order to support the view that the city could be envisaged as a condition for the aesthetic. This lends itself to extra-textual approaches to the periodical, tracing the importance of the social, political and economic contexts for the rise of aesthetics. A short introduction to the scope of aesthetics outside of art will help me recuperate the aesthetic dimension of Mr. Spectator’s reflections on his urban environment. I will then start my analysis of the city as a source of the aesthetic. I argue that the locus of aesthetic theory, Addison’s essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination, needs to be enlarged so as to accommodate Mr. Spectator’s reflections on the city. Tracing back the findings in The Spectator at large to the imagination papers, I show how the metropolis offered Mr. Spectator an immediate space where his two most important aesthetic categories —the new and the great—would be played out.

Joseph Addison’s Spectator papers on the imagination have been read as a landmark in the development of aesthetic disinterestedness. But this is problematic in light of Addison’s theological concerns, particularly as they bear on the final causes of aesthetic pleasures. This teleology of the aesthetic is far from a Kantian understanding, but rather part of a larger discourse of physico-theology. By drawing on the work of Zeitz and Mayhew, among others, this paper shows how Addison’s theological underpinnings of the aesthetic raise the broader question of the role theology played in the emergence and evolution of philosophical aesthetics. In eighteenth-century Britain, the aesthetic belonged to a disciplinary matrix comprising a set of confluent discourses, one of which was theology. Drawing on and expanding M.H. Abrams’s scheme, which explores how concepts such as ‘contemplation’ and ‘disinterestedness’ migrated from theology to aesthetic theory, this paper suggests that the concept of ‘aesthetic pleasure’ underwent a similar transformation. With Addison, the pleasures afforded by the imagination acquire a new dominant position which allows one to speak of a text in modern aesthetics instead of a manual of Christian apologetics.