Endre Szécsényi

This article explores the historical roots of the aesthetic experience of biodiversity, focusing on a formative period of modern aesthetics between the mid-17th and late 18th centuries. Drawing on the works of Balthasar Gracián, Joseph Addison, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the paper argues that the diversity and multitude of living species – what we now call biodiversity – were already central to proto-aesthetic and early aesthetic reflections on nature. Although lacking modern ecological awareness, these authors attributed profound emotional, philosophical, and symbolic value to the variety of life. Gracián’s concept of the innocent gaze, Addison’s aesthetic of novelty and fullness of being, and Goethe’s morphological insights into metamorphosis each exemplify a distinct mode of aesthetically engaging with biodiversity. The study concludes with critical reflections on the limits of linking aesthetic appreciation to ethical responsibility in contemporary debates on conservation, warning against instrumental or scientistic appropriations of aesthetic experience.

This paper discusses some essays from London daily journals at the time of the emergence of modern aesthetics and attempts to demonstrate that what we nowadays call “everyday aesthetics” was not simply present in the relevant texts of the early eighteenth century, but, in a sense, it was the mainstream of the rising modern aesthetic. The aesthetic basically meant paying closer attention to our everyday reality including our natural and human made environments and also various quotidian activities. Contemporary everyday aesthetics should therefore be seen not so much as an extension of the mostly “art-centred” post-Kantian philosophical aesthetics, but rather as one of the original, pre-Kantian, sources of modern aesthetics to be restored or regained.

This e-book written in Hungarian seeks to reconstruct “the aesthetic” in the modern sense of the word, from the mid-17th century to the 1730s, through the texts of mainly British authors such as John Dennis, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Francis Hutcheson, George Berkeley, sometimes using their Spanish and French predecessors for contextualization. It assumes that “the aesthetic” is an unprecedented type of experience that had to be discovered, or rather invented; it is therefore more than a discussion of some old, always existing quality or sensibility in a new theoretical guise. If the words “(school) philosophy”, “art” and “criticism” can be associated with the mostly systematic theories of aesthetics that emerged in the wake of Alexander G. Baumgarten as a loose characterisation, then the words “(popular) theology”, “nature” and “exercise” are even more so with the earlier texts that are on the table here, which played a role in the formation of “the aesthetic”. It seems that in this period, “the aesthetic” is understood above all as a new and intimate link between the sensual and the supernatural or spiritual, in which the former is not just an apropos or disposable means to the latter, but an indispensable and ever-present component that provides a constitutive framework for experience. Its unprecedented modernity lies in its nisus to capture the divine in the sensual and to make it present as sensual. In this new experiential form, both the “nature” of the transcendence and the spiritual economics of the beholder are reconfigured. The new “aesthetic” is connected to and associated with the full experience of life, the joy of existence, the openness to the transcendent through the sensuality of the natural or everyday world, the interplay of external determination and internal spontaneity, the enchanted state of mind experienced in a waking dream, the reinterpretation of the relationship between reality and fiction, the intense existential experience of spiritual and emotional movement provided by walking, wandering, boating or cheerful imagination.

The article considers the concept of gustus spiritualis, in particular its possible historical connection with (aesthetic) taste in the seventeenth century. By ‘aesthetic’, I mean a radically modern phenomenon, attitude, sensibility, and so forth, that is, a new type of experience. Its discourse has many keywords; one of them is taste, an inner faculty by which its possessor is able to make sharp and proper distinctions, and simultaneously to enjoy fine delights. Here, I am obliged to confine myself to the interpretation of some Jesuit authors within the wide tradition of gustus spiritualis: St Ignatius of Loyola, St Francis de Sales, Baltasar Gracián, and Dominique Bouhours in sequence. The latter two are usually treated in the historical narratives of aesthetics, which, however, usually take gustus/gusto/goût as if it were a purely secular (moral, political) notion in the seventeenth century, while its theological roots are ignored. Exploring the role of gustus spiritualis in the evolution of (aesthetic) taste can cast light, on the one hand, on the important fact that this entails volition, that is, the determination and enchantment of human desire and hope without constraint; and, on the other, on the historical process of the emergence of a new type of ‘beholder’ with a sensitive attitude to transcendence, and, in the same manner, to his or her worldly life as well; moreover, it is a process in which, simultaneously, the nature of transcendence is transformed into a tastable one.

Introductory essay / Peter Jones -- The usefulness of the arts and the humanities : the case of Descartes / Gábor Boros -- Roads of remembrance : the treatment of imagination and memory in Gerard's Essay on genius / Zsolt Komáromy -- Diderot's untimeliness / László Kisbali ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Melody vs. harmony : Rousseau, or, The aesthetics of vowels / Mária Ludassy ; transl. Zsolt Komáromy -- Judgement and taste : from Shakespeare to Shaftesbury / Ferenc Hörcher -- Lord Shaftesbury's "aesthetic freedom" / Endre Szécsényi -- Why one should imitate the Greeks : on Winckelmann / Sándor Radnóti ; transl. Márton Dornbach -- Beauty or beast, or, Monstrous regiments? : Robertson and Burke on women and the public scene / László Kontler -- The concept of nature and the theodicy problem in the Malebranche-Arnauld-Leibniz debate / Dániel Schmal -- Lessing's anti-candide : between reason and revelation / Krisztina Utasi ; transl. Márton Dornbach.

ABSTRACT George Berkeley is usually not discussed in the canonical histories of modern aesthetics. Similarly, Berkeley scholars do not seem to have paid attention to his possible contribution to modern aesthetics. Berkeley exploited certain theoretical potentials of the emerging aesthetic experience that was invented and formulated especially by his contemporaries like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele and Lord Shaftesbury. He applied these elements in shaping a theologico-aesthetic language in the very same period when Francis Hutcheson and Alexander Baumgarten wrote their widely acclaimed first aesthetic theories in Europe. At the same time, Berkeley advances the linguistic and religious aspects of the modern aesthetic experience not in his theoretical, but in his pragmatical and popularizing writings. Instead of relying on a purely rational theology or a negative theology, he offers an ‘aesthetic’ one based on the model of the beautiful and the sublime. Aesthetically, this meant a re-interpretation and re-configuration of the duality of the beautiful and the sublime – decades before Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry.

This essay begins with some observations on the main features and availability of the aesthetic experience of the night sky to us. In the second part, the aesthetics of the starry sky is interpreted in terms of time experience, complementing the usual approach in terms of immense space. These remarks on this broad and abundant subject can partly be linked to the intellectual historical interpretation of the birth of modern aesthetics, and partly to the vital discourse of environmental aesthetics, which proves that these two approaches can work together and bring to the fore the aesthetic relevance and fruitfulness of this subject.

This study examines the sources that could inspire Joseph Addison’s influential ‘aesthetic’ triad of ‘great’, ‘uncommon’, and ‘beautiful’, as elaborated in his essay-series The Pleasures of the Imagination in 1712. After identifying a philological problem in the interpretative tradition which gives rise to Addison’s triad from a section of Ps Longinus’ Peri Hypsous, further three seventeenth-century texts – Thomas Burnet’s Telluris theoria sacra, Dominique Bouhours’ Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, and Baltasar Gracián’s El Criticón – are presented in order to reconstruct a ‘reading glass’ through which Addison could peruse and understand the Longinian section, and then could create his ‘aesthetic’ triad. As a result of this reconstruction, the possible connection between Gracián’s allegorical novel and Addison’s essay can cast more light on the complex and insufficiently discussed relationship between theology or devotional literature and the emerging modern aesthetic discourse. From this angle, Addison’s ‘man of polite imagination’, that is, the homo aestheticus in the modern sense of the adjective, seems to be the heir of Gracián’s ‘first man’ who has the privilege of regarding the created world in a new light, and, as Addison’s aesthete, of discovering its greatness, novelty and beauty in ‘innocent pleasures’.

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world.

The article considers the concept of gustus spiritualis, in particular its possible historical connection with (aesthetic) taste in the seventeenth century. By ‘aesthetic’, I mean a radically modern phenomenon, attitude, sensibility, and so forth, that is, a new type of experience. Its discourse has many keywords; one of them is taste, an inner faculty by which its possessor is able to make sharp and proper distinctions, and simultaneously to enjoy fine delights. Here, I am obliged to confine myself to the interpretation of some Jesuit authors within the wide tradition of gustus spiritualis: St Ignatius of Loyola, St Francis de Sales, Baltasar Gracián, and Dominique Bouhours in sequence. The latter two are usually treated in the historical narratives of aesthetics, which, however, usually take gustus/gusto/goût as if it were a purely secular (moral, political) notion in the seventeenth century, while its theological roots are ignored. Exploring the role of gustus spiritualis in the evolution of (aesthetic) taste can cast light, on the one hand, on the important fact that this entails volition, that is, the determination and enchantment of human desire and hope without constraint; and, on the other, on the historical process of the emergence of a new type of ‘beholder’ with a sensitive attitude to transcendence, and, in the same manner, to his or her worldly life as well; moreover, it is a process in which, simultaneously, the nature of transcendence is transformed into a tastable one