From Shaftesbury to Kant: The Development of the Concept of Aesthetic Experience Dabney Townsend Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 48, No. 2. (Apr. - Jun., 1987), pp. 287-305 ble URL: bhtplinks,jstor-org/sici?sici=0022-5037%28 198 704% 2F06%2948 %3A2%3C287%3AFSTKTD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q Jounal of the History of Meas is currently published by University of Pennsylvania Press, ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at butp:/\vww jstor.orglabout/terms.huml. ISTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hup:/ www jstor-org/journalVupenn him. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, JSTOR isan independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to ereating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals, For more information regarding JSTOR, please contaet support @jstor.org, hupulwwwjstororg/ ‘Mon Dee 4 14:04:01 2006FROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT* THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE By Dasney TOWNSEND It is widely recognized that although reference to “aesthetic experi- ence” is anachronistic prior to the nineteenth century, the concept has its foundation in the emerging empiricism of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. Under the influence of Locke and New- ton and a host of others, the decisive break with medieval hierarchical ontology which had been emerging since the fourteenth century took a clear conceptual form. But for the purpose of aesthetic theory, the way that the primacy of “experience” developed created difficulties which have gradually isolated aesthetics form the mainstream of epistemology and ontology. In the eighteenth century this was not yet the case. Hutche- son, Hume, Burke, Hogarth, Gerard, and Alison all take for granted that a discussion of beauty, the sublime, and taste are central to philo- sophical discussion. From their discussions there emerges a concept of aesthetic experience which, in one form or another, dominates subsequent ‘aesthetic 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 is very complex. Rather than trying to trace it in detail, I will single out a series of significant points. At the beginning is Lord Shaftesbury, the pupil of John Locke. In the middle are Francis Hutcheson, who has Shaftesbury explicitly in view, and David Hume. Hume states the paradox of critical judgment—aesthetic judgments are subjective, but the critical judgments which follow from them cannot be subjective without com- mitting us to absurdities and defeating our attempt to say what we hold to be objectively the case about some works of art—but essentially he evades it. At the end stands Immanuel Kant who sums up the movement. The initial question, then, is how one gets from Shaftesbury to Hume and in the process commits aesthetics to a concept of aesthetic experience and taste which creates this paradox. I. At the very beginning of the eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley * have benefited from the criticisms of two readers for the Journal of the History of Ideas who identified a number of obscure passages in this paper; in several instances, Thave adopted wording suggested by them. Ihave also been greatly aed by conversation with my colleague, Mark Strasser, especially on Locke and Hutcheson. 287 Copyright 1987 by JouRNAL OF THE History oF IDEAS, INC.288 DABNEY TOWNSEND Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, provides a convenient reference point. Shaftesbury is one of those Janus figures of philosophy who looks back to an ordered Neo-Platonism while he simultaneously begins to use empirical concepts. If we compare Shaftesbury’s aesthetic philosophy to later eighteenth-century developments of the same basic concepts, it will help to clarify what is taking place. Let us consider first the concept of aesthetic experience itself. Shaftes- bury’s language is firmly Neo-Platonic, but he requires the testing of judgments in a way which gives his Platonism a new content, Thus on the one hand we find Shaftesbury endorsing a traditional hierarchy of forms: first there are “dead forms,” then the “forms which form, that is which have intelligence, action, and operation,” and finally the forms “which form not only such as we call mere forms but even forms which form.””' On the other hand, Shaftesbury defends both criticism and “rail- lery.” He distrusts introspection,” and he defends a public test of time: “The public always judges right, and the pieces esteemed or disesteemed after a time and a course of some years are always exactly esteemed according to their proportion of worth by those rules and studies.” What I draw from this is that Shaftesbury, like the empiricists who follow Locke, finds “experience” the only reliable test. But Shaftesbury is pri- marily a public man, and he never separates his interests in art from his moral theory. For Shaftesbury, therefore, experience and the tests it provides are matters of common judgment. They do not begin with private sense but in medias res where we find ourselves. Shaftesbury is as distrustful of ‘mere sense” as he is of an uncritical introspection. For example, he holds that “Never can the form be of real force where it is uncontemplated, unjudged of, unexamined, and stands only as the accidental note or token of what appeases provoked sense, and satisfies the brutish part.’ He extends the necessity for critical reflection to practical judgment as well: “Nothing is more fatal, either to painting, architecture, or the other arts, than this false relish, which is governed rather by what immediately strikes the sense, than by what consequentially and by reflection pleases the mind, and satisfies the thought and reason.”* Shaftesbury is not systematic, and he does not seriously consider how this reflection is possible. Unlike Locke, he is not prepared to give up innate ideas, and there is no question that Shaftesbury " Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 4, John M. Robertson (Indianapolis,1964), “The Moralist, A Philosophical Rhapsody, TL, 132-33. Throughout the quotations from Shaftesbury, I omit italics. * Ibid, “Soliloquy or Advice to an Author,” I, 113. * Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Second Characters or The Language of Forms, ed. Benjamin Rand (Cambridge, 1914), “Plastics or the Original Progress and Power of Designatory Art,” 124, “ Characteristies, “The Moralists,” Il, 142-43. * Second Characters, “A Notion of the Historical Draught of Hercules,” 61.FROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT 289 remains a much more traditional, superficial thinker on these points than his 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 not in fact require. His writings are personal, didactic, and, one suspects, autobiographical. Instead of experience writing on a blank slate of the mind, Shaftesbury finds the mind being formed by a continual process from life’s experience. His motto might be what he says of taste: “the great business in this (as in our lives, or in the whole of life) is ‘to correct, our taste.’ For whither will not taste lead us?”* Shaftesbury never 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 from qualities in the object. He thus introduces a separation between ideas and the powers of objects which produce those ideas. Shaftesbury is not aware of such a separation. Locke must try to distinguish the ideas of primary qualities which bear a real resemblance to their causes from the ideas of secondary qualities which do not have a real resemblance. In order to retain a connection and account for the difference, Locke thinks in terms of the mechanics of Newton and the corpuscular theory of Boyle.’ Thus Locke's empiricism is atomistic, and it opens a host of problems about hhow ideas are related to the real world which will trouble subsequent empiricists. 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. This may be only a failure on Shaftesbury’s part to perceive the problems which Locke addresses. However, one can imagine Shaftesbury saying with Wittgenstein, “The world and life are one. I am my world. (The Microcosm.)”* In his famous analogy, Locke asks us to “suppose the ‘Mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all Characters, without any ideas.” He then asks us how it comes to be furnished.” I am suggesting only that Shaftesbury, perhaps because he thinks of the mind as already furnished with ideas, is free to conceive of that mind as a whole as an empirical entity which is known as the sum of its own experience. A reflective aesthetic experience—good taste—is the means by which the mind knows itself." - * Second Characters, “Plastic,” 114 " See Peter Alexander, “Boyle and Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities,” in Locke on Human Understanding, ed. 1. C. Tipton (Oxford, 1977), 62-16. * Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractarus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London, 1961), 5.621, 5.63. "John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), Hi, 15 108 'T do not want to press this comparison. It overstates Shaftesbury’s empiricism in290 DABNEY TOWNSEND In aesthetics, the direct consequence of following Locke is found in Francis Hutcheson, Shaftesbury anticipates Hutcheson who begins An inquiry into the Originals of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue as a defense ‘and explanation of Shaftesbury’s principles. Shaftesbury provides grounds for Hutcheson’s immediate sense of beauty and provides a statement of the theory of an internal sense which sounds very much like Hutcheson’s theory: ‘The shape, motions, colours, and proportions of these latter being presented to ‘our eye, there necessarily results a beauty or deformity, according to the different measure, arrangement, and disposition of their several parts... . It (the mind] feels the soft and harsh, the agreeable and disagreeable in the affections; and finds a foul and fai, a harmonious and dissonant, as really and truly here as in any musical numbers or in the outward forms or representations of sensible things. Nor can it withhold its admiration and ecstasy, its aversion and scorn, any more in what relates to one than to the other of these subjects. So that to deny the common and natural sense of a sublime and beautiful in things, will appear an affectation merely, to any only who considers duly ofthis affair." ‘Compare this to Hutcheson’s claim “that some objects are immediately the Occasions of this Pleasure of Beauty, and that we have Senses fitted for perceiving it.”" But Hutcheson is concerned to take the sense of beauty in a different direction. His “defense” of Shaftesbury is designed to show that “this moral sense has no relation to innate ideas.” For Hutcheson, the moral and aesthetic senses produce ideas in the mind like those produced by the “external” senses of sight, taste, smell, and touch. They correspond to Locke’s ideas of sense rather than ideas of reflection, 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 let us know that they reflect upon Proportions and Similitude.”" Hutcheson at least two ways: 1) Shaftesbury does not sy to make Loc 3 because his ‘own Neo-Platonism offers an apparent alternative—ideas are real. My point is only that this 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 a certain place in the cosmos which one must live up to in Shaftesbury’s thinking. Being Lord Shaftesbury carries with it moral and social responsibilities which are givens. I ‘would maintain only that neither the innate ideas nor the class consciousness are necessary to Shaftesbury's aesthetics of taste. Taste isa sign of moral and aesthetic character, and the formation of taste, in practice, if not always in theory, is the result of experience shaped by reflection. ™ Characteristis, “An Inquirey Concerning Virtue or Merit,” 1, 251-52. ° Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, (London, 1725), 11. TbsFROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT 291 takes the internal sense to be a form of perception and its qualitative accompaniment is pleasure. Moral pleasure follows from good actions; aesthetic pleasure from beautiful objects. In both cases, the perception is an idea in the mind and the pleasure is likewise the experiencer’s internal feeling. tis not important that Hutcheson misreads Shaftesbury and that his defense is misguided. Shaftesbury certainly does not find pleasure a re- liable sign of moral or aesthetic quality, and Hutcheson provides so many teleological qualifications that he evades most of the consequences of his implicit hedonism. The significant point is that for Hutcheson, both external and internal sense are immediately reliable (if not wholly in- corrigible.) External sense shows us the physical qualities of the world. Internal sense shows us the moral and aesthetic qualities of the same world. Hutcheson is a much more systematic thinker than Shaftesbury, so he works out the internal sense on a strict analogy to Locke's ideas of sensation. Mistakes about beauty are due to a failure of perception or to accumulated associations. Beauty must be an objective correspondence of the mind to some external thing just as our ideas of sensible qualities are. Hutcheson thinks that he can identify the ideas which correspond to the qualities necessary for beauty in the same way that one identifies the ideas of color which correspond to color qualities: “The figures that excite in us the ideas of Beauty, seem to be those in which there is uniformity amidst variety.”'* But equally, the presence or absence of those qualities is a matter of experience: “As to the universal Agreement of Mankind in their sense of Beauty from Uniformity amidst variety, we ‘must consult experience.” Hutcheson’s concern is to defend the moral and aesthetic sense against charges that it is “interested” and thus ca- Pricious and subjective in the absence of innate ideas. He does so by providing an apparatus of sense which will place morals and aesthetics on the same footing as perception and by appealing to the common experience (the universal agreement of mankind.) Hutcheson does not spell out the requirements for internal sense. However, Alexander Gerard offers a concise argument along the same lines that the power of the mind which is called taste should be properly called a sense. Gerard’s evidence comes from “the phenomenon of our faculties.” A sense supplies us with simple perceptions; they are given immediately; and they are independent of volition. Gerard concludes: ‘These characters evidently belong to all the external senses, and to reflection or consciousness, by which we perceive what passes in our minds. They likewise ‘belong to the powers of taste: harmony, for example, is a simple perception, * Wid, 15. ° Bid, 68, ™ Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (third edition, 1780; repr. Gainsvlle, 1963), us.292 DABNEY TOWNSEND which no man who has not a musical ear can receive, and which every one who hhas an ear immediately and necessarily receives on hearing a good tune.'* Gerard goes on to argue that an internal sense need not be ultimate. Just ‘as white can be decomposed into colors, so internal senses may be based on 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 of the quality in the object, but that does not make the ideas unreliable. For Hutcheson, the perception may be either of the objects of sight or of 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 require some new organ. of sense for an internal sense to be a sense, Gerard clearly follows Hutcheson here, but he is explicitly concerned to defend taste 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 down lead 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 could maintain that beauty has the status of a simple idea of sense. The problem is whether he can do this. For there to be an aesthetic sense, it must not bbe reducible to the external senses (though, as Gerard argued, it need not by wholly independent of them). Ifit were, then beauty would become a complex product of reflection or an association of ideas (as it does for Archibald Alison) and thus a product of education. It would lose the ‘qualified kind of objectivity as a simple idea of sense which Hutcheson seeks to win for it. To achieve this, Hutcheson attempts to follow Locke by treating aesthetic experience as something acquired directly and in discrete units from things. But there is no organ of internal sense. So, in spite of Gerard’s argument, it is unclear how the ideas of an internal sense are to be identified. External sense can be defined causally. A simple idea 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 not just incidental that Hutcheson must supply some criteria for aesthetic qualities in the object even though he acknowledges that the pleasure we call beauty is an idea in the subject. He need not settle on the pleasure which follows from uniformity amidst variety, but he must supply some defining properties which link the idea—pleasure—to the object if the sense of beauty is not to lose the objectivity which simple ideas of sense * Tid, 146,FROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT 293 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 aesthetics to two theses: 1) The aesthetic sense is qualitatively distinct and not reducible to any other sense, and 2) there must be some ‘qualitative characteristics which are uniquely aesthetic.” The first thesis might be called the aesthetic experience thesis; it is most commonly conceived of as a uniquely aesthetic delight or pleasure. Much of sub- sequent eighteenth-century British aesthetics is occupied with supplying alternatives to satisfy the second thesis. Hogarth’s sensuous line and revivals of the classical golden section are among the proposals. Toward the end of the century the qualitative “idea” shifts from pleasure to a more religious ecstasy or awe as romanticism gradually takes hold.” I 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 emphasis falls on “‘immediate.” It is unmediated by rules or interest. The sense of 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 Shaftesbury must counter. Or rather, it is the consequence of being an individual, for Shaftesbury is enough of a follower of Locke and far enough from real Platonism to think of individuals as primary. Shaftesbury wants to show that experience is public and that some senses are not restricted to Hobbes’s individual interest. The moral and beautiful are themselves empirical evidence which Shaftesbury can cite against Hobbes, and his reference to a sense of these in men implies only that to be a man is not to be a brute living in a state of nature. Shaftesbury is thus not committed to a simple sense unqualified by reflection, nor does his aesthetics need the kind of defining qualities which Hutcheson must supply. For Shaftesbury, art is bound up with both history and morality, and “beauty” remains an essentially “higher” form. ‘We cannot get from Shaftesbury a new aesthetic, therefore. He retreats back into the language of Renaissance Neo-Platonism at this point. What he shows us is a different way of relying on experience, however. He points to all of the empirical evidence of character being formed by aesthetic and moral taste (and the aesthetic has the priority because it is free of interest). Aesthetic taste is formed immediately, without the intervention of calculation and interest. Yet Shaftesbury allows fully for the need to reflect, judge, and correct taste. Rather than simple ideas of "Tam leaving aside the moral side at this point because it is ultimately worked out ‘on different grounds and does not concem us directly. Hutcheson does not use “aesthetic” ‘of course, but that anachronism should cause no problems. ™ The subsequent idealist development of these beginnings in Continental aesthetics does not affect the point I am trying to make.294 DABNEY TOWNSEND sense, Shaftesbury shows us an experience which is always public in some sense. His aesthetic follows; it is moral, neo-classical, and conventional. But it has a place for all of the things that Hutcheson finds difficult to account for: deformity, criticism, and higher and lower forms. And it does not have to supply what no eighteenth-century writer—or anyone subsequently, for the matter—has been able to supply: a set of defining ‘qualities for the aesthetic sense. IL. Without defining qualities, aesthetic experience undergoes a met- amorphosis into a pure theory of taste. The shifts which take place can be illustrated by comparing Shaftesbury’s position with that worked out by Hume in “Of the Standard of Taste.” Shaftesbury is a long way from thinking that there is no disputing about taste. As we noted, a central motive for Shaftesbury’s study is the correction of taste. He is also willing to provide rules for the artist drawn from moral and historical sources. In this, Shaftesbury clearly shows the neo-classical direction of his thought. Ultimately, taste is a moral quality of character; the task of Philosophy is “to teach us ourselves, keep us the self-same persons, and so regulate our governing fancies, passions and humours, so as to make us comprehensible to ourselves and knowable by other features than those of a bare countenance.”?! The development of taste is thus one of the elements 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 and sense, the fancies of 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 is whether they shall have it wholly to themselves, or whether they shall acknowl- ‘edge some controller or manager. If none, “tis this, I fear, which leads to madness. ... For if Fancy be left judge of anything she must be judge of all. ‘Everything is right, if anything be so, because T fancy it.” ‘An uncontrolled taste is the subject of fancy. A controlled taste grows from internal mastery of the self. Shaftesbury’s advice to authors leads from internal mastery to the external exercise of taste: “That their com- position and vein of writing may be natural and free, they should settle matters in the first place with themselves. And having gained mastery there, they may easily, with the help of their genius and right use of art, command their audience and establish a good taste.””” Good taste, then, is something to be established. It is subsequent to judgment, not the basis for judgment. » Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” I, 184. ® Tbid., 207-8. » Tbid., 180-81,FROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT 295 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, and judgments of particulars vary from individual to individual, nation to nation, 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 between OGILBY and MILTON, or BUNYON and ADDISON, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as TENERIFFE, or a pond as extensive as the ocean.” Hume then proceeds to try to mitigate the effects of this antinomy. His strategy is to provide enough qualifying factors to account for diversity of taste. These include practice, experience, and delicacy of taste. 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 in disputes about taste. Whereas for Hutcheson an internal sense provides empirical 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 a standard of taste. In reality, the difficulty of finding, even in particulars, the standard of taste, is not so great as itis represented. .... Theories of abstract philosophy, systems of profound theology, have prevailed during one age: In a successive period, these have been universally exploded: ... And nothing has been experienced more liable to the revolutions of chance and fashion than these pretended decisions of science. The case is not the same with the beauties of eloquence and poetry. ust expressions of passion and nature are sure, after alittle time, to gain public applause, which they maintain for ever.”* ‘Thus Hume comes around to a practical standard of taste based on public agreement 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 joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste.” Hutcheson’s dependence on a direct perception of beauty is main- tained, and Hume acknowledges qualities in objects as the causes of sentiments of beauty: “Some particular forms or qualities, from the * David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, Il, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London, 1925), 269. The irony of history's judgment on Hume's comparison of Bunyon and Addison only makes his whole point ‘more strongly. * Bbid., 279. ™ Ibid, 278-79.296 DABNEY TOWNSEND original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and others to displease; and if they fail of their effect in any particular instance, it is from some apparent defect or imperfection in the organ.””” At the same time, Hume never withdraws from his acknowledgment that beauty is 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 qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment, internal or external; it must be allowed, that there are certain qualities’in objects, which are fitted by nature to produce those particular feelings." But much of this agreement is superficial. Hutcheson follows Locke; qualities are powers (or at least we know them as powers). For Hume, qualities produce feelings according to the associations we establish with them. Thus one can identify aesthetic qualities only by examining practices relative to perceivers. Hutcheson distinguishes an “original or absolute” beauty from “comparative or relative” beauty. In Hume's essay this distinction, like that between primary and secondary qualities, disappears. One can only compare actual judgments. Absolute beauty plays no role. Hutcheson explains how things can interfere with the internal sense; the sense itself needs no education. Hume's “taste” must be educated or at least acquired culturally, though some aspects of it may turn out to be universal to human-kind. In fact, beauty gives way generally to taste in Hume's essay. The “facts” Hume has reference to are mostly facts about the judges and not about what is judged. Thus Hume shifts the ground for aesthetics from the aesthetic experience itself to the factors which form our per- ceptions. We have taste, but not a sense of taste in Hutcheson’s strong use 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 in practice. Hume's essay is a defense of the practice of criticism against the claims ‘that anyone can judge as well as anyone else. “It is sufficient for our resent purpose, if we have proved, that the taste of all individuals is not upon an equal footing, and that some men in general, however difficult to be particularly pitched upon, will be acknowledged by universal sen- timent to have a preference above others.” This leads him to link taste and understanding in a manner which Shaftesbury would approve: “It seldom, or never happens, that a man of sense, who has experience in any art, cannot judge of its beauty; and it is no less rare to meet with a ‘man who has a just taste without a sound understanding.” But Hume's practice stands on the opposite side of a chasm opened by Locke and * Ibid, 272. * Ibid, 273. » Ibid., 279. » Ibid, 278FROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT 297 Hutcheson. Whereas for Shaftesbury taste follows education and judg- ment, for Hume taste is simply a phenomenal reality. It may need ed- uucation and correction in a sense of refinement which Hutcheson’s theory of direct sense did not allow, but Hume has no other basis for our aesthetic judgments than taste itself. However, Hume conceives of experience itself in a Lockean fashion and so taste still depends on a “sentiment” or “idea” discrete in itself and linked to the organs of perception. Hume's critique of the connections between “ideas” and that of which they are ideas and his skeptical doubts about our ability to justify our inductive procedures apply to any individual judgment of taste. He acknowledges rules in art: “But though poetry can never submit to exact truth, it must be confined by rules of art, discovered to the author either by genius or observation.””* But such rules are discovered; they have the status of inductive generalizations and are subject to the same doubts. Hume’s advice to the individual critic is a counsel of modesty, therefore, since the critic can appeal beyond the foundations of his own taste and per- ception only to other judgments similarly formed. There is no other standard than the joint Verdict of ideal critics. Only agreement over time can validate either the critic or his judgments. Thus, Hume has raised a whole new set of problems which Shaftesbury did not address. Shaftesbury’s rules are not the kind that judge Milton better 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 to Hume. But Shaftesbury’s view of judgment here is more Greek; only a completed character can be judged, and it is “the whole of life” which matters. 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 does not forget the individual, but he is not primarily concerned with individual judgments. Individual “taste” plays a correspondingly lesser role in his thought. One bases taste on judgment, not judgment on taste. Good taste (like grace) is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual state. II. There are many objections to Shaftesbury’s concept of taste. Hume could certainly reply that it begs the interesting question of how we know specific judgments. Shaftesbury provides no answer. We thus reach an impasse. We may judge the judges by matters of fact, but the aesthetic experience upon which their judgment is based is unique and mysterious. This separates aesthetic judgment from other empirical judgments in science and morals and thus undercuts the original motives for Hutche- son’s work. A form of aesthetic attitude theory results directly from the Ibid, 270.298 DABNEY TOWNSEND attempts to escape the antinomy to which Hume is led. What results from these attempts is an aesthetic subjectivity which resembles modern aesthetic attitude theories in important respects. Again, we may take 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 internal sense to objective qualities. It seems to follow that the one who experiences must 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 concentrated attention on the formation of ideas by association, imagination, and expression. In itself, this may not yet be fully an attitude theory, but once again the ground for judgment is being shifted.” It is a short step from there to the more recent claims that itis an attitude of the perceiver which 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 part of his rejection of Hobbes’s egocentric position. Disinterestedness is one way that we know that private interest is not paramount. For example, Shaftesbury asserts that ‘in all disinterested cases, (the heart] must approve in some measure of what is natural and honest, and disapprove what is dishonest and corrupt.” The contrast to this disinterestedness is the kind of private pursuit of one’s own ends which some senses of “interest” 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. There is a private interest which is good and natural. “We know that any creature has a private good and interest of his own, which Nature has George Dickie has argued that Alison is not an attitude theorist while Jerome Stolnitz classified him that way. The debate between them has been re-engaged recently — George Dickie, “Stolnitz Attitude: Taste and Perception” and Jerome Stolnitz, “The Aesthetic Attitude in the Rise of Modern Aesthetics—Again,” The Journal of Aesthetics ‘and Art Criticism, 43 (1984), 193-208. The problem with their way of arguing is that it puts too much emphasis on classifying someone like Alison who is a complex, transitional figure. I think that Dickie is right that Alison isnot an attitude theorist in the way that some later nineteenth century figures are. However, Alison's insistence that the emotion of taste is complex moves him away from earlier theories of taste in a decisive way. Thus Stolnitz 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. ™ Characteristics, “Advice to an Author,” I, 192-93.FROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT. 299 ‘compelled him to seek." We also recognize the public interest which follows. “Everyone discerns and owns a public interest and is conscious of what affects his fellowship or community.” And finally there are disinterested cases when the heart can be trusted to respond directly and rightly. The three are related, and the object is to discern one’s own true interest. In other words, in spite of his rejection of Hobbes’s egocentric position, Shaftesbury is still concerned with the formation of the indi- vidual character and taste. Public and disinterested judgments serve the cause of educating taste. Rather than opposing interested and disinter- ested judgment, Shaftesbury uses disinterested judgments as evidence that we have a true interest to be discovered beneath the shifting ground of pleasure and fancy. Hume's use of the concept of interest is similar in many respects to Shaftesbury’s. Hume notes that in ethics, the fundamental controversy ‘turns on whether the foundations of morals are derived from reason or sentiment. The latter position he attributes to “the ancients” and to Shaftesbury, although he notes acutely that Shaftesbury can be found arguing on both sides of the issue.”* Hume is aware that if morality is based 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.” The result is that Hume separates morals from aesthetics. Morals should be founded in reason and the nature of things, but aesthetics can remain a matter of taste. In “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume argues that moral precepts are already clearly identified by language itself. We know which sentiments to approve without need for maxims. But that is not the case in aesthetics. There the need for a standard of taste is essentially a need for a rule “by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled” so that one may know which sentiment is to be confirmed and which condemned. Hume does develop a contrast between public and private interest as part of a refutation of ethical egoism which he identifies with private interest.” But for Hume, as for Shaftesbury, the argument against self- love as the sole ethical motive turns on the existence of a competing interest whose existence cannot be denied. This is a “general affection” which is aroused when no advantage or even presence of one’s self is at issue. Also, as Shaftesbury does, Hume contrasts one’s real interest with % Ibid., “Concerning virtue or Merit” I, 243. * Bid. 252. ™ 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 ” Ibid, 71 Hume, “OF a Standard of Taste,” 268, * Hume, Enguiry, 215,300 DABNEY TOWNSEND an imagined interest." Hume then goes on to argue that public interest is 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 that “our concern for the public might be resolved into a concern for our own happiness and preservation.”*' Hume's reply is, in part, that this explains something obvious—the existence of a public interest—by some- thing abstruse and unobservable. A public interest is virtually identical to disinterestedness provided disinterested sentiment is not understood as a lack of interest but as an interest which does not refer to the self. Even in art, itis a type of interest which is aroused. The theater is an example of shared sentiment, not of the absence of sentiment. In poetry, “‘no passion, when well represented, can be entirely indifferent to us.” Hume speaks of disinterested passion as an alternative to selflove,** but his point is that even the egoist distinguishes the “vicious and merely interested” from the virtuous character. The hypothesis of an omni-present self-interest is metaphysical and has no foundation in reality.“* Disinterested benevolence is nothing more than a sentiment which does not require any reference to the self to explain the phenomenon. “In such cases, these and a thousand other instances are marks of a general benevolence in human nature, where no real interest binds us to the object. And how an imaginary interest known and avowed for such, can be the origin of any passion or emotion, seems difficult to explain.”"** The argument, then, claims that only a real interest can be the origin of a passion or emotion, but there are cases where no real interest binds us to the object. Disinterested benevolence is thus a real public or communal interest free of any individual bonds. This has considerable ethical importance for Hume, but he does not ‘make the aesthetic extension which both Shaftesbury and Kant do. (Both Shaftesbury and Kant move from the aesthetic to the moral; Hume does not.) For Hume, it is important to establish whether the moral sentiment is founded in reason and the nature of things. Aesthetic taste can remain merely a matter of sentiment. While it needs a standard, Hume does not claim the universality for it that Kant does. The closest that Hume comes to a Kant’s sense of disinterestedness is in his list of the characteristics of true judges in “Of the Standard of Taste” which includes a freedom from prejudice.” This requires that a work “must be surveyed in a certain * Ibid, 217 * Wid, 218. © id,, 222. © Ibid., 296. * Ibid, 297 * Tbid., 30. “Ibid. © Hume, ‘Of A Standard of Taste," 277,FROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT 301 point of view.” This point of view turns out to be the conformation of the interests of the audience and the work. It is a general view—one in which “I must depart from this situation [friendship or enmity with the author], and considering myself as a man in general, forget, if possible, any individual being and my peculiar circumstances.” In the light of the arguments about public interest, itis important not to misunderstand this criterion. Hume's critic, if he is a true judge, is a critic rather than ‘a private person. His real interest is defined by that role, and the sentiment he feels will be correspondingly indicative of the judgment of the general view of human nature, By the time Immanuel Kant incorporates “disinterestedness” into the Third Critique, the whole problem of aesthetic experience has shifted. The limited role which Hume assigned to sentiments of taste is no longer possible in the system established by the First and Second Critiques. Like Shaftesbury and Hume, Kant’s use of “interest” primarily concerns one’s relation to the world and one’s attitude. But Kant greatly widens the scope of disinterestedness. To be disinterested is to be without interest in the object’s existence while an interested state involves one with the existence of the object. Thus disinterestedness does not pick out a class of general or public judgments. Both practical and conceptual judgments imply the presence of a prior intuition, and disinterestedness is charac- teristic of that prior phase. The “aesthetical judgments” precede the objective and practical. ‘The consciousness of the mere formal purposiveness in the play of the subject’s cognitive powers, in a representation through which an object is given, is the pleasure itself, because it contains a determining ground of the activity of the subject in respect of the excitement of its cognitive powers, and therefore an inner causality (Which is purposive) in respect of cognition in general, without however being limited to any definite cognition, and consequently contains a mere form of the subjective purposiveness of a representation in an aesthetical judgment. The pleasure is in no way practical, neither like that arising from the pathological ground of pleasantness, nor that from the intellectual ground of the presented good." This interweaving of the cognitive and aesthetic places Kant somewhat beyond the scope of the present comparison. Yet it is Kant’s formulations which provide the most telling separation of aesthetic disinterestedness from the practical anid conceptual realms. Once disinterestedness is made central, it completes the separation of the aesthetic from its primary phenomena—works of art—because it is not the work but the perceiver’s pleasure which becomes the subject of aesthetics. If A disagrees with B * Bid, » Bid. "Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1974), 57-58,302 DABNEY TOWNSEND about a work of art, they are really disagreeing about the kind of pleasure each has, and that is a function of the epistemological position of each observer. Kant assimilates aesthetic experience to all experience as its transcendental basis. Croce concludes, in that case, that anything is beautiful if it is known. Other attitude theorists make the attitude of the spectator the sole determinant of aesthetic judgment. Aesthetics really becomes a matter of how one looks at things. The kinds of attitude theories which follow differ greatly from Kant’s complex aesthetic theory, but they can be traced back to it. Consider two illustrative points. The first is disinterestedness itself. The “First Moment” of the “Aesthetic of the Beautiful” culminates in the descrip- tion of taste as “the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfac- tion.” “Interest” is always connected to desire, and desire requires existence. To be disinterested then separates the judgment from the ex- istence of its object. “We must not be in the least prejudiced in favor of the existence of the things, but quite indifferent in this respect, in order to play the judge in things of taste.” The key point here is that dis- interestedness has become the opposite of interest. The pleasure and satisfaction which accompanies interest has to do with the object and its existence. The object, Kant says, “gratifies” me.® That which can be called beauty, in which we take a disinterested pleasure, is altogether different; to be pleased by the beautiful is a wholly subjective, non- cognitive “feeling” for the object as it is contemplated. “Taste in the beautiful is alone a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, either of sense or of reason here forces our assent.” To move from the disinterested to the interested is to go from one kind of satisfaction to another. 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 to both practical and theoretical judgments. But disinterested judgments of taste belong wholly to the beautiful, and in so far as beauty itself provides the satisfaction in the subject, there can be no intermixture of interest. While for Kant the aesthetic may eventually be the keystone upon which the practical and theoretical depend, the contemplation of the beautiful is not and, according to Kant, for a priori reasons, cannot be taken into cither the practical or theoretical. When Kant comes to link the beautiful to the moral, the link can be only “symbolic.”** Thus any actual ex- Tid, 48. ” Ibid, 39. * Ibid, 41. * Ibid, 44. * Ibid, $9.FROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT 303 perience of an object as beautiful will be apart from all of the other ways of experiencing that object. Since this aesthetic experience rests solely on the subject, it follows that if we wish to restrict contemplation to aesthetic contemplation, we must assume a “disinterested attitude” since anything else would belong to a practical or theoretical judgment. This disinterested attitude in the Third Critique seems to me a direct consequence of the way of taking aesthetic experience which has emerged from the position of Hutcheson and Hume. Even if we grant that Kant’s position is more complex than subsequent aesthetic attitude theories, we have a complete separation from the starting point represented by Shat tesbury. For Shaftesbury, interested and disinterested awareness are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Far from making disinterestedness the sole possibility for aesthetics, Shaftesbury uses it only as evidence for finding where our real interest lies. Rather than three different pleasures (gratifying, pleasing, and esteeming), Shaftesbury finds 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 the conceptual and practical to a different kind of judgment and leaves the manifestation of the aesthetic in art isolated. The solution which follows, even if it is not one that Kant directly embraces since he is not very interested 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 shift from judgments about objects of taste to the subjective vision of the beholder. I have emphasized Shaftesbury’s concern for a public interest as well as a private interest, and I think it is instructive to see what happens to this public presence. Kant begins from much the same point as Shaftesbury. Objective principles are ruled out, but so is mere sense: “If they [judgments of taste] were devoid of all principle, like those of the mere taste of sense, we would not allow them in thought any necessity whatever.” Kant concludes from this that there must be some subjective principle with universal validity which he calls a common sense. The ground for assuming a common sense is the universal communicability of 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 feeling as common and not private. Thus Kant begins with the fact that our judgments of taste are universal and combines that with the necessary condition for knowledge that feeling be intersubjective, He concludes that, ‘a. common sense must be presupposed. We are justified in presupposing it on the basis of the possibility of knowledge itself. We do not require actual agreement with our judgments of taste, and we leave open the actual nature of the common sense. * Ibid. 75.304 DABNEY TOWNSEND As a defense of the possibility of knowledge against skepticism or solipsism, this probably assumes too much. But in context, it relates taste to the cognitive powers by granting that when we appeal to “feeling” we are not appealing to our own feeling. The aesthetic ground for the judgment of taste must allow the universality of the judgment or it would be internally contradictory, so a common sense is at least presupposed. The conditions of knowledge make that presupposition acceptable, since it is also required for knowledge itself. (We satisfy Ockham’s razor on this point.) Thus while it does not prove that there is a common sense, Kant’s argument justifies its inclusion since to abandon it is to abandon the whole project of knowing as Kant conceives it. However, Kant has shifted the ground for the common sense from Shafiesbury’s position in a revealing way. Shaftesbury points to a public interest and the relative uniformity or universality of taste as a matter of observation. Hume agrees in this empirical judgment. Actual agreement on specific works, given enough time, emerges as an observable fact. Shaftesbury finds a purely private interest contradictory on the grounds that it makes impossible the kind of pleasure that we do in fact have in objects of art and public benevolence. Kant’s grounds for postulating a common sense have the skepticism of Hume in the background. It is not observation but the possibility of knowledge upon which Kant relies. ‘What lies in between these two positions is the fragmentation of “ob- servation” in the work of Hume and his critics. Shaftesbury takes it for granted that two observers see the same thing; he needs no argument for a common sense. He does need an argument for a common (or public) sense, however. Shaftesbury is sufficiently removed from the medieval sensus communis to think of the individual as an independent moral force; it is important to him to re-establish the link between experience and community, therefore, and typically he does it by appealing to the facts of our experience. Where this is not mere sense, it is public as well as private, and from this follows not only moral but aesthetic agreement. Kant, on the other hand, leaves nothing unexamined, so he begins by stating the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. The universality of taste is a subjective feeling whose only claim to universality is via the common sense. Since empirically it is always possible that people will disagree, the resulting universal claim is only an “ought.” But it is not a moral “ought” as it would be for Shaftesbury. It is an epistemological “ought,” and the result is that the judgment of taste is only incidentally related to the actual experience of works of art. If I say that someone ought to find Hamlet profound, I can only be projecting my attitude as the common attitude. Shaftesbury’s naive view of experience does not limit or isolate the judgment of taste in this way, and Hume would check to see whether true judges have actually found Hamlet profound.FROM SHAFTESBURY TO KANT 305 When Kant comes to resolve the antinomy of taste," he does so by trying to remove the appearance of contradiction. He does not appeal directly to 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 immediately accompanying his intuition).”** Thus we are in fact forced back on an individual judgment and the possibility of assuming a stance and making the judgment ourselves. This must be set over against Shaftesbury’s pro- cedure which is to expose the individual judgment to public scrutiny by soliloquy, criticism, and even “raillery” and Hume's inductive general- ization over time. We have moved from Shaftesbury’s concept of aesthetic experience as open, moral, and “common” in the sense of public to Kant's position which makes the aesthetic experience subjective, singular, and common only as a necessary condition to knowledge. In Kant’s theory as a whole, aesthetic judgment remains intersubjective because it is the foundation of cognition. But it has no practical side. Subsequent versions of aesthetic attitude and taste recover the practical by forgetting the cognitive limit Shaftesbury represents a relatively naive starting point for modern aesthetics. He has not shed medieval Neo-Platonism fully, but he begins an empirical examination of art and taste which subsequently develops into what we know as aesthetics. His empiricism, perhaps because it is undeveloped, is holistic. Taste is a taste for actual works of art; aesthetics is an essential part of one’s moral and epistemological practice, and judgments of taste are practical as well as personal. In the eighteenth century, the empirical foundations of this view are explored. But they are also pulled apart. Hutcheson tries to place aesthetics on a more satisfactory Lockean basis. But the sense of aesthetic taste cannot be established on the same ground as other secondary qualities. The quest for specifically aesthetic qualities and identity criteria opens the way for the criticism of Hume and the re-construction of Kant. Yet each move creases the separation of the subjective and practical aspects of aesthetics and makes it more difficult for aesthetic judgments to be related to other claims about knowledge and value. Modern aesthetic theories based on an aesthetic attitude and a unique aesthetic experience are the heirs of this tradition. University of Texas at Arlington The judgment of taste is not based on concepts and docs not admit of controversy (je. 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, Ibid, 185. Italics mine.