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The plan for today.

Today, we start the philosophical Odyssey of taste in 18th Century.

We begin with the aesthetic theory of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl
of Shaftesbury.

Specifically, we are going to cover three aspects of his theory:

1) Background
2) The notion of disinterestedness
3) The significance for contemporary aesthetics
The plan for today.

Today, we start the philosophical Odyssey of taste in 18th Century.

We begin with the aesthetic theory of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl
of Shaftesbury.

Specifically, we are going to cover three aspects of his theory:

1) Background
2) The notion of disinterestedness
3) The significance for contemporary aesthetics ?
What is aesthetics?

As we have discussed in the last session, one of the most important question in
the 18th century aesthetics is the question about the nature of aesthetics. Why?
What is aesthetics?

As we have discussed in the last session, one of the most important question in
aesthetics
the 18th century
is the question
aesthetics
about
is thethe
question
nature about
of aesthetics.
the nature
Why?
of aesthetics. Why?

That is the only way for aesthetics to secure methodological and thematic autonomy
in relation to other philosophical disciplines.
What is aesthetics?

As we have discussed in the last session, one of the most important question in
aesthetics
the 18th century
is the question
aesthetics
about
is thethe
question
nature about
of aesthetics.
the nature
Why?
of aesthetics. Why?

That is the only way for aesthetics to secure methodological and thematic autonomy
in relation to other philosophical disciplines.

This is a matter of definition. Every valid philosophical definition has to specify


the general the class a certain phenomenon belongs to as well as its unique
properties.
Genus Proxima
The part of definition which signifies the class (i.e. genus) which the object of
definition belongs to.

Example? [def. ‘human being’] or [def. ‘chicken’]


Genus Proxima
The part of definition which signifies the class (i.e. genus) which the object of
definition belongs to.

Example? [def. ‘human being’] or [def. ‘chicken’]

Differentia Specifica
The part of definition which signifies the unique property of the object of definition
In relation to other objects of the same class.

Example?
What is aesthetics?

Depends on the definition of the domain of ‘aesthetic’. What can aptly be


described as aesthetic? What kind of object? Which class of objects?

Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth Century,


the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to be used to designate, among other things,
a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience,
and a kind of value. (Shelley 2017)

Questions of more general nature have lately arisen, and these have tended
to have a skeptical cast: whether any use of ‘aesthetic’ may be explicated
without appeal to some other; whether agreement respecting any use is
sufficient to ground meaningful theoretical agreement or disagreement;
whether the term ultimately answers to any legitimate philosophical purpose
that justifies its inclusion in the lexicon.
What is aesthetics?

Depends on the definition of the domain of ‘aesthetic’. What can aptly be


described as aesthetic? What kind of object? Which class of objects?

Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth Century,


the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to be used to designate, among other things,
a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience,
and a kind of value. (Shelley 2017)

How do you relate disinterestedness to that?


What is aesthetics?

Depends on the definition of the domain of ‘aesthetic’. What can aptly be


described as aesthetic? What kind of object? Which class of objects?

Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth Century,


the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to be used to designate, among other things,
a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience,
and a kind of value. (Shelley 2017)

How do you relate disinterestedness to that?

For Shaftesbury, the realm of aesthetic (the realm of beauty) was a part of
unified Reality that could only be accessed in the meditative state of
disinterested attention.
What is aesthetics?

Depends on the definition of the domain of ‘aesthetic’. What can aptly be


described as aesthetic? What kind of object? Which class of objects?

Introduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth Century,


the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to be used to designate, among other things,
a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind of attitude, a kind of experience,
and a kind of value. (Shelley 2017)

How do you relate disinterestedness to that?

For Shaftesbury, the realm of aesthetic (the realm of beauty) was a part of
unified Reality that could only be accessed in the meditative state of
disinterested attention.
Third Earl of Shaftesbury.

Anthony Ashley Cooper was a British was an


English politician, writer and a philosopher.

He lived from 1671 to 1713. He was one of the most


important philosophers of his day, and exerted an
enormous influence on European thought throughout
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shaftesbury
received less attention in the twentieth century, but in
the twenty-first century there has been a significant
increase in scholarship on his work.

His grandfather, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, oversaw Shaftesbury’s


early upbringing and put John Locke in charge of his education. Shaftesbury
would eventually come to disagree with many aspects of Locke’s philosophy,
but Locke was clearly a crucially important influence on Shaftesbury’s
philosophical development, and the two remained friends until Locke’s death.
Shaftesbury served in Parliament and the House of Lords, but ill health
curtailed his political career when he was 30 years old. From then on, he
concentrated his energies on his philosophical and literary writings.
Characteristicks.

Shaftesbury takes up aesthetic questions from


time to time across his Characteristics of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times (first published in 1711),
particularly within its third, fourth, and fifth Treatises.
But it is perhaps only within this last treatise
—the dialogue The Moralists, a Philosophical
Rhapsody—that he can be said to develop
a theory of taste.

Near the beginning of the dialogue’s climactic


section (Section II of Book III) Shaftesbury’s
spokesman, Theocles, issues a pair of imperatives: one
ought “never to admire the Representative-Beauty,
except for the sake of the Original; nor aim at other
Enjoyment than of the rational kind”
(Cooper 1711/2001, 221).

It is largely in the subsequent explication of these


imperatives that Shaftesbury’s highly influential
theory of taste emerges.
The background.

Before we jump into Shaftesbury’s aesthetic theory, we have to understand


his philosophical background.

This background consists of mixture between neo-platonism and early British


empiricism.

Beauty, for Shaftesbury, is a kind of harmony, proportion, or order that


exists independently of human minds. The human responses that are the
origin of human judgments of beauty are not the origin of beauty itself.
The background.

Before we jump into Shaftesbury’s aesthetic theory, we have to understand


his philosophical background.

This background consists of mixture between neo-platonism and early British


empiricism.

Beauty, for Shaftesbury, is a kind of harmony, proportion, or order that


exists independently of human minds. The human responses that are the
origin of human judgments of beauty are not the origin of beauty itself.

“Harmony is Harmony by Nature, let Men judg ever so ridiculously of


Musick. So is Symmetry and Proportion founded still in Nature, let
Mens Fancy prove ever so barbarous, or their Fashions ever so Gothick
in their Architecture, Sculpture, or whatever other designing Art.” (C 1.216)
Beauty.

Before we jump into Shaftesbury’s aesthetic theory, we have to understand


his philosophical background.

This background consists of mixture between neo-platonism and early British


empiricism.

Beauty, for Shaftesbury, is a kind of harmony, proportion, or order that


exists independently of human minds. The human responses that are the
origin of human judgments of beauty are not the origin of beauty itself.

“Harmony is Harmony by Nature, let Men judg ever so ridiculously of


Musick. So is Symmetry and Proportion founded still in Nature, let
Mens Fancy prove ever so barbarous, or their Fashions ever so Gothick
in their Architecture, Sculpture, or whatever other designing Art.” (C 1.216)
The Great theory of
beauty.
Beauty.

Shaftesbury places all beauty in a three-part hierarchy.

The lowest order of beauty belongs to “the dead Forms”—physical things


such as manmade works of art and natural objects (C 2.406).

The second order of beauty belongs to human minds, or “the Forms


which form, that is, which have Intelligence, Action, and Operation” (C 2.406).

The third order of beauty belongs to that “which forms not only such as we
call mere Forms, but even the Forms which form” (C 2.408).

This highest, most supreme and sovereign beauty, belongs to God,


who has created everything in the world, including human minds
(see Kivy 2003: 12; Den Uyl 1998: 294).
What is beautiful is harmonious and proportionable;
what is harmonious and proportionable, is true;
and what is at once both beautiful and true, is, of consequence,
agreeable and good[.] (C 3.183)
Internal sense.

Shaftesbury’s theory of Beauty is neither original nor particularly


interesting.

The most interesting part of his aesthetic theory is how to we get there.

Beauty, inhering only in mind or in its reflection, cannot be grasped by


any bodily sense, but only by the mind itself:

“There is nothing so divine as BEAUTY: which belonging not to Body,


nor having any Principle or Existence except in MIND and REASON,
is alone discover’d and acquir’d by this diviner Part, when it inspects it-self,
the only object worthy of it-self. (Cooper 1711/2001, 238)”
(II) Internal sense.

But Shaftesbury does not rest with the claim that it is the mind that
grasps beauty: he adds the claim that it is by a “mental” or “internal” sense
that the mind does so.

“than straight an inward EYE distinguishes, and sees the Fair and Shapely,
the Amiable and Admirable, apart from the Deform’d, the Foul, the Odious,
or the Despicable. How is it possible therefore not to own “That these Distinctions
have their Foundation in Nature, the Discernment it-self is natural, and from Nature
alone?” (Cooper 1711/2001, 231)
Why sense?

Firstly, empiricist background. Locke: “There is nothing in the intellect


that was not previously in the senses”

Secondly, we respond to the content we get from our senses immediately and
unwillingly.
Disinterestedness.

The internal sense only ‘works’ under one condition - we have to dedicate
our disinterested attention to the perceived object in order to rise from the
appearing beauty to the beauty of the form.

What is disinterested attention?


(II)Disinterestedness.

Egoism about virtue is the view that to judge an action or trait virtuous
is to take pleasure in it because you believe it to serve some interest of yours.
Its central instance is the Hobbesian view—still very much on early
eighteenth-century minds—that to judge an action or trait virtuous is to take
pleasure in it because you believe it to promote your safety.

Against Hobbesian egoism a number of British moralists—preeminently


Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume—argued that, while a judgment of virtue
is a matter of taking pleasure in response to an action or trait, the pleasure is
disinterested, by which they meant that it is not self-interested
(Cooper 1711, 220–223; Hutcheson 1725, 9, 25–26; Hume 1751, 218–232, 295–302).
(III)Disinterestedness.

“The pleasure we experience when coming to appreciate beauty is of a kind


which relates not in the least to any private Interest…, nor has for its Object
any Self-good or Advantage of the private System. The Admiration, Joy, or
Love, turns wholly upon what is exterior, and foreign to our-selves.”(C 2.104)

A person who is truly responding to beauty does not consider the desirable
consequences that may be associated with a beautiful object but rather
responds favorably to the object “for its own sake” (C 2.59), based purely
on “the Excellence of the Object” (C 2.273). Such a person’s response is not
sensitive to external circumstances but results merely from “seeing and
admiring” (C 2.43).
Taste.

De gustibus non dispuntandum est. => In matters of taste, there can be no disputes.
Taste.

De gustibus non dispuntandum est. => In matters of taste, there can be no disputes.

Taste is a unique human faculty with the help of which we are able to experience
beauty. This inherently pleasurable experience occurs immediately and simultaneously
with the contact with the harmonious object(s) if we approach them with
disinterested attention.

The dispute of how we ‘taste’ beauty is the hottest topic in 18th century aesthetics.
There are, in principle, three main theories:
a) Internal sense
b) Imagination
c) Association
(II)Taste.

De gustibus non dispuntandum est. => In matters of taste, there can be no disputes.

Taste is a unique human faculty with the help of which we are able to experience
beauty. This inherently pleasurable experience occurs immediately and simultaneously
with the contact with the harmonious object(s) if we approach them with
disinterested attention.

The dispute of how we ‘taste’ beauty is the hottest topic in 18th century aesthetics.
There are, in principle, three main theories:
a) Internal sense
b) Imagination
c) Association
Taste is the ability to judge an object,
or a way of presenting it, by means of a
liking or disliking devoid of all interest.
The object of such a liking is called
beautiful.
First moment of Kant’s Critique

Taste is the ability to judge an object,


or a way of presenting it, by means of a
liking or disliking devoid of all interest.
The object of such a liking is called
beautiful.
First moment of Kant’s Critique

We can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is


beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do
with this presentation within myself, and not the [respect] in which
I depend on the object's existence. Everyone has to admit that if a
judgment about beauty is mingled with the least interest then it is
very partial and not a pure judgment of taste. In order to play the
judge in matters of taste, we must not be in the least biased in favor
of the thing's existence but must be wholly indifferent about it.


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