INTRODUCTION

In addition to the associationism of Henry Home (Lord Kames), Alexander Gerard, Archibald Alison, and Dugald Stewart (considered by Rachel Zuckert in Chapter 5 of the current volume), the two other decipherable theoretical traditions in eighteenth-century aesthetics comprise thinkers who emphasize either internal sense or the faculty of imagination. The first approach is based on the premise that aesthetic value presupposes some foundation in human nature without which one could not speak of beauty or sublimity at all, and that this should be conceived as an internal counterpart to the external senses of sight, hearing, touch, and gustatory taste. The second, by contrast, although it does not necessarily exclude the idea of internal sense, focuses on the imagination to explain the active and passive features of artistic creativity and aesthetic receptivity. Various writers in the tradition as a whole might be ranged under these two headings, but with respect to the sublime, four figures stand out as having made significant contributions: on the side of internal sense stand Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Thomas Reid (1719–1796), and on the side of imagination, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792).

THE SUBLIME AND INTERNAL SENSE

Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury

Shaftesbury’s contribution to aesthetic theory is found primarily in “The Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody,” one of a series of lengthy essays composed 1705–1710 and brought together in three volumes as Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times in 1711. Shaftesbury was educated under the direction of John Locke (whose patron was the first earl, Shaftesbury’s grandfather), but although Lockean language pervades the Characteristicks, it is a gloss on a philosophical canvas indebted fundamentally to the rationalist lineage of neo-Platonism and reminiscent, in particular, of Ennead I.6 “On Beauty,” in which Plotinus (himself echoing Plato’s Symposium) argues that the beauty of physical objects is but a “trace” of some higher reality to which the philosophical mind ascends. This school of thought was alive and well in Shaftesbury’s own time through the influence of the late seventeenth-century group of philosophers known as the Cambridge Platonists, and Shaftesbury himself was responsible for publishing the posthumous edition of the Select Sermons of Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), generally considered the founding father of the movement.