Addison, Joseph(1672–1719)
Joseph Addison—Oxford scholar, poet, playwright, essayist, and politician—figures in the history of philosophy chiefly on the strength of his Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination, published in 1712 as numbers 411 through 421 of his and Richard Steele's journal The Spectator.
Addison defines "pleasures of the imagination" as "such [pleasures] as arise from visible objects" (no. 411). He calls "primary" those derived from things present to vision, "secondary" those derived from things merely called to mind. There are three qualities of objects from which the primary pleasures may arise: greatness, novelty, and beauty. Greatness is an extensiveness that throws the viewer into "a pleasing astonishment," as in, for example, the sight of a mountain range. Novelty includes what is new or unfamiliar to the viewer, as a fresh meadow in spring may be, as well as what continually changes its appearance, for example, a waterfall. Beauty includes, on the one hand, whatever appearances effect sexual attraction, and on the other, "the gaiety or variety of colors," "the symmetry and proportion of parts," and "the arrangement and disposition of bodies" (no. 412).
Addison's account of the secondary pleasures is more complex. Such pleasures may be produced by mere spontaneous imaginings, or by representational artifacts, such as sculptures, paintings, some pieces of music, and descriptions. In these cases, we derive pleasure not merely from the object imagined, but also from the comparison of that object with that which represents it (no. 416). Addison also invokes comparison to explain the pleasure that we take in fictional descriptions of terrible things and events: our pleasure derives from our awareness that we ourselves are not actually threatened by the evils about which we read (no. 418).
Addison's Essay has been taken to mark the beginning of modern aesthetics. There are several grounds for such a claim. Addison, in contrast to previous writers on his various topics, investigates pleasures that can be derived from art and nature equally, treats the beautiful as merely one among several pleasing visual qualities, and centers his account on the mental activity of the onlooker rather than on the character of the object viewed. In all these respects, his Essay sets the direction for subsequent work in aesthetics.
At the same time, there are considerable differences of purview between Addison's investigation and later aesthetic thought. The sources of the pleasures of the imagination include works of art only so far as these either please the eye or awaken visual images; they do not include nonprogrammatic music, or even the nonimagistic aspects of literature. Further, for Addison, works of history, natural philosophy, travel narrative, and even criticism, morals, and speculative philosophy (so far as these use visual figures of speech) may be sources of the pleasures of the imagination just as much as works of fiction (nos. 420–421). Thus, for all the concerns and assumptions that Addison shares with subsequent writers on taste and the fine arts, the scope of his inquiry is distinctively his own.
Aesthetics, History Of.
Bibliography
Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele. The Spectator. 5 vols, edited by Donald F. Bond. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Nos. 411–421 are in vol. 3.
Hipple, Walter John, Jr. The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957. Chapter 1 is an exposition of Addison's Essay.
Rind, Miles. "The Concept of Disinterestedness in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics." Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002): 67–87. A critique of Jerome Stolnitz's historiography of aesthetics.
Stolnitz, Jerome. "On the Origins of 'Aesthetic Disinterestedness.'" Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961): 131–144. A highly influential study that credits Addison with originating the concept of "aesthetic perception."
Walker, William. "Ideology and Addison's Essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination." Eighteenth-Century Life 24 (2000): 65–84. A critique of the widely held view that Addison's Essay is a work of "bourgeois ideology."
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