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figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hugh Blair (1718-1800), in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). Commenting on the celebrated essays of 'The Pleasures of the Imagination' , Blair asserts that Addison's 'speculations on this subject, if not exceedingly profound, are, however, very beautiful and entertaining; and he has the merit of having opened a track, which was before unbeaten'. 23 Blair has efficiently amalgamated the essays' ability to strike out an important new course in criticism of the arts while managing to be both pleasurable and, if not superficial, at least not remarkably profound. What Blair points out is a dual trait that appears over and over again in the reception of Addison's essays. As approving as Blair is, the strongly sympathetic criticism of Addison's essays wanes slightly towards the end of the century. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) captures the spirit of the times rather well in The Lives of the Poets (1780-81), when he remarks that a critic is a 'name which the present generation is scarcely willing to allow' 24 Addison, and that his 'criticism is condemned as tentative or experimental rather than scientific'. 25 The impression that Addison's periodical essays are philosophically unsophisticated and not challenging enough for the reader is touched upon by Johnson as well, though he actually mentions this in support of Addison: superficiality, he says, made Addison easy to comprehend and could 'prepare the mind for more attainments'. 26 When The Spectator was re-published in yet another edition in 1793-94, the historian and novelist Robert Bisset (c. 1758-1805) felt called upon to defend Addison mainly against the claim of being scientifically or philosophically
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Joseph Addison’s (1672–1719) essays in The Spectator occupy contradictory positions in the history of aesthetics. While they are generally considered central to the institution of aesthetics as a scholarly discipline, their reception has throughout history entailed a strong questioning of their philosophical and scholarly importance. In the followi...
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The eighteenth century witnessed the historical change from aesthetic instrumentalism to aesthetic autonomy. Aesthetic research has often attempted to capture this change in teleological terms, wherein British aesthetic instrumentalism appears to contain the seeds of its own decline. The purpose of this article is to restore a balance between these two major historical modes of appreciating art, and to display the uniqueness of British aesthetic instrumentalism. During especially the first half of the eighteenth century, aesthetic instrumentalism was revitalised due to a new rationale for art in the reinforcement of a national body politic and in the strengthening of a British identity. In order to recognise the distinctiveness of aesthetic instrumentalism, as well as to acknowledge by what means it operated, I make essentially two claims: (1) aesthetic instrumentalism rediscovered its effective interaction with a national body politic by exploring a possible nexus between Britain and classical antiquity, and (2) although the philosophy of art advanced by Joseph Addison (1672–1719) frequently is held as a possible commencement of aesthetic autonomy, it was, first and foremost, characterised by a systematic aesthetic instrumentalism intended to reinforce the British body politic.
