From the analogy between the perception of colors and the judgment of beauty, L. Jaffro reconstructs the debates which presided over the complex development of aesthetics in XVIIIe English century.
There is no shortage of works that take as their object of study the development of aesthetics in XVIIIe century, particularly in the English-speaking world. We know that this period, from the last third of the XVIIe at the edge of the XIXe century, represented a particularly intense episode of philosophical conceptualization, marked by a proliferation of very diverse writings and ideas that have lastingly shaped the future of this discipline, both in its academic recognition and in its cultural diffusion. Laurent Jaffro’s present book does not provide an additional opus, it does not limit itself to a simple narration, like so many scholarly contributions that sometimes take on the appearance of catalogs where nothing is forgotten but in which everything tends to appear on the same level.
Here the theme is both very circumscribed and open to a tireless internal questioning. Because, by moving from the sensory register to the finesse of discrimination applying to all of our faculties, the term taste loses its apparent simplicity and finds itself inseparable from everything that is specific to the use of passions and to the processes of education. Each contribution deposits less an additional layer than it puts into perspective the cognitive and affective mediations of our relationship to the world and to culture. In this context, it is especially fruitful to question the recurrence of background metaphors that propose attractive unification schemes while revealing new lines of fracture. This is par excellence the case with the analogy between colors and values and it is therefore not surprising that it is announced from the title of the work.
From the harmony of the world to the operations of the mind
Even though the book adopts a roughly chronological presentation, its ambition is indeed to provide a sort of conceptual orientation table that places each of the protagonists in a debate that makes them resonate with all the others. The aim here is not to be exhaustive but to bring out structuring lines of tension around which the identity of the aesthetic enterprise is played out.
The center of gravity of the enterprise is the “psychological turn” which, nourished by the double revolution of empiricism and natural philosophy, exerts its effects well beyond the authors who explicitly claim it, and even among their adversaries nourished, like Shaftesbury, by the Cambridge Platonists, and who advocate creative enthusiasm. This major philosophical inflection has found a privileged place of election in the examination of taste where intellectual discipline never ceases to interact with the disposition to feel and experience satisfaction, prohibiting one from sticking to a simple je ne sais quoi.
The decision to restrict the analysis to this guiding thread certainly has the disadvantage of leaving out important authors. While the near absence of Burke is assumed and logically justified, it can nevertheless be regretted, because his contribution cannot be reduced to the duality of the categories of the beautiful and the sublime. It would have made it possible to contrast the psychological associationism that proceeds by chains of contiguity and resemblance and the mechanical causality of affects that, it is true, goes far beyond taste. On the other hand, this choice allows attention to be drawn to authors who are little known to the French-speaking reader (such as Henry More, James Harris, Joseph Addison). Even those who are more familiar and better served by translation (Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, Alexander Gerard, even Adam Smith) are here the subject of precise lighting that highlights their physiognomy and their strong points.
The book adopts throughout an argumentative style that is both sober and very effective, concerned with conceptual clarity and summaries, which makes it both an exemplary success on the subject it deals with and a plea in favor of analysis. The confrontation of some recent theses with the realism of the time provides a welcome complement.
Three points on the aesthetic experience
In this dense and perfectly structured work, in a series of chapters which respond to each other, several developments particularly attract attention.
(a) The author offers a subtle analysis of a key notion of Hutcheson’s philosophy, that of “absolute beauty” characterized by “uniformity in variety.” Far from being a catch-all formula, which is nevertheless found both in post-Leibnizians and in the writings of artists (such as William Hogarth), he shows that it refers to a “composite reason” whose principle measures the aesthetic importance of an object, that is to say the quantity of beauty that it is likely to embody, inaugurating a form of “calculation of aesthetic pleasure” (p. 85) on the model of moral calculation which maximizes the value of the agent, but which here always remains fallible or revisable.
(b) Laurent Jaffro rightly points out that there is a strong continuity between the Treatise on Human Nature of Hume and his little pamphlet on “The Rule of Taste”. Certainly, in contrast to the realists, Hume does not recognize objectivity in beauty for itself, not even (like Gerard) in the title of technical excellence which would ensure its consistency. But his enlightened skepticism does not have the consequence of delivering aesthetic attributions to arbitrariness, because disagreements are not mysterious, they are explicable on condition of bringing into play the notion of “appropriate point of view” which imposes a selective constraint on admissible interpretations. He appeals to “the delicacy of taste (as) the capacity to discern what in the object is responsible for the reactions of feeling” (p. 213), by providing the necessary information (p. 106). This does not, however, take us out of subjectivism but blocks the relativist variant which undermines all hope of aesthetic consensus. At the same time it marks Hume’s underlying and constant attachment to the cultural tradition of the humanities.
(c) Reid is still little known to the French-speaking reader and one can only deplore that the recent interest he has aroused (notably in Roger Pouivet) obeys a truncated or distorted approach to his work since it sees in him the champion of what Jaffro happily calls an “excessive realism”. In reality, much more than the defense of common sense and its basic ontological objectivism, what is characteristic of Reid’s thought is a dual conception of aesthetic experience involving two inseparable components, the constitution of the mind and the properties of the apprehended object. Beauty does not consist in a disembodied or preprogrammed spiritual excellence, because this is always accompanied by conditions linked to the reception of the works and to the diversity of cultural contexts (cf. p. 166). Reid therefore logically subscribes to a gradualist thesis in which the experience of beauty occupies all the degrees between the most instinctive “animal taste” and the normative pleasure of the connoisseur who is based on a rational judgment (p. 148) allowing him to justify his commitments.
Philosophical lessons of a more general scope
The idea of a XVIIIe century entirely committed to a generalized subjectivism therefore deserves to be revised, on the one hand because of the tension that remains between Platonism and empiricism, and on the other hand because of the multiple nuances that each of these conceptions conveys. Shaftesbury and his disciple James Harris represent a pole that is apparently more traditionalist, but the profound influence that they exerted on the thought of their time is reflected in the importance that the authors continue to grant to love and admiration.
Behind the rigidity of the common labels (realism/antirealism, sensualism/intellectualism, etc.) used to classify each of the authors, we observe a much greater fluidity in the real positions that each of them defends, at least in that their doctrines touch on certain points while frankly opposing each other on others. Thus, depending on the degree of cognitivism that we recognize in Hume, we can see in Gerard either a critic or a follower of his predecessor (p. 194) and he himself sometimes seems to hesitate between the two options. And if it is not illegitimate to make Hume and Reid two typical adversaries (which they both assume), their disagreement on the metaphysics of taste does not prevent them from having convergent views on the phenomenology of aesthetic appreciation (p. 177).
At the same time, when considered as a whole, the aesthetic philosophy of XVIIIe obeys a perspective of constant broadening that leads it from the still pointillist phenomenal intuitions of Addison (preserved by Hutcheson) to the consideration of an amplifying epistemic and temporal dynamic whose most convincing outcome is found in the Aberdonian school, in Gerard (1759, 1764, 1780), even at the cost of increased eclecticism (this is even more the case in Archibald Alison in 1790). If Hume is certainly for us the most eminent figure – in this regard the subtitle chosen for the work is perfectly justified –, he is worth first of all as a standard and touchstone of the entire register of possibilities, all the more so since he willingly presents himself as an “ambassador sent by the provinces of knowledge to the provinces of conversation” (“The Art of the Essay”).
Ultimately, we understand that the analogy that links colors and values is enlightening in highlighting the issue of taste, although it remains in many ways unsatisfactory and incomplete. Because at first glance, there is an unbridgeable gap between the postulation of absolute aesthetic ideals, not reducible to the fabric of the world and sometimes subordinated to a teleological aim, and the uncertain play of secondary qualities that remains immersed in the flow of sensitivity. And yet if we can say with Hume that feeling “colors” the world, it is because the nature of taste is neither limited to receiving fleeting impressions, nor to reflecting the scientific image of the world, and that it cannot help but project what it feels onto the object of attributions: far from being reduced to illusions, “these analogs of colors are apprehended as being outside, in objectivity” (p. 220). We can also guess a premonition of Sibley’s anti-sceptical argument for whom it is not coherent to doubt the objectivity of aesthetic descriptions if we accept that of judgments of color.
In summary, Laurent Jaffro’s work not only provides a wealth of known and lesser-known ideas on the English (and especially Scottish) historical origins of aesthetics, but also a perspective that sheds deep light on the epistemological issues. It will quickly become indispensable.