Journal of Scottish Thought Volume 7 Francis Hutcheson and the Origin of the Aesthetic Published by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies University of Aberdeen 2016 ISSN 1755 9928 Editor: Endre Szécsényi © The Contributors This volume of The Journal of Scottish Thought developed from a conference hosted by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen and part-funded by the European Commission by virtue of a Marie Curie Fellowship held at the University of Aberdeen by Endre Szécsényi. The Journal of Scottish Thought is a peer reviewed, open access journal published annually by the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Correspondence should be addressed to The Journal of Scottish Thought, 19 College Bounds, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UG. Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne. CONTENTS Editorial note v Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull and the Intersection of Aesthetics and Morals 1 Alexander Broadie ‘What could a Statue or Panegyrick effect?’ A Note on the Abstractness of Hutcheson’s Aesthetics 15 Bálint Gárdos Hutcheson and Reid on Natural Beauty 29 Emily Brady The Experience of Absolute Beauty in Hutcheson: Perception, Reason and Pleasure 52 Richard Glauser Francis Hutcheson’s Aesthetics and his Critics in Ireland: Charles-Louis de Villette and Edmund Burke 81 Daniel Carey Francis Hutcheson and the Aesthetics of Multitude 106 Cairns Craig The Aesthetics of Political Economy: 136 The Case of Francis Hutcheson Michael Brown The Epistemology of Sense from Calvin to Hutcheson 148 Giovanni Gellera Francis Hutcheson and the Emerging Aesthetic Experience 171 Endre Szécsényi Notes on contributors 210 Editorial Note Six of the papers presented here were originally delivered in the symposium ‘Hutcheson and the Emergence of Modern Aesthetics’ held at the University of Aberdeen on 23–24 January 2015.1 Inspired by the success of this event, the participants decided to publish their papers together in a special issue of this journal, under the title of ‘Francis Hutcheson and the Origins of the Aesthetic’. To their enterprise, Emily Brady (Edinburgh), Bálint Gárdos (Budapest), and Richard Glauser (Neuchâtel) contributed with further papers. The present collection is not supposed to offer a unifi ed re-interpretation of Hutcheson’s aesthetics, instead, it shows that there are historical and theoreti- cal potentials in Hutcheson’s aesthetics which have remained partly or fully unexploited in the scholarship, and it maintains the plurality of approaches to an intellectual achievement which played a crucial role in the emergence of modern aesthetic thinking. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) wrote the fi rst philosophical aesthetics in Europe in 1725. The fi rst part of his Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue is consensually regarded as his par excellence aesthetics which systematized some fundamental ideas of Lord Shaftesbury (whom Hutcheson explicitly mentioned as his main source of inspiration in the subtitle of the fi rst edition), and applied the epistemological lessons drawn from John Locke’s philosophy. Three major features of his aesthetics proved lasting in the recep- tion: the conception of ‘inner sense’ or ‘the sense of beauty’ as a special aesthetic sense of the human mind; his general formula of beauty in objects as ‘unity amidst variety’; and the claim of the tight relationship between aes- thetics and morality which is emphasized already in the structure of his Inquiry whose fi rst part contains the theory of the sense of beauty, while the second that of moral sense. Since Hutcheson was professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1730 to his death, it is not surprising that the large proportion of his oeuvre deals with moral philosophy; his posthumously 1 This event was supported by a Marie Curie Intra-European Research Fellowship Scheme of the European Commission. published magnum opus is The System of Moral Philosophy (1755). Still, beside the fi rst part of his Inquiry, he also wrote three philosophical letters on laughter for the Dublin Journal (1725) which are customarily and rightly considered sig- nifi cant contribution to contemporary “aesthetic” thinking. With these works and several passages from other writings, especially in the Anglo-American scholarship, Hutcheson has become an indispensable and canonical fi gure in the narratives of the history of modern aesthetics. The authors of this special issue show the multiple layers and the pro- foundness of Hutcheson’s aesthetic thinking, which is unduly neglected in its received interpretations, as well as the diversity of its inspirational sources, and the complexity of its reception. As such, they either rectify or complement the viewpoints of the mainstream literature. In so doing, they put Hutcheson’s aesthetic thinking into different contexts, and exploit various relationships between this eminent Scottish philosopher and a wide range of other authors, like Cicero, John Calvin, Franco Burgersdijk, Adriaan Heereboord, George Turnbull, Joseph Addison, Charles-Louis de Villette, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Archibald Alison, Thomas Reid, W. B. Yeats, Herbert J. C. Grierson, I. A. Richards, and some prominent fi gures of contemporary environmental aesthetics, to mention only a few. Endre Szécsényi University of Aberdeen May 2016 Cover: Allan Ramsay: Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), c.1740–45 (oil painting), © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2015. Francis Hutcheson, George Turnbull and the Intersection of Aesthetics and Morals Alexander Broadie 1 Introduction Of the two portraits of Francis Hutcheson that hang in Glasgow University’s Hunterian Art Gallery one was painted by Allan Ramsay sometime during the period 1745–1746. The other, to a signifi cant extent a copy of the fi rst, and probably painted during the same period, was from the studio of Ramsay. It is however uncertain whether many (if any) of the brush strokes in the later portrait were Ramsay’s.1 In that portrait, though not in the earlier one, Hutcheson holds a copy of Cicero’s De fi nibus bonorum et malorum, a text in which Cicero provides a detailed exposition, accompanied by critique, of Stoicism, Epicureanism and the philosophy of the Academy, the three schools of philosophy that were most prominent in Cicero’s own day. The book that Hutcheson holds is surely no casual prop in this carefully staged performance here portrayed; it must have been chosen to represent the philosophical tradi- tion within which Hutcheson saw himself as rooted. And while it is not from the De fi nibus that Hutcheson takes the lengthy passage we fi nd on the title page of his fi rst and most important book, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,2 the passage quoted in that most conspicuous posi- tion is from a Ciceronian work very closely related to the De fi nibus, namely the De offi ciis: And as regards the things sensed by sight, no animal other than man senses their beauty and elegance, and the harmony of the parts of those visible things; while by nature and reason, man, transferring these 1 For comment on the two portraits in the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow University, see Mungo Campbell (ed.), Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment (Munich, 2013), 19–22. My thanks to Mungo Campbell and Anne Dulau for discussion of the portraits. 2 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (Indianapolis, 2004). 2 Alexander Broadie qualities from the eye to the mind, considers that beauty, consistency, and order should much more be preserved in our purposes and deeds.3 From these elements that which is moral (honestum), which is the object of our inquiry, is composed and created; and even if this be not ranked among the noble, it is nevertheless moral (honestum) and, even if no one praise it, by its nature it is worthy of praise. You perceive indeed the very form and, so to say, the face of the moral (faciem honesti), which, were it seen by the eyes, would produce a wondrous love of wisdom.4 This quotation explains the order of the two treatises that constitute Hutcheson’s Inquiry, the fi rst treatise being on beauty and the second on virtue. For Cicero fi rst refers to our sense of beauty, elegance and harmony in the visible world, then to their analogues in the world of spirit, and fi nally he notes that moral goodness (honestum) is ‘composed and created’ (confl atur et effi citur) from the spiritual analogues of visible beauty, elegance and harmony. On this account, the beautiful and the moral are very similar and in some respects identical, and when, as happens from time to time, Hutcheson speaks of the beauty or loveliness of virtue, he is fully in harmony with the position that Cicero presents in the De offi ciis. In section two of this paper I shall highlight the formidable closeness of beauty and virtue that emerges from Hutcheson’s analysis. Then, in the third section, I shall focus on a very different way in which he represents their relationship, a way directly linked to a cosmic moment in the Scottish Enlightenment. To help us get our bearings permit me fi rst to indicate the territory that I shall be occupying in the third section. Regarding the second of the aforementioned portraits of Hutcheson, it represents a professor of moral philosophy, garbed in what appears to be the gown of Glasgow University’s dean of faculties,5 and displaying one of the great writings of the Roman Republic on the question on how a life should be lived; and he is portrayed as exercising the art of rhetoric, for he is in lecturing mode, his subject being that 3 At this point Hutcheson omits a sentence in Cicero’s text: ‘and he is watchful lest he do anything unseemly or effeminate, and watchful too in all his judgments and actions lest he either do or think anything licentious [cavetque ne quid indecore effeminateve faciat tum in omnibus et opinionibus et factis ne quid libidinose aut faciat aut cogitet].’ 4 The translation is mine.