Early Modern Debates on the Objectivity of Aesthetic Judgment

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), in his widely read Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), proposes that human beings possess an "inner eye" or moral sense, operating by direct analogy with ordinary sight, through which beauty, truth, and virtue are all apprehended as aspects of a single objective harmony pervading nature and the cosmos. Shaftesbury's position remains broadly rationalist and Platonizing in spirit: the harmony perceived by the inner eye is genuinely there in the object or action, not merely projected onto it, so that moral and aesthetic value are, at bottom, one and the same objective order viewed under different aspects. It is also in Shaftesbury's Characteristics that the influential concept of aesthetic disinterestedness first receives sustained philosophical articulation: genuine appreciation of beauty, Shaftesbury argues, requires freedom from any personal appetite for possessing or consuming the beautiful object, a condition later thinkers would make central to defining the aesthetic attitude as such.