Speaker
Description
This paper aims to present a forgotten episode in the history of aesthetics by a study of Adam Smith’s aesthetic thought in relation to his moral philosophy. I address two historical problems. The first is with the gap in Smith scholarship. Smith was practically non-existent in standard accounts of British aesthetic history, but literature and fine arts were a long-meditated project for Smith. Before Smith’s death, he destroyed sixteen volumes of manuscripts, which contained his unfinished composition of philosophical history of literature and jurisprudence. This conspicuous gap in Smith’s oeuvre should not be treated as merely an unfortunate loss of record, but an indication of inherent tension and difficulty within Smith’s intellectual project. The paper thus explores this difficulty by tracing Smith’s intellectual development, particularly through his treatment of his own texts. The second problem concerns the historical understanding of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain, where the technical term was not used. To properly understand the historical making of the discipline, one must consider the history of anti- aesthetics as well as the history of its silent expression. Standard accounts of the history of aesthetics, which consider taste as the primary eighteenth century discussion, do not apply well to Adam Smith. In Smith, I outline a project of “aesthetic political economy,” the government of an interactive social space of judgement. This is built upon Smith’s extremely expansive interpretation of beauty and utility, as a fundamental historical force in the unconscious that both drives social progress and leads to moral corruption. By exploring different aspects of the inherent problematique underneath this project, I make a speculation on Smith’s inner struggles toward the end of his life that points to his unease with the position of an omniscient theorist.
| Organization | University of Oxford |
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