Joseph Addison: The Pleasure Of The Imagination
Rational contemplation upon theory, precedents, and proportion had been the driving force behind the previous concept of beauty in the 17th Century, but with the advancement of multiple theories upon sentiment and sensation, scholars began to study extensively exactly how humans subjectively experienced beauty through taste and not reason. Through to attempting to understand and codify the mechanisms, theoreticians wished to finally paint, construct or sculpt true beauty.
Sight and Imagination
Joseph Addison’s essays on the “Pleasure of the Imagination”, written in 1712 and published in the very popular magazine “The Spectator”, were not the origin of 18th Century English aesthetics, but were of central importance to the debate; diffusing easily to the various members of the bourgeois through the magazine.
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His fundamental concept was that the pleasures of taste are the pleasures of the imagination. Addison is not identifying taste with imagination, as taste is a faculty of judgement that “discerns the Beauties of an Author with Pleasure, and the Imperfections with Dislike.” The visible world is the point of departure for the visual stimuli that enters the mind, evolving once there through the intersection of the multitude of ideas previously seen and experienced.
As Addison believed that sight without imagination would be impossible due to the entwined nature of imagination and perception, he differentiated between the two types of pleasure possible to receive. The first is the most basic form, pleasure deriving from “such Objects as they are before our eyes”, i.e. primary sight and first impressions; whilst the secondary is far more enriched with pleasure flowing from the “Ideas of visible Object, when the Objects are not actually before the Eye, but are called up into our Memories, or formed into agreeable
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