Art and Enlightenment by Friday Jonathan;

Author:Friday, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Scotland, Scottish thought, aesthetics, art, human experience, Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Reid, taste, beauty, sublime, qualitative differences, mind, sensibility, philosophy of art, Stewart, enlightenment, harmony, order, Turnbull, ancient painting, deformity, distance, space and time, tragedy, Baillie, Gerard, Home, Lord Kames, Beattie, Alison, imagination, sublimity
ISBN: 1049950
Publisher: Andrews UK
Published: 2012-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Six: Adam Smith (1723–1790)

Competing with David Hume as the greatest of the Scottish enlightenment philosophers, Adam Smith is now primarily remembered as the most significant of the founders of modern political economy and among the earliest advocates of the benefits of free trade for increasing the overall wealth of a nation. He took his degree at the University of Glasgow, where he was drawn to natural philosophy until he began to attend the lectures of Francis Hutcheson, who steered him towards subjects in moral philosophy, which at the time would have included the operation of the mind and the acquisition of knowledge. After Glasgow he went to Oxford for two years on a scholarship and devoted his time to the study of rhetoric and belles lettres. It is reported that he was put off his planned career in the ministry by the reprimand he received when he was caught reading Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature by the Master of the college in which he resided. In 1748 he moved to Edinburgh and began lecturing on rhetoric and belles lettres, initiating a subject of university instruction that inspired Hugh Blair’s celebrated series of lectures on the subject given for many years at Edinburgh. In 1751 Smith was elected to the Chair of Logic at Glasgow University, and in 1752 transferred to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the same university. His lectures in the latter role were divided into four parts: natural theology, ethics, justice or political philosophy, and political economy. The lectures on ethics provided the material for his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and the material of his political economy lectures grew over the years into the basis for his renowned Wealth of Nations (1776). Between the publication of these two works, Smith resigned from his chair at Glasgow to become the personal tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch. Together with his pupil he travelled extensively in France meeting with many of the leading French philosophers of the day, some of whom—such as A.R.J. Turgot—shared Smith’s interest in political economy. In 1766 he returned to his birthplace at Kirkcaldy, near Edinburgh, and spent the next ten years composing The Wealth of Nations.

For Smith ethics and aesthetics are intimately connected, and his writings on aesthetic matters are both scatted and interwoven into his Theory of Moral Sentiments. The extract that follows clearly illustrates the extension of the scope of aesthetic experience in eighteenth-century Scotland beyond the narrow confines of the fine arts and nature. Smith’s subject is how custom and fashion influence our understanding of what is and isn’t beautiful, concluding that in large measure beauty is the product of custom and the forces that mould it.

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