‘Et in Arcadia Ego’: Philosophical Aesthetics and the Origins of European Romanticism in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics and Rousseau’s Reveries

Abstract

This essay will consider Shaftesbury’s 1711 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, particularly his ‘The Moralists, A Philosophical Rhapsody’, as the first influential instance of the aesthetic revolution in European Romantic thought. Philosophical discourse on the arts goes as far back as Plato’s dialogues (notably, Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, Ion), while the Greek treatise Peri Hypsous [On the Sublime], attributed to a Longinus living in the first century of the present era,¹ was known throughout the Middle Ages but acquires no less than cult status as a modern classic in European literary, artistic and philosophical circles when translated into French in the seventeenth century, most famously by the poet Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux in 1674.² Yet the actual modern sense of the term ‘aesthetics’ was developed by Alexander Baumgarten in the mid-eighteenth century (Aesthetica, Part 1, 1750; Part 2, 1758). Until then, such discourses were understood as dealing with questions of ‘taste’. Following Baumgarten’s work, aesthetics, as the developing science of taste, embarked on a distinct philosophical trajectory by significant German works, such as J.G. Hamann’s Aesthetica in nuce: A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose in 1762, G.E. Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in 1766 and the famous ‘Oldest Programme for a System of German Idealism’ (of uncertain authorship: Hölderlin, Schelling or Hegel) in 1796.