kings, from the example of Barmecides;
And dread being happy.
This last verse is translated word for word. Nothing can be more beautiful in my opinion than, dread being happy. The Arabic tongue had the advantage of being perfected a great while ago; it was ascertained before the time of Mahomet, and has not altered since. Of the several jargons then spoken in Europe, there is not at present the least vestige. Which way soever we turn ourselves, we must own we were born but yesterday. We go beyond other nations in many respects; and perhaps it is because we came the last.
IIC5 Voltaire (François‐Marie Arouet; 1694–1778) from ‘Essay on Taste’
The openness to non‐European civilizations evidenced in Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs (cf. IIC4) did not always extend to their art. While he was capable of surpassing a Judaeo‐Christian estimation of the intellectual, religious and moral dimensions of other societies, his socio‐cultural radicalism was balanced by something altogether more conventional when it came to matters of ‘taste’. For Voltaire, as indeed for many later writers on art, ‘taste’ as it related to aesthetic responses to artistic form (as distinct from individual preferences for certain foods, etc.) had an objective aspect. In the 1960s, as part of the debate over the ‘crisis of Modernism’, the critic Clement Greenberg wrote that it was no more possible to dislike good art – or to like bad art – than it was to have ‘sugar taste sweet or lemons taste sour’. This tension between ‘taste’ as a natural faculty and as something it is possible to educate through experience is arguably one that has never been satisfactorily resolved. On its other side, however, lies a total subjectivism that flies in the face of any settled notion of lasting values. To thinkers of the eighteenth‐century European Enlightenment, cultural pluralism seldom extended to aesthetics. In the present extract, Voltaire is in no doubt that taste in matters of art is restricted to Europe, and other places, including ‘uncultivated wastes’ lacking civil society (i.e. America), countries where ‘all representations of living creatures’ are ‘prohibited by religion’ (i.e. the Islamic sphere), and ‘Asiaticks’ (presumably China and India), simply lack it. The extracts are from Voltaire’s ‘Essay on Taste’ [1757], published as a supplement to Alexander Gerard’s An Essay on Taste, London: A. Millar, and Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and J. Bell, 1759, pp. 213, 215 and 221–2. (A variant extract from the essay can be found in Art in Theory 1648–1815, IIIb8, pp. 531–2.)
The external sense with which nature has furnished us, and by which we distinguish and relish the various kinds of nourishment, that are adapted to health and pleasure, has in all languages given occasion to the metaphorical word taste, by which we express our perception of beauty, deformity, or defect in the several arts. […]
As the corruption of the sensual taste discovers itself by a relish for only those delicate and high seasoned dishes, in which all the refinements of art have been employed to excite a forced sensation of pleasure; so the depravity of intellectual taste manifests itself by an attachment to far‐fetched and studied ornaments, and by want of relish for those beauties which are unaffected and natural. The corruption of the sensual taste, which makes us delight in such aliments as are disgusting to those whose organs are in a good state, is in reality a kind of disease; nor is that depravity of the intellectual taste which makes many prefer the burlesque to the sublime, and the laboured stiffness of art, to the beautiful simplicity of nature, less a disease in our mental frame.
* * *
There are vast countries, where taste has not yet been able to penetrate. Such are those uncultivated wastes, where civil society has never been brought to any degree of perfection, where there is little intercourse between the sexes, and where all representations of living creatures in painting and sculpture are severely prohibited by the laws of religion. Nothing renders the mind so narrow and so little, if I may use that expression, as the want of social intercourse; this confines it’s faculties, blunts the edge of genius, damps every noble passion, and leaves in a state of languor and inactivity every principle that could contribute to the formation of true taste. Besides, where several of the finer arts are wanting, the rest must necessarily languish and decay, since they are inseparably connected together, and mutually support each other. This is one reason why Asiaticks have never excelled in any of the arts, and hence also it is that true taste has been confined to certain countries in Europe.
IIC6 Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) from Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime
Kant’s three great works of critical philosophy (the Critiques of Pure Reason, of Practical Reason and of Judgement) were published relatively late in his life, between 1781 and 1790. They are resolutely abstract works which aspire to deal with the structure of human consciousness unobstructed by any contingencies of time and place. This does not hold for his varied earlier work, particularly the extended essay on feelings for the sublime and the beautiful of 1763. In the nature of the case this is more directed to the particularities of things which are the occasion of such feelings – works of literature, natural phenomena and so forth – and also to the differences which might be expected to exist between individuals who have such feelings: such as characterological differences between individuals or between people of different genders as well as the different ‘characters’ often attributed to people coming from different places. It is Kant’s final chapter discussing such ‘National Characteristics’ that has brought the text its recent notoriety. By his own admission, Kant had read Hume on ‘national characters’ (cf. IIC1), and his text falls prey to the same racist stereotypes. Sometimes these stereotypes can be relatively mundane, as when he attempts to discuss differences between European cultures. But when he expands his view to address differences on a global scale, the flaws become fatal. Islamic cultures, Indian cultures, Chinese cultures are all criticized with the then normative litany of clichés. The inhabitants of North America, on the other hand, receive a dusting of ‘noble savage’ romanticization. It is – needless to say – Africans who suffer the greatest contempt. Perhaps the most appropriate response to this is to note that the parochial Kant, who almost never left his native Königsberg in East Prussia, was as much a creature of the prevailing cultural and religious ideologies of his day as any other citizen. It is of course alarming to find Kant (just as it is to find Hume before him and Hegel after him) giving credence to such demeaning stereotypes. Yet it is arguably more worrying to find the introduction to the modern edition of the work, which first appeared in 1960, completely neglecting to mention the racist dimensions of its final chapter, and indeed concluding with a panegyric to Kant’s ‘noble respect for the underlying dignity of all humanity’. Blindness to racism in the epochs of slavery and imperialism is one thing, it is another to be reminded of its untroubled presence less than a lifetime ago. The present extracts are taken from Section Four, ‘Of National Characteristics, so far as They Depend upon the Distinct Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime’ of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime [1763], Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960, pp. 97–9 and 109–12. (Further extracts from Kant can be found in Art in Theory 1648–1815, VA10, pp. 779–88.)
Of the peoples of our part of the world, in my opinion those who distinguish themselves among all others by the feeling for the beautiful are the Italians and the French, but by the feeling for the sublime, the Germans, English, and Spanish. Holland can be considered as that land where the finer taste becomes largely unnoticeable. […]
I shall mention only fleetingly the arts and the sciences, the choice of which can confirm the taste of the nations which we have imputed to them. The Italian genius has distinguished itself especially in music, painting, sculpture, and architecture. All these beautiful arts encounter a similarly fine taste in France, although their beauty there is less moving. Taste in respect to poetic or oratorical perfection in France falls more into the beautiful, in England more into the sublime. Fine jests, comedy, laughing satire, enamored flirting, and light and naturally flowing writing are native
