SOURCE: “The Politics of Taste in the Spectator,” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 46-63.

[In the essay that follows, Dykstal offers a Marxist analysis of the Spectator's role in defining “taste” as an “organizing principle of the public sphere,” in which private rectitude is publicly recognized. In this formulation, the critic contends, taste “rests, ultimately, not on the private apprehension of beauty but on the public defense of it.”]

The basic error of all materialism in politics—and this materialism is not Marxian and not even modern in origin, but as old as our history of political theory—is to overlook the inevitability with which men disclose themselves as subjects, as distinct and unique persons, even when they wholly concentrate upon reaching an altogether worldly, material object.¹

One of the surprises of Terry Eagleton's magisterial The Ideology of the Aesthetic is his oft-stated admiration for a discourse that others on the political left would dismiss as “simply ‘bourgeois ideology.’”² As it arises in the early eighteenth century, the aesthetic, counters Eagleton, constitutes “the first stirrings of a primitive materialism—of the body's long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical” (13). In his earlier The Function of Criticism, Eagleton was similarly impressed by the bourgeois “public sphere” exemplified by the Spectator papers of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele; curiously, however, he leaves the two out of his book on the aesthetic, even though Addison's Spectator papers on the “pleasures of the imagination” have been called “the starting-point of modern aesthetics.”³ In this essay, I intend to redress that omission. A materialist critique of the Spectator can tell us much about where taste may go wrong as an organizing principle of the public sphere. Yet the politics of taste in the Spectator may also “go right” in a way that a strictly materialist critique, even Eagleton's sympathetic one, cannot fully account for.

As might be expected, Eagleton takes his account of the public sphere from Jürgen Habermas, who sees this “category of bourgeois society” emerging for the first time between state and society in early capitalism. In the institutions—clubs, coffee houses, and periodicals—that comprised this public sphere, the eighteenth-century European bourgeoisie was able “to negotiate an historic alliance with its social superiors” by freely exchanging its opinions about cultural and political matters. The “hallmark” of the English public sphere, as Eagleton puts it, “was its consensual character”: a “new ruling block” was created that merged qualities of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the landed gentry and the mercantile class. In democratic political theory, which Habermas has devoted his career to reviving, the public sphere is that social space where reasoned agreement seems possible.⁴

What does the eighteenth-century search for a standard of taste have to do with such agreement? In hindsight—in the terms, that is, that came to dominate the century—not much. At least since Kant's Critique of Judgment, the commonplace about taste has been not only that reasoned agreement about it is impossible, but that there is not even any disputing about it, reasoned or not: de gustibus non est disputandum. Indeed, continues the commonplace, there are a variety of tastes, not a single correct one, and judgments about taste are “only relative.”⁵ Among the attempts to explain the variability of taste, Marxist theory is the most convincing. It begins by historicizing the concept, describing it (describing aesthetics itself) as a product of consumer capitalism. Thus Raymond Williams, noting that the idea of consumption is conveyed directly in the metaphor, complains that critical standards like taste treat “the work of art as object, as text, as an isolated artefact”; in short, as another commodity to be exchanged in the marketplace.⁶ Williams makes the historical connection between consumption theories of art and capitalism clearer in his entry for “taste” in Keywords: the “idea of taste cannot now be separated from the idea of the CONSUMER (q.v.). The two ideas, in their modern form, have developed together, and responses to ART and LITERATURE (qq.v.) have been profoundly affected … by the assumption that the viewer, spectator, or reader is a consumer, exercising and subsequently showing his taste.”⁷

By describing taste as a product of consumer capitalism, Marxist theory can then explain its variability in terms of another of capitalism's products, the “antinomies of bourgeois thought.”⁸ Capitalism, that is, tends to give rise to “pair[s] of incompatible theses which both seem true” (Stern 67), antinomies which Martin Jay summarizes as “the separation of facts and values; the distinction between phenomena, or appearances, and noumena, or essential things-in-themselves; and the oppositions between free will and necessity, form and content, and subject and object.”⁹ In aesthetic (and other) matters, the antinomies mean, not necessarily that agreement is impossible, but that reasoned agreement is: the consumer exercising his or her taste may argue that a given object has value, but that argument must eventually rest on a subjective apprehension of beauty that may not be shared by all. Even David Hume, who—in his famous essay “Of The Standard of Taste”—believed that he had found a few aesthetic principles on which “reasonable” people could agree, conceded that “the organs of internal sensation are seldom so perfect as to allow the general principles their full play.”¹⁰ Differences of taste exist, in other words, because the “organs of internal sensation” that perceive beauty differ among individual perceivers.

Yet there are (at least) two senses of taste operating in the Spectator. The first, subject to the antinomies, does indeed sacrifice reasoned agreement for the subjective “rationale of feeling” that came to dominate the century.¹¹ The second, however, actually contributes to agreement about cultural matters. Such agreement or consensus, in turn, contributes to what Eagleton, in his remarks on the Spectator, calls that “fragile” cultural “moment at which the bourgeoisie entered into respectability before passing out of it again” (Function 25). Ironically, however, it is a residual, aristocratic sense of taste that acts to preserve that cultural moment.¹² Taste can serve as an organizing principle of the public sphere in the Spectator—can facilitate the sort of “dispute” that leads to agreement—because the standard does not yet, or not always, connote such bourgeois antinomies as subject and object, public and private realms. Taste varies less, in short, because it is open to discussion: it rests, ultimately, not on the private apprehension of beauty but on the public defense of it.

1. TASTE AND ACTING

To explain this residual standard of taste in the Spectator, it is best to refer to a earlier theorist of the public sphere. When he connects his concept to the rise of the “social” as a distinct category in bourgeois culture, a “private sphere” that is “publicly relevant” (Structural Transformation 19), Habermas draws on the work of Hannah Arendt, who, in The Human Condition, claims that “the emergence of the social realm, which is neither private nor public, strictly speaking, is a relatively new phenomena whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modern age” (28).¹³ Neither Habermas nor Arendt, however, see the rise of the social as having a positive effect on the development of the public sphere. For both, society fatally blurs the line between public and private, making public those activities “related to the maintenance of life” and making private those “activities related to a common world” (that is, allowing those activities to “violate” the private realm—Arendt 28-29). More important, at least for Arendt, society tends to degrade the activities related to a common world—what had been exclusively public activities—by demanding that all activity be “common”: “society expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, … to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement” (40). It was only when—for Arendt, in an aristocratic culture—the public realm was both distinguished from the private (including society) and inhabited by actors who desired to distinguish themselves from the commonality (not to mention from each other) that it had the chance to be ennobled. “Excellence itself,” contends Arendt, “has always been assigned to the public realm where one could excel, where one could distinguish oneself from all others” (49). (Arendt does not explicitly connect the rise of the social with the transition from an aristocratic to a bourgeois culture, but she does concede that such “excellence,” indeed the polis itself, “could survive only if the number of citizens remained restricted” [43].) The rise of the social in modern life both blurs the difference between public and private and makes “distinction and difference” to be “private matters of the individual” (41).

By doing so, modern society betrays the dignity of what Arendt calls true public “action.” The “society” that best preserved that dignity, according to Arendt, was the Greek polis, the aristocratic culture that first organized political activity and gave it a name.¹⁴ For the Greeks (and for Arendt, concerned, as Habermas puts it, “to systematically renew the Aristotelian concept of praxis” [“Communications Concept” 7]), action “corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” (Arendt 7).¹⁵ The condition of plurality, however, carries with it a paradox: it entails equality, because if human beings were not the same they could not understand each other, and it entails distinction, because if human beings were not different they would not have to understand each other (175-76). At the same time that action and speech (which is all an actor has besides action to make him- or herself understood) are used to commune with others in the public realm, they “disclose” an agent as unique (175), and—if the speech and action are notable (or noble?) enough—as excellent. Bourgeois society, while never fully divesting itself of the idea that excellence is possible only in the public realm, nevertheless thinks that such disclosure is possible only in private.¹⁶ The Greeks, however, understood “the disclosure of the agent in speech and action” and attempted to preserve a “space of appearance” in the public realm that would allow for the possibility of excellence (175, 199). In the Greek polis, there was no “real,” private self that the actor invested in his or her action: what the polis saw in public was the actor. An actor, that is, just was his or her action, and an action needed “for its full appearance the shining brightness we once called glory, and which is possible only in the public realm” (180).

Turning, finally, to the Spectator, we find that its essayists do indeed speak of “action” as a glorified, and distinctly public, human activity. Although Addison and Steele's creation has been celebrated, and rightfully, for chronicling what Arendt calls the rise of the social in early modern England, it also documents—and this has been less celebrated—that residual aristocratic culture that draws a sharper distinction between public and private realms. The Spectator essayists do this by emphasizing the sheer revelatory quality of the actions that an agent performs in public. In Spectator 4, for example, when Mr. Spectator boasts that he has “a more than ordinary Penetration in Seeing” (thereby defining his particular genius), he adds that such visual acuity allows him to “look[] into the Highest and Lowest of Mankind, and make shrewd Guesses, without being admitted to their Conversation, at the inmost Thoughts and Reflections of all whom I behold.”¹⁷ Mr. Spectator may be looking “into” the various classes of human beings, but he is actually only looking at them. Although other essays, as Michael G. Ketcham observes, “question the link between appearance and character, and still others deny that there is a link at all,”¹⁸ most portray Mr. Spectator inhabiting a world where every utterance tells something about the inner person, every action makes “visible … the inward Disposition of the Mind” (No.86, 1:366). Even if the Spectator chronicles a growing, bourgeois preoccupation with the sincerity of an actor's outward “disposition”—if, as Ketcham says, it attempts “to correlate outward behavior with inward character” (33)—it reveals a residual suspicion that action and appearance may be all that there is.

Mr. Spectator also confirms Arendt's contention that the public realm of action is where human beings distinguish themselves, where they prove their “excellence.” In Spectator 244, an anonymous essayist (who may be Alexander Pope) “endeavour[s] to trace out the Principles of Action in every Individual,” and finds “that Ambition runs through the whole Species, and that every Man in Proportion to the Vigour of his Complection is more or less actuated by it.” This conclusion is disconcertingly contrary to the middle-class morality that innumerable critics have seen Addison and his compatriots promoting: there is no “comfortable sense of security,” as C. S. Lewis (for example) would have it,¹⁹ in Mr. Spectator's picture of the “Competition for Superiority” that rules the public sphere, where “the secret Spring” that pushes us forward is a desire to rise “above the undistinguished Many.” The picture, in fact, resembles the beginning of Jonathan Swift's A Tale of a Tub, where “Whoever hath an ambition to be heard in a crowd must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb, with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them,”²⁰ except that the struggle to be heard depicted by Swift's hack writer leads only to modern vacuity, whereas the competition for superiority that Mr. Spectator describes leads, potentially, to “virtuous Excellence” (2:370-71). Middle-class morality depends on privacy—whether one is living by its standards is ultimately a matter between individuals (or between one and God)—but the sort of aristocratic distinction that Mr. Spectator is talking about here requires the admiration of a public.²¹ “Though the pure Consciousness of worthy Actions, abstracted from the Views of popular Applause, be to a generous Mind an ample Reward” (2:370-71), such private sentiments do not satisfy Mr. Spectator in this essay.

We are so accustomed to the word “taste” describing things, or our perceptions of things, that using it to describe an action—even this kind of glorified, public action—seems, at first, meaningless. Yet this is precisely what Arendt does when she defines “taste” as an “active relationship to what is beautiful.”²² In The Human Condition, again, Arendt locates this “active relationship” in the Greek polis, the public space in which “beautiful” things—words and deeds—are preserved: “the polis seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible and most ephemeral of man-made ‘products,’ the deeds and stories which are their outcome, would become imperishable” (197-98). In a later essay, Arendt finds a similar idea of action among the Romans, when she interprets Cicero's cultura animi—a “cultivated” mind or spirit—as a practical, political attribute. To Arendt, Cicero's cultivated minds (she calls them, coincidentally, “spectators,” because they approach things “without any wish to acquire something for themselves,” or disinterestedly²³) are not passive aesthetes but public figures. They are “cultivated” because they can appreciate the beauty of words and deeds, but they are active because they render those things “politically secure”: they give them the chance to survive in a highly mutable world. And giving them the chance to survive, it turns out, is to convince others that they are worth preserving. Cultivation or taste, in other words, requires not only that one be able to perceive, or judge, beauty personally, but that one be able to persuade other persons of it: what Arendt wants to call taste is “less a personal possession than a social acquisition.”²⁴ Taste, she insists, “rests on a potential agreement with others, and the thinking process which is active in judging something is not, like the thought process of pure reasoning, a dialogue between me and myself, but finds itself always and primarily, even if I am quite alone in making up my mind, in an anticipated communication with others with whom I know I must finally come to some agreement.” In short, one of the most noble actions that a public actor can perform is to facilitate agreement about matters of taste. Taste—what Arendt succinctly defines as “the capacity to judge”—is (or, rather, should be) “a specifically political ability” (“Culture” 220-21).

Of course, there is nothing that guarantees that a person possessing this unconventional sort of political ability—in Arendt's formulation, one with taste—will have the opportunity to use it. What, that is, assures the person of taste access to the public sphere? At the time that Addison and Steele were publishing the Spectator, such access was assured by their more conventional political abilities. Indeed, this is one reason that various commentators, beginning with Oliver Goldsmith, refer to the early eighteenth century as the “Augustan age”: it is as tempting to think that Queen Anne was listening, or had to listen, to Addison, Steele, and other literary figures as it is to think that Augustus had to listen to Virgil and Horace.²⁵ Eagleton paraphrases Thomas Macaulay's essay on Addison to account for this “peculiarly close interaction between the cultural, political and economic”: “before the advent of free parliamentary reporting, the effects of parliamentary oratory were limited to its immediate audience; to disseminate ideas beyond this forum thus demanded that intensive polemicizing and pamphleteering which absorbs so much of the period's literary production” (Function 24). Macaulay himself, however, provides a more compelling reason for the political ascendancy of persons of taste: “At such a conjuncture, it was natural that literary and oratorical talents should rise in value. There was danger that a Government which neglected such talents might be subverted by them.”²⁶ A Whig historian like Macauley can overstate the case for his own class, and the eighteenth-century aristocracy was not in danger, as John Cannon has pointed out, of being overwhelmed by the “rise” of the middle classes,²⁷ but different families could rise or fall depending on how well they employed the talents of an Addison or Steele. For a Marxist like Eagleton, this fact creates the aforementioned “fragile moment” in English history in which bourgeois sentiments were taken seriously; for a liberal humanist like R. S. Crane, whose sense of the moment's “fragility” is less surprising than Eagleton's, “it is difficult not to see in the eighteenth century, … a period—the last one, unfortunately, in our history—in which the humanities … exercised a determining influence in the intellectual life of Europe.”²⁸ From either perspective, the modern problem that Lionel Trilling diagnosed of culture's “adversary” relationship to the public realm did not yet exist: “cultured” persons held political power, and one of their public actions was to command assent for their opinions—cultural as well as political and economic.²⁹

The “givenness” of bourgeois respectability both affirms and complicates a strictly materialist approach like Eagleton's to the function of the eighteenth-century public sphere. It affirms it because, as Eagleton believes, “class-consolidation” was indeed an impulse of general cultural periodicals like the Spectator (Function 10). The middle class gained the esteem to articulate its demands against the absolutist state and a hierarchical society by first articulating, and offering reasoned arguments for, its opinions about cultural matters: in short, through criticism.³⁰ Criticism of absolutism in politics, in other words, was originally criticism of “absolute” standards in art and literature: the world of letters furnished the institutions, and more important supplied the rhetoric, that made political discussions possible.³¹ Thus, when Addison announces in Spectator 58 that, “As the great and only End of these my Speculations is to banish Vice and Ignorance out of the Territories of Great Britain, I shall endeavour as much as possible to establish among us a Taste of polite Writing” (1:245), he is making a political point in the context of a cultural one: “polite writing,” like the desire of distinction, was originally an aristocratic taste,³² and yet the ambition to “banish vice” may be a subtle hit at aristocratic misbehavior. Addison, as Eagleton says, “knew how to upbraid the traditional ruling class while keeping in with it” (Function 11).³³

Yet if it is possible to see Addison and Steele's ambition to establish a standard of taste as an “action” in Arendt's classical (Greek and Roman) sense—that is, as politics in the service of culture rather than the other way around—then Eagleton's emphasis on the material function of criticism in the Spectator is one-sided. And Macauley's insight that the aristocracy had no choice but to recognize the aristocracy of intellect within the bourgeoisie suggests that it is so possible. “Class-consolidation” may have been a by-product of the Spectator, but Addison and Steele, and their middle-class readers, did not have to use culture for political ends at all: politics would come to them. The Spectator could exist as a genuinely “phatic” (Eagleton's own term) discourse, its end being simply “to increase the amount of rational discourse.”³⁴ It is not only that, as Eagleton says, “what the political moment demanded was precisely ‘cultural,’” but also that what the cultural moment demanded was political mediation, by those already in power who wanted it to survive. Dispute and agreement—“the delightful exercise of taste and reason” (Function 24, 26-27)—became ends in themselves, however much those ends may have contributed to class-consolidation.³⁵

If taste remains a bourgeois concept, it begins by imitating the only standards that the bourgeoisie could know: aristocratic notions of what is valuable in art. Ironically, this fact actually helps the bourgeoisie to consolidate itself—to come, finally, to some agreement. For one thing, because the prestige accorded to such standards obtains from outside the bourgeois public sphere, fewer of those inside are inclined to doubt it. For another, the standards are supported by the aristocratic desire for distinction, an action that is not subject to the conflicts (or antinomies) that contribute to disagreement in the public sphere. That action sees no difference between the “public” and the “private” self, or at least does not allow the private self to influence how the public one is perceived. It assumes that persons operating in the public sphere are “actors,” not private personalities, and that there will be no disparity between the opinions they defend in public and the ones they hold in private.

There is, then, a standard of taste in the Spectator, arising from the ambition to preserve a cultural moment, that contributes to reasoned agreement in Addison and Steele's public sphere. But there is another, more familiar sense of taste operating in the Spectator, too, and it is more familiar because its glorification of subjectivity has become the way that we think of “taste” as a critical standard. To explain this standard of taste, a bit more theory is in order.

2. TASTE AND MAKING

The reason that capitalism gives rise to the “antinomies of bourgeois thought” mentioned above is the phenomenon that Marxist theorists (and others) term “reification.” By definition, reification is the treating of an idea as if it had a material existence.³⁶ In capitalism, according to Georg Lukàcs, reification invests the products of human labor with the “social character” of that labor; it turns “a definite social relation between men” into “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”³⁷ To recall one of the antinomies, reification splits the material object from its maker, or subject. The result is the annihilation of meaningful political action on the part of that maker. In Culture and Society, Williams recounts William Wordsworth's attack on taste (in the 1800 “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads) as a passive “metaphor … transferred to things which are in their essence not passive—to intellectual acts and operations.”³⁸ In Keywords he emphasizes that “what [Wordsworth] said is still extremely important”; here, Addison's request in Spectator 409 for “Rules … how we may acquire that fine Taste of Writing, which is so much talked of among the Polite World” (1:527) provides one of Williams' examples of the word. Without using the term “reification,” Williams obviously has the phenomenon in mind when he describes what went wrong in the “metaphorical transfer” from “taste” to “Taste”: “It was the abstraction of a human faculty to a generalized polite attribute, emphasized by the capital letter and significantly associated, as in the Addison example, with the notion of Rules, and elsewhere with Manners. … The strong and active sense of taste had been replaced by the weak because habitual attributes of Taste” (314). The metaphorical transfer from “taste” to “Taste” is also the reification of an active human faculty—the sort of faculty, indeed, that could preserve a cultural moment—to a “generalized polite attribute.” Reification, that is, does not just turn “social relations between men” into things (or commodities), it turns them, even more importantly, back into human faculties. The difference is that what had been active faculties, concerned with changing the world, have become passive faculties, concerned only with interpreting it in various ways.

These passive faculties—what we might call, after the third earl of Shaftesbury, “characteristics”³⁹—can be ethical as well as aesthetic, aspects of a “moral sense” as well as taste. In the early eighteenth century, in the writings of philosophers such as Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and (later) Adam Smith, virtue was becoming aestheticized, and aesthetics was becoming a matter of moral concern. Williams describes this phenomenon as the significant association of taste with the notions of “rules” and “manners,”⁴⁰ and Addison corroborates it, conceding, in almost Marxist terms, that the pleasures of the imagination are not confined to those authors who “are conversant in material Objects [that is, works of art], but are often to be met with among the Polite Masters of Morality, Criticism, and other Speculations abstracted from Matter” (No.421, 4:577). Similarly, in Spectator 93, he mentions “the Exercise of Virtue” as one method by which men may “fill[] up their empty Spaces of Life,” being essentially an “Amusement” like “the reading of useful and entertaining Authors” (1:395-97). Like taste, the moral sense that perceives such “amusements” is essentially passive. It is the “affection” that precedes an action, not the action itself. Hutcheson, the common-sense philosopher who actually coined the term “moral sense,” emphasized that “Every Action, which we apprehend as either morally good or evil, is always suppos'd to flow from some Affection toward rational Agents.”⁴¹ Similarly, Shaftesbury (who preceded Hutcheson as a theorist of both taste and the moral sense) insisted that, even if a moral agent performs “generous, kind, constant, [or] compassionate” actions, unless that agent can make those actions “an object of his affection,” “he has not the character of being virtuous.”⁴² (Without himself using the term, Addison describes something like the moral sense in Spectator 111 as “that secret Satisfaction which [the soul] finds in the Practice of Virtue, and that Uneasiness which follows in it upon the Commission of Vice” [1:457].) Like taste, the moral sense reifies what had been a social relation between human beings: it turns ethics into the “fantastic” (or mythologized) form, not of a thing, but of a passive affection or characteristic.⁴³

Besides being passive, characteristics like taste or the moral sense tend to be private and exclusive. As “secret satisfactions,” they can be known, not by the actions that they produce, but only by the affections (or sentiments) that they engender. It can thus be impossible for an outsider—the person without taste or (less likely) a moral sense—to determine who possesses such characteristics, or to know how to acquire them. Such privacy only encourages the exclusivity that is built into a faculty, like taste, employed in making distinctions between the beautiful (or the good) and the ugly (or evil). As Williams says in Keywords, words like “taste … make little sense unless we are able to contrast their presence with their absence” (281).

For Marxist theorists, reification is another inevitable product of consumer capitalism. Similarly, for Arendt, what she describes as the “substitution of making for acting” occurs when consumer society grows impatient with the unproductivity of public action:

The modern age, in its early concern with tangible products and demonstrable profits or its later obsession with smooth functioning and sociability, was not the first to denounce the idle uselessness of action and speech in particular and of politics in general. Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action—the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors—is almost as old as history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.

(Human Condition 220)

The movement that Arendt is describing here, from “action and speech” to “tangible products” and “sociability,” is what a Marxist might, and what she herself does, call reification (139). The unpredictability inherent in a “plurality of agents,” she says, makes human beings yearn for the solidity, and the stability, of real things. They tend, therefore, to substitute acting for “making,” investing the products of their labor with all the meaning that they tire of demonstrating in themselves. Or they make themselves into a “product,” investing themselves with a characteristic like sociability that, because “habitual,” has no need to be demonstrated.

In aesthetics, the human condition of plurality manifests itself, again, as the obvious difference among, or sheer variety of, tastes.⁴⁴ If taste is to work as a critical standard, how is one to, as Hume asks in “Of the Standard of Taste,” “reconcile … the various sentiments of men” (229)? Addison raises this problem in his series on the imagination:

It may be here worth our while to Examine, how it comes to pass that several Readers, who are all acquainted with the same Language, and know the Meaning of the Words they read, should nevertheless have a different Relish of the same Descriptions. We find one transported with a Passage, which another runs over with Coldness and Indifference, or finding the Representation extremely natural, where another can perceive nothing of Likeness and Conformity.

Addison gives two reasons for this different “relish,” but his second—that different readers affix different ideas to the same words—is less ominous that his first: that the difference proceeds “from the Perfection of Imagination in one more than another” (No. 416, 3:561). It is ominous because it suggests what will be Addison's solution to the problem of plurality: not an attempt to reconcile differences, or to facilitate agreement, but simply to assert that some imaginations, and thus some tastes, are better than others. It signals the increasing exclusivity of a concept that had been at least partly accessible to those classes, and those individuals, willing and able to learn the rules of polite discourse; the reification of an active faculty to a passive attribute or characteristic. Addison's reader proves his or her taste not by “increasing the amount of rational discourse” but simply by taking note of the proper passages. As Arendt predicted, reification turns taste from a thing worth disputing about, or taking action for, in the public sphere, to “a substitute for action,” a private matter of the individual. It consumes beautiful things, but does nothing to preserve them.⁴⁵

The kind of action that Arendt envisions taking on behalf of a standard of taste—action that preserves a cultural moment—does not pretend to be motivated by anything other than a desire for distinction. It, too, depends on exclusivity, but it is an exclusivity that needs to be earned, and continually demonstrated, in the public realm. The kind of contemplation that Addison deems “the perfection of imagination,” however, claims that it is motivated by nothing other than the “pure consciousness” of its own worth: it claims to be “disinterested.” Enlightenment philosophers converged on the concept of disinterestedness as a way to combat the civil philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who assumed that human action is entirely motivated by self-interest. Shaftesbury, for example, countered Hobbes' argument that God could be served “for interest merely” by defining as the proper religious attitude “the disinterested love of God” (2:55). But Shaftesbury soon extended the scope of disinterestedness from religion to ethics, and, as he did so, the concept came to refer less to an action performed from a virtuous (here, purely selfless) motive, and more to the contemplation of virtue itself (Stolnitz 133). In other words, Shaftesbury turned religion and morality into matters, not of rational decision-making and action-taking, but of taste.⁴⁶ Mr. Spectator shows himself to be a follower of Shaftesbury when, very early in the series, he thinks it important to establish his own disinterestedness. “To make up” for his lack of fame and other “trivial Disadvantages,” he declares in Spectator 4, “I have the high Satisfaction of beholding all Nature with an unprejudic'd Eye; and having nothing to do with Mens Passions or Interests, I can with the greater Sagacity consider their Talents, Manners, Failings, and Merits.” But “having nothing to do with men's passions or interests”—being disinterested—it turns out, disqualifies Mr. Spectator from regarding “speech and action,” the very activities that define the public or political actor for Arendt, as anything other than a hindrance. “It is remarkable,” he continues, “that those who want any one Sense, possess the others with greater Force and Vivacity. Thus my want of, or rather Resignation of Speech, gives me all the Advantages of a dumb Man. I have, methinks, a more than ordinary penetration in Seeing” (1:19-20). Mr. Spectator can be a disinterested spectator of human “manners” only because he is speechless, because he refuses to join in the “competition for superiority” that he elsewhere depicts as leading to “virtuous excellence.” If, as Jerome Stolnitz says, philosophers formulated the concept of disinterestedness to signify a practical concern with “choice and action,” it has by the time of the Spectator clearly shifted to refer to a theoretical or perceptual “mode of attention” (Stolnitz 133).

For turning action (or praxis) into attention (or an affection), both Arendt and Eagleton thus want to criticize disinterestedness, in either ethics or aesthetics, as a moral sense or taste. As a materialist, however, Eagleton takes his critique a step further, exposing what he calls the “very concealed problematic” of the disinterested, bourgeois public sphere. Although asserting their disinterestedness (their mere “spectator-ship”) allows Addison, Steele, and their readers to coexist in an “abstract equality,” “it is of course inconceivable,” says Eagleton, “that those without ‘property’—without, in the eighteenth-century sense, an ‘interest’—could participate in this realm. … Only those with an interest can be disinterested” (Function 16). It is “inconceivable” because only those with property have the leisure to learn the rules of polite discourse (the same rules, paradoxically, that show a work of art [or, in the case of the moral sense, a benevolent action] to be wholly “natural” [Bourdieu 55-56]).

It is doubtful, however, that the “problematic” underlying the bourgeois public sphere is as “concealed” as Eagleton thinks it is, especially in Addison and Steele's Spectator papers. It is simply not true, as Eagleton implies, that Addison and Steele do not directly discuss the interests of their class (Function 16): the single most famous essay in the Spectator is Addison's panegyric on the Royal Exchange (No.69), in which what could be conflicting interests are—at least in Addison's vision—happily reconciled. Indeed, Eagleton seems to want to have it both ways: both to blame the problematic of the bourgeois public sphere's “abstract” equality and to ignore when that equality rests on something other than an abstraction; both to praise Addison and Steele for their “energetic collusion with everyday life” (Function 23) and not to notice when they do collude with economic necessity. Even his comment about the fragility of bourgeois respectability implies that what made it so respectable was a certain blindness to its economic underpinnings, as if the moment passed because the class suddenly became aware of the dirt beneath its fingernails. Eagleton is, in short, right to criticize taste for becoming reified and ineffectual (for becoming, in a word, disinterested), but not to question, or rather to ignore, Addison and Steele when they recognize that interest does play a part in their plea for cultural, as well as political, respect.

Arendt has been accused of an unwarranted nostalgia for the Greek polis,⁴⁷ and, like Eagleton, she seems skeptical that a passive and private standard like the second, reified sense of taste can organize a truly “public” sphere. To use her own terms, she clearly prefers taking “action” in order to preserve a cultural moment, and talking about great or good actions within that cultural moment, to filling that cultural moment with “made” things. But, unlike a Marxist, Arendt hesitates to say that human beings lay waste all of their powers in getting and spending. This is the message of the epigraph, from Arendt, to this essay: human actors “disclose” themselves by the material objects that they pursue as well as by the actions that they take and the words that they say. Because it represents an attempt to “escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents,” the world of things will never be as revelatory as the world of words and deeds. But it does reveal something, and interest, as Arendt says, “lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together” (Human Condition 182). Certainly Addison and Steele understood this; indeed, it precisely the point of Addison's essay on the Exchange:

I am wonderfully delighted to see such a Body of Men thriving in their own private Fortunes, and at the same time promoting the Publick Stock. … Nature seems to have taken a particular Care to disseminate her Blessings among the different Regions of the World, with an Eye to this mutual Intercourse and Traffick among Mankind, that the Natives of the several Parts of the Globe might have a kind of Dependence upon one another, and be united together by their common Interest.

(1:294-95)

In a reified world of making rather than acting, our taste for things may be the only “inter-est” (Human Condition 182)—if not the only public sphere—that we have.

Notes

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), 183.

2. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990), 8.

3. Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness,’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (1961):143.

4. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From “The Spectator” to Post-Structuralism (London, 1984), 10, 11. Habermas's original account of the public sphere can be found in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). Since Habermas's work, published in German as his Habilitationsschrift in 1962, has been translated into English, studies and applications of the concept have exploded. Many are collected in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1992).

5. David Stern provides a good overview of the commonplace about taste in “Are Disagreements about Taste Possible? A Discussion of Kant's Antinomy of Taste,” The Iowa Review 21 (Spring/Summer 1991):66-71.

6. Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London, 1980), 46.

7. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York, 1976), 314-15.

8. George Lukàcs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 110.

9. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukàcs to Habermas (Berkeley, 1984), 110.

10. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1985), 241.

11. I take the phrase “rationale of feeling” from Joan Pittock, The Ascendancy of Taste: The Achievement of Joseph and Thomas Warton (London, 1973), 31.

12. Williams defines a “residual” culture as those “experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be verified or expressed in terms of the dominant culture,” but which “are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social formation” (Problems in Materialism and Culture, 40).

13. Habermas mentions Arendt in Structural Transformation, and discusses her work at length in “Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44 (Spring 1977):3-24.

14. In The Human Condition, Arendt uses the Latin name for this “life devoted to public-political matters”: the “vita activa” (12).

15. Arendt contrasts action to the other human activities of “labor” and “work.” Unlike them, action “goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter” (7).

16. If bourgeois society normalizes, that is, the bourgeoisie had to carve out a private realm, in rebellion against the social, to maintain the possibility of distinction. Arendt imputes this rebellion of the private against the social to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the “first articulate explorer and to an extent even theorist of intimacy” (38-39). For the idea that bourgeois society still depends on the public realm for the possibility of excellence, however, see Arendt, 49.

17. The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), 1:20. All quotations from the Spectator are taken from this edition, and are cited in the text by essay number, volume number, and page number.

18. Michael G. Ketcham, Transparent Designs: Reading, Performance, and Form in the “Spectator” Papers (Athens, Ga., 1985), 33. In Spectator 257, for example, Addison asserts that “He … who looks upon the Soul through its outward Actions, often sees it through a deceitful Medium, which is apt to discolour and pervert the Object”; that mere “Outside” is insufficient “to give us a right Notion of each others Perfections” (2:501, 500).

19. C. S. Lewis, “Addison,” in Essays on the Eighteenth Century Presented to David Nichol Smith in Honour of his Seventieth Birthday (Oxford, 1945), 13.

20. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, and Related Pieces, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley, The World's Classics (Oxford, 1986), 25.

21. I use the term “distinction” to describe the aristocratic sense of superiority here in order to invoke Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA., 1984). See also notes 33 and 44.

22. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York, 1961; enlarged edition, 1968), 219.

23. The kind of “disinterestedness” that Arendt identifies in Cicero's cultura animi is not the same as the “pure consciousness of worthy actions” that Addison and Steele's anonymous essayist suggests may be enough to satisfy a “generous mind.” Cicero's cultivated minds still revel in the “distinction” that their actions procure for them. If disinterestedness is understood as the eighteenth century tended to understand it, that is, as an attitude of selflessness (see part 2 of this essay), Cicero's cultivated minds do not have it. What makes these cultivated minds “spectators,” however, is a different, material kind of disinterestedness: they do not want to possess the products of culture, but simply, as I go on to say, give them the chance to survive.

24. Giles Gunn, “The Challenge of the ‘New New Criticism,’” The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York, 1987), 54. Gunn's essay, which discusses Arendt together with John Dewey as twentieth-century philosophers seeking to reanimate taste as a thing worth disputing about, helped to inspire this essay. Because I agree with Arendt that what distinguishes this residual, aristocratic standard of taste is its need to be defended, with reasons, in public, I disagree with some of what Hans-Georg Gadamer says about taste, as a significant term from the humanist tradition, in Truth and Method. Gadamer claims that the traditional (pre-Kantian) sense of taste, while “not private but a social phenomenon of the first order,” “involves no hesitation, no surreptitious glances at others, no searching for reasons” (second, revised edition, trans. rev. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall [London, 1989], 36).

25. Goldsmith, in “An Account of the Augustan Age of England,” in Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1966), asserts that “Towards the end of Queen Anne's reign, some of the greatest men in England, devoted their time to party,” and mentions Addison, Steele, and Tories like Bolingbroke and Swift as examples (1:503-04). Howard D. Weinbrot discusses both “positive views and negative reactions” to Augustus in Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton, 1978).

26. John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984).

27. Thomas Macaulay, “The Life and Writings of Addison,” in Essays on Addison by Johnson, Macaulay and Thackeray with Twelve Essays by Addison, ed. G. E. Hadow (Oxford, 1915), 16-17.

28. R. S. Crane, The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical and Historical (Chicago, 1967), 1:90.

29. Lionel Trilling, preface to Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, The Works of Lionel Trilling (New York, 1965), preface.

30. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca, 1982), 52. Hohendahl's book was one of the first to apply Habermas's concept of the public sphere to the “institution” of literary criticism.

31. I am aware that this conclusion tends to slight the indistinguishability of literary from political value at this time. As John Dryden stated in the preface to “Absalom and Achitophel,” during the Restoration and early eighteenth century, “wit and fool are consequents of Whig and Tory” (John Dryden, ed. Keith Walker, The Oxford Authors [Oxford, 1987], 177).

32. Scholars have long recognized that the pursuit of “politeness” is a major concern in this period, and that the kind of politeness being pursued is that of the aristocracy. For a history of this pursuit, see Lawrence Klein, “The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (Winter 1984/85):186-214.

33. In fact, this “keeping in with it” runs even deeper than Eagleton, in his zeal to find bourgeois class-consolidation in periodicals like the Spectator, suspects. Titus Suck discusses how the taste itself can be construed as an “aristocratic notion” in “Bourgeois Class Position and the Esthetic Representation of Class Interest: The Social Determination of Taste,” MLN 102 (December 1987):1090-1121 (see especially 1100). The “aristocracy of culture” is also one of the main points of Bourdieu's Distinction (11).

34. The phrase is Peter Gay's, from “The Spectator as Actor: Addison in Perspective,” Encounter, December 1967, 29.

35. To be sure, Eagleton and Habermas (in “Communications Concept,” 6), say nearly the same thing. My disagreement is only with their emphasis.

36. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA., 1990), 14. The phrase quoted in the previous sentence is from the introduction by Thomas McCarthy, viii.

37. Lukàcs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” 86.

38. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958; New York, 1983), 41.

39. In Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, a series of essays published together in 1711, Shaftesbury theorized that virtue is the product, not of acting or doing, but of being: of an internal, entirely subjective “moral sense” (see the next paragraph). Although an aristocrat, Shaftesbury anticipated much of Addison and Steele's “bourgeois” cultural project. Indeed, it may be said that Shaftesbury provides Addison and Steele with many of the aristocratic values that they refashion into “bourgeois” standards like taste. See below.

40. This association is most clear in Spectator 447, where Addison, explicating the saying “that Custom is a second Nature,” begins with the instance of physical taste becoming accustomed to “those things which at first created a Disgust in it,” extends the process of habituation to mental activity, and concludes, “If we consider attentively this Property of Human Nature, it may instruct us in very fine Moralities” (4:69-71).

41. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning the Original of our Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good, in British Moralists, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (1897; New York, 1965), 84.

42. Shaftesbury, third earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson, 2 vols. (New York, 1964), 1:253.

43. It should be noted, however, that the Spectator is also full of more traditional ethical discourses. In these, explains Ernest Lee Tuveson in The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (1960; New York, 1974), moral choice or “conscience, as the etymology of the word indicates, was envisioned as an act of conscious reasoning and judging” (49), not, as in moral-sense theory, as the perception of a passive affection or characteristic. For example, when an anonymous correspondent responds in Spectator 286 to an earlier essay on “polite Raillery” by a “Francis Courtly” (in No.276), he objects, “I pretend not to inform a Gentleman of so just a Taste whenever he pleases to use it; but it may not be amiss to inform your Reader that there is a false Delicacy as well as a true one. True Delicacy, as I take it, consists in Exactness of Judgment and Dignity of Sentiment” (3:15). Simply put, it is assumed here that what is morally right (or truly delicate) cannot just be passively perceived: it must be actively reasoned and judged.

44. For a recent overview of the eighteenth-century concern with the variability of taste, see Robert L. Montgomery, Terms of Response: Language and Audience in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theory (University Park, Pa., 1992), 89-126.

45. It is possible, I think, to compare what I have called the “characteristic” of taste to what Bourdieu terms a “habitus.” In Distinction, Bourdieu himself calls taste a habitus (56), and defines the term, somewhat confusingly, as “not only a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a structured structure … which organizes the perception of the social world” (170).

46. Tuveson notes that Shaftesbury added “A specific analogy” of the moral sense “with aesthetic impressions” in later editions of his Inquiry Concerning Virtue, and that “this was the version that was known to the eighteenth century” (53).

47. See, for example, the otherwise favorable account of Arendt's contribution to public sphere theory by Seyla Benhabib, “Models of Public Sphere: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,” in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, 73-98, especially pages 74-81.