Introduction

When David Hume writes, in Book 2 of his Treatise of Human Nature, that “beauty is nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts, which conveys pain,” it may seem as though form is already fixed in place as a concept around which aesthetic theory revolves....

“A Rough Unsightly Sketch”

This chapter surveys the manifestations of empiricist antiformalism in some early texts that ground the tradition of eighteenth-century thought on the subjects of taste and beauty, beginning with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke argues for an attenuated version of form, one that eschews any trappings of scholastic or Platonic philosophy. After Locke, form cannot name anything related to substance or essence; Locke endorses its use only as a synonym for figure, that is, shape or pattern, extension in space or duration in time. Drawing on Locke's Essay, both Joseph Addison and Francis Hutcheson theorize beauty as a secondary quality that emanates from an object, distinct from form, which they understand as a primary quality residing in that object.

Making Art in the Third Critique

This chapter inquires into the fate of artistic practice in the text responsible for making form central to the theorization of aesthetics: Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. When Kant turns his attention to art, it appears as a special case, not fully within the purview of his theory of aesthetic judgment. How might Hogarth’s practitioner-centered aesthetic theory, in The Analysis of Beauty, inform an interpretation of Kant’s Third Critique? Kant, like Hogarth before him, connects the pleasure in aesthetic judgment with the cognitive activity of formal abstraction. Thinking like an artist means exercising the perceptual capacity for formal abstraction. In Kant’s theory as well as Hogarth’s, the artist can be understood as she who models free play as a practice that can be cultivated by means of this perceptual exercise.