Wit and The Spectator's Ethics of Desire

An ethical analysis is particularly apt for explaining sites of contested values. The Spectator papers demonstrate the term "wit" to be such a site, revealing rather than resolving the various cultural demands, energies, and desires attached to language in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In his extended series on wit, Joseph Addison fuses politics, epistemology, and aesthetics in the value-laden discourse that is the tool as well as the product of internalized regulation, but as he does so he also reveals the power and appeal of the habits of mind and language he is attempting to discredit and replace.