Notes
no t e s introduction 1. Mary Douglas, Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good Taste (London : Sage, 1996), 50. 2. The sociologist Hebert Gans, for example, proposed the idea of coexisting “taste cultures and publics” within a society, an idea that denies the previous distinction between high and low culture by refusing to make judgments about which culture is superior and which is inferior. Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (1974; New York: Basic Books, 1999). 3. Luc Ferry, Homo aestheticus: L’invention du goût à l’âge classique (Paris : Grasset, 1990). 4. The word aesthetic allegedly appears for the first time in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus (Magdeburg: Grunerti, 1735) and then as the title of his work Aesthetica in 1750. In an article entitled “L’Esthétique: Problèmes de définition ,” Baldine Saint Girons helpfully explains the origin of the neologism aesthetics and its divergent meanings in eighteenth-century German philosophy . She begins by exposing the problem that has created some confusion among students of aesthetics: “From the beginning, aesthetics is marked by ambiguity: is it the science of knowledge through the senses . . . , the science of the beautiful . . . , or the science of art?” [“D’emblée, l’esthétique est marquée d’équivoques: est-ce la science de la connaissance sensible . . . , la science du beau . . . ou la science de l’art?”] Baldine Saint Girons, “L’Esthétique : Problèmes de définition,” L’Esthétique naît-elle au XVIIIe siècle? ed. Serge Trottein (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 83. The first meaning, related to perception, plays an important role in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, while the second meaning—the science of the beautiful—concerns his Critique of Judgment. Aesthetics as the judgment of art, the third definition, was more relevant to Hegel, for example, than it was to Kant. Saint Girons mentions that the French word esthétique appears for the Notes to Introduction 190 first time in the supplement to the Encyclopédie in 1776 and then is forgotten , only to reappear in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, for practical purposes, I will use the term aesthetic to refer to the judgment of beauty and of art in eighteenth-century French texts. 5. Luc Ferry and several other scholars have speculated about the first metaphorical use of the word taste, that is, not in the sense of how food tastes to the tongue but as the more abstract judgment of beauty or of artistic productions. While no definitive answer has been agreed on, Ferry states that the works of the seventeenth-century Spanish author Baltasar Gracián were instrumental in coining the term gusto (or taste) to refer to the critical faculty. See Ferry, 26–27. 6. “L’autonomisation du champ intellectuel et artistique a constitué la condition permettant de penser l’ordre esthétique proprement dit, et donc favorisé l’émergence de l’esthétique moderne.” Annie Becq, La Genèse de l’esthétique française moderne, 1680–1814 (Pisa: Pacini, 1984; Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 25. 7. Geoffrey Turnovsky, The Literary Market: Authorship and Modernity in the Old Regime (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 8. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 36. 9. Joan DeJean, in Ancients Against Moderns, objects to Habermas’s views because, she asserts, the “public use of reason” did not begin in eighteenth -century coffeehouses but earlier in salons and in the pages of the Mercure galant. She claims that the various seventeenth-century querelles challenge Habermas’s idea of the “monopoly of interpretation” under Louis XIV. Joan DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 10. Habermas, 40. 11. Ibid., 41. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 37. 15. Charles Batteux, A Course of the Belles Lettres: Or the Principles of Literature (London: Printed for B. Law and Co., T. Caslon, J. Coote, S. Hooper, G. Kearsly, and A. Morley, 1761), 68. “Il ne peut y avoir en général qu’un seul bon goût . . . et tous ceux qui ne l’approuvent point, ont nécessairement le goût mauvais.” Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-arts réduits à un meme principe (Paris: Durand, 1746), 102. 16. Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, Conn...
OR
