Introduction to "The Pleasures of the Imagination" by Joseph Addison.

An approach to the contents of the work of Joseph Addison.

 This article is  related to the following theme: aesthetics and theory of art in the 18th century;. I is focused mainly on the work of Joseph Addison entitled: "The pleasures of the imagination", published in the year 1712.  The importance of  of a  review of the said author on issues  that are related to the aesthetics and theory of art of a particular century, lies in the fact that it is a watershed in the so-called consolidation of the influential "British aesthetics" and the period of the "romanticism".

It is worth noting  that according to the biography of this illustrious character, Addison was born in a place called Milston, which is located in South London. He was born in the year of 1672; and he was among other things, a literary critic, essayist, poet, playwright and politician. This  intellectual versatility allowed him to make great contributions to aesthetic thought and other topics.

Among his various works of his intellectual work,  he began to collaborate in a publication that became successful: "The Tatler", later he began, in the year 1711, to collaborate in the publication called: "The Spectator"; where he would have the opportunity to publish this essay Said essay: “The pleasures of the imagination”, was published in the year 1712 precisely in the publication “The Spectator”, in number 461. Since its publication, it has had great reception and acceptance for its approaches to aesthetics.

 What does Addison mean by the idea of ​​“imaginative pleasure”?

Reviewing the author's own essay, the following idea is worth quoting: "I understand the pleasures that visible objects give us whether we currently have them in sight, whether their ideas are excited by means of paintings, of statues, descriptions, or other similar. And of course from there we can reflect.” Addison understood as pleasure, that which came, let's say hermeneutically, from the sense of sight.; noting in it a strong influence by the ideas of the philosophers of his time who addressed the subject of the theory of knowledge; and in particular, on the work of Locke.

The author categorically classified pleasures into two classes; first,in it all those sensations that provide the objects themselves that have as an essential element, that we have present, are manifested.  Here is the influence of Locke. Meanwhile, secondary pleasures are, according to him, those sensations that come in a particular way, from images and ideas from memories or evocations. Here is an influence from Berkeley, although the adaptation to the subject of study is more direct from Locke. Regarding this last idea, it is necessary to point out that the conditioning factor is that the memories or visions are faithfully the product of an observation of something tangible, be it a painting, a sculpture or something similar. It is not considered something that is a product of our aesthetic creativity.

 

Addison and the sublime

 

Although Dennis was perhaps the most original theorist of the sublime in the first half of the eighteenth century, Joseph Addison had far more influence upon his contemporaries. In his essay published by the Spectator (1712), Addison defines his notion of greatness, lists the usual sources of natural sublimity, and explains the psychological mechanism of the aesthetic reaction to sublimity:

 

“By greatness I do not only mean the bulk of any single object but the largeness of a whole view considered as one entire piece. Such are the prospects of an open champaign country, a vast uncultivated desert, of huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices, or a wide expanse of waters, where we are not struck with the novelty or beauty of the sight but with that rude kind of magnificence which appears in many of these stupendous works of nature. Our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them.!”

Addison here makes several points that continued to be important in later writings on the sublime. First, he states that in some way the sublime requires a unified magnificence. Second, he cites the usual mountains, deserts, and seas as the most sublime parts of external nature. And, lastly, he analyzes the sublime reaction or effect in terms of a pleasure caused by attempting to fill the mind by "too big" an object. Johnson, Gerard, and Burke, among others, provide similar though often more detailed examinations of the sublime effect.

 

Dr. Johnson, for example, remarked in his "Life of Cowley" that the sublime was not within reach of the metaphysical poets, "for they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration." Neither Johnson nor Addison (who described feelings of "pleasing astonishment") believed, like Dennis, that sublimity created feelings of terror and horror in the observer. Most writers on the sublime before Burke agreed that the pleasant feelings of awe, delight, and admiration were the result of contemplating mountain ranges, vast seas, and the other usual examples of natural sublimity.

 

Barbarism

 Barbarian, for a Greek of the classical period, was anyone who stammered. In fact, a "barbarian" was someone who did not speak Greek  correctly, or who did not speak it at all, and whose tongue rang in Hellenic ears like a clumsy, dissonant childish babble, like a bar-bar inadequate in relation to the thing named and, for that reason, as an incomprehensible mode of expression.

Babbling, in effect, means speaking with difficulty, eliminating sounds or changing their order, as children usually do. For this very reason, barbarism is a typically infantile characteristic. Isocrates said that a barbarian is not a foreigner in the sense that he belongs to another nation, but someone for whom education turns out to be strange, alien, so he lacks it, regardless of his place of origin. The barbarian finds himself, then, in a childish condition: between the wild and civilization. And, like all infants, he is, in Freud's words, "perverse and polymorphous." Perverse, for being an instinctive transgressor of the determinations of his Ethos, of his civility, because of his ignorance. Polymorphous, because in him there is not yet a "dominant drive", a clear and defined orientation of his desires or desires, capable of providing him with the degree of satisfaction appropriate to a healthy state of maturity.

 

In the history of humanity there have existed, still exist and without a doubt will continue to exist, perverse and polymorphous peoples, peoples, to put it once and for all, childish and, therefore, tendentially barbaric. Towns of infantile symbology, affected by the babbling of those who, club in hand and confusing freedom with debauchery, exercise the function of their parents or representatives. Peoples, in short, of primary colors and lullabies, whose infants prowl, polymorphically, between phallic signs and marches of closed –suspicious– circularity, always accompanied by the “eternal return” Everything depends on the degree of development that their cultural formation, their Bildung, can achieve. The first step has to be the definitive overcoming of populism. Because populism feeds on barbarism and, in turn, feeds barbarism. Again, it is a question of simple circularity, incessant, recurring. To the extent that a society assumes this barbaric condition, it becomes fascist, given the veneration of fascism for perversion and polymorphism, terms that, by the way, characterize it. It is, this time, a sort of Peter Pan complex, with which an attempt is made to deny the objective need to grow and develop, in order to achieve maturity.

 

Between 1803 and 1806, while in Jena – a town besieged and about to be invaded by the Napoleonic army – Hegel wrote in a notebook: “The freedom of the uneducated mass becomes misery and degradation. Not because the churches, the streets of pilgrims, the tombs of supplicants are empty of faithful. It is because, with it, there is a worsening of customs, an evil joy at the impoverishment of the envied rich; defamation, lack of fidelity and gratitude. The ruined economy, the debauchery of all misery, the most petty and destitute selfishness. With a lack of agriculture, with the ruin of the forests, with the decline of industry. And yet, in the midst of luxury.” An education –precisely, a cultural training– of poor quality ends in a poorly educated people, and a poorly educated people ends up in an “uneducated mass”, prey to barbarism, perverse and polymorphous. It is not about having gone to vote or not. Nor is it about the account of the voting records that "have not yet reached us." Nor is it the clumsy Byzantinism of someone who tries to differentiate between a plebiscite and a referendum, or between a fraud and a trap , or who finds abstention to be the primary cause of defeat. The real, absolutely concrete problem does not lie in the effects but in the causes: it lies in the urgent need to focus on the construction of a solid and mature civil society, educated, with ideas and values, mature enough and capable of overcoming itself, that is, to get out of spiritual poverty, overcoming the childish traps of easy populism.

 

Fairness without quality is, by definition, fraudulent. And it is precisely from there that the remarks made by Hegel derive. An effectively equitable society does not equalize the citizens “below”. Beyond the means, the goal consists in fighting for the conquest of a higher level, of an increasingly demanding quality of life, capable of propitiating the realization of civility in the face of barbarism, if one wants to conquer an authentic republic of worthy and free citizens. Demagogy is, in itself, a state of corruption. Populism and demagoguery tend to feed false expectations and create fictions that end in the worst disappointments. No matter what inclination one professes: there is a perversion and a polymorphism in every possible form of populism and demagoguery. Under the guise of adults, they are still children who lie to children and end up lying to themselves. Children who do not grow up, who do not make the immanent effort to improve themselves, will never be able to arrive on time for the banquet of civilization, freedom and progress. It's time to break the vicious circle, put an end to the bar-bar. Without an authentic educational and cultural policy, every society, regardless of the greater natural wealth it may have, will continue to be a society of ill-mannered children, of small barbarians, of potential tyrants.

Reading Michel Onfray

Reading of Michel Onfray in Theory of a body in love with a solar erotic

Michel Onfray in the preface of the book: “It deals with showing the fragility of the human habit, the concern is, in any case, already pronounced by Nietzsche in the discourse of the "Eternal Return", at that time, a neurotic Nietzsche found no more form happy to talk about this circular reaction, than the one expressed by Onfray on this occasion: The happy voluptuousness of joyful libidos.”

 

Extracted from the famous philosopher Michel Onfray, the following reading contains a lighter idea - than the one already expressed by the German - of the need for the concept of Eternal Return.

 

“At the beginning, the murmurs of the amniotic fluid are heard. In those moments, my little body is swimming in warm waters, moving with the slowness of a soul propelled by very light breaths. The meat rotates slowly in the aquatic element like a planet that evolves in a distant cosmos, almost immobile, or like a flaccid jellyfish in the darkness of the underwater depths, almost hieratic. It is only disturbed by the mark that traces in my organs the flow of vital energies. In the confinement of this salty universe, as a fish of origins or an incarnate marine virtue, I fully obey my mother's affections, impulses, emotions and other instincts. Her blood, her breath, her rhythm compel my blood, my rhythm, my breath. truism evidence; all bodies, male and female, proceed from this primitive immersion in a woman's womb. Hypothesis; all bodies, masculine and feminine, aspire according to a principle of confused modalities to reunions with these primitive voluptuousness, to those moments in which life emerges, and exclusively the force of vital powers triumphs. I feel the pressure of the interior of the maternal flesh against my back, my kidneys, my neck, my buttocks of a child carried and suspended in the water; I have memory of the limbo in my fiber informed by the lymph, the nerves, the muscles; there are red, pink, orange cameo lights, similar to the fires of planetary hatchings or the bonfires of stellar explosions; there are volatile perfumes and infinitesimal fragrances, inscribed in the placental matter like those maritime odors that happily abyss the air and ether of coastal geographies; rumbling, low, repeated, sweet, thick purrs of very low frequency are heard; there are external sounds and internal movements, there is the surge of maternal physiology and the murmur of the world: I close my eyelids, I hesitate with extreme slowness, I modify my posture -and I know my first erection-. It is the beginning of a long history developed under the sign of the eternal return. “

In Preface of Theory of the body in love with a solar erotic.

 

Science and Religion

Science and Religion have something in common: when they get to the bottom of what is real, they find the mystery, that which we do not know and questions and excites us

 

How does a scientist see Religion?

 

The surveys carried out, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, show that, among scientists, 40% define themselves as believers, another 40% as atheists and 20% as agnostics, with hardly any variations for a century. This is so because the existence, or nonexistence, of God cannot be proven by an experiment in a laboratory. The question about the meaning of our life does not have a scientific answer. Philosophy and Religion try to give an answer. Basically, it is the life experience of each man that opens you or not to the mystery of God”.

 

Is religious belief and scientific knowledge compatible in the same person?

 

 

For 40% of scientists, yes. Since beliefs are not scientifically proven, what is interesting is to know the reasons that move believers, atheists and agnostics to define themselves as such. Knowing the reasons and motivations of those who do not think the same as one, makes us think and enriches us. Even throughout life, our ideas and beliefs evolve and can change. This is seen in this course by following the biography of some of those great scientists

 

 

Can Science prove the non-existence of religious explanations?

 

No. Science moves in the field of the study of that part of reality that is verifiable. Religion moves in the realm of the meaning of our lives, which is an experience, in part, communicable. They are two independent spheres that can question each other, dialogue and, for some scientists, integrate. However, Science and Religion have something in common: when they get to the bottom of what is real, they find the mystery, that which we do not know and that challenges and excites us.

 

Albert Einstein expressed it like this: “Mystery is the most beautiful thing that we are given to feel. It is the fundamental sensation, the cradle of true art and science. Who does not know her, who cannot be amazed or amazed, is dead. This experience of the mystery is also at the origin of religion.”