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.