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Bentham and the Arts – Edited by Anthony Julius, Malcolm Quinn and Philip Schofield

BENTHAM AND THE ARTS

Chapter 8

Enlightenment unrefined: Bentham’s  realism and the analysis of beauty

Malcolm Quinn

Introduction

Jeremy Bentham was born at a time when the civil discourse on aesthetics and taste in Britain had begun to shift from the idea of beauty as a harmonious order that is perceived by an ‘inner sense’ of taste towards a more practical aesthetics appropriate to commercial society.

These practical aesthetics exchanged fixed rules of art and taste for an analytical power that was attributed to the ‘verdicts of sentiment’ of critics of taste. Definitions of beauty began to focus on the possibility of achieving an unbiased and objective analysis of pleasurable sentiments.1

Bentham’s challenge to aesthetics, which was aligned with his utilitarian ethics, was to reject both rules of taste and the powers of judgment according to the person of taste and replace them with a predilection or disposition towards pleasure. For Bentham, pleasure is what explains human behaviour, not what needs to be explained.

This approach took no account of critical judgments on what was ugly and what was beautiful, of the kind that could be used to construct general ‘agreements on the agreeable’.

This makes Bentham difficult to include in narratives of British aesthetics – in Timothy M. Costelloe’s survey of British aesthetics ‘from Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein’, Bentham only rates a couple of mentions as the background to a discussion of the aesthetics of John Stuart Mill.2 We are more familiar, however, with attacks on Bentham’s hedonic utilitarianism as a form of cultural barbarism, ranging from criticism by Thomas