The teleology of the aesthetic in the british enlightenment

Abstract

When I began studying aesthetics I never would have thought that I would eventually write my dissertation on the final cause arguments in eighteenth-century British aesthetic theories. I simply never could have imagined that eighteenth-century aesthetics could be so beautifully perplexing, intriguing, and relevant until a seminar on Burke's aesthetics and a course on the eighteenth-century philosophies of taste, both held at the Department of Aesthetics at ELTE by Sándor Radnóti. I am immensely thankful for professor Radnóti for enticing me to study this period and supervising this project from my earliest, half-baked ideas to the last moments. The final form of the dissertation also owes a tremendous debt to the supervision of Endre Szécsényi who first drew my attention to the teleological explanatory structures in eighteenth-century British aesthetics during an inspiring graduate seminar. I am also thankful for the support of my former professors at the Department of Aesthetics at ELTE, especially for Béla Bacsó for our many encouraging discussions and for his relentless determination to help any young scholar who turns to him for instruction. My gratitude also goes to Zoltán Papp and Zsolt Komáromy for reading and commenting on certain parts of this work, to Piroska Balogh and Gergely Fórizs for convincing me to look into the anthropological aesthetics of eighteenth-century Central Europe, and to Tamás Seregi for making me think about what aesthetics is and what it could be.I could have never pursued this research without my parents' selfless support, tireless patience, and unbroken confidence in me throughout these years. This dissertation, in several ways, is the result of their work as well. My special thanks also go to my sister and to my extended family, to István and Dániel Gorove in particular, for recovering one file that I thought to have been lost for good.But most importantly, this dissertation could have never been finished without the help and encouragement of my amazing wife, Eszter, whose love kept me going even when I thought I had no more strength left in me. And finally, I would like to apologise to my son, Ábner, for sacrificing many of our precious playtimes for getting on with this work, and to thank him for the prodigious motivation his love and cheerfulness gave me all along.But what remains of "the Enlightenment" if, in the absence of an overarching intellectual or cultural framework, we must make do with a broad definition, which can accommodate the contradictory ideas (and various religious beliefs) that emerged and clashed from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, while we can study only its particular manifestations? Opposing both a borderless Enlightenment and dissolving the Enlightenment into various enlightenments altogether, authors like Jonathan Israel or John Robertson have recently tried to restore the unity of the Enlightenment. 17 Their unity is, however, a unity amidst variety. Israel famously differentiated between a Radical and a Moderate Enlightenment, ...