Joseph Addison and the Pleasures of Sharawadgi

Abstract

Joseph Addison characterizes aesthetic experience in his "Pleasures of the Imagination" (1712) as immediate, pre-cognitive, and largely unconditioned. That characterization requires him to present something that precludes direct description, something primitive, prior to any defined temporal alteration. To define what cannot otherwise be presented, Addison cites Chinese taste in wild landscape--an exotic figure whose difference Addison tropes, turning it to remark a limit of another order, namely a subjective one. If one would expect European aesthetics to be self-contained, Addison makes clear how it requires the exotic to found itself.