Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Reading Reynolds with Bentham’: The Idea of the Art School in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 2 ‘Prejudice Aside’: Jeremy Bentham's Moral Economy of Taste
- 3 ‘Directing the Art of the Country’: Henry Cole's Laws of Public Taste
- 4 The End of the Experiment
- 5 Taste Between Ethics and Aesthetics
- 6 The Return of Adam Smith
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - ‘Prejudice Aside’: Jeremy Bentham's Moral Economy of Taste
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Reading Reynolds with Bentham’: The Idea of the Art School in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
- 2 ‘Prejudice Aside’: Jeremy Bentham's Moral Economy of Taste
- 3 ‘Directing the Art of the Country’: Henry Cole's Laws of Public Taste
- 4 The End of the Experiment
- 5 Taste Between Ethics and Aesthetics
- 6 The Return of Adam Smith
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
I have a need, as a rational creature, for aesthetic experience, and for the habits and customs which engender it. No utilitarian calculation can substitute for this experience, which consists in a projection forwards of the acting self.
— Roger Scruton, ‘Modern Philosophy and the Neglect of Aesthetics’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 June 1987By the rationale I mean … a mass of reasons, accompanying, in the shape of a perpetual commentary, the whole mass of imperative or regulative matter.
— Jeremy Bentham, Papers on CodificationThis chapter is a theoretical treatment of two questions that were addressed historically in the previous chapter. The first of these questions is: what is the role of utilitarianism in the development of publicly funded art education in Britain? The second question is: how is the non-specialist to gain entry to the domain of art and taste? In the previous chapter, these questions were referred to George Berkeley's The Querist, as a historical point of origin for the instrumentalist utilitarianism of the Benthamites in the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures. In this chapter, these questions are referred to the distinction between the theological utilitarian rationalism of Berkeley and Bentham's view that all perception is interested perception.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014