Involuntary Motion and the Origins of Aesthetic Experience, 1700-1750

It used to be widely accepted that the eighteenth-century emergence of the 'aesthetic' as a category of experience and philosophical inquiry depended on an explicit denial of the pleasures, pains, and functions of the body. In recent years, however, scholars have become increasingly interested in how medicine and theories of matter shaped the development of art criticism and philosophical aesthetics. In this paper, I argue that changing ideas about the body's involuntary functions - along with their pathologies and therapies - had a crucial role in the development of aesthetics and art theory in Britain during the first half of the 18th century. Drawing on a wide range of sources concerning the imperceptible motions of plant and animal bodies, I show how debates about the the body's involuntary responses to the world outside it shaped claims about what we now call aesthetic experience - the experience of beauty and sublimity. This paper will do more than simply show that art theorists such as Jonathan Richardson and William Hogarth responded to philosophical and medical attempts to describe and control the body’s involuntary motions. Rather, it will seek to demonstrate that a concern about involuntary motion was a central theme in 18th century thought, animating a range of interconnected discourses and practices concerned with the mind's non-cognitive or affective responses to sensory experience. Those ranged from debates about the how invisible attractive forces shaped the temperaments to questions about the forms of experience arising from mysterious, involuntary vibrations taking place inside the body.