Enlightenment Unrefined: Bentham’s realism and the analysis of Beauty

This chapter was included in the open-access book 'Bentham and the Arts' (UCL Press 2020), edited by Quinn with Anthony Julius, Professor of Law and the Arts at UCL, and Professor Philip Schofield, Director of the Bentham Project, Faculty of Laws, UCL, and General Editor of the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. In his chapter, Quinn shows how Bentham’s criticisms of Claude Adrien Helvétius, Joseph Addison, and David Hume, along with the analysis of taste and predilection in his manuscripts on sexuality, offer a thorough critique of those forms of practical aesthetics that advocated realism about the connections between beauty and human desire and emphasized the cultural power of the ordinary observer. Quinn argues that Bentham was someone who saw that a typically bourgeois, practical, empirical, and experimental approach to the analysis of beauty, would become mired in contradictions if it attempted to impose social norms that could separate the beautiful from the ugly.

'Bentham and the Arts' was developed from a seminar series at UCL Faculty of Laws. Bentham and the Arts considers the sceptical challenge presented by Bentham’s hedonistic utilitarianism to the existence of the aesthetic. Each contributor considered the implications for their research area of the views contained in Bentham’s Of Sexual Irregularities, and other writings on Sexual Morality (published in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham in 2014) and ‘Not Paul, but Jesus: Volume III’ (published online by Bentham Project in 2014). In these essays, Bentham puts forward the first philosophical defence of sexual liberty and questions the meaning of ‘taste’ and hence the received understanding of aesthetics more generally.