English Literature (Jun 2015)
The Spectator, Aesthetic Experience and the Modern Idea of Happiness
Abstract
Focusing on Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator papers, this essay links modern ideas of happiness to the emergence of aesthetic theory in early eighteenth-century Britain. It argues that Addison and his contemporaries understood aesthetics foremost as a means of enriching life through sharpening our sensory experience of the world, especially the world of nature. The «happiness» that attends this experience, as they describe it, is a heightened sense of feeling alive, of connecting to the providential order, and being part of a common universe of existing things.
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