Table Of ContentImitation and Society
L i t e r a t u r e a n d P h i l o s o p h y
A. J. Cascardi, General Editor
This series publishes books in a wide range of subjects in philosophy and literature, including
studies of the social and historical issues that relate these two Welds. Drawing on the resources
of the Anglo-American and Continental traditions, the series is open to philosophically
informed scholarship covering the entire range of contemporary critical thought.
Already published:
J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno
Peter Bürger, The Decline of Modernism
Mary E. Finn, Writing the Incommensurable: Kierkegaard, Rossetti, and Hopkins
Reed Way Dasenbrock, ed., Literary Theory After Davidson
David Haney, William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation
David Jacobson, Emerson’s Pragmatic Vision: The Dance of the Eye
Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Narcissus Transformed: The Textual Subject in Psychoanalysis and
Literature
Robert Steiner, Toward a Grammar of Abstraction: Modernity, Wittgenstein, and the Paintings of
Jackson Pollock
Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics
Michel Meyer, Rhetoric, Language, and Reason
Christie McDonald and Gary Wihl, eds., Transformation in Personhood and Culture After Theory
Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of
Modernism
John C. O’Neal, The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment
John O’Neill, ed., Freud and the Passions
Sheridan Hough, Nietzsche’s Noontide Friend: The Self as Metaphoric Double
E. M. Dadlez, What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions
Hugh Roberts, Shelley and the Chaos of History: A New Politics of Poetry
Charles Altieri, Postmodernisms Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts
Arabella Lyon, Intentions: Negotiated, Contested, and Ignored
Jill Gordon, Turning Toward Philosophy: Literary Device and Dramatic Structure in Plato’s Dialogues
Michel Meyer, Philosophy and the Passions: Toward a History of Human Nature. Translated by
Robert F. Barsky
Reed Way Dasenbrock, Truth and Consequences: Intentions, Conventions, and the New Thematics
David P. Haney,The Challenge of Coleridge: Ethics and Interpretation in Romanticism and Modern
Philosophy
Alan Singer, Aesthetic Reason: Artworks and the Deliberative Ethos
Imitation and Society
The Persistence of Mimesis in the Aesthetics
of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant
Tom Huhn
The Pennsylvania State University Press
University Park, Pennsylvania
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Huhn, Tom.
Imitation and society : the persistence of mimesis
in the aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant / Tom Huhn.
p. cm. —(Literature and philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-271-02468-2(alk. paper)
1. Aesthetics—Social aspects—History—18th century.
2. Judgment (Aesthetics)—Social aspects—History—18th century.
3. Mimesis in art—History.
4. Burke, Edmund, 1729–1797. Philosophical enquiry into the origin
of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful.
5. Hogarth, William, 1697–1764. Analysis of Beauty.
6. Kant, Immanuel, 1724–1804. Kritik der Urteilskraft.
I. Title.
II. Series.
BH181 .H75 2004
111´.85—dc22
2004007094
Copyright © 2004The Pennsylvania State University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press,
University Park, PA 16802-1003
The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American
University Presses.
It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper.
Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Burke and the Ambitions of Taste 15
Prologue 15
I. Introducing Taste 17
II. Delight, or the Labor Theory of Pleasure 27
III. Sensation and Sensibility 34
IV. Shaftesbury and the “Charm of Confederation” 38
V. Sympathy 45
VI. Ambition 49
VII. Spectatorship 57
2 Hogarth and the Lineage of Taste 65
Prologue 65
I. The Epistemology of Lines 68
II. The Eye for Pleasure 74
III. Dance and the Movement from Vision to Imagination 81
IV. Eye and Mind 90
3 Kant and the Pleasures of Taste 103
Prologue 103
I. Activating Sensibility 105
II. Determining ReXective Judgment 115
III. Phantom Sensations and Mistaken Subjects 123
IV. Representative Pleasures 134
V. Opaque Pleasures 139
Conclusion 151
Notes 157
Bibliography 193
Index 211
For Lucia
Acknowledgments
I want to thank some of the many people whose advice and conversation have
helped me better understand and explain the ideas I try to trace in this book:
Jay Bernstein, Natalie Brender, Tony Cascardi, Peter Fenves, Frances Ferguson,
Lydia Goehr, Noah Isenberg, Martin Jay, Mary-Hannah Jones, Rob Kaufman,
Sean McCann, Ronald Paulson, Jeffrey Schiff, David Schorr, Gay Smith, Dabney
Townsend, Betsy Traub, and David Weisberg. So too must I thank Herbert
Arnold, Ethan Kleinberg, Howard Needler, Laurie Nussdorfer, Frank Reeve,
Paul Schwaber, and the late Hope Weissman, all former colleagues in the College
of Letters at Wesleyan University, who provided a congenial, supportive, and
stimulating place to teach and work. And I was fortunate that Sara Richlin spent
countless hours correcting errors and infelicities in the manuscript. My wife
Nancy Steele should know that this book would not have been possible without
her, especially her love and relentless good cheer. I thank my daughter Lucia for
her occasional patience and her mimetic sense of humor: Yes, now we can play.
I am grateful Wnally for the constancy, pleasure, and example of four inimit-
able friends: Tim Dansdill, Gregg Horowitz, Bob Hullot-Kentor, and Jim Zoccoli.
An abbreviated version of Chapter 1appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies 35,
no. 3(2002).
Introduction
Mimesis is a notoriously difWcult term to bring under review. Some of the best
known and perhaps most successful approaches are at best obliquely aimed. Con-
sider Wrst that the most renowned book on the topic, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis:
The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,famously declines to encounter the
word at all.1Auerbach instead allows the subtitle of his inXuential treatment of
scenes from Western literature to stand as his fullest explication of the term. The
meaning of mimesis for Auerbach is inseparable from the accumulation of the
interpretations that occur in each of the book’s twenty chapters. That is, Auerbach
cannot identify a comprehensive, uniWed theory of mimesis because mimesis is
simply the abbreviated term for the fact that literature is itself already the inter-
pretation—by means of representation—of human reality. Auerbach’s Mimesis
thus unfolds as a survey of the various methods, or styles, of interpretation.
Mimesisexhibits no inclination to address a theory of mimesis if it is assumed
that such a theory would arise from inquiry as to why, in the Wrst place, mimesis
exists at all. And yet we might want to ask why Auerbach nevertheless titles the
book Mimesis. In the book’s epilogue he provides a telling clue as he describes
the origin of his subject: “My original starting point was Plato’s discussion in
book 10 of the Republic—mimesis ranking third after truth—in conjunction
with Dante’s assertion that in the Commediahe presented true reality” (Auerbach,
Mimesis, 554). That Auerbach conjoins Dante’s claim with Plato’s infamous
denigration of mimesis suggests that Auerbach might well agree with at least
one aspect of Plato’s complaint. Though Plato’s placement of mimesis at the far-
thest possible remove from truth is usually taken to imply an indictment of imi-
tation and representation, Auerbach may instead be recognizing that in Plato’s
depiction mimesis nonetheless retains some relation to truth and reality. I sus-
pect that Auerbach uses the term “mimesis” to represent the emphatic relation
between literature and reality, or, if you like, between representation and experi-
ence. It is fair to conclude then that Auerbach’s method is itself mimetic of his
own conviction regarding the inseparability of literary representation and the
