ALISON, ARCHIBALD
(1757–1839)

Archibald Alison was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated at Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford. He was ordained in the Church of England and held positions in both England and Scotland. He married a daughter of John Gregory (1724–1773), who was a professor of philosophy and medicine at Aberdeen and an associate of Thomas Reid in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society. Alison preached at the Cowgate Chapel in Edinburgh from 1800 until his death. He published a volume of sermons, but is known primarily for his "Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste," published in 1790 and reissued in 1810.

Alison's theory of taste breaks with earlier eighteenth-century theories in several respects while retaining other characteristic features. Like his predecessors, Alison regards beauty and sublimity as essentially emotional, hedonic experiences. Beauty is a form of pleasure, and as such it is found not in objects but in the mind. He accepts a faculty psychology that is essentially associative, and he regards what he is doing as a scientific investigation of the principles of human nature. In addition, Alison is the first theorist to clearly separate what he calls the emotions of taste—beauty, sublimity, and so on—from other kinds of pleasure. Although earlier theories speak of the pleasures of the imagination as special pleasures and sometimes suggest distinctions from other pleasures, it is Alison who first clearly appeals to a separate aesthetic pleasure that in his words is distinct from "every other emotion of pleasure" (1790/1999, p. 407).

Alison also argues that the ideas required to produce the emotions of taste must be complex. A simple idea, such as that of a color, which may be pleasant in itself, is only felt as beautiful when it enters into an associative complex. Thus, he rejects both the view that taste is an effect of an internal sense and the view that some single principle, such as relation, utility, or order and design, produces the emotions of taste. Alison believes that the emotion he seeks to describe is very much a product of an active mind. So he distinguishes two elements in complex emotions such as beauty. One is a simple idea and its accompanying emotion. Almost any simple emotion will do, including painful as well as pleasurable emotions. But the complex emotion of taste only appears when the simple emotion is acted on by the faculty of the imagination to produce "a consequent excitement. … The peculiar pleasure of the beautiful or the sublime is only felt when these two effects are conjoined, and the complex emotion produced" (1790/1999, p. 408).

Alison's theory of the imagination moves away from the earlier eighteenth-century theories of imagination according to which imagination is essentially a faculty that recombines preexisting ideas into new, artificial images—for example, a centaur is a combination of the ideas of horse and man. Alison still thinks of imagination as producing new ideas, but his emphasis is on its ability to detect resemblances, "trains of imagery" (1790/1999, p. 412), and expressive signs. So the faculty of imagination is essentially an active, associative faculty and the peculiar pleasure that it produces arises from the activity of the mind itself.

Alison draws a conclusion, which parallels Immanuel Kant's theories in many respects, that for the imagination to do its work it must be "free and unembarrassed" (1790/1999, p. 412)—that is, disinterested—"so little occupied by any private or particular object of thought, as to leave us open to all the impressions which the objects that are before us can produce" (p. 412). Whereas the earlier theories that suggest the need for disinterestedness understand it as a negative condition—a condition of good taste (Third Earl of Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper]) or an avoidance of prejudice (David Hume) and thus a part of a theory of criticism, Alison treats it as a condition of experience. It is what allows the imagination to form the associations that are a necessary condition for the production of the complex emotion of beauty or sublimity. Alison goes so far as to describe a kind of free play of the imagination, which is opposed to attention. For Alison, however, these are competing mental habits and not Kantian epistemological principles.

Alison does draw the conclusion, common to some twentieth-century aesthetic attitude theories, that criticism is incompatible with the emotion of taste. Thus, taste ceases to be a form of critical judgment. He acknowledges that an active imagination does not necessarily produce good taste—the young are undiscriminating, for example—but he does not seem to recognize that on his theory taste has ceased to be what it had been since the Renaissance formation of the idea—a form of judgment with social implications.

Instead, Alison develops two essentially romantic theses: "matter is not beautiful in itself, but derives its beauty from the expression of mind" (1790/1999, p. 417) and the qualities of matter that are productive of beauty or sublimity are either themselves immediately expressive of mental qualities or powers—for example, the activity of creation in the arts or of the divine creator in nature; or they are signs of mental qualities—for example, the tone of voice. So Alison's theory combines three elements: imagination, association, and expression. He concludes, "[T]he beauty and sublimity which is felt in the various appearances of matter, are finally to be ascribed to their expression of mind; or to their being, either directly or indirectly, the signs of those qualities of mind which are fitted, by the constitution of our nature, to affect us with pleasing or interesting emotion" (p. 419).

Alison anticipates Kant and many of the features of romantic and twentieth-century aesthetics, therefore, without completely abandoning the tradition of theories of taste with which he is most closely associated—particularly those of Alexander Gerard and Reid. Although there are extensive references to the fine arts, Alison's theory of the arts remains a theory of imitation, not a theory of artistic creation or genius. Natural beauty provides the paradigm for beauty in the arts. The only creative mind is the divine mind; artists can only discover beauty, not create it. At the same time, however, imagination and expression are given a new scope. They are the necessary faculties for an artist. Artistic imitation is an active, not a passive mental operation.

Alison does not go far in formulating the epistemological requirements of his theory. He is not prepared to go as far as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and declare that the artist is a second creator. He takes for granted a theory of natural signs, found also in Reid and drawn from earlier theories, and he depends on a theory of association that is rapidly losing its grounding in the theory of ideas developed by John Locke and Hume. This produces some obscurity about what aesthetic qualities in objects are, a good deal of rhetorical excess, and an avoidance of the problems that exist for a theory of taste in which taste is no longer a form of judgment. But the new scope given to the imagination makes Alison one of the first to formulate a full theory of aesthetics as expression.

See also Aesthetics, History of.

Bibliography

works by alison

"Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste" (1790). In Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics, edited by Dabney Townsend. Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1999.

works about alison

Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Hipple, Walter J. The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957.

Kivy, Peter. The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

McCosh, James. "Archibald Alison" (1875). In The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms, 1966.

Stolnitz, Jerome. "On the Origins of Aesthetic Disinterestedness." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20 (2) (1961): 131–143.

Townsend, Dabney. "Archibald Alison: Aesthetic Experience and Emotion." Journal of Aesthetics 28 (2) (1988): 132–144.

Dabney Townsend (2005)