The conceptualization of our ability to take a disinterested interest, which shows itself in calmly contemplating an object of beauty or admiring even an adversary’s noble action, first emerges in the moral philosophy directed against a Hobbesian concept of human nature. Thus it plays an important role in the writings of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume. It holds an equally prominent position in J. G. Herder’s philosophy of language and it provides the defining feature of an aesthetic judgment in Kant’s aesthetics. To trace some of the key steps in the fate of this concept by paying particular attention to its various contexts is the main goal of this chapter. In other words, I shall study how the capacity for contemplation came to be considered a distinctly human faculty.
For Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, “disinterestedness” is first of all a fundamentally ethical, moral attitude. It is motivated by the love for the thing in itself and thus diametrically opposed to self-interest. Although Shaftesbury was consciously opposed to certain aspects of religious orthodoxy, especially to the doctrine of original sin as well as the concept of the divine authority of Scripture, his concept and cultivation of “disinterested interest” nevertheless arose in the midst of spiritual, religious concerns. Jerome Stolnitz has situated it in the immediate context of Shaftesbury’s understanding of prayer. For Shaftesbury insisted that prayer must not be confused with an attempt at manipulating God, instead it had to be a loving approach to God for God’s sake.1 Similarly, Ernst Cassirer has shown that Shaftesbury’s concept of “disinterested interest” is deeply grounded in his ethics and religion. For according to Shaftesbury only those actions that are not motivated by fear of punishment or hope for reward can be called moral. True faith and true morality presuppose the believer’s freedom, which means the capacity not to be moved by self-interest. Cassirer emphasizes this aspect of Shaftesbury’s philosophy as the most critical point in which Shaftesbury departed from his teacher John Locke and calls it Shaftesbury’s “unrelenting war” against “heteronomy in morals and religion.”2 Ultimately it is in that sense that Shaftesbury’s work can be credited with laying the decisive groundwork for Kant’s and Herder’s aesthetics as well as for the notion of human freedom as it is developed in Kant’s philosophy.
Shaftesbury’s conceptualization of “disinterested interest” can be illuminated by looking at the potential ways of contextualizing such a faculty, by asking not only about its religious, ethical roots but also how the capacity for taking a “disinterested interest” situates the speaking biped with regard to other animals. How does this curious faculty of being able to contemplate something without being attracted or driven to it by a particular interest, appetite, or drive fit in with regard to ways of conceiving of human motives as opposed to or in line with animal motives? This will be the focus in what follows, as I shall situate the reception of Shaftesbury’s concept of “disinterested interest” in the context of the conceptual history of “instinct” during the eighteenth century.3
Although throughout history not only naturalists but also farmers, hunters, and in fact anybody dealing with living animals have been witnesses to behavior that appears to be inborn rather than learned, which we have come to classify as instinctual, for the eighteenth-century naturalist this kind of behavior suddenly became a serious problem.4 The eighteenth century had a vexed relationship to attempts at theorizing and explaining such behavior as that exhibited by the spider constructing its elegant web. Only if instinct were to mean a very basic appetitive drive of self-preservation did it not cause problems. But more complex types of animal behavior that seem to be inborn left the beholder and naturalist puzzled. There is, for instance, the frequently discussed behavior of a batch of young ducklings hatched by a hen instead of their biological mother. On one of their first outings, as they were passing a pond, the little ducklings did not heed the excited warning cries of their foster mother but happily splashed into the pond and swam around. What made it so difficult for many eighteenth-century philosophers and naturalists to engage with these forms of behavior is the fact that these animals appear to rely on an innate program rather than on experience and learning. For such central Enlightenment thinkers as John Locke or Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, whatever seemed to evoke the programmatically rejected concept of “innate ideas” was simply unacceptable. For this would undo the entire empiricist edifice that all knowledge is acquired through our senses and through individual processes of learning.
The entry “instinct” written for the Paris Encyclopédie by Charles Georges Le Roy, the royal gamekeeper and observer of animal behavior, is a good example of the vehement refutation of Descartes’s understanding of instinct as a form of automatism together with all other explanations that would allow for some model of innate knowledge or preprogrammed behavior, such as Buffon’s.5 Thus in his encyclopedia article on “instinct” Le Roy refers primarily to wolves and foxes in order to argue that their behavior can be explained as accumulated experience and learning and that especially carnivorous mammals become increasingly cunning with age. The faculty of memory plays a central role in Le Roy’s account, which concludes by defining instinct as the animal’s ability to feel, compare, judge, reflect, and decide based on a natural desire or aversion to environmental stimuli and situations. This natural desire is explained as being driven by self-interest, self-preservation, or the preservation of its kind. Instinct, in this sense, is a functionally motivated strong appetite, a natural like or dislike. All the more sophisticated types of behavior already present at birth are not addressed. Although animals can learn, they cannot make progress as a species the way humans can. Each individual, each generation has to start the learning process from scratch.6
The entry on instinct from the Protestant counterpart to the Paris encyclopedia, the Yverdon version from 1773, shares this approach to instinctual behavior as behavior directed by natural appetites. However, whereas the Paris entry claims that all complex actions rely on the faculty of reflection as a form of critical, active sampling of data and weighing of possible choices, for the Yverdon entry not all behavior implies conscious decisions, especially if the action is part of a routine. What furthermore makes the Yverdon entry interesting is the shift of the discussion of instinct from the empirical study of animal behavior to making instinct primarily into an issue of moral philosophy. Thus the Yverdon entry defines instinct as “a natural tendency or inclination, which makes us approve of certain things as good and laudable, and condemn others as bad or blameworthy, independently of any reflection.”7 In other words: instinct is what leads to a gut-level moral reaction. Clearly, instinct in this sense is deeply involved with questions about the natural, precultural moral makeup of the human being. Thus the Yverdon entry on instinct argues that, just like the view of somebody suffering makes us feel compassionate, it also makes us judge the attempt to help this person a beautiful and agreeable action. However, the article does not conclude by affirming this instinctual moral and aesthetic judgment but proceeds to demote this reaction to a merely circumstantially formed, quite frequently erroneous kind of prejudice. By contrast, the theory of moral sentiment as introduced by Shaftesbury and developed by Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith would allow for an inborn capacity for sympathy and benevolence. And Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality would claim that the aversion to harming a fellow sentient being, which he calls pitié, provides the basis for the human being’s fundamental capacity for goodness, for this capacity alone can hold aggressive behavior related to self-preservation and self-love in check.8 In that sense, the Yverdon encyclopedia entry can be seen as a critical response to Rousseau on pitié, but also to the theory of moral sentiment in the wake of Shaftesbury.
Shaftesbury’s theory of moral sentiment and his references to instinct are, however, more complicated than can be glimpsed through the Yverdon encyclopedia entry. In his “Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit” Shaftesbury first of all displaces the role of religion by a commitment to teleology. People are not morally righteous and virtuous because of their religious faith, or due to religious precepts, but because they have the innate capacity to be morally good to the extent that they are part of a system of creatures that have natural appetites or instincts that fit together in a well-ordered system of nature that coordinates self-interest and the interest of one’s own species, i.e., the common good.9 Already in this move Shaftesbury liberates the human being from the moral authority of religion. If human appetites and drives, just like animal appetites, are part of a well-constructed order of nature, they cannot be considered selfish or sinful behavior. Moreover, if the human being has an inborn capacity to distinguish good from evil, and can act accordingly, the human being can take full charge of its destiny, and hence is in need of neither religion nor redemption.10
When it comes to basic moral insight, the ability to distinguish between good and evil, Shaftesbury argues that this knowledge is universally and immediately available to any human being.11 This “moral sentiment” must not be acquired through experience or teaching. In this respect the capacity to distinguish between good and evil has the innate characteristics of instinct. But as much as this capacity is inborn and shows itself in an immediate, gut-level response, it is also totally different from the appetitive drives humans share with the animals, drives like hunger, the sex drive, and defense of the young. The difference is that moral sentiment makes itself felt when a person feels pleasure when witnessing a righteous action that has no implications for the observer’s own interests, regardless of the observer’s own capacity to do what is good: “In these vagrant characters or pictures of manners, which the mind of necessity figures to itself and carries still about with it, the heart cannot possibly remain neutral but constantly takes part one way or other. However false or corrupt it be within itself, it finds the difference, as to beauty and comeliness, between one heart and another, one turn of affection, one behaviour, one sentiment and another and, accordingly, in all disinterested cases, must approve in some measure of what is natural and honest and disapprove what is dishonest and corrupt.”12 Here we can see how Shaftesbury’s moral sense shows itself as a disinterested interest or disinterested affective reaction to the good or the bad, the beautiful or the ugly.
I have chosen the phrase disinterested interest deliberately to indicate how Shaftesbury’s model of “moral sentiment,” which he already describes both in moral and aesthetic terms, should be seen as a concept that represents a crucial ancestor for Kant’s take on taste. What is so interesting about Shaftesbury’s moral sentiment, and what makes it relevant for the history of ethics and aesthetics, is that it is, like an instinct or drive, an innate reaction as well as, to a certain extent, the negation of instinct. It might also be described as the pleasurable sensation of the absence of an appetitive urge, especially if we consider the fact that it involves the pleasures of the mind, the reaction to mental images, visions, sounds, and thoughts that we are processing and not actually part of a pressing reality surrounding us. This aspect becomes especially clear in a section in which Shaftesbury describes the pleasures experienced when one engages with mathematics:
There is no one who, by the least progress in science or learning, has come to know barely the principles of mathematics but has found that in the exercise of his mind on the discoveries he there makes, though merely of speculative truths, he receives a pleasure and delight superior to that of sense. When we have thoroughly searched into the nature of this contemplative delight, we shall find it of a kind, which relates not in the least to any private interests of the creature, nor has for its object any self-good or advantage of the private system. The admiration, joy or love turns wholly upon what is exterior and foreign to ourselves. And though the reflected joy or pleasure which arises from the motive of this pleasure once perceived may be interpreted as self-passion or interested regard, yet the original satisfaction can be no other than what results from the love of truth, proportion, order and symmetry in the things without. If this be the case, the passion ought in reality to be ranked with natural affection. For having no object within the compass of the private system, it must either be esteemed superfluous and unnatural, as having no tendency towards the advantage or good of anything in nature, or it must be judged or be what it truly is, a natural joy in the contemplation of those numbers, that harmony, proportion and concord, which supports the universal nature and is essential in the constitution and form of every particular species or order of Beings.13
I have highlighted in this quote Shaftesbury’s insistence on the fact that the pleasure involved in this mode of contemplation is not at all related to any individual creaturely interests, but is directed to the admiration of the universal harmony intuited in that experience.
Like Kant’s pure aesthetic judgment in the face of beauty, Shaftesbury’s moral sentiment is not acquired through learning, and in that sense it is universally available to each human being; like an instinctive reaction, it is universally available to a certain animal species.14 Unlike an instinctive reaction, however, the experience of beauty as well as moral sentiment make themselves felt to a subject marked as interested but not self-interested. Although in Shaftesbury we do not yet find the argument that will eventually become decisive for the philosophical anthropology of the Enlightenment, namely that the human being is distinguished by its remarkable lack of instinct, which in the case of Rousseau and Kant produces the flowering of an unbridled imagination and uncontrolled desire that brings about all the advantages and disadvantages of civilization, we can already see that Shaftesbury’s moral sentiment marks exactly this decisive juncture between the order of nature and the order of culture as it also overturns the Christian dogma of original sin. According to Shaftesbury, the human being has the capacity to know what is right based on its species-specific desire for sociability, in that sense the moral sense is like an instinct. In addition the human being also has the capacity to enjoy the use of the higher mental faculties, even when their deployment is of no use to the well-being of the individual or the species. In that latter case, it seems that this kind of pleasure acknowledges the teleological, harmonious order of nature.
During the eighteenth century, there is just one crucial contribution to the discussion of instinctual behavior that goes beyond the ruling appetitive model. And this can be found in Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s Allgemeine Betrachtungen über die Triebe der Thiere, hauptsächlich über ihre Kunsttriebe (General Reflections on the Drives of Animals, especially on their Technical Drives and Skills) from 1760. A resident of Hamburg, Reimarus was not only a mathematician and scholar of oriental languages but also a careful student of nature. His magisterial treatise on animal instinct and their technical skills combines great attention to specific examples and wide knowledge of the naturalist and philosophical literature, ranging from classical antiquity to his contemporaries, with a refusal to adhere to the empiricist doctrine of the tabula rasa. An outspoken deist and critic of revealed religion, he was also a committed believer in the overall teleological order of nature. He opens his treatise on animal drives and craft by expressing his trust that the scientific observation and study of nature will contribute to a more complete understanding of the underlying intelligent design of the natural world. The teleologically grounded trust in nature as a harmoniously coordinated whole informs his functionalist approach. It motivated him to study different animals in their different behavioral patterns, drives, and appetites in view of how these instinctual behaviors were to secure for each species a specific fit with its particular environmental niche within an overall spectrum of biodiversity.15
Whereas, for Condillac or Le Roy, all complex behavioral patterns are the result of reflection, memory, and learning, for Reimarus, these kinds of behaviors are species specific and functionally predetermined. Reimarus does not argue that animals don’t have a soul. According to Reimarus, higher-developed animals are capable of adjusting their behavior and of learning. However, he insists—and this is the thrust of his argument against Condillac—that even complex animal behavior in its overall shape and scope is uniform, it does not vary or improve regardless where and when a particular kind of animal group, be it a herd of deer or a swarm of bees, can be found. These drives are to be understood as providing a feedback loop of an interactive system in which the sampling of sensory data from the environment elicits a set of locomotor behaviors that are specified by the species’ specific organs and tools for procreation, protection, and self-preservation. Unlike Le Roy, Reimarus does not reduce animal instinctual behavior to some kind of primitive cognitive behavior. Instead he describes all animal instinctual behavior as the living organism’s hereditary potential for successful interaction with its environment. For, according to Reimarus, all animals, in contrast to plants, must have instincts to the extent that they actively move around. Thus they have some kind of nervous system that allows them to interact with their environment and they need instinct to direct and select their intake of perceptual data and their responses. Reimarus explains this with the following example:
If animals are born within their natural element, climate and region, and if they can remain there, no special skill or art to orient them towards the right kind of place seems to be required. However, if they have been hatched in the dry hot sand by the sun—a foreign element to the water—such as turtles and crocodiles—whence do they know to flee from the place that gave them life? What prevents them from looking for a more fertile place on land, where they would find something according to their taste that would satisfy their hunger? What makes them seek out an altogether different element and go into the water? If other animals do well in the one element, why do they occasionally venture into an alien element, such as amphibia and waterfowl? Who teaches the young ducklings hatched by a hen, even against the anxious warning cries of their foster mother to go confidently into the water and to move in an altogether different fashion, paddling into all directions? … Everything that animals undertake in this direction obviously serves their preservation and wellbeing, according to their life-style, necessary and indispensable. Only in order to acquire an inclination for this, to do all of this correctly and without mistakes required a distinct drive, which entailed a natural skill set, which did not require experience, reflection or practice.16
To the extent that it preserves the species an animal’s drive or instinct is fixed and inborn, not open to learning or modification. Instinct can be described as a set of programs that regulate the perception of internal and external sensations and the organism’s reactions to these, without involving the understanding, reflection, or reason. According to Reimarus, animals certainly do have an imagination, as they also have a memory in the sense that present stimuli can call up past sensations. However, there is a fundamental difference between humans and animals in that only humans have the capacity to differentiate between past and present sensations, whereas for animals they are fused. Even if present stimuli call up past sensations, ultimately, animals live in an eternal present.
The limits of the animal faculty of representation [Vorstellung] consist in 1.) the fact that animals do not have access to a discrete, general concept of things, and hence no faculty of language. … Without this discrete representation and language there are no true concepts, or any kind of true thinking. 2.) One can easily notice that their faculty of presentation is entirely enclosed in the sensory perceptual realm that is related to their body; and that their willpower has no further influence on what they present to themselves or what they contemplate, to the extent that their willpower is entirely determined by pleasure or unpleasure. That which can be seen by the eyes of the understanding only is inaccessible to the animal faculty of representation, and even whatever among the sensual realm does not produce a pleasurable or painful stimulus is indifferent to them, animals do not care to contemplate. 3.) The faculty of representation [Vorstellungstrieb] of animals without understanding hence does not aim at acquiring knowledge of things, if this entails a cognition, an insight into truth, a perfection of the understanding, but exclusively at what pertains to their sensual wellbeing or discomfort. 4.) Thus animals occupy their faculty of representation merely with what is present, with what moves the senses in a pleasant or unpleasant fashion. If the past mingles among those representations it happens without their awareness of this being from the past, without memory. And if the future lies in the present this too happens without their knowledge, without their foresight and without their intention.17
Based on the ability to differentiate between past and present, the distinctly human capacity for insight, reflection and “true thinking” emerges as the capacity to compare and contrast sensory data and to distinguish internal from external data. One could also say that the distinctly human capacity for thought and insight comes from the ability to interrupt the feedback loop, which for the instinctually driven animals keeps directing their ability to attend to something and act on it.18 This ability to interrupt the preprogrammed feedback loop, to willfully direct one’s attention to observe and contemplate, is also the precondition for human language, which is entirely different from animal language to the extent that animal language merely communicates present needs or sensations.
Reimarus’s theory of instinct had a tremendous influence on Herder’s philosophy of language and, to a certain extent, also on Kant’s philosophy of history. For both thinkers develop a philosophy of history from an account of the human being as an animal that is distinguished by an extremely weak instinctual guidance in its orientation toward the world. For Herder this means that human language becomes the means of compensating for the instinctual lack, of allowing the human being to focus attention and to differentiate between internal and external sensations. Thus for Herder human language is a world-making tool. For Kant the human animal’s instinctual weakness means that the human being is characterized by unnatural desires, a capacity for error and hence learning, but ultimately also freedom due to the capacity to reflect on actions and decisions as well as on this capacity that sets the human animal apart from all other animals.19
The story of the ducklings hatched by the hen can function as a marker of the trajectory of the concept of instinct in the eighteenth century. It is told in Addison’s Spectator as an example of the mysterious, marvelous, ultimately unfathomable aspects of animal behavior. For Reimarus, as we have seen, the same observation becomes a typical example of instinct as innate behavior that is distinctly functional in a species-specific fashion.20 In Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language the same narrative is used to contrast the ducklings’ disregard for their stepmother due to the independence of their species-specific skills with the human infant’s love of its parents, its need for their care and desire to acquire language. Thus, in Herder’s case, language as the compensation for the lack of instinct in the human species takes on the function of instinct.21 Herder refers to the duckling example in the context of discussing the historicity and diversity of human languages, which respond to the specific needs of human societies in their direct contact with their environment. Reimarus’s model of instinct as a key element providing for biodiversity to the extent that it maintains a species’ functional fit with its specific environmental niche is here directly transferred to Herder’s model of language and culture.
I have traced in this chapter how “disinterested interest” as a capacity for the contemplation of something that might elicit a spontaneous liking or aversion is conceptualized in contrast to an animal’s perception, which is driven by drives and instincts. As a basic faculty, the capacity for disinterested contemplation and the enjoyment of beauty appears to be inborn to all humans. It is discussed and explicitly contrasted with instinctive reactions in that it is not interested, not concerned with the beholder’s physical well-being or sensuous gratification. In that sense it defines both a moral sentiment and an aesthetic enjoyment as a universal and a distinctly human capacity that does not fit in with any kind of concept of animal instinct or drives since the latter are always bound up with the interest in self-preservation or species preservation. In fact, in both Herder’s philosophy of language as well as in Kant’s philosophy of history the human lack of instinctual guidance becomes the marker of the human being and the condition of the possibility of a freely roaming imagination, i.e., of freedom and of rationality. Of course, neither Herder nor Kant assumes that the human being is free of interests, passions, and irrational behavior. Moreover, at least according to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and Kant’s Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, the human creature is subject to a far greater spectrum of needs, desires, and selfish interests.
To a certain extent the capacity for taking a disinterested interest seems to provide the human animal with a break from appetitive drives and interests. It is not just a state of indifference, but is distinguished by a special kind of liking and supersensuous enjoyment. In Shaftesbury we have observed how this kind of pleasure is associated with the exercise of our mental faculties in a situation that is free of any immediate interest or pressure to act. Shaftesbury shows this, on the one hand, with regard to a scenario of moral approval in which the observer is not called upon to act and in that sense disinterested but immediately liking or approving as morally good a kind of behavior that might have even been quite alien to his own moral character. On the other hand, Shaftesbury illustrates the nature of the pleasure that is derived from such a scenario of disinterested interest with regard to the joy one takes in understanding a mathematical formula or procedure as an expression over the intuitive insight into the well-ordered arrangement of a harmonious nature or universe. Thus this faculty of contemplation, of taking a disinterested interest, can be situated both in the moral and the aesthetic domain—indeed, the two domains seem interchangeable when such contemplation involves our faculty of judgment. Since, for Shaftesbury, there exists an unbroken trust in a harmonious, teleological order of nature in which all living beings have their place, role, and function, the possible confusion between the aesthetic and the moral domain does not represent a problem.
In the reflection on the difference between the instinct driven interests of animal behavior and the relative weakness of instinctual guidance in the case of the human animal we can trace the peculiar role that is played by teleology in defining the human being. For Rousseau, who is eager to bolster the moral authority of nature against the morality of civilization, man left in the state of nature can compensate for his instinctual weakness by mimicking the different instinctual adaptations of animals.22 For Herder, it is the world-making capacity of human language that affirms man’s ability to study and hence renders the human a creature who is able to get to know its environment without immediately dominating or exploiting it. And, as we shall see in chapter 4, it is in the contemplation of a work of artistic genius that humans are made aware of this world-shaping power of human language.
When Kant discusses the human lack of instinct, he makes the point that it can also be described as the result of man’s capacity to disregard the voice of nature (or the divine command, which for him is the same thing!).23 Human history and freedom can only evolve in a postlapsarian state, after the break with the instinctual command and once there is the possibility of choice, error, and learning. Then the human being is no longer part of the teleological order of nature, which has ethical implications. The human being as the creature that has to set its own ends has to recognize every member of its species in that capacity, which means that men must not use each other as means to an end, but must instead treat each other as ends in themselves. However, it is not only for Kant that the human being emerges as the animal that is no longer fitted into a set teleological order of nature and hence no longer subject to the moral authority of nature.
Whereas this chapter has traced these teleological approaches in view of a philosophical anthropology, in view of the conceptualization of instinct and the capacity for taking a disinterested interest, the following two chapters will look at the uses and critiques of teleology when it comes to the relationship between nature and aesthetics and nature and artistic production, i.e., with regard to beauty in nature and with regard to original genius, which works with the creative powers of nature. In both these chapters we will see the different stakes that are involved in a critique of teleological discourse. First I will show how Lessing and Goethe, aware of the distinction between the normative and the descriptive, insist on separating beauty in nature from the moral authority of nature. In the final chapter I will analyze how the Enlightenment concept of genius makes use of various models of growth and organic unity borrowed from nature in order to posit a capacity of radical innovation, which would set the realm of the fine arts in contrast to the sciences and the mechanical arts.
