Gerard, Alexander (1728–1795)

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GERARD, ALEXANDER
(1728–1795)

Alexander Gerard was professor of moral philosophy and divinity at the University of Aberdeen and a leading member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Club along with James Beattie and, most importantly, Thomas Reid. He is known primarily for his Essay on Taste (1759/1963), which was awarded a prize by the Edinburgh Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Sciences, Manufacture, and Agriculture. Gerard returned to the subject with An Essay on Genius (1774/1966). In addition to the primary influence of Reid, the work of David Hume is a principal influence, though, like Reid, Gerard disagrees fundamentally with what he takes to be Hume's skepticism.

Although Gerard writes in the tradition of eighteenth-century theories of taste, it is questionable whether he should be regarded as a taste theorist in a strict sense. Gerard is responding to the theories of criticism of Francis Hutcheson and Hume who set the context of discussion in terms of taste and sentiment, but Gerard follows Reid in taking a more realist position regarding the qualities that produce a perception of beauty and relies more directly on rules and principles that are derived by induction. Thus, Gerard defends a position that is moving rapidly away from an essential dependence on taste.

Gerard depends on two fundamental principles. The first is a faculty of imagination. Imagination combines reflective ideas supplied by fancy. Gerard's faculty psychology posits internal senses that are "reflexive," that is, they refer to the workings of the mind rather than to external objects. However, whereas for Hutcheson an internal, reflexive sense is a direct intuition of beauty and virtue, Gerard, following Reid, treats internal senses as active principles of perception. Internal senses correspond to the qualities that they respond to. For example, there are senses of novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony, ridicule, and virtue. The second fundamental principle, following Joseph Addison's Spectator essays (particularly no. 418), identifies the pleasures of the imagination as depending on mental activity. The faculty of imagination exercises the mind; and, when that exercise falls within a moderate range, it is experienced as pleasurable. If it is either too languid and easy or too excited and difficult, discomfort (or simply indifference) results. These two principles combine to explain judgments of taste.

The subordination of taste to imagination seems clear; for example in Essay on Taste, Gerard writes "Taste, therefore, though itself a species of sensation, is in respect of its principles, justly reduced to imagination" (1759/1963, p. 144); and later, "Taste, in most of its forms at least, [is] a derivative and secondary power. We can trace it up to simpler principles, by pointing out the mental process that produces it, or enumerating the qualities by the combination of which it is formed. These are found, on inquiry, to be no other than certain exertions of imagination " (1759/1963, p. 151). Gerard goes on to explain each of the aesthetic predicates in terms of the kind of pleasurable mental activity that they produce: "The sources of all the sentiments of taste ly [sic] in the mind. The qualities of objects affect, in a certain manner, some principles of human nature, which by their operation, either singly or several in conjunction, produce gratification or disgust. … Simplicity, for instance, occasions easiness of conception; novelty or variety, an effort to conceive; amplitude, an expansion of soul" (1759/1963, p. 260).

Gerard holds that sentiment can be judged false because the qualities of taste can be figured out empirically. If I perceive something as grand that lacks the necessary qualities of extensiveness and amplitude, I am mistaken in my sentiment just as I would be if I experienced motion in violation of its actual occurrence. Therefore, for Gerard, there can be only a limited appeal to sentiment: "the qualities of an object, which gratify us, are more fixed and definite than the sensation which they excite" (1759/1963, p. 288). Gerard is clearly committed to what he understands as a "scientific"—that is, Newtonian—model, but at bottom he is siding with Reid against Hume by holding that aesthetic properties must be really in the object and that principles of common sense are sufficient to provide standards of judgment when disagreement arises.

For both Reid and Gerard, active judgment is logically prior to sensory experience in the aesthetic process. The function of sensory experience is to supply the material; the aesthetic operation comes about only when the mind is actively engaged. For example, Gerard writes, "For all the objects that affect taste, and excite its sentiments, are certain forms or pictures made by fancy, certain parts or qualities of things which it combines into complex modes" (1759/1963, p. 157). "In order, therefore, to form an able critic, taste must be attended with a philosophical genius, which may subject these materials to a regular induction, reduce them into classes, and determine the general rules which govern them" (1759/1963, p. 171). That engagement is critical and judgmental. Gerard's theory points toward Archibald Alison's Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790) in that Alison, too, reduces taste to a form of mental activity. But when Gerard says that "The sources of all the sentiments of taste lie in the mind" (1759/1963, p. 290), his purpose is to deny Hume's division between external sense and passions and to side with Reid's dualism between mind and body. Gerard's theory of taste marks the beginning, therefore, of a break with the theories of taste that run from The Third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper) through Addison and Hutcheson to Hume.

Bibliography

works

An Essay on Taste (1759). Facsimile of 3rd ed. (1780). Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1963.

An Essay on Genius (1774). Reprint edited by Bernhard Fabian, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966.

additional sources

Addison, Joseph. "The Pleasures of the Imagination." The Spectator 409 (1712): 411–421. In Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics, edited by Dabney Townsend (New York: Baywood, 1999), 107–136.

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

Gracyk, Theodore A. "Kant's Shifting Debt to British Aesthetics." British Journal of Aesthetics 26 (1986): 204–217.

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. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

McCosh, James. "Alexander Gerard." In The Scottish Philosophy, Biographical, Expository, Critical, from Hutcheson to Hamilton. New York: Robert Carter, 1875. Reprinted, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966.

Stolnitz, Jerome. "'Beauty': Some Stages in the History of an Idea." Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961): 185–204.

Townsend, Dabney. "From Shaftesbury to Kant." Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 287–305.

Dabney Townsend (2005)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy