ABSTRACT
The discourse of taste seemed to offer some hope of controlling such emotional and imaginative excess. Eighteenth-century Britain had seen a growing interest in what would come to be called aesthetic disinterestedness, a notion that might seem to offer the tasteful sympathetic spectator some insulation against the fashionable economy. Yet the early British formulations of disinterestedness in Shaftesbury, Addison, and Hume, subsequently adapted in the discourse of art criticism, did not sufficiently distance the spectator from material concerns; his sympathy remained inflected by self. This chapter argues that these problems with the notion of the emotionally engaged spectator led no. The Romantic suspicion of getting and spending, ultimately led to the promotion of art as way of enhancing economic knowledge. The consequences of failing to link taste, sensibility, and knowledge of suffering are explored during the first dialogues, where Smith uses the flexibility of peripatetic mode to introduce poetry and to allude to painting, landscape appreciation, and music.
