ABSTRACT
Three models of the relation between love and our pleasure in beauty suggest themselves: that they are two entirely distinct affective states, that pleasure in beauty is a kind of love but one that must be distinguished from ordinary love for persons, and that they are essentially the same. The first two positions are well represented in the eighteenth century: the first in the conception of the disinterestedness of aesthetic pleasure and judgment found in Hutcheson and Kant and the second in Burke. The third is represented in contemporary literature in the work of Alexander Nehamas, but less obvious in the eighteenth century. However, the perfectionist aesthetics of Moses Mendelssohn and his theory of “mixed sentiments” might be seen as anticipating some aspects of Nehamas’s approach.
