ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contribute to the ongoing re-evaluation of Shaftesbury’s legacy in aesthetics by addressing two matters. First, it zooms in on how the Hobbesian view of nature and society impedes, from Shaftesbury’s anti-voluntaristic standpoint, a recognition of the intrinsic relatedness that distinguishes man’s productive harmony with inner human nature as well as with the physical beauty of external nature. Second, in a close reading of The Moralists, this chapter focuses on how Shaftesbury explores this productive relatedness by developing an organic notion of nature. Society is, for Shaftesbury, integrated in the beauty of nature, and vice versa. This integration should grant the concept of society a noteworthy role in aesthetics, and if we wish to be faithful to the temporality of Shaftesbury’s philosophy, we must, as this chapter demonstrates, accept that his concept of society is integral to the claims he makes about the beauty of nature.
