Sources of Liberalism: the Geopolitics of Beauty

Abstract

The ARC grant noted a lack of attention to the emotions in scholarship on liberalism in recent Victorian literary studies. This paper duly takes up liberalism and aesthetics. While our contemporary cognitive psychology is less dualistic, often no longer dividing affect from cognition or rationality, in the western tradition aesthetics has historically been the philosophy of the senses and sense-perception, feeling, and emotion, as distinguished from that of cognition. I argue that modern aesthetics, representing liberal voices, have typically functioned dialectically with the constraints of liberalization, and that without them we have only the instrumentalities of scarcity, exploitation, and tyranny or domination. Within this dialectic, Nature and the natural world play a particularly valuable role in conceptions of the Beautiful, one that is threatened today by the market failure of global warming and unsustainability. I begin with our current political spectrum and the geopolitics of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century and then turn to aesthetics in some transcultural contexts of modernity: Western, Islamic, and Chinese. The Conclusion returns to Macleod’s account of Massingham’s liberal networks 1880-1920 and the nature of emotion (individual or collective), the nature of freedom (individual or collective), and the role of Nature and the natural world in both. The examples of transcultural aesthetics throughout highlight a dialectical methodology essential to a liberal humanities.