Shaftesbury's Theory of Art: Substance and Virtue

This article attends to a body of writings on art left unfinished by the English philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury. While these have generally been understood as establishing a view of the artwork intended to express Shaftesbury's political standpoint, less detailed attention has been given to the more complex forms in which the artwork actually took shape. More pointedly, what is left out of the discussion is that the image formulated by Shaftesbury was unresolved, figured by radically opposed conceptions of painting's force. The approach taken here thinks through such contradictions in relation to Shaftesbury's peculiar position, as an MP as well as a philosopher, at a point of intersection between philosophical debates about the nature of 'substance' and what I suggest were interrelated uncertainties about the nature (or 'virtue') of money within a significant political crisis that coincided with Shaftesbury's career in Parliament. To assume a transitive relation between Shaftesbury's political views and his conception of painting is to limit approaches to both politics and the artwork to a logic of representation. Broadly the argument I pursue is that any kind of political understanding of the artwork here must deal with questions of its substance.