China and the West

Addison, Joseph. The pleasures of imagination. In : The Spectator ; vol. 2 ; no 414 (June 21, 1712).
Er schreibt : "If the Writers who have given us an account of China tell us the inhabitants of that country laugh at the plantations of our Europeans, which are laid out by the rule and line; because, they say, any one may place trees in equal rows and uniform figures. They choose rather to show a genius in works of this nature, and therefore always conceal the art by which they direct themselves. They have a word, it seems, in their language, by which they express the particular beauty of a plantation that thus strikes the imagination at first sight, without discovering what it is that has so agreeable an effect. Our British gardeners, on the contrary, instead of humouring nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, lobes, and pyramids."

Sekundärliteratur
Tony C. Brown : Addison presents Chinese taste in landscape gardening as exemplary of aesthetic experience itself. In the way they appreciate a well-laid garden, the Chinese uphold a principle of variety without end, make apparent the immediacy of aesthetic pleasure, and exhibit a positive use of an imagination not beholden to the dictates of reason. Though what the Chinese therefore illustrate is a largely unconditioned state—of perpetual novelty, immediacy, and freedom from reason's rule—this is not because Addison thinks them undeveloped, akin to what we would call a primitive society or culture. Addison, like many late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europeans, considers China to be a site of competing civilization. The China he presents in the "Pleasures" is not a figure of primitivism or a predicate of simplicity prior to complex bureaucratic and commercial development. Nor does it stand in for a condition of simple negation. On the contrary, Addison finds in the figure of Chinese taste something that enables him to delimit the aesthetic, something that he does not find available at home in Europe.
Addison's need for China follows from the noticeably new way he tries to conceive the aesthetic. For him, the pleasures of the imagination are not governed exclusively by the divine final cause but operate via the efficient cause, considered as a primitive, universal human faculty. For this reason, Addison finds aesthetic experience to be immediate and pre-cognitive, hence largely unconditioned—a formulation that posits the aesthetic as something that precludes direct description. It is to define what he cannot therefore otherwise present that Addison calls upon China. China's exotic status supplies him with a geopolitical principle of differentiation that he turns to remark a limit of another order, namely a subjective one. Binding in itself the known and unknown, China allows Addison to figure something lacking in initial distinction, the aesthetic and the self of an aesthetic experience.
As Addison wants to articulate the aesthetic itself through the figure of Chinese gardening, we can call the figure allegoric rather than, say, metaphoric. Whereas the latter, to maintain its coherence, brackets any incompatibility between tenor and vehicle, for Addison Chinese gardening designates something—the aesthetic—that in effect exhibits a qualitative non-equivalence with its vehicle or fable.
An allegory for Addison appeals not only to the understanding but to the imagination as well, a double appeal that gives it its pedagogic utility. Allegories can dress up difficult ideas in pleasing attire, though that attire must fit well. This is what Addison wants to achieve with the figure of Chinese taste. Addison finds the Chinese garden so attractive because it presents a seemingly free distribution of natural objects.