Lofty Thoughts and Dead Leaves

Matthias Stom, A Young Man Reading by Candlelight (1630)

In his study of the Enlightenment, Ritchie Robertson turns next to the issue of “classifying humanity.” He notes, at the onset of the subchapter, that “[t]he study of human nature required consideration of humanity’s place in nature as a whole.” [p. 307] There were, as always, many twists and turns to the thinking about this issue. For example,

“ . . . Buffon took the nominalist view that the world consisted of individuals, and that any attempt to sort them into species would be defeated . . . . Later, however, he changed his mind . . .”. [p. 308]

“Borderline cases aroused great interest. It was much discussed whether anthropoid apes, collectively referred to as ‘Orang-Outangs’, were human. . . . Lord Monboddo . . . thought ‘Orang-Outang’ belonged to a portion of the human race which had got stuck at an early stage of development.” [p. 308]

Last, not least, here is one of Robertson’s many wry statements that could almost pass a reader by: “Insights into the basic nature of humanity were expected, but not received, from feral children.” [p. 309]

The term ‘race,’ it seems, entered the vocabulary of classification for the first time during this period. “It was a disputed term in the eighteenth century but in the nineteenth century and later would often provide a pretext for hierarchical divisions, both in imagination and in reality.” [p. 310]

Robertson explores the different currents of thought and their consequences over several pages. It makes for a fascinating read, to which I cannot begin to do justice. He concludes in part that “[t]he prejudice shown by Hume and Kant was therefore indefensible even in its own time.” [p. 316] Ever the complicator, though, Robertson continues, “However, their remarks do not warrant all the conclusions that have been drawn from them by critics of the Enlightenment” [p. 316], then briefly explains why.

John Raphael Smith after William Redmore Bigg, Schoolboys Giving Charity to a Blind Man (1781)

This marks the beginning of a discussion, the thesis of which appears to be that “[t]he still-widespread conception of the Enlightenment as a project to erase difference and arrange reality in neat categories, implied in Weber’s term ‘the disenchantment of the world’, meets its refutation in the work of Diderot.” [p. 317] In service of his quest, among other things, Diderot “aims to imagine what being blind is like.” [p. 318] Diderot posited, for example, “[i]f all our knowledge is derived from experience, and thus from the senses, what sort of knowledge do the blind possess, deprived of one important sense?” [p. 318]

Diderot’s thinking took him along some odd paths, yet Robertson concludes that “Diderot’s reflections on blindness led indirectly to the humane treatment of the disabled.” [p. 320]

Dreams were another of Diderot’s preoccupations, something “about which Enlightenment thinkers otherwise had little to say.” [pp. 320-21] As Robertson notes, “None of the various philosophies that sustained the Enlightenment, however, could do much with dreams. To the empiricist Locke, as to the rationalist Descartes, dreams were simply the absence of reason . . . . Older explanations of dreams as messages from God were now ruled out of court. . . . Enlightenment philosophers and scientists referred dreams to the circumstances of the individual: to impressions made during the previous day, prompted to reappear by disorder of the nervous system, indigestion, or pressure on the bladder.” [p. 321]

Robertson offers a contrast to present-day thinking about dreams: “Physiological explanations may seem disappointingly meagre to readers influenced by twentieth-century dream research. . . . It may be that most dreams are what Owen Flanagan calls ‘the spandrels of sleep’, in which mental contents just randomly fill up psychic space as architects fill up spandrels on the front of arches with decorative designs.” [p. 321] But, Robertson goes on, again complicating thinking, “there is no denying the importance of ‘big dreams’ in some people’s biographies, including that of Descartes . . .”. [p. 321]  

In furtherance of his examination of the Enlightenment sense of sensibility, Robertson spends a good bit of time discussing fiction. He writes: “In the mid-to late eighteenth century, the reading public grew so sharply in Britain, France and Germany that historians speak of a reading revolution.” [p. 323]

Jean-Étienne Liotard, La Liseuse (1746)

Reading became, “increasingly, a solitary practice, especially popular among middle-class women who had leisure, access to artificial light, and enough money to buy books.” [p. 323] If you’ve ever wondered, as I have, about the number of artworks on offer of women reading, it seems this may be something of why. And of course this brought out stern warnings from “[m]oralists  . . . against unserious and exciting reading.” [p. 323]

Robertson continues, “People not only read more: they read differently, becoming more involved in fictional worlds. . . . The first-person singular becomes increasingly popular as a narrative device, which brings the protagonist close to the reader.” [p. 323]

Even closer to the reader than the first-person narrative was the epistolary novel. Robertson posits that “[t]he epistolary novel provided training not only in sympathy but also in empathy.” While noting that empathy “was not [a word] used in the eighteenth century,” it has been argued that “reading novels, especially epistolary novels, helped people in the eighteenth century to put themselves in other people’s shoes, and sensitized them to cruelty in everyday life . . .”. He cites Steven Pinker for the proposition that “fiction, especially the epistolary fiction of the Enlightenment [had] a key function in widening the circle of empathy and thus promoting the growth of humanitarianism.” [p. 324-5]

Tony Johannot, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1844)

I’ll come back to Pinker in a moment, but first, let’s return to Robertson’s examination of eighteenth century epistolary novels and their humanizing effects. He cites three, “in particular, [that] shaped the sensibility of the late Enlightenment: Richardson’s Clarissa (1748-49), Rousseau’s Julie ou la novelle Héloïse (1761), and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) . . .”. [p. 325] Robertson discusses the three novels at length, after which he observes “These three epistolary novels prompted a new kind of reading, empathetic and enthusiastic . . . . Readers felt that they knew the characters intimately, shared their experiences, were almost unbearably moved, and could not stop reading.” [p. 335]

Diderot went so far as to say that “[e]ven if he had to sell all his other books . . . Richardson would stay on his shelf alongside Moses, Homer, Sophocles and Euripides.” [p. 336] An unusual, one-of-these-is-not-like-the-other selection, wouldn’t you say?

Without a segway, Robertson moves from the sunlit heights of empathy-producing fiction to the soggy depths of “sentimental fiction [which] flourished for the rest of the century. . . . Instead of the psychological ambivalence found in Richardson or Goethe, we have a narrow emotional range, in which the display of sympathy often appears as sentimental self-indulgence.” [p. 338] On reading this passage, I could not help but wonder whether the Enlighteners found themselves exhausted by the cognitive difficulties posed by the exercise of empathy and retreated to less taxing texts.

Enter parody to save the day. So, in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, “when Marianne rhapsodizes about the leaves falling in autumn . . . her sister responds drily: ‘It is not everyone,’ said Elinor, ‘who has your passion for dead leaves.’” [p. 339]

Robertson’s analysis is of course more subtle than my reductive version here, and he does what he can to martial the evidence. He acknowledges that “The abundant emotions expressed in fiction do not necessarily tell us how people behaved in real life. However, we have a variety of written evidence that suggests a much higher emotional temperature in the later 1700s than earlier in the century.” [p. 342] He cites “the enormous amount of charitable activity seen in the late Enlightenment” and how “[s]ensibility also motivated people to oppose social evils” such as slavery and “helped to bring about the gradual end of public executions.” [pp. 344-46]

It is hard to assess, without the level of deep reading and erudition Robertson brings to his subject, to what extent his analysis is borne out by the facts on the ground at the time. I appreciate, though, his educated and thoughtful effort to set forth a broad, complicated view, and not to impose his own throughline overly much.

Francisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (c1797)

Which brings me back to Steven Pinker’s claim for the Enlightenment, as set forth in his own doorstop of a book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: a history of violence and humanity (2011). I watched Pinker debate the topic with John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago. I prepared myself to listen with an open mind (which wasn’t hard as the topic they were discussing was completely new to me). I have to say what struck me most was the way they talked past one another in service of driving their respective and unyielding central premises home. I’ll just say I didn’t find it enlightening.

So, when I saw Robertson quote Pinker, I had some skepticism about Pinker’s premise. I wondered, what would someone like Germaine Greer have to say about his book? Well, in this case, she didn’t review the book—but she did get a mention somewhere along the way, which led me to a Guardian review by John Gray entitled “Steven Pinker is wrong about violence and war.”

Gray takes on not only Pinker, but one of his admiring reviewers: “ . . . the well-known utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, who has praised The Better Angels of Our Nature as “a supremely imp­ortant book … a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline. . . .” [cite]

Gray then takes a hatchet to Singer’s notions:

“Among the causes of the outbreak of altruism, Pinker and Singer attach particular importance to the ascendancy of Enlightenment thinking. Reviewing Pinker, Singer writes: ‘During the Enlightenment, in 17th- and 18th-century Europe and countries under European influence, an important change occurred. People began to look askance at forms of violence that had previously been taken for granted: slavery, torture, despotism, duelling and extreme forms of punishment … Pinker refers to this as ‘the humanitarian revolution’.’ Here too Pinker and Singer belong in a contemporary orthodoxy. With other beliefs crumbling, many seek to return to what they piously describe as ‘Enlightenment values’.” [cite]

Drawing by Willey Reveley of a panopticon prison, circa 1791

As you might expect from Gray’s tone, there is a “but”:

“But these values were not as unambiguously benign as is nowadays commonly supposed. John Locke denied America’s indigenous peoples any legal claim to the country’s ‘wild woods and uncultivated wastes’; Voltaire promoted the ‘pre-Adamite’ theory of human development according to which Jews were remnants of an earlier and inferior humanoid species; Kant maintained that Africans were innately inclined to the practice of slavery; the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham developed the project of an ideal penitentiary, the Panopticon, where inmates would be kept in solitary confinement under constant surveillance. None of these views is discussed by Singer or Pinker. More generally, there is no mention of the powerful illiberal current in Enlightenment thinking, expressed in the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, which advocated and practised methodical violence as a means of improving society.” [cite]

It strikes me that a more edifying debate than that between Pinker and Mearsheimer might be one between Pinker and Gray, perhaps with Ritchie Robertson as moderator, just for fun.

To accompany you on your journey, should you choose to take it, is Jean-Marie Leclair’s Trio Sonata in D Minor, Op. 4, No. 1 (c. 1730), performed by the serendipitously named Ensemble Diderot. With thanks to Bert, via Curt, for spotting this and sending it on.