Origins and the Enlightenment: Aesthetic Epistemology from Descartes to Kant 9781501727436

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ORIGINS AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

ORIGINS AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT Aesthetic Epistemology from Descartes to Kant CATHERINE LABIO

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

This book has been published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University. Copyright© 2004 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2004 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Labio, Catherine. Origins and the Enlightenment : aesthetic epistemology from Descartes to Kant I Catherine Labia. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN o-8o14-4275-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Aesthetics, Modern-18th century. 2. Origin (Philosophy)-History-t8th century. 3· Knowledge, Theory of-History-18th century. 4· Originality (Aesthetics)-History-18th century. I. Title. BH18I.LJ3 2004 nt'.8s-DC22 2004007165 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorinefree, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

For Yin Chin Tong

On ne Sf11Uroit si bien conceuoir vne chose, & la rendre siene, lorsqu'on l'apprent de quelque autre, que lorsqu'on l'inuente soy mesme. One cannot conceive something so well, and make it one's own, when one learns it from someone else as when one invents it oneself. Rene Descartes, Discours de Ia methode

Questa mondo civile egli certamente estato Jatto dagli uomini, onde se ne possono, perche sene debbono, ritruovare i principi dentro le modificazioni della nostra medesima mente umana. The world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and ... its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Giambattista Vico, La Scienza Nuova

Nur soviel sieht man vollstiindig ein, als man nach Begriffen selbst machen and zustande bringen kann. We have complete insight only into what we can ourselves make and accomplish according to concepts. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi Introduction

Descartes's Fabulous World

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER CHAPTER CHAPTER

4

1

15

Vico's Genetic Principle 35

3 Origins Here and Now 66 The Primitive Imagination 94

5 Kant's Abyss: Serialization and Originality Postscript 167 Works Cited 175 Index 189

131

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has many origins and, along with them, many debts, which I am happy to have an opportunity to put on record here, even if that record is inevitably incomplete. Friends, family members, and colleagues in both the United States and Europe have given me much needed advice and support over a long period of time. I am thinking, in particular, of Agnes Bolton, Christos Cabolis, Marjorie Coeyman, Elizabeth Dillon, Raphael Falco, Cecile and Thomas Ferenczi, Mary Floyd-Wilson, Ann Gaylin, Maria Georgopoulou, Sondra and Gary Haller, Amy Hungerford, Nathalia King, Fran~oise Labio, Pericles Lewis, Juliette Loncour, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Marianne Mead, Chantal Snellings, Lisa Steinman, and Scott Wilcox. I began thinking about questions of Enlightenment and origins while I was a Fulbright scholar and a graduate student at New York University, where I was fortunate enough to benefit from the insights of John Chioles, Pellegrino D'Acierno, Daniel Javitch, Perry Meisel, Philippe Roger, and Barbara Vinken. I completed this project during my tenure as a Morse Fellow at Yale University. I thank Edwin M. Duval, Michael Holquist, Christopher L. Miller, David Quint, and the members of the committee chaired by Richard H. Brodhead for giving me this crucial opportunity. I also thank Sandra Rudnick Luft and Tracy B. Strong, who read the manuscript for Cornell University Press, for their insightful and generous comments, and I express my gratitude to Bernhard Kendler for having taken an interest in my manuscript and having shepherded its publication. Many thanks are also due to Karen Hwa for her excellent work as manuscript editor, Jane Marie Todd for her helpful copyediting, and Susan Barnett for her diligent marketing. I also wish to thank an anonymous reader who read a much earlier version of this xi

manuscript. Finally and most importantly, I am indebted more than I can say to Timothy J. Reiss, who has supported and encouraged me at every tum and whose own work and commitment to it are a constant source of inspiration. I presented a version of the Descartes chapter in the Open Forum Lecture Series organized by the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. I am grateful to Patricio Boyer for his invitation and to the participants for their wide-ranging comments. Parts of the fourth and fifth chapters have appeared in "The Aesthetics of Adam Smith's Labor Theory of Value," Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 38, no. 2 (1997): 134.:..49. I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

xii

Acknowlegments

ORIGINS AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Introduction

We search for origins the way some cats chase their tails. After brief bursts of frenetic spinning, we think we have a grasp of our topic, but our hold is elusive. The Freudian primal scene, the big bang theory, and the discoveries of "Lucy" and the so-called First Family are cases in point. So are some of the most influential inquiries of the late twentieth century into the origins of its episteme, Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method, Jacques Derrida's Grammatology, and Michel Foucault's Order of Things, all of which focus, quite fittingly, on the eighteenth century, the period arguably more obsessed than any other with the notion of origins-of ideas, languages, nations, wealth, the universe, and so on. The list does indeed go on, but I am not as interested in these individual topics as in the epistemological foundations that made eighteenth-century inquiries into origins possible and in the ways that these foundations are both similar to and different from our own. Origins are epistemologically porous, and their treatment tells us much about shifting assumptions regarding what can and cannot be known and how. In 1989 Victor Brombert, in his presidential address to the Modern Language Association, noted in passing that contemporary literary criticism was marked by a "blurring of the notion of origins." 1 I take exception to any suggestion that genetic epistemology, or the 1

Victor Brombert, "Mediating the Work: Or, The Legitimate Aims of Criticism,"

PMLA 105 (1990): 393·

1

privileging of origins as primary sources or modalities of knowledge, has ever been a straightforward affair or that origins have ever consisted of dear and distinct ideas. And yet the twentieth-century fascination with origins has often seemed to confine itself to a fairly narrow linear-historicist model in which origins can be defined only as beginnings or moments in time about which nothing will be truly known until an answer has been found to the problem of infinite regress. At the end of the day this is quite possibly the single most intractable challenge posed by both psychoanalysis and postmodernism, whose answers have clustered around the key notions of Nachtriiglichkeit (deferred action, apres-coup) and difference. Indeed, for all their sophistication-or blurring-these concepts rest on a somewhat monochromatic view of origins and reveal (somewhat paradoxically since this is precisely what they are trying to overcome) an almost fetishistic clinging to the idea that there is such a thing as "the" (singular) origin, believed, implicitly or explicitly, to be the epistemological equivalent of the proverbial smoking gun. Hence the search for a time when origins were clear and accessible. Needless to say, the eighteenth century was not such a time. The Enlightenment is nonetheless a good place to start, not only because of its compulsive attention to origins but also because its epistemological breadth can make our own period appear epistemologically challenged by comparison. Whereas the "blurring of the notion of origins" Brombert rightly identified as a key indicator of twentieth-century criticism betrayed a desire to topple a monolithic episteme, or at least one perceived as such, eighteenth-century inquiries into origins remind us instead that Enlightenment thinkers confronted a very different situation. They were faced with the daunting task of having to draw the implications of the tectonic shifts that had rocked seventeenth-century thought. That task involved formulating a wide and fluctuating range of epistemological options, which gave birth to an intellectual environment still quite familiar to us in many respects but also rather difficult for us to map, in spite, and in part because, of that familiarity. Because of their ubiquity, versatility, and suitability for experimenting with new ways of knowing, eighteenth-century genetic speculations illustrate this difficulty well and can be relied on to isolate some of the most dominant features of Enlightenment epistemology and its organization. Foremost among these is a renewed interest in history and in the construction of new models of historical knowledge that do

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Introduction

not quite match our own, but are instead still closely tied to an idealization of synchronic modes of understanding, especially geometry. I am thinking here, for instance, of John Locke's "historical method," which does not deal with the past in any way of Giambattista Vico's insistence on an axiomatic presentation for his "new science" of history, or of Robert Wood's geographically based defense of Homer's priority. Conversely, diachronic models intrude where we least expect them. Consider, for example, the rather odd promotion, in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, of agriculture as the ideal occupation of man on the grounds that it came first. Indeed, my point here is not that one should replace our current emphasis on primitivism as a dominant feature of eighteenth-century thought with a "rediscovery" of rationality and geometry as equally crucial elements of Enlightenment epistemology, but that one should be wary of overemphasizing primitivism when discussing eighteenth-century patterns of historical understanding. If there is a typical eighteenth-century position on the matter, it can be found in the works of the comte de Buffon, who defended the abstract neoclassical notion of la belle nature in his discourse on style and anchored his Histoire naturelle firmly in the present, yet did not hesitate to historicize nature itself in Les epoques de la nature. Eighteenth-century speculations on origins highlight another critical characteristic of Enlightenment epistemology: the growing reliance on psychological explanations, that is, on an increasingly complex definition of the human subject as the source of all possible knowledge. That is why I concentrate on a body of works framed by the publication of Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding in 1690 and that of Immanuel Kant's Critique ofJudgment in 1790· This phenomenon cut across what we would now think of as distinct disciplines and made it possible to think about individual, social, and natural history and their beginnings all in similar terms. One of the most obvious sources for this new development can undoubtedly be found in the works of Rene Descartes. Nothing is indeed easier than to trace a line of descent from the Discourse on Method to the Critique of Pure Reason. One should nevertheless not take away too much from such a history. Eighteenth-century thought departed from its Cartesian roots in significant respects, including in its willingness to archeologize the human mind, to entertain the notion that certainty comes in different guises, and to turn to the senses as sources of knowledge. It did so, however, without necessarily refraining from appealing in the

Introduction

3

same breath to the categories of reason and nature and without discarding the older belief in mathematics as the royal road to knowledge. Instead, it created a new intellectual map in which greater preeminence was accorded to memory, language, the imagination, and the body, but which could only be read using the newly refurbished instruments of history and psychology, not to mention anthropology, alongside the more traditional tools of rationalism. 2 In my view, the most significant consequence of these changes in the intellectual landscape of the eighteenth century is the emergence and increasing prominence of aesthetics as a master discourse, which reformulated and brought together under one conceptual roof the various elements we have just discussed with respect to the make up of Enlightenment epistemology, including the transformations of history and psychology. Aesthetics is not just a narrowly defined poetics for the visual arts, a body of disquisitions on taste, or a branch of philosophy devoted exclusively to the study of the beautiful, christened by Alexander Baumgarten in either 1735 or 1750 (depending on whether one chooses the Meditationes or the Aesthetica as the birthplace of aesthetics). As Terry Eagleton has remarked, "Anyone who inspects the history of European philosophy since the Enlightenment must be struck by the curiously high priority assigned by it to aesthetic questions." His explanation for the success of aesthetics stems from its ideological resilience and its ability to speak of politics, law, and economics through art. In the process, aesthetics both reflects and challenges what Eagleton calls the "middle class's struggle for political hegemony."3 Needless to say, Eagleton is not alone in examining the interplay between developments in aesthetic theories and political discourse. The authors of a number of works devoted to eighteenth-century aesthetics in particular have underscored the connections between the emergence of aesthetics and the reorganization of civil society, a trend exemplified by the following: "The aesthetic sphere emerges as an alternative site for a harmony perceived to be slipping away in other areas of life, notably the political. An aesthetic paradigm of perception thus becomes a cultural means toward

2 Michele Duchet has analyzed the eighteenth-century recasting of anthropology as the study of the human condition as a whole rather than anatomy alone, as well as the ties that bound anthropology and history, in Anthropologie et histoire au siecle des Lumii!res (Paris: Maspero, 1971). 3 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 1, 3·

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Introduction

the ultimately political end of homogeneity and solidarity among England's governing classes."4 My own claim is equally ambitious with respect to the importance of this emerging discipline, but I consider it from the point of view of epistemology rather than politics. Indeed, the central contention of this book is that inquiries into origins both reflected and shaped key eighteenthcentury propositions regarding the nature of human knowledge. Inquiries into origins helped to formulate and cultivate the belief that knowing is a distinctly human activity grounded in the senses and the understanding and that to be human is to be "original," or to "derive one's origin from oneself rather than from something one imitates.''5 In other words, inquiries into origins made it possible for aesthetics, and one of its core constituents, the discourse of originality, to emerge. Not initially concerned exclusively with art, aesthetics in turn allowed art, that most human of activities, to be seen as giving the rule to knowledge. In making this argument, I return to Baumgarten's own definition of aesthetics as a form of knowledge, an episteme aisthetike. He conceded that aesthetics is epistemologically inferior to logic. However, he also believed that logic had become barren and saw aesthetics as a science that would build instead on what he characterized as the sound principles newly offered by psychology, which he believed presented a viable alternative to logic. 6 Foremost among these principles is "the law of the imagination" ("lex imaginationis") or "association of ideas" (" associatio idearum"), formulated in the following statement: "The partial perception of an idea brings back its totality" ("percepta idea partiali recurrit eius totalis").7 4 Elizabeth A. Bohls, "Disinterestedness and Denial of the Particular: Locke, Adam Smith, and the Subject of Aesthetics," in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics and the Reconstruction of Art, ed. Paul Mattick Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 18. Also see John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: "The Body of the Public" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1g86); Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 198