A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.
– Stendhal
The eighteenth century can be examined as a period charting the development of the autonomy and legitimacy of the individual subject within both philosophic and cultural discourse as emerging from the Enlightenment project. This is indeed a highly reductionist and therefore thoroughly naive interpretation of European history, but it does successfully correlate with the emersion of aesthetic discourse as a self-sufficient entity in philosophy. It is my belief that these two conceptual streams are inextricably bound and fundamental to the artistic output of the era. This is not the space for a lengthy audit of western philosophy as an ideational totality, or even for an attempt to negotiate its many oppositions, occlusions, and lacunae. Rather, I wish to use elements of Kantian and Hobbesian thought along with several examples from English poetry to reflect a certain archaeology which would be more amentaceous in a much longer examination than is presently undertaken.
Fundamental to this examination is the development of the study of humanity itself, for the Enlightenment can be observed as the increasing interiorization of the critical faculties onto the Self. In this regard Pope’s An Essay on Man is successfully emblematic: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man” (II, 1-2). As I will later elaborate, this humanist focus does not exclude God to the extent that the first line might suggest, and indeed the final line of the opening stanza outlines the importance of a transcendent absolute for the realization of humanity’s potential, as the poet desires an epistemology that will “vindicate the ways of God to man” (I, 16). The lines following this statement delineate the extent to which humanity can apply its faculty for reason, as originating with the conception of humanity crafted in the image of God: “Say first, of God above, or man below, / What can we reason, but from what we know?” (I, 17-8). The rather infamous Great Chain of Being extends from divine perfection to all that it has created: “behold the chain of love / combining all below and all above” (III, 7-8). In Pope’s epistemological framework, love represents the sublime which is humanity’s gesture to transcend itself. Love is both compassion and desire, the former of which unites organisms while the latter imposes a continual reinvigoration of intellectual processes. The purpose of human endeavour is to understand existence as a rationally ordered reflection of God’s perfection, and the will of humanity to understand its environment reflects the generative (and performative) impulse of the Word of creation:
Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old time, and regulate the sun;
Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;
II, 19-24
This image is precisely a conception of humanity modelled after God, analogous to Genesis 1:27. As a related yet chronologically divergent aside, George Herbert’s Prayer (I) from 1633 also inscribes the generative Word upon the lips of humanity: “Prayer, the church’s banquet, angel’s age, / God’s breath in man returning to his birth” (1-2). Here, both prayer and those who pray simultaneously create each other in the image of God. All of creation is contained within this prayer – “The six-days world transposing in an hour, / a kind of tune” (7-8) – and thus the infinitude of temporality is itself compressed as one finite performative utterance.
To return from this momentary tangent, no longer was the human environment one in which the human subject stood in awe – in the most absolute sense of the term as a sense of beauty and terror of the irrational unknown – of its surroundings, but rather all of existence could ostensibly be rationalized in order to control and direct such understanding. While medieval thought had positioned the human body and its consequent sensory experiences as a corruption of the truth represented in the divine, Enlightenment discourse reinterpreted truth as empirical evidence demonstrating the sublimity and absolute nature of the divine. Descartes had charted all of existence within the empirical framework of numerical quantization. His epistemological system, with the famous cogito ergo sum principally emblematic of his ideology as a whole, exposes the human subject as its locus. Descartes’s cogito posits the conscious subject as transcendent to, and thus autonomous from, nature, and thus the split between consciousness and object reaches its most logical extreme. The Self is itself made transcendent as the I of this dictum, as a subject always-already existing in the duality of object and actor, a nostalgia for both past and present. The mind becomes a preternatural construction, hierarchized above nature and the body, and in a very real sense serves to prefigure divinity itself. In this capacity the mind-body split is extended to the origin of knowledge production. Cogito ergo sum was the monolithic phallus reflecting a cultural sense of masculine identity as self-contained, sovereign, and transcendent. As Mary Wollstonecraft so eloquently pointed out, the Enlightenment project was an a priori exclusion of women as a negative Other that had to be controlled and contained in order to be understood. It is a notable irony that the importance of morality to such an epistemological system, as I will describe below, is consequent with the violent colonization of the Other in order to control the degree to which it informs the Self.
Interestingly, one can readily note the degree to which reason was used as a counter to itself, in terms of aesthetic discourse. In a very real fashion, certain elements of eighteenth century aesthetics tried to seek an outside to the jurisdiction of the rational mind. As mentioned above, frequently this gesture required a transcendent divine source, usually referencing the Platonic idealized forms, in order to justify aesthetics as a truth within an empirical framework. In other words, philosophers such as Hobbes and Kant needed to include the irrational, in its most absolute form as a divine presence, as part of the epistemological system which rationalized knowledge. For Hobbes, the former is best encapsulated early in chapter XVII: “the Lawes of Nature ... of themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like” (223). In other words, the Self must be controlled by an Other to which it is fundamentally dependent. Over the course of the text, Hobbes outlines a material substitute for divine intervention, namely the transcendence of the state, which serves to act as a physical manifestation of divine reason filtered through human virtue.
For Kant, such a dependence on metaphysical theories functions as the syncretic basis for Reason itself. As he argues in his Critiques, reason is the ontological and a priori judgement of information as filtered by human experience. It is reason which defines Objective experience, and thus makes sense of the world in both a rational and symbolic way. Art is no different than science in this context, for each is an examination of rational possibility. There is a fundamental distinction between the two that must be considered, however. Art requires aesthetics in order to reify itself as an artistic gesture different from a non-artistic gesture or event, such as can be defined within the realm of the ‘mundane vulgarity’ of the common. To use a wholly absurd example, it is possible to distinguish an aesthetic sense in the desire to eat a bowl of soup in front of an audience in the manner of the Brechtian Theatre of the Absurd, yet such an action would not signify an aesthetic gesture when the context of its performance in front of an audience expecting theatre is absent. In this sense, the Self of the artistic gesture requires an external observer in order to reify it(S)elf as objet d’art. This external entity is typically a projection of the Self into a transcendent space which nostalgically examines the origins of its transcendence. Thus, we can agree with both Martin Buber and Jacques Derrida when they complete the Self by means of the negational aspects of the Other. In other words, the artistic gesture is the recognition of the importance of the non-Self – that which is not a manifest element of the Self – as fundamental to the conception of the Self within productive terms. The aesthetic is the negotiation of a subjectivity which negates itself in order to reify itself.
In order to unpack this last statement with a little detail, a brief examination of aesthetics and subjectivity is required. In Leviathan, Hobbes points out that aesthetics derive from sense perception, and as a consequence are not qualities inherent in the object itself:
Which Object worketh on the Eyes, Eares, and other parts of man’s body;
and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of Apparences. The
Originall of them all, is that which we call SENSE; (For there is no conception
in a mans mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten
upon the organs of Sense.) The rest are derived from that originall.
(85)
Information is determined in its most primal form by the senses themselves, and any interpretive gesture on the part of the observer must be accomplished with the awareness that it is not the object which is being judged, but rather the representation of that object to the Self. Thus the process of critical inquiry is not distinct from the object in question, but rather judgement and object (or to rephrase, the sensory stimulus) are contingent and can be seen to occupy the same continuum of Self (as equally interior and exterior). While Hobbes did not formulate this process of judgement to the degree that Kantian philosophy was to in the century following his own writing, at least in the important regard of the will of the individual subject Hobbes prefigured Kantian thought. It is at this point that aesthetics becomes associated with reason, as each mirrors the triumph of the will of the subject in Enlightenment discourse. I do not presently wish to unnecessarily cloud this (already somewhat occluded) examination, yet it seems clear that morality is the conjoining element of the natural and the transcendent, for it is morality which signals the intention of judgement (and by extension, of aesthetics) to make the Self a universal, and by consequence a transcendent, entity. In its most absolute sense, aesthetics reflect not the object of critical study but rather the critical study of the Self projected externally. As Hobbes outlined in the first section of Leviathan, “men measure, not only other men, but all other things, by themselves” (87). Stated alternately, beauty is not a property of an object proper, but rather it is a representation of that object to the Self as a conceptual figuration shaped and created by the process of the Self applying judgment to that which is interpreted by sense perception as a non-Self.
Despite this aggrandization of the Self, in the pre-Freudian teleology of Enlightenment thought metaphysics is required to explain (and allow) the irrational. For Kant, an object perceived by a human subject is different from the true object itself – the Ding an sich, or thing-in-itself, which is the ostensible cause of all perceived phenomena. This object in its ‘natural’ state is thus transcendent over the human observer; it is something that cannot be understood in its totality. It is by means of the application of judgement that the object enters into the semantic space of knowledge production (and thus a natural object is represented as a transcendent one). As Adorno formulated in one of his published lectures, “reason is the absolute that holds sway in us all and is supposed to indicate to us what is good and what evil” (Adorno: 93). Thus reason as a gesture toward transcendence mediates experience between the transcendent and the empirical. Yet it should be understood that God is itself viewed as existing in a non-Objective form, and thus it is a priori immune to the application of reason. God is not the sublime, but rather the sublime is a signal path (or system of symbols arranged in a rhizomatic fashion) between judgement and its idealized source of origination, which of course within this teleology is God.
The extension of judgement into the imaginative undertaken in the gesture to understand God represents the manifestation of the sublime in human sensory experience, and thus constitutes the foundation of aesthetics. In the sense of bridging the limitations of subjective experience, the sublime can be seen to represent a negotiation between contradictions, such as freedom and determination, which Kantian thought tries to rationalize. By entering into the otherwise closed system of objective phenomena (or in other words, a phenomenon which creates sensory data by its very existence: volume, weight, motion, etc), judgement inscribes the Self-in-judgement onto the Object of its gaze. This a priori inscription of the Self reifies itself as a transcendent identification – as Beauty, for example: what is beautiful is determined as such on the grounds of giving pleasure to the Ego (in the Freudian sense of both the pleasure principle and death drive libidinously invigorating the subject, an explication which is notoriously beyond the scope of this present examination). Humanity has reached the logical extent of this Promethean gesture, by reifying itself as contingent with a divine essence which underwrites the entire epistemological system of language and signification. Consequently, it is possible to understand the sublime as a consequence of subjectivity itself. That which is ‘self-evident’, or in Kantian terms that which is the given, is that which is most in question within philosophical inquiry since the eighteenth century. As Adorno points out in one of his lectures, “Schopenhauer was perhaps the first to point out that the given is not limited to sense-data, but in some fashion also contains the deity who is supposed to have been the cause of whatever is given” (76). There can be no sense of the aesthetic without a subject, and the subject of the Critiques is one requiring a God in order to rationalize the irrational and provide the foundational essence of the entire Kantian epistemological system.
The outcome of the Enlightenment project should not be misunderstood as a unifying and totalizing one in the sense of its being universally accepted. Many were highly critical of the limitations of reason and scientific inquiry. Of course, one of the principle criticisms Pope expresses in his An Essay on Man is the hubris of humanity in attempting to transcend its own morality by overstressing reason beyond humility: “Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule– / Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!” (II, 29-30). There is in Pope no Prometheus to serve as the sacrificial lamb for humanity’s intellectual benefit, and consequently humanity alone must overcome its pride. Swift demonstrates a similar, and notably less hesitant, contempt when Gulliver visits the Laputians in Book III of his Travels, and the scientific method is satirized in the absurd and superfluous enquiries of the various scientists. The earlier poet John Wilmot was equally as critical of reason, which frequently caused humans to err in contradiction to desire and impulse. In his Satire Against Mankind (1680), reason is likened to a sea which drowns humanity, despite the “Books [which] bear him up awhile, and make him try / To swim with bladders of philosophy” (20-1). While the uncontrolled application of reason is found to be a hollow virtue for humanity – “I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, / Or anything but that vain animal / Who is so proud of being rational” (5-7) – it is evident that by the middle of the text, Wilmot is praising the critical application of reason as representing the will of the individual:
Thus, whilst against false reasoning I inveigh,
I own right reason, which I would obey:
That reason which distinguishes by sense
And gives us rules of good and ill from thence,
That bounds desires with a reforming will
To keep ‘em more in vigor, not to kill.
Your reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy,
Renewing appetites yours would destroy.
(98-105)
In a very real sense this attitude prefigures the Kantian conception of judgement, in which the individual subject is given an ontological priority over its objective surroundings.
It is perhaps most fitting to summarize this somewhat rhizomatic present examination, a (pointedly anachronistic!) comment from Walter Benjamin can best exemplify the aesthetic conceptualisation I have outlined above:
Truth does not enter into relationships, particularly intentional ones.
The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent
in the concept, is not the truth. Truth is an intentionless state of being,
made up of ideas.... Truth is the death of intention.
(Benjamin: 35-6)
If we are to take Benjamin at his word, then truth is not consequent with the sublime, which is the relation between the transcendent and the material. Such is hardly an optimistic proposition for Enlightenment epistemological systems, for it suggests that to endeavour towards the sublime is merely to quest after spectres. Morality is useless in this context, for as Nietzsche was so famously to demonstrate, all moralities are constrained by the conditions of their origination. Only within a universe defined in terms of divine generation does morality based on the sublime remain legitimate. This is one of the key limitations of Kantian philosophy, and served as one of the principle entry points for the dismantling of his thought. We can suppose that it will not be until the humanities attempts to transpose the current scientific discourse concerning chaos principles into critical studies that the sublime and truth can be ratified as a mutually inclusive system of knowledge production.
QZH
Bibliography: A Rhizome and not a Grocery List...
All primary literary sources quoted from http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/index.cfm except as noted.
Adorno, Theodor W. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2001.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London:
NLB, 1977.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Touchstone, 1996.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. C.B. Macpherson. London: Penguin, 1985.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason, and other writings in moral philosophy. Trans.Lewis Black. London: Garland, 1976.
—— Critique of Judgement. Trans. Werner Pluhar. New York: Hackett, 1987.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. New York: Random House, 1992.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. London: Penguin, 1990.
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