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Reason, nature and the human being in the West: Part 3

Thomas Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews (about 1748/9)

3.1 Human beings and Nature in Enlightenment Thought

Introduction

The 18th Century is often defined in terms of a philosophical outlook, and there is no shortage of succinct statements of what it is supposed to have believed about human beings and the world they related to.

THE 18TH CENTURY WAS SELF-CONSCIOUS ABOUT BELIEFS

This is partly because as a period it was self-conscious about beliefs - how to tell which beliefs were correct, how to enlarge the number of these, and what the importance of true beliefs, namely knowledge, was.

- AND INTERESTED IN KNOWLEDGE AS AN EDIFICE

It was also interested, in a way that was new, in human knowledge as a single edifice. The great Encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment philosophes, one of the monuments of the age, was concerned not only to set forth the sum of human knowledge, which was a not an innovative project, but to display "the order and connection of the parts of human knowledge" (D'Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to Diderot's Encyclopaedia, (first published 1751), Library of Liberal Arts edition, Trans. Richard N. Schwab, 1963, p.4).

(We also remember that Modern science was rooted in the exclusion of some material that had counted as knowledge before.)

The main springs of the project were D'Alembert (who was the Editor) and Diderot, contributors included Holbach, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire - the 'Encyclopedists'. For its anticlerical sentiment it was suppressed by Royal Decree in 1759

- AND KEEN ON CLARITY

The ruling philosophy also, most happily, placed emphasis not only on being open about beliefs but on expressing them as clearly as possible, so there is the bonus of having what they regarded as knowledge not only set out, but set out as intelligibly as they knew how.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT'S SELF-PLACEMENT: COMPLETING THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION

The 18th Century saw itself, at any rate, as the flowering of the revolution begun in the seventeenth century: and it construed this revolution, which it thought of as beginning with a revolution in Mathematics and Astronomy, and broadening into one that embraced the whole of "science", as in essence the progressive application of human reason.

This was their self-placement. But of course a period is not in a position to see its own foundations clearly enough to be relied upon in judgements of this kind.

A note on the growth of Eurpean trade with the rest of the world which is an important part of the background to thought about nature is here. And there is also a note on land improvement.

Human beings and nature in Enlightenment thought

We have already noted some of the leading features of the scientific world view as a consensus began to get established at the end of the 17th Century. Here I set out those points with one or two we omitted earlier:

THE UNIVERSE AND ITS CONSTITUENTS AS INERT.

First, established science was seen as assuming that the universe and its basic elements were inert. The distinction between inert (or passive) and active was clearly recognized in medieval thought. A passive body was one which was simply washed about in the tide of events. It might move because it was pushed, or perhaps because it was pulled, but insofar as it was indeed 'passive' it 'took no initiative' of its own, as it were. An active thing, on the other hand, was one which was capable of launching into movement spontaneously. Active things were thought of as possessing a 'power' inside them which was capable of initiating change. Not everybody in the Enlightenment period thought there were such things!

Thomas Hobbes for example held that everything that happened in the Universe could be explained in terms of masses of small particles which were perfectly passive: they moved about, but only because they kept being bumped into by the others!

This is 'atomism' in a particularly clear form: the universe is made up entirely of indivisibly small particles - jostling about, but perfectly inert - and everything about the universe, all the changes that go on as well as all the appearances it presents to us - of colours, smells, sounds and so on - are to be explained in terms of these minute blobs and their senseless jiggling.

There were Enlightenment thinkers who were 'atomists' but who believed the atoms were active (Leibniz, at one point in his career at any rate, was one of these). Nevertheless, the passive conception predominated and it was this that entered into later conceptions of how the universe was thought of by the Enlightenment. It was thought of as made up of minute hard passive particles..

The predominant form of Enlightenment atomism, gives us one clear example of what it was to think of nature as in itself 'inert'.

There is another great picture rooted in the Enlightenment but meaningful to us still today, and that is the metaphor of the universe as a great machine. This too invites the idea that nature is passive. Clockwork is a contrivance of parts, each of which is brought into movement by something else. None of the parts 'takes any initiative' of its own.

THE HUMAN MIND AS INERT

Part of the Enlightenment Project was to bring to bear the scientific mindset upon the human being itself, and when this was done generally speaking the passive conception of nature was taken. One influential approach was to think of 'ideas' as passive mental 'atoms'. Sensations dropped through the letterbox of the senses, then linked up in various ways and through various mechanisms. The object of the science of the human understanding was to work out the principles which governed the way in which such data of sense combined and otherwise related to each other - just as it was the object of the science of the natural world to establish the principles according to which atoms interacted to produce the observed phenomena of physics.

THE UNIVERSE REDUCED TO SHAPE, SIZE, AND MOTION

A third aspect of the Romantic conception of the 'Enlightenment' mindset was this. A part of atomism was - and still is - the idea that much of the ordinary experience we have as human beings is somehow a product of the interaction of atoms which in themselves have only a small number of simple properties. Atomism proposes to explain our experience of colour for example by reference to the movement of atoms which themselves are not coloured at all. Sound is put forward as some sort of movement of atoms. Smell similarly. Different atomists give different lists of the properties atoms are supposed to possess - and sometimes the same atomist gives different lists on different occasions! But the general thrust is to reduce. The world of human experience turns out, according to atomism, to be much more varied and rich than the reality underlying it all, which is for most atomists, a colourless, silent, odourless, tasteless skitter of tiny specks.

'REASON' IN THE AGE OF REASON

The Enlightenment is often known as the Age of Reason. One justification for this epithet was that it had turned its back on the authority of the Church and the Bible and sought to base knowledge instead on whatever could be discovered and verified by human beings on their own. 'The motto of the Enlightenment,' Kant tells us, is this: S'apere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding.' (Kant, An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?", 1784.

In this context 'reason' stood for the power of unaided human thought.

But 'reason' is sometimes used to make a different contrast, not between finding out ourselves and taking things on authority from something or somebody else, but between the analytical aspect of human thought and 'emotion'. Emphasis on reason in this sense is to be found in the Enlightenment too. - For example in the key role that had been ascribed, particularly in early phases of the scientific revolution, to mathematics. Some of the pioneers had certainly seen in mathematics the one and only key to understanding, so that science for them amounted to the progressive application of this form of reasoning to all the possible fields of human knowledge.

But let us not think of the 18th C as extolling reason at the expense of experience. Its ideology is that experience, reasoned about, is the chief or only source of human knowledge.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT PLACEMENT OF FEELING

Though not making the contrast with experience, the Enlightenment idea of reason did make a contrast with feeling. Classifications appealed to properties which could be observed through the senses: especially shape, size, how the parts were arranged in space, how many there were. Plants were never classified on the basis, for example, of how they made you feel - of the pleasure they prompted as you encountered them, or of the emotions they conjured up within you as they were eaten. And that whole dimension of the role of plants in our lives was discounted as not relevant to the project of science.

Human emotion did enter into Enlightenment discourse in one form however. It was thought to play a part, and a key part, in the determination of human action. David Hume is famous for his view that ... and many other thinkers of the period thought of the relationship between human emotion and human reason and action in the same way. It is when we ask about what determined the emotions in their turn that we see what the Romantics were objecting to. For Hume and other Enlightenment thinkers saw emotion in quasi mechanical terms. We were born with a repertoire of emotional responses, and particular responses were triggered by eventualities impinging upon us. Once triggered a response then motivated action.

This treats the emotions as cogs in a machine. They play a part in the machinery which produces action. But they don't originate it.

[This conception of the role of feeling in human life is reflected in the old concept of the 'passions', which was displaced by the concept of 'emotion' in the late 18th Century (Smith, Human Sciences, p. 60). They were interpreted as the result of influences impinging from without.]

DETERMINISM IN ENLIGHTENMENT THOUGHT

In thinking of the human being as a 'subject for science' (Compte?) Enlightenment thinkers seemed to be committed to the idea that what needed to be understood about human behaviour was its causation. I have said that a leading idea was to treat thought in the same way - what was to be understood was what brought such and such a thought about, and to regard thoughts, including feelings, as playing a part in the machinery which brought about behaviour. But this way of thinking of the human being brought with it the suggestion - the implication perhaps - that human beings were at the mercy of the causal forces. In this way human freedom seemed to be under threat. If what you did was a result of the sort of causes which it was the business of science to identify, this seemed to take responsibility for your actions out of your hands. It wasn't just feelings that seemed like cogs in the clockwork from this point of view - it seemed implied that the human being as a whole was a component in some gigantic machine.

The characteristic of a machine is that each part of it comes into play when caused to do so by some other part acting upon it. Without a prompt, a part remains motionless. So in a machine, nothing happens without a cause. This nostrum, when applied to the universe as a whole, is the thesis of determinism. Determinism's thesis that 'every event has a cause' means that the occurrence of any event can be tied to a change in the circumstances that obtained at the time of its occurrence: in Leibniz' words, "Everything remains in the state in which it is if there is nothing to change it..." (Leibniz, Letter to Foucher, in Leibniz, Philosophical Writings trans. Morris, London, 1934, Everyman p. 48)

Determinism stands against the idea that some things that happen as it were spontaneously. Their occurrence is not fixed by prior conditions. And it has seemed to some that human freedom depends on there being some of these 'spontaneous' events - namely human 'acts of will'. Human acts of will, on this view, aren't determined by what has gone before. They are 'free'. And only if we think of them as free can we think of human action as anything other than bits of the universal machine turning.

The power to initiate change, exercised by human beings, on this view, when they act freely, means that sometimes a change happens while the circumstances in which it occurs remain unchanged. It is clearly a peculiar power: it is a power to bring something about, but one which is thought of as somehow not belonging to the circumstances within which the event in question occurs.

The determinism of the Enlightenment was expressed in its commitment to the idea that the universe was 'governed' by 'laws'.

LAWS OF NATURE

PHYSICAL MATTER BEHAVED IN WAYS THAT WERE IN PRINCIPLE LAW-GOVERNED AND EXPLICABLE.

As we discussed in Block 2, the Enlightenment belief was that the physical matter of which the universe was made up behaved in ways that were in principle law-governed.

The Gardening Revolution

Keith Thomas delineates what he calls the 'gardening revolution' in Man and the Natural World. You might like to read this now. Some notes are here.

What do you think? What might have caused the 'gardening Revolution'? What was the social significance of these developments? Discussion site

Possible social significance of growth of interest in gardening.

1. Gardens as a mark of respectability, and therefore a tool for social control.

"Honeysuckle around a cottage door a sign of the sobriety, industry and cleanliness of the inhabitants within." (Thomas)

"Gardening attached a man to his home and it spread a taste for neatness and elegance". (Thomas)

Landlords building model cottages often built them with the garden to the front, where they could be fully inspected by the passer-by: a well-kept garden showed social contentment as well as presenting a pleasant appearance.

A Scottish clergyman reported that on his visits to parishioners he had never had an unfriendly reception in a house which had a flowerpot in the window.

2. The significance of flower-gardening's appeal to town-dwellers.

As people went into the towns, they tried to take a little bit of the country with them - that was the contemporary interpretation. Here for example is the poet William Cowper:

3. Gardening was seen to have a spiritual dimension.

There is a long tradition to the idea of Paradise as a garden and in the 17th Century gardens were regarded as peculiarly appropriate resorts for meditation and reflection. This continued into the 18th, with gardening being regarded as especially suitable for "clergymen and other studious persons that have a taste for beauty and order". (John Laurence, 1726; quoted by Thomas, p. 237).

4. The garden was a powerful source of personal satisfaction.

(The lawn derived from the Tudor bowling alley...) 

If this is the story of gardens and gardening and the rise of this interest throughout the early modern period, and especially in the 18th, similar stories can be told of a specific interest in trees and forests. In particular, there were enormous forestry projects throughout the 18th C, belonging properly to the programme of any self-respecting "improving" landlord.

'Capability' Brown's lake at Blenheim, bridge by Vanburgh Courtesy Arcadia Web, who introduce Brown

Animals from the 18th Century corpuscularian perspective

Sustained attempts were made in the 18th Century to carry the corpuscularian account of the physical universe over to the understanding of animals and plants. As an illustration, here are some notes on the effort to explain the development of the individual animal from conception to maturity. It involves setting out some distinctions between different types of forces.

Growth in sympathy towards animals

There was a significant growth in 'sympathy' towards animals over the 18th Century.

When it came to how it was proper to behave towards animals the question according to the 18th Century was not whether they were intelligent, nor whether they belonged to 'the moral sphere' but whether they had feelings. And it was thought that many of them, maybe all, did. Jeremy Bentham asserted that what mattered was not whether they had reason, or could talk, but whether they were capable of suffering.

By the nineteenth Century, this had changed. Animals came to be regarded in law as chattels, though towards the end of the 19th Century certain protections against ill-treatment of animals were introduced.

Ritvo interprets this change as follows:

She says that what it reflects is a change in the way in which the relationship between human being and animal was perceived over the period (18th and 19th Centuries), a change which she attributes this change in perception to:"the new methods of acquiring and applying knowledge associated with the Enlightenment". (Ritvo, The Animal Estate, above, p.3)

At the beginning of this period, people regarded themselves, she says, as dominated by natural forces; at the end, they thought of science and engineering as putting human beings in control.

Talk about animals is used as a way of talking about nature in general, according to Ritvo: and she says that when animals were spoken of as autonomous, a threat because outside human control, this was a way of saying that the whole of nature was like that. (Animals are part of nature, of course, so the judgement that animals were a threat was part of the judgement that the whole of nature was a threat) .

When people began to feel that nature was under control, they partly said this by saying that animals were not a threat but a chattel.

But you could also say that control specifically over animals had increased over the period. Scientific and technical advances enhanced the control people had over animals (in areas such as breeding, veterinary science, gun design), and this would have made people look at them less as a threat.

Ritvo looks forward of course beyond the 18th Century. In the 19th she sees :-

• sentimental attitudes to pets, and to the lower order of creation, increasing markedly, particularly over the first half of that century.
• wildness becoming increasingly attractive.
• this new sentiment echoed in art and literature, where a new value was put on "wildness" - if we gloss that as "irregularity and lack of restraint" - and the "highly ordered aesthetic" of the 18th C rejected (Ritvo, The Animal Estate, above, p.3).

She is speaking of course of the emergence of Romanticism.

What do you think? What do you think governs a culture's manner of treating animals? Discussion site

Setting out the Order of Nature

Though the corpuscularian project was pursued throughout the 18th Century, another approach to setting out the order that was to be found in nature, thought of objectively, in the end became dominant. This was the approach that pursued classification.

The 18th Century preoccupation with classification is often glossed as a preoccupation with description:

But setting out the order of nature is more than describing the things that belong to nature.

It is displaying the proper relation between the things in nature.

It may be that this can only be done on the basis of 'correct' and 'complete' descriptions. But it goes beyond describing.

What is meant by "proper"? What do we mean by saying that the 18th C project was one of displaying the "proper" relation between things of nature?

It is the project of revealing the true degree of similarity between any two things.

Classification - the 18th Century project

The 18th Century conception of how animals and plants - and stones - might be "naturally" grouped into coherent categories was to think it could be done on the basis of shared 'characteristics'. (I argue this in my 'Foucault & the History of Classification Theory'.

Adanson (Familles des Plantes, 1763) was perhaps the boldest. In the case of plants, he proposed that a complete description of each should be drawn up and a classification derived based on numbers of shared characters.

Linnaeus, courtesy Berkeley University, who have an introductory article. Uppsala University offer to show you Linnaeus garden.

Others (e.g. Linnaeus) despaired of carrying through such a programme successfully and settled for approximations to the "natural" system Adanson's scheme was aimed at establishing. Buffon took the view that there were no natural groupings (above the species) - species were scattered about the similarity space.

ASSUMPTIONS

Notice what assumptions were being made by this conception of natural categories of things.

1. FIXED NUMBER OF POSSIBLE CHARACTERS

The first is that you could draw up a complete list of characters which a plant (in the case of plant classification - and let's stick to that) might have, so that you could go down the list and check off whether a given specimen had it or not.

This creates objectivity: anybody possessed of this understanding of what it was to describe a plant would describe a given plant in the same way. The check-list of possible characters served as a kind of template through which the plant is to be viewed, restricting the attention of the observer to certain features only.

Foucault puts it this way: a plant description had to be articulated in terms of just five elements of structure: roots, stem, leaves, flowers, and fruits; and four variables:

2. CHARACTERS RESTRICTED TO THE VISIBLE

The second is that the characters of a plant which are relevant to its placing in the natural order are observable, by which was meant (overwhelmingly at any rate) characters which were visible.

All classification schemes in the 18th century relied on features that were visible: you inspected the flower, for example, and noted how many stamens, where the ovary was rooted in relation to the stamens, how many petals, how many sepals, the geometrical configuration their arrangements displayed: and so on. Where other features of the plant came in, you inspected them visually as in the case of the flower: Was the stem hirsute? How tall? How did it branch, i.e. according to what geometrical pattern?

The 18th century concentration on the visible is something Foucault brings out. But it is not peculiar to him.

Concentration on the visible was not inescapable. In earlier periods all sorts of things had been thought relevant to a scientific placing of a thing. Renaissance encyclopaedias had been highly catholic in the matter they included: plant's medicinal properties, their uses for food, for clothing, myths about them, their place in literature etc.

But in the 18th century, the visible was taken up and concentrated on to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Describing plant in the 18th century was therefore largely a matter of describing visibilities: that is the second assumption I have picked out. And describing those visibilities was a matter of going down a finite check-list of (visible) characters: that is the import of the second assumption.

Conceptual space for animals and plants in the 18th: Foucault's picture.

If we are asking about the concept of a plant or animal the 18th Century deployed, Foucault expresses his answer in terms of conceptual space.

To say there are different épistèmes is to say there are different conceptual spaces.

His self-appointed task could be said to be to describe the conceptual space in which animals and plants are located in the 18th Century.

What he says is that they were all laid out on table.

He is referring both to a flat-topped table, and tot he sort of table in which figures are laid out on paper, timetables, for example.

A table is in either case two-dimensional. The conceptual space in which animals and plants are located is two-dimensional.

I have explained that the 18th Century saw plants as configurations of visibilities. Things were reduced to descriptions of the visual fields they represented. This is the sense in which the conceptual space they occupied was two-dimensional.

Note this is not to say that the plant was thought not to have an inside, to be a surface, a two-dimensional object. We are talking of "conceptual" space.

In the 18th Century then the two-dimensional table you have is of differences and identities.

This becomes three-dimensional when it becomes recognised that these differences and identities are the surface manifestations of an underlying organisation: as it does in the19th Century.

END OF BLOCK 3

VP

Revised 06:06:03