GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Tom Jones and Rowan Boyson

The intellectual transformation in Europe termed the Enlightenment has long been understood as closely associated with the ambition of creating a science of man.1 Such a project, an anthropological corollary of Newtons project to unify and systematize the natural sciences, saw efforts on the part of figures from Malebranche to Hume to undertake a systematic investigation of mans nature, practices and social arrangements, parallel in rigour and comprehensiveness to the investigations of the natural world with which they were becoming familiar.2 A science of man would integrate the emerging humanistic disciplines of anthropology, comparative religion, economics, linguistics and psychology. Newtons model may have been the best available, but the human sciences differed from it in one major respect: that man was both subject and object of the knowledge that these sciences both studied and produced. This difference is also a difficulty, as Georges Gusdorf notes: La difficult tient ce que lhomme est la fois sujet et objet de la conaissance, en sorte que les problmes de lanthropologie ont une complexit intrinsque plus grande que ceux de la botanique.3 The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century attempts to formulate this self-reflexive science and the implications of such attempts for notions both of disciplinarity and of modernity, have preoccupied a number of eminent European intellectual historians since the 1970s.4 One scholar has emphasized a dialectic of division and reunification with respect to the emergent disciplines: the famous Enlightenment projects in the division of knowledge often aimed, with greater or lesser explicitness, to provide thereby a new foundation for a unified scheme of knowledge.5 The conduct of the project of the human sciences required a governing concept of the human that was then analysed from various disciplinary points of view, each of which produced different emphases in their accounts, and for which the human might come to mean something different. A unified science of man has a dynamic relationship with the various human sciences, through a regulating concept of the human that is posited in the knowledge that it will be revised. Different disciplinary emphases produce different images of the human,
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sometimes within the work of the same author. So, for example, and with reference to Adam Smith, whether man is considered primarily a speaking animal or a sympathizing, producing and consuming animal, or a legislating animal contributes to the determination of method, discipline and discovery. Yet these different emphases ask for a revision of the concept of the human that can in turn accommodate them all. A general science of man must recognize the variety of biological, historical, climatic and other determining factors of human behaviour, each of which is the subject of a discipline. One overarching concept of the human was as a poetic creature. Adam Ferguson wrote in 1767: When we attend to the language which savages employ on any solemn occasion, it appears that man is a poet by nature.6 His compact formulation suggests ways in which in this period poetry might be used to define both the object and the practice of human science. Ferguson indicates that the study of human life should focus on behaviour, such as speech; that ritual behaviour is particularly revealing of human nature; that poetry is natural to humankind; and yet that natural poetry is allied to savagery, and distinguished from the cultivated position of the observer. The naturalness of poetry to man has been lost in modernity, despite Fergusons assertion that If we are asked Where the state of nature is to be found? we may answer, It is here; and it matters not whether we are understood to speak in the island of Great Britain, at the Cape of Good Hope, or the Straits of Magellan.7 Both the savage and the modern man are natural, but modernity as opposed to savagery represents a loss as well as a gain, and one way of describing what is lost is to call it poetry. Thinking about poetry and the poetic as natural to humankind also raises questions concerning the wider relationship of philosophy and poetry in this period. Here one must consider how poetry mediates specialized modern intellectual disciplines. The concept of poetry is at once specific, concentrating on a particular mode of writing, and general, as the poetic was also understood in the eighteenth century as a stage in evolution, a state of mind, a distinctive set of attitudes that imply distinctive cognitive potentials and limitations. Vicos enquiries into the fabular origins of religious, legal and social institutions are one form of exploration into the poetic as a moment in the cognitive evolution of humanity.8 Where poetry stands for what is human, it may also stand for what is beyond scientific or professional knowledge, and it is therefore a challenge to the very human scientific enterprise that partially identifies its object, man, as poetic. The essays in this volume address these and other significant questions, such as how poetry figures in the development of a science of language in this period, and how poetic imagination contributes to Enlightenment histories and theories of social life. This book sets out to provide some new answers to these questions by exploring the concepts of poetry and the poetic in philosophical writings of the Enlightenment that promote a science of man. One imperative to address these

General Introduction

questions anew is the body of historiographical work that redescribes and reconceptualizes the Enlightenment as a moment at which feeling, embodiment and the imagination figure in all manner of discourses (such as those of natural-scientific and philosophical epistemology and empiricism) previously considered inimical to or exclusionary of them. The dichotomy of reason and emotion seen as central to the Enlightenment by its great critics, from Hegel to Adorno and Foucault, has been blurred, and scholars have begun instead to see ways in which poetry is inscribed at the very heart of projects to describe human life and society. On the other hand, recent structuralist and deconstructive work on the sociology and poetics of knowledge has shown ways in which philosophys attempt to be rigorous and systematic paradoxically readmits the poetic as a regulating concept for philosophy itself. In some sense, then, Enlightenment human science becomes a science by excluding itself from the domain of literature, and this book is in part a study of what Jacques Rancire has called the set of literary procedures by which a discourse escapes literature to become science.9 The ambition of the chapters presented here is to extend the important work already carried out on the rle of poetry in epistemic/scientific disciplines in the European enlightenment. Peter Hughes has argued that Vico places poetry at the centre of a science of man, whilst Maureen McLane has traced the effect of the emergence of Enlightenment human science on Romantic notions of the human.10 More recently, Christina Lupton and Alexander Dick have collected essays that show how language and writing leave an impression upon the abstractions of eighteenth-century philosophy, and Robin Valenza has looked at how the literary was shaped reactively against a backdrop of eighteenth-century intellectual specialization.11 The contributions gathered in this volume, each pursuing its own methodology but guided by the set of concerns outlined above, seek to understand the significance of poetry to intellectual history of the long eighteenth century. In the rest of this Introduction we summarize briefly the argument of each chapter, as well as setting out the rationale and scholarly context for each of our three main sections: Poetic Knowledge and the Knowledge of Poetry, Poetic Theories of the Social Self and Enlightenment and Romantic Poetologies.

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I Poetic Knowledge and the Knowledge of Poetry

The essays in this section, dealing mainly with mid-eighteenth-century philosophers and prose writers from France, Scotland and England, ask how the concept of poetry institutes specific discourses, namely those of historical linguistics, literary criticism and literature. They share a concern with poetrys presence in or connection to Enlightenment theories of knowledge. Within literary scholarship of recent years, the problematic relation of poetry and knowledge has been revivified following a period of new-historicist approaches to literary texts,

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which sometimes downplayed their prosodic, and other characteristically literary features. Simon Jarvis has pointed to ways in which poetry might produce knowledge, writing on the cognitive distinction of prosodic utterance, with particular emphasis on Wordsworth, but with implications for many other epochs and manners of poetic composition.12 The essays in this section follow a different procedure from that of Jarvis and they do not offer a poetics of any particular text. They do, however, give active consideration to the claim that there is a role for poetry in philosophy and vice versa, and they may be taken to show that debates around the connection of poetry and knowledge, often situated later in German Romanticism and the creation of literature as a university subject in the nineteenth century, have an important genealogy in this earlier, mid-century period. Avi Lifschitz, intellectual historian of eighteenth-century language debates, offers an introduction to this section. Nicholas Hudson traces the evolution of Samuel Johnsons critical perspective, culminating in the Lives of the Poets, asking whether Johnsons attitudes might reasonably be called scientific. Whilst a structuring opposition between novelty and familiarity informs all Johnsons critical thinking, Hudson argues that this opposition shifts from a scepticism about the operation of rules in literary criticism to a position whereby the special status of aesthetic objects allows poetry to permit the combination, and to resolve the contradiction of something (the literary work) being new and familiar at once. Hudson highlights the implications of eighteenth-century psychology for Johnsons understanding of the differences between real-life and literary experience. Ultimately only literary experience could resolve the dilemma that psychology posed, requiring a framework different from empiricist epistemology. Johnsons critical stance, Hudson proposes, is that which rightly characterizes the modern discipline of literary study. Tom Jones surveys a range of attitudes to prosody in eighteenth-century language theory, including those of Condillac, Diderot, Monboddo, Blair, Smith and Beattie. Language is regarded by these authors as a distinguishing human capacity, the analysis of which, proceeding by historical conjecture or some other means, improves our idea of what it is to be human. Prosody, as a feature of language, will therefore have some role to play in an analysis of what human social and cognitive life is. In the deconstructive tradition, attention to the figurative, substitutive logic of language, writing and philosophy in general presents an epistemological critique of Enlightenment goals of, and belief in, knowledge and truth. Joness analysis suggests the need to counter the emphasis given to figure by attending to the nuances of eighteenth-century writing on prosody. Whilst in some quarters there is a strong association between prosody and primitive, poetic language use, and associated cognitive human function, this association is countered in other writers by recognition of the persistence of prosody as a material aspect of all language even with the development of more

General Introduction

prosaic, modern forms of language. Thus a modern, scientific, philosophical language acknowledges its shared nature with originary poetic aspects of language. Jones asks what kinds of knowledge these historians of language and civic life think is lost in the transition from poetic to philosophical speech. The development of literary study traced by Hudson is also central to Stefan Uhligs chapter, focusing in particular on literary historicism. Uhlig offers a close examination of Adam Fergusons chapter on the history of Literature in An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) in this context. Ferguson, like other commentators, saw the distinctive contribution of the poetic art as being to appear both naturally accomplished and constitutively figurative, and therefore able to integrate early societies through its emotional appeal. Yet just as the progression of society entails the separation and subordination of all kinds of labour, what we have come to know as literary production is also divided and recast in different ways. Uhligs essay describes a subtle yet vital transition by which Ferguson identified the emergence of a specific category of human endeavour known as literature. The members of this class must precede the class, and so its existence as a class is an act of historicizing; it is also an act of distancing, a means by which Ferguson places his own work in the long narrative development of literature. Uhlig argues that Fergusons Literature derives its force precisely from its own ability to yield a history namely the history of literary arts set in the wider context of what Ferguson calls our, historically inflected, knowledge. Given that literature, rather than, say, poetry or poetics, is the category of choice when literary studies are installed as a specific field of enquiry in the nineteenth-century academy, Fergusons divided literary field may be read as part of the long prehistory of that choice.

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II Poetic Theories of the Social Self

This section moves back to an earlier period and beyond the literary and linguistic disciplines to questions of sociability and politics. Dealing mainly with English writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, though with glances forward to the Scottish Enlightenment, the essays in this section show how poetry figured in moral-psychological debates about the self and the possible modes of human relationship. In early enlightenment histories and theories of social life, connections are made between poetry and legislative, religious and civic speech. The essays in this section show how individual poems might be taken to provide examples of specific types of human community or political association, or how the moral imagination or the socially improving practice of dialogue were understood as poetic, in a larger sense. Discussion of theories of the social self raises the question of the historic practices of sociability that, throughout the later eighteenth century, shaped a poetic Enlightenment. Institutions

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of sociability, such as literary and philosophical societies part of the conversable world of enlightenment Britain were formative for the thinking of many of the figures treated in this volume (including Adam Ferguson and Samuel Johnson).13 Their records show serious debates took place about the question of taste in commercial society and the field of the literary as it slowly came into existence, suggesting that the sociable Enlightenment is in part a poetic Enlightenment. An introduction to this section is presented by the historian of Scottish Enlightenment Christopher Berry, whose current research focuses on the philosophical anthropology of politics. We begin in the Interregnum: Philip Connell considers a crucial moment in poetic history, one often linked to the emergence of the neo-classical aesthetic at the end of the seventeenth century, and argues that it also had a formative role in the history of political thought. His close re-evaluation of the significance of William Davenants Preface to his heroic poem Gondibert and Thomas Hobbess Answer (both first published in 1650) is a case study in the intertwining of poetry and philosophy in the early Enlightenment. Extending the insights of Quentin Skinner into the cultural foundations of political power in this period, Connell analyses Davenants poem, showing how the plot and themes of Gondibert transformed Hobbess theories of sovereignty and influenced the style of Leviathan. He contends that Hobbes found in Gondibert an attempt to reconcile many divergent human desires and ambitions into the unified person of that artificial body, the commonwealth, and sees that such reconciliation must be achieved by the rhetorical promotion of loyalty, a circular process of being willing to submit on account of admiration for the exemplary other (husband, sovereign). Christian Maurer is also interested in the way poems and poetic genres influenced the psychological theories of Hobbes and his successors, though his primary concern is the development of moral rather than political philosophy. Maurer charts a tendency in eighteenth-century accounts of tragedy, away from pity rooted in self-interest and towards second-order pleasures such as the recognition of our own benevolence in feeling for others. Maurer highlights the early eighteenth-century debate around what Hume later termed the selfish hypothesis: that our affections are manifestations of self-love. These debates often focused on the question of what we experience when we witness the suffering of others, and drew on the poetic and fictional representations of misery offered by Lucretius, Addison, Trapp and Dubos. Maurer identifies a newly positive conception of pity in the neo-Stoic and anti-Hobbesian doctrines of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, anticipating the central importance of sympathy in the mid-century. He argues that poetry was seen as a means of human moral improvement, not as the older model of purging passions had suggested, but by reinforcing the mechanisms that ground our social nature.

General Introduction

The question of Stoicism is picked up in Rowan Boysons chapter. She offers an account of Shaftesburys thinking on poetry in the context of his larger philosophical project, and especially his relation to the Stoic tradition, focusing on ways in which he represents poetry as overcoming an egoistic self. She highlights Shaftesburys idea of self-division or self-dialogue, and shows how poetry can be understood in relation to such a practice. Boyson argues for linking such an account of poetry to the tradition of dialogue and self-examination in Stoicism and thus for the Stoic character of the theory of poetry found in Shaftesbury. She suggests that, according to Shaftesbury, poetry has a regulatory function, the division of the self which it involves being one manner in which selves are prevented from being purely egoistic. Not only does it facilitate dialogue between the different levels of self, it also facilitates dialogue between the ultimate forms of reality and the practical or empirical forms they take in certain types of character or modes of speech. She reads across the range of Shaftesburys published and unpublished work, paying attention to recent intellectual-historical work on this author. Christopher Tilmouth also stresses the significance of Shaftesbury, in a chapter which traces shifting attitudes towards and uses of the imagination in moral thought of the eighteenth century. Earlier commentators such as Malebranche viewed with suspicion the power of imagination over rational argument in moral questions. Tilmouth identifies the attitudinal moralism of Mandeville, inspired by Bayle and La Rochefoucauld, as he tried to expose the false self-descriptions that moralists give to themselves. Shaftesbury, Tilmouth argues, responds to the Hobbesian assertion of unbounded egotism by identifying a benevolent, ordering spirit in operation in the created universe which it is the function of the imagination to grasp and to bring into the life of the reflective, polished individual. The role of the imagination in the reception or construction of the physical and moral universe, Tilmouth shows, takes on a slightly unnerving aspect in Mark Akensides Pleasures of the Imagination. How can moral certainties survive the post-Lockean realization that certain qualities of the world are attributed to it by each individual, perceiving consciousness? Tilmouth argues that the power of imagination to generate shared moral worlds is its great human value.

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III Enlightenment and Romantic Poetologies

The argument has been proposed that the project of the human sciences is to a large extent historical, identifying species-defining characteristics of the human mind, language, culture that are historically variable. A true science of man, therefore,
a science de lhomme worthy of the name cannot limit itself to analyzing the individual in and of himself, taking him for what he is not: an absolute being, isolated

The Poetic Enlightenment: Poetry and Human Science, 16501820 or separated form a particular context. Man must be studied, instead, considered as enmeshed in a web of relations which tie him to a world, a society, a given esprit.14

Conceiving human beings as a species subject to historical change raises the prospect that those changes constituting the difference between one historical epoch and another might be for better or worse. The stadial thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment is, famously, such a consideration of losses and gains, whereby progress and prosperity have their corollaries in corruption and spiritual impoverishment. The dilemma has recently been succinctly stated in relation to Adam Smiths presentation of primitive social life:
What we find when we are looking at the relationship between the modern and the savage or primitive is an intense unresolved ambivalence about the value of the latter, making it possible to read Smith both as believer in history as progress towards commercial civilization and as a Rousseauvian elegist of a lost social harmony.15

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Smith was not alone in warning of the qualitative loss of human characteristics that might follow from progress through the stages of human history.16 Poetry offered one form of reconciliation between the primitive and the polite, both as a form of enthusiastic utterance and as a principle of unrestrained creativity at work even in the most systematic and regulated human intellectual activity. It is largely as respondents to these features of Scottish Enlightenment texts that Wordsworth and Kant figure in this final section, both endeavouring to articulate a transcendental account of the human that remains poetically alive to individual and collective human histories. The essays here bring the analysis forward to Romanticism, and the term poetology suggests German Romantic conceptions of poetry as having an exemplary theoretical status, where poetry expands into a theory of all human life, science and historical experience, as it does, for example, in F. Hlderlins essay On the Operations of the Poetic Spirit.17 Maureen McLane, who offers an introduction to this section, has noted that, in around 1800, poetry was being proposed as the concept that would totalize and unite a humanity that had been fragmented by the human sciences: Poetry, then, and not literature carried the promise of futurity and the promise of a totality for man.18 Poetry is proposed in various forms of Romantic theory as the means by which a specifically human being might exceed the totality of the findings of various human-scientific endeavours. James Thomsons avant-gardism with respect to the power of poetry to stimulate comprehensive physical and moral understandings of the created world is the subject of Pierre Carbonis chapter. He begins with a brief account of the transmission of belles lettres as a distinct field of inquiry from France to Scotland between the late seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries. Literary works, the object of this field of inquiry, derive their value for a science of man

General Introduction

from their simultaneous presentation of evidence of both rational and passional aspects of the human psyche. Carboni goes on, through a meticulous reading of The Seasons and its prefatory matter, to suggest that Thomson develops the work of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson in that poem, depicting the (socialized) poetic intellect as the means of deriving moral realizations from reflection upon the order of the natural universe. Thomson attempts, in theory and practice, to elevate poetry within the general enterprise of humanity by asserting its worldmaking potential. Thomson celebrates the enthusiastic, non-cognitive attitudes poetry both denotes and promotes, whilst aiming to preserve the art itself from late flourishings of the puritan stricture against the pleasures to be derived from the exercise of poetic imagination. Catherine Packhams chapter draws from recent work on the history of disciplines to consider the apparent subsumption of poetry within a Scottish Enlightenment discourse of human science and its re-emergence as an irreducible category in English Romanticism. She shows how the Romantic apotheosis of poetrys role (Wordsworths poetry of man as set out in The Prelude) both emerged from an eighteenth-century context of intellectual disciplinary division and continues to shape the way we now view that eighteenth-century context. She begins by considering poetrys uncertain place within the organization of knowledge in the early Scottish Enlightenment. Poetry appeared more regularly in Adam Smiths economic than in his rhetorical writings, despite his desire to address poetry in a more dedicated fashion late in his career. Imagination is crucial to Smith, but it is a theory of systematic mental connection based on analogy, rather than a specifically poetic mental attitude. Poetry is not named by Hume in the branches of philosophy that will be improved by a new science of mans nature, but poetry is nevertheless a troubling presence in the Treatise, particularly the threat that eloquence poses to reason. Poetry provides a key example of how beliefs, passions, and imagination exert a hold over the mind. Adam Ferguson and George Campbell bring about a shift whereby poetry becomes an object of investigation by which to understand the human. They provide the lead to Wordsworth, anticipating his language in the Preface. Ultimately, and ironically, Wordsworths poetics specialize a broader and more inclusive Scottish Enlightenment project. Notions of humanism and humanity are central to Simon Swifts reading of Wordsworth and Kant, which begins by considering Kants understanding of enthusiasm as a response to the French Revolution and to counter-revolutionary thinkers. Kants attitude, he suggests, offers new purchase on Wordsworths own response to the revolution in The Ruined Cottage, reworked into the first book of The Excursion. Swift characterizes Kant and Wordsworth as striving to identify a human universalism that is not insensitive to individual loss, and argues that this problem can be best understood by looking at the tension between ease (particularly, and counter-intuitively, in its connection to fanati-

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cism) and philosophical work. Making serious yet playful use of the figure of the swarm, Swift shows how equally close reading of poetical and philosophical texts discloses a truly poetic Enlightenment.

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