Flesh in the Age of Reason (3 page)

In conventional accounts of the ‘ascent of man’, it was the age of the Renaissance and Reformation that brought truly decisive breakthroughs. Ever since Jacob Burckhardt, Darwin’s contemporary, leading historians and art critics have acclaimed Renaissance Italy as the time and place when ‘man’ – for which read literate, gifted, élite males – began to break free from the chains of custom, conformity and the Church, taking fearless leaps forward into self-discovery and self-fulfilment at the very time when Columbus was ‘discovering’ the New World.

As a literary and scholarly movement, humanism rejected the dogma of the miserable sinner required to abase himself before a jealous God, and began to take delight in man himself as the apex of creation, the master of nature, the wonder of the world. New cultural genres – the portrait (above all the
self
-portrait), the diary and the biography (especially the
auto
biography) – reveal heightened perceptions of individuality, the proud ego vaunting and flaunting his own being.

A new sense of personal singularity, and a bold impulse to explore that distinctiveness, radiates from the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne, who posed the fundamental question:
que
sçais-je?
(what do I know?), and then humbly tried to answer it through scrupulous introspection. Infinitely curious, that great sceptic proposed that man possessed an
arrière boutique toute nostre
– a room behind the shop all our own: the individual’s mind was a unique storeroom of consciousness, a personal new world, ripe for discovery. Montaigne himself retired early from public life, not to commune with God but to scrutinize his own psyche. He might have appreciated Prince Hamlet, for such questions of identity are what Shakespeare’s moody, brooding hero soliloquizes upon: who precisely is this ‘paragon of animals’ who is yet the ‘quintessence of dust’? The key role of the soliloquy in Renaissance drama itself marks a new accent on the individual.

Yet, like Socrates and the Christian martyrs, Hamlet too has to die, as do all the other great overreachers portrayed by Renaissance playwrights, such as Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Tamburlaine. Evidently the triumph of the autonomous individual was still a long way off. Highly significant in this respect is the radical ambivalence of Protestantism. Together with other pioneering sociologists of modernization, Max Weber argued in his
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(1904–5) that the Reformation spurred a new individuality, thanks to the reformers’ doctrine of the priesthood of all believers: salvation must be a personal pilgrimage, a matter of faith alone (solifidianism); it could not be parcelled out by priests in pardons and other papist bribes. Hence, Protestantism forced believers into soul-searching: Puritans became noted for their breast-beating spiritual diaries. Guilt, sin and submission remained central. Calvin taught predestination and burned heretics, and arguably it was not until Nietzsche proclaimed ‘God is dead’ late in the nineteenth century that man could fully come into his own as a truly liberated autonomous being.

Ancestor-seeking philosophers have nevertheless identified the seventeenth century as the great divide, the point from which secular rationality served as the foundation of the self-determining individual. According to this reading of Psyche’s Progress, it was René Descartes (1596–1650) who staked out a new role for the individual by making
the basis of his
Discourse on Method
(1637) the proposition
cogito ergo sum
(I am thinking, therefore I am): my own consciousness is the one thing of which I can be sure, the sole Archimedean point in the human universe. Neither God nor nature, but the ego or consciousness is the spring of human self-understanding.

In medieval thought, as Dante’s early fourteenth-century
Divine Comedy
makes clear, the human condition had been conceived through a conspectus of the whole compass of Creation and its macrocosmic–microcosmic correspondences. That cosmological perspective on man’s estate was now reversed by an act of self-reflective thought – literally, so Descartes relates, while meditating alone in a small room with a stove, in what seems a licence for solipsism. Indeed, in an astonishingly daring stroke, Cartesian dualism claimed that reason reveals that man is perfectly unique beneath the heavens: he alone, under God, has a conscious mind (
res cogitans
), he alone can
know himself
and so understand the meaning of things. Everything else, the entire animal kingdom included, is mere ‘extension’ (
res extensa
), that is, inert matter in motion governed by the iron laws of mechanics.

Descartes’s dream of the uniqueness of human interiority (self-aware thinking) provoked later introspective philosophers further to probe the mechanisms of the mind. The question
who am I?
was turned into a matter of how our cognitive processes operate: identity resides within the house of intellect. In his highly influential
Essay concerning Human Understanding
(1690), John Locke argued that the mind is not like a furnished flat, prestocked before occupation with innate ideas, but like a home put together piecemeal from mental acquisitions picked up bit by bit. The self is thus the bit-by-bit product of experience and education: we are what we become – or, in Wordsworth’s later phrase, the child is father of the man. Particular parents, surroundings and stimuli produce individuated selves. Identity is thus unique because contingent, the cumulative product of ceaseless occurrences. By implication, Locke thus gave his philosophical blessing to change, progress and even diversity, and hence championed freedom of speech and religious toleration.

Critics judged this Lockean psychology to be disturbingly relativistic; for supporters, however, it promoted a heroic vision of man making himself – man viewed both as the
producer
but also as the
product
of social development and the civilizing process. Man was no longer to be pictured as an Adam, created by God in His own image, with all his faculties, for good and ill, fully implanted. Rather, the coming myths of the Enlightenment promoted self-made (and Godusurping) man, and thus they made their mark on Marx and the Victorian prophets of progress.

Drawing on Francis Bacon’s championing of science as the key to human progress, enlightened
philosophes
modelled man as
faber suae fortunae
, the author of his own destiny. Building upon Locke’s suggestion that the mind begins as ‘white paper, or wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases’, attention was now paid to dynamic notions of consciousness-forming. Interaction with nature, and the restless dialectic of needs and wants, latent potential and aspirations, gave man the capacity to progress towards perfectibility, proclaimed the sunny new theories advanced by such thinkers as Condillac, Turgot and Condorcet in France, Priestley, Erasmus Darwin and Godwin in England, and Fichte, Herder and Hegel in Germany.

The story standardly told of the heroic rise of the modern self is not, of course, without its sub-plots, complications and deviations. One centres on that great enigma, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who, like a new Luther, took his stand with painful honesty in his soul-searching autobiographical
Confessions
. ‘I know my own heart’, the combative solitary proclaimed; and, knowing it, he felt obliged to bare it, good and bad, to all the world – a compulsion for self-exposure that has released, in a great act of homage, a neverceasing confessional stream, from the poets, artists and geniuses of the Romantic era through to our latter-day drunks, drifters, drug-addicts, drop-outs and depressives. Confession was thereby transformed from an office of the Church into an affirmation of the ‘will to truth’ of the sacred sovereign self within.

He was quite unlike any other person, Rousseau insisted: he was exceptionally sensitive, he had masochistic leanings, he was addicted
to masturbation and other vices, and had abandoned all his infants to an orphanage. In Rousseau, and all the more so in the Marquis de Sade, psychological introspection discovered psycho-pathology – a heart of darkness – and drove the urge to reveal, in the name of truth, what formerly had been judged better left unknown or unsaid and best of all resisted. Formerly a sin, self-centredness was being transformed into the
raison d’être
, the pride and glory, of the modern psyche: thanks to the ‘cunning of history’, Christian self-denial was thus giving way to the urge – even the ‘right’ – to self-expression. A century later, patients would ‘tell all’ on the Freudian couch.

This novel and seemingly inexhaustible fascination with baring the soul reminds us that it was during the eighteenth century that the novel, particularly when cast as first-person narrative, became the prime instrument for the microscopic exploration of fevered inner consciousness. Such classics as Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship
(1795–6) took as their very subject the often tortured development (
Bildung
) of the hero’s character. ‘Sensibility’ became essential to goodness and beauty; in the cult of the man and woman of feeling, every sigh, blush and teardrop confirmed the exquisite tuning of the superior soul; and romantic love privileged the boundless questings of the heart. Self-discovery through bitter experience became the dominant Romantic metaphor, with its wanderer protagonist seeking spiritual epiphany through toil and trouble.

The individual moved centre-stage in many other domains of eighteenth-century thinking. Cast as the autonomous bearer of rights, he (women were rarely yet part of the equation) became the basic building-block in a political liberalism which rebutted old Divine Right and absolutist theories with the declaration that the sovereign individual was prior to the state – indeed, was its sole reason for existing. Society was the product of free men coming together to set up a political society to protect fundamental rights to life, liberty and property. Such were the foundations of the new American republic.

In a parallel move, enlightened economic theories also took as their base the private property-holder – the possessive individualist or Robinson Crusoe figure. Finding classic expression in Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
(1776), political economy imagined the market-place as an arena of independent contractors, each pursuing personal profit through cut-throat competition. Thanks to what Smith called the ‘invisible hand’, enlightened self-interest, pursued without hindrance, would providentially advantage all – the result would be, in Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian formulation, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, with each individual counting as one unit, no more, no less. What a spectacular reversal of the old moral theology! The Church had rejected selfishness (greed, cupidity) as sin. But such enlightened thinkers as David Hume now contended that the rational hedonism of
homo economicus
was advantageous, both for the individual and for society at large: something scandalously close to ‘greed is good’. ‘Self-love thus pushed to social, to divine,/Gives thee to make thy neighbour’s blessing thine’, sang the poet Alexander Pope, while Bernard de Mandeville revelled in the paradox that private vices were public benefits. This new enlightened individualism came to fruition in the American Constitution and in the ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ of the French Revolution. Of course, it was not lost on reactionary foes that the Revolution’s outcomes – notably the Terror – betrayed those aspirations: sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.

The revolutionary era moreover inspired the
Sturm und Drang
(‘storm and stress’) movement in Germany and Romanticism throughout Europe in literature and the arts, thereby pitching individualism onto ever more exalted planes. Rejecting the cash nexus and the insipid despotism of conventional taste, Romanticism idealized the bardic visionary, the Bohemian, the outsider, the Byronic rebel – even victims like Frankenstein’s monster, all alone in an unfeeling world.

Romantic social criticism rejected bourgeois respectability: the world is too much with us, complained Wordsworth; urban man was alienated. Communing with Nature was the way to restore harmony with one’s true inner self. Life must be a pilgrimage of self-discovery, bitter perhaps – a
Winterreise
. In their distinctive ways, Schiller and Shelley, Coleridge and Chateaubriand, Hölderlin and
Hazlitt each espoused a creed of the sacredness of individual development, in pursuit of what Keats called the ‘holiness of the heart’s intentions and the truth of imagination’. Self-development was thus assuming a sanctified ethos while, in the philosophy of Hegel, the dialectical strivings of mind or spirit (
Geist
) towards autonomy or full self-awareness fused personal development with spiritual destiny: Goethe’s
Faust
(first part, 1808; second part, 1832) forms the sublime instance.

Through the nineteenth century, the Romantic drive to self-understanding and realization ventured into ever more intense expression. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the novelists and artists of the
fin de siècle
centred their anguished visions on the solitary individual, solipsistically enduring or enjoying utter isolation from society and the universe. Often stimulated (or wrecked) by dreams, drugs or drink, decadent poets dwelt upon their inner experiences. Academic psychology meanwhile turned subjectivity into an object for scientific investigation and, through the invention of systematic testing, focused attention upon individual differences.

Above all, this impassioned quest for the ultimate truth of the self seemed to make a crucial breakthrough with the ‘discovery of the unconscious’. The upstaging, or rather undermining, of the Cartesian
cogito
certainly did not begin with Sigmund Freud – earlier writers such as Coleridge were fully aware of the ‘insensible’ and the ‘involuntary’ aspects of the self, manifest for instance in dreaming – but it was Freud who theorized the unconscious. Psychoanalysis argued that the rational understanding proudly cultivated by the Renaissance humanists, and likewise Descartes’s prized
cogito
, was not after all master in its own house, not the real thing. What truly counted was what had hitherto lurked concealed, an unconscious that was profoundly repressed and hence expressed only obliquely and painfully through illness and hysteria, nightmare and fantasy.