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The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment

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The Discourse of Sensibility

Part of the book series: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science ((AUST,volume 35))

Abstract

This chapter introduces the problematic addressed by this volume by contextualising the object of study, the eighteenth-century’s body of sensibility, and the discourse within which this object was constructed. It was in terms of this knowing body that the persona of the eighteenth-century knowledge-seeker was constructed. This chapter has two major purposes. First, in order to situate the individual chapters in their broader intellectual context, it outlines four major components of the discourse of sensibility: vitalist medicine, sensationist epistemology, moral sense theory, and aesthetics, including the novel of sensibility. Second, this essay elaborates those general claims collectively supported by the chapters, drawing together what they contribute to questions of the emergence of the discourse, and key elements at stake within the discourse itself. Four major themes are apparent: First, this collection reconstructs various modes by which the sympathetic subject was construed or scripted, including through the theatre, poetry, literature, and medical and philosophical treaties. It furthermore draws out those techniques of affective pedagogy which were implied by the medicalisation of the knowing body, and highlights the manner in which the body of sensibility was constructed as simultaneously particular and universal. Finally, it illustrates the ‘centrifugal forces’ which were at play within the discourse, and shows the anxiety which often accompanied these forces.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Vila, Chap. 7.

  2. 2.

    Frazer 2010, 1–15.

  3. 3.

    Foucault 2004, 25–28, 31.

  4. 4.

    Foucault 2004, 35.

  5. 5.

    Foucault 2004, 36, also 44–54.

  6. 6.

    Foucault 2004, 47–49.

  7. 7.

    Foucault 2004, 41.

  8. 8.

    Foucault 2004, 66.

  9. 9.

    Vermeir and Deckard 2012, 7–8.

  10. 10.

    Vila 1998, 2. See also Festa 2006, 14–15; Cook, Chap. 5.

  11. 11.

    See Vermeir and Deckard 2012; Packham 2012.

  12. 12.

    Vila 1998, 1.

  13. 13.

    Ellis 1996, 8.

  14. 14.

    van Sant 1993, 1.

  15. 15.

    Riskin 2002, 7; Reill 2005.

  16. 16.

    Packham 2012, 1.

  17. 17.

    Vila 1998; Rey 2000; Williams 1994, 2003.

  18. 18.

    ‘la faculté de sentir, le principe sensitif, ou le sentiment même des parties, la base & l’agent conservateur de la vie, l’animalité par excellence, le plus beau, le plus singulier phénomène de la nature.

    La sensibilité est dans le corps vivant, une propriété qu’ont certaines parties de percevoir les impressions des objets externes, & de produire en conséquence des mouvemens proportionnés au degré d’intensité de cette perception’. Fouquet 1765, 38. My thanks to Kim Hajek for assistance with the translations.

  19. 19.

    Diderot 1755, 782.

  20. 20.

    Wolfe and Terada 2008, 540.

  21. 21.

    Williams 2003, 147.

  22. 22.

    Williams 2003, 131. More generally, see Williams 2003, 124–138, 147; Rey 2000, 2–3; Vila 1998, 45–51.

  23. 23.

    Williams 2003, 123. For more on this see Lloyd, Chap. 9.

  24. 24.

    Packham 2012.

  25. 25.

    Packham 2012, 5–7. See also Packham 2012, 103–121; Wolfe, Chap. 8.

  26. 26.

    See Cunningham 2007; Packham 2002.

  27. 27.

    Reill 2005, 5, 33–70. See also Wolfe, Chap. 8.

  28. 28.

    Reill 2005, 6–7. See also Gaukroger 2010, 387–420. For a detailed analysis of vitalist theories of matter, see Wolfe, Chap. 8.

  29. 29.

    Boury 2008; Vila 1998, 13.

  30. 30.

    See Wolfe, Chap. 8.

  31. 31.

    Vila 1998, 46; Boury 2008, 530.

  32. 32.

    French 1990. See also Reill 2005, 9–10, 61.

  33. 33.

    Martin 1990; Cheung 2008, 495–496, 502.

  34. 34.

    Vila 1998, 43; Cheung 2008.

  35. 35.

    Kaitaro 2008, 583.

  36. 36.

    Wolfe and Terada 2008, 542.

  37. 37.

    Wolfe 2008.

  38. 38.

    Packham 2012, 4.

  39. 39.

    Vila 1998, 44; Suzuki 1995, 336–337. Suzuki argues that Locke became heavily influential on medical discourses in the late eighteenth century, though not earlier. See also Vermeir and Deckard 2012, 9, 12.

  40. 40.

    Kuehn 2006, 391. See also Tipton 1996, 69–70.

  41. 41.

    Brown 1996, 12; Kuehn 2006, 399; Knight 1968, 8–17.

  42. 42.

    Tipton 1996, 74–75. See also Vermeir and Deckard 2012, 10.

  43. 43.

    Locke 1690/1849, 63.

  44. 44.

    Locke 1690/1849, 144. It is worth noting that the meaning of Locke’s ‘internal sense’ easily blended into that of ‘sentiment’ understood in terms of the passions, for example in the context of the sentimental novel; there was a certain fluidity in the key concepts within the discourse of sensibility.

  45. 45.

    Taylor, Chap. 4.

  46. 46.

    As well as being a feature of scholarship on vitalism, the relationship between moral sense theory and the sentimental novel has been much discussed. See Mullan 1996, 249; Mullan 1988; Keymer 2005, 578–579; Brewer 2009, 22; Ellis 1996, 9–14. Though the scope of his book is much broader than the narrower themes discussed here, see too, Lamb 2009. See also Vermeir and Deckard 2012, 22.

  47. 47.

    Norton and Kuehn 2006.

  48. 48.

    Irwin 2008, 354, 362, 419; Norton and Kuehn 2006, 946.

  49. 49.

    van Sant 1993, 7.

  50. 50.

    Irwin 2008, 355; Radcliffe 2002, 456.

  51. 51.

    Radcliffe 2002, 463. On the relationship between Shaftesbury and Locke, see Yaffe 2002, 425.

  52. 52.

    Irwin 2008, 679.

  53. 53.

    It was a feature, too, of Hume’s moral theory. See Taylor, Chap. 4.

  54. 54.

    Irwin 2008, 682–684.

  55. 55.

    Fleischacker 2002, 509.

  56. 56.

    Bernier 2010; Vervacke et al. 2007.

  57. 57.

    Brewer 1993, 60–74.

  58. 58.

    Jaucourt 1765a, 28.

  59. 59.

    Bernier 2010, 1.

  60. 60.

    Jaucourt, Louis de 1765b, c.

  61. 61.

    Bernier 2010, 13–14.

  62. 62.

    The sentimental novel has been the subject of much scholarly attention, including Ellis 1996; van Sant 1993; Mullan 1988; Vila 1998; Lamb 2009; Stewart 2010; Festa 2006; Barker-Benfield 1992. For a good summary of the development of the twentieth-century critical literature on the novel of sensibility, see Gaston 2010.

  63. 63.

    Brewer 2009.

  64. 64.

    Brewer 2009, 35.

  65. 65.

    Mullan 1996, 245.

  66. 66.

    Ellis 1996, 44.

  67. 67.

    Stewart 2010.

  68. 68.

    Vila 1998, 111–181, 226–258.

  69. 69.

    Stewart 2010, 5.

  70. 70.

    Stewart 2010, 8.

  71. 71.

    Mullan 1996, 246.

  72. 72.

    van Sant 1993, 3.

  73. 73.

    Mullan 1996, 238. See also Brewer 2009, 29.

  74. 74.

    Keymer 2005, 576. See also Vermeir and Deckard 2012, 39.

  75. 75.

    van Sant 1993, 27; Brewer 2009, 23; Ellis 1996, 17; Festa 2006, 2.

  76. 76.

    Vermeir and Deckard 2012, 27–28.

  77. 77.

    All citations from Orr, Chap. 2.

  78. 78.

    The anxiety created by the radical possibilities of this ‘sympathy machine’ is the theme of Otto’s essay (Chap. 10).

  79. 79.

    Orr, Chap. 2.

  80. 80.

    Cook, Chap. 5, quoting More 1782/1785, 282.

  81. 81.

    Cook, Chap. 5.

  82. 82.

    That sensibility had both an active/imaginative and a passive/corporeal nature is a key theme of my own chapter (Chap. 9).

  83. 83.

    Cook, Chap. 5.

  84. 84.

    See also Vila, Chap. 7.

  85. 85.

    Le Camus is a significant figure in my own chapter, Chap. 9.

  86. 86.

    Citations from Haskell, Chap. 6.

  87. 87.

    Vila, Chap. 7.

  88. 88.

    With reference to Taylor’s chapter (Chap. 4), it is worth noting that this enhanced mechanist view may be compatible with Malebranche’s physiology.

  89. 89.

    Otto, Chap. 10.

  90. 90.

    Otto, Chap. 10.

  91. 91.

    Lloyd and La Caze 2011; Seigworth and Gregg 2010; Leys 2011.

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Acknowledgments

For their assistance in preparing this chapter, I would like to thank Peter Cryle, Kim Hajek, Peter Otto, and the collected members of the Centre for the History of European Discourses at The University of Queensland who kindly read and critiqued a previous version of the chapter.

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  1. Centre for the History of European Discourses and School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, The University of Queensland, 4072, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

    Henry Martyn Lloyd

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Lloyd, H.M. (2013). The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment. In: Lloyd, H. (eds) The Discourse of Sensibility. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 35. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02702-9_1

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