Empiricism, Substance, Narrative: An Introduction

Abstract

Empiricism, Substance, Narrative:An Introduction Helen Thompson (bio) and Natania Meeker (bio) Why pose the question of empiricism's relationship to literature? How has empiricism functioned as a structuring principle within narratives of the emergence of eighteenth-century literary modernity? Certainly, eighteenth-century scholars claim the novel as a privileged scene for the enactment of empiricist presumptions. On the one hand, the genre's narrative techniques have been taken to reflect refinements of perception enabled by emergent technologies, such as the microscope, and to accord new textual space to things. More broadly, the novel puts into circulation a figure of subjectivity authorized by the experimental techniques of observation originating in natural philosophy. This figure is both possessive and self-possessed, and its coherence proceeds from its capacity to taxonomize, manipulate, and objectify a newly secular world. On the other hand, scholarly work on sensibility stresses the immanence of sensory impression, whereby the body and its minutest fibers constitute the foundation for the epistemological, social, political, and aesthetic dimensions of experience. Sensation's extradiscursive immediacy stabilizes both meaning and sociability; physiological reflex passively grounds the truth of feeling and its multifarious expressions. Within these frameworks, empiricist philosophy has often been read as complicit in the practices of objectification which are thought to compose the modern subject; or, empiricism seems to posit sensation as the origin of a mode of embodied responsiveness whose automaticity forecloses thought. Empiricism would thereby appear gradually to substitute the sensate body for the guarantor of epistemological and moral truth once offered by God alone. Denis Diderot writes in the Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage (1772) in a discussion of religious law: "When we are born we bring nothing in the world with us except a constitution similar to that of other human beings—the same needs, an attraction toward the same pleasures, a common aversion to the same pains: that is what makes man what he is, and a code of morality appropriate [End Page 183] to men should rest on no other foundations than these." 1 Empiricism would also seem at its limits to rewrite physical sensation as moral necessity. Francis Hutcheson writes in An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1728) of a subject's reflection upon his or another's moral practice: " Moral Perceptions arise in us as necessarily as any other Sensations; nor can we alter, or stop them . . . any more than we can make the Taste of Wormwood sweet, or that of Honey bitter." 2 From this vantage, empiricism participates in a move toward secularization precipitated by the powers of bodies or of matter itself to subtend moral or social law. As the stuff of body, matter reinforces ethical and social norms; as the stuff of objects in the world, it constitutes the neutral support for acts of knowledge. The substrate of a new epistemology, matter is itself inert. According to these scholarly accounts, spirit emerges as the privileged object of empiricism's epistemological and ethical critique. In this volume, however, we claim that empiricism also reactivates an ongoing crisis in the status of matter and its relationship to human perception. By "matter," we refer to Robert Boyle's definition, found in The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666), where he writes that "there is one Catholick or Universal Matter common to all Bodies, by which I mean a Substance extended, divisible and impenetrable," 3 a definition critically reworked almost a century later in d'Alembert's and Diderot's Encyclopedia as "a substance that is extended, solid, divisible, mobile, and pliant, the first principle of all natural things." 4 We refer to "substance" rather than to "matter" in our title because in the eighteenth century "substance" could claim the qualifiers "material" and "immaterial"; substance thus encapsulates the radical confusion of matter and spirit evoked by John Locke's suggestion that "It being, in respect of our Notions, not much more remote from our Comprehension to conceive, that GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to Matter a Faculty of Thinking, than that he should superadd to it another Substance, with a Faculty of Thinking; since we know not wherein Thinking consists." 5 Substance is never simply given...