Morbid Reason, or the Shadow of the Enlightenment

Abstract

Unlike the commonplace understanding of the Enlightenment as the epistemological and ontological construction of a rationality that is necessarily devoid of passion, Enlightenment reason, this essay claims, not only cannot be divorced from the workings of passion, but is also, in effect, constituted by its passionate sources. In order to complicate and challenge the long-held, conventional dualism of reason and passion, I argue that nineteenth-century European aestheticism fashioned a new model of the reason-passion relationship, a pathological reason coupled with morbid passions. To investigate this problematic monistic attribute and its significance, I examine first the general structure, functions, and characteristics of Enlightenment reason and then discuss significant literary examples of aestheticist characters—Johannes of “The Seducer’s Diary” in Either/Or Part I written by Søren Kierkegaard; Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature; Lord Henry and Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—in terms of the new emergence of morbidly “passionate reason.” I also discuss the significance of a rare example of a literary critique of the morbid reason that had appeared on the other side of the North Atlantic in 1850: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s romance, The Scarlet Letter. My new reading of Hollingsworth, who is depicted by Hawthorne as the stereotypical mad scientist, is intended to shed new light on how Hawthorne critiques a pathological reason, coupled with morbid passions, as the necessary consequence of Enlightenment reason.