Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure by Rowan Boyson

Abstract

Rowan Boyson. Wordsworth and Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 254. $95. Could it really be that Wordsworth (not Rochester, not Byron, not Swinburne, or Stevens) is the defining literary figure for a philosophically oriented study of (186)? Rowan Boyson's formidable book seeks to persuade us that, a philosopher of pleasure, Wordsworth can stand and trade with heavyweights. In poet's work, Boyson argues, we can recover an almost-forgotten idea about how pleasure might register a collective dependence and interaction, and might be from a feeling of (1). Wordsworth and Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure mounts a challenging, capacious, conceptually rich assertion of these counterintuitive claims. Boyson's subject, it must be said, feels very large. Informing Wordsworth and Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure are wide-ranging discussions of Shaftsbury, Kant, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and a host of twentieth-century theorists besides, their writings bear upon classical, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment conceptions of pleasure, joy, self-interest, self-love, Epicureanism, hedonism, happiness, utility and utilitarianism, contentment, complacency, bliss, comfort, and delight. Her chapter headings introduce a further layer of concepts: aesthetics, power, poetics, economics, and politics. The discussion is divided into halves, one that sets up a philosophical background, and one exploring pleasure and its cognates in a selection of Wordsworth's prose and poetry. The first chapter examines aesthetics of pleasure in Shaftsbury and Kant. Its central question could be described how a priori judgments of shared pleasure are possible. Boyson's answer centers on what she identifies ancient idea of a sensus communis, a faculty that both comes before and brings together other senses, making common apprehension and collective human experience possible--what one thinks of common sense. In Shaftsbury and Kant sensus communis occasions an idea of self rooted in interactive sociability (36-37). The clear though unstated context of discussion of Shaftsbury is Adam Smith's invisible hand, or tradition of thinking about self-interest and public good that Smith's metaphor encapsulates. For Shaftsbury, self-love and pursuit of pleasure it entails is inherently sociable and ultimately benevolent--not because it tends towards greater good in spite of selfishness, but because individual and communal ends cannot be separated (32). At a fundamental level, then, preservation of self includes desire for preservation of kind. Boyson's reading of Kant, who defines pleasure of community cautiously and bearing a complex relation to cognition, identifies several of contours of pleasure that she traces throughout rest of book: pleasure as still, calm and closed, or in terms of movement, liveliness or openness (184). Boyson's second chapter takes up pleasure's relationship to power: namely, does one person's experience of pleasure necessarily require domination of someone else? Can pleasure exist without competition and zero sum game it implies? To what extent can pleasure serve purposes of self-liberation and how historically has it been proscribed? Supposing book's argument is, it claims to be, that pleasure can be sociable, shared, generated from a feeling of community, then Boyson might naturally want to persuade us of utopian possibilities for pleasure in her chosen texts: Rousseau's Julie, Emile, and Reveries, and Wollstonecraft's Vindication and Maria, or Wrongs of Woman. Much to her credit, however, she allows her local interpretations to cut against grain of book's larger premise. True, we can find in Julie and Reveries Rousseau's representations of cultivated, hedonistic locations, communities in which desire and capacity harmoniously exist, such that pleasure is not diminished but felt in full. …