Forms of Irrationality in the Eighteenth Century George Rosen COMPLEXITIES AND AMBIGUITIES For THOSE SATISFIED by a simplistic tag, the eighteenth cen tury continues to remain the "Age of Reason.” Under closer and more penetrating scrutiny, however, the homogeneity which the designation seems to imply dissolves. Homogeneity was no more characteristic of the eighteenth century than of any other histori cal period. Behind the seemingly serene certitude of the smile of reason lurked complexities and ambiguities that cannot be reduced to any simple pattern or slogan. The siecle des lumieres was as much the critic of reason as its apostle. Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), who repudiated all rationalistic abstractions and in sisted on the primacy of sense experience and imagination, was the contemporary of Richard Price (1723-91), an uncompromising rationalist for whom ’'reason ... is the natural and authoritative guide of a rational being.”1 Yet to view these divisions in the con sciousness of the period simply as unrelated polar antitheses is equally superficial and misleading. Both reason and feeling were recognized as springs of human behavior in the eighteenth cen tury, and contemporaries were aware that there were complicated and intricate reciprocal relations between them. As Pope put it in the Essay on Man\ Two Principles in human nature reign; Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain,.. . Self-love, the spring of motion, acts the soul; 255 Irrationalism in the Eighteenth Century Reason’s comparing balance rules the whole . . . On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail Reason the card, but Passion is the gale.2 But when a rupture of the relations between the head and the heart led to a fundamental rift, the ensuing gap opened a way for the emergence of the dark, the weird, and the demonic—in short, the ir rational—from the depths of the eighteenth-century psyche. In this sense there is a closer connection than appears at first glance be tween the tears of Goethe’s Werther and the stratagems of Laclos’ Valmont. Both exemplify forms of irrationality arising out of a separation of emotion and reason leading to an exaggerated em phasis on the waywardness of feeling or on insensitive rationality as a basis for personality and interpersonal relations. Illustrative of another facet of the emotional climate of the eigh teenth century and its imaginative peculiarities is the cult of mel ancholy, which distinguishes the later decades of the period, and to which the pleasures of horror were added.3 The latter tendency reached certain psychological extremes toward the end of the eighteenth century and during the early nineteenth century, espe cially in France before and during the Revolution. It was an emo tional climate which expressed the moral nihilism of men who threw off the bounds and obligations of humanity and sought for extremes of experience in the morbid developments possible to the human psyche.4 As one examines the culture of the eighteenth century, it is evi dent that such instances are not unique and isolated; they are indic ative of the psychological make-up and modes of behavior of in dividuals and groups in relation to the larger structure of social and cultural life. Historical periods are characterized by different sen sibilities, that is, modes of feeling shared in varying degree by those living at a particular time. An awareness that the personal and the public interpenetrate within the framework of society must underlie any endeavor to understand these psychological characteristics. Individuals and groups cannot be divorced from the larger institutions within which they carry on their lives, since it is within this framework that their psychologies are formulated. 256 Symposium*. Forms of Irrationality The way in which an individual in a given historical period per ceives his world, the feeling he has about it, depends on his inter ests, beliefs, and values, on the intricate connections between his inner life, his life pattern, and the specific social and cultural con ditions which he encounters in his environment. This character istic mode of perceiving and feeling, which I call sensibility, is an expression of the way in which the personality integrates these di verse elements. Such relationships are as complex for groups as they...
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Apr 1, 1974
Robert Kubicek 
Open Access