Notes on Class Remarks and Discussion

February 20

Introduction: Approach to the history of ideas: the Example of the 18^th Century Enlightenment

• The historical task is to identify varied and shifting patterns of ideas, their relationship to prevailing circumstances, their meanings as understood by contemporaries, and their likely effects. Did ideas get to work in the world? How did circumstances prompt certain attitudes and ideas?
• A good approach is to think of the ideas of an period as conversations and debates, in which there are shared notions and assumptions as well as differences. Example: educated Europeans of the Enlightenment generally agreed with Locke that human beings were shaped considerably by their surrounding environments and by their educations especially, and yet they disagreed, sometimes passionately so, over the effect of the environment or the best way to improve education.
• Good examples of the shared environmentalist notions and the different interpretations that arose from them are illustrated well in the documents in the Lim reader, The West in the Wider World.
• These examples show also how contradictions in Enlightenment debates arose when the belief in “the common humanity of mankind” confronted questions about “difference.” Differences of gender, culture, and social class were examined in Graffigny’s Letters of a Peruvian Woman. Differences in the nature and abilities of Europeans, Africans, Amerindians were discussed and debated in the selections from
• Cornelius de Pauw’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Americas (1768-68)
• Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755)
• Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1797)
• Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764)
• Johann Gottfried von Herder’s Outlines of the History of Man (1784)

Note how the positive views of Amerindians and Africans in Rousseau and Mungo Park stand in contrast to the somewhat negative views of de Pauw, Kant, and Herder.

Key Terms for the Day:

Common Humanity vs. Difference

Emancipation

Regeneration

Environmentalism (Locke’s theories of mind and character)

Key Points in the Discussion:

• Materialism. Zelia’s observations form in part a critique of European/French materialistic life; ostentation and luxury seemed ubiquitous among the upper classes she encountered; a person’s identify and reputation were based on property and wealth.
• Frivolous training: childrearing practices instilled little sense of virtue and habits of frivolity: connection with Locke’s theories was evident.
• European civilization was a source of corruption: Aza symbolized the process whereby a noble man of virtue was corrupted by contact with Europeans.
• Superficiality vs. Sincerity and Virtue: Zelia was struck by the concern for appearances and the superficial expressions of civility and affection as compared to candor, honesty, inner character, and virtue.
• Zelia’s identity: here there was some agreement and some interesting disagreement.
• Agreement on Zelia’s initial identity being wholly defined by her relation to Aza, an extreme version of the notion that women were defined in relation to fathers, husbands, and men.
• Disagreement as the meaning of Zelia’s development to the end of the novel: a) she adapted herself to her new culture but retained via her idealized picture of Aza a connection to the higher morality of homeland and origins; b) Zelia at the end shows herself to be an Enlightened woman, one who chooses to live alone as a means of protecting her new found independence from social corruption and the subordination entailed in European marriage.
• Early and later Enlightenment criticism. Graffigny’s epistolary novel illustrates a pattern of early Enlightenment criticism because the critique of European society is partly between the lines and presented in the guise of a foreign observer. Later Enlightenment critiques were much more direct and open, despite censorship that continued.

Final Remarks: The Noble Savage and the Reassessment of Colonialism

Zelia in some ways illustrates “a noble savage” who resisted corruption; using her reason and virtuous sentiments as a guide, the education she acquired among the upper classes proved a process of emancipation and autonomy.

The later eighteenth-century critique of colonialism exemplifies the outspoken moral criticism of European contact with and control over non-European peoples. This critique gathered force in the 1770s following the discoveries by Captain James Cook of the Pacific world and its peoples and the voyages of the French explorer Louis-Anne de Bougainville. The following quotations convey a sense of this critique.

Two passionate critics of European colonialism, Diderot and Herder, believed that colonialism violated Nature because it ultimately destroyed or reduced the cultural variety. Nature intended such cultures to remain and remain independent. Hence both authors went so far as to condemned European travel to other cultures because of its negative effects on them.

Abbé Raynal (1713-96), History of the East and West Indies, 1770 (rev. 1780) [See also the selection on the need to abolition slavery in Lim, pp. 139-141.]

There has never been any event which has had more impact on the human race in general and for Europeans in particular, as that o the discovery of the New World, and the passage to the Indies around the Cape of Good Hope. It was then that a commercial revolution began, a revolution in the balance of power, and in the customs, the industries and the government of every nation. It was through this event that men in men in the most distant lands were linked by new relationships and new needs. The produce of equatorial regions were consumed in Polar climes. The industrial products of the north were transported to the south; the textiles off the Orient became the luxuries of Westerners; and everywhere men mutually exchanged their opinions, their laws, their customs, their illnesses, and their medicines, their virtues and their vices. Everything changed, and will go on changing. But will the changes of the past And those that are to come, be useful to humanity? Will they give man one day more peace, more happiness, or more pleasure? Will his condition be better, or will it be simply one of constant change? [As cited in Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995): 73.

James Cook (1728-1779), Journals, c. 1770

What is still more to our shame as civilized Christians, we debauch their morals already too prone to vice, and we introduce among them wants and perhaps disease which they never before knew, and which serve only to disturb that happy tranquility which they and their forefathers enjoyed. If anyone denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what the natives of the whole extent of American have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans. [As cited in Outram, Enlightenment, p. 63.]

Louis-Anne de Bougainville (1729-1811)

Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, written in 1772 but not published until after his death in 1796.

The life of savages is so simple, and our societies are such complicated machines! The Tahitian is close to the origin of the world, while the European is closer to its old age . . . The understand nothing about our manners or our law, and they are bound to see in them nothing but shackles disguised in a hundred different ways. Those shackles could only provoke the indignation and scorn of creatures in whom the most profound feeling is a love of liberty. [As cited in Outram, Enlightenment, p. 67]

Je n'en doute pas : la vie sauvage est si simple, et nos sociétés sont des machines si compliquées le Tahitien touche à l'origine du monde, et l'Européen touche à sa vieillesse. L'intervalle qui le sépare de nous est plus grand que la distance de l'enfant qui naît à l'homme décrépit il n'entend rien à nos usages, a nos lois, ou il n'y voit que des entraves déguisées sous cent formes diverses, entraves qui ne peuvent qu'exciter l'indignation et le mépris d'un être en qui le sentiment de la liberté est le plus profond des sentiments.

[From ABU - RESULTATS RECHERCHE DANS supplem2]

Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), Outline of a Philosophy of the History of Man, 1785

[Conquest had its own revenge, the degeneration and ruin of the conqueror. Europeans who transplanted themselves to the New World would grow weak and die out unless they went fully native.]

The history of conquest as well as of commercial companies and especially that of missions afford a melancholy and in some respects a laughable picture. . . . We shudder with abhorrence when we read the accounts of many European nations, who, sunk in the most dissolute voluptuousness and insensible pride have degenerated both in body and mind and not longer possess any capacity for enjoyment or compassion. They are full-blown bladders in human shape, lost to every noble and active pleasur4e, and in whose veins lurks avenging death. [Cited in Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993): 173.

[Nature made cultures distinct and resistant, even impenetrable, to intermingling; indeed it was virtually impossible for one culture to truly understand another. This is hinted in the following. Herder became one of the lauded theorists of national cultures and nationalism.]

How wonderfully [has Nature] separated nations, not only by words and mountains, seas, and deserts, rivers and climates, but most particularly by languages, inclinations and characters, that the work of subjugating despotism might be rendered more difficult, that all the four quarters of the globe might not be crammed into the belly of a wooden horse [Trojan Horse]. [Ibid, p. 177-78.]

Diderot vs. Herder: The Possibility vs. the Impossibility of Understanding “Others.”

Whereas Herder believed that cultures and nations are so distinctive that understanding the “other” was virtual impossible, Diderot believed on the contrary that reciprocal or mutual understanding of Europeans and “Others” was possible. Or in Anthony Pagden’s words:

“For Diderot, this mean that we might learn from the Amerindian the limitations of our understanding of nature, and with that the absurdity of some of our moral codes. The Amerindian, in contrast, would be given access to our superior technology. Both societies would be improved, but both would remain firmly where they were and, except for the improvements which Enlightenment or technology would necessarily effect, they would remain the societies that they were. This could be the only possible embodiment of that midway station between the civil and the savage of which he had dreamed, that place ‘where the happiness of the species resides.” [Ibid., p. 180)