Sensible Instruments Conference Draft 1

Sensible Instruments: Remaking Society through the Body in the French Enlightenment Carolyn Purnell Introduction: The Philosopher-Instrument and the Culture of Sensibility 3 Part One: Sensibility Chapter One. 20 The Troubling Essence of Feeling: The Stable Characteristics of Sensibility A Brief History of Sensible Medicine A Brief History of Sensationalist Philosophy Establishing the Stable Characteristics 1) Sensibility Was a Faculty Involving a Perceptual Act 2) Sensibility Linked the Physical, Mental, and Moral 3) Sensibility Was Manipulable 4) Sensibility Functioned Economically Conclusion Chapter Two. 57 Simple Pleasures: The Ocular Harpsichord and the Stabilization of the Discourse of Sensibility Louis-Bertrand Castel and the Theory of Color-Music The Relationship of the Harpsichord to the Discourse of Sensibility 1) The Simple Agreement Model of Pleasure 2) The Je ne sais quoi 3) Education and Habit in Castel’s System 4) Fatigue and Economic Functioning Conclusion Chapter Three. 95 Castel Redux: Instrumentalizing the Sensible The Material History of the Harpsichord and its Seven Pleasures Resituating the Ocular Harpsichord within the Discourse of Sensibility Conclusion Part Two: Instruments Chapter Four. 130 All that is Pleasant and Useful: Regimens of Talent and Political Economic Improvement Connections Between Animal Economy and Political Economy Antoine Le Camus: Systematizing Non-Natural Regimens to Create Hommes d’Esprit The Maison d’Education of Jean Verdier Valentin Haüy and the Institut des jeunes avegules Conclusion Chapter Five. 179 Charged with Feeling: Medical Electricity and the Social Incorporation of the Useful Individual Electricity and Sensibility: Applications and Connections 1 Paralysis and Electricity The First Wave: The Académie royale des Sciences and the Hôtel des Invalides The Second Wave: Mauduyt’s Trials for the Sociéte royale de médecine Conclusion: Patients’ and Doctors’ Perspectives on the Treatment’s Efficacy Chapter Six. 227 Of Rossoly and Ratafia: Medical Commerce, Non-Naturals, and Sensible Self-Fashioning Limonaderie, the Public Sphere, and the Shift from the Sickbed to the Table Manufactories of Mind: The Consumption of Goods in the Limonadier’s Shop The Problems with Self-Fashioning: Pathological Sensibility Conclusion: Democratization and Social Realities Conclusion: The Diverse Questions Offered by the Economy of Our Being 272 Coda: Ideology Bibliography 284 2 INTRODUCTION The Philosopher-Instrument and the Culture of Sensibility The question is an odd one: to what extent is a philosopher like a harpsichord? It is somewhat reminiscent of the rhetorical “why is a raven like a writing-desk” riddle from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but if you’ve read Denis Diderot’s Le Rêve de d’Alembert, you know that this question has an answer. In this dialogue, a fictionalized version of Diderot debates metaphysics with a fictionalized Jean le Rond d’Alembert, with appearances by equally fictionalized versions of the salonnière Julie de L’Espinasse and the vitalist doctor Théophile de Bordeu. The text is filled with fever dreams, speculations, and philosophical conumdrums. The above question appears only several pages into the dialogue, and from there, things only get curiouser and curiouser. The answer to the question is this: the philosopher and the harpsichord are both instruments. In a harpsichord, plucked strings vibrate and pass their vibrations on to other, nearby strings. “This instrument can make astonishing leaps,” Diderot exclaimed; it has the ability to create tones, harmonics, and beauty out of simple oscillations.1 Humans operate in the same manner, he explained. The philosopher’s nerves vibrate like plucked strings, drawing forth the notes of life. “One idea calls up a second, these two a third, all three a fourth, and so on….If this phenomenon can be observed between sonorous strings, inert and separate, why wouldn’t it take place between living and connected points, between continuous and sensitive [sensible] fibers?”2 Yet the two instruments are not completely alike. Where a harpsichord is unaware of 1 Denis Diderot, Le Rêve de d’Alembert, in Oeuvres de Diderot, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1997), 5:617. 2 Ibid. 3 the pluckings and tunings to which it is subject, the philosopher feels them all. Diderot explained, “The philosopher-instrument is sensitive [sensible]; he is at the same time the musician and the instrument.”3 Sentience and sensibility were the distinctions between the inanimate harpsichord and the thinking, feeling, breathing philosopher. D’Alembert clarified, “If a sensitive [sensible] and active harpsichord were endowed with the ability to feed itself and to reproduce, it would be alive and give birth—either with itself or its female—small, lively, and resonant harpsichords.”4 There would be no qualitative distinction between humans and harpsichords. “No doubt,” Diderot responded.5 “We are instruments endowed with sensibility and memory.”6 As any scholar of eighteenth-century France knows, Diderot had a penchant for off-the- wall philosophical proofs. Indeed, a world populated by walking and talking (waddling and tinkling?) parent-harpsichords and their “lively and resonant” children offers quite the mental image. This fantastic conceit helped Diderot advance his unorthodox materialist philosophy, showing that the lines between inert and living matter are rather thin. The ideas presented in the text were controversial, to say the least, and Le Rêve de d’Alembert had only a limited, clandestine circulation during Diderot’s lifetime. It horrified Julie de l’Espinasse, and d’Alembert asked Diderot to destroy the manuscript.7 Yet in the midst of this strange passage, Diderot raised a point that would have been uncontested in the eighteenth century: the notion that people are sensible instruments. This point was central to eighteenth-century culture and to the 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 618. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 617. 7 Leonard Tancock, “Introduction,” D’Alembert’s Dream (New York: Penguin Books, 1966), 135. 4 project of Enlightenment itself. This book focuses on how the feeling body became an instrument, in multiple senses of the word. As Diderot so colorfully demonstrated, it was analogous to a musical instrument, vibrating with feeling and sending melodies of emotion into the world. It was also a tool that enabled social interaction, political exchange, and economic commerce. And it was a means by which ends were effected, many of which were related to Enlightenment discourses of progress and perfectibility. When we think of an “instrument,” we often think of something that serves a unified purpose—a hammer hits nails, a violin plays music, a clock tells time—but any anthropologist will tell you that instruments are context-specific. Practices of appropriation and bricolage diversify the ends to which instruments are put, such that a single soda bottle can be used to make music, grind grain, or cure snakeskins.8 In the eighteenth century, institutionalized concepts of utility were not dominant in the way that they would be in the following century, and there was not a singular social goal at stake in Enlightenment reform efforts. Instrument though it may have been, the uses to which the body was put were still very much up for debate. The feeling body became the bearer of a multiplicity of aspirations, agendas, and fears, and the discourse of sensibility, in particular, permitted a wide array of meanings and practices to emerge, co-exist, circulate, and merge. The physician Henri Fouquet wrote in his 1765 Encyclopédie entry on sensibility, “The nature or essence of sensibility has always been a curious point and the most troubling of its history.”9 This statement is no less true for historians today than it was for natural historians, 8 The Gods Must Be Crazy, directed by Jamie Uys (Ster Kinekor and 20th Century Fox, 1980). 9 Henri Fouquet, “Sensibilité, Sentiment [Médecine],” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, (University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, Spring 2010 Edition, ed. Robert Morrissey), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu. (accessed October 17, 2011), 15:39. 5 physicians, and metaphysicians in the eighteenth century. Sensibility has long been a catchword for scholars of the Enlightenment, yet it remains an elusive concept, casting its vague and shifting shadow across literary studies, history of science, philosophical investigations, and cultural histories. In the nineteenth century, the French historian Hippolyte Taine reported that sensibility “spread its influence” over “every detail of private life,” to such an extent that “sensibility [became] an institution.”10 In 1956, Northrop Frye called the second half of the eighteenth century an “age of sensibility,” and we frequently talk about an eighteenth-century “culture of sensibility.”11 Yet if sensibility really was a culture, what way of life did it entail? What were its adherents’ customs, contexts, practices, and beliefs? How did it pervade and structure daily life, and how did it shape the ways in which people experienced the world around them? Such questions have occupied generations of scholars, and the list of books in which sensibility features prominently is a very long list indeed. That said, it is worthwhile to identify points of consensus and major themes, and to treat the historiography with a broad stroke, analyses of sensibility have tended to fall into two categories: those that

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