The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought PDF
Preview The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought
The Mind Is a Collection MaTerIal TexTs Series Editors roger Chartier leah Price Joseph Farrell Peter stallybrass anthony Grafton Michael F. suarez, s.J. a complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. T h e MIn d I s a C o l l eC T Io n Case sTudIes In eIGhTeenTh- C enTury ThouGhT sean sIlver university of pennsylvania press philadelphia Copyright © 2015 university of Pennsylvania Press all rights reserved. except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by university of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104- 4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the united states of america on acid- free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data silver, sean, author. The mind is a collection : case studies in eighteenth- century thought / sean silver. pages cm — (Material texts) Coordinates with an online site. Includes bibliographical references and index. IsBn 978-0-8122-4726-8 (alk. paper) 1. Collectors and collecting—history—17th century— Case studies. 2. Collectors and collecting—history—18th century—Case studies. 3. Museums—Curatorship— england—london—history—17th century—Case studies. 4. Museums—Curatorship—england—london— history—18th century—Case studies. 5. england— Intellectual life—17th century. 6. england—Intellectual life—18th century. 7. Imagination (Philosophy) I. Title. II. series: Material texts. aM344.s58 2015 001.0942'09032—dc23 2015013299 ConTenT s PreFaCe: WelCoMe To The MuseuM vii InTroduCTIon 1 Case 1. MeTaPhor 1. John locke’s Commonplace Book — 2. John Milton’s Bed 3. Mark akenside’s Museum 21 Case 2. desIGn 4. robert hooke’s Camera obscura — 5. raphael’s Judgment of Paris 6. a Gritty Pebble — 7. an oval Portrait of John Woodward 8. a stone from the Grotto of egeria — 9. venus at her Toilet 56 Case 3. dIGressIon 10. The Iliad in a nutshell — 11. a Full stop 12. a Conical roman Tumulus — 13. The Reception of Claudius 14. addison’s Walk 109 vi Contents Case 4. InWardness 15. William hay’s stone — 16. Two Calculi Cut and Mounted in a small showcase 17. an ampulla of the Blood of Thomas Becket — 18. a Blue-B ound Copy of The Mysterious Mother 151 Case 5. ConCePTIon 19. a Blank sheet of Paper (1) — 20. a Folio sheet with Two sketches of a single Conception — 21. a Triumph of Galatea — 22. Joshua reynolds, William Hunter 189 Case 6. dIsPossessIon 23. a shilling — 24. a Book of accounts — 25. a Blank sheet of Paper (2) 26. a ring Containing a lock of hair — 27. The lost Property office 28. The skeleton of Jonathan Wild 226 ConClusIon 269 notes 275 index 355 acknowledgments 367 PreF aCe: Wel CoMe T o The MuseuM Welcome to The Mind Is a Collection. Gathered here are twenty- eight exhibits from seventeenth- and eighteenth-c entury london. Taken together, they tell a story about the development of modern theories of mind. each of these exhib- its is posed as a case study of a certain way of thinking—o bjects assembled as the vehicle and proof for theories of cognitive work. The era spanning roughly 1660 to 1800 was a special period in philosophy and the arts; it witnessed the widespread development of what has come to be called philosophical dualism, the strange split between mind and body that now seems to most of us to be intuitive. The general account, as it was worked up by authors, philosophers, painters, and poets, runs like this: the mind is a disembodied entity absolutely and fundamentally unlike the messy physical world in which it finds itself. It observes the world from a distance; it takes in a batch of simple sensations; it reviews them—c omparing, arranging, combining, dividing; it husbands them up; it stores them for later recall. It tells the body what to do— especially by way of gathering more sensations, for, in this scheme, the body’s purpose is to be a vehicle for the mind. This is not therefore just one dualism; it is a system of dualisms, whereby one thing is split into two: subject is parted from object and “me” from “mine,” but also conscious awareness is parted from the mind’s contents, the power of thinking from thoughts, ourselves from our memo- ries. It is not just that the mind is understood to be separate from the body, or even that the body (in much the same way) is understood to be separate from its environment. It is also that the working parts of the mind (its “facul- ties”) are understood to be separate from the materials upon which they work (its ideas). These are the basic outlines of philosophical dualism, which, I am suggesting, is in effect several dualisms. We are the inheritors of this peculiar seventeenth- century innovation. The problem with the dualist account of mind emerges when we realize that this rarified substance, this mind-s tuff, is so absolutely unlike the coarse viii Preface world in which we move and breathe that it offers no way of speaking about itself. There is a primal paradox here, a remnant of the violence of the dualist split. The mind comes with no instruction manual, nor any ready- made vo- cabulary. The only way to speak about it, indeed the only way to conceptualize it, is through systems of metaphors that refer to embodied experience. Meta- phor is the crucial route by which mind is made sensible; it is how a vocabu- lary and way of speaking is worked up in order to make the mind available to itself. It will become apparent, therefore, that this dazzling accomplishment, the work of an age to disengage mind from materials, came through a coun- terintuitive embeddedness. Theories of a mind separate from matter were re- peatedly developed by tinkering with physical gadgets; the sovereign intellect was constructed in and shored up through dialectical relationships between persons and the places in which they lived and worked. This is the basic claim of this book, so it bears repeating. The doctrine of radical separation was elab- orated through a series of profound entanglements: subjects entangled with objects, owners with property, awareness with memory, the power of thinking with thoughts, conscious awareness with the mind’s contents. Put simply, the fundamental split between mind and matter was established and confirmed through embodied engagement with crafted environments. This to- and-f ro between models and minds, spaces of thinking and habits of thought, is what this book will mean by cognitive ecologies. a cognitive ecol- ogy is a system crafted to enable certain kinds of thinking, indeed, to confirm and to conform to a specific working theory of mind. libraries count; so do workshops, notebooks, and collections. Museums offer the paradigmatic example—f or a “museum” is nothing other than an active space of thinking, the favored seat of the muses. The age is littered with people modeling their intellect on the spaces in which they worked. John locke says the mind is like a cabinet; Joseph addison compares it to a drawer of medals; Francis Bacon calls it a repository; robert hooke calls it a workshop. The thing to notice is this: locke was a bibliophile, addison a coin collector, Bacon an architect of libraries, hooke a laboratory technician. The faculties and capacities of the minds that were invented there are roughly equivalent to what we might expect from any librarian in a library, conservator in a numismatic collection, curator in a museum, or artisan in a workshop—b ecause each space provided the vocabulary for the theory in the first place. and this means that philosoph- ical dualisms have histories that are not confined to histories of ideas; their histories spread out into the material, cultural, and political beds in which they find themselves. We should, in other words, attend to locke’s cabinet, Preface ix addison’s medals, Bacon’s repository, and hooke’s workshop, not as curiosities of museology, but as histories of ideas. These were the sites where the museum metaphor of mind was worked out in all its rigor. and they were also sites of profound entanglements, where conceptual systems were continually, dialecti- cally returned for their material purchase and rhetorical force. The Mind Is a Collection offers an ecology of such ecologies. It is arranged as a series of case studies, forming an argument through the elaborations of objects in place, particular objects in the particular cases in which they were once found. “Case” is a term that will receive more attention in its place (ex- hibit 16); for now it is enough to note that it means to capture two things at once. It means to signify the spaces in which thinking takes place—a room, a cabinet, the skin, the skull. “Case” in this sense is the sort of thing one might find in a museum, a thing custom built to display objects or books (exhibit cases, book cases, and so on). But “case” also, as ludwig Wittgenstein puts it, means to capture the whole world or situation that is implied by something as small as a statement or local relation: “the world,” Wittgenstein begins, is “all that is the case.” a legal case is defined by the slightest of evidence; a medical case is decided by the merest of symptoms. Partly, tracing these case studies will mean a wander or two through philosophy, especially in the empiricist legacy of John locke. It will mean more than a few journeys through the so- called sister arts, curatorial forms like poetry, painting, and architecture. each of these, it will appear, was imagined as the confirmation of a mind that works by arranging ideas. But it also means a renewed attention to active objects of thought; the material arrangements of things that were developed and then cast aside so as to launch the enlightenment figure of the autonomous mind. The Mind Is a Collection brings to life a few of the collections left behind by this historical development, cognitive models that were used to separate cognitive activity from bodily work. and I should mention that by no means is this study the first to think of thinking as an embedded practice, or even of empiricist thought as itself arising from its various situations; John locke, among others, was himself invested in the links between thinking and tinker- ing, mental discipline and the library arts. In other words, some of the very people we most commonly associate with the distinction between body and mind were also the earliest theorists of cognition as an embedded practice. This is why The Mind Is a Collection begins with the library and commonplace book of John locke (exhibit 1). The following twenty- eight exhibits provide the fabric of an argu- ment. They trace epistemic dualism as an intimately felt experience and a
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