The Artificial Self: The Psychology of Hippolyte Taine (review)

Nias, Hilary. The Artificial Self: The Psychology of Hippolyte Taine. Oxford: Legenda. European Humanities Research Centre, U of Oxford. Modern Humanities Research Assn. 1999. Pp. 259. ISBN 1-900755-18-1

This work is not, the author explains in her introduction, a study of psychology, or of political history. It is rather an analysis of the idea of the nature of the self and Taine's impact on this tradition in nineteenth-century France.

Nias finds two principal studies of Taine's work of special interest in her reassessment of his personal and public self. One is Simon Jeune's study Poésie et système - Taine interprète de La Fontaine with its focus onTaine's temperament and the tension between his analytical and artistic sides as revealed in the two different versions of his essay on La Fontaine. Jeune's reference to what he calls "un certain manque d'assurance" in Taine's writing is a subject of particular importance for Nias.

The other is Colin Evans's psychoanalytical analysis, Taine - Essais de biographie intérieure, which examines Taine's struggle to reconcile the warring sides of his nature. With access to previously unpublished documents about Taine's intellectual processes, Evans was attracted to the evidence of Taine's acceptance of failure and ascribed it to a universal experience that is part of the human experience. Nias's study questions the "alleged subjectivity of Taine's writing," and takes up Evans's suggestion that it is possible that "cet individu soit en quelque sorte l'incarnation de son époque."

Nias also calls attention to the publication of two other studies on Taine from a modern perspective, Eric Gasparini's La Pensée politique d'Hippolyte Taine (1993) and Jean-Thomas Nordmann's Taine et la critique scientifique (1992). Taine's De l'Intelligence (1870) is valuable, states Nordmann, because it is the first nineteenth-century synthesis of works of experimental psychology. However, these substantial studies of Taine's political thought and critical method, notes Nias, do not otherwise contribute significantly to a discussion of Taine's conception of the self.

Nias is mindful of D. G. Charlton's observation at the conclusion of his study Positivist Thought in France during the Second Empire - 1852-1870 that there was a lack of any "étude d'ensemble" of this period. But she hopes to fill this lacuna through her study relating Taine's "thinking to an identifiably Second Empire mentality" (3).

Based on a close reading of De l'intelligence, Nias disputes G. Monod's claim, written after Taine's death, that "l'ironie . . . lui était étrangère." This judgment, she argues, represents a fundamental misreading and fails to take account of Taine's conception of the self. In her new interpretation of Taine's particular way of thinking, she also suggests that it has "a significant bearing on twentieth-century art forms and on the modern perception of the role of the intellectual" (3). Making use of a quantity of Taine's unpublished manuscripts and personal papers and letters, the author takes a fresh approach to the question as to "whether Taine ever in fact publicly said what he meant," (5). This is the question that lies at the heart of her discussion of Taine's conception of the self.

The answer is developed in the subsequent eight chapters: the formation of a self and the history of the self (Chapters 1 and 2); the germination of a new psychology (Chapter 3); a description of Taine's decision to omit any metaphysical discussion of the self from this psychology (Chapter 4); an outline of Taine's discovery that he could use criticism of the ideas of others as a springboard to launch his own (Chapter 5); Taine's quest for a new and different consolidation in his thought and the aesthetic judgment of a philosopher "resigned to the limited satisfaction of applying his...