Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (review)

Jonathan Kramnick’s Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson is a nuanced and wide-ranging account of consciousness, materialism, and agency in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy. Kramnick’s book makes two important interventions in eighteenth-century studies and in literary studies more generally. First, while Kramnick focuses on certain mainstays of literary criticism—character, personhood, consciousness—he nevertheless offers novel accounts of these subjects. Rather than “validate the long-standing sense that the eighteenth century witnesses a new language of inwardness or subjectivity,” Kramnick instead looks to literature and philosophy that takes an interest in the external forces that shape the mind and its thoughts (p. 2). In practice, this shift in emphasis—from interior to exterior descriptions of the mind—recasts epistemological problems as ontological matters. Kramnick is less interested in works that ask how the mind comes to know certain things, and is more fascinated by texts that wonder what sort of substance constitutes the mind in the first place. And second, Kramnick makes a compelling case for reading Restoration and eighteenth-century texts alongside contemporary philosophy and the science of mind. He ably demonstrates how works like Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Rochester’s A Satyr against Reason and Mankind, and Haywood’s Fantomina anticipate current problems in cognitive science.

Two contemporary philosophical issues in particular compel his interest. The first is the “hard problem of consciousness” (a phrase coined by philosopher David Chalmers). The “hard problem” asks how thoughts in the mind arise from the seemingly thoughtless matter of the brain. As Kramnick puts it: “Matter seems by definition to be without experience, yet put together in certain ways it gives rise to sentience, awareness, pleasure, pain, appetites, and the like” (p. 9). He shows how eighteenth-century thinkers grappled with a similar problem in poems, novels, and tracts on matter and the mind. Kramnick is also interested in the ways in which eighteenth-century texts lend themselves to what he calls an “externalist” view of mind and action. The term is borrowed from philosophers like Hilary Putnam and Alva Noë. “Externalist” accounts of the mind do not accord special privilege to inwardness and subjectivity; instead, these are accounts of mind and matter “that stress the connection between subjective experience and the environment or that show how the meaning of concepts is fixed on the outside or that tie volitional states like desire or intention to physical states like the movement of particles” (p. 6).

Kramnick’s first chapter surveys a series of debates around questions of free will and necessity during the long eighteenth century. These debates pit materialists like Thomas Hobbes and Anthony Collins against dualists like John Bramhall and Samuel Clarke. As Kramnick demonstrates, Hobbes and Collins’s commitment to materialism also commits these thinkers to a view of human agency that troubles their contemporaries. The materialist side argues that mind and matter are the same thing. Since mental states like thinking and willing are not substantially different from physical things like “atoms and apples” (Kramnick’s examples), the former must abide by the same laws of causation as the latter. For instance, human beings can will certain actions (moving one’s hand or fleeing persecution in England), but human wills are determined, in turn, by exterior forces and events, just as otherwise senseless and unwilling bits of matter are. For Bramhall and Clarke, this view of mind and matter leads inevitably to determinism, an outcome they try to combat by stressing the self-moving qualities of the will and the incorporeal nature of the human soul.

Hobbes’s and Collins’s contention that the mind behaves like and is indeed inseparable from physical objects is developed in Kramnick’s second chapter, which deals mainly with Lucretius’s De rerum natura (translated fully into English for the first time in 1682 by Thomas Creech). This chapter focuses directly on the eighteenth-century version of the hard problem of consciousness, and it...