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The Sensationist Aesthetics of the French Enlightenment John C. O’Neal F OR AN AGE THAT WITNESSED the major transition from classicism to empiricism, the eighteenth century in France produced remarkably few treatises on aesthetics. French Enlightenment writers resisted any classical formulation of rules for an ideal or beautiful form in works of art. There is no empiricists’ version of DuBellay’s Défense et illustration de la langue française or Boileau’s A rt poétique, although André and Batteux did attempt to write “ systematic” books on the subject.1The very primacy given to individual sensory experience, especially vision, during the century precluded serious consideration of any a priori system of thought. Not even Diderot, who profoundly influ­ enced the aesthetic thinking of his time, wrote a sustained theoretical piece on the topic, with the possible exception of his article “ Beau” for the Encyclopédie.1Diderot, the enlightened philosophe, recognizing as he did the relativity of cultures and the diversity of languages, perceived relationships, and judgments, questioned the universality of any notion of the beautiful.3 The eighteenth century’s shift away from a classical aesthetics is exemplified to a large degree by the blending of the otherwise distinct relational categories of psychology with aesthetics and perception with literature that took place during the period. The person usually credited as the first to have effected this shift is Dubos in his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture (1719). Whereas the Cartesians had sought to reduce the multiplicity of experience to uniform rules grounded in reason, Dubos denied the validity of objective rules and posited subjec­ tive feeling as the basis by which to judge beauty.4 This shift also elucidates in part the seeming unwillingness of the French to compose aesthetic treatises and to follow the example set by the English, the Scots, and the Germans in the same period. The rise of subjectivism in taste and its attendant relativism led to an increased importance being placed on the point of departure in empirical theory and questions of origin, rather than on the ultimate attainment of those general rules cherished by classicism. Empirical thinking proceeds from the particular (in the case of aesthetics, a feeling subject) toward the Vol.XXVIII, N o.4 95 L’E SPRIT C RÉATEUR general. Perceiving the mind as a veritable tabula rasa, empiricists ruled out such a priori notions as innate ideas. In a word, empiricism con­ stituted a proscriptive way of thinking, in contrast to the prescriptive method of classical doctrine. Despite the century’s tendency to move away from prescriptive think­ ing, one author has, I believe, given a notable account of what can be seen as an aesthetics for literature—my specific concern here. That author is Condillac, for whom all the senses, particularly touch and to a lesser degree vision, played a crucial role in the cognitive process.5Con­ dillac wished to correct the view that grants unwarranted capabilities to vision out of sheer habit and without knowledge of the way in which we learn from the very beginning to use our eyes. First and foremost, according to Condillac, the indispensable sense of touch gives vision its power to judge objects. Once and only once such a coordination of the two senses has been perfected does vision become the preferred sense. Condillac pays it his highest compliment by calling the finely tuned eye an organ that has an “ infinite number of hands” (Traité 167-90). Scholars generally single out Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des con­ naissances humaines (1746), which traces in its Second Part the origin of language and the arts in the history of culture, as his primary work with implications for aesthetic theory (Knight 184f; Cassirer 291; Wade 281) and occasionally his Traité de l’art d ’écrire, written as a handbook of style for the Prince of Parma (Knight 176; Saisselin 34-35). They have given little attention, however, to Condillac’s Traité des sensations (1754), which attempts to explain the origin of our knowledge through the senses and to derive all the operations of the mind from the one faculty of sensation. In his description of the...

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