What Is Modern in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy?

W h a t Is M o d e r n in rqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA E ig h te e n th -C e n tu ry P h ilo so p h y ? S tu a rt H a m p sh ire 2xS A PHILOSOPHER, rather than a scholar o£ the eighteenth century, I want to discuss a particular concept of the modern. I have interpreted "modernity,” as used in the title of this symposium, not as referring to what was new in the eighteenth century, or what was conceived by eighteenth-century writers to be "modern” in their own terms, but rather as referring to what was modern in our terms. I take this to be a set of preoccupations that links them with us across intervening barriers. I also take this to be a set of preoccupations which are more closely theirs and ours than they have been the pre­ occupations of intervening thinkers. As a philosopher, I believe that the answer to the question of what is modern in the eighteenth century is to be found in a particular as­ pect of the eighteenth century’s application of the concept of nature —not in the concept itself, which has been so much discussed by the scholars of the eighteenth century over the last hundred years. This particular aspect is the relation between human nature and the non­ human environment. This is not principally a scientific problem, but a problem for morality and aesthetics, as it is now for us. To illus­ trate this theme, there is one dominating text, one drawn from the end of the century, from the period of the divided minds, not from what you might call the heartland of the eighteenth century. The text I have in mind is one that points forward to the early paintings of the nineteenth century. I’m speaking of Kant’s C ritiq u e o f J u d g ­ m e n t', and, specifically, of the account that Schiller later develops of the aesthetic judgment, though, also, of the teleology. The notion of "modern,” then, that I have in mind relates to the teleological setting of man. I take it that the notion of modernity, 67 Th e Mo d e r n it y o f t h e Eig h t e e n t h Ce n t u r y as it grew up in the early nineteenth century and as it can be dis­ cerned in our histories of the eighteenth century, is connected with the concept of alienation, this being taken as having reference to a new relation between human beings and their non-human environ­ ment. That is, that there comes a period of sudden realization that the forms of life that human beings have developed are beginning (or are liable) to produce monstrous and ugly excrescences—I want to insist on those two words, one ideological and the other aesthetic YXWVUTS — m o n stro u s and u g ly excrescences on the surface of the globe that man inhabits. These epithets are the appropriate ones. The moral revulsion is also aesthetic. A deeper sense that the forms of life developed by human beings are discordant, with both their natural surroundings and their natural origins, comes late in the century. The idea that there is a severance from a childhood garden of Eden and from nat­ ural impulse, a severance that the specialization of function in work and social forms requires, is a late notion. The distinctive modern image is that the breaking point has been reached. We have the sense that we are losing contact with the nat­ ural sources of energy, that our modes of life have become more and more artificial, in a pejorative sense. The fear of city life is perhaps the most characteristic aspect of modern sensibility. In the poets of the nineteenth century, such as Baudelaire, one would note the ob­ session with the city, and what it does to human beings, as a charac­ teristically modern element, one that links them to contemporary poetry. And later, in Eliot’s W a s te L a n d , the...