Enlightenment and the Dirty Philosopher

Speed = Modernity, hygiene

Slowness = Rancid romanticism of the wild, wandering poet and long-haired bespectacled dirty philosopher.

F. T. Marinetti

“I had recourse to several medicines, and was at last obliged to have recourse to the application of leeches to the anus.” In 1799, as the eighteenth century drew to a close, Christoph Friedrich Nicolai presented his Memoir on the Appearance of Spectres or Phantoms Occasioned by Disease to the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Having experienced numerous unsettling visions of deceased persons during a period of about one year, Nicolai was happy to be able to share the secret of his purging with his fellow philosophers. He described in detail the final moments of his definitive cure of April 20, 1791, at the hands of a trusted surgeon. Whereas the room had swarmed with human forms at the beginning of the operation, as the afternoon waned and digestion commenced, the ghosts slowly faded before his eyes, first losing their color and then vanishing altogether. “At about eight o’clock there did not remain a vestige of any of them, and I have never since experienced any appearance of the same kind,” he concluded emphatically. ¹

At pains to apologize for speaking of himself, Nicolai could justify this “impropriety” because he was the object of his own investigation. Moreover, though he wore a variety of hats, he was careful to speak as a philosopher, thus taking advantage of what can most aptly be called a certain immunity: “Philosophers divide the human being into body and mind, because the numerous and distinct observations we make on ourselves oblige us to consider man particularly, as well in respect to his corporeal as his mental functions.” ² Only momentarily terrified, Nicolai was able to serve as his own expert witness.

The unglossed pairing of philosopher and surgeon in this personal anecdote hardly surprises. The Age of Lights might also be known as the Age of Hands. From the Encyclopédie’s engravings of machines highlighting various types of labor, to the cult of sensibility, defined by the same source as the disposition of the soul to be easily touched, there was a dizzying proliferation of reflections on the manual. ³ The privileging of the once-renegade sense of touch is so multifaceted and so widespread that the scholar is better off imitating those philosophers who eschewed seeking ultimate causes and restricted themselves to detailing effects. It is, at the very least, fair to say that one of the first signs of the new emphasis on hands was the rise to prominence of surgeons and the consequent renewal of the art of anatomy. The history of surgeons’ political struggle against the “thinking” physicians is well chronicled and can in part be summarized as a debate over the utility of their hands-on experience as opposed to the abstract reasoning and book-learning of a group unwilling to give up a long-entrenched educational monopoly and an officially sanctioned superiority. The progressive triumph of the surgeons took place first and foremost in France, where they formed their own institutions, including a Royal Academy and a school of dissection, and officially broke with the barbers. The lines between physicians and surgeons became increasingly blurry. Far outnumbering their competitors and, as general practitioners, far more of a visible presence in the private lives of individuals, surgeons came to have an impact on the way the Enlightenment reasoned and philosophized. ⁴

Indeed, surgery and philosophy nourished one another. It was surgery that greatly furthered medical knowledge during the eighteenth century. Surgeons legitimized themselves by adapting the methods, arguments, and tactics of the philosophers; philosophers, meanwhile, in their attempts to grapple with the meaning, origins, and functioning of their universe, looked to surgeons or to doctors trained in anatomy as sources of new scientific data. Their encounter was fortuitous, for the philosophical interest in anatomy and dissection went well beyond the literal. Anatomizing, involving at once an unearthing of hidden mysteries or origins and a dividing into parts so as to reassemble a coherent whole, was the paradigm of all philosophical enterprises and was duly...