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Chapter 1: The Inner Eye: Early Modern Dreaming and Disembodied Sight
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter The Inner Eye Early Modern Dreaming and Disembodied Sight mary baine campbell I think that in general it is a good thing occasionally to bear in mind that people were in the habit of dreaming before there was such a thing as psychoanalysis. —Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Remarks on the Theory and Practice of Dream Interpretation’’ Which dreamed it? —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass The eye was not always a camera, its powers not always nor merely mechanical . But during the period in which it first came to be understood as such, that model sustained a partially articulated move in elite circles toward a sense of vision as located in, and restricted to, the individual conscious body—increasingly a site of subjective experience rather than a source of vital knowledge. The philosophers Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) and George Berkeley (1685–1753) understood visual perception as a kind of language : a set of learned skills and paradigms for apprehending the visual stimuli experienced on what we now think of as the nerve-rich screen of the retina.1 Vision was not a matter of objective impressions passively imprinted by external stimuli (as in the mimetic theory of Johannes Kepler’s influential Astronomiae pars optica [Frankfurt, 1604]). Rather, vision was a set of skills that in the individual mindful brain could undergo 34 European Experiences of Dreaming change, correction, or improvements useful to the social or civic person and ‘‘his’’ community.2 Indeed, few authors today in the humanities or social sciences seem satisfied with the passive mechanical model of geometric vision advanced by Kepler (1571–1630) or René Descartes (1596–1650) despite the fact that this kind of model is still dominant in medical circles. Even within optics itself some are rediscovering a pre-Keplerian, contextdependent theory of depth and distance perception first and most richly articulated in the eleventh century by the Arab philosopher Al-Hacen. It was Al-Hacen who showed how the eye measures the distance of a mountain across a flat plain, not by means of Kepler’s straight lines of light, as we might think, but by following a route from one intermediate object of known size to another between the observer and the object.3 All this eye-opening new and rediscovered work, however, has been concentrated on the visual experience of the waking self. One kind of early modern seeing has been all but ignored since Kepler’s emphasis on the mechanical, mimetic vision of the waking eye. And that kind, the topic of this chapter, is seeing in our sleep. In many societies, sleeping vision was a kind of seeing considered far deeper and ‘‘truer’’ than the kind of sight the eighteenth-century poet William Blake would call, sneering at empirical science, ‘‘the Corporeal eye.’’ But sleeping vision had, undeniably, a bodily basis, and in the development of the ‘‘New Science,’’ material questions came gradually to overwhelm the interest of epistemological ones, and the ambivalent status of the dream was reduced, for educated western Europeans , to that of individual physiological delusion rising from digestive vapors. This is not to say that the problem of the sleeping consciousness did not interest such early Enlightenment natural philosophers as Descartes, John Locke (1632–1704), or especially Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). But the dream itself, that cognitive experience so long dominated by the visual, dropped out of sight toward the end of an era of widespread skepticism.4 All of educated Europe, including the Jesuits and even the Vatican, wished earnestly to awaken from the evacuated illusions of its former knowledge, to ‘‘see’’ again, or for the first time. The culmination of the efforts of its natural and moral philosophy came to be known in every country as a blast of light.5 Enlightenment, Lumières, Illuminismo, Aufklärung: who could sleep through that? The point is made starkly by a comparison of the definitions of ‘‘vision’’ that bookend the seventeenth century in the important French dictionaries E (2024-03-29 06:54 GMT) The Inner Eye 35 of, respectively, Jean Nicot’s Thresor de la langue francoyse and the dictionary of the Académie Française. In 1606, Nicot defines the French word by the Latin and Greek visio, visum, and Phantasia, and offers three senses: 1) ‘‘une vision du ciel . . . c’est comme quand les anges . . . s’apparoissent . . . 2) Vision qu’on voit en dormant’’ [and] 3) ‘‘Faulse vision et semblance’’ (vision of heaven . . . as when the angels appear . . . , Vision...