A Mind for Passion
LOCKE AND HUTCHESON ON DESIRE
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse
MOST SCHOLARS of eighteenth-century England and America are quick to credit John Locke with being the first to imagine a modern liberal state, where literacy was the ticket for participation in the civic arena and men could assume positions there on the basis of their intrinsic worth. While they grant the modernity of his model of the state, many of the same scholars consign Locke’s model of the human subject to the late seventeenth century—there to be superseded during the eighteenth century by Hume, who understood an individual’s intrinsic merit to consist not only or even primarily of reason but also and more importantly of his natural affections and moral sense.1 Thus someone like John Rawls simply reinforces conventional wisdom when he understands eighteenth-century theories of human nature in terms of an opposition between Enlightenment definitions of reason, on the one hand, and intuition, emotion, or imagination on the other.2 Our reading of Locke will challenge the assumptions that allow one to map the eighteenth century onto this opposition, on grounds that doing so creates a false continuity between early modern notions of the subject and the distinctively modern subject that emerges in eighteenth-century debates concerning the relation of reason and sentiment.3 Emptying the mind of each and every idea implanted there by the Creator paradoxically provided Locke with the rhetorical foundation for imagining a new kind of individual naturally disposed to be governed only by an aggregate of individuals like him.4 When he emptied the individual mind of its early modern contents, Locke freed reason both from God and from the passions as they had been defined by humoral theory. Thus, as we hope to show, he opened a category that not only gave rise to a debate about the rational operations of the mind but also encouraged a sustained discussion of what we now call the emotions. While his status as architect of the modern subject diminished precipitously during the nineteenth century, the debate he initiated only gathered momentum. This debate elaborated, challenged, and successively transformed the subject into one predisposed to emotions that he himself could control—an individual, in short, constitutive of the modern state.
To argue that modern theories of the emotions began as a refutation of the humoral model of the passions, we would like to call attention to the figure of terra nullius, which Locke used when he asserted that human intelligence began much like “white paper void of all characters.”5 So successful was this figure in nullifying the earlier belief that the emotions were part of one’s physical makeup that the idea of a surface yet to be inscribed died out as a metaphor and passed into the register of common sense: of course, one assumes, the minds of children, madmen, and illiterate individuals are either empty or their contents disorganized to the point of illegibility. Lost with the figurative dimension of Locke’s rhetoric was the radical nature of his claim. To represent the mind as terra nullius was to imagine it as a territory unclaimed by any nation, a territory without an owner. Like a sheet of “white paper,” such a territory awaited inscription.6 In imagining the mind in such terms, he linked sovereignty over the mind with writing upon it through a play upon the term “characters,” meaning both characters of the alphabet, or “letters,” and the characteristics inhering in one’s mind, or “ethos.” By means of the figure of terra nullius, in other words, Locke represented the mind as something that comes to exist only as the individual receives and orders information gleaned from external sensory experiences. The acquisition of reason in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is, in this respect, exactly analogous to the acquisition of property described in his Second Treatise of Government.7
The mind is void in two ways. First, it has no characters for someone to own and therefore no owner. On the other hand, if there can be no owner before there is a mind to own, then no individual can exist until he acquires sufficient information to fill the blank page of his mind. What this means is that the individual’s existence as such depends on his ability to produce a self-enclosed field of information that belongs first and only to him. But, second, “void” also implies the nullification of ownership, which in this case manifests itself as the erasure of writing. In this respect the figure of the white page “void of all characters” was Locke’s way of announcing that he meant to nullify the prevailing modes of culture and build his model of the human mind from scratch. Althusser’s analysis of the paradox of self-alienation in Rousseau applies equally well to Locke’s use of terra nullius, whereby the empty mind cancels out all prior forms of ownership over the subject, in order that he may voluntarily nullify that sovereign ownership and submit to the state.8
One key component of the early modern subject is significantly missing from the version of the debate that occupies Book I of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Rarely in his argument that reason alone is what distinguishes man from the rest of nature does Locke mention the passions. Yet the passions, according to early modern critiques of reason, kept the human mind from understanding the laws of nature and thus from making principled moral decisions.9 Indeed, even early proponents of the scientific method acknowledged this problem and sought to mitigate it by observing natural phenomena from a position outside of and at a remove from the phenomena observed. By introducing a void precisely where the natural passions had exercised unchallenged dominion over the subject, as it had been represented in literature, theology, epistemology, and political and moral philosophy, Locke accomplished a feat that changed how educated Englishmen and women thought and wrote about the human subject. After Locke, such people invariably imagined two subjects in one: (1) the individual who was subject to the state and (2) the individual intent on expanding the private, internal domain over which he exercised sovereign power. Locke developed his theory of government over the same twenty-year period while writing and revising An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Each theory consequently presupposed and implied the other—a state that protected the autonomy of each individual, his person and property, and an individual free yet predisposed to agree to limit his freedom in the name of civic order and stability.10 Indeed, Locke’s rational individual was the logical precondition for the very government authorized to protect him.
At the same time, Locke enabled his successors to deal with these mutually dependent models of mind and government as if they were in fact independent entities. Authors so different as Adam Smith, Thomas Mal-thus, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, to name but a few, invoked the logic of the Second Treatise on Government in order to adjust the balance between the claims of free subjectivity and the need for political stability to meet the demands of their respective moments in history. Subsequent formulations of the self-enclosed, self-owning, and self-governing subject that took shape in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding observed a different historical trajectory. In striving to differentiate the sources of affection and morality from those of reason, such moral philosophers as Frances Hutcheson and David Hume had to distance themselves from Locke’s premise that almost everything the mind thought derived by logical inference from ideas that originated in sensations. Even in challenging the primacy of reason, however, these authors were in Locke’s debt. Thus, for example, when Hume argued for the primacy of our initial impressions over and above those well-seasoned ideas that piled up in the storehouse of the mind, he was taking issue with certain aspects of Locke’s model from within the problematic of individualism that Locke had established.11 So, too, in arguing that the human passions arose from information provided by the internal senses, Hutcheson was not invalidating Locke so much as appropriating his model of the empty mind in order to challenge Locke’s claim that mind was the exclusive domain of reason. Such a double legacy, Foucault reminds us, is the mark of an originary discourse.12 We intend to show why we have to understand the dependency of Locke’s model of government on his theory of the subject in order to explain the enduring ideological impact of that model of the modern state.
DESIRE IN THE FIELD OF REASON
His account of how the mind acquires and exercises reason enabled Locke to explain how men ideally develop into individuals capable of self-government and therefore capable of governing others. To acquire reason, as he tells the story, one fills “the yet empty cabinet” of the mind with information gathered strictly from encounters with the outside world that enters the mind via the physical senses in the form of “sensations” (I.ii.15). In addition to an empty space that can, like “paper,” be inscribed or, like a “Store-house,” filled with ideas, Locke endows the mind with the faculty of judgment—an ability to classify this information and arrange the categories that result in relations of similarity and difference, cause and effect, greater or lesser importance, and so forth, until the order of the mind mirrors that of the world. Although the human mind, as he conceives it, is potentially reasonable, there is nothing actually present in the mind before its sensory encounter with the world. As a result, reason comes into being only as the mind acquires sensations to classify and arrange. But when it does have sufficient material to develop and eventually to know itself, reason has a relatively clear field in Locke’s model, as compared to early modern accounts where the mind is invariably disturbed by passions coursing through the body.
Consider, for example, this passage from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which demonstrates how the fact of the brain’s being of the body virtually eliminates the possibility of anything like a rational perception of the world:
To our imagination commeth, by the outward sense or memory, some object to be knowne (residing in the foremost part of the braine), which he mis-conceiving or amplifying, presently communicates to the Heart, the seat of all affections. The pure spirits forthwith flocke from the Braine to the Heart, by certaine secret channels, and signifie what good or bad object was presented; which immediately bends it selfe to prosecute, or avoid it; and withall, draweth with it other humours to helpe it: so in pleasure, concurre great store of purer spirits; in sadnesse, much melancholy blood; in ire, choller. If the Imagination be very apprehensive, intent, and violent, it sends great store of spirits to, or from the heart, and makes a deeper impression, and greater tumult, as the humours in the Body be likewise prepared, and the temperature it selfe ill or well disposed, the passions are longer and stronger. . . . The spirits so confounded, the nourishment must needs be abated, bad humours increased, crudities & thicke spirits engendred with melancholy blood. The other parts cannot performe their functions, having the spirits drawne from them by vehement passion, but faile in sense and motion; so we looke upon a thing, and see it not; heare, and observe not; which otherwise would much affect us, had wee beene free. (Part 1, Sec. 2, Mem. 3, Subsect. 1)13
Burton represents human thought as a physical process. When an object comes to the individual’s attention—whether from memory or from observation—that object sets off a chain reaction that Burton describes as the ontogenesis of a disease. According to this model of the individual, his sensory apprehension of an object is always encumbered with imagination.14 The imagination sends out a distorted image to “the Heart,” which calls up the appropriate humors: “in sadness, much melancholy blood; in ire, choller.” The stronger the imaginative supplement that the brain supplies, the more confused the idea of the object, until passion completely destroys its grounding in sensory perception, causing us to “look upon a thing, and see it not; hear, and observe not.” That those things imagined to give pleasure remain relatively free of distortion by the physical effects of passion only implies that imagination—in this case, by not providing much in the way of a supplement—shapes how we see good objects as well as bad.
To create a model whereby the individual’s acquisition and reaction to information received through the senses observes rational principles, then, Locke does more than empty the mind of ideas that circumvented sensory perception because they came from God.15 Locke also severs the mind’s connection to those organs of the body believed to be the source or conduit of the passions: the heart, the spleen, the liver, and even, paradoxically, the brain. Where Burton focuses on the “brain” in relation to other organs of the body, Locke makes a careful distinction between “brain” and “mind” and focuses on the mind as the exclusive terrain of thought.16 The “brain” experiences a constant exchange of fluids with the rest of the early modern body, which sends at least as much information to the brain through the humors as it received from sensations of the outside world. Locke’s “mind,” in contrast, receives information only from the physical senses. Housed within a particular body, with which it carries on an exclusive, lifelong partnership, the modern mind has remarkably little connection to the body. By means of “simple Ideas taken in by Sensation,” Locke explains, “the Mind comes to extend it self even to Infinity. Which however it may, of all others, seem most remote from any sensible Perception, yet at last hath nothing in it, but what is made out of simple Ideas: received into the Mind by the Senses, and afterwards there put together” and reproduced (II.xvii.1).With Locke, then, we suddenly encounter an individual mind enclosed within a particular body and yet so cut off from that body as to overturn the priorities of body and mind that an author of Burton’s moment took for granted.
To turn the individual mind into the exclusive ruler of the body that it inhabits, Locke translates pleasure and pain from the status of physical responses into “sensations.” Until such sensations have been stored in the mind as ideas, we cannot classify pleasure and pain as either good or bad. As with his argument against “innate ideas,” Locke seems, in executing this move, primarily intent on taking the concepts of good and evil away from God and placing them squarely in the domain of human understanding. Good and evil develop as other concepts do, from the individual’s sensory encounter with the world. In truth, he contends, “they be only different Constitutions of the Mind, sometimes occasioned by disorders in the Body, sometimes by Thoughts of the Mind” (II.xx.2). As he systematically incorporates those thoughts and feelings considered irrational within the architecture of reason, it is only accurate to say that Locke overdoes it. So intent is he on emptying the mind of innate ideas that he stretches the notion of “idea” so far out of shape that his successors—notably Hutcheson and Hume—find it necessary to remove from that category those mental operations that seem naturally inclined to respond to beauty and virtue.17
In chapters xx and xxi of Book II of An Essay, we discover that Locke has a yet grander purpose than sweeping away the traditional foundations for human behavior. As the entire thrust of his argument shifts direction in this perplexing chapter, it soon becomes clear that in continuing to rethink pleasure and pain, he is not interested in naturalizing the operations of judgment so much as in disembodying the passions and transforming desire. Desire arises from ideas of pleasure and pain, to be sure. Having been formed on the basis of external “sensations,” however, ideas come to mediate between the mind and the external world that gave rise to those sensations in a very different way than judgment does. In acknowledging that judgment needs desire to make the responsible citizen, Locke obviously feels his argument has ventured onto slippery ground. To provide a clear sense of how gingerly he reintroduces the passions into his model of mind, we might compare his version with Burton’s description of the process by which the passions assert themselves and begin to interact with ideas.
Rather than bubbling up in the organs of origin to surge through heart and brain, the passions according to Locke originate in our sensations of pleasure and pain and take the form of ideas. Love and delight are his clearest illustrations of this point: “any one reflecting upon the thought he has of the Delight, which any present, or absent thing is apt to produce in him, has the idea we call Love” (II.xx.3). In making love depend on “the thought . . . of delight,” Locke removes love one cognitive step further from the body than the idea of pleasure. In this respect, love is neither a sensation nor a simple idea, but a complex idea. Moreover, because pleasure itself does not exist unless and until sensations have been classified as pleasurable, even pleasure is relatively independent of physical sensation, as, for example, when a man takes “constant delight” in the “Being and Welfare of [his] Children or Friends . . . [and] is said to constantly love them” (II.xx.5). So, too, with joy, which Locke defines as “a delight of the Mind from the consideration of the present or assured approaching possession of a Good” (II.xx.7). A source of delight might be right before our noses, he suggests, but unless we “consider” it, we cannot experience joy. Even expectation trumps the physical encounter with an object of delight, as we may experience joy just from knowing that such an encounter awaits us.
Indeed, it is fair to say that in moving swiftly through a catalogue of passions from love and joy to anger and envy, Locke conspicuously removes the passions from the body and relocates their source in the ideas of pleasure and pain that we formulate on the basis of our sensations. At times, moreover, he indicates that before we can experience passion, we must have abstracted from our ideas of pleasure and pain a further level of ideation that indicates whether a given pleasure or pain is good or evil. That would certainly put an edge on the feeling we get when experience contradicts our idea of pleasure. This discrepancy between idea and experience produces “uneasiness,” which we identify as sadness, anger, envy, and so forth, depending on our understanding of the discrepancy that prompts it. Fear, for example, “is an uneasiness of the Mind, upon the thought of future Evil likely to befal us.” Having recovered from an injury, we no longer need to feel pain in order to remain angry and want the person who inflicted that pain to suffer for his deed. Conversely, envy arises from “the consideration of a Good we desire, obtained by one, we think should not have had it before us” (II.xx.13). In none of these cases does the individual respond to the actual sensations of pleasure or pain. The body is all but gone from the picture. The passions originate in ideas of pleasure and pain that have been translated into good and evil and so arouse a form of uneasiness that—except in cases of love and joy—we attribute to the absence of some good. By including the passions in the field of reason as complex ideas several steps removed from immediate sensory experience, Locke has detached them from various organs contending within the body for control of the individual’s will. So detached, the passions blend into one another to form a spectrum from positive joy to negative despair that observes the single dynamic principle spelled out in Locke’s discussion of desire.
Rather than a positive force in its own right, desire is generated by a discrepancy between one’s “idea of delight” and the object whose possession would provide the sensation of delight.18 This gap identifies the lack of some good that produces a sensation of uneasiness within the individual: “The uneasiness a Man finds in himself upon the absence of any thing, whose present enjoyment carries the Idea of Delight with it, is that we call Desire, which is greater or less, as that uneasiness is more or less vehement” (II.xx.6). Lacking something that carries with it the idea of delight, the individual might understand “the impossibility or unattainableness of the good propos’d,” in which case he would abandon hope of acquiring it; his uneasiness would probably disappear at this point. If, on the other hand, the proposed good is not out of one’s reach, achieving it could well be the most reasonable way of dispelling uneasiness. In stimulating desire, “uneasiness” becomes, for Locke, “the chief if not the only spur to humane Industry and Action” (II.xx.6). Too “little uneasiness in the absence of any thing” can prove deleterious, if it “carries a Man no farther than some faint wishes for it, without any more effectual or vigorous use of the means to attain it” (II.xx.6). This rather cursory treatment of the passions is all Locke requires to demonstrate that the various passions are but variations of desire. Indeed, as he acknowledges in the following chapter, “wherever there is uneasiness there is desire” (II.xxi.39).19
A SINGULAR AGENCY
This redefinition of the passions prepares the unruly aspects of the early modern subject to enter into a new relationship with the individual will. Preferring to understand the will not as an independent faculty so much as a component of “volition,” Locke rejects the traditional notion of the human will as a stern opponent and would-be master of the passions. From his claim that “the uneasiness of desire” is the source of all motivation, it follows that there can be no “voluntary action performed, without some desire accompanying it.” This, he explains, “is the reason why the will and desire are so often confounded” (II.xxi.39). Operating in collaboration with the will, desire becomes a relatively aimless, if not passive force that seeks a cure for uneasiness and looks to will for direction. On its own, however, the will is similarly aimless, its chief purpose being to determine “which desire shall be next satisfied, which uneasiness first removed” (II.xxi.46). Once desire is part of the cure rather than the cause of uneasiness, it no longer makes sense to pit the will in a lifelong battle against desire. Indeed, after Locke, one cannot imagine life without desire. Instead of a battleground for contending forces, as it was for early modern intellectuals, the life of an individual can be understood as a “train of voluntary actions” (II.xxi.40). Within this distinctively modern framework, desire informs many different choices, the sum of which serves as the measure of an individual’s worth. It is not whether one desires or even what variety of desire one has, but what one does with it that matters—and that depends largely on judgment.
As the keeper of the information that collects in the empty space of the mind, judgment provides a framework and container for desire, as well as the options among which the will has to choose before committing the individual to action. Any flaws in the train of voluntary actions that make up one’s life are therefore attributable to flaws in that individual’s judgment rather than to either the force of his desire or the weakness of his will. Locke notes, for example, how a “future pleasure, especially if of a sort which we are unacquainted with, seldom is able to counter-balance any uneasiness, either of pain or desire, which is present” (II.xxi.65). Having never tasted such pleasure, men are apt to conclude “that when it comes to trial, it may possibly not answer the report, or opinion, that generally passes of it . . . and therefore they see nothing in it, for which they should forego a present enjoyment” (II.xxi.65). On this “false way of judging,” he observes, any number of men have traded in the possibility of heaven for a few transient pleasures (II.xxi.65). Burton’s Anatomy argues that reason does not stand a chance against the various forces converging in the brain to stir the individual to action. Although reason’s failures are at least as frequent as its successes, according to Locke, one can improve his faculty of judgment through more information, reflection, and education. It is indeed the individual’s duty to do so. By putting reason in charge, Locke removes the shroud of determinism from individual decision-making.
To introduce desire and will into the field of reason, he is especially intent on maintaining the singular agency of the human mind. To this end, he reserves special contempt for authors who refer to the faculties as if they were “some real Beings in the Soul, that performed those Actions of Understanding and Volition.” This tendency among his peers and predecessors has, Locke surmises, “misled many into a confused Notion of so many distinct Agents in us, which had their several Provinces and Authorities, and did command, obey, and perform several Actions, as so many distinct Beings” (II.xxi.6). Indeed, it is entirely reasonable to regard Locke’s discussion of the passions in Book II of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as an argument against the factionalized body dominated by the humors. To be free of the multiple forms of agency that direct the will each towards its local end, Locke renames the faculties in terms of what they do. Hence understanding becomes “the intellectual faculty” and will is “the elective faculty,” or faculty of choice. Thus re-conceived, the faculties cease to operate as agents each in its own right and come to resemble “abilities” or “powers,” which, he says, “are but different names for the same thing” (II.xxi.20). Defined as powers rather than as agents, the faculties no longer need to compete for control of the individual. Each tends to its business within a rational system, where “Digestion is performed by something that is able to digest; Motion by something that is able to move, and understanding by something able to understand” (II.xxi.20). Separated from the body and yet enclosed within it, the mind can enjoy a new kind of reciprocity with the body, that of owner and caretaker.
Locke’s theory of government requires a subject capable of voluntarily submitting to government. To imagine a state governed by its citizens, Locke has to transform the individual driven by the passions into one who would voluntarily renounce any actions that might encroach on the persons and properties of other individuals. Before an individual can, of his own volition, enter into the social contract as Locke describes it in his Second Treatise of Government, that individual has to undergo an internal version of that exchange. He has to understand negative rights as a positive good—the right not to be violated in one’s person or property. He has to desire only those goods that are truly good, because they extend his person and property without violating the negative rights of his fellow citizens. To do so, he has to reject the fantasy supporting the early modern state, namely, the fantasy that one could rule himself only if entitled by lineage, wealth, force, or God to rule others. The social contract cultivates a radically different fantasy that appears to do away with the distinction between entitlement and subjection. If one’s desire were to submit to reason, in the new scenario, then there would be no need for political coercion except, of course, in the cases of individuals who cannot subject their own desire to reason. Driven as they are by the impulses of the body, an activated imagination, or spiritual possession, to name but three external stimuli capable of overturning self-control, these people are hardly at liberty to subject themselves voluntarily to the laws protecting persons and property.20 In effect, only those whose volition works in collaboration with judgment can be considered individuals.
If Locke’s model of the state calls for a critical mass of such self-governing individuals, then his model of mind requires what can only be called a psychology: the articulation of multiple and potentially contending forces as a self-enclosed and purely mental system whose parts are interdependent and add up to much more than their sum.21 As his successors were quick to point out, however, Locke did not provide that psychology. His model of the subject, like his model of the state, assumes that negative rights and a sense of uneasiness are sufficient inducement for men to agree to curtail their acquisitive desire. He neglected to explain why one would want others—not only their immediate dependents, but also potential competitors—to enjoy the same autonomy he had secured for himself, his dependents, and his property. Moral philosophy rose to the challenge of filling in the empty space that remained in Locke’s mind, even after it had acquired reason. For lack of an external authority to compel them, there had to be some internal inducement for individuals to desire the general good.
ENTER THE INTERNAL SENSES
Francis Hutcheson is perhaps best known for arguing on behalf of the “internal senses,” for which he is credited with influencing no less important figures than David Hume or Hutcheson’s student Adam Smith. Overshadowed by the work of these successors, the four treatises contained in Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725) and An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Illustrations of the Moral Sense (1728) lay out the argument that physicians and philosophers of the time had to address if they wanted to recuperate the irrational powers of the human mind. Thus it is to Hutcheson that we turn in support of our claim that the sentimental model of the subject that dominated eighteenth-century letters was not so much opposed to Locke as dependent on his assertion that the mind began as white paper “void of all characters.” Hutcheson accepted the premise that all our knowledge begins only as sensations come into the mind through the physical senses. He says as much, when he opens his treatise “Concerning Beauty” with the Lockean proposition that “the proper Occasions of Perception by the external Senses, occur to us as soon as we come into the World,” while “the Objects of the superior Senses of Beauty and Virtue generally do not.”22 Still agreeing with Locke, Hutcheson goes on to argue that once sensations have registered on the mind, they inevitably combine to form complex ideas.
But he takes a subtle and decisive step away from Locke in asking us to see these complex ideas as analogous to objects in the world, capable of generating sensations in their own right. When we contemplate such ideas, Hutcheson contends, they are “then present to our Minds, with all its Circumstances, altho’ some of these Ideas have nothing of what we commonly call sensible Perception in them” (xiv). Even when these ideas do include information garnered from the physical senses, “the Pleasure [we receive] arises from some Uniformity, Order, Arrangement, Imitation; and not from the simple Ideas of Colour, or Sound, or Mode of Extension separately consider’d” (xiv). Hutcheson, in other words, gives Locke his due in order to launch an argument against the notion that held the rational operations of the human mind or some deficiency thereof chiefly responsible for human behavior. Hutcheson obviously found the ideas of pleasure and pain that we form on the basis of such sensations much too crude to explain many of the decisions we make and certainly not our proudest moments. How, for example, does reason account for the “far greater Pleasures” that we take “in those complex Ideas of Objects which obtain the Names of Beautiful, Regular, Harmonious” (4)? Such pleasures certainly differ from any empirical understanding “of Principles, Proportions, Causes, or of the Usefulness of the object” (8). Nor does education, custom, or example explain what appears to be an internal sense of beauty; witness the fact that the “Poor and Low” can enjoy the beauty of nature as well as “the Wealthy or Powerful” (62). If our knowledge of beauty is not in fact based on the ideas of pleasure and pain derived from physical sensations, if, further, our knowledge of beauty cannot be learned at second hand through education, then the five external senses cannot supply all the sensations an individual requires in order to become fully himself. There has to be another source of sensation. Hutcheson proceeds by analogy to argue that we possess a capacity for understanding beauty distinct from and yet parallel to our understanding of the physical properties of objects. He insists on this analogy in deciding “to call our Power of perceiving these Ideas an internal sense, were it only for the Convenience of distinguishing them from other Sensations of Seeing and Hearing, which Men may have without Perception of Beauty or Harmony” (6).
In turning from his essay on beauty to the one on morality in An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Hutcheson shifts his concern from the individual’s relationship with objects to the individual’s relationship to other subjects. This is clearly what he is after, when he sets up an analogy between the process by which one arrives at a judgment concerning the physical properties of an object and the process by which we come to regard that object as beautiful. He wants to provide a natural source within the mind for emotional responses, one that does not grant those responses the kind of tyranny over body and mind formerly exercised by the passions. Reason might prevent us from pursuing some goal in the heat of the moment, he insists, but reason alone will never yield a moral assessment of our actions. Reason cannot make men desire the well-being of people beyond their immediate families. To produce a model of the individual who would be naturally benevolent, Hutcheson begins by attacking Locke’s claim that reason is chiefly responsible for individual agency. In addition to reasonableness, Hutcheson insists that human nature must include what he rather awkwardly calls “a disinterested ultimate Desire of the Happiness of others.” He insists further “that our Moral Sense determines us to approve only such Actions as virtuous, which are apprehended to proceed partly at least from such Desire” (97). But it is one thing to declare the existence of a moral sense and quite another to argue into being a sense that operates distinct and apart from reason and may consequently pull desire and instruct the will to go in another direction. His treatise “On the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections” tackles this problem head on. To make room in the mind for such a power, Hutcheson must prove reason insufficient to the task.
His treatise on beauty established that while some of our sensations of pleasure and pain enter the mind through the physical senses, others arise from complex ideas and elicit an aesthetic response distinct from our desire for that object. Having argued for the existence of internal senses by analogy to the physical senses, he can move on and repeat the process. Thus his treatise on the nature and origins of human virtue establishes an analogy between the way we recognize and respond to beauty, on the one hand, and the operations of our internal moral sense on the other. In order to elicit our approbation, he concluded, simple ideas form complex ideas as to whether an object is good or evil or else some combination of the two. But it was not until three years later, in 1728, that, in our estimation, Hutcheson actually made his signature move.
In his treatise on “The Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections,” he abandons the Lockean formula of argument by analogy and seizes on the concept of “calm desire” as a true competitor and potential partner to Lockean reason for the role of prime mover of the human subject. He translates the difference between the internal and external senses into a distinction between calm and spontaneous desire. Locke insisted that reason modifies our ideas of pleasure and pain by making us take a hard look at the facts supporting those ideas, and so it may prevent us from acting on rash desires. Contending that much more is required of the citizen of a modern state than that, Hutcheson renders unto reason only what is owing to reason and goes on to address the thorny problem of how to make man benevolent. To curtail his own desires, according to Locke’s own formula, the individual has to desire something well beyond anything that the idea of pleasure derived from the physical senses could make him want. There are, for Hutcheson, two different varieties of desire.
There are calm and spontaneous varieties of both selfish and public-spirited desire. Indeed, Hutcheson considers an individual’s “calm desire of [his own] good” not only morally compatible with his “general calm desire of the Happiness of others” but also morally at odds with his “particular Passions toward objects immediately presented to some sense.”23 Such particular and immediate passions are, in Hutcheson’s view, of a piece with the love, compassion, and other varieties of natural affection, which may indeed have nothing of evil in them and do not require moral approbation before they can exert a powerful influence over human be havior. When examined in moral terms, concern with whether or not our desires are selfish drops precipitously in importance relative to the question of whether the intention of such a desire is good and its consequences beneficial to all concerned. Only when the moral sense engages our ideas of pleasure and pain do we feel that our pursuit of that pleasure would be a good and worthy cause of action. And only when we give the moral sense a chance to inform our desires can a “calm desire for universal benevolence” prevail over particular passions and bring us the pleasure of “constant Self-Approbation” (25). With “calm desire,” Hutcheson abandons the security of analogical reasoning, on which he depended in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, and sets out into historically new discursive territory.24
At least this is what we might infer from the fact that he follows his argument on behalf of calm desire with a sequence of logical maneuvers designed to give that notion a conceptual architecture comparable to Lockean reason. Hutchison provides a list of “definitions” for the various sensations received by the moral sense as well as for the ideas of good and evil we may form on that basis (26–27). He then uses those definitions to create “axioms” describing all possible relationships between these sensations, ideas, and the desires that might accompany them (28–30). These axioms, he claims—with less than the certainty his logic would imply—“seem to be the general laws, according to which our desires arise” (30). Awkward and tentative, this is hardly a move that could give rise to British sentimental discourse. Indeed, we could not consider Hutcheson so important a supplement to Locke had the Scotsman not abandoned the philosophical method associated with his predecessor and begun working the other side of the opposition between reason and emotion. To embark on this new discursive terrain, he poses the question of why we need the passions at all. Without them, after all, one could live a life of calm desire, never repeating bad decisions in the overdetermined manner of early modern individuals.
AFFECTIVE NORMATIVITY
To demonstrate the importance of the passions, Hutcheson selects a peculiarly modern example. Without ambition, he contends, man’s natural aversion to labor and propensity for mirth would render him weak and lazy. What is more, “Without a great deal of human labor and many dangers, this earth could not support the tenth part of its inhabitants. Our nature therefore required a sensation, accompanying its desires of the Means of Preservation, capable to surmount the uneasiness of labor” (35). So, too, must we have intense affection for our offspring in order to give them “perpetual labor and care” beyond what can be expected from “the more general ties of benevolence” (35). Indeed, he continues, parents must experience the pain of such desire in order “to counterbalance the pains of labor and the sensations of the selfish appetites,” as they “must often check and disappoint their own appetites to gratify those of their children” (35). Such “diversity of temper” is natural. It not only ensures the preservation of the individual body, according to Hutcheson, but also ultimately furthers the good of the human aggregate. Has he, in abandoning the philosophical procedures associated with Locke, opened the way for the return of the early modern passions?25 His notion of diversity does indeed invite comparison with the seventeenth-century notion of “countervailing passions,” whereby an individual achieved stability as the desires pulsing from one of his organs ran into conflict and reached accommodation with another, enacting within the body much the same relationship by which the great landowners of England neutralized one another in and around 1688.26
Hutcheson has opened a Pandora’s box, however, so that he can continue reclassifying human desires on the basis of whether they arise from our calm reflection on ideas of pleasure and pain or from immediate sensations. He uses this framework to subordinate the passions to a distinctively modern combination of reason and morality that we now characterize as normative. He identifies desires and aversions that arise from the process of self-reflection as the “spiritual” or “pure” affections (39); through reflection we come to feel the uneasiness that accompanies some absent but anticipated pleasure or pain. Affection therefore remains for Hutcheson, as for Locke, purely a product of thought and at one step’s remove from any physical source. Not all affection, however, is pure. “When more violent confused sensations arise with the affection, and are attended with, or prolonged by bodily motions,” he acknowledges, “we call the whole by the name of Passion” (39). Thus we may want to be with a person whether or not it makes us happy. So, too, men will shriek and flee whether or not what they suppose to be dangerous can actually harm them. In Hutcheson’s nomenclature, “These propensities . . . when they occur without rational desire, we may call Passions, and when they happen along with desires, denominate them passionate” (40–41). Let us consider what he has done to desire by splitting the “affections” off from those desires triggered by the presence of an object. Hutcheson has obviously set the stage for elevating those faculties that spring into action in response to sensations. At the same time, he has also set the stage for debasing the early modern body, home to “the passions” and therefore the source of impurities that adulterate not only the cognitive operations of reason but the affective operations that move us to act on the social virtues as well.
His reduction of “the Passions” to the adjective “passionate” encapsulates the argument to come. Hutcheson grants no validity to classical tragedy, where the passions choreograph individuals of high birth and great authority in scenes of spectacular self-destruction. “There is nothing in our nature leading us necessarily into the fantastic Desires,” which, he insists, echoing Locke, “arise through our ignorance and negligence; when, through want of thought, we suffer foolish associations of ideas to be made, and imagine certain trifling circumstances to contain something honourable and excellent in them” (62–63). Obviously addressing a class very different from the one for whom tragedy was staged, he makes it clear what features of the old ruling class render the individual no better than a slave to passion:27
We know how the inadvertences, negligences, infirmities, and even vices, either of great or ingenious men, have been affected, and imitated by those who were incapable of imitating their excellencies. This happens often to young gentlemen of plentiful fortunes, which set them above the employments necessary to others, when they have not cultivated any relish for the pleasures of the imagination, such as architecture, music, painting, poetry, natural philosophy, history. . . ; when their hearts are too gay to be entertained with the dull thoughts of increasing their wealth, and they have not ability enough to hope for power: such poor empty minds have nothing but trifles to pursue; anything becomes agreeable, which can supply the void of thought; or prevent the sullen discontent which must grow upon a mind conscious of no merit, and expecting the contempt of its fellows; as a pack of dogs, a horse, a jewel, an equipage, a pack of cards, a tavern; anything which has got any confused ideas of honour, dignity, liberality, or genteel enjoyment of life joined to it. (63)
After taking issue sharply with Locke on the adequacy of reason, Hutche-son’s argument arcs around at this point to strike up a new relationship with its former opponent, a relationship that aims at “the best Management of all our desires” (88). A mind that remains empty even after it receives numerous sensations is a mind that has exercised neither the moral sense that bends desire to the general good, nor the reasoning ability to make an individual happy in strictly private terms. By the end of this passage, Hutcheson has put the two powers of mind to work on the same sensory data and made the parallel trajectories created by his earlier analogy of the moral sense to the operations of reason converge upon the common objective of a life of “honour, dignity, liberality, and genteel enjoyment” (63).
Such a life presupposes “a Desire of public Good” (65). Like the “fantastic Desire” that tormented tragic heroes of centuries past and impeached the reason even of ordinary men (62), the “Desire of public Good” is part of one’s nature. Even before reason goes to work ordering our sensations, Hutcheson declares, our desires “are fixed for us by the Author of our Nature, subservient to the interest of the system; so that each individual is made, previously to his own choice, a member of a great Body, and affected with the fortunes of the whole” (65). If, as Locke argues, the rational faculties ensure that reasonable individuals understand the world outside the mind in much the same way, then the affective faculties, as Hutcheson describes them, ensure that each individual desires what is best for the human community, even when that desire conflicts with some rash or selfish desire. This formulation of the nature and conduct of the passions couldn’t be farther from the early modern notion of the passions.
This formulation puts us squarely within a modern paradigm of normative desire—desire as natural as reason to each and every individual, desire whose deviation from the standard of “calm Universal Benevolence” present a threat to the entire community, desire, then, that must be “managed” for the good of the whole (89). Such a project requires a new relationship between reason and morality, as the passions thrive on ignorance and in the absence of clear and refined ideas of pleasure and pain. Reason shows us that violent passions, even those we may regard as tender and benign, do not bring lasting satisfaction, so that we may come to regard such passions as causes of pain. But even if we come to understand that “this Discipline of our passions is in general necessary,” reason cannot make us desire what is most important to our personal happiness—namely, the subjection of both reason and affection to calm universal benevolence (88). To want what is most important, we must already desire it; we must by nature take pleasure in both self-approbation and the public good. Otherwise, there would be no inducement to discipline.28
CULTURE IN THE FIELD OF DESIRE
Our account of the relationship between the passions and politics as conducted in and through Locke’s model of the subject would be incomplete without some sense of what happened to his figure of the empty mind at the end of the eighteenth century. How did An Essay Concerning Human Understanding—specifically the chapter “Of Power” (II.xxi) —generate the questions that would preoccupy authors and intellectuals of various ideological stripes during the nineteenth century, as modern nationalism emerged and assumed the shape of empire in both theory and practice? To sketch the mere outline of an answer, we take a somewhat anomalous route and consider briefly an unlikely pair of texts published in 1798: Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population and Joanna Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse” to A Series of Plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind; each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy. Both authors define the individual as a mind void of characters, one that is inscribed through encounters with an external world on the basis of which it forms ideas of pleasure and pain. Both are concerned, as Hutcheson was, with how to direct human behavior toward socially beneficial ends. Neither, however, can assume that goal can be reached within and by the agency of the individual mind alone. This is the difference between eighteenth-century moral philosophy and the problematic within which Malthus and Baillie wrote. Locke’s consolidation of agency within the individual mind effectively removed the body from consideration and gave the mind sole regulating power not only over itself but over the body as well. While Hutcheson acknowledged that external causes might influence the body, he also maintained that benevolence was the primary and only natural human desire, thus capable of shepherding all rash and immediate desires toward the larger collective good. Malthus and Baillie have to consider whether the force that regulates human behavior comes from within the human mind or from without in the form of some biological imperative. When understood in these terms, the problem was no longer one of how to bend the individual will to that of the aggregate but how to bend the desire of the aggregate to the will of a literate elite—one individual at a time.
Thomas Malthus writes from the perspective of the common good, or what he considers the relative happiness or misery of “the population.” From this perspective, the human body plays an even more central role in human destiny than it had in early modern literature. The collective body is the source of the labor that produces all those objects that display the decision-making prowess of Locke’s ideal citizen. The collective body also consumes. Hence the “two postulata” by means of which Malthus challenges the sufficiency of Locke’s empty mind: “First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state” notwithstanding human progress in every other respect.29 Here, the passions have been whittled down to one all-powerful sex drive, which in evolutionary theory not only subsumes lust, ambition, hatred, envy, and all other rash or immediate impulses, but also displaces anything resembling benevolence as the mother of all desires. Once one understands the passion between the sexes as the body’s natural equipment, then it becomes, as Mal-thus explains, “a palpable contradiction to all experience, to say that the corporal propensities of man do not act very powerfully, as disturbing forces” in “a decision of the mind” (163). Because these propensities “will urge men to actions, of the fatal consequences of which, to the general interests of society, they are perfectly well convinced,” he concludes, starvation, war, and disease are inevitable (163–64). These forms of misery are the only natural checks on unbounded sexual desire. Does this mean that the individual no longer owns himself, as he did a century before?
We are too familiar with the rhetorical behavior of British culture at the moment of the emergence of industrial capitalism to believe that Malthus’s formula for disaster would have caught hold as fast and widely as it did had it not set the stage for resolving the problem of sexual desire at the same time and in the same terms that it formulated that problem. Indeed, Malthus himself points the way to the solution that would put its stamp on all Victorian thought. Adversity improves us, he argues: “Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state” (206). Thus the problem of population offers up its own solution in that the human mind must grow vigorous and more intelligent in overcoming the passions: “When the mind has been awakened into activity by the passions, and the wants of the body, intellectual wants arise; and the desire of knowledge, and the impatience under ignorance, form a new and important class of excitements” (211). It is not in avoiding problems but in surmounting them, in other words, that both individual and collective are each enriched without any cost to the other.30 If, on the other hand, a period were to arrive when there were no such problem-solving to be done, in Malthus’s judgment, “one of the noblest stimulants to mental exertion would have ceased,” and it would be “impossible that . . . any individuals could possess the same intellectual energies as were possessed by a Locke, a Newton, or a Shakespeare” (213). Within a framework where all desire is ultimately shaped by sexual desire, the subject comes into his own as he harnesses his sexual energy and transforms it into intellectual achievement. To put it in Lockean terms, the subject comes to own himself (and eventually herself) as he overcomes what is unruly, childish, and primitive within him.
Joanna Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse” to her Plays on the Passions explains how culture brings about the transformation distinguishing modern individuals from those who remain slaves to their natural desires. Where Locke and Hutcheson allow us to observe the reflective powers of the mind and show how those powers shaped human behavior, Baillie asks us to observe the human body, as it sheds the invisibility afforded by cultural conformity and displays the natural passions animating behavior. Rather than dividing the human aggregate into those who develop reflective powers as opposed to their dependents who lack such powers of judgment, Baillie imagines a world composed of those who are spectators and those whose lack of culture dooms them to remain the object of the gaze.31 We are naturally fascinated with theatrical displays and especially tragedy, she contends, because “any person harbours in his breast, concealed from the world’s eye, some powerful rankling passion of what kind soever it may be.”32 What struts and frets its hour upon the modern stage is not some grand and noble human being, then, so much as a component of ourselves personified and enacted in the extreme. In witnessing such spectacles, we witness “those passions which conceal themselves from the observations of men.” We do so, moreover, without ourselves becoming thrall to the passions (8). Indeed, we require the spectacle of deviance in order to learn the secrets of interiority, namely, the “powerful rankling passion” that we must continue to conceal (3). One’s status as a modern subject henceforth depends on it. In such a cultural milieu, literature ceases to offer a normative model of character and begins to elicit in readers a desire to see what they could not be and still belong to respectable society.
The division of the population into spectators and objects of the gaze thus ushered in the form of self-government peculiar to the layered, internally divided, and self-conflicted individual associated with Victorian culture. The discovery of the sex drive as the ultimate source—however diverted and displaced—of every action revised Locke’s empty mind for the age of imperialism, where each blank space on the map of Empire concealed, in the words of Conrad’s Marlow, a native woman “savage and superb.”