by Joshua Cohen
But ultimately memory isn’t just continuance—rather, it’s a vehicle by which to decode creation:
It may even be said that in consequence of these petites perceptions, the present is big with the future and weighted with the past, that there is a conspiration of all things, and that even in the least of substances eyes as penetrating as those of God might read the total succession of all things in the universe. (New Essays, 1704)
In the same way that you can’t look at the name of God without reading it, God can’t look at you without being aware—given the deity’s superior memory—of everything you’ve ever been, or will be: biologically, chemically, philosophically, religiously.
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DESPITE ANIMALS, VEGETABLES, AND Minerals not differing from one another—or even from others of their own Kingdoms—by stringent transpositions, such symbolic logic became the model for speciation. In systematizing the basic distinctions among earth’s organisms, humanity categorized even itself—if only by placing itself at the pinnacle: from Animalia, through Chordata, Vertebrata, Mammalia, Primates, Hominidæ, to Homo sapiens. Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), not the first Homo sapiens but the first to recognize himself as such, introduced binomial classification, or the nomina trivialia, for plants in his Species Plantarum (1753) and for animals in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae (1758–59).*2 “It is not the character that makes the genus, but the genus that makes the character”: It was the practice of Linnaeus and of earlier taxonomists like Andrea Cesalpino, Gaspard Bauhin, John Ray, Augustus Quirinus Rivinus, and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort to dispose their specimens through wishful intuition as much as by dissection or observation in the field. Their artificial taxonomies would later be replaced by clades, based on more rigorously quantifiable data, but it’s this antique search for a qualifying “character” (Linnaeus), or “affinity” (Bauhin), that ramifies throughout the Enlightenment.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), memoirist and novelist, was also a political philosopher, composer, perambulist, and horticulturist, the author of a popular handbook, Letters on the Elements of Botany, written under the influence of Linnaeus. This concern in particular kept pace with Rousseau’s old age, attaining its formidable dehiscence in Reveries of a Solitary Walker, a notably impractical guide written between 1776 and 1778 and left unfinished. It is the record of a man desystematizing himself—a man quitting the city’s polluting throng for the blameless clean solitude of the countryside, and in doing so realizing that even if all the world around him would be parsed and tagged, pinned if not stilled in amber, any and all conceivable taxa whether revealed or engineered would still be secondary to lived experience:
Trees, hedges, and plants are the attire and clothing of the earth. Nothing is as sad as the sight of a plain and bare countryside, which displays to the eyes only boulders, clay, and sand. But enlivened by nature and arrayed in its wedding dress amidst the brooks and birdsong, the Earth, in the harmony of its three kingdoms [Linnaeus’s Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral], offers man a spectacle filled with life, interest, and charm—the only spectacle in the world of which his eyes and heart never weary. (Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 1782)
For Rousseau, with his artist’s soul, to attend is to appreciate, especially alone and especially amid nature. His observations didn’t have to be utile, only diverting; he would be free to ignore Venus or Mars, the sum of an insect’s limbs or of a fruit’s seeds, a flower’s petal structure, or the dimensions and twitches of the flyblown head of a dray horse, insofar as he sensitized that education to reveries, idylls, spells of dreaming.
Weather, landscape, would be translated inward; passions, translated outward; the inspiration of breezes, the influence of streamlets; pathetic fallacies would abound. The only season in which everything blooms is the poetic occasion—that rarefied spring in which the study of nature becomes a study of self:
This occurred to me when my mind, oppressed by sorrow, recalled and concentrated all its power to preserve the remains of a passion almost extinguished by the heaviness into which I’d slipped. I wandered the woods and highlands, not daring to think, for fear of reviving my afflictions. My imagination, refusing to countenance the cause of my suffering, instead engaged my senses to register the fleet, charming impressions of my surroundings. My eyes roved from one to another, and, though it would appear inconceivable, in a variety so great something or other was bound to attract them the most, and transfix them the longest.
I became fond of this recreation of the sight, which, in an unfortunate man, reposes, amuses, diverts the mind, and suspends the sense of his miseries. The nature of the surroundings profoundly assists the diversion, and renders it more seductive. Fragrant smells, lively colors, the most elegant lines, appear to vie with emulation for the right to our attention. Nothing but a love of pleasure is required to be in thrall to sensations so soft, and, if this effect is not produced in all people, it’s due to a lack of inborn sensibility, and, moreover, to the fact that their minds, otherwise occupied, devote themselves to the sources of their stimulation only between times, or clandestinely. (Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 1782)
*1 Leibniz had served the ducal libraries at Hanover and Wolfenbüttel, where he’d engineered a new type of indexing—a bibliography that communicated a library’s holdings both conceptually and materially. His schema called for books to be alphabetized firstly by author, and secondly by author within subject, producing a mental plan of the libraries’ holdings, to be cross-referenced with the shelf list, which mapped the libraries’ physical plan, where sections A–E covered Theology, F was concerned with Law, while Q–Z were left open to accommodate any fields not yet determined.
*2 Linnaeus regarded Genus, species as innate, or God-given, whereas the preceding levels—Kingdom, Class, Order—he admitted were constructs and was content to treat them as mere foundations for refinement (the ranks of Phylum and Family were still-later partitions).
G. MALEBRANCHE, VITALITY, AUTOMATA, CONDILLAC
WITH LEIBNIZ MATTER HAD BEEN split; the matter that remained was motion. Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) was a philosopher in motion. He went forward and claimed that humanity could experience verities like truth and falsity only as relative notions, as sensations. But he also went backward by claiming that everything existed only wholly in God, and so human access could only be partial.
Like Pascal, Malebranche was Catholic and catholic (French); he dedicated his life to reconciling the philosophies of Descartes—things are ideas—and Augustine—ideas are divine. Like Spinoza, Malebranche sought to render everything as the effect of an initial cause, though while Spinoza settled on a pantheism that sundered God into a passive existence (natura naturata, “nature natured,” or nature already created), descended from an active expression (natura naturans, “naturing nature,” or nature that creates), Malebranche insisted on the role of human will, and spanned the vacuum.
To Malebranche and his fellow Occasionalists—Géraud de Cordemoy, Arnold Geulincx, and Louis de La Forge—the body cannot control the mind, the mind cannot control the body; rather, the two are linked in the soul, which in turn is linked with the Spirit (the divine). Malebranche’s shared soul owes its divisions to Aquinas. For Malebranche, the human portion of the soul is what it intends, but the aspect that is God’s is attentional. Intention is desire, attention—according to Malebranche’s The Search After Truth (1674–75)—“a natural prayer” of the soul, for success at attaining its desiderata.
More-active interpretations of Occasionalism certainly resembled formal worship, with humanity submitting its will to the deity for approval or denial, turning experiences even as mundane as waking or reading or sleeping into sanctimonious events. More-passive interpretations regarded that cooperation as automatic and innate. Both versions, however, insisted on the perfection of all things within God, and the imperfection of how humans experienced them. By insisti
ng that the flaw is always with the human half of the soul—with humanity’s intentions and with its bodily and mental reception of what is sent—Malebranche became the first philosopher to systemize attention as transmission: mutual at best, at worst transactional.
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BUT EVERY TRANSMISSION REQUIRES a medium. The human, without access to God or any other animating force, is just a golem, dusty matter without motion. A mechanism. A machine.
If the mechanical had quondam imitated the mortal—if cams and pistons had always been mere iterations of organs and glands—in the eighteenth century the mortal imitated the mechanical. Descartes regarded animals as machines and humans as no better than animals. Leibniz announced his capability in a letter to French theologian/mathematician Antoine Arnauld: “God has given a soul to every machine capable of having one.”
Malebranche identified two types of machines: artificial, which are finite and rust, and natural, which can infinitely reproduce, like species of flora and fauna. According to Malebranche, not only is humanity a natural machine but it is one that exists preassembled, or preformed, infinitely reproducing itself in mature just miniaturized form in utero, or, to be true to gender norms of the time, in sperm: as homunculi, or “little men,” of small but proportional skeletons who upon birth, in one interpretation, or upon conception, in another, become attached to an entheastic soul and so are engaged, empowered.
What is telling is not that for most of the rationalists the power source of the human mechanism was God, but that for many of them God was the user, or operator, too, Whose eternal input was wisdom and Whose output included feces and urine.
In Classicism, animation was a matter of breath, life imparted by pneuma. Aether was established as a geographic heaven before becoming a conduit for esoteric communiqués. Aristotelian dynamics, which explained how and why things moved teleologically, in a type of physics of the soul, were powered through Medievalism by God, Who instilled in His flock conatus, or the will to exist, while His flock reacted with impetus, or the will to continue existing. But by the time Rationalism had developed its magnetic attraction to opposites, its perpetually pushing and pulling “desires”—between appetition (unconscious corporeal desire) and volition (conscious or willed desire)—science had animated itself. Physical motion was force applied to a thing to counteract its inertia; mental motion was force applied to language’s inertia. Concentrations and distillations served both philosophical discourse and alchemy, in experiments that sought the essential energy of life: virtus seminalis, “seminal power.”
Vitalism, dating from around 1600, classed matter based on its reaction to heat: When heated in a crucible, one type of matter changed form, though that form could be recovered (inorganic), whereas another type could not be recovered in form, due to the loss of a universal lifeforce (organic). Animals had this lifeforce in abundance; humans too, whose “mesmerism”—Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815)—was popularly regarded as animalistic. In 1781, Luigi Galvani’s assistant touched a metal scalpel, charged with static electricity, to the exposed sciatic nerve of a frog. The amphibian sparked, twitched; Galvani deduced that the croaker itself was the source of the current. In 1800, Galvani’s rival, Alessandro Volta, proved that animal electricity, or “galvanism,” as he called it, was a myth, by obtaining the same effect without a specimen, just with alternating bars of copper and zinc separated by strips of cloth soaked in brine (to increase their conductivity): the “voltaic pile,” or battery.
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RATIONALISM WAS THE THEORY, automation, the practice; the logic that replaced divine law dictated that the divinely given innards of any organism were technologically replaceable.
Automata: It’s significant that the Enlightenment’s first and best models of total attention also lacked free will, but it’s just as significant that what Enlightenment humanity chose to do with its independence was to distract itself and play God, in the creation of creaky replica contraptions whose inferiority was only temporary—or so their inventors would claim. The automaton became the foremost creature of its time, a holotype or lectotype of humanity perfected—or as it wished to be perfected—free of infirmity, liberated from death.
To play with nature is to be a deiform child, a doll among dolls—and so it’s understandable that the automation that matured into industrial machinery was first commercialized, or popularized, in toys. Jacques de Vaucanson’s 1739 Digesting Duck gave the illusion of having an enginery metabolism, as if the grains it billed became the turd disburdened, though the duck had to be loaded with turd and the grains were collected for reuse in an adjacent compartment. The 1768–74 automata trinity of Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz: The girl musician played an organ (five different melodies); the boy draftsman drew portraits (subjects included Louis XV, Cupid, and a dog); and the boy littérateur was able to write any text that didn’t exceed forty characters (the text had to be coded onto a wheel one character at a time).
True automata demonstrated the mechanical’s sophistication (and so, by extension, how much more sophisticated was the human creator—no automaton has yet created itself). But it was the false automata that did more to excite curiosity about perception. The body, cut open and examined—modeled in plaster and wax for scale anatomical dummies whose removable vessels helped educate medical students in lieu of cadavers—laid bare humanity’s most brute mechanics, its conduits of nerves, its systems of circulations and respiration, but a cross section of brain or a slice of outer eye or inner ear gave no evidence of an equivalent perceptual system. Instead, Wolfgang von Kempelen’s 1770 chessplaying Turk beat the princes of Europe at the game of kings, though it was merely a shell, and crouched inside was its midget human director. Athanasius Kircher’s Delphic Oracle, ca. 1651, was a statue whose movable mouth answered any questions posed. The voice, through a speaking tube, was Kircher’s.
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IT WAS AN IMPATIENCE with the pedagogic substance of the mille sescenti—and too a skeptical regard for its style, with its propositions and lemmas and postulates and axioms all so foreign to the messy palimpsest of life—which led to its rejection by George Berkeley and David Hume. Rationalists had either ignored or been distressed by a strictly mental attention because for them all faculties of mind had to be physically or metaphysically locatable and this, whatever this was, remained the one semantic floater that refused to stay in its “organ” or “gland.” Empiricists denied attention because for them all faculties of mind were themselves just mental conceptions—all things not merely sensations but conceptions of sensation.
Berkeley (1685–1753) would have denied the existence of this page, and asserted that it is only an idea in your mind, inexistent without being perceived. Hume (1711–76) would have noted that your perception is rather predicated on your drive to perceive this page, or just the idea or an idea of it, while your drive itself is only a matter of cost/benefit, to be settled either instinctively or by conditioning. The Empiricist idea that everything exists in your mind alone, or in your idea of mind, was just the secular transformation of the idea that everything exists in God’s mind alone, or in His idea of mind, the wavering of either being the one thing inconceivable, or Apocalypse. This transformation being yet another instance of anthropomorphizing God by theomorphizing man—or else the other way around, with cause and effect counterpoised by perspective. Empiricism strips experience of all limbs not conceptual, and renders existence embryonic, life as a motile germinal “bundle”—Hume’s word—of crudely interpreted sensations.
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac’s 1754 Treatise on the Sensations sought to prove that interpretation too was merely sensory, and accomplished this in a way that dramatized its reader along with its hero: a simulacrum or idol, a Dr. Frankenstein’s monster—either the victim of a torture device like the bronze bull or iron maiden, or the device itself recast as a victim.
Condillac proposes a man, alive but imprisoned head to toe in marble. This carapace or exoskeleton prevents him from sensing, and his life will become reflexive or reflective only as the different panels—like heavy and shiny plates of knightly armor—are removed. First to go is the panel covering the nose, which then permits a sense of smell to the inmate. Condillac presents a rose; the olfactory sense is created but as the inmate has no sense of roses—of form, sound, color, or even of itself as a sensate being—he himself is created as smell; this smell being the sum of consciousness, he is this smell himself. Condillac then retracts the rose but the scent remains and even blooms in the inmate’s memory (rather, the scent blooms to create his memory, to become his memory, and allows him to both attend and expect: the rose’s retraction being the incipience of space-time). Other flowers are placed before the sniffing inmate, a violet, a jasmine, asafetida. The rose, being incomparable, had smelled neither good nor bad, but now, through memory, it can find its rank in the aromatic order, as the inmate determines his preferences. Memories, contrasted, become ideas. Comparison/contrast, or the attention to two or more ideas, gives rise to judgment, or discrimination. The sweetness of the rose and violet and jasmine, and the sourness of the asafetida, or the incarcerated man’s memories or ideas of them, become abstracted into generalities of pleasure and pain. The incarcerated man himself, his sense of self, is nothing more than the concretization of such abstractions. Say taste and hearing and sight follow by a further removal of marble platelets. Tastes, sounds, and colors would join the smells perceived and the life of the prisoner would expectantly extend, broaden; yet the essential procedures comprising experience would remain. Colors, sounds, tastes, and smells would be mere sensations still, not yet referents to things external. To experience the external causes of sensation the prisoner must be allowed to touch, the tactile, or haptic, being the one sense that effectuates the ideas of size, density, and form in the development of his own conviction, or sense of being—a subject to himself and object to the universe.
