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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
DAVID BROMWICH HAS REMARKED HOW THINKERS AT THE TURN OF THE eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--specifically, Burke and Wordsworth--made the discovery that autonomy and sociability could never be completely reconciled. (1) Richard Rorty agrees, seeing this as the central problem of western political philosophy, and perhaps of western culture itself, in the last two centuries. Rorty locates the origins of this impasse in the erosion of the Enlightenment idea of a universal human nature, maintaining that since the romantics, we have become more aware of the contingency of each self, and that as there is no common human nature, there can be no single way in which the individual's desire for personal fulfillment can be found peacefully to coincide with that of others. (2) This essay explores the contours of this romantic and post-romantic problematic as they appear in Godwin's writings of the decade between his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and his lesser known Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803). (3) Political Justice famously proposed an anarchist utopia based on the free expression of humanity's rational nature. (4) This essay shows how Godwin exchanges an Enlightenment universalism and essentialism, heavily tinctured with Calvinist stoicism and immaterialism, for a more skeptical romanticism which foregrounds the contingency and corporeality of human nature and which profoundly affects his interpretation, practice and deployment of history.
Recent scholarship has drawn belated attention to Godwin's indebtedness to the culture of Rational Dissent, particularly in his insistence on the right and duty of private judgment as the essence of both personal and social felicity. (5) Moreover, Godwin's Dissenting background is evident in the strong Manichaean elements in his ethics and epistemology. As Scott J. Juengel reminds us, Godwin is given to "privileging the active, rational, and autonomous consciousness over such "involuntary" sensations as physical desire, pain, and corporeal sentience." Consequently, his "political program necessarily and systematically attempts to attenuate the role of corporeality in human behavior." (6) For Godwin, the vital, defining human essence is immaterial, as revealed in instances where physical pain "has been contemned and defied by the energies of intellectual resolution" (PJ 1: 78-79).
Such complete dissociation from sensuality is obviously an ideal case. But invariably it is, for Godwin, the ideal which reveals the true essence and potential of humankind. For if one person can thus resist the promptings of the senses, it is possible that "in a widely different state of society," "the whole species" can do likewise (PJ 1: 74). And it is possible because it is mind which, potentially at least, has the decisive, controlling role in human action. Indeed, a person "engaged in the progressive voluptuousness of the most sensual scene" can be drawn from it instantaneously by a "mere proposition": "Tell him at this moment that his father is dead ... and his whole passion shall be instantly annihilated ..." (PJ 1: 73).
This capacity to be motivated solely by intellect owes much to the tradition of rational intuitionism which also figured prominently in the Puritan and Nonconformist culture in which Godwin had been reared. Moreover, rational intuitionism asserted that, as rational beings, human responses to true propositions were as inevitable as their responses to physical stimuli (PJ 1: 382). (7) On this basis, Godwin asserted that "Truth is omnipotent ... [and] Man is perfectible" (PJ 1: 86). Yet crucially, this automatic perception of truth and the moral action it engenders is conditional upon our attaining that "perfectly voluntary state" of consciousness which evidences "the perfection of the human character" (PJ 1: 68). For moral truths to be thus both self-evident and automatically animating, our actions must be based on "judgements extant to ... [our] understanding," that is, "attended with consciousness." Most of us do not, as Godwin desires, "have our faculties in act upon every occasion that occurs, and ... conduct ourselves accordingly" (PJ 1: 345), but rely instead on custom, habit, "prepossession and prejudice" (PJ 1: 62-69). Yet were we to employ our personal rational consciousness not only would we be true to our (rational) nature and thus achieve personal fulfillment or felicity, but we would ensure social solidarity and progress. For rather than encouraging intellectual license, antinomianism and social upheaval as conservatives typically feared, Godwin argues that such widespread independence guarantees consensus and sociability: "... the proper method for hastening the decline of error, and producing uniformity of judgement, is not, by brute force, by laws or by imitation; but, on the contrary, by exciting every man to think for himself" (PJ 2: 501). In this way consensus and solidarity are created by the conscious, rational enquiry of individuals, rather than by "compulsion or sympathy" (PJ 1: 285-97), "that insensible and gradual" process by which "our opinions, our tempers and our habits are modified by those of each other" (PJ 2:499 ff.).
In 1800, Godwin admitted the extent to which his early philosophy had been adversely influenced by the survival of hyper-Calvinist tendencies. He maintained that these had been corrected by his later exposure to, and adoption of, Humean philosophy. (8) Philp has shown, however, that the changes Godwin made to the subsequent editions of Political Justice are indebted more vaguely and generally to moral sense philosophy and the literature of sensibility than specifically to Hume, and that the final edition of 1798 inconsistently employs the opposing vocabularies of Rational Dissent and moral sense (Philp 142-44, 202-13). Although, Godwin comes to assert that it is feeling and habit, rather than reason, which provide the most usual and proper sources of motivation, Political Justice ultimately exhibits an irreconcilable tension between rival conceptions of the human essence as independent, rational mind and as socially-engaged, emotional matter. Thus, he insists not only that all "government is, abstractedly taken, an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind" (PJ 2: 2), but that one's essential rational autonomy is compromised by any kind of social contact other than the most disengaged and cerebral. Godwin ideally proscribes all social intercourse or "cooperation," except "conversation" conceived as a disembodied "intercourse of mind with mind" (PJ 2: 505). On the one hand, he admits that human character is inescapably the product of innumerable conscious and unconscious modificatory social interactions, but insists at the same time that the extent to which we allow the latter to occur measures the degree of our "sensual dereliction" and effects that loss of intellectual independence which is the guarantee both of "progressive [social] improvement" and "purest [personal] delight" (PJ 2: 499-506).
Godwin's human ideal, then, is a Dissenting refinement of what Charles Taylor designates the Cartesian "ideal of the disengaged self." This is an ideal "capable of objectifying not only the surrounding world but also [one's] own emotions and inclinations, fears and compulsions, and achieving thereby a kind of distance and self-possession which allows [one] to act `rationally.'" (9) For Godwin, this conscious disengagement from the promptings of feeling, habit and custom ultimately entails not only a repudiation of the body but, relatedly, of all material and social externalities. Such ontological, epistemological and ethical dislocation, as effected by the culture of western scientific modernity is, of course, a common target of romantic thought conceived, in M. H. Abrams' term, as a "metaphysics of integration." (10) While much of Godwin's work subsequent to Political Justice enacts just such a romantic critique, unsurprisingly, perhaps, he foregrounds the religious origins and manifestations of enlightened modernity.
1. The Puritan Temper
Godwin's early writings propose the ancient Greek and Roman republics as paradigms of the stoical independence he valued so highly. (11) Indeed, he maintains that all subsequent history represents a "night of barbarism" from which the present age has not yet fully emerged (PJ 1: 282). Despite this, he insists that undeniable progress has occurred since the Reformation's delivery of "an irrecoverable shock to the [medieval, Catholic] empire of superstition and implicit obedience" (PJ 1: 450-51). Such plenary condemnation of the medieval Church was characteristic of Enlightenment historiography which, especially in its Rationalist and Protestant forms, decried Catholicism's emphasis on ceremony, ritual and icon. Both Protestants and Rationalists asserted that such practices detracted from the essential "inwardness and incorporeality," and, ultimately, intellectuality, of superior religiosity. (12) Gibbon, for example, had lambasted the ceremonies, rites and iconography of Constantine Christianity as corruptions of the "sublime and simple theology of the primitive Christians" which had the effect of entrenching the superstition and irrationalism of the Middle Ages. He noted that such physical media of worship were effective as they "seemed most powerfully to affect the senses of the vulgar," the uneducated and unenlightened masses possessed only of "gross conceptions and imperfect faculties." (13) In his Life of Chaucer, Godwin dissents from this Rationalist version, maintaining that it is also reasonable to interpret medieval Catholicism as an appropriately enlightened response to the barbarism threatened by the disintegration of the Roman Empire:
Everything has its place; and it would be difficult to find any cause influencing the mind of man in society, however now perhaps antiquated, insipid or poisonous, which was not at one period genial and nourishing, restraining the ferocious and savage passions, or forwarding and maturing the fairest offspring of intellect. Thus, perhaps the secularised and degenerate religion established by Constantine and his successors contributed to bring on the darkness and ignorance of the middle ages: yet that very religion acting upon the barbarous usurpers of the Roman empire tended to keep alive some of the arts of a more cultivated period, and to prevent the darkness from becoming universal and complete. (1: 257-58)
Thus, while Godwin acknowledges the relatively unenlightened character of the Middle Ages, contrary to Gibbon, he views the iconolatry of the medieval church as inevitable, appropriate and salutary. For it was, he says, an attempt to create and maintain religious habits or instincts in people incapable of rational discernment.
What has been called the worship of images, or, more accurately speaking, the attempt to render more defined and habitual the intellectual conceptions of the multitude by the assistance of a gross and sensible representation, was the invention of the dark ages of the church. This was natural and just: without some contrivance to act powerfully upon the senses, there could not perhaps in such ages be any religion. (1: 258)
In accordance with the Humean revisions made to Political Justice, then, Godwin contends that the more entrenched or habitual ideas are the more likely they are to be an effective...
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