Why study Enlightenment ideas about the self? This lecture presents an overview of the traditional belief system of 1500 to 1700, and how its coherent picture of psychological life began to break down during the Renaissance and Reformation.
This lecture examines two great religious writers, the English Protestant John Bunyan and the French Catholic Blaise Pascal. Enlightenment thinkers would insist on the positive value of this world, would make pride a virtue rather than a sin, and would seek fulfillment in social interaction, not in self-disciplining solitude.
This lecture considers the implications of René Descartes' rationalism and of the empiricism of the British political theorist Thomas Hobbes. Enlightenment thinkers had to reconfigure empiricism to avoid its grimmer aspects—defining competition as constructive and sociability as natural for human beings.
The aristocratic court culture in France at the end of the 17th century held a shrewd but narrow world-view. The pioneering novel La Princesse de Clèves by Mme. de Lafayette. Today's culture aspires to an ideal of truth-telling authenticity, but most 17th-century writers took for granted that we never can know the truth about our own motives.
La Princesse de Clèves, for all its greatness, presented a world-view that was unable to envision the possibility of companionate love, of sexual enjoyment that is not a power play, or an evolving personality as opposed to a static character.
The philosophy of empiricism provided a default framework for psychology throughout the 18th century. Empiricism was an empowering ideology of a middle-class culture that needed value in competition and a secure basis for cooperation in the social self. We discuss empiricist psychology in the immensely influential writings of John Locke.
The Scottish philosopher David Hume exposed some crucial questions that Locke had evaded. Hume's radical skepticism dissolved any possibility of knowing what the self is. The lecture concludes with the poet Alexander Pope, who struggled to make sense of inner conflict in the limiting confines of the empiricist framework.
Voltaire's career and writings reflect the outwardly directed and pragmatism of the Enlightenment. Voltaire dismissed introspection and directed his inspired propaganda at historical events. In the satiric fable Candide he parodies philosophical optimism.
As an approach to 18th-century ways of understanding behavior, this lecture considers biographies by several major writers to show how hard it was to recognize, let alone to explain, issues that would later become central in biographical explanation.
The London Journal, a diary kept by the young James Boswell in 1762–1763, gives valuable insight into problems of the self as experienced by an actual person. The problems he raises are important symptoms, exposing issues that the culture as a whole will have to acknowledge and try to deal with.
Boswell strives impressively to reconcile his conflicted feelings. We use a modern perspective to clarify what he has trouble understanding: his role-playing, euphemistic language, attraction to prostitutes, his "melancholy" or bipolar disorder. Empiricist psychology had no way of addressing the psychological suffering that Boswell experienced.
Diderot played a central role in the public mission of the Enlightenment. He was editor of the Encyclopédie, which aspired to promote open inquiry and make technological knowledge available to all.
In this novel Diderot presents a world in which the narrator can never be trusted to tell a reliable story. Jacques the Fatalist refuses to be "realistic" and develops a metafictional perspective on the way we normally try to find "truth" in works of fiction.
The fatalism of his title refers to the idea that everything is determined by an unbreakable chain of causes, but as Diderot also acknowledges, human beings cannot help believing in freedom.
Empiricism left each individual trapped in a private subjectivity. Rousseau's response to this dilemma was to consider that, perhaps, we do have an authentic self that has been covered over and distorted by a lifetime of social conditioning.
Rousseau began the Confessions to assert his personal integrity and to recover the meanings in childhood experiences that haunted his memory. In doing so, he reveals fundamental patterns in his psychic life.
The episodes recounted in Confessions implicitly confirm Rousseau's theory of natural man and his deformation by civilization. He presents a critique of the assumptions of empiricism with respect to particularity and generality, the self and memory, and the value of the imagination.
Detaching himself from society, Rousseau invokes nature as his god-term and becomes a major contributor to the current of thought later known as Romanticism, in which human beings receive spiritual sustenance from external phenomena.
In Franklin's Autobiography we return to the optimism, practicality, and sociability of the empiricist model that has continued to influence our culture to this day. Franklin embodied the American ideal of being well adjusted and, in his own time, was seen as the quintessential American.
This lecture examines the psychological and economic writings of Adam Smith, which advance a powerful theoretical foundation for the values that Franklin exemplified in his life.
This lecture introduces the most compelling and thought-provoking novel of the 18th century. Written as a series of letters, it makes the truth about human motives seem unknowable: Most of the characters are so skilled at duplicity; even their attempts at self-knowledge are doomed to failure.
Les Liaisons challenges us to find a moral perspective in a hermetically closed society, where power is the only value, but refuses to give us a place to stand and remains disturbingly ambiguous throughout.
The final two lectures look back at the Enlightenment from the perspective of the Romantic movement that succeeded it, focusing on William Blake's imaginative works that brilliantly reconceive the central issues of this course.
Written in response to the excitement of the French Rev¬olution, Blake's book uses a medley of genres to explore interrelated themes in psychology, politics, and religion. With Blake, we take a retrospective view of what the Enlightenment achieved in understanding the self and of what it left undone.