Passionate Persons: Enlightenement Conceptions of Human Dignity Before Kant

 

Draft: first paragraphs  (not viewable on mobile devices)

 

 

 

[I]t would seem that if I am obliged not to harm another being like myself, this is so less because it is a rational being than because it is a sentient being

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1755 - Preface to Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Enlightenment had many hearts. One was its spirit of irreverence – its willingness, even dogged determination to question authority, challenge dogma, ignore platitudes, and rethink tradition. Where it was once possible to command deference merely by certifying the legacy of any given title, belief, custom, or norm, by the time the Enlightenment concluded, to speak of what was anciene had become a descriptive reminder that something was simply old, if not rigid, encrusted, and outmoded. It is thus ironic that historical study of the Enlightenment often succumbs to a kind of slavish (albeit often unconscious) canon worship with respect to the ideas and figures studied. We should do better; try harder. Especially when the stakes are high, as they are today for the lofty subject of human dignity.  

 

The Enlightenment contains the first concerted movement in Western thought for the cause of human dignity, understood roughly as the fundamental moral worth or status belonging to persons.[1] Anyone with a passing knowledge of philosophy will not be surprised to hear this, given that it was Enlightenment’s brightest star, Immanuel Kant, who articulated the most famous doctrine of human dignity in Western thought – namely his 1785 mandate in the Groundwork to always treat “humanity,” both in our own person and in others, “always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”[2] However, as I shall argue here, it is time to rethink Kant’s canonical status on this score. Not only is that status propped up by mistaken or at least exaggerated platitudes about his role as an innovator, this status also has had the effect of obscuring a second story about human dignity in the Enlightenment – a story with different origins and different outcomes. Telling this second story is the overarching goal of this essay.

 

 

I

 

 

Kant’s doctrine exerts a near hegemonic grip on contemporary philosophy of dignity, in part because Kant enjoys a reputation for radical novelty on this score. This is understandable, if for no other reason than before Kant the English term ‘dignity’ and its Latin and French cognates almost always bore a distinctly different connotation, namely something like the merit-laden idea of “social rank or elevation.” Nevertheless, Kant’s reputation has greatly benefited from some simple ignorance.[3] In the first place, little attempt has been made to examine carefully earlier English, Latin and French usage for possible exceptions to the typical merit connotation of the term ‘dignity.’ More important, there has been little effort to determine whether the concept of dignity had any life before Kant apart from explicit use of the term ‘dignity.’ Concepts, after all, don’t depend for their existence on particular words. And as we will see, Kant’s “leap” in conceptualizing the worth of human persons was indeed less dramatic than it first appears.   

 

Much more important is what we find when we look behind Kant. According to Kant, the ground of human dignity, and the duty to treat persons as “ends in themselves,” is their rational nature, or autonomy. And yet, it is precisely this claim about the ultimate appeal to rationality that Rousseau – in the epigraph I selected for this essay – seems to set aside at the outset of his great treatise on equality. It is not rational nature, but sentient nature that Rousseau fixes on as the original grounds of obligation to others. Pregnant in this single line is the suggestion that in Kant’s shadow there is not simply a “second” story about human dignity waiting to be told, but a divergent one.

 

Three obvious questions rush in. First, what does Rousseau mean by “sentient” nature? That is, what does this supposed alternative conception of dignity consist in? Second, if Rousseau’s remark really does reflect a broader philosophical mindset in the Enlightenment, what are the origins, central proponents, and shared principles of this position? Third, what reasons are there for thinking this position is genuinely an account of dignity in the first place? Even if we assume a rough and ready concept of human dignity – something like the status or inherent value of persons that grounds fundamental human rights – isn’t this already a manifestly contemporary concept loaded by a Kantian inheritance? Indeed, I already noted that before Kant the term ‘dignity’ had no such purchase in the Enlightenment (i.e. as signifying a rights-grounding status or value). How then do we avoid the charge of anachronism?  

           

Telling the second story of Enlightenment dignity will require moving back and forth between these questions and their answers. But as prelude, I offer the following condensed summary. At one limit, Rousseau thought of sentience as entailing merely the capacity to suffer. However, Rousseau wasted little time elaborating this to passionate nature. Thus, although Rousseau is famous for theorizing the delusory powers of some emotions (like envy and the other products of amour proper) – no one who reads him carefully fails to be impressed by the idea that respecting others, whatever else it means, requires recognizing them as passionate persons. However, in marking a positive place for passion in moral life, Rousseau was in truth but one voice among many. It is thus now widely appreciated that the eighteenth century was distinguished by an array of work, both philosophical and literary, meant to recuperate the passionate side of human nature from the negative portrayal of traditional philosophical and religious attitudes (especially medieval and early modern). Speaking only to the early and middle eighteenth century British and French scenes,[4] major figures in this effort included philosophers like Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Richard Cumberland, Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau, and Voltaire, as well as a variety of highly popular sentimental novelists like Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Rousseau (again), Madame de Tencin, and Marie-Jeanne Roccoboni[5] (to say nothing of the many more minor philosophers and authors speaking to the same cause). Our question thus becomes: where and to what extent did this trend lead to a bona fide conception of human dignity. That is, where did eighteenth century optimism about the passions eventuate into more than defense of the instrumental value of the passions to living morally (e.g. because passions can be the proper motivational consequence of right reason), and instead into a view that the fundamental worth or status of a person is constituted by her passionate nature (at least in part)? Even narrowing the scope to only ostensibly philosophical work,[6] as I shall in his essay, this question is difficult to answer for the simple reason that we can’t rely on clear terminological markers. This brings us to the last summary point: my answer to the worry of anachronism.

 

In one sense, this worry is simply over anxious. Kant himself indicated earlier sources for his ideas about human dignity. Rousseau, in particular, is long known to have influenced Kant in various ways, including on the general subject of respect for persons.[7] “Rousseau set me right about this,” Kant wrote famously, “I learned to honor humanity.”[8] But Kant also credits the Stoics: “These philosophers derived their universal moral principle from the dignity of human nature, from its freedom (as an independence from the power of the inclinations), and they could not have laid down a better or noble principle for foundation.”[9] We thus already have an invitation to look before Kant, from Kant, for a “Kantian” concept of dignity. Still, given that the actual term ‘dignity’ was not reliably associated with a connotation of fundamental moral worth until after the eighteenth century, the proper starting point must be the more abstract task of identifying what I will call a formal definition of ‘dignity’ – which definition I lay out next, in Section III. This formal definition can then be used to look backwards in history for possible substantive arguments (i.e. ones fitting the formal criteria). Taking this approach avoids, or at least mitigates, any worry of anachronism. It also proves to have a surprising outcome. In the first place, as I will argue in Section IV, we are led to a concrete account of human dignity penned well before Kant in the natural law theory of Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694). This in itself is not particularly surprising, given that Stephen Darwall has very recently defended this specific point.[10] Indeed, in this respect, I will lean on Darwall’s analysis. My real interest is in the next step. As it turns out, when we cast our gaze forward to the eighteenth century, we find a particularly clear version of Pufendorf’s view in French Enlightenment thought, only now revised to make room for the passionate person. However, and what may be surprising at this point, this particular defense of human dignity isn’t in Rousseau. It actually comes from Rousseau’s compatriot, the great architect of the Encyclopedie, Denis Diderot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] This connotation of ‘dignity’ is to be contrasted with its other contemporary connotation, namely the family of ideas surrounding “self-esteem,” e.g. “comportment, poise, or gravitas.” I have no objection to talk of a “sense of dignity” in these ways. And I’m open-minded about there being conceptual connections between them. Nevertheless, one must be careful to distinguish it from the connotation of moral status discussed here. I duly note that Bloch himself does not always make this distinction clearly. However, there is no mistaking that he is primarily interested in the connotation of dignity we are examining.

 

[2] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals Ak 4:429. 

 

[3] It might also stem from a deeper, entrenched misunderstanding of Kant’s own thought. In particular, Oliver Sensen has recently and convincingly argued that the text does not sustain the platitude that ‘dignity’ is a kind of inherent value of persons which grounds the moral law (See Sensen, “Kant’s Revolutionary Concept,” forthcoming in Dignity: The History of A Concept (Oxford University Press)).

 

[4] The recuperation of passion had a prominent place in the later German Enlightenment as well, but took on a rather distinctive character of the proto-Romantic movement of the Sturm und Drang of the 60s, 70s, and early 80s. Some of the major figures here include the philosopher Johann Hamann, the playwright Friedrich Klinger (whose work the movement was named after), and the novelist Johann von Goethe. Whether we find a concept of dignity based on the passionate person in this German thought, which was virtually cotemporaneous with Kant’s work on the Groundwork, and certainly influenced him generally, is beyond my scope in this essay.

 

[5] Riccoboni’s Lettre de Milady Juliette Catesby (1759) was lauded by Voltaire and translated into English in 1760 by the Canadian novelist, Frances Moore Brooke.

 

[6] Professional philosophy remains less than ideally receptive to the role literature played (and continues to play) in furthering various philosophical developments. This must change for it is within literature that many minority voices find their place in such developments. Case in point, in the context of Enlightenment discussions of human nature and human dignity, literature was the primary vehicle for women authors. The story I tell here is thus necessarily incomplete, though telling both stories wouldn’t have been possible anyway in the scope of a single essay. However, other chapters in this volume will make more explicit address to the role literature played in the conceptual history of ‘dignity.’ For those interested especially in the eighteenth century recuperation of passionate nature, I recommend Lynn Festa’s Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth Century Britain and France (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 2006).

 

[7] For a very good primer on Rousseau’s influence, see George Armstrong Kelly, “Rousseau, Kant, and History,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 29, No. 3 (1968), pp. 347-364. For a more recent entry into this scholarship, which refocuses on Kant’s novelty, see Karl Ameriks, “Kant, Human Nature, and History after Rousseau,” in his Kant’s Elliptical Path (Oxford: 2012).

 

[8] Remarks AK 20:44, as translated in Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge), p. xvii.

 

[9] Religion AK 6:57 note. I borrow this point from Oliver Sensen, Kant on Human Dignity (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), p. 165.

 

[10] Stephen Darwall, “Pufendorf on Morality, Sociability, and Moral Powers,” Journal of the History of Philosophy (2013) 50:1.