Date: Tue, 7 Jul 1998 16:44:07 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Literature and Space


On Tue, 7 Jul 1998, Reg Lilly wrote:

> 	He refers to an almost canonical view here, articulated by Lessing.  Can someone tell me more about this view?  And how
> is the Englightenment associated with spatiality?  Philosophically speaking, for Kant (for example), space is the form
> of outer intuition, and time the form of inner intuition, and it is the latter that clearly is the more fundamental for
> Kant.  So I don't quite see how the Enlightenment is preponderately spatial in orientation.  Indeed, Hegel, a child of
> the Englightenment, makes time almost everything.


Two quick points off the top of my head, Reg.

1.  You probably teach Descartes, right?  Maybe Spinoza too.  With the
rise of modern philosophy (or more basically with the rise of capitalism
and secular governments) comes the attempt to break the world down into
quantifiable bits and display them on a table or grid which makes them
manageable information.  Think of the invention of vanishing point
perspective in Renaissance art as a kind of model that Enlightenment
thought will adopt when considering the well run state.Think of those Durer
woodcuts of artists placing a squared grid between them and their
subjects.    Think here of Enlightenment cities like
Mannheim, Germany, laid out in rationally ordered squares. Think of Defoes
depiction of Robinson Crusoe, tabulating his resources and setting his
island in order.  Think of how the Globe itself is segmented into
lattitude and longtitude, how land is laid out in grids (this is
especially clear in the European colonies, where such grids are
superimposed over native cultural boundries.  Think of the
rationalized literary (Pope) and scientific (Bufon) adpations of the Great
Chain of Being.  (Foucault's The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish
deal with aspects of Enlightenment control of space.)  Try and think of an
ENlightenment philosopher who regards historical change as qualitative
change.  Think of Heidegger's essay on the World Picture.

2.  Kant is the ultimate Enlightenment philsopher, but also the guy who
sets up Hegel and the problem of historical change because he makes the
cause/effect relation central to the production of knowledge and not (as
Foucault points out) just one relation among others (e.g., identity,
contradiction, reciprocity). Hegel may be a child of the ENglightenment,
but his recognition of historical forms of human subjectivity is also a
distinct break with Enlightenment assumptions of a uniform or universal
human subject.  For Hume, for example, human institutions may come and go
but "Man" is pretty much the same now as he was in ancient Rome.  Not so
for Herr H.  



hh
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