Understanding Enlightenment

Roy Porter died two years ago at 55. Newly retired, newly married, he moved to the seaside to live a quieter -- but what would have been no less productive -- life than the one he had left in London as professor of the history of medicine at the Wellcome Institute. No one of his remarkable generation of British historians -- Simon Schama and John Brewer were his contemporaries at Cambridge -- wrote more, wrote better or wrote more exuberantly about the 18th century. There was no end in sight. “Flesh in the Age of Reason” was not to have been his last book, and it would be a mistake to read it as if Porter somehow imagined that it would be. But still, it is hard in retrospect not to see mortality in its cheery pages.

This is Porter’s second book on the Enlightenment. In the first, “The Creation of the Modern World,” he exulted in the emergence of the modern secular mind from the many forms of modern sociability -- the coffee house, the circulating library, the many institutions of civil society and more generally the to-ing and fro-ing of modern urban life. In “Flesh in the Age of Reason,” the focus is more on the body than on the mind, but it is still part of the same story -- the story of how fundamentally secular visions of society and what it means to be human slowly came into being during the late 17th and 18th centuries. It is about the “demise of the soul,” about how “individuals reformulated the problems of existence and made sense of the self, with a changing, and waning, reference to the soul.”

The pain, but also the ever more plentiful pleasures, of the body in this world replaced anxiety about its material fate in the hereafter. The mind, as the repository of memory that guaranteed our identity, over time supplanted the notion that selfhood resided in an incorporeal thing that abandoned the body at the moment of death. In the process, death became an object of scientific study even if it never lost its sting.

Death is by no means the only theme of this wonderful book. There is much here about fashion and makeup and what their relationship might be to one’s personality; masquerade was popular if condemned; makeup was de rigueur even if “making up her face” was loaded with sexual innuendo. This was the age of the first diet books, of the bestselling Dr. George Cheyne, whose “The English Malady” showed that much of what ailed us was the fault of corpulence and of a popular literature that extolled an almost anemic thinness for girls that was, in the eyes of pundits, even more dangerous than fatness. (Around 1750, ideas of what constituted a desirable female body changed; the late 17th century portraits of Godfrey Kneller and Peter Lely made ladies look fat.)

Porter writes, in other words, about the early stages of a world we might recognize as our own, about the first era in which famine did not stalk Europe and the prosperous (at least) could worry about their weight. And death is certainly not crucial to Porter’s argument, largely because in this book, as in his many others, he is not so much staking out a position and defending it against all comers as he is recording a conversation in many registers.

He acknowledges, for example, critiques of the age of reason, such as the postmodern view that the triumph of the self and the vaunted rise of individualism led not to liberation but to an increased enslavement in bureaucratic and administrative systems of knowledge, or the feminist argument that the male self was treated as the normative one. But he does not really engage these so much as offer them to readers as a service. Reminding us that humanity’s heroic narratives of the self need to be taken with a grain of salt, he announces that he will discuss new responses to new versions of old questions such as “Who am I?” and “What will become of me?” He offers no single answer or argument. When Porter tries to be tendentious -- he claims near the beginning and again in the last sentence, for example, that the “doctrine of mind over matter stood for power over the plebs” -- his heart is not really in it. It probably is not true; it is not argued; and I do not think Porter cares.

Porter’s great gift as a historian was his readings of an enormous number of thinkers, ranging from the famous -- Locke, Addison and Steele, Swift, Mandeville, Hume, Gibbon, Priestley, Hartley, Erasmus Darwin -- to crackpots like Thomas Day. Day took the idea that one could bring up children to one’s own specifications to the ludicrous length of adopting two girls, sending them off to isolation in France, inuring them to pain by dropping candle wax on their arms and to loud noises by firing blanks at them -- all in the interest of raising for himself the perfect wife with energy and attention. The lofty Lord Shaftesbury, Locke’s pupil, and his idea of God as a Universal Mind who guaranteed autonomy to noble earthly minds, gets his due from Porter. And so do the writings of the Tory wags who produced “The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus,” with his scurrilous and misogynist mock-questioning of whether, when its hero has sex with one of a pair of female Siamese twins, he is committing bigamy with the other.

There is no better guide to the great and the wacky -- and many happen to be both (Blake, Boswell, Godwin, for example) -- than Porter. His 18th century is full of smart, daring, befuddled, funny men and women who began the struggle in which we are still engaged: how to live in a disenchanted world, how to find pleasures in a consumer society without losing a sense that there may be more to life than ever more money and pleasure; how to eat well but not too much; how to stay healthy when there are so many temptations around.

Death, however, had always figured importantly in answers to the questions of “Who am I?” and “What will become of me?” and it was thus never far from the minds of the men and few women about whom Porter writes. There are the old questions of what the resurrected body will be like that are now open to discussion to those well outside the priesthood: “Shall we have claret, Sir John?” writes Boswell of a question put to John Pringle about heaven, and “ ‘why not the pleasure of women?’ ‘Why not,’ cried I, with animation.”

And there were new ways of thinking about a life eternal. If memory, as Locke argued, makes the man, it also makes his futurity. Gibbon, Porter tells us, wrote his autobiography so “that one day his mind [would] be familiar to the grandchildren of those yet unborn.” He had lost any hope of an old-fashioned afterlife. His hope for immortality was based not on an immortal soul but on immortal “literary fame.” If, as David Hartley thought, the soul was the product of mental processes -- the brain produced consciousness and a sense of self -- then perhaps, just perhaps, reanimated matter at the end of the world could reanimate a soul that had died with the body.

Mostly this sort of materialism offered little of the old hope. Maybe Hartley did not want to go as far as Hume in holding that God was merely the product of the human mind; Hartley did argue that fear of death is a psychological phenomenon that can embitter life but that can also be overcome. Dr. Johnson, on the other hand, lived all his life in the fear of damnation but announced to his friends that, if he were free of such worries, he would never work as hard as he did and would spend his time riding around in carriages with pretty ladies. The afterlife, in short, was much in play.

And so was death itself. “Flesh in the Age of Reason” shows us how this was the time during which death came under the sway of medicine, in which death was something that had to be defined physiologically rather than, or not just, metaphysically. Doctors could do little if anything to keep it at bay, but they were increasingly called upon to diagnose it when it happened. Fear of being buried alive grew dramatically -- and hence the rise of expertise to prevent it -- as did studies to determine how coma differed from death, how the breathlessness of a drowning differed from that of someone dead.

There was a parallel move, Porter intriguingly portrays, in how men and women understood alcoholism or drug dependency. No longer a malaise of the soul, it was something in the body. Thomas Trotter, the man who first defined addiction in the 1790s, argued that man was “the creator of his own temperament” and thereby “the creature of habit.” The process could go awry. Addiction represented a failure to take care of oneself. It was, as Coleridge believed of his opium addiction, a sickness even if one that was grounded in an inner and perhaps spiritual frailty.

Some of Porter’s characters simply made the problem of death and the afterlife go away by insisting on the possibility of some kind of heaven on Earth. Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather, worked out a proto-evolutionary scheme in which the seemingly lofty and mysterious ideas of religion were intelligible materially in the here and now. His more famous progeny followed the same tack. Sex played an especially important part. The “purest source of human felicity, the cordial drop in an otherwise vapid cup of life,” it supported and created life at all levels. What came in the next world -- a construct like any other that anthropologists might ponder -- was not a question to be asked. Indeed, during the Industrial Revolution, early socialists such as Robert Owen thought they could engineer a New Jerusalem on Earth.

The problem of death and its meaning, of course, did not go away. Porter acknowledges that for many (indeed the majority), older Christian notions of heaven and hell remained exigent. Hell may have lost its literal horrors for many and heaven became increasingly fuzzy. But the old answers were still there to the old questions. Still, who we are and what will become of us would never be resolved in quite the same way as they had once been. There had been a sea change in the range of talk about life and what gave it meaning. “Tristram Shandy” signaled the change. It is, Porter writes, “the first novel to bear the weight of a major philosophical shift.... [T]he old regime of the self -- that ordered hierarchy which housed the separate soul -- was rendered a thing of the past.”

Porter loved the world that emerged from the so- called Age of Reason. He was not blind to its dangers and perversions but he had no truck for Enlightenment bashing. He did not believe, as did the great historian of death Philippe Aries, that the demise of the soul placed an unbearable burden of fear on humanity as it faced death. He had no taste for philosophical or religious grandstanding.

Porter could not have known his own death was imminent as he wrote this, his posthumous, book; he did not live to finish the notes. But one suspects that he would have faced death with the sort of epistemological modesty we might associate with David Hume or with one of Porter’s historian heroes -- Edward Gibbon. We do not know what will become of “the naturalization and even secularization of the self,” in a country with a born-again president and a world in which the apocalypse is again part of politics. But we know, thanks to this readable and humane book, how the hare was set running. *