3 Doris Kaufmann

Dreams and Self-consciousness

MAPPING THE MIND IN THE LATE
EIGHTEENTH AND EARLY NINETEENTH
CENTURIES

This chapter tackles the coming into being of dreams as an object of Er-
fahrungsseelenkunde (empirical psychology or science of the soul, cover-
ing the still unseparated fields of psychology and psychiatry) in German
thought of the late Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth and the be-
ginning of the nineteenth centuries. This dream research then stopped for
almost one century. It was Sigmund Freud who once again attended to
dreams, and made them the starting point and key object of his scientific
approach. Though he took up questions similar to those of the Enlighten-
ment psychological and psychiatric discourse on dreams, he was not aware
of his predecessors. 1 They were not only forgotten by Freud and his con-
temporaries, but also by the later historiography on dream theories-
such as the psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger's 1928 Wandlungen in der
Auffassung und Deutung des Traums or the literary scholar Albert
Beguin's 1937 L'ame romantique et le reve: Essai sur le romantisme alle-
mand et Ia poesie fran~aise. The early twentieth-century dream historiog-
raphy discovered in the eighteenth century only the dominance of a
"mechanistic psychology," 2 transforming the "individual's living self"
into a "mechanical-dynamic play of forces." Such a view of the human
being, Binswanger wrote, was "not favorable" to the investigation of

1. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, the Pelican Freud
Library, vol. 4 (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 1976.
2. Albert Beguin, Traumwelt und Romantik: Versuch uber die romantische Seele in
Deutschland und in der Dichtung Frankreichs (1937; reprint, Bern: Francke, 1972), 71.

67
68 D 0 RIS KAU FM AN N

dreams. 3 More recent studies also assign scientific dream theories a later
beginning, namely as part of the Romantic period and its central interest in
dream images and in a universal language of symbols, which was different
from that of the Enlightenment dream discourse. 4
I propose to rewrite this historiography of dreams. I shall investigate the
Enlightenment discourse on dreams, and shall focus on the following ques-
tions. Why did the last three decades of the eighteenth century witness a
broad Enlightenment discussion of dreams? Who recounted and discussed
dreams, and for what reasons? Where was this need articulated? Did inter-
relations and interactions exist between everyday knowledge and scientific
knowledge in the field of empirical psychology (Erfahrungsseelenkunde)?
What importance did the different emergent dream theories of German Er-
fahrungsseelenkunde have for the differentiation and the future develop-
ment of this field? Why were these dream theories thereafter dismissed for
such a long time? Did the Enlightenment dream discourse already contain
a possible anticipation of this demise and of basic controversies that later
dominated the fin de siecle discussion on dreams?

From the last third of the eighteenth century until the first decades of the
nineteenth century a discourse on self-knowledge and knowledge of hu-
man nature preoccupied the writers of the German Enlightenment. In the
emerging bourgeois public sphere discussions on the external, i.e., social
and political, constraints on reason were matched by an anguished concern
with the internal forces and passions that disabled individual reason. The
examination of the "other" of reason or the "dark sides" in oneself and
one's fellow human beings was considered to be the key to deciphering the
inner forces and workings of human nature, ultimately the key to a rational
way of life. Collective anxieties like losing control or feeling endangered by
a threat to one's own ego expressed the painful experiences and uncertain-
ties experienced by the members of the new middle-class strata in their at-
tempts to establish civil society and culture. 5 The efforts to create a

3. Ludwig Binswanger, Wandlungen in der Auffassung und Deutung des Traums von den
Griechen bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin: Springer, 1928), 27.
4. For example, Henry F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and
Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1971), draws a direct line from the
Romantic period to Freud and C. G. Jung.
5. See Doris Kaufmann, Aufkliirung, biirgerliche Selbsterfahrung und die "Erfindung"
der Psychiatrie in Deutschland, 1770-1850 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 25-
109.
 D r e a m s a n d 5 e If- c o n s c i o u s n e s s 69

biirgerliche identity and constitution of the self, clearly drawing the line
between socially acceptable and deviant behavior, were articulated and dis-
cussed mainly in the new genre of the psychological periodical, 6 such as the
Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Journal for the experience and
knowledge of the soul), which emerged in the last third of the eighteenth
century.
This journal, edited from 1783 to 1793 by the author, educator, and for-
mer Pietist Karl Philipp Moritz, was probably the best-known organ of the
discourse on the unveiling of inner nature at the time. 7 Moritz organized a
broadly supported project that the German philosopher Johann Gottfried
Herder, among others, had already suggested in his treatise Vom Erkennen
und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele of 1778 (On the thoughts and sen-
sations of the human mind). Herder had proposed collecting empirical
sources both on everyday expressions of the mind, such as dreaming or re-
membering, and on signs of mental deviance in order to discover how
thinking and feeling functioned. The methodological model was taken
from the sciences of anatomy and physiology, which had already made the
internal workings of the human body visible and comprehensible. 8 At the
very beginning of his "Vorschlag zu einem Magazin einer Erfahrungssee-
lenkunde" (Proposal for a journal of the experience and knowledge of the
soul), which appeared in 1782 in the Enlightenment journal Deutsches
Museum, Moritz emphasized the similarity between the study of the body
and the study of inner nature. 9 Knowledge of the body, Moritz noted, had

6. For full references, see Johann Baptist Friedreich, Systematische Literatur der
iirztlichen und gerichtlichen Psychologie (Berlin:Th. Enslin, 1833), 1-5.
7. Gnothi sauton oder Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, 10 vols. (1783-1793;
reprint, Niirdlingen: Franz Greno, 1976 [referred to henceforth as MzE]). The literature on the
journal includes Hans Joachim Schrimpf, "Das Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde und sein
Herausgeber," Zeitschrift fur deutsche Philologie 99 (1980): 161-87; Schrimpf, Karl Philipp
Moritz (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980); Raimund Bezold, Popularphilosophie und Erfahrungsse-
elenkunde im Werk von Karl Philipp Moritz (Wlirzburg: Kiinigshausen & Neumann, 1984);
Werner Leibbrand, "Karl Philipp Moritz und die Erfahrungsseelenkunde," Allgemeine
Zeitschrift fur Psychiatrie und ihre Grenzgebiete 118 (1941): 392-414; Ulrich Herrmann,
"Karl Philipp Moritz: Die innere Geschichte des Menschen," in Wegbereiter der Historischen
Psychologie, ed. Gerd Jtittemann (Munich: Beltz, 1988), 48-55.
8. Michel Foucault, Die Geburt der Klinik: Eine Archiiologie des iirztlichen 8/icks, trans.
Walter Seitter (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1976), 38-68; Georges Canguilhem, Das Nor-
male und das Pathologische, trans. Monika Noll and Rolf Schubert (Frankfurt am Main: Ull-
stein, 1977), 75-156.
9. Karl Philipp Moritz, "Vorschlag zu einem Magazin einer Erfahrungsseelenkunde,"
Deutsches Museum, 1782. The program of the Societe des observateurs de l'homme, founded
in 1799, demonstrated the simultaneity of such initiatives in the European Enlightenment.
See Sergio Moravia, Beobachtende Vernunft: Philosophie und Anthropologie in der Auf-
kliirung (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1977).
70 D 0 RIS KAUFM A N N

been advanced by its diseases. Under the present circumstances he was con-
vinced of an urgent need for knowledge in the field of the experience of the
soul as well. "The maladies of the soul" were "far more various, pernicious,
and widespread than any physical ailment" and the yet unestablished sci-
ence of mental disorders "more indispensable than any medicine for the
body." 10
Sacrifices had to be made, however. The general accessibility of case his-
tories, i.e., their publication as a necessary precondition for their use,
might, after all, in some cases expose their subjects to "public shame."
Moritz nevertheless demanded this sacrifice. He compared it to leaving
one's corpse to be dissected by anatomists, a highly controversial act at the
time. 11 Becoming a "calm, cold self-observer" was, therefore, on the one
hand, a sacrifice to be made for science. On the other hand, Moritz-with
autobiographical overtones-assumed that those interested in self-obser-
vation would be driven by a certain degree of inner suffering. So he
promised a positive therapeutic effect: "Comfort and a refuge from our
own particular grief." 12
The discourse on threats to the equilibrium of the faculties of the soul in
the Enlightenment press arose against the background of a new conscious-
ness of a coherent self that "belonged to oneself," was separate from that of
one's fellow human beings,B and could, in principle, be studied with the
methods of the natural sciences. This process of "naturalizing" human in-
ner life was not restricted to the level of philosophical, medical, and literary
reflection. The relationship between physical and psychological states be-
came a central theme of public discussion in the Enlightenment. 14 In his
Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Anthropology from a prag-
matic point of view), the philosopher Immanuel Kant posed the essential
question in the discussion on self-knowledge: what rules and purposes had
been given to mankind by nature, and how great was the part played by per-

10. Moritz, "Vorschlag," Deutsches Museum, 1782, p. 486.

11. For a detailed discussion, see Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute
(London: Penguin, 1989).
12. Moritz, "Vorschlag," quoting 492-95. See Moritz's Anton Reiser, which he intro-
duced as" a 'biography' in the truest sense of the word, a truthful and faithful presentation of
a human life down to its tiniest nuances." Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton Reiser: Ein psychologi-
scher Roman (1785; reprint, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987), 93.
13. Norbert Elias, iiber den Prozefl der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogeneti-
sche Untersuchungen, vol.1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976).
14. See Roger Smith, "The Language of Human Nature," in Inventing Human Science:
Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 88-111, for the importance of the cat-
egory of human nature for the organization of knowledge about the human subject.
 Dreams and Self-consciousness 71

sonal freedom, that is," that which he [man] can or should make of himself
as a being capable of acting freely." 15 Each individual must endeavor tore-
duce as much as possible the scope of his or her "involuntary" nature in re-
lation to the scope of his or her own voluntary and calculated goals.
Enlightenment thinkers thus combined two objectives. First, they sought
to establish "healthy, purified, unclouded reason," for the "universal good
of humanity." Second, they sought to find the way to the" greatest possible
satisfaction of one's personal inclinations" by means of individual knowl-
edge of one's own faculties of the soul. On the level of middle-class every-
day experience, the last programmatic point in particular, however, tended
to be inverted into a fear of not being able to establish the desired balance of
psychic and physical powers.
The experience that "the soul's own power over its ideas" 16 did not func-
tion during certain periods was shared above all by the many self-observers
who reported their dreams in the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde.
This potentially everyday experience, often associated with fear, made
the reporting of dreams in the form of case histories the largest rubric
among contributions. The dream accounts submitted by readers (following
Moritz's request to establish an empirical collection before submitting fun-
damental principles of an Erfahrungsseelenkunde, including a dream the-
ory) were intended as a collective effort to help the authors as well as the
Magazin's dream commentators to decipher the inner forces and workings
of human nature. Which mental processes were subject to will and which
worked involuntarily? The answer was as urgent as it was important, for it
set up the framework for conscious independent behavior and action in civil
society.
One group of dream accounts gave immediate and very direct insight
into the constellations of social and cultural relationships, tensions, and de-
sires. For example, a physician dreamt of neglecting his professional duties
and of intentionally making himself incapable of working in the hospital. 17
A "very upright and truth-loving man" dreamt of beating to death a man
with whom he argued in a coffeehouse, 18 and a "learned man" admitted
that at the moment of falling asleep" against my will and without any insti-
gation" he was obliged to struggle "with the most alluring images of sensu-
15. Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983),
29.
16. Salomon Maimon, "Uber den Traum und iiber das Divinationsvermiigen," MzE, vol. 9,
p.64.
17. "Merkwiirdiger Gang der Phantasie in einem Delirium: A us einem Briefe, von Herrn
D. Dunker aus Klitschdorf bei Bunzlau in Schlesien," MzE, vol. 2, pp. 201-8.
18. Aaron Wolfssohn, "Erfahrungen iiberTriiume," MzE, vol. 9, pp. 273-77.
72 DORIS KAUFMANN

ality" and sudden notions of" degrading appellations for the Godhead and
things divine." 19
Aside from these transgressions of social norms of behavior and moral
boundaries, the medium of dreams also articulated fundamental cultural
conflicts. Rahel Varnhagen von Ense, a Jewish writer who recorded dreams
in her diary and in letters to friends, told of her experience of social margin-
alization in dreams as another form of reality. Thus she commented upon a
dream in which she, having" departed this life," discussed with other women
the sufferings of their past existence. She found comfort and purification
but, in the end, had to bear alone the "disgrace" of Jewish birth:" and upon
waking the burden still remained, for I truly do bear it; and if there really
were people who could understand it completely, I would feel some relief." 20
For contemporaries, the obvious meeting of the two worlds-the dream
world and the real world-in these dreams raised the question of the sleep-
ers' moral responsibility for their dreams' content. Although under the
rule of the imagination the higher faculties of the soul acted only" mechan-
ically," dream images were nevertheless-as Kant put it-"images
produced by the dreamer himself." 21 This problem occupied the Enlighten-
ment public beyond the psychological journals, as the Enlightenment the-
ologian Johann Abegg's 1798 account of his journey through the German
states in search of self-improvement illustrates.Abegg discussed the "psy-
chological topic, whether dreams were moral?" with the philologist and ed-
ucational reformer Carl Gotthold Lenz.
In general, I thought, one could not say with certainty. One would need to
know the individual. He alone could know this, a stranger only with diffi-
culty. Lenz agreed with me, but believed nevertheless that, generally speak-
ing, dreams could be imputed morally, for surely each human being was more
or less guilty if dreams were not absolutely moral. Nonetheless strange phe-
nomena do occur. Professor Weber in Jena, for example, recognized as an
honest and wise man, struggled much with melancholy during his last years.
In his brighter moments he wrote down the thoughts that occurred to him in
his miserable periods, including his dreams. And this otherwise so exemplary
man reported that despicable, completely immoral ideas often came to him,
and he did not know how they did so. 22

19. "Uber den Einflul.l der Finsternil.l in unsere Vorstellungen und Empfindungen, nebst
einigen Gedanken iiber dieTriiume," MzE, vol. 5, pp.164-65.
20. "1m Schlaf bin ich wacher," in Die Triiume der Rahel Levin Varnhagen, ed. Barbara
Hahn (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1990), 20-22, at 22.
21. Immanuel Kant, Triiume eines Geistersehers, erliiutert durch Triiume der Metaphysik
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), 40.
22. Johann Friedrich Abegg, Reisetagebuch von 1798 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1987), 45.
 D r e a m s a n d S e If- c o n s c i o u s n e s s 73

The educator Friedrich Pockels, one of the Magazin's editors, tried to an-
swer this question:
An absolute absence of shame, wild emotions, contempt for religious ques-
tions, blasphemies, and other abominable thoughts and sentiments, not trou-
bling us when awake, are experienced by even the most excellent persons
while dreaming ... One either already had such notions during one's waking
hours, or an association of contrasting notions leads us to them in a dream, or
the emotions, in order to act all the more freely, instill images in the reflec-
tion, or-perhaps when awake one never, or seldom, acted upon religious
principles, for then the dream is only a copy of waking life. 23

Karl Philipp Moritz accused Pockels of positing a "mechanism of imagi-

nation," since he "himself proceeded mechanically," "without once consid-
ering that beyond the obvious surface there might well be something as yet
unexamined by human thought." Again Moritz vigorously emphasized
the healing powers of Enlightened self-knowledge: "At the point where our
nature perfects itself, it truly must not shrink from itself; in its deepest re-
cesses it holds firmly onto itself, and where it is recognized, all imagined
horrors flee before its glowing clarity." 24 Moritz himself, however, found
remembering his dreams "highly unpleasant." 25 He resolved the question
of the dreams' origin and of their morality in the imperative to" obscure the
ideas which we receive in dreams in an orderly fashion." Moritz saw the
equilibrium of the faculties of the soul and the soundness of mind in direct
relationship to this filtering ability. An "adequate number" of ideas that
were constantly "flowing into the mind daily and hourly" had to be sup-
pressed, because otherwise an" overabundance of ideas would arise, causing
disorder and confusion." This intervention was more difficult to perform
during dreams, because "in this state the self is only floating," as the
philosopher Joseph Veit wrote in a debate with Salomon Maimon on
dreams and delusions published in the Magazin. 26 There was the danger,
Veit believed, that in dreams man would, "forget his own true self."
This observation, accompanied by terrible anxiety, recurred in a number
of dream accounts in Moritz's Magazin. The dreamers experienced a total

23. Friedrich Pockels, "Psychologische Bemerkungen iiber Triiume und Nachtwandler,"

MzE, vol. 6, pp. 238-39.
24. Moritz, "Revision iiber die Revisionen des Hrn. Pockels in diesem Magazin," MzE, vol.
7, pp.198, 199.
25. Moritz, "Grundlinien zu einem ohngefahren Entwurf in Riicksicht auf die See-
lenkrankheitskunde," MzE, vol. 1, p. 30, also for the two following quotations.
26. Veit,"Schreiben iiberTiiuschung und besonders vom Traume," MzE, vol. 8, p. 200. The
following quotation is from p. 204.
74 DORIS KAUFMANN

dissolution of the boundaries of the self. 27 Such nightmares had to be bro-

ken off, because this was the only way that the self could again cohere. 28
The fact that this often happened proved to the Enlightened self-observers
the existence of a faculty of the soul that they considered the crucial sign of
its soundness: willpower, i.e., the ability to "keep the imagination under
control," ultimately even in states of "incomplete consciousness." 29 Ac-
cording to Maim on this faculty could be all the more effective" the more we
sense our self, the more we regard this self as a source of our ideas, the more
we are convinced that we are no mere suffering creatures simply receiving
ideas, but in part produce them ourselves; and finally, the more we recog-
nize the value of guiding our ideas, the more we will be encouraged to rule
them." 30
The ability to make a conscious distinction between dream world and
real world, i.e., to interrupt a dream or to know that one was dreaming, tes-
tified to a strong and conscious self. It almost became a feature distinguish-
ing sanity from madness.
What, however, had then caused the "strange crowding and confusion"
in the head of Johann Joachim Spalding, Enlightenment thinker and
Protestant theologian, dean of the Nikolaikirche in Berlin? He had been at-
tacked by a "swarm of thrusting tangled images" one day in 1772, while
making out interest receipts for the parish poor. 31 Among the" tumultuous
disorder in a portion" of his "ideas," as he put it in his case history reported
to the Magazin, the member of the Berlin Consistory was capable neither
of writing nor of intelligible speech. Yet with another "part of his brain" he
was" fully and firmly" conscious of the" familiar principles of religion and
conscience." Moreover, he was able to reflect upon his loss of social commu-
nication and its consequences. Spalding was therefore reminded of the
"probationer [for an ecclesiastical living] in the local lunatic asylum" who

27. For example, Carl Gotthold Lenz, "Auszug aus einem Briefe iiber Ahndungen und
Feuerbesprechen," MzE, vol. 4, pp. 55, 56: "Everything was spinning around inside me like a
disk, accompanied by creative ideas of eternal millennia and spaces I had to wander through,
the thought of the impossibility of completing this journey, this vastness, which I saw always
before me like an unending circle (and all of this is in an awakening state) aroused in me an ex-
traordinary unease, in which I often could not stop myself from springing out of bed in a sin-
gle leap ... in order to escape that terror." Salomon Maimon wrote of the violation of sexual
boundaries in dreams in "Revision der Erfahrungsseelenkunde," MzE, vol.10, pp.10-11.
28. S. Maim on, "Fortsetzung des Aufsatzes iiberTiiuschung und besonders vom Traume,"
MzE, vol. 9, pp. 105-15; Joseph Veit, "Ober die Anmerkungen des Herrn Maimon zu der Fort-
setzungdesAufsatzes iiberTiiuschung," MzE, vol.10, pp. 76-98.
29. Maimon, "Fortsetzung," 110.
30. Ibid., 111.
31. Spalding, "Ein Brief an Sulzern iiber eine an sich selbst gemachte Erfahrung," MzE,
vol.1, pp.117-21.
 D r e a m s a n d S e If- c o n s c i o u s n e s s 75

had "begun by speaking confusedly and incompletely," only to fall into a

lasting silence. "Who knows, I thought, whether he does not have his own
orderly thoughts just as I do mine, and only does not wish to speak because
he knows and senses that he is not the master of his innermost organs of
speech, and is thus reluctant to appear insane in speech, because he is not so
in his thoughts."
Spalding's story of an involuntary "dissociation of the self" became a
central case in the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, followed by nu-
merous similar self-observations. 32 The authors of these case histories all
shared the experience that personal freedom could be severely impaired by
the power of involuntary ideas arising from physical causes, which could
place the mind in a "state of slavery." 33
This provided a first answer to the controversial and explosive, because
potentially materialist, question of whether "there is something mechani-
cal or, so to speak, physical in the workings of the soul ?" 34 The experience of
many observers confirmed a connection between disruptions to the "regu-
lar activity of the mind," especially in dreams, and disorder in the brain,
which, as an organ of the body, was subject to the influence of "mechanical
laws." Its disorder could also produce a disorder in the capacity of reason,
considered the core or the highest faculty of the souP 5 A teacher at the
Graue Kloster in Berlin, a famous Enlightenment college, who described his
nightmares in the Magazin concluded that if a simple wrong positioning of
the head during sleep could unleash "terrifying brainless visions" and
"ideas devoid of any human sense," setting off" a state of great alarm," no-
body could really know where to draw the "borderline" to the "higher fac-
ulties" of the soul that would remain untouched by potential"horrifying
disorders in the machine." 36
If, however, one part of the self was capable of observing and describing
the other part, "which of the two says 'I'?" the theologian Spalding asked. 37

32. "Selbsterfahrung des Herrn Kirchenrath Stroth in Gotha," MzE, vol. 2, pp. 59-60;
Ernestine Christiane Reiske, "Parallel zu der Selbstbeobachtung des Hr. 0. C. R. Spalding im
2ten Sti.ickdes ersten Bandes," MzE, vol. 3, pp. 218-20; "Auszug a us einem Briefe, von Hrn. K.
Gemeinheits-Commissarius Gadicke zu Cammin," MzE, vol. 4, pp. 207-8; "Anmerkungen
und Berichtigungen zu dem Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, von Herrn van Goens,"
MzE, vol. 8, pp. 239-40.
33. "Geschichte eines im fri.ihesten Ji.inglingsalter intendirten Brudermords, von V ... s.
in Br--g," MzE, vol.3, p.41.
34. Fischer, "Starke des Selbstbewu!Stseyns," MzE, vol. 1, p. 41.
35. For the discourse on the soul as a bodily organ, see Michael Hagner, Homo cerebra/is:
Der Wandel vom Seelenorgan zum Gehirn (Berlin: Berlin, 1997).
36. Fischer, "Starke des Selbstbewul5tseyns," 39, 41.
37. Spalding, "Ein Brief an Sulzern," 121 n. 31.
76 DORIS KAUFMANN

The prominent philosopher Moses Mendelssohn replied to him in the

Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, testifying to the significance of such
questions. His answer also pointed to a typical characteristic of the Maga-
zin's articles, namely, the blurring of genres between public discussion and
scientific reflection on dreams. In his "Psychologische Beobachtungen auf
Veranlassung einer von dem Herrn Oberkonsistorialrath Spalding an sich
selbst gemachten Erfahrung" 38 (Psychological observations occasioned by
Consistorial Councillor Spalding's own experience) Mendelssohn there-
fore reported on his own "nervous weakness," which he experienced as a
"fit" after awaking from a troubled sleep. He lay in bed, fully conscious and
capable of" following any sequence of thoughts I undertook with order and
clarity," but incapable of movement.

I felt as though something burning was trying to flow down my spine from
my brain and was encountering resistance, or as if someone was whipping the
back of my neck with burning switches. I thus had to keep perfectly still until
an impression from without opened the sluices of my vital spirits, allowing
them free reign, and in that very moment everything was suddenly restored,
and I was once again master over my voluntary motions. 39

Mendelssohn interpreted his and Spalding's experience by assuring the

latter that "neither the location nor the purpose of his self had changed." It
was only that "strange, inappropriate ideas had attained more influence
than he had intended." According to Mendelssohn, human inner nature
was organized like an Enlightened absolutist monarchy under the reign of
the mind:
Only it [the mind] does not rule absolutely in its kingdom, and not all of its or-
ders are carried out unquestioningly ... Sometimes an idea attains greater
force, refuses obedience, and wishes to act on its own where it should not; it
displaces an appropriate idea ... which necessarily occasions disorder and in-
terruption in public affairs. The ruler hurries to steer the disorder. It thus
seeks to turn more of the attention, which it already possesses in part, to ap-
propriate ideas, and thus make them more effective. It is understandable,
however, that the unruly idea will not always give up straightaway, but rather
may even win the first battle and produce an organic reaction, which the self's
dominant part fails to recognize and finds inimical to its ultimate objective. 40

38. Moses Mendelssohn, "Psychologische Beobachtungen auf Veranlassung einer von

dem Herrn Oberkonsistorialrath Spalding an sich selbst gemachten Erfahrung," MzE, val. 1,
pp.211-32.
39. Ibid., 227-28.
40. Ibid., 232.
 Dreams and Self-consciousness 77

How such a "tumultuous disorder of the ideas" -whether suffered in

dreams or in madness-could come about, and which role "the self-con-
trolling faculty of the soul" played in all this was one of the central and con-
troversial themes of discussion in the different but related discourse of the
developing scientific field of Erfahrungsseelenkunde. Dreams became an
essential object there. Beginning at midcentury and gathering momentum
in the last third of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of books
appeared on dreams, and also on visions, presentiments, and sleepwalking.
They were written by scholars, academic empirical psychologists (Er-
fahrungsseelenkundler}, who were largely trained as physicians, and also
as philosophers and theologians. 41 They referred to the case histories on
dreams in the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde and in other publica-
tions of this genre as empirical sources.
Most of these empirical psychologists echoed the emotional response of
participants in the broader Enlightenment discourse on self-knowledge.
They associated reflections on dreams with experiences of fear. The profes-
sor of medicine Johann Christian Reil, for example, a leading figure in the
nascent field of German psychiatry, gave the following disturbing descrip-
tion of a dreamer's state of mind:

The self-consciousness wavers in all its relations. The fantasy ebbs and flows
within itself, no sensory impression restrains it anymore. The dreamer has
no idea whatsoeverofhis objectivity, and conceives of his subject wrongly. He
believes his visions to be real objects and plays each alien role as his own ...
Tied neither to actual time nor place he exists now in the past, now in the fu-
ture, among the living and the dead. 42

Carl August Eschenmayer, professor of medicine and philosophy, noted

that in dreams the persona became" diffuse and detached and often slipped
into another." 43 His colleague Dieterich Tiedemann described in his
Handbuch der Psychologie (Handbook of psychology) how, shortly after
awaking, the dream's "imaginary reality" often could "not be reconciled
at first with that reality experienced by the senses." One felt oneself

41. This indicates that the control of the soul is transferred to a new professional group.
Textbooks on the science of the mind (psychology) always devoted much attention to the sub-
ject of dreams.
42. Johann Christian Rei!, Rhapsodieen iiber die Anwendung der psychischen Kur-
methode auf Geisteszerriittungen, 2d ed. (Halle: Curt, 1818), 92.
43. Carl August Eschenmayer, Psychologie (1817; reprint, Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein,
1982), 226.
78 D 0 RI5 KAU FM AN N

"doubled," a pathological experience one might also have" after a grave ill-
ness."44
Academic psychologists, however, tried to dissolve and overcome such
fears by the" objectivity" of scientific dream explanation. 45
Three main approaches to a theory of dreaming emerged at the end of
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. They point to
the importance of dreams as a constitutive scientific object for the develop-
ment of explanatory concepts of human inner nature. The different dream
theories also already hint at the different future directions of this enter-
prise in empirical psychology and psychiatry.
In quantitative terms, the most important group among the three ap-
proaches to a dream theory were those empirical psychologists who fol-
lowed the lines of the Enlightenment public's discussion of dreams. They
based their reflections of dreams on the faculty-based model of the soul al-
ready described in Mendelssohn's reply to the theologian Spalding. When
dreaming, the equilibrium of the various faculties of the soul in the wak-
ing state was destroyed in favor of the absolute rule of imagination. The
soul thus turned into a "spectator" of its own actions. 46 The physician,
philosopher, and experimental psychologist Johann Gottlob Kruger de-
scribed the soul as" similar, in dreams, to a puppeteer who moves her own
puppets, and does so without knowing that she does it." 47 The ideas an
individual had "more or less consciously" 48 when dreaming were, after
all, not connected through outward sensory impressions and feelings to
"objectivity with its firm realities." 49 The powers of reason and will were
active only to a limited extent and no longer capable of "reigning in" the
"ideas and images that fantasy strings together by using the magic wand
of the association of ideas." 50 The borderline between the internal and ex-
ternal world was abolished, and dreamers took their inward pictures for
outward reality. This experience was shared by dreamers and the insane
alike, and psychiatrists in particular took up this theme and commented on

44. Dieterich Tiedemann, Handbuch der Psychologie, ed. Ludwig Wachler (Leipzig: Barth,
1804).
45. See Georges Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (the
Hague: Mouton, 1967).
46. Eschenmayer, Psychologie, 226.
47. Johann Gottlob Kriiger, Versuch einer Experimental-Seelenlehre (Halle: Hemmerde,
1756), 197. See Gary Hatfield, "Remaking the Science of Mind: Psychology as Natural Sci-
ence," in Fox, Porter, and Wokler, Inventing Human Science, 201-5, for Kruger's attempt to
create an experimental science of the mind.
48. Wolf Davidson, Versuch iiber den Schlaf (Berlin: Belitz & Braun, 1799), 105.
49. Eschenmayer, Psychologie, 226.
50. Davidson, Versuch, 104.
 D r e a m s a n d S e If - c o n s c i o u s n e s s 79

the natural transition from dream states to madness. Probably in order to

quiet fears, the powers of reason and judgment (repressed while dream-
ing), were brought back into play in the theoretical reflections at this point.
These faculties were thought to be able to interrupt dreams or to make
them recognizable as such by scanning the overflowing chaotic associa-
tions of ideas for logical conclusions. Thus, for example, the physician Wolf
Davidson described a dream in which he was standing at an open window
with his landlord when the latter leaned out and fell. Davidson thereupon
rushed into the courtyard gripped "by the most awful fear that people
might think I had pushed him out," but found nobody. This "made me
doubt everything, I believed it a dream and awoke with the greatest feeling
ofjoy." 51
The origin of these dream sequences was interpreted variously as remi-
niscences of daytime occurrences and occupations and of far-off (child-
hood) experiences that the mind now recalled, undisturbed by outward
impressions. Imagination, however, was also regarded as a productive activ-
ity, as a creative power. To the objection that nobody could dream of any-
thing not experienced before, Johann Gottlob Kruger replied: "[T]hrough
amalgamation of ideas imagination has a capacity to produce new ones. It is
a creator like chemistry, which, through the mixing of those substances
provided to it by nature, produces new ones that nature herself would not
have produced." Imagination therefore could, alongside highly unpleasant
nightmares, also bring forth very pleasant dreams. Kruger asked: "Do not
say that these are mere imaginary pleasures, for what would remain of the
real ones if we removed all belonging to imagination?" 52 Karl Philipp
Moritz described the joy of immersing oneself in the world of "fantastical
dreams" in the first German psychological novel, Anton Reiser. But he cas-
tigated such pleasures as negative antisocial behavior, because then
"dreams and madness would be preferred to order, illumination, and
truth." 5 3
Following this line, the particular group of empirical psychologists in-
troduced here stated in their dream reflections that to turn the internal
world into an external world meant for waking and sleeping dreamers to
experience isolation and loneliness. "When we are awake, we have a shared
world; but when we sleep, each has his own." 5 4 In this world of one's own,
unreflected by outward impressions and the control of others, a loss of
moral principles occurred. It plunged the dreamer into a "wild chaos of in-

51. Ibid., 134.

52. johann Gottlob Kruger, preface to Triiume, for the preceding quotation as well.
53. See Moritz, Anton Reiser, 364.
54. Davidson, Versuch, 138.
80 D 0 RIS KAU FM AN N

cidents" and led him to doubt "morality, human dignity, the Creation, exis-
tence, and duration."ss
All similarities to the argumentation of the Enlightenment discourse on
self-knowledge notwithstanding, it is this more emphatic and almost uni-
versally negative interpretation of the dream event as an expression of the
"limited autonomy of the higher faculties of the soul" that distinguished
this approach to dream theory from the public Enlightenment dream dis-
cussion. Concerning the general judgment, this negative interpretation
connects it to the fin de siecle physiological approach to dreaming, which
paid little attention to dreams as objects of scientific research-because the
autonomy of the higher faculties of the soul during dreams seemed, so to
speak, not limited enough and dreams as manifestations of mental life too
independent of demonstrable organic changes. This approach began in the
mid-nineteenth century and was connected to the rise of a physiological
approach in the life sciences. In the second theory of dreams emerging at the
end of the eighteenth century this tendency and its underlying reason are
already visible.
A fundamental change in thinking was ushered in by those dream the-
orists who no longer proceeded from the interplay of various mental fac-
ulties. They instead declared the nervous system-as the organ of the
soul-to be the constituting factor of self-consciousness. The latter was
therefore thought to be dependent upon the regular working of physical
processes. 56 The dream, J. C. Reil explained, was "the product of a partial
waking of the nervous system" without a" synthesis" with self-conscious-
ness.57 During both dreaming and sleepwalking a person might be "par-
tially conscious of himself; he may act, observe himself, reflect upon
himself, even consider whether he is doing all of this awake or asleep ...
We may carry out the most sublime operations of the higher faculties of
soul consciously or unconsciously, as mere automata." 58 In his 1802 Rap-
ports du physique et du moral de l'hornrne, the French professor of medi-
cine Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis went much further than Reil in
developing the consequences of this approach. In the face of a theory that
regarded physical reactions to external stimuli and the motions of the in-
ner organs as the causes of" disorders of the intellect and the will," it was
no longer relevant to ask questions of individual responsibility and the

55. Ibid., 119.

56. See George Rousseau, "Cultural History in a New Key: Towards a Semiotics of the
Nerve," in Interpretation and Cultural History, ed. Joan H. Pittock and Andrew Wear (New
York: St. Martin's, 1991), 25-81, for the discourse on nerves in the eighteenth century.
57. Rei!, Rhapsodieen, 90, 92.
58. Ibid., 96-97.
 D r e a m s a n d 5 e If- c o n s c i o u s n e s s 81

loss of moral principles, of the dissociation of the self and of inner conflict
in dreams, and of the causes for certain associations of ideas which oc-
curred in dreams. 59
Cabanis had taken the" daring step" of" reducing all of anthropology to
physiology," the German translator and editor Professor Ludwig Heinrich
Jakob remarked critically in his preface. Moderating Cabanis's work and ex-
plaining it to German readers, he had also added his own treatise "Uber die
Grenzen der Physiologie in der philosophischen Anthropologie" (On the
limits of physiology for philosophical anthropology) in order to encourage
"some of our German physiologists who recently favor the same system in
their writings ... to consider their claims more carefully." 60 This worry
seemed to be quite baseless, for Jakob's reflections on the tasks of a science
of man written in opposition to Caban is were also an accurate description of
the theoretical level of German physiologically oriented dream theory. Ac-
cording to Jakob, Cabanis's main error was "not only his endeavor to ex-
plain all states of inner nature in terms of physical causes, but primarily
that he considers them to be themselves physical conditions." While Jakob
approved of the "maxim to avoid the introduction of a spiritual substance
distinct from the body into science," he insisted that "physical processes
and mental ideas belonged to two wholly different classes of sensory phe-
nomena."61 But a "causal connection" existed between them. Physiology
as the "science of the system of physical processes and changes" was an
"auxiliary science indispensable to anthropology." But the latter also re-
quired" empirical psychology, i.e., knowledge of the ultimate inner changes
in the workings of human nature and of the system of ideas." Anthropology
or the science of man should investigate the relationship between the fields
of physiology and empirical psychology. 62
The third approach to theories of the dream I would like to sketch here
emphasized the therapeutic value of dreams and their significance for cur-

59. Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, 2 vols.

(Paris 1802; trans. Uber die Verbindung des Physischen mit dem Moralischen, Halle: Reinicke,
1804), 1:532. Also: "Thus for example cramps of the intestines and diaphragm and the entire
epigastric region, the filling up of the vessels of the portal vein, or the fear of difficult digestion
produce quite different images in the brain during sleep than during the waking state, and the
means by which the sleeping state produces these images corresponds perfectly, as we shall
see, to the means by which the crazed images of madness and delirium are produced in the
diseased processes of the various internal organs": 1:567. On Cabanis, see MartinS. Staum,
Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1980).
60. Ludwig Heinrich Jakob, "Uber die Grenzen der Physiologie in der philosophischen
Anthropologie," in Cabanis, Uber die Verbindung, v-vi.
61. Ibid., xxxvi, xlvii, and xl.
62. Ibid.,li.
82 D 0 RI S KAUFM A N N

ing "maladies of the soul," rather than dream stimuli and dream sources
from external and internal motions of the organs. The most prominent rep-
resentative of this approach was the professor of philosophy and psychol-
ogy Friedrich August Carus (1770-1807), an older relative of the famous
Romantic physician and artist Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869). In the
chapter on dreams in his book Psychologie published in 1808, F. A Carus
defined the dream as an "involuntary uninterrupted continuous and often
all the more powerfully productive or poetic activity of the faculties of the
soul in the state of sleep." 63 There was, during the individual's lifetime, no
"complete cessation of all mental activity." So the mind occupied itself dur-
ing sleep, when the" senses were closed off," with the" stock of ideas resting
within it." It revived the "images slumbering in its depth and the earlier no-
tions much obscured during waking life." 64

What we did, felt, and thought, with outer and inner senses open, is not lost
even if it was interrupted. Our inward drive takes up the thread once more
and carries on ... Even more, whatsoever we practiced in the past, even in our
earliest childhood, to which we were accustomed and which we enjoyed at
that time, it is with those things that we continue to occupy ourselves during
the silent nights. 6 5

F. A. Carus also incorporated nightmares into this pattern of interpreta-

tion. "Frightening dreams are thus also nothing more than a continuation
of our feelings. But these are not intended to frighten us, but only to rouse
us and bring us suddenly to a full consciousness of our self, even if it be a
hideous one ... The dream may be considered man's secret face; but here
too he, as an independent and responsible individual, should be his own
judge." 66 From this he derived a "law," namely "there is no dream without
a relationship to the issues the dreamer dealt with in a waking state, how-
ever long ago." For this reason each dream contained" some truth," and the
"essential feature of each dream" referred to the dreamer's particular char-
acter, his "ways of thinking, his inclinations, and his memories, however old
they might be."
In analogy to his idea of different historical layers of experience embed-
ded in a human being, F. ACarus also considered human psychic disposi-
tions to be the substratum of social evolution. In his book Geschichte der
Psychologie (History of psychology) he therefore interpreted and pre-
63. Friedrich August Carus, Psychologie, in Nachge/assene Werke (Leipzig: Barth &
Kummer, 1808), 2:181-82.
64. Ibid., 2:186.
65. Ibid., 2:189-90.
66. Ibid., 2:190-91.
 0 r e a m s a n d S e 1f - c o n s c i o u s n e s s 83

sented a universal history of mankind-in fact the history of cognition and

its limits-as the history of psychology. 67
The experience of a dissociation of the self in dreams, usually into a
second, worse person, was for him also an allusion to the dreamer's past,
present, or future potential. 68 Carus confronted the assumption of the
chance and chaotic nature of associations of ideas and images in dreams
with the thesis of their coherence and causality based on the dreamer's per-
sonal history. "Objections may easily be raised here, as the content of
dreams often appears too motley, too caricaturish, and as most jump from
one object to the next. And yet here too the mind obeys the laws of causal-
ity and surely there is always a thread along which all are strung, even if it
remains hidden from us." 69
Ninety-two years later in his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud claimed
to have discovered this thread and with it the secret of dreams:
I will bring forward proof that there is a psychological technique which
makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that, if that procedure is employed,
every dream reveals itself as a psychical structure which has a meaning and
which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of waking
life. I shall further endeavor to elucidate the processes to which the strange-
ness and obscurity of dreams are due and to deduce from those processes the
nature of the psychical forces by whose concurrent or mutually opposing ac-
tion dreams are generated? 0

Freud did not realize however, that much of his thinking on dreams had
already been present in the Enlightenment discourse on dreams, particu-
larly the use of dreams for healing mental and psychic diseases, the method
of analyzing dream events and searching for laws of causality in a patient's
personal history as well as the narrative presentation of a dream theory-
based on the scientist's own experience. This discourse of the late Enlight-
enment-in fa.ct several discourses-had been contradictory and frag-
mented and had left the future orientation of psychiatric and psychological
research undetermined and with it the importance of dreams as its object.
At the end of the nineteenth century this question seemed to be settled.
In his Interpretation of Dreams Freud noted the clear primacy of the phys-
iological approach in contemporary psychiatry, which meant almost no
attention to dreams as an object of research. According to him this low

67. Friedrich August Carus, Geschichte der Psychologie (Leipzig, 1808; reprint, Berlin:
Springer, 1990).
68. Carus, Psychologie, 2:192-93.
69. Ibid.,2:195.
70. Freud, Interpretation, 57.
84 DORIS KAUFMANN

evaluation of dream-life was a result of the triumph of the specifically" sci-

entific way of thinking" (naturwissenschaftliche Denkweise) that had en-
tered psychological and psychiatric research in the second half of the
nineteenth century. 71 Freud summarized:
It is true that the dominance of the brain over the organism is asserted with
apparent confidence. Nevertheless, anything that might indicate that mental
life is in any way independent of demonstrable organic changes or that its
manifestations are in any way spontaneous alarms the modern psychiatrist,
as though a recognition of such things would inevitably bring back the days
of the Naturphilosophie, and of the metaphysical view of the nature of mind.
The suspicions of the psychiatrists have put the mind, as it were, under tute-
lage, and they now insist that none of its impulses shaJI be ailowed to suggest
that it has any means of its own. 72

A case in point was for example the German neurologist Adolf Striipell,
who interpreted dreams as "an eclipse of all the logical operations of the
mind which are based on relations and connections." He therefore judged
them useless for scientific research on the brain.73
Almost one hundred years after the discussion on dreams as a threaten-
ing phenomenon of inner nature in the context of Erfahrungsseelenkunde
Freud became the figure around whom the unsolved contradictory ele-
ments in the earlier discussion cohered. Though Freud also trusted in phys-
iological and anatomical explanations of psychic disorders and mental
diseases, he criticized the limited and-so to speak-mechanical under-
standing of the physical realm by his contemporaries. Both at the end of the
eighteenth and at the end of the nineteenth centuries, there was a surpris-
ingly similar constellation between collective and individual awareness of
crisis within the middle class and among competing psychiatric and psy-
chological attempts at an interpretation. The underlying reason was the
search for a burgerliche identity. For the fin de siecle, a period of social, cul-
tural, and political crisis, saw the dissolution and destabilization of middle-
class patterns of thought and behavior that had been established in the
course of the nineteenth century. Again the workings of inner human na-
ture became the main focus in the struggles over the redefinition of a bur-
gerliche identity. And again the question in psychiatry of whether dreams
were or were not a significant object for explaining human nature came up.
In this article I have outlined how a threatening phenomenon of inner
human nature-the dream-had been constituted by the Enlightenment
71. Ibid., 130.
72. Ibid., 105.
73. Quoted ibid., 122.
 0 r e a m s a n d 5 e If - c o n s c i o u s n e s s 85

public and by scientific discussion as an object of observation, description,

and empirical inquiry together with a common language and a narrative
form, namely the case study. This coming into being of dreams as an object
in Erfahrungsseelenkunde was linked to the everyday needs of the new
middle-class strata, and emerged from the public sphere of the late Enlight-
enment at the end of the eighteenth century.
The public discussion of dreams directly influenced the theoretical con-
siderations of the early psychologists and psychiatrists. Though they were
as frightened by their own dreams as their middle-class correspondents
were by theirs, they did not write primarily from the dreamer's point of
view. The empirical collections of dreams were used for diagnosis and treat-
ment of the insane, thereby lending scientific substance to the claim for ex-
clusive expertise in the treatment of the disorders of the mind. And most
importantly, because dreams promised to provide insight into the workings
of human inner nature, reflections and theories on dreams became the
starting point for different concepts of inner nature. The coming into being
of dreams as an object of Erfahrungsseelenkunde and later of psychoanaly-
sis point to the close correlation between the specific historical nature of
consciousness and mentalite and of scientific developments.
4 Jan Goldstein

Mutations of the Self

in Old Regime and
Postrevolutionary France
FROM AME TO MOl TO LE MOl
MOl It has been contended that this personal pronoun has the same
meaning as the je or as the Latin ego. The je has been condemned by the
word egotism, but that does not prevent it from being suitable on certain
occasions. It follows still less that the moi cannot sometimes be sublime
or admirably placed. Here are some examples ...
-Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et des
metiers, 1765

MOl This is the name by which modern philosophers customarily des-

ignate the soul [arne] insofar as it has consciousness of itself and is famil-
iar with its own operations, or is simultaneously the subject and object of
its thought. When Descartes defined himself as a thinking substance, a res
cogitans, or when he set forth the famous proposition "I think therefore I
am," he truly put the moi in the place of the am e. And he was not content
to found that substitution (or, to put it more exactly, that equation) on the
very nature of things, he also made it pass into language ... However, in
his own usage and that of his disciples, the new expression never took on
the rigorous and absolute meaning later attached to it. Descartes said, un-
mistakably and deliberately, moi, instead of saying mon arne; but he did
not say le moi . ..
-Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, 1849

86
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e S e If 87

The French encyclopedic impulse, which flourished so luxuriantly during

the siecle des lumieres, continued through the nineteenth century, when it
characteristically produced multivolume works taking the form not of en-
cyclopedias properly so-called but of encyclopedic dictionaries, or" dictio-
naries of things and not of words," as the genre was sometimes described. 1
This constancy of intellectual aspiration and publishing trend affords a
handy way to begin our investigation of the coming into being of the self as
a scientific object in France, to map out the semantic field related to that
event. Since there exist, on both sides of the Revolutionary divide, compila-
tions of the most up-to-date knowledge on an exhaustive array of topics, we
are in a good position to chart sea changes in this subtle and tricky area,
which might otherwise be so difficult of access. For the eighteenth century
the relevant text is, of course, the celebrated Encyclopedie of Diderot and
d' Alembert. The early nineteenth-century text that I have consulted here,
the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, is less well known; and toes-
tablish its credentials as a source, I should say a bit about its genealogy.
The Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques is in fact connected to the
Encyclopedie by an unbroken lineage, one in which a third work, the Dic-
tionnaire des sciences medicales, functions as the intermediary link. In
1768 an aggressive capitalist publisher named Charles-Joseph Panck-
oucke, having correctly perceived the potential market for less costly ver-
sions of the Encyclopedie than the first folio, bought the rights to all future
editions. 2 By the early 1780s he had expanded his operations beyond
reprinting the Encyclopedie in cheaper formats and had masterminded the
project for the Encyclopedie methodique, an updating of the original En-
cyclopedie and, more significantly, a division of it into forty specialized se-
ries, including agriculture, chemistry, jurisprudence, medicine, political
economy. 3 Panckoucke's decision to introduce the Encyclopedie metho-
dique suggests that the fast-growing corpus of knowledge had, in his view,
become too cumbersome to submit to alphabetical organization under a
single title, and that a market for more selective slices of the whole could be
tapped. In the opening years of the nineteenth century, Panckoucke fils,
carrying on the family tradition, brought the Methodique to a still higher

1. See "Prospectus," in Dictionaires des sciences medicates, 60 vols. (Paris: C.L.F. Panck-
oucke, 1812-22), 1:viii. See also "Le lexicographe et l'encyclopediste,"in Le siecle des diction-
naires, ed. Nicole Savy and Georges Vigne, Les Dossiers du Musee d'Orsay, no. 10 (Paris:
Editions de Ia reunion des musees nationaux, 1987), 26-28.
2. On Panckoucke and his entrepreneurial activities, see Robert Darn ton, The Business of
Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, 1775-1800 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1979).
3. Encyclopedie methodique, ou par ordre des matieres, 197 vols. (Paris: Panckoucke,
1782-1832).
88 JA N G 0 LD STEI N

level of specialization and conceived of the plan for an encyclopedic dictio-

nary of medicine. Published between 1812 and 1822, the resulting Diction-
naire des sciences medicales grew to an imposing sixty volumes and
assembled a large stable of authors that included the most prominent
physicians of the day. That it also became something of a cultural icon-an
emblem of the boiled-down sum total of medical knowledge-is seen
vividly in a passage in Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857). Enumerating
the contents of the consulting room of Charles Bovary, licensed officier de
sante, Flaubert observes: "Volumes of the 'Dictionary of Medical Science,'
uncut, but the binding rather the worse for the successive sales through
which they had gone, occupied almost alone the six shelves of a pinewood
bookcase." 4
The considerably smaller Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques was
constructed on the model of its medical forebear: not only was there a direct
parallelism in the titles of the two works and in the representations of their
collective authorship ("By a Society of Physicians and Surgeons," itself a
variant on the phrase "By a Society of Men of Letters" used in the Ency-
clopedie, became "By a Society of Philosophy Professors"), but the firm of
Panckoucke kept its hand in the enterprise, serving in this case not as pub-
lisher but as printer. 5
The anonymous "authors' preface" says a good deal about the intellec-
tual motivation behind this compendium. Most conspicuously, these
spokesmen for philosophy betray a strong sense of em battlement. They al-
lude darkly to the "abundant self-interested hatreds [that] rise up against
[philosophy]" and to the widespread allegations that" after three thousand
years, [philosophy] can still do no more than haltingly address frivolous
questions, being condemned on more serious matters to the most shameful
and incorrigible confusion." But while on the defensive, the philosophy
professors also attempt to mount an offense, using the occasion of the pub-
lication of the first volume of the Dictionnaire to declare that the field of
philosophy has been constituted as a science. Their opening sentence states
proudly, "When, after much trial and error and many vicissitudes, by dint
of struggles, conquests, and the vanquishing of prejudice, a science finally
manages to constitute itself, it then faces an easier, more modest, but not
less useful task: it must in some fashion conduct its own inventory." That
"inventory" is, of course, the Dictionnaire itself. In keeping with the" ex-

4. On this point, see Lawrence Rothfield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-
Century Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 17. The quotation is from
Madame Bovary, trans. Paul de Man, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W. W. Norton,
1965), 22-23.
5. See the title page of volume 1, which gives the publisher as L. Hachette; the facing page
indicates "lmpr[imerie] Panckoucke."
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e S e If 89

ample given by the last century," it seeks not to reproduce the strenuous
processes of reasoning by which philosophy arrived at its truths but to give
a simple exposition of those truths for purposes of dissemination. It will
"spread them out beneath everyone's eyes," inviting "each person,
whether savant or man of the world, to draw from [the Dictionary], effort-
lessly and according to the needs or even whims of the moment." The time
had come, they proclaim, for philosophy to cross the threshhold of the
schoolroom and enter the public realm. 6
Philosophy, with its tradition in the West going back at least to Plato,
a newly constituted science in 1844? Philosophy, in the wake of the
Enlightenment, just becoming matter for public consumption? Clearly, if
implicitly, the authors of the preface are addressing the new, peculiarly
nineteenth-century condition of French philosophy, when the prevailing
definition of science had changed and the materialist trends associated with
medicine and empiricist philosophy had threatened to subsume mental
phenomena under the laws of biology and thus to put philosophy out of
business altogether. 7 Under this protopositivist and, by the 1830s, bona fide
positivist barrage, philosophy lost the high status and the currency in the
world of public affairs that it had enjoyed during the Enlightenment, when
to be a philosophe was an honored calling. Now, as the publication of the
Dictionnaire indicated, philosophy was attempting to reconstitute itself,
not as a master science but simply as one specialized science among many.
Whatever its own epistemological commitments, it had not failed to notice
the prestige attached to such observational sciences as medicine, and it was
sufficiently savvy and opportunistic to deck out its own Dictionnaire with
all the formal trappings of the famous Dictionnaire des sciences medicales,
thus tacitly asserting a full parity between philosophy and medicine. 8
It is in the context of this scaling down of French philosophy first for pur-
poses of survival and later for purposes of renewed expansion, that the
"self" did not so much freshly emerge as a scientific object in France as it be-

6. "Preface des Auteurs," Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, 6 vols. (Paris: L. Ha-
chette, 1844-52) 1:v-vi.
7. I discuss the beleaguered situation of early nineteenth-century French philosophy in
Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 7.
8. The opening passages of the "Prospectus" for the Dictionnaire des sciences medicales
focus on the definition of a science (a collection of facts given by Nature and a collection of the
rules governing them, which are the discovery of the human intellect and are geared to inter-
vention in the facts) and the problems characteristic of medicine as a science (its facts are so
plentiful and unstable that it must multiply its rules, thus undercutting their certainty). The
model of the Dictionnaire des sciences medicales was, in other words, one of a self-conscious
effort to make medicine conform to what can be called the positivist ideal.
90 JAN GOLDSTEIN

came for the first time a salient scientific object, much discussed and, in in-
fluential quarters, much insisted upon and even lionized. But what kind of
scientific object is the self, anyway?
Just as I would agree with Marcel Mauss that "there has never existed a
human being, who has not been aware not only of his body, but also at the
same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical," 9 so I would haz-
ard that the scrutiny of the contours of that awareness and the development
of specialized and in some manner "scientific" vocabularies to describe it is
also a ubiquitous phenomenon. I would also readily assent to Mauss's claim
about the mutability of the self, its assumption of significantly different
forms in different societies and time periods. But beyond this point of (to
my mind) axiomatic clarity, the issue becomes murky. Many competing
systems of classification, each arrayed along a temporal axis, have been pro-
posed to trace the conceptual varieties of selfhood, personhood, subjectiv-
ity-terms that, moreover, may or may not be regarded as interchangeable
by those who employ them. 10
Rather than adopting one of these preexisting schemes, or recklessly ad-

9. Marcel Mauss, "A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of the Person; the Notion
of the Self" (1938), trans. W. D. Halls, in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philoso-
phy, History, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1985), 1-25, at 3.
10. Thus, for example, Mauss himself believed the originary form of the self, found alike
among indigenous Australian and Northwest American tribes, to be the persona, role, or mask,
a concept referring to its possessor's social function. According to Mauss's unabashedly pro-
gressive account, this primitive form evolved in ancient Rome into the self as a bearer of legal
rights and obligations, was then enriched by the Stoics with a consciousness of good and evil
and by the early Christians with a metaphysical aspect and finally, sometime during the eigh-
teenth century, achieved its current form as a self-knowing psychological being. See Mauss, "A
Category of Mind." Charles Taylor found the modern Western" self" or "identity" to be triply
characterized by an inwardness, or sense of having inner depths, that began its career with Au-
gustine; by an affirmation of the ordinary life of work and family as the arena for the realiza-
tion of selfhood, a development that awaited the Protestant Reformation; and by a late
eighteenth-century Romantic-inspired belief in the voice of nature as expressive of the au-
thentic self. See Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989). Michel Foucault offered yet another rendition of chronology
and terminology. He distinguished between the" self," which had in his view existed as a cate-
gory at least since classical antiquity, and the" subject," a distinctly modern invention. The for-
mer, fundamentally ethical and aesthetic in nature, was capable of obtaining truth only if well
cared for by its owner. The latter, introduced by Descartes, could obtain truth by seeing what
was evident and was thus functionally equivalent to all other subjects. With the mid seven-
teenth-century advent of the subject, in other words, evidence supplanted the vagaries of "care
of the self" as the road to truth, and the enterprise of modern science was made possible. See
Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress," in The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 340-72, esp. 371-72. To judge only
from the learned contributions of Mauss, Taylor, and Foucault, the possibilities for dating the
coming into being of the self would appear myriad, perhaps endless.
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e S e If 91

vancing one of my own, I will for purposes of this essay embrace a mini-
malist theoretical attitude toward the self. I will regard it as a perennial sci-
entific object whose form and degree of cultural salience are prone to
extremely wide variation. What is noteworthy about the early nineteenth-
century French moment with respect to the self, then, is not its absolute
novelty but rather the heightened, almost obsessive attention paid to that
object and the dramatic shift in the relevant vocabulary. The sense of local-
ized everyday selfhood denoted by the humble vernacular rnoi-as op-
posed to the high-flown arne-came to be intensively theorized. The two
quotations that begin this essay attest to the vast difference in the treat-
ment accorded the rnoi in the Encyclopedie, where a few brief paragraphs
suffice to cover a suspect term whose only meaning is grammatical, and in
the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, where the same entity has
become the designated heir of the Cartesian cogito and Descartes himself is
assigned a role in initiating the transformation. That difference in turn
makes plain the vast conceptual distance that the rnoi has traveled in the
space ofless than a century.
The same point is brought home by tracing the evolution of the term
arne, meaning in English "soul,""spirit" or "mind." The long and compli-
cated article "Arne" in the Encyclopedie defines that traditional category as
"a principle endowed with consciousness and feeling" and goes on to pon-
der, with reference to Western philosophy from the ancient Egyptians and
Greeks forward, whether soul is a pure quality or a substance, how it is re-
lated to the divinity, and in what sorts of beings it resides. The article never
even mentions the rnoi and certainly never suggests the workaday per-
sonal pronoun as a synonym for the arne. The same article in the Diction-
naire des sciences philosophiques is, by contrast, fixated on the rnoi. It
starts with a basic distinction between modern philosophers like Descartes
who, we are told, use the term arne to refer to the substance of the human
self (rnoi hurnain), and ancient and medieval philosophers, who used it in
an extended and etymologically more correct sense to mean the principle
of life and movement in organized bodies. It then goes on to fine-tune the
"modernist" view, stipulating that while arne and rnoi are certainly over-
lapping categories, not entirely distinct from one another, they are not
coterminous. The rnoi, characterized by reflexivity, self-consciousness, and
generally expanded faculties, represents a decided development of the
"spiritual principle," or arne, and occupies only a portion of its conceptual
space. 11
11. "Arne," Encyclopedie, 2:294-322; and "Arne," Dictionnaire des sciences philo-
sophiques, vol.l (1844), 81-92. Hence, according to the article "Moi" in the Dictionnaire des
sciences philosophiques, the critical, but ultimately insufficient move made by Descartes in
92 JA N G0 LD STEI N

The early nineteenth-century French philosophers who assumed the

related tasks of the disciplinary defense of an embattled philosophy and
the foregrounding of the self were the Sorbonne maitre Victor Cousin and
the members of his carefully groomed school. The latter exclusively com-
prised the authorship of the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques,
turning that work into the repository and codification of Cousin ian ortho-
doxy. Since Cousin was a derivative philosopher but an academic entrepre-
neur of true genius, we can assume even at this early stage of our
investigation that the coming into being of the self as a scientific object in-
volved many extraintellectual considerations, especially those related to
politics, both national and professional. The mere fact that the title page at-
tributed the creation of the Dictionnaire to a society of philosophy profes-
sors indicates that philosophy production had acquired institutional
moorings in the post- Revolutionary period, that its locus had shifted from
the independent freelance Enlightenment philosophe to the salaried func-
tionary of the new state educational system. The thoroughness with which
the moi had invaded and overrun Cousinian philosophy, as well as the ex-
tent to which the term in its newly technical sense had penetrated the gen-
eral culture, can be seen in the article "Moi" in the Dictionnaire de la
conversation et de la lecture, an all-purpose reference work intended to
meet the needs of the bourgeois household. 12 Prepared by a minor
Cousinian philosopher, the article begins with a flourish: "That word
[moi], which formerly belonged only to the domain of grammar and was
nothing more than the most notable of pronouns, has become, after the
word 'God,' the substantive noun par excellence. It now plays, and justly

the sixth meditation; see above, the second epigraph to this paper. Descartes wrote, "[O]n the
one hand, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself (moi-meme) insofar as I am simply a think-
ing, non-extended thing; and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of my body, insofar as this
is simply an extended, non-thinking thing. And accordingly, it is certain that I, that is, my soul,
by which I am what I am, is really distinct from my body and can exist without it." The English
translation comes from Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham,
Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 115
n. 2. The note indicates that the phrase equating the moi and the arne was an addition to the
Latin text made by Descartes in the French version-a fact that tends to support the Cousin-
ian point that Descartes was interested in the linguistic innovation of bringing the term moi
into technical, philosophical usage. Descartes's French reads: "[I]l est certain que moi, c'est-a-
dire, mon arne, par laquelle je suis ce que je suis ... "
12. It also prided itself on toeing no party line but instead giving voice through its differ-
ent articles to controversy and divergent opinions. See the untitled preface to the Dictionnaire
de Ia conversation et de Ia lecture, 52 vols. (Paris: Beilin-Mondar, 1832-39) 1:3.A glance at the
list of principal collaborators on the page facing the title page confirms this claim. It includes
such representatives of opposing camps as Victor Cousin and Fran~ois Guizot, on the one side,
and F.-J.- V.Broussais and Armand Marrast on the other.
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e S e If 93

so, a powerful role in philosophy. In fact, we could say without exaggera-

tion that it epitomizes all of philosophy." 13

IS THERE A SELF IN THIS MENTAL APPARATUS?

The article "Moi" in the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques sug-

gested a temporal sequence in which Descartes's moi was directly meta-
morphosed into le moi of Cousin. But that capsule narrative omitted an
intervening dialectical stage that in fact bore primary causal responsibility
for the advent of the Cousinian self: the eighteenth-century vogue in
France of Condillac's sensationalist psychology. While Condillac func-
tioned in effect as the French Locke, significant differences separated the
two philosophers. In the context of the present discussion, it is particularly
noteworthy that, writing a half century before Condillac, Locke had explic-
itly posed and had wrestled at length with the problem of the implications
of a sensationalist epistemology for personal identity, or the unity and co-
herence of the self.
If, Locke asked in a chapter written for the second edition of An Essay on
Human Understanding at the express request of his friend William
Molyneux, 14 we discard the Cartesian contention that the indivisibility of
the self or thinking substance is a self-evident truth and postulate instead
that all our mental contents are derived from discrete sensory impressions,
then what is the ground of selfhood, of the "sameness of a rational Being"
that persists through space and time? In a somewhat rambling argument,
Locke located that ground in a combination of consciousness and memory.
We cannot think, feel, sense, or will without being aware that we do so, he
asserts, and this consciousness inevitably accompanying our mental pro-
cesses "makes every one to be, what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes
himself from all other thinking things, [and] in this alone consists personal
Identity." Still, in order to ensure this identity, memory must be added to
consciousness because, as Locke readily concedes, consciousness is discon-
tinuous, "being interrupted always by forgetfulness, there being no mo-
ment of our Lives wherein we have the whole train of our past Actions

13. A.-Jacques Matter, "Moi," Dictionnaire de !a conversation, 38:259-61, at 259.

14. See Henry E. Allison, "Locke's Theory of Personal Identity: A Re-examination," in
Locke on Human Understanding: Selected Essays, ed. I. C. Tipton (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 105-22, esp.106 and 106 n. 3. In a letter of2 March 1693, Molyneux, replying to
Locke's request for "any new heads from logick or metaphysicks to be inserted," suggested
that a discussion of the principium individuationis be included in the new edition. See The
Correspondence ofJohn Locke, 8 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1976-89), letter 1609,4:647-
51, esp. 650.
94 JAN GOLDSTEIN

before our Eyes in one view." Sometimes sheer absorption in present

thoughts momentarily obliterates our awareness of our past selves; once a
day consciousness itself is suspended in sleep. Hence memory must be en-
listed to fill in the gaps and restore that continuity of consciousness called
self. 15
But Locke probes further, posing as a more strenuous objection to the co-
herence of the concept of selfhood the possibility that certain portions of
lived experience may be lost beyond retrieval-those, for example, that oc-
cur when an individual is drunk or in a state of somnambulism. Locke now
salvages his basic contention about the persistence of the self through re-
course to what he terms a "forensick" conception. A court of law, he says,
lacks any sure means of assessing the authenticity of a plea that an accused
should be found not guilty for reason of drunkenness or sleepwalking.
Hence convention deems that the court avoid the issue entirely, ignoring
any alleged gap in consciousness and, hence, any lapse in moral responsibil-
ity attendant upon it, and punishing the person in question on the purely
factual basis of the crime committed by his hand. But this pragmatic
arrangement lasts only as long as our temporal existence, becoming irrele-
vant on the Day ofJudgment, "wherein the Secrets of all Hearts shall be laid
open ... [and] no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of;
but shall receive his Doom, his Conscience accusing or excusing him." Pre-
sumably, then, the postulation of the unity of the self is for Locke a neces-
sary expedient to sustain the concept of moral responsibility in daily life in
face of the ultimate imperfection of our terrestrial knowledge about other
people's states of consciousness. 16
While Locke recognized the magnitude of the problem on his hands and
spun out a long and tortuous argument attempting to resolve it, his French
successor dealt surprisingly casually with the unity of the self. In fact, his
first psychological treatise, the Essai sur['origine des connaissances hu-
maines (1746), mentioned the self only in passing. When describing the

15. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed., Peter H. Nidditch (Ox-
ford: Clarendon, 1975), 2.27.9-10, pp. 335-36.
16. Ibid., 2.27.20-26, at 344, 346.1t should be pointed out that Locke does not assimilate
madness to drunkenness and somnambulism. In his view madness qualifies both as a valid le-
gal reason for exemption from responsibility for a criminal act and as an instance of" duplica-
tion" of the self. As Locke observes, "[I]f it be possible for the same Man to have distinct
incommunicable consciousness at different times, it is past doubt the same Man would at dif-
ferent times make different Persons; which we see, is the Sense of Mankind ... , Humane Laws
not punishing the Mad Man for the Sober Man'sActions, nor the Sober Man for what the Mad
Man did, thereby making them two Persons; which is somewhat explained by our way of
speaking in English, when we say such an one is not himself. or is besides himself." See
pp.342-43.
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e S e If 95

generation of the various mental operations from the primal capacity

for sensation that, in his view, gives birth by stages to our whole mental
apparatus, Condillac noted that the operation of reminiscence enables us
to preserve the sequential linkage between perceptions that we have expe-
rienced at different moments in time; as such, he opined, reminiscence is
a necessary condition for a persisting, unified self. "If this linkage were
each night interrupted, I would so to speak begin a new life each day, and no
one could convince me that today's moi was the moi of the day before."
Condillac then went on to analyze two distinct aspects of reminiscence,
one that "makes us recognize our own being," the other that "makes us
recognize the perceptions that are there repeated." In other words, he
tersely predicated selfhood on memory, making memory its sufficient
condition; but he failed utterly to acknowledge the immensity of that
claim. 17
By the time of his second psychological treatise, the Traite des sensations
(1754), Condillac was somewhat more deliberate in his treatment of the
self, but he still disposed of that topic promptly and without obvious intel-
lectual agony. Condillac's hypothetical case history of a statue gradually
endowed with each of the five senses included, in book 1 (in which the
statue's exclusive sensory organ is his nose), a succinct chapter entitled "Of
the Moi, or of the Personality of a Man Limited to the Sense of Smell." Here
once again, selfhood and memory are tightly bound. The statue, we are told,
could not say "I" at the moment when it first experienced an odor. "Insofar
as a being does not change, it exists without any folding back on itself [re-
tour sur lui-meme]. But insofar as it changes, it judges that it is still in some
manner the same as it previously was, and it says moi." Condillac then re-
casts this point in a stunning definition of the self: the "moi is nothing but
the collection of the sensations that [the statue or person] experiences and
of those that memory recalls to it. In a word, it is the simultaneous con-
sciousness of what [the statue or person] is and the memory of what it
was." 18

17. Condillac, Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines, 1.1.1.15, in Oeuvres
philosophiques, 3 vols., ed. Georges Le Roy (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1956),
1:14. In equating Condillac's "reminiscence" with memory here, I am taking certain liberties
with the subtlety of his categories. In the Essai, "memoire" is generated after reminiscence
(see 1.1.2) and is a more sophisticated mental operation; while reminiscence merely preserves
past perceptions, memory processes past perceptions to which we have affixed linguistic signs
and hence enables us to retrieve those perceptions whenever we wish.
18. Condillac, Traite des sensations, 1.6, in Oeuvres philosophiques, 1:238-39.1t should
be noted that while this chapter includes the word "moi" in its title, the moi is treated in the
Essai in a chapter that, implicitly denying the importance of that concept, is called "De Ia per-
ception, de Ia conscience, de I' attention, et de Ia reminiscence."
96 JA N G 0 L 0 ST EI N

The brevity and nonchalance of Condillac's handling of the self is quite

remarkable in view not only of Locke's extensive discussion but also in view
of the controversial nature of the concept, the barrage of criticism that
Locke's account had sustained from all sides since its first appearance in
1694. In Britain, Bishop Butler and Thomas Reid attacked Locke's argu-
ment as circular, presupposing what it allegedly proved by defining per-
sonal identity as consciousness of personal identity. 19 Noting the brouhaha
surrounding personal identity (it had become, he wrote, "so great a ques-
tion in philosophy, especially of late years in England, where all the ab-
struser sciences are study'd with a peculiar ardour and application"), David
Hume offered in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) a more elabo-
rate critique of Locke-and one all the more devastating because, unlike
Butler and Reid, he shared Locke's sensationalist epistemology. Postulating
that there "must be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea,"
Hume argued that no such single impression could possibly be found to un-
dergird the idea of a self. Ordinary reflection revealed that far from being
unitary, we are all "nothing but a bundle or collection of different percep-
tions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a
perpetual flux and movement." Hume therefore concluded that the self
was a "fiction" or "artifice." As such, it was a construction of that most
unreliable of human mental faculties, the imagination, here aided by our
characteristically sloppy perceptual processes, which overlooked slight al-
terations and pronounced sameness where none existed. 20
In France, the critique of the Lockean self was undertaken by Catholic
Cartesians intent upon exposing the immoral and atheistic implications of
empiricism. 21 Preaching to the converted, these critics tended to be more
declamatory than argumentative. Their main point was that a sensational-
ist epistemology could never satisfactorily ground a self recognizable as
such to a Catholic. Hence recourse to a philosophy that postulated a self
given all at once as a spiritual substance, instead of being assembled serially
from material sensations, was necessary. The Reverend Father Hayer as-
serted that while the alleged unity of physical bodies was" only an abstrac-

19. See Allison, "Locke's Theory of Personal Identity," 112.

20. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 2d
ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 1.4.6, "Of Personal Identity," esp. pp. 251,252,259, for the pas-
sages quoted. Hume very much favored the vocabulary of fiction as applied to the self; see also
p. 259: "The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one"; and p. 262:
"All the disputes concerning the identity of connected objects are merely verbal, except so far
as the relation of parts gives rise to some fiction ... of union."
21. On this point, see the excellent discussion in R. R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in
Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), chap. 6, "Soul and
Mind."
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e S e If 97

tion of our minds," in the essentially spiritual creature that is a human be-
ing "we find a really and substantially indivisible center, where everything
that interests man is brought back to unity." And how, one might ask, do we
find this center, which Hayer called the rnoi? Hayer's answer is that the sit-
uation simply could not be otherwise: "If for this unique self [rnoi] we sub-
stituted a multitude of selves, what strange confusion would result!" The
hypothetical multiple individual would be like an "anarchical society"
composed of isolated, self-absorbed parts functioning as wholes, each part-
whole in perfect ignorance of the needs of the others. 22
Hayer went on to invoke other proofs of the unified and spiritual nature
of the human rnoi, some of which relied-as was typical of this mode of
Catholic-Cartesian apologetic-upon the self-evidence of introspective
experience. ("Having retreated into a pleasant solitude, solely occupied
with the desire of knowing myself, I begin to consider with the eyes of my
arne, my arne itself. That is to say, my rnoi, folding back upon itself, ... con-
templates itself ... ") 23 Introspection and the psychic reality to which it
bears witness were also at the heart of the argument of the abbe de Lignac
against Locke's theory of personal identity. In his preface, in which he also
articulates his intention to write a book enlisting contemporary philosophy
to vindicate the wisdom of the church fathers, Lignac explains and justifies
his confident, declamatory tone. "Just as a witness ought to be firm when,
before the court, he makes a deposition concerning what he has seen, ... so
ought I to refrain from weighing pros and cons or appearing to have the
slightest doubt about the verities I discover." 24 Lignac gave his book a title
consonant with that motif-he called it "testimony of the sens intirne"-
and he proceeded accordingly:
By the sens in time of existence, I have always understood, Monseigneur [the
cleric to whom the book is dedicated], the consciousness of the identity of our
arne at all times, under an infinite variety of different ways of being, which
the substance of our ame sheds without thereby ceasing to be the same per-
son, the same moi. This consciousness of my identity I find at the bottom of
all my thoughts, sensations, emotions. I sense myself perceiving while per-
ceiving something, as Locke says. But what Locke does not say is that, when
perceiving the letters that I am now tracing, I sense myself as the same being

22. Hubert Hayer, Le spiritualite et l'immortalite de /'Arne, 2 vols. (Paris: Chaubert, 1757),
2:1-3.
23. Ibid., 2:6-7. Hayer also offers a spiritualist response to Locke's argument about the
discontinuity in the self introduced by deep sleep; see pp. 2:13-18.
24. Le Large de Lignac, Le temoignage du sens intime et de /'experience oppose aIa foi pro-
fane et ridicule des Fatalistes modernes (Auxerre: Fournier, 1760), preface, 1:n.p.
98 JA N G 0 LD STEIN

who received his first writing lessons so many years ago. If this experience
... is common to all men ... I am correct in insisting that our iime is a sub-
stance and correct in defining it as the consciousness of identity. For sub-
stance is that which remains the same whatever form it assumes, whatever
modification it is subjected to. 25
But, despite the aggressive tone of these Catholic critics, Condillac did
not engage them in a debate about personal identity. Nor did he engage
Hume, whose Treatise was never translated into French during the eigh-
teenth century. 26 With respect to the former, he seems to have shied away
from polemics on religious matters. His reply to Lignac's critique of his
Traite des animaux, for example, counsels the Catholic apologist simply to
accept or reject a philosophical argument on its internal merits, bracketing
its doctrinal consequences. A valid argument, he promises, will never har-
bor danger for religion because "Truth cannot be contrary to truth." 27
With respect to Hume, whose Treatise he probably never read, Condillac
is in the odd, almost perverse position of appearing to side with Locke about
the cogency of a self founded on sensations while sounding a great deal like
Locke's Scottish detractor. The very same image of the mind as a "collec-
tion" of fleeting sensations and perceptions, which Hume deliberately em-
ploys to damn Locke's theory of personal identity, is employed by Condillac
in a completely neutral register, simply to describe the moi as Condillac
believes it is, without commentary on the cogency or absurdity of the con-
cept. For Hume, the presumed fact that the self is nothing but an arbitrary
collection of sensations and their by-products reveals the scandalous back-
ruptcy, the fictive nature of Locke's claims about personal identity. But for
Condillac the self as an empty space, as the theatrical stage (to use Hume's
metaphorf 8 where a succession of sensory events are momentarily en-
acted, seems all the self that he could ever envision. Condillac evinces no
discomfort, certainly no horror, with the flimsiness and lack of grandeur of
such a self. Not inclined to dwell on the self in the first place, he seems obliv-

25. Ibid., 1:392-93, my italics.

26. In the early nineteenth century, Victor Cousin would regret that it had taken so long
for Hume's corrosive argument against the sensationalist self to reach and be appreciated in
France; in 1816, there was still no French translation of Hume's Treatise. See Cousin, Premiers
essais de philosophie, 3d ed. (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1855), 57-58. Cousin's comments were
made as part of his 1816 course at the Sorbonne.
27. "Lettre de M.l'Abbe de Condillac a!'Auteur des Lettres aunAmeriquain," reprinted
from the Mercure de France, April1756, and bound with the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris,
copy of Condillac, Traite des animaux (Amsterdam, 1755), p. 10.
28. See Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 1.6, p. 253: "The mind is a kind of theatre, where
several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle
in an infinite variety of postures and situations."
 M u t a t i o n s o f t h e S e If 99

ious to the controversy swirling around his formulations-much like the

intrepid truth seeker, the philosopher committed to exploring the limits of
human knowledge, that he would later depict in his reply to Lignac. 29
It remained for Cousin and his school to inject the (in their view) requi-
site note of horror, to reveal the mental apparatus of sensationalist psychol-
ogy as shamefully lacking in a proper self. They would do for Condillac
what the eighteenth-century Catholic apologists had done for Locke. But,
while they would rehabilitate many of the apologists' old keywords, like
substance and sens intirne, they would meet with notably greater success.
Before turning to the pivotal conceptual move of the Cousinians, let me
examine the terminology of the eighteenth-century phase of the story:
the transition from arne to rnoi.
As the citations from the eighteenth-century French texts, both Carte-
sian and sensationalist, suggest, the term rnoi was used with some fre-
quency before the Cousinians swept the philosophical field. It was not,
however, used with any systematicity. On the one hand, Condillac's 1746
Essai implicitly defines it as that aspect of the arne that has cognizance of
its persisting sameness and is the locus of personal identity; the chapter in
which Condillac introduces the rnoi as a corollary of the mental operation
of reminiscence is included in a section of the book called "The Analysis
and Generation of the Operations of the Arne," and this organizational de-
vice appears to designate the rnoi as a subset of the arne. 30 On the other
hand, both Hayer and Lignac, as quoted above, use moi and arne as syn-
onyms and seem simply to equate the spiritual substance with the sense of
personal identity. And at least one eighteenth -century figure scrupulously
avoided using the term rnoi to mean enduring personal identity: Locke's
first French translator, the Huguenot emigre to England, Pierre Coste. In a
fascinating footnote to his translation of the chapter "Of Identity and Di-

29. That is, I think, the point of Condillac'slong footnote to his discussion of the moi in the
Traite des sensations. He cites a passage from Pascal that poses the question of whether we love
other persons for their particular mental and physical qualities or for the abstract conception
of the substance of their soul. Pascal insists that human love is confined to the former, and
Condillac quotes him as saying, "We never love the person, then, but only the qualities; or, if
we love the person, then it is the assemblage of qualities that makes the person." Commenting
on Pascal's text in the same footnote, Condillac then denies that this" assemblage of qualities"
is really what Pascal takes a person to be. He concludes, "In Pascal's meaning of the term [per-
son or moi], only God can say moi." Traite des sensations, 1.6, p. 1:239 n. 1. In other words,
Condillac is fully aware that his own definition of the moi as a" collection of sensations" does
not exhaust all the meanings of that term in the language of his day or, perhaps, even capture
the most desirable meanings. But in keeping with the principle of epistemological modesty
that undergirds his work, he contends that the moi-collection is the only self knowable by hu-
man intelligence.
30. Condillac, Essai, title of section 2 of part 1.
100 JA N G0 LD STEIN

versity" of Locke's Essay, Coste explained why he used the terms le soy
and soy-meme to translate Locke's" self." Part of the reason for his choice
was the indelible coloration that Pascal had, in Coste's view at least, im-
parted to the term le moi; the other part was Locke's own alleged neologiz-
ing in English:

The moi of Monsieur Pascal in some manner authorizes me to make use of

the words soy, soy-meme, to express the sentiment that each one has within
himself that he is the same. Or, better put, I was obliged to do so by an indis-
pensable necessity, for I would not know how otherwise to express the mean-
ing of my author, who has taken a parallel liberty in his language. The
roundabout terms I would have to employ on this occasion would clutter the
prose and perhaps render it completely unintelligible. 31

In some famous passages in his Pensees, Pascal used the noun moi to refer to
the fallen self that had not yet found God. "The moi is hateful (hai·ssable),"
he declared bluntly. Its hatefulness derived from its exclusive self-love ("it
makes itself the center of everything") and from its desire to rule tyranni-
cally over others. One version of the Pensees had Pascal pronouncing the
rhetorical rule, similar to the one later disputed in the Encyclopedic article
"Moi," that an" honnete hom me ought to avoid ... using the words 'je' and
'moi.'" In Pascal's theological scheme, conversion to the love of God would
bring about not merely a forgetfulness of the moi but a total annihilation of
it. 32 The term moi was so thoroughly imbued with these Pascalian associa-
tions for Coste that he regarded it as inappropriate to signify the respectable
entity, the bearer of moral responsibility, that was the Lockean self. But by
1839 when a new French edition of Locke's Essay appeared, a "revised [and]
corrected" version of the Coste translation, Locke's "self" was routinely

31. See Locke, Essai philosophique concernant l'entendement humain, trans. by Pierre
Coste from the4thed. (Amsterdam: Henri Schlete, 1700),403 n •. I do not know whether Coste
is correct in attributing to Locke the coinage of the noun "self." In any case, Coste engaged in
other neologistic gestures in French, for example, translating Locke's "consciousness" as the
hyphenated con-science, instead of the ordinary conscience, in order to stress the Latin ety-
mology of the term and thus make Locke's meaning clearer; see 404 n •.
32. For the well-known passages about the moi in the Pensees, see Pascal, Oeuvres com-
pletes, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Gallimard/Pleiade, 1954), para.130, p. 1123 ("Le nature de
l'amour-propre et de ce moi humain est de n'aimer que soi et de ne considerer que soi ... ");
para.136, pp.l126-27 ("Le moi est hai:ssable ... "); para.443, p.l211 ("le moi consiste dans rna
pensee ... ").The rhetorical rule attributed to Pascal is found in Victor Cousin, Des Pensees de
Pascal, rapport al'Academie francaise sur Ia necessite d'une nouvelle edition de cette ouvrage
(Paris: Ladrange, 1843), 45, which also quotes Pascal as saying "Christian piety annihilates the
human moi" and "human civility hides and suppresses it." For a discussion of the annihilation
of the moi in Pascal's theology, see Henri Gouhier, Blaise Pascal: Conversion et apologetique
(Paris: Vrin, 1986),49-53.
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e 5 e If 101

rendered as the moi. This change no doubt owed a good deal to the Cousin-
ian philosophical revolution of the intervening decades. 33

THE COUSINIAN PHILOSOPHICAL OFFENSIVE

As he often noted, Victor Cousin articulated his brand of philosophy at a

critical moment in the history of France. Influenced by Hegel, whom he had
visited in Germany, and passionately convinced that all philosophical prac-
tice was historically situated, he never intended his own philosophy as
mere intellectual tinkering. Rather he conceived of it as a vehicle for there-
configuration of French society and politics in the wake of the upheavals of
the 1789 Revolution, a revolution whose liberal principles he basically af-
firmed but whose episodes of disorder he deplored. To the famous lament
about the origins of the Revolution, that it was "the fault of Voltaire, the
fault of Rousseau," Cousin would probably have made the emendation that
it was really the fault of Condillac and of the sensationalists in general. As
he wrote in 1826 of "that sad philosophy": "It is an incontestable fact that,
in eighteenth-century England and France, Locke and Condillac replaced
the great antecedent schools and that they have reigned supreme until to-
day. Instead of being irritated by that fact, we must try to understand it." 34
In Cousin's view, the unchallenged ascendancy of sensationalism had
the disastrous effect of eroding the moral verities that must, if society is to
remain stable, serve as a brake on human impulse. The precise source of that
erosion was the failure of sensationalism to ground a durable, unified self-
one that would bear moral responsibility both as a duty in this life and be-
cause its immortality would entail eternal punishment if it strayed. In the
Cousinian scheme of things, repairing the self by philosophical means was
therefore the linchpin in the project of the post-Revolutionary stabiliza-
tion of France.
Cousin's moi-centered philosophy was linked to his politics not only as
means to end; the two also shared formal analogies. After the demise of
Napoleon in 1815, Cousin belonged to a group of politician-philosophers, in-
cluding the future prime minister Fran\ois Guizot, who believed that the sta-
bility of France required ending the country's ideological polarization and
forging a deliberately middle-of-the-road path-a juste milieu-between

33. Oeuvres de Locke et de Leibnitz con tenant/' essai sur/' entendement humain, revised,
corrected, and annotated by M. F. Thurot (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1839). In bk. 2, chap. 27, compare
the different versions of. e.g., para. 23, last sentence (Thurot p. 203, Coste p. 418) and para. 24,
first sentence (Thurot p. 203, Coste p. 418).
a
34. Cousin, "Preface Ia premiere edition," Fragmens philosophiques, 2d ed. (Paris: Lad-
range, 1833), 1-50, at 3, 5.
102 JAN G 0 L D STEIN

the egalitarianism of the radical Revolution and the traditional hierarchies of

the Old Regime. In politics, this middlingness translated into a peculiarly cau-
tious and conservative brand of liberalism, one that was not only un-
abashedly antidemocratic but was as much concerned with using authority to
prevent excesses of liberty as with safeguarding liberty to begin with. As was
noted by Adolphe Franck (the first Jew to become a philosophy professor in
France and the faithful disciple of Cousin who undertook the editing of the
Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques and penned its article "Moi"), the
"mere name of democracy never reached [Cousin's] ears without causing
him obvious displeasure." 35 The counterpart of this juste-milieu political po-
sition was a philosophical position called rational spiritualism or, more usu-
ally, eclecticism. It aimed at harmonizing sensationalist philosophy in the
manner of Locke and Condillac, and especially its reliance on observation and
experience, with a rationalist philosophy that would restore the legitimacy of
ontology and metaphysics and thus reinsert human beings into a world of
stable, transcendent meanings. Both the political and the epistemological
prongs of this juste-milieu conception gained hegemonic status under the
July Monarchy (1830-48), the constitutional regime with a non-Bourbon
king and high property qualifications for voting that emblematized the will to
achieve durability through the reconciliation of opposites.
What is significant for our purposes is that, almost immediately upon
assuming a public role, Cousin began to hammer out his message about the
grandeur of the human moi and the inability of a sensationalist philosophy
to provide a foundation for that indispensable entity. Indeed, his fixation on
the moi surfaced from the moment he emerged as a public philosopher and,
simultaneously, as a charismatic professor who enraptured the new student
generation. 36 He made his entrance onto the public scene in December
1815, when he began a five-year stint as Royer-Collard's substitute as pro-
fessor of the history of modern philosophy at the Sorbonne. 37 His inau-

35. Adolphe Franck, "Victor Cousin," in Moralistes et philosophes (Paris: Didier, 1872),
291-321, esp. 304.All of the unsigned articles in the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques,
of which the article "Moi" was one, were written by Franck as editor of the compendium.
36. See Alan B. Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987), chap. 3, "Victor Cousin: The Professor as Guru." As one of Cousin's detractors de-
scribed his lecture style, "Monsieur Cousin ... speaks like a high priest; his rich intonation, his
mobile features, his weighty and cadenced diction, the painful childbirth of a thought that
seems to have gestated in his gut-everything he does favors the impression that he makes on
his audience." See Armand Marrast, Exam en critique du cours de philosophie de M. Cousin
(Le~on par Le~on) (Paris: Correard Jeune, 1828-29), 7.
37. See Cousin, Premiers essais de philosophie, 3d ed. (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1855).
This volume provides a version of the text of Cousin's Sorbonne lectures of 1815-16 as well as
course outline fragments for those of 1816-17. First published many years after the lectures
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e S e If 103

gurallecture had announced a course on the perception of external phe-

nomena. But after several classes on this subject Cousin quickly-and, no
doubt, all the more memorably-reversed direction and devoted the entire
year to the philosophical issue he regarded as "first both chronologically
and in importance, that of the moi and of personal existence." 38
The maiden course treated the history of philosophy exclusively
through this lens. Thus when Cousin turned to Condillac, he warned his
audience not to "expect any general consideration" of that philosopher or
of the eighteenth century. "I will limit myself ... to all the passages about
the moi that can be found in [Condillac's] writings." His criticism was
harsh. Condillac, he charged, "departs from a radically defective hypothe-
sis" and subsequently" gets lost in nihilism." He is able to make the self de-
pendent on something as flimsy and feeble as memory only by confusing it
with another concept, that of the self-identical self. After all, Cousin
pointed out, "memory returns to that which was; if there is nothing prior, it
is mute. It can say 'still me' only after an initial act of intelligence mingled
with consciousness has said 'me."' Cousin thus corrected Condillac by in-
sisting that the moi exists a priori, that it is already there at the first sensa-
tion and the first glimmerings of consciousness. Only its utter priority, its
foundational nature, enables a more highly elaborated entity, the self-iden-
tical moi that endures through space and time, to come into existence at the
moment of the second sensation. 39
The moi is a substance, Cousin furthermore insists, controverting
Condillac; but, pace Spinoza, it is not a substance that can be defined ax-
iomatically. "Metaphysics," Cousin states, "is not a part of mathematics. It
is instead a science of observation, like physics or the natural sciences."
Hence, Cousin's eclecticism will not be a simple reprise of the seventeenth-
century systems; it will return to metaphysics while inflecting it with the
modality of observation emphasized by the eighteenth-century empiri-
cists. Cousin's insistence on self-as-substance is also marshalled against
Condillac's definition of the self as a collection of sensations, a collection
that, Cousin says, paraphrasing Condillac, is located in an indeterminate
"somewhere" and is nothing but a "logical and grammatical subject," a
"sign" affixed to an assemblage of floating qualities that is "imagined" as a
subject. By contrast, Cousin's substantial self is no nebulous, jerry-built

were delivered, these materials were drawn, Cousin tells us, both from his own yellowing and
barely legible notes and from the notes taken by students; see "Avertissement de Ia 2e edition
de 1846," 1-2.
38. Cousin, Premiers essais, 24.
39. Ibid., 128-29,132, 134, 138.
104 JAN G 0 L D S T E IN

somewhere; as "common sense and the entire human race" attest, it is a

"real subject." 40
The core of Cousin's observationally based metaphysics, of that "so
sought-after alliance of metaphysical and physical science," was what he
called the "psychological method." Descriptions of that method lard his
teaching like incantations. Here is a description from 1826:
The psychological method consists in isolating oneself from any other world
but that of consciousness in order to establish and orient oneself there, where
everything is real but where the reality is exceedingly diverse and delicate.
The talent for the psychological consists in voluntarily inserting oneself into
this entirely interior world, in giving oneself to oneself as spectacle, and in re-
producing freely and distinctly all the phenomena [faits] that, in the circum-
stances of ordinary life, are thrown up only in an accidental and confused
manner.
The rule of this interior observation was totality: undertaken without bias,
observation "must be complete, must exhaust its object, and can be allowed
to stop only when there are no phenomena [faits]left to observe." No won-
der, then, that there were "many different levels of depth in the psycholog-
ical method," as years of practice had taught Cousin. 41 But the method had
led to at least one discovery of capital importance. In direct refutation of the
doctrine of the sensualistes, it had revealed that sensation and its deriva-
tives constituted only one of the categories of the so-called real contents of
consciousness. Distinct from and "impossible to confound with" sensation,
but equally incontestably real, were two additional components: volition
(which often existed in combat with sensation) and reason (which alone
was capable of supplying such concepts as substance, cause, time, space, and
unity). 42 The three components operated as a seamless ensemble, but they
could be teased apart by means of analysis. They were, Cousin noted in a
phrase heavy-handed in its neologizing as well as in its religious reference,
"a triplicity that resolves itself into a unity and a unity that develops into a
triplicity." 43
The psychological method was for Cousin the key to the philosophic en-
terprise not only because its supposed scientific rigor as an observational

40. Ibid., 134-36.

41. Cousin, "Preface aIa premiere edition," Fragmens philosophiques, 2d ed., 11-12.
42. Ibid., 13-14.
43. Cousin, Introduction al'histoire de Ia philosophie (Paris: Pichon & Didier, 1828), les-
son 5, p.15 (each of the lessons is separately paginated in this edition). He said much the same
thing two years earlier; see "Preface aIa premiere edition," Fragmens philosophiques, 2d ed.,
38.
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e S e If 105

practice lent it credibility and cachet in an early nineteenth-century intel-

lectual environment. The method, as the maitre construed it, also extended
well beyond itself, functioning (in another of his favorite phrases) as the
"vestibule" to ontology and metaphysics. 44 Indeed, Cousin contended, any
fledgling philosopher who began by scrutinizing his own consciousness
would soon learn that its so-called triplicity provided a map of the very
structure of the universe. "Ontology is given to us in its entirety at the same
time as psychology." The three internal elements of consciousness had
their external counterparts, voluntary activity translating into mankind,
sensibility into nature, and reason into God. 45 Delving deeply inside him-
self, then, the student of Cousinian philosophy would be quickly propelled
outward and upward, arriving at an intimate conviction of time-honored
verities.
But how was the moi related to the three distinct elements of conscious-
ness ?While Cousin did not pose the question so baldly in his earliest teach-
ings,46 by the mid-1820s he made it clear that volition was the stuff of
selfhood. "The will alone is the person or the moi," he announced in 1826,
only to reiterate a few sentences later, "Our personality is the will and noth-
ing more." 47 In contrast to those "movements that external agents deter-
mine in us, despite ourselves, we have the power to initiate a different kind
of movement," one that "in the eyes of consciousness, assumes a new char-
acter." We "impute [such a movement] to ourselves," consider ourselves as
its cause; indeed it serves for us as the very origin of the concept of cause. 48
Voluntary activity, be it spontaneous or reflective, is that element of con-
sciousness that we perceive as our own; it belongs to us. It exists in a "for-
eign world, amidst two orders of phenomena [the sensible and the rational]
that do not belong to us, that we can perceive only on the condition of sepa-
rating them from ourselves." 49
The motif of belonging and not belonging was one that Cousin mined

44. For the vestibule metaphor, see, e.g., Cousin, Introduction ii l'histoire de Ia philosophie,
lesson 13, p. 14. Two years earlier, Cousin employed a slightly different version of the
metaphor: "Psychology is thus the condition for and, as it were, the vestibule of philosophy";
see Fragmens philosophiques, "Preface aIa premiere edition," 12.
45. Cousin, "Preface aIa premiere edition," Fragmens philosophiques, 2d ed., 39.
46. See "Du fait de conscience," a brief excerpt from Cousin's 1817 Sorbonne course,
reprinted in his Fragmens philosophiques, 2d ed., 242-52. This text discusses the three com-
ponents of consciousness but does not explicitly locate the term moi with respect to them.
Cousin does, however, indulge his predilection for the Fichtean term non-moi as a synonym
for the external world as known through sensation.
47. "Preface aIa premiere edition," Fragmens philosophiques, 2d ed., 17.
48. Ibid., 25.
49. Ibid., 17.
106 JAN G 0 L D STEIN

extensively. It formed the basis of his celebrated concept of "impersonal

reason." 50 As he instructed the students in his 1828 course, "Your intelli-
gence is not free .... You do not constitute your reason, and it does not be-
long to you." There was nothing "less individual" or "less personal" than
reason. If the products of reason were merely personal, imposing them on
others "would be an exaggerated form of despotism." Instead, the "univer-
sal and absolute nature" of reason obliged everyone to bend to its dictates.
We are entirely within our rights when "we declare entirely crazy (en
de lire) those who do not accept the truths of arithmetic or the difference be-
tween beauty and ugliness, justice and injustice." 51 In other words, Cousin
deployed the claim that reason does not "belong to us" (but rather to God)
as a powerful argument in favor of common standards and values and
against the kind of social and political contestation that bred instability and
revolution.
Conversely, the claim that voluntary activity, or the moi, did indeed "be-
long to us" provided Cousin with an equally powerful argument in favor of
private property. It is worth noting that both Locke and Cousin provided a
philosophical blueprint of the self with reference to its legal implications.
Locke's forensic reference was, as discussed above, the criminal law. He em-
phasized the pragmatic need to postulate a continuous self-identical self to
ensure the just punishment of wrongdoers. Cousin's forensic reference
was, on the other hand, the civil law. He stressed the inextricable inter-
twinement of the theory of the self with the right to private property.
As Cousin declared in his 1818-19 Sorbonne lectures on the history of
moral philosophy, the" first and most intimate development of the free moi
is thought; all thought, considered within the bounds of the individual
sphere, is sacred." Its quality of inviolability derived from the transfer to it
of an essential quality of the self-that it belongs to us. Thus, in keeping
with the principle that "our original property is ourselves, our moi,"
Cousin asserts that the "first act of free, personal thought is the first act of
property." This rhetorical move then enabled him to make sweeping asser-
tions about property in general. Property was not, he assured his student
audience, based upon mere convention; after all, conventions could be an-
nulled by the parties who had agreed to them. Rather it was founded on a
"superior principle-that of the sanctity of liberty." Property consisted in
the "free imposition of the personality," that is, of volitional activity, "on

50. "Reason is impersonal by its nature," Cousin declared; see ibid., 18. One of Cousin's
students, who wrote an entire book on impersonal reason, regarded it as among Cousin's" glo-
ries" as well as the "link uniting the whole eclectic school"; see Francisque Bouillier, Theorie de
Ia raison impersonnelle (Paris: Joubert, 1844), ii, iv.
51. Cousin, Introduction al'histoire de Ia philosophie, lesson 5, pp. 9-10; emphasis added.
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e S e If 107

things." Once acquired, those things "participate in some manner in my

personality." They obtain rights by this relationship m, what is the same
thing, "I have rights in them," so that "by augmenting [my] property, [I]
extend the circle of [my] rights." The natural right to property thus rested
on the principle of human liberty, and that natural right in turn became in-
stitutionalized as a right protected by civil law. 5 2
To sum up, private property was for Cousin not only rooted in and pro-
tected by the homologous structures of the human psyche and the universe
but was also an arena of distinctly human self-development: nowhere more
than in its gloss on property do eclectic philosophy and its conception of the
moi appear so clearly as a justification for the bourgeois order. The urgent
intensity of the eclectic need to shore up property can be seen by comparing
Cousin's argument with those of Locke and of Destutt de Tracy, the fore-
most representative the post- Revolutionary brand of sensationalism called
Ideologie.
In his late seventeenth-century Second Treatise of Government, Locke
also derived the right of private property from the contention that" every
Man has a Property in his own Person." But his understanding of the per-
son in this context was a corporeal rather than a spiritual or psychological
one ("The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are
property"), and he cast his whole discussion in terms of man's natural right
to physical self-preservation. While an unambiguous advocate of private
property, Locke did not attempt to depict ownership as a spiritual desidera-
tum; nor did he return to the issue in his Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing in order to treat it from a psychological angle. 53
In an argument quite similar to and nearly contemporaneous with
Cousin's, Destutt de Tracy did derive private property from human psy-
chology and, in particular, from the will. But that will was itself a rather
more contingent affair than it was in the eclectic system, being itself a con-
sequence of the prior capacity for sensation. Destutt insisted that the capac-
ity for sensation was originary.It was "that beyond which we cannot go,"
and as such it was the same thing as us," the existence of the moi and the
11
II

sensitivity of the moi" being simply identical. Hence, to regard one's will II

as the equivalent of oneself is to take the part for the whole." Destutt even
entertained the possibility that a being endowed with sensitivity but lack-
ing a will could have individuality or personality; but such a being, he

52. Cousin, Cours d'histoire de Ia phi/osophie morale au 18e siecle, professe aIa Faculte
des Lettres en 1819 et 1820, ed. E. Vacherot (Paris: Ladrange, 1841), 11-13.
53. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 5th ed. (London, 1728), 159-61,172 (chap.
5, paras. 25-27,44, of the Second Treatise).
108 JAN G 0 L D S T E IN

opined, could never come up with the idea of property. On the other hand,
once the sensory capacity had generated a will, the idea of property would
be born "necessarily and inevitably in all its plenitude." 54 In other words,
Ideologues like Destuttwere entirely committed to the idea of private prop-
erty, but they thought that idea sufficiently hardy that it did not need the
fortress like protection of an a priori moi nor of a tripartite division of con-
sciousness replicated in the structure of the universe as a whole.
Let me conclude this section on a rather speculative note. During his fre-
quent sessions of interior observation, Cousin had perceived voluntary ac-
tivity, or the moi, inevitably present in consciousness as its center.
(According to the typically metaphor-laden formula that he offered, "The
sensibility is the external condition of consciousness, the will is its center,
and the reason is the source of light.") 55 He thus believed that he had em-
pirical evidence for rejecting Condillac's conception of consciousness as an
empty space awaiting the random entrance of sensory experience. "Con-
sciousness," he asserted, "is not a deserted stage where the events of the in-
tellectual life occur while someone in the pit [parterre] contemplates
them." Because of the continual presence of the moi, "the audience is, so to
speak, onstage." 56
But what would consciousness be like in the absence of the controlling
center provided by this a priori moi?What, in other words, if a strictly sen-
sationalist model of consciousness obtained? Such a decentered conscious-
ness would be a shifting series of disconnected images and sensory traces, a
kind of phantasmagoria. In fact, the term phantasmagoria, so formally con-
sistent with the sensationalist construction of mental experience but lend-
ing a touch of horror to it, was a neologism of this period. It was coined in
French by a Belgian physicist, student of optics, and showman, Etienne-
Gaspard Robertson, who presented his first fantasmagorie in Paris in 1796.
The term referred to a lugubrious and terrifying form of entertainment, a
public exhibition of optical illusions that were produced chiefly by means of
a magic lantern and billed to the audience as spectral apparitions of the dead.
So overwhelmingly popular did phantasmagorias become that they soon
sprang up everywhere in Paris. 5 7 And, to judge from Stendhal's account,

54. Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy, Traite de Ia volonte et de ses effets, 2d ed.

(Paris: Courcier, 1818; reprint, Geneva and Paris: Slatkine Reprints, 1984), 49, 60-63,66-67.
55. Cousin, "Preface ala premiere edition," Fragmens philosophiques, 2d ed., 18.
56. Cousin, "Du fait de conscience," 245.
57. On the history of the phantasmagoria, see Terry Castle, "Phantasmagoria and the
Metaphorics of Modern Reverie," in The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture
and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 140-67, esp.
144-55. Castle's interest in the phantasmagoria as evidence of the "displaced supernatural-
ism" of the post-Enlightenment period is quite different from my interest here; but she
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e 5 e If 109

they played an important role in the provinces as well. 58 The public fascina-
tion with the phantasmagoria might have been, at least in part, an unreflec-
tive version of Cousin's philosophical recoil from sensationalism. That is to
say, the lantern show might have been on some level perceived as a concrete
representation of the empiricist model of the mind; but in this rendition,
the string of projections on an empty screen was far from reassuring. It pro-
duced in the public a frisson of horror, conjuring up a world of hallucina-
tions and feverish delusions, a world gone out of control. Cousin did not, to
my knowledge, use the term "phantasmagoria" to describe and express his
distate for the phenomenology of the Condillacian mind, but he did use that
term to mean the opposite of his supremely ordered eclectic system. Speak-
ing of the sensationalist philosophy of the eighteenth century, which,
though misguided, still had its place in the larger scheme of things, Cousin
commented, "The apologia for a century is in its existence, for its existence
is a decree and a judgment of God, or else history is nothing but an insignif-
icant phantasmagoria." 59

INSTITUTIONALIZING THE COUSINIAN SELF

If Cousin had merely articulated his doctrine of the moi in books and lec-
tures, it would not be entirely clear why he rather than, say, Condillac
would deserve the credit for bringing the self-as-moi into being as a scien-
tificobject. There are, I think, two main reasons for Cousin's unambiguous
salience in this endeavor. The first is the pivotal place of the moi in his phi-
losophy as compared with its decidedly minor role in Condillac's. (If any
further proof of the latter contention is needed, it should be noted that
Condillac's Dictionnaire des synonymes includes an entry for "arne" but
none for "moi.") 60 The second and by far the more important reason is the
currency acquired by the Cousinian moi as a result of its creator's com-
bined vocation for philosophy and bureaucracy. The maftre succeeded in
institutionalizing his grandiose version of the self in the curriculum of the
state educational system, an achievement never matched by the sensa-

nonetheless notes (p. 144) the formal correspondence between the phantasmagoria and the
empiricist model of the mind.
58. See Mimoires d'un touriste (1838) in Oeuvres completes (Geneva: Cercle du Biblio-
phile, 1968), 15:44-45, where Stendhal describes a locally celebrated episode in a small town
in the Nivernais that took place between 1815 and 1820 at a soiree at which Robertson pre-
sented his phantasmagoria.
59. Cousin, "Preface aIa premiere edition," Fragmens philosophiques, 4.
60. Le Roy, ed., Oeuvres philosophiques de Condillac, vol. 3. The Dictionnaire was not
published during Condillac's lifetime but was found in manuscript among his papers.
110 JAN G0 LD STEI N

tionalists and their modest, pared-down self. To be sure, the sensationalist

Ideologues had their moment in the sun under the Directory (1795-99),
when they were put in charge of formulating a curriculum for the new
central schools, designed as the republican replacement for the Jesuit col-
leges of the Old Regime. For this purpose they created a master course in
"general grammar" that was really a course in Condillac's epistemology
and theory of language. The voluminous archive generated by the revolu-
tionary government in its effort to ascertain the degree to which pedagog-
ical practice in the central schools corresponded to the founders' ideals
indicates that at least one professor of general grammar-the one sta-
tioned in the remote region of the Basses Pyrenees-included Condillac's
conception of the self in his lesson plans. 61 But whether or not this Ideo-
logue pedagogical experiment gave much attention to the sensationalist
concept of the moi, the experiment itself was of notably short duration.
The central schools fell with the Directory, to be supplanted by lycees un-
der Napoleon.
The lycees, of course, proved a far more lasting educational innovation,
and it was Cousin's great administrative feat to have acquired enough con-
trol over them at a formative phase that he could firmly install his eclectic
philosophy centered on the moi. In fact, during the period of the constitu-
tional monarchy, Cousin set up a formidable educational machine. At the
Ecole Normale and the Sorbonne, he trained a "philosophical regiment"
that obtained academic employment and carried his message(" our cause")
throughout the provinces. His position as president of the national jury of
the philosophy agregation further strengthened his gatekeeper role in phi-
losophy teaching in France. And perhaps most significantly, as a member of
the Conseil royal de !'instruction publique, he authored an 1832 decree that
added a subject called "psychology" to the standard lycee course in philos-
ophy, giving it pride of place as the first substantive section. 62 Henceforth
the youth of France, or more precisely the male bourgeois youth who alone
attended the lycees, would be instructed about the dynamic, action-initiat-
ing moi that was always already there and would learn the meticulous in-

61. See Archives Nationales, Paris, F171344/3, reply of Germain Baradere, professor of
general grammar at the Central School of the Department of the Basses-Pyrenees, to the min-
isterial circular of the Year 7. The reply includes his manuscript, "Cours de Grammaire
Generale: 1ere an nee," which presents (ms. p.48) an account of the self drawn from Condillac's
Essai and Trait e. While I did not make an exhaustive study of these archives, my impression is
that the moi was an infrequent item in the lesson plans submitted and that Baradere was more
the exception than the rule.
62. Archives Nationales, Paris, f17• 1795, "Proces-verbaux des deliberations du Conseil
royal de !'instruction publique," 28 September 1832, fols. 434-36.
 Mutations of the Self 111

trospective techniques required to explore it directly. They would thus

presumably come to identify themselves as possessors of such a moi or, in
another standard Cousinian locution, as bearers of the" sentiment of per-
sonality."
Moreover, the hegemonic power of Cousinianism over the philosophy
curriculum of the lycees proved extraordinarily durable, persisting at least
until the end of the nineteenth century. A reform of the curriculum in 1880
might have been expected to unseat the Cousinian moi from the instruc-
tional program, given the strong positivist affiliations of the newly repub-
licanized Third Republic and its anticlerical distaste for metaphysics. But,
through a combination of institutional inertia and the "fit" between eclec-
ticism and generic French bourgeois values, the moi survived the change in
political climate and retained its old curricular centrality. 63
Among Cousin's entourage, the moi passed readily from psychology
and metaphysics into other discursive contexts, adding to the domains in
which it functioned as a scientific object. In his history lectures at the Sor-
bonne in the 1820s, later to become the best-selling History of Civilization
in Europe, Fran~ois Guizot ascribed the" sentiment of personality" to those
individuals whose actions he deemed decisive in moving along the meta-
narrative of liberal progress. Guizot's rhetoric thus posited a strong moi as
one of the explanatory factors in the unfolding ofhistory. 64
Similarly, Cousin's student Theodore Jouffroy marshalled the senti-
ment of personality in support of an aesthetic theory. Objects move us aes-
thetically, he asserted, by "their invisible element," by the force in them
similar to and therefore able to address the" force that animates us-that is
to say, [human consciousness] endowed with the three principal attributes
of sensibility, intelligence, and freedom." It is by reference to this trio that
we distinguish the merely agreeable from the beautiful and the beautiful
from the sublime. For example, the spontaneous movements of a woman

63. The brunt of the 1880 reform of the philosophy curriculum was variously interpreted
at the time; according to some accounts, the moi may have lost some of its privileged status as
an a priori entity. See my discussion of this matter in "Saying T: Victor Cousin, Caroline
Angebert, and the Politics of Selfhood in Nineteenth-Century France," in Rediscovering His-
tory: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche, ed. Michael S. Roth (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1994), 321-35.As I stress there, the moi survived in the lycees for boys but was deliber-
ately omitted from the curriculum of the newly created lycees for girls.
64. Fran.,ois Guizot, Histoire de Ia civilisation en Europe (Paris: Didier, 1846), 58-59. Here
Guizot credits the German barbarian invaders with having introduced one of the "fundamen-
tal elements" of modern European civilization: "le plaisir de se sentir homme, le sentiment de
Ia personnalite, de Ia spontaneite humaine dans son libre developpement." By the twelfth cen-
tury the burghers in the towns will have picked up this sentiment ("Ia volonte individuelle se
deployant dans toute son energie") from the feudal seigneurs; see 195-96.
112 JA N G0 LD STEIN

are childlike and obey the impulsions of the passions, but they" do not give
us the idea of a free force that understands its goal and heads toward it."
Such movements therefore strike us as agreeable and nothing more. To ac-
quire either beauty or sublimity, movements must express psychological
attributes other than mere sensibility. "Only in face of the spectacle of a
man who develops himself with intelligence and freedom, who pursues
with his freedom the goal that he identifies with his intelligence, ... can the
beautiful and the sublime appear." The fundamental difference between the
latter two lies in their relationship to struggle and, hence, in the quality of
the sentiment of personality that they disclose. Sublimity attaches to the
"idea of a free, intelligent force struggling against obstacles that impede its
development," beauty to the idea of that same force" arriving at its goal eas-
ily and without effort." In other words, Jouffroy continues, what we label
sublime evokes its characteristically intense aesthetic response because it
provides an especially pure, strong, and concentrated expression of the sen-
timent of personality. By contrast, "there is in the development of a force
operating with ease" -and that we consequently experience only as beau-
tiful-"a self-forgetfulness [oubli de soi-meme] entirely contrary to the
sentiment of personality that dominates us when we develop ourselves
painfully." In the hierarchy of aesthetic responses according to Jouffroy, the
peak is attainable only in the presence of a distilled manifestation of the
moi. 65

THE COMING INTO BEING OF A SCIENTIFIC OBJECT:

SOME REFLECTIONS

The Cousinian moi was a very particular and almost paradoxical kind of
self, one capable of sublimity yet at the same time carefully circumscribed.
Defined as an entirely individual will and a personal principle of activity
that could impose itself on inanimate matter, its options for titanic self-
making were nonetheless severely limited by the ontology to which it was
attached. Radically free and capable of profound introspection, its life's
journey would be one of quasi-comic deflation. For the grandiose moi was
destined to be thoroughly unoriginal, to rediscover and take as its guide the
eternal verities about The True, the Beautiful, and the Good described in
Cousin's lectures of that title, which became the official philosophy text-

65. Jouffroy, Cours d'esthetique, ed. Ph. Damiron (Paris: Hachette, 1843), lesson 14, esp.
pp. 315-18. As noted in Damiron's preface, these lectures were given by Jouffroy as a private
course to some twenty to twenty-five young people on the rue du Four in 1826-that is, dur-
ing the period when the Restoration monarchy had banned the eclectics from public instruc-
tion.
 Mutations of the Self 113

book in France for most of the nineteenth century. 66 In short, the Cousin-
ian combination of "personal will" and "impersonal reason" flattered the
possessor of the rnoi that he enjoyed a thrilling degree of individuality and
efficacy yet at the same time guaranteed that he would not rock the boat.
A rnoi replete with such contradictions clearly corresponded in manifold
ways to its historical moment, which I will take for these purposes to be the
aftermath of the 1789 Revolution, the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the
socially and politically dominant class, and its deep fear of renewed revolu-
tion. The bourgeois, unaccustomed to his new leadership role and anxious
about his capabilities, needed a" sense of self." In part, this was furnished by
a bevy of social practices that constituted him as an object of deference, a
man to be reckoned with. But the equally important linguistic aspect of that
sense of self-that is, a precise vocabulary of robust selfhood-was sup-
plied by the Cousin ian discourse on the rnoi that he imbibed in adolescence
at the lycee.
Still, a bourgeoisie fearful of renewed revolution and eager to restore
consensus could not afford to produce a race of willful heroes, even among
its own membership. Hence it was appropriate that the Cousin ian rnoi come
into the world already anchored in an ontology and foreordained to em-
brace the blandest of value systems. Religious politics also helped to shape
this self. The project of reestablishing social stability required that the old
principles attached to the Catholic soul-moral responsibility, immortal-
ity, and eternal punishment for serious transgression-be revived and that
the sensationalist version of the self, smacking of materialism and moral
unaccountability, be eradicated. But since the Church was a pillar of the pre-
1789 order, the religious roots of those reassuring principles had also to be
played down. Thus Cousinian discourse spoke garrulously of the rnoi, a
thoroughly secular term, and painstakingly distinguished that entity from
its predecessor, the arne, which was awash in religious connotations.
As part of the process by which the Cousinian rnoi gained discursive cur-
rency in nineteenth-century France, a new social division of labor took
place. The cleric continued as the caretaker of the arne. The biomedical sci-
entist took firm charge of physiological researches. The professor of philos-
ophy emerged as a new social type. 67 Entrusted with inculcating the secular
but resolutely nonmaterial rnoi, he also claimed the right to monitor the

66. On Cousin's textbook Du vrai, du beau et du bien, see Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-
1945,2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973-77) 2:409.
67. On the role of Cousin in bringing about the professionalization of philosophy in
France by making possible the secure, full-time employment of philosophy specialists in the
lycees and arts faculties, seeR. R. Bolgar, "Victor Cousin and Nineteenth-Century Education,"
Cambridge ]ourna/2 (1949); 357-68, esp. 358-59.
114 JAN GOLDSTEIN

biomedical sciences in order to keep them from overstepping their limits

and attempting to reduce mind to body. A new professional man staffing the
national educational system created by the Revolution, the philosophy
professor thus embodied the middlingness of all eclecticism, in this case by
representing and trying to keep ascendant the middle term between reli-
gion and biomedical science.
Both by its internal intellectual features and by the mode of its institu-
tionalization, the Cousinian moi also participated in creating critical dis-
tinctions within the new bourgeois order, especially distinctions of gender
and class. The reader will probably have already noted the gender implica-
tions of Cousin's psychological theory, which are writ large in the passage
from Jouffroy's aesthetics discussed above. Within the parameters of the
tripartite Cousinian consciousnesss, women are assigned to the realm of
sensibility; their movements can therefore be at best no more than agree-
able. Men, inhabiting the realm of reason and will, are by contrast capable of
movements that reveal a sentiment of personality and can therefore strike
the beholder as beautiful or even sublime. This gender bias was to some ex-
tent built into eclectic psychology through Cousin's reliance on the binary
opposition between activity (the quality par excellence of the will) and pas-
sivity (the quality par excellence of sensitive matter, which awaits a form-
imposing will) and through the presumed operationalization of that binary
opposition in the mechanics of human sexual reproduction. The maitre
thus implicitly divided the world into the sectors of man-activity-rational-
ity-culture and woman-passivity-feeling-nature, additionally positing as
an axiom the superiority of the former sector over the latter. This strategy,
a nineteenth-century intellectual commonplace, dovetailed nicely with the
domestic ideology-that is, the relegation of women to home and family,
the reservation to men of the public spheres of work and politics-that
everywhere in Europe and America accompanied the ascension of the bour-
geoisie.68
At the same time that Cousinian eclecticism reinforced and rationalized
a hierarchical relationship between male and female, it reinforced and ra-
tionalized a distinction between the working class and the bourgeoisie be-
fitting its obdurate opposition to democracy. Here Cousin's typology of the
principle of personal mental activity was key: that principle, he stipulated,

68. But as Caroline Angebert, an autodidact female admirer and critic of Cousin, aptly
pointed out to the maftre in the late 1820s, the eclectic philosophy, which zealously affirmed
the mind-body distinction against sensationalists and physiologists, should therefore have af-
firmed the disembodied nature of mental attributes; it was by no means logically wedded to
the principle of the intellectual inferiority of women. Angebert's correspondence with and
criticism of Cousin is discussed at length in my essay, "Saying 'I.'"
 M u t a t i o n s of t h e S e l f 115

could be either "spontaneous" or "reflective." 69 Hence everyone had a moi

in principle and, to some degree, in practice; but every moi was not equiva-
lent to every other moi. Only in an elite minority would the moi be
detached by reflection from the "primitive synthesis" of elements of con-
sciousness in which it was ordinarily fused? 0 In the vast majority of people,
on the other hand, the mental activity that was the spiritual endowment of
all human beings would remain in an aggregated, inarticulate, and" sponta-
neous" condition. 71 It was in fact along this axis of spontaneity or reflec-
tion, fusion or delineation of the elements of consciousness, that Cousin
located "the sole difference possible" among people. 72
Evidently (although Cousin left this implicit), the reflective possessors
of a strong sentiment of personality became the ruling class, the sponta-
neously inspired masses became the ruled. But whether or not one was a
bourgeois male who had gone to the lycee to learn philosophy and to hone
his moi, one was intimately bound by the moral truths that the psycholog-
ical method and its resultant ontology revealed. As Cousin pointed out in a
pamphlet called Popular Philosophy that he wrote immediately after the
bloody working-class insurrection of June 1848, there were two sorts of
philosophy," one artificial and learned, reserved for the few, the other nat-
ural and human, for everyone's use." Although the latter, which springs
from" the spontaneous suggestions of consciousness" rather than the exer-
cise of reflection, lacked the specialized scientific vocabulary of the former,
the basic contents of the two were identical: the distinction between mind
and body, the moral freedom of human beings to choose between good and
evil, the existence of God?3 The working class might, in other words, have
fewer capacities than the bourgeoisie, but there could be no doubt that it op-
erated within the same constraints.
The Cousinian moi thus corresponded neatly to a quite detailed sociopo-
litical agenda-that of a conservative brand of nineteenth-century liberal-

69. See, e.g., Cousin, "Preface a Ia premiere edition," Fragmens philosophiques, 2d ed.,
pp. 27-29, a passage that concludes, "Search as hard as we might, we will find no other modes
of action. AI! the real forms of activity are covered by reflection and spontaneity."
70. Cousin, Introduction al'histoire de Ia philosophie, lesson 5, pp. 39-40.
71. Cousin, "Preface aIa premiere edition," Fragmens philosophiques, 2d ed., 45. The pas-
sage reads: "Now in my view, the mass of humanity is spontaneous and not reflective; human-
ity is inspired. The divine breath that is always and everywhere in it reveals all truths to it in
one or another form ... Spontaneity is the genius of human nature, reflection is the genius of
certain men."
72. Ibid. Cousin made the same point in Introduction al'histoire de philosophie, lesson 5,
pp.39-40.
73. Victor Cousin, Philosophie populaire, suivie de Ia premiere partie de Ia profession de
foi du vicaire savoyard ... (Paris: Pagnerre, 1848), 1-14, quote at 2.
116 JAN G 0 L D 5 T E IN

ism dedicated to the empowerment of the male bourgeoisie and the protec-
tion of its property. This moi came into being as a scientific object charged
with multiple extrascientific roles, including the demarcation of a "self-
possessed" ruling class from the" unselved" masses of workers and women.
The use of the ordinary personal pronoun to designate this self secularized
it without democratizing it. In order to constitute what Michel Foucault
felicitously named the "everyday individuality of everybody," the nine-
teenth century relied not on elite, state-sponsored instruction in philoso-
phy, but on another aspect of the so-called disciplinary regimen: the
individual, data-filled dossiers that resulted from the sustained, scientific
observation of the occupants of hospitals, asylums, primary schools, and
prisons? 4

74. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Pantheon, 1977), 191-93, quote at 191. The phrase is in fact rather more felicitous
in Sheridan's English translation than in Foucault's original: "l'individualite quelconque-
celle d'en bas et de toutle monde." See Surveiller et punir: Naissance de Ia prison (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1975), 193.