The Art of Moving
“The Art of Moving” turns to an eighteenth-century culture of the sentiments, traditionally seen in strong contrast to a Renaissance culture of the passions. I argue instead that, from the standpoint of rhetoric, the discourses on affectivity from 1500 to 1800 constitute parts of a single, unfolding process. The chapter traces the influence of rhetoric on Shaftesbury, Hume, and Smith, arguing that empiricist models of the mind are built on a rhetorical concern with vivid, forceful, and passionate imagery, and that such models effectively introject a rhetorical scene into the mind. The chapter then turns to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa—traditionally the exemplary instance of a new, “psychological” fiction—in order to argue that the novel’s psychology is in fact an externalist, rhetorical one that resists any clear distinction between character-driven and plot-driven fictions. Richardson’s novel opens up a series of concerns that reach deep into the material of both this chapter and the previous one: about post-Hobbesian accounts of the will as determined by passions; about circumstantial narrative as a means of not just representing but also exploiting that determination; about empiricism collapsing into a Gorgian rhetoric in which the very effort to promote an ethics of natural sentiment introduces a quasi-mechanistic model of the human being. In its final pages, the chapter turns to Smith’s lectures on rhetoric and Giambattista Vico’s New Science to argue that, between 1600 and 1800, literary history was becoming legible as the material of a cultural history of the passions.