Coda

By discussing the works of Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Herder, and Kant, this book presented a number of case studies that endorse the idea that the kind of experience that is at play in many early modern accounts is best thought of as embodied. To acknowledge that the body plays this role matters not only because it helps us to correct a misconception of what the early modern concept of experience stands for, by highlighting that this concept cannot be comprehended if understood in purely subjectivist terms. It also enables us to break free from an overly narrow focus on epistemic questions that are typically investigated when conceiving of experience as something that captures the nature of one’s own thinking and feeling, but not how things outside the mind really are....

Diversifying Method

By investigating Kant’s anthropology, this chapter presents him as a thinker who was firmly committed to a conception of the human being as shaped by its situatedness in the empirical world of history and culture. However, due to Kant’s own methodological constraints, he could recognize this situatedness only if approached through a deterministic framework that traces the causes and effects of the laws of nature. Human freedom here becomes almost unrecognizable, which makes it necessary for us to acknowledge the systematic nature of Kant’s general “scientific” enterprise. This enterprise employs different methodological strategies and disciplines that all in their own way clarify what it means to be human: a creature that is able to know and understand, but also able to act freely. Kant’s anthropology appeals to us in our capacity to act, thereby performing a function his theoretical sciences fail to cover.

Manipulated Sensibilities

Chapter 4 discusses Rousseau’s attack on d’Alembert’s proposal to introduce the theater in Geneva. What comes to the fore in this controversy is that, for Rousseau, it is important to comprehend human nature as part of the societal structures within which this nature is placed. If approached from this perspective, it becomes clear that Rousseau’s normative considerations about what society should look like set the stage for what he understands as a “natural” trait that is worth being cultivated. To draw out this paradoxical understanding of what counts as natural, the chapter analyzes some of the hidden assumptions of Rousseau’s educational program that revolve around the specifically different roles of female and male citizens within civic society.

Locke’s Experiential Persons

The second chapter examines Locke’s account of self-formation as it is presented in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). It will be argued that, for Locke, the evaluative perspective that arises when confronted with other people’s expressions of praise and blame crucially underpins the human capacity to think of themselves as persons. The second half of this chapter applies the results of this discussion to Locke’s account of personhood, as developed in the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694). The aim of this is to demonstrate that even here it holds that the contents of what figures in our self-conception as persons are determined by the actions we perform in the publicly accessible domain.

Moral Reflection as Perception

This chapter argues that Hume’s account of moral reflection enables us to understand that, for him, even sophisticated cognitive capacities arise and evolve as a result of complex experiential patterns. The experiential patterns that matter to Hume’s discussion on moral reflection are established through the mind’s sympathetic connectedness with other persons’ feelings and thoughts, as well as through the capacity to sympathetically connect with historically and culturally diverse settings. The analysis of these complex sympathetic dynamics will demonstrate that, for Hume, the artifices of human life “naturally” impact on our moral development, so that the traditional contrast between nature and artifice, which shapes much of the debate of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, needs to be rethought.

Affect and Imagination in Processes of Cognition

This chapter discusses Herder’s uptake of Hume’s account of sympathy to demonstrate that the capacity to connect with the thoughts and feelings of other people not only matters with respect to moral questions, as in Hume, but also with respect to the possibility of acquiring a better understanding of the world. The crucial reason for this is that, on Herder’s account, our imagination-driven sympathetic engagements provide us with quasi-experiences that mimic what we would feel if we were present in the situation under consideration. Such quasi-experiences can then be used to generate new conceptual tools that enable us to understand situational contexts genuinely different from our own. Through this account, Herder introduces a type of imagination-driven experience that possesses a genuinely epistemic function in addition to its acknowledged moral function.

Experience and Cartesian Agency

Chapter 1 investigates Descartes’s account of the union of body and mind and the confusion that he takes to characterize our understanding of what we are when reflecting on the roles body and mind perform in our lives as human beings. To clarify this confusion, this chapter argues, a specific form of experience is needed, one that enables us to self-determine our thinking and acting. This experience is delivered by the Meditations, as this work’s confronting nature stirs us into action and thereby enables us to explore in a performative exercise what it means to guide one’s thinking by willful determination. Through this new experience, we can better comprehend what the mind is and what it enables us to do, thereby learning to put into practice the conduct of virtuous agents.

Introduction

This chapter illustrates how the three parts of the book relate to one another and jointly reinforce the claim that the early modern concept of experience is best understood as representing an embodied form of experience that raises questions about the possibility of self-determined agency. It elaborates on the background of the early modern debate and discusses some objections to the claim that experience is a concept that refers to our embodied existence in the world, while outlining how the suggested approach breaks with some of the common interpretative paradigms. This discussion is followed by a detailed overview of the individual chapters of the book.

Natural History and the Formation of the Human Being

Chapter 6 compares Herder’s and Kant’s accounts of history and how it serves to present humans as part of nature. For Herder, it holds that humans have history because they have reason, while he conceives of reason as a capacity that emerges out of nature itself; human history thereby turns into a subchapter of a general history of nature. For Kant, reason stands outside of nature. Since this is so, Kant also holds that empirical investigations, which build on what we can experience in the realm of nature, necessarily fail to explicate what is crucial about human existence: namely that humans are governed by the capacity to be rational and free. More generally, this comparison reveals that changing conceptions of what human reason is, and where it comes from, motivated a change in the methods deemed suitable for the study of human existence.