Before imagination became the transcendent and creative faculty promoted by the Romantics, it was for something quite different. Not reserved to a privileged few, imagination was instead considered a universal ability that each person could direct in practical ways. To imagine something meant to form in the mind a replica of a thing—its taste, its sound, and other physical attributes. At the end of the Renaissance, there was a movement to encourage individuals to develop their ability to imagine vividly. Within their private mental space, a space of embodied, sensual thought, they could meditate, pray, or philosophize. Gradually, confidence in the self-directed imagination fell out of favor and was replaced by the belief that the few—an elite of writers and teachers—should control the imagination of the many.
This book seeks to understand what imagination meant in early modern Europe, particularly in early modern France, before the Romantic era gave the term its modern meaning. The author explores the themes surrounding early modern notions of imagination (including hostility to imagination) through the writings of such figures as Descartes, Montaigne, François de Sales, Pascal, the Marquise de Sévigné, Madame de Lafayette, and Fénelon.

John D. Lyons is Commonwealth Professor of French at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Tragedy of Origins: Tragedy and History in the Work of Pierre Corneille (Stanford University Press, 1996).

Before Imagination

EMBODIED THOUGHT FROM MONTAIGNE TO ROUSSEAUBy John D. Lyons

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2005 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5110-0

Contents

Preface......................................................................................ixAcknowledgments..............................................................................xviiIntroduction.................................................................................11. The Return of Stoic Imagination...........................................................322. Self-Cultivation and Religious Meditation.................................................613. Picturing Ourselves in the World: Pascal's Penses........................................944. The Imagination of Loss...................................................................1225. From Imagination to Significance: The Novel from Scudry to Lafayette.....................1486. How the Ancients Modernized Imagination...................................................179Conclusion...................................................................................206Notes........................................................................................209Bibliography.................................................................................257Index........................................................................................279

Chapter One

The Return of Stoic Imagination

"There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge," wrote Montaigne to begin "Of experience"(III, 13), the final chapter of his Essays. There is little doubt that Montaigne's combination of the drive to know and of corrosive doubt set in motion an important current of modern European philosophy. Descartes and Pascal, careful readers of Montaigne, took up the challenge of his skepticism and, in attempting to confront and overcome radical doubt, laid the basis for several branches of modern thought. Richard Rorty writes that "The 'epistemological turn' taken by Descartes might not have captured Europe's imagination had it not been for a crisis of confidence in established institutions, a crisis expressed paradigmatically in Montaigne." Sketching the history of epistemology, Gilles Granger echoes thetitleofMontaigne'sessaytodesignateacrucialproblemsofpost-Cartesian epistemology, "The role assigned to experience-that is the starting point of the problems that lead to the development of this epistemology. Pascal's writings on physics are the most perfect example." English and American scholars of literature have begun to write about Montaigne's epistemology. From a modern perspective, nothing could be fitting; the "Apology for Raymond Sebond" (Essays II, 12) is an important starting point for the critical study of perception and knowledge, and many other passages in the Essays bear on these issues. Yet, in preferring the more scientific or technical term, we overlook two facts: first, that for Montaigne the study of knowledge-of our ability to know-was the study of imagination (the faculty through which all knowledge of the physical, external world must pass); second, that Montaigne sought to integrate reflection on knowledge into everyday situations and not to create a separate, specialized discipline. For Montaigne, a critical awareness of how we know things is not separable from the constant exercise of managing our mental images of things. An early chapter of the Essays presents this clearly:

If what we call evil and torment is neither evil nor torment in itself, if it is merely our fantasy that gives it this quality, it is in us to change it. (I.14:50/33).

Although Montaigne sometimes uses fantasie in the broad sense of whimsy, here in "That the taste of good and evil depends in large part on the opinion we have of them" his allusion to the ancient Greek context connects fantasie to phantasia: "Men, says an old Greek maxim, are tormented by the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves" (50/33). Thus, very close to the outset of the Essays, imagination is presented as the bridge between the world of things outside us and our judgment within us. And he does not send his reader down the path that leads away from thinking in physical terms but rather points toward representation itself, the specialty of imagination, as a useful remedy to our ills. We should find out, he writes, if we can, when confronted with an ill, "give it a different savor and a different complexion; for all this comes to the same thing" (51 /33). So the approach proposed is not simply an intellectual one involving our judgment but rather one that modifies the perception of the physical properties of things. We have an opportunity to change the way we sense it, the way we taste it. Ann Hartle has brilliantly noted that Montaigne's use of his imagination is the key to his ability to break out of unexamined, traditional patterns of thought: "The imagination is the faculty that is essential to Montaigne's openness." In terms of Montaigne's relation to the tradition of philosophy, the claim that we need not be trapped in old perceptions and that we have the ability to reprogram our phantasiai-sense impressions as they are entertained in the mind-is a teaching that links Montaigne to the Stoics.

The revival of Stoic philosophy is one of the most important events of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. In the case of some writers, like Justus Lipsius and Guillaume du Vair, the systematic statement of Stoic thought became an almost exclusive focus of their work. In France, in the wake of the Reformation and the wars of religion, selected elements of Stoicism blended variously with both Catholic and Protestant sensibilities while sometimes providing a common ground, particularly in ethics, for those on different sides of theological issues. Calvin wrote a commentary on Seneca's De Clementia, Simon Goulart edited Seneca's moral writings, and the poet Franois de Malherbe (who was twenty-five years old when the Essays first appeared) translated Seneca's letters. Although the sixteenth-century drew much of its view of Stoicism from Seneca and Cicero, there were numerous translations of Epictetus's Manual from Greek into Latin, beginning around 1453, and Montaigne owned Angelo Poliziano's 1498 translation. Toward the end of the century, in 1591, Guillaume du Vair, who, after being a close advisor of King Henri IV was later to become a Catholic bishop, published still another translation of the Manual into French, along with other extensive writings on Stoicism.

PRACTICING FOR DEATH

Montaigne's early chapter of the Essays, "That to philosophize is to learn to die" (I, 20), is often described as being one of the most deeply influenced by Stoicism, at least in the earliest, unrevised passages. Scholars have long been at odds over the depth of Montaigne's commitment to Stoicism, and Villey's view that Montaigne had only a brief infatuation with the movement has been very influential. In Villey's perspective, Montaigne's career is described as an evolution away from Stoicism toward an acceptance of life, a less austere outlook, and a broader conception of philosophy, or at least of the life of the mind. And it seems entirely right not to pigeonhole the extremely eclectic author of the Essays into any single philosophical school. Montaigne's approach to death in this chapter...