On Enthusiasm

Francesco Ventrella

"If I can't dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution."
- Emma Goldman

What is the object of students’ enthusiasm?
If we were to consider the concept from the point of view of Platonic aesthetics, enthusiasmós refers to the poet’s inspiration that is ‘inhaled from god’, and passed on to his listeners. Enthusiasm is defined as a dunamis, whose force can be compared to that of a magnet, attracting other stones.1 As the poet does not have any téchne, the Muse is to inspire him, passing her singing on to him. ‘Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles…’ reads the very first line of Homer’s Iliad. This vocal economy of epic poetics not only highlights the social performativity on which oral transmission of cultural memory relies, but also fosters a transsubjective distribution of aesthetics.2 Nevertheless, the Platonic theory of poetic inspiration founds also the question of poetic melancholy that Aristotle discusses in the famous Problem XXX, I. Here, the idea of the poet as that subject which is caught by a divine furor merged with that of the artist as an isolated genius, who seems to have abandoned the prerequisites of poetics as a social practice, which were so essential to Plato’s original discourse of inspiration.3 But if an individualist poetic of the melancholic reason is the dark side of enthusiasm, how are we to find the traces of this overlooked aesthetic capacity, and foster its distribution within the practice of apprehension of the world?

During the Restoration period, and especially at the beginning of the eighteenth century, enthusiasts were regarded as those religious fanatics among Puritans, Quakers, and Methodists4 whose manifestations on the one hand, according to Jean Paul, are the outcome of ‘the split between trope and metaphor’ (namely the capacity to assume the senses and corporeality as a reliable source of knowledge);5 while on the other hand, as Hobbes’ Leviathan made clear in 1651, those movements are the testimony of the crucial role played by beliefs within the struggle between Empire and Knowledge.6 In the accounts of its critics, it is interesting to notice that enthusiasm is actually described as an affect of the body. Jonathan Swift believes that the spirit can be enthused mechanically, by diminishing the subject’s consciousness, thus effecting a ‘lack of Reason’.7 ‘What pestilential influence the genius of enthusiasm or opinionative zeal has upon the public peace is so evident from experience that it needs not to be prov’d from reason’, Samuel Parker had already claimed in his condemnation of Neoplatonism, to which Swift seems to be attuned.8 Moreover, in the 1700 addition to his Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, commenting on the morbus which affected the political body, John Locke argues that enthusiasm, though not merely irrational in fact, is not even concerned to be rational in theory: ‘Whereby in effect it takes away both reason and revelation, and substitutes […] the ungrounded fancies of man’s own brain, and assumes them for a foundation of both opinion and conduct’.9 But what if the Reason missing at the emergence of enthusiasm is followed by the occurrence of another reason?

Since ‘enthusiast’ has not always been a derogatory term, it is in the transition from the derogatory to the creditable meaning, or in the co-existance of old and new currencies of the word, that both interest and difficulty lie. Besides, isn’t our vulnerability to language a consequence of our being constituted within it, but also the symptom of our capacity of being without it?10 Indeed, enthusiasm is more about elation and the passing on of affect, or the transmission of a psycho-physic state, rather than the yearning for an object. Aside from its object in fact, enthusiasm can be contagious, hence the reason why philosophers between the Interregnum and the Restoration, such as Thomas Hobbes, Alexander Ross, Samuel Parker, and Jonathan Swift interpreted it and criticized it as an actual threat to the sovereign power of the State. Enthusiasm produces excitable matter. Therefore, enthusiasm as such, being an affect without object, resists fetishization purposely because it conveys the enthusing movement of the body’s relating desire, rather than an object relation. As it occurs within the lack of Reason, enthusiasm has/is the capacity to embody the reason of another order of things, and yet it always entails the subject thinking anew.

Der Streiten der Facultäten (The Conflict of the Faculties, 1798) opens with a definition of the university as that institution which ‘handles the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak – by a division of labour’.11 Interestingly enough, in this book Immanuel Kant recognizes in the French Revolution the event whereby enthusiasm is a mode of experience. Paragraph VI of the second part is dedicated to an attempt at answering the question of whether humankind is constantly in progress, and which could be the ‘sign of history’ explaining it. Since the problem is not to be resolved directly through experience, Kant argues that there should be a form of prophetic history which is instead connected to experience, and that ‘can be acquired in no other way that through a supernatural communication and widening of one’s view of future time’.12 The ‘supernatural communication’ has to be interpreted as beyond nature, therefore tending towards the ideal. But due to the men and women’s limited will, we need to establish a possible cause for this progress, which is also able to identify the ‘possibility of an effect’ that depends on the existence of an event.

The French Revolution is this event, which, according to Kant, mainly indicates (hinweisen), but does not prove (beweisen), that humanity is capable of being both cause (Ursache) and author (Urheber) of its progress. By overturning the causality of the historical discourse, Immanuel Kant states that the reason why ‘the course of human affairs seems so senseless to us, perhaps lies in a poor choice of position from which we regard it’.13 Here, by raising the question of the situatedness of the viewer, Kant not only finds enthusiasm as the mode of apprehension of the French Revolution, but he also grounds his philosophical question in the actuality of the now.14 Moreover, this stress on spectatorship, uncovers an ‘anthropology’ which lies on the limitedness of knowledge as the universal condition of its possibility: ‘It is simply the mode of thinking of the spectators which reveals itself publicly in this game of great revolutions, and manifests such a universal and yet disinterested sympathy (uneigenüssige Teilnhemung) for the player on one side against those on the other, even at the risk that this partiality could become very disadvantageous for them if discovered’.15 It does not matter whether you support one team or the other, since what is crucial here is the degree of disinterested sympathy, which becomes ‘public’ in the event of the French Revolution.

Kant’s theory of enthusiasm is a modality of the feeling of the sublime that has been extensively analyzed in §27 of the Critique of Judgement (1790).16 Since the failure of reason in experiencing a feeling for the object allows enthusiasm to be the feeling ‘for the Idea of humanity in our subject’, the theory of the sublime also entails a crisis of the subject’s wholeness before the world, and thus becomes a pivotal concept for an understanding of transsubjectivity in aesthetics.17 However, Kant warns us that the spectatorship that is at stake in witnessing the revolution is not to be confused with the gesticulation of the Schwärmer,18 for ‘spectacle’ here does not refer to an opposition between seeing and acting, as in the Platonic opposition of theatron and choreia. If we were to read Kant closely, we would understand how revolution is primarily about the possibility to overturn some positions, which have become naturalized by bureaucracy or, in Rancière’s words, by a certain ‘partition of the sensible’. If it is due to a ‘poor choice of position’ that our understanding of the human affairs is partial, we need to substitute a theory of representation as alienation of the self, with a theory of presentation based on enthusiasm and compassion, which breaks with the coincidence between the unthinkable and the ‘unpresentable’.19 As long as we overcome the separation between the poetic/democratic community and the ‘living community’, the theatre of the revolution becomes, beyond the mere metaphor, the actual place of direct confrontation of the audience with itself as a collective: ‘theatre remains the name for an idea of the community as a living body. It conveys an idea of the community as self-presence opposed to the distance of representation’.20 Besides the choreographic imagination of a body whose movements are not shaped by the ‘apparatus of forms and rules’, but live within a performative experience, revolution lies in the possibility of changing not only laws and institutions, but also ‘the sensory forms of human experience’.21This seems to me the ultimate message conveyed by Kant’s conflict of the faculties: a plea for a permanent revolution of knowledge, that is based on a pedagogy of the enthusiastic reason –rather than on its administration. Instead of suppressing ignorance by reducing the gap between who knows and who doesn’t, Kant seems to stress the critical importance of ‘not knowing’ as that condition which makes knowledge possible. We need to unlearn the rules of selection and canonization by means of which the gap between who knows and who doesn’t is repeatedly reinstated. This is where also Rancière seems to ground his critique of the dramaturgy of teaching: ‘What students learn is the knowledge of their masters. That identity of cause and effect is the principle of stultification. On the contrary, the principle of emancipation is the dissociation of cause and effect’.22

Kant’s apparent lack of interest towards the action of the French Revolution should be understood as a critique of action, of any action, as for what he is ultimately trying to do is to allow the conditions of possibility for an ‘emancipated spectator’ to uncover the very reason of revolution: co-responsibility, as that compassionate ability to respond to an event, that is opposed to mere indoctrination, which leads to individualism. Since enthusiasm does not have an object, but always moves towards an ideal, ‘it cannot be grafted into self-interest (Eigenuß)’.23 Therefore, he opts for an idea of the spectator as that one who, through ‘passionate participation in the good (Teilnhehmung am Guten mit Affekt)’, will pass on his enthusiasm onto another. If we were to consider the effects of enthusiasm, indeed, we would recognize there is a sort of emphasis on a circulatory enthusiastic economy of affects, which is unlikely to occur in the melancholic approach to human actions – whatsoever avant-gardist revolution in style these action might enact. Jean François Lyotard was extremely clear on this matter, when he studied the function of enthusiasm in the analytic of the sublime: ‘Although ethically condemnable as pathological, “esthetically, enthusiasm is sublime, because it is a tension of forces produced by Ideas, which give an impulse to the mind that operates far more powerfully and lastingly than the impulse arising from sensible representations” (KUK: §27). Historical-political enthusiasm is thus on the edge of dementia, it is a pathological outburst, and as such it has in itself no ethical validity, since ethics requires one’s freedom from any motivating pathos; ethics allows only that apathetic pathos accompanying obligation that is respect. In its periodic unbridling, however, enthusiastic pathos conserves an aesthetic validity, it is an energetic sign, a tensor of Wunsch. The infinity of the Idea draws to itself all the other capacities, that is, all the other faculties, and produces an Affekt “of the vigorous kind”, characteristic of the sublime’.24

It is crucial to notice that students, as well as revolutionaries, are strangely missing on the stage of Kant’s The Conflict, for they hardly get mentioned. Is there any intention to preserve the disinterestedness of their revolution, namely impeding that anybody (even Kant!) could speak on the behalf of their reason? However, I would rather consider the way in which the narrative of The Conflict of the Faculties works performatively towards its readers. Kant is interested in the creation of the universal conditions of possibility for action to occur, and not in establishing its partial objects: being free to disagree is a fundamental precondition of any form of political action, namely the conflict (Streiten) of enthusiasm with the repressive stultification of bureaucracy. Rancière radicalizes this point even further when he says that ‘artists, like researchers, build the stage where the manifestation and effect of their competences become dubious as they frame the story of a new adventure in a new idiom. The effect of the idiom cannot be anticipated. It calls for spectators who are active interpreters, who render their own translations, who appropriate the story of themselves, and who ultimately make their own story out of it. An emancipated community is in fact a community of storytellers and translators’.25

Ultimately, we have found an answer to my previous question: students’ enthusiasm is about learning what their teachers do not know.

* This contribution is not meant to be a criticism of the degree show, but a piece of research enfolded within it. I strongly believe that research and study are collective activities that Universities should foster as such, rather than individualizing the study in career paths, which sadly remembers one-way train rails. Enthusiasm is precisely about thinking together: a political praxis that relies on the passing on of passions. And this is ultimately the modus operandi that we have tried to attend during the preparation of the degree show, by turning disagreement into a productive practice, fostering collaboration in place of the narcissism of artistic production, seeking for our elating illumination by always trying ‘to have fun’. Whether this is a successful collective degree show or not, only the spectators can say. We just hope it is going to be an enthusing experience. For thinking is a collective enterprise, I am grateful to all the third year students of the School of Fine Arts, who unwillingly inspired the topic of my essay: enthusiasm! Some of the moves that I take in this paper have benefited of the contagious intellectual excitement of Rowan Bailey, whom I thank with admiration. Above all, this paper would not exist without the daily love and care of Ed.
‘This ability of yours to speak well about Homer is not a skill, but, as I was just saying, there is a divinity moving you like that contained in the stone which Euripides calls a magnet, but which is commonly known as the stone of Heraclea. This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings […]’. Plato, Ion, 533d.
See Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learn to Write. Reflection on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1986).
Aristotle took over from Plato and further analysed the question of the genius and its relation to madness (furor) in the ‘Problem XXX, i’ that is notoriously the locus classicus from which the Western discourse on melancholia originated by merging a poetic condition (facies nigra) with a physiological state (related to the production of black bile secreted by the liver). Aristotle considers the melancholic humour as a psychophysical state, which can affect everybody. For a cultural history of Melancholy see the wonderful volume edited by Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxly that is the outcome of a research lasted over forty years, and represent the continuation of Warburg’s study of Albrecht Dürer, the Northern Renaissance and the essence of Lutheranism: Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (Thomas Nelson: London, 1964). Whether melancholy and enthusiasm are ravelled and articulated within several folders that intermittently allow the visibility of either one or the other at the time is an extremely fascinating question...
See Truman Guy Steffan, ‘The Social Argument Against Enthusiasm (1650-1660), Texas Studies in English vol. 55 (1941), pp. 39-63.
‘Figurative wit can either animate the body or embody the spirit. Originally. When men still bloomed as if it grafted with the world on a single stem, this double trope did not exist; man did not compare dissimilar elements but proclaimed equality; metaphors, like those of children, were only involuntary synonyms of the body and spirit. As hieroglyphs proceeded letters in writing, in speech the metaphor, insofar as it signifies relationships and not objects, was the earlier word which slowly had to fade into denotative expression (eigentlichen Ausdruck). The figurative animation and embodiment still coincided, because self and the world were still fused. For this reason every language in its spiritual relationships is a dictionary of faded metaphors (erblasseter Meaphern)’. Jean Paul Richter, Vorschule der Ästhetik, [1813], §50; transl. Margaret H. Hale, Horn of Oberon. School for Aesthetics (Wayne State University: Detroit, 1973), p. 131-134. Also partially quoted in Aby Warburg, ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther (1920)’, in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 597-698.
It is often overlooked that before Hobbes treats the question of the commonwealth, the first part of The Leviathan is entirely dedicated to senses, imagination, passions and their relation to speech as constituting the ‘natural condition of mankind’, and thus functioning as the basis for Hobbe’s theory of the social contract. Paolo Virno has extensively analysed Hobbes’ aesthetics and philosophy of language in Quando il verbo si fa carne. Linguaggio e natura umana (Bollati Boringhieri: Turin, 2003). Fifty years after Hobbes, Jonathan Swift is one of the earliest critics to understand that enthusiasm is not only a religious phenomenon, but that it also has some political effects. He compares enthusiasm to a plant that ‘has found a root in the fields of Empire and of Knowledge’ and that ‘produced certain branches of a very different nature, however often mistaken for each other’. Jonathan Swift, ‘Discourse Concerning The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit’ (1704), in The Works of Rev. Jonathan Swift D.D. vol 3, ed Thomas Sheridan (William Durell: New York, 1812), p. 253. Moreover, it is not by chance that the foundation of the Royal Society in 1660 is welcomed as the formation of an ‘Empire of Knowledge’.
Jonathan Swift, ‘Discourse Concerning The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit’, p. 253-254.
Samuel Parker, A Free and Impartial censure of the Platonick Philosophie (Oxford, 1666), p. 73.
John Locke, Essay Concerning the Humane Understanding [1690-1700], 13th edition (William Tegg: London, 1849), Book IV, 19: 3, p. 532.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative (Routledge: New York and London, 1997), p. 2. I am trying to push to the edges of its social boundaries, Judith Butler’s reflection on sex, gender and the politics of the performative, in order to allow the ‘formation’ of a question about another reason, that is driven by enthusiasm, rather than melancholia. I am thinking in particular of the theories of sex and gender deployed by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) and Excitable Speech (1997).
Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakultäten [1798], transl by Mary G. Gregor, The Conflict of the Faculties (Abaris: New York, 1979), p. 23.
Ibid., p. 141.
Ibid., p. 149.
Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed Sylvère Lotringer (Semiotext(e): Los Angeles, 2007), p. 86. Foucault considers both the motto ‘sapere aude!’ of the Was ist Aufklärung? (1784) and the question about revolution in Der Streit der Facultäten (1798) as Kant’s seminal text for an understanding of actuality in the discourse of Modern philosophy. Unlike Descartes, who also had undertaken a reflexive path in Discours de la Méthode (1637), but grounding his philosophical decision in historical positions that are part of the order of knowledge and science of his own period, Kant, for the first time in the history of philosophy, according to Foucault, opts for an ‘ontology of ourselves, an ontology of the actuality’ (Foucault, p. 95).
Ibid., p. 153.
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, [1790], transl. by J.H. Bernard, Critique of Judgment (McMillan: London, 1914), Book II, §27-29, p. 119 et seq.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment [1790], ed. J.H. Bernard (McMillan: London, 1914), Book II, §27, p. 119. See also the Lyotard’s crucial contribution to the analysis of enthusiasm in Kant, to which my paper is very much indebted. Jean François Lyotard, Enthousiasme. La critique kantienne de l’histoire (Galilée: Paris, 1986); transl. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Enthusiasm. The Kantian Critique to History, (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2009).
Schwärmeren were those religious fanatics belonging to Lutheran minorities, who were called like this because their movements resembled some bee’s swarm (Schwarm). Kant makes a definite distinction between Schwärmerei and Enthusiasmus, for the first is an imagination without bridle, while the latter sees nothing. See Gabriele Brandstetter, ‘Swarms and Enthusiasts. Transfers in/as Choreography’, parallax 46, vol. 14, 1, pp. 96-97. See also Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, p. 91.
Jacques Rancière, via Lyotard on Kant, is extremely concerned with a critique of this coincidence that is at the heart of the problem of representing the Holocaust. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, transl. Gregory Elliott (Verso: London, 2007), pp. 130-138.
Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, in Artforum International, Vol. 45 (March, 2007), p. 273.
It is crucial to acknowledge here the radical difference between Rancière and Debord on the different use of the word ‘spectacle’; for the latter the society of spectacle institutes an ‘externality’ grounded on the idea of representation as simulacrum, whereas the first stresses the embodiment of a collective experience that is grounded within a partition of the sensible. It would be interesting to further investigate whether the two French philosophers performs a melancholic (Debord) and an enthusiastic (Rancière) conception of aesthetics. Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, p. 274.
Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, p. 277. These arguments are extensively treated in his account of Joseph Jacotot, the French schoolteacher who taught in French to Flemish students who knew no French, thus claiming that intellectual emancipation was a form of translation, rather than delivery of information. Illiterate parents could teach their children how to read, only by comparing the one thing they knew with something of which they remain ignorant. Jacques Rancière, Le maître ignorant [1987], transl. Kristin Ross, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1991).
Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, p. 156.
Jean François Lyotard, ‘The Sign of History’, in The Lyotard Reader, Andrew Benjamin ed. (London: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 166-167.
Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, p. 280. The word ‘translation’ here is used by stressing its very etymology from the Latin trans-latum, past participle of the verb trans-fero, which means to transfer, to transport, and it emphasizes translation as the very mode of transmission of enthusiasm.