Uncommon Sense

Carrie D. Shanafelt

Description

Infamous for authoring two concepts since favored by government powers seeking license for ruthlessness—the utilitarian notion of privileging the greatest happiness for the most people and the panopticon—Jeremy Bentham is not commonly associated with political emancipation. But perhaps he should be. In his private manuscripts, Bentham agonized over the injustice of laws prohibiting sexual nonconformity, questioning state policy that would put someone to death merely for enjoying an uncommon pleasure. He identified sources of hatred for sexual nonconformists in philosophy, law, religion, and literature, arguing that his goal of "the greatest happiness" would be impossible as long as authorities dictate whose pleasures can be tolerated and whose must be forbidden. Ultimately, Bentham came to believe that authorities worked to maximize the suffering of women, colonized and enslaved persons, and sexual nonconformists in order to demoralize disenfranchised people and prevent any challenge to power.

In Uncommon Sense, Carrie Shanafelt reads Bentham’s sexual nonconformity papers as an argument for the toleration of aesthetic difference as the foundation for egalitarian liberty, shedding new light on eighteenth-century aesthetics and politics. At odds with the common image of Bentham as a dehumanizing calculator or an eccentric projector, this innovative study shows Bentham at his most intimate, outraged by injustice and desperate for the end of sanctioned, discriminatory violence.

Introduction: Queer Aesthetics and the Problem of Common Sense
1. The Trouble with Bentham
2. Aesthetics of Pleasure, Ethics of Happines
3. Against Rights
4. Bentham's Queer Christ
5. Politics and Poetics of Liberty
Conclusion

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Éthique et morale
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• Philosophie de la religion
• Movements
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy
• Utilitarianism
• Enlightenment

Informations

• Publié par: University of Virginia Press
• Date de parution: 14 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780813946887
• Langue: English

Extrait

Uncommon Sense
Uncommon Sense
Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste
Carrie D. Shanafelt
University of Virginia Press • Charlottesville and London
University of Virginia Press
© 2022 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
First published 2022
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shanafelt, Carrie D., author.
Title: Uncommon sense : Jeremy Bentham, queer aesthetics, and the politics of taste / Carrie D. Shanafelt.
Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021030607 (print) | LCCN 2021030608 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813946863 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813946870 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813946887 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Bentham, Jeremy, 1748–1832. | Pleasure—Political aspects. | Aesthetics—Political aspects. | Liberty. | Common sense. | Law and aesthetics. | Philosophers—Great Britain—Biography.
Classification: LCC B 1574. B 34 S 53 2021 (print) | LCC B 1574. B 34 (ebook) | DDC 152.4/2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030607
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030608
Cover art: Jesus Is Arrested in the Night in the Garden of Gethsemane. Detail of engraving by A. Reindel after H. Füger. (Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International [CC BY 4.0])
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1The Trouble with Bentham
2Aesthetics of Pleasure, Ethics of Happiness
3Against Rights
4Bentham’s Queer Christ
5Politics and Poetics of Liberty
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
Interdisciplinary research depends on an accumulation of intimacies and arguments with friends, colleagues, and strangers (who often become friends or colleagues), who make up a world one can inhabit, interrogate, and address with the hope of being understood. This book is the culmination of twenty years of world-building intimacies and arguments, beginning in the earliest years of my graduate study, long before I read aesthetic theory or anything substantial by Jeremy Bentham. I am grateful that, wherever I have studied and taught, I have been part of communities in which the pleasure of sharing and debating ideas, learning from one another, and promoting one another’s successes has created a shared (but uncommon) sense of what academic work can and should look like. I am grateful to my friends and colleagues at Case Western Reserve University, the City University of New York Graduate Center, Queens College, Franklin & Marshall College, Grinnell College, and Fairleigh Dickinson University (whose generous Grant-in-Aid program partially funded research toward this book), as well as the Universität Osnabrück Summer School on the Cultural Study of the Law, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, and the Johnsonians for supporting, including, amplifying, criticizing, and responding to the ideas that follow.
It would have been impossible to write this book without the generosity and patience of the librarians and archivists at University College London Special Collections, where I spent long, emotional days in the summer of 2018 trying not to cry on everything I handled. It was a joy to read there. And due to the extraordinary efforts of the UCL Bentham Project to make Bentham’s manuscripts as accessible as possible, I was able to continue reading and verifying my notes from my home in New York. If this work inspires any interest in Bentham among its readers, I encourage them to check out the Bentham Project’s unprecedented archival generosity at www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/ . There is still so much to be done. Thirty-four of a projected eighty volumes of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham are in print, led by General Editor Philip Schofield, without whose scholarship this project would never have been imagined.
So many individual people have mentored, collaborated, commiserated, and shared with me during this long process that I struggle to name them all: David Richter, Carrie Hintz, Blanford Parker, Jack Lynch, Jenny Davidson, Mario DiGangi, Rebekah Sheldon, Brooks Hefner, Helena Ribeiro, Chris Leslie, Nola Semczyszyn, Rivka Swenson, Dwight Codr, Tita Chico, William Flesch, Emily Friedman, Paul Kelleher, Laura Miller, Kathleen Elizabeth Urda, Sarah Purcell, Loren Ludwig, Ed Kazarian, Courtney Wennerstrom, Erica Richardson, Kevin Bourque, Laurence Williams, Andrew Benjamin Bricker, Shelby Johnson, Kathryn Temple, Brian Goldberg, Anne McCarthy, Declan Gilmore-Kavanagh, Jennifer Mitchell, and many others have contributed in some form to this project. Thank you to my many writing groups and reading groups, past and present. Infinite thanks goes to Angie Hogan at the University of Virginia Press, who believed in this project and helped bring it to fruition in a season of constant crisis at every scale, as well as Ellen Satrom, Ruth Melville, Scott Sheldon, and the anonymous peer reviewers, whose diligence, attention to detail, and thoughtful suggestions improved this book at every step.
Thank you to my parents, who have always believed in me more than I have. And I am overwhelmed with gratitude for my spouse, Cliff, whose humor, patience, integrity, brilliance, kindness, and love make everything possible.
Part of chapter 3 appears in Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory as “Against Rights: Jeremy Bentham on Sexual Liberty and Legal Reform”; and parts of chapters 2 and 5 appear in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation as “Jeremy Bentham and the Aesthetics of Sexual Difference.”
Uncommon Sense
Introduction
Almost twenty years ago, I fell in love with a book that changed me—Henry Fielding’s novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, first published in 1749 in London. The characters and their lives were far from my own experience, but I felt confronted by the narrator, whose aggressive, teasing rhetoric challenged me to reconsider many of my cynical pet theories about love and human nature. Fielding’s narrator appealed to “common observation,” rather than his or my own observations, for verification of what he asserted was plainly true for others, if not for me. As Wayne Booth argues in The Rhetoric of Fiction, the narrator of Tom Jones offers the reader an imaginary center of moral objectivity that is not possible for any of the characters—nor even for Fielding himself as a real person who served as a magistrate. 1 Throughout the novel, Fielding chides the reader not only to think of our own experiences but to balance our perception with that of other imaginable readers and lives; he invites us to be humble about the limitations of our perspective on reality. In September of 2001, Fielding was my first intoxicating taste of the rhetoric of common sense, which Immanuel Kant would later define as “putting ourselves in the position of everyone else”—imagining what “normal” people think as a check to our unique experiences of the world. 2
I became obsessed with eighteenth-century British rhetoric in literature and philosophy because I wanted to understand the power of that appeal to imagine the minds of others. As someone who had always relied on my own idiosyncratic judgment, I was learning that I was wrong to trust my observations, not only about love and morality, but about almost everything. If I wanted to live in peace with humankind, I needed to learn humility toward a normative understanding. During this process of pathologizing individual judgment, my country went to war on the basis of obvious lies intended to foment Islamophobia and racism, enriching private corporations at the cost of perhaps a million uncounted civilian lives as well as thousands of working-class soldiers. At a time when my studies demanded humility toward some conception of popular opinion, I saw how that same rhetoric of the British Enlightenment had been revived to cloak genocidal nihilism in the socially enforced pseudohumility of common sense. In US political discourse of the mid-2000s, “common sense” became synonymous with the fearfulness, prejudice, and cruelty that enriched and empowered the same men who profit from every crisis.
As I began to interrogate the history of common sense, I found a strange rhetorical legacy. Before the eighteenth century, following Aristotle, common sense was the term for a mental faculty that collates and organizes information from the five senses into a perception or cognition of experience. It had nothing to do with conceiving of a public opinion or the ideas of common people. John Locke introduces the idea of a consensus-based epistemology, but still uses “common sense” to refer to a faculty of the mind that organizes sensory information into ideas. 3 George Berkeley is the first philosopher I find who refers to “men of plain common sense” with the implication that an educated person loses his common sense and can no longer derive rational knowledge from empirical experience in the manner of an uneducated person. Thus, the philosopher cannot be among “men of plain common sense,” but a gardener is. In Berkeley’s fictional dialogue Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, the two philosophers agree that the goal of their debate about epistemology should be to arrive at a conclusion about epistemology to which the gardener would assent. “I am content, Hylas, to appeal to the common sense of the world for the truth of my notion. Ask the gardener, why he thinks yonder cherry-tree exists in the garden, and he shall tell you, because he sees and feels it; in a word, because he perceives it by his senses.” And a few pages later, “I wish both our opinions were fairly stated and submitted to the judgment of men who had plain common sense, without the prejudices of a learned education.” 4 Philonous implies that the