Uncertainty and Identity: The Enlightenment and its Shadows

Chris Sparks

Centre for the Study of Democracy
University of Westminster

August, 1994 Research Papers, Number 5

INTRODUCTION

Uncertainty is an expression of the limits of understanding. As understanding of things is framed in modes of knowing, uncertainty sits on the obscure line between epistemological issues of knowing and ontological issues of the condition of beings. When one is uncertain, one asks: "Is it my understanding or the object of my knowledge which is uncertain?" This unsettling difficulty may be perceived as threatening when the object known is the self; expressions of uncertainty may be expressions of an uncertain condition of being. This pamphlet argues that in early modernity a common experience of uncertain understanding catalysed a novel and all-encompassing perception of an uncertainty of knowledge and of known identities. The significant and frightening aspect of this uncertainty is that a coherent sense of human identity itself has become difficult to maintain.

In the argument that follows, uncertainty is presented as an inherent feature of the discursive production of common understanding. While discourse makes experience (commonly) sensible, it is always in tension with this experience due to the creative impact which language has upon its named matter. The art of discourse creates an imitation of experience even as it makes it recognisable as such. For this reason, discourse is prone to failure; unable to make sensible the novel character of experiences, it produces cognitive uncertainty.

Cognitive uncertainty is expressively codified in a secondary reproduction of confusions and absences in the structure of discourse in general. This causes confusion in the structural constitution of the mode of knowing, which in turn creates opacity or irresolvable problems. Cognitive uncertainty is, therefore, expressed in discourse as structural uncertainty. Structural uncertainty moves beyond discourse: it enters into the realm of action, as theoretical confusions produce structural uncertainties in the commonly understood world. Not only do conceptual confusions and incoherences infect the mode of common understanding; in so doing they also confuse the criteria for the activity aimed at the actualization of theoretically established objectives: they feed into the criteria for judgement and intent which provide the principles for action. Thus the activity which produces and maintains the common world does so on uncertain "grounds"; the uncertainties of theory feed into the active construction of a known world and thus deny the actor the intended goal of establishing a familiar context within which a secure and defined self-identity can be determined.

Structural uncertainty is, then, an uncertainty of creative enactment which undermines the intention (and possibly the commitment) of self-enactment. For this reason, it is more than an expression of complexity: it stretches beyond epistemological problems to the fundamentally political experience of the struggle to establish a secure and clearly defined presence in a familiarised world.

A third element of uncertainty resides in the subjective realm of perception, wherein a recognition of conceptual and communicative incoherences generates a psychological response - a sense of "uncertainty" - which in turn feeds back through discourse to accelerate the first two processes.

This paper explores the interaction of these three elements of uncertainty through an examination of their emergence in the philosophical and political discourse of early modernity. Through this exploration it seeks to highlight the unsettling influence which the sense of uncertainty has on the historicity of modernity - that is, the scenario of power in which the discourse of modernity enfolds itself over time.

The scenario of power is not a simple expression of communal homogeneity. The existence of discursive communality requires varying degrees of consensus, but the differences that must be drawn together to establish consensus represent plurality of perspective wherein lies the ever-present potential for conflict. This conflict involves attempts to establish different modes of identification and different identities; the conception of the common world and those who create and live in it is disputed. This political condition is thus the self-expression of communality in terms of relations of power through which definitive conceptions are promoted, enforced, muffled, obscured or censored. The political is therefore a constant juncture of understanding, intention, and uncertainty. For uncertainty to be known, the political must be known, and for the political to be known, it must be addressed in its particularity, namely the geo-historical moments in which particular events conspire to accelerate and expand the uncertainties of the discursive activity to a point of active deconstruction (both in the attempts at definition and communication and in the power scenarios through which these attempts are expressed).

The historicity of uncertainty is the expression of the political in events over time, but uncertainty is not trans-historical: it has historical dimensions. The elements of cognitive and structural uncertainty are produced in the primary discursive activity of identification, and consequently create potential, and often actualised, disputes over identity. They are, therefore, ever-present in discursive communalities, but are expressed through different discursive paradigms, thus appearing in different guises to the participants. The emergence of the third element - psychological uncertainty - is produced by a particular, very complex moment brought about by the mutual exposure of cognitive and structural uncertainties between competing discourses. This is early modernity, notably the eighteenth century, in which a particular play of power formations is derived from a complex of interrelated parts framed within a developing secularisation. This historical event is characterised by the emergence of psychological uncertainty, expressed in a common recognition of the failure of various modes of discourse, including politics, theology and scientific rationalism (all politicised around the issue of identity) to expunge cognitive and structural uncertainty.

Early modernity is characterised by shock at the uncertainties within competing modes of defining identities, revealed through the political struggle for dominance. Psychological uncertainty results from the actors' realisation that the identification of the commonly perceived identities, "nature" and "man", is too incoherent to secure their being. This novel, radical sense of uncertainty feeds back into common discourse, accelerating the disintegrative tendencies already prevalent within the competing discourses.

In making this argument, it is necessary to consider the uncertainty of the political, prior to exploring the moment of reaction to it. Thus, the historically particular dimension of uncertainty - that which provides sight of its historicity - will be explored in the second part of this pamphlet. First, I shall explore the dimensions of the political.

In discussing the political we must be aware of the relativity of political language which, produced by its own historicity, expresses a particular relationship to uncertainty. The fundamental cognitive uncertainty located in the activity of definitive naming is expressed in a historically particular formulation of the political as politics. The discursive tradition of political theory seeks to prescribe "politics", an activity (including the theorists' own efforts) which constructs contextual political identities, in terms of which the human identity can be fulfilled or secured. In attempting to exclude uncertainty from the process of identification, the discourse of politics encounters its own uncertainty, and so generates the political where it seeks a certainty of conceptual and material government.

Considering the above, it is necessary to critically assess the idea of politics from the standpoint of the political. The two are not fully distinct; elements and implications of the latter are to be found in the former. For this reason the first section proceeds through a process of presentation, critique and modification.

THE IDEA OF POLITICS

Political life, as the empowered means of producing a collective world, is the societal locus of tension between the conservative government of received identities and creative change. Thus to fully understand the political it is necessary to explore how its core tension functions within and between theory and practice and how it is represented in the common condition, the common world which both manifests and represses the features of uncertainty.

The tension is immediately apparent in the opposition ofical pro c
nc concern with the securing of such a 4…) ˙U €;'˙ categories of identity stemming from a concern to establish and maintain a perceived "right" order. Dysfunctional self-expression, public debate, the arts, and any other potential introducers of novelty, are to be censored. The status quo, once established, is to be re-produced in technical subservience to the original blueprint. ₁ Plato's claim that politics and oikonomia (household management) are but different orders of the same activity is significant. To the degree that the tradition of politics seeks to establish the government of experience, it attempts to impose a definitive organisation of identities onto a familiar and secure order of life. This is the activity of domestification. The idea of politics as praxis stands in tension with the idealisation of domestification. First fully presented by Aristotle, it is the idea of politics as public debate and action expressing the individuality of perception and ability among the participants, while potentially generating a community ethic - a common will and identity - manifested in a polity. It is interesting that Aristotle, while often providing managerial metaphors for politics, saw its highest end as the fulfilment of human essence in creative expression. ₂ This apparent confusion indicates a muddy perception of a vital dimension of the tension between politics as the activity of attempting to secure identity, and the political, which attends politics as the creative expression of actors in the power relations of a society's historicity.

While the conceptions of politics as praxis and household management have been deployed in many and various ways and have frequently been integrated in balanced opposition in subsequent theories, in the tradition of European politics they have endured as referenial foundations. Throughout this pamphlet, both are presented as vital elements also of discursive activity by which identities are defined and disintegrated, thus, linking at root, political concerns to the issue of uncertainty of identity.

The consideration of politics as praxis will now be extended to a significant modern representation which explicitly combines politics with the constructive power of discourse, that is, the political writing of Hannah Arendt. Arendt's argument, by presenting praxis as the discursive creation of a common world, provides a means of perceiving the dimensions of politics within a context of the political. As a strong advocate of politics, her argument is not clear about the distinctiveness of the two activities, and some modification of it is therefore necessary. In making this clarification, Arendt's conception of politics as the discursive production of a common world can be shown to contain the seeds of a critical assessment of the notion of politics in general.

In Arendt's version of politics, the Aristotelian conception of praxis is comprehensively restated. Politics, she argues, is the high point of "action", defined as the plural condition of common intercourse through debate and interaction. ₃ It is the reflexive self-maintenance of "action" wherein actors, through debate and enacted policy, construct a public sphere. The substance of politics is the plurality of individual expression and common concern in debate; and the aim of politics is to establish and maintain the conditions which preserve its substance. The importance of this preservation, Arendt argues, derives from the actors' realisation of their need to express their experiences and to further their understanding for development of themselves as individuals. "Action", as the participation in the practical and ethical considerations involved in communal existence, is the only activity wherein humans can develop their common identity as citizens. ₄ This fully Aristotelian presentation is modified by the introduction of a Kantian notion of common sense. ₅ Through this modification Arendt explores the discursive substance of praxis, providing insight into the entwinement of discursive and political communality. This argument provides the opening to a perception of the intervention of uncertainty in the attempted construction of communalities.

In Kantian theory, all is built on a dualism of the subjectivity of experience and the objective being. The subject constructs an understood world by the application of reason to images of objective reality (phenomena) received through sensory perception. The activity of producing phenomena requires constructive input - the generation of images and their arrangement into understandable order. This latter activity, which Kant calls "judgement", makes it possible to understand and thus to live in the objective order of being. Arendt, developing the involvement of discourse in inter-subjective creativity, draws out the political implication of common sense. The judgemental faculty can function only within the context of a plurality of subjective opinion, for each individual registers objects only as imagined phenomena and therefore needs external verification to establish the objective status of their imagery. Central to this verification is the function of discourse. It is the formal communicative mode by which speech, presented as the fundamental expression of identity, is rendered both meaningful and practical. It enables us to communicate, to consider our identities, to comprehend our needs and the means to fulfil them. Crucially, the activity of discourse provides the nexus between otherwise isolated subjectivities, creating a communality of sensed "reality". ₆

Underpinning this presentation of common sense is the Kantian point that the subject's appeal for verification of experienced phenomena implies universal criteria. The development of this point is the recognition that the activity of understanding and interpretation must be constituted as a discursive interaction. The universality of judgement is tied and bound to the universality of discourse. A further point is that the universality of discourse is expressed in the highly particular mode of self-revealing "action". The passing of judgements takes the form of speech acts. ₇ This is most clear in statements. These are two-fold acts: they are acts of self-revelation, bringing the actor into the field of common vision and so giving that actor a worldly identity; they are also acts of judgement.

Arendt's conception of discursive action is limited by a reliance upon ontological assertion which partly obscures the conceptual difficulties attached to key notions in this tradition of political theory - the public and the individual identity. We can register these difficulties and avoid the fate of submitting to a "metaphysics of presence" by reassessing the relationship between discourse and communal activity in the following manner.

Discourse is the condition which enables "the subject" to become a common reference point. Communality, which involves the individuality to which the concept "subject" is applied, is a necessary condition for discourse. As concepts abstracted from employment in particular referential contexts, "the public" and "the individual identity" fail to establish certainty of meaning, and, thus, even in contextual use, they can have only limited relative "universality". Yet we can agree with Arendt as far as she argues that it is not possible to move beyond discourse and communality as framing reference points. There can be no communication without communality and discourse. If it is taken that there is communication, then, relatively speaking, the status of discourse and communality must be seen as objective.

Arendt's great advance on the classic notion of praxis, then, is to locate the dialectic of discourse and communality within it. Such a perspective provides the means of giving discourse itself a contextual reference - that of political situations. Yet the implications of Arendt's insight into the plural dimension of common sense require modification of her presentation, which contains a confusion of the political with politics. The modification centres on a perception of the inherent uncertainty of discourse. Discourse functions as communication between participants. In that instant - a self-definitive moment of discursive communion - it involves the attempted government of experience into defined identities (those of individual participants and, through the notion of participants, that of a community). Beset by its own integral uncertainty or difference, the discourse cannot pin down these fundamental identities. It thus feeds uncertainties into the self-definition of the participants. The space which is opened between participants - that which undermines the communion - is the space wherein political activity takes place. Ironically, this activity being undertaken by peoples whose understanding is organised though the definitive concepts of the discursive tradition of politics has, through much of history, been the ongoing attempt to establish the solidity of a defined collective identity.

It is clear, then, that Arendt's conception of politics, once modified, provides us with a point from which to see that the commonly constructed world is not firm, either in substance, or at the boundaries. Its identity is disputed and persists only as a total of multiple, often contradictory, parts. However, a formal condition can be conceptualised, and, as an actively constructed condition, it is characterised by a political expression consisting of the power formation constructed from the establishment of named identities and the enforcement of conditions through the naming activity itself.

Viewing discourse as an activity which is at once communal and beset by disseminating difference, we should expect the formal uncertainty of discourse to manifest itself in the political life of the participants. The following section will explore how such a scenario can be understood.

UNCERTAINTY IN THE POLITICAL

It is common in the discourse of politics to discuss its subject matter in terms of conflict, strategy and the pursuit of power. Conversely, it is also common to stress that we share a common political status as members of a discursive community. While accepting all these features as genuinely present in political life, the political community must be understood not as a clearly defined entity - as the tradition of politics has sought to understand it - but as a fractious and dangerously uncertain collectivity. Further consideration of the political reveals that the features of uncertainty which beset political life are rooted in the structure and aims of the discourse of politics and in its relationship to the political condition which it attempts to conceptualise. These features fall into three related elemental conditions. First, uncertainty generates a tension between social theory and common experience. Secondly, tensions are generated between strategic actors and by the strategic definition of the "other" in political scenarios. Thirdly, uncertainty is expressed in a tension between the promiscuous generation of ideas and the prohibitive attitude involved in governing; both of which are expressed through, and generated by, the discourse of politics.

Political action consists, in part, of strategic, goal-oriented activities which are undertaken within a complex of power relations to which they necessarily refer. To be raised above mere strategy, to be political, this activity must refer to a conception of "right " or the "good life" which it is intended to bring about. In this sense, political activity refers to perceived universal principles of political theory. Thus, particularistic strategic action acquires its political sense from the product of political theory. This product, constituted of guiding principles, stands in relation to action as "dogma" and functions to fit particularistic action to the "universals" of theory. Dogma, however, as a fixed prescription, cannot provide explanations for novel particularities or events. Furthermore, these events often impose upon actors immediate necessities which preclude the possibility of following dogmatic prescription. At this moment a primary tension within politics is revealed. The action, in the moment of its necessity, is bound by the principles of the dogma that inspired it; yet the latter has not the power to explain how to deal with the former. As a consequence, the perceived universality of the dogma is fractured by the particular present. Therefore, any organised perception, and, thus, any clear political sense of the situation, dissolves. The door is open to splits and conflicts within the polity.

This brings us to the second level at which uncertainty prevails within the political. To a large degree, political activity consists of strategic action aimed at creating or maintaining enough power to order society into a desired form. Such activity indicates a tension within the discursive community. Making strategy is exclusive because it involves only some of those whom the strategy is intended to affect. The others are those who stand in some way as impediments to the goals of the strategists. Strategic action, then, implies actual or potential conflict between actors in the discursive community, and expresses what Carl Schmitt terms the "friend/enemy" dimension of political life.

The need for strategy within such action reveals that the actors seek to obtain their goal with reference to some potentially limiting "other". By definition, then, strategic action refers to "the other", which may be environmental or may be other actors with different goals. In either case, "the other" bears a potential negation of the actors' project; but this is particularly so when the other consists of similar actors with their own goals. What is evident is that political actors move in a condition of possible danger, giving to their actions an element of risk. The strategic element of their action is intended to overcome the danger which the presence of "the other" generates. It directs political activity into strategies of opposition, expressing recognition of, and maintaining, the permanently potential conflict with "the other".

This fundamental element of political life is a central theme in Carl Schmitt's The Concept of The Political. ₈ The foundational point in his analysis is that the political actor is not a mere object with predictable behaviour patterns, but an actor and, thus, unpredictable. In this sense, the other is beyond the realm of its opponent's knowledge. As an unknown factor, the other appears as a potential threat. But because the threat is potential, it is not clearly defined nor even definitely intended by the other. It is impersonal and constant by virtue of the differences which, by defining the actors as separate groups, make them "other" to each other. The potential threat therefore operates regardless of the intended relationship of the political groups involved.

Schmitt's presentation contains both insight and confusion regarding the impact of uncertainty upon the political construction and maintenance of societal identity. The condition of otherness which he pinpoints does manifest uncertainty within political experience, but, while the presence of the "other" does bring uncertainty into political experience, this is not to be confused with strategic risk. The two do feed into each other, but there is a tendency amongst political actors (and theorists such as Schmitt) to conflate uncertainty - expressing the limits of knowledge - with the risk inherent in organising forces against the other. The strangeness of the other is understood by actors in political terms. Strangeness is sensed as threatening from the perspective which seeks familiarity of a common identity: "the other" may wish to destroy them, to impose another, foreign identity upon them. In treating "the other" as an unknown, but nevertheless political, identity, political actors move strategically. They operate in the realm of doubts and risk. ₉ Yet the perceived enmity of the other is an unknown; the actual otherness of "the other" may be "other" to political conceptions entirely. The other is, in its otherness, outside the actors' mode of understanding, and the significance of its movements, if seen, are beyond comprehension. The secondary stage of uncertainty is thus constituted: the failure of the actors' modes of understanding to comprehend leads to psychological uncertainty, a condition of fearful scepticism.

In both of the above examples, a third level of uncertainty can be seen. At this level, uncertainty affects political life in a tension between the activity of government, in its most general sense, and political creativity. In political life, strategic activity is government-oriented; all those involved seek to gather up the power to participate in, or at least significantly influence, the ordering of society. Herein lies a fundamental tension within politics; for the valuation of debate and action as an end in itself stands in tension with strategic valuation which is the means of government. Yet, both the creative and governmental elements of politics are contained in its condition as discourse. Underpinning this tension is the dichotomy of imaginative creativity and factuality. The approach to experience which creates facts is concerned with pinning down and controlling objectivity to govern experience as a means of overcoming fear of the unknown. The method its advocates employ is a core element of political science and is the conservative substance of all governmental activity. By contrast, imaginative discourse seeks to explore beyond the limits of imposed definition. It is an encounter with the novel and, thus, undefined features, of possible common experience without which definitive change is impossible. For change depends upon uncertainty for its energy; uncertainty is the sea upon which the creative debate surfs. Without it, the debate is forced to an end. Yet if creativity is allowed to run its course, the debate is swamped by the forceful tides of its own uncertainty, throwing up the fragments as meaningless oddities on empty sands.

PUBLIC LIFE AND THE SUBJECT

The consideration of attempted praxis shows that political activity as a framing condition of discourse is, itself, prone to uncertainty. Not only the status of the actors, but also that of the collective condition itself, is obscure, as the multiple variants involved in its constructed identity, far from fitting in a functional utility, pull and push, collide, disseminate, and reform in endless flux, barely giving time for the conceptual governance of definition. Uncertainty of discursive form generates cognitive confusions, which, in turn, generate doubt. The above considerations make it clear that it is simplistic to present the political as an assertion in public of an antecedent presence, be it the individual "human" or the collective "people "or "nation". What is missed in traditional presentations is the creation and destruction of identities in the activity of definitive naming.

In broader terms, these difficulties hold significant implications for the self-productive project of the discursive communality. What is clear is that the elements of uncertainty destructively impact upon the notion of politics as the participation of members within public life. This is of huge significance since they are base conceptions for both theorists of government and of praxis, and therefore of their multiple variants (as the brief presentation of Aristotelian and Platonic political theory indicated). For the greatest part of European history they have been treated as foundational reference points; the notion of the public and its relationship to individuals and "lesser" groupings has been the most common conceptual framework for the conceptualisation of politics.

The question this raises is: why have these ideas held such sway over the political imagination for so long if they cannot be given a greater certainty of identity in definition? On the basis of our consideration of the expressions of uncertainty in politics, we are in a position to give an answer. Furthermore, in doing so, we shall see that this ideal, almost perverse in its tidy boundaries and particular categories and in the futility of its attempted actualization, is at the crux of the tension between theory and practice, creativity and governance of definition, and experience as expressed in our own tradition of political discourse. We are then bringing our general observations on uncertainty and politics into a sharp point of focus to the particular core problem in our inherited political discourse.

The political definitions of "public collectivity" and "private individual" are identities constructed in pursuit of the understanding of the conditions of individual participation in practical discourse. Each contains reference to, and idealises, participation and communality; but these definitions and the dichotomous totality, "public/private", which is the subject of so much political theory, are subject to a degree of qualitative obscurity. This obscurity, it will be argued, is a product of features of uncertainty discussed above.

The concept in which the difficulties attached to the ideal of "politics" combine is that of the participating member. Contrary to the common argument, the traditional language of citizenship does not have the conceptual capacity to fully communicate this idea. The Ancients' conception of citizenship precluded many aspects of belonging and participation, while the modern conception is so entwined with ideas of nationality that its original connotation of participation has now been entangled with a conception of citizenship as an almost passive and merely categorical belonging. The original and the categorical notions of citizenship tend to cancel each other out. Eventually one ideal must be chosen over the other, and neither has the capacity to make sense of the whole variety of possible modes of belonging and participation. The concept which has the capacity to include and cover these variations, and also the notion of "privacy of consciousness" and its relationship to the "public objective" realm, is "the subject". Examination of this term and its oppositional partner, "the public", shows that both obtain a degree of cogency from their reference to the concept of communality; but both also obscure the fracturing differences which characterise communality beneath the cover of an ideal and unified form. From what has already been presented here, it is reasonable to doubt the possibility of fully constructing these ideals, not only as practical possibilities, but as intrinsically cogent definitions of identities. As the dimensions of these ideals are explored the question is not whether they will succeed in the conceptual government of political experience, but what intentions might be revealed in the flawed attempt. In the following section it is argued that these intentions, once revealed, expose a conservative longing for the safety of the familiar as an environment of experience in which identity can be defined, secured, and protected.

The term "subject" has a three-fold signification: as the matter under consideration or observance; the conscious receptacle/organiser of experience; and as one who is under obligation to a lord or sovereign. Its plural dimension enables the term to function as a convergence of the inter-subjective production of identity involved in discourse and the political dimensions of establishing collective identity. In addition, it is the organising concept in terms of which experience is defined, significantly categorised, and given meaningful status. Importantly, its function as the primary location of individual self-definition gives to it an emotional power as a representation of our certainty in being. It is this variable mix of basic constituents which give it the flexibility to provide us with the chameleon "subject-hero", a constant but flexible identity which alters as the societal verstehen alters. ₁₀ For the Greeks, the hero was primarily the subject of the story; the matter which observed and revealed the significance of events vis-a-vis our common "human identity". ₁₁ Shakespeare's Macbeth represented the subject as conceived in terms of "the great chain of being". Macbeth, born into the ranks of noble subjects, would always be subject; he could never achieve genuine sovereignty. ₁₂ Descartes's "I" represents the subject of a secular verstehen, the observer of the real and authoritative locus of its verification. ₁₃

A secret driving desire can be found lurking within the varied presentations of the subject-hero. The desire can be seen both in what is common to them, and in the continuous totality they participate in constructing: all notions of the subject are used in the notions of belonging in an order, participating in an order, and creating an order. This flexibility enables the term to bridge the gaps between stories, apparently keeping the unity of the subject-hero alive, giving it both mortal and immortal status as the representative of our continuous unified identity.

The desire which is signalled here is for an identity made meaningful by reference to an understandable contextual order. This desire is both produced and expressed by the discursive communality; clearly the power to produce conviction lies in the appeal to common sensibilities, and these in turn are the product of such convictions. Put another way, stories work by arousing empathy in those whose understanding is shared by the story teller.

Seen in this way, it is not surprising that the story of the subject-hero should reach its most intense point, its idealised presentation, in Kant's dichotomous transcendental/empirical self. The universal transcendental subject is the author of the story in which (s)he exists as a mortal, empirical subject. ₁₄ As Kant is aware, this presentation appeals (in the most demanding way) to our common sense. The apparent force of this dual subject is derived from an appeal to the common experience not only of the determining conditions of our objective "being", but also of the privacy of experience, the latter constituting the paradox of inter-subjectivity. But it is at the finale of the story, the point at which once and for all the identity of the characters and their place in the "plot" is revealed, that the cogency of the concept of the subject-hero begins to come apart. The apparent certainty of common subjective experience depends upon the certainty of the concept of subject-experience itself. Kant's efforts to make this notion sensible become intensely problematic at the very moment of assertion. The dichotomy of self raises the issue of the unity of self and, from this, questions the appropriateness of asserting a singular "identity" for a possible plurality of "identities". At the apex of Kant's difficulties lies the problem of how the transcendental subject could know itself as itself (without recourse to dichotomising objectification) and, thus, be certain of its genuine presence. ₁₅ As a summary of Kant's difficulties, it could be said that, by exploring the foundational status of subjecthood, he eventually collided with the continuous reflexivity of referral to antecedent presence. ₁₆ Thus, for all his efforts to clarify the identity of the subject, Kant's work presented to the discursive communality a perception of the un-groundedness and fragility of the concept "subject". Despite this, the concept has had a long afterlife, and it is this which is significant, for desire rather than reason becomes the dynamic, pushing theorists to ever more obtuse attempts to "solve the riddles" or to "clarify the remaining difficulties". Such attempts ensure that the notion of the safe, identifying, and seemingly securing, concept, "the subject", can be retained at the level of practical discourse. ₁₇

This retention is vital to the continuance of politics understood as public life, for it provides the focus of the idealisation of communality as the collective mode of heroic self-expression. As Arendt reminds us, the great Hellenic story tellers established the idea of the public as the sphere in which the subject-hero appears before others; their virtues and vices become apparent as they grapple with both the problems facing the communality and those produced for them by participation within the communality. They become known to the others who observe them, they get a sense of their own identity as members from the responses of others, and, finally, the significance of their lives can be told when they have died and the effects of their actions have come to a settled end. The public is thus the locus for identification of each individual member. It in turn derives its definitive status from the totality of the actions which express and maintain membership. ₁₈

Arendt's presentation of the ancient agora typifies the way in which the psychological weight derived from the apparent objectivity of communality is often reinforced by the assertion of its ontological status, giving the communality an apparent certainty of being (that is, it is something beyond the uncertainty of discourse). This has often stimulated the idealisation of communality as an identity in itself. In its idealised presentation, communality is given the status of "the public", variously referred to as "the polis", "the body politic", and, in some conceptualisations, "the state".

In time, of course, the notion of "the public", like that of the subject-hero, has undergone changes, most notably in the transformation of that identified as the body of "a people", to a quality which extends from this body to those things it holds in common. With this expansion the term has lost some of its definitive force, but it still retains reference to an idea of a community of participants, and it is upon this idea that the integral and unifying political identity of the subject-hero is built.

Typifying this idealisation, Arendt argues from the necessary existence of communality for discourse, that the existence of communality must be made certain. Its necessary, self-maintaining substance is mapped out thus: a plurality of perspectives to be voiced on the basis of equality of status for participants, which in turn requires freedom from economic or personal coercion by other participants. These conditions must be established as principles of common interaction, thus ensuring the identity of the participants as individuals through their identification as citizens, as members of a secure, self-maintaining communality - the public. ₁₉

The problem here is that the communal is not the same as the public, though, as we have seen, it is characterised by many of the same features. The latter, as an idealised conception of these elements, abstracts them from the complex whole of inter-subjective creation of a common "objectivity".

The differences between the ideal of the public and the actual communality have fed a line of critical exploration, at times involving explicit challenges to the notion of the public, though all too often without challenging its mutually definitive partner, "the subject". Aristotle's challenge to Plato's alignment of government with domestic management begins a series of challenges which feed off a consistent, though quietly present, sub-discourse, which runs through the tradition of political theory and is expressed in the political activity of government. This is the discourse of domestification, which is the locus of some grasping perceptions of the limits of the public/subject ideal. Montaigne, Wollstonecraft, De Sade and Marx, all in their different ways, mine the seam of incoherence in the dichotomy of the public/private self. None, however, is able to transcend the limits of the dichotomy and present a fully cogent critique of the public/subject dichotomy.

Montaigne sets the challenge to the ideal of public life, perceptively pinpointing its multiple demands as the source of subjects' disintegration; but he seeks to protect the fragile subject in the security of domestic life and private self-reflection. ₂₀ Wollstonecraft, locked into a love of the domestic and the public as ideals, fails to perceive that she can't make sense of their conflicting demands because they express the incoherence of the public/private dichotomy itself. ₂₁ Marx and Engels, though posing a full-blown challenge to the public, retain in modified form the concept of "pure" communality between producing and reproducing subjects, thereby raising the domestic to the status of "the public"; and, through their presentation of politics as a social expression of economic concerns, reducing the public to the domestic. ₂₂ De Sade focuses attention upon the private dimensions of power as the exercise of will over others in pursuit of desires. In his advocacy of self-gratification, however, he presents a ritualistic, rule-bound sphere of interaction, necessitating participation even by the victims of the powerful. It is a kind of anti-polity, a communality of isolated desires and fears, in which all are valued only as a means to the others' pleasure. ₂₃ In this presentation he unintentionally gives the clearest picture of domestification as an ideal and, in doing so, implies domesticity's own internal incoherence.

As the difficulties of the challenges indicate, the unravelling of the apparent cogency of the public/private dichotomy by the discourse of domestification is an expression of a general cognitive uncertainty which also unravels the conceptualisation of domestification itself. It is possible to see that, in its dimension of domestification, politics includes both public and private dimensions. As an activity of self-definition and maintenance, politics seeks to formulate the boundaries between political identities in order to define the private integrity of each political identity in regard to others. Most notable in this respect is the perceived need to define the exclusive boundaries of the collective subject to be governed. At the same time, the collective quality of the political experience - its communal substance - is a public quality, which, if destroyed, ends the condition necessary for the communality's discursive self-creation and maintenance. The fundamental problem is that the public and private are dimensions of the same, perceived as distinct only by the application of limiting and highly focused perspectives. From a general perspective one sees that the public quality - the self-definition of the collective "we", a body which is a home to its members - is also a private quality in its exclusion of strangers. It is the definition of membership, setting out duties and entitlements which are fundamentally linked to the collectivity's distribution of commonly possessed resources.

Thus the process which theories of politics claim distinguishes the collectivity of the citizenry from "others" is the same process by which both the exclusive individuality of each member in relation to private property, and the family's exclusivity against the general collective, is conceptualised. The perspective is confused and the argument incoherent. The inability of naming to certify identities merges with the inability of the domesticator to fully establish the boundaries of identities to be managed. It manifests the futility of attempts to secure beyond doubt a collective presence, a place of belonging, a home. This is how the threatening otherness within domestification undermines the goal of political organisation; it adds to and highlights another dimension of uncertainty involved in organisational activity. As has been shown, the organisation of life into a collective identity expresses the desire for identity; and it is therefore inherently conservative in seeking a familiar and, thus, manageable order. The conservative position, though, entails a recognition of its own relativity, and, thus, indications of its fragility, for within the activity of constructing a familiar, organised collective identity, lies the sense of alternatives to the order sought. The order is, after all, selected from a recognised set of possibilities. The appeal of the selected order is its fit to perceived conceptions of normality and "rightness". It is intended to provide a sensory comfort, allied to the intellectual security of the moral right to such comfort. This is the conservative substance of political activity.

The conservative perspective, however, contains an intellectual tension between the desire for normative comfort and the active choice to take such a position; for the former contains a normative drive in itself, while the latter recognises the option of other modes of organisation. Indeed, the conservative is often best placed to understand and admire other social modes of organisation as alternative traditions. The tension exists, then, between the feel of the chosen order as "natural", and, thus, in some way foundational, and the recognition of it as optional, as one mode of being among others. This awareness extends to a compound realisation of the unfounded, particularistic, and, thus, fragile, familiarity of the chosen order when the difficulties of internal coherence expressed in the confusions of the public/subject dichotomy become apparent. The quest for a home holds out a vision of threatening otherness outside and within the familiar homely mode of collective life.

In adding to the problem of discourse a dimension of praxis, that is, of socio-political activity conducted over time, we can clearly perceive the centrality and futility of conservatism as expressed in customary conceptualisation. The conservatism which underpins the attempt to establish in certain and familiar terms a conception and enactment of "the public" indicates the potential for psychological shock upon recognition of the futility of the quest. The depth of need for safety and security is loaded in the underlying quest for the certifying of identity through the establishment of a body or place of belonging. The potential for the recognition of futility is built into the recognition of otherness which is integral to the conservative stance. Thus, it is the idealised conceptualisation of "the familiar", or "the homely", which is the core uncertainty within the conservative understanding; as such, it is the core uncertainty within the activity of government.

THE UNHOMELINESS OF HOME: PSYCHOLOGICAL UNCERTAINTY

Having set out the primary motivations of conservatism, the psychological impact which the rupture of its cognitive order has on the governing mentality can now be explored. The full effect of the confusions involved in the pursuit of identification through belonging is neatly brought into focus in Freud's classic essay, Das Unheimliche, which literally means "the unhomely", but translates into English usage as "the uncanny". Tracing the various significations of the term "heimlich" (homely), Freud realises that the term not only includes the ideal of familiarity, restfulness, and security, but that it also includes secrecy, enclosedness, and hiddenness, implying fear of what is outside, and possible strangeness on the inside. Thus, the "heimlich" is characterised by "a sense of agreeable restfulness and security", ₂₄ which is simultaneously undermined by a tendency towards the "eerie, weird... and ghostly". ₂₅ In short, the notion of the uncanny encompasses an opposition which is not a dialectic of boundaried opposites, but is fused into a singularity of experience. That which engenders familiarity is also that which promotes distance; that which promotes security is that which creates fear. The quality which dominates the experience is that of strangeness in the familiar; that which is familiar is sensed as having a quality of novelty (as in the novelty of the stranger) and, thus, of unknown potential or significance.

For Freud, this problem is treated as one of individual psychology; yet he notes, in his way, that it is clearly a problem which is also displayed in collective activity. His argument that uncanniness derives from repressed memory of a prior breaking of a collective taboo relates to a perception of the general problem of establishing the safe and familiar collectivity: the family, the city, the nation, the people.

The violation of taboo is the violation of an understanding framing discourse, what Collingwood termed an "absolute presupposition", that which precedes and provides the basic elements of the first principles of a verstehen. ₂₆ The violation of absolute presuppositions has an odd effect; it fundamentally ruptures the paradigm of knowledge, but barely visibly, just below the water line. Its significance is not fully recognised for some time. It works away at the discursive paradigm undermining its meaningfulness until the signifier doesn't mean anything and the object has no term of signification; that is, it cannot be meaningfully named within the terms of the discourse. This is the moment when the actor/speaker can no longer certify familiar experience by the use of familiar, customary signifiers. It is the moment of uncanniness. The experience of the uncanny is the acute moment when uncertainty of condition corresponds to psychological uncertainty.

It is clear now that "uncertainty" has more dimensions than the psychological. Viewing the (un)heimliche from the political perspective of the activity of self-generation and maintenance, we can see that, though the moment of experience is enclosed, the experience of the uncanny is other-referring. Those who experience different ways of being have noted possible and/or actual otherness which provides the model terms by which they see otherness in themselves. This in itself, however, is not sufficient to stimulate "unheimlich" experience. It is possible to perceive other modes of understanding and action which might throw one into doubt, but this does not necessarily generate uncanniness. The uncanny is experienced when anomalous experience begins to dissolve the foundational structures of understanding itself. Strange experiences puncture the apparent fabric of "reality". For this to happen, the otherness experienced must either be other to the terms of the experience itself, or reveal some strangeness about the terms of reference, making them `unhomely'. ₂₇ Such experiences characterise the shift from doubt to uncertainty. This occurs when the identity of the doubting self is threatened at the level of its capacity for self-generative existence. Though highly varied in expression and signification, the self-identity is constructed within a particular paradigmatic discourse as a primal "certainty". From this steadfast rock, doubt can be expressed about everything except the "I". It is only when the unitary, homely familiarity of self becomes odd to the one who experiences it that unheimlich sensibility begins actively to unravel identity.

The uncanny as a dimension of uncertainty is tied to the political activity of societal governance. The political perspective gives the uncanny a certain sobriety. In as much as it is a quest to govern destiny, the political is characterised by a practical earnestness. In its futility, this often turns to tragedy. It is overall a slightly grim and melancholic activity, and these aspects of political life bear upon the impact of the uncanny on our experience. While the sense of the uncanny can be celebrated as the jouissance of sublimity, the thrill of the strange or a Nietzschean walking of the high wire, in the context of politics it is a malignant strangeness within the numbing ordinariness of the familiar which the conservative (and everyone who engages in politics is a conservative) eventually must know and dread as a signal of crisis and potential catastrophe.

THE HISTORICITY OF UNCERTAINTY

Having set out in analytic terms what the sense of the uncanny is, and why it is a constant potential in political theory and action, it is possible to construct an image of what the historical conditions actualising such a potential might have been. To this end, "modernity" should be viewed as a situation which a discursive communality defines as its own. Such a view enables a perception of the development of the elements of uncertainty as they become entropically involved within the creative self-enactment of this communality.

Yet care must be taken in the exploration of the historical factors involved. The historicity of the community is too complex for a definitive summary of its totality. The "history" in this work attempts the more modest task of collecting some of the myriad historical details into a defined form, one which is capable of framing their significance in terms of a discernible theme: the realisation of uncertainty. The case for this theme can be made on the grounds of ambiguity, by using the story teller's opening: "if there was a discernible theme to the complex of expressed ideas in the eighteenth century, it would be the gradual realisation of uncertainty."

From this beginning, the second part of this pamphlet sets out the significant detail of the correlation between the emergence of a common sensibility of uncertainty in eighteenth-century Europe, and the secularisation of modes of understanding. This presentation is developed through an exploration of a dialectical interaction between scientism on the one hand, with a focus upon the attempted government of uncertainty, and the literature of the fantastic on the other, with its focus upon the sense of the uncanny. However, the contextual frame of this interaction - the scenario from which it derives its great significance - is the historical development of secularisation.

SECULARISATION

Though the secular scientific/rationalist challenge to Christian hegemony has often been characterised as an atheistic and revolutionary project (with key players ranging from Machiavelli and Hobbes to the Jacobins), the integration of political with religious concerns throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ensured that, in the main, the challenges to Christendom did not come from outside a theologically referential discourse; Protestantism and the neo-Christian Deism were doctrines which contributed largely to the framing discourse of doubt and certainty, later to become dominated by secular scientific rationalism.

Any broad-brush presentation of the religious positions held during the Enlightenment would distinguish between them in something like the following manner. Catholicism, though flexible enough to incorporate new modes of theorising, maintained its identity by its retention of belief in the mystery of presence (that is, the notions of God and of human essence). The key mysteries were celebrated and revered through cabalistic and Gothick ritual. By contrast, Protestantism was characterised by exercises in clarification of "Man's relationship to "God" and to "nature". From its origins in the activities of Calvin and Luther, it defined its goal as the opening up of the dark recesses of mystery to the clarity of the revealed and the reasoned. Deism, the religion of Voltaire and Montesquieu, is characterised as the belief in God derived from appreciation of the rational order of nature. Deists argued that where there is a system of cause and effect which can be comprehended rationally, there must have been an originating cause. By applying reason to natural law, people can come to know God's design and, through this, his intentions regarding humankind.

But the broad brush sweeps over the oddities that give historical character to the inter-relationship of these religions and to the project of scientific rationalism. It fails to uncover a rationalist streak within Catholicism, which, in its Thomist and Augustan theories, had long held an inner tension between attempts to explain the necessity of God and the ideal of the mystery of God's presence. Pascal, a Catholic himself, advanced this tension by the application of Cartesian rationalism to the analysis of the mysteries of God's design, focusing on the dualistic (Godlike and animal) essence of man. ₂₈ The rationalist mode of argument set the grounds for Catholic advocates to debate with Deists, and crucially, to grapple with the development of scientific rationalism.

The advance of Deism and even of atheism in the eighteenth century cast the contest of Catholics and Protestants in a new light, showing that the Protestant assertion of original sin had tied it closer to Catholicism than its advocates realised. Indeed, early Protestantism was so fierce in its retention of the dogma of original sin that it fell into subjugating reason before mystery. ₂₉ It is not surprising, then, that empiricism, as a clear, rational means of obtaining certain knowledge of a limited collection of objects, flourished within Protestantism. The ideal was, as Newton suggested, to play with the pebbles on the beach while the mysterious seas remained untouched. Empiricism provided the grounds for debate with rationalism, which was to provide the dynamic in the development of scientific rationalism.

What lay between theological and scientific-rationalist theorists was their attitude to "mystery" (an ontologisation of cognitive uncertainty). Yet their intellectual relationship to mystery had a lot in common. The presence of the intrinsically mysterious, which is the foundation of theological belief, challenges the rational construction of a meaningful world, signifying the gap between the limits of knowledge and its aspiration to certainty. On encountering the intrinsically mysterious, the intellectual actor works with reason at its edges, performing reasoned processual actions, which, meeting with no understandable response, fail to enclose the otherness of the experienced in the lighted world of known identities. Yet such actions do carry sensible signals back to the actor. They are performed both to create an understandable order of events which provides some security, and to self-reflectively express the actor's relationship to the unknown but dimly perceived strangeness of that which is beyond him/her. The actions cease to be genuine communicative sorties into "the other" and become pure ritual. This ritual is a common feature of religious and rationalist understanding; and though the former celebrates and finds security in it and the latter goes kicking and arguing defiance, both encounter and enter into the mystery of their absolute presuppositions - the definitive parameters of common understanding. On entering the intrinsic mystery, both display a common concern with identification and identity, performing cabalistic rituals in the half-light, processes which attempt to make a Gothick house of uncertainty into a homely context for the establishment of our "human" identities.

While the common perception of mystery provided the common ground for the disputes between theologians and scientific rationalists, the common concern with identification and identity provided their focus. The eighteenth century inherited a structuration of all identities around a reference to the certain mystery of God. The concern with God was an expression of the concern with permanent identity. God had appeared to be the certifying foundation providing a context for the impermanence of natural beings. The inheritance of a common understanding, founded upon respect for a perceived "mystery of presence", set the terms for the developing secular perspective. From this rationalist perspective, the difficulty of the Catholic mysteries was that they precluded knowledge of God in himself. If God couldn't be known - if he was a mystery which could only be approached through faith - nothing could be known as a certain identity. People could not identify themselves. In the light of this difficulty it was seen as necessary to affirm an independence of identity for "humankind" (individualised as "man"). But, despite their efforts to break free, the humanists remained tied to the conceptual framework derived from belief in God. The idea of God remained important because it expressed difficulties in the definition of the identity "man", particularly in regard to his place in the natural order and the possibility of permanence in some sense beyond natural being. Unlike all else, we act and hope and strive, but like all else, we come to nothing in this natural world. Permanence only appears to offer a foundational context for our actions.

It is this secular humanism which underpins Voltaire's critique of Pascal's notion of the mystery of man's essential nature. Voltaire understood that concern with God expresses the concern with "man", but his attack on Pascal's theology expressed a difference between rationalist and theological perceptions as to the degree of true understanding that can be achieved. ₃₀ Pascal's attempt to found a rational perception on the certification of an impenetrable mystery could not be enough for humanist rationalism, which, seeking foundations within human terms, requires all to be brought within its circumference. Voltaire made it perfectly clear that the aim was not to abolish God, but to de-mystify him; to know God in truth. This project characterises Deism, and, to the degree that Protestantism was capable of pursuing its partial commitment to reason, this was the common ground between the two religions and their point of conflict with Catholicism.

Yet Voltaire's own rationalism exceeded even his Deist beliefs. Comprehending the contingency and amorality of natural events, his argument pushed ever closer to atheism. In his inability to restrain the doubtful probing of rationalist and empiricist perspectives, he exemplified how the denial of mystery moved the one who denied beyond religious sensibility, marking a shift of understanding towards secularisation. The contradictory and constraining frame of religious understanding that distorted Voltaire's vision begged the kind of critique developed by Pierre Bayle, who, influenced by Hobbes's empiricism, built an atheistic critique of the distorting effect of the dogma of final causes on the enquiry into as yet unknown truths. Such was the dynamic towards secularisation in the attempts to clarify God's order that Montesquieu's rebuttal of Bayle, described by Lacordaire as the finest eighteenth-century defence of Christianity, advocated religion largely on the secular criteria of political stability and social cohesion. ₃₁ Montesquieu stated that "even a false religion is the best security we can have of the probity of men". ₃₂ On the ethical role of religion, he argued, "it is much easier to prove that religion ought to humanise the manners of men than that any particular religion is true". ₃₃ Montesquieu's "defence" indicates how, as scientific rationalism gathered pace, religion remained, but increasingly only as an object of the secular perspective.

Nevertheless, scientific rationalism, developed within the discourse of European religion, did not expunge the "mystery of presence", but carried it in the modified sceptical form of "the mystery of the uncertainty of identity", which drove its concern for the identity of man and natural objects. In its modified form, this perception of a mystery at the edges of understanding appeared even more threatening, for it resided in the limits of practical modes of knowing and theoretical coherence. As such, it was present within the practice and discourse of scientific rationalism itself. It appeared for the first time as an intransigent stranger intruding into the ordered world of rational coherence and known facts and, by remaining the un-nameable, it generated (and still generates) the structural and psychological uncertainty which characterise modern discourse and consciousness. Yet, though this threat is the product of the debate of theologians and enlightenment theorists, its central importance and its implications became obscured as the terms of enquiry and the emphasised goal of the enquiry were undergoing fundamental alterations. By gradually closing off the para-physical as the source of explanation of the mysterious, secularisation introduced a range of questions about subjects hitherto managed by the conceptual government of theology. The fundamentals previously guaranteed by theological certification of enduring mysteries, the order and purpose of our environment and of our own physical and spiritual identity, became subject to doubt. As Cartesian philosophy exemplified, doubt is an expression of the centrality of human consciousness to the production of believable understanding, and, as such, an uncompromisingly secular location for gaining a perspective upon the issue of identity.

This shift in the perceived locus of objectivity changes the optic from an attempted universal objectivity to a particular subjectivity. Thus, though questioning the appearance of and, eventually, the certainty of God, and apparently focusing upon the identity of man, both of these issues, which were the core of the rationalist debate with traditional religion, increasingly became side issues. Cartesians were concerned with the issue of identity in general, and, significantly, the focus of concern moved to the certainty of knowledge. Thus, the problem of epistemology became the core issue, avoiding the challenging issue of the certainty of the knowing subject. The optic of rationalism guides the philosophers' eyes ever away from their original concerns, yet these remain subsumed in the rationalist project. Similarly, the influence of Lockean and Hobbesian philosophy, carried into French theory by such advocates as Voltaire and Bayle, sidestepped the fundamental difficulties of understanding "human" identity. ₃₄ From an empiricist (scientistic) base, the certainty of the identity of God was considered beyond the bounds of worthwhile enquiry, and the identity of "man" was unquestioned. As Hobbes put it, the material sensory body is acted upon and acts upon other "bodies". For Locke, the mind was a tabula rasa, an empty capacity for knowledge lodged within the physical unity of the sensory human being. Thus, empiricism provided the apparently safe base of the co-ordinated response of the senses to the external environment; the identity of "man" was seen as secure in itself, even if its existence might be endangered by its relationship to nature. The problem of identification was therefore viewed only as a difficulty in understanding what the natural order is and how "man" fits into it.

Thus, empiricists sidestepped the origins of the enquiry by focusing on the problem of the limits of knowledge which, in this case, derived from Protestant adherence to the mystery of "God's will". However, though the original problem fell away from the line of focus, it remains a problematic in the discourse of scientism. To the scientistic understanding, the significance of facts for man can be understood only with reference to an empiricist ontology and therefore, with reference to the "mystery of identity".

We can see, then, that the concern with identity stimulated rationalist and empiricist responses. Competing as modes of knowledge, each was intended to expand knowledge, to bring all experience and possibilities understood in relation to it under conceptual governance. The concern with identity also stimulated a subversion of these responses in the literary mode of "fantasy". Further consideration of these responses and their particular inter-relationship reveals that this dual response to the loss of theological foundation marked the period of modernity as a struggle with the gradual realisation of uncertainty. In this context it is possible to perceive the significance of a largely Anglo-French two-part drama. The first part consists of the superficially confident project of scientific rationalism, while the second part relates the project's unwinding into a frightened uncertainty.

UNCERTAINTY AND SCIENTIFIC RATIONALISM

With eyes averted from the fundamental problematics involved in its origins, the advocates of scientific rationalism provided the core confidence dynamising the pursuit of enlightenment. This pursuit was, however, never free from conceptual tensions and underlying anxieties around the mystery of identity, and these were to expose the futility of its ultimate aims. Initially, the Enlightenment debate centred around the relative merits of Cartesian and Newtonian methodologies. The former's method of deducing systems of order from an initial certainty had been challenged by the use of scientific technology. ₃₅ This technology, the product of science, helped the Newtonian scientists to piece together empirically certified facts into a jigsaw of definitive knowledge. To many philosophers this successful production of facts certified Locke's empiricist philosophy. Typically, Maupertuis asserts, "One constructs for one's self a satisfactory system while one is ignorant of the phenomenon to be explained. As soon as these are known one sees the inadequacy of one's reasoning and the system fades away. If we think we know anything it is merely because of our extreme ignorance." ₃₆

The point of importance here is the implicit reference to empirical validation; only factuality provides genuine knowledge which is, thus, limited and piece-meal; all else is speculation. Yet the moderate claim for the possible range of knowledge is offset by the shift in emphasis upon the degree of certainty of what is known. Whereas reasoned speculation claims to enable knowledge about "the other", that is, to deduce what it must be like, empiricism makes a claim for a means to know the "object" in itself, to make contact with it, to open up its substantive being to observation. It is particularistic, but provides "certainty" of what is known. From this stand-point, abstract a priori systems are "extreme ignorance". Their familiarity does not correspond to factuality, and, thus, provides no practical means for establishing a secure existence. Of course, the empiricist stance is dependent upon a good deal of abstract rationalist theorising to establish its first principles, and its position regarding a priori reasoning has therefore never been fully cogent. It is not surprising, then, that despite the limits imposed by Locke and Newton, later theorists believed that science provided the factual basis for a systematic knowledge of the entire workings of the universe. In the early eighteenth century, the project was to come to know the universe factually in itself. This trend was probably due to the necessary involvement of rationalist systems in organising empirical information and, relatedly, to the pragmatic employment of both rationalist and empiricist principles of enquiry, which is exemplified in the work of such enlightenment "greats" as Diderot (before his scepticism took full hold) and Montesquieu, who set the terms of scientific rationalism with his argument that "the rational world must be governed just as well as the material world". ₃₇

On this superficially confident platform, there developed a project to end all ignorance, to penetrate and de-mystify all experience by gradually discovering new facts and piecing together all the accumulated knowledge. This attitude is exemplified in Pluche's claim that his readers will "savour what [they] will find guaranteed by the evidence of modern observers who have acquired a universal reputation for their precision and exactitude." ₃₈ This attitude is also exemplified, most famously, in Diderot and D'alembert's construction of L'Encyclopaedie, a massive venture to bring together all known facts. Groethuysen, an observer of this enterprise, wrote, "Once they have arranged all the material they have got together they will see the universe take on a recognisable shape; they will behold a mass of scientific data, of facts duly authenticated, something which man can take hold of, something he can call his own." ₃₉

These quotations epitomise the duality of signified intent underpinning the advocacy of scientism. On the superficial level, empirical definitions were valued for their "enlightening" aspects, the conquest of phantoms of the unknown by "true" knowledge. But integral to this valuation is the desire to have a safe and familiar environment. The above quotations also exemplify how this discourse is marked by an almost obsessive desire conceptually to govern all experience, and, derivatively, all the potential possibilities indicated by such experience. It is the expression of the desire to make actual and possible experience safe, by subjugating it to the government of certain knowledge. Pluche is pleased to guarantee a known reality because he believes that, in knowing it, you can determine its dimensions. Then, as Groethuysen says, you can "take hold of" it, make it your own. The desire for possession and management of "the real" is the desire to subject it to oikonomos, to become patriarch over a familiar and governable home. In turn, the desire for a homely world expresses a desire for a context from which one can derive a secure and meaningful identity. This very desire implies a recognition of other possibilities of meaningless strangeness and indicates at some level a recognition of the threat to self-conception which this other possible experience holds.

The fear of the known other is constantly implied; indeed, underpinning this perception were a constant and increasing number of statements of doubt. Voltaire expressed this underlying mood: "From the stars to the earth's centre in the external world and in ourselves, every substance is unknown to us. We see appearances only; we are in a dream." ₄₀

The move to a sense of unreality brings Voltaire's sensibility close to that of psychological uncertainty itself. Only the assumed certainty of the antecedent identity of the dreamer stands between his words and a full sense of the strangeness of experience (that is, it's like a dream but it isn't; there is no safe, outside reality in which the solid and secure dreamer lies). Diderot, bringing the problem of discursive definition of experience into the edge of focus, comes even closer to a sense of radical uncertainty: "If all things are in flux. . . all our natural sciences become as transient as words themselves." ₄₁

It is not so odd that the veracity of scientific and rational knowledge could be claimed by the authors of such doubting comments. Diderot's remark, "The first step towards philosophy is incredulity", ₄₂ indicates that scepticism draws upon the basic tension of this position. Rationalism and, at a different level perhaps, science, are built upon doubt; their truth claims are thus subverted by their founding principle. But while some were at times brave enough to take on this challenge, the psychological appeal of security through controlling knowledge, combined with the energy generated by the flow of successful discoveries produced by empiricism and rational deduction, led many, like Pluche and Groethuysen, to take up the faith of scientism. Such was the emotive power of the quest that even the sceptical stance of writers such as Diderot is, at times, swept away by the excited tones of "discovery" and "conquest". At such times they lose sight of their original doubts and the recognition of their fears which, seen through a cloudy vision of uncertainty, are obscured still further.

The danger that lay in this false optimism was that it obscured the political significance of secularisation. Scientific rationalism sought originally to clarify the identity of man and to provide at least some knowledge of his place in the universal order. Yet it was caught upon the spike of its continuing attempts at essentialist philosophy and the growing realisation that neither empiricism nor reason could verify antecedent presence or, as the philosophes would put it, "natural identity". The unintentional threat is to a common world discursively produced upon the belief of foundational presence, or "God", from which was derived the presence of "man". As noted earlier, politics has been traditionally concerned to establish the precise identity of "man" in order to build a political identity which will secure "his" needs. In this concern politics entangles ethical and practical arguments with the ontology of antecedent presence. Thus, scientific rationalism, which appeared to give new tools to the task of politics, carried an accidental challenge to its fundamental premise.

From Leviathan onwards, scientific rationalism became increasingly employed as the means of "finally" resolving the uncertainties of political life. Notably, disputes as to how the collectivity should live could be resolved by a rational, and/or empiricist, proof of the nature of man and his consequent needs. From this proof, a rational construction of a suitable order of life could be prescribed and enacted. Again, the confidence in the project was high. The Abbé Saint Pierre set the tone of the political project: "the highest form of politics is to find or establish a form of government that will perfect itself". ₄₃ An order constructed upon a rational assessment of the character of man and his consequent needs would banish the persistent dangers of contingency and conflict.

Yet, in the political project of the Enlightenment, two distinct problematics tended to be conflated. The epistemological concern with the identification of man was confused with a political concern with the securing of such an identity. Within this conflation, the uncertainty of the former, derived from its struggle with the mystery of presence, is hidden in the apparent certainties of scientific government. The result, a simultaneous expression and masking of uncertainty, is exemplified in Montesquieu's scientific rationalist politics. In his post-fictional works, Montesquieu developed an entirely novel proto-sociology of political orders of power in which contingency is included, but its implications of chaotic disorder are precluded by overarching natural laws. In Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence, he writes: "There are general causes, whether moral or physical, which operate... All accidents are subject to these causes and if the outcome of a single battle was the ruin of a state there was a general cause which decreed the state was to perish through a single battle". ₄₄ Understanding the laws which constitute the processual, and, thus, rationally governable, order of the universe will give the political theorist the means of prescribing modes of action which can avoid errors that lead to apparent, fateful disasters, and it can limit the effects of actual contingency.

Montesquieu sought to show that "man" can construct artificial orders which meet the prescribed conditions for practical success, protect him from possible contingency and meet his natural needs. Yet, in making this argument, Montesquieu sows the seeds of the argument's own structural uncertainty. The identification of "man" as a being with a place in a rational, natural order indicates that his argument, typifying scientific rational constructions, is still reliant upon quasi-theological notions of a perfect and right order. It is dependent, at least as a metaphorical prop, upon a circular theological definition of man in terms of how he fits into God's order, which defines God also in terms of the perfect, autonomous and totally secure identity, in other words, as an ideal of indestructible man. The circularity of this starting point hides its lack of a genuine foundational reference point. It contains a cognitive failure which scientific rationalism carries into its attempts to establish certain identities. Montesquieu exemplifies this masked failure in the attempt to establish the identity of "man" which opens his major work on politics, De l'esprit des lois. In doing so, he places the basic cognitive failure of scientific rationalism at the heart of his political perception. As a Deist, he derives a conceptualisation of man from that of God, whose universality and autonomy symbolise the state and goal of self-conscious identity. Montesquieu begins by setting out the uncertainty of human identity. Man's identity is transient and limited and, thus, threatened with extinction at all times. From this he moves to the political question: how, then, can we assert and protect human identity? In a sense, the question is how to make man more God-like. Montesquieu's answer is that we need to develop those aspects of our being which are already God-like. Man's relationship to God is a "relationship of equity" between "intelligent beings": though we are not universal and God is, we are equal in autonomy of will and in our rational capacity. ₄₅ What God gives to aid our need for autonomous self-determination is a context in which to establish and maintain our own identity as independent beings. This context is a rationally-ordered nature. Nature is governed by rational principles which manifest an "original reason" (God). Thus, use of his reasoning capacity will give man what we now call a priori knowledge of how things work. It shows us that "there are relations of justice" in the natural order which therefore exist "prior to positive law". ₄₆ By making natural law in accordance with these principles, we can use them to order ourselves collectively into a social system, a processual order of regular and, thus, predictable motions. This system enables men to act freely, because they know what it is and can rationally comprehend the scope of their liberties within it. Thus, for Montesquieu, politics is the scientific housing of our frail identities in the securing home of reasoned order; the identity of man is established and protected in the successful construction of a sphere of liberty and (most important) security.

The difficulty with this identification of the political is that its prescription for the securing of human identity depends upon the certainty that there is a rational order, external to and corresponding with "man's" rational constructions. Montesquieu argues that the use of reason clarifies and liberates because it mediates between our will and God's; knowledge is tied to truth, and man's identity is secured by true knowledge of his place in God's order. Yet all these claims depend upon the certainty of a rational creator or organising principle which Deists would term "God", existing independently of the discourse of man. It returns the rationalist to the point of origin: the issue of the status of the theological understanding of presence. The problem for the rationalist is that "presence" always lies beyond naming, and therefore cannot be enclosed within definitions. Thus, God, as the archetypal primal presence, remains beyond the rational grasp, as do derivative "foundational" identities. The intensity of the problem - a problem signifying the limits of definitive naming as the fundamental source of uncertainty - is expressed in the almost perverse activity of its obfuscation. Montesquieu was not unaware of the problem. In his earlier fiction, Lettres persanes (1721), he has a character declare: "the most sensible of philosophers who have reflected upon the nature of God have said that he is a being of supreme perfection. . . They have enumerated all the perfections that man is capable of possessing or imagining, and have applied them to the idea of divinity without realizing that these attributes are often incompatible, and cannot subsist in the same subject without invalidating each other". ₄₇ The implication is that reason denies the possibility of full presence and, with it, raises the issue of antecedent identity in general. The frightening question which follows for the humanist is then: "and what of man?"

If the notion of God, understood as an idealisation of man, is incoherent, then the idea of man as an imperfect and corruptible image of God is reflectively shown to be so too. While the incoherence of this notion of God is not inherently problematic to a Deist, the question remains: from what is the context for the identification of man derived? Without a corresponding order of reason, our reason has no special status; it cannot by itself be held up as the means by which we know an antecedently defined identity. Without an external standard against which to validate definitions, we must define ourselves in the half-light of our own ideas. Framed by the limits of definitive naming and, thus, always grasping at shadowed and un-named experience, the methods we employ inevitably fail to secure our identity once and for all and, as a consequence, the security of the identities we do create is frail.

In the attempt to eradicate the myth of presence, Montesquieu introduces uncertainty as a haunting stranger into the house of politics. Uncertainty is there to be perceived and, once perceived, political actors, contrary to Montesquieu's hopes (but manifesting his fears), would become anomic, potentially volatile, and, without another way of understanding their political existence, nihilistic. Realising such a potential, rationalists and humanists may well have cried, as did Diderot: "Oh God of Clarke and Newton, have pity on me." ₄₈

THE EMERGENCE OF THE UNCANNY

In such light, the emergence in the late eighteenth century of a "Gothick literature", an exploration of the fear of that which lies beyond reason and scientific knowledge, can be viewed as a response to the repression of such fear in the philosophical discourse of "enlightenment". To take this view, however, restricts our perception of the discursive encounter with uncertainty to a limited time space and literary genre. Notably, it precludes exploration of the literary expressions of unease which parallelled the gradual expressions of doubt in the earlier eighteenth century. If, however, the roots and offspring of the Gothick are considered, the wider significance of its subject matter becomes visible. Gothick literature fed off rich and diverse sources. The popular novels of Anne Radcliffe and Matthew "Monk" Lewis fed off the detail of Shakespearean tragedy. ₄₉ There is also a common use of effects from medieval tales of chivalry and magic, which, like Shakespearean writings, took much from oral folk myth. In classic works such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), the Gothick ran over into Romanticism and established a central sense of the uncanny which characterises works of writers as diverse as Poe, Kafka, and Orwell, as well as the more populist offshoots of horror and science fiction. ₅₀ Additionally, Gothick fiction was also understood in the eighteenth century to include Oriental mysteries.

Here the Gothick crossed over into the very different terrain of early eighteenth-century French literature, which, though sharing an inspiring initiation in the European productions of Arabian Nights, pursued the effect of mystery through the mode of satire. This mixed genre, as the most famous example, Montesquieu's Lettres persanes, shows, was often used as a digging tool in the pursuit of reason. ₅₁

The Gothick, then, was a moment within the flow of dramatic presentations of "otherness", a moment which can be characterised as a strand of the communal discourse enacted in parallel and, at times, in symbiotic interrelation with rationalism and science. The significance of the Gothick (dramatically represented by its historical proximity to the French Revolution) was its severance of the para-normal from the cogent context of theology. This severance was not immediate, nor was its shocking impact initially the aim of Gothick authors. As the reflections of Walpole (author in 1764 of The Castle of Otranto, generally regarded as the first fully Gothick work) testifies, the early Gothick authors commonly used the supernatural as a tool to instil a little "terror" as a light thrill for readers. ₅₂ Though initially not undertaken as a serious enterprise, it had a strong impact, as will be shown. Using the language of literary critics, Gothick literature rapidly moved from presentations of the "marvellous" (para-physical oddities explainable with reference to a supernatural order), to "fantasy" (events which are anomalous to understood meta-physical and/or material orders of being). ₅₃

The impact of fantasy literature on established modes of understanding was two-fold. Focusing upon the mystery of presence, Gothick literature presented and subverted both theological and rationalist/materialist modes of managing experience. In the early "immature" Gothick, it was the cabalistic ritual of religion which was most subject to subversion. Religion, especially in its Catholic form, was consistently presented as a means of dealing with a dark unknown, the otherness of which eventually exceeds its comprehension by rupturing its customary process with inconceivable events. Yet the greatest impact of fantasy was eventually to be upon the ever-more dominant secular modes of understanding. The reason for this lies in its cohabitation in the secular communality with science and rationalism, shadowing their concerns and, so, giving dimension and depth to the figure of modernity.

As it moves away from presentations of the "marvellous", the discourse of the "fantastic" is increasingly concerned with what is "other" in terms of its own secular perspective. It, thus, pushes at the limits of its mode of understanding. It takes the mode of definitive naming to its limits by bringing into definition the otherness which the boundaries of definition imply. For example, the introduction of the living dead and the un-real bring into discourse identities which cannot be cogently defined and, in doing so, dramatise the ontological portrayal of cognitive uncertainty as the mystery of presence. Similarly, writers introduce things which are unidentifiable and which cannot be named. Mary Shelley's famous monster is something which is neither living nor dead, man nor beast, and which is named only as that which shouldn't be, but is: a monster. As this indicates, the fantastic does not erect spiritual or para-physical constructions as counter-modes of interpretation; rather, it works upon confusion and spaces within the secular conceptualisation and organisation of understood objects to create models which are commonly understandable, but which confuse and disorient the reader by making overt and actual the potential conceptual disorder.

The overall effect is to create something understandable and, thus, mimetically real, and, yet, impossible. The psychological impact is to produce fear of something that reason indicates cannot exist: I don't believe in ghosts, but under certain conditions I can become scared of them. In such a way, fantastic literature stresses the boundaries of common sense, exposing them as boundaries, and subverting them by stressing their own indication of otherness beyond. The conceptual problematic facing such a secular enterprise is that it is enclosed by its own conjuncture of the real with itself. The exposed other is radically unplaceable and has status only as a paraxical ₅₄ phenomenon in the secular optic, being neither the object visualised nor a phantom. It is the otherness of what is; that which is unheimlich.

In his article "I will be with you on your wedding night", Mladen Dolar summarises the relationship between the secularisation of verstehen and the emergence of the uncanny into public discourse. ₅₅ "In pre-modern societies," he writes, "the dimension of the uncanny was largely covered (and veiled) by the area of the sacred and untouchable. It was assigned to a religiously and socially sanctioned place in the symbolic from which the structure of power, sovereignty, and a hierarchy of values emanated. With the triumph of the enlightenment, this privileged and excluded place became no more. . .that is to say the uncanny became unplaceable: it became uncanny in the strict sense." ₅₆ Adding substance to the link of secularisation and the growing sense of the uncanny, Dolar hints at the significance of the symbiosis of the latter with scientific rationalism:

There was an irruption of the uncanny strictly parallel with bourgeois (and industrial) revolutions and the rise of scientific rationality - and, one might add, with the Kantian establishment of transcendental subjectivity, of which the uncanny presents the surprising counterpart. Ghosts, vampires, monsters, the undead dead etc., flourish in an era when you might expect them to be dead and buried, without a place. They are something brought about by modernity itself." ₅₇

This summary, though suffering from oversimplification, pinpoints a number of related factors in the historical formation of the conditions for radical uncertainty. ₅₈ Firstly, Dolar calls our attention to the shared concerns of scientific rationalism and fantasy literature, while also hinting at the integrally political tension between the activity of domestification and the creativity involved in the construction of common understanding. Secondly, he posits these problematics in the context of their historicity. This is considered far too briefly to carry much weight in itself, but it does point our attention to a novel scenario, one increasingly enclosed by the boundaries of the secular optic, built on the quicksands of doubt and fear of what is not known, and given the self-enclosed signifier, "modernity". Taking these two points in turn and exploring them in terms of their rich historicity, we shall see that Dolar's presentation can be given persuasive substance.

The shared concerns of scientific rationalism and fantasy literature are readily apparent. Both function at the point of the secular problematic(s) of understanding and knowing identities, continuing pre-modern concerns with the identity of "man". In both modes of understanding the concern is expressed in the form of exploration of the possible constitution of subjecthood and, also, of the identity of man as an actor.

The novelty which catalyses this concern is a new perception of the relationship of people to nature. The decline of the conception of the Sovereign Creator set the focus upon human capacity for creative change of the natural environment. Problematically, the secular identity of man was conceived as being both "natural" in its physicality, and above nature in its subjective independence and consequent capacity for creativity. This raised three related conceptual questions: what might constitute "nature"? what was man's relationship to it? how could the dual nature of man be understood as a singular identity? Clearly, the first two problems are two sides of the same coin, while the third is conceptually integrated into both. This complex problematic had a special significance; its implication is the possibility that "man", like "God", is an identity that cannot be sensibly defined or made present in the terms of secular discourse. For the early modern scientific rationalists, such an implication would have a great psychological impact. Yet, of these three problems, only the first two were directly addressed (with the honourable, and eventually influential, exception of Montaigne) by scientistic and rationalist modes of understanding, the third being obscured by the common presupposition of human identity. The problem of the human or subject's identity, however, is a consistent theme in the literature of the fantastic. To understand the significance of this difference requires further attention to the constructive avoidance of the issue of self-identity which characterises the development of scientific rationalism prior to the late eighteenth century. What is revealed is that a recognition of the subject-hero as a precarious construct is both manifest and hidden by the conceptual uncertainties which beset scientism and rationalism as modes of discursive identification. It is with regard to this deep problematic that the significance of fantastic literature can be seen.

Though developed through a rivalry between advocates, rationalism and scientism, far from being mutually exclusive, tend to integrate as complementary modes within scientific rationalism as an applied project of producing knowledge. Historically, this tendency was intensified by the common concern with the identity and environment of man. The rationalist and the scientistic projects conjoined around this concern in the discourse of natural law. A notion inherited from pre-modern political discourse, natural law was developed as a correspondence of rational systemic principles and empirical findings. It restrained the idea of a cosmic order in terms of which man's identity could be defined. Further, it intensified the ethical dimensions of this order by locating knowledge of "right" in the realms of reasoned judgement, thereby producing "right" as an element of subjective knowledge.

This discourse is beset by a conceptual uncertainty which is the focus of the literature of the fantastic. The uncertainty is expressed at the focal point of the discourse, which is its discussion of the natural condition of man. The employment of natural law theory was (and is) aimed at impressing on people their rightful place in the order of things. That is, to provide a practical and a moral basis for action. But the uncertainties of natural law theory are exposed when the theory is applied to people themselves. Classically, the mode of developing such a theory is to attempt to construct a picture of "natural man", but at the point where the a priori is fitted to the commonly experienced activity of humans, the enclosed rationality of the theory is infected by an incommensurable knowledge, a practical knowledge of the anarchic creativity and destructiveness of human action.

The apprehension of this problem and the attempts to develop a concept of natural law which could overcome it, are exemplified in the work of Montesquieu. In De l'esprit des lois (1748), "man" is the individual human characterised, in the traditional mode of western philosophy, as possessor of the "masculine" properties, "will" and "reason". ₅₉ Like all beings, man functions within natural law, but his position is unique and difficult. Natural law, as far as it is biological law, is constituted of principles which move living matter. In its classic sense, natural law is the set of dynamic principles ordering movement into categories of process, which involve the production of categorical beings - species types. ₆₀ The laws are general and aimed at the maintenance of species. ₆₁ Man exists uniquely as an individual identity, as well as being a part of a species whole; and herein lies the difficulty. The totality of the human being has two elements, "physical" and "intelligent". ₆₂ The first element, like all physical being, is subject to the "immutable and eternal" laws of nature. ₆₃ Human being is secured, as all animal being is secured, by the survival of the species. The individual is afforded the security of the species. This includes a limited security for the individual members, the security of the herd, but is not aimed at individual survival per se. Species organisation can involve sacrificing individuals as part of the maintenance of the whole species. At the level of individual experience, the safety of the individual's identity is not guaranteed by general principles of natural law. Montesquieu, thus, brings us to the difficulty facing all natural law theorists: to secure their existence, individual humans would have to act on the basis of some principles other than those which govern the natural order. If they are other to the laws of nature, they must be artificial. The task for natural law theorists is always to show some fit between artificial human activity and natural law. The quest focuses upon the fit of positive law to the perceived prior and natural law. But even if it could be shown that such a fit exists, it has to be shown that this is not merely circumstantial or, even more problematic, that the natural principles are not phantoms constructed from the antecedent experience of the positive laws. A deep connection between a fitting artificial order and the natural order must be shown.

It can be argued that in the work of Kant, which was to follow, these difficulties became explicated as the limits of natural law theory were transcended by the notion of transcendent universality. As noted earlier, Kant argued that humans construct their objectively real order; in this, the order is particular and relative. However, for reality to be understandable to the subject and communicable to others, it must have some organisational cogency. It must, therefore, conform to rational principles. It thus has an independent a priori universality. ₆₄ As the subject, each of us constructs reality from such principles and comes to recognise their conceptual independence. We apply them in definition and understanding of the condition of defined objects, thereby recognising the independent universality which is a necessary implication of empirical processes. ₆₅ Such understanding can be applied to our own identity; we can be conscious of ourselves as transcendent subjects and know ourselves as empirical man. ₆₆ This argument, which completes the marriage of rationalism and empiricism, does remove the clumsiness of the notion of the natural as the basis of rational process and human reason; but the non-unity of the self and, derivatively, the conceptual cogency of self as a singular "identity", is even more overtly problematised. The empirical is the self as known to the subject. It is also the objective condition which provides the particularity of specific reference points from which the subject can derive its own sense of worldly identity. The subject constructively knows this objective condition from the standpoint of universal reason. The empirical man is heteronomously compelled by objective laws to judge and act in certain ways, and the constructing subject is the autonomous realiser of these laws.

Such an argument places strain on the idea of the subject as a unified identity. If the transcendental subject constructs the objective world which gives it the necessary particularity to be a definable identity, in what sense can it be a subject prior to this construction? Secondly, if such a being could be conceptualised, how could its autonomy and creativity be aligned with the heteronomous subject which is the object of self-knowledge? This argument is confused; it hints at an endless self-reflexivity which is simultaneously punctured by the assertion of the universal a priori. As Dolar hints, in the case of Kant, the conceptual difficulties which beset secular modes of identification at last become overt. In this light it is now possible to see how the literature of the fantastic is scientific rationalism's "surprising counterpart". ₆₇

It is significant that, for a number of related reasons, the early 1800s saw a decline of intellectual interest in the Gothick. This was so partly because it was seen as a reaction to the turmoils of the late eighteenth century, the impact of which was fading; and also because of the seemingly endless progress of both rationalism and science, epitomised by Kant's outstanding theorising and by the apparent success of empiricist experimentation. ₆₈ Yet at this very point in its history, the literature of the fantastic acquires a fully critical status, expressed in a conscious stressing of the limits of scientific rationalism. In Shelley's Frankenstein, the outstanding and almost singularly influential Gothick work of this time, the concepts of nature, of natural order, and the frailty of both reason and empirical knowledge are fully explored. Shelley, in creating a being which is of nature and is completely artificial, which is of man but is not human, exposes how man as creator, particularly in his employment of scientific rationalism, works at the very limits of his means to render himself into existence as a comprehensible identity. The book works not only at the level of parable, but in the deconstructive employment of the common modes of understanding to convey to the reader a sense of what the monster is. At the famous moment where the monster confronts his maker with an account of his experience, every significant aspect of common understanding is employed, from the most sensitive, theologically expressed reason of Paradise Lost, to the scientism of Erasmus Darwin, to render the monster's condition as a non-man subject understandable. But the end product - the reader's understanding of a subject whose identity is un-nameable - ruptures the cohesion of the humanism and natural law theory which enables its production: the subject is not and cannot be "man". ₆₉ Shelly finally explicates the implications of Gothick literature and, in doing so, shows them to be the implications of scientific rationalism as well. Explicating the limits of scientific rationalism, she shows in dramatic terms that uncertainty is inherent in all levels of identification and, thus, shadows the form of identity.

The mutual concerns of the fantasist and the scientist are finally and famously acknowledged by Freud, who, in his study of the unheimlich, appropriates Hoffman's Sandman as an exemplary Gothick presentation of the uncanny. ₇₀ Here, the scientistic theorist employs the fantasist to explicate the duality of identity which Kantian theory struggles to comprehend rationally. Freud spends some time in re-telling Hoffman's story, showing that Hoffman ruptures the process of the synthetic a priori by working the seam of overlap between the particularities that enable identification of a singular self and the universality of principles of knowledge applied in defining identities. ₇₁ Freud shows how the desires, needs, and fears of the principle actor in the story feed into his construction of identities. The woman he desires turns out to be an inanimate doll, a trick which apparently shows not only that he was not rigorous enough in consideration of his experience, but also the distortion of (universal) judgement by (particular) desire. Fear, too, eats at the foundation of rational comprehension. A series of characters appear to threaten the re-enactment of a childhood trauma. Increasingly unable to perceive the characters in separation from this act, the (subject) hero begins to see them as different incarnations of the same threatening character, who, if he exists in such multiple form, must be some devil. As Freud points out, no final explanation is given. The hero is unable to cope with the confusion of his judgement and the fear it expresses and he loses whatever sanity is left. Safe, rational judgements are revealed as assumptions; identities are not what reason and experience indicate. Fear and desire dwell upon the unreasonable possibilities of experience and, so, create the sense of the otherness of what is rationally comprehended, which appears to make itself present as the light and shade of phenomena.

Freud's own difficulties begin when he attempts his own domestification of the uncanny. Like all scientistic theorists, having exposed significantly anomalous experience, he attempts to create a theoretical explanation by which he can make sense of it. In psycho-analytical theory, the uncanny is a product of our non-rational self, which, through therapy, can be brought to consciousness and, thus, become subject to rational appraisal and "therapy", after which it will lose its otherness and become a feature of consciousness. Freud misses the point: the significance of anomalous experience for the scientist is that it reveals flaws in theory and/or methodology. These, the scientist believes, can be corrected, and the anomaly removed. For the fantasist, the anomaly is an expression of the limits of understanding and, as such, of the permanent otherness of experience. Perhaps it was the literary sensitivity to the creativity in the production of things at the level of ideas that helped the fantasists become aware of the locus of this otherness in the very act of naming; in any case, Shelley's Monster and, later, the un-nameable "others" of Lovecraft, among a host of others, bring this awareness dramatically into the realm of common sensibilities. ₇₂

THE POLITICAL IMPACT OF THE GOTHICK

Throughout the discussion of the difficulties of defining identities, a recurring theme has been the tension between domestification and the creativity involved in the construction of common modes of understanding. The political dimension of this tension, which is the subject of Dolar's second point, is traceable through the overt reactions to the Gothick among those engaged in political activity at the time of its initial impact. In examining this, we can integrate our perception of the specifically political dimensions of uncertainty with a perception of their historical expression, and, in doing so, locate the emergence of a common sense of uncertainty in the political condition of modernity.

"Let us agree that this species of writing, whatever one may say about it, is, assuredly, not without merit. It became the necessary fruit of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe". ₇₃ In such terms, the link between the emergence of psychological uncertainty and the dichotomy of conservatism and radicalism in political life is first made explicit by the Marquis De Sade, whose own explorations of the more fearful realms of desire and self-definition was influenced by his readings of Anne Radcliffe's works, and whose Justine (1791), in turn, influenced Lewis's The Monk (1796). ₇₄

By overtly linking the Gothick with the political chaos and cultural shift towards "reason" embodied in the revolution, De Sade hints at the combination of the progress of scientific rationalism and the terror of radical uncertainty - the perceived certainty that all is uncertain -in the condition of self-conscious modernity. It would be too simple, though, to regard the flowering of Gothick literature as an artistic effect caused by the rationalist destruction of the Bastille of Christendom. As scientific rationalism and theology were entangled around the perceived issue of identity, any crude dichotomy of modernity and Christendom misses the point.

Gothick literature, which shadowed scientific rationalism, was initially (and, in various strains, continued to be) characterised by a curious mix of insight into, and parody of, the "mystery of presence". From a political point of view, the overlapping, integrating and often contradictory activities of religion, scientific rationalism and the Gothick provided a rich dish for the subversive appetite, and the integration of religious and scientistic ethics into political life ensured that the impact of the Gothick would not be restricted to academic and literary circles. Initially, however, the subversion of religious and scientistic ideals was playful; the Gothick was political only in that it expressed potential to undo the established modes of understanding. Nevertheless, it was seen by those who see the political as "politics" as a straightforward threat, its otherness being translated as enmity. Thus, Gothick authors, with few exceptions, became viewed as actual or potential enemies of the establishment. This political reaction is not entirely surprising. In the eighteenth century, the term "Gothick" was commonly recognised as carrying political connotations. It was readily associated with the invading barbarian hordes who destroyed the ordered world of Rome. There was also a common mythology of the Gothick foundations of a "balanced" realm of liberty in the "Kentish" heart of England, an idea which, from the view point of politics, appeared to tie the term strongly to the democratic movement. ₇₅ The backdrop to the emergence of the Gothick in England was one of governmental insecurity. The French Revolution was followed by a French-supported Irish Rebellion (1798) and the development of hundreds of "revolutionary clubs" in England. In 1797 there were Naval mutinies. Economic government throughout was beset by ongoing fiscal crises, characterised by rapid inflation and widespread impoverishment. The uncertainty of the national constitution was expressed in the urgent polemic of pamphleteers. Tom Paine's Age of Reason had been through multiple editions by 1796, and William Godwin's libertarian Enquiry into The Principles of Justice had greatly influenced literary output. It was not coincidental that the most influential of Gothick authors included Godwin himself, the Shelleys and Byron. In addition, major Gothick works were produced by the overtly homosexual Liberal MP, Matthew Lewis, the radical liberal MP, William Beckford, and a number of women authors, including the widely read and very influential Anne Radcliffe. ₇₆ It is not surprising, therefore, that the Gothick was perceived as a threat by the conservative bastions of Christianity and careful progress. What might initially seem surprising, however, is that Gothick literature frightened all the major political factions.

Victor Sage, in The Gothick Novel, touches upon the political impact of Gothick literature in late eighteenth-century Britain. Noting that "the [British] fiction market of the 1790s was polarised by a range of contradictory social and political factors - by methodism, by female emancipation, by political radicalism, by anti-catholicism, and by anti-Jacobinism" ₇₇ , Sage presents the reactions of these lobbies to various works and their authors. From the conservative view, many Gothick novels, especially a number of popular works by female authors, were dangerously "tinted with democracy" and acted as a corrupting influence upon women readers generally. ₇₈

Matthew Lewis's The Monk, having been favourably reviewed by the journal Analytical Review, itself "regarded in Government circles as a dangerous nest of Jacobins, feminists and radicals" ₇₉ , became the subject of concerned cabinet discussion. ₈₀ By contrast, some reviewers took exception to the anti-democratic retention of "the great chain of being", a characteristic of many Gothick works. ₈₁ The religious significance of the Gothick is again exemplified by reactions to The Monk. The book portrays debauchery and sexual promiscuity as the driving force of a monk's existence and, as such, was designed, in part, to appeal to the anti-Catholicism of its intended public. It became, however, the subject of a blasphemy suit by the strongly anti-Catholic Coleridge. ₈₂

Sage's work indicates the unsettling impact of Gothick literature upon the discursive communality. Seen from the varying perspectives of the different religious/political dogmas, the Gothick appeared to reflect back to each position its worst fears. Though the opposing political factions saw in the Gothick an agent or potential agent of their opponents, the phantoms which so frightened political actors were often expressions of the otherness within their own dogmatic positions. This is epitomised in Coleridge's response to The Monk. So concerned is Coleridge with its anti-Christian implications that he unwittingly defends the Catholic position in terms that a Catholic would not alter. Thus, the Protestant's reaction reveals that, despite their dogmatic assertion of opposition, the Catholic and Protestant positions share some elements of similarity: the dogmatic assertion of opposition is revealed as a basis of something shared; a mutuality of fear in which each represents the shared limits of understanding to the other in terms of the failure and incoherence of dogma.

In similar ways, the radicals and democrats also became alarmed. Beckford, author of the Gothick History of the Caliph Vathek, and friend of the French revolutionaries, became so alarmed at the anti-democratic tendencies within such presentations that he took to writing parodies under a false, female name. Within these he also satirised the anti-democratic beliefs of the governing establishment. ₈₃ In this case, the opposition is revealed to lie in the Gothick itself. Walpole, though a political "radical" and friend of the French Encyclopedists, perceived the Gothick as properly "Catholic-Feudal and Anglo-Norman", an ideal with clear anti-democratic implications. ₈₄ Within the ambivalence of the Gothick sensibility, there lies the fearful unheimlichkeit of a concealed otherness; both the democrat and the conservative see democratic presentations hidden under the cloak of aristocratic presentation. For the former, the Gothick presents a stealthy suffocation of their ideals; for the latter, its democratic content is a hidden evil. Designed as a subversion of reason and a dramatisation of uncertainty, the Gothick is unusable as a tool for the presentation of singular perspectives. It is the systematic production of effects, and, as such, is more spell-binding than argument. In this way, these works of the 1700s shared with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the effect of inducing readers to acknowledge the secret otherness within their own house. They worked to induce the sense of the uncanny at a profoundly personal level, at a political level, and at the level of inter-subjective creation of a common verstehen. Yet, by virtue of its critical effect upon the totality of the discursive production of a shared, if fractious, world, the Gothick had little potential as a means of argument within the factional discourse of politics. Thus, though the Gothick was little more than a trivial feature of eighteenth-century politics, an imaginary threat to the state bolstered by the political fame of some Gothick authors, it would be a misjudgment to perceive this "limitation" as the measure of the Gothick's political impact. Despite a brief dip in popularity in the early 1800s, Gothick literature continued to play upon the collective imagination in the works of Shelley and Maturin and, shortly after, emerged with a new vigour in the work of the American, Edgar Allen Poe. By the mid-life of modernity, the Gothick sensibility, far from going into decline, was expanding beyond Europe. In this expansion, and its subsequent continuation into this century, it is revealed to be an expression of "modern" consciousness, and, as such, much more than an immediate time-bound reaction to the particular European experiences of the late 1700s. The capacity of Gothick literature to produce shock and fear across the broad spectrum of socio-political perspectives is not as surprising as it seems, given that it was not the tightly limited genre often presented from the viewpoint of the present day. Used to cover a range of writings concerned with the fantastic and, usually, with the uncanny, the Gothick did not locate its power to disturb in its superficially definitive modes of presentation (which were too diverse to carry a singular formal impact), but in the capacity of such modes as devices for the substantive presentation of the fantastic and the uncanny as the otherness within the secular construction of a common world.

Taking the political as the self-expression of the discursive communality as a formation of power, we can see that the emergence of the Gothick was a significant political event. Even before the Gothick authors realised it, their work initiated a sense of the "otherness" within the competing theological and secular designs of identity. While its impact spread across both religious and scientific rationalist discourse, its significance is perhaps greater in regard to the latter. There are two reasons for this. First, by showing that theological understanding is incapable of moving from its own Gothick sensibility of the "mystery of identity" to rational grounds for truth claims, rationalists had made significant advances in unravelling the hegemonic power of the theologians. Thus, the critical effects of Gothick subversion were merely additions to the decline of a common religious sensibility. The second reason lies in the Gothick's status as the most effective challenge to the growing persuasive power of scientific rationalism. Increasingly self-defined as a structure of knowledge, scientific rationalism was (and is) presented by its advocates as the precision mode of knowing through the securing of "the other" within controlled processes aimed at capturing its "being" in material and conceptual order. ₈₅ In this project the structuring of experience into categorical forms is vital as an obtainable goal, and its attempted formulation characterises its mode of expression. But this structuralist language, both unintentionally and (eventually in a despondent acceptance) intentionally, expresses the fundamental uncertainty of discourse as the fracturing and weakening processes within itself. Where the voids occur in the significance of words and the structure of argument and method, the otherness of experience makes its presence apparent. The absence of order which lurks within the "ordered" modes of understanding provides the necessity of an intuition (to use Kant's terminology) of otherness. T

Taking the political as the self-expression of the discursive communhis otherness is characterised by the rationalist in negative terms as that which does not fit, that which expresses absence of sense. The significance of the Gothick is that, through its parasitic subversion of scientistic and rationalist discourse, it displays the incoherences of primary empiricist and rationalist identities. It thereby reveals the otherness of experience to be the product of the naming discourse itself, and is therefore an inherent feature of scientific rationalist modes of knowing.

The impact of the Gothick is, thus, significant in that, by subverting and, so, challenging the dominant modes of knowing, the related societal beliefs in science and reason, and their attendant political notion of "progress", it finally brings into play all the features of uncertainty which characterise the enactment of political discourse and action. Thus, the two framing conditions of the elements of uncertainty, the political and the historical, combine into the fullness of the moment of common recognition of the limits of the verstehen, and create, in the scrambling attempt to rationally comprehend the non-rational, the appearance of uncertainty.

Chris Sparks
Centre for the Study of Democracy
London
August 1994

Footnotes

Note 1: The Republic, Book VI, 499d-503d. Back.

Note 2: Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, section 2, pp. 1094a1-1094b7. Back.

Note 3: ibid. Back.

Note 4: ibid., pp. 193-198. Back.

Note 5: ibid., pp. 208-209. Back.

Note 6: ibid., pp. 205, 198. See also Ronald Beiner, Political Judgement (Methuen & Co, London, 1983), pp. 15-16. Back.

Note 7: The notion of speech acts was introduced by Austin in his How to do Things with Words (Oxford University Press, 1962). It refers to the effectiveness of statements as modes of activity changes. The "purest" examples of this are declarations, such as "I sentence you to hang", or "I name this ship". The notion of speech acts is now used with effect, but, of course, with a wide variance of modifications by a wide range of theorists. Back.

Note 8: Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Rutgers University Press, 1976), p. 26. Back.

Note 9: See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Polity Press, 1991), pp. 4-7. Back.

Note 10: By societal verstehen, I mean a common sense of social identities framed in terms of a paradigmatic mode of understanding. Back.

Note 11: The classic example of the Hellenic subject is Oedipus, upon whom events take their course, and who represents the futility of human endeavour in the face of unknowable destiny. Back.

Note 12: Macbeth is never in control of events or destiny. The very substance of nature moves against him until the great chain of being is restored. Back.

Note 13: This is so despite the author's attempt to rectify the secular direction of his argument with the construction of the notion of an absent but originating God. Back.

Note 14: Critique of Pure Reason, translation by N. K. Smith, (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1965), pp. 193-197, especially B/198/A159. Back.

Note 15: ibid., pp. 328-386, especially B407, B422-424. Back.

Note 16: Beiner, op. cit., pp. 33-34. Back.

Note 17: See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago University Press, 1962), pp. 35-42. Back.

Note 18: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago University Press, 1958), pp. 22f, 179-180, 195. Back.

Note 19: See Jürgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt's Communications Concept of Power", Social Research, volume 44, Spring 1977. Back.

Note 20: Montaigne, "De L' Amitie", in The Collected Essays, translation by M. A. Screech, (Penguin, 1993), pp. 205-219. Back.

Note 21: This confusion leads to a contradictory assertion of the need for simultaneous full participation in domestic and public life. See Vindication of The Rights of Women (Penguin, 1982), pp. 265-266; 258-259. Back.

Note 22: This is a point levelled sharply at Marx by Arendt, op. cit., pp. 44-45. Back.

Note 23: De Sade's stories nearly always involve ritualistic and very private enactments of enslavement and destruction between powerful, ruling men and powerless women who are tricked into becoming use-objects for the men's domestic pleasure. For an almost Foucauldian example of the architecture and order of domestic rituals of power, see Justine, pp. 568-587; p. 469. Back.

Note 24: Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny", in his Art and Literature: Jensen's Gradiva, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works. (Translated under the editorship of James Strachey, Penguin, 1985), p. 342. Back.

Note 25: ibid., p. 345. Back.

Note 26: R. G. Collingwood, Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 65-67. Back.

Note 27: The idea of the uncanny has some ambiguity. Freud's specific connection of it to unconscious repressions is neither necessary for its cogency nor fully accepted. Todorov, for example, challenges the connection in The Fantastic (pp. 46-47), where the idea that the uncanny event is, by definition, explainable in rational terms is modified to focus on the experience of the uncanny. This experience relates to a sensed quality which is present in rational events but which is not explainable in rational terms. Back.

Note 28: See E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 142-143. Back.

Note 29: ibid., p. 140. Back.

Note 30: Voltaire, Letters on England, translation by Leonard Tancock, (Penguin, 1980), pp. 120-146. Back.

Note 31: See Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 352. Back.

Note 32: Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, translation by Thomas Nugent, (Hafner Publishing, 1949), Book 24, chapter 8, part ii, p. 32. Back.

Note 33: ibid., chapter 4, part ii, p. 30. Back.

Note 34: See Paul Hazard, European Thought in The Eighteenth Century (World Publishing, 1973), pp. 4, 131. Bayle's popularisation of Hobbes in France is noted by Quentin Skinner in "The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Thought", Historical Journal, number 9, (1966). Back.

Note 35: Cited in Norman Hampson, The Enlightenment (Harmondsworth Penguin, 1968), p. 73. Back.

Note 36: ibid. Back.

Note 37: Raymond Aron, Currents in Sociological Thought (Penguin, 1986), p. 55. Back.

Note 38: Cited in Hampson, op. cit., p. 84. Back.

Note 39: B. Groethuysen, "L'Encyclopedie", Tableau de la Litterature Francaise, cited in Hazard, op. cit., pp. 199-200. Back.

Note 40: Hampson, op. cit., p. 76. Back.

Note 41: ibid., p. 95. Back.

Note 42: Peter France, Diderot (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 29. Back.

Note 43: N. O. Keohane, Philosophy and The State in France: the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 371. Back.

Note 44: Quoted in Aron, op. cit., pp. 18-19. Back.

Note 45: Montesquieu, op. cit., Book 1, chapter 1, p. 1-3. Back.

Note 46: An outline is, in fact, all Montesquieu gives; op. cit., Book 23, chapter 2, part ii, p. 2. Back.

Note 47: Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, translation by C. J. Betts, (Penguin, 1973), p. 144. Back.

Note 48: France, op. cit., p. 35. Back.

Note 49: Victor Sage, The Gothick Novel (Macmillan Education, 1990), p. 25. Back.

Note 50: See Todorov, op. cit., pp. 157-176, especially pp. 172-175; also see Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (Methuen & Co, 1981), pp. 157-169. Back.

Note 51: For a discussion of the rationalist intent of authors of the orientalist genre of pseudo letters, see Atkinson, The Extra-ordinary Voyage in French Literature (Libraire Ancienne Honore Champion, Paris, 1922). For analysis of the rationalist content of Lettres Persanes, see John Falvey, "Aspects of Fictional Creation in the Lettres persanes and of the Aesthetic of the Rationalist Novel", The Romanic Review, volume LVI, number 4 (December 1965). Back.

Note 52: Walpole indicates the lighthearted intent of early Gothick writings, but shows also a sense of its threatening possibilities, when he comments on the initial secrecy of his authorship of The Castle of Otranto: "It is not everybody that may in this country play the fool with impunity". See Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror (Constable and Company, London, 1921), p. 16. Back.

Note 53: Todorov, op. cit., chapter 3, pp. 41-44. Back.

Note 54: Rosemary Jackson sets out this interesting concept. Op. cit., pp. 19-20. Back.

Note 55: October, number 58, (Fall 1991), pp. 5-23. Back.

Note 56: ibid., p. 7. Back.

Note 57: ibid. Back.

Note 58: Dolar is concerned to explore the significance of the uncanny in Lacanian theory, and, moving on to consider his topic, leaves these important signposts unclear. Back.

Note 59: See Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, Book 1, chapter 1, p. 3, for "natural man". See Book 23, chapter 7, part 2, p. 3 for "man as patriarchal holder of reason and will". The explicit inequality of women regarding these elements of species being is summed up in Book 23, chapter 9, part ii, p. 6. Back.

Note 60: Montesquieu typifies this position in his comparison of men and "brutes"; the characteristic which distinguishes the former as a species type is the ability to develop "acquired knowledge" from which "the desire of living in society" stems. See ibid., Book 1, chapter 1, pp. 4-5. Back.

Note 61: ibid., Book 23, chapters 12, 14, 16, pp. 7-10. Back.

Note 62: ibid., Book 1, chapter 1, p. 2. Back.

Note 63: Lettres persanes, p. 180. Back.

Note 64: Kant, op. cit., b37/a23, p. 68. Back.

Note 65: ibid., b60/a43, p.83. Back.

Note 66: ibid., b157-158, pp. 168-169. Back.

Note 67: Dolar, op. cit., p. 7. Back.

Note 68: See Walter Scott's essay in The Foreign Quarterly Review 1827. On Scott's development from the Gothick to explained "fantastic" events, see Edith Birkhead, op. cit., pp. 153-156. Back.

Note 69: The importance of the monster's status as not-man has become a feature of feminist interpretations of Frankenstein. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve", and Mary Poovey, "My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminisation of Romance". Both are reproduced in Sage, op. cit. Back.

Note 70: "The Uncanny", edited by Strachey, op. cit. Back.

Note 71: ibid., p. 359. Back.

Note 72: H. P. Lovecraft's attempt to focus on the unnamable is a consistent theme throughout his works. It is discussed in Jackson, op. cit., pp. 59-60. Back.

Note 73: Sage, op. cit., p. xi. Back.

Note 74: See Birkhead, op. cit., p. 64 and 69. See also, Boris Ford, From Blake to Byron (Penguin, 1982), pp. 116-117. Back.

Note 75: The political connotations of the term "Gothick" in the eighteenth century are discussed by Samuel Kleiger in "The Goths in England", Sage, op. cit., pp. 115-29. The link between the democratic movement and Gothick writers is referred to in A. Parreaux, The Publication of the Monk: a Literary Event 1796-1798 (Paris, 1960), pp. 12-13; and also in Jackson, op. cit., p. 126. Back.

Note 76: Birkhead, op. cit., chapter 3, especially p. 38f. Back.

Note 77: Sage, op. cit., p. 13. Back.

Note 78: Jackson, p. 126; Sage, op. cit., p. 13. Back.

Note 79: Sage, op. cit., p. 14. Back.

Note 80: ibid., p. 7. Back.

Note 81: ibid., p. 14. Back.

Note 82: Coleridge's review of The Monk was published in The Critical Review, volume XIX (February 1797). It is reproduced in part in Sage, op. cit., pp. 39-44. Back.

Note 83: Birkhead, op. cit., p. 97; and Sage, op. cit., p. 15. Back.

Note 84: Sage, op. cit., p. 18. Back.

Note 85: This tendency is exemplified in Kant's discussion of the "architectonic" of pure reason; op. cit., part 2, chapter 3, a832/b860, p. 653. Back.