Useful fictions and necessary idols: the comedy of Enlightenment understanding

Charging the Enlightenment with naivety for its advancement of human understanding has become a critical commonplace. Yet, in truth, Enlightenment thinkers were their own first critics where understanding is concerned. Eighteenth-century debates raised profound misgivings about the limits of human understanding, including concerns about the integrity of individual judgment and the credibility of knowledge gained by the senses. In my dissertation, I argue that four authors—Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and George Gordon, Lord Byron—employ laughter to resolve anxieties surrounding human understanding. Directing their comic critique at what Fielding describes as “not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species,” these authors depart from traditional forms of ridicule that polemically ostracize particular individuals or beliefs. Instead, they ridicule the flawed nature of all human understanding by exposing the comic results of rating human understanding as an absolute authority or an agent of truth. Laughter at collective foolishness introduces reflexivity in readers that redirects them from the proud error of wanting to know what is true to the social pursuit of living well. These authors reconcile living well with a limited human understanding by reconceiving the nature of “fiction” as not falsehood or lie absolutely opposed to “truth,” but as a fruitful mode for achieving collective commitment to practical conventions on the grounds not of ontological rectitude but of increased sociability. I designate these conventions as “useful fictions” and “necessary idols” to emphasize the collaboration of aesthetic invention and practical reason, and remark on “the Comedy of Enlightenment Understanding” to denote the mode of ridicule these authors apply as a specifically literary continuation of the Enlightenment project of disenchantment that disenchants human understanding itself through the critical and clarifying pleasures of laughter.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Melanie D. Hol