Forms of Sentience in Early Modernity

My dissertation examines the relationship between affect and biological life by exploring how Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton articulated the feeling of being alive. This phenomenon, which I call sentience, is at the heart of recent debates in philosophy and the cognitive sciences, but I argue that early modern literature plays a central role in developing a language adequate to its expression. I focus on written depictions of threshold experiences when this feeling slips into the historical record: altered states of consciousness, episodes of suspended animation, and moments of radical awakening. Although I adumbrate the theoretical history of sentience--a scattered lineage stretching from Aristotle to Antonio Damasio and other current thinkers--my focus is on first-person accounts of this phenomenon. I draw a methodological distinction between attempts to explain sentience and attempts to express it. There were many early modern categories that expounded how sentience might work: the common sense, humors, animal spirits, vital heat, and so on. These are akin to the current invocation of hormones, homeostasis, and other principles that may have explanatory purchase but never address how it feels to be alive. Since my dissertation seeks to shed light on how early moderns experienced sentience, I anchor my analysis in passages where writers express the felt qualities of vitality in language that is not inscribed in explanatory categories. I focus on two strategies that Montaigne, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton used to express the feeling of being alive. First, since sentience has no inherited system of images and phrases (as do such senses or passions as vision and melancholy), grammar became a primary tool for verbalizing the feeling of being alive. Second, because sentience is all but inexpressible, those who put it into words appropriated other discourses--including theology and philosophy--and repurposed them to register subtle distinctions in affect and sensation. Organized around an analogy to the life cycle--beginning with birth and then moving through death to re-birth--each of the five chapters focuses on a different aspect of sentience: its relationship with death, personhood, temporality, effort, and other living beings.Ph.D.2016-11-30 00:00:0