Abstract

The dissertation shows that the prevailing concern with embodiment in Enlightenment philosophy and the literature of sensibility gives birth to a fully secularized and socialized ethics. I argue that John Locke's construction of moral identity through the power of bodies to move and be moved inaugurates the culture of sensibility. In an age of scientific development, commercial expansion, and encyclopedic revisions of culture, David Hume, Denis Diderot, and Laurence Sterne reinvent Locke's "moral body" as a socially constructed medium of sentimental exchange. Correlating human nature with cultural production, Diderot and Sterne in particular trace the traffic of moral feelings in language and money. Drawing a lively trajectory from Locke's amputated body in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding to the musical instruments, puppets, actors, toys, commodities, and fashions of Diderot and Sterne, I thus examine a variety of comical and ironic linkings of materiality and morality. Against the impulse to dismiss sensibility as easy subjectivism, emotivism, or even physicalism, I propose to recuperate sensibility as a self-conscious and socially responsive ethics of continuing relevance to contemporary culture