Art in Theory

1 1 I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negroe slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity, tho’ low people, without education, will start up amongst us and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.

2 1 Sovereigns always see with pleasure a taste for the arts of amusement and superfluity … They very well know that, besides nourishing that littleness of mind which is proper to slavery, the increase of artificial wants only binds so many more chains upon the people … The American savages, who go naked, and live entirely on the products of the chase, have been always impossible to subdue. What yoke, indeed, can be imposed on men who stand in need of nothing?

3 2 I dare not speak of those happy nations, who did not even know the name of many vices, which we find it difficult to suppress; the savages of America, whose simple and natural mode of government Montaigne preferred, without hesitation, not only to the laws of Plato, but to the most perfect visions of government philosophy can ever suggest.

4 1 Lake Moeris, a vast natural phenomenon that Egyptian hydraulic engineering greatly improved on, was long considered to be entirely man made. [Translator’s note.]

5 1 The ‘you’ who is addressed in the opening passages was Voltaire’s deceased partner, Emilie du Châtelet, who seems to have functioned for him as an ideal reader. [Editors’ note.]

6 1 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art), Part 1, Chapter 1.4. [Translator’s note.] (cf. IIC7)

7 1 Quatremère seems to suggest that the modillion‐like effects produced by the ends of supporting timbers in Chinese roofs imitate regular patterns cut from cloth and suspended along a tent roof. [Translator’s note.]

8 1 It would be an easy, though tedious, task to produce the authorities of poets, philosophers, and historians. I shall therefore content myself with appealing to the decisive and authentic testimony of Diodorus Siculus. The Ichthyophagi, who in his time wandered along the shores of the Red Sea, can only be compared to the natives of New Holland. Fancy, or perhaps reason, may still suppose an extreme and absolute state of nature far below the level of these savages, who had acquired some arts and instruments.

Part III covers a shorter chronological span than either of the two preceding parts. It contains textual materials drawn from the period extending from the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789, to the mid‐nineteenth century, marked throughout Europe by the revolutionary upheavals of 1848. The widespread enthusiasm among radicals for the French Revolution decreased markedly, though never entirely, from the early 1790s. This was a response both to the anti‐aristocratic and anti‐bourgeois violence of the new regime and, later in the decade, to its usurpation by Napoleon Bonaparte. By then, the radical and democratic energies unleashed by the revolution had mutated into the programme of a peculiarly hybrid French expansion, simultaneously imperial in fact and anti‐monarchical, democratic, in the identity it claimed. Nationalist reactions against the revolutionary armies in both Spain and Germany, coupled with the alliance of normative European regimes against post‐revolutionary France, gave a second impetus to a long period of warfare, which had begun before the revolution. At bottom, these wars, fought both in continental Europe itself and across the world in America and India, were being fought for domination of the entire world‐system. In Europe, the eventual triumph of the conservative powers of Russia, Austria and Prussia, led by Britain, over Napoleonic France at Waterloo in 1815 both continued and extended a period of political reaction. The release of the pressures thus built up eventually issued in change on both sides of the Channel – firstly in revolution, once more, in France in 1830, and in the strategy aimed at heading off revolution in Britain in the shape of the 1832 Reform Bill. The cumulative effect was a stabilization of the European system, despite the wave of revolutions in 1848, both in terms of domestic political arrangements and in terms of the imperial balance of power between Britain and France across the world at large.

Like Parts Iand II, Part III is again divided into three thematic sections, but once more we have made changes both to their scope and their sequence in order to fit the requirements of the period. The first section, IIIA, focuses on the principle axis of European thought in the period: between a continuation of the Enlightenment‐rooted empirical temper on the one hand, and on the other, the different register of concerns evident in emergent Romanticism and the German tradition of philosophical idealism. The second section, IIIB, moves to a concentration on the realm of the imagination, highlighting the reflections of a range of artists and poets; it thus essentially continues the thread begun in Section IIA. The third section, IIIC, looks to developments in the material world, as the expansion of European global domination continued apace. The selections in this last section embrace both hard and soft power: observations by those with a stake in administering the new colonies and also the ideological complement to this in the form of the renascent Christianity of the missionaries. We have also included several examples of resistance to these encroachments in a range of artistic, literary and political dissent.

The two main concerns of Section IIIA are woven through the chronological sequence of texts. Thus the German‐based tradition of philosophical idealism is represented by a sequence that runs from Herder’s inception of a Romantic reappraisal of history, and the introduction of an element of cultural relativism rather than the universalizing tendencies of the Enlightenment, through Friedrich Schlegel’s encomium to the language and philosophy of India, culminating in Hegel’s magisterial – albeit flawed – attempt to construct an overarching history of art drawing on more than the Graeco‐Roman heritage. As in the previous section, where both Hume and Kant were seen to undercut their universalistic humanism with what would nowadays qualify simply as racial prejudice, so in the Romantic period, Hegel’s philosophy of world history, though in one sense having the merit of at least trying to incorporate a wider basis for human civilization, is likewise seen to undercut the humanistic claim by adherence to a yet more blatant racism. It is this aspect of his work more than any other that has led to Hegel’s positioning during the present period of post‐colonial debate as something very like the fount of all evil in terms of the production of Eurocentric histories of art (not least on the part of many borne along by the contemporary current who likely have little acquaintance with the full scope of his thought).