WE ORDER TO DISSECT: KANT’S PLATYPUS, MR. SHANDY’S WHITE BEAR, AND THE FARMER KING’S COLLECTION OF NATURAL HISTORY
WE ORDER TO DISSECT: KANT’S PLATYPUS, MR. SHANDY’S WHITE BEAR, AND THE FARMER KING’S COLLECTION OF NATURAL HISTORY

Summary/Abstract: Currently defined as the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment is a culture of taxonomic disposition and expanding classification. Spectacular discoveries in natural history, ‘anthropology’, and the world of artifacts at home and overseas make of the 1753 founded British Museum, initially hosted by the Montagu House, a ‘universal museum’, indeed. As Tristram Shandy’s father debated the possibility of there existing a white bear, Immanuel Kant had just started his professorship at Königsberg, teaching logic and metaphysics and taking, like Aristotle, special interest in the categories underlying animal reality. But, as the Stagyrite had failed to classify the camel, so Kant would have found it hard to place the ornithorhynchus in the scientific columbarium of the day. A far from fixed ‘grammar’ of nature, the comprehensive table of species rising, among others, from the botanical hierarchy established by Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather) or Carolus Linnaeus’s binary cataloguing, this was a pride of the philosophes, the offspring of the ‘mechanical philosophers’ of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution. The natural philosophers of George III’s reign, like the ‘Farmer King’ himself, were faced with the same dilemma, as must have been Queen Charlotte, whose enthusiasm for the world of plants, animals and gardening was neither insignificant nor temporary. Visitors to the impeccably and lavishly equipped King’s Rooms on the premises of the British Museum cannot fail to be overwhelmed by the world-on-a-small-scale impression which irradiates from each and every glass case replete with period instruments and tools, vases and books, cosmetics and objets, as well as fossils and mineral, vegetal and animal specimens, all turned exhibits for the inquisitive eye of the modern onlooker. This is as much as saying that the Spectator, that emblematic metaphor of the age, is traceable in the British or international inspector of the modern scene. This paper attempts to provide an overall definition of the eighteenth century as a time of break (κρίσις) with the dogmatic tradition and of new axiological expectations, both baffling received ideas and inducing disquiet in the current perception of things – a time of classic modernity, as the literature has it. A time, above all, of critical inquiry and of critique(s).

• Details
• Contents