European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism Book

In the afterward, Pagden writes, "This book has attempted to describe a number of conceptual problems which Europeans have confronted'or constructed'in their dealings during a formative historical period with one highly significant 'other'." 184 He shows that Europeans' understandings of themselves and the "other" were intertwined. As one changed, so did the other. Savage or noble savage? Innocent or devilish? All the various conclusions showed was the thinker's understanding of "his" culture and its place in the universe. "Modern ethnographical descriptions may seem, at first glance," Pagden warns, "more complex and more persuasive than their eighteenth-century predecessors. But that is generally an illusion which disappears on a second reading. We have a different set of concerns, a different 'grid' through which we read the evidence we have before us. But it need hardly be said that that grid is as powerfully present as it was two hundred years ago." 186

Selections:

"Our eyes and our scientific understanding move from the known to the unknown, not the other way. Having made the attachment, we name the unknown for the known. Having named we have recognized and, having recognized, we have also taken possession." 26

"Until the second half of the seventeenth century, all attempts to represent America and its peoples constitute, at some level, an attempt to resolve this tension between an appeal to authorial experience and the demands of the canon." 56

"Neither he [Las Casas] or Oviedo were impartial, neutral observers, nor did they wish to be. They made no claim'as did their often disingenuous eighteenth-century successors were to do'to be above the fray, to act as dispassionate recording angels. It is very likely that they would not even have understood such an objective." 69

"In America, it seemed, Europe had not only discovered an unknown geographical space. It had also discovered something about its own past: that the accumulated wisdom of the Ancients might be, if not entirely false, at least seriously flawed. If the knowledge of the Ancients had been so limited in this geographical respect who could know, asked Erasmus as early as 1517, in what other as yet undiscovered ways it might also turn out to have been in error?" 89

"For many, however..the discovery could be interpreted as a liberation from the limits of knowledge imposed by the accumulated statements of the past, a proof of the power of lived experience over any theoretical claim based on exegesis." 89

"Unlike Erasmus or Cardano, unlike even Condorcet, [Humboldt] was convinced that the discovery of America had 'multiplied the objects of knowledge and of man's contemplation' to the point where he had been driven to adopt a new mental stance to cope with the new information now available to him." 113
"America was new in both senses of the word: new in relation to geological and human time, and new in relationship to us, the European observers. This is the paradox of Rousseau's savage Caribs. They are contemporary with the reader, yet they belong to a period of human infancy." 117

"The savage, whose contact with nature is unmediated through any form of artifice, uses speech for the sole purpose of describing what is palpably 'out there'. [Europeans can lie] but "The savage's discourse, by contrast, is only about the true, the given, nature of the world." 129

"The crucial step in the move away from this primitive 'ideal speech-situation' towards the language of reflection, is the creation of abstractions and universals. This marks a decisive stage in the history of the development of man's cognitive powers It marks the recognition that the natural world possesses an intelligible order governed by a body of immutable laws, that there exist qualities not immediately accessible to the senses, and that the same transparency which characterizes the relationship btween a concrete noun and a palpable object also characterizes the relationship between abstract nouns and
"Both Humboldt and Diderot had seen, in the sudden and massive increase in our knowledge of other worlds which the discovery of America had entailed, a significant change in the ways in which we respond to our own. But their conclusions also point up the differences between the objectives of the late Enlightenment and those of the early Romantics. For Humboldt, the exchange of the pace of wonder for the development of a unified scientific vision, a gaze which would slowly reveal the underlying analogy between all things, human as well as natural, had , in the long run, been an unalloyed benefit to man./For Diderot, by contrast, the discovery, settlement and colonization of America threated the possibility of further imaginative response to difference, threatened to reduce us all to the citizens of a single invariable culture." 167

"We all do our own things in our own ways, and the things that we do are all different things./On this account, there can be no common cultures, no common beliefs or certainties which we can all claim to share by virtue of our common humanity. There cannot even be a common set of descriptive terms upon which we could all agree." 179

"Diderot's hope for a world poised midway between the savage and the civil is, though we may express it differently, recognizably one of ours. So, too, is Herder's insistence upon the absolute incommensurability, and consequent plurality of all cultures towards which we [are] asked to extend, in Ernest Gellner's phrase, indiscriminate charity." 183