European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism

by Anthony Pagden

For more than three centuries after Columbus's voyages to America, Europeans pondered how the Old World's encounters with the New World affected European sensibilities and intellectual horizons. In this book Anthony Pagden examines some of the varied ways in which Europeans interpreted these encounters with America.

Pagden explores the strategies used by Columbus and the early chroniclers of America to describe a continent and its inhabitants so deeply unfamiliar to Europeans that they seemed hardly to be real. He looks at how, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans reacted in different ways to these descriptions. Some, like the Prussian explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, declared that scientific understanding before the oceanic voyages had advanced by slow steps and that the encounter with America had invigorated Europeans to make new discoveries in many directions at once. Other Europeans, particularly Enlightenment and Romantic figures, argued fiercely against the whole process of colonization and acculturation in the Americas. French philosophe Denis Diderot, for example, felt that the European experience of America had led to an increased familiarity with all that was potentially strange and unusual―the creation of a global village―and that this had resulted in a steady decline in that sense of wonder that was the principal incentive for all scientific inquiry. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder proposed that all cultures must recognize their essential alienness and that the single world culture that colonization and commerce had helped to create must be allowed to revert to its natural condition of plurality. In an exploration of these and other responses, Pagden throws a vivid new light on the intellectual consequences of Europe's encounter with the Americas.

Genres: History, European History

225 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Anthony Pagden was educated in Santiago (Chile), London, Barcelona and Oxford and holds a B.A.. M.A. and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He has been a free-lance translator and a publisher in Paris a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Senior Research Fellow of the Warburg Institute (London), Professor of History at the European University Institute (Florence), University Reader in Intellectual History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and the Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins. He joined UCLA in the Fall of 2002. His research has concentrated on the relationship between the peoples of Europe and its overseas settlements and those of the non-European world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He is primarily interested in the political theory of empire, in how the West sought to explain to itself how and why it had come to dominate so much of the world, and in the present consequences of the erosion of that domination. His research has led to an interest in the formation of the modern concept of Europe and most recently in the roots of the conflict between the ‘West’ and the (predominantly Muslim) ‘East’. He has also written on the history of law, and on the ideological sources of the independence movements in Spanish-America, and is currently completing a book on cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment . He has written or edited some fifteen books, the most recent of which are, Lords of all the World. Ideologies of Empire in Britain, France and Spain (1995), Peoples and Empires (2001), La Ilustración y sus enemigos (2002), Worlds at War, The 2500 year struggle between East and West (2008), and, as editor, The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (2002). – all of which have been translated into several European and Asian languages. He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books, and has written for The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Il Sole 24 Ore (Milan), El Mundo (Spain), El Pais, (Spain) and La Nueva Provincia (Argentina).

He teaches classes in the history of political thought from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, in the theory of international relations, and seminars on imperialism and nationalism and on the theory of racism and ethnicity since antiquity.

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has a tendency to get a bit too jargon-y for its own good, but it's still a really interesting read. Pagden's book examines European interactions and conceptualizations of the New World from 1492 through the Romantic period, with a particular focus on the shift from the assumed commensurability of cultures in the time of Columbus to the assumed incommensurability of cultures in the time of Diderot and Alexander von Humbert. He also underlines that while "the other" is always constructed to some degree, it is not entirely invented but the result of attempted understanding and communication.

I thought that the earlier parts of the work were the most interesting. Pagden notes that the earliest writers about the New World – particularly Columbus – followed what he calls the ‘principle of attachment.’ When unknown things were discovered they were simply pulled out of their original context and situated into a European equivalent in order to facilitate understanding. A ritual to discover gold in a stream was converted into traditional Catholic prayer and fasting; Columbus renamed most places he found after European lands or royalty; a priest observing the devotion of Amerindians to a god named Cemi assumed that Cemi was simply the local word for Lucifer; flora and fauna were immediately named and shoved into traditional European categories, even if they didn’t particularly fit. One of the best examples is when Columbus, discovering the Orinoco meeting with the sea and realizing that it was a river that could only be part of a large continent (and thus not fitting with his geographical assumptions of the area), immediately concluded that he must have happened upon the Earthly Paradise.

Just as interesting is what people thought about Columbus himself. Pagden discusses how Columbus’s actual motivations and methods (eschatological, gold-centric, and largely faulty) were gradually transformed in a way that turned him into a hero of modern science. He is depicted by later writers as breaking through earlier categories and restrictions, following his own genius to make a new discovery, even though his science was nearly entirely wrong and he had no real conception of where he was going. Columbus thus becomes part of a new dialogue of modernity, in which he follows scientific progress instead of customary assumptions to make new discoveries about the world. This became commonplace enough that Galileo's discoveries, 150 years later, made him a "New Columbus." Pagden also touches upon the cosmological ramifications of Columbus's accidental discovery: the 16th century was a world of continually expanding horizons that required constantly more exploration and investigation. This occurred to the point that Bernard de Fontenelle suggested that there was no reason to believe that there weren’t more continents to discover and that someone wouldn’t one day find a path to the moon.

There's also a very interesting essay on language, particularly its role in cultural communication. It explores the shift from the early assumption that language was God-given to the increasingly popular idea that language was something constructed by society. There was an increasing awareness, as each group tried to learn the others’ language, that there was a large gap not only in terms of linguistic construction but resultant differences in conceptions of reality. European languages, for example, tended to focus more on abstractions (particularly Christianity, with its Platonic connotations), Amerindian languages on concrete reality. This then led to moral questions – Amerindian languages were seen as less complex but more tangible, and perhaps closer to the long-sought Edenic language. European languages were more complex but thus more easily manipulated and corrupted. They require tangible things to be broken down, decomposed into words and letters before being reconstructed.

The last section then jumps ahead to the Romantic era, during which there was a heightened emphasis on the incommensurability of cultures. Things were very far away from Columbus by this point, and Diderot went so far as to suggest that travel was dangerous and unwarranted, resulting only in a diluting of cultures and violent attempts at cultural assimilation. He saw natives as uncivilized, living in a kind of eternal present that did not allow for society but that did allow for approaching the Stoic ideal of living in the moment. Contrarily, he saw Europeans as civilized, living in a kind of accumulated past and potential future (but lacking a present), which allows for civilization but not Stoic happiness.

He then followed Rousseau in seeing the homogenizing effects of culture, and seeing colonization and travel as destructive. Instead of allowing for all civilizations to develop on their own, he colonization made civilized people revert to 'barbarism' and stunted the growth of the colonized. Incommensurability hurt both sides; "Travel decomposes civilized man." Interestingly, commerce was seen as an anecdote to this, the inverse of colonization. By creating mutual ties, exchanges, and networks, commerce made war mutually destructive.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

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