Feeling Better: Moral Sense and Sensibility in Enlightenment Thought

For much of the eighteenth century in Europe, the concept of ‘sensibility’ formed a bridge between nature and culture, and between the body and the moral world. In doing so, it provided a site for the emergence of a range of projects in what this chapter labels affective pedagogy—techniques for training the unruly passions and for nurturing social sentiments as an inoculation against them. Though such pedagogy could take various forms, ranging from sentimental novels to dietetic regimes, it was characterised above all by a common attempt to help humanity, quite literally, to feel better. By exploring the social and philosophical dynamics that promoted the turn to affective pedagogy, and the anxieties that shaped its manifestations in Britain and France, this chapter illuminates how eighteenth-century understandings of the character and history of emotions were bound up with central moral and political questions of the era.