'O soothest Sleep!': Romanticism as a retort to Hobbes.

As Aldo has mentioned before (following after Jonathan Crary, i think?) the modern conception of sleep can be seen as taken in large part from the writings of Hobbes - sleep  (or more generally the extent to which we are at the mercy of our natural bodily functions) makes us vulnerable, infringes on our ability to be fully 'switched on' all the time:

For if we look on men full-grown, and consider how brittle the frame of our human body is, which perishing, all its strength, vigour, and wisdom itself perisheth with it; and how easy a matter it is, even for the weakest man to kill the strongest: there is no reason why any man, trusting to his own strength, should conceive himself made by nature above others. 

In the modern view, it is these sort of natural 'conventions' such as sleep (a left-over from slothful 'barbarians' whose lives were governed by base desires, and animals that lie in the sun all day?) that are stopping supreme security, reducing the superiority of our rationality. Each of us are forced to obey these natural functions and, there seems also to be the implication that this bond between our conciousness and our bodily needs is a fundamentally bad, or at least dangerous thing (the modern notion of the individual founded on the idea that 'i think therefore i am' - a sort of abstract sense of certainty rather than one rooted in physicality)

I think it's possible to argue (and I'm sure it has been by many elsewhere) that it logically follows on from this attitude that we, as a species, should thus attempt to split conciousness (that which we can more regularly, fully rely on) from the body, that which is 'brittle'. According to Aristotle: man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech... it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust. Conciousness/rationality, being that which separates us from those other bodied beings that populate this earth.

How dissimilar is our modern conception of sleep then, from that of the technology on which we so rely: phones/laptops occasionally need to 're-charge'... and human sleep is also, just a nuisance, which must take up as little time as possible.Superior rationality must briefly humour its physical 'partner' (prison?) until it can get back to the important stuff. This might all sound a bit abstract and far-fetched, I suppose it is an extreme account in some ways. But I genuinely think there is an intelligible link between the sort of 'unsaid' basis on which modern thinking is based and the current cutting edge of scientific enquiry - culminating in the idea that the body is a weak inefficient vessel in itself that must be overcome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2045_Initiative . The 2045 Initiative holds that as a species, we must  attempt to upload our conciousness to that much more durable storage facility - a hard drive. The body is resigned to mere 'carrier' of precious cargo. 

When trying to critique this mostly unchallenged view of sleep, and conciousness more widely, that so abounds today then, where are we to look for theoretical backing? I'm sure there's plenty of sources, but for me, the first thing that sprung to mind was the poetry of the Romantic period:

Wordsworth, To Sleep:

Without thee what is all the morning's wealth?
Come, blessed barrier between day and day,
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!

In just this small extract, Wordsworth makes two important points, firstly the extent to which day relies on night, wakefulness on sleep... we are only able to enjoy the day time because of this break in between, and where would we be left when no distinctions between days remain? And secondly, the power of sleep to rejuvenate; there's plenty of sayings about 'a good nights sleep' making even the worse day seem better upon awakening. It's much more than a purely physical process of getting just enough sleep to be able to do another day of work, it's what conciousness needs for 'fresh thoughts'.

Keats' To Sleep, makes a similar point:

O SOFT embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;

Forgetfulness, encouraged by sleep, is 'divine' - would life be bearable without breaks from it? Keats' insistence that our eyes are 'gloom-pleased' seems to argue that it would not. His plea overall is for sleep to save him from 'curious / Conscience, that still lords / Its strength for darkness, burrowing / like a mole.' With rationality it is possible to achieve wondrous things (the act of writing a poem for one!), but in the view of Romanticism, this human ability is founded on a lot of sleep, to allow the mind to calm itself and recollect. 

In Ode to a Nightingale, Keats wishes that he could accompany the nightingale he spies, and with it,

fade away into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Keats, highlights the negative effects of conciousness - he proclaims later ' to think is to be full of sorrow' which is an important repost to someone such as Hobbes, so deeply in love as he was, with rationality, and its potential.

Wordsworth, in another poem entitled To Sleep, writes:

Dear Bosom-child we call thee, that dost steep

In rich reward all suffering; Balm that tames

All anguish; Saint that evil thoughts and aims

Takest away, and into souls dost creep,

Like to a breeze from heaven.


In sleep, we decide what to keep and what to filter - without it, there would surely just be confusion. In the poetry of the Romantics, sleep is about  consideration, review/examination of ones life, about absorption of what has happened, but also, forgetfulness. It also has a sort of 'grounding' quality - there is something magnificently levelling about sleep, in that all creatures have to do it. This is a point made by Shelley:

Percy Shelley, Remorse:

The cloud shadows of midnight possess their own repose,
For the weary winds are silent, or the moon is in the deep;
Some respite to its turbulence unresting ocean knows;
Whatever moves or toils or grieves hath its appointed sleep.

To sum up, much of the poetry of the Romantic period offers an important counter-argument to the prevailing view of the body as a weak vessel which the mind must unfortunately 'humour' until it can finally surpass it once the technology has arrived... More specifically, it praises above all, the amazing properties of one of the key bodily processes - sleep. Our intervention seems to ask: why is it that sleep, which takes up around a third of our lives,'takes up so little of our thinking'? The poetry of the Romantic period is a useful example of a period that sits firmly 'in praise of sleep' - attempting to bring it firmly into the public eye in a time when, with the Industrial Revolution at its peak, capitalism had already heavily eroded the time most spent sleeping. I like to think our intervention will in some way be an extension of this Romantic ideal.