Philosophe/Philosopher
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!! ST É PHANE VAN DAMME Philosophe /philosopher Let us make a detour via Italy and borrow a phrase from the Neapolitan jurist Gaetano Filangieri who, in the !$%&s, wrote in his Science of Legislation , ‘The philosophe must be an apostle of truth and not an inventor of sys- tems.’! The distinction between philosophe and philosopher has often been linked to two different spheres of activity: on the one hand, the publicist and man of letters; on the other, the scientist, scholar and natural philosopher. The intense dialogue between the history of philosophy, history of science and cultural history now allows us to go further. The social and cultural density of philosophy in the Enlightenment is becoming apparent outside spaces where its production and reception seem the most legitimate. But Enlightenment philosophy is not con' ned to writings and concepts, for it can be seen at once as knowledge, social practice and a cultural object far exceeding the context of teaching in schools and universities. Can this maxi- mal extension of the philosophical domain be explained without invoking the usual explanation of the epistemological boundaries of different ' elds of philosophical knowledge in the classical age? It seems imperative to shift the focus by totally abandoning a de' nition of philosophy in terms of dis- ciplines in order to approach the question obliquely. Hence, this chapter will concentrate on the differentiation, the partitioning or, conversely, the blurring of distinctions. ( Instead of taking ' xed de' nitions as its starting point, this chapter will map the work of their production by exploring their various underlying tensions and considering boundary objects. Philosophy and/or science? The ' rst tension we must examine arises between ' elds of knowledge and philosophy in the Enlightenment. How should we understand eighteenth- century philosophy? Philosophical knowledge in its different aspects should be understood not as a block of disciplines but rather as a system in which statements and intellectual practices circulate between different !"# 99781107021488c11_p153-166.indd781107021488c11_p153-166.indd 115353 77/2/2014/2/2014 77:49:36:49:36 PPMM )*+,-./0 1./ 2.330 forms of knowledge. The philosophy taught in colleges and universities was well de' ned within the framework of the liberal arts and quadriv- ium. It was integrated knowledge. It included lessons in logic, physics and metaphysics, sometimes supplemented by mathematics and geography. # Natural philosophy gained increasing autonomy as the different intellec- tual domains began to draw apart. In the second half of the eighteenth century, natural history, chemistry, botany, zoology, geology and physics gradually lost their strictly philosophical de' nition to become scienti' c disciplines in their own right. However, the shift from ‘natural philosophy’ to modern sciences was not linear. Many ' elds of knowledge were simul- taneously seeking to be labelled as philosophy, a term synonymous with breadth. The linguist Ferdinand Brunot tried to measure the expansion that the concept of philosophy underwent in the eighteenth century in his Histoire de la langue fran ç aise ( History of the French Language ). 4 Its 5 exibility can be seen in many expressions describing the state of knowl- edge at the time, including ‘philosophical chemistry’, ‘zoological philoso- phy’, ‘economic philosophy’, ‘rural philosophy’, ‘philosophical grammar’ and new terms such as ‘experimental philosophy’, ‘moral philosophy’ and ‘speculative philosophy’. These designations did not correspond to the tra- ditional representation of philosophy as an academic discipline. Instead, they indicated an identity, a new general economy of knowledge. In ‘the detailed explanation of the system of human knowledge’ offered by the Encyclop é die , Diderot is careful to make ‘philosophy and science’ equiva- lent: ‘Philosophy, or that portion of human knowledge that must be linked to reason, is very broad. There is almost no object grasped by the senses from which re5 ective thought has not formed a science.’ " Michel Foucault has noted the decisive mutation in the classical age concerning the ' eld of philosophy and its objects: Philosophy was, precisely, the organisational system, the system that allowed knowledges to communicate with one another … With the disciplinarisation of knowledges, in its polymorphous singularity, now leads to the emergence of a phenomenon and a constraint that is now an integral part of our society. We call it ‘science’. At the same time, and for the same reason, philosophy loses its foundational and founding role. 6 In this science, we can sense the Foucaldian episteme, understood ‘as a set of relations between sciences, epistemological ' gures, positivities and discur- sive practices’. $ The ‘restricted’ philosophy – as in ‘restricted’ rhetoric – that emerged in the nineteenth century had to work through the loss of this global knowledge, while, beyond the break imposed by modern philosophy, an older de' nition of philosophy as wisdom persisted. !"4 99781107021488c11_p153-166.indd781107021488c11_p153-166.indd 115454 77/2/2014/2/2014 77:49:37:49:37 PPMM Philosophe/philosopher The philosophe : professor or sage? Extending this initial opposition, we must also re-evaluate the social and ‘professional’ status of the philosophe , reconsidering the identity of the teacher and the teaching of philosophy as well. While the erudite philoso- pher is automatically classed as a teacher, the philosophe is placed among the men of letters and amateurs. As heir to the ‘new’ philosophy of the seventeenth century, the Enlightenment was grounded in a relationship of inclusion in and opposition to the philosophy of colleges and university arts faculties. Dictionaries ' rst recorded this change of status and blurring of identi- ties. In his analysis of the different meanings of the word philosophe in the Dictionnaire de l’Acad é mie fran ç aise of !674, !$!% and !$4&, Daniel Brewer notes a shift from identi' cation with the professor of logic to the polemical de' nition that would become current in the mid eighteenth century: ‘He is a man who rejects nothing, who constrains himself in relation to nothing, and who leads the life of a philosophe .’ % With Dumarsais, the philosophe gained his recognition from a subversive reputation. Subsequently, in the context of the theatre, a series of plays developed new social representa- tions of the philosophe and opened up a literary space of satire and critique, from Saint-Jorry’s Le Philosophe tromp é par la nature ( The Philosopher Deceived by Nature ) (!$!7) to the marquis de Sade ’s Le Philosophe soi- disant ( The So-called Philosopher ) (!$67). 7 The philosophe appears as an Enlightenment invention whose social portrait requires redrawing. Most of these plays were based on Marmontel ’s story Le Philosophe soi-disant (!$"7), from which a total of eight plays were adapted. They re5 ect the reworking and transposition of narrative into drama and vice versa that was common in the eighteenth century. To judge from the many theatrical adaptations produced in the years !$6&–#, the story enjoyed considerable success. The theme of the self-proclaimed philosophe , the false philosophe hoodwinked and unmasked, was highly contemporary. Fré ron ’s attacks in his journal L’Ann é e litt é raire ( The Literary Year ) and those of Palissot on stage were linked to an early pamphlet campaign against the encyclo- p é distes , whose cause was taken up by Marmontel. A second battle was unleashed on ( May !$6& at the Th é â tre-Fran ç ais, with a three-act comedy in verse by Palissot. Another playwright, Fran ç ois-Georges Fouques, known as Desfontaines , adapted this play as Le Philosophe pré tendu ( The Supposed Philosopher ), performed at the Thé â tre-Italien on 6 October !$6(. The vari- ous plays were primarily polemical in intent and gave visibility to new play- wrights. Several elements characterize the representation of the philosophe in these pieces. First, he is a learned man steeped in Latin and Greek, directly !"" 99781107021488c11_p153-166.indd781107021488c11_p153-166.indd 115555 77/2/2014/2/2014 77:49:37:49:37 PPMM )*+,-./0 1./ 2.330 based on the character of the pedantic scholar Trissotin in Moli è re ’s Les Femmes savantes ( The Learned Ladies ). Palissot de Montenoy’s comedy represents the philosophe with the features of Monsieur Carondas, ‘bris- tling with Greek and scholastic terms’ (line 74). Second, the playwrights highlight his solitude and lack of socialization, pursuing a theme dear to eulogists and found in representations of the savant as unmarried and living alone. !& It is the philosophe ’s asocial nature that helps drive the dramatic action. A play by Destouches opens on ‘a book-lined study: Ariste is seated opposite a table, on which are a writing case and pens, books, mathematical instruments and a sphere.’ !! Biographies and academic eulogies of the phi- losophe formed another genre where the man of letters or genius aspiring to immortality was to be restored to primacy, alongside the philosophy pro- fessor. !( The ethical dimension re5 ects the persistence of a cynical or more broadly ancient model associating intellectual life with spiritual exercise. !# It also permitted the links between philosophical and religious beliefs to be maintained, denials and denunciations notwithstanding. Enlightenment prophetism, the view of the philosophe as an apostle, clearly expresses this convergence of the messianism of progress and Enlightenment