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The Enlightenment Republic of Letters

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The Enlightenment Republic of Letters Chapter One The Enlightenment Republic of Letters The Party of Humanity ousseau’s Enlightenment was the “high Enlightenment” of the RParisian philosophes. While many no longer think it intellectually respectable to focus on this often unrepresentative elite when discussing “the Enlightenment” in general, there is some justification for doing so in the particular case of Rousseau, who actually inhabited their world. I will deal exclusively with the Enlightenment in its French context, even though Rousseau was a citizen of Geneva. Notwithstanding this vital fact, he participated in, influenced and was influenced by a social, cul- tural, political, and philosophical environment that was predominantly French in an age when France was the dominant cultural force in Europe. However, as we shall see, his provincial background on the periphery of this world is crucial to understanding his attitude towards the dominant political and philosophical trends in France in the second half of the eigh- teenth century. The term “the Enlightenment” only came into common use in English to designate a specific historical period long after the eighteenth century, and it was not until after World War II that it usurped the expression “the Age of Reason.” Although the philosophes used the term “éclaircisse- ment” and sometimes referred to themselves as “les hommes éclairés,”1 this word refers to the general concept of enlightenment rather than to the specific historical movement we now call “the Enlightenment” (definite article, capital ‘E’). However, the French expression “le siècle des lumières” was used from the late eighteenth century, while ‘Lumières’ on its own has been popular in French since the 1950s to refer to what is now known in English as the Enlightenment.2 As for there having been a single Enlightenment “project,” this belief is most commonly held by its detractors, who have found it much more 11 12 The Enlightenment Republic of Letters convenient to dismiss one simplistic caricature than to deal with a com- plex and heterogeneous range of views. This tendency has provoked a backlash among dix-huitièmistes and some Enlightenment sympathizers. While the more nuanced and historically informed view of the Enlightenment they favor is a welcome improvement on many earlier defi- nitions, it is still compatible with the idea that the philosophes—in France at least—were pursuing a common project, broadly defined.3 That is how Diderot characterized the Encyclopédie, “the text most representative of the French Enlightenment:”4 as a “project” (his word) that could “only be completed by a society of men of letters and arts” who were bound together “by the general interest of humanity and a sense of mutual good- will.”5 The “society of men of letters” whose project this was in France were the philosophes. It was around the middle of the eighteenth century—just as Rousseau was emerging as a leading European intellectual—that a group of writers in France formed themselves into a loose “society” with a broadly shared conception of enlightenment that they actively promoted.6 It was not until then that the philosophes in France started to think of themselves as an informal party—the “party of humanity”—devoted to the promotion of enlightenment understood in a particular sense. From about this time they came to view themselves as the self-appointed leaders of an “unofficial opposition” to the religious, political and philosophical establishment in France with a mission to “legislate for the rest of the nation in matters of philosophy and taste.”7 As Dena Goodman writes, by then they had come to conceive of themselves as a corps, “a status group within French soci- ety. This new French identity was overlaid upon the fundamental princi- ples of the Republic of Letters: reciprocity, cosmopolitanism, status based on merit, and fidelity to truth.”8 In his “Reflections on the Present State of the Republic of Letters” (1760), d’Alembert describes this eighteenth- century “society” as follows: Among the men of letters there is one group against which the arbiters of taste, the important people, the rich people, are united: this is the pernicious, the damnable group of philosophes, who hold that it is possible to be a good Frenchman without courting those in power, a good citizen without flattering national prejudices, a good Christian without persecuting any- body. The philosophes believe it right to make more of an honest if little-known writer than of a well-known writer without enlightenment and without principles, to hold that foreigners are not inferior to us in every respect, and to prefer, for example, a government under which the people are not slaves to one under The Enlightenment Republic of Letters 13 which they are. This way of thinking is for many people an unpardonable crime.9 In his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), Condorcet (1743–1794) characterizes the philosophes as, above all, popularizers concerned “less with the discovery or development of truth than with its propagation . [who] made it their life-work to destroy popular errors rather than to drive back the frontiers of human knowledge.”10 All of those who supported the general goals of the Enlightenment in France were loosely committed to the emancipatory project of liberating the mind and power of human beings from the fetters of prejudice, intol- erance, and tradition, to exorcise the “idols of the human mind,” as Francis Bacon (1561–1626)—one of the heroes of the philosophes— phrased it. The philosophes wished to reorganize the world so that the individual would be capable of free and independent action, and to sub- ject to human control those features of the social and natural environ- ments that had formerly determined human existence. In its most general sense, the philosophes understood enlightenment as a process in which ignorance and superstition are replaced by truth and knowledge.11 “That is why everything must be examined, everything must be investigated, without hesitation or exception,” Diderot explains in the Encyclopédie. “[P]uerile restrictions must be stamped out; any barriers not set up by reason must be overthrown. The arts and sciences must be granted the freedom which is so vital to them.”12 The certain result of this process, they believed, would be the promotion of human well-being, although few believed that the road leading to this end was either straight or easy. It could only be achieved by first discovering the truth and then prudently disseminating it as widely as the maintenance of social, moral, and politi- cal order would allow, something requiring a constant struggle against powerful institutions, vested interests, and entrenched prejudices. Such knowledge can only be acquired and disseminated where “the yoke of authority and precedent comes to be shaken and to yield to the laws of reason” and facts are accepted on the basis of scientifically verifiable sen- sory evidence rather than tradition or the blind authority of others.13 Universal reason was to replace arbitrary and irrational beliefs and tradi- tional institutions, and those aspects of moral, social, and political life that had previously been accepted unquestioningly would now be sub- jected to chronic revision in the light of their practical usefulness and new information made available through scientific investigation and discovery. Orthodox religious dogmas and abstruse metaphysical systems were regarded as nothing more than impediments to our direct experience of 14 The Enlightenment Republic of Letters the world and the exercise and development of our mental faculties and powers. La Mettrie called on his readers to “[b]reak the chains of your prejudices and take up the torch of experience.”14 This general outlook is summarized very well by the Baron d’Holbach: How could the human mind, haunted by frightening phantoms and guided by men interested in perpetuating its ignorance, make any progress? Man has been forced to vegetate in his primitive stupidity; he has been told only about invisible powers on which his fate was supposed to depend. Completely occupied with his fears and his senseless reveries, he has always been at the mercy of his priests who reserve for themselves the right to think for him and to regulate his conduct. He [man] believed himself forced to groan under the yoke of his gods, whom he knew only through the fabulous accounts of their ministers. The human mind, confused by theological opinions, failed to recognize itself, doubted its own powers, mistrusted experience, feared the truth, scorned its reason, and passed it by in order blindly to follow authority. Man was a simple machine in the hands of his tyrants and his priests, who alone had the right to regulate his move- ments. Science, reason and liberty alone can cure them and make them happier. Let minds be filled in good time with true ideas, let men’s reason be nurtured, let justice govern them, and there will be no need to oppose the helpless barrier of fear of the gods to the passions. Worn out by an inconceivable the- ology, ridiculous fables, impenetrable mysteries, puerile cere- monies, let the human mind concern itself with natural things, intelligible subjects, tangible truths and useful knowledge. Once the vain fancies that obsess peoples are dissipated, soon rational opinions will come of themselves to win those human minds which have always been thought to be destined for error.15 The project that the French philosophes shared for promoting enlightenment—as they understood it—had negative and positive dimen- sions. Negatively, as we have already seen, it required tearing down the many obstacles to a clear and accurate perception of reality, such as super- stition, dogma, and prejudice. The greatest of these obstacles, they thought, was the Church, the Enlightenment’s principal target in France.
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