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Gadamer, Hans-Georg_ Heidegger, Martin_ Bultmann, Rudolf_ Thiselton, Anthony C. - The Two Horizons _ New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description With Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Ga
Gadamer, Hans-Georg_ Heidegger, Martin_ Bultmann, Rudolf_ Thiselton, Anthony C. - The Two Horizons _ New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description With Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Ga
Genevieve Lloyd
1
3
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Contents
Prologue 1
Introduction: The Enlightenment and its Future 9
Kant on enlightenment 9
Light and knowledge 13
Whose Enlightenment? 17
1. Cosmopolitan Imagining: Montesquieu’s Persian Letters 21
Tales of travel 21
Montesquieu’s travellers 26
Seraglios, real and imagined 34
Truth, interpretation, and tolerance 40
2. In Celebration of Not Knowing: Voltaire’s Voices 45
What’s in a name? 45
The Philosophical Dictionary 46
Tolerance and religion 56
3. Hume’s Sceptic 61
The intellectual character of the Sceptic 61
Hume and ancient scepticism 63
Humean detachment 66
The reconstruction of objectivity 75
4. As Seen by Others: Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments 81
Morals and religion 81
Sympathy and imagination 85
The impartial spectator 92
Fortune and human action 98
The ‘voices’ of Adam Smith 103
Philosophy and imagination 108
5. ‘Changing the Common Mode of Thinking’: d’Alembert
and Diderot on the Encyclopedia 111
Maps, trees, and circles 111
Judgement and genius 118
vi CONTENTS
1
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto &
Windus,1999), pp. 32–4.
PROLOGUE 3
2
Lucretius, The Nature of Things, 4.7222–82; as quoted in A. A. Long, and D. N. Sedley,
trans., The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), vol. I,
p. 74.
4 PROLOGUE
3
Lucretius, The Nature of Things, 3.966–1023; Long and Sedley, vol. I, p. 153.
4
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge,
1994), p. 96.
PROLOGUE 5
ideas wistfully towards the future. Their hopes often add a poignancy to
the spectral return of their ideas; at times it seems that hope itself provides
the substance of their thought.
Ideas that are in their origins oriented to an idealized future can turn
into parodies of themselves. The passage of time can of itself pose chal-
lenges to the collective life of the mind. The liveliness of fresh ideas can
quickly rigidify into cramping orthodoxies. This process of intellectual
enervation can give rise to particular paradoxes when Enlightenment ideas
are at issue. The atrophying effects of time on Enlightenment ideas are
one source of their spectral character in our contemporary context.
Enlightenment ideals of constant critique of the status quo can harden
into an oppositional style of thinking in which we—the supposedly
enlightened—align ourselves with the heritage of light against presumed
dark forces of ignorance or evil. Criticism—a practice often associated
with the Enlightenment—can become dogmatism when it ceases to be
self-reflective. Often, Enlightenment hopes and aspirations can thrive only
if they are themselves subjected to sustained critique.
The temporal paradox here was articulated by Max Horkheimer in his
writings, in the aftermath of the Second World War, on Enlightenment
ideals of reason. If we want to be true to Enlightenment ideals now, we
may need to criticize what they have involved in the past. Horkheimer’s
reflections on the paradoxes of Enlightenment reason—like those of his
fellow critics from the Frankfurt school, Adorno and Habermas—were
formulated in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In that context Enlighten-
ment reason, rather than being seen as heralding unlimited progress for the
human race, could be seen as itself producing a repressive imposition of
inflexible uniformity and orthodoxy.
The future of reason, Horkheimer observed, demands a radical critique
of the inner contradictions of Enlightenment thought; but this, he insisted,
does not mean that the ideals of the Enlightenment should be left behind.
We must rather, he says, ‘encourage Enlightenment to move forward even
in the face of its most paradoxical consequences . . . The hope of Reason
lies in the emancipation from its own fear of despair.’5 It may be in the
5
Max Horkheimer, ‘Reason Against Itself: Some Remarks on Enlightenment’, in James
Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Ques-
tions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 366–7.
6 PROLOGUE
contained more of his deft lightheartedness. But we have all grown serious
and forgotten how to laugh.’6
Without an appreciation of the tenor and mood—the intellectual
character—that runs through the texts discussed in this book, the doctrines
they articulate can be pale copies of their originals. Without some insight
into the imaginative play and the emotional resonances that hold them
together, the ideas of the Enlightenment can indeed become pallid wraiths
that come back to haunt us. If we want now to understand and learn from
these texts it is important to attend not only to what they say but to how
they are written.
The readings which follow will thus take seriously the literary aspects of
philosophical texts; and the texts themselves are chosen with an eye to
illustrating the varying ways in which Enlightenment thinkers enacted—
and reflected upon—the interplay of intellect, emotion, and imagination.
The texts display a sense of the ascendancy of the imagination which can
be both exhilarating and unsettling. Rather than being relegated to a
subordinate position to reason, the imagination here emerges as the real
source of objectivity in moral consciousness—a shift in thought which is
accompanied by an unease, a sense of vulnerability which coexists with
Enlightenment optimism.
In some cases—as in the selection of writings from David Hume and
Adam Smith—the workings of imagination are central to the subject
matter of the works themselves. In others—especially in relation to Mon-
tesquieu and Diderot—the literary form of the works becomes the primary
focus. In the case of Voltaire, the emphasis is on the philosophical force of
rhetorical strategies, especially his use of multiple voices. In discussing
d’Alembert’s and Diderot’s explanations of the Encyclopedia, I highlight
the play of metaphors through which they try to reconcile two things
which can seem in conflict—a project of mapping the structure of the
mind, and the aspiration to capture processes of intellectual change. My
reading of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew in contrast centres on the work’s
enactment of the emotional instability and vulnerability accompanying the
power of imagination. Finally, Kant’s Perpetual Peace will be presented as
a striking literary hybrid of genres of theoretical discourse and visionary
tale of the future.
6
Bertrand Russell, ‘Voltaire’s Influence on Me’, Studies in Voltaire, vol. 6, 1958, p. 161.
8 PROLOGUE
Kant on enlightenment
In 1784 there was a striking, and in some ways peculiar, moment in
intellectual history: a philosopher addressed himself to his future—to the
heirs of the process we now in retrospect talk of as the Enlightenment. The
moment comes in a short essay by Immanuel Kant, called Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose a companion piece to
the better-known essay he published in the same year, An Answer to the
Question: What is Enlightenment? In that essay Kant famously defined
enlightenment as mankind’s exit from self-incurred immaturity.
The rationale of Kant’s definition in What is Enlightenment? was that
human beings had previously lacked the courage to make use of their own
understanding without the guidance of others. Hence, appropriating a
classical Latin quotation from Horace’s Epistles, Kant offered as the slogan
of enlightenment, Sapere Aude; that is, ‘Dare to Know’: have the courage to
use your understanding in your own right; think for yourselves, rather than
accepting things on authority. Judged in relation to that ideal of maturity,
Kant thought, his own age could not be said to be enlightened; but it could
be said to be a period of history in which the process of enlightenment was
under way. ‘If it is now asked whether we at present live in an enlightened
age? the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.’1
1
‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, in Kant, Political Writings, ed.
Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn., 1991),
p. 58. Subsequent quotations from Kant’s political essays are accompanied by page references
to this volume in parentheses.
10 INTRODUCTION : THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS FUTURE
Kant goes on to be more specific about the positioning of his own time
and place in relation to enlightenment. The signs of the process, he says,
are visible around him. The obstacles to enlightenment are becoming ever
fewer. ‘In this respect’, he concludes, ‘our age is the age of enlightenment,
the century of Frederick’ (p. 58). Kant was by no means unusual in seeing
the reign of the current Prussian sovereign as symbolizing ‘the age of
enlightenment’. Frederick the Great was at the time renowned for his
endorsement of the values of enlightenment. He fostered religious toler-
ance, introduced legal reforms, restricted the practice of judicial torture
and of the death penalty, reduced censorship, provided support and
protection for leading intellectual figures, and encouraged public scrutiny
of the workings of the state.
The connotations of ‘enlightenment’ here are of course much broader
than can be encompassed in the practice of philosophy as an intellectual
activity—though Frederick did pride himself on his engagement with
philosophers as well as on his efforts to produce poetry. Kant, in his essays
on enlightenment, meant the term to include not only philosophical
thinking but those broader commitments to the transformation of social
practices and institutions. In the Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Purpose he elaborated his version of the process of enlight-
enment, with breathtaking confidence, in a grand vision of the develop-
ment of reason in the human species.
Nature’s purpose for human beings, Kant argues, is the full flourishing
of their dormant capacities for reason. This demands a long series of
generations—each passing on its enlightenment to the next. For Kant,
enlightenment—thus construed as the unfolding of the moral maturity of
the species—demands the emergence of a cosmopolitan political system,
in which nations will stand to one another in relations similar to those in
which individuals stand to one another in civil society. Nature’s highest
purposes for the human species will be achieved in a ‘universal cosmopol-
itan existence’ which will at last be realized as the matrix within which all
the original capacities of the human race may develop under the guidance
of Nature. ‘Individual men and even entire nations little imagine that,
while they are pursuing their own ends, each in his own way and often in
opposition to others, they are unwittingly guided in their advance along a
course intended by nature’ (p. 41).
It is indeed a grand vision of human progress; and within it Kant assigns
to his own contemporaries—whom he sees as located little more than half-
KANT ON ENLIGHTENMENT 11
2
See especially James Schmidt, ‘What Enlightenment Project?’, Political Theory, vol. 28,
no. 6, December 2000, 734–57.
12 INTRODUCTION : THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS FUTURE
3
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1951), p. 278.
14 INTRODUCTION : THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS FUTURE
The darkness which was in need of dissipation through knowledge was for
Lucretius, as for Epicurus, religious superstition—and especially the fear of
death generated by irrational expectations of an afterlife. The destructive
power of religious superstition was epitomized for Lucretius by the story—
immortalized by Euripides—of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter
Iphigenia, in the hope of securing from the gods the passage to Troy of
the Greek ships becalmed at Aulis:
She fell, e’en now grown ripe for Nuptial joy,
To bribe the Gods, and buy a Wind for Troy:
So dy’d the innocent, the harmless Maid,
Such Devilish Acts Religion could persuade. (Book I, 120–1)
4
These quotations from Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things are from the eighteenth-
century translation by Thomas Creech, as given by Peter Gay in his book The Enlightenment:
A Comprehensive Anthology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), pp. 32–6. They are
accompanied in parentheses by section references to the Creech text.
5
Voltaire, Lettres de Memmius à Ciceron, in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols.
(1877–85), XXVIII, p. 439; as quoted by Peter Gay in his The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive
Anthology, pp. 32–3.
LIGHT AND KNOWLEDGE 15
6
Friedrich Karl van Moser, ‘True and False Political Enlightenment’, trans. John Christian
Laursen, in James Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-
Century Question, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 213.
16 INTRODUCTION : THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS FUTURE
Even more sardonic at Kant’s expense was his friend Johann Georg
Hamann. Soon after the publication of Kant’s essay What is Enlighten-
ment Hamann wrote in a letter to another friend—Christian Jacob
Kraus—that, although he could tolerate seeing enlightenment elucidated
through analogies with human maturing, he took strong exception to
Kant’s use of ‘that accursed adjective self-incurred’. Taking aim at Kant’s
alignment of enlightenment with maturity, he observed that if the imma-
turity of the unenlightened is self-incurred, there must be a question as to
who then is the indeterminate other—the ‘tiresome guardian’ who must be
understood as the correlate of the immature?
Hamann complained that Kant had implicitly reckoned himself among
the class of the guardians. The alleged immaturity of the unenlightened is
then ‘self-incurred’ only insofar as they have surrendered themselves to the
guidance of a leader who remains invisible.
‘So wherein lies the inability or fault of the falsely accused immature one?
In his own laziness or cowardice? No, it lies in the blindness of his
guardian, who purports to be able to see, and for that very reason must
bear the whole responsibility for the fault.’ The enlightenment of their
century, Hamann concludes, is a delusion—‘a mere northern light, from
which can be prophesied no cosmopolitan chiliasm except in a nightcap
and by the stove . . . a cold, unfruitful moonlight without enlightenment
for the lazy understanding and without warmth for the cowardly will’.
Kant’s response to the question: ‘what is enlightenment?’, he concludes, is
‘a blind illumination for every immature one who walks at noon’.7
Hamann—no doubt wilfully and mischievously—is here allowing
metaphors of light to run riot at Kant’s expense. Having invoked an
opposition between enlightenment and self-incurred immaturity, Kant
has left himself open to a counter-attack of hostile imagery. Metaphors
of light are twisted to convey ideas of blindness and delusion. Kant’s
appropriation of the classical slogan ‘Dare to Know’ is presented as
delivering at best the unadventurous, cosy, fireside light enjoyed by
the self-satisfied in their nightcaps. Even worse, the would-be enlightener
can be cast as manipulating the connections which bind knowledge to
power—blinding the ignorant with dazzling, but nonetheless deluding,
illumination.
7
Johann Georg Hamann, Letter to Christian Jacob Kraus, 18 December 1784, trans. Garrett
Green, as in James Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment?, pp. 146–7.
WHOSE ENLIGHTENMENT ? 17
Whose Enlightenment?
We may well now tend to be sceptical about grand narratives addressed to
the future. Yet the heavy sarcasm of Hamann’s response shows that even in
Kant’s own time his version of progress could be seen as pompous and
pretentious. If his contemporaries could already see hubris in Kant’s vision,
what about us now? How should we position ourselves in relation to
Kant’s vision of the future? Metaphors of ‘passing on the light’ still resonate
with us; and there is a rhetorical structure at play in Kant’s call to the future
that can still be attractive. For example, the metaphor runs hauntingly
through Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, where a father and son walk
resolutely—though without any clear purpose—through a mysteriously
ravaged landscape. As they make their relentless journey into a desolate
future, they tell one another that they are the bearers of the light. At times
the imagery is embodied in an actual candle; at other times it is an elusive
metaphor. ‘In that cold corridor they had reached the point of no return
which was measured from the first solely by the light they carried with
them.’8
Evocative metaphors of passing on the light can still enchant us. How-
ever, if we want to think of ourselves as bearing a fragile light to an
unknown future, we need to be clear about what that light might promise,
and especially about on what authority we claim to be its bearers. If we
want to think of ourselves as participating with Kant in an ongoing process
of enlightenment we may need to understand, not only Kant’s optimism
about the future, but also what made it possible for Hamann to see it as a
pernicious delusion. Hamann condemned the egoism he saw as implicit in
the Kantian narrative of progress into the light: the enlighteners are the
ones who presume to know where all should be heading. It may be
reassuring to invoke a lost or betrayed light as the repository of hope
against encroaching forms of darkness. Yet, as Hamann saw, it can be a
self-serving and dangerous rhetorical manoeuvre. Whatever the Stoics
may have thought, the forces of light cannot be relied upon to reveal
both themselves and the darkness. Nor can we assume that our conviction
that we are ‘bearers of the light’ is not itself a delusion.
Looking back now at Kant looking forward, we can reflect on what we
might now celebrate, and about what we should perhaps be distrustful or
8
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2006), p. 236.
18 INTRODUCTION : THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS FUTURE
cautious, in the rich but complex legacy of the Enlightenment. For Kant
the emerging powers of human reason were supposed to find realization in
a way of thinking that was distinctively ‘cosmopolitan’. His grand narrative
of the future had at its core a vision of the emergence of a world
government that would stand to nation states in a similar relationship to
that in which individuals stood to nations. His intellectual peers may have
taken the cosmopolitan ideal less literally. Yet the vision of a generous
acceptance of—and expansive engagement with—diversity was central to
the ideals of intellectual character we will see emerge in the texts discussed
in this book.
It is perhaps ironic then that the Enlightenment should be now invoked
as a signifier of cultural superiority—of the need to defend ‘our’ values
against a morally inferior ‘other’. How, we may ask, did the effort to
maintain supposed Enlightenment values come to this? The fearful
tightening of borders—and closing of minds—which can seem such a
disturbing feature of the post-11 September world, seems far removed
from the generous expansiveness of spirit in which Diderot could write to
Hume in 1768, ‘My dear David, you belong to all nations, and you will
never ask an unhappy man for his birth certificate. I flatter myself that I am,
like you, citizen of the great city of the world.’9
We will see in the readings that follow an optimism about the future, a
hope—even an assurance—that all will ultimately be well. It is a confi-
dence that can strike us as at odds with their authors’ clear-sighted,
intellectually tough perceptions of what is wrong in their present. They
share a vision of social progress through knowledge which rests on a view
of benign providence as at work in the world—even if they no longer
assume the transcendent nature of that providence. Even their insight into
human cruelty is often encompassed by a frame of optimism that can now
strike us—with the advantage of hindsight on the unfolding of their
hopes—as poignant.
The sardonic Voltaire, having rejected the doctrine that all is well in the
best of all possible worlds, could nonetheless hold onto the hope that all
will be well in the future. As he says in his attack on facile optimism in his
poem on the Lisbon earthquake: ‘One day all will be good, that is our hope,
9
Diderot, Letter to David Hume, February 22, 1768, as quoted in Peter Gay, The Enlighten-
ment: An Interpretation (London: Wildwood House, 1973), vol. I, p. 13.
WHOSE ENLIGHTENMENT ? 19
All is good today, that is the illusion.’10 A bleak view of the present can be
mitigated by hope for the future; yet the juxtaposition of temporal
perspectives can also have an impact in the other direction. The radiance
of the future can accentuate the blackness of the present; and the immedi-
acy of that present can eclipse an imagined future. There are dark under-
currents in Enlightenment optimism; and they often seem to be, not
incidental lapses of resolve, but inherent in the structure of the texts.
The capacity to shift between different moods, to speak in a variety of
voices, to resist encapsulation into any one stance—to sense the darkness
implicit in the light—is at the very core of Enlightenment criticism.
10
Voltaire, Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, as quoted in Theodore Besterman, Voltaire
(Oxford: Blackwell, 3rd edn., 1976), p. 369.
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1
Cosmopolitan Imagining:
Montesquieu’s Persian Letters
Tales of travel
To imagine one’s self into the situation of another is an idea so familiar to
us that it is easy to overlook just how complex an exercise it is. We are
now so used to treating sympathy and empathy as ethically significant
human traits that it can be difficult to realize that this insight was a
contingent development—both in the history of moral philosophy and
in the cultural history of human emotions. The celebration of the capacity
to put oneself imaginatively into the place of another is a central strand in
Enlightenment thought. In the mid-eighteenth century, David Hume and
Adam Smith made the interactions of sympathy and imagination central in
their accounts of the well lived life. For Smith especially the key to virtue
was that we should learn to see what we do as if from outside—from
the perspectives of others. However the scene for this development in
the history of moral consciousness was set by earlier literary works,
which appealed to the fascination of European readers with voyages
of exploration. Fictional travels invited readers to reflect on what was
distinctive—and often strange—in their own culture.
By the time Diderot wrote his famous fictional Supplement to the Voyage
of Bougainville, in 1772—shortly after the publication of Bougainville’s
own Voyage Around the World—European readers were already familiar
with a genre of travel writing imbued with philosophical reflection. There
were earlier models for the use of fictional travel tales as vehicles of satire
directed to an author’s own culture. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—a
satire on the genre of travel tale no less than on human nature—was
published in 1726 and translated into French in 1727. Although Voltaire’s
Letters Regarding the English Nation—published in English and in French in
22 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS
set the scene for Enlightenment authors to use fictional travellers to raise
questions about European customs and institutions.
There is, Montaigne insists, nothing ‘savage’ or ‘barbarous’ about the
cannibals. Rather, every man calls ‘barbarous’ anything to which he is not
accustomed: ‘It is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth
or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of
our own country.’ Laying on the irony more thickly, he adds that it is
commonly in one’s own country that there is to be found ‘the perfect
religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing
anything’.1 He defends the cannibals from the charge of savagery by
turning it upside down. They are ‘wild’ only in the sense that we call
fruits wild when they are ‘produced by nature in her ordinary course’.
What we really ought to call ‘savage’ is the fruit we have artificially
‘perverted and misled from the common order’—the things we have
‘bastardised’ by adapting them to our corrupt tastes.
Living in accordance with nature is of course an old ideal, defended
especially by the ancient Stoics. We will see it invoked in varying ways in
Enlightenment texts. Montaigne appeals to it here in support of his
suggestion that terms such as ‘savage’ and ‘barbarous’, when used in
relation to cannibals, should be restricted to a literal rather than pejorative
sense. Just as they are ‘wild’ only in the sense that plants can be thus
described, so too the cannibals are ‘barbarous’ only in that ‘they have been
hardly fashioned by the mind of man, still remaining close neighbours to
their original state of nature’ (p. 232).
Montaigne is not celebrating the virtues of a supposed ‘noble savage’.
His claim is not that the cannibals are more virtuous than Europeans; he
acknowledges that much of their behaviour is undeniably cruel. The
analysis he offers does nonetheless operate as a powerful critique
of European ways. Having stripped ‘savagery’ of its prevailing moral
connotations—of its associations with pre-moral primitivism—he can
then reverse the familiar condemnation of the cannibals: ‘It does not
sadden me that we should note the horrible barbarity in a practice such
as theirs: what does sadden me is that, while judging correctly of their
wrong-doings, we should be so blind to our own’ (p. 235).
1
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin
Books, 1987), p. 231. Other quotations are accompanied by page references to this edition in
parentheses.
TALES OF TRAVEL 25
Yet it brings a new capacity to perceive one’s own customs as if from the
standpoint of the other. His European readers are drawn into seeing
themselves as a ‘savage’ might see them.
This distancing strategy allows Montaigne a perspective from which it is
possible to make a much stronger critique than would be available if he
invited his readers to share a stance of supposed moral superiority over
the cannibals. He is not saying: ‘in behaving thus we are behaving like
the savages’. The whole point of his comparisons is to accentuate the
differences. He does not see his contemporary Europeans as ‘like savages’.
His point is rather that the Europeans’ behaviour is unacceptably cruel in
their own terms. The indignation is neatly turned back on practices in his
own culture, which might otherwise be too familiar to elicit the thought-
stopping sense of strangeness which is here a prerequisite for moral
understanding.The capacity for imagining difference without assuming
superiority was to prove a crucial exercise in later Enlightenment thought.
Its philosophical significance is given literary expression early in the
eighteenth century in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, published in 1721.2
Montesquieu’s travellers
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel, a collection of letters—principally
between two travellers: the elderly, thoughtful Usbek and the more
youthful, exuberant Rica; but also from friends, wives, and eunuchs at
home, as well as other non-Europeans. Montesquieu exploits to the full
the possibilities for contrasting viewpoints which the epistolary genre
affords. As Voltaire will later do in the Philosophical Dictionary, he takes
the strategy of multiple voices well beyond the limits of a two-sided
debate, offering a plurality of epistemological and moral perspectives.
As a literary device, the use of multiple voices allowed the author to
engage in critique of contemporary European customs without having to
speak on his own account. However, there is also much else going on in
the literary strategies of Persian Letters. The work is cosmopolitan in form as
well as in content; and as satire it has multiple targets—Persian as well as
European. There are many themes and many objects of critique, ranging
2
Quotations are from Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008). References and page numbers to this edition are given in
parentheses.
MONTESQUIEU ’ S TRAVELLERS 27
from the most trivial of customs—dress and social norms—to the most
profound. However, the most persistent themes involve the critique
of tyranny—of the vagaries and vulnerabilities of absolute power, and
associated attitudes of prejudice and intolerance.
By showing the development in his characters of a capacity to perceive
their own customs from the standpoint of others, Montesquieu fosters a
similar capacity in his readers. The engagement of their imagination and
their ‘empathy’—as we might now call it—becomes an exercise in the
formation of cosmopolitan consciousness. The travellers’ perceptions are
filtered through memories of home—sometimes nostalgic, sometimes
critical. Their views change in response to the maturing, educative
dynamic of travel, shifting with the passage of time no less than with the
changes of place; and the juxtapositions of perception and memory allow
for critique of Persian customs as well as of European ways. These Persians
are not unprejudiced observers; but they are shown going through
processes of reflection which yield a fruitful kind of detachment.
Persian Travellers enacts an imaginative interplay between distance and
engagement, similar to that offered in Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals.
It is a novel about—among other things—the formation of judgement.
As they travel, Usbek and Rica come to form favourable as well as
negative views of the cultural differences that at first astonish them; and
their judgements about their own country also change. Their letters testify
to the transformations of consciousness that come from exposure to
difference. The travellers move from surprise and wonder at strikingly
novel customs to a deeper understanding of passions that are universal in
humanity, though differently expressed in different places—passions of
greed, vanity, love, jealousy; and the emotions associated with loss, and
with the fear of loss. They also come, in judging others, to a realization of
some—though not all—of their own limitations. What emerges from
the multiplicity of voices in Persian Letters is not the truth of any one
perspective to the exclusion of others; but nor is it an epistemological or
moral relativism. The work expresses a cosmopolitan ideal nourished by
what can be seen as an expansive form of scepticism.
Montesquieu’s Persians bring fresh perspectives to European customs;
and their exposure to Europeans in turn allows them to see their own
customs in a new light. They encounter, as Rica reports, things quite alien
to the Persian character. Usbek and Rica are both initially overwhelmed
by wonder in the face of all that is strange. Usbek comments in a letter to
28 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS
his friend Ibben in Smyrna that when first seen ‘a Christian city presents a
wonderful spectacle to a Muslim’ (Letter 21; p. 30). Even in the tiniest
details, he says, there is something strange that he cannot put into words.
Yet out of the initial sense of distance arising from wonder comes an
increasingly eager engagement with difference.
Although the travellers initially perceive the Europeans as very different
beings from their own countrymen, they also see the great cities of Europe
as providing ‘a kind of homeland common to all foreigners’ (Letter 21,
p. 30). There is a cosmopolitan impulse in the travellers’ responses to
strangeness—an incipient sense of the possibility of coming to belong in a
place which is as yet unfamiliar. Ibben describes Usbek as ‘amiable enough
to make friends everywhere’—as one for whom ‘the heart is a citizen of
every country’ (Letter 65; pp. 87–8).
Usbek’s wonder persists longer than that of his younger companion.
He tells a friend that, in comparison with his own slow processes of
observation, Rica’s lively mind enables him to grasp things in a flash
(Letter 23; p. 33). Usbek’s surprise persists despite increasing familiarity,
but it is transformed: wonder drives his passion for knowledge. He writes
to his nephew Rhedi, who is travelling in Venice, ‘I find everything
interesting, everything astonishing; I am like a child whose still-tender
organs are keenly affected by the most trivial objects’ (Letter 46; p. 59).
Montesquieu’s use of wonder as a distancing strategy is subtle. His
Persians are clearly not just amazed innocents abroad; they can also be
shrewd observers. It would be difficult—now and no doubt for readers
at the time—to miss the cutting edge of satire, especially in Rica’s
witty observations of French foibles. The Persians are clearly surprised—
sometimes very surprised—by the Europeans. Their surprise serves a
satirical purpose. Montesquieu does not present them as consciously
hostile critics but as wondering wanderers; and we are drawn into that
wonder.
To engage his readers in an exercise of social critique, Montesquieu
does not need to have his characters engage in any heavy-handed criticism
of Europeans. He has only to get his readers to come to see themselves
as if from outside—to come to see the strangeness in what is for
them familiar. In drawing his European readers into his characters’ initial
astonishment and gradual accommodation to the new, he evokes a process
of cosmopolitan imagining—of engagement with the strangeness of
others—which is an analogue of actual travel.
MONTESQUIEU ’ S TRAVELLERS 29
3
Montesquieu, ‘Some Reflections on The Persian Letters’, in Persian Letters, pp. 227–8.
Other quotations are accompanied by page references in parentheses.
30 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS
and cosmic perspectives is the idea that citizenship of the world is for all of
us mediated through a sense of what is distinctive about our own place.
Travel teaches the Persians that what matters is to be a citizen, a husband,
a parent, in accordance with whatever that amounts to in the place where
one lives. Here there is no one right way of being a citizen of the
world. That indeterminacy in turn opens up transformative possibilities
for whatever situating culture one starts from.
The Persians’ amazement at the strangeness of the new reflects a deeper
and older sense of wonder at the world, which goes back to the ancient
origins of the cosmopolitan vision. Yet it is no longer a matter of some
one right order of things mapped—however elusively—onto a universal
rational structure. Rather, there are as many ordered ‘worlds’ as there are
social orders through which the Persians pass. As Montesquieu says in
his later reflections on the work, they ‘found themselves suddenly
transplanted into Europe, that is, into another universe’ (p. 228). Their
education involves moving from that state of stunned surprise at being
transported into another universe to the realization that, however different
cultures may be, it is all ultimately the same human world.
It is a delicate balancing act, this holding together of perceptions of
human sameness and of cultural difference. Persian Letters takes seriously
the relativization of its characters’ judgements to the cultural frames out of
which they speak. Yet there is nonetheless a sense of universality—
grounded in the shared needs and passions that find such different cultural
expression throughout the work. Sameness interacts with difference; the
universal with the specifically local. Again, there is no endorsement here of
what we now talk of as moral relativism—no repudiation of the possibility
of objective moral judgement. Shared humanity emerges through
encountering and coming to understand difference. The Persians enact
developing capacities to form objective judgements about what is lacking
in their own cultural norms. Montesquieu’s readers are drawn into both
the wonder and the humour of these cross-cultural encounters—sharing
the respect, and the sense of absurdity, generated by serious engagement
with difference.
Those tensions between sameness and difference are inherent in cosmo-
politan imagining. They intersect—and interact—with the contrasts in
intellectual character that emerge between Usbek and Rica. They play out
also in another theme which is central to the work—the operations of
male power in organizing the lives of women. The contrasts between male
34 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS
and female lives are significant within what is shown of both European
and Persian social arrangements. There is no suggestion that all is well
between the sexes in the European world. Rather, the work illuminates
sexual inequities in general, opening up space for the consideration of
alternatives. As the work proceeds, Montesquieu exposes his readers to a
dramatic development in his travellers’ perceptions of what is possible in
relations between the sexes.
which is supposed to temper it: ‘Return to comfort the laments of love and
make duty pleasurable’ (Letter 93; p.129). However, as the plot unfolds, it
becomes clear to the reader that the eunuchs are anything but loyal
collaborators in the power of the master; and that the ‘laments of love’
are not what they appear.
On one level, the growing disarray in Usbek’s seraglio represents the
lack of order which ensues in the lack of clear and present authority.
However, it also dramatizes possibilities for subversion of the power which
appears on the surface to be absolute. The disorder that develops in
Usbek’s absence makes visible the hidden structures of the authority
which operated in his presence. Within that organization of power,
order depends on the visibility of the figure around whose needs and
desires it is all arranged. The disarray at home becomes increasingly a
microcosm of the failures which Usbek comes to attribute to absolute
power in relation to civil order.
Some of those problems about political despotism anticipate Montes-
quieu’s own critique of absolutism in his later and better known work, The
Spirit of the Laws. What is striking in Persian Letters is that criticisms of
political despotism are here juxtaposed with insights into the oppression of
women in the domestic sphere. Usbek reflects on civil authority in ways
that resonate with his own domestic predicament. He quotes an unnamed
‘sensible European’ who analyses the deficiencies of the power wielded by
the ruler who remains invisible. Although Persian rulers intend their
invisibility to make them more respected, that source observes, it in fact
inspires respect for royalty in the abstract, rather than for the person of the
ruler. The invisibility of power attaches the minds of subjects to an abstract
throne rather than to a particular person. To the common people, this
invisible power remains always the same. ‘Even if ten kings, whom they
knew only by name, were to be slaughtered one after another, they would
experience no difference; it would be as if they had been governed by a
succession of ghosts’ (Letter 100; p. 138). In Usbek’s absence, his authority
becomes both more tyrannical and more ineffectual. Yet the letters from
home make it clear to the reader that, in relation to his own household,
Usbek is himself becoming a ghost.
Clearly, Usbek’s travels are making him a man of enlightenment—
trusting to laws of reason accessible to science and reflected in good
forms of governance. He shares in the optimism of ideals of progress
now associated with the Enlightenment. Reassuring Rhedi in Venice
36 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS
that knowledge can be trusted to improve rather than damage human life,
he comments: ‘You are afraid, you say, that someone may invent a means
of destruction crueller than what is currently in use. No; if such a fatal
invention were discovered it would soon be prohibited by international
public law, and then nations would unanimously agree to bury this
discovery . . . ’ (Letter 103; p. 142). The growing disorder in the seraglio
is counterpoised to the gradual development of Usbek’s insights into the
politics of power and his associated hopes for the future of humanity.
Montesquieu comments in his later reflections on Persian Letters that
there is a tension in the travellers’ development which gives a narrative
form—a beginning, a middle, and an end—to the work. The longer the
travellers remain in Europe, the less amazed they are by what they
see there; their sense of strangeness subsides as they become familiar
with Europe. At the same time, for Usbek, the disorder at home—the
increasing anger, the diminishing love—grows in proportion to the length
of his absence. Montesquieu talks of this counterbalancing as giving an
emotional structure to the work which justifies describing it as ‘a kind of
novel’. However, the literary effects here are not just incidental to the
work’s philosophical content. The connections between Usbek’s waning
domestic power and his increasing dissatisfaction with political absolutism
do not merely facilitate its narrative structure. The unravelling of domestic
order is integrated into Montesquieu’s ‘chain’ of theoretical reflection.
Even in the early stages of his travels, Usbek has begun to doubt his
love for his wives. Although he writes fondly to them, he expresses
his ambivalence in his letters to others. To his friend Nessir he writes
that in his large seraglio he has ‘forestalled love, and let it destroy itself ’; but
that he is nonetheless ‘devoured’ by a jealousy that has come out of this
very indifference (Letter 6; p. 8). As his bewilderment at the novelty of
Europe lessens, he becomes increasingly disoriented about the place he has
left, and increasingly confused about his own emotions.
Montesquieu attempted to clarify the emotional structure of the story of
the seraglio in a set of ‘supplementary’ letters, written some time after the
original publication of Persian Letters. In one of these new letters—written
home by Jaron, a eunuch travelling with Usbek—more is revealed about
the absent master’s state of mind. Even early in his travels, his jealousy and
anxiety prey on him. ‘The farther Usbek travels from the seraglio,
the more does he turn his head in the direction of his sacred wives;
SERAGLIOS , REAL AND IMAGINED 37
he sighs, he weeps; his anguish grows more bitter, his suspicions more
deep’ (Supplementary Letter 22; p. 215).
The chaos in Usbek’s household is reinforced by the confusion and
deception that accompany the exchange of information and commands.
Letters are lost or ignored; orders are not received; action is deferred.
He must act decisively in response to reports of intense emotions about
which he has no reliable knowledge. His own emotions become dark
entanglements of jealousy, anxiety, and misery. Meanwhile, power
struggles—and passionate alliances—are developing among the eunuchs
and the wives. Usbek is increasingly bereft and frantic; his letters are crazed
and tyrannical. ‘May this letter fall upon you like a thunderbolt that strikes
amid lightning and tempestuous rain!’, he thunders to his wives—in
sympathy with the elements his images evoke (Letter 146; p. 209).
The unfolding story of Usbek’s domestic problems thus has also
an epistemological dimension. Travel enhances Usbek’s capacity for
informed judgement; but this comes at a high cost. The subversion of
his domestic authority is exacerbated by the epistemological vulnerabilities
that accompany his travels. The hazards of testimony—some of which are
later highlighted by Hume in his discussion of miracles in the Inquiry into
Human Understanding—are enacted in a succession of unreliable reports
and miscommunications. Usbek’s growing uncertainties open up a space
within which it is possible for thought to happen—a space for constructive
wavering; a space of not knowing, in which intellectual habits and beliefs
might shift. Yet none of this uncertainty is revealed to those in his power;
to them he is determined to appear free of doubt and hesitation.
To a modern reader, Usbek’s letters to his wives as the seraglio disinte-
grates can read like feminist parodies of intractable male power. The
reader, however, is made well aware in the final stages of the work that
Usbek no longer really believes in his own authority. His ranting letters to
his wives and their eunuch carers are both comical and poignant. His
illogical concoctions of presumptions, counterfactuals, and inconsistencies,
border on the farcical. For example, he berates one of his wives for being
found alone with a eunuch, contrary to house rules. Against her protest-
ations that nothing of significance happened between them—that the
eunuch lowered his eyes in ‘holy respect’—Usbek insists, with more
vehemence than coherence, that she nonetheless acted against her duty:
‘And if you did this gratuitously, without satisfying your dissolute desires,
what would you have done in order to satisfy them?’ (Letter 19; p. 28).
38 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS
She should be grateful, he roars, for the holy customs of her country—
customs we know have already loosened their hold on Usbek himself. It
is, he insists, the constraints on her life that have saved her from greater
transgressions.
At the core of the tragedy are the letters exchanged between Usbek and
his favourite, most trusted wife, Roxane. Usbek’s letters to her display a
self-satisfied confidence—a readiness to occupy the high moral ground,
which seems at odds with the doubts about Persian customs in general
which he expresses to his male correspondents. He assures Roxane that she
is fortunate to be living in ‘the sweet land of Persia’ rather than in France—
a ‘poisonous place where modesty and virtue are unknown’ (Letter 24;
p. 33). What Usbek presents as the security of his wife’s imposed virtue
may well strike us as a projection of his own insecurity. Roxane’s supposed
security apparently consists in her being obliged to love Usbek—in never
being able to lose what it is her duty to feel for him. The perversities in
Usbek’s relations with his wives are summed up by another wife, Fatme.
‘You men are so cruel!’, she complains. ‘You are delighted for us to feel
desires we cannot satisfy: you treat us as if we were insensible, yet you
would be angry were that actually the case’ (Letter 7; p. 10).
As the letters continue it emerges that all is not as it seems—either with
the devotion of the wives or with the loyalty of the eunuchs. It becomes
clear to the reader—before it has become clear to Usbek—that his wives
are deceiving him and that the eunuchs are manipulating his passions and
subverting his power. The eunuchs are not only unreliable in their exercise
of authority; they are also unreliable narrators. The wretched outcomes are
revealed bit by bit in letters whose sequence is structured in such a way that
we know the full horrors before Usbek himself gets the news.
The story of Usbek’s enlightenment about the politics of power
develops in counterpoint to the story of the unravelling of his own
power at home and of his efforts to reassert his tyrannical authority
there. However, there is an additional subtlety in Montesquieu’s use of
multiple narratives on themes of power and sexual difference. He adds a
third narrative—a fiction within a fiction—which complements the tragic
story of disarray in Usbek’s seraglio. Like most of the novel’s stories within
a story, it is told by the imaginative Rica.
Speaking in his own voice, Rica—charmed by the relative freedom of
female lives in Europe—has already made his own comparisons between
Persian and European ways of organizing relations between the sexes.
SERAGLIOS , REAL AND IMAGINED 39
they are now to be seen mingling freely with the male guests. He realizes
that the customs of this new country ‘were not made for citizens like
himself ’, and that his sojourn there can only be temporary. Meanwhile, he
does not refuse himself any expense, disbursing with great liberality the
fortune of the jealous Ibrahim before the latter can manage to return.
It is all a delightful fantasy, which is at the same time an exercise of
political imagination—echoing in some ways Plato’s talk in The Republic of
the return of the philosophers to the cave after their vision of the Forms—a
metaphor which is also embedded in a story of an ideal society. Rica’s story
of the happiness that accompanies the cultivation of freedom and equality
is an exuberant political fiction—an expression of hope, of a kind which
eludes the theorizing of the more ruminative and melancholic Usbek.
Rica’s fantasy of the female paradise acts as an emotional counter-
balance to the bleak denouement of the narrative of Usbek’s disintegrating
seraglio. Roxane’s tragic death at her own hand has poignant reverber-
ations with Rica’s story of Anais’s escape from the tyrannous Ibrahim into
her version of paradise. Persian Letters closes with a final, passionate, and
moving letter in which Roxane narrates her own dying from swallowing
poison. Roxane has the last word. In her last letter to Usbek, she cries:
Yes, I have deceived you; I have bribed your eunuchs, I have played upon your
jealousy, and I have managed to make of your dreadful seraglio an abode of delights
and pleasures . . . . How could you suppose me so credulous as to believe that the
sole purpose for my existence was to adore your caprices? That while you refused
yourself nothing, you had the right to frustrate every desire of mine? No: I may
have lived in servitude, but I have always been free: I have rewritten your laws to
conform to those of nature, and my spirit has always remained independent. You
should still be thanking me for the sacrifice I made you, in my degrading pretence
of being your faithful wife, and in cravenly keeping secret in my heart what
I should have proclaimed before the whole world; in short, that I profaned virtue,
in allowing my submission to your caprices to be described by that word. (Letter
150; p. 213)
We are left to hope that in asserting her freedom she finds her paradise.
4
Edwin Curley, ‘From Locke’s Letter to Montesquieu’s Lettres’, Midwest Studies in Philoso-
phy, vol. 26, no. 1, 2002, pp. 280–306.
TRUTH , INTERPRETATION , AND TOLERANCE 43
What’s in a name?
Casanova—himself an ardent name-changer—suggested that Voltaire
would never have attained immortality under his original name, ‘Arouet’.
It labelled him, in sound though not by meaning, ‘the one to be beaten’—
a whipping-boy. Casanova pointed out that in this stupidest of all possible
worlds—a description which was of course itself a tribute to Voltaire’s
Candide—to write under that name would have been asking for trouble:
the door to the temple would have been slammed shut in his face.1
The younger Arouet changed his name after a short period of incarcer-
ation in the Bastille for testing too audaciously the limits of the French
state’s toleration of satire. Although it seems not to have been a particularly
austere imprisonment, he later regarded this misfortune as helping to
develop both his courage and his sense of injustice. His imprisonment
marked the beginning of Voltaire’s writing of works for the theatre.
Perhaps his readiness to change his unfortunate name with an eye to his
literary aspirations may have marked also the beginnings of a lifelong
writing strategy—the use of his extraordinary capacity to speak in many
voices.
At its most basic level, the art of writing in multiple voices was for
Voltaire, as for many of his time, a tactic for staying out of trouble. The
stratagem was so common that it was not even necessary for the ‘deception’
to succeed. Often all that was required was a token denial of authorship.
1
Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1966), vol. II, Ch. 10, pp. 269–70.
46 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES
2
Quotations are from Theodore Besterman, ed. and trans., Voltaire: Philosophical Dictionary
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). Page references to this edition are given in
parentheses.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY 47
3
See Besterman’s footnotes identifying fictitious attributions at the end of specific entries
in his edition of the Philosophical Dictionary.
4
Theodore Besterman, Voltaire (Oxford: Blackwell, 3rd edn., 1976), p. 487.
48 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES
his central concern: ‘It would thus appear that Bayle should rather have
inquired which is the more dangerous, fanaticism or atheism.’ By this stage
in the argument it is clear that it is not the presence or absence of religious
belief that matters for Voltaire; what matters is the way in which a belief is
held. With the issue cast in these terms, there can no longer be any contest:
fanaticism is surely a thousand times worse than atheism; for atheism does
not inspire bloody passions or motivate crimes. Voltaire observes that,
whereas fanatics perpetrated the Bartholomew’s Day massacres, Hobbes,
who was regarded as an atheist, lived a calm and innocent life. Nor was it
the atheist Spinoza who tore to pieces the de Witt brothers. The worst that
can be said of atheists in his own times is that they are ‘bold and misguided
scholars who reason badly’ and thus are unable understand such ‘difficul-
ties’ as creation, or the origin of evil (p. 56).
Voltaire’s readers may well be losing their grip on where he stands on
the perils of atheism. Despite his previous insistence that it was better for
society that fear should be directed towards false gods than that no gods be
feared at all, he now concludes that atheists are no real threat to the well-
being of society. He assigns them to the ranks—which they share with
many non-atheists—of foolish but harmless ‘argufiers’. If this were a
conventional argument about theological positions, his readers might
well have grounds for complaint about what seems a bewildering chain
of thought. However, in these final sections of the entry there are shifts,
not only in attitude towards the rival merits of atheism and idolatry, but in
the understanding of what counts as either position. It is not, as earlier, the
Greeks who are here supposed to be seen as having worshipped false gods.
It is rather the later Christians; for the Christians have so totally miscon-
strued God as to persecute in his name. It is the Christians, then, who are
rightly seen as the ‘idolators’—the believers in a false God.
Voltaire goes on to move cunningly between past and present, con-
tinuing to shift the content of ‘idolator’ and ‘atheist’. There have indeed
been dangerous atheists, he observes, citing again—though apparently to
different purpose—the senators of ancient Rome who believed neither in
providence nor in the future life. They were ‘an assembly of philosophers,
voluptuaries and ambitious men, all very dangerous, and who destroyed
the republic’ (p. 57). But should we believe that it was their atheism that
made them dangerous? By way of answer, Voltaire offers this barbed
reflection on the workings of moral motivation in his own times:
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY 51
I should want no dealings with an atheist prince who thought it useful to have me
pounded in a mortar: I am quite sure that I would be pounded. If I were a
sovereign I should want no dealings with atheist courtiers whose interest it was
to have me poisoned: I should have to take antidotes at random every day. It is thus
absolutely necessary for princes and peoples to have deeply engraved in their minds
the notion of a supreme being, creator, ruler, remunerator and avenger. (p. 57)
The reader has come a long way to reach the reassuring sanity of that
final voice. However, what has happened is not that the original version of
atheism has been found to be morally superior to ‘idolatry’ as it is usually
understood; rather, zealous belief has been shown to be a form of idolatry.
The fanatic’s belief has been cast as a belief in a false God, while atheism is
presented as the repudiation of that monstrous God. In this form, atheism
converges disconcertingly with the content which Voltaire goes on—in
one of the final entries in the Philosophical Dictionary—to give to the beliefs
of the Theist. Here it emerges that Voltaire’s theist does not claim to know
how God acts; nor does he embrace any of the sects, which all contradict
one another. Theism, in this version, consists neither in the ‘opinions of an
unintelligible metaphysic’ nor in ‘a vain apparatus’, but solely in ‘worship
and justice’.
Should we take this version of theism as at last Voltaire’s own authentic
voice? His presentation of it does have the ring of conviction. However,
the full subtlety of his approach to religious belief in this entry emerges if
we see it in the context of the remarkable ‘Prayer to God’, with which he
concludes his Treatise on Tolerance, published in 1763. This ‘prayer’ reson-
ates both with apparent personal conviction and—at first sight—with the
cadences of conventional Christianity: ‘It is not now to mankind that
I address myself, but to thee, God of all beings, of all worlds, and of all
ages, if it be permitted to feeble creatures lost in the immensity of space and
imperceptible to the rest of the universe to presume to ask Thee aught,
Thou who hast given all and whose secrets are as immutable as they are
eternal.’5
It sounds like familiar piety. Yet there is already, in Voltaire’s stress on
human insignificance, an intimation of the scathing critique of assumed
knowing which he offers in the Philosophical Dictionary. Readers may
initially be lulled into thinking they know where they are in this ‘prayer’.
However, they may be stopped in their tracks by Voltaire’s elaboration of
the theme of human insignificance. The praying voice suggests that, given
that we are such trifling atoms in the universe, the differences between our
customs are surely of no consequence or interest to the deity. Yet these
very trifles are also presented as the substance of the established religions.
5
Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance and Other Writings, trans. Brian Masters (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 92.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY 53
6
Some of these pieces, translated and edited by Simon Harvey, are included in Voltaire,
Treatise on Tolerance and Other Writings.
54 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES
against the Sirven family, who were also accused in relation to the death of
their daughter and sister; and in relation to the fate of the young chevalier,
La Barre, who was brought before the courts after supposedly mocking a
religious procession. Both Jean Calas, the father of the murdered young
man, and La Barre, were executed after first enduring horrific torture.
Voltaire’s outrage at these events was expressed also in the entry on
Torture which he added in the 1769 edition of the Philosophical Dictionary.7
It incorporates a sardonic description of the La Barre case, which echoes his
preoccupation in the earlier entries with attitudes to knowing and not
knowing. His anger at the cruel treatment of La Barre is expressed in
scathing irony about the etymological connections between torture and
knowledge. Playing on the derivations which construe torture in terms of
‘the putting of the question’, he comments that it is a strange way to
question someone. ‘Yet it was not invented by the merely curious.’
Voltaire’s brief account of the La Barre case is cleverly constructed to
juxtapose the triviality of the alleged offences with positive connotations
of intellectual curiosity, which are carried by talk of ‘the question’:
When the chevalier de la Barre, grandson of a lieutenant-general, a very intelligent
and promising young man, but with all the thoughtlessness of wild youth, was
convicted of singing impious songs and even of passing a procession of Capuchins
without taking his hat off, the judges of Abbeville, people comparable to Roman
senators, ordered not only that his tongue be torn out, his hand cut off, and his
body burned on a slow fire, but they also put him to the torture, to discover exactly
how many songs he had sung, and how many processions he had watched with his
hat on.
7
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, pp. 394–6.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY 55
something of the divine about it: torture imitates the divine. ‘Providence
sometimes tortures us by means of the stone, gravel, gout, scurvy, leprosy,
pox great and small, griping of the bowels, nervous convulsions, and other
executants of the vengeance of providence.’
There are in that macabre list echoes of Voltaire’s earlier savage satire on
the belief in divine providence—construed as the claim that we live in the
best of all possible worlds—in his famous novella, Candide. Now, in the
entry on torture in the Philosophical Dictionary, he associates providence
with vengeance, divine power with cruelty. He means to startle his readers
into recognition of torture as a grotesque practice; but conventional ideas
of providence are here called into question along with the practice of
torture.
All this allows Voltaire to present the practice of torture in his own times
as a gross abuse of power. ‘Woe to a nation which, long civilized, is still led
by atrocious ancient practices!’ The Torture entry also echoes the derision
he directed in earlier entries at scholarly pedantry—his sardonic critiques
of the ‘argufiers’, of the traders in ‘quiddities’. Defective attitudes to
knowing—in particular, obsessive concern with detail, removed from
any apparent concern with human well-being—are here presented as
enmeshed with the abuse of power. As in theTheist entry in the Philosoph-
ical Dictionary, the unsettling incongruities of earlier voices give way to
reassuring rational tones. Yet the target of that clear, critical voice is again,
not religious belief as such, but the zeal with which it is held. Nor does
Voltaire have to add an extra voice of his own to make his intention clear,
any more than he needed to add himself as an extra part to his plays. His
distinctive voice is in the staging.
Voltaire’s writing is a model of the integration of emotion and
reasonableness, of deep anger with sound judgement. The vigour of
the writing has a momentum which sweeps us up and takes on a wild
ride with him wherever the logic leads. But the logic here has as much to
do with the requirements of decency in emotional response as with the
demands of rational argumentation. To read Voltaire properly, we have
to engage with him—not as ‘argufiers’, but as complete human beings.
In the end it is the capacity for shared emotion and shared judgement—
in the face of the depiction of horrors and incongruities—that allows us
to recognize, in the midst of all its multiplicity, the authentic and rare
voice of Voltaire.
56 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES
8
Besterman, Voltaire, p. 232.
TOLERANCE AND RELIGION 57
9
The disputed authenticity of the remark—quoted by, among others, Condorcet—is
mentioned by Ian Davidson, in his Voltaire: A Life (New York: Pegasus Books, 2010), p. 460.
10
See Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 606.
58 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES
a matter for the literary critic as for the historian of ideas.11 With regard to
Voltaire’s inner religious convictions, we may well wonder whether there
is any clear truth of the matter lurking beneath the pragmatic posturing
and dazzling theatricality of his life, of which his multiple voices were a
part. The fixity of belief here seems to disappear into the fluidity of his
roles and masks. This confronts us with one of the paradoxes played out
more generally in texts of the Enlightenment—the readiness with which
commitment to truth can be held in tension with what seems an attraction
to the instabilities of uncertainty.
In Voltaire’s case, the repudiation of intolerance seems to be closely tied
to the celebration of doubt, which reverberates in his involvement with
political causes associated with tolerance. In 1766, within a few years of the
publication of the Philosophical Dictionary and the Treatise on Tolerance—at
the period in which he was being drawn into fighting particular causes
associated with intolerance and oppression—he published Le Philosophe
Ignorant. This work was a collection of fragments in various genres—much
of it oriented towards an ideal of acknowledged and accepted ‘not-know-
ing’, associated explicitly with tolerance. His discussion of knowledge
there echoes his mockery in the Philosophical Dictionary of the ‘conceited
upstarts’ with their cry: ‘What Do I Not Know?’
Voltaire seems content to leave unresolved the epistemological ambi-
guities in his celebration of doubt. His emphasis is on inquiry—on the
movement of thought in the search for truth, rather than the stasis of
belief. Yet his repudiation of certainty as an ideal does not commit him
to rejecting objectivity. In a letter of 3 March 1766, he talks of his
intention—not carried out—to include a frontispiece in the published
version of Le Philosophe Ignorant: ‘The thing is to represent three blind
men who grope after a fleeing donkey. This is the symbol of all philoso-
phers who run after the truth. I consider myself one of the blindest, and
I have always run after my donkey. So it is my portrait for which I am
asking you.’12 It is hardly a resounding endorsement of the philosopher’s
need to pursue truth, leaving us perhaps to wonder whether for Voltaire
the philosopher’s folly resides, not so much in failing to acknowledge his
11
David Beeson and Nicholas Cronk, ‘Voltaire: philosopher or philosophe?’ in Nicholas
Cronk, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), pp. 47–64.
12
Quoted in Besterman, Voltaire, p. 498. The reference is to Best.D.13194.
TOLERANCE AND RELIGION 59
13
As quoted by Nicholas Cronk, in the Introduction to his Cambridge Companion to
Voltaire, p. 6. Cronk discusses the letter in an essay, ‘Une Lettre de Voltaire à David Hume
(D11499R)’, Revue Voltaire, vol. 8, 2008, pp. 369–75.
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3
Hume’s Sceptic
1
David Hume, Selected Essays, ed. S. Copley and A. Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), p. 353, footnote 77. Subsequent quotations are accompanied in parentheses by
page references to this edition. This volume includes essays written at different periods. The
four essays on ancient sects of philosophy belong to the early period, represented by the first
editions of Essays, Moral and Political (1741–2).
62 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC
is with the character of the Sceptic that Hume identifies most strongly.
Philosophically, this is the most detailed of the sketches. Catherine Wilson
has suggested that the essay on ‘the Epicurean’—in comparison with the
more substantial piece on the Stoic—‘must be judged a virtually worthless
piece of literary trivia’.2 However that may be, Hume’s presentation of his
preferred persona in the character of the Sceptic is not mere literary
trivia. Here he integrates—in a form intended to be accessible to
eighteenth-century readers—aspects of all four ancient character ideals,
and also elaborates what he sees as the practical upshot of his own version
of scepticism.
It quickly emerges that this Sceptic’s preference about the good life is
envisaged as not just one among others: the key to living the life of Hume’s
Sceptic is to behave in such a way that no one way of living is to
be regarded as superior to the others. In this essay he is exploring how
we should conduct ourselves in relation to the business of believing; and
this is a matter of no small import in trying to live well.
Already there is an appearance of paradox here. Should a committed
sceptic engage at all in the business of believing? Must he not resolutely
refrain from believing anything at all? In the context of Hume’s essay this is
not merely an epistemological dilemma. It bears also on the choices
involved in how to live. Scepticism is supposed to yield a preferred way
of living. Yet it seems there can be no coherent statement of its superiority;
for that would be to breach the principle that is here presented as the core
of scepticism: that there can be no rational basis for preferring one way of
life over another. What Hume offers is a model of the good life, presented
with a clear eye to the diversity of good lives. From the perspective of the
Sceptic, there can be no categorical preference; different kinds of life can
be lived agreeably, and mixing them judiciously can make each all the
more agreeable.
It is clear from the start that Hume’s evaluation of the life of the Sceptic
goes beyond concern with avoiding the perils of falsehood: this scepticism is
the key not only to escaping error but to living well. In this respect, Hume’s
version of the Sceptic is not new. It echoes some important themes in
ancient discussions of scepticism. He is writing against the background of
well-worn anomalies arising from attempts to take sceptical doubt seriously.
2
Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2008), p. 37.
HUME AND ANCIENT SCEPTICISM 63
Can the sceptic really live his scepticism without perversely undermining his
own resolve to call everything into question? Is a strong commitment to
scepticism in breach of the sceptic’s own resistance to believing confidently
in anything?
Such issues have in the history of scepticism often been posed as
epistemological puzzles rather than ethical predicaments. Hume’s concern
is explicitly with the status of scepticism in relation to the good life—with
what manner of life is the best. However, in some ways his discussion of
scepticism here is a return to the past—not least in his integration
of elements from the ‘Platonist’, the ‘Epicurean’, and the ‘Stoic’ into his
‘Sceptic’. Ancient philosophers of all four types were concerned with how
to live, no less than with how to know. In insisting that the business of
believing is an important aspect of how best to live, Hume was echoing
some important aspects of those ancient debates.
3
Myles Burnyeat, ed., The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983), Introduction, pp. 1–2.
4
Myles Burnyeat, ‘Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?’, in The Skeptical Tradition,
pp. 117–48.
64 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC
5
David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles W. Hendel
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Library of Liberal Arts, 1955), Section XII, Part 2, p. 168.
Page numbers for other quotations from this work will be included in parentheses.
HUME AND ANCIENT SCEPTICISM 65
adapt his writing style to the challenges of communicating with the public.
His appeal to imagination is embedded in the troubled history of the
development of his writing craft, no less than in the intellectual content
of his works.
The work we now know as Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding was
first published, under the name Philosophical Essays Concerning Human
Understanding, in 1748. It was an attempted reworking—in more accessible
form—of material from the first book of his Treatise of Human Nature,
published in 1739. The pieces published in the first edition of Essays, Moral
and Political in 1741 were a foray into lighter essay writing, in the hope of
better communicating with the public after what he saw as the failure
of the first two Books of his Treatise to do so. He says in his short
autobiographical piece My Own Life that the work ‘fell dead-born from
the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur
among the zealots’.6 However, he continued also to rework his weightier
philosophical ideas in essay form. The Philosophical Essays Concerning
Human Understanding were published in 1748, the same year as an enlarged
edition of Essays, Moral and Political. In 1758 Hume republished those
‘philosophical’ essays under the title Inquiry into Human Understanding,
including additional sections on Miracles—which he had been persuaded
to leave out of the Treatise of Human Nature—and on Providence.
It is helpful to keep this publishing history in mind in reading Hume’s
essay on the Sceptic. Although the piece belongs to Hume’s period of
experimentation in writing accessibly and engagingly for the general
public, the themes of the essay link it with what he himself described—
in a letter to Henry Home of 13 June 1742—as the more ‘durable’,
‘harder’, and ‘more stubborn’ aspects of his philosophy. There are clear
continuities in content with his discussions of scepticism in theTreatise and
the Inquiry into Human Understanding. However, the essay is more directly
focused on the intellectual character of the Sceptic, drawing out more
explicitly—and more playfully—the upshot of scepticism in ordinary
life. It explores, especially, the significance of the imagination—its
strengths and its hazards—in the business of belief. The proper use of the
imagination becomes central in Hume’s ideal of intellectual character. Out
6
‘My Own Life’ (1776), in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp
Smith (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Library of Liberal Arts, 1947), p. 234.
66 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC
Humean detachment
‘The Sceptic’ opens with a criticism of how philosophers tend to go about
organizing their beliefs. Hume complains of their tendency to extend
‘principles’ beyond reasonable limits of application. He argues neatly
that the fault in question is both an unreasonable restriction and an
unreasonable expansion. On the one hand, philosophers ‘confine too
much their principles’, taking no account of nature’s ‘vast variety’. Yet
this undue restriction on the number of acceptable principles demands an
equally inappropriate expansion of those that are adopted: the philosopher
extends one and the same principle over the whole of creation, reducing
every phenomenon to it, though only by ‘the most violent and absurd
reasoning’. ‘Our own mind being narrow and contracted, we cannot
extend our conception to the variety and extent of nature, but imagine
that she is as much bounded in her operations as we are in our speculation’
(p. 95). The fault, on Hume’s analysis, lies in a lack of mental expansiveness
of mind—an inappropriate limiting of imagination. The image is of a
cramping of the mind—a setting of restrictive boundaries on what should
be a free-ranging speculative power.
It is interesting to compare Hume’s initially surprising juxtapositions
here of restriction and expansion, contraction and extension, to his later
discussion of a similar theme in Part III of Section XII of An Inquiry
Concerning Human Understanding. There he talks of a ‘mitigated’ scepticism
which may be ‘both durable and useful’—a gentler scepticism which
might emerge either when the excesses of Pyrrhonian scepticism
are ‘corrected by common sense and reflection’, or when inquiry is
limited to those subjects best adapted to the narrow capacity of human
understanding (Inquiry, pp. 169–70).
Hume’s talk there of kinds of scepticism which might be construed as
‘the natural result of the Pyrrhonian doubts and scruples’ echoes Sextus’
talk of Pyrrhonian doubt as flowing naturally into epoche and hence to
the detachment which yields tranquillity. The Inquiry discussion of this
‘mitigated’ scepticism emphasizes the schooling of the imagination. ‘The
imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote
HUMEAN DETACHMENT 67
and extraordinary, and running, without control, into the most distant
parts of space and time in order to avoid the objects which custom
has rendered too familiar to it.’ Correct judgement requires that the
philosophical mind should instead confine itself to ‘common life’ and to
‘such subjects as fall under daily practice and experience’. To achieve this
salutary restriction of subject matter, Hume observes, nothing can be
more serviceable than ‘to be once thoroughly convinced of the force of
Pyrrhonian doubt and of the impossibility that anything but the strong
power of natural instinct could free us from it’ (Inquiry, p. 170).
In his earlier discussion in the essay on ‘The Sceptic’, Hume’s emphasis
is on the ‘enfeebling’ of imagination, rather than on its unbridled
leaps away from the familiar to the more remote. Yet here too there are
echoes of the Pyrrhonian idea of the transformative effects of exposure to
doubt—of acknowledged not-knowing as the key to the contented life.
The context of Hume’s discussion in the essay is more explicitly the
concern with the good life—rather than a desire to set proper limits to
philosophical inquiry. In this context the pretensions of ‘the philosophers’
become a target of ridicule. Their ‘infirmity’—the enfeebling of their
imagining—is, Hume says, at its most suspect in ‘their reasonings concerning
human life, and the methods of obtaining happiness’ (p. 95).
The ‘infirmity’ which Hume attributes to the philosophers arises from a
weakness in their imagination; but this lack is to be explained by reference
to the operations of the passions. The interconnections between passions
and imagination are central to Hume’s whole philosophy; but they
are here explicitly brought to bear on what is lacking in the common
intellectual character displayed by the philosopher. In their reasonings
concerning human life and happiness, he complains, philosophers are led
astray ‘not only by the narrowness of their understandings, but by that also
of their passions’ (p. 95). It is a striking observation: the philosophers’
failure in understanding is attributed not to an excess of passion but, on the
contrary, to the narrow range of their passions.The flaw lies not in the
presence of emotion but in a lack of emotional intelligence.
On Hume’s account, the alleged narrowness of the philosopher’s
mentality reflects a self-centredness—a lack of genuine expansiveness
towards the world. Almost every one, he observes, is governed through-
out the course of his life by a ‘predominant inclination’, which makes it
difficult for him to apprehend that things to which he is indifferent can
ever give enjoyment to others. ‘His own pursuits are always, in his
68 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC
account, the most engaging, the objects of his passion the most valuable,
and the road which he pursues the only one that leads to happiness’ (p. 95).
This takes us to the heart of the Sceptic’s resistance to philosophical
theories of the good life. Where ‘the philosopher’ sees universal truths
of human nature—supposedly grounding judgements about how we
should all live—the Sceptic sees a projection from the philosopher’s
own predominant inclinations and prejudices. What is more, according
to the Sceptic, even within the limits of a single life our changing
inclinations make it impossible to reach general conclusions about
how we ourselves should live. If we consult experience we will find
that each kind of life is ‘agreeable in its turn’; and that ‘the variety of
their judicious mixture chiefly contributes to the rendering all of them
agreeable’ (p. 96).
So far, all this may sound like a rejection of all possibility of objectivity
in judging how best to live. However, Hume goes on to insist that it in no
way suggests that we are left at the mercy of our changing inclinations.
Nor are we forced to conclude that there is no basis for preferring one
man’s conduct over another’s. What is taken from us, rather, is confidence
that those bases for preference are grounded in principles of reason—and
hence the idea that the philosopher, as a man of reason, can lay claim to
any privileged authority in judging how to live.
The account Hume goes on to offer of the supposed wisdom of the
philosopher in evaluating ways of living is subtle and ironic. People come
to philosophers, he observes, in the hope of something more than ‘maxims
of common prudence and discretion’. They want from them something
more than advice about how best to achieve goals they already have; they
expect advice about ‘how we shall choose our ends, more than the means
for attaining these ends: we want to know what desire we shall gratify,
what passion we shall comply with, what appetite we shall indulge’ (p. 97).
In mock modesty, he disavows any pretensions on his own part to this
privileged position of adjudicator of the good life:
I am sorry, then, I have pretended to be a philosopher; for I find your questions
very perplexing, and am in danger, if my answer be too rigid and severe, of passing
for a pedant and scholastic; if it be too easy and free, of being taken for a preacher of
vice and immorality. However, to satisfy you, I shall deliver my opinion upon the
matter, and shall only desire you to esteem it of as little consequence as I do myself.
By that means you will neither think it worthy of your ridicule nor your anger.
(p. 97)
HUMEAN DETACHMENT 69
7
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), Book II, Part III, Section X, pp. 448–54.
HUMEAN DETACHMENT 71
human lives; and a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts can
have an indirect refining and humanizing effect on human tempers. What
remains under challenge, though, is the supposed universality of
the philosopher’s claim to the good life. ‘I must’, he says, ‘entertain doubts
concerning all those exhortations and consolations, which are in such
vogue among speculative reasoners’ (p. 106). The philosopher cannot
present his own way of life as a model for how all should live.
For Hume’s Sceptic, then, there are no rational grounds that could
directly justify a preference for one way of living over another. He
concludes provocatively that ‘the catching of flies, like Domitian, if it
give more pleasure, is preferable to the hunting of wild beasts, like William
Rufus, or conquering of kingdoms like Alexander’ (p. 106). Nor is there
any significant role, in the challenge of exciting or moderating any passion,
for the ‘artificial arguments of a Seneca or an Epictetus’. The reflections of
philosophy are too subtle and distant from common life to serve to
eradicate any affection. ‘The air is too fine to breathe in, where it is
above the winds and clouds of the atmosphere’ (p. 107).
We are left with an intriguing conjunction of attitudes. Hume rejects
the received content of Stoicism, construed as a cultivated passivity; yet
he replaces it with a new version of acceptance, drawn from his own
reflections on the character of the Sceptic. The ancient Stoics cultivated
an acceptance of what is supposedly natural; they also aimed to rid
themselves of their passions. Hume argues that the effort to extinguish
our vicious passions could succeed only by diminishing also our virtuous
passions, rendering our minds ‘totally indifferent and inactive’. Likewise,
he argues, the Stoic in attempting to avoid allowing his particular interests
to ‘disturb the order of the universe’, will be forced to acquiesce also in
vices that are equally part of the same order. Hume clearly relishes his
suggestion that the Stoic’s advice—that we should constantly reflect
on death and the many ills that afflict human life—will succeed only
in ‘poisoning all our pleasures, and rendering us perpetually miserable’
(p. 108).
Again, it is important to remember that in the context of these essays
Hume’s light-hearted rebuttals of Stoic injunctions are not meant to be
conclusive refutations of ancient philosophical doctrines. Yet his sketch of
the intellectual character of the modern Sceptic does articulate some
affinities and continuities with the old ideals. Hume’s Sceptic has a genial
attitude towards the vicissitudes of human life, which contrasts favourably
74 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC
with the austerities commonly associated with the Stoic. Yet this Sceptic
does nonetheless capture something of the ideals of detachment and
acceptance which connected ancient Stoicism and Pyrrhonian Scepticism.
Hume has fun with his readers at the expense of his imagined Stoic,
who disdains vulnerability to passion. ‘Your sorrow is fruitless, and will not
change the course of destiny’, says the imagined stoical voice of his ‘philoso-
pher’. ‘Very true; and for that reason I am sorry’, responds the sceptical voice.
In the same spirit, he mocks Cicero’s ‘curious’ consolation for deafness—that
it is not so bad to be deaf to one language more, when there are so many
others he does not understand. Hume responds that he prefers Antipater’s
alleged riposte to some women who were offering condolences on his
blindness: ‘What! Do you think there are no pleasures in the dark?’
Increasingly, as the essay unfolds, the figure of the philosopher which
Hume is intent on lampooning takes on the lineaments of the Stoic. Yet
Hume’s engaging critique nonetheless yields his own distinctive version of
the ancient Stoic ideal of acceptance—now expressed in the voice
of common sense. In his figure of the Sceptic, he has constructed an
intellectual character capable of finding its own acceptance of fortune.
This Sceptic shows resilience in the face of adversity, a sustained calm
tranquillity, and—above all—a capacity for enjoyment. In the end Hume
offers also a qualified defence of the importance of philosophy—
now presented, though not without some irony, as a pleasurable, social
intellectual activity.
In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded
more as a dull pastime than a serious occupation; and is more influenced by
particular humour, than by general principles. Shall we engage ourselves in it
with passion and anxiety? It is not worthy of so much concern. Shall we be
indifferent about what happens? We lose all the pleasure of the game by our
phlegm and carelessness. (p. 112)
to fix with accuracy its just idea, would be overvaluing it, were it not
that, to some tempers, this occupation is one of the most amusing in which
life could possibly be employed’ (p. 113).
There is a final ironic twist here. Hume rejected the preference for an
intellectual life when it was presented as grounded in reason: there can be
no rational grounds for such a preference. Yet in the end he endorses that
preference, though in a very different frame. What is in the end celebrated
is the genial, sociable character of his Sceptic. This Sceptic is a lover of
the activity of mind involved in intellectual inquiry. However, he is also an
inquirer who makes no assumptions about the worth, for humanity in
general, of his way of life; he claims no right to prescribe the best kind of
life for others.
Hume emphasizes the diversity of the fabric of the human mind, and its
variability even within the limits of a single life. Yet those variable human
propensities can ground philosophical delights no less than the pleasures of
hunting, from which he draws his satirical analogies. Here—as earlier, in
his discussion of the love of truth in the Treatise of Human Nature—Hume
rejects the pomposity of received ideas of the philosophical life in favour of
a ‘careless’ pursuit of intellectual inquiry. In the persona of the Sceptic,
nonetheless, he clearly celebrates the humanizing and ennobling force of
the shared life of the mind.
There may appear to be something left unresolved here. If there can be
no rational preference for one way of life over others, can there really be
an objective basis for choices as to how best to live? If our preferences in
this matter have no basis in reason, are they after all baseless? What
prevents the Sceptic’s preference for a life spent in the ‘careless’ pursuit
of truth from being a matter of mere whim? How, in this context, are
objective judgements to be distinguished from subjective prejudices?
8
David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in Selected Essays. Page references to this edition
are included in parentheses.
76 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC
(p. 141). Likewise, says Hume, we should allow that the delicacy of
imagination which makes some critics of works of art better than others
is in principle explicable, although the ‘general rules or avowed patterns
of composition’ underlying the superiority may be as elusive as the
submerged iron and leather in the wine (p. 142).
Although Hume’s primary concern in this essay is with how to under-
stand judgements of taste, he presents that issue as inseparable from the
consideration of the intellectual character of the critic. To judge well
the quality of a performance or a work demands that the critic free himself
from prejudice. He must consider himself as ‘a man in general’, forgetting
if possible his ‘individual being’ and ‘peculiar circumstances’. ‘A person
influenced by prejudice complies not with this condition, but obstinately
maintains his natural position, without placing himself in that point
of view which the performance supposes.’ By failing to ‘enlarge his
comprehension’ in response to a work ‘executed for the public’, the
prejudiced critic shows that his taste is not in accordance with ‘the true
standard’ (p. 146). He has failed to ‘forget himself ’—failed to set aside his
special interests as ‘a friend or enemy, a rival or commentator’ (p. 146).
Hume’s good critic, it seems, must have a ‘public’ intellectual character,
attuned to the ‘public’ nature of the works he is called upon to evaluate.
Hume’s concern, in Of the Standard of Taste with what makes for good
critical judgement of artistic performance helps give content to his earlier
claim, in the essay on the Sceptic, that his rejection of reason as the basis of
preference between ways of living in no way amounts to a rejection of the
possibility of objective judgement in the matter. Once they recognize
that judgement can be grounded in experience and the exercise of
imagination, rather than exclusively in reason—and that in some areas of
life this is what good sense demands—his readers may, he hopes, be less
bothered by his Sceptic. Read together, the two essays become an exercise
in the expansion of the mind—the ‘enlargement of comprehension’—by
taking into account other perspectives than one’s own.
The essay Of the Standard of Taste itself becomes an exercise in that
expansion which Hume demands of the intellectual character of the critic.
Critics begin from the peculiarities and specific affinities underlying their
own ‘mental state’. They move from that to the mature endeavour which
Hume describes in more detail later in the essay—the effort to ‘enter into
the sentiments of others, and divest ourselves of those propensities which
are natural to us’ (p. 150).
78 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC
9
David Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, in Selected Essays, p. 1.
10
James Boswell, An Account of My Last Interview with David Hume, Esq., in Hume,
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, p. 78.
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF OBJECTIVITY 79
uneasy at the thought that he would not exist after this life than at the
thought of his non-existence before living. Johnson angrily replied that
Hume was either mad or lying.11
Hume’s tranquillity in the face of death echoed the Epicurean/Lucre-
tian philosophy in its resistance to the imagining of an afterlife. It echoed
Stoicism in its acceptance that—as he put it in another of his essays—‘the
life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an
oyster’.12 It can also perhaps be seen as reflecting an integration of strands
from those ancient ideals into Hume’s own cultivation of a ‘careless’
scepticism, yielding an ultimate satisfaction in having enjoyed ‘the pleasure
of the game’.
The spirit of Hume’s Sceptic resurfaces in his final work—the posthu-
mously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion—where he returns
to his concern with the ways in which beliefs are held, this time with
special reference to religious belief. The dialogical exchanges in that work
call into question the assumption that certainty is to be had about the
ultimate nature and origins of the world, while yet raising possibilities for
living calmly and with pleasure in the absence of such certainties.
In place of old certainties about ways of living and dying, Hume has
offered a different understanding of objectivity—recast in terms of good
sense, grounded in experience. It is a genial and appealing approach. His
readers may nonetheless be left wondering whether something has perhaps
gone missing in this ‘careless’ approach to the business of believing. Unlike
the ancient Pyrrhonian, Hume’s Sceptic rejects not belief as such but
dogmatic ways of holding beliefs. However, in the process of avoiding
zeal, has he forfeited also all that gives intensity and purpose to belief?
Reading The Sceptic now we may well feel some misgivings about this
urbane, gentlemanly mode of truth-seeking. The agreeable intellectual
pursuits of Hume’s Sceptic can sound to a modern ear as class-bound as
the more earthy hunting from which he drew his playful analogies.
We can readily imagine this Sceptic thoroughly at home amid the well-
mannered proprieties of a gentleman’s club—an ambience conducive to
the avoidance of unseemly fervour. Yet might the genial sociability of this
reconstructed version of the philosopher exclude him also from the
11
James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press,
1970), pp. 426–7.
12
‘On Suicide’, in Selected Essays, p. 319.
80 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC
1
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Selected
Edition, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Part I, Ch. II,
p. 22. References and page numbers for other quotations from this edition are included in
parentheses.
82 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
2
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), Part IV, Ch. 1, Sec. 2, p. 209. Subsequent quotations
are accompanied in parentheses by references and page numbers to this edition.
MORALS AND RELIGION 83
his life and character. Reporting the death to their friend, the publisher
William Strahan, he observed:
Thus died our most excellent and never to be forgotten friend; concerning whose
philosophical opinions men will, no doubt, judge variously, every one approving
or condemning them, according as they happen to coincide or disagree with his
own; but concerning whose character and conduct there can scarce be a difference
of opinion. His temper, indeed, seemed to be more happily balanced, if I may be
allowed such an expression, than that perhaps of any other man I have ever
known . . . Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime
and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and
virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.3
3
Adam Smith, Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (Indian-
apolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 220–1. Subsequent quotations from Smith’s correspondence
are accompanied in parentheses by page numbers to this edition.
4
See Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (Yale University Press, 2010),
pp. 244–6.
84 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
power to some extent in their own intellectual context. Yet the persist-
ence of the idea that virtue and happiness depended on religious belief is
evident in the shock and exasperation which Boswell and Johnson ex-
pressed in response to Hume’s equanimity in the face of death. On the
posthumous publication of Hume’s short autobiographical piece ‘My
Own Life’, Boswell wrote to Johnson, on 9 June 1777, of his hope that
Johnson might ‘knock Hume’s and Smith’s heads together, and make vain
and ostentatious infidelity exceedingly ridiculous’. ‘Would it not be worth
your while’, he asks Johnson, ‘to crush such noxious weeds in the moral
garden?’5
At the core of the alarm and aversion evoked by Hume’s apparent
nonchalance about death was the assumption that the prospect of divine
judgement was crucial to the preservation of morality. To reject belief in
an afterlife, in which ultimate reward or punishment might be delivered,
could be seen as threatening the moral order. Such were the religious
ambiguities of the time and place, however, that—in contrast to the drama
surrounding the fate of Voltaire’s remains—the burial of the notorious
Scottish atheist in sacred ground seems not to have attracted public
controversy.
Alarmed though Boswell and Johnson were by the pair, the issue of
whether either of them should be regarded as a deist, an atheist, or a
disaffected Christian, was in general less stridently pursued than was the
issue of Voltaire’s religious status. Yet their religious standing was not
without significance with regard to what posts they could expect to
occupy. At a time when Hume was considering whether he should live
in Paris or in London, Smith wrote wryly to him: ‘The Clamour against
you on account of Deism is stronger, no doubt, at London where you are a
Native and consequently may be a candidate for everything, than at Paris
where as a foreigner, you possibly can be a candidate for nothing.’6
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments echoes the resistance to zealous belief
which Hume expressed in his essay on the Sceptic; and its preoccupation
with the interactions of imagination and emotion has much in common
with Hume’s rejection of the primacy of reason in the life of the mind. In
relation to religion, however, Smith seems more accommodating to public
5
James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press,
1970), p. 810.
6
Adam Smith to David Hume, September 1765, in Correspondence of Adam Smith, p. 108.
SYMPATHY AND IMAGINATION 85
In another example, Smith observes that the sympathy we feel for new-
born children is not confined to imagining their actual feelings; it can
embrace what we expect them to endure in their future—an expectation
which is beyond their own present capacities. We feel on their behalf what
they cannot feel for themselves. In another—even more striking—
example, he calls attention to our capacity to feel sympathy for the dead.
Smith’s analysis here is particularly revealing for the way he thinks of the
joint operations of emotion and imagination. His treatment of the topic is
subtle and wry. Our sympathy for the dead—insofar as it is based on their
being dead—rests, he argues, on an ‘illusion of the imagination’. Unlike
Hume, Smith does not express explicit doubts about the afterlife. He goes
along with the rationality of sympathizing with the dead on the prospect of
divine judgement—on ‘what is of real importance in their situation, that
awful futurity which awaits them’ (Part I, Sec. 1, Ch. 1, p. 16). However,
he points out that there is also an irrational sympathy which we direct
towards the dead for the things that are important, not to them, but rather
for our own present happiness.
Thus, he says, we have a misplaced sympathy for the dead on the
supposedly dreadful calamities they undergo—on their being ‘deprived
of the light of the sun; shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in
the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be
no more thought of in this world’. Moreover, the fact that our sym-
pathy can afford the dead no consolation seems merely to add to their
calamity, serving only to ‘exasperate our sense of their misery’. In thus
projecting onto the dead our own misery, Smith argues, we are de-
luded. This is an erroneous way of ‘putting ourselves in their situation’;
and the common dread of death rests on this ‘illusion of imagination’.
Yet, illusory though the dread is, it is nonetheless ‘one of the most
important principles in human nature’, setting limits to behaviour which
might otherwise be destructive of human societies. Fear of death is ‘the
great restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which, while it afflicts and
mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society’ (Part I, Sec. 1,
Ch. 1, pp. 16–17).
There are echoes here of Epicurus’ famous observations on the irration-
ality of the fear of death. Since death is the absence of sensation, he argued,
it is nothing to us; for when we exist it is not present, and when it is present
we do not exist. In dreading death we needlessly erode the joy of living. As
Lucretius expressed the point, it is here on earth that the life of the foolish
SYMPATHY AND IMAGINATION 87
becomes hell.7 Smith’s metaphor of lodging our living souls in the inani-
mate bodies of the dead echoes Lucretius’ observation that by ‘remaining
present’ to them—identifying ourselves with the abandoned corpse—we
‘infect’ it with our own sensation. However, Smith, unlike Epicurus, does
not rest his argument for the irrationality of sympathizing with the dead on
rejecting immortality. Accordingly, he does not push as far as Epicurus did
the ramifications of the idea that reason demands our seeing death as
nothing to us.
On the Epicurean analysis, fully understanding the reality of death
releases us from the desire for immortality and hence ‘makes the mortality
of life enjoyable’. ‘For there is nothing fearful in living for one who
genuinely grasps that there is nothing fearful in not living.’8 While
accepting much of the Epicurean diagnosis of the irrationality of the fear
of death, Smith acknowledges nonetheless that belief in an awful futurity
after death can be rational—an awfulness focused on the deliverance of
divine justice rather than on the deprivation of mortal pleasures.
It is striking here that, although Smith grants the rationality of belief in
such awful futurity, he does not appeal to that dread in explaining the
beneficial deterrent force of the fear of death. That force is given rather to
the irrational dread of posthumous sensation. Smith’s point is that even
if—as Epicurus thought—it is irrational to fear death, that irrationality can
be beneficial to society. Thus, on Smith’s account, the protection of
society does not depend on the content of religious belief in an afterlife.
It depends rather on an illusion—though a providential one—in the way
we imagine death. It is not the possibility of disembodied suffering—a
‘futurity’ whose content is left unimagined—that is said to be beneficial to
the the preservation of social order. What is described as deterring human
beings from wrong-doing is rather an irrational fear—the thought of a
more immediate future of embodied sensation, continuing after death.
A sceptic might wonder here whether the supposedly rational belief
in the futurity of divine judgement turns out to depend after all on
the irrational belief in posthumous sensation. There are some shifts of
7
Lucretius, The Nature of Things, 3.1023; as translated in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley,
eds., The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), vol. I,
p. 153.
8
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 124–7; as translated in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic
Philosophers, vol. I, p. 149.
88 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
in the same passage to say that sympathy does not arise from the imagin-
ation of anything that relates to myself as such. ‘A man may sympathize
with a woman in child-bed; though it is impossible that he should
conceive himself as suffering her pains in his own proper person and
character.’
In our own times a similar contrast has been drawn in relation to the
complexities of selfhood and imagination in Thomas Nagel’s much dis-
cussed essay, ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’: to imagine being a bat is not to
imagine being oneself spending the day hanging upside down by one’s feet
in an attic.9 The point here is of course not really about bats but about
human consciousness and inter-subjectivity. We talk readily of imagining
ourselves in the position of another—a demand which is often made in the
name of compassion. Smith’s examples show just how complex such
exercises of imagination really are; and, by the same token, what a
complex phenomenon sympathy is.
It may seem at first sight that Smith’s insistence on the unselfishness of
sympathy is at odds with his earlier treatment of imagination in relation to
death. If a man can unselfishly imagine the situation of a woman in
childbirth—a situation he can never actually experience—why should all
of us not be able to coherently imagine the condition of the insentient
dead? Smith’s point, however, is that death is precisely not a condition
which is experienced by the dead. In that respect his treatment of death is
thoroughly in accord with the Epicurean/Lucretian position. In supposedly
imagining myself into the situation of someone dead, I must take, as it
were, my whole self with me into an inanimate body. But this is exactly
what Smith would—in the light of his later discussion of the unselfishness
of sympathy—regard as a ‘selfish’ projection of myself into another. Insofar
as my grief is focused on the other’s lack of sensation, I grieve, not on behalf
of him—for whom lack of sensation is not a misfortune—but on behalf of
my imagined self. My supposed grief on behalf of the other is in fact a
‘selfish’ projection, giving rise to my own deluded ‘dread of death’—a self-
absorption which can poison the enjoyment of life.
There is thus no contradiction here. Far from being inconsistent, Smith’s
discussions of the two cases in fact reinforce one another. The male sympa-
thizes, rationally, with the woman in labour—not by imagining being
9
In Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979),
pp. 165–80.
90 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
himself in labour, but by imaging himself into her situation. The illusory
imagining of one’s self into the present situation of the dead is in contrast
entirely a projection of self. Yet the initial appearance of a tension between
the two illustrations serves to highlight the dynamic—and not always
rational—shifts between self and other, which are the stuff of sympathy.
Those exchanges can be particularly unsettling in situations of death and
grief. Jacques Derrida, in a moving discussion of these issues in Memoires for
Paul de Man, has given a subtle account of some of the complexities in the
experience of bereaved friendship—the strange shifts of thought that are
brought into play on the uncertain borders of self and other. Derrida
invokes there, and in other discussions of grief, a rich concept of ‘impos-
sible mourning’. In grief we attempt to incorporate the lost other into our
self—an attempt that is constantly thwarted by the very nature of friend-
ship, with its demands for recognition of otherness. ‘An aborted interior-
isation is at the same time a respect for the other as other, a sort of tender
rejection, a movement of renunciation which leaves the other alone,
outside, over there, in his death, outside of us.’10
Derrida’s analysis points to an unresolvable uncertainty which is central
not only to grief but to the very nature of friendship. Relations between
selves and others involve conflicted boundaries—impossibilities which are
also the realities of human interaction. The tensions arise especially in the
intensity of grief; but they are there also in intense relations between the
living. Smith’s description, early in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, of a
mother’s anxiety on behalf of a sick infant is illustrative of just how
complex the relations between imagination and sympathy can be. In her
idea of what the infant suffers, the mother
joins, to its real helplessness, her own consciousness of that helplessness, and her
own terrors for the unknown consequences of its disorder; and out of all these
forms, for her own sorrow, the most complete image of misery and distress. The
infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of the present instant, which can never be
great. With regard to the future, it is perfectly secure, and in its thoughtlessness and
want of foresight, possesses an antidote against fear and anxiety, the great tormen-
ters of the human breast, from which reason and philosophy will, in vain, attempt
to defend it, when it grows up to be a man. (Part I, Sec. 1, Ch. 1, pp. 15–16)
10
Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, revised edition, trans. C. Lindsay, J. Culler,
E. Cadava, and P. Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 35.
SYMPATHY AND IMAGINATION 91
11
See Bence Nanay, ‘Adam Smith’s Concept of Sympathy and its Contemporary Inter-
pretations’, in Vivienne Brown and Samuel Fleischacker, eds., The Philosophy of Adam Smith:
The Adam Smith Review, vol. 5, Essays Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of The Theory
of Moral Sentiments (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), pp. 85–105.
THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR 93
disapprove of it’ (Part III, Ch. 2, p. 149). God, he continues, has ‘made
man the immediate judge of mankind’, appointing him his ‘vice regent
upon earth to superintend the behaviour of his brethren’. However, this
concrete ‘immediate judge’, identified with our fellow man, is subordinate
to a ‘higher tribunal of conscience’—to ‘the supposed impartial and well-
informed spectator’, the ‘man within the breast’, the ‘great judge and
arbiter’ of conduct (Part III, Ch. 2, p. 150).
Smith talks in this context of two jurisdictions. There is a jurisdiction of
‘the man without’, founded on ‘the desire of actual praise and aversion to
actual blame’. This jurisdiction, however, is subordinate to that of ‘the
man within’, which is founded not on actual praise or blame but on ‘the
desire of praiseworthiness and aversion to blameworthiness’. Above both,
there is a ‘still higher tribunal’—that of ‘the all-seeing Judge of the world,
whose eye can never be deceived, and whose judgement can never be
prevented’ (Part III, Ch. 2, p. 153).
The language of this layering of moral authority is that of divine
purpose. Yet the religious overtones are again not essential to the concep-
tual structure of Smith’s model. The impartial spectator remains natural
rather than supernatural. It can all sound deceptively like a restatement of a
faith-based moral theory; but, although the language is religious, the
careful nesting of moral jurisdictions yields a structure that makes its
authority independent of religious belief. There is no appeal to divine
revelation of how human beings ought to act. The appeal is rather to facts
about the operation of human sentiments in conjunction with imagin-
ation. Out of the familiar human experiences of desire for praise and
aversion to blame—of sympathy, indulgence, or disapproval—the imagin-
ation forms the construct of an ideal observer, more godlike than our-
selves. This ideal observer may be made ‘in the image of God’, but it is
nonetheless subordinate to divine judgement. Its imagined moral insights
are not identified with the view of God.
Immortality also figures in Smith’s account of the ideal observer. How-
ever, here again, it is not the appeal to divine judgement as an event
beyond death that carries the conceptual weight. For that, he appeals
rather to the imaginative construct of an ideal just observer. He acknow-
ledges that a ‘firm confidence’ in a great tribunal which will in due time
judge innocence and reward virtue can be a source of support for the
‘weakness and despondency’ of our own minds. Our happiness in this life
often depends, he continues, on ‘the humble hope and expectation of a life
THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR 95
the connections with the Stoics explicit in his later discussion of the various
systems of moral philosophy. There, he stresses the Stoics’ emphasis on ‘the
prosperity of the whole’ as the core of their efforts to maintain ‘that
complete propriety and rectitude of sentiment and conduct’ in which
consists ‘the perfection of our nature’ (Part VII, Section 2, Ch. 1, p. 324).
Yet he insists on what makes his own version of impartiality distinctive.
Clearly, Smith sympathizes with the Stoic repudiation of the folly of
thinking the universe is in confusion when it is in fact ourselves who are
‘out of order’ (Part VII, Section 2, Ch. 1, p. 325). In the concluding
sections of his discussion of Stoicism, he draws out what he sees as the
superiority of his own impartial spectator over the Stoic version of detach-
ment. The crucial difference, he thinks, lies in the ready transitions which
his construct allows back and forth between close and more distant
perspectives on our lives. It is natural that the events that interest us the
most are those that ‘immediately affect that little department in which we
ourselves have some little management and direction’. Those events
which immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country, are what
‘chiefly excite our desires and aversions, our hopes and fears, our joys and
sorrows’. However, when those passions become—as they are apt to do—
too vehement, we have resort to a ‘remedy and correction’ which Nature
has provided. ‘The real or even the imaginary presence of the impartial
spectator, the authority of the man within the breast, is always at hand to
overawe them into the proper tone and temper of moderation’ (Part VII,
Section 2, Ch. 1, p. 344). The impartial spectator provides a moderating
force which does not disdain or destroy the partial affections which sustain
us in the ‘little departments’ of our lives.
When our exertions in those little departments turn out ‘the most
unfortunate and disastrous’, we have consolation not only from ‘the
complete approbation of the man within the breast’ but also from thinking
of the necessity of our misfortunes in relation to the good of the whole.
However, this ‘sublime contemplation’ of the whole is not, as the Stoic
philosophy claims—on Smith’s interpretation—given us by Nature as ‘the
great business and occupation of our lives’. ‘She only points it out to us as
the consolation of our misfortunes’ (Part VII, Section 2, Ch. 1, p. 345).
For Smith the grand view of the whole—seen as if from a distance—is
not always the most appropriate perspective. His departure from both
Plato and the Stoics is apparent in this refusal to see the road of abstraction
as the preferred path for good living. His criticisms are directed mainly at
THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR 97
12
Epictetus, Discourses 1.1, 7–12, as translated in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philoso-
phers, vol. I, pp. 391–2.
FORTUNE AND HUMAN ACTION 99
in Greek tragedies. Those tragic reversals were the backdrop to the Stoic
ideal of detachment which both fascinated and repelled Adam Smith. His
treatment of the influences of Fortune in relation to the merit or demerit
of actions opens with what sounds at first like a familiar hard line on the
irrelevance of outcomes to the moral quality of acts: their merit or demerit
can reside only in our intentions. The only consequences for which we
can be answerable are ‘those which were someway or other intended’ or
which ‘at least, show some agreeable or disagreeable quality in the inten-
tion of the heart’. However, the direction in which Smith develops this
point yields something very different from the version of detachment
which he associated with Stoicism.
Smith concedes the apparent self-evidence of the maxim that only
intention is worthy of praise or blame—as long as that maxim is proposed
‘in abstract or general terms’. When we come to particular cases, however,
we find that our sentiments are in fact scarcely ever found to be entirely
regulated by this rule. We are then confronted with an ‘irregularity of
sentiment, which everybody feels, which scarce any body is sufficiently
aware of, and which nobody is willing to acknowledge’ (Part II, Section 3,
Introduction, p. 110). Smith’s discussion of Fortune is revealing for his
understanding of the concept of nature in relation to human action.
‘Irregular’ though our sentiments towards unintended consequences may
be, the ‘mechanism’ of this departure from what ought to be the case is, he
insists, natural. It answers an end or purpose intended by ‘the author of
nature’.
This juxtaposition of the purposes of Nature with ‘irregularity’ is
startling. Nature’s purposes, it seems, can incorporate something untoward
which ought not to happen. Smith seems to go further here than Kant’s
talk in his Idea for a Universal History of apparent irregularities which are
accommodated into the order of Nature’s purposes. Smith seems to be
talking of real irregularities which are nonetheless part of Nature. The
apparent oddity of the association of the irregular and the natural marks his
distance from the rigidity he associated with Stoic ethics. What we have
here is not a simple readiness to bend the rules; it is not just a matter of
relaxing the inflexibly high standards required of the Stoic sage. Smith
seems prepared to see Nature itself as responsible for the irregularity.
Implicit already here in Smith’s discussion of Fortune is a criticism of
Stoic ideals of perfection, on the grounds that they would not serve the
true interests of human beings—even if they were attainable.
100 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
13
Papers by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, both called ‘Moral Luck’, were
originally published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 1, 1976. Nagel’s paper
THE ‘ VOICES ’ OF ADAM SMITH 103
Smith was committed to the idea that human deeds should spring from
an understanding of how things really are. Yet for him this aspiration was
consistent with an open scepticism about the possibility of knowing
definitively what it is we are really doing. Within his conceptual
frame for understanding and evaluating intention and action, our self-
descriptions can always be challenged by appeal to counter-descriptions of
what we do. The world—the actuality of events—sets constraints on the
truth of our descriptions of even our own actions.
There is here a demand for truthfulness, which cannot be set to rest by a
closer scrutiny of some inner mental object—the agent’s intention. As
agents, we are challenged to bring our self-perception into alignment with
what actually happens. The focus is on what agents actually do—with the
changes they make in the world—rather than on what their intentions
might have been. Yet, as we have seen, it is by no means always the case
that the appeal to such an impartial spectator yields a harsh judgement.
Within this ethical frame, allowance must always be made for the intru-
sions of Fortune into human responsibility. Sometimes it is appropriate
that, in Smith’s terms, the ‘innocent offender’ should not be ‘left without
consolation’.
Agent and observer perspectives are here envisaged as coming together
in a shared attempt to reach truthful understanding. In relation to action,
that understanding involves a delicate adjustment between those different
perspectives. Moral worth is constantly revisable—ever open to be judged
anew. It is an ethical frame which allows the evaluation of human action to
be imbued with a sceptical spirit. It also represents a shift to a secular
approach to ethics. Moral consciousness may find expression in the lan-
guage of God, Nature, or Providence; but moral authority now resides in
the endlessly fallible and revisable judgements of human beings—subject
always to the vagaries of Fortune.
was republished in his collection Mortal Questions, pp. 24–38; Williams’ paper was republished
in his collection Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 20–39.
104 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
14
Charles L. Griswold, Jr., Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999). See pp. 14–15.
15
Griswold, Virtues of Enlightenment, pp. 371–2.
THE ‘ VOICES ’ OF ADAM SMITH 105
itself an exercise of the imagination and hence, like any work of the
imagination, subject to shifts and turns. Griswold’s appeal to Platonic
imagery to explain what is distinctive about Smith’s approach to moral
philosophy may in the end retain too much from Plato. The objectivity
yielded by the impartial spectator model is not really an alternative to the
Platonic story, in a shared project for articulating the process of attaining a
fixed truth. The process of enlightenment modelled here is of a kind that
sheds, not only the need for the ascent to the light, but the very idea of a
fixed truth to be attained.
In a later essay,16 Griswold has himself highlighted the presence of a
narrative dimension in Smith’s treatment of sympathy, which he sees as in
tension with the ocular imagery evoked by the impartial spectator model.
Smith’s version of sympathy, he argues there, may be better construed as
more like a ‘communicative, rhetorical process’ than as an exercise of a
kind of vision. It is a promising interpretive move, which helps capture the
temporal dimensions of Smith’s version of sympathy. Imagining one’s self
into the situation of another demands attention not only to what is
happening now but also to past and future, including—as in the case of
sympathy for the newly born—future possibilities to which the object of
our sympathy is oblivious. This is one among many ways in which the
literary and rhetorical dimensions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments are
integral to its philosophical content.
Vivienne Brown, in a fascinating study of the literary forms of Adam
Smith’s works, has shown how his central concern in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments with the operations of imagination and sympathy is enacted in
the book’s structure.17 She uses Bakhtin’s distinction between ‘dialogic’
and ‘monologic’ literary forms to explore the array of ‘voices’ in the work.
A ‘dialogic’ text, in Bakhtin’s sense, is one that is structured by an interplay
of voices, whereas a ‘monologic’ text evokes a single voice. For Bakhtin,
the novel is the archetypical form of dialogic discourse; but it is significant
that he also finds this form in ethical discourses epitomized by Stoic works
of moral philosophy, where a moral agent is presented as engaged in
16
Charles L. Griswold, ‘Smith and Rousseau in Dialogue: Sympathy, Pitié, Spectatorship
and Narrative’, in Brown and Fleischacker, eds., The Philosophy of Adam Smith: The Adam
Smith Review, vol. 5, pp. 59–84.
17
Vivienne Brown, Adam Smith’s Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce and Conscience (London:
Routledge, 1994).
106 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
of the passions, he urges his readers to turn towards the sociable world, the
conversable world illustrated in the multiplicity of voices in his book.
18
Adam Smith, ‘The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Inquiries, As
Illustrated By The History of Astronomy’, in his Essays, Philosophical and Literary, ed. Joseph
Black and James Hutton (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010) [originally published in London
by Ward, Lock & Co. in 1795], pp. 336–7. Subsequent page references to this edition are
given in parentheses.
PHILOSOPHY AND IMAGINATION 109
is the ‘ultimate end of philosophy’ (p. 348). The imagination has ‘natural
propensities’ which accompany ‘with ease and delight any regular and
orderly motion’ (p. 345). It can thus allay the unsettling wonder which can
be excited in the mind by the ‘unusual or seemingly disjointed appearances
of nature’ (p. 359). For Smith, it is the role of philosophy—more than any
other of the ‘agreeable arts’—to bring relief from the ‘wandering in
uncertainty’ (p. 371) associated with undisciplined wonder.
Smith’s idea of the liberal arts is of course much broader than is implied
in more recent versions of the distinctions between the ‘arts’ and ‘sciences’.
He himself came to have some serious reservations about the grand vision
of the liberal arts which inspired his treatment of them in The History of
Astronomy. Although the essay was published only posthumously—by his
literary executors in 1795—his own description of it as ‘an intended
juvenile work’ suggests that its first drafts may date from his years in
Oxford from 1740 to 1746. In 1773 he wrote to Hume, who was at
that stage his literary executor, that he thought it the only piece among his
unpublished works—apart from the manuscript of The Wealth of Nations—
that might be worth publishing. Whether it might be presented ‘as a
fragment of an intended juvenile work’, he said, ‘I leave entirely to your
judgement; tho I begin to suspect myself that there is more refinement
than solidity in some parts of it.’19
By the time Smith died, in 1790, he had given permission for this essay
and a few others to be exempted from his desire that his unpublished
papers be burnt. His literary executors included them in a collection under
the general title Essays on Philosophical Subjects, writing in the Editors’
Advertisement that they appeared to be ‘parts of a plan he once had
formed, for giving a connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant
arts’.
At the end of the unfinished essay, Smith is clearly struggling to sustain
his conviction of the role of imagination in all these areas of knowledge.
His editors reported that he left some notes from which it appeared
that ‘he considered this last part of his History of Astronomy as imperfect,
and needing several additions’ (p. 385). Newton’s system—with which he
ends the essay—is a stumbling block. ‘And even we, while we have been
endeavouring to represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of
19
Adam Smith to David Hume, 16 April 1773, Letter 137 in Correspondence of Adam Smith,
p. 168.
110 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
20
Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles Hendel (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Library of Liberal Arts, 1955), Section V, Part II, p. 61.
5
‘Changing the Common
Mode of Thinking’:
d’Alembert and Diderot on
the Encyclopedia
stability, flight and rest. The harm of untruth, he says, does not come from
the lie that ‘passeth through the mind’—firing the imagination in its
passage. It comes rather from the lie that ‘sinketh in, and settleth in it’.
The mind that remains steady in its love of truth—notwithstanding the
passing pleasures of imagining—is stable also in its joy. ‘Truth, which
only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the
love-making or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is
the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it,
is the sovereign good of human nature.’1
There is a wealth—perhaps even a surfeit—of imagery of light and
motion in these passages. Yet they capture something which will continue
to engage thought about the nature of human knowledge throughout
the eighteenth century—the tensions between demands for timelessness
and for change. On the one hand, there is the sense of a timeless structure
of the human mind, which acts as a universal template for the organization
of knowledge and learning. On the other, there is an equally strong sense of
change in the business of knowing—of a distinctive moment in the
development of human capacities to understand and control the world.
Those tensions surface in the reflections which d’Alembert and Diderot
offered on the conceptual aspects of the enormous project of the Encylope-
dia, published between 1751 and 1772. The ordering of the entries, they
think, must address two things which appear to be in tension. On the one
hand, attention must be given to the historical development of the different
subject areas—to what is new in their era. On the other, the Encyclopedia
must also address the timeless structure of the human mind, which
underpins the state of knowledge at a particular time.
D’Alembert’s involvement in the editing of the volumes ended in 1758;
Diderot’s continued through the first twenty-eight volumes, including
eleven volumes of plates. Both participated in conceptualizing the
project. Although they both signed the Dedication, the Preliminary
Discourse, which introduces the first volume, was written solely by
d’Alembert. Diderot gives his own account of the project in his entry
on Encyclopedia. These complementary accounts together provide a fascin-
ating picture of how they saw the work. Clearly their contemporaries
were struck, not only by the size of this ordering of knowledge, but by its
1
Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 74.
MAPS , TREES , AND CIRCLES 113
2
Frederick the Great, Oeuvres (Berlin, 1854), XXV, 166, Letter of 1780 to d’Alembert. As
quoted by Richard N. Schwab in Translator’s Introduction to d’Alembert, Preliminary
Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Library of the Liberal
Arts, 1963), p. x.
3
Schwab, Translator’s Introduction to d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. x.
114 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA
4
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans.
Richard N. Schwab, p. 76. Page references to other quotations from this work are given in
parentheses. A version of Schwab’s translation is also available online. See d’Alembert, Jean Le
Rond, ‘Preliminary Discourse’. The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative
Translation Project. Translated by Richard N. Schwab and Walter E. Rex (Ann Arbor:
MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2009). At: <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.
did2222.0001.083>. Trans. of ‘Discourse Préliminaire’, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des
sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. I (Paris, 1751).
MAPS , TREES , AND CIRCLES 115
Their historical moment is oriented towards a new sense of the role of the
imagination in knowledge: imagination is to be set free from the cramping
effects of the arid abstractions of reason. However, this new freedom is
not to be construed as the feckless indulgence of mere fantasy. Enjoying
what Bacon called ‘the serene air of truth’ demands that the mind remains
grounded—that it be seen as what it has always been, though it is now
free to move without the old constraints.
The tensions in the editors’ vision of a balance between the freedom of
the imagination and the firm grounding of reason are acted out, as we shall
see shortly, in Diderot’s later work, the remarkable Rameau’s Nephew.
There Diderot gives literary expression to the theme of the stabilizing
force of reason, and its contrasts with the giddying flights of imagination.
The strange destabilizing voice of the fictional nephew of the composer
Rameau confronts and challenges the rational, sequential thought of the
work’s narrator. However, we need first to look a little more closely at
how the Encyclopedia organization of knowledge was supposed to be
grounded in models of the universal operations of the human mind.
The editors of the Encyclopedia were of course working against the
background of a wide range of earlier efforts to order the branches of
knowledge. The idea—to which they often appeal—of including the
reader in a circle of communication of ideas goes back to the Roman
rhetorician Quintilian, who used the term encyclopedia in the first century
ce as a Latinized version of a Greek term for ‘a circle of study or learning’.5
Diderot and d’Alembert imagined the ordering of their project as retaining
continuity with Bacon’s ideal of an ordering of knowledge which reflected
a right ordering of the mind’s capacities. At the same time, they wanted
the project to capture something of older ideas of a ‘circle of learning’; but
this was now to be construed, not in terms of a guide or a particular
instruction manual for a specific group of scholars, but in terms of a
broader access to knowledge. Their Enyclopedia was to continue to pursue
the goal implicit in Chambers’ Cyclopedia—an alphabetically arranged
Dictionary of Arts and Sciences which they took as a model, and from
which they took over some entries. They saw that work as taking as its
imagined audience the public at large.
5
See Richard Yeo, ‘Encyclopaedism and Enlightenment’, in M. Fitzpatrick, P. Jones,
C. Knellwolf, and I. McCalman, eds., The Enlightenment World (London and New York:
Routledge, 2007), p. 350.
MAPS , TREES , AND CIRCLES 117
Clearly there were tensions between the models through which the
project of the Encyclopedia was conceptualized. The editors were appealing
to a range of ways of understanding the rationale and purpose of organizing
knowledge—not all of which were concerned with reflecting the nature
and operations of the human mind. They were also well aware of the
rich philosophical past which gave content to their own variations on
that theme of a universal structure: Platonic accounts of the divided soul;
Bacon’s ordering of memory, imagination, and reason; Descartes’ ‘method’
for ordering the intellectual processes at stake in gaining certainty;
Locke’s classifications of different kinds of ‘ideas’ in the Essay Concerning
Human Understanding. There were significant philosophical differences
and priorities also between the editors themselves which surfaced in
d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse and Diderot’s own entry under the term
Encyclopedia.
Diderot offers a succinct statement of how he sees the upshot of the
grand project in the opening passage of his entry on Encyclopedia:
Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around
the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and
transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries
will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring,
becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and
happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the
human race.6
6
Quotations are from Denis Diderot, ‘Encyclopedia’, in The Encyclopedia of Diderot and
d’Alembert, Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Philip Stewart (Ann Arbor:
Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, 2002). Web 5 December
2009. At: <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.004>. Trans. of Encyclopédie ou
Dictionnaire raisonnés des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. V (Paris, 1755).
118 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA
mould and which are merely following where they have been led. There
are affinities here with Hume’s discussion of aesthetic judgement in ‘The
Standard of Taste’. Diderot sees the Encyclopedia as breaking away from
the arbitrary rules that governed literary genres in the past. ‘We needed a
time of reasoning, when we no longer look for the rules in authors, but in
nature, and when we can feel what is false and what true in all those
arbitrary poetics.’
Diderot sees this carefully balanced alignment of the demands of
philosophy and the expectations of ‘genius’ as allowing the Encyclopedia
to bring together coherently the local and specific with the universal.
Justice must be done to the present in such a way that it is seen both in
the context of the past and in relation to an open-ended future.
For let there be no mistake: there is a great difference between giving birth out of
pure genius to a work celebrated by a whole nation which has its moment, its taste,
its ideas and its prejudices, and setting forth the poetics of the genre, in accordance
with a real and thoughtful knowledge of the human heart, the nature of things, and
right reason, which are the same in every era. Genius knows no rules, and yet it
never departs from them in its successes. Philosophy knows only the rules founded
on the nature of beings, which is immutable and eternal.
which affect us. It is indeed difficult to see how this could be otherwise; for
the time when the passions are deeply affecting us is precisely the time
when we are least able to subject them to tranquil study (p. 96).
The view of the mind which emerges in the Preliminary Discourse,
although it claims universality, is very much of its time. It was this timely
aspect of the work that dominated its contemporary reception. Among the
editors’ contemporaries the Encyclopedia was seen primarily as documenting
the eighteenth-century mind, rather than as laying bare a timeless structure.
Yet its imaginative scope reached beyond the present. In describing the
project, both d’Alembert and Diderot draw on the etymological derivation
of Encyclopedia as a ‘circle’ of knowledge. However, they conceptualized the
work neither as the product of a restricted group of scholars nor as a fixed
structure of interrelated subject areas. This organization of knowledge
is consciously open-ended and dynamic. It attempts to capture the interrela-
tions of subject areas at a particular time; but it aims to do so in a way that
both connects the current state of knowledge with what has gone before and
opens contemporary knowledge to the future.
The work is presented as an organic, though highly reflective, process.
Diderot explains in his Encyclopedia entry that the cross-references
throughout the work are designed to open all entries to the possibility of
criticism and challenge, breaking down the implicit authority of the
individual authors. They are, he says, meant to ‘give the whole that
unity which is so favourable to the establishment and conviction of
truth’; but also to allow a subtle overturning of opinions: they will give
an Encyclopedia the character that a good dictionary should have—that
of changing the common mode of thinking.
The Encyclopedia thus has a deliberately loose unity which allows
an evolving set of interconnections. Although the two editors share a
common conception of the work, they emphasize different aspects of
these interconnections, reflecting their different—though converging—
attitudes to the significance of abstract analysis in the intellectual life of
their times. For d’Alembert the work’s dynamic open-ended character
reflects nonetheless a philosophical understanding of timeless structural
relations—the map, as seen from above, as he describes the encyclopedic
approach to knowledge.
A significant aspect of d’Alembert’s reorganization of that map is his
recasting, in Part II of the Preliminary Discourse, of the ancient ideal of
JUDGEMENT AND GENIUS 123
imitating Nature, so that it comes to fit the imitative roles of the fine Arts
in his own times. Painting and Sculpture—which Plato, especially, had
treated as distorting reality—are here given equal recognition with those
forms of knowledge which aim at ‘true representation’. On the one side of
his division, he places the ‘sciences of reflection’, which rest on the
combination of the basic ‘primitive’ ideas which arise directly within us.
On the other side are the ideas we ourselves form—by imagining things
which resemble the objects of those primitive ideas; and by composing
other objects out of them. The mind’s creativity in combining and
composing is no less important than its capacity to truly reflect what is
given directly to it.
The editors’ explanations of the organization of subject areas are often
complicated. However, it is clear that they are giving a new status to
Imagination in the evaluation of the branches of knowledge as they exist in
their own times. In their division, the ‘imitation of Nature’ is extended to
the agreeable arts, which are concerned with beauty—with the creative
depiction of la belle nature—rather than being restricted to the more rigid
sciences of truth (p. 45). D’Alembert’s system echoes the threefold division
he and Diderot had taken over from Bacon between three faculties of
the mind: History relates to Memory; Philosophy is ‘the fruit of reason’;
and the Fine Arts originate in imagination (p. 51). Philosophy—broadly
construed as the activity of ordering ideas—continues to hold prime place
in relation to Reason. However, there is a new attention given to the role
of judgement, as a kind of ‘feeling’, in the evaluation of the imitative arts.
To this feeling, d’Alembert says, ‘we owe taste and genius, which are
distinguished from one another in that genius is the feeling that creates and
taste the feeling that judges’.
Diderot in his entry on Encyclopedia, as we have seen, also emphasizes
the significance of what he calls ‘genius’—in contrast to the relative
inflexibility associated with philosophy’s predilection for timeless truths.
He goes further than d’Alembert in resisting philosophical abstractions.
There are differences here in their ways of imagining their shared project,
which surface in different ways of drawing out a common set of metaphors
taken from maps and topography.
Towards the end of Part I of the Preliminary Discourse, d’Alembert,
commenting on the organization of ‘encyclopedic trees’, suggests that
the universe is best thought of as ‘but a vast ocean’—on the surface
of which we notice a few islands of varying sizes, whose connections
124 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA
with the continents are hidden from us (p. 49). Again, it is the underlying
structural interconnections that matter—although he sees those structures
as themselves dynamic, in contrast to the rigidities of older organizations of
knowledge. Diderot’s metaphors for ordering knowledge are less con-
cerned with structural connections—more painterly, more sensuous, and,
in more than one sense, more grounded:
A universal dictionary of the sciences and arts needs to be thought of as a vast
countryside containing mountains, plains, rocks, water, forests, animals, and all the
objects that make for the variety of a great landscape. The light of heaven falls on
them all; but it strikes them all in different ways. Some stand out by nature and
exposure, in the front of the scene; others are spread out on countless intermediate
planes; some fade into the distance; all enhance each other.
7
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1952); Book II, Part I, sec. 40, p. 153. Other quotations from this work
are accompanied in parentheses by references and page numbers to this edition.
126 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA
1
Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 33. Subsequent quotations are accompanied in
parentheses by page references to this edition.
128 THE ATTRACTIONS OF INSTABILITY
2
Quotations are from G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 317–18, 332.
DIDEROT ’ S RAMEAU ’ S NEPHEW 129
3
Jean Starobinski, ‘The Man Who Told Secrets’, New York Review of Books, vol. 20, no. 4,
22 March 1973, pp. 18–21.
130 THE ATTRACTIONS OF INSTABILITY
4
On the Origin of Language: Two Essays by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder,
trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), p. 50.
DIDEROT ’ S RAMEAU ’ S NEPHEW 131
5
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Temperament’. The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert
Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Terry Stancliffe (Ann Arbor: MPublishing,
University of Michigan Library, 2008). Web 19 April 2012. At: <http://hdl.handle.net/
2027/spo.did2222.0000.897>. Trans. of ‘Tempérament’, in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire rai-
sonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. XVI (Paris, 1765).
6
James Schmidt, ‘The Fool’s Truth: Diderot, Goethe, and Hegel’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, vol. 57, no. 4, 1996, pp. 625–44; p. 642.
132 THE ATTRACTIONS OF INSTABILITY
Although Diderot has packed his text with detail on theory of music and
performance, it is clear that he intends it to have broader application. It is
written against the background of Rousseau’s notorious attack on the
theatre in his Letter to d’Alembert—a stance which Diderot loathed, and
to which Rameau’s Nephew may well be in part a riposte. In that context,
‘the theatre’ is not only a cultural institution but a metaphor for contem-
porary society; and ‘the actor’ is a surrogate for human agency in general.
Yet in contrast to Rousseau’s heavy-handed condemnation of the theatre
as locus for—and instantiation of—an immoral lack of transparency,
Diderot’s defence of the theatre is subtly nuanced and ironic.
The complexity of the interpretive issues in relation to the work
becomes apparent in Diderot’s presentation of the strange event which is
at the heart of the exchange between Je and Lui—the recounting of
the episode which resulted in Rameau being ejected from the wealthy
household of Bertin, where he was previously welcome in the role of
entertaining buffoon. The depiction of this lost role is of course itself an
exercise in satire. The nephew has never been an equal partner in the
elegant socializing at the Bertin household. From an external perspective,
he can be seen as a sycophant who sacrifices his independence for the sake
DIDEROT ’ S RAMEAU ’ S NEPHEW 133
of access to a mode of life he could never provide of his own resources. His
place as household jester is a product of the corruption of natural gifts, as
well as of the cunning use of acquired skills. Yet the account we are offered
of this central event is just as much a scathing exposure of a whole social
scene as it is a critique of an individual character’s moral flaws.
Diderot has Rameau describe the Bertin gatherings as a clamour
of ‘noise in the menagerie’—a convergence in one place of ‘wretched,
spiteful, malevolent and truculent creatures’. Diderot—the real Diderot—
is said to be present along with Buffon, Duclos, Montesquieu, Rousseau,
Voltaire, and d’Alembert. The fictional Rameau reports that in this
assembly, ‘nobody is allowed to have any brains unless he is as stupid as
we are’ (p. 80). In setting the context for his own fall from grace, he offers
a comical—but also disconcerting—account of the cultivation of appear-
ances, and its connections with the reading of literary works in the
intellectual circle epitomized by the Bertin household. Rameau confides
that he reads books not—as Je would have him do—for entertainment and
instruction, but as a way of learning how to hide his vices. ‘For instance,
when I read L’Avare I say to myself: “Be a miser if you want to, but mind
you don’t talk like one . . . Keep the vices that come in useful to you, but
don’t have either the tone or the appearance, which would expose you to
ridicule” ’ (p. 82).
The nephew boasts that he uses literary portraits to inform his efforts to
conceal in his own conduct the ‘tone and appearance’ of the vices. ‘I am
myself, and I remain myself, but I act and speak as occasion requires.’ He
does not, he insists, look down on moralists. Rather he looks to them to
learn how to avoid the appearance of evil. ‘Evil only upsets people now
and then, but the visible signs of evil hurt them from morning till night. It
might be better to be a rascal than to look like one: the rascal by nature
offends only now and again, but the evil-looking person offends all
the time’ (pp. 82–3). He has, he claims, systematically devoted himself to
such studies of appearances, to the point where—unlike his peers—he is
ridiculous only when he means to be. ‘For the same art which helps me to
avoid being ridiculous on certain occasions helps me on others to achieve
it in a masterly manner’ (p. 83). Hence his skill in playing with ‘the great of
the world’ the role of the jester—being ridiculous when that is what is
wanted of him.
In a dazzling excursus on the theme of truthful conduct, he defends
this studied readiness to assume a variety of postures, as occasion demands:
134 THE ATTRACTIONS OF INSTABILITY
played by ‘fools’ like him in the broader social scene. ‘Oh, drop your
reflections and go on with the story’, Je pleads. ‘Cant be done’, responds
Lui. ‘There are days when I have to reflect. It’s an affliction you have to let
run its course’ (p. 94). The comical story of the debacle in the household
becomes lost in darker narratives of deceit and betrayal. At the same time,
the verbal account becomes increasingly interwoven with phases of gro-
tesque mime. In response to the puzzlement expressed by Je about the
variability of his style, Lui responds: ‘Can the style of an evil man have any
unity?’ Yet the fluidity of Rameau’s style makes it difficult to treat him as
categorically evil, any more than he can be treated as categorically good.
The role of the dialogue form goes further here than merely distributing
the parts of an argument between different voices. The role assigned to Lui
itself splits into a multiplicity. Starobinski, speaking more generally about
Diderot’s writing, comments that ‘he never closes his ears to his own
internal contradictions and unforeseen trains of thought’. Rather, he reacts
by embodying them in an interlocutor. ‘When he hears in himself the
presence of a new thought, he immediately transforms it into an imaginary
being with whom he can exchange ideas.’7 In this respect, the character
seems to mirror the author.
Despite the fascination of Rameau’s extraordinary performances, the
narrating voice within the parentheses retains a detachment from the
spectacle which allows a reflective perspective. ‘Did I admire? Yes, I did.
Was I touched with pity? Yes, I was. But a tinge of ridicule ran through
these sentiments and discoloured them’ (p. 103). He finds Lui admirable,
pitiful, and—finally—ridiculous. Yet it cannot be claimed that Je, in
conjunction with the narrative of the parentheses, finally wins the argu-
ment; or even that the narrator is clearly on the side of Je. For there is a
partnership also between the detachment of the narrative voice and the
dynamic intensity of the voice of Lui. This alliance is relevant to Hegel’s
appropriation of the text. James Schmidt has pointed out that the detach-
ment of the parenthetical narrator comes together with the open-ended
consciousness of Lui, making possible a determinacy which goes
beyond the possibilities represented by Je. As the conversation becomes
increasingly chaotic, the voices work in collaboration to yield something
richer than the static, judgemental stance adopted by Je.
7
Starobinski, ‘The Man Who Told Secrets’, p. 21.
136 THE ATTRACTIONS OF INSTABILITY
8
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans.
Richard Howard (London: Tavistock, 1965), Ch. VII, pp. 199–200.
DIDEROT ’ S RAMEAU ’ S NEPHEW 137
which we all act, but which we leave unsaid’. What makes Rameau’s
moral reflections distinctive, the narrator suggests, is his lack of hypocrisy:
‘He was simply more open, more consistent, and sometimes more
profound in his depravity’ (p. 111).
The conversation wanders back and forth between morals and music.
Rameau recommends a ‘sense of proportion’—to which he gives content
as ‘the art of dodging disgrace, dishonour and the law’. ‘These are the
dissonance in the social harmony that need skill in placing, leading in to
and resolving. Nothing is so dull as a succession of common chords. There
must be something arresting, to break up the beam of light and separate it
into rays.’ ‘To speak frankly’, comments Je, ‘I like you better as a musician
than as a moralist.’ ‘And yet I am very second-rate in music and a much
better moralist’, responds Lui (pp. 111–12).
The connecting theme in these ramblings about art and life is the well-
worn ideal of being ‘natural’. Yet Diderot has Rameau give a striking
new twist to that old ideal. Je prides himself on speaking the truth.
Lui responds that he envies him his gifts, not for the sake of telling the
truth, but for the possibilities they offer for ‘telling lies properly’. When
Je comments that there are many other ‘odd people’, for whom wealth
is not the most precious thing in the world, Lui responds that they
are indeed ‘very odd’. ‘People aren’t born with that kink. It is acquired,
for it isn’t natural’ (p. 112). In an implicit jibe, at the expense of traditional
associations between virtue and nature, Lui turns the ideal of the natural
back on the moralist. In parenthesis we are offered a pantomime of the
profusion of nature in which, we are told, he puts on all sorts of faces as if
‘kneading a bit of dough between his fingers’, and smiling at the funny
shapes before hurling the misshapen images away from him (p. 114).
In the final sections of the dialogue, Je praises the aspiration to live close
to nature, epitomized in the life of Diogenes. The philosopher, he sug-
gests, is the one person free to do without pantomime: he has nothing and
asks for nothing. ‘If he has nothing he suffers’, responds Lui. ‘If he asks for
nothing he won’t get anything, and he will go on suffering’ (p. 122). It is
the philosopher who is here presented as trying to curtail the possibilities
enacted in the pantomime of life; and it is the fool who releases those
possibilities to display a kind of truth—even if only in not hiding what
does not fit the desired pattern of ‘closeness to nature’. The pantomime
itself breaks the mould, setting nature free.
In the end no one wins the debate. For all his energetic miming of
endless possibilities, Rameau’s closing question—‘Isn’t it true that I am
DIDEROT ’ S RAMEAU ’ S NEPHEW 139
always the same?’—expresses not only his persistence but the poignancy
of a shapeless life. Je responds, with a touch of irony: ‘Alas, yes, unfortu-
nately.’ Yet the last word is given to Lui. ‘So long as I have that misfortune
for another forty years! He laughs best who laughs last.’ And so the
pantomime goes on.
The enthralled onlookers who gather at the café windows to watch his
antics prefigure the fascination which Rameau’s Nephew will hold for later
thinkers. Through Goethe’s translation, the character became a marker in
German intellectual history—an embodiment of Enlightenment ambiva-
lences and of transitions into Romanticism. Whatever his moral failings,
there is in him a touch of ‘genius’, and an emotional intensity which makes
him attractive as well as disturbing.
Hegel saw this character as modelling the intellectual potential, and
the limitations, of both Enlightenment and Romantic mentalities—as
representing a phase of intellectual instability, which will be by-passed in
the unfolding of human consciousness towards its realization in the fulness
of Spirit. Just as he is pushed aside from the Bertin table, what he represents
will be pushed aside in the onward movement of human consciousness.
Yet Hegel sees in him also an intimation of what is to come: the
very instability of this mind brings with it an openness to change—to
the possibility of escape from the limits of the stage of consciousness
which it represents. Hegel thus imagines Rameau’s nephew from both a
forward- and a backward-looking perspective. In relation to the future, his
individual selfhood is a fragile achievement; yet in his restlessness he
models a kind of individuality which can exceed its own limits.
In later sections of the Phenomenology, Hegel used the metaphor of
‘overthrowing the idol’—through which he had responded to Diderot’s
story—to describe the Enlightenment’s own struggle against superstition.
He warns there of the ways in which the criticism of religion in the name
of reason can itself become atrophied, sinking into rigidity.9 In that
context, Rameau’s nephew stands as a symbol of the positive aspects of
intellectual ‘instability’ with its connotations of openness to change. In the
history of European thought, he remains the figure of the one who will
ultimately ‘laugh last’.
9
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, C. (BB.) ‘Spirit’. II ‘The Enlightenment’, Section 545,
p. 332.
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7
Kantian Cosmopolitanism:
Perpetual Peace
A cosmopolitan future
Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace published in 1795, is a strange piece—
very different in genre from the dazzling virtuosity of Rameau’s Nephew, or
the probing satire of Persian Letters, but no less an audacious exercise of
imagination. Like Montesquieu, Kant offers a reconstruction of ancient
cosmopolitan ideals. However, Kant’s excursion into cosmopolitan im-
agining represents a stronger version of universalizing—a stronger pull
towards detachment from the particular or specific than Montesquieu
offered in the character of Usbek. Kant’s emphasis is on cosmopolitanism
as a political idea—as an ideal for the organization of collective life, rather
than as an individual character trait. He envisages cosmopolitanism as a
new phase of human history: the emergence of a new political order,
directed to a permanent cessation of armed conflict between states. Sub-
titled ‘A Philosophical Sketch’, the essay is schematic, and unrelentingly
abstract in its philosophical apparatus.
Perpetual Peace like Kant’s earlier essay, Idea for a Universal History
brings an apparently tight argumentative structure together with what can
seem a wildly speculative leap into an imagined future. The essay opens
with an explanation of its title—a reference to the satirical signpost of a
Dutch Inn, ‘The Perpetual Peace’, which bears a picture of a graveyard.
Kant’s ‘philosophical sketch’ takes us to an ideal future in which there will
prevail a permanent end to conflict—a time of quiet and stability, which
will nonetheless be something other than ‘the vast graveyard of the human
race’.1 The argumentation which is supposed to deliver this outcome rests
1
Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant:
Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
142 KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM : PERPETUAL PEACE
1970), p. 96. Subsequent quotations are accompanied in parentheses by page references to this
text.
A COSMOPOLITAN FUTURE 143
2
Kant: Political Writings, p. 182.
3
Charles L. Griswold Jr., ‘Imagination: Morals, Science, and Arts’, in Knud Haakonssen,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), p. 39.
A COSMOPOLITAN FUTURE 145
outrage elsewhere. ‘The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying
degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point
where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The
idea of a cosmopolitan right is therefore not fantastic and overstrained; it is
a necessary complement to the unwritten code of humanity. Only under
this condition can we flatter ourselves that we are continually advancing
towards a perpetual peace’ (pp. 107–8).
The frame which is supposed to give content and force to Kant’s ‘musts’
throughout this argumentation about the future in Perpetual Peace is
presented in two ‘supplements’ to the preceding ‘articles’. With startling
confidence, he opens his first supplement with the assertion: ‘Perpetual
peace is guaranteed by no less an authority than the great artist Nature
herself.’ It may sound like a pious resort to faith, rather than a prediction
grounded in reason. However, although Kant invokes the idea of Provi-
dence in this context, he makes it clear that he is not appealing to divine
intervention. Here, as in his Idea for a Universal History he talks of
purpose unfolding in the course of events. ‘The mechanical process of
nature visibly exhibits the purposive plan of producing concord among
men, even against their will and indeed by means of their very discord’
(p. 108).
From our temporal perspective, the teleological thrust of Kant’s argu-
mentation in support of the recognition of cosmopolitan rights may well
be disconcerting. By way of clarification, he notes that, although his
version of providence involves a teleology which ‘indicates the foresight
of a wise agency governing nature’, this is not a mechanism which intrudes
on the rational explanation of ‘secular events’ (p. 109). He insists that he is
not offering an alternative explanation of why particular things happen as
they do. For that would presuppose a knowledge of God’s actions, which
would amount to a theoretical knowledge of what transcends Nature; and
that is for Kant impossible. ‘Modesty forbids us to speak of providence as
something we can recognize, for this would mean donning the wings of Icarus
and presuming to approach the mystery of its inscrutable intentions’ (p. 109).
Kant sees the understanding of providence—like that of ‘all relations
between the forms of things and their ultimate purposes’—as, rather,
something we can and must ‘supply mentally’; we conceive of its possibil-
ity by analogy with human artifices (p. 109). Yet, like the concept of
perpetual peace itself, he insists, this appeal to Nature’s purposes has a ‘very
real foundation in practice’, which makes it ‘our duty to promote it’.
146 KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM : PERPETUAL PEACE
Within this teleological framework, even war itself is incorporated into the
assured ultimate goal of perpetual peace. By means of war, Nature has
driven human beings in all directions so that they come to inhabit even the
most inhospitable regions of the earth. ‘In seeing to it that men could live
everywhere on earth, nature has at the same time despotically willed that
they should live everywhere, even against their own inclinations. And this
obligation does not rest upon any concept of duty which might bind them
to fulfill it in accordance with a moral law; on the contrary, nature has
chosen war as a means of attaining this end.’ War is ‘nature’s means of
peopling the whole earth’ (p. 111).
Is war then ‘natural’? Kant seems to come close to saying so. War, he
observes, ‘seems to be ingrained in human nature, and even to be regarded
as something noble to which man is inspired by his love of honour,
without selfish motives’ (p. 111). Warlike courage is generally valued,
‘not just in times of war (as might be expected), but also in order that there
may be war’ (p. 111). War itself, he says, is ‘invested with an inherent
dignity’; it is eulogized even by philosophers as ‘a kind of ennobling
influence on man’ (p. 112). Kant’s discussion falls short of endorsing
those exultant attitudes towards war. Yet neither does he clearly condemn
them. What is clear is that, regardless of what human beings think of war,
Nature acts through it to ‘further her own end with respect to the human
race as an animal species’ (p. 112). War, far from being at odds with
Nature, is Nature’s ally.
In his Idea for a Universal History Kant spoke of a ‘purpose in nature’
behind the apparently senseless course of human events—a purpose which
acts through the unfolding history of ‘creatures who act without a plan of
their own’. In Perpetual Peace he presents these purposes of nature as
enacted in relation to each element of his threefold distinction between
different ‘areas of public right’. With regard to political rights within a
state, what the purposes of Nature demand is that the constitution be so
designed that, although citizens are opposed in their ‘private attitudes’,
their public conduct will be the same as if they were not thus divided. The
opposing views of individual citizens must counterbalance and thus ‘in-
hibit’ one another (p. 113).
In this context of counterbalancing forces, Kant argues that only the
republican form of constitution can do ‘complete justice to the rights of
man’. Yet even if people were not compelled by ‘internal dissent’ to accept
the coercion of public laws, war would ‘produce the same effect from
A COSMOPOLITAN FUTURE 147
humanity—as distinct from the rights that accrue from their membership
of particular associations or polities. It is important to keep in mind here
that Kant is at pains to clearly distinguish the temporary right of sojourn
from any right to permanent presence, which he construes as a special
privilege bestowed by the sovereign on specific foreigners. For Kant such
privileges presuppose that to some extent the visitor has already earned
exemption from the status of stranger. The ‘right of hospitality’ is in
contrast supposed to apply to all human beings by virtue of their being
human. To use the language of more ancient versions of the cosmopolitan
ideal, dating back to the Stoics, we have this right as ‘citizens of the world’.
Kant takes up the issue of cosmopolitan rights again in his Metaphysics of
Morals, published in 1797, two years after Perpetual Peace.4 There he
distinguishes this category of rights from ‘international rights’—the rights
of states in relation to one another: the rights at stake in war and peace.
Again, he appeals to the finitude of the earth’s surface to justify the idea of
cosmopolitan right. However it becomes clear in this later exposition of
the concept that these rights are supposed to be grounded in the coming
together of what Kant calls ‘political right’—rights associated with aggre-
gates of individual human beings—and ‘international rights’, which apply
to aggregates of ‘peoples’. The conceptual interrelations between these
kinds of rights make the status of Kantian cosmopolitan rights a vexed
interpretive issue—not least because the bearers of cosmopolitan rights
seem to inhabit an indeterminate zone between individuals and ‘peoples’.
Kant appeals again to the finitude of the earth’s surface to justify
cosmopolitan rights. The idea of a peaceful international community
formed from all those of ‘the earth’s peoples’ who can enter into active
relations with one another is, he says, not a ‘philanthropic principle of
ethics’ but ‘a principle of right’, grounded in the spherical shape of the
planet they inhabit. Cosmopolitan rights regulate human commerce—in
the broad sense of reciprocal interaction between peoples. Such rights
confer on ‘the world’s citizens’ the right to attempt to enter a community
with everyone else and to visit—though not to settle in—all regions of the
earth with this intention. Kant explicitly appeals to these limited rights of
visitation in condemnation of the specious arguments commonly invoked
4
The relevant passages of The Metaphysics of Morals—in ‘The Theory of Right’, Part II,
Section 1, and Section II (#43 and #62)—can be found in extracts included in Kant: Political
Writings, pp. 137 and 172–3.
A COSMOPOLITAN FUTURE 149
5
Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 1, ‘On Hospitality: Re-Reading Kant’s
Cosmopolitan Right’, pp. 25–48.
150 KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM : PERPETUAL PEACE
members and non-members. They thus contrast with the rights of ‘per-
manent visitorship’ which were granted in pre-modern Europe—for
example to the Jews who spread to other territories, especially Holland,
after their persecution in Spain in the fifteenth century. Kant’s ‘right of
hospitality’ or ‘right of resort’ suggests an entitlement to immediate though
transient protection, which arises precisely from the status of stranger.
Benhabib, however, goes on to point out that, without Kant’s accom-
panying teleological framework, his arguments for the recognition of such
rights inevitably appear to carry little force in the context of contemporary
debate on the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.
Kant’s arguments for cosmopolitan rights are encompassed by the
broader objective he offered in his other essays on enlightenment; they
belong in his bold sketch of a cosmopolitan future. His conviction of the
ongoing progress of the human race stands or falls with his teleological
vision of Nature’s purposes for human beings. That may well mean that for
us it falls rather than stands. It is not clear how a viable contemporary
version of such rights might be extricated from the grand vision which
frames it.
Benhabib has returned to the consideration of Kantian cosmopolitan
rights in relation to contemporary issues of migration and citizenship in a
later book, A New Cosmopolitanism,6 in which she explores the tensions
between the ‘universalism’ of cosmopolitan aspirations and the particu-
larity—the partiality and ‘boundedness’—of democratic communities as
they now exist. We are witnessing, she argues there, a ‘disaggregation’ of
citizenship in which entitlement to social rights has become dissociated
from shared collective identity and political participation. The issues of
contemporary cosmopolitanism raised in this volume by Benhabib and
her respondents are wide-ranging and complex. They concern the
evolving interactions of ethics and politics with local and international
law. However, the unresolved tensions between ‘universalist’ and ‘par-
ticularist’ strands in contemporary ideas of cosmopolitanism—between
the demands of ‘citizenship of the world’ and the restrictive citizenship
requirements of particular polities—have continuities with some of the
disparate strands in Enlightenment reconstructions of ancient cosmopol-
itan ideals.
6
Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
A COSMOPOLITAN FUTURE 151
7
Arendt’s Lectures on Kant, together with some of her other reflections on judging, are
included in Ronald Beiner, ed., Hannah Arendt: Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982). Page references to this collection are included in
parentheses throughout my discussion.
HANNAH ARENDT ON IMAGINATION AND JUDGEMENT 153
The faculty that makes that ‘expansion’ possible, Arendt notes, is called
‘imagination’. In elaborating the point, she invokes Kant’s account of
‘world citizens’ in Perpetual Peace ‘To think with an enlarged mentality
means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting. (Compare the right
to visit in Perpetual Peace.)’ (p. 43).
Arendt’s account of the connections between imagination and judge-
ment offers a new angle on Kant’s distinction between genius—required
for the production of beautiful objects—and taste, which is involved in
judging them. She draws out the implications for judgement in terms of an
expansion of imagined perspectives in a sociable human world. Judgement
reflects upon others, taking their possible judgements into account. ‘This is
necessary because I am human and cannot live outside the company of
men. I judge as a member of this community and not as a member of a
supersensible world . . .’ (p. 67). Hence the connections between judge-
ment and the capacity for ‘enlarged thought’.
There are strong echoes here of Adam Smith’s transitions from the
perceptions of actual others, through the idea of merely possible alterna-
tive perspectives, to the construction of the idea of an ‘impartial spectator’.
Interpreting comments by Kant in the Critique of Judgement, Arendt says
that it indicates ‘enlarged thought’ if someone disregards the subjective
private conditions of their own judgement, and reflects from what she calls
a ‘general standpoint’, which they can only determine by placing them-
selves at the standpoint of others (p. 71). For Arendt this is a way of giving
content to Kant’s special meaning of a sensus communis—a ‘common
sense’—as in effect a ‘community sense’, related to the communicability
of feeling. It is to this sensus communis that judgement appeals; and this gives
judgement its distinctive form of validity. Judgements do not have the
validity of ‘cognitive’ or ‘scientific’ propositions. On Arendt’s reading,
such propositions are ‘not judgements, properly speaking’ because they
are, in contrast to judgements, compelled by the evidence either of one’s
senses or of one’s mind (p. 72). Such ‘compulsion’ leaves no room for the
exercise of judgement.
Drawing on Arendt’s account of the ramifications of Kant’s versions of
genius and of judgement, the character created by Diderot in Rameau’s
Nephew could be said to have a touch of genius; but he cannot be regarded
as a man of ‘enlarged mind’—a man of judgement. His leaps of imagination
are not moderated by the capacity to think himself into the perspectives—
actual or possible—of others. This character’s imagination may ‘go visiting’
154 KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM : PERPETUAL PEACE
but it is not a well-behaved guest. Its flaws are not just a matter of etiquette
or decorum, any more than the foreign visitors whose behaviour Kant
deplores are guilty only of bad manners. This is an imagination which
remains subjective—immersed in its own particularity. It operates without
the steadying force of ‘common sense’—in Kant’s special meaning of
communicability of feeling, as well as in the more obvious everyday
meaning. That is why, despite the appeal of his engaging antics, Rameau’s
nephew remains emotionally chaotic—a figure of pathos.
There are broader implications too of Arendt’s treatment of Kant for
the understanding of objectivity in relation to the Enlightenment texts
discussed in this book. She concludes from her brief analysis of the place of
judgement in ‘the life of the mind’ that it would be a great error to believe
that Kantian ‘critical thinking’ stands somewhere between ‘dogmatism’
and ‘scepticism’: ‘It is actually the way to leave these alternatives behind’
(p. 32). In other words, objectivity in judgement is not to be construed as a
source of ‘certainty’. It has a different agenda.
The capacity to imagine ourselves into the situations of others involves a
constant readiness to adjust and adapt. The opposition between ‘relativism’
and ‘absolutism’, in relation to the attainability of truth, is out of place
within this frame. Likewise, the ideal of a cosmopolitan style of imagining
does not belong within the discourse of certainty; here the issue of
relativism is by-passed.
Kant himself provides a useful conceptual connection for understanding
his version of cosmopolitanism. In a passage in his Anthropology he talks of
‘pluralism’, which he defines as ‘the attitude of not being occupied with
oneself as the whole world, but regarding and conducting oneself as a
citizen of the world’.8 Cosmopolitan imagining, construed in terms of that
understanding of pluralism, is a form of objective judgement. It transcends
the subjectivity of a limited viewpoint. Yet it does not yield epistemo-
logical certainty—not because it falls short of that goal, but because it has a
different role in the life of the mind.
8
Cited by Ronald Beiner, in his interpretive essay in Hannah Arendt: Lectures on Kant’s
Political Philosophy, p. 120. The reference is to Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View, trans. Mary Gregor (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), p. 12.
Conclusion
Looking Back on the Enlightenment
1
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1952), Book II, Part I, Sec. 40, p. 152.
156 CONCLUSION
The usual relations between passivity and activity are here reversed, so
that activity resides in a lack of movement: it is those minds which stand
back, rather than ‘following’, which are ‘non-passive’. However, this is a
kind of passivity which makes possible a superior kind of mental activity.
Kant goes on to explicitly link the ideal of a non-passive mind—an enlarged
mind—with the capacity to actively shift to the standpoint of other minds.
It achieves this shift, not by slavishly following the would-be knowers,
but by imagining itself into other perspectives. The requirement of ‘non-
passivity’ is delivered by the capacity to reflect on one’s own judgement
from a universal standpoint; yet this activity of the mind resides in a ‘merely
negative’ attitude. It is, in Kant’s sense, a ‘critical’ attitude.
The readings of Enlightenment texts offered in this book have tracked
through various forms this idea of the processes of enlightenment as
an ‘enlargement of mind’. We have seen it emerge as a capacity for
detachment—through the exercise of imagination—from the limitations
of subjective standpoints; and as a capacity for expansion of sympathetic
engagement with others. There are echoes, in Kant’s talk of a ‘merely
negative’ attitude, of Hume’s account of the intellectual character of the
Sceptic; and also of the enriching transformations of wonder in the experi-
ence of Montesquieu’s Persian travellers. The cross-cultural perceptions
enacted in Persian Letters prefigure the shifting perspectives at play in Adam
Smith’s model of the impartial spectator, which is in turn echoed in Kant’s
talk of the shift to a ‘universal standpoint’. Voltaire’s resort to the strategy
of multiple voices—allowing a detachment from the authorial voice, and
conjuring up the imagining of a public conversational space—can also be
seen in retrospect as setting the scene for Kant’s much more theorized
concept of sensus communis.
This thread which I have followed through a number of texts is of
course just one in the varied and complex pattern which can be seen in
retrospect as ‘Enlightenment thought’. Yet Kant’s link between enlighten-
ment and the ‘negative attitude’ implicit in judgement serves to highlight
just how crucial a thread it was. It is an aspect of the Enlightenment
tradition which has, however, proved easy to overlook amidst the exultant
celebration of Enlightenment optimism about the ever expanding reaches
of human knowledge. The pursuit of certainty in matters of scientific
knowledge was undeniably also a significant thread in Enlightenment
thinking. Kant deals with it in his Critique of Pure Reason, by differentiating
the well-grounded knowledge of ‘appearances’ from delusory claims of
LOOKING BACK ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT 157
2
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. R. Beiner (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 35.
158 CONCLUSION
only on how contemporary philosophers now see Kant, but more gener-
ally on the retrospective understanding of ‘the Enlightenment’.
In the context of contemporary divisions of philosophical subject areas,
Kant’s treatment of judgement in the third Critique is often relegated to
aesthetic theory; and its significance is then overshadowed by attention to
Kantian epistemological and moral theories. The ethical and political
ramifications of his treatment of judgement—the issues explored by
Arendt—have largely gone missing from the concerns of professional
philosophers, exacerbating a general lack of attention to that aspect of
‘the life of the mind’.
Arendt’s claims about the demise of judgement in ordinary life, in the
context of the Eichmann trial, were controversial; and they may well
seem counter-intuitive in relation to the present. We readily praise and
blame individuals for good or bad judgement; and we readily talk too of
collective decision-making in public policy as well or ill judged. Yet the
suggestion that there may be an increasing distrust of the capacity to judge
does resonate with aspects of current discourse which invoke a need for
‘certainty’ or ‘security’—even in situations where there is no possibility of
such expectations being satisfied. Reluctance to leave space for the exer-
cise of judgement surfaces in contemporary concern with circumscribing
risk—in calls for pre-emptive action in anticipation of terrorist acts; in
trends towards mandatory detention; and in demands for mandatory
sentencing, where even judges can be deprived of the capacity to judge.
In times when the capacity to judge is neglected in philosophical
reflection and distrusted or restricted in practice, it may be salutary to
read or re-read works which speak to us from a time when the ideal of an
‘enlarged mind’—a mind engaged in the free exercise of imagination
in judgement—was freshly articulated. Also, at times when ‘the Enlight-
enment’ is being invoked as a unitary signifier of western values, it may be
salutary to recapture something of the ambivalences at play in those
formative texts. It may be a good time to return to writings which are
concerned, not with shaping the contours of a recognized intellectual
movement, but with enacting and celebrating a process of thought.
Enlightenment thinkers have left a complex legacy. Their ideas were of
course not entirely new; many of them were revived and restated from
ancient sources. Amidst their continuities with those sources, they recon-
figured intellect, imagination, and emotion in new ways of understanding the
structure and operations of the human mind. They offered a transformation
LOOKING BACK ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT 159
3
Aayan Hirsi Ali, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (London:
Fourth Estate, 2010), p. 19.
162 CONCLUSION
4
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 255.
164 CONCLUSION
5
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus,
1999), pp. 52–5.
LOOKING BACK ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT 167
British, French and American Enlightenments (London: Vintage Books, 2008). She
emphasizes the contribution of Enlightenment thought to the formation of ‘social
virtues’ of continuing ethical relevance. From that ethical perspective, the thinkers
of the British Enlightenment—moral philosophers such as Hutcheson, Hume, and
Smith—take on a greater significance than the more politically oriented French
philosophes. The Roads to Modernity is also of interest for its treatment of the varying
forms of Enlightenment thinking as distinctive ‘mentalities’. On Himmelfarb’s
account, the Enlightenment—as enacted in Britain, in France, and in America—
yields different forms of what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘the habits of the mind’
and ‘the habits of the heart’ that make up ‘the whole moral and intellectual state of
a people’. In that context, she presents the thought of eighteenth-century British
moral philosophers as offering possibilities for a defence and revival of exemplary
British values.
From a more critical perspective, in another very different approach, John Gray
has offered a provocative critique of the upshot of the ‘Enlightenment project’ in
his book Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age
(London and New York: Routledge, 2007), originally published by Routledge in
1995 and reissued, with a new Introduction, in their Routledge Classics Series.
Drawing on Isaiah Berlin’s critiques of Enlightenment ideals from the perspective
of the supposedly greater ‘pluralism’ of a later ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, Gray
argues that the Enlightenment project—construed as a programme for the uni-
versal civilizing force of reason—has undermined itself, and is now exhausted as a
movement, though its cultural effects may be irreversible. Gray’s disaffection with
what he takes to be the Enlightenment project centres on its alleged ‘universalism’
and its dreams of endless progress towards the improvement of the human
condition.
Tzvetan Todorov’s In Defence of the Enlightenment, trans. Gila Walker (London:
Atlantic Books, 2009) offers a perceptive response to some common contemporary
criticisms of Enlightenment ideals. His account of the core principles of the
Enlightenment makes Rousseau’s thought central, emphasizing the understanding
of autonomy and the relations between ideas of truth and goodness. Of particular
interest, for my concerns in this book, is his treatment of the conceptual interplay
between ideas of the unity of the human race and the recognition of cultural
difference—between the celebration of a plurality of cultures and the affirmation
of universal human rights. His defence of the Enlightenment in a contemporary
context offers thoughtful discussion of issues arising from the legacy of colonialism,
the ramifications of globalization, and changing attitudes to torture.
The very idea of a unitary ‘Enlightenment project’ has been criticized by James
Schmidt in an interesting and important set of interrelated essays. Of particular
interest are ‘What Enlightenment Project?’ Political Theory, vol. 28, no. 6, December
2000, 734–57; ‘Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians,
FURTHER READING 171
and the Oxford English Dictionary’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 64, no. 3, 2003,
421–43; ‘What Enlightenment Was, What It Still Might Be, and Why Kant May
Have Been Right After All’, American Behavioural Scientist, vol. 49, no. 5, January
2006, 647–63; ‘Misunderstanding the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”: Ven-
turi, Habermas and Foucault’, History of European Ideas, vol. 37, no. 1, 2011, 43–52.
Several of his pieces on ‘the Enlightenment project’ are available online through his
web page at Boston University.
James Schmidt has also edited an excellent collection, What is Enlightenment?
Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996), which includes material taken from Enlightenment
sources, along with an interesting selection of more recent philosophical discus-
sions. His Introduction to the volume includes a useful discussion of Kant’s
response to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in its intellectual context.
Also relevant to my introductory discussion of Kantian themes is a volume of
essays edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt, Kant’s Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009). My discussions of Kant in this book complement my
earlier essay in that volume, ‘Providence as Progress: Kant’s Variations on a Tale of
Origins’, pp. 200–15.
On Kant’s identification of the ‘age of Frederick’ with the ‘age of enlighten-
ment’ see Christopher M. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia
1600–1947 (London: Allen Lane, 2006), Chapter 8, ‘Dare to Know’, especially
pp. 247–57. Voltaire offered a less adulatory account of Frederick the Great than
Kant’s in his entertaining memoir—drawing on their volatile friendship—written
at about the same time as Candide in 1759, and published posthumously in 1784:
Memoirs of the Life of Monsieur de Voltaire, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus
Press, 2007).
For Isaiah Berlin’s ideas on a ‘counter-Enlightenment’, which repudiated
the assumptions of the Enlightenment and set the scene for Romanticism, see
especially his books Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London:
Hogarth Press, 1979), and The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1999), especially Chapter 2, ‘The First Attack on Enlighten-
ment’, pp. 21–45. The idea of a ‘counter-Enlightenment’ is challenged by James
Schmidt in his paper ‘Misunderstanding the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”:
Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault’, mentioned above. The issue is also explored
in Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler, eds., Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment:
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (American Philosophical Society,
2003). Berlin’s interpretations of Hamann and Herder—central to the idea of a
‘counter-Enlightenment’—are challenged by Robert Norton in ‘The Myth of the
Counter-Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 68, no. 4, 2007, 635–58.
The readings of Enlightenment texts which I have offered are at odds in some
172 FURTHER READING
Voltaire’s Voices
Hume’s Sceptic
For a brief informative overview of the relations between ancient and modern
scepticism, see Myles Burnyeat’s Introduction to his edited volume The Skeptical
Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 1–8. In addition to
Burnyeat’s own essay ‘Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?’—discussed in this
chapter—that volume contains a useful essay by Robert J. Fogelin, ‘The Tendency
of Hume’s Skepticism’ (pp. 397–412). Also relevant is another essay by Burnyeat,
‘The Sceptic in his Place and Time’, in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and
Quentin Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984). There, Burnyeat contrasts modern and ancient versions of scepticism
with respect to the ‘insulation’ of ordinary beliefs from philosophical doubts.
Hume’s personality and intellectual character are beautifully discussed in the
standard biography, by E. C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1970). A new ‘intellectual biography’ is under preparation by James Harris
for publication with Cambridge University Press. Harris has also published ‘The
Place of the Ancients in the Moral Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in
FURTHER READING 175
The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 1, 2010, 1–11; and ‘Reid and Hume on
the Possibility of Character’, in Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning, eds., Character,
Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011), pp. 31–47.
For an interesting exploration of Hume’s attitude to religion, and of Samuel
Johnson’s attitude to Hume, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation,
vol. 1, Chapter 7, Sec. 3, ‘David Hume: The Complete Modern Pagan’, pp. 401–22.
Hume’s ideals of intellectual character—and the understanding of his own
intellectual character—have been central themes in Annette Baier’s important
work on his philosophy. See especially A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on
Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1991); Moral Preju-
dices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Death
and Character: Further Reflections on Hume (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008); and her essay, ‘Hume: The Reflective Women’s Epistemologist?’ in
Anne Jaap Jacobson, ed., Feminist Interpretations of David Hume (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 19–38 (also published in Moral
Prejudices).
I discuss Hume’s essays on the Epicurean, the Stoic, the Platonist, and the
Sceptic, in ‘Hume on the Passion for Truth’, in Feminist Interpretations of David
Hume, pp. 39–59; and Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in Chapter 7 of
Providence Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 265–78.
The Encyclopedia
Rameau’s Nephew
My discussion of Rameau’s Nephew has benefited especially from insights in Jean
Starobinski’s ‘The Man Who Told Secrets’, New York Review of Books, vol. 20, no.
4, 22 March 1973, pp. 18–21, and James Schmidt’s ‘The Fool’s Truth: Diderot,
Goethe and Hegel’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 57, no. 4, 1996, 625–44.
For an illuminating discussion of the German reception of Rameau’s Nephew see
Margaret Stoljar, ‘The Musician’s Madness: Goethe and Hegel on Le Neveu de
Rameau’, Australian Journal of French Studies, vol. 24, No. 3, 1987, 309–32.
The real Rameau’s nephew, and his resemblances to the character created by
Diderot, are discussed by Milton F. Seidon in ‘Jean Francois Rameau and Diderot’s
Neveu’, Diderot Studies, vol. 1, 1949, 143–91. On the musical background to
Rameau’s Nephew—including the debate between Rousseau and Rameau senior
on harmony versus melody as the primary source of musical expression—see
Cynthia Verba’s chapter, ‘Music and the Enlightenment’, in Fitzpatrick, Jones,
Knellworth, and McCalman, eds., The Enlightenment World, pp. 307–22; and Mark
Darlow, ‘Diderot’s Voice(s): Music and Reform, from the Querelle des Bouffons
to Le Neveu de Rameau’, in James Fowler, ed., New Essays on Diderot (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 203–19.
Pauline Kleingeld gives a useful overview of the range and history of political ideas
of cosmopolitanism in her entry on ‘Cosmopolitanism’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy. See also her essay, ‘Kant’s Changing Cosmopolitanism’, in Amélie
Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt, eds., Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide, pp. 171–86. For a detailed and informative
account of Kant’s concept of cosmopolitan right in relation to other German
FURTHER READING 179
cosmopolitan theories see her book Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical
Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
In addition to the collections on Kant’s political essays already mentioned as
further reading in relation to the Introduction to this book, there is a useful volume
edited by James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Perpetual Peace: Essays on
Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). For contemporary
perspectives on Kantian cosmopolitanism see, in that volume, Jürgen Habermas,
‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hind-
sight’ (pp. 113–54) and Martha Nussbaum, ‘Kant and Cosmopolitanism’ (pp. 25–
58); and also Chapter 7 of Pauline Kleingeld’s Kant and Cosmopolitanism, ‘Kant’s
Cosmopolitanism and Current Philosophical Debates’.
For broader discussions of cosmopolitanism in the context of contemporary
political philosophy, see Jeremy Waldron, ‘What is Cosmopolitan?’, Journal of
Political Philosophy, vol. 8, 2000, 227–43; Gillian Brock, Global Justice (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009); Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, eds., The
Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005); David Held, Cosmopolitanism: A Defence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003);
and Cosmopolitanism: Ideals, Realities and Deficits (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010);
and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(London: Allen Lane, 2006)—a book which engagingly combines the genres of
political essay and memoir.
Seyla Benhabib’s The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) contains useful chapters on Kant on
‘hospitality’ and cosmopolitan right (pp. 25–48); and on Hannah Arendt’s
treatment—in Part II of The Origins of Totalitarianism—of ‘the right to have
rights’ (pp. 49–69). Benhabib’s later book, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006) contains her two Tanner Lectures on Human
Values, with responses by Bonnie Honig, Will Kymlicka, and Jeremy Waldron,
together with a reply from Benhabib.
Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the ‘right to have rights’ is in Part II of her Origins
of Totalitarianism (1951) (rev. edn., New York: Schocken, 2004). She discusses the
situation of refugees also in her essay ‘We Refugees’, published in 1943 in The
Menorah Journal; republished in Marc Robinson, ed., Altogether Elsewhere: Writers in
Exile (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994), pp. 110–19. Arendt’s ‘We Refugees’ is
discussed by Gorgio Agamben in a brief essay written in 1993, translated as
‘Beyond Human Rights’ in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought
in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and
also included in Agamben’s Means without End: Notes on Politics (Theory Out of
Bounds, vol. 20) (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
On the bearing of the idea of ‘the right to have rights’ on contemporary attitudes to
asylum seekers and refugees, see Frank Michelman, ‘Parsing “A Right to have
180 FURTHER READING
Rights’ ”, Constellations, vol. 3, 1996, 200–9. Arendt and Agamben are also dis-
cussed in relation to contemporary refugee issues in Andy Lamey, Frontier Justice:
The Global Refugee Crisis and What To Do About It (St Lucia: University of
Queensland Press, 2011).
Arendt’s reconstruction of a Kantian political philosophy can be found, with a
very helpful interpretive essay, in Ronald Beiner, ed., Hannah Arendt: Lectures on
Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). For useful
and engaging discussions of Arendt’s version of judgement see Max Deutscher,
Judgment After Arendt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and In Sensible Judgement (Alder-
shot: Ashgate, 2013).
Samuel Fleischacker, in A Third Concept of Liberty (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1999) integrates themes from Kant and Adam Smith through readings
of The Critique of Judgement and The Wealth of Nations, arguing that both authors
think of liberty as a matter of acting in accordance with the capacity for judgement.
He presents this approach as a third kind of liberty, distinct from Isaiah Berlin’s
‘positive’ freedom—construed as participation in the political realm—and his
‘negative’ freedom, construed as a lack of interference.
Conclusion
Giovanna Borradori’s Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas
and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003) brings
together two important perspectives on contemporary terrorism in the context of a
critical reassessment of the political ideals of the Enlightenment. The dialogue with
Derrida, especially, offers interesting insights into how a rethinking of Enlighten-
ment ideals might contribute to a better understanding of contemporary issues of
tolerance and hospitality to refugees.
On the history of ideas of universal human rights in relation to the Enlighten-
ment ideals, see Lynn Hunt’s excellent Inventing Human Rights: A History (New
York and London: W. W. Norton, 2007). Chapter 1, “ ‘Torrents of Emotion”:
Reading Novels and Imagining Equality’, is especially interesting in highlighting
eighteenth-century emphasis on empathy and inwardness—enacted in the devel-
opment of the literary genre of the novel.
On the role of Enlightenment thought in the development of modern ideas of
‘the secular’ Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008) is invaluable. See especially Part IV, ‘Narratives of Secularisation’,
pp. 423–538. Also of interest is his later essay ‘What Does Secularism Mean?’, in his
collection Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 303–25. Taylor’s view is ultimately that the
‘immanent’ version of moral motivation, associated with the Enlightenment, is
impoverished by the absence of a viable sense of transcendence. Yet the discovery
FURTHER READING 181
refugees, see asylum seekers cosmic order 24, 32–3, 95–6, 120
relativism 25–6, 27, 33, 104, 154, 157, detachment 96–9, 106–7
165; see also objectivity Swift, Jonathan 21
religion 42–3, 46, 49, 51–3, 56–8, 79, sympathy 85–92, 144, 152
82–5, 88, 162–3; see also deism;
secular, idea of Taylor, Charles 163, 180–1
Revolution, French 144 theatre 131–2
Romanticism 1–3, 164–7, 171–2 Todorov, Tzvetan 170
Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 22–3, 130–2, tolerance 4, 40–4, 46, 161–2
166, 173 torture 25, 54
Russell, Bertrand 6–7 travel tales 21–4; see also narrative