Wicked Company: Holbach's salon, Diderot, & friends (3)

I finally finished reading this 384-page saga: A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment by Philipp Blom. What an adventure!

It is written for the general reader and is the most effective argument for the Radical Enlightenment I have seen, particularly the Epilogue following the account of the deaths of Holbach and Diderot, the heroes of the book, esp. Diderot. The final chapter alone is radical.

A recap of the contents:

Dedication
Introduction

FATHERS AND SONS
CHAPTER 1 - CITY OF LIGHTS
CHAPTER 2 - JOURNEYS
CHAPTER 3 - ENCYCLOPÉDIE: GRAND AMBITIONS
CHAPTER 4 - CHEZ M. HOLBACH
CHAPTER 5 - AUDACITY
CHAPTER 6 - CHRISTIANITY UNVEILED
CHAPTER 7 - ONLY THE WICKED MAN LIVES ALONE

MARVELOUS MACHINES
CHAPTER 8 - LE BON DAVID
CHAPTER 9 - A NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
CHAPTER 10 - SHEIKHS OF THE RUE ROYALE
CHAPTER 11 - GRANDVAL
CHAPTER 12 - THE BEAR

THE ISLAND OF LOVE
CHAPTER 13 - CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
CHAPTER 14 - THE MOST UNGRATEFUL DOGG IN THE WORLD
CHAPTER 15 - FAME AND FATE
CHAPTER 16 - THE EMPRESS AND THE BEAN KING
CHAPTER 17 - SEX IN PARADISE
CHAPTER 18 - FIFTY HIRED PRIESTS

EPILOGUE
A GLOSSARY OF PROTAGONISTS
A VERY SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
INDEX

My previous post on this book sketchily covered up through part 2 (chapter 12). Chapter 13 begins with Cesare Beccaria's argument against capital punishment, which, curiously, did not impress Diderot. Diderot was not a systematic thinker, and he was skeptical of the possibilities of both ideal government and rational administration. Unlike other skeptics, though, Diderot was not attracted to conservatism. He developed progressive views on specific issues, notably women's rights and education.

The subject of chapter 14--"the most ungrateful dogg"--is Rousseau, who turned against all his friends, including Diderot.

Chapter 15 is about the triumph and subversive nature of the Encyclopédie. The subversion, of course, had to be slyly embedded in various entries. The common theme of Diderot's cohort was the advocacy of reason, but each person had a different orientation to its role and potential. Diderot was more skeptical about the possibility of the actualization of reason in the world.

Diderot’s greatness as a philosopher lies partly in the constant, pulsating tension between rationality and instinct. In contrast to Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Kant, who suggested a totally rational world order that would free individuals from the troubling influence of irrational forces within themselves, Diderot wrote about a complex, contradictory, and essentially dark human nature illuminated only rarely by the sunlight of reason. Holbach believed that life must be liberated from superstition and oppression, but he was essentially serene in his belief in reason; for Diderot, life was always marred by error and destruction because human beings can never be purely rational.

And:

For Diderot, the body was everything there was, and reason was a bodily function with a tendency to transcendental megalomania. True insight lay not in fighting, ignoring, or sublimating physical desire, but in building a life in which it had its place. The tension between reason and instinct appeared at precisely this moment. As a philosopher who wanted to change the general way of thinking, he had to believe in the power of persuasion and of virtue, but at the same time his materialist conviction made him uncertain of both.

Chapter 16 details Diderot's experience of Empress Catherine of Russia, who took up his offer to buy his library on condition that he become its librarian and visit her in St. Petersburg. Life in France was becoming dangerous for heretics, and despite Diderot's wariness about people in power, he reluctantly accepted. Catherine feted him and received his ideas with great enthusiasm, accepting his unconventional manner and lack of toadying . . . up to a point. He got overly absorbed in his role:

Diderot backed up his irrepressible stream of ideas with a series of memoranda on different aspects of modernizing the Russian empire according to Enlightened principles, including the importance of tolerance, the promotion of manufacturing, a complete overhaul of the administration, a draft constitution, and a plan for a new university system. Despotic rule and total authority would inevitably lead to a society marked by servility, superstition, and lack of initiative, he told his hostess, the most absolute of absolute monarchs.

He was not prepared for the rebuff that followed. He realized that he was being used to polish the public image of a despot. Returning home in ill health, he contemplated the question of whether one can be more in a deterministic world, resuming working on his Sterne-inspired novel, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master.

Chapter 17 provides some vital information new to me. Report of the encounter of Europeans with the very different mores of the people of Tahiti made Diderot a firm opponent of colonialism. His 1772 essay Supplement to Bougainville’s Journey, or Dialogue Between A and B About the Disadvantages of Attaching Moral Ideas to Certain Physical Acts Which Do Not Call for Them roundly condemns European Christian mores and the European mission of conquest. Nothing is more strikingly different in the two cultures than their sexual views and practices. In his Unconnected Thoughts on Painting Diderot contrasts European sexual prudery with its uninhibited, explicit depiction of violence, blood, and gore. Diderot at least thinks that art can tell us how to improve.

The creativity of art is nothing else than the erotic life of the mind, a common ritual allowing us to accept nature, pleasure, and pain. The greatest, the deepest pleasure of all, erotic love, is the best incentive for creating a society more in tune with our nature and ultimately with nature’s drive towards the survival of the species.

Diderot does not romanticize the Tahitians in the European mold of the 'noble savage', emphasizing that the Tahitians thought that sex should result in fertility. It seems then, that Diderot emphasizes the relativity of customs rather than an absolute ideal. However, the Tahitians lived more rationally in accord with nature than the Europeans. Diderot was far from irreproachable in his depiction of non-European peoples, however he drew egalitarian conclusions in his writings, and his view of sexuality and human nature was at the opposite pole from Rousseau's. Above all, Diderot was vehemently opposed to slavery.

Diderot was an admirer of the United States. Blom deliberates on the possible meetings of the representatives of the American Enlightenment (Jefferson, Franklin) with Holbach's circle.

Chapter 18 depicts Holbach and Diderot in their old age as they wind down toward death. France's own aristocrats shunned Holbach's circle, but foreign aristocrats flocked to it. Holbach and Diderot remained no less suspicious of the aristocracy. Diderot's friend Grimm had turned reactionary. Diderot dreaded the publication of Rousseau's Confessions and became increasingly concerned with his reputation, the only 'immortality' he believed in. In his old age, Diderot was running out of energy and friends. Holbach was still alive, but the two communicated less and less. Diderot died in 1784, Holbach in 1789.

Diderot, Holbach, and their circle had made history, redefining the terms of the debate between religion and science, of politics and morality. Their only judge, they thought, would be posterity. They had no idea just how right they were, no means of knowing how posterity would treat them, and they would have been appalled to think that, having weathered and triumphed over the storms of their own time, their legacy would be all but obliterated by what was to come. They would be practically forgotten for over a century.

Wicked Company: Holbach's salon, Diderot, & friends (2)

I am past the halfway mark through the incredibly detailed, highly readable volume A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment by Philipp Blom. There are a number of interesting characters in it, and the contrast of characters, styles, philosophies, and behaviors is most interesting. There is the cooperation as well as temperamental and stylistic differences between the heroes of the book, Holbach and Diderot, at the center of the Radical Enlightenment. I also take note of the different perspectives and social roles of Rousseau, Voltaire, and David Hume.

All of the Frenchmen had their shortcomings when it comes to applying their principles to their wives and/or mistresses. Diderot is portrayed as more passionate, more bold in his rejection of traditional morality, and livelier in his writing style than his friend Holbach. (He edited much of the lead out of Holbach's prose.) Both are the heroes of the book, but Diderot comes off as more well-rounded and vital, though Holbach's literary output was prodigious as was his table. Both sought to re-ground morality casting aside not only the repressive morality of Catholicism but all theistically based notions. Nature is the basis of their rational world view and the fulfillment of pleasure combined with cooperation the basis of their morality. Diderot nevertheless was totally unrestrained in his advocacy of sexuality, casting aside whatever inhibitions (Stoical tendencies) that might still be found in Holbach's perspective. (Note though Diderot's disdain for La Mettrie.)

Rousseau was a piece of work. A product of malformed sexuality and upbringing, his paranoia and persecution complex poisoned all of his relationships with his friends, some of whom he also attacked in his writings. While a product of the same Enlightenment intellectual heritage as the Radical Enlightenment, he gave all of these ideas a reactionary spin once he opposed the atheism and sensualism of Holbach and Diderot, whom he grew to detest. He was a proto-Romantic, rebelling against Enlightenment rationalism, attacking the notion of civilizational progress, and equating the uncorrupted state of nature with godliness (though human nature is judged as corrupted by desire), essentially duplicating in modern form the Christian morality the Radical Enlightenment rejected. Despite Rousseau's critique of inequality, his social world view, including his conception of the general will and his views of education, censorship, religion, and political rule, is seeded with authoritarianism. His ideal society has all the features of a police state. Hence Rousseau effectively erases his incipient dialectical notion that man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Blom effectively relates Rousseau's ultimately regressive social vision and his spiteful philosophical betrayal of his former friends to his personal history and pathology.

Voltaire is presented largely as an opportunist, pursuing his own wealth, status, and reputation, and despite his problems with clerical and aristocratic despotism, attacked the Radical Enlightenment for his own ends. (As a deist he attacked atheism.)

David Hume was received as a superstar in France. Feted there, he had the time of his life, but philosophically he was quite at a distance from his hosts despite their enthusiasm for him. Hume was a skeptic rather than an atheist and he lacked that sharp polemical opposition to the social order exhibited by the Radical Enlightenment. Of note in this account is that the French materialists bypassed the epistemological preoccupation with certainty, skepticism, and justification that would drive so much of modern philosophy. For Holbach, who contributed mightily to the development of a scientific world view, science, based on empirical engagement with the world, provided the source for knowledge. No other justification was needed. Hume's philosophical preoccupation was quite foreign to him. And Holbach was quite prescient in his scientific ideas. I think that this was the main way forward at this point, though the epistemology behind it was not finely developed from what I can tell--the nature of concept and theory formation, etc. Hume was innovative in bringing to light fundamental issues that would devastate traditional a priori metaphysics, and it was too early at that point to see clearly what a dead end skepticism as the dogmatic inverse of dogmatism would become.

Generalizing the narrative so far, Blom insists that the Radical Enlightenment has been gravely misrepresented. "Passion is crucial to the radical Enlightenment." (Their moral theory on the positivity of sensual enjoyment, empathy, etc., is detailed, in contradistinction to both Christian morality and nihilism.) But also the Radical Enlightenment's view of Reason is the polar opposite both of Rousseau's repressive world view and technocratic rationalization.

So much of the Enlightenment was or was represented as a cult of “pure reason” (in Immanuel Kant’s key phrase) that it is still common in our day to think of this great philosophical paradigm shift as being concerned merely with making life more rational, more efficient, and less superstitiously medieval. This may be partly true for moderate, often deist thinkers such as Leibniz, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Kant, and even for Diderot’s friend Helvétius, but it was never true of the radical Enlightenment around Diderot and Holbach.

To the Enlightenment radicals, reason is merely a technical faculty of analysis, part of our material constitution. But while moderate thinkers wanted to create a life governed less by the passions and more by rational behavior, a life purified of physical desire and instinctive acts, Holbach and particularly Diderot wanted to create a society in which individuals could live as far as possible in harmony with their desires and fulfill them. Reason was simply a tool for a life that was essentially passionate and governed by vital drives, by pleasure and pain.

Now whether or not this world view is sufficiently well articulated in hindsight is less important than the facile assumptions indiscriminately attributed to the Enlightenment. My first thought is to refer here to Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno, which I have always disliked. As it happens, at book's end Blom does refer to it, and he lays all the blame for instrumental reason critiqued therein on the moderate Enlightenment!

There is no mention of William Blake in the book, but while Blake's aversion to much of the Enlightenment (though he had engaged it earlier in life, e.g. via Wollstonecraft and Paine), links the imperial capitalist order Blake opposed to empiricism proximately and materialism somewhat more remotely--specifically the figures of moderate English/Scottish and French Enlightenment, the Frenchmen targeted being Voltaire and Rousseau. Blake could never have been congenial to the materialism of the Radical Enlightenment, but perhaps earlier in life he could have accommodated aspects of it as he accommodated Thomas Paine.

David Hume's society & the nightmare of Rousseau

For some years I have been reading philosophical histories written for a popular audience, some of which I've mentioned here, others on another blog. Here's an extract from an entry of 30 June 2007 on my Studies in Dying Culture blog:

My next book was Rousseau’s Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (New York: Ecco, 2006). (Contents) This is basically historical gossip: a biographical account of the relation between the philosophers Hume and Rousseau. It has less intellectual content than their previous work Wittgenstein’s Poker, and even the title doesn’t fit. Is this about Rouseeau’s essential loneliness, apart from his beloved dog, or is the dog a greater thinker than David Hume? The authors are apparently infatuated with the contest between strong intellectual personalities Oddly, the popularity of these writers in their time does not seem to have been accompanied by profound engagement with their ideas. Only in chapter 11 is there actually an intellectual comparison between the two figures. Of greatest interest is the antipathy of Hume towards the French Enlightenment’s atheism and materialism, which resonates down through British intellectual history (see T. H. Huxley).

Another popular book on this subject (which I've not had a chance to read) has since appeared:

Zaretsky, Robert; Scott, John T. The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

The subtitle is an evident pun on Hume's work. What these authors or the authors of comparable books aim to communicate is a matter for extensive discussion. The juxtaposition of work and life can be instructive, but judging thereupon is a tricky business. At stake here is not only the ideologies of philosophers/philosophies, and not just the overall social context, but the possibilities of being rational actors in an irrational society.

I've just been reading a book I've had for years but just grabbed out of the mothballs, definitely not written for a popular audience:

Christensen, Jerome. Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

Though the conceits imposed on the work by poststructuralism are irritating (converting the entire universe into discourse), and get tedious occasionally, there is nonetheless some interesting content here. The question at hand is how did Hume construct himself socially as a man of letters and exercise a potentially limitless adaptability in all social settings, and generally, how did this fit into the emerging bourgeois order where commerce becomes king? I did not read the whole book; I skipped to the final two chapters where Hume's strategy apparently breaks down.

Hume is the toast of the salon culture of Paris, but he finds negotiation of his relations with the French women in the salons rather complicated. Women are indispensable to Parisian salon culture; they are enchanted by male intellectuals; yet, paradoxically, they are maintained as intellectual inferiors by the men, who love having women in their society but really only are interested in one another as intellectual equals. There is an undertone of flirtatiousness in intellectual encounters with women; the tacit social conventions of "gallantry" just complicate matters for the celibate (I get this from other sources) Hume.

The final chapter deals with the subject of the two aforementioned books, the disquieting public tiff initiated by Rousseau. Here Hume's fundamental strategy of engaging everyone in the world of letters and keeping on good terms with everyone is sabotaged. In the No-Good-Deed-Does-Unpunished Department, Hume's generous gesture of rescuing Rousseau from France and setting him up in England, instead of cementing Rousseau's friendship, only arouses his paranoia. Fearful of accusations being circulated against him, Hume feels compelled to engage in a peremptory strike to ward off the threatened public scandal and publishes an Exposé Succinct. Christensen analyzes this scenario at length, but his tedious writing and postmodern conceits are not easily digestible. He seems to validate Rousseau's paranoia, as men of letters were in that time accustomed to acting as political agents for others, and David Hume's liberality comes under some scrutiny. But I see no convincing argument made. Notably lacking is an examination of the contradictions in Rousseau's life strategy that are discernible in Rousseau's Dog. The Republic of Letters was an urbane microsociety embedded in a treacherous macrosociety. The "dialectic of Enlightenment" here need not be made so mysterious: where social mores, conventions, and institutions are at odds with the pretenses of rationalism, a rational being cannot function in society, and a social being cannot function rationally. One can project, abstractly, the development of society in a rational direction, but to be blind to the shaky premises of one's own social being vitiates one's pretensions. This book yields relevant information usable for the triangulation of Hume's society, his social position as an intellectual, and the ideological assumptions embedded in his philosophy, but I do not find it conclusive.