Rousseau’s reception as an Epicurean: from atheism to aesthetics

ABSTRACT

What did Rousseau's readers mean when they called him an ‘Epicurean’? A seemingly simple question with complex implications. This article attempts to answer it by reconstructing Rousseau's contemporary reception as an Epicurean thinker. First, it surveys the earliest and most widely read critics of the second Discourse: Prussian Astronomer Royal Jean de Castillon, Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel, and Hanoverian biblical scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus. These readers branded Rousseau an Epicurean primarily to highlight his atheism, his anti-providential and materialist natural philosophy. Then, it discusses Genevan pastor Jacob Vernet's positive assessment of Rousseau as a critic of ‘fashionable’ Epicureanism, before reconstructing Rousseau's critique of the reception of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man as an Epicurean text. These sources elucidate Rousseau's engagement with a range of ideas and argumentative positions that would inform his later self-identification as a ‘refined’ Epicurean. In particular, they highlight his interest in how a sentimental awareness of beauty might mitigate the potentially vicious effects of hedonism. The article concludes with novelist Mme. de Genlis’ critique of Rousseau's Wise Materialism, using his thoughts on the imagination to suggest some of the ways the neglected aesthetic dimensions of Rousseau's reception of Epicureanism might be developed.     

Les inscriptions des casques de Negau,Styrie

This article is chiefly a sceptical critique of two recent interpretations of the Epicurean doctrine on the relevance of the atomic swerve to free will, by D. N. Sedley and T. J. Saunders. Against the latter, it argues that the role of the swerve is to be found not in the execution of the will but in its formation; against the former, that to ascribe to Epicurus an explanation of free will in terms of ‘emergence’ theory renders the swerve redundant as an condition of the will's freedom. A concluding analysis of the Epicurean theory suggests that it is seriously flawed by internal inconsistencies of principle.     

The rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters

This article provides a reappraisal of the history of proyectismo. Scholars have employed the concept to categorise early eighteenth-century Spanish authors and reforms, and have thereby severed them from their historical context. This article explores the imperial origins of this political culture by shedding light on the generation of knowledge in early eighteenth-century diplomatic and imperial spaces. The article focuses on the overlooked thinker Álvaro José Navia-Osorio y Vigil, Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1684–1732) – long considered to be a proyectista – and his appeal to the Spanish Republic of Letters to assist him in his project for a universal dictionary; an enterprise that predated Chamber’s Cyclopedia and Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Marcenado’s contributions to the establishment of Spanish intellectual connections with foreign thinkers were, moreover, symptomatic of the political approach of early eighteenth-century ilustrados – transterritorial, transnational, and transversal thinkers who drew on the peninsula’s ties with the Flanders and Italy to revitalise the intellectual life of Spain. These thinkers recovered the study of Muslim Spain, and envisioned the establishment of councils and academies in Mexico and Peru. The Spanish Enlightenment, then, originated in the early eighteenth-century from their rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters.     

Communities of discourse: Ideology and social structure in the reformation,the enlightenment,and European socialism

In contrast to the conventional view of Ludwig Feuerbach as a left-wing Young Hegelian, this article argues that his primary contribution to philosophy is to be found in his later ethics, the basis of which may be discerned in his earlier writings. Over and above recent work on Feuerbach's aesthetics, his relation to Herder, and the relationship between aesthetics and ‘theological politics’ in his thought, Feuerbach's philosophy can re-evaluated, in relation to Epicurus and the French libertin tradition, as articulating an ethics of hedonism. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), the Nachlass fragment ‘Elementary Aesthetics’ (1843), and his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) Feuerbach moves towards the vitalist materialist position that culminates in his (proto-Nietzschean) insight in ‘Against the Dualism of Body and Soul, Flesh and Spirit’ (1846) into the world as an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’, thus laying the foundations for his recognition of the centrality of sensuous pleasure to the ethical life.     

Aeque mit dem ablativ

Before Marx the atomic swerve was little regarded by champions of Epicureanism: since Guyau it has been central, though attempts to explain the mechanism of free will by it have failed. This is because they assume the occurrence of swerves inside the soul. But the swerve is only attested for the downward‐falling atoms ‐and as an instantaneous side‐step not as a change of direction. Swerves are the pluralist counterpart to Aristotle's unmoved mover, a cosmological principle and not the cause of particular happenings. On this view good sense can be made of Epicurus’ hitherto puzzling statements on predestination, nouthesia, and luck.     

Anarchism,utopianism and hospitality: the work of René Schérer

Abstract

René Schérer (born 1922) is lamentably almost unknown to the Anglo-American world as his work has, as yet, not been translated. He is one of the main specialists of the French ‘utopian socialist’, Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and a major thinker in his own right. He is the author of more than twenty books and co-editor of the journal Chimères. Colleague and friend at Vincennes University (Paris 8) of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, François Châletet, Alain Brossat, Georges Navet, Miguel Abensour, Pierre Macherey..., he continues to host seminars at Paris 8 (now located at Saint-Denis). He is a living testimony to a radical past, and a continuing inspiration to a new generation of young thinkers. This article aims to convey the original specificity of his understanding of anarchism. By so doing, it will stress the importance of his work for any thinking concerned with a politicised resistance to social conformity and the supposed ‘state of things’ today.     

Death on the Seine: The mystery of the pagan king Setric

In 943, a pagan king called Setric arrived with a fleet on the Seine, seeking to ‘take over the whole area without a grant from the king’ and to bring the young Richard and his Rouen Northmen back ‘to the worship of idols, and to bring back pagan rites’. But this was not to be because the young Carolingian king Louis IV d’Outremer was quickly on the scene and engaged Setric and his dux Turmod in battle. Louis’s mounted forces were victorious and both Setric and Turmod were killed. As the great French historian Philippe Lauer said: ‘La défaite du viking Setric et du renégat Turmod est un événement important dans l’histoire de l’établissement des Normands en Neustrie’. The mystery examined in this article is, who was this pagan king Setric (ON Sigtryggr) who had been sent to Valhalla? And where had he come from —York or Denmark? It is shown that whilst a Danish origin for King Setric cannot be completely excluded, the equation of a King Sihtric of York with King Setric on the Seine is more likely and is supported by a plethora of onomastic, chronological, numismatic and contextual evidence.     

Pufendorf disciple of Hobbes: The nature of man and the state of nature: The doctrine of socialitas

No doctrine of Pufendorf's is better known than that of socialitas. The reason is that Pufendorf himself declared that socialitas was the foundation of natural law. No interpreter of Pufendorf can therefore avoid dealing with it. Moreover, Pufendorf linked the issue of socialitas to the question of the state of nature, thus raising important issues with both theological and philosophical implications.

Given the prominence and importance of this theme in Pufendorf's work, a close analysis of what he meant by it is central to the interpretation of his work, even though this means to pose again a new number of questions already discussed in the scholarly literature. In particular, this article examines the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes with regard to this central theme. In fact, a traditional historiographic topos is that Pufendorf and Hobbes fundamentally disagree on the doctrine of socialitas, while the former is closer to Grotius and to the Aristotelian-classic tradition that see man as a social animal.

This article takes, instead, Pufendorf to be a follower of Hobbes, and tries to explain how the more traditional view of Pufendorf as a critic of Hobbes was in some way due to Pufendorf's own attempt to distance himself from the accusations of Hobbesism (and hence of atheism and moral indifference) that the critics made against him when his work first appeared. In order to do this, Pufendorf tried to rethink his own position within the history of ethics, and put himself on the side of the Stoics, of Grotius and of Cumberland, against Epicurus and Hobbes. This retrospective ‘illusion’ has greatly influenced later scholarship, giving us a distorted image of Pufendorf's own view of socialitas. A more precise account of the latter gives a better prospective from which to look at the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes.     

Rethinking the Political Thought of James Harrington: Royalism,Republicanism and Democracy

Traditional accounts of seventeenth-century English republicanism have usually presented it as inherently anti-monarchical and anti-democratic. This article seeks to challenge and complicate this picture by exploring James Harrington's views on royalism, republicanism and democracy. Building on recent assertions about Harrington's distinctiveness as a republican thinker, the article suggests that the focus on Harrington's republicanism has served to obscure the subtlety and complexity of his moral and political philosophy. Focusing on the year 1659, and the pamphlet war that Harrington and his supporters waged against their fellow republicans, it seeks to re-emphasise important but neglected elements of Harrington's thought. It suggests that the depth and extent of Harrington's sympathy with royalists and royalism has been underplayed, while too little attention has been paid to the fundamental differences between his ideas and those adopted by other republican thinkers at the time. In addition it brings to light, for the first time, Harrington's innovative endorsement of both the term and the concept of ‘democracy’ and draws attention to his intellectual and personal affinities with the Levellers. Finally it outlines some implications of these findings for understandings of English republicanism and the republican tradition more generally.     

Commentary Animal Domestication: Toward a Definition

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a pioneering French aviator who helped to open airmail routes in North Africa and South America during the interwar years of the early twentieth century. He was also a celebrated author who described his piloting experiences and the relations between aviation, society and human development in several popular books. Saint-Exupéry's writings contain vivid representations of landscapes, places and people from the novel perspective of the airborne observer. Based on analysis of the revised editions of most of the English-language translations of Saint-Exupéry's published works, this article reveals that his writings contain a distinctive ‘geography from above’ in which landscapes and places are culturally constructed and myths about various ‘others’ are reproduced. Such a view was important: it allowed powerful visualisations to be created and communicated, and its expressions accompanied and legitimated the imperial expropriation of land.     

George Woodcock and the Doukhobors: peasant radicalism,anarchism, and the Canadian state

For the British-Canadian writer and intellectual George Woodcock, the Doukhobors – a persecuted radical Christian sect, many members of which emigrated from Russia to Canada at the turn of the twentieth century – were a continual source of fascination. A cause célèbre for a host of nineteenth-century thinkers, including Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, the Doukhobors were frequently portrayed as the exemplars of the viewer’s particular ideological beliefs. The present article examines Woodcock’s shifting interpretation of the Doukhobors, mapped onto the development of an intellectual career that saw him emerge as a leading anarchist thinker, and his broader transition from a British writer to a Canadian public intellectual. Where once he saw the Doukhobors representing anarchism in action, as his politics matured his view of the sect became more complex. Rather than living anarchists, he came to see the Doukhobors’ experience as a powerful reminder of the forces of assimilation at work in modern democracies that threatened the liberties of dissenters. Reflecting Woodcock’s revised anarchist politics, the Doukhobors’ story now became a key component of an intellectual vision that cast a probing light on Canadian history and Canadian cultural politics.     

French Eighteenth-Century Materialists and Natural Law

Summary

This article looks at the discussions of natural law by the eighteenth-century French materialists Julien Offray de La Mettre, Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d'Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. It is particularly concerned with their discussion of moral values and their attempt to find a materialistic basis for them as part of their rejection of religion. The discussion brings out the différences between them and analyses their dialogues on this question, including the other materialists' rejection of La Mettrie's amoralism, which threatened to undermine their attempt to found a natural law taught by experience and based on human nature. Particular attention is paid to Diderot's many writings which grapple with the subject, beginning with his Encyclopédie article droit naturel, probably written in 1754. He discussed the question in many of his later writings, including in his annotations on the works of Helvétius, who based natural law on the general interest. These writings reveal a tension between Diderot's emphasis on the search for individual happiness and the interests of society as he, together with d'Holbach, attempted to provide a natural basis for morality and government from which to criticise existing institutions.     

James Mill's treatment of religion and the History of British India

James Mill's History of British India’ (1817) played a major role in re-shaping the English policy and attitudes in India throughout the nineteenth century. This article questions the widely held view that the ‘HBI’ heralded the utilitarian justification of colonisation found for instance in John Stuart Mill's writings. It suggests that James Mill's role as a proponent of ‘utilitarian imperialism’ has been overstated, and argues that much of Mill's criticism of Indian society arose from the continuing influence of his religious education as well as from his links with a network of Presbyterian and Evangelical thinkers. It is only after his death that the colonialist views put forward in the History of British India were re-interpreted in light of his later attachment to utilitarianism.     

Pleasure: ‘The Choice of Hercules’

In this article I contend that John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism has been widely misunderstood, and hence the importance of his philosophical project has been diminished. This misunderstanding arises primarily from misconceptions regarding Mill’s definition of pleasure. However, these misconceptions may be successfully resolved by reflecting on Mill’s educational roots and his commitment to Greco-Roman philosophy. In particular, I hold that a deeper understanding of Mill’s philosophical progenitors (i.e., Aristotle and Epicurus) would lead us to conclude that for Mill the “pleasures” of the Utilitarian project are in the final analysis nothing other than the “pleasures” of the mind and conscience. Thus, by following Mill’s line of reasoning and adhering to some of the salient points of his work, specifically in Chapter 2 of Utilitarianism, we may reach a richer and more nuanced understanding of his impressive philosophical project.     

Portraits of the garçonne as artist: gender and creativity in French fiction of the années folles

This article examines a series of popular and middlebrow works of fiction from the 1920s that represent the garçonne (the flapper, or androgynous, emancipated young woman) as artist. Challenging the popular view of the années folles as a period of relatively relaxed social conventions and gender norms, it shows that far from embracing female creativity, the authors of the period took pains to link it to moral and aesthetic deviance. Having considered what the representation of female creativity in novels by Berthe Bernage, Victor Margueritte and Marcel Prévost can tell us about gender in the 1920s, I go on to examine novels by the art critics André Warnod and François Fosca, who use the figure of the garçonne as artist to air art-critical positions about the modernist art produced in Montparnasse, especially by members of the École de Paris. Whereas Warnod represents his female artist as a victim of a modernism linked with the foreign and the ‘primitive,’ in Fosca’s novel the female painter is a more threatening figure: an agent of a modernism whose attacks on the female body (in the form of the conventional academic nude) are in turn echoed in a broader ‘troubling’ of gendered and aesthetic categories.     

'The purity of the blood': Poncet de la Grave,pronatalism and empire

This article will analyze key publications of Guillaume Poncet de la Grave (1725-1803), formerly the monarchy’s representative to the Admiralty Court, who worked during the Ancien Régime to restrict immigration to France, particularly that of people of color. He was also a passionate advocate for French imperial expansion. After the Revolution, in his political tract Réflections on the Unmarried, he expressed his anxiety over a declining French birthrate and a desire to have the state monitor marriage, sexuality, and reproduction in order to increase legitimate births. In this work he identified threats to what he referred to as ‘the purity of the blood’ within and without France, and proposed to the Republic legislation designed to eliminate them. Poncet de la Grave’s career has been largely neglected but his former position merits a closer look at his political writing, which expressed significant, constant objectives that demonstrate thematic continuity over a tumultuous time. French fears of depopulation and national ‘degeneration’ were still strong at the turn of the century, and remain of great interest to historians eager to understand how they were discussed in the context of great historical change.     

‘Resemblances to archaeological finds’: Guido Boggiani,Claude Lévi-Strauss and Caduveo body painting

In 1942, Claude Lévi-Strauss published an article on Caduveo body painting in the first number of the surrealist magazine VVV, with the editorial assistance of André Breton and cover by Max Ernst. In the article, Lévi-Strauss uses the photographs of the Caduveo women taken during his fieldtrip in 1935–36, together with drawings of facial designs collected to reflect on their ‘strong originality’, which ‘evokes a very ancient culture, and one full of preciosities’. Amongst these illustrations, there is an engraving taken from Guido Boggiani’s book, I Caduvei, published in 1895. Boggiani, an Italian landscape painter who visited South America in 1887–93, was captivated by the Caduveo graphic art, which he sketched in detail. In 1896 he returned, travelling to Paraguay, this time equipped with a new tool to help his ethnographic research: a photographic camera. Over a period of five years, Boggiani completed more than 400 photographs on glass gelatin plates of various sizes. For Lévi-Strauss, as for Boggiani, the originality of the Caduveo graphic art remained enigmatic, evoking a very ancient culture; it was a topic to which he would return in several of his most influential works. In this article, I focus on the visual images (engraved, drawn, photographed and filmed) that depict the body painting of the Caduveo people in central Brazil by Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss in order to explore the ways in which they enabled an ephemeral art – delicate arabesques painted on skin – to be studied as archaeological vestiges. In the process, I trace the aesthetic sensibility of Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss that provided them with the imaginative tools to do so.     

Philosophy,Sociability and Modern Patriotism: Young Herder between Rousseau and Abbt

Summary

In his early years Herder is known to have been a follower of Rousseau (via Kant). This article argues that there was indeed a substantial overlap between Herder's and Rousseau's ideas in Herder's early writings, particularly in terms of their joint critique of abstract philosophy and their understanding of the sentimental foundations of morality, as well as their commitment to the ideals of human moral independence and political freedom. Yet Herder's admiration for Rousseau's moral philosophy did not lead him to adopt Rousseau's critique of sociability even in this early period, and there was in fact a deep divergence between their political views. Herder attempted to combine a Rousseauian cultural critique, ‘human’ moral philosophy and philosophy of education with ideas inspired by Thomas Abbt's theory of monarchical patriotism. In contrast to Rousseau, and following Abbt, Herder posited the existence of natural patriotic feelings and underlined their importance in guaranteeing good government and political freedom. Thus, Herder could have a relatively optimistic view of the role of ‘human philosophy’ in regenerating patriotism in a modern setting. Herder embraced Abbt's emphasis on the positive aspects of modern monarchies and ‘modern liberty’ when compared to ancient republics, highlighting the compatibility of Christianity, international commerce and religious tolerance, and the general possibility of developing one's natural inclinations in modern monarchies.     

Explanatory structures

Muratori has often been portrayed as a moral philosopher who represented the traditional neo-Aristotelian mainstream of Italian intellectual life in the early part of the eighteenth century. His loyalty to Christianity as a basis from which societies ought to be reformed has determined his reputation as a ‘pre-enlightened’ thinker. Yet, it is argued here that not only was Muratori very much in touch with the state of the art of early eighteenth-century moral philosophy, but also that he was really a historian with political interests who came to develop a renewed Christian moral philosophy as a tool to respond to the political challenges of the time. Fallen man's preference for self-preservation to natural freedom prepared him for engaging in increasingly sociable contexts that required further self-disciplining and moral improvement. Thus, man cultivated his fallen condition into prudence and ultimately developed a capacity both for charity and for functioning in modern commercial societies.     

Retour aux sources: crisis and reappraisal in Albert Camus's final pronouncements on justice,

Both personally and professionally, the 1950s proved a difficult decade for Albert Camus. Not only would the controversy surrounding the publication of L'Homme re´volte´ (1951) leave an indelible mark, but also the pressures of history would increasingly impact on his concern for justice throughout this troubled period. This article examines how Camus's moral sensibility is undermined by le drame alge´rien to such an extent that, as the pressures of history and personal circumstance become increasingly intolerable for him, he is forced to undertake a ‘scaling-down process’ of his whole attitude towards justice. Both the ‘Appel pour une tre?ve civile en Alge´rie’ (1956) and the ‘Re´flexions sur la guillotine’ (1957) can usefully be read in this context where, against a more general background of a,retour aux sources, Camus reverts to his earlier ‘person-to-person’ response to perceived injustice as a means, perhaps, by which to reinvigorate his now frustrated moral stance.