The pursuit of glory, p.63
The Pursuit of Glory, page 63
By the second half of the eighteenth century, the anonymous abstract public had come to be recognized not just as one legitimate source of value in aesthetic matters but as the source. From the rich repertoire of illustrations available, the following cri de cœur from Friedrich Schiller is distinguished by its intensity. Schiller had been given an excellent free education at the ducal grammar school at Stuttgart but at the cost of his intellectual independence. Forced to study medicine against his will, imprisoned for writing his first sensational play–The Robbers–and told to confine himself in future to medical treatises, he protested with his feet and ran away. He issued the following declaration of intellectual independence:
I write as a citizen of the world who serves no prince…From now on all my ties are dissolved. The public is now everything to me–my preoccupation, my sovereign and my friend. Henceforth I belong to it alone. I wish to place myself before this tribunal and no other. It is the only thing I fear and respect. A feeling of greatness comes over me with the idea that the only fetter I wear is the verdict of the world–and that the only throne I shall appeal to is the human soul.
Those brave words were written in 1784. Three years later Schiller entered the service of the Duke of Saxony-Weimar, accepting a position as Professor of History at the University of Jena. He was ennobled in 1802. As this trajectory implies, the public did not turn out to be the ideal patron. Its shortcomings will be discussed later. For the time being, the importance of the public sphere as a cultural space and of the public as a cultural actor can be acknowledged. The essential characteristics of the public can be defined as follows: it consists of private individuals brought together by the voluntary exchange of ideas to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Not only is it independent of the state, it claims a superior status for both quantitative and qualitative reasons: because its numerical strength allows it to claim to be representative of civil society, and because its insistence on free expression and public debate allows it to claim enhanced authority. It is anonymous and unhierarchical, gaining access solely by the capacity to pay for the cultural commodities it consumes. That its discourse is characterized by openness, criticism, spontaneity and reasoned argument is revealed by cognates such as ‘publicity’, ‘publicize’ and ‘public opinion’.
THE TRIUMPH OF THE CULTURE OF REASON
The years around the middle of the eighteenth century marked the coming-of-age of the public sphere and the apparent triumph of the culture of reason. The publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in 1748 and the first two volumes of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie in 1751 both had a tremendous impact right across Europe. Representative of the response to the former was Horace Walpole’s letter to Horace Mann, the British minister to the court of Tuscany, on 10 January 1750: ‘I want to know your opinion of…Montesquiou’s [sic] Esprit des Lois, which I think the best book ever written–at least I never learned half so much from all I ever read. There is as much wit as useful knowledge. He is said to have hurt his reputation by it in France, which I can conceive, for it is almost the interest of everybody there that can understand it, to decry it.’ Walpole was half right: The Spirit of the Laws was acclaimed rhapsodically by enlightened French intellectuals, but denounced with equal enthusiasm by the conservatives. For once, Jesuits and Jansenists could agree on something: that Montesquieu’s book was deeply offensive and dangerous–atheist indeed. If they had actually wanted to promote the book’s fame, they could not have done better. The ultimate franking of its reputation came when it was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1751, despite Pope Benedict XIV’s misgivings. The reception accorded to the Encyclopédie was just as contentious and just as international. Of the 25,000 sets, comprising thirty-five volumes, sold before 1789, about half were to subscribers living outside France. Diderot’s restatement of Descartes’ methodology of systematic doubt in the preface can stand as the mature Enlightenment’s manifesto: ‘Everything must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection.’ A generation later in 1781, as the enlightened tide was on the ebb, Kant returned to the same central theme in his preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and law-giving through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination.’
Jules Michelet observed that ‘the Encyclopédie was much more than a book. It was a faction…all Europe took it up.’ ‘All Europe’, of course, must be refined to mean ‘the enlightened European intelligentsia’. This was indeed a self-conscious faction (‘party’ would be a better word, for the French ‘faction’ does not have the same pejorative overtone as its literal English equivalent). The sense that there was an international community of rational progressive educated people, bound together by the same ideals, dated back to the seventeenth century. Its members liked to refer to themselves as ‘the republic of letters’, which formed part of the title of Pierre Bayle’s immensely influential periodical News from the Republic of Letters which began publication in 1684. In his Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire wrote about the late seventeenth century: ‘A republic of letters was being gradually established in Europe, in spite of different religions. Every science, every art, was mutually assisted in this way, and it was the academies which formed this republic.’
This was of course a wholly informal space. It was the creation of individuals seeking out or responding to the like-minded. Its chief medium was the written word, so it expanded in tandem with the growth of literacy and publications, especially periodicals. Of special importance was the improvement of postal services discussed in an earlier chapter. As John Brewer has remarked, ‘correspondence held the Republic of Letters together’. Among other illustrations he cited the boast of the classical scholar Gisbert Cuper that ‘I have a hundred or so volumes of letters, with the responses of Scholars, who honour me with their friendship and correspondence’. The importance of letters went beyond mere convenience, for their very nature encapsulated the idea of intellectual intercourse. Most of the periodicals therefore liked to include a ‘readers’ letters’ section, even if many of them were composed or at least rewritten by the editor. For example, the first series of The Spectator in 1712 included 250 letters. News and other items were also presented in epistolary form ‘from our own correspondent’–in the first four months of 1764 The Gazeteer of London received 861 letters, of which 560 were published at length and 262 were noticed under the heading ‘Observations of Our Correspondents’. Improvements in physical communications and longer periods of peace encouraged members of the republic to get to know each other personally. Anne Goldgar provides the example of Charles-Étienne Jordan, a Prussian of Huguenot descent, who in 1733 embarked on a six-month voyage littéraire which took in Halle, Leipzig, Paris, London, Oxford, Amsterdam and Leiden. If he did not avert his eyes from buildings and paintings, his chief concern was to visit libraries, literary societies, bookshops and fellow intellectuals. Arriving in London, he wrote: ‘I saw St Paul’s Church: I won’t say anything about it, because my Goal is only to speak about Books and Literature’.
From the republic of letters, and the public sphere into which it fed, came a rapidly growing intelligentsia, socially disparate but ideologically cohesive. By the time the Encyclopédie was published, they were no longer ‘the little flock of philosophes’ but a major force in the public discourse of Europe. Like all intellectuals, there was nothing they liked to do more than to argue, but their common axioms allow the identification of a single European Enlightenment. Not the least important was their common use of the metaphor of light. As one of their deadliest enemies, Novalis, observed in Christianity or Europe (1799): ‘Light became their favourite subject on account of its mathematical obedience and freedom of movement. They were more interested in the refraction of its rays than in the play of its colours, and thus they named it after their great enterprise, enlightenment.’ The German word Novalis used was ‘Aufklärung’. If he had been Italian, he would have written ‘i lumi’, if Spanish ‘ilustración’, if French ‘les lumières’, if Russian (which, confusingly, can also mean ‘education’), and so on. Although this was an attractive metaphor, for it could be contrasted with the darkness of ignorance, prejudice and superstition, it also invited charges of superficiality. Voltaire himself said disarmingly, ‘I am like a mountain stream–I run bright, clear and fast, but not very deep.’
The source of the light was reason. Here one has to tread carefully–as indeed the ‘philosophes’ did themselves. They were well aware of the varieties and limitations of reason and liked nothing more than to deride the great rationalist systems of the seventeenth-century philosophers, including Descartes and Leibniz, the latter being the butt of Voltaire’s wit in the shape of Doctor Pangloss in Candide. They admired Descartes for his systematic doubt, while rejecting his deductive reasoning in favour of English inductive empiricism: ‘Descartes gave sight to blind men; they saw the errors of the ancients and his own’ was Voltaire’s double-edged compliment. Voltaire also likened rationalist metaphysics to a minuet, in which the dancer displays much skill and grace but ends up in exactly the same place. As Peter Gay has put it: ‘the Enlightenment was not an Age of Reason, but a Revolt against Rationalism’. On the other hand, for all its frailty, reason was deemed greatly superior as a means of understanding the world than such alternatives as the Bible, tradition, intuition or faith. Or to put it another way, if an intellectual were to stand Descartes on his head and say ‘my project is to lead the mind away from reason’, he would automatically disqualify himself from any claim to be enlightened. This central concern was best expressed by Ernst Cassirer in his difficult but profound The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, first published in German in 1932: ‘The basic idea underlying all the tendencies of Enlightenment was the conviction that human understanding is capable, by its own power and without recourse to supernatural assistance, of comprehending the system of the world and that this new way of understanding the world will lead it to a new way of mastering it.’
As Cassirer’s final remark indicates, the understanding of nature that reason brought was not for its own sake. It was just the first step towards controlling (or, one might add, exploiting) nature in the interests of humankind. Here the philosophes were following an agenda set out by one of their most venerated ancestors–Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who wrote in Novum Organum (1620): ‘The true and lawful goal of the sciences is none other than this: that human life be endowed with new discoveries and powers.’ A good example was provided by Benjamin Franklin who flew a kite during a thunderstorm in June 1752 to test his hypothesis about the nature of electricity. The knowledge gained enabled him to invent the lightning conductor: ‘I say, if these Things are so, may not the Knowledge of this Power of Points be of Use to Mankind; in preserving Houses, Churches, Ships, etc. from the Stroke of Lightning?’ Pre-modern man rang church bells and prayed to God to avert lightning strikes; post-Franklin man installed a lightning conductor.
Understanding and manipulating nature also involved understanding and manipulating human nature. The philosophes were more optimistic about tackling this apparently intractable problem because they rejected the idea of original sin. Nothing separated them more sharply from the traditional Christian world than their epistemology and psychology. Here they were following another English philosopher, John Locke (1632–1704), whose An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) laid down the basic axiom:
All ideas come from sensation or reflection. Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas:–How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. These two are the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can naturally have, do spring.
This rejection of innate ideas opened up boundless possibilities for social engineering. If man was simply the product of his environment acting on his sensations, then to change the nature of man one only had to change his environment.
From England the philosophes also imported the Newtonian view of the universe and then popularized it across the continent. In Voltaire’s influential opinion: ‘Newton is the greatest man who has ever lived, the very greatest, the giants of antiquity are beside him children playing with marbles’. It is a safe conjecture that most educated Europeans made their acquaintance with the laws of gravity through Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques, first published in English in 1734 with the title Letters Concerning the English Nation, rather than the Principia. For the enlightened across Europe they helped to consolidate a further axiom: that the natural world was a mechanism, that God was not constantly interfering with his creation and that what appeared to be miracles were delusions or natural phenomena. Hume’s celebrated definition of a miracle in his An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748)–‘a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent’–was the prelude to what many regarded as the definitive demolition (although it is still disputed by some).
With God banished from the physical universe and relegated to primal clock-maker, the way was free for human beings to concentrate on the here and now. Life was no longer to be regarded as a vale of tears through which the faithful had to pass before gaining admission to Heaven, or being sent down to Hell; it was promoted to be humankind’s prime concern. So the Enlightenment can be said to have been secular, although the German word ‘diesseitig’ is more eloquent, meaning ‘this side of the grave’, as opposed to ‘jenseitig’ or ‘the far side of the grave’. It can also be said to have been anthropocentric, a quality best expressed by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man (1733):
Say first, of God above, or Man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of Man what see we, but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
…
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
The Man in question was man per se. Reason was a universal attribute, the condition of being human, so differences of nationality or religion were mere externals. So cosmopolitanism was one of the badges worn most proudly by the enlightened–by Diderot, for example, who wrote to his friend David Hume: ‘My dear David, you belong to all nations…I flatter myself that I am, like you, a citizen of the great city of the world.’ They had nothing against love of the fatherland, so long as it was defined rationally as ‘ubi bene, ibi patria’, but assigned it a secondary value. In Edward Gibbon’s view ‘it is the duty of a patriot to prefer and promote the exclusive interest and glory of his native country; but a philosopher may be permitted to enlarge his views, and to consider Europe as a great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation’. Gibbon certainly followed this precept himself, publishing his first book in French. The article on ‘nation’ in the Encyclopédie, written by Jaucourt, put it more neatly: ‘I prefer, a philosophe said, my family to myself, my fatherland to my family and the human race to my fatherland.’ It was an ideal shared by some musicians, for example by Gluck, who aimed for ‘a music which can speak equally to all nations and will dissolve the ridiculous national differences’. According to the reviewer of his opera Alceste in 1768, he had succeeded too, for such was the power of his musical imagination that he had exploded national constraints, creating a music that was all his own but also in perfect conformity with nature and therefore universal.
Deemed even less important than geographical origin was confessional affiliation. Of all the crimes and follies of mankind that the Englightenment railed against most often and most passionately, religious intolerance must stand at the top of the list. As we have had occasion to remark already, every state in Europe was a confessional state and everywhere the heavy hand of the ecclesiastical authorities could be felt by the heterodox, despite such appeals as Pierre Bayle’s Letter on the Comet of 1682 and John Locke’s Letter on Toleration of 1689. Significantly, both men wrote their treatises while in exile in the Dutch Republic. Across Catholic Europe the fires of the Inquisition still burnt–at Palermo in 1724, for example, when thousands poured in from the surrounding countryside to watch Brother Romualdo and Sister Gertrude being burnt alive at the stake, or at Braganza in 1755, when the Jewish merchant Jeronimo Jose Ramos was incinerated. Even in France long after Louis XIV had died, it was dangerous to be a Protestant. In 1724 a royal decree actually strengthened the laws against heresy: a pastor caught officiating at a Protestant service was to be executed and his congregation to be put away for life, the women in prison, the men in the galleys. So toleration really was a matter of life and death and the philosophes responded with a sense of being secular crusaders.
