De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 39
(2007)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–
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Berichten uit de geleerde wereld
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denbaum, Wiep van Bunge and Giuseppe Ricuperati, as well as in my own publications. For these roots actually reach quite a long way back, to a much earlier stage in contemporary Enlightenment historiography. The forerunners of this key conceptual tool in our contemporary culture (philosophical as well as historical), a tool which I think will remain a powerful factor in historiographical debates for a long time to come, were (among others) the already mentioned French historian, Paul Hazard, who in the 1930s was the first to assert, in his Crise de la conscience européenne, that authors such as Spinoza, Collins and Toland went much further and were more radical than Voltaire or Montesquieu in their critique of organized religion, Bible criticism and attack on the social psychology of priestcraft; the American scholar, Ira Wade, who in 1938 was the first - albeit following up hints already provided by Gustave Lanson - to demonstrate the huge importance of the French clandestine philosophical literature of the period before 1750 (especially the works of Meslier, Du Marsais, Boulainvilliers, Fréret, Lévesque de Burigny, and Mirabaud) and, in particular, the first to point out that ‘the greatest single influence upon the writers of the period is that of Spinoza’;Ga naar voetnoot3 Paul Vernière who, in the 1950s, was the first to stress the pervasive presence of Spinoza in French eighteenth-century ‘philosophical’ literature more generally;Ga naar voetnoot4 the great Italian Enlightenment historian, Franco Venturi, who, early on, urged the need to distinguish between republican and monarchical tendencies within the Enlightenment; and, finally, another American, Henry May, who in The Enlightenment in America (1976), was the first to urge the need to differentiate sharply between ‘moderate Enlightenment’ and what he calls ‘revolutionary Enlightenment’ if one is to get a proper grip on the Enlightenment in the United States.Ga naar voetnoot5 | |||||||||||||||||||
Unchanging modernity?As regards Hanco Jürgens' querying what he suggests may be the dangers of my treating ‘modernity’ as something constituted by a package of core philosophical values, and thus identifying modernity with a particular set of concepts, namely primacy of reason, equality (social, sexual and racial), democracy, toleration, individual liberty and freedom of expression, he is doubtless correct insofar as I may have failed to draw a sufficiently clear line in my books between ‘modernity’ conceived of philosophically, as a package of core values, and ‘modernity’ understood as a historical process. The two things are indeed completely different and do indeed need to be carefully separated in any worthwhile discussion of the Enlightenment. Hanco Jürgens argues that the bringing about of a ‘philosophical revolution’ in the way that I describe it can only too easily lead to an ahistorical standpoint. I agree that the agenda of the Radical Enlightenment defined as a set of core philosophical values is a pure abstraction and, in no particular epoch, a concrete historical actuality. Even in the minds of the ‘founding fathers’ of the Radical Enlightenment, Spinoza, Bayle and Diderot, not all these values were upheld by any | |||||||||||||||||||
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of them with equal force and consistency all the time and in the case of Bayle, he expressly rejected one of these, democracy. I agree also with Hanco Jürgens' remarks about the nineteenth century (the Radical Enlightenment was after all decisively, if not permanently, defeated in the 1790s) and also with his view that whatever one's personal values happen to be, it is better not to ground them in a particular epoch of history. But I also think that there is an opposite (and perhaps greater) danger and that is that the rather silly objection - sometimes heard even from historians - that all that Enlightenment talk about toleration, individual liberty and freedom of thought occurred over two hundred years ago and hence cannot be especially relevant, or valuable, to us now since it belonged to a particular and now remote period. I would suggest that this quite popular view is just as absurd and self-contradictory as the current enthusiasm in some quarters (including certain Dutch politicians), as Herman Philipse recently showed, for the notion of ‘Enlightenment fundamentalism’.Ga naar voetnoot6 Hanco Jürgens will doubtless agree with me that both these notions about the Enlightenment are indeed absurdly superficial and self-contradictory; but history proves that practically nothing is too superficial and self-contradictory to become a powerful force in society. There are still plenty of people impressed by the continuing relevance of the Reformation and the Renaissance. But are there enough who see what seems to me the much greater relevance of the Enlightenment? The important thing, then, is to keep reminding the reader that philosophy is one thing and history another. There is a real need to emphasize, as I tried to do in Enlightenment Contested, that Radical Enlightenment when defined as a philosophical package rooted in Spinoza, Bayle and Diderot is not to be thought of as a historical description, or account of how things stood at any particular moment, but rather as an abstract set of philosophical concepts which is essentially a distillation of the thinking of more than eighty writers in the radical (i.e. mostly Spinozist) tradition spread out over a century or more. At the same time, though, as a historian by profession, I have strenuously tried not just to be keenly aware of what is historically grounded, and what is not, but to build this into my analysis with all due care. In other words, I have sought to be very specific about particular theories of toleration, equality, individual liberty, and democracy, putting each in its precise historical context and never anachronistically mixing notions which do not go together, in any concrete historical conjuncture, in pursuit of some generalized abstract teleology. In principle, I suspect that there is not a lot of difference between our two positions on this question, so that here the issue comes down, in the end, to arguing about particular cases. The example which my critic gives of Bishop Berkeley describing Spinoza as ‘the great leader of our modern infidels’, in 1732, which is presumably meant to illustrate how important it is to locate such statements in their immediate context (since he especially had Anthony Collins in mind), actually seems to me rather superfluous, since I cannot discern any tangible element of disagreement between us as regards what Berkeley meant to say and who he had in mind. More substantial is the charge of lack of balance and here I must plead innocent though many will see it otherwise. In Enlightenment Contested, I have in fact given | |||||||||||||||||||
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a great deal of space to discussing Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Hume - and in Radical Enlightenment also Wolff - and would not, for one moment, wish to appear to be in any way denying their centrality or very far-reaching historical impact and importance. That said no-one can altogether live up to the demands of full historical objectivity, comprehensiveness and balance and I willingly acknowledge that there are cases (and possibly quite a lot of them) where I have simply failed to
 Ludwig Oswald Wenckebach's bust of Spinoza in the garden of the Spinozahouse, Rijnsburg (photo Sijmen Hendriks ©)
do what I tried to do - be balanced. Hanco Jürgens rightly mentions the example of Linnaeus. I was guilty of lack of balance in giving much more attention in the sections touching on biology to Buffon than Linnaeus. Another figure who should have been brought more into the picture, a split personality partly on the moderate and partly on the radical side, was the famous Hamburg philologist and scholar (and secret enemy of Christianity), Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), one of the key deists in eighteenth-century Germany. No doubt there are other such gaps some of which I hope to fill in the next volume. Hanco Jürgens is right, of course, that I do not agree with those historians of the eighteenth century in recent decades who have chiefly stressed the social and cultural history of books, journals and ideas rather than the struggle over the ideas themselves. I think these scholars often greatly underestimate the cultural and social impact of intellectual developments, public rhetoric and ideology, hence of the ideas as socially absorbed, and greatly overestimate, or else are much too vague about, what they regard as the underlying social and cultural trends to which they give primacy over ideas. Nevertheless, I have great appreciation for the new dimensions they have opened up and the much improved knowledge, especially about readership and book diffusion, they have given us, as well as their insights into other aspects of social and cultural change directly relevant to the advent and progress of the Enlightenment. I have tried to incorporate a good | |||||||||||||||||||
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deal of both book history and general social history in what I do but I agree that this is not likely to reconcile a large number of colleagues to the dominant role which I allocate to ideas and intellectual debates. One of the best things the cultural-social historians have to offer, it seems to me, is the world of Enlightenment urban clubs and societies, a very important dimension of the subject, about which I have indeed, as yet, not said remotely enough. But that is because, to my mind, the impact of the literary and philosophical clubs and societies came chiefly in the second half of the eighteenth century and thus far my history of the Enlightenment has got no further than the beginning of the 1750s. I hope to get round to it. | |||||||||||||||||||
The ‘controversialist method’I agree with Hanco Jürgens that the correct application of the ‘controversial method’, the approach to intellectual history starting with the major debates and controversies as these developed in society (ignoring what subsequent accounts by historians of philosophy have selected as ‘key’), using political, judicial, ecclesiastical, journalistic and academic records (and popular word of mouth) as well as what is conventionally thought of as philosophical literature, must necessarily reflect the very heavy emphasis that contemporaries put on the ‘respectable’ enlightened ideas of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Locke, Hume, Wolff and Kant. However, I question the conclusion he draws from this. The concepts of these thinkers were undoubtedly greatly preferred by governments, churches, and universities to the condemned and denounced views of radical thinkers like Spinoza, Bayle, Toland, Collins, Diderot, Holbach, Helvetius and Condorcet. Nevertheless, these ‘moderate’ thinkers were vulnerable on purely intellectual grounds and hence were often themselves attacked. Hanco Jürgens is right that Christian Wolff, despite being a moderate Christian thinker who sought to safeguard miracles and did not challenge the social hierarchy, or princes, or the Church, became the center of a vast public controversy which dominated German academic and intellectual life for nearly two decades. But he is mistaken, it seems to me, in supposing, as he apparently does, that because Wolff, or for that matter any other ‘moderate’ thinker, stood at the center of a great public controversy, as Wolff did in Germany in the 1720s and 1730s, that the Radical Enlightenment was therefore marginal to that controversy. Apart from anything else, this would be to ignore the often crucial role of the Counter-Enlightenment which was probably the most powerful of the three great cultural blocs in eighteenth-century Europe and had its own very particular way of classifying what was going on in these great public controversies. The hall-mark of the eighteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment, whether in its Catholic, Calvinist, or German Protestant Pietist format, was the plea that reason, and therefore philosophy and science, must be firmly subordinated to faith and theology - and that religious leaders, and not philosophers, are therefore to be venerated as the chief guide in human life and in society. It was above all the Counter-Enlightenment, and specifically its German Pietist representatives who insisted, rather like Jacobi, later on, during the Pantheismusstreit in the 1780s, that the problem with moderate philosophical positions such as those of Wolff is that they fail to block Spinozism either convincingly or effectively and that what Wolff was really doing with his talk of pre-established harmony and universal laws of nature was, wittingly or unwittingly, letting in Spinoza's determinism, fatalism and atheism by the back door. It may be correct to say that Wolff's philosophy, from the point of view of history of philosophy strictly defined, has few real affinities with Spinozism. But that is | |||||||||||||||||||
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debatable and anyway, from a general historical perspective, is not the real point. The whole thrust of the ‘controversial method’ correctly understood and applied is that it does not begin with modern scholars' judgments about what was and what was not important in eighteenth-century philosophical debates but rather adopts as its starting-point what contemporaries actually claimed, emphasized and were preoccupied with at the time. Far from being ‘ahistorical’, the method followed in Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested can therefore claim to be more, not less, historical than alternative historians' accounts of these developments. Whereas other Enlightenment historians often just look at texts or intellectual debates in isolation, or else unconvincingly allege cultural developments without reference to ideas, I have tried to treat ‘controversies’ as the general reaction of governments, churches, universities, legal bodies and so forth, as well as the reading public, to unacceptable, worrying or challenging new ideas defined as those ideas which they themselves say actually disturbed them at the time. By this criterion, during the German controversies of the 1720s and 1730s over Wolff and Wolffianism, what contemporaries rightly or wrongly took to be its Spinozist aspects were unquestionably the principal issue, even if this is nowhere reflected in the modern Enlightenment historiography about Wolffianism. Viewed from a broad social and cultural perspective, Spinozism is, in effect, what the eighteenth-century Wolffian controversies, like the great French controversy over Montesquieu's L'Esprit des Lois (1748-51), were principally about. | |||||||||||||||||||
The importance of SpinozaI will concentrate the rest of my remarks on what I regard as the most important and challenging part of Hanco Jürgens' claim that my method may have been applied in an unbalanced fashion, the criticism, I would predict, which will be most widely shared by colleagues over the coming years, namely that I have exaggerated the importance of Spinoza and ‘made Spinoza and the Spinozists more important than they were’. As a general criticism, this must indeed seem extremely plausible to any lay reader or student perusing the extant literature on the eighteenth century. After all there are many major and authoritative works on the subject, such as Ian Hunter's Rival EnlightenmentsGa naar voetnoot7 which do not even include an entry for Spinoza in the index let alone give him a prominent role in the story. The claim that Spinoza and Spinozism are absolutely central to understanding the Enlightenment does indeed go completely against the whole trend and tenor of most (though, as we have both pointed out, not all) previous Enlightenment research. In addition, we should also bear in mind that there exists a strong vested intellectual and ideological interest in resisting such a thesis: for, if correct, it would completely undermine the conviction, fervently held for a variety of reasons (in the United States, sometimes political) by many, that the truly progressive ideas not just of the Enlightenment but of all modernity, are quintessentially British and Anglo-American in origin. If Spinoza, Bayle and Diderot are admitted to have been pivotal, then by the same token Britain can not have been the true source of everything truly progressive in the modern world and one must then de-emphasize in some degree the hitherto massively central and foundational roles of Bacon, Locke, Newton and Hume, a teleology cherished as well as stressed by innumerable philosophers and political scientists as well as historians. After all, did Spinoza not scorn Bacon | |||||||||||||||||||
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and Boyle, Bayle ridicule and marginalize Locke, and Diderot turn his back almost completely on English ideas in favour of crypto-Spinozism? Even where historians like Hanco Jürgens, and recently John Robertson, have been willing to grant that Spinoza and Spinozism may have been central, perhaps even dominant, in the Radical Enlightenment, there is a marked tendency to insist, as Hanco Jürgens does here, that the Radical Enlightenment, though certainly a ‘widespread philosophical underground’, nevertheless was officially persecuted and suppressed: ‘many radicals were marginalized, silenced, ignored or criminalized as heterodox’. In itself, this is, of course, perfectly true though Robertson at least goes too far, I would suggest, when he says: ‘the radical assault on the foundations of the Christian religion’ was largely over by the 1740s ‘because the authorities, Protestant as well as Catholic, had effectively suppressed it, or at least curtailed its expression.’Ga naar voetnoot8 But whether Robertson exaggerates or not, what I chiefly want to question is the implication drawn from all this that because there was persecution, and Spinozism was driven underground, it was therefore marginalized in the consciousness of the mainstream Enlightenment. The mistake that both Hanco Jürgens and Robertson seem to me to make is to envisage the Radical Enlightenment as a largely separate line of intellectual development which could effectively be segregated and then excised, suppressed, or marginalized, leaving the mainstream moderate Enlightenment to continue on its way broadly intact. But this was by no means the case. It is here that the analogy between the Radical Enlightenment and the penetration of Marxism in the West in the twentieth century especially breaks down. During the Cold War, many people were, of course, deeply fearful of Marxism and its ability to appeal intellectually to some, and some feared especially that its ideals of social justice could carry more weight than liberal arguments among intellectuals, and here there are indeed parallels with the Radical Enlightenment. But there was a crucial difference. When it came to the core secular and social values of modern Western liberalism, not many, if any, Cold War era intellectuals thought that on the issues of freedom of thought, freedom of expression, individual liberty, equality before the law, and democracy, the Marxists had better arguments than the liberals. Quite the reverse. But it was very different with the core values of the moderate mainstream Enlightenment. For while its leading figures, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Turgot, Locke, Hume, Wolff and Kant, were clearly and unambiguously opposed to democracy, equality, and some other features of radical thought, the differences between them and the radicals when it came to the primacy of reason, toleration, freedom of thought, republicanism, and individual liberty of life-style were more questions of formulation, and especially degree, rather than total differences. Consequently, there was a continuous, and very real, fear in many quarters (not least by the way in Counter-Enlightenment circles), that the Spinozists might in fact turn out to have better and patently more cogent arguments relating to the primacy of reason, individual liberty and freedom of expression, as well as questions menacing to monarchy, aristocracy and ecclesiastical authority, than the moderates. If radical attacks on divine providence and religion could be simply denounced and driven underground by the majority, the same could not be said for radical arguments about the place of reason, toleration, individual liberty etc, or even about | |||||||||||||||||||
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monarchy, aristocracy, empire, slavery, and ecclesiastical power where they often had fringe religious minorities, such as the Unitarians, Collegiants, Mennonites and others on their side. All this emerges very clearly, for instance, from the Pantheismusstreit of the years 1780-87 in Germany, perhaps the greatest and most bitterly-contested intellectual controversy to shake the German cultural arena in the later eighteenth century - and the reason that Kant's critical philosophy suddenly became much better known to the general public in 1786-7 than it had been before. When Jacobi announced to the world in 1785 that Germany's great critic and playwright, Lessing, had been a ‘decided Spinozist’, most of the public, undoubtedly, was horrified. Herder, Goethe and a number of others, on the other hand, were perfectly delighted by this, feeling that they had unexpectedly found a brother in arms, since, in private at least, they themselves were declared Spinozists too. Significantly, almost no-one at the time questioned whether the reports of Lessing's ‘Spinozism’ were actually true. Everybody found the reports convincing (unlike modern scholars now) and everybody accepted, and found it unsurprising, that he should have been a ‘Spinozist’. Even Jacobi's chief antagonist in the controversy, Moses Mendelssohn, made no attempt to argue that Lessing was not a Spinozist, claiming merely that he was a ‘purified Spinozist’ who had replaced atheism with theism as distinct from being an unreformed atheistic Spinozist. The main point in this furious controversy was not, therefore, to determine whether Lessing really was a Spinozist which, as I say, hardly anybody contested, but something completely different. What people were chiefly afraid of was Lessing's reported claim that if one accepts reason as the supreme criterion in human life then one cannot avoid embracing Spinoza, because only Spinoza's philosophy is fully cogent: ‘es gibt keine andre Philosophie’ as Lessing reportedly put it, ‘als die Philosophie des Spinoza’.Ga naar voetnoot9 It was precisely this proposition that lay at the heart of Jacobi's essentially Counter-Enlightenment campaign: he argued that all philosophy, that relies solely on reason and seeks to be fully consistent, must end up by degenerating (as he saw it) into Spinozism. The only proper solution, then, according to Jacobi, was a leap into faith. This is how and why Kant's philosophy (despite its, to many, incomprehensibly technical terminology) suddenly came to seem the desperately-needed cure that everyone had been crying out for. By delimiting the scope of reason more strictly than had been done by anyone previously, Kant was seemingly able to block and side-line Spinoza. At the same time, though, Kant himself was in no doubt as to the extreme seriousness of the situation. At the height of the controversy, in 1786, he published an article entitled ‘Was heisst: Sich im Denken orientieren?’ in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in which he announced to the public that only strictly delimited reason, along the lines he was urging, was a viable philosophical basis for embracing the conventional Christian concept of God. In this article Kant is especially concerned to denounce the claim, being put about by Jacobi and others, ‘that the Spinozist concept of God is the only one in agreement with all the principles of reason and is nevertheless to be rejected.’Ga naar voetnoot10 The claim that Spinoza's system is the only correct outcome of philosophical endeavour, so | |||||||||||||||||||
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resoundingly heard in late eighteenth-century Germany, a claim vehemently asserted by Jacobi and the Counter-Enlightenment no less than by Lessing, Herder and Goethe, was undoubtedly motivated in large part, Kant justifiably complained, by a desire to debase and discredit philosophy and reason itself. ‘Have you thought’, he demanded of Jacobi and his allies, ‘about what you are doing and where your attacks on reason will lead?’ He expressly rebuked Mendelssohn's opponents for jeopardizing ‘freedom of thought’, appealing to all who supported the ideals of the Enlightenment to uphold reason above all and defend that precious legacy and do it while nevertheless repudiating Spinoza which, the inevitable implication of his words was, could only be honestly done by embracing Kantian philosophy. | |||||||||||||||||||
A tradition of marginalizingIt is true that large parts of the Enlightenment have been written about and are still being written about without any reference to Spinoza and Spinozism. But the impartial reader would be well advised to suspend judgment for a while before assuming that the usual approach is correct. Hundreds of books have been written about Leibniz, for example, who in the past many people lionized, presenting him as a great philosophical hero in whose life and development Spinoza played no significant part. Nevertheless, recent research such as the fascinating contributions of Mogens Laerke and Ursula Goldenbaum, and the latter's discovery of Leibniz's own copy of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus with his own hand-written annotations, has shown, I would say conclusively, that in reality Leibniz was always centrally preoccupied with Spinoza and especially so during the most crucially formative and decisive part of his development, in the 1670s and 1680s.Ga naar voetnoot11 Another notable example of this strange historiographical phenomenon of a long tradition of marginalizing what is really central, is the question of Dutch philosophical debate in the later eighteenth century. Until very recently, most authorities who discussed the subject agreed that Spinoza and Spinozism had little or no bearing on Dutch thought in that period. The ‘correct’ procedure has traditionally been to discuss François Hemsterhuis, for instance, the most interesting Dutch philosopher of the era, and the other Dutch philosophical writers of his time, scarcely referring to Spinoza or Spinozism at all, while heavily emphasizing their supposedly infinite admiration for Locke and Newton and so forth, a tradition recently continued by Theo Verbeek in his otherwise very competent entry, on Hemsterhuis, in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment.Ga naar voetnoot12 But in a posthumously published essay, M.J. Petry (who previously also gave the impression that Spinoza was of little relevance)Ga naar voetnoot13 modified his position markedly by pointing out that Locke was actually not very important in Hemsterhuis' development after all, and noting that ‘although Hemsterhuis was indeed extremely critical of Spinoza's writings, he was only too ready to give him [ie. Spinoza] more credit for insight into the true nature of mathematics and physics than nearly all the other thinkers of his time and was sympathetic towards Herder's attempt to present Spinozism as anything but anti-religious.’Ga naar voetnoot14 Then, re- | |||||||||||||||||||
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cently, the picture changed further with the discovery of a previously unknown key letter from Hemsterhuis, indicating ‘that both the Lettre sur la sculpture (1769)’, as Henri Krop has recently written, ‘and the Lettre sur les désires (1770), dedicated to the Amsterdam banker, Theodoor de Smeth, were written in order to save this amateur philosopher from Spinozism.’Ga naar voetnoot15 But if Hemsterhuis sought to save De Smeth from Spinozism, De Smeth evidently thought that Hemsterhuis' philosophy was itself, as Henri Krop puts it, ‘in harmony with Spinozism’. Hemsterhuis himself undoubtedly believed ‘que ceux qui ont cru voir du Spinosisme dans mes ouvrages ne sont pas absurdes main preoccupés’. Perhaps so; but this does not alter the fact that Lessing, according to Jacobi's account of their Spinoza conversations, ‘was absolutely convinced that Hemsterhuis’ later work, Aristée ou de la Divinité (1779) ‘was pure Spinozism’. Jacobi (who did not yet know Hemsterhuis personally, being only visited by him, in Düsseldorf, the following year (1781)), immediately protested against Lessing's remark: ‘from what I knew of Hemsterhuis, he was no Spinozist; Diderot himself had assured me of this.’ ‘Read the book’, retorted Lessing,’ and you will doubt [its Spinozistic character] no longer. His Lettre sur l'homme et ses rapports (1772) was still a bit hesitant and it is possible that Hemsterhuis himself did not fully recognize his own Spinozism at that time; but he is most certainly aware of it now.’Ga naar voetnoot16 This should suffice to convince the impartial reader that no matter how often it has been claimed that Spinoza and Spinozism were of little or no relevance to the late eighteenth-century Dutch intellectual Enlightenment, there is every justification for questioning the validity of this influential notion. It was precisely the reason why I tried to introduce a new method of writing intellectual history, the ‘controversialist method’, in my two books on the Enlightenment, that I had become convinced that the older methodologies concede far too much ground to a priori teleological assumptions about the real nature of the Enlightenment, assumptions which grew up in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and were built on a deep conviction of the intrinsic superiority of British ideas and constitutionalism in the construction of progressive modernity and, correspondingly, on the irrelevance of the tradition of eighteenth-century French materialism and what I call radical thought. If one is guided by the extant literature it may seem obvious that I have greatly exaggerated the importance of Spinoza and Spinozism. If on the other hand one prefers to be guided by the primary sources recording the actual controversies of the eighteenth century, I would submit that it is equally obvious that I have neither exaggerated Spinoza's centrality nor overplayed the decisive and formative importance of Spinozism and radical ideas more generally on all major Enlightenment developments. | |||||||||||||||||||
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Literature
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