Enlightenment Shadows

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Enlightenment
Shadows

Genevieve Lloyd

1
3
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Contents

Prologue 1
Introduction: The Enlightenment and its Future 9
Kant on enlightenment 9
Light and knowledge 13
Whose Enlightenment? 17
1. Cosmopolitan Imagining: Montesquieu’s Persian Letters 21
Tales of travel 21
Montesquieu’s travellers 26
Seraglios, real and imagined 34
Truth, interpretation, and tolerance 40
2. In Celebration of Not Knowing: Voltaire’s Voices 45
What’s in a name? 45
The Philosophical Dictionary 46
Tolerance and religion 56
3. Hume’s Sceptic 61
The intellectual character of the Sceptic 61
Hume and ancient scepticism 63
Humean detachment 66
The reconstruction of objectivity 75
4. As Seen by Others: Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments 81
Morals and religion 81
Sympathy and imagination 85
The impartial spectator 92
Fortune and human action 98
The ‘voices’ of Adam Smith 103
Philosophy and imagination 108
5. ‘Changing the Common Mode of Thinking’: d’Alembert
and Diderot on the Encyclopedia 111
Maps, trees, and circles 111
Judgement and genius 118
vi CONTENTS

6. The Attractions of Instability: Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew 127

7. Kantian Cosmopolitanism: Perpetual Peace 141
A cosmopolitan future 141
‘Going visiting’: Hannah Arendt on imagination
and judgement 152
Conclusion: Looking Back on the Enlightenment 155

Further Reading 169

Acknowledgements 182
Index 183
 Prologue

There is a rich—though often confusing—literature of critique of the

intellectual movement we now know as ‘the Enlightenment’. It has
been celebrated for its resolute commitment to freedom of thought—to
ideals of unfettered criticism of prevailing opinion; it has also been de-
plored for its alleged associations with totalitarian thinking. It has been
hailed as a precursor of ‘evidence-based’ approaches to governance and
policy making; it has also been denigrated as heralding inflexible ‘top-
down’ administration. It has been credited with being an influence on
modern understanding of universal human rights and multiculturalism; it
has also been blamed for inappropriate projections of western ideals onto
non-western cultures, to the detriment of the recognition of difference.
The Enlightenment has become the touchstone for highly emotional—
often contradictory—articulations of contemporary western values. We of
the west may proudly claim it as our heritage; we may also blame it for our
contemporary woes. Whether we praise or deride it, we now live in its
shadows and must reckon with what it has bequeathed us. Western
thought is haunted by the Enlightenment.
The power of metaphors of light can make it difficult to get clear
articulations of the darker side of the Enlightenment. Customary boundaries
between the successive periods of intellectual history can also complicate
the appreciation and evaluation of Enlightenment thought. The Enlight-
enment, construed as an intellectual movement, was succeeded—so a
common story goes—by the more expansive spirit of Romanticism. The
celebration of Romanticism, with its emphasis on the non-rational powers
and dispositions of the human mind, can encourage the idea that Enlighten-
ment thinkers were in contrast excessively rational. They can be seen as
excessively preoccupied with abstractions—with the universal as against the
2 PROLOGUE

specific or particular; with the commonalities of human nature rather than

with diversity; with the rigid formalities of reason, in contrast to the
subtleties of emotion and imagination.
The writings of Isaiah Berlin have been central to that way of thinking
of the relations between Enlightenment texts and what happened later in
European intellectual history. Berlin talks of a ‘counter-Enlightenment’—
an intellectual transformation which rejected a number of assumptions
underlying the thought of the Enlightenment. According to the Enlight-
enment outlook, on his analysis, the world was amenable to a unified
explanation which could form the basis for a single form of resolution to
human problems. Thus construed, the Enlightenment fostered commit-
ment to universal truths, universal canons of art, universal demonstrative
criteria for getting things right. With the transition to Romanticism, the
story goes, came a shift to delight in difference—to recognition of diversity
rather than universal order. The ‘counter-Enlightenment’—epitomized
by the German Romantics—is presented as celebrating the expression of
what is creative and sublime in human individuality and cultural groups,
rather than the common necessities of human nature.
There are of course hazards in offering broad articulations of tectonic
shifts in the history of thought of the kind at which Berlin excels—and
hazards too in offering a simple overview of Berlin’s own subtle interpret-
ations of individual authors or texts. He acknowledged that there are in
some Enlightenment texts anticipations of what was to become the
Romantic resistance to Enlightenment ways of thinking: Hume repudi-
ated universal order, affirming that there were no real necessities—only
probabilities; Montesquieu articulated the significance of cultural differ-
ences, showing that not everything was everywhere the same.1 However,
for Berlin such shifts within Enlightenment thought were minimal—‘faint
dents’ in the Enlightenment outlook, in comparison with the magnitude
of those that were to follow. My own assessment of such apparent
anomalies sees them as both deeper and less antithetical to what Berlin
describes as ‘the Enlightenment outlook’ than his metaphor of ‘faint dents’
suggests. I will be presenting them as rich tensions within Enlightenment
texts, rather than as weak intimations of what was still to come.

1
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto &
Windus,1999), pp. 32–4.
 PROLOGUE 3

There is more at stake here than perennial vexed questions of where

one intellectual movement or tradition begins and another starts—or of
where individual thinkers are best located on a scholarly reading list. If we
miss the interplay of intellect, affect, and imagination in Enlightenment
texts, we are also going to miss a great deal of what those texts have to offer
in helping us better understand our contemporary intellectual predica-
ments and moral conflicts. If we think of an Enlightenment outlook,
somehow repudiated or superseded by that of Romanticism, we miss
tensions within the texts which are a large part of their characteristic
tone and mood—the poignancy and wistfulness which often lurk beneath
their explicit expressions of confidence and optimism about the future. It
was often the ability to hold those tensions unresolved which marked the
distinctive intellectual character which emerged in Enlightenment texts. If
we ignore, especially, the ambivalences of their concern with the imagin-
ation and its interactions with emotion, we may well miss what gives us
now our strongest affinities with Enlightenment thinkers.
What then are the shadows evoked in the title of this book? It is meant
to suggest the darker elements in the thought of the Enlightenment—the
uncertainties and instabilities which often lurked at the time beneath its
imagery of light; but also the darkness which attends our own backward
gaze. It is also meant to suggest something less dark: the insubstantial
presence still discernible—or recoverable—of intellectual processes
which were once lively and full of hope.
A shadow can be either a benign or a malign presence. In ancient
Epicurean treatments of knowledge made popular by Lucretius’ famous
work On the Nature of Things—much read and admired by Enlightenment
thinkers—delicately textured images, ‘like spider’s web or goldleaf ’, could
be shed from the surfaces of things, as well as spontaneously forming in
mid-air. Such images could wander around the world, finding their way
into human minds. As well as conjuring up objects that never existed, they
could be the residual likenesses of living things that had met their death.2
As simulacra of the dead, they could flit around the world for a time,
troubling the living. Learning to see through the illusory nature of such

2
Lucretius, The Nature of Things, 4.7222–82; as quoted in A. A. Long, and D. N. Sedley,
trans., The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), vol. I,
p. 74.
4 PROLOGUE

ghostly apparitions was an important part of the Epicurean approach to the

diagnosis and exposure of superstitions at stake in the fear of death.
The belief in an afterlife—an underworld peopled by apparitions of the
dead—was for Lucretius central to the ways in which the life of the foolish
becomes hell here on earth.3
The Epicurean desire to demolish superstition by the force of reason
was a strong influence on Enlightenment thought. Yet the Enlightenment
itself has left some apparitions of its own which can be disturbing. As
shades, nebulous shadows can be unsettling phantoms—frightening rather
than reassuring visitations from the past. Even initially friendly shades can
turn to spectres. The life of the mind is susceptible to phantoms. Jacques
Derrida in Spectres of Marx has articulated ways in which living ideas can
turn ‘spectral’—lingering in strange forms which can both resemble and
be at odds with their originals. Derrida describes ideas which are, in his
sense, ‘spectral’ as ghostly presences with which we must learn to live. It is
futile, he says, to try to exorcise or chase away such visitations from the
past. They must rather be sorted out and critiqued—kept close by so that
they can be allowed to come back in forms in which we can better
understand them. Such intellectual spectres can be ‘timely’ visitations
from the past; yet they have of themselves no proper time. We cannot
be sure whether by ‘returning’ they testify to a living past or to an
anticipated future.4
Imagery of light may seem at odds with imagery of ghosts. Yet there is
now—in the evocative sense Derrida has given the term—a ‘spectral’
aspect to some of the central concepts of the Enlightenment. They
come from the past; yet, if they inspire us, we see them as belonging
to the future. Ideas of universal human rights; the ideals of tolerance
or hospitality associated with cosmopolitanism; aspirations towards
grounding human action in knowledge—all these come to us mediated
through the Enlightenment. In the clarity and vigour of their formulations
of such ideals, Enlightenment thinkers can seem to offer clear models of
reasonableness and humane civility from which we ourselves have fallen
away. Yet it is no less true that—formative though many of their ideas
became—Enlightenment thinkers were also often projecting tentative

3
Lucretius, The Nature of Things, 3.966–1023; Long and Sedley, vol. I, p. 153.
4
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge,
1994), p. 96.
 PROLOGUE 5

ideas wistfully towards the future. Their hopes often add a poignancy to
the spectral return of their ideas; at times it seems that hope itself provides
the substance of their thought.
Ideas that are in their origins oriented to an idealized future can turn
into parodies of themselves. The passage of time can of itself pose chal-
lenges to the collective life of the mind. The liveliness of fresh ideas can
quickly rigidify into cramping orthodoxies. This process of intellectual
enervation can give rise to particular paradoxes when Enlightenment ideas
are at issue. The atrophying effects of time on Enlightenment ideas are
one source of their spectral character in our contemporary context.
Enlightenment ideals of constant critique of the status quo can harden
into an oppositional style of thinking in which we—the supposedly
enlightened—align ourselves with the heritage of light against presumed
dark forces of ignorance or evil. Criticism—a practice often associated
with the Enlightenment—can become dogmatism when it ceases to be
self-reflective. Often, Enlightenment hopes and aspirations can thrive only
if they are themselves subjected to sustained critique.
The temporal paradox here was articulated by Max Horkheimer in his
writings, in the aftermath of the Second World War, on Enlightenment
ideals of reason. If we want to be true to Enlightenment ideals now, we
may need to criticize what they have involved in the past. Horkheimer’s
reflections on the paradoxes of Enlightenment reason—like those of his
fellow critics from the Frankfurt school, Adorno and Habermas—were
formulated in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In that context Enlighten-
ment reason, rather than being seen as heralding unlimited progress for the
human race, could be seen as itself producing a repressive imposition of
inflexible uniformity and orthodoxy.
The future of reason, Horkheimer observed, demands a radical critique
of the inner contradictions of Enlightenment thought; but this, he insisted,
does not mean that the ideals of the Enlightenment should be left behind.
We must rather, he says, ‘encourage Enlightenment to move forward even
in the face of its most paradoxical consequences . . . The hope of Reason
lies in the emancipation from its own fear of despair.’5 It may be in the

5
Max Horkheimer, ‘Reason Against Itself: Some Remarks on Enlightenment’, in James
Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Ques-
tions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 366–7.
6 PROLOGUE

very process of criticizing the limitations and inadequacies of Enlighten-

ment thought that we can continue what is best in it.
There may be much associated with the Enlightenment which we now
want to reject. Yet we have here a very complex object of criticism. We
should be wary about projecting a unitary project back onto Enlighten-
ment texts. ‘The Enlightenment’ is notoriously a concept that lacks clear
definitional boundaries. Peter Gay, in his masterly study The Enlightenment:
An Interpretation—published in the late 1960s and well worth revisiting
now—argued that to understand the Enlightenment we need to think in
terms not so much of a body of doctrines as an intellectual mood. On
Gay’s analysis, what Enlightenment thinkers shared was a style of thinking
and the related aspiration to a kind of intellectual character—a cluster of
ideals at the core of which was the idea of criticism.
Much has happened since the 1960s that can make criticism itself a
confusing and contested idea in ways that lie beyond the concerns of this
book—including developments in ‘postmodernism’ and ‘critical theory’.
However, my concern in the readings that follow is with a broader notion
of criticism. In the spirit of Gay’s approach to the Enlightenment, I want to
try to capture something of the intellectual mood and tone which suffused
the thinking in which these writers engaged—with such concern for their
present and hope for their future.
The readings offered in this book thus aim to bring into clearer focus
what was distinctive in the dynamic movements of thought that went into
the crafting of the texts. For there is, I will be arguing, a distinctive mood
and tone discernible in these Enlightenment texts—evoking a kind of
intellectual character from which contemporary western thinking can
seem increasingly distanced.
Bertrand Russell, in a moving short tribute to the influence of Voltaire
in his own thought, talks of the importance of attending not only to the
content of beliefs but to the ways in which beliefs are held. Voltaire, he
says, influenced not so much his opinions as the way in which he held
them, and the tone of voice in which he advocated them. Whereas it had
once seemed important to Russell that people should hold the right beliefs
and unbeliefs, and hold them earnestly, he came through Voltaire to
regard all dogmatic belief as something to be avoided, even if the belief
happens to be true. ‘I cannot’, he says, ‘find words in which to express
my delight in his sharp, swift wit which penetrates in a moment to the
inner core of humbug beneath pretentious trappings. I wish the world
 PROLOGUE 7

contained more of his deft lightheartedness. But we have all grown serious
and forgotten how to laugh.’6
Without an appreciation of the tenor and mood—the intellectual
character—that runs through the texts discussed in this book, the doctrines
they articulate can be pale copies of their originals. Without some insight
into the imaginative play and the emotional resonances that hold them
together, the ideas of the Enlightenment can indeed become pallid wraiths
that come back to haunt us. If we want now to understand and learn from
these texts it is important to attend not only to what they say but to how
they are written.
The readings which follow will thus take seriously the literary aspects of
philosophical texts; and the texts themselves are chosen with an eye to
illustrating the varying ways in which Enlightenment thinkers enacted—
and reflected upon—the interplay of intellect, emotion, and imagination.
The texts display a sense of the ascendancy of the imagination which can
be both exhilarating and unsettling. Rather than being relegated to a
subordinate position to reason, the imagination here emerges as the real
source of objectivity in moral consciousness—a shift in thought which is
accompanied by an unease, a sense of vulnerability which coexists with
Enlightenment optimism.
In some cases—as in the selection of writings from David Hume and
Adam Smith—the workings of imagination are central to the subject
matter of the works themselves. In others—especially in relation to Mon-
tesquieu and Diderot—the literary form of the works becomes the primary
focus. In the case of Voltaire, the emphasis is on the philosophical force of
rhetorical strategies, especially his use of multiple voices. In discussing
d’Alembert’s and Diderot’s explanations of the Encyclopedia, I highlight
the play of metaphors through which they try to reconcile two things
which can seem in conflict—a project of mapping the structure of the
mind, and the aspiration to capture processes of intellectual change. My
reading of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew in contrast centres on the work’s
enactment of the emotional instability and vulnerability accompanying the
power of imagination. Finally, Kant’s Perpetual Peace will be presented as
a striking literary hybrid of genres of theoretical discourse and visionary
tale of the future.

6
Bertrand Russell, ‘Voltaire’s Influence on Me’, Studies in Voltaire, vol. 6, 1958, p. 161.
8 PROLOGUE

Throughout the book I hope to offer a view of Enlightenment thinking

which is more attuned to the anomalies and uncertainties of twenty-first
century intellectual mood and character than is the more familiar picture
of exultation and optimism in the vision of reason unfolding in human
history. It must be acknowledged that these interconnected readings offer
just one thread in a complex pattern. However, what is at issue here is not
competing answers to a question about the definitive essence of an
intellectual movement. ‘The Enlightenment’ is itself in many ways a
retrospective construction. My concern is not to set firm limits to the
borders of a tradition, but rather to recapture some of the movements of
thought—the shifts and tensions within particular texts—which challenge
common assumptions about Enlightenment thinkers, and demand a more
nuanced view of the ways in which they celebrated the light of Reason.
Before looking more closely at the texts, we first need to attend to some
broader aspects of the narrative frame within which we have become
accustomed to think of that strange object of thought—the Enlightenment.
 Introduction: The
Enlightenment and its Future

Kant on enlightenment
In 1784 there was a striking, and in some ways peculiar, moment in
intellectual history: a philosopher addressed himself to his future—to the
heirs of the process we now in retrospect talk of as the Enlightenment. The
moment comes in a short essay by Immanuel Kant, called Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose a companion piece to
the better-known essay he published in the same year, An Answer to the
Question: What is Enlightenment? In that essay Kant famously defined
enlightenment as mankind’s exit from self-incurred immaturity.
The rationale of Kant’s definition in What is Enlightenment? was that
human beings had previously lacked the courage to make use of their own
understanding without the guidance of others. Hence, appropriating a
classical Latin quotation from Horace’s Epistles, Kant offered as the slogan
of enlightenment, Sapere Aude; that is, ‘Dare to Know’: have the courage to
use your understanding in your own right; think for yourselves, rather than
accepting things on authority. Judged in relation to that ideal of maturity,
Kant thought, his own age could not be said to be enlightened; but it could
be said to be a period of history in which the process of enlightenment was
under way. ‘If it is now asked whether we at present live in an enlightened
age? the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.’1

1
‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, in Kant, Political Writings, ed.
Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn., 1991),
p. 58. Subsequent quotations from Kant’s political essays are accompanied by page references
to this volume in parentheses.
10 INTRODUCTION : THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS FUTURE

Kant goes on to be more specific about the positioning of his own time
and place in relation to enlightenment. The signs of the process, he says,
are visible around him. The obstacles to enlightenment are becoming ever
fewer. ‘In this respect’, he concludes, ‘our age is the age of enlightenment,
the century of Frederick’ (p. 58). Kant was by no means unusual in seeing
the reign of the current Prussian sovereign as symbolizing ‘the age of
enlightenment’. Frederick the Great was at the time renowned for his
endorsement of the values of enlightenment. He fostered religious toler-
ance, introduced legal reforms, restricted the practice of judicial torture
and of the death penalty, reduced censorship, provided support and
protection for leading intellectual figures, and encouraged public scrutiny
of the workings of the state.
The connotations of ‘enlightenment’ here are of course much broader
than can be encompassed in the practice of philosophy as an intellectual
activity—though Frederick did pride himself on his engagement with
philosophers as well as on his efforts to produce poetry. Kant, in his essays
on enlightenment, meant the term to include not only philosophical
thinking but those broader commitments to the transformation of social
practices and institutions. In the Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Purpose he elaborated his version of the process of enlight-
enment, with breathtaking confidence, in a grand vision of the develop-
ment of reason in the human species.
Nature’s purpose for human beings, Kant argues, is the full flourishing
of their dormant capacities for reason. This demands a long series of
generations—each passing on its enlightenment to the next. For Kant,
enlightenment—thus construed as the unfolding of the moral maturity of
the species—demands the emergence of a cosmopolitan political system,
in which nations will stand to one another in relations similar to those in
which individuals stand to one another in civil society. Nature’s highest
purposes for the human species will be achieved in a ‘universal cosmopol-
itan existence’ which will at last be realized as the matrix within which all
the original capacities of the human race may develop under the guidance
of Nature. ‘Individual men and even entire nations little imagine that,
while they are pursuing their own ends, each in his own way and often in
opposition to others, they are unwittingly guided in their advance along a
course intended by nature’ (p. 41).
It is indeed a grand vision of human progress; and within it Kant assigns
to his own contemporaries—whom he sees as located little more than half-
 KANT ON ENLIGHTENMENT 11

way in the process—the responsibility of putting in place for future

generations the preconditions for that onward movement. The ‘rational
projects’ of his contemporaries can accelerate the coming of the enlight-
ened future, which will deliver such great benefits to their descendants.
Alternatively, by failing to take up their responsibilities, they can put
obstacles in the way of the emerging moral maturity of the species. Future
generations will then have to cope in the centuries to come with the
‘burden of history’ which they will inherit.
Much can be—and has been—said about the content of Kant’s cosmo-
politan vision of the age he saw unfolding. My concern here is with
something more general: the focus on the future itself, which is such a
striking feature of his way of thinking of enlightenment. As he sees it, the
very idea of enlightenment is oriented to the future: it is impossible to
think of enlightenment without thinking of the future. Kant gives expres-
sion here to something which is crucial to address if we now want to
understand our own relations to the Enlightenment tradition: do we relate
to it as to something past, or as participants in an ongoing process?
It is helpful here to keep in mind a distinction which has been
well drawn and perceptively explored in an important set of papers
by James Schmidt on the history of the Enlightenment. In talking of
enlightenment—Aufklarung—Kant is not talking, as we can now, of the
Enlightenment as an intellectual movement or distinctive period of
thought. He is concerned, rather, with the idea of enlightenment as an
intellectual activity. Kant and his peers often engaged in vehement debate
about the nature and the prospects of enlightenment; but they were not
discussing a movement in which they were consciously participating.
When, in the late eighteenth century, he denies that his own age is
enlightened, Kant is not rejecting ‘the Enlightenment’ as an appropriate
description of a particular stage of intellectual history. Rather, he is seeking
clarification regarding an ongoing process or activity. The outcomes to be
expected from that process might have been in dispute; but Kant and his
contemporaries were not attempting to describe a temporally bounded
period. Nor were they initiating a readily definable project or movement.
Enlightenment was for them an activity oriented towards a diverse set of
ends in an indeterminate future.2

2
See especially James Schmidt, ‘What Enlightenment Project?’, Political Theory, vol. 28,
no. 6, December 2000, 734–57.
12 INTRODUCTION : THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS FUTURE

I will be returning to Schmidt’s distinction throughout my discus-

sions of Enlightenment texts. His two aspects of ‘enlightenment’—as
an open-ended intellectual process, and as a specific intellectual move-
ment or tradition—cannot always be kept separate; and both are
addressed in this book. To understand a text, we need to see it in its
own intellectual context; but that in turn can demand that we bring to
bear on it competing interpretations of the intellectual movement to
which it is now seen in retrospect as belonging. However, my primary
focus will be on processes of thought internal to the texts—especially
with their enactments of interrelations between intellect, imagination,
and emotion.
Keeping in mind Schmidt’s distinction—between enlightenment as
process and ‘the Enlightenment’ as an intellectual movement—we can
see that the startling effect, for modern readers, of Kant’s essay comes
largely from a juxtaposition of temporal perspectives. On the one hand,
we have Kant’s own forward-looking concern with enlightenment as an
ongoing process—a process in which his readers are called to willingly
participate. On the other hand, there is our perspective on the Enlight-
enment as a finite historical period—an intellectual movement whose
pretensions and illusions we are in a position to evaluate from our own
present. For Enlightenment thinkers to support processes of enlighten-
ment was, as Schmidt has pointed out, not the same as their wishing to
defend the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement. Yet for us the
two temporal perspectives cannot be sharply separated; for we are
ourselves included in Kant’s call to the future. Are we now inside or
beyond the Enlightenment? If there is such a thing as ‘the Enlighten-
ment tradition’, whose tradition is it? By what right might we now
claim it as ‘ours’?
To get to grips with these issues, we need first to focus on the crucial
imagery of light which gave the Enlightenment its name. For something
special happened in the Enlightenment era in relation to a symbolic
structure which had long associated knowledge with imagery of light. In
Kant’s essays on enlightenment that configuration can be seen at its most
dramatic—in the integration of imagery of light with metaphors of human
growth and maturing. It is an alignment of metaphors which is crucial to
Enlightenment thinking about knowledge.
 LIGHT AND KNOWLEDGE 13

Light and knowledge

Associations between light and knowledge of course run right through the
history of western philosophy. The connection has been so close that we
now barely notice that to think of knowledge in terms of light is indeed to
use metaphors. Plato in The Republic used the metaphor of ascent from the
darkness of a cave to express the idea of a journey towards ever more
adequate knowledge. Through reflecting on its knowledge, the mind
moves from shadows to seeing things in the direct light of the sun—and
finally to the unmediated contemplation of the Forms, the eternal arche-
types of changing things.
Imagery of light is central also to treatments of knowledge offered by
the Stoics, who articulated their crucial epistemological category of ‘im-
pressions’ in terms of light: just as light revealed both itself and other
things, so impressions were supposed to reveal both themselves and their
causes. Later philosophers continued to be fascinated with the idea of truth
as self-evident to the attending mind—as incontrovertible to the mind as
what is revealed in sunlight is to the eyes. In the seventeenth century,
Spinoza throughout his works repeatedly insisted that what he was saying
was as clear as the sun at noonday—even when what was supposed to
follow deductively might be anything but apparent—dismissing his critics
as men in complete mental darkness.
However, those age-old symbolic associations of light and knowledge
lack something which becomes significant in Enlightenment texts: the idea
of human agency as involved in spreading the light of knowledge. It was an
idea which went beyond the Platonic model of the journey of an individual
mind from darkness to light. Enlightenment thinkers reworked the old
Platonic imagery for their own purposes. For them, light was not just an
attainment of individual minds; it was something to be disseminated
through collective activity. They were concerned with the transformation
of social practices and institutions through knowledge—with putting
knowledge to work. Ernst Cassirer summed up this aspect of their concern
with knowledge as a radically new form of philosophy. The epoch of the
Enlightenment, he said, ‘joined, to a degree scarcely ever achieved before,
the critical with the productive function and converted the one directly into
the other.’3 Philosophy itself here becomes ‘practical’—oriented, as we will

3
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1951), p. 278.
14 INTRODUCTION : THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS FUTURE

see especially in relation to the Encyclopedia—to the mechanical arts no less

than to science or literature and, more generally, to the betterment of
human lives through legal, educational, and economic reforms.
There were other classical sources of imagery of light which were
reworked, often consciously, in Enlightenment texts. In talking of the
cultivation of knowledge in terms of the dissipation of the darkness of
ignorance, the authors drew on imagery from the work of the Roman
Epicurean poet, Lucretius, On the Nature of Things:4
For we, as Boys at Night, at Day do fear
Shadows, as vain too and senseless as those are. (Book II, lines 58–9)

The darkness which was in need of dissipation through knowledge was for
Lucretius, as for Epicurus, religious superstition—and especially the fear of
death generated by irrational expectations of an afterlife. The destructive
power of religious superstition was epitomized for Lucretius by the story—
immortalized by Euripides—of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter
Iphigenia, in the hope of securing from the gods the passage to Troy of
the Greek ships becalmed at Aulis:
She fell, e’en now grown ripe for Nuptial joy,
To bribe the Gods, and buy a Wind for Troy:
So dy’d the innocent, the harmless Maid,
Such Devilish Acts Religion could persuade. (Book I, 120–1)

When eighteenth-century philosophers presented themselves as part of

processes of enlightenment, they were often aligning themselves with such
classical rejections of the persuasion of superstition. Voltaire celebrated that
line from Lucretius—Such Devilish Acts Religion could persuade—writing of
it that it was a beautiful line which would ‘last as long as the world lasts’.5
In associating themselves with the light of reason against the darkness of
superstition, Enlightenment thinkers were often also acknowledging what
they saw as the lost light of those classical sources themselves. Renaissance

4
These quotations from Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things are from the eighteenth-
century translation by Thomas Creech, as given by Peter Gay in his book The Enlightenment:
A Comprehensive Anthology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), pp. 32–6. They are
accompanied in parentheses by section references to the Creech text.
5
Voltaire, Lettres de Memmius à Ciceron, in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols.
(1877–85), XXVIII, p. 439; as quoted by Peter Gay in his The Enlightenment: A Comprehensive
Anthology, pp. 32–3.
 LIGHT AND KNOWLEDGE 15

scholars of classical antiquity—most notably Petrarch—had already pos-

itioned themselves with the ancients as associated with the light of know-
ledge. They saw in classical sources a power to dispel the darkness of the
‘middle’ period of thought which now separated them from the Greeks
and Romans. In aligning himself with the classical period—seen as ‘the
Age of Light’—Petrarch was reversing Christian versions of the stages of
history, which saw the light of Christ as succeeding the supposed darkness
of pagan classical antiquity. It was those ‘middle ages’ which were now
supposed to be seen as the ‘dark ages’, outshone by the cultural and
intellectual achievements that had preceded them.
At play here is a familiar dynamic of self-congratulatory identification
with metaphorical forces of good against evil, truth against error. How-
ever, in contrast to eighteenth-century appeals to imagery of advancing
light, these earlier identifications were a-temporal. There was no assump-
tion of forward movement—of assured progress. Renaissance thinkers
would adopt a preferred period, associating themselves with it in collabor-
ation with the forces of light. In contrast, it is from a standpoint immersed
in time that Kant associates metaphors of growth with metaphors of light.
He offers a story of progress essentially oriented to the future rather than to
the past. The process of enlightenment is construed as ongoing, rather than
as an established achievement to be celebrated in the present.
Like any metaphors, imagery of light has its limitations and its pitfalls.
Not all Kant’s learned contemporaries were appreciative of his efforts to
include them in his exultant vision of the future of enlightenment. Some
of them scornfully turned Kant’s metaphors back on him. Friedrich Karl
van Moser, in an essay called ‘True and False Political Enlightenment’,
warned facetiously of the need for good sense and caution with the sources
of light. Light, after all, is associated with fire:
It would be criminal, on the pretext of providing light, to bring so many candles
into a room and to place them in such a way that the whole house would catch fire.
It would be foolish to light candles at bright midday, in order to make the sun shine
brighter. It would be nonsense to place candles in the churchyard so that the dead
could see in their graves.These are the operations of some of our modern enlight-
eners, candle bearers, and lantern carriers.6

6
Friedrich Karl van Moser, ‘True and False Political Enlightenment’, trans. John Christian
Laursen, in James Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-
Century Question, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 213.
16 INTRODUCTION : THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS FUTURE

Even more sardonic at Kant’s expense was his friend Johann Georg
Hamann. Soon after the publication of Kant’s essay What is Enlighten-
ment Hamann wrote in a letter to another friend—Christian Jacob
Kraus—that, although he could tolerate seeing enlightenment elucidated
through analogies with human maturing, he took strong exception to
Kant’s use of ‘that accursed adjective self-incurred’. Taking aim at Kant’s
alignment of enlightenment with maturity, he observed that if the imma-
turity of the unenlightened is self-incurred, there must be a question as to
who then is the indeterminate other—the ‘tiresome guardian’ who must be
understood as the correlate of the immature?
Hamann complained that Kant had implicitly reckoned himself among
the class of the guardians. The alleged immaturity of the unenlightened is
then ‘self-incurred’ only insofar as they have surrendered themselves to the
guidance of a leader who remains invisible.
‘So wherein lies the inability or fault of the falsely accused immature one?
In his own laziness or cowardice? No, it lies in the blindness of his
guardian, who purports to be able to see, and for that very reason must
bear the whole responsibility for the fault.’ The enlightenment of their
century, Hamann concludes, is a delusion—‘a mere northern light, from
which can be prophesied no cosmopolitan chiliasm except in a nightcap
and by the stove . . . a cold, unfruitful moonlight without enlightenment
for the lazy understanding and without warmth for the cowardly will’.
Kant’s response to the question: ‘what is enlightenment?’, he concludes, is
‘a blind illumination for every immature one who walks at noon’.7
Hamann—no doubt wilfully and mischievously—is here allowing
metaphors of light to run riot at Kant’s expense. Having invoked an
opposition between enlightenment and self-incurred immaturity, Kant
has left himself open to a counter-attack of hostile imagery. Metaphors
of light are twisted to convey ideas of blindness and delusion. Kant’s
appropriation of the classical slogan ‘Dare to Know’ is presented as
delivering at best the unadventurous, cosy, fireside light enjoyed by
the self-satisfied in their nightcaps. Even worse, the would-be enlightener
can be cast as manipulating the connections which bind knowledge to
power—blinding the ignorant with dazzling, but nonetheless deluding,
illumination.

7
Johann Georg Hamann, Letter to Christian Jacob Kraus, 18 December 1784, trans. Garrett
Green, as in James Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment?, pp. 146–7.
 WHOSE ENLIGHTENMENT ? 17

Whose Enlightenment?
We may well now tend to be sceptical about grand narratives addressed to
the future. Yet the heavy sarcasm of Hamann’s response shows that even in
Kant’s own time his version of progress could be seen as pompous and
pretentious. If his contemporaries could already see hubris in Kant’s vision,
what about us now? How should we position ourselves in relation to
Kant’s vision of the future? Metaphors of ‘passing on the light’ still resonate
with us; and there is a rhetorical structure at play in Kant’s call to the future
that can still be attractive. For example, the metaphor runs hauntingly
through Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, where a father and son walk
resolutely—though without any clear purpose—through a mysteriously
ravaged landscape. As they make their relentless journey into a desolate
future, they tell one another that they are the bearers of the light. At times
the imagery is embodied in an actual candle; at other times it is an elusive
metaphor. ‘In that cold corridor they had reached the point of no return
which was measured from the first solely by the light they carried with
them.’8
Evocative metaphors of passing on the light can still enchant us. How-
ever, if we want to think of ourselves as bearing a fragile light to an
unknown future, we need to be clear about what that light might promise,
and especially about on what authority we claim to be its bearers. If we
want to think of ourselves as participating with Kant in an ongoing process
of enlightenment we may need to understand, not only Kant’s optimism
about the future, but also what made it possible for Hamann to see it as a
pernicious delusion. Hamann condemned the egoism he saw as implicit in
the Kantian narrative of progress into the light: the enlighteners are the
ones who presume to know where all should be heading. It may be
reassuring to invoke a lost or betrayed light as the repository of hope
against encroaching forms of darkness. Yet, as Hamann saw, it can be a
self-serving and dangerous rhetorical manoeuvre. Whatever the Stoics
may have thought, the forces of light cannot be relied upon to reveal
both themselves and the darkness. Nor can we assume that our conviction
that we are ‘bearers of the light’ is not itself a delusion.
Looking back now at Kant looking forward, we can reflect on what we
might now celebrate, and about what we should perhaps be distrustful or

8
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (London: Picador, 2006), p. 236.
18 INTRODUCTION : THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS FUTURE

cautious, in the rich but complex legacy of the Enlightenment. For Kant
the emerging powers of human reason were supposed to find realization in
a way of thinking that was distinctively ‘cosmopolitan’. His grand narrative
of the future had at its core a vision of the emergence of a world
government that would stand to nation states in a similar relationship to
that in which individuals stood to nations. His intellectual peers may have
taken the cosmopolitan ideal less literally. Yet the vision of a generous
acceptance of—and expansive engagement with—diversity was central to
the ideals of intellectual character we will see emerge in the texts discussed
in this book.
It is perhaps ironic then that the Enlightenment should be now invoked
as a signifier of cultural superiority—of the need to defend ‘our’ values
against a morally inferior ‘other’. How, we may ask, did the effort to
maintain supposed Enlightenment values come to this? The fearful
tightening of borders—and closing of minds—which can seem such a
disturbing feature of the post-11 September world, seems far removed
from the generous expansiveness of spirit in which Diderot could write to
Hume in 1768, ‘My dear David, you belong to all nations, and you will
never ask an unhappy man for his birth certificate. I flatter myself that I am,
like you, citizen of the great city of the world.’9
We will see in the readings that follow an optimism about the future, a
hope—even an assurance—that all will ultimately be well. It is a confi-
dence that can strike us as at odds with their authors’ clear-sighted,
intellectually tough perceptions of what is wrong in their present. They
share a vision of social progress through knowledge which rests on a view
of benign providence as at work in the world—even if they no longer
assume the transcendent nature of that providence. Even their insight into
human cruelty is often encompassed by a frame of optimism that can now
strike us—with the advantage of hindsight on the unfolding of their
hopes—as poignant.
The sardonic Voltaire, having rejected the doctrine that all is well in the
best of all possible worlds, could nonetheless hold onto the hope that all
will be well in the future. As he says in his attack on facile optimism in his
poem on the Lisbon earthquake: ‘One day all will be good, that is our hope,

9
Diderot, Letter to David Hume, February 22, 1768, as quoted in Peter Gay, The Enlighten-
ment: An Interpretation (London: Wildwood House, 1973), vol. I, p. 13.
 WHOSE ENLIGHTENMENT ? 19

All is good today, that is the illusion.’10 A bleak view of the present can be
mitigated by hope for the future; yet the juxtaposition of temporal
perspectives can also have an impact in the other direction. The radiance
of the future can accentuate the blackness of the present; and the immedi-
acy of that present can eclipse an imagined future. There are dark under-
currents in Enlightenment optimism; and they often seem to be, not
incidental lapses of resolve, but inherent in the structure of the texts.
The capacity to shift between different moods, to speak in a variety of
voices, to resist encapsulation into any one stance—to sense the darkness
implicit in the light—is at the very core of Enlightenment criticism.

10
Voltaire, Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, as quoted in Theodore Besterman, Voltaire
(Oxford: Blackwell, 3rd edn., 1976), p. 369.
This page intentionally left blank
 1
Cosmopolitan Imagining:
Montesquieu’s Persian Letters

Tales of travel
To imagine one’s self into the situation of another is an idea so familiar to
us that it is easy to overlook just how complex an exercise it is. We are
now so used to treating sympathy and empathy as ethically significant
human traits that it can be difficult to realize that this insight was a
contingent development—both in the history of moral philosophy and
in the cultural history of human emotions. The celebration of the capacity
to put oneself imaginatively into the place of another is a central strand in
Enlightenment thought. In the mid-eighteenth century, David Hume and
Adam Smith made the interactions of sympathy and imagination central in
their accounts of the well lived life. For Smith especially the key to virtue
was that we should learn to see what we do as if from outside—from
the perspectives of others. However the scene for this development in
the history of moral consciousness was set by earlier literary works,
which appealed to the fascination of European readers with voyages
of exploration. Fictional travels invited readers to reflect on what was
distinctive—and often strange—in their own culture.
By the time Diderot wrote his famous fictional Supplement to the Voyage
of Bougainville, in 1772—shortly after the publication of Bougainville’s
own Voyage Around the World—European readers were already familiar
with a genre of travel writing imbued with philosophical reflection. There
were earlier models for the use of fictional travel tales as vehicles of satire
directed to an author’s own culture. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—a
satire on the genre of travel tale no less than on human nature—was
published in 1726 and translated into French in 1727. Although Voltaire’s
Letters Regarding the English Nation—published in English and in French in
22 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

1733 and 1734—was based on a period he actually spent in England from

1726 to 1728, the French traveller in whose voice it is written operates
as a fictional construct, shrewdly satirical about both the French and
the English.
Fictional travel tales answered to a fascination with real travel—to
wonder at voyages of exploration; to the lure of the exotic. In this interest
in other peoples and customs there was of course more at stake than a
disinterested desire for knowledge. There were darker undercurrents to
the genial cosmopolitanism with which Enlightenment thinkers could talk
of themselves as citizens of the ‘great city of the world’. This was an age of
colonialism—a time of expansion of European power beyond European
borders, and of competition among European states for dominance of
newly conquered territory. Yet the indulgence of curiosity in travel—real
and imagined—played a central part in the formation also of gentler ideals
associated with enlightenment.
Sankar Muthu, in Enlightenment Against Empire, has argued convincingly
that there is, running through Enlightenment texts, a neglected thread of
critique—often vehement—of the ruthlessness of European colonization.
He shows how this strand—associated especially with works of Diderot,
Kant, and Herder—developed against the background of the extensive
literature glorifying ‘the noble savage’ who supposedly lived harmoniously
in a ‘state of nature’. Also in the background of the critiques of colonialism
discussed by Muthu was Rousseau’s more sophisticated story of human
development in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, where the
supposed golden age of humanity is located, not in humanity’s ‘original’
condition, but in its middle stages where savagery had been laid aside but
not yet replaced by the corruptions of social institutions.
There were anomalies and ambiguities in those glorifications of earlier
stages of human development; but they set the scene for a critical engage-
ment with the author’s own present. Ideas of what constituted enlighten-
ment came to be linked with discussion of the differences displayed by
human beings inhabiting different places. Interest in travel prompted
reflection on the relations between, on the one hand, cultural differences
in behaviour, and, on the other, the unity of human nature. Travel could
thus become a metaphor for developing a more distanced perspective on
what was distinctive in European customs and social institutions. As well as
satisfying the desire to learn about other peoples, travel tales offered ways
of imagining one’s own customs as if from the perspective of the other.
 TALES OF TRAVEL 23

There is a two-way imagining here across collectivities. It may be

in some ways anachronistic to talk in this context of transformative
‘cross-cultural’ encounters; ideas of distinctive unitary ‘cultures’ were not
yet fully formed. Eighteenth-century readers of travel literature could
nonetheless imagine themselves into the situations of foreign others, in
ways that could allow also for imagining how their own situations looked
from outside. Thus the fictional traveller became a recognized vehicle of
social critique.
In Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, two imaginary
disputants exchange views on an alleged addition to the French explorer’s
account of his travels. The fictional addendum records speeches and
conversations in which the Tahitians speak for themselves of their customs,
and of the strangeness they see in the behaviour of their European visitors.
Before the island’s chief gives a speech of farewell to the travellers, the
ship’s chaplain converses about sex and religion with a Tahitian who
welcomes him to his home and, in particular, to the sexual favours of his
youngest daughter.
It is possible to read this piece as a celebration of freedom from
the restraints and hypocrisies of European society—as an idealization of
closeness to nature. There are echoes in it of Rousseau’s criticisms of the
artificiality of city life, and of his regrets about the loss of natural expression
of the passions as a cost of social progress. Diderot has the French chaplain
make a transition from chastity to sexual freedom. Whatever they make of
the chaplain’s behaviour, readers are left in no doubt that they are not
meant to see the Tahitians’ ways of ordering sexual relations as clearly
inferior to those common in Europe. The thoughtful care expressed in
the Tahitians’ freedom-centred management of adolescent sexuality is
favourably contrasted with the repressive control exerted in European
societies. The contrast here is not between European sexual morality
and uncontrolled lust; it is rather between two different ways of managing
sexual relations. What can look to the chaplain—and initially to the
reader—like release from control, is in fact a different, complex, and subtle
form of social order.
In the background of Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville—
and more generally of the use of travel tales as a vehicle of social criticism—is
an earlier challenging treatment of common ways of perceiving the strange-
ness of others: Montaigne’s essay On the Cannibals, written in the late
sixteenth century. This widely read satirical essay on the cannibals of Brazil
24 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

set the scene for Enlightenment authors to use fictional travellers to raise
questions about European customs and institutions.
There is, Montaigne insists, nothing ‘savage’ or ‘barbarous’ about the
cannibals. Rather, every man calls ‘barbarous’ anything to which he is not
accustomed: ‘It is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth
or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of
our own country.’ Laying on the irony more thickly, he adds that it is
commonly in one’s own country that there is to be found ‘the perfect
religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing
anything’.1 He defends the cannibals from the charge of savagery by
turning it upside down. They are ‘wild’ only in the sense that we call
fruits wild when they are ‘produced by nature in her ordinary course’.
What we really ought to call ‘savage’ is the fruit we have artificially
‘perverted and misled from the common order’—the things we have
‘bastardised’ by adapting them to our corrupt tastes.
Living in accordance with nature is of course an old ideal, defended
especially by the ancient Stoics. We will see it invoked in varying ways in
Enlightenment texts. Montaigne appeals to it here in support of his
suggestion that terms such as ‘savage’ and ‘barbarous’, when used in
relation to cannibals, should be restricted to a literal rather than pejorative
sense. Just as they are ‘wild’ only in the sense that plants can be thus
described, so too the cannibals are ‘barbarous’ only in that ‘they have been
hardly fashioned by the mind of man, still remaining close neighbours to
their original state of nature’ (p. 232).
Montaigne is not celebrating the virtues of a supposed ‘noble savage’.
His claim is not that the cannibals are more virtuous than Europeans; he
acknowledges that much of their behaviour is undeniably cruel. The
analysis he offers does nonetheless operate as a powerful critique
of European ways. Having stripped ‘savagery’ of its prevailing moral
connotations—of its associations with pre-moral primitivism—he can
then reverse the familiar condemnation of the cannibals: ‘It does not
sadden me that we should note the horrible barbarity in a practice such
as theirs: what does sadden me is that, while judging correctly of their
wrong-doings, we should be so blind to our own’ (p. 235).

1
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin
Books, 1987), p. 231. Other quotations are accompanied by page references to this edition in
parentheses.
 TALES OF TRAVEL 25

In a deliberate attempt to startle his readers, Montaigne continues by

observing that there is more ‘barbarity’ in ‘eating a man alive’ than in
eating him dead—in ‘lacerating by rack and torture a body still fully able to
feel things’; in ‘roasting him little by little and having him bruised and
bitten by pigs and dogs’—than in roasting and eating him after his death.
He points out that such things have, moreover, been seen in recent
memory—not just among enemies in remote antiquity, but among his
fellow-citizens and neighbours. What is worse, it has been done ‘in the
name of duty and religion’ (p. 236).
It is a clever rhetorical strategy. The shock of the description ‘eating him
alive’ comes from the initial comparison with the behaviour of the ‘savage’
cannibal. By the time we get to the end of Montaigne’s catalogue of
European horrors, we know that the ‘eating alive’ is not literal but
metaphorical; but the horror remains. The rhetorical manoeuvre allows
Montaigne to reach a powerful conclusion about his own culture: ‘So
we can indeed call those folk barbarians by the rules of reason but not in
comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarism’
(p. 236).
Montaigne does not here deny the distance that separates ‘us’ from
‘them’. He acknowledges that the contrasts between the two cultures are
enormous. However, he cleverly denies his European readers the comfort
of being able to position themselves on the high moral ground. ‘It is no lie
to say that these men are indeed savages—by our standards; for either they
must be or we must be: there is an amazing gulf between their souls and
ours’ (p. 239). For Montaigne this gulf is not aligned with the distinction
between good and evil. It is only by our own standards of goodness that
the behaviour of the ‘savage’ can be judged more evil than ours.
Is this what we now call ‘relativism’? I think not. If Montaigne could
now engage in debates about the relativity of moral values—debates
which he helped make possible—it is by no means clear that he would
be on the side of the relativist. What is striking in his descriptions of the
cannibals is the ease with which he is prepared to cross cultural divides,
imaginatively entering into the consciousness of those who see as normal
what his readers will see as ‘barbaric’. Yet he does so while nonetheless
clearly condemning the cruelty of the practice of cannibalism. The upshot
of the exercise in imagining difference, through which he takes his readers,
is not that to understand is to condone. The capacity to enter into the
situation of the other does not demand a withholding of moral judgement.
26 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

Yet it brings a new capacity to perceive one’s own customs as if from the
standpoint of the other. His European readers are drawn into seeing
themselves as a ‘savage’ might see them.
This distancing strategy allows Montaigne a perspective from which it is
possible to make a much stronger critique than would be available if he
invited his readers to share a stance of supposed moral superiority over
the cannibals. He is not saying: ‘in behaving thus we are behaving like
the savages’. The whole point of his comparisons is to accentuate the
differences. He does not see his contemporary Europeans as ‘like savages’.
His point is rather that the Europeans’ behaviour is unacceptably cruel in
their own terms. The indignation is neatly turned back on practices in his
own culture, which might otherwise be too familiar to elicit the thought-
stopping sense of strangeness which is here a prerequisite for moral
understanding.The capacity for imagining difference without assuming
superiority was to prove a crucial exercise in later Enlightenment thought.
Its philosophical significance is given literary expression early in the
eighteenth century in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, published in 1721.2

Montesquieu’s travellers
Persian Letters is an epistolary novel, a collection of letters—principally
between two travellers: the elderly, thoughtful Usbek and the more
youthful, exuberant Rica; but also from friends, wives, and eunuchs at
home, as well as other non-Europeans. Montesquieu exploits to the full
the possibilities for contrasting viewpoints which the epistolary genre
affords. As Voltaire will later do in the Philosophical Dictionary, he takes
the strategy of multiple voices well beyond the limits of a two-sided
debate, offering a plurality of epistemological and moral perspectives.
As a literary device, the use of multiple voices allowed the author to
engage in critique of contemporary European customs without having to
speak on his own account. However, there is also much else going on in
the literary strategies of Persian Letters. The work is cosmopolitan in form as
well as in content; and as satire it has multiple targets—Persian as well as
European. There are many themes and many objects of critique, ranging

2
Quotations are from Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008). References and page numbers to this edition are given in
parentheses.
 MONTESQUIEU ’ S TRAVELLERS 27

from the most trivial of customs—dress and social norms—to the most
profound. However, the most persistent themes involve the critique
of tyranny—of the vagaries and vulnerabilities of absolute power, and
associated attitudes of prejudice and intolerance.
By showing the development in his characters of a capacity to perceive
their own customs from the standpoint of others, Montesquieu fosters a
similar capacity in his readers. The engagement of their imagination and
their ‘empathy’—as we might now call it—becomes an exercise in the
formation of cosmopolitan consciousness. The travellers’ perceptions are
filtered through memories of home—sometimes nostalgic, sometimes
critical. Their views change in response to the maturing, educative
dynamic of travel, shifting with the passage of time no less than with the
changes of place; and the juxtapositions of perception and memory allow
for critique of Persian customs as well as of European ways. These Persians
are not unprejudiced observers; but they are shown going through
processes of reflection which yield a fruitful kind of detachment.
Persian Travellers enacts an imaginative interplay between distance and
engagement, similar to that offered in Montaigne’s essay on the cannibals.
It is a novel about—among other things—the formation of judgement.
As they travel, Usbek and Rica come to form favourable as well as
negative views of the cultural differences that at first astonish them; and
their judgements about their own country also change. Their letters testify
to the transformations of consciousness that come from exposure to
difference. The travellers move from surprise and wonder at strikingly
novel customs to a deeper understanding of passions that are universal in
humanity, though differently expressed in different places—passions of
greed, vanity, love, jealousy; and the emotions associated with loss, and
with the fear of loss. They also come, in judging others, to a realization of
some—though not all—of their own limitations. What emerges from
the multiplicity of voices in Persian Letters is not the truth of any one
perspective to the exclusion of others; but nor is it an epistemological or
moral relativism. The work expresses a cosmopolitan ideal nourished by
what can be seen as an expansive form of scepticism.
Montesquieu’s Persians bring fresh perspectives to European customs;
and their exposure to Europeans in turn allows them to see their own
customs in a new light. They encounter, as Rica reports, things quite alien
to the Persian character. Usbek and Rica are both initially overwhelmed
by wonder in the face of all that is strange. Usbek comments in a letter to
28 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

his friend Ibben in Smyrna that when first seen ‘a Christian city presents a
wonderful spectacle to a Muslim’ (Letter 21; p. 30). Even in the tiniest
details, he says, there is something strange that he cannot put into words.
Yet out of the initial sense of distance arising from wonder comes an
increasingly eager engagement with difference.
Although the travellers initially perceive the Europeans as very different
beings from their own countrymen, they also see the great cities of Europe
as providing ‘a kind of homeland common to all foreigners’ (Letter 21,
p. 30). There is a cosmopolitan impulse in the travellers’ responses to
strangeness—an incipient sense of the possibility of coming to belong in a
place which is as yet unfamiliar. Ibben describes Usbek as ‘amiable enough
to make friends everywhere’—as one for whom ‘the heart is a citizen of
every country’ (Letter 65; pp. 87–8).
Usbek’s wonder persists longer than that of his younger companion.
He tells a friend that, in comparison with his own slow processes of
observation, Rica’s lively mind enables him to grasp things in a flash
(Letter 23; p. 33). Usbek’s surprise persists despite increasing familiarity,
but it is transformed: wonder drives his passion for knowledge. He writes
to his nephew Rhedi, who is travelling in Venice, ‘I find everything
interesting, everything astonishing; I am like a child whose still-tender
organs are keenly affected by the most trivial objects’ (Letter 46; p. 59).
Montesquieu’s use of wonder as a distancing strategy is subtle. His
Persians are clearly not just amazed innocents abroad; they can also be
shrewd observers. It would be difficult—now and no doubt for readers
at the time—to miss the cutting edge of satire, especially in Rica’s
witty observations of French foibles. The Persians are clearly surprised—
sometimes very surprised—by the Europeans. Their surprise serves a
satirical purpose. Montesquieu does not present them as consciously
hostile critics but as wondering wanderers; and we are drawn into that
wonder.
To engage his readers in an exercise of social critique, Montesquieu
does not need to have his characters engage in any heavy-handed criticism
of Europeans. He has only to get his readers to come to see themselves
as if from outside—to come to see the strangeness in what is for
them familiar. In drawing his European readers into his characters’ initial
astonishment and gradual accommodation to the new, he evokes a process
of cosmopolitan imagining—of engagement with the strangeness of
others—which is an analogue of actual travel.
 MONTESQUIEU ’ S TRAVELLERS 29

In his reflections, published later, on Persian Letters, Montesquieu

sought to distance himself from any implied condemnation of his own
society—especially of its religious principles and practices. Anxious to
defend himself against hostile readers who ‘wish to delude themselves’
about his intentions, he appeals to the motif of surprise. His travellers, he
suggests, were not so much critical of European ways as surprised by them.
Controversial passages which had attracted the ire of his critics were in fact,
he claims, never associated with any idea of scrutiny, even less with that of
criticism. His concern was rather to show the ‘genesis and progress’ of the
traveller’s ideas of Europe; and this demanded that they be shown as for a
time ‘full of ignorance and prejudice’. Their first thoughts were bound
to be bizarre, so his solution was to ‘make them bizarre in a way that is
compatible with intelligence’.3
Continuing his self-defence, Montesquieu urges his readers to note that
‘the entire charm of the work resides in the constantly recurring contrast
between actual reality and the singular, naive, or strange manner in which
reality is perceived’. His own interest, he insists, is in his characters’
changing perceptions rather than in any supposedly overriding truth. In
his account of the work, Montesquieu leaves open the issue of what the
‘actual reality’ of European society might be. However, it would be an
obtuse—if not ‘deluded’—reader who took the upshot of Persian Letters to
be uncritical of Europe.
It is not surprising that Montesquieu was later eager to distance himself
from any appearance of wilful critical intent. However, there are other
aspects of authorial voice at play in Persian Letters. The epistolary genre
suits the author’s purposes well in allowing him—as he coyly puts it in his
later ‘reflections’—to indulge in theoretical digressions without speaking
in his own voice. The multiple voices allow him the ‘advantage of adding
philosophy, politics and ethics to the novel, and of linking it all together by
a secret and, in a sense, unrecognized chain’. The reference to the ‘secret
chain’ is intriguing; it suggests that the selection of ‘surprises’ was not
arbitrary. However, there is probably no one secret, hidden doctrine
lurking in the text. The ‘chain’ is the authorial selection itself—the
continuing exercise of imagination involved in rendering the familiar
strange by constructing a succession of startled perceptions.

3
Montesquieu, ‘Some Reflections on The Persian Letters’, in Persian Letters, pp. 227–8.
Other quotations are accompanied by page references in parentheses.
30 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

The fictional travellers find their bearings in bewildering places by

interpreting the unusual in terms of the familiar. Their reconstruction of
Christian beliefs and practices in terms of what is familiar to them
as Muslims is often comical. French clerics are perceived as ‘dervishes’—
some of whom have surprisingly scholarly preoccupations with thousands
of head-spinning questions about religion. Rica reports to Ibben that the
war of arguments between them lasts until a decision is reached that
concludes it. ‘I can consequently assure you that no kingdom has
ever existed with as many civil wars as occur in the kingdom of Christ’
(Letter 27; p. 39).
Rica is impressed by the French commitment to passionate debate; but
he is sceptical—perhaps even cynical—about the capacity of this constant
questioning to yield truth. He reports to Ibben that he ‘has acquired one of
the tastes of this nation, whose people enjoy supporting extraordinary
opinions, and reducing everything to a paradox’ (Letter 36; p. 49). Mon-
tesquieu presents Rica as appalled by the conjunction of concern
with trivia with a capacity for apparently mindless cruelty. It is, as we
will see, a juxtaposition which later appalls also Voltaire. Rica sees French
theological preoccupations with subtle distinctions as underpinning
unwarranted charges of heresy—often with cruel consequences. European
religious authorities, he comments, apparently act in accordance with the
‘principle’ that it is best to come down on the side of severity. ‘Happy is
the country’, he concludes, that is ‘inhabited by the children of the
prophets: for there, such tragic spectacles are unknown; the holy religion
which the angels brought requires only its own truth to defend it, and has
no need of these violent means to keep it secure’ (Letter 27; p. 40).
However, as the work develops, the travellers’ growing scepticism will
be directed also towards their own trust in the capacity of religious truth to
speak for itself; and they come to challenge the self-assurance of their own
religious authorities, no less than that of the European ‘dervishes’.
Usbek’s reflections on difference are deeper and more philosophical
than Rica’s; the younger Rica’s observations are sharper and wittier.
Usbek is drawn to the consideration of universal abstract principles, Rica
to the discovery of more ad hoc similarities. Usbek’s ruminations bring
him closer to some of the agenda of Enlightenment philosophers. He
ruminates on styles of government; on the vagaries of power and domin-
ance; on the relations between civil, public, and international law, on the
one hand, and the ‘law of reason’ on the other. He is a theorist rather than
 MONTESQUIEU ’ S TRAVELLERS 31

a story teller; he finds pleasure in discourse on political systems rather

than in the reporting of gossip. His form of the cosmopolitan impulse
is directed to understanding what arrangements best meet universal human
needs.
Rica is more susceptible to the transient delights of the passing moment;
his kind of cosmopolitanism has special associations with the flow of urban
life. His enactment of the cosmopolitan mentality is in some ways an
anticipation of Baudelaire’s flâneur, celebrated by Walter Benjamin.
He delights in observing the varieties of human interaction, acted out
and symbolized by the vitality of the city. He revels in the movement of
crowds on European streets, amused by the extreme sociability of
the French—by their propensity to wear out front doors with
their hammering on them, faster than wind or rain can do. ‘They are
always in a rush, because they have the important responsibility of asking
every man they meet where he is going, and where he has been’ (Letter
85; p. 119).
It is Rica who makes the more amusing observations on daily life; it is
he who tells the delightful stories which illustrate cultural contrasts. His
cosmopolitanism finds expression in the sheer delight in difference, in the
ongoing unfolding of the new. There are emotional differences too.
Usbek is serious—even sombre—rather than playful. He is a man with
much on his mind. Yet there is more going on here than contrasts between
temperaments. Usbek and Rica represent different pulls of the cosmopol-
itan imagination—on the one hand, towards the understanding of what
is common to all; on the other, towards the recognition of what is
distinctive. Yet, rather than being radically opposed, these responses are
often two sides of the one movement of thought. Rica’s cosmopolitanism
finds expression in a capacity to see absurdity in the local and familiar; but
this rests on a recognition of a shared humanity in the initially strange ways
of the other. Usbek, though he is drawn to the abstract and universal, has
also a strong sense of the particularities of place.
The Persians’ travels bring, not a total rejection of origins, but rather
a growing awareness of alternative possibilities. We see them expanding,
rather than abandoning, their original perspectives. Travel brings them
education rather than conversion. Nor, in coming to more mature per-
ception, do they attain to a ‘view from nowhere’. The work as a whole
reinforces the sense of attachment to particular places and cultures. Those
ties remain as the soil which makes possible the imagining of alternatives.
32 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

As they grow in understanding, the Persians become more conscious of

who they are. The awareness of self is strengthened by confrontation with
the other. ‘It seems to me, Usbek’, Rica remarks, ‘that we never judge
anything without secretly considering it in relation to our own self ’ (Letter
57; p. 78).
Usbek’s sense of his growing cosmopolitanism is accentuated by an
observation in a letter to him from Nargum, the Persian envoy in
Moscow: ‘The Muscovites are not permitted to leave the empire, even
to travel; so that, isolated from the nations by the laws of their country,
they have preserved their ancient customs all the more keenly because
they do not believe anything different to be possible’ (Letter 49; p. 67).
Usbek, in contrast, is gaining a sense of other possibilities. From the initial
strangeness of foreign customs, he moves to a disquieting sense of the
strangeness of his own. He develops more distanced perceptions of Persia.
Experience brings him a kind of detachment—and with it a realization, in
the midst of his own strong convictions and habits, that others are possible.
One of the interesting things here is that the travellers’ emerging
cosmopolitanism brings both a stronger sense of self and an awareness
nonetheless of the insignificance of particular individuals—and even
of whole cultures—in the order of things. It is a constructive tension.
Echoing themes from ancient Greek articulations of the cosmopolitan
vision, Rica tells Usbek, ‘When I see men that creep about over
an atom, the earth, which is simply a dot in the universe, propose
themselves as models of Providence, I do not know how to reconcile
such extravagance with such insignificance’ (Letter 57; p. 78). The travel-
lers come to see that the beliefs and customs embedded in their own
culture have ultimately no more claim to absolute truth or value than
those embedded in radically different cultures. This leads them to a further
insight—into the tininess of human lives in general in relation to the
immensity of the world. Rica’s realization that everything is perceived in
relation to the self deepens into a sense of the insignificance of any
particular self—or cultural grouping of selves—in relation to the whole.
There are echoes here of the ancient Stoics, whose influence can often
be discerned in Persian Letters. The Stoics did not see their ideals of living in
accordance with cosmic order—‘acting in accordance with nature’—as at
all inconsistent with meeting the responsibilities involved in their ‘stations
in life’: the daily duties of being a father, or a citizen of a particular polis.
What Montesquieu has Usbek add to that Stoic conjunction of mundane
 MONTESQUIEU ’ S TRAVELLERS 33

and cosmic perspectives is the idea that citizenship of the world is for all of
us mediated through a sense of what is distinctive about our own place.
Travel teaches the Persians that what matters is to be a citizen, a husband,
a parent, in accordance with whatever that amounts to in the place where
one lives. Here there is no one right way of being a citizen of the
world. That indeterminacy in turn opens up transformative possibilities
for whatever situating culture one starts from.
The Persians’ amazement at the strangeness of the new reflects a deeper
and older sense of wonder at the world, which goes back to the ancient
origins of the cosmopolitan vision. Yet it is no longer a matter of some
one right order of things mapped—however elusively—onto a universal
rational structure. Rather, there are as many ordered ‘worlds’ as there are
social orders through which the Persians pass. As Montesquieu says in
his later reflections on the work, they ‘found themselves suddenly
transplanted into Europe, that is, into another universe’ (p. 228). Their
education involves moving from that state of stunned surprise at being
transported into another universe to the realization that, however different
cultures may be, it is all ultimately the same human world.
It is a delicate balancing act, this holding together of perceptions of
human sameness and of cultural difference. Persian Letters takes seriously
the relativization of its characters’ judgements to the cultural frames out of
which they speak. Yet there is nonetheless a sense of universality—
grounded in the shared needs and passions that find such different cultural
expression throughout the work. Sameness interacts with difference; the
universal with the specifically local. Again, there is no endorsement here of
what we now talk of as moral relativism—no repudiation of the possibility
of objective moral judgement. Shared humanity emerges through
encountering and coming to understand difference. The Persians enact
developing capacities to form objective judgements about what is lacking
in their own cultural norms. Montesquieu’s readers are drawn into both
the wonder and the humour of these cross-cultural encounters—sharing
the respect, and the sense of absurdity, generated by serious engagement
with difference.
Those tensions between sameness and difference are inherent in cosmo-
politan imagining. They intersect—and interact—with the contrasts in
intellectual character that emerge between Usbek and Rica. They play out
also in another theme which is central to the work—the operations of
male power in organizing the lives of women. The contrasts between male
34 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

and female lives are significant within what is shown of both European
and Persian social arrangements. There is no suggestion that all is well
between the sexes in the European world. Rather, the work illuminates
sexual inequities in general, opening up space for the consideration of
alternatives. As the work proceeds, Montesquieu exposes his readers to a
dramatic development in his travellers’ perceptions of what is possible in
relations between the sexes.

Seraglios, real and imagined

Three intersecting narratives bear on Montesquieu’s theme of male power
over female lives. First, there is the unfolding story of Usbek’s growing
insight into the tyrannies of absolute power. Second, closer to home, there
is the story of the erosion of Usbek’s own domestic power in the disarray
that descends on his seraglio in his absence—reported in letters from
his wives and from the eunuchs to whom he has delegated his authority.
Third, in counterpoint to those two narratives, we have Rica’s dazzling
tale of a female paradise, which throws into relief the specific situation of
Persian women under conditions of oppression, but also directs the reader’s
perception to a more general consideration of issues of sexual equality.
Usbek’s enlightenment about the fragility and hazards of absolute
political power has a tragic undercurrent. At the same time that his travels
are eliciting in him an aversion to political despotism, he is forced to face
the contradictions in his own domestic situation. Ironically, the travel
which brings his enlightenment about the vagaries of absolute power
also increases his vulnerability as an absent domestic despot. His reflections
on the theme of power are punctuated with increasingly disturbing news
of chaos at home.
Usbek, despite his lapses into obtuseness, clearly grows in wisdom
throughout his journey; yet, as he refines his views on the weaknesses
inherent in despotism, the tensions in his own situation become more
apparent. His head eunuch reports that, in the absence of the master, the
eunuchs have only the ‘futile ghost of an authority that is never completely
present’ (Letter 93; p. 129). That ghostly presence becomes ever more
futile as the delegated authority unravels. The eunuchs, their head reports,
can represent only the severity that goes with authority, not the love
 SERAGLIOS , REAL AND IMAGINED 35

which is supposed to temper it: ‘Return to comfort the laments of love and
make duty pleasurable’ (Letter 93; p.129). However, as the plot unfolds, it
becomes clear to the reader that the eunuchs are anything but loyal
collaborators in the power of the master; and that the ‘laments of love’
are not what they appear.
On one level, the growing disarray in Usbek’s seraglio represents the
lack of order which ensues in the lack of clear and present authority.
However, it also dramatizes possibilities for subversion of the power which
appears on the surface to be absolute. The disorder that develops in
Usbek’s absence makes visible the hidden structures of the authority
which operated in his presence. Within that organization of power,
order depends on the visibility of the figure around whose needs and
desires it is all arranged. The disarray at home becomes increasingly a
microcosm of the failures which Usbek comes to attribute to absolute
power in relation to civil order.
Some of those problems about political despotism anticipate Montes-
quieu’s own critique of absolutism in his later and better known work, The
Spirit of the Laws. What is striking in Persian Letters is that criticisms of
political despotism are here juxtaposed with insights into the oppression of
women in the domestic sphere. Usbek reflects on civil authority in ways
that resonate with his own domestic predicament. He quotes an unnamed
‘sensible European’ who analyses the deficiencies of the power wielded by
the ruler who remains invisible. Although Persian rulers intend their
invisibility to make them more respected, that source observes, it in fact
inspires respect for royalty in the abstract, rather than for the person of the
ruler. The invisibility of power attaches the minds of subjects to an abstract
throne rather than to a particular person. To the common people, this
invisible power remains always the same. ‘Even if ten kings, whom they
knew only by name, were to be slaughtered one after another, they would
experience no difference; it would be as if they had been governed by a
succession of ghosts’ (Letter 100; p. 138). In Usbek’s absence, his authority
becomes both more tyrannical and more ineffectual. Yet the letters from
home make it clear to the reader that, in relation to his own household,
Usbek is himself becoming a ghost.
Clearly, Usbek’s travels are making him a man of enlightenment—
trusting to laws of reason accessible to science and reflected in good
forms of governance. He shares in the optimism of ideals of progress
now associated with the Enlightenment. Reassuring Rhedi in Venice
36 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

that knowledge can be trusted to improve rather than damage human life,
he comments: ‘You are afraid, you say, that someone may invent a means
of destruction crueller than what is currently in use. No; if such a fatal
invention were discovered it would soon be prohibited by international
public law, and then nations would unanimously agree to bury this
discovery . . . ’ (Letter 103; p. 142). The growing disorder in the seraglio
is counterpoised to the gradual development of Usbek’s insights into the
politics of power and his associated hopes for the future of humanity.
Montesquieu comments in his later reflections on Persian Letters that
there is a tension in the travellers’ development which gives a narrative
form—a beginning, a middle, and an end—to the work. The longer the
travellers remain in Europe, the less amazed they are by what they
see there; their sense of strangeness subsides as they become familiar
with Europe. At the same time, for Usbek, the disorder at home—the
increasing anger, the diminishing love—grows in proportion to the length
of his absence. Montesquieu talks of this counterbalancing as giving an
emotional structure to the work which justifies describing it as ‘a kind of
novel’. However, the literary effects here are not just incidental to the
work’s philosophical content. The connections between Usbek’s waning
domestic power and his increasing dissatisfaction with political absolutism
do not merely facilitate its narrative structure. The unravelling of domestic
order is integrated into Montesquieu’s ‘chain’ of theoretical reflection.
Even in the early stages of his travels, Usbek has begun to doubt his
love for his wives. Although he writes fondly to them, he expresses
his ambivalence in his letters to others. To his friend Nessir he writes
that in his large seraglio he has ‘forestalled love, and let it destroy itself ’; but
that he is nonetheless ‘devoured’ by a jealousy that has come out of this
very indifference (Letter 6; p. 8). As his bewilderment at the novelty of
Europe lessens, he becomes increasingly disoriented about the place he has
left, and increasingly confused about his own emotions.
Montesquieu attempted to clarify the emotional structure of the story of
the seraglio in a set of ‘supplementary’ letters, written some time after the
original publication of Persian Letters. In one of these new letters—written
home by Jaron, a eunuch travelling with Usbek—more is revealed about
the absent master’s state of mind. Even early in his travels, his jealousy and
anxiety prey on him. ‘The farther Usbek travels from the seraglio,
the more does he turn his head in the direction of his sacred wives;
 SERAGLIOS , REAL AND IMAGINED 37

he sighs, he weeps; his anguish grows more bitter, his suspicions more
deep’ (Supplementary Letter 22; p. 215).
The chaos in Usbek’s household is reinforced by the confusion and
deception that accompany the exchange of information and commands.
Letters are lost or ignored; orders are not received; action is deferred.
He must act decisively in response to reports of intense emotions about
which he has no reliable knowledge. His own emotions become dark
entanglements of jealousy, anxiety, and misery. Meanwhile, power
struggles—and passionate alliances—are developing among the eunuchs
and the wives. Usbek is increasingly bereft and frantic; his letters are crazed
and tyrannical. ‘May this letter fall upon you like a thunderbolt that strikes
amid lightning and tempestuous rain!’, he thunders to his wives—in
sympathy with the elements his images evoke (Letter 146; p. 209).
The unfolding story of Usbek’s domestic problems thus has also
an epistemological dimension. Travel enhances Usbek’s capacity for
informed judgement; but this comes at a high cost. The subversion of
his domestic authority is exacerbated by the epistemological vulnerabilities
that accompany his travels. The hazards of testimony—some of which are
later highlighted by Hume in his discussion of miracles in the Inquiry into
Human Understanding—are enacted in a succession of unreliable reports
and miscommunications. Usbek’s growing uncertainties open up a space
within which it is possible for thought to happen—a space for constructive
wavering; a space of not knowing, in which intellectual habits and beliefs
might shift. Yet none of this uncertainty is revealed to those in his power;
to them he is determined to appear free of doubt and hesitation.
To a modern reader, Usbek’s letters to his wives as the seraglio disinte-
grates can read like feminist parodies of intractable male power. The
reader, however, is made well aware in the final stages of the work that
Usbek no longer really believes in his own authority. His ranting letters to
his wives and their eunuch carers are both comical and poignant. His
illogical concoctions of presumptions, counterfactuals, and inconsistencies,
border on the farcical. For example, he berates one of his wives for being
found alone with a eunuch, contrary to house rules. Against her protest-
ations that nothing of significance happened between them—that the
eunuch lowered his eyes in ‘holy respect’—Usbek insists, with more
vehemence than coherence, that she nonetheless acted against her duty:
‘And if you did this gratuitously, without satisfying your dissolute desires,
what would you have done in order to satisfy them?’ (Letter 19; p. 28).
38 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

She should be grateful, he roars, for the holy customs of her country—
customs we know have already loosened their hold on Usbek himself. It
is, he insists, the constraints on her life that have saved her from greater
transgressions.
At the core of the tragedy are the letters exchanged between Usbek and
his favourite, most trusted wife, Roxane. Usbek’s letters to her display a
self-satisfied confidence—a readiness to occupy the high moral ground,
which seems at odds with the doubts about Persian customs in general
which he expresses to his male correspondents. He assures Roxane that she
is fortunate to be living in ‘the sweet land of Persia’ rather than in France—
a ‘poisonous place where modesty and virtue are unknown’ (Letter 24;
p. 33). What Usbek presents as the security of his wife’s imposed virtue
may well strike us as a projection of his own insecurity. Roxane’s supposed
security apparently consists in her being obliged to love Usbek—in never
being able to lose what it is her duty to feel for him. The perversities in
Usbek’s relations with his wives are summed up by another wife, Fatme.
‘You men are so cruel!’, she complains. ‘You are delighted for us to feel
desires we cannot satisfy: you treat us as if we were insensible, yet you
would be angry were that actually the case’ (Letter 7; p. 10).
As the letters continue it emerges that all is not as it seems—either with
the devotion of the wives or with the loyalty of the eunuchs. It becomes
clear to the reader—before it has become clear to Usbek—that his wives
are deceiving him and that the eunuchs are manipulating his passions and
subverting his power. The eunuchs are not only unreliable in their exercise
of authority; they are also unreliable narrators. The wretched outcomes are
revealed bit by bit in letters whose sequence is structured in such a way that
we know the full horrors before Usbek himself gets the news.
The story of Usbek’s enlightenment about the politics of power
develops in counterpoint to the story of the unravelling of his own
power at home and of his efforts to reassert his tyrannical authority
there. However, there is an additional subtlety in Montesquieu’s use of
multiple narratives on themes of power and sexual difference. He adds a
third narrative—a fiction within a fiction—which complements the tragic
story of disarray in Usbek’s seraglio. Like most of the novel’s stories within
a story, it is told by the imaginative Rica.
Speaking in his own voice, Rica—charmed by the relative freedom of
female lives in Europe—has already made his own comparisons between
Persian and European ways of organizing relations between the sexes.
 SERAGLIOS , REAL AND IMAGINED 39

Commenting on the lack of real pleasure or light-heartedness under the

Persian arrangements, he has described the lives of women there as ‘a
regular life without excitement’, where ‘everything speaks of subservience
and duty’. ‘Even the pleasures are serious, and the joys sober, and they are
rarely experienced except as marks of authority and dependence’ (Letter
32; p. 43). Later in the text, Montesquieu has Rica elaborate those
reservations about Persian sexual arrangements in his moving fantasy of a
female paradise.
Rica’s tale is an enchanting articulation of ideas of female freedom and
equality—a utopian fiction of a society structured around female needs
and pleasures. This paradise is a ‘place of pure delight’. It is inhabited by
virtuously sensuous women—‘intoxicated by flowing streams of sensual
pleasures, with sublime men who will submit to them’ (Letter 135;
p. 188). In a reversal of the arrangements in Persia, the women will have
their own seraglio, where the men will be confined with eunuchs to guard
them. However, this story of role reversal is not really a fantasy of
male subordination to women. Men are not unhappy in Rica’s imagined
seraglios—though one might well wonder how they find time for much
beyond the satisfaction of female desire.
The story begins at the moment of death of its heroine Anais—stabbed
by her jealous husband, Ibrahim, when she resists his cruel demands. Anais
is transported at death to the female paradise. However, the heroine—
being possessed of ‘a truly philosophical mind’—soon passes from
her initial state of thoughtless rapture into a more reflective mode,
enjoying the ‘quiet moments when the soul takes stock of itself, as it
were, and listens to its own voice, in the silence of the passions’ (Letter
135; p. 191). In this thoughtful, socially conscious disposition, Anais
altruistically decides to send back to the land of her death one of her
lovers—an Ibrahim impostor, who will introduce into the real Ibrahim’s
worldly harem something of the happiness of the paradisial one.
The surrogate Ibrahim, as well as sexually delighting the women in the
real Ibrahim’s harem, tries to educate them into the possibility of living
free lives. In that light, the women come to see that the tyrannical real
Ibrahim had no notion of true female virtue—that ‘he only knew
about his own weakness’ (Letter 135; p. 193). His replacement, having
dispatched the old Ibrahim to a far-away place, sets about a programme of
social reform. He dismisses the guards, opening his house to all. In this new
order, the wives are encouraged to cease veiling their faces; on feast days
40 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

they are now to be seen mingling freely with the male guests. He realizes
that the customs of this new country ‘were not made for citizens like
himself ’, and that his sojourn there can only be temporary. Meanwhile, he
does not refuse himself any expense, disbursing with great liberality the
fortune of the jealous Ibrahim before the latter can manage to return.
It is all a delightful fantasy, which is at the same time an exercise of
political imagination—echoing in some ways Plato’s talk in The Republic of
the return of the philosophers to the cave after their vision of the Forms—a
metaphor which is also embedded in a story of an ideal society. Rica’s story
of the happiness that accompanies the cultivation of freedom and equality
is an exuberant political fiction—an expression of hope, of a kind which
eludes the theorizing of the more ruminative and melancholic Usbek.
Rica’s fantasy of the female paradise acts as an emotional counter-
balance to the bleak denouement of the narrative of Usbek’s disintegrating
seraglio. Roxane’s tragic death at her own hand has poignant reverber-
ations with Rica’s story of Anais’s escape from the tyrannous Ibrahim into
her version of paradise. Persian Letters closes with a final, passionate, and
moving letter in which Roxane narrates her own dying from swallowing
poison. Roxane has the last word. In her last letter to Usbek, she cries:
Yes, I have deceived you; I have bribed your eunuchs, I have played upon your
jealousy, and I have managed to make of your dreadful seraglio an abode of delights
and pleasures . . . . How could you suppose me so credulous as to believe that the
sole purpose for my existence was to adore your caprices? That while you refused
yourself nothing, you had the right to frustrate every desire of mine? No: I may
have lived in servitude, but I have always been free: I have rewritten your laws to
conform to those of nature, and my spirit has always remained independent. You
should still be thanking me for the sacrifice I made you, in my degrading pretence
of being your faithful wife, and in cravenly keeping secret in my heart what
I should have proclaimed before the whole world; in short, that I profaned virtue,
in allowing my submission to your caprices to be described by that word. (Letter
150; p. 213)

We are left to hope that in asserting her freedom she finds her paradise.

Truth, interpretation, and tolerance

Montesquieu’s narration of his Persians’ travels can be read as an attempt
to educate his readers in the emancipating power of imagination. In
following Usbek’s and Rica’s changing perceptions, his readers are enabled
 TRUTH , INTERPRETATION , AND TOLERANCE 41

to see European customs as if through the eyes of foreigners. At the

same time the story of the collapse of Usbek’s seraglio draws them into a
critical perspective on the subjection of the Persian wives—all of course
from within a European narrative frame. Rica’s utopian tale within
a tale in turn allows the imagining of alternative futures, not only
for Montesquieu’s Persians but for his European readers—futures centred
on ideals of freedom and equality. The wretchedness of the Persian
wives stands condemned; but Rica’s tale also confronts European sexual
inequities.
The nested perspectives carried by the multiple voices, and by the
interwoven narratives, conjure a common intellectual space—accessible
to the reader and sometimes glimpsed by the characters themselves—
within which a complex conversation goes on. This orchestration of
voices does not amount to a succession of political theories offered for
intellectual evaluation. Rather, the reader is drawn into the alternative
‘worlds’, as if experiencing them from within—entering imaginatively and
sympathetically into an open-ended engagement with difference.
It is striking here that deliberations about power and about knowledge
seem to converge in Persian Letters. For absolutism can be epistemological
as well as political. What crumbles—in the bruising and ultimately
enlightening encounters which Montesquieu has his characters undergo
with the strangeness of others—is a configuration of relations between
knowledge and power. The characters come to engage with difference,
acquiring an openness to change even in the midst of passionate convic-
tion. The shifts between perspectives introduce an intellectual flexibility
which allows judgement to occur; but no one perspective is presumed to
be an exclusive point of access to truth. Persian Letters celebrates the
formation of objective judgement; but it is a multi-faceted truth that it
offers. Dogmatic certainties are rejected, whether they are expressed by the
Europeans or the Persians.
Issues of truth and interpretation—of objectivity and subjective
conviction—run right through Persian Letters. In one illuminating passage,
a bemused Usbek tells Rhedi of an exchange on interpretation and
casuistry, in which a ‘dervish’ of the Jesuit variety tells him: ‘I’m confiding
to you the secret of an art in whose service I’ve grown old; I’m showing
you its finer points; there’s a way of interpreting everything, even matters
which appear the least susceptible of interpretation’ (Letter 55; p. 75).
However, Usbek realizes that zeal for interpretation is not confined to
42 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

Jesuit casuistry. He comments on the ‘highly wrought’ style of Islamic

religious texts and the challenges they pose. With them too, he ironically
suggests, it may seem at first as if the inspired writings are simply divine
ideas expressed in human language; but on closer examination, it seems
that in them ‘we find the words of God and the ideas of men, as if by some
extraordinary caprice God had dictated the words, and man had provided
the thought’ (Letter 94; p. 131).
Usbek yearns for epistemological simplicity—for a truth which
will shine through the confusions and complexities of conflicted social
practices and competing ethical systems. It is a yearning, he knows, which
is exploited by religious authorities of all kinds. Yet Usbek himself is not
free of the patronizing tendency to appropriate aspects of other religions as
containing intimations of his own. Commenting, in a letter to his
cousin—a (real) dervish—on the things that favourably impress him
about European culture, he says: ‘I see Muhammadanism everywhere,
although I do not find Muhammad here. Whatever people may do, truth
will out, and shine through the shadows surrounding it. The day will come
when the Eternal One will find only true believers on this earth’ (Letter
33; p. 45).
It is a remark which can be read as showing the limitations of Usbek’s
current capacity for cosmopolitan imagining. It can also be read as express-
ing Montesquieu’s sense of the limitations of the attitudes of his fellow
eighteenth-century Europeans towards different cultures. He gives that
stance of condescending acknowledgement, from a position of assumed
superiority, to a fictional traveller in Europe; but, in being confronted with
it, his readers may get an unsettling glimpse of the possibility that this
might also be themselves as perceived by others.
Edwin Curley, in an interesting essay comparing Persian Letters and
Locke’s Letter on Tolerance, has argued that Montesquieu managed to
articulate in the novel a broader version of religious toleration than
Locke offered.4 Locke’s justifications for religious toleration in the Letter,
published in 1689, were confined to relations between Christians—indeed
to relations between different kinds of Protestant Christians, whose crucial
commitments to civil authorities in the commonwealth were not in
doubt. He argued that tolerance could not extend to Roman Catholics

4
Edwin Curley, ‘From Locke’s Letter to Montesquieu’s Lettres’, Midwest Studies in Philoso-
phy, vol. 26, no. 1, 2002, pp. 280–306.
 TRUTH , INTERPRETATION , AND TOLERANCE 43

or to Muslims, because they directed their loyalties to rival jurisdictions—

to the Papacy or to an Imam. Curley argues that in Persian Letters
Montesquieu offers a more general defence of tolerance—a challenge to
the religious ‘exclusivism’ which makes religions treat their own sacred
texts as offering a unique path to salvation.
Curley’s arguments for the comparative ‘pluralism’ of Persian Letters
in relation to religious tolerance are convincing. Locke’s arguments
for religious tolerance rested largely on the inevitable uncertainties
surrounding what is required for salvation. Matters of such importance,
he thought, must be left to conscience and reason, rather than imposed by
religious authorities. Issues of tolerance remained for Locke framed
by shared belief in an afterlife and the expectation of divine reward or
punishment. Thus Locke also argued that tolerance could not be extended
to atheists, who—lacking belief in an afterlife of rewards or punishments—
supposedly lacked also the capacity to live in any moral order at all. On
Curley’s analysis, Montesquieu offers in Persian Letters a ‘deistic’ critique of
revelation-based approaches to religion.
Judged in relation to Montesquieu’s own intellectual context, the
critique of religious power implicit in the novel may well be appropriately
taken as ‘deistic’, rather than as promoting an atheism that acknowledges
no God at all. However, we can also see in this text intimations of
an emerging ‘secular’ basis for moral consciousness—glimpses of an
approach to the formation of moral judgement which will receive fuller
and more explicit articulation in David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s treat-
ments of the interactions of sympathy and imagination. Persian Letters
points the way, not only to a broader extension of religious tolerance,
but towards a secular understanding of moral judgement—centred on
the capacity to imagine ourselves into the situations of others. It is a
conceptual shift which opens up the possibility of a new version of
‘cosmopolitanism’—a readiness for an open-ended engagement with
cross-cultural difference.
It is not an untroubled sense of the future that becomes visible here. If
the character of Usbek is to be read as an early pre-figuring of ideals
associated with cosmopolitan imagining, his unravelling in the face of
the challenges of living between different cultures must strike an ominous
note. It is different cultures—not just individual selves and others—that
confront one another across difference in Montesquieu’s tale. Yet it is
individual characters that carry the burdens of the cross-cultural failures, as
44 COSMOPOLITAN IMAGINING : MONTESQUIEU ’ S PERSIAN LETTERS

well as the exhilarating achievements of expansion of the mind. We will

see, in the thought of David Hume and Adam Smith, the complex
imaginative and emotional shifts at stake in that enlightened expansion
of the mind. First, however, let us see how the distancing strategy of
multiple voices is put to work by Voltaire.
 2
In Celebration of Not
Knowing: Voltaire’s Voices

What’s in a name?
Casanova—himself an ardent name-changer—suggested that Voltaire
would never have attained immortality under his original name, ‘Arouet’.
It labelled him, in sound though not by meaning, ‘the one to be beaten’—
a whipping-boy. Casanova pointed out that in this stupidest of all possible
worlds—a description which was of course itself a tribute to Voltaire’s
Candide—to write under that name would have been asking for trouble:
the door to the temple would have been slammed shut in his face.1
The younger Arouet changed his name after a short period of incarcer-
ation in the Bastille for testing too audaciously the limits of the French
state’s toleration of satire. Although it seems not to have been a particularly
austere imprisonment, he later regarded this misfortune as helping to
develop both his courage and his sense of injustice. His imprisonment
marked the beginning of Voltaire’s writing of works for the theatre.
Perhaps his readiness to change his unfortunate name with an eye to his
literary aspirations may have marked also the beginnings of a lifelong
writing strategy—the use of his extraordinary capacity to speak in many
voices.
At its most basic level, the art of writing in multiple voices was for
Voltaire, as for many of his time, a tactic for staying out of trouble. The
stratagem was so common that it was not even necessary for the ‘deception’
to succeed. Often all that was required was a token denial of authorship.

1
Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1966), vol. II, Ch. 10, pp. 269–70.
46 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES

However, Voltaire’s brilliant exploitation of the manoeuvre—especially in

his later works—goes well beyond anything needed for self-protection.
Voltaire’s multiple voices reflect his lifelong love of the theatre. The
interplay of the voices express an exuberant sense of fun—a delight in the
theatricality of life. Yet they also serve serious philosophical purposes. His
philosophical insights are expressed through the orchestration of voices,
the choreography of masks. The technique is already evident in his early
work Letters Concerning the English Nation—published in London in 1733,
and as Lettres Philosophiques in France, with a false imprint, in 1734.
The work offers observations drawn from Voltaire’s life in England
between 1726 and 1728, after he had to leave Paris following a violent
quarrel with the chevalier, Gui Auguste de Rohan-Chabot, the reper-
cussions of which had led to another spell in the Bastille. Not surprisingly,
the insights of the narrating Frenchman into the relative freedom, civility,
and tolerance of English life have a satirical edge; and the voice of this
fictionalized traveller is constructed so as to avoid explicit identification.
Yet there is already more going on here than the general concern with
anonymity which made it a common practice of eighteenth-century
authors to avoid putting names on title pages. It is not only the name of
the narrator that is withheld. In contrast to the sketches of the English,
which illustrate national customs and attitudes, the persona of the nameless
narrator remains elusive. This has a distancing effect which accentuates the
liveliness of the characters the narrator meets and observes. The orchestra-
tion of voices takes the reader directly into the succession of encounters.
It is a literary strategy which Voltaire increasingly uses for philosophical
purposes.

The Philosophical Dictionary

By the time he published his Philosophical Dictionary, in 1764, Voltaire’s
masquerades with identity had the status of jokes he could share with his
readers. The Philosophical Dictionary is a collection of short essays on a wide
range of topics, many of them related to Voltaire’s preoccupations with
issues of religious tolerance.2 The style is both playful and serious—at times

2
Quotations are from Theodore Besterman, ed. and trans., Voltaire: Philosophical Dictionary
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). Page references to this edition are given in
parentheses.
 THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY 47

darkly comical, at other times savagely sardonic. His pretences, though

they may well have been prudent, were also transparent. Some of the
Dictionary entries were cunningly attributed to contemporary scholars—
real or imaginary. At times the attributions are anagrams of real names—
just as his own name was an anagram of the initials making up the
Latinized spelling of ‘Arouet the younger’. Some are attributed to real
local or foreign identities; some are fictitious. An entry on faith is given to
‘A Descendant of Rabelais’; one on Job is assigned to ‘an invalid at the
waters of Aix-la-Chapelle’. The entry on ‘transubstantiation’ is claimed
to be by ‘M. Guillaume, protestant minister’.3 There can have been no
serious intent to hide behind these assumed identities. What mattered was
the sheer multiplicity of voices.
Clearly there is more at stake in Voltaire’s ventriloquism than the fun he
undoubtedly had in going through the motions of concealing his identity.
It allows him to bring different positions into argument without having to
explicitly endorse any one of them. That much of the technique is familiar
in philosophical writing constructed in dialogue form. Voltaire’s writing
strategy goes further. His voices operate, not only among the different
entries in the Philosophical Dictionary, but often also within an entry.
Although the work does include some dialogues, the entries often do
not involve an argument—or even a conversation—between clearly
identifiable opinions. The interplay of voices plays out in conjunction
with irony in such a way that within any one voice we cannot be sure
whether anything is being advanced for serious consideration. There is
often not so much a differentiation of distinct voices as an indeterminacy
of tone, which can make it difficult to identify even a single position.
Theodore Besterman has argued that the multiple voices serve a peda-
gogic function: Voltaire, rather than offering a clearly enunciated position,
is intent on getting his readers to complete the thought for themselves. As
Voltaire observed in the preface to an early edition of Philosophical Diction-
ary, the most useful books are those to which the readers contribute half,
by developing ideas the seeds of which have been presented to them.4
Strategies for drawing thoughts out of a student are as old as Plato’s
Socratic dialogues. However, this does not suffice to capture what is

3
See Besterman’s footnotes identifying fictitious attributions at the end of specific entries
in his edition of the Philosophical Dictionary.
4
Theodore Besterman, Voltaire (Oxford: Blackwell, 3rd edn., 1976), p. 487.
48 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES

distinctive about Voltaire’s pedagogy. With him it is not just a matter of

eliciting thoughts but also of forcing reflection on how beliefs are held. His
use of multiple voices reflects a concern with attitudes towards knowing
and not knowing.
This concern is made explicit in the Philosophical Dictionary entry on
‘The Limits of the Human Mind’. Here Voltaire praises ‘I Do Not Know’
as a response to abstruse questions. He attacks the ‘conceited upstarts’ who
appear to think that, because they have taken degrees and wear furred
gowns or have bought office, they have the right to judge and to condemn
what they do not understand. Whereas Montaigne’s motto was ‘What Do
I Know?’, he observes, theirs is ‘What Do I Not Know?’ (pp. 74–5).
Voltaire’s concern with the limits of knowing—and with related issues
of the modalities of believing—is particularly strong in relation to religious
belief. In the entry on Atheism he presents that state as the antithesis, not of
religious belief as such, but of believing with fervour. A voice—some
voice—assures us with apparent confidence that atheism is of all positions
the worst. Yet by the end of the entry the claim has shifted to the point
where atheism is seen as harmless; for it is, we are told, rarely held with
zeal. The greatest source of danger and affliction in relation to religion is
now presented as zealous religious belief.
The Atheism entry has a complex, layered structure which rewards close
examination. Throughout it, Voltaire is concerned with the rhetorical
force of calling someone an atheist. The focus is, from the beginning, on
attitudes to knowledge. In former times, he says, anybody who possessed a
secret in one of the crafts ran the risk of being taken for a sorcerer, and
every new sect was accused of butchering children. So, too, every phil-
osopher who turned aside from the jargon of the schools was accused of
atheism by fanatics and rascals, and condemned by fools. He goes on to
complain that the fanatics, the rascals, and the fools are still at it: ‘atheism’ is
seen in his own times as a term of abuse; the atheist is regarded as a threat to
society.
By a series of subtle moves—liberally laced with irony—Voltaire goes
on to argue that the real threat to society is the zealous religious believer.
For that way of believing is really a form of idolatry, which is surely more
dangerous to society than the quibbles of the atheist. Voltaire’s claim that
the religious believer is in fact an idolator may well seem initially counter-
intuitive. Yet in context he is making a powerful point. His contemporar-
ies, he points out, think of the ancient Greeks as idolators because they
 THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY 49

worshipped false gods. However, it is in fact the zealous Christians who

have so totally misconstrued the true nature of God as to persecute in his
name. Nothing could be more ‘idolatrous’, he concludes, than to worship
a God who would make such demands.
Having thus called into question the content of religious belief in a
vengeful God, Voltaire goes on to challenge the ways in which his
contemporaries attribute disreputable character traits to atheists. It quickly
emerges that the central issue for him is, not the reputation of individual
atheists, but rather how we should regard the character of the atheist as
such. His discussion tracks the course of the defence offered in Pierre
Bayle’s work, Pensées Diverses, of the character of an alleged atheist, Vanini.
However, the issue for Voltaire becomes more general: is the atheist really,
as Bayle suggests, capable of living as part of a society? Are those whose
behaviour is unchecked by the idea of a vengeful God capable of living
together? Could there be a functioning society of atheists? Or does
society—as Bayle’s critics argued—presuppose belief in an avenging God
who will punish the wicked in this world or the next? Against the view
that society depends for its existence on fear of the gods, Voltaire offers for
consideration the ancient Sceptics, the Epicureans—who were convinced
that the gods, if there were any, were indifferent to human needs—and,
especially, the senators of ancient Rome who were, he sardonically asserts,
‘true atheists’ who neither feared the gods nor hoped for anything from
them.
Voltaire’s reasoning here does not take the form of sustained argumen-
tation proceeding systematically through considerations for and against a
position. Not only does the conclusion waver; the topic under consider-
ation also shifts. Having made the connections between contemporary
Christian belief and idolatry, he then moves to the question whether
idolatry is more dangerous to society than atheism. From there the
discussion quickly shifts again to a broader consideration of the importance
to society of religious belief. With increasingly apparent irony, Voltaire
suggests that it was infinitely better for the Greeks to fear false gods than to
fear nothing: ‘It is indubitable that it is infinitely more useful in a civilized
city to have even a bad religion than none at all’ (p. 56).
By now, readers may well feel confused by Voltaire’s apparently ram-
bling argument. Yet the sequence of topics in his discussion of atheism is
by no means arbitrary. The nested themes allow him to displace the
reader’s focus from the reputation of particular atheists to what is in fact
50 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES

his central concern: ‘It would thus appear that Bayle should rather have
inquired which is the more dangerous, fanaticism or atheism.’ By this stage
in the argument it is clear that it is not the presence or absence of religious
belief that matters for Voltaire; what matters is the way in which a belief is
held. With the issue cast in these terms, there can no longer be any contest:
fanaticism is surely a thousand times worse than atheism; for atheism does
not inspire bloody passions or motivate crimes. Voltaire observes that,
whereas fanatics perpetrated the Bartholomew’s Day massacres, Hobbes,
who was regarded as an atheist, lived a calm and innocent life. Nor was it
the atheist Spinoza who tore to pieces the de Witt brothers. The worst that
can be said of atheists in his own times is that they are ‘bold and misguided
scholars who reason badly’ and thus are unable understand such ‘difficul-
ties’ as creation, or the origin of evil (p. 56).
Voltaire’s readers may well be losing their grip on where he stands on
the perils of atheism. Despite his previous insistence that it was better for
society that fear should be directed towards false gods than that no gods be
feared at all, he now concludes that atheists are no real threat to the well-
being of society. He assigns them to the ranks—which they share with
many non-atheists—of foolish but harmless ‘argufiers’. If this were a
conventional argument about theological positions, his readers might
well have grounds for complaint about what seems a bewildering chain
of thought. However, in these final sections of the entry there are shifts,
not only in attitude towards the rival merits of atheism and idolatry, but in
the understanding of what counts as either position. It is not, as earlier, the
Greeks who are here supposed to be seen as having worshipped false gods.
It is rather the later Christians; for the Christians have so totally miscon-
strued God as to persecute in his name. It is the Christians, then, who are
rightly seen as the ‘idolators’—the believers in a false God.
Voltaire goes on to move cunningly between past and present, con-
tinuing to shift the content of ‘idolator’ and ‘atheist’. There have indeed
been dangerous atheists, he observes, citing again—though apparently to
different purpose—the senators of ancient Rome who believed neither in
providence nor in the future life. They were ‘an assembly of philosophers,
voluptuaries and ambitious men, all very dangerous, and who destroyed
the republic’ (p. 57). But should we believe that it was their atheism that
made them dangerous? By way of answer, Voltaire offers this barbed
reflection on the workings of moral motivation in his own times:
 THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY 51

I should want no dealings with an atheist prince who thought it useful to have me
pounded in a mortar: I am quite sure that I would be pounded. If I were a
sovereign I should want no dealings with atheist courtiers whose interest it was
to have me poisoned: I should have to take antidotes at random every day. It is thus
absolutely necessary for princes and peoples to have deeply engraved in their minds
the notion of a supreme being, creator, ruler, remunerator and avenger. (p. 57)

At this point Voltaire has completely unsettled any expectation that

atheists should command less moral respect than believers. He has demon-
strated that the assumed ethical superiority of the religious believer is not
coherently based. By the time he offers his list of divine attributes sup-
posedly supporting the ethical foundations provided by religious belief—
including ‘remunerator’ and ‘avenger’—it is clear that his account of the
moral threat posed by the atheist to society is ironic. Atheism, he tells his
readers, is a ‘monstrous evil’ in those who govern, and also in learned men
even if their lives are innocent, because their studies might affect those
who hold office. However, the double-edged character of this supposed
conclusion quickly becomes apparent. The foolish but harmless ‘quid-
dities’ of the atheist are brought finally into contrast with the ruthlessness
of the religious zealot. The existence of ‘tyrants of souls’ who believe in a
‘vengeful god’ provides a rationale for ‘feeble spirits’ to deny the god of
truth and purity whom these monsters in fact dishonour. Their feeble
followers are urged: ‘Believe a hundred things either obviously abomin-
able or mathematically impossible: otherwise the god of mercy will burn
you in the fires of hell, not only for millions of billions of centuries, but
throughout all eternity, whether you have a body or whether you have no
body’ (p. 58).
In case the message may have been missed, Voltaire concludes the entry
with a final blast of sardonic invective. The ‘inconceivable stupidities’
of the zealous revolt alike, he observes, ‘feeble and reckless’ minds and
those that are ‘firm and wise’. The god rejected by the atheist is but a false
god—the most senseless and barbarous of gods. We should not feel the
lack of that god; for he is nothing but a projection of the zealous believer’s
own absurdities and rages. God, he concludes, is therefore the opposite of
what the zealots proclaim; he is really as wise and good as they allege him
to be mad and wicked. ‘This is what wise men conclude. But if a fanatic
hears them, he denounces them to a magistrate subservient to the priests;
and this magistrate has them burnt on a slow fire, believing that he is
avenging and imitating the divine majesty he violates’ (p. 58).
52 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES

The reader has come a long way to reach the reassuring sanity of that
final voice. However, what has happened is not that the original version of
atheism has been found to be morally superior to ‘idolatry’ as it is usually
understood; rather, zealous belief has been shown to be a form of idolatry.
The fanatic’s belief has been cast as a belief in a false God, while atheism is
presented as the repudiation of that monstrous God. In this form, atheism
converges disconcertingly with the content which Voltaire goes on—in
one of the final entries in the Philosophical Dictionary—to give to the beliefs
of the Theist. Here it emerges that Voltaire’s theist does not claim to know
how God acts; nor does he embrace any of the sects, which all contradict
one another. Theism, in this version, consists neither in the ‘opinions of an
unintelligible metaphysic’ nor in ‘a vain apparatus’, but solely in ‘worship
and justice’.
Should we take this version of theism as at last Voltaire’s own authentic
voice? His presentation of it does have the ring of conviction. However,
the full subtlety of his approach to religious belief in this entry emerges if
we see it in the context of the remarkable ‘Prayer to God’, with which he
concludes his Treatise on Tolerance, published in 1763. This ‘prayer’ reson-
ates both with apparent personal conviction and—at first sight—with the
cadences of conventional Christianity: ‘It is not now to mankind that
I address myself, but to thee, God of all beings, of all worlds, and of all
ages, if it be permitted to feeble creatures lost in the immensity of space and
imperceptible to the rest of the universe to presume to ask Thee aught,
Thou who hast given all and whose secrets are as immutable as they are
eternal.’5
It sounds like familiar piety. Yet there is already, in Voltaire’s stress on
human insignificance, an intimation of the scathing critique of assumed
knowing which he offers in the Philosophical Dictionary. Readers may
initially be lulled into thinking they know where they are in this ‘prayer’.
However, they may be stopped in their tracks by Voltaire’s elaboration of
the theme of human insignificance. The praying voice suggests that, given
that we are such trifling atoms in the universe, the differences between our
customs are surely of no consequence or interest to the deity. Yet these
very trifles are also presented as the substance of the established religions.

5
Voltaire, Treatise on Tolerance and Other Writings, trans. Brian Masters (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 92.
 THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY 53

As the prayer unfolds, there is little doubt that it is an attack on

conventional religion rather than a celebration of it. The prayer is really
an attack on the self-centred intolerance that accompanies lack of doubt—
on the religious zealots’ presumptions about their own centrality in the
order of things; on their posturing pomposity; on their denial of the light
of good sense. ‘Grant that those who light candles in the full light of day to
worship Thee should look with kindness upon those others who are
content with the light of Thy sun!’ Voltaire’s final sentence resonates
with familiar rhythms of prayer: ‘If the scourges of war are not to be
avoided, let us at least not hate one another or tear each other apart in the
midst of peace, but let us use the moment of our earthly existence to praise,
in a thousand different but equal languages, from Siam to California, Thy
goodness which has given us that moment.’ It is clear by this stage, however,
that Voltaire’s stance on religion is far from conventional. The shifting
tones of his prayer evoke a deep anger directed at religious zeal.
The prayer really expresses neither obeisance before a transcendent God
nor self-congratulation on a supposed special status for humanity in his
creation. It is not so much an honouring of a preconceived deity as an
attempt to construct—out of the rejection of conventional pieties—an
alternative vision of humanity’s relations with the universe as a whole.
Rather than conjuring up a transcendent deity with whom human beings
have a special relationship, the prayer resonates with the tones of ancient
Stoic awe and wonder at the cosmos, of which humanity is but a tiny part.
Voltaire’s anger is directed at the presumption implicit in the exalted
status which fervent religious believers often give to human beings—at
their exaggeration of human importance. That anger is nonetheless closely
connected with his concern for human well-being. Outrage at unjust
treatment of individual people suffuses many of his works of this period.
The Treatise on Tolerance—along with a cluster of related shorter pieces
written through the 1760s—publicized a series of cases in which religious
fervour swayed the administration of justice.6 He was involved especially
with the notorious ‘Calas affair’, in which a Protestant family was accused
of complicity in the murder of their son and brother, because of his
intention to convert to Catholicism. He was active also in the case brought

6
Some of these pieces, translated and edited by Simon Harvey, are included in Voltaire,
Treatise on Tolerance and Other Writings.
54 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES

against the Sirven family, who were also accused in relation to the death of
their daughter and sister; and in relation to the fate of the young chevalier,
La Barre, who was brought before the courts after supposedly mocking a
religious procession. Both Jean Calas, the father of the murdered young
man, and La Barre, were executed after first enduring horrific torture.
Voltaire’s outrage at these events was expressed also in the entry on
Torture which he added in the 1769 edition of the Philosophical Dictionary.7
It incorporates a sardonic description of the La Barre case, which echoes his
preoccupation in the earlier entries with attitudes to knowing and not
knowing. His anger at the cruel treatment of La Barre is expressed in
scathing irony about the etymological connections between torture and
knowledge. Playing on the derivations which construe torture in terms of
‘the putting of the question’, he comments that it is a strange way to
question someone. ‘Yet it was not invented by the merely curious.’
Voltaire’s brief account of the La Barre case is cleverly constructed to
juxtapose the triviality of the alleged offences with positive connotations
of intellectual curiosity, which are carried by talk of ‘the question’:
When the chevalier de la Barre, grandson of a lieutenant-general, a very intelligent
and promising young man, but with all the thoughtlessness of wild youth, was
convicted of singing impious songs and even of passing a procession of Capuchins
without taking his hat off, the judges of Abbeville, people comparable to Roman
senators, ordered not only that his tongue be torn out, his hand cut off, and his
body burned on a slow fire, but they also put him to the torture, to discover exactly
how many songs he had sung, and how many processions he had watched with his
hat on.

Voltaire’s association of torture with the need to know is deliberately

incongruous: the chevalier’s alleged offences are trivial; the responses
massively disproportionate. The ‘question’ here takes on grotesque associ-
ations with an obsessive concern with knowing trivia. The uselessness of
the knowledge extracted by torture is juxtaposed with the savagery of the
process.
Voltaire goes on to play on associations between torture and providence.
The idea of divine providence as wilfully torturing us is of course at odds
with its usual connotations of loving provision for human needs. Voltaire
darkly suggests that the history of the practice of torture has nonetheless

7
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, pp. 394–6.
 THE PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY 55

something of the divine about it: torture imitates the divine. ‘Providence
sometimes tortures us by means of the stone, gravel, gout, scurvy, leprosy,
pox great and small, griping of the bowels, nervous convulsions, and other
executants of the vengeance of providence.’
There are in that macabre list echoes of Voltaire’s earlier savage satire on
the belief in divine providence—construed as the claim that we live in the
best of all possible worlds—in his famous novella, Candide. Now, in the
entry on torture in the Philosophical Dictionary, he associates providence
with vengeance, divine power with cruelty. He means to startle his readers
into recognition of torture as a grotesque practice; but conventional ideas
of providence are here called into question along with the practice of
torture.
All this allows Voltaire to present the practice of torture in his own times
as a gross abuse of power. ‘Woe to a nation which, long civilized, is still led
by atrocious ancient practices!’ The Torture entry also echoes the derision
he directed in earlier entries at scholarly pedantry—his sardonic critiques
of the ‘argufiers’, of the traders in ‘quiddities’. Defective attitudes to
knowing—in particular, obsessive concern with detail, removed from
any apparent concern with human well-being—are here presented as
enmeshed with the abuse of power. As in theTheist entry in the Philosoph-
ical Dictionary, the unsettling incongruities of earlier voices give way to
reassuring rational tones. Yet the target of that clear, critical voice is again,
not religious belief as such, but the zeal with which it is held. Nor does
Voltaire have to add an extra voice of his own to make his intention clear,
any more than he needed to add himself as an extra part to his plays. His
distinctive voice is in the staging.
Voltaire’s writing is a model of the integration of emotion and
reasonableness, of deep anger with sound judgement. The vigour of
the writing has a momentum which sweeps us up and takes on a wild
ride with him wherever the logic leads. But the logic here has as much to
do with the requirements of decency in emotional response as with the
demands of rational argumentation. To read Voltaire properly, we have
to engage with him—not as ‘argufiers’, but as complete human beings.
In the end it is the capacity for shared emotion and shared judgement—
in the face of the depiction of horrors and incongruities—that allows us
to recognize, in the midst of all its multiplicity, the authentic and rare
voice of Voltaire.
56 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES

Tolerance and religion

If he could make atheism and theism change places so easily, where does this
leave the issue of Voltaire’s own religious belief? From the perspective of
our own times, there remain enigmas in the understanding of Enlighten-
ment atheism. Issues of religious belief were of course often complicated
for Enlightenment thinkers by genuine need to conceal unbelief—for fear,
if not of persecution, at any rate of frustration of ambition, or denial of
preferment. It is also important to remember that at this time the term
‘atheist’, though it was clearly pejorative, lacked clear content. It could be
used to describe the ‘heretical’ denial of a particular theological doctrine—
a particular view of the nature of God—rather than a denial of God’s
existence.
The popularity of doctrines associated with Deism further complicates
the assessment of eighteenth-century philosophical stances on religion. It
was possible to reject orthodox Christian belief while embracing a deistic
affirmation of divine presence in the world. The rejection of a transcend-
ent God was in this context not necessarily perceived as amounting to
atheism. What was more important was the rejection of belief in an
afterlife which allowed for the reward of virtue or the punishment of
evil-doing. However, even a belief in divine justice was often regarded as
consistent with Deism rather that indicative of religious orthodoxy.
Voltaire’s own pronouncements on the question of his religious belief
were, unsurprisingly, elusive. Despite common associations of his name
with the repudiation of religion, modern scholarly assessments, associated
especially with an influential study by René Pomeau, have presented him
as a committed deist—believing in a supreme being who created the
universe and continues to dispense divine justice. Theodore Besterman—
having pointed out the shifting meanings of ‘deism’, and the problems
in categorizing Voltaire’s stance on religion from the perspective of
contemporary distinctions—concludes: ‘Voltaire was at most an agnostic;
and were any tough-minded philosopher to maintain that this type of
agnosticism is indistinguishable from atheism, I would not be prepared to
contradict him.’8
In his final years at Ferney—presiding like a patriarch over a local
community—Voltaire attended services in the church he had built, which

8
Besterman, Voltaire, p. 232.
 TOLERANCE AND RELIGION 57

were conducted by a Jesuit friend residing in his household. However, he

also carried on a mischievous game with religious authorities—designed to
ensure for himself the right to a Christian burial, while nonetheless avoiding
compliance with their demands that he first ‘confess’ his anti-Church views.
Complicating things yet further is the fact that, during those last years when
he made the Church representatives look ridiculous in the ongoing tussle
over his religious status, he also carried on a series of vehement attacks on
what he saw as atheism.
Legend has it that, when asked on his deathbed to renounce Satan,
Voltaire replied that now was not the time to be making new enemies. He
is also said to have responded to a direct question as to whether he believed
in the divinity of Christ: ‘In the name of God, Sir, do not speak to me any
more about that man, and let me die in peace.’9 On a more serious note,
he was also reported to have said in the year of his death that he would die
adoring God, loving his friends, not hating his enemies, and detesting
superstition.10 There are many quotations falsely attributed to Voltaire—
perhaps on the principle that, even if he did not actually utter them, he
might well have been expected to do so. His reputation for the pithy
epigram is unsurpassed.
It is clear that Voltaire, despite his vehement denunciations of supersti-
tion, remained eager to avoid being denied burial in Christian ground.
However, it may well have been apprehension about the indignities
that might otherwise have been visited on his remains—rather than respect
for any presumed religious beliefs—that motivated his friends to organize
the strange expedition that took place upon his death. Voltaire’s embalmed
corpse—sitting up in a carriage as if going out for a drive—was delivered for
hasty internment at a church in Champagne, before the authorities had time
to issue the order denying him the right to Christian burial.
Voltaire’s attitude to religion is especially illustrative of the complex
interplay between literature and philosophy in his writing. In an interest-
ing discussion of his status as a philosopher, David Beeson and Nicholas
Cronk have argued that the interpretation of his religious views is as much

9
The disputed authenticity of the remark—quoted by, among others, Condorcet—is
mentioned by Ian Davidson, in his Voltaire: A Life (New York: Pegasus Books, 2010), p. 460.
10
See Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 606.
58 IN CELEBRATION OF NOT KNOWING : VOLTAIRE ’ S VOICES

a matter for the literary critic as for the historian of ideas.11 With regard to
Voltaire’s inner religious convictions, we may well wonder whether there
is any clear truth of the matter lurking beneath the pragmatic posturing
and dazzling theatricality of his life, of which his multiple voices were a
part. The fixity of belief here seems to disappear into the fluidity of his
roles and masks. This confronts us with one of the paradoxes played out
more generally in texts of the Enlightenment—the readiness with which
commitment to truth can be held in tension with what seems an attraction
to the instabilities of uncertainty.
In Voltaire’s case, the repudiation of intolerance seems to be closely tied
to the celebration of doubt, which reverberates in his involvement with
political causes associated with tolerance. In 1766, within a few years of the
publication of the Philosophical Dictionary and the Treatise on Tolerance—at
the period in which he was being drawn into fighting particular causes
associated with intolerance and oppression—he published Le Philosophe
Ignorant. This work was a collection of fragments in various genres—much
of it oriented towards an ideal of acknowledged and accepted ‘not-know-
ing’, associated explicitly with tolerance. His discussion of knowledge
there echoes his mockery in the Philosophical Dictionary of the ‘conceited
upstarts’ with their cry: ‘What Do I Not Know?’
Voltaire seems content to leave unresolved the epistemological ambi-
guities in his celebration of doubt. His emphasis is on inquiry—on the
movement of thought in the search for truth, rather than the stasis of
belief. Yet his repudiation of certainty as an ideal does not commit him
to rejecting objectivity. In a letter of 3 March 1766, he talks of his
intention—not carried out—to include a frontispiece in the published
version of Le Philosophe Ignorant: ‘The thing is to represent three blind
men who grope after a fleeing donkey. This is the symbol of all philoso-
phers who run after the truth. I consider myself one of the blindest, and
I have always run after my donkey. So it is my portrait for which I am
asking you.’12 It is hardly a resounding endorsement of the philosopher’s
need to pursue truth, leaving us perhaps to wonder whether for Voltaire
the philosopher’s folly resides, not so much in failing to acknowledge his

11
David Beeson and Nicholas Cronk, ‘Voltaire: philosopher or philosophe?’ in Nicholas
Cronk, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), pp. 47–64.
12
Quoted in Besterman, Voltaire, p. 498. The reference is to Best.D.13194.
 TOLERANCE AND RELIGION 59

own blindness, as in judging the donkey to be a worthy object of pursuit in

the first place. However, the philosophers are at least presented as pursuing
a real donkey.
In another letter a few years earlier, sent to David Hume in November
1763—the year of the publication of the Treatise on Tolerance, Voltaire’s
imagery is more exalted—and more redolent with Platonic invocations of
light: ‘We are generally speaking, half philosophers as we are half free. We
dare neither see truth in its full light; nor unveil openly the little glimpses
we discover. . . . The abetters of superstition clip our wings and hinder us
from soaring.’13 Yet Voltaire’s central point was the same as that expressed
in the symbol of the blind men pursuing the runaway donkey. It is the
interference with the mind’s movement—its thwarted ‘soaring’—that
carries the poignancy. In the next chapter we will see David Hume also
develop this theme of the primacy of the movement of thought in the
practice of inquiry. For him too it is the pursuit of truth that most matters,
rather than its elusive attainment.

13
As quoted by Nicholas Cronk, in the Introduction to his Cambridge Companion to
Voltaire, p. 6. Cronk discusses the letter in an essay, ‘Une Lettre de Voltaire à David Hume
(D11499R)’, Revue Voltaire, vol. 8, 2008, pp. 369–75.
This page intentionally left blank
 3
Hume’s Sceptic

The intellectual character of the Sceptic

How do self-avowed sceptics deal with the daily dilemmas arising from
their refusal to believe? The celebrated sceptic David Hume touches on
the question throughout his works. He addressed it most directly in a witty
and engaging piece included in a set of essays, first published in 1741:
Essays, Moral and Political. This piece is one of a group of four essays in
which he sets himself the task of describing the distinctive intellectual
characters of the Epicurean—‘the man of elegance and pleasure’;
the Stoic—‘the man of action and virtue’; the Platonist—‘the man of
contemplation and philosophical devotion’; and finally the character closest
to his own heart—the Sceptic, for whom, significantly, he did not offer a
descriptive subtitle.
Hume’s purpose in these sketches is, he says, ‘not so much to explain
accurately the sentiments of the ancient sects of philosophy, as to deliver
the sentiments of sects that naturally form themselves in the world, and
entertain different ideas of human life and happiness’. Accordingly, he has
given each of them ‘the name of the philosophical sect to which it bears
the greatest affinity’.1 However, his central concern is with kinds of
intellectual character which can be found in his own world, rather than
with scholarly details of past philosophy.
In each of the four essays there is a subtle interplay between the stances
represented by the different intellectual personae, with Hume varying his
writing style to capture the emotional tenor of each. Not surprisingly, it

1
David Hume, Selected Essays, ed. S. Copley and A. Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), p. 353, footnote 77. Subsequent quotations are accompanied in parentheses by
page references to this edition. This volume includes essays written at different periods. The
four essays on ancient sects of philosophy belong to the early period, represented by the first
editions of Essays, Moral and Political (1741–2).
62 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC

is with the character of the Sceptic that Hume identifies most strongly.
Philosophically, this is the most detailed of the sketches. Catherine Wilson
has suggested that the essay on ‘the Epicurean’—in comparison with the
more substantial piece on the Stoic—‘must be judged a virtually worthless
piece of literary trivia’.2 However that may be, Hume’s presentation of his
preferred persona in the character of the Sceptic is not mere literary
trivia. Here he integrates—in a form intended to be accessible to
eighteenth-century readers—aspects of all four ancient character ideals,
and also elaborates what he sees as the practical upshot of his own version
of scepticism.
It quickly emerges that this Sceptic’s preference about the good life is
envisaged as not just one among others: the key to living the life of Hume’s
Sceptic is to behave in such a way that no one way of living is to
be regarded as superior to the others. In this essay he is exploring how
we should conduct ourselves in relation to the business of believing; and
this is a matter of no small import in trying to live well.
Already there is an appearance of paradox here. Should a committed
sceptic engage at all in the business of believing? Must he not resolutely
refrain from believing anything at all? In the context of Hume’s essay this is
not merely an epistemological dilemma. It bears also on the choices
involved in how to live. Scepticism is supposed to yield a preferred way
of living. Yet it seems there can be no coherent statement of its superiority;
for that would be to breach the principle that is here presented as the core
of scepticism: that there can be no rational basis for preferring one way of
life over another. What Hume offers is a model of the good life, presented
with a clear eye to the diversity of good lives. From the perspective of the
Sceptic, there can be no categorical preference; different kinds of life can
be lived agreeably, and mixing them judiciously can make each all the
more agreeable.
It is clear from the start that Hume’s evaluation of the life of the Sceptic
goes beyond concern with avoiding the perils of falsehood: this scepticism is
the key not only to escaping error but to living well. In this respect, Hume’s
version of the Sceptic is not new. It echoes some important themes in
ancient discussions of scepticism. He is writing against the background of
well-worn anomalies arising from attempts to take sceptical doubt seriously.

2
Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
2008), p. 37.
 HUME AND ANCIENT SCEPTICISM 63

Can the sceptic really live his scepticism without perversely undermining his
own resolve to call everything into question? Is a strong commitment to
scepticism in breach of the sceptic’s own resistance to believing confidently
in anything?
Such issues have in the history of scepticism often been posed as
epistemological puzzles rather than ethical predicaments. Hume’s concern
is explicitly with the status of scepticism in relation to the good life—with
what manner of life is the best. However, in some ways his discussion of
scepticism here is a return to the past—not least in his integration
of elements from the ‘Platonist’, the ‘Epicurean’, and the ‘Stoic’ into his
‘Sceptic’. Ancient philosophers of all four types were concerned with how
to live, no less than with how to know. In insisting that the business of
believing is an important aspect of how best to live, Hume was echoing
some important aspects of those ancient debates.

Hume and ancient scepticism

Myles Burnyeat has argued that Hume’s scepticism made creative use of
a tradition reaching back to Pyrrho of Elis in the fourth century bce,
made famous by the rediscovery and publication in the sixteenth century
of the works of the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus, dating from
the second century ce.3 In an interesting discussion of Hume in relation
to the concerns of ancient philosophers, Burnyeat has highlighted
old strategies for attaining the state of detachment or tranquillity.4 The
Sceptic’s notorious withholding of judgement in the face of competing
claims to truth is not a mere perversity. As presented in Sextus’ Outlines
of Pyrrhonism, it is supposed to yield a fundamental change in the character
of a man’s thinking and hence in his practical life. The Pyrrhonian Sceptics,
especially, had their own concern with a kind of enlightenment—construed
especially as freedom from disturbance. By attempting to hold together
the equal strength of rival claims to truth, the mind moves from an initial
state of conflict to the state of epoche—suspension of judgement—and hence
to the condition of ataraxia or tranquillity.

3
Myles Burnyeat, ed., The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983), Introduction, pp. 1–2.
4
Myles Burnyeat, ‘Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?’, in The Skeptical Tradition,
pp. 117–48.
64 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC

For this Sceptic, on Burnyeat’s analysis, all belief is unreasonable.

The Pyrrhonian Sceptic, like all human beings, has ‘preconceptions’
that incline him to pursue some things and avoid others; but to obtain
tranquillity he must learn to give up thinking that there is any reason
to prefer the things he pursues over those that he avoids. In fact what
his scepticism really involves is learning to live without belief altogether—
learning, that is, to live with ‘appearances’ rather than demanding real
existence. The Sceptic’s life thus demands a withdrawal, not merely from
a restricted class of beliefs, but from the whole business of believing. To
achieve this the Sceptic must learn a radical detachment from himself.
It was this extreme detachment that ancient critics of scepticism argued
was not a possible life for a human being.
It is in the light of that ancient dispute about the possibility of radical
detachment from all belief that Burnyeat reads Hume’s critique of the
radical sceptic—epitomized in his observation at Section 12 of the Inquiry
Concerning Human Understanding that ‘Nature is always too strong for
principle.’5 The ‘great subverter’ of the ‘excessive principles’ of Pyrrhonian
scepticism, Hume says there, is ‘action, and employment, and the occupa-
tions of common life’.
These principles may flourish and triumph in the schools, where it is indeed
difficult, if not impossible, to refute them. But as soon as they leave the shade,
and by the presence of the real objects which actuate our passions and sentiments
are put in opposition to the more powerful principles of our nature, they vanish
like smoke and leave the most determined skeptic in the same condition as other
mortals. (p. 167)

Like ancient critics of Pyrrhonism, Hume thought the radical Sceptic

could not really live his scepticism. Our nature ensures that we continue
to hold beliefs which cannot be rationally defended against sceptical
objections. What he famously concludes is that, since we do not in fact
give up the beliefs that sustain our daily lives in the face of sceptical
objections, our beliefs must be due to the role in our lives of factors
other than reason—to custom and imagination. The role of imagination
in belief is a persistent thread throughout Hume’s treatment of scepticism.
It reflects not only his philosophical views but a prolonged attempt to

5
David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles W. Hendel
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Library of Liberal Arts, 1955), Section XII, Part 2, p. 168.
Page numbers for other quotations from this work will be included in parentheses.
 HUME AND ANCIENT SCEPTICISM 65

adapt his writing style to the challenges of communicating with the public.
His appeal to imagination is embedded in the troubled history of the
development of his writing craft, no less than in the intellectual content
of his works.
The work we now know as Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding was
first published, under the name Philosophical Essays Concerning Human
Understanding, in 1748. It was an attempted reworking—in more accessible
form—of material from the first book of his Treatise of Human Nature,
published in 1739. The pieces published in the first edition of Essays, Moral
and Political in 1741 were a foray into lighter essay writing, in the hope of
better communicating with the public after what he saw as the failure
of the first two Books of his Treatise to do so. He says in his short
autobiographical piece My Own Life that the work ‘fell dead-born from
the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur
among the zealots’.6 However, he continued also to rework his weightier
philosophical ideas in essay form. The Philosophical Essays Concerning
Human Understanding were published in 1748, the same year as an enlarged
edition of Essays, Moral and Political. In 1758 Hume republished those
‘philosophical’ essays under the title Inquiry into Human Understanding,
including additional sections on Miracles—which he had been persuaded
to leave out of the Treatise of Human Nature—and on Providence.
It is helpful to keep this publishing history in mind in reading Hume’s
essay on the Sceptic. Although the piece belongs to Hume’s period of
experimentation in writing accessibly and engagingly for the general
public, the themes of the essay link it with what he himself described—
in a letter to Henry Home of 13 June 1742—as the more ‘durable’,
‘harder’, and ‘more stubborn’ aspects of his philosophy. There are clear
continuities in content with his discussions of scepticism in theTreatise and
the Inquiry into Human Understanding. However, the essay is more directly
focused on the intellectual character of the Sceptic, drawing out more
explicitly—and more playfully—the upshot of scepticism in ordinary
life. It explores, especially, the significance of the imagination—its
strengths and its hazards—in the business of belief. The proper use of the
imagination becomes central in Hume’s ideal of intellectual character. Out

6
‘My Own Life’ (1776), in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp
Smith (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Library of Liberal Arts, 1947), p. 234.
66 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC

of this comes an interesting recasting of ancient ideals of detachment,

which were central in both Pyrrhonian scepticism and Stoicism.

Humean detachment
‘The Sceptic’ opens with a criticism of how philosophers tend to go about
organizing their beliefs. Hume complains of their tendency to extend
‘principles’ beyond reasonable limits of application. He argues neatly
that the fault in question is both an unreasonable restriction and an
unreasonable expansion. On the one hand, philosophers ‘confine too
much their principles’, taking no account of nature’s ‘vast variety’. Yet
this undue restriction on the number of acceptable principles demands an
equally inappropriate expansion of those that are adopted: the philosopher
extends one and the same principle over the whole of creation, reducing
every phenomenon to it, though only by ‘the most violent and absurd
reasoning’. ‘Our own mind being narrow and contracted, we cannot
extend our conception to the variety and extent of nature, but imagine
that she is as much bounded in her operations as we are in our speculation’
(p. 95). The fault, on Hume’s analysis, lies in a lack of mental expansiveness
of mind—an inappropriate limiting of imagination. The image is of a
cramping of the mind—a setting of restrictive boundaries on what should
be a free-ranging speculative power.
It is interesting to compare Hume’s initially surprising juxtapositions
here of restriction and expansion, contraction and extension, to his later
discussion of a similar theme in Part III of Section XII of An Inquiry
Concerning Human Understanding. There he talks of a ‘mitigated’ scepticism
which may be ‘both durable and useful’—a gentler scepticism which
might emerge either when the excesses of Pyrrhonian scepticism
are ‘corrected by common sense and reflection’, or when inquiry is
limited to those subjects best adapted to the narrow capacity of human
understanding (Inquiry, pp. 169–70).
Hume’s talk there of kinds of scepticism which might be construed as
‘the natural result of the Pyrrhonian doubts and scruples’ echoes Sextus’
talk of Pyrrhonian doubt as flowing naturally into epoche and hence to
the detachment which yields tranquillity. The Inquiry discussion of this
‘mitigated’ scepticism emphasizes the schooling of the imagination. ‘The
imagination of man is naturally sublime, delighted with whatever is remote
 HUMEAN DETACHMENT 67

and extraordinary, and running, without control, into the most distant
parts of space and time in order to avoid the objects which custom
has rendered too familiar to it.’ Correct judgement requires that the
philosophical mind should instead confine itself to ‘common life’ and to
‘such subjects as fall under daily practice and experience’. To achieve this
salutary restriction of subject matter, Hume observes, nothing can be
more serviceable than ‘to be once thoroughly convinced of the force of
Pyrrhonian doubt and of the impossibility that anything but the strong
power of natural instinct could free us from it’ (Inquiry, p. 170).
In his earlier discussion in the essay on ‘The Sceptic’, Hume’s emphasis
is on the ‘enfeebling’ of imagination, rather than on its unbridled
leaps away from the familiar to the more remote. Yet here too there are
echoes of the Pyrrhonian idea of the transformative effects of exposure to
doubt—of acknowledged not-knowing as the key to the contented life.
The context of Hume’s discussion in the essay is more explicitly the
concern with the good life—rather than a desire to set proper limits to
philosophical inquiry. In this context the pretensions of ‘the philosophers’
become a target of ridicule. Their ‘infirmity’—the enfeebling of their
imagining—is, Hume says, at its most suspect in ‘their reasonings concerning
human life, and the methods of obtaining happiness’ (p. 95).
The ‘infirmity’ which Hume attributes to the philosophers arises from a
weakness in their imagination; but this lack is to be explained by reference
to the operations of the passions. The interconnections between passions
and imagination are central to Hume’s whole philosophy; but they
are here explicitly brought to bear on what is lacking in the common
intellectual character displayed by the philosopher. In their reasonings
concerning human life and happiness, he complains, philosophers are led
astray ‘not only by the narrowness of their understandings, but by that also
of their passions’ (p. 95). It is a striking observation: the philosophers’
failure in understanding is attributed not to an excess of passion but, on the
contrary, to the narrow range of their passions.The flaw lies not in the
presence of emotion but in a lack of emotional intelligence.
On Hume’s account, the alleged narrowness of the philosopher’s
mentality reflects a self-centredness—a lack of genuine expansiveness
towards the world. Almost every one, he observes, is governed through-
out the course of his life by a ‘predominant inclination’, which makes it
difficult for him to apprehend that things to which he is indifferent can
ever give enjoyment to others. ‘His own pursuits are always, in his
68 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC

account, the most engaging, the objects of his passion the most valuable,
and the road which he pursues the only one that leads to happiness’ (p. 95).
This takes us to the heart of the Sceptic’s resistance to philosophical
theories of the good life. Where ‘the philosopher’ sees universal truths
of human nature—supposedly grounding judgements about how we
should all live—the Sceptic sees a projection from the philosopher’s
own predominant inclinations and prejudices. What is more, according
to the Sceptic, even within the limits of a single life our changing
inclinations make it impossible to reach general conclusions about
how we ourselves should live. If we consult experience we will find
that each kind of life is ‘agreeable in its turn’; and that ‘the variety of
their judicious mixture chiefly contributes to the rendering all of them
agreeable’ (p. 96).
So far, all this may sound like a rejection of all possibility of objectivity
in judging how best to live. However, Hume goes on to insist that it in no
way suggests that we are left at the mercy of our changing inclinations.
Nor are we forced to conclude that there is no basis for preferring one
man’s conduct over another’s. What is taken from us, rather, is confidence
that those bases for preference are grounded in principles of reason—and
hence the idea that the philosopher, as a man of reason, can lay claim to
any privileged authority in judging how to live.
The account Hume goes on to offer of the supposed wisdom of the
philosopher in evaluating ways of living is subtle and ironic. People come
to philosophers, he observes, in the hope of something more than ‘maxims
of common prudence and discretion’. They want from them something
more than advice about how best to achieve goals they already have; they
expect advice about ‘how we shall choose our ends, more than the means
for attaining these ends: we want to know what desire we shall gratify,
what passion we shall comply with, what appetite we shall indulge’ (p. 97).
In mock modesty, he disavows any pretensions on his own part to this
privileged position of adjudicator of the good life:
I am sorry, then, I have pretended to be a philosopher; for I find your questions
very perplexing, and am in danger, if my answer be too rigid and severe, of passing
for a pedant and scholastic; if it be too easy and free, of being taken for a preacher of
vice and immorality. However, to satisfy you, I shall deliver my opinion upon the
matter, and shall only desire you to esteem it of as little consequence as I do myself.
By that means you will neither think it worthy of your ridicule nor your anger.
(p. 97)
 HUMEAN DETACHMENT 69

Hume goes on to offer, as the only reliable principle to be learned from

philosophy: ‘that there is nothing, in itself, valuable or despicable, desirable
or hateful, beautiful or deformed; but that these attributes arise from the
particular constitution and fabric of human sentiment and affection’
(p. 97). He has shifted attention firmly to passions and sentiments—rather
than principles accessible to reason—as the basis for judgements about
how to live. Here again, his strategy has some parallels with the ancient
Pyrrhonian’s shift to learning to ‘live with appearances’. The parallels
cannot be pushed too far; Hume is not, in this context, engaging with
epistemological issues about the limits of knowledge. Yet there is an
analogue here of the ancient sceptic’s suspension of judgement: the good
life involves a refusal to judge one’s own preferences and tastes as superior.
Hume offers a shift of focus—away from the exercise of reason towards
the flow of emotion and imagination—which brings a recasting also of
philosophical ideals of the good human life. This shift has significant
consequences for the understanding of the nature of judgement.
Hume argues that human sentiments of blame or approbation—no less
than of beauty—are subject to such diversity that we must conclude that
there is, in relation to them, no definitive truth to be had. What can appear
to be an attribution of qualities to an object is in fact nothing but an
expression of the variable structures of human sentiments and passions. As
example of the variability of judgements of worth and value, Hume offers
the lover’s supposed insights into the qualities of his beloved. ‘The same
divine creature, not only to a different animal, but also to a different man,
appears a mere mortal being, and is beheld with the utmost indifference’
(p. 98). In this respect, he goes on, there is a great difference between
matters of truth and falsehood and matters of sentiment and passion. Truth
and falsehood do not vary in relation to the variety of human apprehen-
sion. ‘Though all the human race should for ever conclude that the sun
moves, and the earth remains at rest, the sun stirs not an inch from his place
for all these reasonings; and such conclusions are eternally false and
erroneous. But the case is not the same with the qualities of beautiful
and deformed, desirable and odious, as with truth and falsehood’ (p. 99).
For Hume the crucial point of contrast here is the presence or absence
of accompanying ‘sentiment’. The mind, in its judgements on beauty
or desirability, is ‘not content with merely surveying its objects, as they
stand in themselves’. It also feels a sentiment—of delight or uneasiness,
approbation or blame, which is ‘consequent to that survey’; and this
70 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC

sentiment determines it to ‘affix the epithet beautiful or deformed, desirable or

odious’ (p. 100). This accompanying sentiment depends in turn on ‘the
particular fabric or structure’ of a mind, which produces a ‘sympathy or
conformity’ between it and its objects. The same object presented to a
different mind need not produce the same sentiment. What then inclines
us to regard beauty or deformity as qualities of the object itself, when
in fact they arise from the ‘structure and fabric’ of the sentiments which
accompany its perception? According to Hume, the explanation is that
the accompanying sentiment is in these cases quieter than with other
sentiments. It is not so ‘turbulent and violent’ as to distinguish itself from
the mere perception of the object.
Hume’s discussion here echoes his treatment of the distinction between
calm and violent passions in the Treatise. There he talks of the calm passion
of ‘curiosity or the love of truth’.7 Such a passion may bring so little
disturbance that we don’t realize it is there. Now, in the essay on
‘The Sceptic’, he observes that a little reflection suffices to show us the
distinction between the object and an accompanying quiet sentiment.
Beauty is not a quality of the circle additional to those explained by Euclid.
In another example, he invites us to consider a reader who understands in
detail the geography of Virgil’s Aeneid, yet is ignorant of its beauty. For the
beauty, ‘properly speaking’, lies not in the poem, but in the ‘sentiment or
taste of the reader’. Where a man has no such ‘delicacy of temper’ as to
make him feel this sentiment, he must be ignorant of the beauty, though
‘possessed of the science and understanding of an angel’ (p. 101).
Hume’s conclusion is deliberately stark: ‘Objects have absolutely no
worth or value in themselves. They derive their worth merely from the
passion. If that be strong and steady, and successful, the person is happy’
(p. 101). The wide extremes of happiness and misery in human life arise
from differences that lie ‘either in the passion, or in the enjoyment’ (p. 101).
It may well seem at this point that Hume has gone too far. Are no objects
of themselves worthy or unworthy of our passions? Hume’s purpose,
however, is to draw our attention away from questions about the appro-
priate objects of passion to consideration of the relative intensities of the
passions directed to them. ‘To be happy, the passion must be cheerful and

7
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), Book II, Part III, Section X, pp. 448–54.
 HUMEAN DETACHMENT 71

gay, not gloomy or melancholy. A propensity to hope and joy is real

riches; one to fear and sorrow, real poverty’ (p. 102).
In place of the evaluation of objects of passion, Hume thus offers
evaluation of the quality of the passions directed to them. Deliberation
about the good life here involves critique of the ways in which
we experience our passions. The key to living well is steadiness in the
enjoyment of cheerful passions. However, to achieve this we must attend,
not only to the operations of passions, but also to senses and imagination.
We then see, for example, that the ‘abstract and invisible’ objects offered
by philosophical accounts of divinity cannot ‘actuate’ our minds long
enough to sustain lasting enjoyment. To achieve that, we must find ways
of involving our senses and imagination. Abstract philosophical accounts
of the divinity will not suffice; historical accounts—and even ‘popular super-
stitions and observances’ may be required if the pleasures of religion are to be
maintained. It is a clever and mischievous move. In place of the pieties of
religion Hume offers, as the basis of durable happiness, those activities which
have ‘a mixture of application and attention in them; such as gaming and
hunting’. In an observation which anticipates his treatment of scepticism in
the Inquiry, he observes that in general ‘business and action fill up all the
great vacancies in human life’ (p. 102).
The example of gaming and hunting echoes passages in the Treatise
where Hume playfully compared those activities to the love of truth. That
supposedly noble disposition, he argued there, depends—no less than do
hunting and gaming—on the pleasures of the chase. Returning to that
theme in The Sceptic, he ironically reconstructs the central role in the
good life which the ancients had given to philosophy. Those passions
which pursue external objects, he argues, contribute less to our happiness
than those which ‘rest in ourselves’, which we are more certain of attaining
and more secure in possessing. A passion for learning is hence preferable—
with regard to happiness—to a passion for riches. However, the happiness
which resides in intellectual pursuits remains for Hume no less dependent
on variable passions than any other happiness. Virtue remains crucial to
the good life; but, along with happiness, it is recast in terms of the passions.
A virtuous disposition, leading to ‘action and employment’, renders us
sensible to the ‘social passions’. It ‘steels the heart against the assaults of
fortune’; reduces affections to a ‘just moderation’; makes our own thoughts
72 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC

‘an entertainment to us’; and ‘inclines us rather to the pleasures of society

and conversation than to those of the senses’ (p. 103).
Hume has reconfigured the persona of the philosopher—along with
the understanding of the good life—in terms of passion and enjoyment.
The intellectual character of the Sceptic that emerges is in some
ways reminiscent of the ancient figure of the Stoic—the emphasis on
intellectual pursuits, on virtuous friendship, on detachment from things
that are vulnerable to changing fortune; and the recommendation of
moderation in emotion. What makes Hume’s adaptation of the ancient
ideal distinctive is his conclusion that no one way of life is able to be
rationally preferred—that no ‘situation of affairs’ is in itself better than any
other. This is the twist that Hume has his Sceptic give to the Stoic doctrine
that the good life depends on the cultivation of mental attitudes. ‘Good
and ill, both natural and moral’ are now ‘entirely relative to human
sentiment and affection’. In a striking image drawn from classical sources,
he observes that no man would ever be unhappy if only he could alter
his feelings. ‘Proteus-like’, he would elude all attacks, by the continual
alterations of his shape and form. ‘But of this resource nature has, in a great
measure, deprived us. The fabric and constitution of our mind no more
depends on our choice than that of our body’ (p. 103).
The virtuous Stoic’s cultivation of reason has been absorbed into
Hume’s Sceptic. What then becomes of ancient ideas of philosophy as
central to the good life? Clearly, part of Hume’s agenda in his celebration
of the Sceptic is to debunk the exalted figure of the philosopher as a sage
who has assumed—on the basis of his own virtue—the authority to lay
down for others how they should live. Contrary to the philosopher’s
conviction that his mode of living can be universally recommended, the
‘natural propensities’ of the ‘ignorant and thoughtless’ serve to exclude
them from all pretensions to philosophy and its much boasted ‘medicine of
the mind’. ‘The empire of philosophy extends over a few; and with regard
to these, too, her authority is very weak and limited’ (p. 103).
Differences in human ‘propensities’ are thus seen as undermining any
attempt to privilege one way of living—including the philosopher’s—over
others. Hume argues that the practice of philosophy—whether his own or
anyone else’s—‘affords no remedy’ against the ‘unhappy condition’ of
those who have no ‘relish for virtue and humanity’ (p. 104). Yet, far
from abandoning philosophy, he now recasts it in a less pretentious
form. Philosophical thought can have a ‘secret, insensible influence’ on
 HUMEAN DETACHMENT 73

human lives; and a serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts can
have an indirect refining and humanizing effect on human tempers. What
remains under challenge, though, is the supposed universality of
the philosopher’s claim to the good life. ‘I must’, he says, ‘entertain doubts
concerning all those exhortations and consolations, which are in such
vogue among speculative reasoners’ (p. 106). The philosopher cannot
present his own way of life as a model for how all should live.
For Hume’s Sceptic, then, there are no rational grounds that could
directly justify a preference for one way of living over another. He
concludes provocatively that ‘the catching of flies, like Domitian, if it
give more pleasure, is preferable to the hunting of wild beasts, like William
Rufus, or conquering of kingdoms like Alexander’ (p. 106). Nor is there
any significant role, in the challenge of exciting or moderating any passion,
for the ‘artificial arguments of a Seneca or an Epictetus’. The reflections of
philosophy are too subtle and distant from common life to serve to
eradicate any affection. ‘The air is too fine to breathe in, where it is
above the winds and clouds of the atmosphere’ (p. 107).
We are left with an intriguing conjunction of attitudes. Hume rejects
the received content of Stoicism, construed as a cultivated passivity; yet
he replaces it with a new version of acceptance, drawn from his own
reflections on the character of the Sceptic. The ancient Stoics cultivated
an acceptance of what is supposedly natural; they also aimed to rid
themselves of their passions. Hume argues that the effort to extinguish
our vicious passions could succeed only by diminishing also our virtuous
passions, rendering our minds ‘totally indifferent and inactive’. Likewise,
he argues, the Stoic in attempting to avoid allowing his particular interests
to ‘disturb the order of the universe’, will be forced to acquiesce also in
vices that are equally part of the same order. Hume clearly relishes his
suggestion that the Stoic’s advice—that we should constantly reflect
on death and the many ills that afflict human life—will succeed only
in ‘poisoning all our pleasures, and rendering us perpetually miserable’
(p. 108).
Again, it is important to remember that in the context of these essays
Hume’s light-hearted rebuttals of Stoic injunctions are not meant to be
conclusive refutations of ancient philosophical doctrines. Yet his sketch of
the intellectual character of the modern Sceptic does articulate some
affinities and continuities with the old ideals. Hume’s Sceptic has a genial
attitude towards the vicissitudes of human life, which contrasts favourably
74 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC

with the austerities commonly associated with the Stoic. Yet this Sceptic
does nonetheless capture something of the ideals of detachment and
acceptance which connected ancient Stoicism and Pyrrhonian Scepticism.
Hume has fun with his readers at the expense of his imagined Stoic,
who disdains vulnerability to passion. ‘Your sorrow is fruitless, and will not
change the course of destiny’, says the imagined stoical voice of his ‘philoso-
pher’. ‘Very true; and for that reason I am sorry’, responds the sceptical voice.
In the same spirit, he mocks Cicero’s ‘curious’ consolation for deafness—that
it is not so bad to be deaf to one language more, when there are so many
others he does not understand. Hume responds that he prefers Antipater’s
alleged riposte to some women who were offering condolences on his
blindness: ‘What! Do you think there are no pleasures in the dark?’
Increasingly, as the essay unfolds, the figure of the philosopher which
Hume is intent on lampooning takes on the lineaments of the Stoic. Yet
Hume’s engaging critique nonetheless yields his own distinctive version of
the ancient Stoic ideal of acceptance—now expressed in the voice
of common sense. In his figure of the Sceptic, he has constructed an
intellectual character capable of finding its own acceptance of fortune.
This Sceptic shows resilience in the face of adversity, a sustained calm
tranquillity, and—above all—a capacity for enjoyment. In the end Hume
offers also a qualified defence of the importance of philosophy—
now presented, though not without some irony, as a pleasurable, social
intellectual activity.
In a word, human life is more governed by fortune than by reason; is to be regarded
more as a dull pastime than a serious occupation; and is more influenced by
particular humour, than by general principles. Shall we engage ourselves in it
with passion and anxiety? It is not worthy of so much concern. Shall we be
indifferent about what happens? We lose all the pleasure of the game by our
phlegm and carelessness. (p. 112)

In conclusion, Hume offers his own version of reconciliation with death:

‘While we are reasoning concerning life, life is gone; and death though
perhaps they receive him differently, yet treats alike the fool and the
philosopher.’ Yet the philosophical life is not finally rejected, though its
rational basis is destroyed. In a wilfully twisted argument between the
voice of the philosopher—intent on reducing life to ‘exact rule and
method’—and the Sceptic, who regards such efforts as ‘fruitless’, neither
is allowed a definitive win. ‘Even to reason so carefully concerning it and
 THE RECONSTRUCTION OF OBJECTIVITY 75

to fix with accuracy its just idea, would be overvaluing it, were it not
that, to some tempers, this occupation is one of the most amusing in which
life could possibly be employed’ (p. 113).
There is a final ironic twist here. Hume rejected the preference for an
intellectual life when it was presented as grounded in reason: there can be
no rational grounds for such a preference. Yet in the end he endorses that
preference, though in a very different frame. What is in the end celebrated
is the genial, sociable character of his Sceptic. This Sceptic is a lover of
the activity of mind involved in intellectual inquiry. However, he is also an
inquirer who makes no assumptions about the worth, for humanity in
general, of his way of life; he claims no right to prescribe the best kind of
life for others.
Hume emphasizes the diversity of the fabric of the human mind, and its
variability even within the limits of a single life. Yet those variable human
propensities can ground philosophical delights no less than the pleasures of
hunting, from which he draws his satirical analogies. Here—as earlier, in
his discussion of the love of truth in the Treatise of Human Nature—Hume
rejects the pomposity of received ideas of the philosophical life in favour of
a ‘careless’ pursuit of intellectual inquiry. In the persona of the Sceptic,
nonetheless, he clearly celebrates the humanizing and ennobling force of
the shared life of the mind.
There may appear to be something left unresolved here. If there can be
no rational preference for one way of life over others, can there really be
an objective basis for choices as to how best to live? If our preferences in
this matter have no basis in reason, are they after all baseless? What
prevents the Sceptic’s preference for a life spent in the ‘careless’ pursuit
of truth from being a matter of mere whim? How, in this context, are
objective judgements to be distinguished from subjective prejudices?

The reconstruction of objectivity

Hume offers a fuller account of the idea of a form of objectivity that is not
grounded in reason in his later and better known essay Of the Standard of
Taste, first published in 1757.8 Here his focus is on the variability, not of

8
David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in Selected Essays. Page references to this edition
are included in parentheses.
76 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC

judgements as to how best to live, but rather in matters of ‘taste’ in relation

to our judgements of beauty and, more generally, of the quality of human
creativity. However, similar issues arise here as to how we are to reconcile
the wide variations of human sentiments with the possibility of objective
judgement. We are apt to call ‘barbarous’, he says, whatever ‘departs
widely from our own taste and apprehension’; but we soon find that this
‘epithet of reproach’ is revisited on us. Our arrogance and self-conceit
is ‘startled’ on observing an equal assurance on all sides of the ‘contest of
sentiment’ (p. 134).
Hume quickly sets himself against that ‘species of philosophy’ which
maintains the impossibility of objective judgement in relation to the realm
of ‘sentiment’. It is natural, he says, for us to seek ‘a Standard of Taste; a rule
by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least a
decision afforded confirming one sentiment, and condemning another’
(p. 136). On the view he is here repudiating, ‘mental taste’ is comparable
to sensory taste: it is as fruitless to dispute about it as it would be to dispute
as to whether the one and same object can be considered absolutely
sweet or bitter. Yet, Hume responds, surely common sense opposes
that conclusion—or at least demands that it be modified or restrained. In
the realm of ‘mental taste’ there are surely some general presumptions
about the quality of a work that apply across differences in time and
cultural context: ‘The same Homer who pleased at Athens and Rome
two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London. All the
changes of climate, government, religion, and language, have not been
able to obscure his glory’ (p. 139). Surely, there must be some basis also,
he goes on to say, for making legitimate comparisons about the ‘delicacy of
imagination’ that distinguishes some critics from others. If there were
indeed no room for objectivity in judgements of taste, one critic would
be as good as any other.
Hume illustrates his point with a story drawn from Don Quixote. Sancho
claims to have a hereditary capacity for judgement in wine. Two of his
kinsmen, he reports, were once called on to give their opinion of a
hogshead of wine which was supposed to be excellent—old and of
a good vintage. One of them, after tasting it, declares it good—were it
not for a small taste of leather. The other—to the mirth of observers—also
judges the wine to be good, but with the reservation that he discerns in it a
taste of iron. ‘But who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead,
there was found at the bottom an old key with a leathern thong tied to it’
 THE RECONSTRUCTION OF OBJECTIVITY 77

(p. 141). Likewise, says Hume, we should allow that the delicacy of
imagination which makes some critics of works of art better than others
is in principle explicable, although the ‘general rules or avowed patterns
of composition’ underlying the superiority may be as elusive as the
submerged iron and leather in the wine (p. 142).
Although Hume’s primary concern in this essay is with how to under-
stand judgements of taste, he presents that issue as inseparable from the
consideration of the intellectual character of the critic. To judge well
the quality of a performance or a work demands that the critic free himself
from prejudice. He must consider himself as ‘a man in general’, forgetting
if possible his ‘individual being’ and ‘peculiar circumstances’. ‘A person
influenced by prejudice complies not with this condition, but obstinately
maintains his natural position, without placing himself in that point
of view which the performance supposes.’ By failing to ‘enlarge his
comprehension’ in response to a work ‘executed for the public’, the
prejudiced critic shows that his taste is not in accordance with ‘the true
standard’ (p. 146). He has failed to ‘forget himself ’—failed to set aside his
special interests as ‘a friend or enemy, a rival or commentator’ (p. 146).
Hume’s good critic, it seems, must have a ‘public’ intellectual character,
attuned to the ‘public’ nature of the works he is called upon to evaluate.
Hume’s concern, in Of the Standard of Taste with what makes for good
critical judgement of artistic performance helps give content to his earlier
claim, in the essay on the Sceptic, that his rejection of reason as the basis of
preference between ways of living in no way amounts to a rejection of the
possibility of objective judgement in the matter. Once they recognize
that judgement can be grounded in experience and the exercise of
imagination, rather than exclusively in reason—and that in some areas of
life this is what good sense demands—his readers may, he hopes, be less
bothered by his Sceptic. Read together, the two essays become an exercise
in the expansion of the mind—the ‘enlargement of comprehension’—by
taking into account other perspectives than one’s own.
The essay Of the Standard of Taste itself becomes an exercise in that
expansion which Hume demands of the intellectual character of the critic.
Critics begin from the peculiarities and specific affinities underlying their
own ‘mental state’. They move from that to the mature endeavour which
Hume describes in more detail later in the essay—the effort to ‘enter into
the sentiments of others, and divest ourselves of those propensities which
are natural to us’ (p. 150).
78 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC

There is a self-reflexive dimension to Hume’s treatment of intellectual

character in these essays. In introducing his literary analogy for the
general rules of taste—Sancho’s story in Don Quixote of the key at the
bottom of the hogshead—he remarks that his intention in this essay is ‘to
mingle some light of the understanding with the feelings of sentiment’
(pp. 140–1). His subject matter is the ‘delicacy of imagination’ demanded
by the finer emotions at stake in judging matters of ‘mental state’. Such
judgements involve an interaction of imagination and emotion. To give an
adequate account of them, then, he wants to inculcate in his readers a
corresponding interaction of imagination and emotion.
In another essay ‘Of Essay Writing’—dating from 1741 but not
included in the first editions of Essays, Literary and Moral—Hume deplores
the separation of ‘the learned’ from ‘the conversable world’ as ‘the great
defect of the last age’, exerting a bad influence ‘both on books and
company’. Often, especially in his essays, his own writing enacts the effort
to ‘enter into the sentiments of others’ which he sees as crucial to engaging
in what he calls ‘the conversable world’.9
This excursus into Hume’s more general concerns in his essays may
help make it clear that his Sceptic does not have as his goal a cautious
withholding of belief in order to avoid error. This Sceptic’s goal is
not certainty. Nor is he committed to any overriding value of resolute
truth-seeking in comparison with other human propensities. In the midst
of his own pleasure in the life of the mind, he recognizes other possibil-
ities—other pursuits which may, for minds of a different fabric, provide
no less a means of agreeable occupation. The intellectual character of
Hume’s Sceptic nonetheless clearly resonates with the concerns which
made ancient philosophers seek ways of living which could sustain virtue
and bring some measure of reconciliation to death.
Famously, Hume himself persisted to the end in his professed scepticism
about religious belief and, in particular, the belief in immortality. James
Boswell was shocked to find Hume, the notorious atheist, cheerful at the
approach of death—‘talking of different matters with a tranquillity of mind
and a clearness of head which few men possess at any time’.10 Boswell
reported to Samuel Johnson that Hume had told him that he was no more

9
David Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, in Selected Essays, p. 1.
10
James Boswell, An Account of My Last Interview with David Hume, Esq., in Hume,
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, p. 78.
 THE RECONSTRUCTION OF OBJECTIVITY 79

uneasy at the thought that he would not exist after this life than at the
thought of his non-existence before living. Johnson angrily replied that
Hume was either mad or lying.11
Hume’s tranquillity in the face of death echoed the Epicurean/Lucre-
tian philosophy in its resistance to the imagining of an afterlife. It echoed
Stoicism in its acceptance that—as he put it in another of his essays—‘the
life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an
oyster’.12 It can also perhaps be seen as reflecting an integration of strands
from those ancient ideals into Hume’s own cultivation of a ‘careless’
scepticism, yielding an ultimate satisfaction in having enjoyed ‘the pleasure
of the game’.
The spirit of Hume’s Sceptic resurfaces in his final work—the posthu-
mously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion—where he returns
to his concern with the ways in which beliefs are held, this time with
special reference to religious belief. The dialogical exchanges in that work
call into question the assumption that certainty is to be had about the
ultimate nature and origins of the world, while yet raising possibilities for
living calmly and with pleasure in the absence of such certainties.
In place of old certainties about ways of living and dying, Hume has
offered a different understanding of objectivity—recast in terms of good
sense, grounded in experience. It is a genial and appealing approach. His
readers may nonetheless be left wondering whether something has perhaps
gone missing in this ‘careless’ approach to the business of believing. Unlike
the ancient Pyrrhonian, Hume’s Sceptic rejects not belief as such but
dogmatic ways of holding beliefs. However, in the process of avoiding
zeal, has he forfeited also all that gives intensity and purpose to belief?
Reading The Sceptic now we may well feel some misgivings about this
urbane, gentlemanly mode of truth-seeking. The agreeable intellectual
pursuits of Hume’s Sceptic can sound to a modern ear as class-bound as
the more earthy hunting from which he drew his playful analogies.
We can readily imagine this Sceptic thoroughly at home amid the well-
mannered proprieties of a gentleman’s club—an ambience conducive to
the avoidance of unseemly fervour. Yet might the genial sociability of this
reconstructed version of the philosopher exclude him also from the

11
James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press,
1970), pp. 426–7.
12
‘On Suicide’, in Selected Essays, p. 319.
80 HUME ’ S SCEPTIC

healthy vitality of conviction? And what of that genial sociability itself?

The capacity for fellow-feeling which Hume sees as finding expression in a
comfortably shared way of life may seem restricted to the circle of those
who share also a common ‘fabric of mind’.
The tensions here are not unresolvable. Imagination can leap ahead
of the restrictions imposed by our present sympathies to open up
new possibilities for shared ‘propensities’. In Book II of the Treatise of
Human Nature Hume offered a fuller account of the ways in which the
imagination can work constructively with the passions to yield a vibrant
and durable sociability. However, it is to his friend Adam Smith that we
will have to look for a sustained account of the role of the imagination
in producing an objective moral consciousness, capable of integrating
the perspectives of individual selves—and their circles of amiable
friends—with more alien others.
 4
As Seen by Others: Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral
Sentiments

Morals and religion

The name of Adam Smith is now most often associated with economic
theory—especially with the pursuit of self-interest, as the conceptual basis
of free markets. Individuals, he famously insisted in his best known book
The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, generally neither intend to
pursue the public good nor know that they are doing so. ‘It is not from
the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect
our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address
ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to
them of our own necessities but of their advantages.’1 Later in the work, in
discussing specific uses of capital in support of domestic industry, Smith
invokes his famous metaphor of the invisible hand, which can lead an
agent who may be intending only his own gain to ‘promote an end which
was no part of his intention’ (Part IV, Ch. 2, p. 292).
Much recent commentary on the Wealth of Nations has argued persua-
sively that, taken—as Smith himself would have hoped—in the context of
his other works, Smith’s treatment of the pursuit of individual self-interest
is far from the endorsement of ruthless egoism which has dominated his
contemporary image. His earlier work The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
published in 1759, offers a subtle construction of a very different model

1
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Selected
Edition, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Part I, Ch. II,
p. 22. References and page numbers for other quotations from this edition are included in
parentheses.
82 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

of intellectual character, emphasizing the conditions of sociability and

concern with the well-being of others. It offers also a powerful account
of the formation of moral consciousness, grounded in interactive oper-
ations of sympathy and imagination. Rather than being at odds with
Smith’s later often quoted—but also often misunderstood—observations
on economic relations, the moral psychology offered in The Theory of
Moral Sentiments is crucial to their interpretation. Without reciprocal
engagement with others through the operations of sympathy and imagin-
ation, he argues, we would have no access to other selves; we would be
unable to make the shifts between self-interest and concern for the good of
others which are the stuff of moral life.
The genial intellectual friendship of Adam Smith and David Hume is
reflected in themes central to their works. Both were deeply concerned
with the role of the passions in the well-lived life; with the nature of
sociability; with the nexus between individual and social virtues. For both,
serious engagement with philosophy demanded reflection on its social
context—on the connections between the cultural, the commercial, and
the political. They shared an aversion to religious superstition and zeal.
Whereas Hume was commonly regarded as an atheist, Smith’s religious
standing was more ambiguous. There is much that remains unclear about
the exact nature of his religious beliefs—not least because of the reticence
about his inner life that has proved a challenge to his biographers. His
works frequently allude to religion, especially to belief in immortality; but
the presence of this religious strand in the presentation of his thought often
seems carefully crafted to avoid giving it any serious weight in the argu-
mentative structure.
In a passing remark in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith offers a
tribute to his unnamed friend, describing Hume as ‘an ingenious and
agreeable philosopher, who joins the greatest depth of thought to the
greatest elegance of expression, and possesses the singular and happy talent
of treating the abstrusest subjects not only with the most perfect perspicu-
ity, but with the most lively eloquence.’2 When Hume died, Smith wrote
a moving tribute to his calm acceptance of death, treating it as indicative of

2
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), Part IV, Ch. 1, Sec. 2, p. 209. Subsequent quotations
are accompanied in parentheses by references and page numbers to this edition.
 MORALS AND RELIGION 83

his life and character. Reporting the death to their friend, the publisher
William Strahan, he observed:
Thus died our most excellent and never to be forgotten friend; concerning whose
philosophical opinions men will, no doubt, judge variously, every one approving
or condemning them, according as they happen to coincide or disagree with his
own; but concerning whose character and conduct there can scarce be a difference
of opinion. His temper, indeed, seemed to be more happily balanced, if I may be
allowed such an expression, than that perhaps of any other man I have ever
known . . . Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime
and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and
virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.3

Their final exchange of letters—some of which address Hume’s concern

to ensure the posthumous publication of his controversial Dialogues on
Natural Religion—indicates a difference in attitude towards involvement in
public polemic about religion. Hume was anxious to ensure the publica-
tion of the work, anticipating that he would not himself live long enough
to see the project through. Smith, clearly, did not wish to be associated
with it. Ever concerned with ‘propriety’, he was uneasy about the antici-
pated ‘clamour’—not only on his own behalf but because of the likely
effects on his friend’s reputation. It is a tussle between conflicting demands
on a cherished friendship. The issue—probably to Smith’s relief—was
eventually resolved without his own involvement. Strahan published the
Dialogues on the authority of Hume’s nephew. In a letter to Smith of 16
September 1776, Strahan commented: ‘I own I did not expect to hear
they were so very exceptionable, as in one of his late Letters to me, he tells
me there is nothing in them worse than what I have already published, or Words
to that Effect’ (p. 212). It was an ironical outcome that, although the
appearance of the Dialogues caused little controversy, the publication along
with them of Smith’s letter to Strahan, describing the calm virtue of the
atheist’s death, was greeted with considerable outrage from the zealous.4
In thus praising Hume’s virtue, Smith was breaking from a conventional
association between perceived atheism and dubious moral character. The
stereotype of the atheist as morally dissolute may have been losing its

3
Adam Smith, Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (Indian-
apolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), pp. 220–1. Subsequent quotations from Smith’s correspondence
are accompanied in parentheses by page numbers to this edition.
4
See Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (Yale University Press, 2010),
pp. 244–6.
84 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

power to some extent in their own intellectual context. Yet the persist-
ence of the idea that virtue and happiness depended on religious belief is
evident in the shock and exasperation which Boswell and Johnson ex-
pressed in response to Hume’s equanimity in the face of death. On the
posthumous publication of Hume’s short autobiographical piece ‘My
Own Life’, Boswell wrote to Johnson, on 9 June 1777, of his hope that
Johnson might ‘knock Hume’s and Smith’s heads together, and make vain
and ostentatious infidelity exceedingly ridiculous’. ‘Would it not be worth
your while’, he asks Johnson, ‘to crush such noxious weeds in the moral
garden?’5
At the core of the alarm and aversion evoked by Hume’s apparent
nonchalance about death was the assumption that the prospect of divine
judgement was crucial to the preservation of morality. To reject belief in
an afterlife, in which ultimate reward or punishment might be delivered,
could be seen as threatening the moral order. Such were the religious
ambiguities of the time and place, however, that—in contrast to the drama
surrounding the fate of Voltaire’s remains—the burial of the notorious
Scottish atheist in sacred ground seems not to have attracted public
controversy.
Alarmed though Boswell and Johnson were by the pair, the issue of
whether either of them should be regarded as a deist, an atheist, or a
disaffected Christian, was in general less stridently pursued than was the
issue of Voltaire’s religious status. Yet their religious standing was not
without significance with regard to what posts they could expect to
occupy. At a time when Hume was considering whether he should live
in Paris or in London, Smith wrote wryly to him: ‘The Clamour against
you on account of Deism is stronger, no doubt, at London where you are a
Native and consequently may be a candidate for everything, than at Paris
where as a foreigner, you possibly can be a candidate for nothing.’6
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments echoes the resistance to zealous belief
which Hume expressed in his essay on the Sceptic; and its preoccupation
with the interactions of imagination and emotion has much in common
with Hume’s rejection of the primacy of reason in the life of the mind. In
relation to religion, however, Smith seems more accommodating to public

5
James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press,
1970), p. 810.
6
Adam Smith to David Hume, September 1765, in Correspondence of Adam Smith, p. 108.
 SYMPATHY AND IMAGINATION 85

perception than his controversial friend. Religion is not repudiated in The

Theory of Moral Sentiments; it has a constant presence—even if it is often
difficult to discern whether the authorial voice is speaking in tones of
conviction or of irony. Yet the story of the formation of moral conscious-
ness is told solely through the operations of sympathy and imagination. In
this story religion lays no claim to the status of moral authority. Nor can
reason alone deliver conclusions about how best to act. In that respect
The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a crucial text for understanding the place
of the idea of the secular in Enlightenment thought.

Sympathy and imagination

On the analysis Smith offers in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, moral
consciousness is ultimately dependent on imagination. Sympathy is the
foundation of our moral lives; but without imagination there could be no
sympathy:
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea
of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves
should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we
ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They
never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the
imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.
(Part I, Section 1, Ch. 1, p. 11)

Imagination allows us to place ourselves in another’s situation, entering ‘as

it were into his body’ and becoming ‘in some measure the same person
with him’. What exactly is involved in this remarkable joint operation of
imagination and feeling? How does the partnership work and what are its
limits? Smith makes it clear early in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that
becoming ‘in some measure the same person’ is a matter, not of sharing in
what the other actually feels, but rather of embracing his ‘situation’. It is an
important distinction. Elaborating it, Smith observes that in this exercise of
imagination we sometimes indeed feel for another a passion of which he
himself seems incapable. When we ‘put ourselves in his case’, that imagin-
ing may produce in us a passion that does not arise in him. ‘We blush for
the impudence and rudeness of another, though he himself appears to have
no sense of the impropriety of his own behaviour; because we cannot help
feeling with what confusion we ourselves should be covered, had we
behaved in so absurd a manner’ (Part I, Sec. 1, Ch. 1, p. 15).
86 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

In another example, Smith observes that the sympathy we feel for new-
born children is not confined to imagining their actual feelings; it can
embrace what we expect them to endure in their future—an expectation
which is beyond their own present capacities. We feel on their behalf what
they cannot feel for themselves. In another—even more striking—
example, he calls attention to our capacity to feel sympathy for the dead.
Smith’s analysis here is particularly revealing for the way he thinks of the
joint operations of emotion and imagination. His treatment of the topic is
subtle and wry. Our sympathy for the dead—insofar as it is based on their
being dead—rests, he argues, on an ‘illusion of the imagination’. Unlike
Hume, Smith does not express explicit doubts about the afterlife. He goes
along with the rationality of sympathizing with the dead on the prospect of
divine judgement—on ‘what is of real importance in their situation, that
awful futurity which awaits them’ (Part I, Sec. 1, Ch. 1, p. 16). However,
he points out that there is also an irrational sympathy which we direct
towards the dead for the things that are important, not to them, but rather
for our own present happiness.
Thus, he says, we have a misplaced sympathy for the dead on the
supposedly dreadful calamities they undergo—on their being ‘deprived
of the light of the sun; shut out from life and conversation; to be laid in
the cold grave, a prey to corruption and the reptiles of the earth; to be
no more thought of in this world’. Moreover, the fact that our sym-
pathy can afford the dead no consolation seems merely to add to their
calamity, serving only to ‘exasperate our sense of their misery’. In thus
projecting onto the dead our own misery, Smith argues, we are de-
luded. This is an erroneous way of ‘putting ourselves in their situation’;
and the common dread of death rests on this ‘illusion of imagination’.
Yet, illusory though the dread is, it is nonetheless ‘one of the most
important principles in human nature’, setting limits to behaviour which
might otherwise be destructive of human societies. Fear of death is ‘the
great restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which, while it afflicts and
mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society’ (Part I, Sec. 1,
Ch. 1, pp. 16–17).
There are echoes here of Epicurus’ famous observations on the irration-
ality of the fear of death. Since death is the absence of sensation, he argued,
it is nothing to us; for when we exist it is not present, and when it is present
we do not exist. In dreading death we needlessly erode the joy of living. As
Lucretius expressed the point, it is here on earth that the life of the foolish
 SYMPATHY AND IMAGINATION 87

becomes hell.7 Smith’s metaphor of lodging our living souls in the inani-
mate bodies of the dead echoes Lucretius’ observation that by ‘remaining
present’ to them—identifying ourselves with the abandoned corpse—we
‘infect’ it with our own sensation. However, Smith, unlike Epicurus, does
not rest his argument for the irrationality of sympathizing with the dead on
rejecting immortality. Accordingly, he does not push as far as Epicurus did
the ramifications of the idea that reason demands our seeing death as
nothing to us.
On the Epicurean analysis, fully understanding the reality of death
releases us from the desire for immortality and hence ‘makes the mortality
of life enjoyable’. ‘For there is nothing fearful in living for one who
genuinely grasps that there is nothing fearful in not living.’8 While
accepting much of the Epicurean diagnosis of the irrationality of the fear
of death, Smith acknowledges nonetheless that belief in an awful futurity
after death can be rational—an awfulness focused on the deliverance of
divine justice rather than on the deprivation of mortal pleasures.
It is striking here that, although Smith grants the rationality of belief in
such awful futurity, he does not appeal to that dread in explaining the
beneficial deterrent force of the fear of death. That force is given rather to
the irrational dread of posthumous sensation. Smith’s point is that even
if—as Epicurus thought—it is irrational to fear death, that irrationality can
be beneficial to society. Thus, on Smith’s account, the protection of
society does not depend on the content of religious belief in an afterlife.
It depends rather on an illusion—though a providential one—in the way
we imagine death. It is not the possibility of disembodied suffering—a
‘futurity’ whose content is left unimagined—that is said to be beneficial to
the the preservation of social order. What is described as deterring human
beings from wrong-doing is rather an irrational fear—the thought of a
more immediate future of embodied sensation, continuing after death.
A sceptic might wonder here whether the supposedly rational belief
in the futurity of divine judgement turns out to depend after all on
the irrational belief in posthumous sensation. There are some shifts of

7
Lucretius, The Nature of Things, 3.1023; as translated in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley,
eds., The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), vol. I,
p. 153.
8
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 124–7; as translated in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic
Philosophers, vol. I, p. 149.
88 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

perspective in these passages—as in many others in The Theory of Moral

Sentiments—which make it difficult to judge whether Smith is speaking in
his own voice or ironically adopting a standpoint of piety. It is, however,
made clear that for him the moral order does not depend on the belief in
divine judgement, rational though that belief might be. It is grounded
rather in a proper understanding of the operations of sympathy and
imagination between living human beings. That shared understanding
can encompass disagreements over whether belief in a transcendent Cre-
ator or an afterlife is irrational. The demands of morality weigh on the
atheist no less than on the religious believer. In this respect, Smith is
offering a secular account of the foundations of morality, regardless of
what his own religious beliefs might be.
The all-important exercise of imagination in shifting between self and
other—relocating ourselves into situations which are not our own—
is explored throughout The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For Smith these
exchanges are never simple substitutions; hence, the complexities of
selfishness. Although the sympathy grounded in these shifts can involve
what he calls ‘illusions of the imagination’—unwarranted projections of
self—he nonetheless insists that sympathy is inherently unselfish. Towards
the end of the book, he offers a rebuttal of moral theorists who treat self-
love as the foundation of morals. Such views, he argues, have arisen from
some ‘confused apprehension of the system of sympathy’, which wrongly
construes sympathy as a selfish principle.
Smith elaborates the point through a consideration of grief. Although
entering into the grief of another involves ‘an imaginary change of situ-
ations’ with another person, this imaginary exchange is not supposed to
happen to me ‘in my own person and character’ but in that of the person
with whom I sympathize:
When I condole with you for the loss of your only son, in order to enter into your
grief I do not consider what I, a person of such a character and profession, should
suffer, if I had a son, and if that son was unfortunately to die: but I consider what
I should suffer if I was really you, and I not only change circumstances with you,
but I change persons and characters. My grief, therefore, is entirely upon your
account, and not in the least upon my own. It is not, therefore, in the least selfish.
(Part VII, Sec. 3, Ch. 1, p. 374)

We can now see how sympathy, thus construed as dependent on imagin-

ation, enables us to bridge the gap between self and other. Smith goes on
 SYMPATHY AND IMAGINATION 89

in the same passage to say that sympathy does not arise from the imagin-
ation of anything that relates to myself as such. ‘A man may sympathize
with a woman in child-bed; though it is impossible that he should
conceive himself as suffering her pains in his own proper person and
character.’
In our own times a similar contrast has been drawn in relation to the
complexities of selfhood and imagination in Thomas Nagel’s much dis-
cussed essay, ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’: to imagine being a bat is not to
imagine being oneself spending the day hanging upside down by one’s feet
in an attic.9 The point here is of course not really about bats but about
human consciousness and inter-subjectivity. We talk readily of imagining
ourselves in the position of another—a demand which is often made in the
name of compassion. Smith’s examples show just how complex such
exercises of imagination really are; and, by the same token, what a
complex phenomenon sympathy is.
It may seem at first sight that Smith’s insistence on the unselfishness of
sympathy is at odds with his earlier treatment of imagination in relation to
death. If a man can unselfishly imagine the situation of a woman in
childbirth—a situation he can never actually experience—why should all
of us not be able to coherently imagine the condition of the insentient
dead? Smith’s point, however, is that death is precisely not a condition
which is experienced by the dead. In that respect his treatment of death is
thoroughly in accord with the Epicurean/Lucretian position. In supposedly
imagining myself into the situation of someone dead, I must take, as it
were, my whole self with me into an inanimate body. But this is exactly
what Smith would—in the light of his later discussion of the unselfishness
of sympathy—regard as a ‘selfish’ projection of myself into another. Insofar
as my grief is focused on the other’s lack of sensation, I grieve, not on behalf
of him—for whom lack of sensation is not a misfortune—but on behalf of
my imagined self. My supposed grief on behalf of the other is in fact a
‘selfish’ projection, giving rise to my own deluded ‘dread of death’—a self-
absorption which can poison the enjoyment of life.
There is thus no contradiction here. Far from being inconsistent, Smith’s
discussions of the two cases in fact reinforce one another. The male sympa-
thizes, rationally, with the woman in labour—not by imagining being

9
In Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979),
pp. 165–80.
90 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

himself in labour, but by imaging himself into her situation. The illusory
imagining of one’s self into the present situation of the dead is in contrast
entirely a projection of self. Yet the initial appearance of a tension between
the two illustrations serves to highlight the dynamic—and not always
rational—shifts between self and other, which are the stuff of sympathy.
Those exchanges can be particularly unsettling in situations of death and
grief. Jacques Derrida, in a moving discussion of these issues in Memoires for
Paul de Man, has given a subtle account of some of the complexities in the
experience of bereaved friendship—the strange shifts of thought that are
brought into play on the uncertain borders of self and other. Derrida
invokes there, and in other discussions of grief, a rich concept of ‘impos-
sible mourning’. In grief we attempt to incorporate the lost other into our
self—an attempt that is constantly thwarted by the very nature of friend-
ship, with its demands for recognition of otherness. ‘An aborted interior-
isation is at the same time a respect for the other as other, a sort of tender
rejection, a movement of renunciation which leaves the other alone,
outside, over there, in his death, outside of us.’10
Derrida’s analysis points to an unresolvable uncertainty which is central
not only to grief but to the very nature of friendship. Relations between
selves and others involve conflicted boundaries—impossibilities which are
also the realities of human interaction. The tensions arise especially in the
intensity of grief; but they are there also in intense relations between the
living. Smith’s description, early in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, of a
mother’s anxiety on behalf of a sick infant is illustrative of just how
complex the relations between imagination and sympathy can be. In her
idea of what the infant suffers, the mother
joins, to its real helplessness, her own consciousness of that helplessness, and her
own terrors for the unknown consequences of its disorder; and out of all these
forms, for her own sorrow, the most complete image of misery and distress. The
infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of the present instant, which can never be
great. With regard to the future, it is perfectly secure, and in its thoughtlessness and
want of foresight, possesses an antidote against fear and anxiety, the great tormen-
ters of the human breast, from which reason and philosophy will, in vain, attempt
to defend it, when it grows up to be a man. (Part I, Sec. 1, Ch. 1, pp. 15–16)

10
Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, revised edition, trans. C. Lindsay, J. Culler,
E. Cadava, and P. Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 35.
 SYMPATHY AND IMAGINATION 91

For Smith then it is the interactions and interdependence of sympathy and

imagination that make it possible for human beings to transcend self-
interest in the formation of moral consciousness. Imagination reaches
beyond the present and beyond the boundaries between self and other.
It is a powerful source of the expansion of consciousness. Yet the mix of
sympathy and imagination is also a volatile brew which can produce
irrational delusions, no less than generous expansion of selves. Even the
delusional is encompassed in Smith’s overall picture—ambivalent though
it may be—of a benign Nature, oriented towards human well-being. His
subtle analysis of the interactions of sympathy and imagination helps to
meet one of the challenges confronting the Sceptic of Hume’s essay—the
need to forge, out of relations of congenial collaboration between the like-
minded, an expanded consciousness that can recognize difference while
avoiding indifference.
Smith shows how sympathy can take us beyond the congenial limits of
what is ‘like us’ to recognize the needs and demands of more distant others.
Working together with imagination, it can reach beyond the differences
between the sexes: with the aid of imagination, a man can sympathize fully
with the pangs of childbirth, although he can never feel them. Sympathy,
grounded in imagination, can cross the borders which otherwise limit our
capacities for fellow-feeling.
Sympathy and imagination are supposed to interact in the formation of
the capacity for moral judgement. Yet, by the end of his account of that
interaction, the two seem so close that they are not really separate capacities.
Sympathetic fellow-feeling is so imbued with insight into the situation of
another human being that its full description demands consideration over a
span of time. It demands attention, not merely to what is happening now,
but to what has happened in the past and to what may happen in the future.
The description of such sympathy thus already involves appeal to entering
into another’s ‘situation’—an exercise of imagination. Equally, this exercise
of imagination seems of its nature to involve affect. Having the relevant
insight seems to demand that we be emotionally affected by what we
understand.
In some respects Smith’s ‘sympathy’ seems more akin to what we now
call ‘empathy’—a term which was not available to him. It involves feeling
for another person—not just reverberating with their feelings like a spider’s
web moving in a breath of wind. Yet it can be a more complex exercise
92 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

than empathy in being directed to another in his specific character and

circumstances—not just as a being with similar feelings to one’s own.
The interdependencies of sympathy and imagination are perhaps one
explanation of the challenge that commentators have found in mapping
Smith’s version of sympathy onto contemporary philosophical categories.11
As well as being assimilated to empathy, it has been analysed in terms of a
direct visceral reaction; and of simulated emotion. However, Smith’s main
concern is not with offering a theory of sympathy as a single concept.
What he calls sympathy cannot be readily detached from his whole
account of moral judgement. To grasp his understanding of sympathy,
we need first to understand what he has to say about the construct of the
‘impartial spectator’ and the role it plays in explaining how, out of those
shifting and turbulent—intense yet fragile—interconnections between
selves, there can emerge a stable, objective moral consciousness.

The impartial spectator

Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’—the ‘demigod within the breast’, as he
sometimes calls it—can sound at first much like older ideas of individual
conscience. The judgements of this inner observer, like those of con-
science, can be at odds with those of our closest fellow human beings. It
can be a dissenting inner voice, in disagreement with how others see our
actions. On the other hand, this spectator does not always adopt the
agent’s perspective. It has an external viewpoint that cannot be identified
with our own inner thoughts; it can pull us away from indulgent self-
perception, thrusting upon us an unsettling alternative interpretation of
what we do. It can also operate in the other direction, pulling us away
from the comforting indulgence of our peers to a harsher inner stance.
Both sides of the tension—the inward pull towards the solitude of
individual judgement, and the outward pull towards the perceptions of
others—are essential to the construct. Like older ideas of conscience, the
impartial spectator challenges our self-excusing perceptions of our own
actions. Yet it can comfort as well as confront. Here we see Smith’s

11
See Bence Nanay, ‘Adam Smith’s Concept of Sympathy and its Contemporary Inter-
pretations’, in Vivienne Brown and Samuel Fleischacker, eds., The Philosophy of Adam Smith:
The Adam Smith Review, vol. 5, Essays Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of The Theory
of Moral Sentiments (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), pp. 85–105.
 THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR 93

distinctive integration of the perspectives of self and other. The construct

of the impartial spectator brings the sense of individual responsibility
together with the sense of ‘propriety’, to yield Smith’s version of a
stabilized moral consciousness.
Although it is an abstract construction—an invention of the imagination—
the impartial spectator is caught up with more immediate relations between
self-perception and the regard of others. Smith makes it clear that, without
actual exposure to the harsh light of others’ opinions of us, the ‘man within
the breast, the abstract and ideal spectator of our sentiments and conduct’
would remain ‘unawakened’. To be put in mind of its duty, this ideal observer
needs the presence of ‘the real spectator’—the critic from whom we can
expect ‘the least sympathy and indulgence’.
Smith’s shifts between abstract and concrete—between imagined and
real observers—can be confusing. They are grounded in his emphasis on
sociability and, especially, on the crucial role he assigns to the sense of
propriety in the formation of stable selfhood. It is awareness of the gaze of
others—and especially the perceptions of those not bound to us by
immediate sympathy—that gives rise to the capacity to deal with the
intensity of our passions. ‘Are you in adversity? Do not mourn in the
darkness of solitude, do not regulate your sorrow according to the indul-
gent sympathy of your intimate friends; return, as soon as possible, to the
day-light of the world and of society’ (Part III, Ch. 3, p. 178).
The authority of the abstract impartial spectator is grounded in the
distancing from intense passion which is already implicit in Smith’s notion
of propriety. ‘The propriety of our moral sentiments is never so apt to be
corrupted, as when the indulgent and partial spectator is at hand, while the
indifferent and impartial one is at a great distance’ (Part III, Ch. 3, p. 179).
Smith’s explanation of his construct evokes the familiar experience of how
different our conduct can appear according to whether it is seen from a
partial close perspective or from the impartial perspective of more distant
observers. He preserves those continuities with ordinary experience, while
moving beyond them into a conceptual space which allows for the
development of moral objectivity.
Beginning from the desire to avoid blame and reproach—which he sees
as grounded in human nature—he invokes again the language of religion
to observe: ‘The all-wise Author of Nature has . . . taught man to respect
the sentiments and judgments of his brethren; to be more or less pleased
when they approve of his conduct, and to be more or less hurt when they
94 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

disapprove of it’ (Part III, Ch. 2, p. 149). God, he continues, has ‘made
man the immediate judge of mankind’, appointing him his ‘vice regent
upon earth to superintend the behaviour of his brethren’. However, this
concrete ‘immediate judge’, identified with our fellow man, is subordinate
to a ‘higher tribunal of conscience’—to ‘the supposed impartial and well-
informed spectator’, the ‘man within the breast’, the ‘great judge and
arbiter’ of conduct (Part III, Ch. 2, p. 150).
Smith talks in this context of two jurisdictions. There is a jurisdiction of
‘the man without’, founded on ‘the desire of actual praise and aversion to
actual blame’. This jurisdiction, however, is subordinate to that of ‘the
man within’, which is founded not on actual praise or blame but on ‘the
desire of praiseworthiness and aversion to blameworthiness’. Above both,
there is a ‘still higher tribunal’—that of ‘the all-seeing Judge of the world,
whose eye can never be deceived, and whose judgement can never be
prevented’ (Part III, Ch. 2, p. 153).
The language of this layering of moral authority is that of divine
purpose. Yet the religious overtones are again not essential to the concep-
tual structure of Smith’s model. The impartial spectator remains natural
rather than supernatural. It can all sound deceptively like a restatement of a
faith-based moral theory; but, although the language is religious, the
careful nesting of moral jurisdictions yields a structure that makes its
authority independent of religious belief. There is no appeal to divine
revelation of how human beings ought to act. The appeal is rather to facts
about the operation of human sentiments in conjunction with imagin-
ation. Out of the familiar human experiences of desire for praise and
aversion to blame—of sympathy, indulgence, or disapproval—the imagin-
ation forms the construct of an ideal observer, more godlike than our-
selves. This ideal observer may be made ‘in the image of God’, but it is
nonetheless subordinate to divine judgement. Its imagined moral insights
are not identified with the view of God.
Immortality also figures in Smith’s account of the ideal observer. How-
ever, here again, it is not the appeal to divine judgement as an event
beyond death that carries the conceptual weight. For that, he appeals
rather to the imaginative construct of an ideal just observer. He acknow-
ledges that a ‘firm confidence’ in a great tribunal which will in due time
judge innocence and reward virtue can be a source of support for the
‘weakness and despondency’ of our own minds. Our happiness in this life
often depends, he continues, on ‘the humble hope and expectation of a life
 THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR 95

to come: a hope and expectation deeply rooted in human nature; which

can alone support its lofty ideas of its own dignity; can alone illumine the
dreary prospects of its continually approaching mortality, and maintain its
cheerfulness under all the heaviest calamities to which, from the disorders
of this life, it may sometimes be exposed’ (Part III, Ch. 2, p. 153). The
point is expressed in the language of popular belief—in terms of a ‘world
to come’ where ‘exact justice will be done to every man’. Yet, comforting
though that language may be, the crux of Smith’s argumentation is again
the ideal of just perception—not any explicit commitment to a future
distribution of rewards and punishments. On the issue of the reasonable-
ness of popular belief in immortality, Smith remains elusive, though he
does not dismiss the possibility.
Like Hume, Smith directs his criticisms of religion not to religious belief
but to zealous believing. He complains that the ‘zealous asserters’ have
given to divine judgement a content which exposes the whole idea to ‘the
derision of the scoffer’ because their views of what is to come have been ‘in
direct opposition to all our moral sentiments’. Again, what carries the
burden of his arguments is not the appeal to a divine authority but rather
the ideal of complete—and completely impartial—judgement of human
action. The difference between his own strategy and appeals to divine
authority is evident in Smith’s more general observations on the misuse of
the shifting concept of divine will in moral theory. ‘That to obey the will
of the Deity, is the first rule of duty, all men are agreed. But concerning
the particular commandments which that will may impose upon us, they
differ widely from one another’ (Part III, Ch. 6, p. 206).
There are echoes of ancient Greek thought in Smith’s appeal to an ideal
observer—of Plato’s elusive Form of the Good, lying beyond the mere
shadows which are the objects of ordinary human perception; and of the
Stoic ideal of adopting the standpoint of the whole, setting aside the
distortions of partial perspectives. In a section on ‘universal benevolence’,
Smith observes: ‘Though our effectual good offices can very seldom be
extended to any wider society than that of our own country; our goodwill
is circumscribed by no boundary, but may embrace the immensity of the
universe’ (Part VI, Section 2, Ch. 3, p. 276).
These resonances from ancient Greek philosophy make Smith’s notion of
propriety conceptually richer than a mere concern with how we are in fact
perceived by others. He acknowledges that his talk of an impartial spectator
echoes Plato’s ideal of complete virtue, construed as Justice. He also makes
96 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

the connections with the Stoics explicit in his later discussion of the various
systems of moral philosophy. There, he stresses the Stoics’ emphasis on ‘the
prosperity of the whole’ as the core of their efforts to maintain ‘that
complete propriety and rectitude of sentiment and conduct’ in which
consists ‘the perfection of our nature’ (Part VII, Section 2, Ch. 1, p. 324).
Yet he insists on what makes his own version of impartiality distinctive.
Clearly, Smith sympathizes with the Stoic repudiation of the folly of
thinking the universe is in confusion when it is in fact ourselves who are
‘out of order’ (Part VII, Section 2, Ch. 1, p. 325). In the concluding
sections of his discussion of Stoicism, he draws out what he sees as the
superiority of his own impartial spectator over the Stoic version of detach-
ment. The crucial difference, he thinks, lies in the ready transitions which
his construct allows back and forth between close and more distant
perspectives on our lives. It is natural that the events that interest us the
most are those that ‘immediately affect that little department in which we
ourselves have some little management and direction’. Those events
which immediately affect ourselves, our friends, our country, are what
‘chiefly excite our desires and aversions, our hopes and fears, our joys and
sorrows’. However, when those passions become—as they are apt to do—
too vehement, we have resort to a ‘remedy and correction’ which Nature
has provided. ‘The real or even the imaginary presence of the impartial
spectator, the authority of the man within the breast, is always at hand to
overawe them into the proper tone and temper of moderation’ (Part VII,
Section 2, Ch. 1, p. 344). The impartial spectator provides a moderating
force which does not disdain or destroy the partial affections which sustain
us in the ‘little departments’ of our lives.
When our exertions in those little departments turn out ‘the most
unfortunate and disastrous’, we have consolation not only from ‘the
complete approbation of the man within the breast’ but also from thinking
of the necessity of our misfortunes in relation to the good of the whole.
However, this ‘sublime contemplation’ of the whole is not, as the Stoic
philosophy claims—on Smith’s interpretation—given us by Nature as ‘the
great business and occupation of our lives’. ‘She only points it out to us as
the consolation of our misfortunes’ (Part VII, Section 2, Ch. 1, p. 345).
For Smith the grand view of the whole—seen as if from a distance—is
not always the most appropriate perspective. His departure from both
Plato and the Stoics is apparent in this refusal to see the road of abstraction
as the preferred path for good living. His criticisms are directed mainly at
 THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR 97

what he perceives as the Stoic prescription of ‘perfect apathy’, which

exhorts us ‘not merely to moderate, but to eradicate, all our private, partial
and selfish affections’. By allowing us to feel for what happens to ourselves,
our friends, our country ‘not even the sympathetic and reduced passions of
the impartial spectator’, Stoicism tries to make us ‘altogether indifferent
and unconcerned in the success or miscarriage of every thing which
Nature has prescribed to us as the proper business and occupation of our
lives’ (Part VII, Section 2, Ch. 1, p. 345). It is important then to note that
although Smith’s construct of the impartial spectator enacts a form of
detachment—and that the construct itself depends on detachment from
the particularity of specific standpoints—this is meant to be a very different
kind of detachment from the form he associates with Stoicism.
Fonna Forman-Barzilae, in her book Adam Smith and the Circles of
Sympathy, has described the difference in terms of an old Stoic image of
concentric circles, radiating out from the individual self: we are bound by
close ties to blood relations and those most familiar to us, and compara-
tively indifferent towards the well being of those more distant. On her
analysis, Smith accepted much of that picture as conveying empirical facts
about human affections; however, he refused to draw the Stoics’ cosmo-
politan conclusion that the pursuit of virtue demands shedding those close
ties of affection to the inner circles, in order to live as ‘citizens of the
world’. She argues that—although sections of some of Smith’s other works
can be read as providing support for more recent cosmopolitan politics—
the impartial spectator construct in The Theory of Moral Sentiments should
not be read in that way. Smith, she argues, saw the Stoic exercise of
collapsing the concentric circles as a misplaced attempt to overcome the
natural structure of human affection: the detachment of his own impartial
spectator should not be seen as cosmopolitan, if that is construed in terms
of withdrawal from the concerns of a particular context of place or family.
Such a ‘collapse of concentric circles’ version of Stoic detachment is
indeed very different from the ideal which Smith expresses through his
impartial spectator model. However, his account of the Stoics may present
them as more severe than is warranted by the diversity of the ancient texts.
The concerns and pleasures which some of them regarded as ‘indifferents’
were not central to their ideas of the well-lived life; but those things were
not on that account to be spurned. Unfair though Smith’s account of
Stoicism may be to actual Stoics, it does nonetheless provide a useful foil
for articulating his own version of detachment—attained through delicate
98 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

shifts of perspective and nuanced emotion. Yet there remains in his

impartial spectator a strong sense of ‘propriety’ which may well seem to
have some affinities with the character of the Stoic sage.
Smith regards his model of the impartial spectator as allowing him to
retain something of the detachment of the Stoic ideal, while rejecting the
indifference he thinks that perspective fosters towards the emotional
aspects of human life. It is also supposed to offer a humane alternative to
the Stoics’ apparent lack of concern for the unanticipated outcomes of
human action. For the Stoics, on Smith’s account of them, human agency
is ideally distanced not only from our shifting emotions but also from
anxiety about the future: the virtuous man is supposed to remain aloof
from unexpected outcomes—whether they arise entirely from Fortune,
over which he has no control, or from his own well-intentioned actions.
The Stoics had their own version of the good human being’s detach-
ment from concern with all that lay beyond the scope of what is freely
chosen. According to Epictetus, we should not be bothered by the gap
between what we intend and what actually comes about through our
acting. All that the gods have placed in our power, he says, is ‘the correct
use of impressions’. We need be concerned about nothing that lies beyond
this ‘power of impulse and repulsion, desire and aversion’. If we take care
of this power over impressions, we will never be blocked, never hindered,
never complain, never blame, never flatter anyone.12
Smith resists the celebration of apathy he discerns in Stoic attitudes to
Fortune—especially in their apparent indifference to unintended conse-
quences of human agency. In a section on ‘the influence of fortune upon
the sentiments of mankind, with regard to the merit or demerit of actions’
(Part II, Section 3, pp. 108–12) he draws on his model of the impartial
spectator to offer an alternative account of responsibility for unintended
consequences.

Fortune and human action

The interplay of human action with fickle Fortune—the frequent random
reversals of even the most well-intentioned deeds—was a constant theme

12
Epictetus, Discourses 1.1, 7–12, as translated in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philoso-
phers, vol. I, pp. 391–2.
 FORTUNE AND HUMAN ACTION 99

in Greek tragedies. Those tragic reversals were the backdrop to the Stoic
ideal of detachment which both fascinated and repelled Adam Smith. His
treatment of the influences of Fortune in relation to the merit or demerit
of actions opens with what sounds at first like a familiar hard line on the
irrelevance of outcomes to the moral quality of acts: their merit or demerit
can reside only in our intentions. The only consequences for which we
can be answerable are ‘those which were someway or other intended’ or
which ‘at least, show some agreeable or disagreeable quality in the inten-
tion of the heart’. However, the direction in which Smith develops this
point yields something very different from the version of detachment
which he associated with Stoicism.
Smith concedes the apparent self-evidence of the maxim that only
intention is worthy of praise or blame—as long as that maxim is proposed
‘in abstract or general terms’. When we come to particular cases, however,
we find that our sentiments are in fact scarcely ever found to be entirely
regulated by this rule. We are then confronted with an ‘irregularity of
sentiment, which everybody feels, which scarce any body is sufficiently
aware of, and which nobody is willing to acknowledge’ (Part II, Section 3,
Introduction, p. 110). Smith’s discussion of Fortune is revealing for his
understanding of the concept of nature in relation to human action.
‘Irregular’ though our sentiments towards unintended consequences may
be, the ‘mechanism’ of this departure from what ought to be the case is, he
insists, natural. It answers an end or purpose intended by ‘the author of
nature’.
This juxtaposition of the purposes of Nature with ‘irregularity’ is
startling. Nature’s purposes, it seems, can incorporate something untoward
which ought not to happen. Smith seems to go further here than Kant’s
talk in his Idea for a Universal History of apparent irregularities which are
accommodated into the order of Nature’s purposes. Smith seems to be
talking of real irregularities which are nonetheless part of Nature. The
apparent oddity of the association of the irregular and the natural marks his
distance from the rigidity he associated with Stoic ethics. What we have
here is not a simple readiness to bend the rules; it is not just a matter of
relaxing the inflexibly high standards required of the Stoic sage. Smith
seems prepared to see Nature itself as responsible for the irregularity.
Implicit already here in Smith’s discussion of Fortune is a criticism of
Stoic ideals of perfection, on the grounds that they would not serve the
true interests of human beings—even if they were attainable.
100 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

Because he accepts this benign irregularity, Smith sees the considera-

tion of actual consequences—and hence of what lies in ‘the empire of
Fortune’—as appropriately entering our moral evaluations. The influence
of Fortune, he says, casts a shadow of merit or demerit on the agent. No
matter how ‘proper and beneficent’ or ‘improper and malevolent’ a
person’s intentions may be, their merit and demerit are bound to seem
imperfect or incomplete if they fail in producing their effects. Nor is this
‘irregularity of sentiment’ felt only by those directly affected by the
consequences of an action. It is felt in some measure even by the impartial
spectator. However well-intentioned a would-be benefactor might be, we
think less well of him if his efforts towards our good are unsuccessful.
There is an ‘unjust’ diminishment of the debt due to good intentions
which occurs ‘even in the eyes of the impartial spectator’ (Part II,
Section 3, Chapter 2, pp. 114–15).
Unsuccessful attempts to do evil are subject to this ‘irregular sentiment’,
no less than unsuccessful attempts to do good. Our resentment against a
person who only attempted to do a mischief is ‘seldom so strong as to bear
us out in inflicting the same punishment upon him, which we should have
thought due if he had actually done it’. Since his intentions were equally
criminal, his ‘real demerit’ is undoubtedly the same in both cases. Yet there
is in this respect ‘an irregularity in the sentiments of all men’ and in
consequence an appropriate ‘relaxation of discipline’ in the laws of all
nations—of ‘the most civilized’ as well as ‘the most barbarous’. The
humanity of a civilized people induces them to dispense with or to
mitigate punishments wherever their natural indignation is not ‘goaded
on by the consequences of the crime’. Barbarians, on the other hand,
when no actual consequence has happened from any action, are not ‘apt to
be very delicate or inquisitive about the motives’. Either way, the proper
objects of blame and punishment are actual consequences, rather than
intentions.
Recognition of the role of Fortune in the good life is of course not of
itself new. It was an important strand in Aristotle’s ethics. Smith, however,
gives Fortune a role in the determination, not only of human happiness,
but in that of the merit and demerit of human actions. Aristotle recognized
the chanciness of virtue—its dependence on the contingencies that con-
tribute to the formation of intellectual and moral character; its vulnerabil-
ity to blows of Fortune which can erode our capacities to practise the good
habits which sustain it. Smith in contrast is prepared to incorporate
 FORTUNE AND HUMAN ACTION 101

Fortune into the judgement of the moral worth of particular actions. In a

bold summation of his views on the issue, he says: ‘Such is the effect of the
good or bad consequences of actions upon the sentiments both of
the person who performs them, and of others; and thus, Fortune, which
governs the world, has some influence where we should be least willing to
allow her any, and directs in some measure the sentiments of mankind,
with regard to the character and conduct both of themselves and others’
(Part II, Section 3, Ch. 3, p. 123).
Smith’s description of the benign irregularities in moral judgement,
which operate even in the impartial spectator, is framed by the language
of Providence. ‘Nature . . . when she implanted the seeds of this irregular-
ity in the human breast, seems, as upon all other occasions, to have
intended the happiness and perfection of the species’ (Part II, Section 3,
Ch. 3, p. 123). Yet his concern is not with redescribing apparent evils as
real goods, but rather with getting an accurate account of how human
passions actually operate and of how we actually form our moral judge-
ments. ‘If the hurtfulness of the design, if the malevolence of the affection,
were alone the causes which excited our resentment, we should feel all the
furies of that passion against any person in whose breast we suspected or
believed such designs or affections were harboured, though they had never
broke out into any action’ (Part II, Section 3, Ch. 3, pp. 123–4). What is
most humane in our judgements of human action is not always in accord-
ance with our judgements of how things ought to be. In other words, our
moral judgements are rightly tempered by a shared sense of human frailty.
Without such allowance for Fortune, Smith argues, the human world
would be a chillingly rational domain. ‘Sentiments, thoughts, intentions,
would become the objects of punishment.’ Every court would then
become ‘a real inquisition’. ‘Actions, therefore, which either produce
actual evil, or attempt to produce it, and thereby put us in the immediate
fear of it, are by the Author of Nature rendered the only proper and
approved objects of human punishment and resentment.’ The rule that
men are liable only for what they bring about, not their designs and
intentions, is founded on this ‘salutary and useful irregularity in human
sentiments concerning merit or demerit, which at first sight appears so
absurd and unaccountable’. It all lies for Smith within the frame of
Providence: ‘we may admire the wisdom and goodness of God even in
the weakness and folly of man’ (Part II, Section 3, Ch. 3; p. 124). Yet this
version of benign Providence accommodates the irregularities of Fortune.
102 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

Smith’s language in his discussion of Fortune has religious overtones.

To punish for the ‘affections of the heart only’ is ‘the most insolent
and barbarous tyranny’; to reward ‘that latent virtue which has been useless
only for want of an opportunity to serve’ is in contrast ‘the effect of the most
divine benevolence’ (Part II, Section 3, Ch. 3, p. 125). Yet, here once more,
the argumentative force of his treatment of the relations between Fortune
and human agency does not depend on any revealed content of religious
belief. The benefits for humanity in the ‘irregularity’ he describes in human
sentiment are meant to be open for common sense to see; they are inde-
pendent of any faith in the beneficence of an elusive divine will.
In the concluding sentences of his discussion of Fortune, Smith com-
ments explicitly on the role of Fortune in Greek tragedy—in particular, on
the ancient idea of the piacular, which demanded atonement of even an
unintentional violation of a sacred place. His own analysis of ‘irregularity of
sentiment’ accords, he points out, with this ‘fallacious sense of guilt’, which
makes an innocent person feel distress when they have done accidentally
something which—if done intentionally—would occasion the deepest
reproach. Smith’s impartial spectator recognizes the irrationality of such
distress without casting it aside. While not denying the claim of the piacular,
the impartial spectator can press beyond its restraints. The innocence of the
unintentional offender is not left without consolation; nor is his failed virtue
left without reward. The man in this unfortunate position ‘summons up his
whole magnanimity and firmness of soul’ to try to regard himself in the light
in which he would have appeared had his ‘generous design’ been ‘crowned
with success’; and ‘the more candid and humane part of mankind’ go along
with that effort (Part II, Section 3, Ch. 3, p. 127).
Smith’s construct of the impartial spectator involves an imaginative
integration of the perspectives of self and others on human action. It
allows transitions between close and distant—partial and more impartial—
perceptions of what we do. It provides a basis for a strikingly humane view
of the relations between intentions and outcomes—of our responsibility
for unintended consequences. Without subjecting us to strict liability for
consequences, his analysis of Fortune allows us to acknowledge the place in
our lives of what philosophers such as Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel
have more recently called ‘moral luck’.13

13
Papers by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, both called ‘Moral Luck’, were
originally published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 1, 1976. Nagel’s paper
 THE ‘ VOICES ’ OF ADAM SMITH 103

Smith was committed to the idea that human deeds should spring from
an understanding of how things really are. Yet for him this aspiration was
consistent with an open scepticism about the possibility of knowing
definitively what it is we are really doing. Within his conceptual
frame for understanding and evaluating intention and action, our self-
descriptions can always be challenged by appeal to counter-descriptions of
what we do. The world—the actuality of events—sets constraints on the
truth of our descriptions of even our own actions.
There is here a demand for truthfulness, which cannot be set to rest by a
closer scrutiny of some inner mental object—the agent’s intention. As
agents, we are challenged to bring our self-perception into alignment with
what actually happens. The focus is on what agents actually do—with the
changes they make in the world—rather than on what their intentions
might have been. Yet, as we have seen, it is by no means always the case
that the appeal to such an impartial spectator yields a harsh judgement.
Within this ethical frame, allowance must always be made for the intru-
sions of Fortune into human responsibility. Sometimes it is appropriate
that, in Smith’s terms, the ‘innocent offender’ should not be ‘left without
consolation’.
Agent and observer perspectives are here envisaged as coming together
in a shared attempt to reach truthful understanding. In relation to action,
that understanding involves a delicate adjustment between those different
perspectives. Moral worth is constantly revisable—ever open to be judged
anew. It is an ethical frame which allows the evaluation of human action to
be imbued with a sceptical spirit. It also represents a shift to a secular
approach to ethics. Moral consciousness may find expression in the lan-
guage of God, Nature, or Providence; but moral authority now resides in
the endlessly fallible and revisable judgements of human beings—subject
always to the vagaries of Fortune.

The ‘voices’ of Adam Smith

The account of moral judgement offered in The Theory of Moral Sentiments
clearly has implications for a more general understanding of objectivity in

was republished in his collection Mortal Questions, pp. 24–38; Williams’ paper was republished
in his collection Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 20–39.
104 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

relation to morals. By moving between different perspectives on an

action—and especially through resort to the impartial spectator model—
we are supposed to reach a place of detachment within which it becomes
possible to make an objective, though revisable, evaluation. Not surpris-
ingly, the conjunction of detachment and revisability has given rise to
some concerns about this version of moral objectivity. The impartial
spectator model enacts the process of coming to judgement in a particular—
and ever-changing—situation. These impartial judgements are situated;
they are not expressed as general principles or rules. Is Smith then on a slippery
slope to what we now call ‘moral relativism’?
Charles Griswold Jr., in an important and influential study of The Theory
of Moral Sentiments, has drawn attention to the ways in which the object-
ivity of this spectator is grounded in its ability to reflect on the practices and
customs of its own social context. Griswold draws on Plato’s imagery of
ascent from the cave to argue that Smith offered a new middle way for
moral philosophy—neither reducing the basis of moral judgement to
‘ordinary experience’ nor transcending that ordinariness to enter a higher
realm of ‘moral theory’. The process of enlightenment now goes on
within the cave; no ascent into the light is required. For Griswold, this
amounts to a distinctive Enlightenment treatment of virtue.14 He argues
that Smith’s approach to moral philosophy, far from involving relativism,
lends force to resistance to more recent tendencies towards it. If the
standpoint of the spectator is subverted into that of the actor, the result
is that individuals and groups come to see themselves as ‘beholden only to
their own standards’.15 Smith’s impartial spectator in contrast resists any
such collapse of external perspectives into that of the agent.
Griswold is surely right about the significance of the anti-Platonic
orientation of Smith’s model. Despite the echoes of Plato, this spectator
does not have a ‘view from nowhere’. Griswold’s analysis may retain,
nonetheless, too tight a connection between objectivity and the idea of a
definitive access to truth. Perhaps there is too much fixity in this apprehen-
sion of truth from within the cave to capture just how radical is Smith’s
departure from Platonic models. His impartial spectator is, after all, con-
structed out of a multiplicity of changing perspectives. That construction is

14
Charles L. Griswold, Jr., Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999). See pp. 14–15.
15
Griswold, Virtues of Enlightenment, pp. 371–2.
 THE ‘ VOICES ’ OF ADAM SMITH 105

itself an exercise of the imagination and hence, like any work of the
imagination, subject to shifts and turns. Griswold’s appeal to Platonic
imagery to explain what is distinctive about Smith’s approach to moral
philosophy may in the end retain too much from Plato. The objectivity
yielded by the impartial spectator model is not really an alternative to the
Platonic story, in a shared project for articulating the process of attaining a
fixed truth. The process of enlightenment modelled here is of a kind that
sheds, not only the need for the ascent to the light, but the very idea of a
fixed truth to be attained.
In a later essay,16 Griswold has himself highlighted the presence of a
narrative dimension in Smith’s treatment of sympathy, which he sees as in
tension with the ocular imagery evoked by the impartial spectator model.
Smith’s version of sympathy, he argues there, may be better construed as
more like a ‘communicative, rhetorical process’ than as an exercise of a
kind of vision. It is a promising interpretive move, which helps capture the
temporal dimensions of Smith’s version of sympathy. Imagining one’s self
into the situation of another demands attention not only to what is
happening now but also to past and future, including—as in the case of
sympathy for the newly born—future possibilities to which the object of
our sympathy is oblivious. This is one among many ways in which the
literary and rhetorical dimensions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments are
integral to its philosophical content.
Vivienne Brown, in a fascinating study of the literary forms of Adam
Smith’s works, has shown how his central concern in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments with the operations of imagination and sympathy is enacted in
the book’s structure.17 She uses Bakhtin’s distinction between ‘dialogic’
and ‘monologic’ literary forms to explore the array of ‘voices’ in the work.
A ‘dialogic’ text, in Bakhtin’s sense, is one that is structured by an interplay
of voices, whereas a ‘monologic’ text evokes a single voice. For Bakhtin,
the novel is the archetypical form of dialogic discourse; but it is significant
that he also finds this form in ethical discourses epitomized by Stoic works
of moral philosophy, where a moral agent is presented as engaged in

16
Charles L. Griswold, ‘Smith and Rousseau in Dialogue: Sympathy, Pitié, Spectatorship
and Narrative’, in Brown and Fleischacker, eds., The Philosophy of Adam Smith: The Adam
Smith Review, vol. 5, pp. 59–84.
17
Vivienne Brown, Adam Smith’s Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce and Conscience (London:
Routledge, 1994).
106 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

internal dialogue—in self-interrogation or soliloquy. Monologic discourse

is in contrast typically found in theoretical writing, where a constant
authorial voice controls the text and guides the reader through a unified
argumentative structure.
In a subtle analysis of the writing strategies of The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, Brown explores the complex interplay of voices through
which Smith engages the reader: agent and spectator; author and reader;
the universal ‘we’ of humanity; and often a ‘hybrid’ utterance which can
change in mid-sentence. In an interesting twist, she shows the conver-
gence here between Smith’s use of multivocity in the passages on the
impartial spectator and its use in treatments of conscience and self-reflec-
tion in his Stoic sources. In Smith’s text, the dialogic form of moral
discourse comes to act out the exploratory nature of moral judgement; it
is an important consequence that in the process the author’s voice becomes
‘refracted’, losing its certainty.
On Brown’s analysis, what The Theory of Moral Sentiments requires of its
readers is that they themselves take up the role of impartial spectator.
Reading the text requires a ‘spectatorial sympathy’, and this in turn
demands an active imaginative response—a changing of places, imagining
oneself into another’s situation. That is to say, in order to engage with this
text, the reader must re-enact the content of the story it tells. The dialogic
form of the text thus powerfully illustrates the nature of moral judgement
itself. The process of judging, as it is enacted here, involves attention to the
details of imagined situations; it is not predetermined or derivable from a
set of rules. Moral judgement has an indeterminacy which reflects the
multiple voices at work in the text. The authorial voice has become one
among many; rather than controlling the work from an external point,
it becomes itself open to wavering. This brings us to what Brown calls a
dark side of Smith’s treatment of the interactions of imagination and
sympathy—their capacity to generate delusions.
There is an interesting contrast here with the moral ‘wholeness’ of the
Stoic sage. Instead of a self divided between reason and the passions—with
reason holding the preferred superior standpoint—Smith offers a version
of detachment which involves the agent learning to stand, as it were,
outside himself to view his own conduct. It as an exercise in which
imagination takes over from reason the role, as Brown puts it, of ‘prime
moral mover’. The pressure this puts on imagination brings a vulnerability
which was unknown in the detachment yielded by Stoic ‘apathy’. For
 THE ‘ VOICES ’ OF ADAM SMITH 107

moral judgement cannot, without illusion, really achieve this doubling.

On Brown’s analysis, the problem lies with the mechanism Smith has
supplied for the moral imagination. For the mechanism to work properly,
the moral spectator must assume a double identity. In order to appreciate
the situation of the other, the spectator must imagine what it is like to be in
that situation; but at the same time he must observe it as an outsider. In
effect, the spectator is required to perform simultaneously two opposed
roles—that of the observing/judge and that of the observed/judged.
The intent of this intriguing analysis is not to condemn Smith’s impartial
spectator model as ultimately incoherent. Brown’s claim rather is that the
text itself displays a radical doubt concerning the viability of the spectator
mechanism that forms the basis of the theory. That is, the text displays a
scepticism about itself. There is, for the moral agent Smith has constructed,
nothing of the certainty that derives from the possibility of a ‘single true
vision’. This agent cannot become a unified moral being; it must remain
fractured and morally ambivalent, ‘subject to bifocal vision and competing
voices’.
Brown has offered an insightful account both of the intricacies of the
text and of the uncertainty inherent in Smith’s version of moral judge-
ment. What is grounded in the imagination unavoidably rests on unstable
ground. It may seem a bleak picture. Yet it is offset by the sense of calm
acceptance which is also carried by the authorial voice—in all its complex-
ities—that runs through this text. It is as if Smith has found an alternative
route to the capacity to face the troubles of being human—a route which
does not demand the withdrawal from human partialities in affection, to
which he objected in what he took to be the intellectual character of the
ancient Stoic sage. What I would add to Brown’s analysis is that the tone of
his account of moral judgement—ever revisable, ever open to the
future—is no less exhilarating than it is disturbing.
Smith’s appeal to a Nature—a Providence—that encompasses every-
thing human, including our vulnerability to delusion, has all the irony we
might expect from the ambiguities of his attitude to religion. Yet, despite
its dark undercurrents of a doubting, fractured wholeness, The Theory of
Moral Sentiments is a book true to the spirit of its own injunction—
however multivocal the advice might be—about how best to deal with
intense emotion: in adversity it is best to return as soon as possible from the
‘darkness of solitude’ to ‘the day-light of the world and of society’ (Part III,
Ch. 3, p. 178). In place of a ‘stoical’ resolve not to submit to the sway
108 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

of the passions, he urges his readers to turn towards the sociable world, the
conversable world illustrated in the multiplicity of voices in his book.

Philosophy and imagination

Many-voiced though it may be, The Theory of Moral Sentiments is clearly
intended as a piece of philosophical writing. Yet, despite its close argu-
mentation, its emphasis on the workings of imagination in conjunction
with the emotions makes reading this book an unusual experience for
contemporary philosophers. The interactions of imagination and emotion
are indeed integral to the form of the work as well as to its content. In
describing the interactions between sympathy and imagination, for
example, Smith constantly resorts to illustrations which demand that we
ourselves ‘enter into the situation of another’. These illustrations do not
function just as test cases calling for an intellectual evaluation of a theory.
They evoke an affective response which in turn calls for an exercise of
moral imagination.
The emphasis Smith places on imagination throughout The Theory of
Moral Sentiments complements the account of philosophy as one of the
‘liberal arts’, which he offers in his early essay, The History of Astronomy.
There he insists that Philosophy is to be regarded as ‘one of those arts
which address themselves to the imagination’, describing it as ‘the most
sublime of all the agreeable arts’. ‘Its revolutions have been the greatest, the
most frequent, and the most distinguished of all those that have happened
in the literary world.’18
Smith wanted to show how each of the arts—philosophy included—
was fitted to ‘soothe the imagination’, rendering ‘the theatre of nature a
more coherent, and therefore a more magnificent spectacle, than other-
wise it would have appeared to be’ (p. 337). Within that frame, philoso-
phy’s old associations with wonder are given a new twist. Philosophy
springs from wonder; yet it also seeks to allay the destabilizing effects
wonder has on the mind. The repose and tranquillity of the imagination

18
Adam Smith, ‘The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Inquiries, As
Illustrated By The History of Astronomy’, in his Essays, Philosophical and Literary, ed. Joseph
Black and James Hutton (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010) [originally published in London
by Ward, Lock & Co. in 1795], pp. 336–7. Subsequent page references to this edition are
given in parentheses.
 PHILOSOPHY AND IMAGINATION 109

is the ‘ultimate end of philosophy’ (p. 348). The imagination has ‘natural
propensities’ which accompany ‘with ease and delight any regular and
orderly motion’ (p. 345). It can thus allay the unsettling wonder which can
be excited in the mind by the ‘unusual or seemingly disjointed appearances
of nature’ (p. 359). For Smith, it is the role of philosophy—more than any
other of the ‘agreeable arts’—to bring relief from the ‘wandering in
uncertainty’ (p. 371) associated with undisciplined wonder.
Smith’s idea of the liberal arts is of course much broader than is implied
in more recent versions of the distinctions between the ‘arts’ and ‘sciences’.
He himself came to have some serious reservations about the grand vision
of the liberal arts which inspired his treatment of them in The History of
Astronomy. Although the essay was published only posthumously—by his
literary executors in 1795—his own description of it as ‘an intended
juvenile work’ suggests that its first drafts may date from his years in
Oxford from 1740 to 1746. In 1773 he wrote to Hume, who was at
that stage his literary executor, that he thought it the only piece among his
unpublished works—apart from the manuscript of The Wealth of Nations—
that might be worth publishing. Whether it might be presented ‘as a
fragment of an intended juvenile work’, he said, ‘I leave entirely to your
judgement; tho I begin to suspect myself that there is more refinement
than solidity in some parts of it.’19
By the time Smith died, in 1790, he had given permission for this essay
and a few others to be exempted from his desire that his unpublished
papers be burnt. His literary executors included them in a collection under
the general title Essays on Philosophical Subjects, writing in the Editors’
Advertisement that they appeared to be ‘parts of a plan he once had
formed, for giving a connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant
arts’.
At the end of the unfinished essay, Smith is clearly struggling to sustain
his conviction of the role of imagination in all these areas of knowledge.
His editors reported that he left some notes from which it appeared
that ‘he considered this last part of his History of Astronomy as imperfect,
and needing several additions’ (p. 385). Newton’s system—with which he
ends the essay—is a stumbling block. ‘And even we, while we have been
endeavouring to represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of

19
Adam Smith to David Hume, 16 April 1773, Letter 137 in Correspondence of Adam Smith,
p. 168.
110 AS SEEN BY OTHERS: ADAM SMITH’S THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discord-

ant phenomena of Nature, have insensibly been drawn in, to make use of
language expressing the connecting principles of this one, as if they were
the real chains which Nature makes use of to bind together her several
operations’ (p. 384).
Newtonian principles must, it now seemed to Smith, be acknowledged
as having a kind of truth which goes beyond mere ‘inventions of the
imagination’. Yet it is striking that, in trying to reconcile the persuasive
force of Newton’s system with his own inclination to regard that system as
just one more effort of the imagination to ease the discomforts of wonder,
Smith resorts to another exercise of imagination: Newton’s ‘connecting
principles’ are to be seen as the ‘real chains’ of Nature. What matters here,
however, is not whether Smith succeeded in offering a plausible account
of the unity of the arts and sciences—or of their shared dependence on
imagination. What is important is to bring into focus his account of the
struggle to bring to easeful rest the mental instability—the ‘wandering in
uncertainty’—inherent in imagination.
Smith and Hume both wanted to reconstruct a kind of objectivity out
of the powers of imagination—an objectivity which did not depend on
the dominance of reason. However, as Hume said in the Inquiry Concerning
Human Understanding, ‘nothing is more free than the imagination of
man’.20 Hume thought that the imagination’s tendencies to overreach,
to wander beyond the constraints of experience, are harmless—provided
they can be reined in when we judge that to be appropriate. Both were
confident that good sense could keep things reasonable. However, if—as
Smith argued—objective moral judgements are themselves constructs of
the imagination, a vulnerability lurks under these thinkers’ celebration of
the freedom of imagination. A similar tension surfaces in the reflections on
knowledge offered by the editors of the Encyclopedia.

20
Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Charles Hendel (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Library of Liberal Arts, 1955), Section V, Part II, p. 61.
 5
‘Changing the Common
Mode of Thinking’:
d’Alembert and Diderot on
the Encyclopedia

Maps, trees, and circles

‘What is truth?’ Jesting Pilate may have been shrewd in not ‘staying for an
answer’. However, in the rhetoric of Francis Bacon’s essay, published
in 1625, Pilate’s flightiness is of course presented as being to his own
detriment. The giddiness of those who ‘count it a bondage to fix a belief ’
deprives them of an incomparable pleasure. They will never stand in clear
and serene air on the vantage ground of truth, to survey ‘the errors, and
wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below’. For Bacon it is
‘heaven on earth’ for a human mind to ‘move in clarity, rest in providence,
and turn upon the poles of truth’. Yet Bacon was well able to appreciate
the general reluctance to stand in that ‘naked, and open day-light’. For
there are other kinds of light-filled pleasure; and On Truth is a celebration
of the nebulous delights of imagining, no less than of the serene air of
knowledge. ‘Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth
best by day; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond, or carbuncle,
that showeth best in varied lights.’ Without the candle-lights of poetic
pleasures, the minds of many would be left ‘poor shrunken things, full of
melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves’.
For Bacon the key to resolution of the apparent conflict between the
sober joys of truth and the more light-hearted delights of fantasy lies
in understanding their different modes of presence in the mind. His
metaphors of light are complemented by other metaphors of motion and
112 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

stability, flight and rest. The harm of untruth, he says, does not come from
the lie that ‘passeth through the mind’—firing the imagination in its
passage. It comes rather from the lie that ‘sinketh in, and settleth in it’.
The mind that remains steady in its love of truth—notwithstanding the
passing pleasures of imagining—is stable also in its joy. ‘Truth, which
only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the
love-making or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is
the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it,
is the sovereign good of human nature.’1
There is a wealth—perhaps even a surfeit—of imagery of light and
motion in these passages. Yet they capture something which will continue
to engage thought about the nature of human knowledge throughout
the eighteenth century—the tensions between demands for timelessness
and for change. On the one hand, there is the sense of a timeless structure
of the human mind, which acts as a universal template for the organization
of knowledge and learning. On the other, there is an equally strong sense of
change in the business of knowing—of a distinctive moment in the
development of human capacities to understand and control the world.
Those tensions surface in the reflections which d’Alembert and Diderot
offered on the conceptual aspects of the enormous project of the Encylope-
dia, published between 1751 and 1772. The ordering of the entries, they
think, must address two things which appear to be in tension. On the one
hand, attention must be given to the historical development of the different
subject areas—to what is new in their era. On the other, the Encyclopedia
must also address the timeless structure of the human mind, which
underpins the state of knowledge at a particular time.
D’Alembert’s involvement in the editing of the volumes ended in 1758;
Diderot’s continued through the first twenty-eight volumes, including
eleven volumes of plates. Both participated in conceptualizing the
project. Although they both signed the Dedication, the Preliminary
Discourse, which introduces the first volume, was written solely by
d’Alembert. Diderot gives his own account of the project in his entry
on Encyclopedia. These complementary accounts together provide a fascin-
ating picture of how they saw the work. Clearly their contemporaries
were struck, not only by the size of this ordering of knowledge, but by its

1
Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 74.
 MAPS , TREES , AND CIRCLES 113

conceptualization. Frederick the Great wrote to d’Alembert of the Prelim-

inary Discourse: ‘Many men have won battles and conquered provinces, but
few have written a work as perfect as the preface to the Encyclopedia.’2
Condorcet, in his eulogy for d’Alembert, spoke of it as one of the two or
three invaluable works of the century.3
There are three striking features of the way the editors thought of their
enormous task. First, the organization of knowledge is mapped onto a
reconstruction of the mental operations involved in knowing. Complex
and conflicted though the collaborations involved in the huge project may
have been, they are presented as all grounded in the universal structure of
the human mind. Second, despite that underlying structure, the work as a
whole is nonetheless a time slice of the state of knowledge at the period
in which it was produced—of the current state of the arts and sciences.
Third, the work is consciously directed towards the communication and
dissemination of knowledge.
The editors of the Encyclopedia admired Bacon. Diderot had explicitly
invoked him in his explanation of the organization of the work, in
the prospectus issued in 1750. The entries were to be arranged, not
alphabetically, but in accordance with a chart of the intertwining branches
of knowledge, modelled on Bacon’s ordering of the faculties in The
Advancement of Learning. In that work, published in 1605, Bacon had set
out his own organization of the different areas of learning, in accordance
with the goal of a ‘Great Instauration’ reforming knowledge. Bacon
distinguished three ‘faculties’: Memory, associated with History; Reason,
associated with Philosophy; and Imagination, associated with Poetry.
Controversially, he located Religion and Theology under the more general
category of Philosophy rather than as separate sources of knowledge.
Although Diderot was enthusiastic about the idea of having Bacon’s
ordering of the branches of knowledge reflected in the structure of the
Encyclopedia, it quickly proved impractical and the editors returned to an
alphabetical ordering, though with some important innovations which
would reflect the influence of the Baconian model. In the Preliminary

2
Frederick the Great, Oeuvres (Berlin, 1854), XXV, 166, Letter of 1780 to d’Alembert. As
quoted by Richard N. Schwab in Translator’s Introduction to d’Alembert, Preliminary
Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Library of the Liberal
Arts, 1963), p. x.
3
Schwab, Translator’s Introduction to d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse, p. x.
114 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

Discourse, d’Alembert thus acknowledges that he and Diderot owe

principally to Bacon the model of an ‘encyclopedic tree’ which structures
their project, though they have not followed his exact ordering. Their
own organization of knowledge is to follow the ‘metaphysical order of
the operations of the mind in the encyclopedic system rather than the
historical order of its progress since the renaissance of letters’.4 This shift
will involve, among other things, a rethinking of the relations between
reason and imagination.
For d’Alembert, these rearrangements reflect a strong attachment to
topological imagery. Speaking earlier of the timeless aspects of mapping
the divisions of knowledge, d’Alembert observes that the emergence of
the sciences has often been contemporaneous, though when ‘tracing in
historical order the progress of the mind, one can only embrace them
successively’. An encyclopedic arrangement of knowledge in contrast
‘consists of collecting knowledge into the smallest area possible and of
placing the philosopher at a vantage point, so to speak, high above this vast
labyrinth, whence he can perceive the principal sciences and the arts
simultaneously’. From this vantage point the philosopher can discern
‘the general branches of human knowledge, the points that separate or
unite them; and sometimes he can even glimpse the secrets that relate
them to one another’. It is, he says, ‘a kind of world map’ which shows the
principal countries and ‘the road that leads directly from one to
the other’—a road which is often ‘cut by a thousand obstacles, which
are known in each country only to the inhabitants or to travellers’ (p. 47).
The tensions between timeless structural relations and, on the other
hand, the ever-changing scenario of knowledge surface in d’Alembert’s
attempts to locate the project of the Encyclopedia in relation to their
intellectual past. The Preliminary Discourse speaks of Bacon as ‘the greatest,
the most universal, and the most eloquent of the philosophers’ (p. 74).
D’Alembert acknowledges, especially, the enormous influence on the

4
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans.
Richard N. Schwab, p. 76. Page references to other quotations from this work are given in
parentheses. A version of Schwab’s translation is also available online. See d’Alembert, Jean Le
Rond, ‘Preliminary Discourse’. The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative
Translation Project. Translated by Richard N. Schwab and Walter E. Rex (Ann Arbor:
MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2009). At: <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.
did2222.0001.083>. Trans. of ‘Discourse Préliminaire’, Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des
sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. I (Paris, 1751).
 MAPS , TREES , AND CIRCLES 115

Encyclopedia project of Bacon’s New Organon of the Sciences, the second

part of the Great Instauration, published in 1620. Bacon had stressed the
interconnections between knowledge and human power: science,
rather than seeking merely contemplative aims, should be oriented to
the improvement of human life. D’Alembert saw that goal as linked
with Bacon’s rejection of the restrictive role of philosophical abstraction
in the ordering of knowledge. ‘Hostile to systems, he conceives of
philosophy as being only that part of our knowledge which should
contribute to making us better or happier, thus apparently confining it
within the limits of the science of useful things, and everywhere he
recommends the study of Nature’ (p. 75).
D’Alembert thought that, in rejecting the primacy of abstractions in
favour of ‘the study of Nature’, Bacon showed an admirable openness to
whatever was of human interest. ‘He would have been able to say, like that
old man in Terence, that nothing which touches humanity was alien to
him’ (p. 75). However, he also thought that Bacon, despite being a
‘sublime genius’, could perhaps be criticized for being too timid in
his repudiation of the ‘petty questions’ and the use of divisions and
subdivisions ‘fashionable’ in his times. ‘After having burst so many irons,
this great man was still held by certain chains which he could not, or dared
not, break’ (p. 76). The imagery of solid chains may seem strange in the
context of talk of being held in thrall by abstractions. The metaphor of
links in a chain gains content, however, in d’Alembert’s reconstruction
of the proper place of reason in the ordering of knowledge, and the
transformation of reason in that process.
The metaphysical relations between reason and imagination may seem
to amount to little in the wider context of the Encyclopedia’s detailed
accounts of the current state of the branches of knowledge; and what
the two editors have explicitly to say on the topic is often confusing.
However, in signalling their departures from ‘the immortal Chancellor of
England’, d’Alembert highlighted something important in the editors’ way
of construing knowledge—a shift away from the abstractions of reason to
the robust operations of imagination. Imagination is nonetheless to be held
in balance with what remains ‘universal’.
D’Alembert, especially, tries to keep in the picture an unchanging
structure, which frames their historical moment in the development of
knowledge. This balancing act between the historical and the timeless
must keep in play the shifting relations between reason and imagination.
116 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

Their historical moment is oriented towards a new sense of the role of the
imagination in knowledge: imagination is to be set free from the cramping
effects of the arid abstractions of reason. However, this new freedom is
not to be construed as the feckless indulgence of mere fantasy. Enjoying
what Bacon called ‘the serene air of truth’ demands that the mind remains
grounded—that it be seen as what it has always been, though it is now
free to move without the old constraints.
The tensions in the editors’ vision of a balance between the freedom of
the imagination and the firm grounding of reason are acted out, as we shall
see shortly, in Diderot’s later work, the remarkable Rameau’s Nephew.
There Diderot gives literary expression to the theme of the stabilizing
force of reason, and its contrasts with the giddying flights of imagination.
The strange destabilizing voice of the fictional nephew of the composer
Rameau confronts and challenges the rational, sequential thought of the
work’s narrator. However, we need first to look a little more closely at
how the Encyclopedia organization of knowledge was supposed to be
grounded in models of the universal operations of the human mind.
The editors of the Encyclopedia were of course working against the
background of a wide range of earlier efforts to order the branches of
knowledge. The idea—to which they often appeal—of including the
reader in a circle of communication of ideas goes back to the Roman
rhetorician Quintilian, who used the term encyclopedia in the first century
ce as a Latinized version of a Greek term for ‘a circle of study or learning’.5
Diderot and d’Alembert imagined the ordering of their project as retaining
continuity with Bacon’s ideal of an ordering of knowledge which reflected
a right ordering of the mind’s capacities. At the same time, they wanted
the project to capture something of older ideas of a ‘circle of learning’; but
this was now to be construed, not in terms of a guide or a particular
instruction manual for a specific group of scholars, but in terms of a
broader access to knowledge. Their Enyclopedia was to continue to pursue
the goal implicit in Chambers’ Cyclopedia—an alphabetically arranged
Dictionary of Arts and Sciences which they took as a model, and from
which they took over some entries. They saw that work as taking as its
imagined audience the public at large.

5
See Richard Yeo, ‘Encyclopaedism and Enlightenment’, in M. Fitzpatrick, P. Jones,
C. Knellwolf, and I. McCalman, eds., The Enlightenment World (London and New York:
Routledge, 2007), p. 350.
 MAPS , TREES , AND CIRCLES 117

Clearly there were tensions between the models through which the
project of the Encyclopedia was conceptualized. The editors were appealing
to a range of ways of understanding the rationale and purpose of organizing
knowledge—not all of which were concerned with reflecting the nature
and operations of the human mind. They were also well aware of the
rich philosophical past which gave content to their own variations on
that theme of a universal structure: Platonic accounts of the divided soul;
Bacon’s ordering of memory, imagination, and reason; Descartes’ ‘method’
for ordering the intellectual processes at stake in gaining certainty;
Locke’s classifications of different kinds of ‘ideas’ in the Essay Concerning
Human Understanding. There were significant philosophical differences
and priorities also between the editors themselves which surfaced in
d’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse and Diderot’s own entry under the term
Encyclopedia.
Diderot offers a succinct statement of how he sees the upshot of the
grand project in the opening passage of his entry on Encyclopedia:
Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around
the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and
transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries
will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring,
becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and
happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the
human race.6

Despite its anchoring in place and time, knowledge is here presented as

inherently open-ended; the work is conceptualized as involving its readers
in a collective venture reaching into the future.
The interactions and tensions between different aspects of the project
of the Encyclopedia can afford some insight into some assumptions that
underlie thought of the Enlightenment era more generally. For a start,
there seems to be a tension within the very idea of mapping, onto a static
universal structure, subject areas which shift and evolve. Those structural
features of the Encyclopedia are emphasized more by d’Alembert than by

6
Quotations are from Denis Diderot, ‘Encyclopedia’, in The Encyclopedia of Diderot and
d’Alembert, Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Philip Stewart (Ann Arbor:
Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, 2002). Web 5 December
2009. At: <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.004>. Trans. of Encyclopédie ou
Dictionnaire raisonnés des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. V (Paris, 1755).
118 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

Diderot. Early in the Preliminary Discourse, he tells his readers that, as

the term Encyclopedia suggests, the work must expose as much as possible
the ‘order and connection’ of human knowledge. It must make visible the
relations between different areas of knowledge. However, it must also
address the internal structure of each.
While the one concern pulls towards a timeless structure, the other pulls
towards what is happening in the here-and-now. As well as being—in the
traditional sense of the word—an Encyclopedia, setting out the ‘order and
connection of the parts of knowledge’, it is to be a ‘Reasoned Dictionary
of the Sciences, Arts and Trades’, containing the general principles of each
science and art—‘liberal or mechanical’—and ‘the most essential facts that
make up the body and substance of each’ (p. 4).
The crucial concern with the ‘order and connection’ of different bodies
of knowledge is stressed also by Diderot in his Encyclopedia entry.
However, there are significant differences in the ways the two authors
construe that idea, which reflect their different intellectual preoccupations.
For d’Alembert—oriented as he is towards mathematics and abstract
principles—the emphasis is on the articulation of formal structures. Dider-
ot’s orientation is in contrast towards literature and the literary aspects of
philosophy. He was responsible for many of the Encyclopedia entries on the
literary arts. Yet both see the work as essentially philosophical. Diderot
observes that, because the construction of the work demands judgements
of order and relations, ‘only a philosophical century’ could attempt
an encyclopedia of this kind. Such a work ‘everywhere requires more
boldness of mind than is normally possessed in centuries of cowardly
taste . . . ’ However, the philosophy Diderot regards as essential here
is one that respects what he calls ‘genius’ rather than conformity with
unchanging structures.

Judgement and genius

For Diderot the crucial consideration in the organization of the Encyclo-
pedia is that it demands the exercise of judgement, as distinct from the
slavish following of rules. The requisite capacity for ordering—for
selecting and organizing—is for him akin to the judgement involved in
the comparative evaluation of literary works. It is the kind of judgement
manifested in being able to distinguish which authors are breaking the
 JUDGEMENT AND GENIUS 119

mould and which are merely following where they have been led. There
are affinities here with Hume’s discussion of aesthetic judgement in ‘The
Standard of Taste’. Diderot sees the Encyclopedia as breaking away from
the arbitrary rules that governed literary genres in the past. ‘We needed a
time of reasoning, when we no longer look for the rules in authors, but in
nature, and when we can feel what is false and what true in all those
arbitrary poetics.’
Diderot sees this carefully balanced alignment of the demands of
philosophy and the expectations of ‘genius’ as allowing the Encyclopedia
to bring together coherently the local and specific with the universal.
Justice must be done to the present in such a way that it is seen both in
the context of the past and in relation to an open-ended future.
For let there be no mistake: there is a great difference between giving birth out of
pure genius to a work celebrated by a whole nation which has its moment, its taste,
its ideas and its prejudices, and setting forth the poetics of the genre, in accordance
with a real and thoughtful knowledge of the human heart, the nature of things, and
right reason, which are the same in every era. Genius knows no rules, and yet it
never departs from them in its successes. Philosophy knows only the rules founded
on the nature of beings, which is immutable and eternal.

In his Preliminary Discourse d’Alembert also appeals to the structure and

invariant operations of the human mind—to the order displayed in the
‘origin and generation’ of our ideas (p. 5). Throughout the Preliminary
Discourse there are strong echoes of—and explicit references to—Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding. However, d’Alembert gives his
own twist to the Lockean framework of knowledge. His treatment of
the liaisons and skirmishes that go on amongst our ‘ideas’ is in some ways
more reminiscent of Spinoza than of Locke. It puts strong emphasis on
passions and desires, and on their dynamic interactions which serve
to enhance human existence. D’Alembert adapts the Lockean model of
the mind, so that—even on his more theoretical approach to the project—
the Encyclopedia has a practical orientation towards strengthening the
efforts of his contemporaries to enhance human powers to survive, and
to improve the conditions of life.
However, the goal of this practically oriented organization of
knowledge is by no means an austere survival strategy. In Part I of the
Preliminary Discourse, D’Alembert emphasizes the pleasures to be gained
from intellectual inquiry, although he acknowledges that the misfortune of
120 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

the human condition is such that suffering is the strongest sentiment

within us. Pleasure touches us less and rarely suffices to console us. It is
the necessity of guarding our own bodies from pain and destruction that
makes us study external objects so that we can know what will be useful or
harmful to us, seeking out the one and avoiding the other.
This emphasis on what is useful, however, does not mean that the
theoretical or contemplative aspects of inquiry should be entirely replaced
by its practical dimensions. In the economy of satisfaction of human needs
which d’Alembert sketches, the study of nature takes on a significance that
goes beyond what immediate utility it may have for self-preservation.
The satisfaction of curiosity brings an abundance of pleasures which can
collectively compensate for the inability of any one piece of knowledge
to provide for more basic needs. It brings ‘a kind of superfluity that
compensates, although most imperfectly, for the things we lack’ (p. 16).
D’Alembert’s analysis of the operations of the human mind thus
provides a persuasive rationale for the Encyclopedia to embrace in its
scope both practical arts—directly concerned with allowing us to
deal with external objects to our own advantage—and more theoretical
pursuits that can seem useful only in satisfying for a time our endless
curiosity. Both kinds of learning can be related back to an underlying
structure, which provides the basis for their ‘ordering and connection’
within the encompassing unity of the Encyclopedia.
There are echoes of Stoic doctrines of the unity of the interconnected
cosmos in d’Alembert’s account of the ordering of knowledge. Things
which are for us ‘detached’ and ‘different’ would be seen to be a single
thing if we could reach the primary causes. The universe—if we knew
how to embrace it from a single point of view—would, he says, only be
‘one fact and one great truth’ (p. 29). However, he puts his own stamp on
this ancient doctrine of the interconnection of all things, playing down its
connections with principles of reason. Although we rightly regard ‘the
science of reasoning’ as the key to all our knowledge, this does not mean
that reasoning—as epitomized in the art of Logic—should take priority
over other branches of knowledge. ‘The art of reasoning is a gift which
Nature bestows of her own accord upon men of intelligence, and it can be
said that the books which treat this subject are hardly useful except to those
who can get along without them’ (p. 30).
The world may be ‘one great truth’ but for d’Alembert that does not
mean that there is one order of ideas that should be seen as inherent in the
 JUDGEMENT AND GENIUS 121

structure of the world, independently of the activity of human mind.

Ordering ideas is rather a ‘valuable art’, the exercise of which is able to
effect ‘at least a partial reconciliation among men who seem to differ the
most’ (p. 31). For d’Alembert all our knowledge is reduced ultimately to
sensations which are almost the same in all human beings. The art of
combining these ‘direct’ ideas, however, adds to them an arrangement and
enumeration which can be grasped by many minds, though not with equal
ability. Some minds may make the connecting moves faster than others;
some may be able to grasp in a single glance what others can take in only in
slow succession.
The echoes of Descartes’ ‘rules for the mind’ are strong here. However,
the rules invoked by d’Alembert lack the rigidity of the rationalist project
of an inexorable matching of the order of thought to the order of things.
The ordering tasks of the Encyclopedia must address not only the demands
of thinking, but also those of communication. Grammar is no less essential
than Logic; and the art of communication involves attention not only to
reasoning but also to the passions. Eloquence, he says, speaks to sentiment,
as Logic and Grammar speak to mind, and it can ‘impose silence even
upon reason’ (pp. 33–4).
There is an emphasis here, and throughout the Encyclopedia, on process
rather than static structure—on the intellectual processes of the mind, but
also on the processes through which learning is given practical application.
The encyclopedists’ version of the tree of knowledge thus incorporates
practical as well as theoretical arts and sciences—trades as well as scholarly
pursuits. D’Alembert keeps the underlying Lockean aspiration to classify
the contents of the human mind. However, in this new organization of the
constituents of knowledge, sentiments and passions are no less important
than abstract ideas; and impulses towards communication are of no less
concern than the ingredients of solitary thought.
In Part II of the Preliminary Discourse d’Alembert elaborates his distrust of
the ‘rigid and didactic’ discussions which characterize the ‘philosophic
spirit’ in fashion in his times. Its inclination towards ‘combination
and analysis’ make it particularly inappropriate for understanding the
operations of sentiment in the fine arts. Passions and taste, he says there,
have their own sort of logic; but that logic has principles completely
different from those of ordinary logic—principles which current philoso-
phy is ill equipped to unravel. Immersed in the analysis of perceptions, it
has difficulty dealing with the throes of passion or the lively sentiments
122 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

which affect us. It is indeed difficult to see how this could be otherwise; for
the time when the passions are deeply affecting us is precisely the time
when we are least able to subject them to tranquil study (p. 96).
The view of the mind which emerges in the Preliminary Discourse,
although it claims universality, is very much of its time. It was this timely
aspect of the work that dominated its contemporary reception. Among the
editors’ contemporaries the Encyclopedia was seen primarily as documenting
the eighteenth-century mind, rather than as laying bare a timeless structure.
Yet its imaginative scope reached beyond the present. In describing the
project, both d’Alembert and Diderot draw on the etymological derivation
of Encyclopedia as a ‘circle’ of knowledge. However, they conceptualized the
work neither as the product of a restricted group of scholars nor as a fixed
structure of interrelated subject areas. This organization of knowledge
is consciously open-ended and dynamic. It attempts to capture the interrela-
tions of subject areas at a particular time; but it aims to do so in a way that
both connects the current state of knowledge with what has gone before and
opens contemporary knowledge to the future.
The work is presented as an organic, though highly reflective, process.
Diderot explains in his Encyclopedia entry that the cross-references
throughout the work are designed to open all entries to the possibility of
criticism and challenge, breaking down the implicit authority of the
individual authors. They are, he says, meant to ‘give the whole that
unity which is so favourable to the establishment and conviction of
truth’; but also to allow a subtle overturning of opinions: they will give
an Encyclopedia the character that a good dictionary should have—that
of changing the common mode of thinking.
The Encyclopedia thus has a deliberately loose unity which allows
an evolving set of interconnections. Although the two editors share a
common conception of the work, they emphasize different aspects of
these interconnections, reflecting their different—though converging—
attitudes to the significance of abstract analysis in the intellectual life of
their times. For d’Alembert the work’s dynamic open-ended character
reflects nonetheless a philosophical understanding of timeless structural
relations—the map, as seen from above, as he describes the encyclopedic
approach to knowledge.
A significant aspect of d’Alembert’s reorganization of that map is his
recasting, in Part II of the Preliminary Discourse, of the ancient ideal of
 JUDGEMENT AND GENIUS 123

imitating Nature, so that it comes to fit the imitative roles of the fine Arts
in his own times. Painting and Sculpture—which Plato, especially, had
treated as distorting reality—are here given equal recognition with those
forms of knowledge which aim at ‘true representation’. On the one side of
his division, he places the ‘sciences of reflection’, which rest on the
combination of the basic ‘primitive’ ideas which arise directly within us.
On the other side are the ideas we ourselves form—by imagining things
which resemble the objects of those primitive ideas; and by composing
other objects out of them. The mind’s creativity in combining and
composing is no less important than its capacity to truly reflect what is
given directly to it.
The editors’ explanations of the organization of subject areas are often
complicated. However, it is clear that they are giving a new status to
Imagination in the evaluation of the branches of knowledge as they exist in
their own times. In their division, the ‘imitation of Nature’ is extended to
the agreeable arts, which are concerned with beauty—with the creative
depiction of la belle nature—rather than being restricted to the more rigid
sciences of truth (p. 45). D’Alembert’s system echoes the threefold division
he and Diderot had taken over from Bacon between three faculties of
the mind: History relates to Memory; Philosophy is ‘the fruit of reason’;
and the Fine Arts originate in imagination (p. 51). Philosophy—broadly
construed as the activity of ordering ideas—continues to hold prime place
in relation to Reason. However, there is a new attention given to the role
of judgement, as a kind of ‘feeling’, in the evaluation of the imitative arts.
To this feeling, d’Alembert says, ‘we owe taste and genius, which are
distinguished from one another in that genius is the feeling that creates and
taste the feeling that judges’.
Diderot in his entry on Encyclopedia, as we have seen, also emphasizes
the significance of what he calls ‘genius’—in contrast to the relative
inflexibility associated with philosophy’s predilection for timeless truths.
He goes further than d’Alembert in resisting philosophical abstractions.
There are differences here in their ways of imagining their shared project,
which surface in different ways of drawing out a common set of metaphors
taken from maps and topography.
Towards the end of Part I of the Preliminary Discourse, d’Alembert,
commenting on the organization of ‘encyclopedic trees’, suggests that
the universe is best thought of as ‘but a vast ocean’—on the surface
of which we notice a few islands of varying sizes, whose connections
124 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

with the continents are hidden from us (p. 49). Again, it is the underlying
structural interconnections that matter—although he sees those structures
as themselves dynamic, in contrast to the rigidities of older organizations of
knowledge. Diderot’s metaphors for ordering knowledge are less con-
cerned with structural connections—more painterly, more sensuous, and,
in more than one sense, more grounded:
A universal dictionary of the sciences and arts needs to be thought of as a vast
countryside containing mountains, plains, rocks, water, forests, animals, and all the
objects that make for the variety of a great landscape. The light of heaven falls on
them all; but it strikes them all in different ways. Some stand out by nature and
exposure, in the front of the scene; others are spread out on countless intermediate
planes; some fade into the distance; all enhance each other.

Diderot’s geographical metaphors have temporal as well as spatial over-

tones. The vista of an open future—receding into the distance, yet
embraced by the present ‘circle’ of learning—reinforces the disposition
which inclines both editors to dismiss the misgivings of their contemporary
critics by appealing to a wider readership that encompasses the future.
As d’Alembert says pointedly in concluding the Preliminary Discourse, it
is above all to the ‘reading public’ that the work is directed and this
public, they believe, must be distinguished from ‘the one which only
speaks’.
The editors’ interest in issues of taste—and especially Diderot’s explor-
ation of the idea of ‘genius’ and its connections with judgement—reflects a
concern they share with Hume. In trying to give form to a common
‘standard of taste’, they open up possibilities for articulating a kind of
objectivity which is not bound by rules or principles. What is glimpsed
here is an objectivity which is attuned to the operations of the imagination.
The ideal is to liberate that faculty from both the cramping constraints of
conventional Reason and the randomness of subjectivity. It is a concern
which will later find more detailed treatment in Kant’s treatment of taste,
in his Critique of Judgment, published in 1790.
The idea of an ‘enlargement of the mind’, which is given voice in
different ways by Hume, by Adam Smith, and by the editors of the
Encyclopedia plays a crucial role in Kant’s third Critique. The man of
‘enlarged mind’, he says there, ‘detaches himself from the subjective personal
conditions of his judgment, which cramp the minds of so many others, and
reflects upon his own judgement from a universal standpoint (which he can
 JUDGEMENT AND GENIUS 125

only determine by shifting his ground to the standpoint of others)’.7 Like

Adam Smith, Kant connects the possibility of objective judgement
with putting ourselves in the place of another, which is an operation of
imagination; and, like Diderot, he emphasizes in his account of judgement
freedom from the constraints of rules and principles. However, Kant’s
version of judgement offers a much more detailed account of the distinc-
tion which d’Alembert and Diderot invoke between genius and taste.
For Kant, like d’Alembert, genius is associated with creation; taste with
judgement. Genius, he says, is required for the production of beautiful art
works; taste is, in contrast required for judgements of beauty. Taste is
‘merely a critical, not a productive faculty’ (Book II, Part I, Sec. 48,
p. 174). Both involve the imagination, but in different ways. Taste is
what Kant calls, with a special meaning, a ‘common sense’—that is, a
public sense, a critical faculty which allows us to put ourselves in the
position of everyone else, ‘weighing’ our judgement with ‘the collective
reason of mankind’. This involvement of ‘collective reason’ means that
taste is associated with judging as part of a community—with communic-
ability. Taste, like judgement in general, he says, is ‘the discipline (or
corrective)’ of genius. It ‘severely clips its wings’. ‘It introduces a clearness
and order into the plenitude of thought, and in doing so gives stability to
the ideas, and qualifies them at once for permanent and universal approval,
for being followed by others, and for a continually progressive culture’
(Book II, Part I, Sec. 50, p. 183).
From a Kantian perspective, the Encyclopedia editors’ vision of a ‘circle of
learning’ which embraces past, present and future, could be seen as
prefiguring the ideal of a ‘judging community’. Such a ‘circle’ contributes
to the formation of what Kant calls sensus communis—a ‘public’ of collect-
ive judgement which transcends the multiplicity of individual minds and
their actual opinions. Seen in that way, Diderot’s celebration of the
freedom of genius is no more a repudiation of objectivity than is Adam
Smith’s model of the impartial spectator, which was also constructed out
of imagination. In both cases, it is the involvement of judgement—made
more explicit and elaborated by Kant—which creates a middle ground of

7
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1952); Book II, Part I, sec. 40, p. 153. Other quotations from this work
are accompanied in parentheses by references and page numbers to this edition.
126 D ’ALEMBERT AND DIDEROT ON THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

objectivity between the ‘wandering uncertainty’ of imagination and the

rigid, universal abstractions of Reason.
In the lack of that middle ground—the nature of which will become
clearer in the chapter on Kant—Diderot himself gave voice to the
ambivalences arising from the unnerving instabilities of imagination in
his fictional creation, the strange character ‘Rameau’s nephew’.
 6
The Attractions of Instability:
Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew

We meet him in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, where Diderot’s narrator

is taking his regular late afternoon walk. Here Je is accosted by Lui—‘one
of the weirdest characters’, we are told, in a land where ‘God has not been
sparing of them’.1 The man who is presented as Rameau’s nephew can
pass, not only as one of the weirdest in the land of the narrator, but also as
one of the strangest in literature. The famous composer did indeed have a
nephew, Jean-François Rameau, who was also a musician of sorts, and
whom Diderot did meet. Whatever may have been the rationale
for connecting him to the famous Rameau, Diderot’s fiction stretches
the boundaries of any character that might plausibly be presented as come
across in real life.
In his grotesqueness and his excess, Rameau’s nephew is not without
precursors. He is like Shakespeare’s Falstaff in his larger-than-life exuberance;
like Rabelais’ Pantagruel in his uncontained appetites. Yet this character—
if a character it be—manifests also some more profound and bewilder-
ing aspects of the idea of the overflowing of limits. Diderot’s imagined
dialogue between Je and Lui is conducted against the background of
rational order exemplified in the games of chess played in the gardens’
café. However, the contributions attributed to Lui are so unbounded, so
unfixed, as to cast doubt on whether he can really be treated as having
the unity and order requisite to be a character at all.
Hegel, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, used the fluidity of this character to
illustrate his theme of the instability of self-consciousness at the stage of

1
Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 33. Subsequent quotations are accompanied in
parentheses by page references to this edition.
128 THE ATTRACTIONS OF INSTABILITY

mere ‘culture’—one of the lower stages in the emergence of Spirit. Clearly

fascinated by the mad exuberance of Diderot’s weird creation, Hegel
quotes—from Goethe’s translation—the narrator’s descriptions of Lui as
talking ‘a rigmarole of wisdom and folly’, a ‘medley of as much skill
as baseness’. For Hegel it is a fitting illustration of a mental state which
falls short of the ‘tranquil consciousness’ which will be fully attained in a
more mature stage of the development of Spirit. This strange medley
nonetheless contains within it, he thinks, an implicit awareness of its
own limitations. It will form the ‘withered skin’ shed in higher stages of
‘invisible and imperceptible Spirit’.
Hegel quotes with approval the prediction Diderot attributes to the
fictional Rameau—that one fine day the style of thought he represents will
gain dominance, giving its more restrained comrade a ‘shove with the
elbow’. The nephew envisages his own thinking style as strengthening its
position slowly—like the foreign god, which has taken its place unobtru-
sively beside the unconscious idol of the country—until suddenly ‘down
goes the idol’ before the overwhelming force of the new.2 Hegel’s descrip-
tion of the emergence of Spirit from the fluid medley corresponding to the
unconscious idol may well remind us of the mature Prince Hal’s shoving
aside of the rumbunctious Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II.
Yet Hegel’s appropriation of Diderot’s text captures an aspect of fluidity
which expresses a deeper, more metaphysical lack of character than the
moral weakness Shakespeare would have us see in Falstaff ’s instability. If
we want to understand Rameau’s nephew through Shakespeare, we may
look beyond Falstaff to the succession of wise fools which inhabit his plays.
However, this character seems to lack even the stability of a series of
articulations of ‘foolish’ wisdom.
The fluidity which fascinated Hegel is reminiscent of his own celebra-
tion, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, of Spinoza’s remark that all
determination is negation. Spinoza’s point—made in his Letter on the
Infinite—was that determinacy requires the exclusion of other possibilities:
the content of any affirmation demands that some other content be
rejected. The boisterous ramblings of Lui enact a succession of possibilities
in which nothing is excluded. What entrances readers is Rameau’s
capacity to engage us with an endless parade of postures and positions.

2
Quotations are from G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 317–18, 332.
 DIDEROT ’ S RAMEAU ’ S NEPHEW 129

This is discourse as of birds in quick flight—alighting easily on a succession

of perches, settling on nothing long enough to be held to it. It maintains
the trappings of argument, while willfully obfuscating its normal condi-
tions. The ripostes are fast and often elegant; but before Je can gather
his breath for a considered response his opponent has moved to another
position, assumed another posture. Yet there is, as Hegel saw, a truthful-
ness below this inchoate medley.
We seem to be confronted here with an honesty which cannot pass as
virtue; for there is in it no real possibility of sustained deception. Jean
Starobinski, in a review of books about Diderot, described Rameau’s
nephew as ‘a rare blend of villainy and intelligence’. This character, he
suggested, has ‘surprising sensitivity and artistic ability, yet he is incapable
of creating anything’. He is ‘a hybrid of talent and impotence’.3 He
has an agile vitality which belies his gargantuan over-indulgence. His
vices, no less than his virtues, seem insufficiently stable to warrant the
remonstrations which Je struggles to formulate. Lui is neither good nor
bad. Yet there is about this energetic flow of apparently indiscriminate
folly and wisdom—madness and intelligence—a bewildering truthfulness.
It is as if the torrent of speech, which seems to know no limits, has
captured something of the ancient Stoic ideal of a ‘smooth flow’—perhaps
at a deeper level than the Stoics themselves could accommodate into their
struggle for ‘accordance with nature’. Dionysian excess here jostles on
apparently equal terms with the ideal of philosophical detachment. The
character offers us ‘Nature’ in a form which can encompass the naturalness
of both excess and deficiency, rather than the measured tranquillity of the
mean between the two.
What, we may ask, was Diderot’s purpose in creating this strange appar-
ition, which erupts against the background of the measured chess games
in the Palais-Royal? What does Rameau’s mercurial, though seedy, nephew
represent? If this be satire, what is its target? Like any text, Rameau’s Nephew
can be read in many ways. Spinoza’s dictum that every determination
involves negation can serve to mark, among other things, the difference
between the determinacy of the real world and the indeterminacy of literary
creation. Yet it is not by any means obvious where the limits lie between
critique and celebration, interpretation and enactment. Diderot clearly has a

3
Jean Starobinski, ‘The Man Who Told Secrets’, New York Review of Books, vol. 20, no. 4,
22 March 1973, pp. 18–21.
130 THE ATTRACTIONS OF INSTABILITY

wider agenda concerned with the nature of moral consciousness. He is

concerned with virtue, with excess and moderation, with the role of
reflection in the good life. Yet in relation to these broader issues it is—as
with Voltaire—by no means clear which voice can be taken as Diderot’s
own. Is the work a defence of the Enlightenment programme, as envisaged
by Diderot and his fellow encyclopedists? Or is it Diderot’s own expression
of misgivings about that project? Is it Diderot’s reply to the critics of the
Encyclopedia, or an exercise in self-parody?
It is clear that the connection with the real Rameau senior is not entirely
incidental. Controversial issues in the theory of music run through the
text. Diderot is writing against the background of a long-running conflict
between Rousseau and Rameau over the source of the expressive content
of music. It was a dispute which had ramifications for the relative merits of
different styles of opera, as well as more generally for the status of music as
an ‘art’ or as a ‘science’, and for the understanding of its relations with
language and with the natural, non-human world.
For Rameau it was primarily harmony, and its associations with math-
ematical relations, that made music ‘expressive’. For Rousseau, it was
‘melody’—its connections with the human voice and the direct expression
of human emotion. In his early essay on The Origins of Language, Rousseau
talks of verse, singing, and speech as having a common origin—as ‘formed
according to the respective passions that dictated them’. ‘The periodic
recurrences and measures of rhythm, the melodious modulations of
accent, gave birth to poetry and music along with language. Or, rather
that was the only language in those happy climes and happy times, when
the only pressing needs that required the agreement of others were those
to which the heart gave birth.’4
In one of the entries on music which Rousseau contributed to the
Encyclopedia, he warns readers about the unintelligibility of what Rameau
(the real Rameau) has to say about the idea of ‘temperament’, on which his
account of the generation of harmony depends. They should not be
surprised, he says, if they do not understand it, because it is easy to see
that it was ‘written by two men who disagreed with each other, that is, a

4
On the Origin of Language: Two Essays by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder,
trans. John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), p. 50.
 DIDEROT ’ S RAMEAU ’ S NEPHEW 131

mathematician and a musician’.5 Diderot’s own musical aesthetic tried to

reconcile and synthesize the two approaches, although the fictional young
Rameau’s imitative antics, which can reduce a whole orchestra to the
range of the human voice, might well be read as a satirical defence of
Rousseau’s side of the debate.
Clearly, too, Rameau’s Nephew is—among many things—a celebration
of the theatre. It confronts the reader with the differences between the
deliberated judgements of the philosopher, represented by Je, and the
capacity of the actor to take form in a succession of representations
without commitment to any of them. It can be seen as the release of the
author’s own alter ego: Diderot the dramatist enters into argument with
Diderot the philosopher. Yet there is no one alterity here. This Rameau is
not a creator of dramas; he is rather himself a dazzling enactment of the
possibilities of theatre. The parentheses in the dialogue read like stage
directions; they offer detailed descriptions of the antics which accompany
the spoken words. They also—as James Schmidt has pointed out—offer a
third voice in the work, a commentary from outside the dialogue between
Je and Lui.6 The parenthetical excursions allow Diderot a narrative voice
that is independent of the two voices in the dialogic exchange. They also
allow him to exercise his skills as a dramatist in conjunction with his
philosophical reflections.
The extraordinary mime performances described in the parentheses are
counter-pointed to the measured tones in which Je attempts to challenge
the content of Rameau’s outrageous pronouncements. The energetic
pantomimes reduce Je to passive bewilderment. From within the imagined
space of the dialogue, Je—in the figure of the philosopher—wants our
attention to be focused on his own weighty words. Yet the effect of the
narrator’s control of the parentheses is to shift our attention away from him
to the weirdly exuberant performances of Lui. Je may have reason on his
side, but he cannot match the imaginative force of Lui. The chess players
do not leave their boards to listen to the philosophical ponderings of Je, yet

5
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Temperament’. The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert
Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Terry Stancliffe (Ann Arbor: MPublishing,
University of Michigan Library, 2008). Web 19 April 2012. At: <http://hdl.handle.net/
2027/spo.did2222.0000.897>. Trans. of ‘Tempérament’, in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire rai-
sonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. XVI (Paris, 1765).
6
James Schmidt, ‘The Fool’s Truth: Diderot, Goethe, and Hegel’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, vol. 57, no. 4, 1996, pp. 625–44; p. 642.
132 THE ATTRACTIONS OF INSTABILITY

they gather enthusiastically around the ebullient Rameau. The café

windows are thronged with passers-by attracted by the noise; and we too
are drawn into the mesmerized circle as he sings his mixed-up tunes and
enacts his odd pantomimes: ‘Italian, French, tragic, comic, of all sorts and
descriptions, sometimes in a bass voice going down to the infernal regions,
and sometimes bursting himself in a falsetto voice he would split the heavens
asunder, taking off the walk, deportment and gestures of the different
singing parts: in turn raging, pacified, imperious, scornful’ (p. 102).
Rameau’s bizarre performances are not confined to representations of
the human voice. To the astonished amusement of the gathered crowd, to
whom he seems oblivious, he mimes also the instruments of an orchestra:
With cheeks puffed out and a hoarse, dark tone he did the horns and bassoons, a
bright, nasal tone for the oboes, quickening his voice with incredible agility for the
stringed instruments to which he tried to get the closest approximation; he
whistled the recorders and cooed the flutes, shouting, singing and throwing himself
about like a mad thing: a one-man show featuring dancers, male and female, singers
of both sexes, a whole orchestra, a complete opera-house, dividing himself into
twenty different stage parts, tearing up and down, stopping, like one possessed,
with flashing eyes and foaming mouth. (p. 103)

Although Diderot has packed his text with detail on theory of music and
performance, it is clear that he intends it to have broader application. It is
written against the background of Rousseau’s notorious attack on the
theatre in his Letter to d’Alembert—a stance which Diderot loathed, and
to which Rameau’s Nephew may well be in part a riposte. In that context,
‘the theatre’ is not only a cultural institution but a metaphor for contem-
porary society; and ‘the actor’ is a surrogate for human agency in general.
Yet in contrast to Rousseau’s heavy-handed condemnation of the theatre
as locus for—and instantiation of—an immoral lack of transparency,
Diderot’s defence of the theatre is subtly nuanced and ironic.
The complexity of the interpretive issues in relation to the work
becomes apparent in Diderot’s presentation of the strange event which is
at the heart of the exchange between Je and Lui—the recounting of
the episode which resulted in Rameau being ejected from the wealthy
household of Bertin, where he was previously welcome in the role of
entertaining buffoon. The depiction of this lost role is of course itself an
exercise in satire. The nephew has never been an equal partner in the
elegant socializing at the Bertin household. From an external perspective,
he can be seen as a sycophant who sacrifices his independence for the sake
 DIDEROT ’ S RAMEAU ’ S NEPHEW 133

of access to a mode of life he could never provide of his own resources. His
place as household jester is a product of the corruption of natural gifts, as
well as of the cunning use of acquired skills. Yet the account we are offered
of this central event is just as much a scathing exposure of a whole social
scene as it is a critique of an individual character’s moral flaws.
Diderot has Rameau describe the Bertin gatherings as a clamour
of ‘noise in the menagerie’—a convergence in one place of ‘wretched,
spiteful, malevolent and truculent creatures’. Diderot—the real Diderot—
is said to be present along with Buffon, Duclos, Montesquieu, Rousseau,
Voltaire, and d’Alembert. The fictional Rameau reports that in this
assembly, ‘nobody is allowed to have any brains unless he is as stupid as
we are’ (p. 80). In setting the context for his own fall from grace, he offers
a comical—but also disconcerting—account of the cultivation of appear-
ances, and its connections with the reading of literary works in the
intellectual circle epitomized by the Bertin household. Rameau confides
that he reads books not—as Je would have him do—for entertainment and
instruction, but as a way of learning how to hide his vices. ‘For instance,
when I read L’Avare I say to myself: “Be a miser if you want to, but mind
you don’t talk like one . . . Keep the vices that come in useful to you, but
don’t have either the tone or the appearance, which would expose you to
ridicule” ’ (p. 82).
The nephew boasts that he uses literary portraits to inform his efforts to
conceal in his own conduct the ‘tone and appearance’ of the vices. ‘I am
myself, and I remain myself, but I act and speak as occasion requires.’ He
does not, he insists, look down on moralists. Rather he looks to them to
learn how to avoid the appearance of evil. ‘Evil only upsets people now
and then, but the visible signs of evil hurt them from morning till night. It
might be better to be a rascal than to look like one: the rascal by nature
offends only now and again, but the evil-looking person offends all
the time’ (pp. 82–3). He has, he claims, systematically devoted himself to
such studies of appearances, to the point where—unlike his peers—he is
ridiculous only when he means to be. ‘For the same art which helps me to
avoid being ridiculous on certain occasions helps me on others to achieve
it in a masterly manner’ (p. 83). Hence his skill in playing with ‘the great of
the world’ the role of the jester—being ridiculous when that is what is
wanted of him.
In a dazzling excursus on the theme of truthful conduct, he defends
this studied readiness to assume a variety of postures, as occasion demands:
134 THE ATTRACTIONS OF INSTABILITY

‘ . . . bear in mind that in a matter as variable as behaviour there is no such

thing as the absolutely, essentially, universally true or false, unless it is that
one must be what self-interest dictates—good or bad, wise or foolish,
serious or ridiculous, virtuous or vicious’ (p. 83). In his description of the
scene at the Bertin household, the jester’s successions of wildly ridiculous
postures join the jostling profusion of literary figures, literary critics, actors
and actresses, librettists, in a microcosm of their society—a noisy assembly
of ‘down-and-outs’ united in front of food. In his own self-perception,
this Rameau is not so much an indeterminate drifter as a calculating
dissembler. Yet on his own account it is a perversely ill-judged moment
of truth which is his undoing.
The cause of Rameau’s fall from grace on the fateful night is the
presence of a new guest who, to Rameau’s chagrin, is given the place of
honour at the head of the table—where he himself would once have been
seated. To the amusement of the guests, and the anger of the host, Rameau,
having arrived late, warns the new guest—a cleric—that in time he will
move down the seating order until he reaches the lowly position
now occupied by himself. Threatened with being thrown out, Rameau
promises to leave of his own accord—after supper. He then makes hilarious
preparations for departure, prowling around the room pretending to
look for his stick and hat in unlikely places, until he is accosted by the
exasperated master ‘more black and midnight than Homer’s Apollo when
he hurled his bolts against the hosts of Greece’ (p. 85).
In an increasingly comical scene, Rameau begs the pardon of the
priest who, along with the other guests, enters willingly into the fun.
In the midst of this play-acting Rameau realizes that he is still acting to
type—entertaining the assembled audience. Even a puppet made of steel,
he reflects, would be worn out if the string is pulled too much. ‘I have to
entertain them, that is in the bargain, but I must amuse myself sometimes.
In the middle of this set-out a fell thought came into my head, a thought
that made me feel arrogant and filled me with pride and insolence: it was
that they couldn’t do without me, that I was indispensable’ (p. 86). Out
and out fools like himself, he considers, are extremely rare. ‘Foolery is a
more ticklish problem than talent or virtue.’ In return for his bed and
board he has supplied ‘a complete madhouse’ of entertaining folly which
will be irreplaceable (p. 87).
Rameau’s narrative of his ejection from the Bertin household is chaot-
ically intertwined with intermittent passages of reflection on the role
 DIDEROT ’ S RAMEAU ’ S NEPHEW 135

played by ‘fools’ like him in the broader social scene. ‘Oh, drop your
reflections and go on with the story’, Je pleads. ‘Cant be done’, responds
Lui. ‘There are days when I have to reflect. It’s an affliction you have to let
run its course’ (p. 94). The comical story of the debacle in the household
becomes lost in darker narratives of deceit and betrayal. At the same time,
the verbal account becomes increasingly interwoven with phases of gro-
tesque mime. In response to the puzzlement expressed by Je about the
variability of his style, Lui responds: ‘Can the style of an evil man have any
unity?’ Yet the fluidity of Rameau’s style makes it difficult to treat him as
categorically evil, any more than he can be treated as categorically good.
The role of the dialogue form goes further here than merely distributing
the parts of an argument between different voices. The role assigned to Lui
itself splits into a multiplicity. Starobinski, speaking more generally about
Diderot’s writing, comments that ‘he never closes his ears to his own
internal contradictions and unforeseen trains of thought’. Rather, he reacts
by embodying them in an interlocutor. ‘When he hears in himself the
presence of a new thought, he immediately transforms it into an imaginary
being with whom he can exchange ideas.’7 In this respect, the character
seems to mirror the author.
Despite the fascination of Rameau’s extraordinary performances, the
narrating voice within the parentheses retains a detachment from the
spectacle which allows a reflective perspective. ‘Did I admire? Yes, I did.
Was I touched with pity? Yes, I was. But a tinge of ridicule ran through
these sentiments and discoloured them’ (p. 103). He finds Lui admirable,
pitiful, and—finally—ridiculous. Yet it cannot be claimed that Je, in
conjunction with the narrative of the parentheses, finally wins the argu-
ment; or even that the narrator is clearly on the side of Je. For there is a
partnership also between the detachment of the narrative voice and the
dynamic intensity of the voice of Lui. This alliance is relevant to Hegel’s
appropriation of the text. James Schmidt has pointed out that the detach-
ment of the parenthetical narrator comes together with the open-ended
consciousness of Lui, making possible a determinacy which goes
beyond the possibilities represented by Je. As the conversation becomes
increasingly chaotic, the voices work in collaboration to yield something
richer than the static, judgemental stance adopted by Je.

7
Starobinski, ‘The Man Who Told Secrets’, p. 21.
136 THE ATTRACTIONS OF INSTABILITY

We can see emerging here a more dynamic form of determinacy—an

awareness, in the midst of lively engagement, of other experiences which
are possible. Hegel was later to adapt this state of consciousness to his own
ends in using the text to illustrate the stages of Spirit. However, there are
convergences also between the concerns of Rameau’s Nephew and other
Enlightenment texts which attempt to reconcile the force and vitality
of imagination with the calm detachment of reason. The need to reconcile
determinacy with multiplicity connects Diderot’s text with Hume’s
celebration of openness to alternative possibilities in his essay on the
Sceptic; and with the controlled multiplicity of voices in Voltaire’s
writing. We can also see in the fluidity of Rameau’s mental life something
of the condition of unstable imagining which Adam Smith, in his Theory of
Moral Sentiments presented, in more sober prose, as both demanding and
making possible the emergence of the ‘impartial spectator’.
Starobinski commented, in ‘The Man Who Told Secrets’, that in
Diderot’s works we find ‘a permanent tug of war between the stability
which a rationalist representation of the world strives after and the instabil-
ity of present time as it forces itself irresistibly upon a mind perpetually in
motion’. Foucault, in his discussion of Rameau’s Nephew in his History of
Madness, suggests that the work can be read as prefiguring the destiny of
madness in our own times: the modern inseparability of reason and
unreason.8 Hegel discerns in Rameau’s voice a dormant power waiting
to emerge from inchoate, immature openness to experience—a presaging
of engaged reflection on multiplicity, of determinacy without exclusion.
Foucault’s reading has a different emphasis. He sees in the intellectual
character of Rameau an implicit recognition of the madness that has come
to be inextricably present in reason.
Foucault’s reading is not far-fetched. Fascination with madness is clearly
an important thread in Diderot’s text. It is often at the apparently calmer
moments in Rameau’s ramblings—when he speaks with eagerness of the
quiet approach of the ‘reign of nature’—that frenzy erupts. In speaking of
musical composition—ruled by the trinity of truth, goodness, and beauty—
he is quickly overtaken, as the narrator observes, by ‘a frenzy, an enthusiasm
so near to madness that it was uncertain whether he would ever get over it,
whether he should not be packed off in a cab straight to Bedlam’ (p. 103).

8
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans.
Richard Howard (London: Tavistock, 1965), Ch. VII, pp. 199–200.
 DIDEROT ’ S RAMEAU ’ S NEPHEW 137

On a less dark reading, the text can be seen as a celebration of imagin-

ation in its various forms. The nephew enacts a mind’s openness to what is
new—to what is as yet uncontained, unaccommodated into the ordinary;
and the text as a whole can be seen as reflecting the cultural expression of
imagination. However, it also shows that such openness to the new brings
with it a vulnerability. Even on this benign reading, it is clear that
Rameau’s mentality lacks the capacity to sustain a stable grasp of its own
identity while acknowledging and appreciating difference. The English
Romantic poet Keats will later use the term ‘negative capability’ to express
the idea of a mature readiness to delight in what is different from oneself
without imploding into the profusion of what is other. It is a condition
which eludes Lui.
Understanding the emotions is no less a concern of Diderot’s text than is
understanding the operations of imagination. Much of the nephew’s
brilliant, though disjointed, harangue is directed to specific issues about
the relations between music and the passions, and about the place of
simulation of emotion in dramatic performance. Diderot addressed those
issues more fully in The Paradox of the Comedian, on which he was working
at the same time as he reworked Rameau’s Nephew. Current debates about
the direct expression of emotion in the arts are reflected in the nephew’s
insistence that the ‘animal claim of passion’ should dictate the melodic line
in music, and that these moments of high emotion should ‘tumble
out quickly one after the other’. ‘The passions must be strong and the
sensibility of composer and poet must be very great . . . What we want
is exclamations, interjections, suspensions, interruptions, affirmations,
negations; we call out, invoke, shout, groan, weep or have a good
laugh. No witticisms, epigrams, none of your well turned thoughts—all
that is far too removed from nature’ (pp. 105–6).
Rameau’s style for delivering his own thoughts seems designed to
accord with the desired closeness to nature—spurning ‘well-turned
thoughts’ in favour of ‘exclamations’ and ‘interruptions’. Not surprisingly,
as he moves briefly into a more reflective vein, the crowd which had
gathered melts away back to their games of chess. ‘Generally speaking a
child like a man and a man like a child would rather be amused than
instructed’, observes the narrator (p. 106). Ethical reflection is of course
served even less well by Rameau’s style of delivery than is his theorizing
about music or drama. Yet the narrator finds himself forced to acknow-
ledge that in these odd ruminations there is ‘much that we all think and on
138 THE ATTRACTIONS OF INSTABILITY

which we all act, but which we leave unsaid’. What makes Rameau’s
moral reflections distinctive, the narrator suggests, is his lack of hypocrisy:
‘He was simply more open, more consistent, and sometimes more
profound in his depravity’ (p. 111).
The conversation wanders back and forth between morals and music.
Rameau recommends a ‘sense of proportion’—to which he gives content
as ‘the art of dodging disgrace, dishonour and the law’. ‘These are the
dissonance in the social harmony that need skill in placing, leading in to
and resolving. Nothing is so dull as a succession of common chords. There
must be something arresting, to break up the beam of light and separate it
into rays.’ ‘To speak frankly’, comments Je, ‘I like you better as a musician
than as a moralist.’ ‘And yet I am very second-rate in music and a much
better moralist’, responds Lui (pp. 111–12).
The connecting theme in these ramblings about art and life is the well-
worn ideal of being ‘natural’. Yet Diderot has Rameau give a striking
new twist to that old ideal. Je prides himself on speaking the truth.
Lui responds that he envies him his gifts, not for the sake of telling the
truth, but for the possibilities they offer for ‘telling lies properly’. When
Je comments that there are many other ‘odd people’, for whom wealth
is not the most precious thing in the world, Lui responds that they
are indeed ‘very odd’. ‘People aren’t born with that kink. It is acquired,
for it isn’t natural’ (p. 112). In an implicit jibe, at the expense of traditional
associations between virtue and nature, Lui turns the ideal of the natural
back on the moralist. In parenthesis we are offered a pantomime of the
profusion of nature in which, we are told, he puts on all sorts of faces as if
‘kneading a bit of dough between his fingers’, and smiling at the funny
shapes before hurling the misshapen images away from him (p. 114).
In the final sections of the dialogue, Je praises the aspiration to live close
to nature, epitomized in the life of Diogenes. The philosopher, he sug-
gests, is the one person free to do without pantomime: he has nothing and
asks for nothing. ‘If he has nothing he suffers’, responds Lui. ‘If he asks for
nothing he won’t get anything, and he will go on suffering’ (p. 122). It is
the philosopher who is here presented as trying to curtail the possibilities
enacted in the pantomime of life; and it is the fool who releases those
possibilities to display a kind of truth—even if only in not hiding what
does not fit the desired pattern of ‘closeness to nature’. The pantomime
itself breaks the mould, setting nature free.
In the end no one wins the debate. For all his energetic miming of
endless possibilities, Rameau’s closing question—‘Isn’t it true that I am
 DIDEROT ’ S RAMEAU ’ S NEPHEW 139

always the same?’—expresses not only his persistence but the poignancy
of a shapeless life. Je responds, with a touch of irony: ‘Alas, yes, unfortu-
nately.’ Yet the last word is given to Lui. ‘So long as I have that misfortune
for another forty years! He laughs best who laughs last.’ And so the
pantomime goes on.
The enthralled onlookers who gather at the café windows to watch his
antics prefigure the fascination which Rameau’s Nephew will hold for later
thinkers. Through Goethe’s translation, the character became a marker in
German intellectual history—an embodiment of Enlightenment ambiva-
lences and of transitions into Romanticism. Whatever his moral failings,
there is in him a touch of ‘genius’, and an emotional intensity which makes
him attractive as well as disturbing.
Hegel saw this character as modelling the intellectual potential, and
the limitations, of both Enlightenment and Romantic mentalities—as
representing a phase of intellectual instability, which will be by-passed in
the unfolding of human consciousness towards its realization in the fulness
of Spirit. Just as he is pushed aside from the Bertin table, what he represents
will be pushed aside in the onward movement of human consciousness.
Yet Hegel sees in him also an intimation of what is to come: the
very instability of this mind brings with it an openness to change—to
the possibility of escape from the limits of the stage of consciousness
which it represents. Hegel thus imagines Rameau’s nephew from both a
forward- and a backward-looking perspective. In relation to the future, his
individual selfhood is a fragile achievement; yet in his restlessness he
models a kind of individuality which can exceed its own limits.
In later sections of the Phenomenology, Hegel used the metaphor of
‘overthrowing the idol’—through which he had responded to Diderot’s
story—to describe the Enlightenment’s own struggle against superstition.
He warns there of the ways in which the criticism of religion in the name
of reason can itself become atrophied, sinking into rigidity.9 In that
context, Rameau’s nephew stands as a symbol of the positive aspects of
intellectual ‘instability’ with its connotations of openness to change. In the
history of European thought, he remains the figure of the one who will
ultimately ‘laugh last’.

9
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, C. (BB.) ‘Spirit’. II ‘The Enlightenment’, Section 545,
p. 332.
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 7
Kantian Cosmopolitanism:
Perpetual Peace

A cosmopolitan future
Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace published in 1795, is a strange piece—
very different in genre from the dazzling virtuosity of Rameau’s Nephew, or
the probing satire of Persian Letters, but no less an audacious exercise of
imagination. Like Montesquieu, Kant offers a reconstruction of ancient
cosmopolitan ideals. However, Kant’s excursion into cosmopolitan im-
agining represents a stronger version of universalizing—a stronger pull
towards detachment from the particular or specific than Montesquieu
offered in the character of Usbek. Kant’s emphasis is on cosmopolitanism
as a political idea—as an ideal for the organization of collective life, rather
than as an individual character trait. He envisages cosmopolitanism as a
new phase of human history: the emergence of a new political order,
directed to a permanent cessation of armed conflict between states. Sub-
titled ‘A Philosophical Sketch’, the essay is schematic, and unrelentingly
abstract in its philosophical apparatus.
Perpetual Peace like Kant’s earlier essay, Idea for a Universal History
brings an apparently tight argumentative structure together with what can
seem a wildly speculative leap into an imagined future. The essay opens
with an explanation of its title—a reference to the satirical signpost of a
Dutch Inn, ‘The Perpetual Peace’, which bears a picture of a graveyard.
Kant’s ‘philosophical sketch’ takes us to an ideal future in which there will
prevail a permanent end to conflict—a time of quiet and stability, which
will nonetheless be something other than ‘the vast graveyard of the human
race’.1 The argumentation which is supposed to deliver this outcome rests

1
Immanuel Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’, in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant:
Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
142 KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM : PERPETUAL PEACE

on acceptance, within and between nations, of three interrelated forms of

constitution—based respectively on ‘civil right’, ‘constitutional right’, and
‘cosmopolitan right’. All three are folded into Kant’s sketch of an ideal
political order which is, he insists, not merely utopian. Echoing his earlier
essays on enlightenment, he argues that this future must come to be; for its
eventual attainment is assured by nothing less than the ultimate purposes of
Nature for the human race.
Kant’s reasoning throughout Perpetual Peace has a form reminiscent of
the ‘transcendental’ arguments he employs elsewhere in his philosophy.
Starting from a situation presented as undoubtedly true, he works back
through the preconditions of that presumed truth. Here he presents his
three forms of ‘right’ as what must first be in place if the future state of
perpetual peace is to be attained. For Kant, the belief that Nature will—at
some point in the future—deliver this state to humanity must be seen as a
practical necessity; it is unthinkable that the ultimate future of the human
race should be anything less positive. Regardless of whether we want it or
not—regardless of whether or not we cooperate with Nature’s purposes
for us—the realization of these ends must be expected.
There are similarities here with the argumentative structure of Kant’s
Idea for a Universal History—a similar interplay of imagination with
reasoned argument; and similar shifts between the bold speculation
which he presents there as a philosophical history of the future and, on
the other hand, the painstaking assemblage of abstract principles and
formal divisions. In Perpetual Peace the logical apparatus is divided into
‘definitive articles’ and ‘supplements’. The arguments proceed along
formal lines. Yet, reading it now, we cannot but be struck by the confi-
dence expressed in the succession of ‘musts’ embedded in this self-assured
sketch of the future.
Kant argues that, for perpetual peace to become a reality, there must in
the first place be within every state a republican civil constitution: war will
be avoided only if the head of each state is himself a citizen of his state,
rather than its owner. ‘Under a constitution where the subject is not a
citizen, and which is therefore not republican, it is the simplest thing in the
world to go to war’ (p. 100). It is a prerequisite of avoiding war that heads

1970), p. 96. Subsequent quotations are accompanied in parentheses by page references to this
text.
 A COSMOPOLITAN FUTURE 143

of state must be unable to engage in it without self-sacrifice. It must also be

the case that there is between all states a ‘federation of peoples’.
Kant stresses that what is required under this second condition is not an
‘international state’. Nations are not to be ‘welded together as a unit’
(p. 102). He argues that the idea of such a state is contradictory, since every
state demands a relationship between a superior, who legislates, and an
inferior—the people obeying the laws—whereas a number of nations
forming one state would constitute a single nation. Rather, the very
concept of ‘international right’ demands that it be coupled with a feder-
ation of states—each accepting peace between them as a requirement:
‘The concept of international right becomes meaningless if interpreted as a
right to go to war’ (p. 105).
By the same reasoning, Kant—concerned, as he insists, ‘not with
philanthropy but with right’—concludes that states united into such a
federation must observe ‘cosmopolitan right’ (p. 105). They must agree
to observe conditions of ‘universal hospitality’. Cosmopolitan right, thus
construed, is for Kant no less a precondition of perpetual peace than the
civil right of individuals within each nation, and the international right of
states in their relation to one another. It follows that a stranger visiting a
foreign country must be able to claim a ‘right of resort’—a right not to be
treated with hostility, provided only that he himself behaves in a peaceable
manner in the place where he happens to be. Recognition of this right to a
limited hospitality encourages, Kant observes, ‘peaceful mutual relations’
between continents distant to each other—relations which may eventually
be regulated by public laws, ‘thus bringing the human race nearer and
nearer to a cosmopolitan constitution’ (pp. 105–6).
Kant presents the emergence of a federation of nations as an expectation
of a future development; and what he calls ‘the right to hospitality’ is
likewise forward-looking. It is part of his grand vision of the future. Yet it
is also a normative concept, demanding observance in the present.This
right is for him not just an idle hope or a utopian dream. In his Idea for a
Universal History he appealed to the future realization of Nature’s goals as
a benchmark for judging the moral standing of his contemporaries, who
can either collaborate with or obstruct Nature’s plans. In a similar way, he
now uses his vision of a cosmopolitan future as a basis for criticizing the
inhospitable conduct of European states in his own times: ‘The Injustice
which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples (which in their
case is the same as conquering them) seems appallingly great’ (p. 106).
144 KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM : PERPETUAL PEACE

To criticize the conquerors as breaching the demands of hospitality

may seem a strange inversion of the relations involved in visitation.
However, Kant is implying that the behaviour of explorers and commer-
cial ‘visitors’ in his own times is a breach of the requirement of behaving
in a peaceable manner, on which their limited ‘right of resort’ depends.
Where visitation turns to plunder or conquest, there can be no reciprocal
requirement of hospitality. Under those ‘unjust’ conditions, the spread of
European civilization around the globe has served the interests of war,
rather than facilitating the emergence of permanent peace. Yet Kant
insists that, whether we will it or not, Nature will nonetheless see to it
that her ultimate ends of peace are served. Non-peaceable behaviour is
subsumed—regardless of our own short-term goals—into the long-term
purposes of Nature.
In another of his political pieces, The Contest of Faculties, published in
1798, Kant argued that the response of ‘a sympathy, which borders almost
on enthusiasm’—which was in his own time aroused in the hearts of
spectators of the French Revolution—could be taken as a sign of the
moral progress of the human race towards the ends intended for them by
Nature.2 The echoes of Adam Smith’s account of the development of
objective moral judgement, in this conjunction of sympathy and the
perspective of the spectator, are striking. Charles Griswold Jr. has com-
mented on how Smith’s impartial spectator, and thus his version of ‘the
moral imagination’, provides at least part of what Kantian moral reason
was meant to provide.3
Spectatorship—the capacity for detached observation, standing back
from the immediacies of action—is for Kant an important element in
the development of moral maturity in the species. What goes for the
eliciting of enthusiasm at the vista of the French Revolution goes also
for the eliciting of general indignation at the deeds of would-be ‘visitors’
across borders. In a similarly optimistic vein about the emerging signs of
moral maturity in his times, he says in Perpetual Peace that progress towards
Nature’s goals can be seen to be under way from the fact that violations of
peaceable behaviour on the part of ‘visitors’ in one part of the world elicit

2
Kant: Political Writings, p. 182.
3
Charles L. Griswold Jr., ‘Imagination: Morals, Science, and Arts’, in Knud Haakonssen,
ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006), p. 39.
 A COSMOPOLITAN FUTURE 145

outrage elsewhere. ‘The peoples of the earth have thus entered in varying
degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point
where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The
idea of a cosmopolitan right is therefore not fantastic and overstrained; it is
a necessary complement to the unwritten code of humanity. Only under
this condition can we flatter ourselves that we are continually advancing
towards a perpetual peace’ (pp. 107–8).
The frame which is supposed to give content and force to Kant’s ‘musts’
throughout this argumentation about the future in Perpetual Peace is
presented in two ‘supplements’ to the preceding ‘articles’. With startling
confidence, he opens his first supplement with the assertion: ‘Perpetual
peace is guaranteed by no less an authority than the great artist Nature
herself.’ It may sound like a pious resort to faith, rather than a prediction
grounded in reason. However, although Kant invokes the idea of Provi-
dence in this context, he makes it clear that he is not appealing to divine
intervention. Here, as in his Idea for a Universal History he talks of
purpose unfolding in the course of events. ‘The mechanical process of
nature visibly exhibits the purposive plan of producing concord among
men, even against their will and indeed by means of their very discord’
(p. 108).
From our temporal perspective, the teleological thrust of Kant’s argu-
mentation in support of the recognition of cosmopolitan rights may well
be disconcerting. By way of clarification, he notes that, although his
version of providence involves a teleology which ‘indicates the foresight
of a wise agency governing nature’, this is not a mechanism which intrudes
on the rational explanation of ‘secular events’ (p. 109). He insists that he is
not offering an alternative explanation of why particular things happen as
they do. For that would presuppose a knowledge of God’s actions, which
would amount to a theoretical knowledge of what transcends Nature; and
that is for Kant impossible. ‘Modesty forbids us to speak of providence as
something we can recognize, for this would mean donning the wings of Icarus
and presuming to approach the mystery of its inscrutable intentions’ (p. 109).
Kant sees the understanding of providence—like that of ‘all relations
between the forms of things and their ultimate purposes’—as, rather,
something we can and must ‘supply mentally’; we conceive of its possibil-
ity by analogy with human artifices (p. 109). Yet, like the concept of
perpetual peace itself, he insists, this appeal to Nature’s purposes has a ‘very
real foundation in practice’, which makes it ‘our duty to promote it’.
146 KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM : PERPETUAL PEACE

Within this teleological framework, even war itself is incorporated into the
assured ultimate goal of perpetual peace. By means of war, Nature has
driven human beings in all directions so that they come to inhabit even the
most inhospitable regions of the earth. ‘In seeing to it that men could live
everywhere on earth, nature has at the same time despotically willed that
they should live everywhere, even against their own inclinations. And this
obligation does not rest upon any concept of duty which might bind them
to fulfill it in accordance with a moral law; on the contrary, nature has
chosen war as a means of attaining this end.’ War is ‘nature’s means of
peopling the whole earth’ (p. 111).
Is war then ‘natural’? Kant seems to come close to saying so. War, he
observes, ‘seems to be ingrained in human nature, and even to be regarded
as something noble to which man is inspired by his love of honour,
without selfish motives’ (p. 111). Warlike courage is generally valued,
‘not just in times of war (as might be expected), but also in order that there
may be war’ (p. 111). War itself, he says, is ‘invested with an inherent
dignity’; it is eulogized even by philosophers as ‘a kind of ennobling
influence on man’ (p. 112). Kant’s discussion falls short of endorsing
those exultant attitudes towards war. Yet neither does he clearly condemn
them. What is clear is that, regardless of what human beings think of war,
Nature acts through it to ‘further her own end with respect to the human
race as an animal species’ (p. 112). War, far from being at odds with
Nature, is Nature’s ally.
In his Idea for a Universal History Kant spoke of a ‘purpose in nature’
behind the apparently senseless course of human events—a purpose which
acts through the unfolding history of ‘creatures who act without a plan of
their own’. In Perpetual Peace he presents these purposes of nature as
enacted in relation to each element of his threefold distinction between
different ‘areas of public right’. With regard to political rights within a
state, what the purposes of Nature demand is that the constitution be so
designed that, although citizens are opposed in their ‘private attitudes’,
their public conduct will be the same as if they were not thus divided. The
opposing views of individual citizens must counterbalance and thus ‘in-
hibit’ one another (p. 113).
In this context of counterbalancing forces, Kant argues that only the
republican form of constitution can do ‘complete justice to the rights of
man’. Yet even if people were not compelled by ‘internal dissent’ to accept
the coercion of public laws, war would ‘produce the same effect from
 A COSMOPOLITAN FUTURE 147

outside’. Confronted with the encroachment of another neighbouring

people, each people is forced to form itself internally into a state in order
to ‘encounter the other as an armed power’ (p. 112). Hence in relation to
international right Kant observes that, although the preferred route for
states or rulers to lasting peace may be world domination, Nature wills it
otherwise. Peace between nations is created and guaranteed by ‘an equi-
librium of forces and a most vigorous rivalry’ (p. 114).
Nature is at work also in Kant’s cosmopolitan rights—acting again
through reciprocal self-interest. Here the crucial contributing force is
‘the spirit of commerce’ which sooner or later takes hold of every people
and ‘cannot exist side by side with war’. ‘In this way, nature guarantees
perpetual peace by the actual mechanism of human inclinations’ (p. 114).
Kant’s general conclusion is that war will cease when Nature no longer has
need of it to realize its purposes for humanity.
It is difficult to see how Kant’s argumentation in all this could work in
the lack of the supporting teleological framework, ‘secular’ though it may
be. For us it may well seem a strange—even preposterous—basis for
drawing conclusions, either about the best forms of political organization
or about the prospects of a permanent end to war. Reading Kant’s essay
now we are confronted with an extraordinary vision of a cosmopolitan
political structure which—bizarre though it may in retrospect seem—he
confidently expects to emerge in his future.
It is striking that this Kantian cosmopolitanism—while it is projected
into an imagined future—seems not to depend on the development of any
shared sympathy between different peoples. It is not construed as an
outcome of breaking down the barriers between strangers. To understand
Kant’s talk of ‘cosmopolitan rights’, we must imagine exchanges that occur
at the borders—literally and metaphorically—of different places and cul-
tures. What he sees as rights of temporary sojourn arise from our rights as
strangers not to be treated as enemies when we arrive in the lands of others.
Cosmopolitan rights rest on a prior right, which all human beings have, to
associate with others. Yet, unlike the commonalities which arise within
shared projects, they do not rest on human beings ceasing to be strangers to
one another. Rather, they rest precisely on the status of the stranger. Kant’s
strangers—while remaining strangers—are bearers of rights common to all.
Odd though its justificatory frame may now seem, Kant’s account of the
‘right of hospitality’ nonetheless stands as a significant attempt to articulate
a basis for recognizing rights that individuals have by virtue of their shared
148 KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM : PERPETUAL PEACE

humanity—as distinct from the rights that accrue from their membership
of particular associations or polities. It is important to keep in mind here
that Kant is at pains to clearly distinguish the temporary right of sojourn
from any right to permanent presence, which he construes as a special
privilege bestowed by the sovereign on specific foreigners. For Kant such
privileges presuppose that to some extent the visitor has already earned
exemption from the status of stranger. The ‘right of hospitality’ is in
contrast supposed to apply to all human beings by virtue of their being
human. To use the language of more ancient versions of the cosmopolitan
ideal, dating back to the Stoics, we have this right as ‘citizens of the world’.
Kant takes up the issue of cosmopolitan rights again in his Metaphysics of
Morals, published in 1797, two years after Perpetual Peace.4 There he
distinguishes this category of rights from ‘international rights’—the rights
of states in relation to one another: the rights at stake in war and peace.
Again, he appeals to the finitude of the earth’s surface to justify the idea of
cosmopolitan right. However it becomes clear in this later exposition of
the concept that these rights are supposed to be grounded in the coming
together of what Kant calls ‘political right’—rights associated with aggre-
gates of individual human beings—and ‘international rights’, which apply
to aggregates of ‘peoples’. The conceptual interrelations between these
kinds of rights make the status of Kantian cosmopolitan rights a vexed
interpretive issue—not least because the bearers of cosmopolitan rights
seem to inhabit an indeterminate zone between individuals and ‘peoples’.
Kant appeals again to the finitude of the earth’s surface to justify
cosmopolitan rights. The idea of a peaceful international community
formed from all those of ‘the earth’s peoples’ who can enter into active
relations with one another is, he says, not a ‘philanthropic principle of
ethics’ but ‘a principle of right’, grounded in the spherical shape of the
planet they inhabit. Cosmopolitan rights regulate human commerce—in
the broad sense of reciprocal interaction between peoples. Such rights
confer on ‘the world’s citizens’ the right to attempt to enter a community
with everyone else and to visit—though not to settle in—all regions of the
earth with this intention. Kant explicitly appeals to these limited rights of
visitation in condemnation of the specious arguments commonly invoked

4
The relevant passages of The Metaphysics of Morals—in ‘The Theory of Right’, Part II,
Section 1, and Section II (#43 and #62)—can be found in extracts included in Kant: Political
Writings, pp. 137 and 172–3.
 A COSMOPOLITAN FUTURE 149

to justify the violent and exploitative behaviour associated with European

colonization. The supposedly good intentions of colonization—bringing
culture to the uncivilized, or ridding a home country of undesirable
elements, as in the British colonization of New Holland—cannot wash
away ‘the stain of injustice’ from the means used to implement them.
Kant’s interest in affirming cosmopolitan rights was of course not
primarily directed to the situation of people fleeing starvation or persecu-
tion. It was oriented, rather, to the needs of Europeans engaged in voyages
of exploration and trade. His defence of the ‘right of resort’ confronted his
readers with the expectation of reciprocal hospitality on which those
voyages depended. The outrage felt by his contemporaries at the unjust
behaviour of European voyagers towards their indigenous hosts—at their
lack of insight into the fact that they were indeed strangers in another’s
land—was for Kant evidence of the recognition, not only of cosmopolitan
right, but also of the limitations inherent in that right. Implicit in such
outrage was a judgement on the injustice of conquest. The new arrivals,
though they had a right to hospitality, had no right to engage in appropri-
ation or exploitation in the lands they ‘visited’. Kant’s analysis served as a
defence of the general human significance of exploration and trade—a
defence of the rights of the European strangers to visit other places, no less
than of the rights of the visited to be treated with respect, regardless of how
they all feel towards one another.
Although Kant’s idea of cosmopolitan rights was framed by concern
with the rights and responsibilities of eighteenth-century ‘visitors’—
explorers and traders—it remains of interest in relation to more recent
situations involving strangers at borders. Seyla Benhabib, in her book
The Rights of Others, has argued that it raises issues of importance in our
own times with respect to the movements of refugees.5 The idea is
reflected in the Principle of Non-Refoulement included in the 1951
UN Convention on the Status of Refugees, which requires that asylum
seekers accepted as satisfying criteria for refugee status cannot be com-
pelled to return to situations of danger from which they have fled.
Kantian cosmopolitan rights, on Benhabib’s analysis, are situated at the
borders of a polity; they delimit civil space by regulating relations between

5
Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chapter 1, ‘On Hospitality: Re-Reading Kant’s
Cosmopolitan Right’, pp. 25–48.
150 KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM : PERPETUAL PEACE

members and non-members. They thus contrast with the rights of ‘per-
manent visitorship’ which were granted in pre-modern Europe—for
example to the Jews who spread to other territories, especially Holland,
after their persecution in Spain in the fifteenth century. Kant’s ‘right of
hospitality’ or ‘right of resort’ suggests an entitlement to immediate though
transient protection, which arises precisely from the status of stranger.
Benhabib, however, goes on to point out that, without Kant’s accom-
panying teleological framework, his arguments for the recognition of such
rights inevitably appear to carry little force in the context of contemporary
debate on the rights of refugees and asylum seekers.
Kant’s arguments for cosmopolitan rights are encompassed by the
broader objective he offered in his other essays on enlightenment; they
belong in his bold sketch of a cosmopolitan future. His conviction of the
ongoing progress of the human race stands or falls with his teleological
vision of Nature’s purposes for human beings. That may well mean that for
us it falls rather than stands. It is not clear how a viable contemporary
version of such rights might be extricated from the grand vision which
frames it.
Benhabib has returned to the consideration of Kantian cosmopolitan
rights in relation to contemporary issues of migration and citizenship in a
later book, A New Cosmopolitanism,6 in which she explores the tensions
between the ‘universalism’ of cosmopolitan aspirations and the particu-
larity—the partiality and ‘boundedness’—of democratic communities as
they now exist. We are witnessing, she argues there, a ‘disaggregation’ of
citizenship in which entitlement to social rights has become dissociated
from shared collective identity and political participation. The issues of
contemporary cosmopolitanism raised in this volume by Benhabib and
her respondents are wide-ranging and complex. They concern the
evolving interactions of ethics and politics with local and international
law. However, the unresolved tensions between ‘universalist’ and ‘par-
ticularist’ strands in contemporary ideas of cosmopolitanism—between
the demands of ‘citizenship of the world’ and the restrictive citizenship
requirements of particular polities—have continuities with some of the
disparate strands in Enlightenment reconstructions of ancient cosmopol-
itan ideals.

6
Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
 A COSMOPOLITAN FUTURE 151

Central to those tensions is the issue of the sources of moral authority—

between ideas of a transcendent moral law derived from religious authority
and, on the other hand, of a secular ethics grounded in capacities of
sympathy and imagination. As Montesquieu’s travellers found, the joint
operations of those capacities can yield an expansion of emotional borders:
people once entirely other can come to be included among those into
whose situation we can imaginatively enter. Yet, as the experiences of
Usbek, especially, showed, there are limits inherent in those possibilities
of emotional expansion. Any idea of forging connections of sympathy or
empathy with the whole human race is bound to sound hollow to the
point of meaninglessness.
Kant’s leaps of cosmopolitan imagining pointed to the possibility of
recognizing at least limited reciprocal rights and obligations among
strangers which did not depend on relations of sympathy—rights and
duties which connect human beings, even if they remain for ever strangers.
There is an implicit appeal to universality in this idea of a right which all
human beings have simply by being human. Yet the content of Kantian
cosmopolitan rights falls a long way short of the universal principles of
morals associated with older natural law theories of morality. Enlighten-
ment reconstructions of moral judgement were ungrounded in ideas of an
unchangeable human nature, and unsheltered by associated ideas of divine
authority to impose laws which all must obey. Kant’s restricted rights of
visitation seem to fall short also of the ethical universality which charac-
terized his own construction of a secular ethical ‘categorical imperative’.
The tensions between the pull towards the universal, on the one hand,
and the pull towards the recognition of difference and diversity, on the
other, continue to arise in more recent debates on cosmopolitanism. The
conceptual dilemmas at stake in the consideration of what rights human
beings might claim simply from being human—the rights of ‘citizens of
the world’—were given eloquent and moving expression by Hannah
Arendt in her descriptions of the plight of refugees during and after the
Second World War. On her analysis, the power of nation states to tie the
having of rights firmly to citizenship makes the stateless refugee a living
symbol of deprivation of ‘the right to have rights’.
Kant’s political essays do not constitute a rigorous political philosophy in
any way that could compare with his elaborate ethical system. However,
there are ideas—especially in his third Critique, the Critique of Judgement—
which suggest ways of bridging the gulf between the ‘particularism’ of the
152 KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM : PERPETUAL PEACE

deliverances of sympathy, together with imagination, and the implicit

‘universalism’ of his cosmopolitan vision. The key is the notion that has
been a recurring motif in the texts discussed in this book—the idea of an
‘enlargement of the mind’. This idea of a cosmopolitan mind—a mind
capable of ‘going visiting’—was given powerful expression by Hannah
Arendt.

‘Going visiting’: Hannah Arendt on

imagination and judgement
In 1970, Hannah Arendt delivered a course of lectures at the New School
for Social Research in New York on the topic ‘Kant’s Political Philoso-
phy’. The lectures brought together themes from Kant’s aesthetic and
political writings. At the time of her death, in 1975, she was planning
another set of lectures at the New School on the Critique of Judgement.
Together with notes on Imagination, dating from a seminar on the Critique
of Judgement given at the New School in 1970, the notes of the lectures
give some insight into what might have been the content of the third part
of the work The Life of the Mind, had she lived to complete it. Judging was to
have followed on from Thinking and Willing, which were published
posthumously in a single volume in 1978.
Arendt’s lectures attempted to reconstruct what might have been Kant’s
political philosophy—if he had developed one out of the material con-
tained in the Critique of Judgement—supplemented by what he did actually
write in his political essays. Since the lectures and seminar notes were not
themselves published by Arendt, the exercise of interpreting Kant’s un-
written political philosophy is doubly conjectural. However, there is rich
material here for thinking through ramifications of what Kant did say
about imagination and about judgement.7
Arendt stresses the crucial role played in the Critique of Judgement by the
idea of an ‘enlargement of the mind’ accomplished, as she describes it, by
‘comparing our judgement with the possible, rather than the actual judge-
ments of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man’.

7
Arendt’s Lectures on Kant, together with some of her other reflections on judging, are
included in Ronald Beiner, ed., Hannah Arendt: Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982). Page references to this collection are included in
parentheses throughout my discussion.
 HANNAH ARENDT ON IMAGINATION AND JUDGEMENT 153

The faculty that makes that ‘expansion’ possible, Arendt notes, is called
‘imagination’. In elaborating the point, she invokes Kant’s account of
‘world citizens’ in Perpetual Peace ‘To think with an enlarged mentality
means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting. (Compare the right
to visit in Perpetual Peace.)’ (p. 43).
Arendt’s account of the connections between imagination and judge-
ment offers a new angle on Kant’s distinction between genius—required
for the production of beautiful objects—and taste, which is involved in
judging them. She draws out the implications for judgement in terms of an
expansion of imagined perspectives in a sociable human world. Judgement
reflects upon others, taking their possible judgements into account. ‘This is
necessary because I am human and cannot live outside the company of
men. I judge as a member of this community and not as a member of a
supersensible world . . .’ (p. 67). Hence the connections between judge-
ment and the capacity for ‘enlarged thought’.
There are strong echoes here of Adam Smith’s transitions from the
perceptions of actual others, through the idea of merely possible alterna-
tive perspectives, to the construction of the idea of an ‘impartial spectator’.
Interpreting comments by Kant in the Critique of Judgement, Arendt says
that it indicates ‘enlarged thought’ if someone disregards the subjective
private conditions of their own judgement, and reflects from what she calls
a ‘general standpoint’, which they can only determine by placing them-
selves at the standpoint of others (p. 71). For Arendt this is a way of giving
content to Kant’s special meaning of a sensus communis—a ‘common
sense’—as in effect a ‘community sense’, related to the communicability
of feeling. It is to this sensus communis that judgement appeals; and this gives
judgement its distinctive form of validity. Judgements do not have the
validity of ‘cognitive’ or ‘scientific’ propositions. On Arendt’s reading,
such propositions are ‘not judgements, properly speaking’ because they
are, in contrast to judgements, compelled by the evidence either of one’s
senses or of one’s mind (p. 72). Such ‘compulsion’ leaves no room for the
exercise of judgement.
Drawing on Arendt’s account of the ramifications of Kant’s versions of
genius and of judgement, the character created by Diderot in Rameau’s
Nephew could be said to have a touch of genius; but he cannot be regarded
as a man of ‘enlarged mind’—a man of judgement. His leaps of imagination
are not moderated by the capacity to think himself into the perspectives—
actual or possible—of others. This character’s imagination may ‘go visiting’
154 KANTIAN COSMOPOLITANISM : PERPETUAL PEACE

but it is not a well-behaved guest. Its flaws are not just a matter of etiquette
or decorum, any more than the foreign visitors whose behaviour Kant
deplores are guilty only of bad manners. This is an imagination which
remains subjective—immersed in its own particularity. It operates without
the steadying force of ‘common sense’—in Kant’s special meaning of
communicability of feeling, as well as in the more obvious everyday
meaning. That is why, despite the appeal of his engaging antics, Rameau’s
nephew remains emotionally chaotic—a figure of pathos.
There are broader implications too of Arendt’s treatment of Kant for
the understanding of objectivity in relation to the Enlightenment texts
discussed in this book. She concludes from her brief analysis of the place of
judgement in ‘the life of the mind’ that it would be a great error to believe
that Kantian ‘critical thinking’ stands somewhere between ‘dogmatism’
and ‘scepticism’: ‘It is actually the way to leave these alternatives behind’
(p. 32). In other words, objectivity in judgement is not to be construed as a
source of ‘certainty’. It has a different agenda.
The capacity to imagine ourselves into the situations of others involves a
constant readiness to adjust and adapt. The opposition between ‘relativism’
and ‘absolutism’, in relation to the attainability of truth, is out of place
within this frame. Likewise, the ideal of a cosmopolitan style of imagining
does not belong within the discourse of certainty; here the issue of
relativism is by-passed.
Kant himself provides a useful conceptual connection for understanding
his version of cosmopolitanism. In a passage in his Anthropology he talks of
‘pluralism’, which he defines as ‘the attitude of not being occupied with
oneself as the whole world, but regarding and conducting oneself as a
citizen of the world’.8 Cosmopolitan imagining, construed in terms of that
understanding of pluralism, is a form of objective judgement. It transcends
the subjectivity of a limited viewpoint. Yet it does not yield epistemo-
logical certainty—not because it falls short of that goal, but because it has a
different role in the life of the mind.

8
Cited by Ronald Beiner, in his interpretive essay in Hannah Arendt: Lectures on Kant’s
Political Philosophy, p. 120. The reference is to Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View, trans. Mary Gregor (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), p. 12.
 Conclusion
Looking Back on the Enlightenment

In his discussion of aesthetic judgement in the Critique of Judgement, Kant

identifies the process of enlightenment as emancipation from superstition—
from the condition of blindness which reduces the mind’s reason to
passivity, putting us in need of being led by others. It is a formulation
close to the slogan ‘Dare to Know’ which he appropriated in his essay An
Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? However, in affirming
it in the context of his treatment of judgement, he gives it an added
content which might otherwise be missed.
Elaborating the point in a footnote, Kant connects enlightenment
directly with the avoidance of mental passivity. While no doubt easy in
principle, he says, it is ‘difficult and slow of realization’. Hence the long
process of maturing of the human mind, of which he talks in his political
essays. However, in the context of Kant’s treatment of judgement, there is
a crucial difference of emphasis in his account of what makes enlighten-
ment such a long, arduous process. The human mind, he says, has a
tendency to seek to know what is beyond its understanding; and, as
there are always those who are intent on ‘coming and promising with
full assurance that they are able to satisfy one’s curiosity’, it must then
be very difficult to ‘preserve or restore in the mind (and particularly in
the public mind) that merely negative attitude (which constitutes enlight-
enment proper)’.1 ‘Enlightenment proper’ is a process of actively standing
back, of refusing to passively follow where others—the putative knowers
of absolute truths—would lead.

1
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1952), Book II, Part I, Sec. 40, p. 152.
156 CONCLUSION

The usual relations between passivity and activity are here reversed, so
that activity resides in a lack of movement: it is those minds which stand
back, rather than ‘following’, which are ‘non-passive’. However, this is a
kind of passivity which makes possible a superior kind of mental activity.
Kant goes on to explicitly link the ideal of a non-passive mind—an enlarged
mind—with the capacity to actively shift to the standpoint of other minds.
It achieves this shift, not by slavishly following the would-be knowers,
but by imagining itself into other perspectives. The requirement of ‘non-
passivity’ is delivered by the capacity to reflect on one’s own judgement
from a universal standpoint; yet this activity of the mind resides in a ‘merely
negative’ attitude. It is, in Kant’s sense, a ‘critical’ attitude.
The readings of Enlightenment texts offered in this book have tracked
through various forms this idea of the processes of enlightenment as
an ‘enlargement of mind’. We have seen it emerge as a capacity for
detachment—through the exercise of imagination—from the limitations
of subjective standpoints; and as a capacity for expansion of sympathetic
engagement with others. There are echoes, in Kant’s talk of a ‘merely
negative’ attitude, of Hume’s account of the intellectual character of the
Sceptic; and also of the enriching transformations of wonder in the experi-
ence of Montesquieu’s Persian travellers. The cross-cultural perceptions
enacted in Persian Letters prefigure the shifting perspectives at play in Adam
Smith’s model of the impartial spectator, which is in turn echoed in Kant’s
talk of the shift to a ‘universal standpoint’. Voltaire’s resort to the strategy
of multiple voices—allowing a detachment from the authorial voice, and
conjuring up the imagining of a public conversational space—can also be
seen in retrospect as setting the scene for Kant’s much more theorized
concept of sensus communis.
This thread which I have followed through a number of texts is of
course just one in the varied and complex pattern which can be seen in
retrospect as ‘Enlightenment thought’. Yet Kant’s link between enlighten-
ment and the ‘negative attitude’ implicit in judgement serves to highlight
just how crucial a thread it was. It is an aspect of the Enlightenment
tradition which has, however, proved easy to overlook amidst the exultant
celebration of Enlightenment optimism about the ever expanding reaches
of human knowledge. The pursuit of certainty in matters of scientific
knowledge was undeniably also a significant thread in Enlightenment
thinking. Kant deals with it in his Critique of Pure Reason, by differentiating
the well-grounded knowledge of ‘appearances’ from delusory claims of
 LOOKING BACK ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT 157

access to things-in-themselves. His famous rising to the challenge of laying

epistemological scepticism to rest—by articulating the limits and condi-
tions of human knowledge—has come to eclipse the fact that he was no
less concerned to carve out a territory for judgement, where demands for
certainty have no proper place.
For Kant, the ‘rules of Nature’, rather than transcending unaided human
knowledge, are imposed by the conditions of objective knowledge itself;
there is no room for religious authorities—or other supposed knowers of
what lies beyond ‘appearances’—to impose on others their doctrinal or
doctrinaire beliefs about how things really are. However, although he
rejects in the Critique of Pure Reason the pretensions of would-be knowers
of transcendent truths, he leaves room for separate consideration of the
realm of aesthetic and teleological discourse—the province of his Critique
of Judgement. Kant thought that in the realms of both scientific knowledge
and judgement, the resolution of apparent impasses—between dogmatism
and scepticism; between prejudice and detached objective judgement—
was to be found in his ‘critical philosophy’.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was to be a watershed in epistemological
disputes about scepticism which Enlightenment thinkers had inherited
from ancient philosophers; but his three Critiques together also help defuse
the claims of that other ancient doctrine—relativism. Within that Kantian
frame, certainty can be had in relation to ‘appearances’; but the unknow-
ability of things-in-themselves serves to avoid the morass of a relativized
truth. All that is relative here is the frame provided by the conditions of
human knowledge itself.
Hannah Arendt observed in her Lectures on Kant that his ‘critical’
approach to philosophy was almost immediately misunderstood as yet
another ‘system’, and was then attacked as such by the next generation
when ‘the spirit of the Enlightenment, which had inspired it, was lost’.2 In
other works—especially an Appendix to the second edition (1965) of her
book Eichmann in Jerusalem—she talks of an atrophying of the work of
imagination which Kant calls judgement. Again, it should be stressed that
Arendt’s reconstruction of Kant is in some ways itself an exercise of
imagination. Yet there is an important insight here which bears, not

2
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. R. Beiner (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 35.
158 CONCLUSION

only on how contemporary philosophers now see Kant, but more gener-
ally on the retrospective understanding of ‘the Enlightenment’.
In the context of contemporary divisions of philosophical subject areas,
Kant’s treatment of judgement in the third Critique is often relegated to
aesthetic theory; and its significance is then overshadowed by attention to
Kantian epistemological and moral theories. The ethical and political
ramifications of his treatment of judgement—the issues explored by
Arendt—have largely gone missing from the concerns of professional
philosophers, exacerbating a general lack of attention to that aspect of
‘the life of the mind’.
Arendt’s claims about the demise of judgement in ordinary life, in the
context of the Eichmann trial, were controversial; and they may well
seem counter-intuitive in relation to the present. We readily praise and
blame individuals for good or bad judgement; and we readily talk too of
collective decision-making in public policy as well or ill judged. Yet the
suggestion that there may be an increasing distrust of the capacity to judge
does resonate with aspects of current discourse which invoke a need for
‘certainty’ or ‘security’—even in situations where there is no possibility of
such expectations being satisfied. Reluctance to leave space for the exer-
cise of judgement surfaces in contemporary concern with circumscribing
risk—in calls for pre-emptive action in anticipation of terrorist acts; in
trends towards mandatory detention; and in demands for mandatory
sentencing, where even judges can be deprived of the capacity to judge.
In times when the capacity to judge is neglected in philosophical
reflection and distrusted or restricted in practice, it may be salutary to
read or re-read works which speak to us from a time when the ideal of an
‘enlarged mind’—a mind engaged in the free exercise of imagination
in judgement—was freshly articulated. Also, at times when ‘the Enlight-
enment’ is being invoked as a unitary signifier of western values, it may be
salutary to recapture something of the ambivalences at play in those
formative texts. It may be a good time to return to writings which are
concerned, not with shaping the contours of a recognized intellectual
movement, but with enacting and celebrating a process of thought.
Enlightenment thinkers have left a complex legacy. Their ideas were of
course not entirely new; many of them were revived and restated from
ancient sources. Amidst their continuities with those sources, they recon-
figured intellect, imagination, and emotion in new ways of understanding the
structure and operations of the human mind. They offered a transformation
 LOOKING BACK ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT 159

of reason which brought new ways of thinking of knowledge and belief.

How do their preoccupations and their hopes now look?
The readings in this book have focused especially on the various ways
in which the interactions of imagination and emotion have figured in
Enlightenment texts. At its most explicit in Adam Smith’s model of the
impartial spectator, this recurring motif has pointed to possibilities for an
expansion of the boundaries that unite and divide human beings. Smith’s
analysis of the conceptual implications of imagining ourselves into the
situations of others has offered ways across the divide between individual
self-interest and collective concern for the well-being of others—between
selfishness and civility; between merely personal attachments and broader
moral demands. It allows for close attachments to be held in constructive
tension with concern for the needs of remote others. Having followed the
trajectory of this motif, perhaps we are now in a position to see how rich
and complex it is, in comparison with the relatively more insipid notions
of compassion or sympathy which are often invoked in the rhetoric of
contemporary debates.
To imagine ourselves into the situation of another, we must first see him
or her as having an inner life—as affected by, and responding to, circum-
stances and cultural expectations which may be different from our own. It
can be a demanding exercise. We can think we have achieved it when we
are in fact doing something else. We might, for example, be indulging in
an exercise of self-projection, so that the imagined experience of another
becomes an extension of our own inner life. Such ambiguities and hazards
in the relations between selves and others were explored long ago in
Aristotle’s treatment of friendship in his Nicomachean Ethics. The slogan
Aristotle discusses—that the friend is ‘another self ’—does not necessarily
express a recognition or acceptance of the other; it could also be an
expression of self-absorption. Empathetic connection with other cultures,
no less than with individual ‘others’, can turn out to be deluded exercises
in self-projection—often masked by a spurious ‘multicultural’ tolerance
which presumes cultural superiority.
The ideal of an enlarged mind, which was central to the process of
enlightenment articulated in the texts previously discussed, involves more
than allowing ourselves to reverberate with the emotions of others. As
Adam Smith stressed, his form of imagining the lives of others is not really
at all a matter of feeling what others feel. It involves being present in
imagination to their past and future, no less than to to what they may be at
160 CONCLUSION

present undergoing. It is a kind of imagining which can be directed also at

an agent’s own actions and at collective policies—at the changes we make
in the world, and at how those changes are perceived by others. The hard
exercise of imagining the lives of others might serve us better, in relation to
current responses to issues raised by the situations of refugees and asylum
seekers, than shouting—across an abyss of failed imagination—about
competing demands on our compassion.
This exercise of imagination is a kind of thinking which resists flight into
abstraction. As we have seen, it involves detachment. Yet it also involves a
concreteness—the kind of immediacy which d’Alembert and Diderot
emphasized in their resistance to Baconian abstractions. Something
of that immediacy also resonates in Kant’s account of what he called
‘judgements of reflection’ in which the particular is discerned in the
universal. In this respect, the strand I have tracked in Enlightenment
texts can be at odds with the kind of ‘universalism’ manifested in, for
example, contemporary discourse of ‘universal human rights’, which are in
our own times commonly associated with the Enlightenment.
Voltaire was not alone among Enlightenment thinkers in being outraged
by torture—and more generally by the denial of religious, political and
intellectual freedoms. Their responses to perceived injustices undoubtedly
played a significant part in the piecemeal history of the understanding and
enforcing of human rights. Yet it is misleading to project back onto them a
fully formed concept of ‘universal human rights’. Their attempts to integrate
reason, imagination, and emotion had a different orientation—to the con-
tingent particularities of what is human; and towards future possibilities,
rather than towards an abstract timeless essence of human nature.
There were tensions in that orientation towards the particular; and their
differences from their philosophical predecessors were not always clear-
cut. Hume and Smith can still be read as offering alternative models of the
unchanging human mind to those offered by previous ‘rationalist’ models.
Diderot and d’Alembert, for all their emphasis on what was distinctive to
their time, were nonetheless happy to frame their enterprise, at least in
principle, with an analogue of Bacon’s map of the mind. Kant, in
his account of judgement, does not shed concern with the universal; but
its relations with the particular are very differently construed from the
connotations of escape from the concrete to the abstract which bothered
the editors of the Encyclopedia.
 LOOKING BACK ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT 161

It can be tempting to look back to the Enlightenment as the beginning

of a narrative—as our modern story of origins. It is a seductive story of the
recognition of ‘western’ values even if—as Kantian cosmopolitanism
would have it—humanity as a whole is not there yet. The ‘universality’
which is part of the complex content of contemporary understanding of
human rights can all too readily be recast in terms of a Kantian narrative of
progress; some cultures and polities can then be judged more advanced
than others in relation to the ultimate goal. Curiously, the values towards
which all are supposedly moving can then be seen as both ‘universal’ and
yet somehow distinctively ‘western’. We can recognize here a cultural
version of the sense of superiority—the hubris—which exasperated Kant’s
contemporary critics about his vision of enlightenment.
Many contemporary political debates about multiculturalism are still
implicitly framed in ways that resonate with Samuel Huntington’s conten-
tious concept of the ‘clash of civilizations’, positioning Islam as outside and
antithetical to the ‘western’ tradition, identified with the Enlightenment.
That frame is explicit in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s book Nomad: A Personal Journey
Through the Clash of Civilizations. She poses, in colourful terms, a rhetorical
question for contemporary heirs of the Enlightenment: for how long
will western societies, ‘whose roots drink from the rational sources of
the Enlightenment’, continue to tolerate Muslim practices and attitudes
oppressive to women?3
When tolerance is bestowed from a stance of assumed superiority—and
when ‘western’ values are taken as the benchmark in relation to which
difference is evaluated—it is all too easy to take a further step: to question
whether tolerance should be withdrawn from the unenlightened ‘other’. If
we think instead in terms of the capacity to imagine ourselves into the
situations of others—and into their perspectives on ourselves—talk of
having reached the ‘limits of tolerance’ makes little sense. This does not
at all mean that we come to accept what we find morally abhorrent in
some cultural practices—any more than Montaigne’s reversals of perspec-
tive had to be taken as a defence of cannibalism. It remains possible—and
necessary—to repudiate attitudes and practices that oppress women. How-
ever, when we find ourselves invoking the Enlightenment in a supposed

3
Aayan Hirsi Ali, Nomad: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (London:
Fourth Estate, 2010), p. 19.
162 CONCLUSION

‘clash of civilizations’ to justify setting limits to tolerance, that may be a

sign that it is our understanding of tolerance that needs to be rethought.
Reading Persian Letters now allows us to glimpse an understanding of
tolerance which involves a readiness to enter into an open-ended engage-
ment with difference—an engagement which sets aside assumptions of
cultural superiority. It would be a mistake to project into those possibil-
ities a ‘theory of tolerance’ attributable to Montesquieu. Nor can we treat
the ‘right of hospitality’ of which Kant talks in Perpetual Peace as an ideal
from which contemporary policies on asylum seekers have somehow
fallen away. The encounters with strangers which prompted Kant’s
reflections were very different from those posed in our own times by
the mass movements of uninvited ‘others’ gathering at borders. In many
ways, too, Montesquieu’s story of cross-cultural encounters between
eighteenth-century gentlemen—enjoying the benign educative force of
travel—is very far from contemporary realities of the unnerving encoun-
ters with raw difference that are the daily reality of life within culturally
diverse societies. If we wish to think now in the spirit of Enlightenment
thought, we might be better served by trying to cultivate new forms
of cosmopolitan imagining—attuned to the realities of contemporary
migration—rather than doggedly invoking our supposed heritage of
superior ‘Enlightenment values’.
There is insight to be gained from these texts also for coming to grips
with some of the complexities of contemporary ideas of ‘the secular’ that
surface in debates about the place of religion in culturally diverse societies.
The Enlightenment is now often associated with hostile repudiation of
religious belief. Its legacy in contemporary thought is seen—for better or
worse—as the triumph of ‘the secular’ over religion. Yet this legacy, as we
have seen in the texts discussed in this book, is more nuanced than is
suggested by the familiar narrative of progress away from old religious
influences towards secular modernity. The enemy they address is not
religion but religious superstition. The aim was not to destroy religion
but to accommodate it into a shared public space of reason. The criticisms
offered of religious belief were often sardonic. Yet their target was not
religion as such, but what was seen as an unholy alliance—threatening
scientific knowledge and rationally based humane social policy—between
superstition and state power. Re-reading Enlightenment texts now can
yield a better understanding of modern ideas of the secular.
 LOOKING BACK ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT 163

Charles Taylor, in his comprehensive study of the idea of the secular,

A Secular Age, has suggested that the conceptual transformation that took
place in the period of the Enlightenment—involving a radical ‘immanen-
tizing’ of the moral order—was one of the great achievements in the history
of civilization. With this crucial shift from transcendence to immanence,
the sources of moral motivation come to be seen as lying not in a supernat-
ural domain but rather in human nature itself. Transcendence could then
come to be seen as superfluous to moral consciousness. In these conceptual
preconditions for seeing moral motivation as immanent rather than derived
from transcendence, Taylor sees ‘one of the great realizations in the history
of human development’. Whatever our ultimate view of their role or
limitations, these conceptual innovations are, he argues, ‘a milestone in
human history’.4
In considering what these Enlightenment texts might have to offer for
understanding modern ideas of the secular, it is again important to attend
to their tone—and to the intellectual character they enact—no less than to
what may be extracted from them as an arguable theoretical position. In
the lack of attention to those rhetorical contexts, the emerging idea of the
secular they convey can harden into a dogmatic opposition to religion.
Much of the rhetoric of contemporary atheism—rather than seeking to
accommodate religious belief in a shared public intellectual space—can
appear directed to driving religion back into the domain of the private or
merely ‘personal’. In that respect, zealous atheism may be no more true to
the intellectual spirit of Enlightenment texts than is zealous religious belief.
The texts discussed in this book offer insights still relevant to many
contemporary challenges. Their themes resonate in current debates on
vexed issues—about the rights of non-citizens; about obligations to
strangers; about the security of borders; about the treatment of refugees
and asylum seekers; about apparent clashes between the inexorable
demands of ‘universal human rights’ and the restrictions imposed in pre-
emptive anti-terrorist laws; about the legality and morality of torture;
about multiculturalism and the ‘limits’ of tolerance; about the place of
religion in a ‘secular’ society.
What has emerged in these readings is of course just one strand in the
formation of the concepts we bring to these issues. We cannot extract from

4
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 255.
164 CONCLUSION

the texts any one ‘Enlightenment theory’ of tolerance, of cosmopolitan-

ism, of belief, of truth, or knowledge. We can nonetheless find in them
ways of thinking—sometimes familiar, sometimes surprising—which can
enrich the conceptualization of current debates and even sometimes point
to ways out of current impasses.
If we want to insist on our continuity with Enlightenment thinking, we
may best honour those sources by returning to the texts themselves—by
trying to engage with their strangeness, as well as with what in them may
seem unmistakably ‘ours’. These texts still speak to us of things we regard
as of crucial importance; yet we also experience them as coming from an
intellectual past which is, in L. P. Hartley’s oft-quoted phrase, ‘another
country’ where ‘they do things differently’. Even where they seem
to articulate familiar ideals, we encounter in them also some disconcerting
conceptual alignments. We can learn much from thinking through what
is surprising in them. Encountering what is unfamiliar about the past
can help ‘enlarge’ the mind, no less than encounters with strangeness in
the present.
A common myth about Enlightenment thinkers—seen through the lens
of later Romanticism—is that they privileged reason over emotion and
imagination. The texts discussed in this book offer a richer and more
nuanced treatment and enactment of the relations and interactions of
those three capacities of the mind. Adam Smith may be the most explicit
in theorizing their dynamic interactions; but he is not alone in incorpor-
ating that interplay into his writing style. The texts themselves demand to
be read—to use a phrase from Hume—with a wholeness of mind. There is
no hierarchical opposition here between the mind’s direct subjective
experience and its objective judgements—between experience and
reason—but rather a criss-crossing of paths forward and back between
immediacy and reflective thought.
We have seen in these texts a capacity to combine a passionate commit-
ment to inquiry with the cultivation of an expansive scepticism as an ideal
of intellectual character. That ideal was at its most explicit in David
Hume’s endorsement of the Sceptic. However, Hume’s version of it is
of a piece with d’Alembert’s and Diderot’s readiness to conjoin a strong
sense of the objectivity of knowledge with an equally strong sense that it is
constantly changing. There was often a fine balance between the Enlight-
enment desire to celebrate the expansion of knowledge and a sense of
trepidation at the hazards of the restless movement of the mind.
 LOOKING BACK ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT 165

In his essay on ‘The Sceptic’, Hume was addressing scepticism as a

character ideal rather than as an epistemological theory, though the two
themes could not be kept entirely separate. His treatment of scepticism—
though it was, in Kant’s sense, ‘pre-critical’—anticipated some of the
insights about the relativization of human knowledge to human conditions
of knowing which received fuller development in Kant’s Critiques. Kant
himself credited Hume with having woken him from his ‘dogmatic slum-
ber’. Yet, neither of them could be described as embracing the view of
knowledge now called ‘relativism’. Nor can either of them be seen as
‘dogmatic’ in their defence of the possibility of objective knowledge.
These texts speak to us from a time before Romanticism had accentu-
ated the emphasis on imagination and emotion in opposition to reason.
Seen through the lens of Romanticism, the Enlightenment can be
constructed as the Age of Reason. The texts themselves, however,
evoke an integrated approach to the structure of the mind—constructing
objectivity out of the resources of imagination and feeling, rather than
affirming those faculties against the rigidities of reason. While repudiating
the free-floating abstractions which they associated with some of their
predecessors, they framed their celebration of passions and imagination
with a respect for the guiding and regulating role of intellect in the
wholeness of the mind.
Some commentators have found in the transition from Enlightenment
repudiations of absolute power to the zeal of the Terror a dangerous
precedent for later attempts to prescribe a rigid system of dogmatically
held truths as the basis of social order. There may well be truth in that
claim—as a critique of the rigidities that can beset thinking which claims
the Enlightenment as its source of values. It is through the intervening
prism of Romanticism that the Enlightenment can be seen as an age
of rigid ‘system’. Yet nothing could be further from the intellectual
mood and spirit we encounter in directly reading texts of Diderot and
d’Alembert, of David Hume and Adam Smith, of Montesquieu, or Vol-
taire. We should be cautious of seeing these texts as coming from a lost
golden age of intellectual freedom and open mindedness. Yet they do
speak to us with a freshness and delight in a sense of new possibilities
opening up for the life of the mind.
There is always room for disagreement about where one period of
thought ends and another begins. History of philosophy, like other
forms of intellectual history, is more akin to an interpretive art than to
166 CONCLUSION

an exact science. The borders between the Enlightenment and Romanti-

cism are porous. Clearly Rousseau, in some important ways, belonged to
the Enlightenment—troubled though his friendships often were with
those we see in retrospect as more clearly identified with it. Yet his version
of the ideal of ‘closeness to nature’ can now seem to align him with
Romanticism. He insisted towards the end of his Discourse on the Origins
of Inequality that his glowing account of the middle stage of human society
was not meant to suggest that we should return to the forest and live like
bears. His critique of contemporary society was meant to be a call for
radical reform of institutions rather than an expression of nostalgia for lost
simplicity. Yet it is the emotional overtones of his own celebrations
of ‘closeness to nature’ that set him apart from other thinkers of the
Enlightenment era.
Discussing Rousseau in The Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin com-
mented that, although he is rightly regarded as one of the fathers of the
Romantic movement, the actual substance of what he had to say about
human beings, and about his contemporary society, was not so very
different from Enlightenment doctrines. What sets Rousseau apart, on
Berlin’s analysis, is his conviction of his own uniqueness and the emotional
fervour of the tone in which he describes his own particular states of
mind.5 The contrast in tone here is not a superficial difference; it reflects
different preoccupations, different ideals of intellectual character, different
hopes for the future of humanity. It is not just a matter of saying the same
things with more feeling. Rousseau’s passion for self-expression served to
located him more sharply on the Romanticism side of a divide that
Romanticism itself accentuated.
There are undeniable continuities also between the Enlightenment
thinkers I have selected for close reading in this book, and thinkers
more definitively associated than Rousseau was with Romanticism. For
example, Herder’s rejection of absolute values resonates with Hume’s
treatment of the Sceptic, though he takes much further than Hume or
Montesquieu ever did the idea of incommensurability between different
cultures. There are, nonetheless, hazards in making sharp distinctions
between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. If we share James
Schmidt’s distrust of the retrospective construction of ‘the Enlightenment’

5
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus,
1999), pp. 52–5.
 LOOKING BACK ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT 167

as a unitary intellectual movement, we should be sceptical also about

attempts to tighten its borders with Romanticism—not least because it
can give us a distorted view of what lies on either side of the border.
I have argued that the habits of sustained critique associated with
Enlightenment texts can themselves turn ‘spectral’ when they are plucked
out of their context without being rethought in a new one. It is unlikely
that Hume would see in contemporary ‘climate change scepticism’, for
example, an enactment of the intellectual character he attributed to his
Sceptic. That Sceptic was a shrewd judge of when it is reasonable to accept
the consensus on probabilities, while acknowledging that there is no
ultimate certainty to be had. Insistence on prolonged questioning and
doubting—beyond the point where a consensus of informed judgement
has been reached—can itself be a form of zeal.
The Enlightenment cannot be held responsible for later totalitarian
thinking. Nor did it deliver the future of endless progress envisioned
in Kant’s political essays. His future—our present—has delivered what
Montesquieu might have called ‘another universe’. It is in many ways
beyond, and in some ways darker than, the optimistic imaginings of our
Enlightenment predecessors. Yet we owe those genial thinkers much—
not least for their capacity to keep hope alive. They were able to connect
with their past while embracing—at times with poignant optimism—their
present and future. They were able to look on the horrors of their
times with indignation, but without despair. They kept their capacity for
laughter in the midst of grotesque absurdity. Perhaps we can best celebrate
them by trying to emulate their intellectual vitality, their wryness
and good humour, as we contemplate the shadows—both benign and
malign—which they left behind.
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 Further Reading

Prologue and Introduction

There is a large secondary literature discussing the upshot of Enlightenment
thought from contemporary perspectives. The following is a selection of such
works of particular relevance to the general concerns of this book.
Jonathan Israel’s A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual
Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2010) offers a short and accessible treatment of his controversial ideas on the ‘radical
Enlightenment’. For Israel, this radical strand in the Enlightenment is ‘the system of
ideas that, historically, has principally shaped the Western world’s most basic social
and cultural values in the post-Christian age’ (p. xi). On his account, this originally
clandestine intellectual movement matured in opposition to the mainstream
Enlightenment dominant in Europe and America in the eighteenth century. It
advocated, he argues, ideals of democracy, social and sexual equality, individual
liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and the separation of church and state.
This radical movement—centred on social reform and democracy—is set over
against a moderate strand which was more accepting of religious belief and current
institutions. Israel’s analysis stresses the centrality of Spinoza to the radical strand in
Enlightenment thought; he also stresses the continuities between Enlightenment
themes and contemporary concern with human rights. Israel’s theory of a sharp
distinction between radical and moderate streams of Enlightenment thought is
developed more fully in his three-volume historical study: Radical Enlightenment:
Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001); Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of
Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Democratic Enlight-
enment: Philosophy, Revolution and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011).
Israel’s interpretation of the Enlightenment stresses the revolutionary tenden-
cies and influences of what he calls the radical Enlightenment, highlighting the
interconnections between transformative ideas in science and in politics. In
the Introduction to the third volume in his trilogy—Democratic Enlightenment—
he responds to some of the criticisms raised against this emphasis on a revolutionary
strand in the Enlightenment, and also discusses its bearing on later ‘postmodern’
attacks on ‘universalist’ tendencies in Enlightenment thought.
A very different approach to the Enlightenment—from a politically conserva-
tive perspective—is offered in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity: The
170 FURTHER READING

British, French and American Enlightenments (London: Vintage Books, 2008). She
emphasizes the contribution of Enlightenment thought to the formation of ‘social
virtues’ of continuing ethical relevance. From that ethical perspective, the thinkers
of the British Enlightenment—moral philosophers such as Hutcheson, Hume, and
Smith—take on a greater significance than the more politically oriented French
philosophes. The Roads to Modernity is also of interest for its treatment of the varying
forms of Enlightenment thinking as distinctive ‘mentalities’. On Himmelfarb’s
account, the Enlightenment—as enacted in Britain, in France, and in America—
yields different forms of what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘the habits of the mind’
and ‘the habits of the heart’ that make up ‘the whole moral and intellectual state of
a people’. In that context, she presents the thought of eighteenth-century British
moral philosophers as offering possibilities for a defence and revival of exemplary
British values.
From a more critical perspective, in another very different approach, John Gray
has offered a provocative critique of the upshot of the ‘Enlightenment project’ in
his book Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age
(London and New York: Routledge, 2007), originally published by Routledge in
1995 and reissued, with a new Introduction, in their Routledge Classics Series.
Drawing on Isaiah Berlin’s critiques of Enlightenment ideals from the perspective
of the supposedly greater ‘pluralism’ of a later ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, Gray
argues that the Enlightenment project—construed as a programme for the uni-
versal civilizing force of reason—has undermined itself, and is now exhausted as a
movement, though its cultural effects may be irreversible. Gray’s disaffection with
what he takes to be the Enlightenment project centres on its alleged ‘universalism’
and its dreams of endless progress towards the improvement of the human
condition.
Tzvetan Todorov’s In Defence of the Enlightenment, trans. Gila Walker (London:
Atlantic Books, 2009) offers a perceptive response to some common contemporary
criticisms of Enlightenment ideals. His account of the core principles of the
Enlightenment makes Rousseau’s thought central, emphasizing the understanding
of autonomy and the relations between ideas of truth and goodness. Of particular
interest, for my concerns in this book, is his treatment of the conceptual interplay
between ideas of the unity of the human race and the recognition of cultural
difference—between the celebration of a plurality of cultures and the affirmation
of universal human rights. His defence of the Enlightenment in a contemporary
context offers thoughtful discussion of issues arising from the legacy of colonialism,
the ramifications of globalization, and changing attitudes to torture.
The very idea of a unitary ‘Enlightenment project’ has been criticized by James
Schmidt in an interesting and important set of interrelated essays. Of particular
interest are ‘What Enlightenment Project?’ Political Theory, vol. 28, no. 6, December
2000, 734–57; ‘Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jacobins, British Hegelians,
 FURTHER READING 171

and the Oxford English Dictionary’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 64, no. 3, 2003,
421–43; ‘What Enlightenment Was, What It Still Might Be, and Why Kant May
Have Been Right After All’, American Behavioural Scientist, vol. 49, no. 5, January
2006, 647–63; ‘Misunderstanding the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”: Ven-
turi, Habermas and Foucault’, History of European Ideas, vol. 37, no. 1, 2011, 43–52.
Several of his pieces on ‘the Enlightenment project’ are available online through his
web page at Boston University.
James Schmidt has also edited an excellent collection, What is Enlightenment?
Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996), which includes material taken from Enlightenment
sources, along with an interesting selection of more recent philosophical discus-
sions. His Introduction to the volume includes a useful discussion of Kant’s
response to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in its intellectual context.
Also relevant to my introductory discussion of Kantian themes is a volume of
essays edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt, Kant’s Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009). My discussions of Kant in this book complement my
earlier essay in that volume, ‘Providence as Progress: Kant’s Variations on a Tale of
Origins’, pp. 200–15.
On Kant’s identification of the ‘age of Frederick’ with the ‘age of enlighten-
ment’ see Christopher M. Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia
1600–1947 (London: Allen Lane, 2006), Chapter 8, ‘Dare to Know’, especially
pp. 247–57. Voltaire offered a less adulatory account of Frederick the Great than
Kant’s in his entertaining memoir—drawing on their volatile friendship—written
at about the same time as Candide in 1759, and published posthumously in 1784:
Memoirs of the Life of Monsieur de Voltaire, trans. Andrew Brown (London: Hesperus
Press, 2007).
For Isaiah Berlin’s ideas on a ‘counter-Enlightenment’, which repudiated
the assumptions of the Enlightenment and set the scene for Romanticism, see
especially his books Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London:
Hogarth Press, 1979), and The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1999), especially Chapter 2, ‘The First Attack on Enlighten-
ment’, pp. 21–45. The idea of a ‘counter-Enlightenment’ is challenged by James
Schmidt in his paper ‘Misunderstanding the Question: “What is Enlightenment?”:
Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault’, mentioned above. The issue is also explored
in Joseph Mali and Robert Wokler, eds., Isaiah Berlin’s Counter-Enlightenment:
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (American Philosophical Society,
2003). Berlin’s interpretations of Hamann and Herder—central to the idea of a
‘counter-Enlightenment’—are challenged by Robert Norton in ‘The Myth of the
Counter-Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 68, no. 4, 2007, 635–58.
The readings of Enlightenment texts which I have offered are at odds in some
172 FURTHER READING

important respects with Berlin’s interpretations of the upshot of the Enlightenment.

However, no serious attempt to understand the intellectual history of modernity can
afford to ignore the profound significance of his imaginative and engaging insights
into Enlightenment writers and their critics.
Among older books which remain of enduring importance for understanding
the heritage of the Enlightenment, a stand-out is Peter Gay’s two-volume study:
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: 1. The Rise of Modern Paganism (London:
Wildwood House, 1966) and 2. The Science of Freedom (London: Wildwood
House, 1969). Gay’s approach to Enlightenment thinkers, while acknowledging
the many intellectual and political differences that divide them, highlights the ways
in which they are a ‘family of intellectuals united by a single style of thinking’. My
own approach to Enlightenment texts owes much to his efforts to articulate what is
distinctive in such ‘styles of thinking’. Also very useful for understanding the
general mood and tenor of Enlightenment thought—as well as for more detailed
discussion of particular thinkers—is Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlighten-
ment, trans. Fritz C. A. Coelin and James P. Pettigrove (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1951).
Leaving aside contested issues of the unity of its ‘project’, there are useful works
offering overviews of the Enlightenment in its historical context—among them:
the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, edited by Alan Kors (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002) and Harvey Chisick’s Historical Dictionary of the
Enlightenment (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2005). The Enlightenment World, ed.
Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf, and Ian McCalman (Abingdon
and New York: Routledge, 2007) offers a comprehensive selection of scholarly
papers on Enlightenment thought and culture from a diverse range of disciplinary
perspectives—including history, science, aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and litera-
ture.
The principal sources for Max Horkheimer’s critique of Enlightenment ideas of
Reason are his Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947),
especially Chapter 1, ‘Means and Ends’; and (with Theodor Adorno) Dialectic of
Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), especially Chapter 1, ‘The
Concept of Enlightenment’.

Montesquieu’s Persian Letters

For an informative discussion of the anomalies—and possible anachronisms—in talk

of eighteenth-century ‘cross-cultural’ contacts see Dorinda Outram’s chapter,
‘Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Enlightenment’, in Fitzpatrick, Jones, Knellworth,
and McCalman, eds., The Enlightenment World, pp. 551–67.
Sankar Muthu’s Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003) traces an ‘anti-imperialist’ strand in texts of the Enlightenment—focusing
 FURTHER READING 173

especially on Diderot, Kant, and Herder—against the background of a fascinating

discussion of Rousseau’s account of the history of humanity in the Discourse on the
Origins of Inequality, and earlier ‘noble savage’ literature. It contains an excellent
discussion of the ways in which Diderot’s presentation of Tahitian society in the
Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville subverts the tradition of the ‘noble savage’ even
as it draws on some of its ‘classic tropes’. Muthu also gives an interesting account of the
critique of European colonization in Diderot’s anonymous contributions to the
Histoire philosophiques et politique des deux Indes, written in collaboration with Abbé
Raynal. His readings of Kant’s political essays situate them informatively in relation to
broader themes in Kantian theories of knowledge and ethics.
For a brief discussion of Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville as a
critique of Christian morality, see Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the
French Enlightenment, Part Two, Chapter 4, ‘Three Stages on Love’s Way: Rous-
seau, Laclos, Diderot’ (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1959), pp. 133–61.
On the imagining of difference in Diderot’s Supplement, see Andrew Curran,
‘Logics of the Human in the Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville’, in James Fowler,
ed., New Essays on Diderot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
pp. 158–72. For a more general treatment of the European imagining of the Pacific
region see the writings of the art historian Bernard Smith, especially European
Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960; 2nd edn., 1985) and Imagining the Pacific: In the
Wake of the Cook Voyages (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992).
Edwin Curley discusses what is distinctive in Montesquieu’s approach to reli-
gious toleration in his essay, ‘From Locke’s Lettre to Montesquieu’s Lettres’, Midwest
Studies in Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 1, 2002, 280–306.
For an insightful and interesting discussion of Persian Letters as illustrative of the
use of the eighteenth-century genre of travel tale as a vehicle of political theory, see
a conference paper by Susan McWilliams, ‘Montesquieu’s Persian Letters: Travel,
Translation, and the Problems of Political Theory’ (2003), available online at the
website of the American Political Science Association.

Voltaire’s Voices

On the intellectual context of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, see Theodore

Besterman’s comprehensive study of Voltaire’s life and works, Voltaire (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1969). The work itself is discussed in Chapter 35, pp. 473–87.
Chapter 17, ‘Voltaire’s God’ (pp. 215–32) discusses the issue of Voltaire’s religious
beliefs in relation to eighteenth-century deism arguing that—in terms of our
contemporary distinctions—Voltaire’s views are close to agnosticism if not atheism.
174 FURTHER READING

A more readable biography, drawing extensively on Voltaire’s voluminous

correspondence, is Ian Davidson’s Voltaire (New York: Pegasus Books, 2010).
Peter Gay discusses the Philosophical Dictionary in his book, The Party of Human-
ity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
1971), Chapter 1, ‘The Philosophe in His Dictionary’, pp. 7–54. Also of interest is
his Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist, 2nd edn. (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1988). The first edition was published in 1959 by Princeton University Press.
Jonathan Israel discusses ‘Voltaire’s Enlightenment’ in Chapter 29 of his Enlight-
enment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man, mentioned
above, pp. 751–62.
The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire, edited by Nicholas Cronk (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009) is an extremely useful collection covering
philosophical, historical, and literary aspects of Voltaire’s writing. Of particular
interest are: Geoffrey Turnovsky, ‘The Making of a Name: A Life of Voltaire’,
pp. 17–30; David Beeson and Nicholas Cronk, ‘Voltaire: Philosopher or Philo-
sophe’, pp. 47–64; Russell Goulburne, ‘Voltaire’s Masks: Theatre and Theatrical-
ity’, pp. 93–108; John Renwick, ‘Voltaire and the Politics of Toleration’, pp. 179–
92; and Daniel Brewer, ‘The Voltaire Effect’, pp. 205–18.
Nicholas Cronk has also edited a volume Voltaire and the 1760s: Essays for John
Renwick (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 10; Oxford:
Voltaire Foundation, 2008) which includes useful material on the context of
Voltaire’s writings on toleration in that period. See especially Cronk’s own essay,
‘Voltaire and the 1760s: The Rule of the Patriarch’.

Hume’s Sceptic
For a brief informative overview of the relations between ancient and modern
scepticism, see Myles Burnyeat’s Introduction to his edited volume The Skeptical
Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 1–8. In addition to
Burnyeat’s own essay ‘Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?’—discussed in this
chapter—that volume contains a useful essay by Robert J. Fogelin, ‘The Tendency
of Hume’s Skepticism’ (pp. 397–412). Also relevant is another essay by Burnyeat,
‘The Sceptic in his Place and Time’, in Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and
Quentin Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984). There, Burnyeat contrasts modern and ancient versions of scepticism
with respect to the ‘insulation’ of ordinary beliefs from philosophical doubts.
Hume’s personality and intellectual character are beautifully discussed in the
standard biography, by E. C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1970). A new ‘intellectual biography’ is under preparation by James Harris
for publication with Cambridge University Press. Harris has also published ‘The
Place of the Ancients in the Moral Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in
 FURTHER READING 175

The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, vol. 8, no. 1, 2010, 1–11; and ‘Reid and Hume on
the Possibility of Character’, in Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning, eds., Character,
Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011), pp. 31–47.
For an interesting exploration of Hume’s attitude to religion, and of Samuel
Johnson’s attitude to Hume, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation,
vol. 1, Chapter 7, Sec. 3, ‘David Hume: The Complete Modern Pagan’, pp. 401–22.
Hume’s ideals of intellectual character—and the understanding of his own
intellectual character—have been central themes in Annette Baier’s important
work on his philosophy. See especially A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on
Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1991); Moral Preju-
dices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Death
and Character: Further Reflections on Hume (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008); and her essay, ‘Hume: The Reflective Women’s Epistemologist?’ in
Anne Jaap Jacobson, ed., Feminist Interpretations of David Hume (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 19–38 (also published in Moral
Prejudices).
I discuss Hume’s essays on the Epicurean, the Stoic, the Platonist, and the
Sceptic, in ‘Hume on the Passion for Truth’, in Feminist Interpretations of David
Hume, pp. 39–59; and Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in Chapter 7 of
Providence Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 265–78.

Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments

Knud Haakonssen’s edited volume, The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), is a comprehensive collection
of scholarly essays covering Smith’s contributions to ethics, political thought,
economics, aesthetics, and theory of language. Another useful collection is Vivi-
enne Brown and Samuel Fleischacker, The Philosophy of Adam Smith: The Adam
Smith Review, vol. 5, Essays Commemorating the 250th Anniversary of The Theory
of Moral Sentiments (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations has in general attracted more contemporary
attention than his Theory of Moral Sentiments; but there is growing interest in that
work’s intellectual grounding in the earlier book, and in the relations between the
two works. Recent commentary has become more nuanced in its approach to the
so-called ‘Adam Smith Problem’, which concerned an alleged inconsistency be-
tween the concern for others—central to The Theory of Moral Sentiments—and the
apparent defence of exclusive self-interest in The Wealth of Nations. Although
contemporary philosophers have often been more interested in Hume than in
Smith, there has also been increased recognition of the philosophical richness of
The Theory of Moral Sentiments in its own right.
176 FURTHER READING

Vivienne Brown’s Adam Smith’s Discourse: Canonicity, Commerce and Conscience

(London: Routledge, 1994) offers an excellent discussion of the writing strategies
of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and their bearing on the work’s relations to The
Wealth of Nations. See especially, Chapter 1, ‘Reading Adam Smith’s Discourse’
and Chapter 2, ‘Signifying Voices: Reading the Adam Smith Problem’.
For a comprehensive study of Adam Smith’s philosophy—centred on his
approach to virtue and his treatment of imagination and sympathy—see Charles
L. Griswold Jr., Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999). In a later essay, ‘Imagination: Morals, Science, and
Arts’, in Knud Haakonssen’s Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, pp. 22–56.
Griswold discusses the central role of imagination in Smith’s uncompleted com-
prehensive philosophical system. More recently, bringing Smith into imaginary
dialogue with Rousseau, Griswold has argued that Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’
may be better understood in terms of narrative strategies than through ocular
metaphors: ‘Smith and Rousseau in Dialogue: Sympathy, Pitié, Spectatorship and
Narrative’, in Vivienne Brown and Samuel Fleischacker, The Philosophy of Adam
Smith, pp. 59–84.
David D. Raphael’s The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) is a synthesis and revision of essays written
over several years on Smith’s moral philosophy. It is particularly useful for his
treatment of the progression of Smith’s thought throughout his works, and
through the successive editions of The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Fonna Forman-Barzilae’s Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolit-
anism and Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), offers a
comprehensive account of Smith’s moral theory in relation to Stoicism. She
argues that The Theory of Moral Sentiments is antithetical to Stoic cosmopolitan-
ism in refusing to accept ancient Stoic tendencies to break down the ethical
distinctions between concern for those close to us and concern for those more
remote. Her essay ‘Smith’s Anti-cosmopolitanism’, in Brown and Fleischacker,
The Philosophy of Adam Smith, pp. 145–60, offers a briefer version of the book’s
argumentation on cosmopolitanism. Smith’s relations with Stoicism are also
addressed in Chapter 4 of Vivienne Brown’s book, Adam Smith’s Discourse:
Canonicity, Commerce and Conscience.
On Smith’s treatment of sympathy and imagination, see—in addition to works
already mentioned—Alexander Broadie, ‘Sympathy and the Impartial Spectator’,
in Knud Haakonssen’s Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, pp. 158–88; and three
essays in Brown and Fleischacker’s The Philosophy of Adam Smith: Bence Nanay,
‘Adam Smith’s Concept of Sympathy and its Contemporary Interpretations’
(pp. 85–105); Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, ‘Sentiments and Spectators: Adam Smith’s
Theory of Moral Judgement’ (pp. 124–44); and Robert Urquhart, ‘Adam Smith’s
Problems: Individuality and the Paradox of Sympathy’ (pp. 181–97). Also relevant
 FURTHER READING 177

to consideration of the differences between Smith’s version of sympathy and

contemporary concepts is Stephen Darwall, ‘Empathy, Sympathy, Care’, Philo-
sophical Studies, vol. 89, 1998, 261–82.
Martha Nussbaum discusses Smith’s use of literary examples in his account of the
impartial spectator, in ‘Steerforth’s Arm: Love and the Moral Point of View’, in her
collection Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 335–64. For an interesting argument that aesthetic
judgements are central to the intellectual context of Smith’s impartial spectator
model, see Karen Valihora, ‘The Judgement of Judgement: Adam Smith’s Theory of
Moral Sentiments’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 41, no. 2, 2001, 138–61.
On the interconnections of philosophy, politics, and economics in relation to
Adam Smith, and more generally to the Enlightenment, see especially Emma
Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and also her essay jointly
authored with Amartya Sen, ‘Adam Smith’s Economics’, in Knud Haakonssen,
The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, pp. 319–65.
On Adam Smith’s life and intellectual context, there are two recent biographies:
Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd
edn., 2010) (originally published in 1995); and Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith:
An Enlightened Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). There is also an
engaging short memoir essay by Ian Simpson Ross, ‘Adam Smith’s Smile: His
Years at Balliol College, 1740–46, in Retrospect’, in Brown and Fleischacker’s The
Philosophy of Adam Smith, pp. 251–62.

The Encyclopedia

For an informative discussion of the project of the French Encyclopedists, placing it

in the broader context of the history of Encyclopedias, see Richard Yeo, ‘Encyclo-
paedism and Enlightenment’ in Fitzpatrick, Jones, Knellworth, and McCalman,
eds., The Enlightenment World, pp. 350–65. Yeo has also written a comprehensive
study of the cultural significance of eighteenth-century scientific dictionaries:
Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the
Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979) traces
the history of successive editions of the Encyclopedia—the processes of its produc-
tion and circulation, and its role in the diffusion of Enlightenment ideas. His later
book The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New
York: Basic Books, 1984) contains a chapter ‘Philosophers Trim the Tree of
Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopédie’, which relates
178 FURTHER READING

Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s re-mapping of knowledge to earlier schematic models,

including Bacon’s.
There is a useful overview of the history of the Encyclopedists’ project in
R. J. White, The Anti-Philosophers: A Study of the Philosophes in Eighteenth Century
France (London: Macmillan, 1970), Part Three, ‘The Encyclopedia’, pp. 91–118.
A more recent assessment of the work’s significance is Daniel Brewer, ‘The
Encyclopédie: Innovation and Legacy’, in James Fowler, ed., New Essays on Diderot
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 203–19. On the issue of the
philosophes’ political programme—or lack of one—see David Garrioch, ‘The Party
of the Philosophes’, in Fitzpatrick, Jones, Knellworth, and McCalman, eds., The
Enlightenment World, pp. 426–41.

Rameau’s Nephew
My discussion of Rameau’s Nephew has benefited especially from insights in Jean
Starobinski’s ‘The Man Who Told Secrets’, New York Review of Books, vol. 20, no.
4, 22 March 1973, pp. 18–21, and James Schmidt’s ‘The Fool’s Truth: Diderot,
Goethe and Hegel’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 57, no. 4, 1996, 625–44.
For an illuminating discussion of the German reception of Rameau’s Nephew see
Margaret Stoljar, ‘The Musician’s Madness: Goethe and Hegel on Le Neveu de
Rameau’, Australian Journal of French Studies, vol. 24, No. 3, 1987, 309–32.
The real Rameau’s nephew, and his resemblances to the character created by
Diderot, are discussed by Milton F. Seidon in ‘Jean Francois Rameau and Diderot’s
Neveu’, Diderot Studies, vol. 1, 1949, 143–91. On the musical background to
Rameau’s Nephew—including the debate between Rousseau and Rameau senior
on harmony versus melody as the primary source of musical expression—see
Cynthia Verba’s chapter, ‘Music and the Enlightenment’, in Fitzpatrick, Jones,
Knellworth, and McCalman, eds., The Enlightenment World, pp. 307–22; and Mark
Darlow, ‘Diderot’s Voice(s): Music and Reform, from the Querelle des Bouffons
to Le Neveu de Rameau’, in James Fowler, ed., New Essays on Diderot (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 203–19.

Kant’s Perpetual Peace

Pauline Kleingeld gives a useful overview of the range and history of political ideas
of cosmopolitanism in her entry on ‘Cosmopolitanism’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy. See also her essay, ‘Kant’s Changing Cosmopolitanism’, in Amélie
Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt, eds., Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a
Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide, pp. 171–86. For a detailed and informative
account of Kant’s concept of cosmopolitan right in relation to other German
 FURTHER READING 179

cosmopolitan theories see her book Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical
Ideal of World Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
In addition to the collections on Kant’s political essays already mentioned as
further reading in relation to the Introduction to this book, there is a useful volume
edited by James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Perpetual Peace: Essays on
Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). For contemporary
perspectives on Kantian cosmopolitanism see, in that volume, Jürgen Habermas,
‘Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hind-
sight’ (pp. 113–54) and Martha Nussbaum, ‘Kant and Cosmopolitanism’ (pp. 25–
58); and also Chapter 7 of Pauline Kleingeld’s Kant and Cosmopolitanism, ‘Kant’s
Cosmopolitanism and Current Philosophical Debates’.
For broader discussions of cosmopolitanism in the context of contemporary
political philosophy, see Jeremy Waldron, ‘What is Cosmopolitan?’, Journal of
Political Philosophy, vol. 8, 2000, 227–43; Gillian Brock, Global Justice (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009); Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, eds., The
Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005); David Held, Cosmopolitanism: A Defence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003);
and Cosmopolitanism: Ideals, Realities and Deficits (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010);
and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
(London: Allen Lane, 2006)—a book which engagingly combines the genres of
political essay and memoir.
Seyla Benhabib’s The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) contains useful chapters on Kant on
‘hospitality’ and cosmopolitan right (pp. 25–48); and on Hannah Arendt’s
treatment—in Part II of The Origins of Totalitarianism—of ‘the right to have
rights’ (pp. 49–69). Benhabib’s later book, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006) contains her two Tanner Lectures on Human
Values, with responses by Bonnie Honig, Will Kymlicka, and Jeremy Waldron,
together with a reply from Benhabib.
Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the ‘right to have rights’ is in Part II of her Origins
of Totalitarianism (1951) (rev. edn., New York: Schocken, 2004). She discusses the
situation of refugees also in her essay ‘We Refugees’, published in 1943 in The
Menorah Journal; republished in Marc Robinson, ed., Altogether Elsewhere: Writers in
Exile (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994), pp. 110–19. Arendt’s ‘We Refugees’ is
discussed by Gorgio Agamben in a brief essay written in 1993, translated as
‘Beyond Human Rights’ in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought
in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and
also included in Agamben’s Means without End: Notes on Politics (Theory Out of
Bounds, vol. 20) (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
On the bearing of the idea of ‘the right to have rights’ on contemporary attitudes to
asylum seekers and refugees, see Frank Michelman, ‘Parsing “A Right to have
180 FURTHER READING

Rights’ ”, Constellations, vol. 3, 1996, 200–9. Arendt and Agamben are also dis-
cussed in relation to contemporary refugee issues in Andy Lamey, Frontier Justice:
The Global Refugee Crisis and What To Do About It (St Lucia: University of
Queensland Press, 2011).
Arendt’s reconstruction of a Kantian political philosophy can be found, with a
very helpful interpretive essay, in Ronald Beiner, ed., Hannah Arendt: Lectures on
Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). For useful
and engaging discussions of Arendt’s version of judgement see Max Deutscher,
Judgment After Arendt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); and In Sensible Judgement (Alder-
shot: Ashgate, 2013).
Samuel Fleischacker, in A Third Concept of Liberty (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1999) integrates themes from Kant and Adam Smith through readings
of The Critique of Judgement and The Wealth of Nations, arguing that both authors
think of liberty as a matter of acting in accordance with the capacity for judgement.
He presents this approach as a third kind of liberty, distinct from Isaiah Berlin’s
‘positive’ freedom—construed as participation in the political realm—and his
‘negative’ freedom, construed as a lack of interference.

Conclusion
Giovanna Borradori’s Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas
and Jacques Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003) brings
together two important perspectives on contemporary terrorism in the context of a
critical reassessment of the political ideals of the Enlightenment. The dialogue with
Derrida, especially, offers interesting insights into how a rethinking of Enlighten-
ment ideals might contribute to a better understanding of contemporary issues of
tolerance and hospitality to refugees.
On the history of ideas of universal human rights in relation to the Enlighten-
ment ideals, see Lynn Hunt’s excellent Inventing Human Rights: A History (New
York and London: W. W. Norton, 2007). Chapter 1, “ ‘Torrents of Emotion”:
Reading Novels and Imagining Equality’, is especially interesting in highlighting
eighteenth-century emphasis on empathy and inwardness—enacted in the devel-
opment of the literary genre of the novel.
On the role of Enlightenment thought in the development of modern ideas of
‘the secular’ Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008) is invaluable. See especially Part IV, ‘Narratives of Secularisation’,
pp. 423–538. Also of interest is his later essay ‘What Does Secularism Mean?’, in his
collection Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA and London:
Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 303–25. Taylor’s view is ultimately that the
‘immanent’ version of moral motivation, associated with the Enlightenment, is
impoverished by the absence of a viable sense of transcendence. Yet the discovery
 FURTHER READING 181

of intra-human sources of moral consciousness remains for him an enduring

achievement. Unlike him, I am content to celebrate Enlightenment versions of
the secular without hoping for a new version of transcendence. My understanding
of conceptual shifts around the idea of the secular which are played out in the texts
discussed in this book nonetheless owes much to his analysis.
On the historiography of the Enlightenment, Daniel Brewer, in The Enlighten-
ment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), explores the historical construction of the Enlightenment;
its own contribution to modern historiography; and its role in the formation of
modern French political culture. The concluding chapter of Sankar Muthu’s
Enlightenment Against Empire, ‘The Philosophical Sources and Legacies of Enlight-
enment Anti-Imperialism’, offers some interesting reflections on the exercise of
reading Enlightenment texts from contemporary political perspectives—especially
on the distortions that can arise from the assumption of a unitary ‘Enlightenment
project’, and from an uncritical identification with ideas of cultural superiority and
progress.
 Acknowledgements

Several passages in Chapter 1—differently framed—have previously appeared in an

essay, ‘Imagining Difference: Cosmopolitanism in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters’,
included in a Special Section on Politics and Literature published in Constellations,
vol. 19, no. 3, 2012.
I am grateful to Amélie Rorty for encouragement and many helpful suggestions
on earlier drafts. I wish also to express my appreciation to several anonymous
readers who have provided painstaking and constructive comments.
 Index
Adorno, Theodor 5
Alembert, Jean le Rond d’ 112–26
Arendt, Hannah 151, 152–4, 179–80
Aristotle 100, 159
arts, liberal 108–10, 118, 123–4
asylum seekers 149–51, 160; see also
hospitality
atheism 43, 48–52, 56–7, 78–9, 83–4,
163; see also deism; religion
Bacon, Francis 110–16, 123
Bakhtin, Mikhail 105
Bayle, Pierre 49
Beeson, David 57
Benhabib, Seyla 149–50, 179
Berlin, Isaiah 2, 171–2
Besterman, Theodore 47, 56
Boswell, James 78–9, 84
Brown, Vivienne 105–7, 176
Burnyeat, Myles 63–4, 174
Casanova, Giacomo 45
Cassirer, Ernst 13, 172
Condorcet, Marquis de 113
conscience 43, 92–3; see also impartial
spectator
Curley, Edwin 42–3
cosmopolitanism 22, 27–8, 31–2, 43,
154, 178–9
in Kant 10, 18, 141–5, 148–52
see also multiculturalism
d’Alembert, see Alembert, Jean le
Rond d’
death
Derrida on 90
Epicureans on 3–4, 86–7
Hume on 73–4, 78–9
Smith on 86–90, 94–5
see also grief; immortality
deism 43, 56, 84, 173; see also atheism;
religion
Derrida, Jacques 4, 90, 180
detachment 156
in ancient scepticism 63–4
in Hume 66, 72–4
in Persian Letters 32
in Rameau’s Nephew 129, 136
in Smith 96–8, 104, 106
see also impartial spectator; Stoicism
Diderot, Denis 112–14
Encyclopedia entry 117–19, 122–4
Paradox of the Comedian 137
Rameau’s Nephew 116, 127–39, 153–4
Supplement to the Voyage of
Bougainville 21–3, 173
empathy 91–2; see also sympathy
Encyclopedists, see Alembert; Diderot
Epictetus 98; see also Stoicism
Epicureans 3–4, 14, 49, 61–3, 86–7
equality, sexual 34–40
Euripides 14
Forman–Barzilae, Fonna 97, 176
fortune 74, 98–103; see also providence;
Stoicism
Foucault, Michel 136
Frederick the Great 10, 113, 171
Gay, Peter 6, 172–3, 175
Gray, John 170
genius 118–26, 153
grief 88–90, 93; see also death
Griswold, Charles Jr 104–5, 144, 176
Habermas, Jurgen 5, 179, 180
Hamann, Johann Georg 16–17
Hegel, Georg Friedrich 127–9,
136, 139
Himmelfarb, Gertrude 169–70
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan 161
Horkheimer, Max 5
hospitality 147–9, 162; see also asylum
seekers; cosmopolitanism
human rights 4, 160, 179–80
Hume, David
death 82–4
184 INDEX

Hume, David (cont.) ‘Perpetual Peace’ 141–7, 153

Dialogues Concerning Natural ‘What is Enlightenment?’ 9, 155
Religion 79, 83 Kraus, Christian Joseph 16
friendship with Adam Smith 82–3
Inquiry Concerning Human light, metaphors of 1, 4, 12, 59
Understanding 64–5, 66–7, 110 in Bacon 111–12
Letters in Epicureans 14
from Adam Smith 84 in Kant 12, 15–17
to Henry Home 65 in McCarthy, Cormac 17
from Voltaire 59 in Petrarch 14–15
My Own Life 65, 84 in Plato 13, 105
‘Of Essay Writing’ 78 in Spinoza 13
‘The Sceptic’ 61–75 in Stoics 13
‘Of the Standard of Taste’ 75–8, 119 Locke, John 42–3, 119
Huntington, Samuel 161 Lucretius, see Epicureans

imagination 7, 12, 21–3, 158–60, 165 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de 23–6,

in Arendt’s Kant Lectures 152–4, 157 48, 161
in Bacon’s On Truth 111–12 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de 2, 26–44,
in the Encyclopedia 114–18, 123–6 156, 162
in Hume’s works 65–7, 71, 78, 80 Moser, Friedrich Karl van 15
in Kant’s works 142, 147, 156 multiculturalism 1, 43–4, 159, 161–2;
in Persian Letters 27, 29, 41–3 see also cosmopolitanism;
in Smith’s works 82, 85–96, 102, 105, tolerance
106–7, 108–110 music 130–2, 138
immortality 43, 78–9, 86–7, 94–5; Muthu, Sankar 22, 172–3, 181
see also death
impartial spectator 93–8, 102–4, 107, Nagel, Thomas 89, 102
144, 156, 159; see also conscience narrative 17–18, 36, 38, 41, 131, 162;
Israel, Jonathan 168, 174 see also travel tales; voices,
multiple
Johnson, Samuel 78–9, 84 Newton, Isaac 109–10
judgement
in ancient scepticism 63–4, 67–9 objectivity 41–2, 58, 165
in Arendt 152–5, 158 in Hume 68, 75–80
in Encyclopedia 118–25 in Smith 104–5, 110
in Hume 67–9, 76–8 in Kant 125, 154
in Kant 124–6, 155–7 see also relativism
in Persian Letters 25–7, 41, 43 optimism 17–19
in Smith 93–4, 101–7
Petrarch, Francesco 15
Kant, Immanuel piacular 102; see also fortune
Anthropology 154 Plato 13, 40, 47, 59, 95, 104–5, 117, 123
‘Contest of Faculties’ 144 pluralism 43, 154, 170
Critique of Judgement 124–6, 151–3, progress 10–11, 15–18, 162
155, 157, 180 providence 18, 54–5, 65, 101, 107, 145;
Critique of Pure Reason 156–7 see also fortune
‘Idea for a Universal History’ 9–10, Pyrrhonism 63–6, 79
16, 99, 143, 145–6
Metaphysics of Morals 148 Quintilian 116
 INDEX 185

refugees, see asylum seekers
relativism 25–6, 27, 33, 104, 154, 157,
165; see also objectivity
religion 42–3, 46, 49, 51–3, 56–8, 79,
82–5, 88, 162–3; see also deism;
secular, idea of
Revolution, French 144
Romanticism 1–3, 164–7, 171–2
Rousseau, Jean–Jacques 22–3, 130–2,
166, 173
Russell, Bertrand 6–7
cosmic order 24, 32–3, 95–6, 120
detachment 96–9, 106–7
Swift, Jonathan 21
sympathy 85–92, 144, 152
Taylor, Charles 163, 180–1
theatre 131–2
Todorov, Tzvetan 170
tolerance 4, 40–4, 46, 161–2
torture 25, 54
travel tales 21–4; see also narrative

Schmidt, James 11–12, 131, 135, 166–7, voices, multiple

170–1 in Persian Letters 29, 41
secular, idea of 43, 85, 88, 162–3, 180–1; in Smith 105–8
see also religion in Voltaire 45–8
Sextus Empiricus 63 see also narrative
Shakespeare, William 127–8 Voltaire 6, 14
Smith, Adam Candide 45, 55
‘History of Astronomy’ 108–10 Letters Concerning the English
Letters Nation 21–2, 46
to David Hume 84 Memoirs 171
from and to William Strahan 83 Philosophe Ignorant 58–9
Theory of Moral Sentiments 81–108; Philosophical Dictionary 46–55
see also impartial spectator Poem on Lisbon Earthquake 18–19
Wealth of Nations 109, 175
Spinoza, Benedict de 13, 50, war 142–8
119, 128–9 Williams, Bernard 102
Starobinski, Jean 129, 135–6 Wilson, Catherine 62
Stoicism 13, 17, 72–4, 129, 176 wonder 27–8, 33