When viewed in terms of cultural visibility, intellectual life in Enlightenment Europe can appear spectacular. Some of the period’s biggest stars—Isaac Newton, Voltaire, Rousseau—were famous because of their ideas, and many authors went to considerable lengths to cultivate their public personae, whether as urbane wits or moral leaders of the nation. Those efforts were fostered by the tendency to glorify celebrated thinkers and writers both in print and in art: their life stories were recounted in academic éloges and biographical dictionaries, and their faces were immortalized through busts, statues, and the growing market in inexpensive portraits. Of course, as Antoine Lilti has emphasized, celebrity culture affected not just those who were lionized as intellectual and literary heroes but also entertainers, artistic virtuosi, and political leaders.1 Still, it helped to create an exceptional amount of interest in the traits and habits of gens de lettres.
The term gens de lettres was broad and somewhat nebulous in meaning during the eighteenth century.2 Just as the canon of “great Frenchmen” covered a range that included statesmen and soldiers as well as writers, scientists, and philosophers, the title of gens de lettres was applied to many sorts of people who engaged in intellectual activity.3 The plural term gens de lettres was relatively gender-neutral, in contrast to terms like femmes savantes and femmes philosophes (both of which were pejorative). It was also more ideologically neutral than philosophe, a figure often endowed with specific moral characteristics—like critical reason and civic responsibility, as pro-Enlightenment authors insisted, or impiety and cynical self-interest, as their anti-philosophe adversaries countered.4
The appellation of gens de lettres was not necessarily synonymous with écrivains or auteurs. After all, as Voltaire observed, one could belong to the former category without ever putting pen to paper: “There are many gens de lettres who are not authors, and they are probably the happiest; they are shielded from the weariness that the writerly profession sometimes brings, from the quarrels that rivalry engenders, from partisan animosities, and false judgments; they have more solidarity among themselves and take greater pleasure in society. They are the judges and the others are judged.”5 While Voltaire’s remark was clearly intended to make a wry point about the persecutions suffered by some contemporary authors (himself included), it also highlights two traits that provided a group identity to gens de lettres: a certain solidarity among themselves, and a prudent distance from society.
For the medical authors we examined in Chapter 1, what bound this group together was a particular set of ailments and obsessions, which physicians like Tissot believed they could cure through stern and sound advice to all those who engaged in mental work. When they dwelled on the obsessional aspect of mental endeavor, those doctors reflected a more general cultural belief: namely, that those who belonged to the ranks of gens de lettres shared a common passion—the passion for learning—that differentiated them from the common herd. Because it entailed a mixture of rational, sensuous, and social qualities, that passion was regarded with a combination of admiration and suspicion.
This ambivalence is evident in the abbé Claude Yvon’s Encyclopédie article “Amour des sciences et des lettres,” a text taken (without explicit attribution) from Luc de Clapier Vauvenargues’s Introduction à la connaissance de l’esprit humain (1747). After a melancholic reflection on the sense of emptiness and imperfection that underpinned the passion for learning, Yvon (citing Vauvenargues) declared that “one cannot have a great soul or a somewhat penetrating mind without some passion for Letters. Most men honor Letters as they do religion or virtue: that is, as something that they can neither know, nor practice, nor love.”6 Those lines sum up the period’s double-edged attitude about scholarly pursuit: a passion for learning was essential to greatness of soul and intellect, but only the fit and few could truly feel or understand it. The text also expressed broader thinking by underscoring that people gripped with this passion were inclined to misdirect it or carry it to excess. Rigorous knowledge seeking, in this view, wasn’t appropriate for everyone, and those who undertook it required guidance to avoid its dangers.
The notion that knowledge seeking is rooted in passion had, of course, existed prior to this period. The seventeenth-century philosophers René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche were ambivalent about curiosity and wonder, the two emotions they associated with intellectual endeavor. What made these cognitive passions problematic, in their eyes, were the nonintellectual motives that sometimes drove the desire to learn. In La Recherche de la vérité (1641), Descartes commented that “the desire to know, which is common to all men, is an incurable malady” and characterized insatiable, blind curiosity as particularly unhealthy.7 In De la recherche de la vérité, où l’on traite de la nature de l’esprit de l’homme (1674–75), Malebranche ridiculed “those so called studious persons” who, although lacking the capacity to meditate, were moved to read ambitiously either by excessive esteem for some author or by “the stupid vanity that makes us hope to be esteemed as scholars.”8 However, there is an important distinction between the excessive, unproductive desire for knowledge criticized by Descartes and the sort of wonder or “admiration” that he described elsewhere as compatible with knowledge—as, for example, when he spoke of intellectual joy in article XCI of the Passions de l’âme (1649).9 Descartes was one of the theorists who elaborated what Susan James calls an “internally complex conception of knowledge . . . closely linked to emotion” and who emphasized the joy that is achieved when the mind “rejoices in the operations of its own understanding.”10 Moreover, as Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park contend, curiosity was revalued by 1750 as a positive spur to knowledge, a respectable motive underlying earnest application to intellectual inquiry.11
The changing status of the cognitive passions was tied to a larger reconfiguration of philosophy that rejected the Stoical antithesis between reason and affect, took a serious interest in the psychological and physical underpinnings of the emotions, and saw the passions not as vices or obstacles to reason, but, rather, as forces instrumental to maintaining human life, bringing happiness, and pushing people to improve their condition.12 Proponents of this view regarded the wish to improve and expand one’s mind as an urge inherent to human nature—one that, with proper discipline and direction, could both extend knowledge and enable the individual to live a good and virtuous life. As part of their effort to integrate mathematics and the scientific disciplines into the quest for noble self-cultivation, Descartes, Pascal, and Leibniz developed methods for training and perfecting the intellect that took account of the role played by the emotions in knowledge seeking.13 These views, along with John Locke’s sense-based philosophy of mind, were adapted and expanded by various eighteenth-century French authors, ranging from sensationist epistemologists like Etienne Bonnot de Condillac to libertine writers like Boyer d’Argens.14
Overzealous or misdirected indulgence in learning was nonetheless an ongoing concern in eighteenth-century discussions of scholarship, and that worry was accentuated by medical warnings about the health risks of mental application. The association of study with work and strain suited both the polemics of the day and the newly revalorized myth of the suffering scholar. Whereas Rousseau emphasized the collective social and moral weakness produced by the advancement of the arts and sciences, Voltaire underscored the personal debility caused by intellectual effort, drawing attention throughout his correspondence to his ardent, exhausting stints of reading, meditating, and writing.
All of these factors fostered a perception of gens de lettres as a group that was temperamentally distinct from the larger cultural establishment. An aura of mystery as well as difference surrounded this group: whereas gregariousness was commonly viewed as a defining trait of the contemporary French social elite, serious intellectuals operated, according to some of their observers, in an affective register of intense inwardness and separateness from the world.
Curiously, aside from being mentioned occasionally in historical discussions of genius, this particular image of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century gens de lettres has not received much attention—despite the fact that emotions have become a popular object of study in the past two decades.15 This may be due to the preoccupation with sentimentalism among scholars interested in emotions in Old Regime or Revolutionary-era France. Sentimentalism has inspired a range of interpretations, negative as well as positive. One of the sharpest critiques is that of William Reddy, who associates sentimentalism with “effusive, lachrymose emotives” that externalized extreme feeling via tears, sighs, trembling, falling on one’s knees, and so on; he argues that those “emotives” were suffocating for those who weren’t inclined to go along with such affectation.16 Taking a different view, David Denby and Sara Maza emphasize the socially transformative powers of literary sentimentalism: its dramatic verbal and bodily languages acted, as Maza puts it, as “a solvent of class differences.”17 Building on that perspective, Lynn Hunt contends that sentimentalism popularized an empathetic, emotionally intense style of reading, which contributed to the emergence of human rights as a sociopolitical principle.18 Others have credited sentimentalism with such developments as the ascendancy of women in elite culture, the rise of a warmer and less authoritarian ideal of paternity, and the value placed by natural philosophers on empirical modes of scientific inquiry.19
My intent here is not to join the debate on sentimentalism’s social effects, good or bad. Rather, it is to stress that the effusive style of emotional expression typically associated with sentimentalism coexisted with very different affective styles.20 For example, Denis Diderot and other philosophes used sentimentalism as a tool: they aimed to reform theater, the novel, and the visual arts by making them vehicles for strong, even terrifying emotions that would literally jolt their audiences (it is worth pointing out the resemblance between this aesthetic project and the therapeutics of perturbation advocated by some contemporary biomedical theorists, particularly those who were experimenting with medical electricity).21 However, these same authors lauded the mastery over feeling, which they held to be characteristic of the sages of the world. It was, as Diderot argued in the Paradoxe sur le comédien (1769), sangfroid that allowed certain people to be clearheaded observers of the workings of the moral and physical world, including the histrionic blathering of the more impressionable souls in their midst. The persona of the knowledge lover was sometimes endowed with that cool temperament, but not always: he or she could also be portrayed as an enthusiast, with all of the negative as well as positive connotations that enthusiasm held at the time.22 In any case, this persona’s detached aura makes it difficult to assimilate into the sentimentalist paradigm, which was by definition outward-turning and socially directed.
The knowledge-lover persona also illustrates the limits of the historical narrative that views sociability as the main structuring value of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters.23 Such a narrative unquestionably fits certain works of this era, like the Considérations sur les moeurs de ce siècle (1751), where Charles Duclos described modern-day gens de lettres as convivial sorts who enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with the better educated species of gens du monde that had formed in their enlightened century.24 Gens de lettres certainly had greater social prominence in the Enlightenment era, a development aided by the emergence of what Geoffrey Turnovsky has called “a self-consciously new social elite, which appropriated ‘literary’ writing forms—along with their writers—in assertions of its cohesiveness, brilliance, indeed, its modernity.”25 However, as Lilti points out, eighteenth-century Parisian salons were not necessarily literary or intellectual venues: they were, above all, “the social spaces of elite leisure . . . deeply rooted in court society,” and the writers who frequented these social spaces were keenly aware of the asymmetrical relationship between themselves and the Grands who received them.26 Moreover, the image of the scholar as seamlessly integrated into fashionable society competed with the counterimage of the intellectual as yearning for solitude. Take, for example, these lines from Voltaire’s “Discours en vers sur l’homme” (1738):
God of thinking beings, God of fortunate hearts,
Conserve the desires you have given me,
This taste for friendship, this ardor for study,
This love of fine arts and solitude:
Those are my passions, my soul has at all times
Tasted consoling pleasures from their attractions.27
The tidy balance struck by Voltaire’s hemistichs—particularly in the line “This taste for friendship, this ardor for study”—suggests an equally tidy balance between the pleasures associated with sociability and intellectual endeavor. It also brings to mind the fluidity that existed between the “learned” versus “conversible” worlds in some aspects of salon culture.28 There were, however, other contexts in which the boundaries between those worlds were firmly upheld, along with the otherness of the learned vis-à-vis the nonlearned elite. One such context was the period’s debates on the inward-turning passions of the learned, a discussion that involved moral philosophers, physicians, pedagogical theorists, and gens de lettres themselves.
In his Encyclopédie article “Étude,” the Chevalier de Jaucourt drew on a long humanist tradition that regarded the pleasures of study as the highest, most universally rewarding source of human contentment.29 Citing Cicero for support, he declared that the contemplative life was fully compatible with the values and duties of active life—adding that, rather than clinging to old stereotypes and treating scholars with mocking disdain, the social elite of his day should themselves engage in study, both for its private “charms” and for the benefits it brought to the nation and to humanity at large. Jaucourt’s definition of study as a means of personal and collective refinement was clearly designed to appeal to worldly readers who placed a premium on polished language and manner. At the same time, he aimed to correct the pejorative view of scholars as boorish, low-born pedants, which had been common among seventeenth-century aristocrats—for whom refinement was tied not to book learning but to qualities like the keen social discernment, good taste, and politesse exercised by the honnête homme in courtly settings.30
Eighteenth-century moralists and pedagogues adapted and transformed the ideals of honnêteté: they invested study with broad edifying qualities and included both mental acuity and the capacity for deep feeling among the traits of the truly refined individual.31 This period expanded the categories by which people could be labeled as more or less refined, and more or less intelligent: it produced a remarkable number of histories of the human mind, typologies of sentiment and intelligence, and narratives describing the progress (sometimes negative) that had been brought about through learning and the ongoing march of civilization.32 Last but not least, it made the love of study more legitimate for women, despite the aura of ridicule that lingered in the wake of Molière’s famous satires of intellectually pretentious précieuses.
The moral effects that Jaucourt attributed to study—admiration for true glory, zealous love of country, and enhanced sentiments of humanity, generosity, and justice—illustrate the century’s general shift toward a more personal, feeling-based view of intellectual endeavor. The moral vocabulary of sensibility built upon a preexisting moralist rhetoric of finesse and délicatesse. Borrowing (without attribution) from Madame de Lambert, Jaucourt defined it in his short Encyclopédie entry “Sensibilité (morale)” as “a tender and delicate disposition of the soul that makes it easily moved or touched. . . . Sensitive souls have more existence than others: good things and bad are multiplied in them.”33 Sensibility was thus first and foremost a heightening quality—a trait that magnified feeling and made the sensitive more humane, more empathetic, and also more intelligent.
Magnification was not, however, perceived positively in regard to all affective experiences. In articles like “Digestion” and “Vapeurs,” for example, medical encyclopedists attributed intensified feeling mainly to people who constantly and fretfully observed their feelings and sensations, a group that included gens de lettres along with aristocrats, ecclesiastics, dévots, women of leisure, and people worn out from debauchery.34 And in the medical entry on sensibility, the Montpellier-trained physician Henri Fouquet equated heightened sensitivity in one body part with disruption of the overall animal economy.
Although Fouquet later dismissed this article as the “work of an écolier,” his reflections capture the suggestive range of connotations that sensibility held at the mid-eighteenth century, a range made possible by two premises: the vitalist notion that physiological sensibility and contractility were diffused throughout the body, and the assumption that the physical and moral realms of human existence were deeply interdependent.35 He began “Sensibilité, Sentiment (Médecine)” by characterizing the property as a “physical or material passion” common to all animals, which allowed individual organs to perceive and respond to the impressions made by external objects.36 He then evoked the theory of vital centers, which Dr. Louis de Lacaze had popularized in his Idée de l’homme physique et moral (1755), according to which the epigastric region acts as a sort of fulcrum or rallying center for many, if not all, of these organic passions (40). Next, he described organic sensibility as a “taste” or tact that could turn it in either of two opposing directions: an expansive “intumescence” that was triggered by positive, pleasing stimuli, or a compression incited by negative ones (41–42). A compression was a crisis, in the medical sense of a process that moved from irritation, to climactic reaction, to resolution: an organ reacting to an unpleasant stimulus would recoil until its sensitive principle came back to “consciousness” and expelled the humors that it had concentrated within itself—affecting, for good or bad, all the organs in its vicinity. Sensibility’s overall physiological scheme thus entailed a complex interplay between the particular organs or vital centers within the body, each of which felt its own passions and expanded or compressed in reaction to them. Vital departments were more or less lively, depending on how much stimulation they got—that is, on how much sensibility was “transported” to them—as a result of habit, age, sex, climate, and other factors (51).
As Fouquet’s text illustrates, the medical vocabulary used to explain sensibility was suffused with psychological metaphors, a rhetorical technique that lent an air of dynamic agency to the workings of the body’s organs. Human beings were, in this view, teeming with passions, pleasures, and pains deep within themselves, whether they realized it or not; and the more they stimulated certain vital centers—the brain, the heart, the stomach, and so on—the more those parts developed their own tastes, needs, and sensitivities. Out of this theory, theorists spun a functional anthropology that categorized people according to the organ or vital center that dominated their existence.
The tendency to set gens de lettres apart as a group was tied to this effort to typologize human beings along differential lines.37 It was also connected to the period’s veneration for great thinkers, which produced an abundance of eulogistic and biographical literature on France’s most eminent philosophers, scientists, and literary writers. That sort of writing unquestionably had a sociable thread running through it: academic eulogists commonly styled their subjects as national heroes because of their devotion to publicly useful knowledge and the exemplary civic-mindedness they showed in their private lives.38 Scholars themselves stressed certain social values as essential to good citizens of the Republic of Letters; examples of these values were modesty, civility, and trust toward other intellectuals; deference toward those at the top of the scholarly hierarchy; and a collaborative spirit (the last was deemed especially important for those engaged in the new, empirical style of natural philosophical experience).39 However, the collegial sociability that regulated behavior within the scholarly world coexisted with a topos that emphasized detachment from the larger social world. The tension between the two worlds was, as we shall see in Chapter 3, often dramatized in the period’s imaginative and biographical literature.
Another focus of dramatization was the moment of intellectual inspiration, standardly scripted as playing out far away from le monde. Fascination with that moment underpinned the notion (frequently mentioned in biographical notices) that true geniuses possessed a special, brain-centered constitution. In some cases, brain-centeredness was equated with tepidness in other affective realms. As Madame de Tencin put it, while pointing at the chest of Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, “what you’ve got there is all brain,” thereby implying that Fontenelle was a cold fish—an impression expressed in more elegant terms by Mme de Lambert, who described him as the embodiment of dispassionate reason.40 More typically, however, this constitution was endowed with its own kind of emotional intensity. Fontenelle recounted that Malebranche was seized at the age of twenty-six with a life-changing passion for reading Descartes when he stumbled upon the Traité de l’Homme in a Parisian bookstore.41 Descartes himself had a famous moment of enthusiastic illumination—as would Jean-Jacques Rousseau, even more famously, while walking on the route to Vincennes (to visit the imprisoned Diderot) a century later.42 Such emotional intensity was central to the foundational story that biographers often told of a great thinker’s discovery of his or her intellectual vocation. So, too, was the related theme of disdain for health and neglect of the body.
Ardor for learning also went hand in hand with a penchant for seclusion, like in this 1735 description of Baruch de Spinoza: “He was so ardent in his quest for truth that, although he had very weak health and needed a break [from his studies], he took so little respite that he once went for three entire months without leaving the house.”43 As Dinah Ribard emphasizes, biographers did not use the theme of retreat to suggest that eminent thinkers like Spinoza (or Pierre Bayle, Descartes, Malebranche, and, later, Rousseau) were reclusive out of a vainglorious desire to thumb their nose at the world. Rather, the theme served to signal the autonomy of the thinker vis-à-vis conventional categories of social or professional activity: academic eulogists often emphasized that a given scholar’s social withdrawal was episodic rather than permanent, serving, for example, as a prelude to a life spent in proximity to princes.44 Studious solitude nonetheless marked the cerebralist as a type who dwelled in a world apart from the rest of humanity, both spatially and psychologically.
Partial retreat from the world was central to the group habitus that developed when fifteenth-century northern European scholars first moved from university or monastic settings into urban family households, creating cloisterlike spaces within them that functioned, as Gadi Algazi has put it, as a “shield for a scholar’s vulnerable self.”45 What the eighteenth century added was an updated list of the dangers to which the scholarly self was vulnerable, as well as an emphasis on the dangers associated with study itself.
One risk associated with study was its tendency to cut scholars off from useful and necessary contact with the wider world. This was particularly anathema to those who placed a premium on the socially utilitarian aspects of learning. Even as they defended and celebrated learned endeavor, these writers cautioned intellectuals about the deleterious effects of spending too much time confined in their studies or libraries. Louis-Sébastian Mercier, for example, waxed lyrical in Le Bonheur des gens de lettres (1766) about the delights enjoyed by cerebralists, whom nature had endowed with “that expanded, active mind that is aroused by all sensations, and that avidly grasps their connections.”46 Yet he also warned in his Discours sur la lecture (1764) that the attraction of reading was liable to turn some into “solitary misanthropes, when we should be active citizens.”47
Although traditionally associated with male intellectuals, the principle of willed detachment from social and domestic obligations was embraced by some elite women who engaged in intellectual pursuits. Mme Du Châtelet displayed it at Cirey and at the court of Sceaux, where she and Voltaire worked so incessantly and kept such odd hours that they offended their more sociable companions. As the exasperated Baronne de Staal (Mme de Staal-Delaunay, protégée of the Duchesse du Maine, who held court at Sceaux) complained in a letter to the Marquise du Deffand, the renowned thinkers were like “two specters, with an odor of embalmed corpses that they seemed to have brought from their tombs. . . . Our ghosts don’t show themselves during the day; they appeared yesterday at ten at night, and I don’t think we’ll see them any earlier today. One is busy describing great events, the other commenting Newton. They want neither to gamble nor to go for a stroll: they are, indeed, two non-values in a society where their erudite writings have no pertinence.”48
This was, of course, just one of many images of Châtelet and Voltaire that circulated in the eighteenth century.49 What makes it striking is the emphasis that Staal-Delaunay placed on the socially inappropriate, literally unworldly quality of their zeal for scholarship. Voltaire took pains to counter that portrayal in his “Éloge historique de Madame du Châtelet” (1752) where he simultaneously lauded his late mistress’s quest for intellectual glory and praised her ladylike ability to hide her erudition from everyone except her fellow geometers and Newton specialists.50 His effort to shape Châtelet’s posthumous reputation may have been prompted by the smear campaign launched by Staal-Delaunay’s correspondent, Mme du Deffand, who wrote an extremely nasty portrait of Châtelet after her death.51 Both Staal-Delaunay and Deffand styled themselves as the upholders of worldly politesse and its imperatives, an aristocratic ethos that had little place for the unconventional behavior of those with intense scholarly inclinations.
Another set of imperatives emanated from the bourgeois ideology of family life. One of the more curious contributions to this sort of discourse was the anticelibacy competition held by the Académie Française during the 1770s, which inspired the otherwise unnotable bards Doigny du Ponceau and Jean-François Ducis to write epistles urging bachelor-scholars to marry, have children, and embrace the touching pleasures of domesticity and active civic involvement.52
The very existence of such a poetry competition might lead us to conclude that, as the century progressed, the ideal of sociability won out over the defense of solitude in portrayals of the intellectual. I would argue, however, that discussions of the temperament and role of gens de lettres oscillated between two opposing poles. The first was the ideology of active sociability and fellow-feeling, and the second was the topos of contemplative detachment from the social realm. Because the first was so firmly embedded in the ethos of the intellectual persona known as the philosophe, it was more loudly trumpeted than the latter. It did not, however, override the more established motif of speculative retreat, which was perhaps the most persistent element of the group habitus embraced by early modern scholars. Rather, the two coexisted, somewhat uneasily, in the images of intellectuals that circulated in the period’s letters, memoirs, eulogies, and fictional works. The taste for studious retreat was particularly pronounced among learned women: as Mme Du Châtelet wrote regarding the quiet existence she shared with Voltaire at Cirey, “My taste for solitude in good company does nothing but grow and become more attractive.”53 Speaking more generally, Jean le Rond d’Alembert commented: “When torn away from their solitude, gens de lettres find themselves swept up into a new whirlwind. . . . It is an experience that I have had, and which can be useful, as long as one doesn’t do it for too long.”54
For many commentators, both the pleasures and dangers of solitary meditation were personified by Archimedes, the ancient mathematician who was too lost in thought during the Roman siege of Syracuse in 212 BC to notice that his life was in danger. Plutarch’s Lives (widely admired by eighteenth-century readers, as Rousseau’s autobiographical works attest) included two stories about Archimedes in contemplative oblivion, both of which appeared in the life of Marcellus. The first was the tale that “the charm of his familiar and domestic Siren made him forget his food and neglect his person . . . being in a state of entire preoccupation, and, in the truest sense, divine possession with his love and delight in science.” The second was the story of Archimedes’ demise, when he was so “intent upon working out some problem by a diagram, and having fixed his mind alike and his eyes upon the subject of his speculation” that he either failed to notice or ignored the Roman soldier who had been sent to take him to appear before General Marcellus—so enraging the soldier that he killed Archimedes instantly.55
These anecdotes inspired diverse applications. Montesquieu mentioned the first story while commenting that pleasure and chance sometimes played a greater part in the discovery of truth than deliberate, laborious mental effort: “Archimedes found, in the delights of a bath, the famous problem that his long meditations has missed a thousand times.”56 Condillac used the same anecdote to support his thesis that deep thinkers were the group most liable to lose touch with the real world under the sway of the imagination, “whose characteristic is to arrest the impressions of the senses in order to substitute for them a feeling independent of the action of external objects.”57 Julien Offray de La Mettrie used the second story in his dedication to L’Homme machine (1747), to paint an erotically tinged picture of knowledge seeking: “It is a catalepsy or immobility of the mind, which is so deliciously intoxicated by the object that arrests and enchants it, that it seems to be detached, through abstraction, from its own body and everything that surrounds it, to be completely devoted to what it is pursuing. It feels nothing, by dint of feeling so intensely. Such is the pleasure that one feels both in seeking and in finding truth. Judge the power of its charms by considering the ecstasy of Archimedes; you know that it cost him his life.”58 The same tale got a more sanitized spin in the Encyclopédie article “Attention,” where Yvon praised Archimedes’ extraordinary powers of intellectual attention, so great that he ignored the fact that the world around him was being sacked.59 So, too, did Louis-Jean Levesque de Pouilly in his Théorie des sentiments agréables (1748), where—leaving out the story’s tragic ending—he cited Archimedes’ “charmed” state of mind/body detachment as an example of perfect philosophical happiness.60
By contrast, the medical encyclopedist Henri Fouquet cited Archimedes along with the mathematician François Viète to point out that the sensory oblivion observed in some deep thinkers had pathological repercussions akin to those seen in melancholics and maniacs: “a man absorbed in a deep meditation lives only in the head, so to speak.”61 A tandem citation of Archimedes and Viète also appeared in Johann-Georg Zimmermann’s discussion of the effects of excessive mental exertion in Von der Erfahrung in der Arzneikunst (1763).62 His friend and colleague Tissot also mentioned Archimedes and Viète together in his Traité des nerfs et de leurs maladies while warning about the dangerous detachment of mind from body, which doctors had observed in deeply absorbed gens de lettres, people with exalted imaginations, and the convulsionnaires of Saint-Médard.63
These authors obviously held different theories on what happened to thinkers in the state of deep mental concentration. For some, Archimedian attention exemplified optimal mental concentration, the state achieved by those rare souls capable of enjoying the sublime bliss of a meditative trance. This was the view of Yvon, in “Attention,” who favored blocking out sensations as much as possible to focus the mind on the quest for truth. It was also the view of the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet, who erected a veritable cult around painstaking focus on single objects of study—like the aphids to which he became sympathetically attached.64 For others, however, full intellectual absorption created a perplexing split between consciousness and other operations, which seemed to carry on in the absence of regulation and direction by the will.65 Physicians like Zimmermann and Tissot tended to medicalize extreme absorptive states of mind, and they used arguments similar to those which Dr. Philippe Hecquet had employed in the 1730s to debunk the miraculous claims of the convulsionnaires by “naturalizing” them.66
Clearly, then, despite efforts by many in the Republic of Letters to bring scholarly and artistic life into closer alignment with polite society, a distinctly different, asocial image of the knowledge seeker persisted. This was not simply because some intellectuals remained willfully aloof from le beau monde, as d’Alembert recommended. It was also due to the pervasive sense that the true “deep thinkers” of the world were constituted differently from the nonintellectual cultural elite as well as from the rest of society. According to this view, those who devoted themselves fully and intently to learned and creative endeavor had unique ways of feeling and sensing. Willfully or otherwise, they dwelt in a world apart.
Ominous as they sometimes were, warnings about the absorptive effects of deep thinking were not necessarily heeded. Moreover, sustained, solitary meditation was vigorously promoted in some contexts, including pedagogical works like L’homme de lettres (1764) by the antiquarian and Hebrew professor Jean-Jacques Garnier. Garnier urged his students to confine themselves as much as possible to their libraries and avoid everything that could distract them from their studies—including the tumult of worldly life, social visits, gambling, dissipation, and even passing romantic involvement. The true man of letters, he declared, was devoted exclusively to the cultivation of the mind: “His life is a continuous meditation, and retreat is his element.”67 Taking a dim view of the “mania for bel esprit” that he believed had seduced many contemporary writers, he declared that “by losing the taste for retreat one soon abandons the effort to cultivate one’s mind, and through a necessary consequence one ceases to be a man of letters to become a man of society.”68 Invoking Pythagoras, the only social role that Garnier recommended to his students was that of spectator. He even went so far as to wish that contemporary men of letters would revive the old custom of wearing a pallium to set themselves clearly apart from the social world.
Counter-Enlightenment critics also weighed in on the issue as part of their broader critique of the overreaching tendencies of modern gens de lettres, who, in their minds, ventured too far into society—and too far beyond the disciplines they were qualified to pursue. This was a favorite argument of the conservative journalist Elie Fréron, who contended that the very nature of the scholar was corrupted by excessive social engagement: “Gens de lettres have lost more by frequenting social circles than by living among themselves as they did in the past. It is true that they have gained fortunes, positions, and pleasures, but they have denatured, weakened, and debased their talents by taking on the tone of others. If one can put it in such terms, they have undone the original character that nature had given them.”69 Although Fréron was certainly no friend to Rousseau, his depiction of the un-denatured, solitary, highly “original” man of letters bears a resemblance to the self-portraits that Rousseau sketched after his dramatic break with Diderot and other philosophes in the late 1750s. From that point on, Rousseau made solitude and unsullied naturalness the cornerstones of his public persona.
The tensions between social engagement versus solitude come into sharper relief when one compares two different articles that Voltaire, one of Fréron’s biggest targets, wrote on the topic of gens de lettres. The first appeared in the seventh volume of the Encyclopédie (1757) and the second in his own Dictionnaire philosophique (1764). In the Encyclopédie, Voltaire praised contemporary intellectuals as superior to their predecessors because “the spirit of the century has made most of them as well-suited for society [le monde] as for the study [cabinet].”70 His tone in the Dictionnaire philosophique was quite different: “The men of letters who have rendered the greatest service to the small number of thinking beings spread around the world are the isolated authors, the true scholars enclosed in their study, who have neither argued on university benches nor muttered pronouncements in the academies; and those of this sort have almost all been persecuted. Our miserable species is so made that those who walk the beaten path always throw stones at those who are opening up a new way.”71 Seclusion, in the latter scenario, was what best suited true scholars. It did not protect them from persecution, but it did allow them to uncover new, useful sorts of knowledge.
Even the most convivial intellectuals spoke of a deep love for prolonged periods of solitary writing and thinking. It was, for example, a prominent theme of the letters that Diderot wrote to his mistress, Sophie Volland, during the fall of 1765. As he wrote in October, “Tomorrow, it will be eight days since I last left my study. . . . I’ve taken such a keen liking for study, application, and life with myself, that I’m tempted to stick to them”; and, again in November, “My taste for solitude increases by the moment; yesterday, I went out in my dressing gown and nightcap to go dine at Damilaville’s house. I’ve taken an aversion to dress clothes; my beard grows as much as it likes.”72 Diderot’s self-description here echoed the portrait of the absorbed geometer he would soon sketch in the Rêve de d’Alembert: he portrayed himself as gripped with an intense penchant for study and “life with himself,” exhibited externally by his neglected beard (reminiscent of the iconographic bearded philosopher of antiquity) along with the night-clothes he wore when venturing out for a social dinner.
To some degree, these letters confirm the precept of distance from society, which Lorraine Daston has called essential to the ideology of the philosophes.73 Diderot’s taste for scholarly retreat can also be tied to the admiration for Seneca that he developed in his later years—which, as Elena Russo argues, illustrates the inclination he shared with other philosophes for dwelling in “a sort of time-lag,” a state of detachment from the present that allowed them to commune with the great men of antiquity and the appreciative audience that awaited their works in the future.74
However, we should also keep in mind that the intent of the letters Diderot wrote to Volland was often seductive, as is amply clear in this passage: “My friend, the truth is that we’re not made for reading, meditation, letters, philosophy, or sedentary life. It’s a depravation for which we pay with our health. . . . We shouldn’t break altogether with the animal condition, especially since it offers both an infinite number of healthy occupations and some that are quite pleasant, and if I wasn’t afraid of scandalizing Urania, I’d tell you frankly that I would be healthier if I had spent some of the time I’ve stayed hunched over my books spread out instead over a woman.”75 By playfully contrasting the delights of solitary literary/philosophical endeavor with more robust carnal pleasures, Diderot pointed toward the two rival topos that structured the group habitus of eighteenth-century gens de lettres: on the one hand, the insistence on social/civic engagement, and on the other hand, the promotion of retreat (whether meditative, or of a different variety).
Solitary retreat was a prominent theme in the vignettes Diderot sketched of the thinkers and creative artists he most admired. I will explore his use of those personae more fully in Chapter 4, but it is worth citing one particular case here: Leibniz, or, more properly speaking, Leibniz as Diderot depicted him in the Réfutation suivie de l’ouvrage d’Helvétius intitulé “de l’Homme” (1775). Drawing, perhaps, on Fontenelle’s curious biographical portrait of Leibniz as a solitary (he was, in fact, a diplomat who led an active, worldly existence76), Diderot depicted the famous philosopher/mathematician as having spent thirty years in a serene meditative trance:
When Leibniz holed himself up, at the age of twenty, and spent thirty years in his dressing gown, plunged in the depths of geometry or lost in the shadows of metaphysics, he gave no more thought to obtaining a position, sleeping with a woman, or filling an old chest with gold, than if he’d been at death’s door. He was a reflecting machine, like a weaving loom or a machine for making stockings; he was a being who took pleasure in meditating; he was a sage or a madman, whichever you like, who placed infinite importance on the approval of his peers, who loved the sound of [intellectual] praise like a miser loves the sound of a coin.77
The point of this anecdote is twofold. Diderot sought, first of all, to refute the simplistic causal logic that Helvétius had applied to human nature, which posited physical sensibility as the universal impetus for all human actions. Bodily pleasure and pain may (as Diderot retorted in his imaginary conversation with the by-then deceased Helvétius) have been fundamental motives for the “voluptuous” Helvétius, but they simply didn’t fit the case of Leibniz: “You’re obsessed with Mlle Gaussin [the famous actress], but he is chasing Newton” (539). Second, Diderot was intent on underscoring the wide range of “species” of reason to be found in the human race: “human reason is an instrument that corresponds to all the varieties of human instinct . . . every man is led by his organization, his character, his temperament, his natural aptitude to combine such and such ideas preferentially, more than other ideas” (540). Leibniz, as Diderot characterized him, was a strange bird in that he was more interested in winning out over Newton than in spreading out over a woman; yet he was a uniquely human beast, with a mind propelled as much by its own well-developed habits as by the pleasures peculiar to his “species”: that is, the species of the ardent cerebralist. He conjectures that Leibniz was so intensely focused on making a glorious mathematical discovery (and being recognized for it) that if someone had broken down his door and entered his study “with pistol in hand” saying “your money, or your discovery of the calculus,” he would have handed over the key to his safe with a smile (539).
In addition to humor, Diderot infused his portrait of Leibniz with admiration for the great scholar’s prodigious powers of mental concentration. That sentiment is conveyed through the very particular machine analogy he used to describe Leibniz plunged in meditation: the stocking-weaving loom—which, as Daniel Brewer emphasizes in his reading of Diderot’s Encyclopédie article “Bas,” was “the most complicated machine of the time.”78 Diderot ends “Bas” by citing Charles Perrault’s wonder-struck observation on the stocking machine:
Those who have enough genius, not to invent such things but to understand them, fall into a state of deep astonishment upon seeing the almost infinite mechanisms [ressorts] with which the stocking machine is composed, and the great number of its diverse, extraordinary movements. . . . How many little parts pull the silk toward them, and then let it go and pull it back again, and then pass it through a stitch in an inexplicable manner? . . . It is quite bothersome and unfair, adds M. Perrault, that we don’t know the names of those who imagined such marvelous machines.79
In other words, far from reducing the stature of Leibniz’s genius, Diderot does just the opposite by characterizing him in Réfutation d’Helvétius as a “reflecting machine, like a weaving loom or a machine for making stockings.” That comparison elevates the venerable mathematician and philosopher into a special category of wondrous machine, one driven by a rare intelligence.
Diderot also used Leibniz to make another argument about the peculiarity of the passions that drove cerebralists, passions that had nothing to do with earthly pleasures like sex or money. Although he rejected Helvétius’s notion that all human actions and emotions could be boiled down to physical pleasure or pain, he agreed with the Helvétian thesis that passion of a certain sort is a prerequisite for intellectual superiority—and that dispassionate people are generally incapable of understanding a genius’s fiery enthusiasm for a certain field, art, or idea.80 Those endowed with genius were, as Diderot put it in his Salon de 1767, “poetic beings”: although nature usually doomed them to unhappiness, they were excellent to paint.81
Ultimately, Diderot considered mental absorption and mind-wandering to be productive states that allowed the creative mind to make the complex, unexpected, perhaps aberrant connections among ideas that led to the discovery of truth and beauty. Distraction, as he put it in his Encyclopédie article on the subject, was rooted in “an excellent quality of the understanding, by which one idea easily sparks another”; and although he cautioned that those capable of being productively distracted should take care not to lose all regard for the people and things around them, he also maintained that “a good mind must be capable of distractions.”82 Moreover, despite his frequent borrowings from medical discourse, he did not share the concern evident among some contemporary physicians with waking up the senses when they closed as the result of deep thinking. In fact, he insisted that he had done some of his own best deep thinking when he plugged up his ears (as in the Lettre sur les sourds et muets [1751]), lingered in a dream state (as in the Salon de 1767), or cloistered himself for days in his study.
Equally crucial to Diderot’s conception of knowledge seeking was the notion that the flights of genius involve a felicitous alienation, a separation of the conscious mind from its bodily trappings. That sort of alienation was central to his aesthetic theory and to the eighteenth century’s larger discourse on “poetic” enthusiasm.83 Diderotian artist characters like the poet Dorval of the Entretiens sur “le Fils naturel” (1757) have fits of enthusiasm and lapse into trancelike oblivion while pondering some aspect of art or nature, but the condition is temporary and promptly followed by an outpouring of new, inspiring ideas. As Kineret Jaffe explains, “It is the peace that follows these emotional episodes that the artist’s more rational faculties take over, and he is able to compose”—although in some texts, Diderot “placed the enthusiastic moment after the act of composing.”84
Clearly, commentators of many different ideological persuasions perceived a considerable distance between the two types of homme d’esprit that Montesquieu identified in his “Essai sur les causes qui peuvent affecter les esprits et les caractères” (c. 1734–36), where he wrote “there is really just as much difference between what is called the man of esprit in the world and the man of esprit among the philosophers, as there is between a man of esprit and a stupid person. Esprit according to the worldly [gens du monde] consists in connecting the most distant ideas, whereas esprit according to philosophers means distinguishing them.”85 Prior to writing that essay, Montesquieu had already established this opposition in his novel Les Lettres persanes (1721), where various nameless French characters are enlisted to embody the qualities of worldly versus scholarly esprit: for instance, the two fellows who conspire to work together on witticisms they can utter in social gatherings so that each can maintain his reputation as a bel esprit (letter 54); the bookish monk who gives Rica a prolonged tour of the mostly useless books in the collection of his abbey’s library (letters 133–37); and the pompous scholar who, as Rica relates in letter 144, declares that anything he has not said is not true “because I have not said it.”86
However, the novel’s most significant treatment of the gap between the two forms of esprit involves the character Usbek. Usbek is never as fully integrated into polite French society as his fellow traveler Rica, a difference that critics typically explain by citing Usbek’s attachments to the seraglio back in Ispahan over which he reigns as despotic master—an identity that coexists paradoxically with Usbek’s other face, that of enlightened philosophical observer.87 It is nonetheless arguable that the distance Usbek maintains from worldly life has just as much to do with his sympathy toward a particular subset of French society: its scholars.
This is, to be sure, a rather lamentable group, as Usbek underscores in letter 145: “An homme d’esprit is usually rather difficult in social circles. He likes very few people; and he is bored with the great number of people he refers to as ‘bad company.’ His contempt is impossible to disguise, and then they all turn into his enemies. . . . He tends to criticize, because he notices more things than do other people, and senses them better” (357). Life is even harder for true scholars, who toil in poverty and obscurity, endure accusations of irreligion or heresy from common people, and face “a thousand persecutions” when they publish (359). To illustrate these points, Usbek cites a letter he’d read by an anonymous French homme d’esprit who lamented that he communicated only with like-minded men in distant places (Stockholm, Leipsick, London), whom he had never met in person (358). Unhappy as they are, the genuine scholars portrayed in letter 145 have a sense of solidarity born of mutual esteem and fellow suffering. Moreover, the traits Usbek evokes when summing up their condition—“an equivocal reputation, the sacrifice of pleasures, and the loss of health” (360)—are similar to his own, in the end.
It is important to note, in this regard, that letter 145 of Les Lettres persanes is dated “the 26th of the moon of Chahban, 1720”: that is, in October 1720, at a time when Usbek has already learned about the collapse of the seraglio he left behind in Persia nine years earlier.88 Usbek reports how he has been affected by that collapse in letter 155 to his friend Nessir, where he laments: “I am living in a barbarous climate, in the company of everything that vexes me, far removed [absent] from everything that interests me . . . it seems to me that I am destroying myself [je m’anéantis]” (367). Letter 155 has attracted significant critical attention, including this observation by Josué Harari: “Usbek realizes his helplessness and the tragic meaning of his existence.”89 That tragic interpretation is, indeed, supported by the end of the letter, where Usbek confides to Nessir that he plans to return to Persia to face his enemies and angry, unfaithful wives—and thus die. However, if we look closely at the chronology of the letters, we see that, although presented later than letter 145 in the novel, letter 155 is actually written a year earlier, in Chabhan, or October 1719.
What the final letters penned by Usbek make clear is that he does not return to Persia; rather, he stays in Paris and writes both letters 145 and 146, dated “the 11 of the moon of Rhamazan, 1720,” or November 1720. Letter 146 is a philosophical commentary on the moral disorders into which France has been plunged by the financial crisis of the early 1720s—that is, the collapse of the banking system created by John Law. Usbek is not, therefore, reduced to silence or driven to leave France by the destruction of his old harem; it is he, not Roxane, who has the last word in terms of the dates of letter writing. One can, of course, argue that Montesquieu set up the timing of Roxane’s letter 161 (dated “the 8th of the moon of Rebiab [May], 1720”) so that it would reach Usbek shortly after he wrote his final letter. Still, Usbek’s preoccupations both before and after he sends his wives his thunderously punitive letter 154 (dated “the 4th of the moon of Chahban 1719”) are clearly not focused on the state of his harem. This suggests that what Usbek ultimately becomes is a French-style scholar of the sort that Montesquieu admired but lamented. He is obscure and misunderstood by many in the “barbarous” climate in which he lives, but he continues to write and philosophize nonetheless. Usbek’s fate is sad, but it may not be tragic; and judging from Montesquieu’s comments here and elsewhere, he has plenty of company in France.90