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Epicurus in the Enlightenment: an introduction NEVEN LEDDY and AVI S. LIFSCHITZ
Reappraising militant Epicureanism: aims and methodology The general appeal of Epicureanism in the Enlightenment has been taken for granted at least since the post-Revolutionary crystallisation of an influential though reductive image of eighteenth-century philosophy as materialist, hedonistic and godless. In this construction Enlightenment thinkers were seen as eagerly incorporating Epicurean elements including atomism, the plurality of worlds, mortality of the soul, the pursuit of pleasure without reference to future rewards and punishments, a denial of design or purpose in the universe, and the portrayal of the gods as distant entities with no active interest in human affairs. Twentieth-century interpreters keen on reversing the negative image of the Enlightenment took eighteenth-century Epicureanism to be more serious than the facile or ‘lazy’ Epicurean libertinism of the preceding century (as practised by Saint-Evremond, Ninon de Lenclos and their circle).1 Enlightenment Epicureanism was characterised as a sophisticated doctrine skilfully employed by committed philosophical warriors such as Voltaire, Diderot and Hume. As Peter Gay proclaimed, ‘In their earnest rancour against religion the philosophes resembled no one quite so much as Lucretius, and it was fitting that Lucretius should provide them with their favorite tag: tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.’2 Gay suggested that from the Renaissance to the early eighteenth century – what he called ‘the era of pagan Christianity’ – classical and Christian values were not considered mutually exclusive, allowing for new concepts and circumstances to be reconciled with older traditions. The eighteenth-century philosophes, however, were ‘mystified by the coexistence of criticism 1.
2.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), translated by Fritz Koelln and James Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ, 1951), p.354-56; Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: an interpretation, vol.1: The Rise of modern paganism (New York, 1966), p.304-308. Gay, Enlightenment, p.371. (‘So potent was Superstition in persuading to evil deeds’ – W. H. D. Rouse’s translation in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Martin Ferguson Smith, Cambridge, MA, 1975, I.101, p.11). On this famous line, see Jean Salem, ‘Les crimes de la religion (Lucre`ce, I.101): histoire d’une formule’, in Pre´sences du mate´rialisme, ed. Jacques d’Hondt and Georges Festa (Paris, 1999), p.9-22.
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and myth and eager to pit one against the other’; the Enlightenment thus witnessed the disentanglement of Christian and neo-classical thought, marking ‘the rise of modern paganism’ (the subtitle of Gay’s book).3 This compelling portrait of Enlightenment Epicureanism is due for a comprehensive reappraisal in the light of historical, philosophical and literary studies conducted since the mid-1960s. The image of Epicureanism as a powerful weapon in the arsenal of anti-religious crusaders may perhaps be consistent with Epicurus’ desire to liberate mankind from the shackles of superstition by overthrowing the anthropomorphic projection of agency and purpose onto the heavens. This combative stance would, however, be far from conducive to ataraxia, the detached and balanced state of mind which Epicurus recommended. The view of Epicureanism as an extremely belligerent philosophy also seems to imply that it was a cohesive set of ideas with a single overarching goal, whereas this collection of essays seeks to demonstrate that Epicureanism in the Enlightenment was anything but a unified doctrine. As argued in this volume, it was built out of a variety of components, often applied independently of one another, in different contexts and with multiple strategies. The radical view of Epicureanism obscures its complex interplay with non-Epicurean elements in most contemporary domains, from fiction to natural philosophy to political theory. This is not to deny the distinctive or even subversive features of eighteenth-century Epicureanism; contributors to this volume retrace and delineate the mutual interaction between Epicurean and other elements in Enlightenment thought. As pointed out by Catherine Wilson in reference to the seventeenth century, cautious enquiry into the history of early modern philosophy should no longer treat Epicureanism and theism as two opposite poles. Instead of a contest between contrasting ideological camps, Wilson suggested that the conflict between Epicureanism and the Christian–Aristotelian worldview occurred within the minds of individual thinkers as they attempted to reconcile new discoveries and experimental data with ‘cherished remnants of the older theological synthesis’ (her example was Leibniz).4 The articles in this volume apply this nuanced approach to a variety of authors and topics. The ensuing picture of Enlightenment Epicureanism is indeed one of many shades and colours, replacing Gay’s black-and-white portrait of Lucretius 3. 4.
Gay, Enlightenment, p.256-57. Catherine Wilson, ‘Epicureanism in early modern philosophy: Leibniz and his contemporaries’, in Hellenistic and early modern philosophy, ed. Jon Miller and Brad Inwood (Cambridge, 2003), p.90-115 (91). Wilson’s article is, partly, a response to Thomas Lennon’s portrayal of a serious struggle between Gassendist materialism and Cartesian idealism, eventually won by the latter – for which see Thomas M. Lennon, The Battle of the gods and giants: the legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655-1715 (Princeton, NJ, 1993).
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heralding a campaign against Christianity and medieval Aristotelianism; even the Epicureanism of Diderot, La Mettrie and Helve´tius emerges here as more refined and problematic than is conventionally allowed. Regardless of whether we speak of ‘the Enlightenment’ or a plurality of Enlightenments, eighteenth-century research over the last few decades has extended the discussion – both geographically and intellectually – to include figures of a disposition distinct from that of Gay’s ‘little flock’ of philosophes.5 This inclusiveness reinforces the need to examine diverse strategies in the application of Epicureanism which were hardly exhausted by renowned Parisian radicals or their clandestine peers. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton had been grappling with the theological implications of a new concept of matter in the seventeenth century; their acceptance of some elements of ancient atomism was accompanied by a marginalisation of its more troubling aspects, such as the corporeality and mortality of the soul or the view of the universe as eternal and uncreated.6 This creative selectivity can be discerned throughout the eighteenth century and across Europe concerning Hume, Smith, Bolingbroke, Priestly, Schmauss and Anichkov, as discussed in this volume. Verbatim borrowing from Gassendi or full translations and adaptations of Lucretius are no longer seen as exclusive criteria for ‘Epicurean influence’ in the eighteenth century, as Epicurean elements were more quietly employed by a diverse gallery of authors. In order to perceive these elements, integrated as they were within works that were not necessarily thoroughly Epicurean, we might substitute the notion of selective appropriation for the traditional concepts of ‘reception’ and ‘influence’. For example, Joseph Priestley’s natural philosophy might have contained some elements of Epicurean physics but it served to promote a Unitarian ‘materialist theism’, as Matthew Niblett points out in this volume; Vico and Warburton used an Epicurean account of the emergence of language and civilisation while confidently viewing the universe as created and maintained by a providential God, as discussed by Avi S. Lifschitz. The focal point of this volume is not, therefore, the availability of ancient sources (mainly Lucretius’ De rerum natura and accounts of Epicurean philosophy by Diogenes Laertius and Cicero) or their early 5.
6.
See, most recently, Peripheries of the Enlightenment, ed. R. Butterwick, S. Davies and G. Sa´nchez Espinosa, SVEC 2008:01; David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ, 2008). J. J. MacIntosh, ‘Robert Boyle on Epicurean atheism and atomism’, in Atoms, pneuma, and tranquility: Epicurean and Stoic themes in European thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge, 1991), p.197-219; Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson, ‘Lucretius and the history of science’, in The Cambridge companion to Lucretius, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie (Cambridge, 2007), p.131-48.
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modern translations.7 The investigation of the selective appropriation of Epicurean themes, in the different contexts discussed in this volume, reveals a variety of approaches. The first is the self-identification of an author with Epicurus or Lucretius, explicitly or implicitly, as in several works by Voltaire and Diderot.8 While such self-identification had been performed on a large scale by Gassendi in the preceding century (albeit not without significant qualifications), in the Enlightenment this was not a common strategy as it involved the adoption of a specific tradition rather than the discrete elements of a system.9 A more common form of association with Epicureanism was through third-party attributions, either disparagingly or in a more neutral manner. Ever since its negative assessment by Cicero and the early Church Fathers, Epicureanism had been used as a smear word – a rather general label indicating atheism, selfishness and debauchery. As Thomas Ahnert points out in his discussion of the early German Enlightenment, the term ‘Epicureanism’ was regularly employed to discredit opponents by emphasising an alleged resemblance between their ideas and a ‘well-established caricature of Epicureanism as licentiousness’. The need to maintain orthodoxy and disavow such an association often led to original reformulations of philosophical systems and literary works. These third-party attributions were not, however, always smears. Diderot, for example, assigned several seventeenth-century and contemporary figures to the Epicurean tradition in his Encyclope´die entry on ‘Epicure´isme’ as an exercise in appropriation. While Diderot attributed Epicureanism to these thinkers explicitly, Adam Smith did so in a more oblique 7.
8.
9.
For the textual transmission of ancient and modern Epicurean themes, see A. A. Long, Hellenistic philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, 1974), p.23248; Ira O. Wade, The Clandestine organization and diffusion of philosophic ideas in France from 1700 to 1750 (Princeton, NJ, 1938); J. S. Spink, French free-thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (London, 1960), p.103-68; and contributions by Yasmin Haskell, Michael Reeve, Valentina Prosperi, Philip Ford, Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins in The Cambridge companion to Lucretius, ed. S. Gillespie and P. Hardie (Cambridge, 2007). Voltaire, ‘Epıˆtre a` Uranie’ (1722), ed. Haydn T. Mason, in The Complete works of Voltaire, vol.1B (Oxford, 2002), p.485-502; ‘Lettres de Memmius a` Cice´ron’ (1771), in Œuvres comple`tes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols (Paris, 1877-1885), vol.28, p.437-63; Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles a` l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749), ed. Marian Hobson and Simon Harvey (Paris, 2000). See also Pierre Force’s discussion of Helve´tius in this volume. On Gassendi’s Epicurean project see Olivier Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi: nominalisme, mate´rialisme, et me´taphysique (The Hague, 1971); Saul Fisher, Pierre Gassendi’s philosophy and science (Leiden, 2005); Lynn S. Joy, Gassendi the atomist: advocate of history in an age of science (Cambridge, 1987); Antonia LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the birth of early modern philosophy (Cambridge, 2007); Gassendi et les gassendistes, ed. Antony McKenna and Pierre-Franc¸ois Moreau, Libertinage et philosophie 4, special issue (2000); Margaret J. Osler, Divine will and the mechanical philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on contingency and necessity in the created world (Cambridge, 1994); Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s ethics (Ithaca, NY, 1996); Sylvie Taussig, Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655): introduction a` la vie savante (Turnhout, 2003).
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manner – making David Hume a Stoic, as explained by James A. Harris and interpreted by Neven Leddy in this volume. The third and perhaps most common strategy examined here is the selective appropriation mentioned above. It includes an instrumental use of Epicurean themes and elements, usually within a hierarchy of values or systems derived from different ancient and early modern sources. Apart from the discussions of Smith and Hume, this is also the case in Natania Meeker’s account of Diderot; Elodie Argaud shows that, although Pierre Bayle used the Epicurean tradition, his ultimate aim in so doing was never made explicit. The distinction between Epicureanism and tenets of other philosophical systems was a complex affair, as demonstrated by A. A. Long in 2003, using early modern Stoicism as an example. According to Long, an early modern reincarnation of Stoicism is hardly identifiable as an independent tradition comparable to medieval Aristotelianism, Renaissance Scepticism or Cambridge Platonism, due both to the scarcity of the ancient sources and to their partial but profound incorporation into Christian theology.10 The seventeenth-century baptism of Epicurean atoms and their presentation as created and moved by God entailed a similar confusion of philosophical tenets, and the situation was only exacerbated by third-party accusations juxtaposing Epicureanism with Spinozism. Just as Spinozism could sometimes be a construct of the radical Enlightenment or its critics rather than a serious engagement with Baruch Spinoza’s system, eighteenth-century Epicureanism was an amalgam in constant evolution through its interaction with Christian theology on the one hand and Spinozism on the other, alongside other traditions (see, for example, the interaction between Epicureanism and Spinozism in Bayle’s case, as examined by Elodie Argaud).11
Stoicism, Epicureanism and Augustinianism: an ill-defined relationship Two of the most significant systems in continuous interplay with Epicureanism were the Stoic and the Augustinian traditions, and several contributors to this volume attempt to locate Enlightenment Epicureanism in relation to one or the other, or to both. The emergence of a distinctive commercial psychology in the seventeenth and eight10. A. A. Long, ‘Stoicism in the philosophical tradition: Spinoza, Lipsius, Butler’, in Hellenistic and early modern philosophy, ed. J. Miller and B. Inwood (Cambridge, 2003), p.7-29. 11. For Spinozism see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making of modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford, 2001); on the complex relationship between Epicureanism and Spinozism in early Enlightenment radical circles, see A. McKenna, ‘Epicurisme et mate´rialisme au XVIIe sie`cle: quelques perspectives de recherche’, in Qu’est-ce que les Lumie`res radicales? Libertinage, athe´isme et spinozisme dans le tournant philosophique de l’aˆge classique, ed. Catherine Secre´tan, Tristan Dagron and Laurent Bove (Paris, 2007), p.75-85.
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eenth centuries has been at the centre of much recent scholarship suggesting that it was one of the defining aspects of the Enlightenment. This new scholarship builds on the assumption that classical influence on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought is best understood as a dialogue between Augustinianism and Stoicism. On this approach, the Augustinian tradition interpreted the nature of fallen man pessimistically: the effect of original sin was to poison all human motivations and forever exclude the possibility of improvement, other than through divine grace. The Stoic challenge to this Augustinianism was described as one where human destiny could be taken in hand by right-thinking people to achieve actual improvement in this world and human life within it. The role of Epicureanism in this binary framework has been consistently marginalised in two distinct ways: Epicureanism has been subsumed under either the Augustinian or the Stoic traditions. We shall now briefly review the historiography of this marginalisation. An influential interpretation of the Enlightenment as a response to Augustinian theology and its concomitant social theory was presented by Ernst Cassirer in 1932.12 For Cassirer the Enlightenment was characterised by recurring attempts to answer Pascal’s Augustinianism, an unsuccessful endeavour until Rousseau reformulated the mechanics of the Fall by declaring that ‘God is condoned and guilt for all evil is attributed to man.’13 Cassirer gave the same emphasis to international Augustinianism in his separate treatment of Rousseau, published in the same year, and Peter Gay took up this theme as Cassirer’s translator in 1963.14 Where Cassirer had focused on Maupertuis’ characterisation of variant attempts to answer the Augustinian view of fallen man on the part of both Stoics and Epicureans, Gay pointed to Condorcet’s description of an anti-Augustinian truce between the Porch and the Garden.15 In line with his portrayal of Epicureanism as radically anti-religious, Gay characterised this Enlightenment compromise as a sort of critical eclecticism, with specific reference to Diderot’s Encyclope´die article on eclecticism, as well as to Montesquieu, Voltaire and Adam Smith.16 Epicureanism became in this framework subsidiary to Stoicism, since for Gay, ‘In the great campaign against Christianity, all – Stoicism, and Epicureanism as much as Skepticism, especially Stoicism – had their place.’17 The assimilation of Epicureanism to Stoicism was made more 12. Cassirer, Enlightenment, particularly ch.4: ‘Religion’. 13. Cassirer, Enlightenment, p.157. 14. E. Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1932), translated by Peter Gay (Bloomington, IN, 1963). 15. Cassirer, Enlightenment, p.150; Gay, Enlightenment, p.166. 16. Gay, Enlightenment, p.172. 17. Gay, Enlightenment, p.296.
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explicit by William J. Bouwsma in his 1975 article on the Stoic– Augustinian dialogue in Renaissance thought.18 More recently, Christopher Brooke has elaborated this binary interpretation in an article in The Cambridge companion to Rousseau (2001), demonstrating the flexibility of revamped Stoicism in the ideological polemic of the seventeenth century and the secularisation of Augustinianism in that process, with a passing reference to Adam Smith.19 The assimilation of Epicureanism to Stoicism has been formulated and expressed mainly by Anglo-American political theorists and historians of philosophy, but a parallel interpretative tradition has engaged with the same texts, questions and themes as an examination of the literature of ideas (mostly based in French departments of lettres). Historians are not generally noted for their rapid assimilation of frameworks borrowed from literature departments, but in this instance the cross-pollination has proved particularly fruitful – to which this volume aims to contribute. In this parallel genealogy Epicureanism was subsumed under the Augustinian tradition and opposed to Stoicism. This line of investigation dates back to the 1950s, when French scholars began to associate seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jansenism with the subsequent development of political economy. Characteristic of this interpretative framework is the sustained use of the Augustinian lens through which to examine the development of commercial psychology from Pierre Nicole to Adam Smith. The initial formulation of the view of paradoxical Augustinianism, incorporating Epicurean themes, seems to be Marcel Raymond’s 1957 article on Jansenism and what we now call commercial psychology. Raymond set out from an inherent tension in Jansenism, as expressed by Pascal and Pierre Nicole: postlapsarian human beings, dominated by self-love and mutual aversion, ultimately manage to live together in a functioning society. According to Raymond, this Jansenist tension between fallen human nature and fruitful social interaction remained the animating paradox for Smith and subsequent political economists.20 Jean Lafond entrenched and expanded this interpretation, first in his work on La Rochefoucauld and Gassendi and later with direct reference to Adam Smith.21 Lafond made Gassendi the 18. William J. Bouwsma, ‘The two faces of humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance thought’ (1975), in A Usable past: essays in European cultural history (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, 1990), p.19-73. 19. Christopher Brooke, ‘Rousseau’s political philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian origins’, in The Cambridge companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge, 2001), p.94-123. The present volume is partly the result of a continuing dialogue with Brooke on this topic. 20. Marcel Raymond, ‘Du janse´nisme a` la morale de l’inte´reˆt’, Mercure de France 330 (1957), p.238-55. 21. Jean Lafond, La Rochefoucauld: augustinisme et litte´rature, 3rd edn (Paris, 1986); ‘Augustinisme
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locus for the reconciliation of the Augustinian and Epicurean traditions, and characterised the new commercial psychology as paradoxically Augustinian.22 As this paradigm was stretched to cover Adam Smith’s very unAugustinian celebration of concupiscence, its inherent tensions became more apparent. It came to rest on the assertion that human nature was transformed by a kind of Augustinian alchemy over the course of the Enlightenment. Philippe Sellier, for example, suggested that Adam Smith’s commercial psychology was the end result of an alchemical transformation of Augustinianism.23 This procedure consisted in assimilating Epicureanism to Augustinianism, for if Epicureanism was made interchangeable with Augustinianism, it would be unnecessary to document the movement from one to the other. The gravitation of the Augustinian paradigm was such that it not only assimilated Epicureanism, but, in the case of La Rochefoucauld, Stoicism as well.24 As Pierre Force points out in his contribution to this volume, prior to Lafond’s treatment of La Rochefoucauld, the seventeenth-century author had been widely read as an Epicurean, based on his comment that ‘In matters of morals Seneca was a hypocrite and Epicurus was a saint.’25 As to Adam Smith, Pierre Force played down the role of Epicureanism in his system in Self-interest before Adam Smith (2003). According to Force, Smith’s Epicureanism was assimilated to an Augustinianism which was countered by a Stoic perspective.26 This presentation of Adam Smith between Augustinianism and Stoicism,
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
et e´picurisme au XVIIe sie`cle’, Dix-septie`me sie`cle 34 (1982), p.149-58; ‘De la morale a` l’e´conomie politique, ou de La Rochefoucauld et des moralistes janse´nistes a` Adam Smith, par Malebranche et Mandeville,’ in De la morale a` l’e´conomie politique: actes du colloque de Columbia University (New York), ed. Pierre Force and David Morgan (Pau, 1996), p.187-96. Following Raymond, Lafond argued that in the new economic morality ‘il y a place pour des vertus tout humaines qui entrent, non pas bien e´videmment dans l’e´conomie du salut, mais dans celle de la morale sociale’ (Lafond, ‘De la morale a` l’e´conomie politique’, p.188). ‘Mais il s’agit d’une action particulie`re, avec une vise´e pre´cise. Ce genre d’alchimie ne re´ussit que ponctuellement, au sein de petits groupes choisis, ou` les calculs de l’honneˆtete´ aboutissent a` un faux-semblant de la charite´’ (Philippe Sellier, Port-Royal et la litte´rature, vol.2: Le Sie`cle de saint Augustin, La Rochefoucauld, Mme de Lafayette, Sacy, Racine, Paris, 2000, p.178). ‘Ainsi, dans l’œuvre de La Rochefoucauld, autour de notions qui sont d’inspirations augustinienne, des survivances stoı¨ciennes peuvent avoisiner des e´le´ments de psychologie d’origine e´picurienne’ (Lafond, La Rochefoucauld, p.198). As reported by the chevalier de Me´re´ in ‘Entretien de La Rochefoucauld avec le chevalier de Me´re´ sur la recherche du bonheur’, in La Rochefoucauld: œuvres comple`tes (Paris, 1964), p.728. For the Epicurean reading of La Rochefoucauld see Louis Hippeau, Essai sur la morale de La Rochefoucauld (Paris, 1967), p.85. Pierre Force, Self-interest before Adam Smith: a genealogy of economic science (Cambridge, 2003), p.89.
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based on the fusion of Epicurean and Augustinian traditions reviewed above, raises several questions. Smith was certainly an anti-Augustinian in developing a progressive social theory without reference to divine grace, but does this imply that he was equally an anti-Epicurean? Force returns to this issue in his contribution to this volume.27 Lafond’s presentation of the Epicurean–Augustinian paradigm has also been taken up by John Robertson, who presented the paradox of Jansenism as prompting the convergence of Epicureanism and Augustinianism in opposition to the Stoicism that had dominated seventeenth-century French thought.28 In Robertson’s presentation, however, it is Epicureanism and not Augustinianism that was the driving force in the tandem. Responding to Jonathan Israel’s claim that ‘the real business [of Enlightenment] was already over’ by the 1740s, Robertson instead suggested that this watershed represented the moment when Epicureanism was redeployed away from anti-clerical polemics towards political economy.29 In light of this proposal, several essays in this volume examine the complex eighteenth-century interplay between Epicureanism and other philosophical currents, while questioning the marginalisation of Epicureanism in relation to both Stoicism and Augustinianism. Elodie Argaud shows how Epicureanism and Augustinianism might have come together in Pierre Bayle’s presentation of Malebranche, while Hans W. Blom describes how Epicureanism was subsumed into a more politically relevant Stoic anti-Augustinianism in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. More space is dedicated, however, to demonstrating how Epicureanism came to the fore either within the Epicurean–Augustinian paradigm or independently of it altogether. In all of these discussions the role of Stoicism is never far removed. Contributors do not offer solutions to the paradox of an Enlightened Augustinian framework encompassing Epicureanism, or stable criteria for distinguishing between tenets shared amongst different systems. But taken together, these essays do suggest 27. On this question, see Gloria Vivenza, ‘Review of Pierre Force Self-interest before Adam Smith: a genealogy of economic science’, Economic history services, 20 September 2004, accessed from http://www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/0846.shtml on 23 April 2009. On Smith in relation to Jansenism and Augustinianism, see also Istvan Hont, Jealousy of trade: international competition and the nation-state in historical perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), p.46-51. 28. John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Oxford, 2005), p.128. 29. With reference to Hume, Robertson explained how ‘By the 1750s he had recognised that he could not expect to make the case for Enlightenment as if he were addressing a society of atheists; but he could make it to a society of improvers. [...] The promotion of political economy, as the means to achieve human betterment in this world, was far more likely to command the attention of the Scottish public’ (Case for the Enlightenment, p.374; for Israel’s thesis see Radical Enlightenment, p.6-7).
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that there is a point at which Epicurean elements came to play a major role in the European Enlightenment. Thomas Ahnert and James A. Harris suggest that from the 1740s onwards Epicureanism emerged from an ancillary position to play a fundamental role in social theory and political economy. Matthew Niblett traces the evolution of theistic Epicurean physics in the second half of the eighteenth century. Neven Leddy follows up on Harris’ presentation of the instrumental use of Epicureanism by Hume to suggest that Adam Smith had something very similar in mind when he revised his Theory of moral sentiments for the last time in 1790; in both cases Epicureanism emerged from the realm of implication and allusion, only to be left behind as the Scots turned their attention from ethics to politics. Finally Pierre Force revisits the Augustinian–Epicurean thesis through Helve´tius, proposing that by the third quarter of the eighteenth century the paradoxical Augustinian element of that tandem had been superseded. The turning point in this chronology may well be 1758-1759, with the publication of Helve´tius’ De l’esprit and the first edition of Smith’s Theory of moral sentiments.
New contributions to the study of Enlightenment Epicureanism Beyond the discussion of the Epicurean–Stoic and Epicurean– Augustinian paradigms, this volume reflects the growing interest in other aspects of Enlightenment Epicureanism. Charles T. Wolfe examines the relationship between Epicureanism and vitalist theories in medicine and natural philosophy over the background of La Mettrie’s writings; Avi S. Lifschitz traces the integration of the Epicurean history of language into Enlightenment accounts of the emergence of mankind; and in reminding us that Epicurus’ Garden – unlike other Athenian schools – readily accepted women, Natania Meeker observes the interaction between Epicureanism and gender-construction in Diderot’s works. The multi-faceted character of eighteenth-century materialism is discussed by Meeker, Niblett and Wolfe, while the prioritisation of ethics or physics in the reception of Epicureanism (and its theological consequences) is surveyed by Harris, Kahn, Niblett and Blom. These contributions concentrate on the Enlightenment and its European manifestations mostly in the eighteenth century. This focus distinguishes the current volume from several collections on the general uses of Hellenistic philosophy in the early modern period. A few publications have been dedicated to the reception and transformation of Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism, but their focus remained firmly on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; this was also the case with an
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excellent recent volume on early modern Epicureanism.30 The importance of Epicurean themes in Gassendi and Hobbes, or of Stoicism in Lipsius and perhaps Spinoza, has been thoroughly examined in these and other studies. Contributors to the current volume take note of earlier applications of Epicurean philosophy, but they are collectively interested in the appropriation of Epicurean topoi primarily in the eighteenth century. Our approach is shared by an issue of the periodical Dix-huitie`me sie`cle edited in 2003 by Anne Deneys-Tunney and PierreFranc¸ois Moreau which was, however, focused on science, politics and libertinism in France.31 The scope of the present volume is panEuropean, as attested by Andrew Kahn’s attempt to integrate Russia into the debate over Enlightenment Epicureanism, as well as by contributions on Germany and the Netherlands. Considerable space is dedicated to religion, ethics and language beyond politics and science. The collaboration of historians, philosophers, political scientists and literary scholars serves to bring together over these pages different aspects of research on the topic. Historians and political theorists of the early modern period have offered insights into the challenge of ‘Epicurean’ social utility and commercial conduct to a ‘Stoic’ civic tradition, while literary scholars have broadened this discussion by exposing the invaluable role of plays, maxims, epistolary novels and fictional dialogues in the history of ideas. Here we attempt to bridge some of the remaining cross-disciplinary gaps in the study of Enlightenment Epicureanism in its diverse manifestations, applications and selective appropriations.
30. Hellenistic and early modern philosophy, ed. B. Inwood and J. Miller (Cambridge, 2003); Der Einfluß des Hellenismus auf die Philosophie der Fru¨hen Neuzeit, ed. Ga´bor Boros (Wiesbaden, 2005). These collections had been preceded by Atoms, pneuma, and tranquility, ed. M. J. Osler, which includes a single contribution on the Enlightenment after Locke and Berkeley. In Gianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo’s Epicureanism-focused volume, Der Garten und die Moderne: Epikureische Moral und Politik vom Humanismus zur Aufkla¨rung (Stuttgart, 2004), only the fifth and last section covers the Enlightenment. 31. L’Epicurisme des Lumie`res, ed. Anne Deneys-Tunney and Pierre-Franc¸ois Moreau, Dixhuitie`me sie`cle 35 (Paris, 2003).
