Abstract
The early modern radical savant did not travel so much as he read travel narratives. From Montaigne’s cannibals to Locke’s talking parrot, from Leibniz’s plans to create a race of “warrior slaves” to Diderot’s utopian Voyage de Bougainville, a kind of ‘science fiction’ or ‘deterritorialization’ of the narrative of the familiar, Eurocentric, Plato-to-Hegel narrative of Western philosophy can be discerned. A key feature of these artificial travel narratives is that they serve as a basis for proclaiming atheism (and China plays a well-known role here). The radical savant described here is neither the solitary meditator, nor the participant in communal knowledge-gathering projects for national glory (Bacon, Linnaeus). He (for it is always a he in this case) is less a producer of a stable, cumulative body of knowledge than a destabilizer of forms of existing knowledge.
I have been driven out of the court, where I knew not what to do; if they push me to leave France, wherever in Europe I shall go, I have acquaintances there thanks to my name. I can easily accommodate myself to a variety of foods and garments; I am indifferent towards climates and men.
—Théophile de Viau, 1623 (De Viau 1668, 13/1965, 58; all translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.)
It is up to us to go to extreme places, to extreme times, where the highest and deepest truths live and rise up. The sites of thought are the tropical zones frequented by the tropical man, not the temperate zones of the moral, methodical or moderate man.
—Gilles Deleuze (1962, 126.)
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Garber 1998, 40. This is not just true of the best-known texts such as the Discourse and the Meditations, but also the Regulae (Rule 3 emphasizes the importance of individual knowledge over and against knowledge from authority). Of course, one can also view Descartes as deeply ‘dialogical’ given the effort he put into collecting responses e.g. to the Meditations, but I do not think this attitude is ‘fundamental’ to his natural-philosophical project.
- 2.
- 3.
Linnaeus, letter of 10 January 1746 to the Swedish Academy of Science, quoted in Koerner 1996a, 151; see also Koerner 1996b. This aspect of Linnaeus has been well-known since Lisbet Koerner’s study (Koerner 1999); a good shorter analysis is Sörlin 2000, 60–65. Interestingly, Linnaeus’ vision of an oeconomia naturae (which may have influenced Smith’s idea of the invisible hand), a vision of balance and equilibrium, meant that he refused to accept racist ideas about inequality of different races: “Wild peoples, barbarians and Hottentots differ from us only because of sciences; just like a thorny sour-Apple differs from a tasty Reinette, only through cultivation” (1759 speech to the Swedish Royal Family, quoted in Rausing 2003, 193).
- 4.
- 5.
The term ‘deterritorialization’ was first used in Deleuze-Guattari’s 1973 Anti-Oedipus, where it had a psychoanalytic connotation of the freeing of a libidinal entity from pre-established objects of investment; but it quickly, in their Thousand Plateaus of 1980 (translation, Deleuze-Guattari 1987), also comes to mean a socio-political process whereby, e.g., a population is either dispossessed of its territory (like peasants by lords) or in contrast, freed from a fixed territory such as land or a factory. Closer still to the sense in which I am using the term, Deleuze and Guattari say in their work on Kafka that “the first characteristic of a minor literature in any case is that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 16).
- 6.
- 7.
Margaret Jacob’s focus on Freemason networks (in addition to her better-known studies on Newtonianism, the English Revolution and the Scientific Revolution) in Jacob 1981, 2006 fits as it were somewhere in between a narrative of respectable natural philosophers functioning as pillars of society and a narrative of anti-social, ‘mad dog’ deists / atheists / materialists like John Toland or the anonymous authors of the Theophrastus redivivus (1659), the Treatise of the Three Impostors (sometimes dated to 1716; cf. Benítez 1996a, 203), or The Material Soul (L’Âme Matérielle, approx. 1725–1730; Niderst 2003).
- 8.
Boyer d’Argens 1739–1740, vol. I, letter XIV, 106 (this text apparently served as a basis for Oliver Goldsmith’s Chinese Letters). It is not possible here to go into details about this entertaining and interesting work; the first Chinese traveller-narrator describes how, upon arriving in Le Havre, he is asked if in China they believe in the Pope, and when he answers No, how he has to convince the crowd that his compatriots are also neither Huguenots nor Jansenists…
- 9.
Proust 1998; Terada 2006. There are Chinese and Japanese sources for the vitalist view: the former were notably collected in R. P. Harvieu/Louis-Augustin Allemand’s 1671 Les Secrets de la Médecine des Chinois and the 1702–1776 Jesuit compendium Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères par quelques Missionnaires de la Compagnie de Jésus; the latter notably include Willem Ten Rhijne’s 1683 Dissertation de arthritide: mantisa schematica de acupunctura… (London/The Hague/Leipzig 1683; translation in Carrubba and Bowers 1974). It is noteworthy that the Jesuits were forbidden from studying and practicing medicine, and did not give much reports of treatments such as acupuncture. They focused on sphygmology (medicine of the pulse). Conversely, Ten Rhijne focuses on practices such as acupuncture (a word he is often credited with inventing), and does not mention the medicine of the pulse. On the role of sphygmology in the conceptual articulation of vitalist medicine in the eighteenth century see Terada 2006, and Wolfe and Terada 2008.
- 10.
To be clear, I am not using the word ‘holism’ in any especially valuative sense – in the older but still common sense, found on both sides of the ‘divide’, that Eastern thought is holistic whereas Western thought is mechanistic, with the implication that Western thought has somehow come closer to a hidden (holistic) truth by learning from the East – but rather as a historico-theoretical construct which had a certain efficacy. Namely, if ‘mechanism’ is the respectable paradigm of Western medical science in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries (and beyond), ‘holism’ is a kind of heterodoxy, and as far back as the early eighteenth century, anti-mechanists looked to the East for legitimizing sources of their knowledge – which could be assimilated to ‘native’ forms of exotica such as the Hippocratic paradigm.
- 11.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum I, 129; New Atlantis, in Bacon 1996, 480.
- 12.
- 13.
De Pauw 1768–1770, reprinted 1990. I cannot take up here the debates on universalism and relativism: suffice it to say that de Pauw combines both, if one compares his book to John Millar’s later (1779) The origin of the distinction of ranks (a product of the Scottish Enlightenment), we can see in Millar but not in de Pauw a clear, systematic intent to synthesize ethnographic data from travelers, Jesuits etc. in order to formulate some relativistic principles for a nascent social science.
- 14.
Quoted in Pugliano 2009, 323. Scheuchzer was the author of the pre-Linnean Natur-Historie des Schweizerlandes (1706–1718).
- 15.
“An Introductory Discourse containing the whole History of Navigation,” in Churchill 1704, vol. 1, lxxiii, cit. in Schaffer 2009, 247. The passage began, much like Linnaeus’s statements, by referring to the benefits of the importation of new plants, drugs and spices: “Natural and moral history is embellished with the most beneficial increase of so many thousands of plants it had never before received, so many drugs and spices, such unaccountable diversity.”
- 16.
James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, “Introduction: The far side of the ocean,” in Delbourgo and Dew 2008, 7.
- 17.
Hal Cook in his recent Matters of Exchange states that “it was no accident that the so-called Scientific Revolution occurred at the same time as the development of the first global economy” (Cook 2007, 411), but we never really learn why, or what this changes in other stories; clearly medical and natural-historical knowledge are highly involved with commodities and exchange, but this does not make them “the big science of the early modern period,” as Cook rather strangely claims without explanation (410). For further analysis of early modern voyages of discovery as integrating the worlds of commerce, science and ‘knowledge’ see the work of Kapil Raj, e.g. Raj (2000); on go-betweens: Schaffer, Roberts et al., eds. (2009).
- 18.
“Chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage. … Ces nations me semblent donc ainsi barbares, pour avoir receu fort peu de façon de l’esprit humain, et estre encore fort voisines de leur naifveté originelle. Les loix naturelles leur commandent encores, fort peu abastardies par les nostres; mais c’est en telle pureté, qu’il me prend quelque fois desplaisir dequoy la cognoissance n’en soit venuë plustost, du temps qu’il y avoit des hommes qui en eussent sceu mieux juger que nous” (Montaigne 1588/1992, I.xxxi, 205–206).
- 19.
“On sait maintenant qu’il y a en Pologne des ourses charitables qui enlèvent des nouveaux-nés laissés sur le seuil d’une porte par une nourrice imprudente, et les élèvent avec autant d’affection et de bonté que leurs propres petits” (La Mettrie, Système d’Epicure, § xxxv).
- 20.
A good example of this is chapter 3 of the anonymous manuscript L’Âme Matérielle (approx. 1725–1730); see the edition by Alain Niderst (Niderst 2003).
- 21.
Locke 1975, I.iii.9, at Locke 1975, 70–71; for further discussion of Locke’s anti-innatism in the context of travel narratives, see Carey 2006, ch. 3 (who notes, among other things, the influence of Gassendi’s Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus aristoteleos, written 1624–1626, published in his Opera Omnia in 1658). A similar focus on the Tupinambas is found in La Forge 1666, 354; on the Tupinamba as somehow paradigmatic cannibals, see Lestringant 1997.
- 22.
“On ne prescrit pas contre la vérité par la tradition générale et par le consentement unanime de tous les peuples” (Pensées diverses sur la comète, § xlv, in Bayle 1727–1731, III, 53).
- 23.
Pagden 1993, 69. That Las Casas, who was consistently an advocate of indigenous rights, was at one stage Bishop of Chiapas may seem to us an odd irony of history (thinking down to the present day’s EZLN and Subcomandante Marcos).
- 24.
Essais, III, xi, “Des boiteux,”: “Jusques à cette heure tous ces miracles, et événements étranges, se cachent devant moi – Je n’ai vu monstre et miracle au monde plus exprès que moi-même: On s’apprivoise à toute étrangeté par l’usage et le temps, Mais plus je me hante et me connais, plus ma difformité m’étonne. Moins je m’entends en moi” (Montaigne 1588/1992, 1029).
- 25.
Koselleck 1959/1988; Negri and Hardt 2000. There would be more to say here about ‘global reach’ and stages or forms of globalization (not so much in debates over economic cycles, concerning work such as Wallerstein’s and Arrighi’s – Wallerstein 1980; Arrighi 1995, 2007 – but rather, concerning early forms of globalization, via Christianity and the like). While I am obviously borrowing some aspects of Israel’s notion of ‘radical Enlightenment’, I am not using either his distinction between a moderate and a radical Enlightenment, or his focus on Spinoza and Spinozism as a driving force in the movement. Indeed, not all of the radical savants discussed here are political radicals in any straightforward sense. From the libertins érudits to La Mettrie, one can conceptually plan the destruction of an existing order – a metaphysical order, a religious order – without having any interest in the democratization of knowledge and thus in political revolutions; as I mention below, a ‘closet radical’ like La Mothe Le Vayer can explicitly oppose his own cosmopolitanism and free-thinking attitude towards customs and norms, to the entrenched prejudice of the common folk – without seeking to emend the latter.
- 26.
Kappler 1980, 115: “[Q]ui n’a pas vu de monstres, n’a pas voyagé.”
- 27.
Thevet, Singularitez…, f. 99a, quoted in Céard 1977/1996, 312. Thevet’s work is known in good part also for its description of Brazilian cannibals. In his later Cosmographie universelle Thevet devotes a chapter to “Why I call this land ‘Antarctic France’ which others falsely call the Indies” (Thevet 1575, Bk. XXI, ch. 3; vol. II, 911a). “Car étant cette terre découverte de notre temps, si grande comme elle est ce serait simplesse que de la soumettre au nom particulier de l’Inde”; “Car l’Inde est orientale et l’Antarctique est toute méridionale: le Pérou, Mexique, la Floride entre l’Équateur et le Pôle Arctique. Par quoi vous pouvez voir la faute de plusieurs hommes de notre siècle.” Quoted and discussed in Hoquet 2005.
- 28.
- 29.
As regards the relation of the radical savant to institutions, it was easy enough, in the set of distinctions with which I began, to oppose the ‘company man’ à la Boyle to the solitary Descartes and the radical Boyer d’Argens or La Mettrie. But this leaves out the role, primarily in the next century, of institutions such as dissenting academies, which precisely trace their roots to individuals who could not get into Oxford and Cambridge in the late seventeenth century (thanks to John Gascoigne for this point). One could also point to Protestant, sometimes Huguenot-based scientific clubs in the early Enlightenment in places such as The Hague (discussed in Jacob 2006) – but they were secret. A point closer to my own narrative is that the radical usage of, e.g., philology is definitely not a solitary enterprise; texts such as the Treatise of the Three Impostors emerged in milieus such as the Berlin salons of the early 1700s. By the next century, a heterodox institution such as the Lunar Society of Birmingham appears, at which James Watt, Joseph Priestley, Matthew Boulton and Erasmus Darwin meet, with a shared ‘materialist’ goal focusing on the practical, public consequences of the knowledge produced therein.
- 30.
José de Acosta, De Natura novi orbis libri duo (Salamanca 1589), later entitled Historia natural y moral de las Indias, translated into French by Robert Regnault or Regnauld as Histoire naturelle et morale des Indes tant orientales qu’occidentales (Paris: Orry, 1598), II, ch. IX, in Acosta 1617, 63b. John Gascoigne describes Acosta’s History as “a pioneering work of anthropology and natural history” (Gascoigne 2010). For discussion see Duchet 1971/1995 and Abbattista and Minuti, eds., 2006.
- 31.
- 32.
“La Religion dominante du vaste Empire de la Chine, qui est particulierement celle des Magistrats, est le pur Atheïsme ; puisqu’ils croyent l’éternité du monde, qu’ils ne connoissent point d’autre Dieu, que l’Esprit, ou la Vertu Active du Ciel, et enfin qu’ils ne croyent pas à l’immortalité de l’ame, non plus qu’aux peines et recompenses après la mort” (Anon., Doutes des Pirroniens, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, ms. 15191, f. 40, cit. in Benítez 2007).
- 33.
Anon., Dialogues sur l’âme, ms. Bibliothèque Mazarine 1191, I, fol. 109–110, cit. in Benítez 1996b, 403.
- 34.
Henri de Boulainvilliers (correct spelling Boulainvillier, which apparently he was very attached to, as Renée Simon indicates in her introduction to volume 1 of his works), Essai de métaphysique (1731), in Boulainvilliers 1973, I, 84. See also Bove 2008. On Boulainvillier’s relation to libertine salon culture see Wade 1938, 97–123.
- 35.
- 36.
For the review of the Principia: Journal des Sçavans (Amsterdam), August 2, 1688, 128; for the review of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, Jan. 5, 1688, 5–12. See discussion in Dew 2009, 206–207, and more generally Mungello 1998, 90 f. The text was produced by at least seventeen Jesuit missionaries, with the help of many Chinese interlocutors, across almost a century. It gave Latin translations of three of the ‘Four Books’ (Sishu) that the Jesuits had identified as the core of the Confucian canon: the Great Learning (the Daxue), the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong), and the Analects (Lunyu); the Mengzi or Mencius, was left out (Dew 2009, 210).
- 37.
In a note to this section Boulanger uses the term ‘despotism’: “L’empire de la Chine demontre la sublime speculation des premiers hommes qui ont cru se rendre heureux en etablisssant un gouvernement semblable a celui du ciel, il ne faut cependant pas croire que le gouvernement chinois puisse justifier les theocraties terrestres par ce que les beaux traits de l’histoire de la chine ne peuvent pas contrebalancer les maux que le despotisme y a causé et qu’il cause chez les autres nations.”
- 38.
- 39.
Bernier lived for years in Mughal India and wrote a massively successful multi-volume history cum political and anthropological study of the peoples and customs of South Asia, the 1670 Histoire de la dernière Révolution des Etats du Grand Mogol (Bernier 1670, translated at the time as The History of the Late Revolution of the Empire of the Great Mogol, Bernier 1671; see the excellent analysis in Dew 2009, ch. 3), but was also a pupil of Gassendi who wrote the most influential summary of the latter’s philosophy, the equally massive Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi (Bernier 1678), which influenced Locke amongst others in the articulation of a hedonistic motivational psychology, and an ‘empiricist’ account of cognition and the formation of ideas (Milton 2000).
- 40.
A recent discussion of ‘Creoleness’ by major Francophone Caribbean authors has it this way: “Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles. This will be for us an interior attitude – better, a vigilance, or even better, a sort of mental envelope in the middle of which our world will be built in full consciousness of the outer world” (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, Confiant 1989/1993, 75).
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Wolfe, C.T. (2014). Travel as a Basis for Atheism: Free-Thinking as Deterritorialization in the Early Radical Enlightenment. In: Gal, O., Zheng, Y. (eds) Motion and Knowledge in the Changing Early Modern World. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 30. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7383-7_8
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