Tag Archive for: philosopher

MONTHLY BLOG 150, Tribute to the Gracious International City of Geneva – Historic Home of Three Hegemonc Radical Thinkers – and, Additionally, Thronged with Sparrows

If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2023)

Image1 Male House Sparrow in Fine Voice (2023)

Image1 Male House Sparrow
in Fine Voice (2023)

Reflections upon Geneva, prompted by a recent visit (late May 2023): Geneva is a gracious city, situated at the point where the River Rhône rushes headlong out of Lake Geneva en route for its journey to the Mediterranean. The city is full of trees, and the trees are full of sparrows. Their non-stop cheeping, from dawn to dusk, provides an engagingly cheery urban sound-track. It’s almost enough to make visitors forget the eye-wateringly high prices for everything.1 (So costly is this city that many thousands of its work-force live in nearby France and commute to Geneva daily).

Having ruefully noted that point, there is much to celebrate in a city famed for many things – one being its role as the home of three rebellious and controversial Francophone thinkers, whose ideas remain influential to this day.

One was John Calvin (1509-64), born in northern France. In his lifetime, he had a tumultuous relationship with the city. Yet their names are indelibly linked.2 Geneva was the heartland of the radical Protestant movement, known as Calvinism or Presbyterianism. And the Geneva Bible (translated into brisk English in 1560 by William Whittingham and other Calvinist scholars) had major impact across the English-speaking world. In keeping with the Calvinist lack of flamboyance, there are no great physical monuments to Calvin in today’s multi-cultural Geneva.3 Nonetheless, religious legacies are potent. Hence, in the words of one friend who lives locally, ‘In Geneva today, Calvin is everywhere’. Hard to prove – or to disprove. Yet Geneva is undeniably a ‘serious’ city..

Very different in character and intellect was a second great French thinker who moved to Geneva. He was François-Marie Arouet, known universally by his pen-name Voltaire (1694-1778). Born in Paris, he was a prolific controversialist, philosopher, historian, and all-round man of letters. As a fierce advocate for civil liberties and pungent critic of religious intolerance, Voltaire was not an easy ‘subject’ for absolute monarchs to stomach.

So when, in 1754, he was banned by Louis XV of France, Voltaire moved across the border into republican Geneva. There he purchased a fine city mansion, Les Délices. And, since his relationship with the city government was not always easy, Voltaire also established a grand country abode just outside Geneva at Ferney. From this dual base, he flourished as a celebrity intellectual.4 And that international role is celebrated today by the city of Geneva, which maintains the Institut et Musée Voltaire. And this body is housed in the mansion Les Délices itself.5 So visitors can enjoy its impressive library and memorabilia at the very spot where the great thinker planted his banner of intellectual independence. Voltaire chose Geneva and the city today reciprocates the choice.

The third radical thinker, meanwhile, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), the Genevan-born son of a ‘middling-sort’ watch-maker. The young Rousseau had a troubled childhood and, later, spent long periods away from the city. Nonetheless, he often signed his writings as a ‘Citizen of Geneva’. And he won fame as an original educationalist and democratic theorist.6 Among other things, he held that all religions were equally valid if they taught people to live morally as good citizens – a view that outraged Calvinist and Catholic ministers alike – and caused Rousseau’s books to be banned in his native Geneva. At that point, Voltaire offered Rousseau his chateau at Ferney as a refuge (their own intellectual disagreements notwithstanding). But the reply was negative.

Instead, Rousseau embraced a wandering life, in which he often fell out with former friends. He saw himself as a ‘solitary walker’, though his reputation and influence continued to grow. Indeed, in 1794 – sixteen years after his death – Rousseau’s remains were re-interred in the Pantheon at Paris. Revolutionary France thus saluted him posthumously as a prophet of democracy. Geneva meanwhile has a fine statue to Rousseau (installed 1835) on an islet in Lake Geneva. Some city streets are also named after his most famous works. And the Musée Rousseau et Littérature (located in his birth-place in the old city) offers an immersive tour.7 Geneva has long welcomed back its wandering son.

None of these three original thinkers, however, had an easy relationship with the city authorities. All three were too independent to be easily assimilated – and too strong-minded to be intimidated. Collectively, they indicated the power of untrammelled communication: Calvin teaching from the pulpit; Voltaire and Rousseau via print – that modern free-range pulpit – which they used with great versatility.

Geneva’s open society and governance greatly aided all three. The city was then – as it remains – an international communications hub, not subject to close censorship by an autocratic ruler nor to close identification with any one great power. It was a logical venue, later on, for the global headquarters of the new League of Nations (1920-46). Today Geneva continues to flourish, hosting many international enterprises and simultaneously safeguarding its great history but without fussing or fawning. And the cheery sparrows chirp ceaselessly …

ENDNOTES: 

1 But one very helpful feature for visitors, who are booked into approved Genevan hotels, is the free Transport Card, issued by the City of Geneva, which is valid on all buses, trams, and shuttle-boats within the city canton.

2 See R.M. Kingdom, Reforming Geneva: Discipline, Faith and Anger in Calvin’s Geneva (Geneva, 2012); K. Maag, Lifting Hearts to the Lord: Worship with John Calvin in Sixteenth-Century Geneva (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2016).

3 But a statue of Calvin does feature on the ‘Reformation Wall’ (Monument International de la Réformation), located in the grounds of Geneva University. It was constructed in 1906, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Calvin’s birth and the 350th anniversary of the University’s foundation by Calvin: see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformation_Wall.

4 For context, see R. Pearson, Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom (New York, 2005); and I. Davidson, Voltaire: A Life (London 2010).

5 F. Borda d’Agua and F. Jacob, A Short History of Les Délices: From the Property of St Jean to the Institut et Musée Voltaire (Geneva, 2013).

6 H. Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749-62 (Cambridge, 1997); L. Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Boston, Mass., 2005); L.D. Cooper, Dreaming of Justice, Waking to Wisdom: Rousseau’s Philosophic Life (Chicago, 2023).

7 See https://www.geneve.com/en/attractions/maison-rousseau-et-litterature-mrl.

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MONTHLY BLOG 104, Is it Time to Look beyond Separate Identities to Find Personhood?

If citing, please kindly acknowledge copyright © Penelope J. Corfield (2019)

Collectively, the 15th International Congress on the Enlightenment (ICE), focusing upon Enlightenment Identities, was a huge triumph. For five days in Edinburgh in July 2019 some 2000 international participants rushed from event to event. There were not only 477 learned panel presentations and five great plenaries but also sundry conducted walks, coach tours to special venues, a grand reception, a superb concert, a pub quiz, and an evening of energetic Highland dancing. So much was happening that heads spun, and not just from the jovial Edinburgh hospitality.

By way of introduction, I began the first plenary session, with its global array of speakers, by offering some basic definitions. The grand themes of the Congress were Enlightenment and Identities: Lumières et Identités. Powerful concepts, which are both much contested. Needless to say, the Congress organisers did not insist on single definitions of these grand themes, which were chosen precisely to promote debate.

In that spirit, the Congress logo displayed two iconic figures from the eighteenth century. Both are shown as questioning, as they flank the silhouette of the classic monument on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill to the philosopher Dugald Stewart. These two iconic figures may be considered as the Adam and Eve of the Congress, venturing out into the world to lead the collective intellectual journey.

The young woman was named Dido Belle Lindsay. She was aged 18 at the date in 1778-9, when her portrait was painted alongside her fair-skinned cousin. By heritage, Dido Belle was an illegitimate African-Caribbean-Scot. Yet she was given a resonant first name which evoked the celebrated Queen of Carthage. And by life experiences, Dido Belle Lindsay had a protected and affluent upbringing in the household of her great-uncle, an eminent London lawyer. She later married a Frenchman and lived quietly in England with her family.

Meanwhile, the man, who drew his own brooding self-portrait at the age of 40, was a German Swiss named Heinrich Füssli.3 He had travelled to Italy, where he Italianised his surname to Fuseli and then made a successful career as an artist in London. There he married an Englishwoman. Both these individuals embodied the flexibility and fluidity of eighteenth-century identities. Neither their social milieux nor their individual life-histories were static.

As educated people, the Congress’s Adam and Eve might well have encountered, in their reading and conversations, various catch-phrases like ‘It’s an Age of Light’ or ‘This Age of Reason and Science’. Specifically, too, Fuseli as a German-speaking Swiss could have read in the original Immanuel Kant’s celebrated enquiry, published in 1784, Was Ist Aufklarung? What is Enlightenment?

Moreover, Dido Belle Lindsay, the free daughter of a formerly enslaved African woman, would no doubt have appreciated the public appeal made by the leading African abolitionist Olaudah Equiano. He urged that slavery had no place in an age of ‘Light, Liberty, and Science’. He was thereby invoking the sense of a new Zeitgeist and new forms of knowledge. By contrast, the slave traders had custom and practice in their support, as well as financial vested interests. But, tellingly, the slave traders did NOT justify their business by saying ‘It’s an Age of Slave-Trading’, even though that was factually true. On this issue, the abolitionists were ‘seizing the narrative’, to put the point into twenty-first-century terminology.5

Nonetheless, the Congress’s Adam and Eve would not have thought about their era as one of fixity. They both lived long enough to see the emergence of conscious anti-Enlightenment thought, from the later eighteenth century onwards. Fuseli specifically contributed to Romanticism in his art, and expressed scepticism about the claims of cold rationality. So neither figure would have been surprised to learn that the concept of Enlightenment remains contested among historians, political theorists and social philosophers.

Responses today range from appreciation and appropriation through to rejection and outright denial. Scholars analyse national and regional variations; and they debate differences between mainstream and radical Enlightenments. Meanwhile, in the later twentieth century, hostile postmodernist critics attacked appeals to rationalist reforms, which they identified as a single and oppressive ‘Enlightenment Project’.8   Yet rival sceptics denied the existence of any cohesive movement at all. Plenty to debate.

To those complexities, moreover, may be added the further complications of ‘Identities’. The terminology is warm and positive. But its impact is not simple. Viewed schematically, the rise of identity studies in the last thirty years has matched the decline of research interest into historical class, and the rise of ‘identity politics’ in the wider world.10  This fashionable approach is personal, individualistic. It rejects economic determinism. Instead, the factors that influence identity are seen as endlessly fluid and flexible. They may include gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and yes, social class; but they extend to religion, nationality, region, language, politics, culture, brainpower – and the power of physical appearances.

Certainly the Congress’s Adam and Eve would have known about identity issues, although they would not have described them in such terms. Dido Belle Lindsay lived with her great-uncle, the liberal judge William Mansfield. It was he in 1772 who heard the famous test case, when the captive African James Somersett sued for his freedom from the hold of an English ship in an English port. The case was an individual one. But the judge, when granting Somersett’s plea for liberty, pronounced publicly that the state of slavery was ‘odious’.11  Dido Belle Lindsay would surely have approved. As a result, Somersett gained the legal identity of a free man and judicial disapproval was directed at the entire system of personal enslavement. The case became a landmark in the long (and still continuing) struggle to abolish unfree personal servitude in its many different guises.

However, there are criticisms to be made of identity histories, as there are of identity politics. There is a danger that personal classifications may be interpreted too rigidly. In reality, people then and now may have multiple and overlapping identities. They may move between them as they prefer: an eighteenth-century gentleman livening in Northumbria might define himself as an Englishman when teasing a Scot from north of the border; but both might define themselves as Britons when opposing the French.

It’s also vital to recognise that identities are not always soft, liberal and inclusive. Group identities especially can become aggressive, bellicose, and coercive, formed in contra-distinction to ‘other’ groups. So identity politics may lead not to shared pluralism but to harsh conflict and polarisation. In sum, these big organising concepts may contain light – but also darkness.

Today it is surely time to look beyond the sub-divisions, not in blind denial but in awareness that there are also universals alongside diversities. In gender history, there is also a concept of personhood, beyond the rivalries of men and women.12  In terms of polymorphous human sexualities, there’s a potential for agreed boundaries of non-exploitative behaviour, beyond the rhetoric of individual sexual gratification. In the context of historical ‘racism’, there’s also significant movement towards a non-racialised understanding that all people are members of one human race.13  And, legally and politically, there is scope for a renewed endorsement of universalist human rights, as triumphantly if controversially expounded in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, applying not to one section of the globe but to all – and applying in practice as well as in theory.14

These communal issues are becoming especially highlighted in the light of the global climate emergency.15  They make a huge agenda but a very human one, to be pursued with a spirit of unity which underlies diversity: avec l’esprit de l’unité, qui sous-tend la diversité …

ENDNOTES:

1 Edited text of presentation given to Edinburgh Congress Enlightenment Identities, on Monday 15 July 2019, introducing first Global Plenary. My esteemed colleagues on the panel were, in order of speaking, Deirdre Coleman (University of Melbourne); Sébastien Charles (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Canada); Tatiana Artemyeva (Herzen State University of Russia); Sutapa Dutta (Gargi College, University of Delhi, India); and Toshio Kusamitsu (University of Tokyo, Japan).

2 For Dido Belle Lindsay (1761-1804), see P. Byrne, Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle (2014); and an intriguing outreach film Belle (dir. A. Asante, 2018).

3 For Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), see M. Myrone (ed.), Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli Blake and the Romantic Imagination (2016).

4 O. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative: And Other Writings, ed. V. Carretta (1995), p. 233.

5 For a huge literature, follow leads in B. Carey and others (eds), Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760-1838 (Basingstoke, 2004); and R.S. Newman, Abolitionism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2018).

6 See e.g. R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981).

7 See e.g. J.I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford, 2001) and ensuing debates.

8 S-E. Liedman, The Postmodernist Critique of the Project of Enlightenment (Amsterdam, 1997); G. Sauer-Thompson and J. Wayne Smith, The Unreasonable Silence of the World: Universal Reason and the Wreck of the Enlightenment Project (2019).

9 G. Garrard, Counter-Enlightenments: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (2004).

10 See e.g. critiques like W. Egginton, The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality and Community on Today’s College Campuses (New York, 2018).

11 For the complexities of the case, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart.

12 See e.g. commentary in P.J. Corfield, ‘Enlightenment Womanhood, Manhood, Sexualities and Personhood: Thematic Overview’, in L. Andries and M-A. Bernier (eds), L’Avenir des Lumières: The Future of Enlightenment (Pars, 2019), pp. 89-105; L. Appell-Warren, Personhood: An Examination of the History and Use of an Anthropological Concept (Lewiston, 2014).

13 For the shared genetic history of humankind, see L. Cavalli-Sforza and F. Cavalli-Sforza, The Great Human Diaspora: The History of Diversity and Evolution, transl. S. Thomas (Reading, MA, 1995).

14 Consult A. Brysk, The Future of Human Rights (Cambridge, 2018).

15 See calls for more urgent responses as in D. Spratt and P. Sutton, Climate Code Red: The Case for Emergency Action (Victoria, Australia, 2008); and many other publications.

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