How mystics, radicals, and philosophers shared heretical views of the self in 18th-century France.
The traditional consensus on the Enlightenment describes a compellingly simple narrative. It portrays humankind’s emergence from the shadows of blind faith and self-denial to its discovery of a path illumined by reason, utility, and sociability. As the story goes, this passage led to an unprecedented sense of personal and collective agency in a universe where man, rather than God, stood as the principal measure of all things. Along with the possessive, autonomous individual arose the watershed ideologies of liberalism and secularism, sparking revolutions in both the old world and the new.
Of course, nothing—particularly history—is so cut-and-dried, which is where history professor, Charly Coleman, comes in. His new book, The Virtues of Abandon, offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the French Enlightenment. It does so by uncovering the opposing strands of anti-individualist sentiment that ran through the rituals of heretical Christian mystics, the salons of the materialist philosophes, and the French Revolution’s cult of patriotic self-sacrifice. Each of these groups, in their own way, spurned the idea of individual self-ownership in favor of an ideal of dispossession that, while often overlooked, bore an equally crucial influence on thought and experience in eighteenth-century France.
Accepting only the predominant line on the French Enlightenment, with its undue emphasis on triumphant individualism, has had profoundly distorting effects. It not only impoverishes our understanding of a historical moment in which the values that inform the modern world took shape, but also perpetuates a misapprehension of what these ideals have meant and should mean. According to Coleman, the complex interplay between individualist and anti-individualist ideals clarifies both the nature of the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement and also the surprising contingencies that have marked the history of selfhood. In the interest of better understanding this dynamic and its significance, we asked Professor Coleman a few questions about the Enlightenment and anti-individualism.
Q:
The book explores what you refer to as an “unholy trinity” comprised of Christian mystics, materialist philosophers, and political radicals. What do you mean by this term? What drew these seemingly disparate actors together, and what threat did they pose to the status quo of the period?
A:
The expression “unholy trinity” captures two central aspects of anti-individualist thought during the French Enlightenment.
The first relates to its emergence out of mystical heresy, and the broader implications of these origins. Among the most influential early theorists of dispossession was Jeanne-Marie Guyon, a woman who broke with her family—and with her wealthy past—to embark on a religious vocation. Her rhetoric of spiritual abandon not only captivated the period’s leading theologians, but also prefigured the incorporation of dispossessive thought into Enlightenment materialism. Philosophical radicals such as Diderot shared the aversion of Guyon and her disciples to claims that the self could hold irrevocable property in material things, or even in its person. This striking affinity compels us to grapple with the Enlightenment’s religious dimensions even where least expected: among its most avowedly atheist partisans.
This brings me to a second feature. Critics of dispossession, whether clerics or philosophes, never forgot its heretical origin; indeed, they constructed their respective versions of orthodoxy very much in response to it. Anti-individualism challenged both time-honored religious truths about moral accountability as well as the moderate Enlightenment’s self-image as a bastion of reason and self-mastery. In order to understand the motives of theologians and philosophers when formulating arguments in defense of the self’s powers and prerogatives, we must also confront the myriad challenges to this position. That the emergence of individualism was so closely bound up with self-ownership stems from the latter ideal’s highly contested status.
Q:
Why was the self such a pressing issue throughout the eighteenth century? And why does your terminology of the self, with its emphasis on ownership and dispossession, have a distinctly economic ring?
A:
Thinking about the self was implicated in a range of controversies—over venal office-holding, Christian mysticism, atheistic materialism, luxury consumption, and civil and political rights. These debates shared a preoccupation with whether a person could claim its identity, its salvation, its earthly belongings, or even its ideas and actions as its own. They elicited such vehemence in part because French subjects found themselves confronted by a panoply of new material objects, the expanding accessibility of which challenged the traditional society of orders. The kingdom experienced a consumer revolution as well as a political one in the eighteenth century. At stake in both was the relationship of personhood to property.
Q:
What do debates over the self tell us about how men and women in eighteenth-century France understood their world?
A:
As my comments on the consumer revolution suggest, the book’s narrative engages with questions of both thought and practice. Christian mystics did not merely theorize spiritual abandon; they also dared to succumb to it in elaborate rituals. Philosophical materialists were similarly inventive in their quest for dispossession: some attempted to induce consciousness-altering dreams to satisfy their lust for knowledge, while others committed suicide out of fatalistic foreboding. During the Revolution, the government debated the limits of property rights while orchestrating political cults that encouraged citizens to emulate the sacrifice of martyrs to the republican cause. In recounting these and other cases, I address conceptual transformations without losing sight of the experiences of men and women during the period—or of the logic behind those experiences, however curious they may strike us now.
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Charly Coleman is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University and author of The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment.
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