‘Art’, Artifice, the Natural, and the Political in Enlightenment France

• In Event: Delimiting the Popular and the Political in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This paper examines responses by some 17th- and 18th-century authors to a seemingly ridiculous, but in fact very serious and intractable philosophical problem: What are the implications of the fact that all members of a given political community cannot possibly possess the same qualities as that community’s most outstanding individuals? All political thinking on the place of ‘the people’ in civil society has arguably addressed this question, albeit for the most part obliquely. But a considerable number of authors in Enlightenment Europe did so explicitly. The aforementioned question is a striking trope in 17th- and 18th-century Francophone political writing, from Pierre Bayle to Denis Diderot. In posing that question, such authors were chiefly preoccupied with determining what qualities or achievements distinguished a society’s best candidates for government from everyone else— ‘the people’.

These reflections were particularly thorny for two main reasons. Firstly, the analogical reasoning underpinning them was not always unassailable: it proved difficult to explain why superior capacities in fields other than politics and government ought to translate to political responsibility and suitability for office. Secondly, distinctions between ordinary and extraordinary members of the political community were difficult to accept without accounting for fundamental inequalities not only the political community, but also mankind. No attempt to address the question of how to compensate for various disparities amongst members of society could avoid reckoning with these challenges. This meant that responses to that question tended not to be straightforward attempts to justify the domination of ‘the people’ by an intellectual-political elite. Rather, they were serious reflections not only on the roots of inequality, but also on what was really common—that is, natural—to man.

The most striking attribute that 17th- and 18th-century authors proposed was natural to man was a capacity for art. By ‘art’, these authors did not mean the activity of producing visual, performing, or other kinds of artworks. Rather, a capacity for art was simply a capacity to do, to make, to create wholes out of parts. One who undertook this kind of art was not an ‘artist’, but an ‘artificer’. Famously, it was over this precise attribute of man that Adam Ferguson found himself in the most categorical disagreement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who insisted on a dichotomy between art and nature. But a more thorough look at wider discussions about art and nature in the period reveals that Ferguson’s declaration that ‘art itself’ was ‘natural to man’, and that man was ‘the artificer of his own frame’, ‘destined, from the first age of his being, to invent and contrive’ (An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767) was rooted not merely in a disagreement with Rousseau, but also in longer-standing conversations about the nature of this kind of art, and the place of artifice in human nature and in civil society. Central to these conversations was the aforementioned challenge of accounting for differences between ordinary members of civil society and their more exceptional counterparts—those with a greater capacity for art.

This paper examines how this was explored in some 17th- and 18th-century Francophone reflections on the qualities of two sorts of persons whose capacities for art were universally acknowledged to be extraordinary: dramatists and actors. It is in these writings that we find particularly developed articulations of the idea that ‘art’ and ‘artifice’ were cognates. But it was in the disjuncture between dramatists’ and actors’ capacities for art on one hand, and those of ‘the people’ on the other, that authors were most interested. At the heart of their discussions were disagreements about what the political consequences of that disjuncture ought to be. At first glance, exalting the desirability in the political sphere of the capacities for art that dramatists and actors possessed seems to betray an irredeemably elitist view of who was permitted to have access to the political sphere. But some of these writings in fact offer a radical vision of political equality. The argument was not that only those who possessed powers of art and of artificing equal to those of dramatists and actors could gain entry to the political sphere. Rather, dramatists and actors simply demonstrated the art that man was naturally capable of. The point therefore was not to shrink the boundaries of the political to exclude all but the best artificers, but to extend them to those of the natural, to encompass all who were naturally capable of art. Raising questions about what kinds of, and how much, artifice is needed for civil society to function and to flourish, this paper seeks to cast new light on Enlightenment debates on human nature, equality, and citizenship, and attendant attempts to resolve disconcerting cleavages within the abstract monolith of ‘the people’.

Author

• Shiru Lim, European University Institute