La Critique du préjugé au prisme de l’herméneutique (1680–1780). Sous la direction de Muriel Brot et Claire Fauvergue

Abstract

In the Introduction, editors Muriel Brot and Claire Fauvergue state the aim of their volume: to nuance, by drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s re-evaluation of prejudice as the necessary ground of thought and experience, the prevailing assumption that Enlightenment is single-mindedly antagonistic to prejudices. Demonstrating the complexity of approaches to prejudice in Enlightenment writing, the collection seeks to show that post-war criticism of ‘le préjugé contre le préjugé’ by Gadamer and Theodor W. Adorno (discussed in Paolo Quintili’s closing article) might in fact be congruent with much eighteenth-century thought. At the heart of the volume is the claim that Enlightenment thinkers indeed sought to free themselves as far as possible from the distortions of prejudice to understand phenomena, but not by rejecting situated points of view in favour of an all-conquering universal reason: rather, by the inhabitation of multiple perspectives. The volume thus applies the ‘prisme de l’hermeneutique’ to the light of Enlightenment. In the opening articles, Jean-Christophe Abramovici and Céline Spector trace Bayle’s and Montesquieu’s ambivalence towards certain prejudices, while Stéphanie Géhanne Gavoty asks exactly what contemporaries understood by the phrase ‘préjugé légitime’, frequently encountered in apologist and anti-philosophe writing. Christophe Martin reintegrates the imagination into the critique of prejudice, arguing that philosophers from Descartes and Cyrano de Bergerac to Rousseau, via Fontenelle, Montesquieu, and Diderot, used critique not to banish the fabulous from the world, but rather to speculate on what might be possible against the prejudice of the vraisemblable. This careful volume is not an introductory work, but Martin’s article would be invaluable to students keen to get a handle on the ambiguities of critique as it operates across a spread of genres (fundamental to our teaching of the Enlightenment). The volume then focuses in on a couple of key thinkers, treating Diderot and his collaborators in five articles, and Holbach in two. All are informative and stimulating within their narrower purview, with Fauvergue and Brot’s own pieces offering the most expansive takes on Diderot’s deployment of prismatic perspectives. Both argue that Diderot’s ‘universal’ constituted an opening out to the other, not a refusal of difference: as Brot writes, citing Gadamer, ‘comprendre revient à comprendre autrement’ (p. 171; original emphases). The penultimate article, by Luigi Delia, deserves particular mention for advancing the thesis of the volume through a less familiar case study: the Swiss Christian encyclopaedia project Code de l’humanité. Delia argues that the contributors to this revisionist encyclopaedia also evoked multiple perspectives, but that they took revelation as their unifying viewpoint, rather than the bird’s-eye view of the philosopher/historian. Reading the article ‘Homme’, Delia suggests that the contributors’ prejudice against materialism was not an unreflecting bias, but rather, per Gadamer’s definition, a fixed point of departure from which to reason. Their arguments against materialism actually incorporate some of Holbach’s optimistic assertions as unmarked citations, an incorporation which should be understood as an example of Gadamer’s ‘médiation et […] fusion d’horizons’ (p. 228). This unexpected encounter reminds us of the continued humanist orientation of many Enlightenment writers, who aimed ‘moins à séparer les individus sur la base de leurs croyances et de leurs préjugés, qu’à enseigner aux hommes à être humains, c’est-à-dire, […] “bienveillants et bienfaisants”’ (p. 228).