The Anti-metaphysical Turn in the Philosophy of Love (From the Cartesian Perinatal Perspective on Love to Diderot’s Free Love in His Supplement to Bougainville’s Journeys)

Abstract

In my paper, I show how the metaphysical aspect of the earlier concepts of love faded away through the disappearance of the essential references to God as the one, omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent being of the creation of nature, physis. Although in the seventeenth century, the structure of nature was conceived roughly in Epicurean terms, this concept was thought to be in need of a completion through a parallel system of being directed by teleological causality in one way or other. A synthesis of the Epicurean-scientific and the Christian teleological worldview was the main point in the philosophical agenda. The Enlightenment period meant a radical break between this soul-centred view and a new body-centred view most of the important thinkers were persuaded of. I exemplify this radically new look at the human being-in-the-world by presenting some ideas from § 50 of Diderot’s “Thoughts on the interpretation of nature” (Pensees sur l’interpretation de la nature). Diderot attributes the faculties of feeling and thinking to all being from the tiniest molecules to the most complex beings, dispensing in this way with the typically seventeenth-century idea of God as the personal warrant of the possibility of cognition. The sentient elements’ joining other corpuscles is no more governed by an omniscient creator but by the dynamism of the process itself. This boundless, creative, dynamic fluidity of being, this newly conceived nature in continual flux seemed to be captured best by such elastic faculties as imagination or sentiment. This is one of the reasons for the overall dominance of these faculties in the French and Scottish versions of the philosophy and theory of art of Enlightenment. The consequences of all this in domain of the thinking on love will be presented by way of a reflection upon Diderot’s ideas on the mixing of human and animal species in the Dream of D’Alembert and on his ideas on “free love” in his Supplement to the voyage of Bougainville (1775/1796).