The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason ed. by Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reasoned. by Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin Gianni Paganini Jeffrey D. Burson and Anton M. Matytsin, editors. The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason. Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment. Gregory S. Brown, General Editor. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019. Pp. 235. Paper, £65.00. In the last half century, the image of the Enlightenment underwent many changes and no longer is monolithic, as was the case with Paul Hazard, Peter Gay, and Ernst Cassirer. It is usual nowadays to talk about national Enlightenments, moderate and radical Enlightenment, religious Enlightenments, counter-Enlightenment, and so on. In this process of widening the notion of Enlightenment, which the editors depict as a real "explosion," there is also [End Page 615]room for a skeptical Enlightenment, which not so long ago was limited to a few, supposedly fringe figures: Bayle, Hume, and Rousseau. The ubiquitous "specter" of skepticism that Burson and Matytsin see as present all along the eighteenth century comprises also the reactions and responses to skepticism. Actually, besides enriching enormously the mapping of skeptical thinkers in the age of reason, the editors advance a more daring thesis: the interaction between skepticism and anti-skepticism would ultimately qualify the very meanings of the terms 'reason' and 'rationality,' redefining the powers and the limits of human understanding, and bringing about a new, more comprehensive definition of the Enlightenment. The authors of the different chapters show that the imperative to overcome doubt and uncertainty stimulated some of the most innovative characteristics of the Enlightenment. For example, Burson deals with the Jesuits and the skeptical crisis, Martin Mulsow and John C. Laursen with legal skepticism, Rodrigo Brandao with Voltaire, Sébastien Charles with Berkeley, and John P. Wright with skepticism in Bayle and Hume. In the Introduction, the editors react to the thesis, advanced by Jonathan Israel, that the skeptical crisis was resolved by the partisans of the "radical Enlightenment," and emphasize by contrast the persistence and fertility of the debates on skepticism. The target of the volume is, in the editors' words, "any overly reductive and celebratory paradigms of the Enlightenment," and especially explanations ex post factothat "whiggishly derive a conjectural and triumphalist origin narrative of a historically distorted definition" (5). This collection of essays thus challenges several prevailing interpretations of the Enlightenment. However, the reader has sometimes the impression that the editors fall into the same mistake that they charge others with, even if the values they stress are different from the "radical" or the "pagan" vulgate. Is it not the same, albeit inverted, essentialist error to claim that the learned culture of the eighteenth century was "an age of skepticism" rather than an "age of reason"? To counter unidirectional teleological explanations of "whiggish" style, the editors risk falling into opposite oversimplifications when claiming that "philosophical skepticism, far more than certainty and the glib assumption of inevitable progress, was, in fact, the crucible of the Enlightenment process" (8). Without any doubt, it is important to stress the fact that skepticism was an important aspect of the eighteenth-century culture; but substituting a part for the whole is never wise. Caution is all the more legitimate as the editors, in their sketch of "the age of skepticism, c. 1500–1750" (8), neglect other important aspects that do not fit in their schema. For example, in light of recent post-Popkin scholarship, it is astonishing that Matytsin and Burson still place under the same label of "Christian skepticism" authors who are very different from each other, such as Montaigne, Charron, La Mothe Le Vayer, and Huet. Only the latter was a true "Christian skeptic," while La Mothe, especially in his juvenile works, was much more a pagan than a Christian skeptic. As for Montaigne and Charron, they established the canon of the "honnête homme," who is not simply a believer, but also a moralist, a fine connoisseurof human nature, a defender of toleration, a proto-anthropologist of societies, customs, religions, and civilizations. Nonetheless, it is certainly a very good thing that Enlightenment skepticism at last leaves the margins of history and enters the range...