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Suffering Scholars: Pathologies of the Intellectual in Enlightenment France (Intellectual History of the Modern Age) - Hardcover

Buch 7 von 19: Intellectual History of the Modern Age

Vila, Anne C.

 
9780812249927: Suffering Scholars: Pathologies of the Intellectual in Enlightenment France (Intellectual History of the Modern Age)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812249925 ISBN 13: 9780812249927
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX, intellectual superiority has been linked to melancholy. The association between sickness and genius continued to be a topic for discussion in the work of early modern writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. But it was not until the eighteenth century that the phenomenon known as the "suffering scholar" reached its apotheosis, a phenomenon illustrated by the popularity of works such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's De la santé des gens de lettres, first published in 1768. Though hardly limited to French-speaking Europe, the link between mental endeavor and physical disorder was embraced with particular vigor there, as was the tendency to imbue intellectuals with an aura of otherness and detachment from the world. Intellectuals and artists were portrayed as peculiarly susceptible to altered states of health as well as psyche—the combination of mental intensity and somatic frailty proved both the privileges and the perils of knowledge-seeking and creative endeavor.

In Suffering Scholars, Anne C. Vila focuses on the medical and literary dimensions of the cult of celebrity that developed around great intellectuals during the French Enlightenment. Beginning with Tissot's work, which launched a subgenre of health advice aimed specifically at scholars, she demonstrates how writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mme de Staël, responded to the "suffering scholar" syndrome and helped to shape it. She traces the ways in which this syndrome influenced the cultural perceptions of iconic personae such as the philosophe, the solitary genius, and the learned lady. By showing how crucial the so-called suffering scholar was to debates about the mind-body relation as well as to sex and sensibility, Vila sheds light on the consequences book-learning was thought to have on both the individual body and the body politic, not only in the eighteenth century but also into the decades following the Revolution.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anne C. Vila is the Pickard-Bascom Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France.

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Introduction
A Strange Idea: The Singularity of the "Poetically" Organized

Few characters embody the myth of the suffering scholar more dramatically than the mysterious protagonist of Honoré de Balzac's novel Louis Lambert (1832), "that poor poet who was so nervously constituted, often as vaporous as a woman, dominated by a chronic melancholy, entirely sick from his genius as a girl is sick from the love for which she yearns without knowing it." Lambert is certainly a striking figure, endowed with a brilliance that is both dazzling and strangely pathogenic, and his creator is arguably the modern writer who did the most to popularize the idea that intellectual endeavor could be dangerous to your health. Balzac was, in fact, the author who first got me thinking about one of the central notions underlying this book: the idea that sustained mental effort comes at the cost of the body. Where, I wondered, did he get the idea of "thought killing the thinker," which determines the fate of various characters in the Études philosophiques cycle, including the brilliant but doomed Louis Lambert? And what factors were at play in this conception of thought as capable of sapping the life force of the person who engaged in it too intensely?

Balzac did not invent the strange condition of being sick from one's genius. Concern about infirmities tied to study dates back to Aristotle's famous problem XXX, which linked intellectual superiority to melancholy. The topic was also discussed by early modern writers like Marsilio Ficino (De triplici vita; Three books on life [1489]), Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy [first ed., 1621]), and Daniello Bartoli (Dell'huomo di lettere difeso et emendato; English trans., The Learned Man Defended and Reformed [1660]). However, it was during the century directly preceding Louis Lambert's creation that the persona of the ailing scholar really took hold in the French vernacular, a phenomenon illustrated by the popularity of works like Samuel-Auguste Tissot's De la santé des gens de lettres, first published in French in 1768. Though hardly limited to French-speaking Europe, the link between mental endeavor and disorder was embraced with particular vigor in that context—as was the tendency to imbue cerebralists with an aura of otherness and detachment from the world. Oddly perhaps, an important strand of French Enlightenment thought portrayed intellectuals as peculiarly susceptible to altered states of health as well as psyche.

That situation looks less odd if we recall that the eighteenth century was also an age of great anxieties, many of which revolved around health. Compared with the centuries that preceded it, this one was relatively healthy: mortality rates declined in France and longevity rose, due to factors that included a reduction in famine, fewer wars on French soil, and the declining frequency of the waves of massive epidemics like the plague, which had been a regular fact of life. However, people still lived in fear of falling victim to other diseases recognized as transmissible, like smallpox, dysentery, and syphilis. They also faced such potentially grave conditions as consumption; excretory obstructions (the term sometimes applied to cancer); apoplexy, gout, and gastric disorders (more prevalent at the high end of the social spectrum); fevers and other sorts of pathological heat; and the dangers of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding. Last but not least, they were exposed to various "manufactured" diseases, an expression that Dr. Théodore Tronchin used to describe the vapors, but which could also be applied to onanism (the century's most notorious invented pathology) and to the maladies des gens de lettres, the disease syndrome explored in this book.

Viewed against the backdrop of the period's health anxieties, the Balzacian-style cerebralist comes more fully into focus: although obviously a reflection of Balzac's own vision of the life of the mind, this figure also had roots in eighteenth-century ways of thinking about thinkers. In the eyes of numerous Enlightenment-era commentators, the passions and pathologies of intellectuals and artists made them singular—not simply as individuals like the original genius (a new type of being, born during this period) but also as a group of people bound together by their working habits and their devotion to the life of the mind. Much of the discourse written in this vein was medical, but just as much belonged to the realms of moral philosophy and imaginative literature, like moralist accounts of the passion known as the love of learning, autobiographical reflections on mental application, and fictional portrayals of meditators in the grips of cogitation.

Singularity, we should note, carried both positive and pejorative meanings at the time, an ambivalence illustrated by the entry for singulier in the 1694 Dictionnaire de l'Académie française: "Unique, particular, that which has no peer, rare, excellent. . . . It is sometimes used negatively, and signifies 'bizarre, capricious, affecting personal distinction.'" That ambivalence was apparent in the celebrity culture that took shape around the mid-eighteenth century, when, as Antoine Lilti has shown, a particular set of factors converged to make certain people a focus of intense public curiosity. Fame was, of course, bestowed upon many types besides intellectuals: some of the greatest stars were actors, opera singers, courtesans, and political figures. However, the mantle of singularity was particularly associated with those who distinguished themselves through their ideas, as Charles Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, emphasized in "Mes pensées": "As soon as a man thinks, and he has a personality, people say 'he's a singular man.' . . . It must be that singularity consists in a refined way of thinking that escapes other people; because a man who can only distinguish himself by wearing a particular sort of shoe would be deemed an idiot anywhere."

Montesquieu's larger point was that people who actually thought for themselves were in the minority in the conformist milieu of polite society: "Most people resemble each other in the sense that they don't think: they are eternal echoes, who have never said anything [new] and always repeated." That remark brings to mind various critiques he made in his novel Les Lettres persanes (1721), like the character Rica's wry comments on the French nation's slavish devotion to the latest sartorial fashions, and the tale he recounts of the two aspiring beaux esprits who take turns uttering empty witticisms they've practiced in advance. However, like many contemporaries, Montesquieu attributed the uniqueness of genuine thinkers to more than just their social comportment: he held superior minds to be exceptional in physical organization as well.

This period's blanket term for intellectuals, gens de lettres, encompassed many sorts of knowledge seekers, but it was commonly evoked to single them out as a group in terms of their habits and temperament. Thanks to the rise of the maladies des gens de lettres, the singularity of intellectuals and artists came to entail more than their unique ways of thinking or behaving: it also derived from the special constitution they supposedly possessed. This book is designed to tell the story of how the bodily as well as moral exceptionalness of the learned was represented and debated from the early eighteenth century to the era of Balzac. It also explores the complex web of interconnections created between the life sciences and literature around that idea.

Background Currents: Sensibility, Psychology, and the Mind/Body Relation

Obviously, French culture has long given privileged status to intellectuals. Even today, the mythology of Frenchness endows...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812249925
ISBN 13 
9780812249927
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
267
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