Micromégas: objet littéraire non identifié

Le tome 20c des Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, tout juste sorti des presses, comprend entre autres textes le conte philosophique Micromégas. Publié en 1751 mais mûri pendant de longues années (ses origines remontent à ‘une fadaise philosophique’ à propos d’un certain ‘baron de Gangan’ que Voltaire avait envoyé au futur Frédéric II de Prusse en juin 1739), c’est incontestablement l’un des chefs-d’œuvre de Voltaire, dont le succès ne s’est jamais démenti depuis sa publication (l’astronome américain Carl Sagan le cite même comme l’une de ses sources d’inspiration).

Citoyen de Sirius banni par ‘le muphti de son pays’ pour ses propositions ‘sentant l’hérésie’, le géant Micromégas parcourt l’univers, et échoue sur Terre en compagnie d’un habitant de Saturne rencontré en chemin. Croyant tout d’abord la planète inhabitée en raison de la taille minuscule de ses habitants, les deux visiteurs finissent tout de même par établir le contact avec des Terriens membres d’une expédition scientifique, et une conversation s’engage.[1] Le lecteur assiste alors en compagnie de Micromégas et de ses interlocuteurs à une sorte de tour d’horizon des connaissances scientifiques de l’époque.

Romans et contes de Monsieur de Voltaire, 3 vol. (Bouillon, Société typographique, 1778), vol.2, p.15.

Riche d’un contenu scientifique pointu (en tout cas pour l’époque), Micromégas joue sur les tensions qui animent le débat entre les théories scientifiques cartésienne et newtonienne – Voltaire, on le sait, avait largement contribué à faire connaître Newton en France avec ses Elements de la philosophie de Newton, composés en 1736-1737, période où a probablement germé dans son esprit l’idée du conte qui allait devenir Micromégas. Mais c’est également la tension entre poésie et science, et entre imagination et vérité qu’explore Voltaire dans son conte. Il ne s’agit pas simplement de mettre en récit des idées philosophiques, mais plutôt d’élaborer une fiction prenant pour thème la quête de la vérité. Dans cet objet littéraire hybride fait de science et de philosophie, Voltaire met littéralement en œuvre la méthode expérimentale héritée de Locke et de Newton.

Récit de science-fiction, fable, à la fois conte et règlement de comptes de l’auteur avec certains ennemis personnels, commentaire sur la société de son temps, le texte propose aussi une réflexion sur la place de l’homme dans l’Univers, entre deux infinis. Comme souvent chez Voltaire, la simplicité du style, la limpidité de la narration et la concision du récit dissimulent maints niveaux de complexité et des subtilités insoupçonnées au premier abord.

Loin de n’être qu’un conte philosophique certes très plaisant et qui prône les valeurs voltairiennes de tolérance et de lucidité, Micromégas revêt également une importance unique en tant que texte scientifique ‘déguisé’ en conte.

[1] On reconnaîtra facilement Maupertuis et les membres de son expédition polaire dans la petite équipe découverte par Micromégas. Témoin de l’actualité scientifique de son temps, Voltaire s’était enthousiasmé pour le voyage du savant en Laponie au cours des années 1736-1737, voyage qui contribua à confirmer la théorie de Newton selon laquelle la Terre était aplatie aux pôles.

– Georges Pilard et Karen Chidwick

Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment

Sir Isaiah Berlin, as he eventually became, was the leading British intellectual historian of his time. He was born in 1909 in Riga, on the western edge of the Russian Empire. To avoid the Revolution, his family moved to Britain, where the young Berlin pursued a brilliant academic career in philosophy, becoming a Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford in 1932. His many later achievements included the founding of Wolfson College, also in Oxford. As a public intellectual, he was famous as a spell-binding lecturer, much in demand for talks and broadcasts.

Feeling somewhat constrained by Oxford philosophy, Berlin turned increasingly to the history of ideas. No such subject was recognized in mid-twentieth-century Britain, though it was represented in the United States by Arthur O. Lovejoy, author (among much else) of The Great Chain of Being (1933). By the time of Berlin’s death in 1998, the ‘Cambridge school’ of intellectual history, based less on discrete concepts than on the historical study of languages and vocabularies, was well established, thanks to Quentin Skinner and John Pocock. But for some decades Berlin had the field virtually to himself.

Though Berlin’s interests were many and various, he is associated especially with the Enlightenment. And here some oddities occur, which Laurence Brockliss and I sought to explore in a conference held at Wolfson in 2014 and in the resulting book, Isaiah Berlin and the Enlightenment (2016).

Sir Isaiah Berlin, by Walter Stoneman (1957), National Portrait Gallery, London.

Berlin came to the Enlightenment via Karl Marx. In 1933 he was commissioned to write a small book on Marx for a general audience. It appeared in 1939 as Karl Marx: His Life and Environment. Berlin read not only Marx’s voluminous writings but also the authors who had influenced him, including the philosophes of the French Enlightenment. In exploring their work, Berlin, who knew Russian perfectly, was guided by the work of the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov. Plekhanov’s writings directed him to the radical materialists Helvétius and d’Holbach. They were convinced that human beings came into the world with minds like blank slates (as Locke had argued), owed all their knowledge to external sensations and influences, and could therefore be shaped through education and guided towards perfection.

In all Berlin’s subsequent references to the Enlightenment, this utopian doctrine reappears. The Enlightenment stands for the hope of reshaping the world through rational education and leading humanity towards a perfect society. Naturally Berlin regarded such hopes with scepticism. While respecting the humane intentions of the philosophes, he thought that their programme would involve unacceptable coercion and would risk ironing out the rich diversity of human life into boring uniformity. Above all, it was sure to founder on what Kant, in a phrase Berlin loved to quote, called ‘the crooked timber of humanity’. Human beings were too quirky, too awkward, too cussed to fit into any utopian scheme – and that was fortunate, considering how the utopian hopes invested in the Soviet Union had turned out.

Berlin’s opposition to utopian schemes made him one of the great liberal intellectuals who were much needed during the Cold War period. He has an American counterpart in the New York critic Lionel Trilling, whose novel The Middle of the Journey (1948) culminates in a fine statement of liberal values.

But was Berlin fair to the Enlightenment? He foregrounds thinkers who now seem minor and relatively uninteresting. He never gives extended discussion to the far more complex, more sceptical, and more talented writers Voltaire and Diderot. More curiously still, when the New American Library commissioned him in the 1950s to compile an anthology of philosophical texts, The Age of Enlightenment (1956; re-issued in 1979 by Oxford University Press), most space is given to British writers – Locke, Hume, and Berkeley; of the French, only Voltaire features, and that briefly; and we find a very incongruous writer, Johann Georg Hamann.

Johann Georg Hamann. Image Wikimedia Commons.

Hamann (1730-1788), a fellow-townsman and acquaintance of Kant and other Enlightenment luminaries, was a devout if unorthodox Christian who wrote in a perplexingly opaque style. He dwells on the inadequacy of reason, the limitations of language, the need for a constant dialogue with God who himself speaks in riddles. He represents the antithesis to the utopian optimism that Berlin ascribed to the Enlightenment. Hamann became a central figure in what Berlin called ‘the Counter-Enlightenment’. This term referred to the late-eighteenth-century reaction against Enlightenment universalism in favour of the unique particular. It rejected reason in favour of emotion, ‘progress’ in favour of pessimism; instead of affirming humanity’s basic goodness, it warned darkly of original sin.

Berlin did not share these beliefs. But, by his own account, he found the Counter-Enlightenment a salutary reminder of the insufficiency of Enlightenment values. One of Berlin’s favourite ideas was that humanity had to choose or compromise between incompatible goods. Enlightenment, reason, and liberty were excellent; but to embrace them you had to relinquish other values which were also good.

Neither Berlin’s conception of the Enlightenment, nor that of the Counter-Enlightenment, would be generally accepted now. But the tension he found between them illustrates an undeniable moral dilemma in human life. And his expression of this dilemma may well be found memorable and challenging, long after his conception of intellectual history has retreated into the past.

– Ritchie Robertson

Animals and humans in the long eighteenth century: an intricate relationship

How does a scholarly book get started? In the majority of cases it is bound with the author or editor’s passion and deep-rooted (and often inexplicable) connection with his or her subject matter. For me, Animals and humans: sensibility and representation, 1650-1820 began nearly ten years ago, when I read Kathryn Shevelow’s eminently readable book For the love of animals, about the growth of the animal welfare movement in the eighteenth century. Our relationship with animals never ceases to fascinate, as we see from the Wellcome Collection’s current exhibition ‘Making nature: how we see animals’, and animal studies has recently flourished in the academic mainstream. Like Shevelow’s book, it crosses the boundaries between specialised academic study and deeply felt human experience.

My own beginning with this subject, though, occurred almost in infancy. An innate attraction to animals, these others with whom we co-exist on this planet, is shared by almost all small children and all human cultures in one way or another, and is represented throughout human history. And as we see in very small children, in this oldest relationship of the human species we still find a deep connection and resonance. In bringing together and editing this book, it was wonderfully liberating to be able to combine a lifelong passionate interest in animals with my own professional field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.

Thomas Gainsborough, Girl with pigs (1782), oil on canvas; Castle Howard Collection. © Castle Howard; reproduced by kind permission of the Howard family.

1650-1820 – the timeframe we cover in our study – is the period associated both with the growth of experimental science and the horrors of vivisection, and with the rise of modern humanitarianism. While the defence of animal rights itself goes back to classical times, in the eighteenth century it was directly linked to a growing awareness of universal human rights and a new definition of humanity based on the ability to feel rather than in the primacy of reason. Together with the abolitionist and feminist movements of the later eighteenth century, animal welfare came to resemble its modern self, with legislation first enacted in 1820.

Peter Simon after Gainsborough, The Woodman (1791 [1787]), stipple engraving; Sudbury, Gainsborough House. © Gainsborough House.

But in this book we aim to explore more deeply the human relationship with animals in the long eighteenth century, in many different forms of expression. As shown by the different essays in this volume, this ancient relationship challenges not only the arbitrary divisions of Western cultural history (classicism and romanticism, for example), and not only disciplinary boundaries between poetry and science, art and animal husbandry, fiction and natural history, but also the basic assumptions of human self-perception, in which we do not see animals as objects of our ‘objective’ study, but rather as beings with whom we share a space and who demand a mutual response. A major thread of this book, then, is the re-evaluation of sentiment and sensibility, terms that in the eighteenth century referred to the primacy of emotion, and which were not solely the prerogative of humans. Through the lens of eighteenth-century European culture, contributors to this volume show how the animal presence, whether real or imagined, forces a different reading not only of texts but also of society: how humans are changed, and how we the readers are changed, in our encounters with the non-human other, in history, art, literature, natural science and economics. More deeply, we are reminded of the power and antiquity of this relationship.

– Katherine M. Quinsey

OSE Digitisation for archiving… then sale?

The Vf is in the midst of a big project to digitise all 550+ books from the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series into ORA (Oxford University Research Archive), the University’s own archive of scholarly publications – Oxford’s dark archive.

We are heavily indebted to four students who have hugely helped by working over the last two years. Here, Andi and Elizabeth give us their views, which show how much publishing has evolved since the beginning of the series and the benefits that the metadata capture and printing-on-demand (a.k.a. PODing) will bring to the users and buyers of Studies volumes.

Print-on-demand creation – Andi Glover

I worked as a digitisation assistant for the Voltaire Foundation for four months, administering the creation of print-on-demand (POD) editions of volumes in the SVEC series (Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), now Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment.

SVEC, established by Theodore Besterman in 1955, is a series of scholarly monographs in French and English on diverse aspects of eighteenth-century European history, culture and ideas. The volumes I worked on, published between 1964 and 1979, covered subjects as diverse as Molière’s critical reception in his time (vol.112), and a study of the influence of Hobbes and Locke on the concept of sovereignty in French philosophy (vol.101). Many of these volumes were written by authors still collaborating with the Vf today, such as a study on the account of Rousseau given in Madame de Graffigny’s letters (vol.175) by English Showalter, now the editor of her complete correspondence.

As a student of librarianship, I was aware of Besterman’s contribution to bibliography as the author of The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography (1935), Counsellor of the World Bibliographical and Library centre, and editor of the World Bibliography of Bibliographies. Several SVEC volumes bear witness to his application of these skills to Voltaire studies, such as Some eighteenth-century Voltaire editions unknown to Bengesco (vol.111), which builds on earlier bibliographies of Voltaire with editions that Besterman located through his research.

To digitise and create POD editions of these volumes, I first prepared draft preliminary pages and covers, and sent them to typesetters with whom I then liaised to finalise the PDF files they created. I also approached some of the original authors to request overview text for the covers of their volumes; their good wishes and enthusiasm for the project were encouraging. Where we could not contact authors, I enjoyed choosing extracts from the books themselves that I felt would inform and engage a scholarly reader.

Next, I uploaded my proofs to the printer, Ingram’s Lightning Source website, and input key metadata about the volumes, such as number of pages and year of publication. Finally, I posted the hard copy volumes, provided by the Taylor Institution, to Ingram for scanning, and checked the resulting digital and hard copy proofs. The first hard copy proof arrived in early August; two months and many cups of coffee later, I had sent 60 volumes to be scanned and digitised.

Working simultaneously on several volumes, each at a different stage in the process, was challenging. I was well supported throughout as well as being free to make decisions independently about formatting, and organising my own workload, and as a result I have become more confident about managing responsibility!

Andi Glover is a Library and Information Studies MA student at University College London. Tweet @librarimand, or e-mail.

Malheur aux détails, la postérité les néglige tous… (*) except when needed for e-books! – Elizabeth Duncan

I worked at the Voltaire Foundation a couple of weeks after finishing the final exams for my BA degree in Classics and French, looking to gain some practical experience in publishing.

Over the summer I worked on capturing metadata for the digitisation of the extensive back catalogue of books in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series (formerly Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century).

Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment holds a wealth of interesting and erudite work on the Enlightenment which deserves to be made more readily accessible and widely available, and digitisation, or electronic publishing, offers a way to achieve this aim.

Drawing of Château at Ferney on website of Vanderbilt Library – relating to Voltaire’s British visitors

Begun in 1955, with over five hundred books to its name, the series encompasses scholarship ranging from highly specialised work on Voltaire, such as Sir Gavin de Beer and André-Michel Rousseau’s detailed catalogue of Voltaire’s British visitors, for which I wrote a description for the website, to broader studies shedding light on neglected areas, such as Enlightenment Spain and the ‘Encyclopédie méthodique’ (November 2015) for which I checked the first proofs.

My work largely consisted of cross-checking the details held about each book, from its ISBN to its pagination, and keying the short descriptions and tables of contents, in order to capture all the information (or metadata) necessary to find the electronic books when digitised and online. In the cases of earlier books, ones from the 1950s and 1960s when no-one ever dreamt that a book could become, or should become, an intangible piece of electronic data, finding and collating these details was sometimes a challenge! This initial project was an essential step in a longer process, and it is exciting to think of these older books, which still have valuable things to say about the Enlightenment, being made available once again to a new audience through a medium invented many years after they were written.

The other advantage of working in a small team like the Voltaire Foundation is that I had the opportunity to see other aspects of publishing by doing other odd jobs – I have definitely had my practical experience!

As a keen student of French literature who had very much enjoyed the eighteenth-century literature I covered at Oxford, I also really appreciated the chance to broaden my acquaintance with the subject by seeing the diversity of topics on which scholars work and publish, especially the opportunities to dip into the proofs of books not even published yet to see where the very newest thought on the Enlightenment is going.

(*) Title reference: Letter from Voltaire to the abbé Dubos, Best.D1569