Enlightenment Universalism? Bayle and Montesquieu on China

Abstract

This article addresses questions concerning Enlightenment universalism and cultural diversity by focusing on the views of China held by Pierre Bayle and the Baron de Montesquieu. In contrast to the characterizations of Enlightenment thought as insufficiently attentive to cultural diversity and as providing pretexts for imposing European values on non-European cultures, recent scholarship has sought to uncouple Enlightenment thought from imperialism and colonialism. An examination of the perspectives, positive and negative, of Bayle and Montesquieu on China suggests that Enlightenment thinkers attempted to reconcile ethical universalism and cultural diversity, but also shows the limitations of such attempts. Thus, while dismissals of Enlightenment thought as universalistic and even imperialistic fail to consider Bayle’s and Montesquieu’s subtle engagements with Chinese culture, their accounts of China arguably fall short of being robust cross-cultural or anti-colonial perspectives.

This article is a substantially revised version of a paper delivered at a workshop on “Universalism to the Test of History and Geography,” organized by Frank Chouraqui, at the 13^th conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, Nicosia, Cyprus, July 2–6, 2012. Special thanks go to Aurélie Elisa Gfeller, Robert Sparling, and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Seyla Benhabib, “In Defense of Universalism. Yet Again! A Response to Critics of Situating the Self,” New German Critique 62 (1994): 173–75.

2. Fred Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory,” Perspectives on Politics 2.2 (2004): 253.

3. Seyla Benhabib, “Another Universalism: On the Unity and Diversity of Human Rights,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 81.2 (2007): 8.

4. Dallmayr, “Beyond Monologue,” 249–50.

5. For a fuller account and assessment of postcolonial critiques of the Enlightenment, see the editors’ introduction to The Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. 5–17.

6. Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap.7, esp. 258–61, 266–68, 274–77, 282.

7. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

8. Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 869–70. William A. Callahan argues that Kang’s reliance on Social Darwinist “racial harmony” in his Book of Great Harmony is evidence of sinister undertones to his universalist project: “Harmony, unity, and diversity in China’s World,” The Newsletter (International Institute of Asian Studies) 60 (Summer 2012): 22–23.

9. See, for example, the contributions in Carey and Festa, The Postcolonial Enlightenment; Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 4; Henry Vyverberg, Human Nature, Cultural Diversity, and the French Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds., Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).

10. Vyverberg, French Enlightenment, 121.

11. David E. Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 59–99; Jonathan Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), chap. 5; Simon Kow, “Confucianism, Secularism, and Atheism in Bayle and Montesquieu,” The European Legacy 16.1 (2011): 39–52. Positive and negative evaluations of China in the early modern period did not necessarily correspond to positive or negative evaluations of other non-European cultures. For example, the Jesuits were much more critical of indigenous American cultures than of China, as I argue below; while the Baron de Lahontan, a critic of the Jesuit missions to North America, contrasted the Chinese unfavourably with the Hurons (see Louis Armand de Lom d'Arce, baron de Lahontan, New Voyages to North America, 2 vols. [London: printed for H. Bonwicke; T. Goodwin, M. Wotton, B. Tooke; and S. Manship, 1703], 2:155). Rousseau followed Lahontan in championing les sauvages of America while regarding China as an example of corruption in the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Basic Political Writings, trans. and ed. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 6. Hence the thoughtful engagements with China which I explore here show a selective attunement to cultural diversity in the case of a non-European society.

12. See Israel, Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested.

13. Ho-Fung Hong, “Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East-West Differences from 1600 to 1900,” Sociological Theory 21.3 (2003): 257–58.

14. On Jesuit attitudes to First Nations peoples of North America, see Relations des Jésuites: contenant ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable dans les missions des pères de la Compagnie de Jésus dans la Nouvelle-France, 3 vols. (Québec: Augustin Coté, 1858).

15. Mungello, Great Encounter, 13–14.

16. Matteo Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord in Heaven (T’ien-chu Shi-i), trans. Douglas Lancashire and Peter Hu Kuo-Chen, ed. Edward J. Malatesta (St. Louis, MO: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1985), 452–53.

17. Mungello, Great Encounter, 20–21; see also David E. Mungello, ed., The Rites Controversy: Its History and Meaning (Nettetal, Germany: Steyler, 1994).

18. Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin, 1983), 210; Liam Matthew Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 106–7.

19. Ricci, Lord in Heaven, 456–57.

20. Robert Shackleton, “Asia as Seen by the French Enlightenment,” in Essays on Montesquieu and on the Enlightenment, ed. David Gilson and Martin Smith (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988), 234.

21. On Bayle as an atheist, see Israel, Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested'; as a sceptic, see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and Howard Robinson, Bayle the Sceptic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931); as a fideist and Calvinist, see Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1963–64).

22. Robert Sparling, “Religious Belief and Community Identity in Pierre Bayle’s Defense of Religious Toleration,” Eighteenth-Century Thought (forthcoming).

23. Pierre Bayle, Oeuvres Diverses, ed. Elisabeth Labrousse, 5 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Oms Verlag, 1964–82), 2.520. This and the following translation are from A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14:23, “Compel Them to Come In, That My House May Be Full,” ed. John Kilcullen and Chandran Kukathas (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005), 456.

24. Bayle, Oeuvres Diverses, 2.378; Philosophical Commentary, 97. A similar point is made in Bayle’s 1686 essay, “Ce que c’est que le France toute Catholique sous le Regne de Louis de Grand,” Oeuvres Diverses, 2.350–51.

25. See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Writings on China, trans. Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemont Jr. (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1994); “Athée, atheism,” “Catéchisme chinois,” and “De La Chine,” in Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1964); chaps. 1–2 of Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations in The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Theodore Bestman et al., 142 vols. (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1968), vol. 22; Christian Wolff, Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica, ed. Michael Albrecht (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1985).

26. Shackleton, “French Enlightenment,” 237; Kow, “Bayle and Montesquieu,” 42–45.

27. Bayle, Oeuvres Diverses, suppl., 1.2.257–58. The translation is from Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. Richard H. Popkin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1991), 295.

28. Bayle, Oeuvres Diverses, 3.88. The translation is from Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. Robert C. Bartlett (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 169.

29. Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 645–46. See also Robert C. Bartlett, “On the Politics of Faith and Reason: The Project of Enlightenment in Pierre Bayle and Montesquieu,” The Journal of Politics 63 (2001): 1–28; and Kenneth R. Weinstein, “Pierre Bayle’s Atheist Politics,” in Early Modern Skepticism and the Origins of Toleration, ed. Alan Levine (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999), 197–223.

30. For Bayle, an atheist may behave decently because human beings do not act according to their consciences: “what convinces us that atheism is the most abominable state one can be in is but a false prejudice concerning the lights [lumières] of the conscience, which are imagined to be the rule of our actions in the absence of a proper examination of the true springs that make us act.” (Oeuvres Diverses, 3.86; translation from Various Thoughts, 165).

31. Weinstein, “Bayle’s Atheist Politics,” 213.

32. Bayle, Réponse au questions d’un provincial, cited in Weinstein, “Bayle’s Atheist Politics,” 213.

33. Bayle’s seventh proof for his assertion that atheism is no worse than idolatry is entitled, “l’athéisme ne conduit pas nécessairement à la corruption des mœurs” (Oeuvres Diverses, 3.86). Atheism does not necessarily lead to moral corruption because it is in itself a false and immoral doctrine that atheists may not follow in their actions.

34. Bayle, Oeuvres Diverses, suppl., 1.1.831–33.

35. See, for example, his positive and enthusiastic account of the Jesuit missions in the Preface to the Novissima Sinica, in Leibniz, Writings on China, 45–59.

36. Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 78–87. See also Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 359–61.

37. Leibniz, Writings on China, 75–138. See also David E. Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1977), 75–117; and Perkins, Leibniz and China, 191–94.

38. Leibniz, Writings on China, 51.

39. Perkins, Leibniz and China, 120–21.

40. Leibniz, Writings on China, 48–49.

41. Leibniz, Writings on China, 45–46.

42. Vyverberg, French Enlightenment, 126–32; Mungello, Great Encounter, 94.

43. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Roger Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1949–51), 2.237. This and other translations are from The Spirit of the Laws, ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8.

44. Montesquieu, Oeuvres Complètes, 2.231; Spirit of the Laws, xliv. On Montesquieu’s critique of natural law and emphasis on diversity, see Mark Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 108–10. For an interpretation which stresses Montesquieu’s development of the natural law tradition (against nineteenth-century views of Montesquieu as a forerunner of value-free sociology), see C. P. Courtney, “Montesquieu and Natural Law,” in Montesquieu’s Science of Politics, ed. David W. Carrithers, Michael A. Mosher, and Paul A. Rahe (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 42–67.

45. Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 111.

46. Montesquieu, Oeuvres Complètes, 2.357; Spirit of the Laws, 119.

47. Spirit of the Laws, bk. 17.

48. Sharon Krause, “Despotism in the Spirit of Laws,” in Montesquieu’s Science of Politics, 251; Melvin Richter, “Montesquieu’s Comparative Analysis of Europe and Asia: Intended and Unintended Consequences,” in L’Europe de Montesquieu, ed. Alberto Postigliola (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1995), 317–36. See also Hulliung, Old Regime, 100–102.

49. See Montesquieu, Oeuvres Complètes, 2.289; Spirit of the Laws, 56.

50. Montesquieu, Oeuvres Complètes, 2.365; Spirit of the Laws, 126–27.

51. Johann Gottfried Herder, On World History, ed. Hans Adler and Ernest A. Menze (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 237.

52. Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 130–31.

53. Montesquieu, Oeuvres Complètes, 2.368; Spirit of the Laws, 128.

54. Montesquieu, Oeuvres Complètes, 2.535; Spirit of the Laws, 288. Cf. this comment in his early unpublished manuscript, “Quelques remarques sur la Chine que j’ay tirées des conversations que j’ay eües avec Mʳ Ouanges”: “nous regardons la Chine comme le plus grand empire du monde, il faut dit-on qu’il y ait bien de la sagesse puisqu’il subsiste depuis si longtems ce raisonnement seroit bon sy c’etoit le meme empire qui eut toujour subsisté, mais il n’y a qu’a lire les Annales chinoises pour se persuader du contraire. ...” Oeuvres Complètes de Montesquieu, 18 vols. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2007), 16.123n.

55. Kow, “Bayle and Montesquieu,” 46–49. See De l’esprit des lois, bk. 14, chap. 5; bk. 24, especially chaps. 2 and 19; and Rebecca E. Kingston, “Montesquieu on Religion and on the Question of Toleration,” in Montesquieu’s Science of Politics, 389.

56. For sympathetic accounts of Montesquieu’s use of Jesuit and other sources on China, see E. Carcassonne, “La Chine dans ‘l’Esprit des Lois,’” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 31e Année, 2 (1924): 193–205; and more recently, Catherine Volpillhac-Auger, “The Proper Use of the Stick: The Spirit of Laws and the Chinese Empire,” in Montesquieu and His Legacy, ed. Rebecca E. Kingston (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009), 81–95.

57. On Montesquieu as an historical thinker, see Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 209–16. Catherine Larrère regards his thought as constituting a liberal pluralism in “Montesquieu and Liberalism: The Question of Pluralism,” in Montesquieu and His Legacy, 279–301.

58. It should be noted that Dallmayr does see Montesquieu as a “nonconformist” Enlightenment thinker whose work “is an important guidepost pointing (however vaguely) in the direction of an ‘alternative modernity’ or ‘alternative modernities’.” Fred Dallmayr, “Montesquieu’s Persian Letters: A Timely Classic,” in Montesquieu and His Legacy, 240. Such nonconformity was characteristic of many Enlightenment thinkers, whereas Montesquieu’s preference for constitutional reform was rather less radical than the perspectives of many of his Enlightened peers, complicating Dallmayr’s schema of alternative versus conformist modernities.

59. Richter, “Europe and Asia,” 317–36; Mungello, Great Encounter, 91–94.

60. See Israel, Enlightenment Contested, chap. 11.

61. See, for example, the lively debate on these issues in The Newsletter 60 (Summer 2012): 19–30.

62. Daniel Carey and Sven Trakulhun relate Enlightenment universalism and diversity, particularly in Kant and Herder, to contemporary theories of multiculturalism in “Universalism, Diversity, and the Postcolonial Enlightenment,” in Carey and Festa, Postcolonial Enlightenment, 240–80.