Anne C. Vila

The Philosophe’s Stomach

“The stomach rules the brain”: with that pithy maxim, Voltaire summed up much of the spirit of scholarly endeavor in the French Enlightenment. The stomach did, indeed, seem to rule the life of the mind in eighteenth-century France, a time when social pleasures like fine dining were central to the effort to redefine the modern intellectual as a public-spirited, convivial fellow eager to partake of worldly life.l Nowhere, it seems, did the French love of food and the equally French passion for ideas converge more harmoniously than in the mythic “repas philosophique,” the imaginary gathering of Voltaire and other famous talking heads that became one of the century’s canonical images.2 However, even in this golden age of intellectual sociability, the connection between the thinker’s mental and digestive pursuits was far from simple: although philosophes like Voltaire and Diderot were avid gourmands who disavowed the ascetic image of the scholar that had prevailed in the past, they were often ambivalent about the belly-centered excesses of their own era.3 They seemed, moreover, to regard the Republic of Letters as an institution plagued with indigestion—both the metaphorical indigestion induced by the flood of books issuing forth from writers great and small, and the literal indigestion that tormented those who overindulged in high living, the pursuit of learning, or both at once.

Sex, Procreation, and the Scholarly Life from Tissot to Balzac

Anne C. Vila is Associate Professor, Department of French and Italian, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Vila is the author of Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998) and articles on Diderot, Rousseau, Sade, Balzac, literature and medicine in eighteenthand nineteenth-century France, the Encyclopédie, and cultural studies. She is currently preparing a book entitled Virile Minds, Ambiguous Bodies: Thinkers in French Literature and Medicine, 1700–1840. ANNE C. VILA

L'esprit (dé)réglé: Literature, Science, and the Life of the Mind in France, 1700–1900

Abstract: The case studies presented in this special issue illustrate the unique appeal that the puzzle of the mind exerted across fields of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They highlight the diversity of approaches and perspectives that the exploration of the mind elicited in literature, philosophy, and the sciences de l’homme. They also testify to the conceptual challenges and persistent nebulousness that surrounded the notion of esprit and its close associates. That fluidity of meaning was, in its way, productive: it provoked debates about the nature of the self, the precarious status of consciousness, and the relevance of human exceptionalism.

Singular Devices: Minds at Work from Montesquieu to Diderot

Abstract: Eighteenth-century descriptions of esprit and the persona of the thinker often insisted on the interplay of “le physique et le moral.” This idea was often illustrated through analogies that compared the embodied mind to a device that operated via fine-tuned response and motion. Whereas physicians used such analogies to warn scholars about the health dangers of overstudy, other authors deployed them for positive, heuristic purposes. The two main examples examined here are Montesquieu and Diderot, who figured the complexities of thinking through models that included musical instruments, the “spider in its web,” and the mechanical apparatus known as the tableau mouvant.

Penseurs Profonds: Sensibility and the Knowledge-Seeker in Eighteenth-Century France

The best-known intellectual persona of the French Enlightenment, the philosophe, is typically associated not with the vicissitudes of sensory, corporeal existence, but with reason, truth-telling, and the pursuit of social and political reform. However, like many other aspects of eighteenth-century culture, the figure of the thinker was deeply inflected by sensibility’s rise as a concept that bridged body, mind, and milieu. This chapter focuses on the absorbed thinker as a type to reconstruct what sensibility was held to do in the mind and body during the act of intense cerebration. It examines the ambiguous affective and sensory state which various moralists and physicians ascribed to thinkers observed or imagined in the state of absorption. It then considers some of the purposes to which Denis Diderot put the figure, focusing particularly on the absentminded geometer characters that appeared in his fictional dialogue Le Reve de d’Alembert (1769) and in the Elements de physiologie (1778). Finally, it considers what those depictions imply, both for Diderot’s views on the thinking process and for existing historiographical accounts of sensibility in the Enlightenment era.

‘Ambiguous Beings’: Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante

Few personae seemed to vex the French Enlightenment quite so deeply as that of the overtly cerebral woman: although learned women enjoyed a prominent role both at court and in the Parisian salon, they were nonetheless vulnerable to the biting ridicule made popular years earlier by Moliere’s satire of pretentiously intellectual precieuses, Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies; 1672).1 Despite efforts made by Madame de Lambert, Mercier, Thomas, and others to refute the notion that learning was nothing more than a vainglorious fad among women, Moliere’s comedy still cast a long shadow in eighteenth-century France: it inspired numerous stage spin-offs, permeated biomedical discussions of sexual difference, and tainted the public image of women like Emilie du Châtelet, who was viciously attacked after her death for having appeared too ‘singular’ in both her scholarly aspirations and her love life.2 The double bind that confronted learned women is evident in Voltaire’s ‘Eloge historique de Madame du Châtelet,’ where he simultaneously lauded his late mistress’s quest for intellectual glory and praised her lady-like ability to hide her erudition from everyone except her fellow geometers and Newton specialists. In a comment that shows how firmly social demands circumscribed the exercise of the reasoning female mind in Enlightenment France, Voltaire declared: ‘never was a woman more scholarly than she, and never did anyone deserve less that one say of her: “she’s a femme savante” … amidst a mass of projects that the most laborious scholar would scarcely have undertaken, who would have believed that she found time not just to fulfill all the duties of society but avidly seek out all of its amusements? She devoted herself to high society as she did to study.’3 In other words, a woman like Châtelet might be just as adept as a man in cultivating knowledge, but her scholarly achievements had to be counterbalanced by an equal degree of success in the elite social realm.