‘Casanova and Enlightenment: His Study of Life and Other Writers’ – extracts
Contents
Introduction
1 Enlightenment Roots
2 Horace: 65-8 BCE
3 Ludovico Ariosto: 1474-1533
4 Pierre Gassendi: 1592-1655
5 Libertinism
6 Voltaire: 1694-1778
7 Denis Diderot: 1713-1784
8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 1712-1784
9 Threads of Recollection
10 A Philosopher and a Christian
11 An Experimental Moral Philosopher
Introduction
‘We talk, and we become good friends. It was the illustrious Abate Winckelmann, who twelve years later was assassinated in Trieste.’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
In Casanova’s Life and Times: Living in the Eighteenth Century the focus was on the wider social context of Casanova’s day-to-day life and, in particular, his relationship with women. To have a rounder understanding of the man we need to turn our attention to his life as an Enlightenment man of letters. Casanova’s engagement with the intellectual and cultural concerns of the day were an important part of who he was, and in this, as with so many other aspects of his life, he was shaped by the age in which he lived.
What constitutes the Enlightenment is a matter of debate but typically its beginning is dated from the mid- to late seventeenth century, ending with the start of the French Revolution in 1789. Broadly speaking, the Enlightenment was a movement that was influential in the creation of a mental outlook commonly described as Western. This outlook is marked by a range of generally accepted values. Inalienable and universal individual rights are acknowledged to be of primary importance. There is an understanding that reality is grounded in what is material, observable and measurable as opposed to what can be deduced from, or asserted by, authority, custom and tradition. Physical well-being is prioritised over spiritual well-being – it would not be acceptable to kill a person to save their soul. It is recognised that all have an equal claim to happiness, and that a person’s happiness should not be compromised by appeals to supernatural deities. Democracy is believed to be a superior system of government. Toleration, freedom of expression, universal education and equality before the law regardless of identity or status, are all typically regarded as essential to a civilised society. While certain groups or individuals may question these values and the extent to which they should be regarded as norms, they are part of the fabric of European institutions and laws, and for most Europeans are uncontroversial.
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1 Enlightenment Roots
‘The next day at nine o’clock, I saw the language teacher. He was a respectable-looking man, polite, modest, speaking little and well, reserved in his answers, and with an old-fashioned education. He began by making me laugh when he told me that a Christian could only accept the Copernican system as a scholarly hypothesis. I answered him that it could only be the system of God since it was that of nature, and that the holy scripture was not the book from which Christians could learn physics.’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
The moral mind
Imagine that you are talking to a neighbour and discover that they regularly punished their child after being informed by a teacher that their child is left-handed. Up until that moment you only knew them to be a well-respected member of the community. They were sociable, honest, educated, devout, had a good occupation and had appeared to be a loving parent. They explain to you that they are training their child to be right-handed because they are concerned that otherwise they will go to hell. You might conclude that this person was suffering from some sort of delusion and you would likely report them to social services. Yet this calculation, sacrificing earthly pleasures and well-being in the hope of attaining paradise in the afterlife, was unexceptional for members of Abrahamic religious traditions (Jewish, Christian and Muslim) and rooted in their most fundamental conceptions of reality. For generations such societies were in thrall to a supernatural cosmos that supervised and judged each moment of their lives. Yet to a citizen of the modern Western world, even to those who are members of one these traditions, many of those attitudes and behaviours now appear baffling.
But consider the following. In Europe from the end of the fifteenth century until the middle of the eighteenth, it is estimated that some 200,000 people were tortured, burnt or hanged as witches. Pain was lauded as a purgative. Punishments of the most gruesome kinds were meted out in rituals of purification and redemption. Fire was particularly valued. It was in the nature of fire to move up towards the heavens and so it occupied a position in the order of the cosmos that was closer to God. Running alongside those Abrahamic traditions, and frequently merging with them, were numerous other supernatural beliefs. We have faeries stealing babies and replacing them with half-wit changelings. We have the royal touch whereby as a consequence of their divinity monarchs had the power to heal disease (as did the right hand of an executed prisoner – note, not the left hand). We have horseshoes to ward off evil and the breaking of mirrors that brought bad luck (because the image reflected was a person’s soul and breaking the mirror disconnected the soul from the body). The souls of the dead migrated or transformed into birds and beasts. In seas, lakes and rivers we find mermaids, mermen and water-guardians along with cursed monsters of the likes of Grendel sheltering in the murky depths. Dwelling in the woods and forests we have spectral hounds, phantom huntsmen, mysterious warriors and pest maidens. To live in pre-modern Europe was to share a parallel dimension populated by more angels, spirits, elves and the dark forces of evil than you could shake a stick at, and in the mountains, the occasional giant. The signs were all around you, if you knew where to look and how to read them. For thousands of years the existence of the supernatural was an almost tangible reality of daily life that had to be navigated and assuaged.
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2 Horace: 65-8 BCE
‘Horace, whom I know by heart, is my guide [in studying humanity], and I find him everywhere.’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
Popularity
Quintus Horatius Flaccus was Casanova’s favourite Latin poet, ranking alongside the Renaissance poet Ludovico Ariosto in the Venetian’s literary affections. Casanova’s memoirs contain dozens of references to him, such as the one above. Horace had been a significant cultural figure for centuries before the Enlightenment and was to continue to be so after it. His writing was appreciated not only for its craftsmanship, originality and beauty but for moral guidance, on what constituted a good life, and observations on social conduct. Particularly influential was his treatise The Art of Poetry (19 BCE), itself a poem in the form of a letter on poets, poetry and poetry writing. From his work we also learn much about everyday Roman life as well as his own, all against the backdrop of momentous political change as the Roman Republic transitioned under Augustus into the Roman Empire. Horace was particularly esteemed in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century, and was an educational staple of Europe’s elite. This meant that Casanova could expect his readers and, in company, his listeners, to have some familiarity with him. He records a number of times how not just he but others made references to Horace in conversation. On one social occasion he attended in Warsaw, which included King Stanislas of Poland (1764-1795) and several guests, the conversation turned to Horace, ‘each quoting one or two of his maxims, expressing his opinion on the deep philosophy of the great poet of reason.’1 Literary and intellectual European luminaries of the likes of Alexander Pope, Pietro Metastasio, Nicolas Boileau, Voltaire, Diderot, Fredrich von Hagedorn, Christophe Wieland along with a host of less gifted writers found inspiration in Horace, often interacting directly with his work as translators or imitators. From 1660 to 1790 there were 120 English translations, more than those of Virgil and Homer put together.3
As well as the various editions and translations of his poems themselves, ‘in the first half of the eighteenth century,’ notes David Money with regards to the English market, ‘there were well over 100 imitations of individual Horatian poems, quite apart from complete editions.’2 It is worth pointing out that to imitate or borrow from the work of another writer was a literary practice without the stigma that might be attached to it today. Ideas, structures, subjects, phrases lifted in their entirety from the translations of others were all fair game. In fact, imitations might in some ways be understood as a loose form of creative translation that allowed writers considerable freedom in the way they worked their chosen material, for instance by integrating concerns relevant to contemporary society. An example would be the satires and epistles of Alexander Pope with titles such as The Seventh Epistle of the First Book of Horace. Imitated in the Manner of Dr. Swift. Part of the pleasure for the reader was to be able to identify how the imitator was playing with the original, rather like someone today recognising a director’s references in their own work to other films and film-makers.
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3 Ludovico Ariosto: 1474 to 1533
‘Not knowing what method to use to force destiny to reveal to me through the Bible the moment in which I would recover my freedom, I determined to consult the divine poem of The Frenzy of Orlando by Messer Lodovico Ariosto, which I had read a hundred times, and which was still my delight up there [in the prison of the Venetian Inquisition called ‘the Leads’]. I idolized his genius, and I believed him to be much more fitted than Virgil to predict my happiness.’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
One and a half thousand years later, the twinned presence of Horace and Epicurus crops up in the poetry of Ludovico Ariosto, in both Ariosto’s satires and his epic The Frenzy of Orlando. Ariosto was sympathetic to Epicureanism, a philosophical system that was to acquire increasing prominence from the seventeenth century onwards following upon the work of Pierre Gassendi. No doubt this aspect of his writing would have resonated with his future Enlightenment audience.
History of My Life is littered with references to the Italian and his work. When Voltaire asks Casanova which Italian poet he likes best, he answers, ‘Ariosto: and I can’t say that I love him more than the others; because I love only him.’1 Later in his memoirs he refers to The Frenzy of Orlando as ‘the masterpiece of the human mind.’2 Casanova’s admiration was not unusual; the poem was regarded as amongst the greatest literary works of the Italian Renaissance.
The Frenzy of Orlando
Completed in 1532, the poem is set in the eighth century with the Christian forces of Charlemagne besieged in Paris by the Saracen forces of Agramente, the king of Africa and Spain. It is made up of 40,000 lines divided across 46 cantos, comprising three main plots. These are two love stories and the war between Charlemagne and Agramente. The first love story is a triangle in which cousins Orlando and Rinaldo, the greatest champions of France, pursue Angelica, an Asian Princess at Charlemagne’s court. But she falls in love with a wounded Saracen infantryman called Medero whom she nurses back to health, and with whom she then runs off, triggering Orlando’s frenzy. The second love story involves Rinaldo’s sister Bradamante, a female knight who is searching for her love Ruggiero. In an intricate tale that encompasses Europe, Africa and Asia, the poem weaves together the natural and the supernatural. Alongside the life and death adventures of warriors embroiled in matters of honour, glory and the heart, the narrative features such wonders as a magic ring that confers invisibility, enchanted wells of love and hate, invulnerable armour, a hippogriff and lost wits in a bottle.
Ludovico Ariosto, born in Reggio Emilia, lived during a tumultuous period of European history. It was the age of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the wars of religion, the printing press and global exploration – Ariosto was 18 when Columbus set off for the New World. It was a time when the likes of Ferdinand and Isabella, Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V and Pope Leo X fought to establish their political, religious and territorial authority. For much of Ariosto’s life the Italian peninsula was a theatre of war between France and Spain. Trained in law, and a student of Greek and Latin literature, he was the son of the governor of Reggio, and was to work as a diplomat for the Este family of Ferrara. He dedicated The Frenzy of Orlando to Ippolito d’Este, his patron. Ferrara was at this time an important Renaissance city able to boast of works by men such as Piero della Francesca, Jacopo Bellini and Andrea Mantegna. Ariosto himself kept the company of artists and scholars. He had direct experience of war and the battlefield – he witnessed the siege of Padua in 1509 and the Battle of Ravenna in 1512 – giving him insights which he was able to draw upon for his writing.
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4 Pierre Gassendi: 1592 to 1655
‘The doctrine of the Stoics, and of every other sect, on the force of Destiny is a fantasy of the imagination that is rooted in atheism. I am not only monotheistic, but a Christian fortified by philosophy, which has never spoiled anything.’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
Pierre Gassendi was highly thought of by a wide range of key Enlightenment figures, including Diderot and Voltaire. He was a scholar of immense significance, if lesser known than Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Newton, Locke and Spinoza. Gassendi connects the philosophers of ancient Greece with the scientists of today, illuminating the transition from the world of the Middle Ages into the modern. He is important for anyone interested in tracing the materialist ideas that anchored Casanova’s libertinism. Casanova was introduced to Gassendi’s writings when he was 15 by his patron Senator Malipiero, at least in part as an antidote to the teachings of Aristotle.
Gassendi was born in the village of Champtercier in the south of France, the frail child of a peasant farmer, and went on to study philosophy and theology. He was a gifted student, obtaining a doctorate in theology in 1614 when he was 24. In 1616 he was ordained a priest, eventually rising to become provost of the Cathedral Chapter of Digne in 1634, and in 1617 he obtained the chair of philosophy at the University of Aix-en-Provence where he lectured on Aristotle. Around that time, he lodged with the vicar general of Aix, Joseph Gaultier, an accomplished astronomer. It was from Gaultier that that he acquired much of his knowledge of astronomy. Gassendi was subsequently forced out of his post at Aix in 1622 or 1623, along with other non-Jesuits, when the Jesuits assumed control of the university.
In the same year that he was awarded his chair of philosophy, he befriended the nobleman and influential magistrate Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a well-known humanist scholar and amateur astronomer who was to become his patron. The magistrate was sympathetic to Bacon’s idea that natural philosophy should be pursued in order to advance the well-being of one’s fellow citizens. Taking advantage of the closeness of Provence to Italy, for a period he studied under Galileo in Padua, the two becoming friends. Peiresc was later to intercede on Galileo’s behalf in an attempt to have his sentence reduced. Shortly after Galileo discovered Jupiter’s four moons in 1610 Peiresc had an observatory constructed at his home, and employed Gaultier and Gassendi to record their movements. He recognised that Jupiter’s moons might be useful as a way of more accurately establishing longitude. This was a matter of considerable practical importance for sea travel. In 1598 Philip III of Spain had offered a pension to anybody who was able to solve the problem. Unfortunately, the observations of the trio were not sufficiently precise, and the attempt failed. But Peiresc’s efforts did pay off in other respects. In 1610 he discovered the great nebula of Orion (although he did not publish his findings).
Peiresc introduced Gassendi to the intellectual circles of Marin Mersenne, a key facilitator of European scholarly debate. Mersenne was a friar, mathematician and polymath, and dubbed ‘the secretary of learned Europe’. He engaged and corresponded with the foremost thinkers of the day, including Descartes who was also a friend. Mersenne put scholars in touch with each other, communicated information, raised theoretical queries, translated texts and supplied and published books (including one of Hobbes’ optical treatises). It was largely Mersenne who introduced Galileo to France. And it was Mersenne who in 1641 organised the famous scholarly debate around Descartes’ Meditations. From 1633 Mersenne was at the centre of regular weekly meetings of mathematicians and physicists in Paris, meetings that inspired a number of significant mathematical discoveries. Its attendees were to include luminaries such as Blaise Pascal, Pierre de Fermat and Gilles de Roberval. Known as the Academia Parisiensi, it was a precursor in many ways to London’s Royal Society and Paris’s Academy of Sciences. These informal networks highlight how new radical theories and ideas were able to side-step the constraints of formal educational institutions such as universities that were controlled by the Church.
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5 Libertinism
‘In Venice there was not a greater libertine than myself.’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
‘The mythic character who had so swiftly taken hold as the emblem of libertinism was not merely French, but European: this mythic figure was a man whose life transcended all national cultures, social conditions, and different literary genres. In the final reckoning it is perhaps the figure of Giacomo Casanova that the libertinism of enlightenment Europe has left its most powerful legacy.’ Jean-Christophe Abramovici Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
God’s anarchist
‘Libertine’ is a term frequently used to describe Casanova, popularly understood today to be ‘a person who is unrestrained by convention or morality… one leading a dissolute life’ (Merriam-Webster online dictionary). It can also mean, disparagingly, ‘a freethinker especially in religious matters’ (again, Merriam-Webster) although this usage is probably one with which people are less familiar.
The word arose in the fourteenth century to signify a freed slave or ‘freedman’ (derived from the Latin ‘libertinus’) although its negative moral associations did not appear until the sixteenth century, and were the result of religious doctrinal and political conflicts triggered by the protestant reformation. ‘Libertine’ seems to have been first used in a derogatory sense by the second-generation, French-protestant reformer and theologian John Calvin (1509-1564), a central figure in the establishment of the Reformed tradition commonly known as Calvinism. His key work was the Institutes of the Christian Religion (Institutio Christianae Religionis), published in 1536, a textbook on the Protestant faith. Calvin’s teachings emphasized predestination and that the Bible was the ultimate authority in defining truth. Persecution of protestant dissenters in France led Calvin to flee to Switzerland in 1534, eventually settling in the city-state of Geneva which had recently embraced the Reformation and become a magnet for protestant refugees. There he was involved in the struggle to develop and establish a form of Church government known as Reformed or Presbyterian.
Calvin was opposed by several groups during this struggle in the late 1540s and early 1550s. It was one these, the Spirituels, that Calvin labelled Libertines. This was a reference to the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament where a group of Hellenistic Jews fell into a dispute with Stephen at the Synagogue of the Freedmen (hence Libertines from ‘libertini’). Stephen won the dispute but the Jews falsely accused him of blasphemy to avenge their humiliation, leading him to being stoned to death, and becoming the first Christian martyr. The Spirituels attracted particular support from amongst the social elites of French society, managing to convert several thousand and gaining the favour of Queen Marguerite of Navarre (1527-1549).
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6 Voltaire: 1694 to 1778
‘“This,” I said to him, “is the happiest moment of my life. Finally I see my master. For twenty years, sir, I have been your pupil.”’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
Much of the French Enlightenment was dominated by public intellectuals, or philosophes, such as d’Alembert, Comte de Buffon, Nicolas de Condorcet, Diderot, Helvétius, d’Holbach, La Mettrie, Montesquieu and Rousseau. But foremost amongst them was Voltaire. His output (literary, historical, political and philosophical) was prodigious, filling over 100 volumes of published works and over 100 volumes of correspondence. They included satirical novels such as Candide (1759), philosophical short stories such as Plato’s Dream (1756), entries for that great Enlightenment project the Encyclopedia, histories such as The Age of Louis XIV (1751), poetry such as the Henriade (1723), tragic plays such as Oedipus (1718) and comedy ballet such as The Princess of Navarre (1745). His works brimmed with originality, subtlety and wit, their frequent subversiveness incurring the ire of the Church and state. And it was not just the sharpness of his pen that got him into trouble. His tongue could be just as provocative. He was exiled and imprisoned on various occasions (twice in the Bastille), and his writings censored, banned, confiscated and burned. Voltaire’s influence and reach, in France and abroad, was immense. Not for nothing was he known as ‘the patriarch’ of the Enlightenment. He did much to establish its key battle grounds: anticlericalism; censorship; deism; ethics; Newton; political oppression; and toleration. Despite his various works grounded in philosophy and natural philosophy, he was a reformer and activist (although not a revolutionary) rather than a creator of philosophical systems. The persona of the philosophe, as it had come to be understood by the middle of the century, was largely created by Voltaire.
Born François-Marie Arouet in the long reign of Louis XIV, Voltaire was 20 years-old by the time of the Sun King’s death. The first twenty years of anybody’s life is hugely formative but this was particularly the case with Voltaire. The final two decades of Louis’ reign had been marked by war, famine, religious persecution and intellectual upheaval. The Edict of Fontainebleau of 1685 stripped the rights awarded to the Protestant minority by the 1598 Edict of Nantes which had allowed them to practise their religion free from persecution. Over a period of more than a quarter of a century, the wars of the League of Augsburg (1688-1697) and the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) ensured that France had enjoyed only a handful of years of peace. Across the channel, the discoveries of Newton, the writings of Locke, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 with its 1689 Bill of Rights undermined the older political, intellectual and religious certainties. Throughout Europe radical ideas were being discussed in academic societies and circulated by people of letters and learned publications. Journals and journalism proliferated, enabling access to these debates by the more educated members of society. And France was not immune. The Regent of France from 1715 to 1723, Philippe II, Duke of Orleans, was sympathetic to much of this thought, reducing censorship and allowing French citizens to engage with literature that was critical of the established orthodoxies of the state.
François-Marie was born in Paris to an affluent family. His father, also François, was a lawyer whose own family had been successful merchants and businessmen, although Voltaire suspected that he was not his true father. His mother, Marie-Marguerite, was from the minor nobility, and there is a possibility she may have had an affair with a higher ranked nobleman, Guérin de Rochebrune, who was one of her husband’s clients. François Arouet bought the lucrative royal office of ‘receiver of spices’ shortly after Voltaire was born which allowed him to collect taxes levied on the spice trade. On top of this he was a money-lender, a side-line that his son would go on to pursue. Voltaire was encouraged to write poetry from an early age, a highly regarded skill for a gentleman, while his father’s wealth and connections meant that he came to know important writers of the day, such as the poet and critic Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711), spurring on his literary ambitions. Also, from an early age, his godfather, abbé de Châteauneuf, taught him to be sceptical of religious claims.
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7 Denis Diderot: 1713 to 1784
‘There is no man in the world who manages to know everything; but every man must aspire to know everything.’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
A prominent Enlightenment figure, Denis Diderot was the prime mover behind the Encyclopedia, one of the great intellectual accomplishments of the age. According to biographer Andrew Curran, he was ‘the most creative and noteworthy thinker of his era,’ high praise indeed given the standard of the competition.1 He was a member of an informal network of brilliant minds centred on the Parisian salon of Baron Thiry d’Holbach (1723-1789). A relentless critic of Christianity who was eventually to become an atheist, in 1749 Diderot was imprisoned in the fortress of Vincennes after publishing a work which questioned the value of believing in a creator God. He was released after four months, partly on the understanding that he would not write any more such blasphemous works. Given the punishment to which authors and possessors of anti-Christian works could be subject, Diderot now had to be more discrete, at least in public. Henceforth he communicated his ideas through entries in the Encyclopedia, through literary works, through writings for the ‘drawer’ to be read only by friends and to be published after his death, by helping to shape and edit the texts of others, and through private conversation.
Casanova had two extended visits to Paris, in his mid-20s and early 30s: 1750-1752 and 1757-1759. It was a period when Paris was the nerve centre of the Enlightenment: an intense, restless city, fizzing with controversy and radical ideas that challenged the established order. Recently published, and generating tremendous outrage, was La Mettrie’s Man a Machine (1747), which argued that the mind was a consequence of the complex organisation of matter not the mysterious operation of the soul. La Mettrie had lived and worked in Paris then moved to Leiden in the more tolerant Dutch Republic after an outcry following upon a previous work Natural History of the Soul in 1745. But Man a Machine was too much even for the Dutch, and so he fled to Prussia. Montesquieu’s pioneering The Spirit of the Laws (1748) had also recently been published and was causing a stir (it was banned by the Catholic Church in 1751). That mighty undertaking, the Encyclopedia, was under way and provoking considerable opposition, the first volume released, as it happened, in the same year that The Spirit of the Laws was banned. Rousseau was making a name for himself with his 1750 winning essay Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, followed up in 1754 with Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. Voltaire was banned from Paris in 1754. Claude-Adrien Helvétius raised a storm in 1758 with his publication On Mind, which questioned religion as the basis for morality. Grounded in sensationalist philosophy, he argued that the actions of men were guided by a self-interested desire to maximise pleasure. The book was condemned as heretical and publicly burned by the Paris hangman. Meanwhile, d’Holbach was working on Christianity Unveiled, to be published anonymously in 1761, a swingeing attack on Christianity. Those who were discovered to possess the book could be sent to the galleys or incarcerated in a lunatic asylum for the rest of their lives as in the case of at least one poor woman.
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8 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 1712 to 1778
‘At that time, Madame d’Urfé wanting to know J-J Rousseau, we went to Montmorency to pay him a visit, bringing him music that he copied marvellously well. He was paid double the money that would have been paid to another; but he vouched that no fault would be found with it.’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
Notwithstanding Casanova’s claims to have had ‘three interviews’ with Rousseau, there is a debate over whether he did ever meet him.1 Possibly the account he gives in his memoirs was constructed from anecdotes that he had come across from others. It would not have been the first time that he had made himself an eye-witness to an event at which he was never present. Whether true or not that he had met the man, it is likely he would have wanted to. Rousseau was one of the great figures of the eighteenth century and was to be a major influence upon the direction of the French Revolution.
The Genevan was very different to Voltaire and Diderot, both of whom were highly educated, possessed quicksilver minds and relished society. Rousseau, by contrast, lamented his ‘slow thoughts’: ‘Ideas take shape in my head with the most incredible difficulty.’2 Conversely, he was an extremely emotional man: ‘It is as if my heart and my brain did not belong to the same person. Feelings come quicker than lightning and fill my soul, but they bring me no illumination; they burn me and dazzle me.’3 He never attended school, gained little from any sort of formal tuition, and tended to be awkward and withdrawn in elevated company, although probably not to the degree that he liked to make out. He enjoyed solitary pursuits, especially walking and wandering in the countryside when he got the opportunity, and one of his favourite pastimes was botany. It was during such walks he did much of his thinking. Throughout his life he had tremendous stamina and a degree of fitness that made his frequent claims of debilitating ill health rather questionable, suggesting a psychological cause as much as a physical one. He did indeed recognise that at times he used illness to manipulate others.
Rousseau was self-taught and driven by what appealed to him, devising his own somewhat hit-and-miss strategies for learning. He developed a love of music but was not particularly gifted, acquiring some mastery of the discipline by dint of years of perseverance. Keen to examine the works of various philosophers, he gave up trying to analyse and reconcile their arguments and instead built up ‘a store of ideas, true and false but all of them clear.’ He continues: ‘After I spent some years never thinking independently, but always following the thoughts of others unreflectively, so to speak, and almost without reasoning, I found myself equipped with a great enough fund of learning to be self-sufficient and to think without the help of another.’4 In addition to this store of ideas, he reflected deeply about his own feelings and experience of life, and applied his conclusions not only to himself but to society at large. In the process he produced original and important works across a range of genres. Rousseau was an outsider in many ways, in his adulthood often by choice, and the perspective this gave him may have helped to nurture his originality, less constrained as he was by the social and intellectual assumptions either of the traditional conservative kind or of the progressive Enlightenment. For much of his life he defended himself tenaciously from any form of imposition that might compromise his liberty to act, to a degree that at times left even his closest allies bewildered and alienated. In later life this concern became more pronounced as he sought to protect his reputation as a philosopher who had exposed the intrinsically corrupting nature of society. He would routinely reject gifts and offers of support in order to avoid becoming entangled in obligations to others or to be perceived as a hypocrite who was willing to profit from a society that he so excoriated. This wariness of others fed into a paranoia which was to blight his later life. It was partly for this desire to achieve independence from others that he chose to earn his living as a music copyist even at the height of his fame.
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9 Threads of Recollection
‘I have done many foolish things in my life; I confess it with as much candour as Rousseau, and with less pride than that unhappy great man.’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
Casanova and Rousseau can claim to have written amongst the most important autobiographical accounts in modern history, accounts of two lives that encompassed a critical period in the moral and intellectual development of the West. The word ‘autobiography’ itself was not coined until 1797. The term memoirs was used. It was an aristocratic genre that usually referred to a person’s public rather than private life, and this is the term used both by Casanova and Rousseau. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and History of My Life are linked by the authors’ close involvement in the fierce debates that were taking place at the time. The positions they adopted reflected contrasting ways of understanding the world, and this shaped both how they went about living in it and their report of the experience. While Rousseau did not have as direct an impact upon Casanova as Voltaire, the Venetian did engage with his writings and ideas, and Rousseau’s memoirs influenced his own. The Confessions was published posthumously in two parts, in 1782 and 1789, and runs to around 275,000 words, less than a quarter of History of My Life but substantial nonetheless. Rousseau wrote Books 1 to 6 from 1765 to 1767, and Books 7 to 12 from 1769 to 1770. The Confessions may well have influenced Casanova’s decision to get on and write his own memoirs, although it had been on his mind for a while, certainly since 1780. Casanova’s attempt to emulate the work of this titan of the Enlightenment would be typical of him.
European societies remained highly religious but the new intellectual climate spurred a re-evaluation of the source and character of knowledge and meaning. This had important implications for the place of individual experience. Were knowledge and meaning obtained directly from God through revelation? Were they to be found in nature, the product of divine will, of which mankind was a part? Had God supplied humans a priori with innate ideas? Was reality perceived according to the ideas the mind imposed upon it? Or was understanding constructed by an internal creative process tied to sensory input, perhaps unrelated to God at all? To what extent was the mind’s ability to grasp reality shaped by that very reality itself? And how much of reality, at the end of the day, could ever be accessible?
In this environment the self became a legitimate object of empirical enquiry: material, spiritual and moral. In a number of works, notably his Treatise on Human Nature (1739-1740), David Hume conducted insightful explorations of the ‘passions’, including scrutiny of his own emotional states, and the role they played in thinking, behaviour and our interactions with others. For Hume, reason is a slave of emotion not its master, and it is our emotions that drive us to act. The eighteenth century grew introspective. The subjective experience and inner life of the individual acquired increasing significance not just for philosophers but novelists, poets, biographers, historians, the religious, and society in general, including, of course, Rousseau and Casanova.
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10 A Philosopher and a Christian
‘Man is free; but he is not if he does not believe that he is, for the more influence he ascribes to Destiny the more he deprives himself of that power which God gave him when He granted him reason.’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
We tend to associate philosophy with names such as Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Marx, and Rousseau – people whose works are characterised by carefully reasoned and systematic thought, on occasion culminating in grand metaphysical edifices. Sometimes their ideas attract disciples and engender entire schools of thought or set off political movements. Today, the typical habitat of the philosopher is the college and the classroom. They are mainly professional academics, often producing work that is so specialist that much of it will be incomprehensible to anyone who is not a specialist themselves. But while these are important traditions within philosophy, they are not the whole story. We must be wary of making unhelpful assumptions about what can legitimately be regarded as the practice of philosophy and who can legitimately be regarded as a philosopher.
Much philosophy in the past was expressed in a range of forms including drama, letters and poetry. Plato’s dialogues, as mentioned in the introduction, were a frequently emulated form of philosophical discourse. To make his own work accessible, the influential third Earl of Shaftesbury exploited a wide variety of genres, so much so, writes Michael Gill, that ‘this diversity of forms, styles, tones, and personae makes it difficult to attribute to Shaftesbury a single philosophical system of thought.’1 Voltaire’s masterpiece, Candide, was a philosophical tale that attacked Leibniz’s theory of optimism. Voltaire was perhaps the greatest of the French philosophes but was a brilliant polemicist rather than a creator of philosophical systems. Isaac Newton was a natural philosopher, and science was natural philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1892) comprises prose and poetry in a fictional philosophical narrative. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary definition of ‘philosopher’ is ‘A man deep in knowledge, either moral or natural.’
Within this historical and cultural context, if we consider philosophy as broadly understood to be an active engagement with questions of knowledge and what can be known then Casanova was unquestionably a serious philosopher and viewed himself as such. For almost 200 years researchers have investigated Casanova’s writings but for much of that time their interest lay in discovering and verifying the facts of his life rather than getting to grips with his ideas and their development. Serious work on his philosophical beliefs and his place in the Enlightenment has really only been undertaken in the last thirty years or so, notably by scholars such as Gérard Lahouati and Federico di Trocchio and, more recently, through publications such as Casanova: Enlightenment Philosopher (2016).
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11 An Experimental Moral Philosopher
[Casanova] ‘I read as much as I can, and I enjoy studying man while travelling.’
[Voltaire] ‘This is the way to know him; but the book is too big. It is best achieved by reading history.’
[Casanova] ‘History lies.’ Giacomo Casanova, History of My Life
A conspicuous theme in Casanova’s writing is the importance of acquiring knowledge through direct experience. Casanova rejects Descartes’ claim that animals cannot feel pain by reference to the distress he had witnessed of a dolphin stranded on a beach: ‘If the cries of this fish did not come from genuine sensitivity and great pain, it was the cleverest charlatan of all the fish in the sea.’1 He uses his inability to remember anything of his childhood before he was 8 years-old to prove that the soul is dependent upon the body. This in turn allows him to cast doubt upon the notion of any kind of divine reward or punishment after death once the body and all sensory record of its existence has perished. In his account of his escape from the Leads he observes: ‘I had read and learned from the great book of experience that great enterprises should not be discussed but executed, while recognising the role that chance plays in everything that men undertake.’2 As mentioned in Chapter 2 on Horace, he also uses his experience of imprisonment in the Leads to cast doubt on claims made by Epicureans and Stoics that it was possible through training to possess ‘perfect tranquillity’ in all circumstances. Exploring the veracity of a rumour about a cardinal’s impiety, Casanova writes: ‘woe to all those who love the truth, and who do not know how to draw it from its source.’3 And elsewhere in his memoirs, recalling his disappointment at what he saw on a visit to a famous monument, he notes that ‘the wise man who wants to learn must read, and travel afterwards to rectify his learning.’4 Bearing this in mind, if we wanted to identify Casanova with a more specific philosophical tradition beyond his resemblance to the philosophes, one promising candidate might be experimental philosophy. This was a movement that emerged around the late seventeenth century, with university courses in the method becoming established by the early eighteenth century.5, 6
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