The Super-Enlightenment: Daring to Know Too Much (review)

Beginning with its title, this volume indicates a boundary for Enlightenment thought and invites us to explore what lies beyond. Editor Dan Edelstein calls this beyond 'the Super-Enlightenment' and defines it as 'those lasting currents of mysticism, magic, mythical speculation and hermeticism that persisted throughout the eighteenth century' (p. 3), reminding us of the eighteenth century's interest in alchemy and Atlantis, the importance of Mesmerism and Swedenborgianism, and the myth-based rites of Freemasonry in a time ordinarily defined by the rise of empirical science. However, instead of looking at the Super-Enlightenment as an opponent of the Enlightenment, this volume persuasively argues for the two tendencies as interdependent currents of thought. In a section on epistemology, Peter Reill's exploration of vitalism's integration of hermeticism and empiricism shows that in the eighteenth century there was no easy distinction between 'magical nonsense' (p. 38) and real science. In his 'Super-epistemology' David Bates argues convincingly that, by bounding the sphere of enquiry to the finite natural world, the Enlightenment created a desire to reconnect the human and the divine and thus caused the emergence of the Super-Enlightenment. Jessica Riskin, in an essay enlivened by incisive biographical anecdotes, demonstrates that La Mettrie's materialism is at the same time an anti-rationalist celebration of feeling. In a section on the Super-Enlightenment and the arts, Liana Vardi shows that Quesnay's tableau économique was less an expression of a mathematical formula than of its founder's 'inner vision' (p. 120). Anthony Vidler's study of a treatise by architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux demonstrates that the text was informed not so much by Enlightenment ideas than by an esoteric Renaissance work, and he thus characterizes Ledoux's ideal city not as a utopia of reason but as a visionary dreamscape. Questioning the division of eighteenth-century French poetry into Enlightenment and Catholic, Fabienne Moore vividly presents a group of Super-Enlightenment poets who rejected not only established ideologies but also the technical limitations of versification in order to rediscover the power of language to express the soul and its sacred source. In a final section entitled 'Sacred Societies', Natalie Bayer examines the coexistence of Voltairean rationalism and Masonic mysticism in eighteenth-century Russia. Kris Pangburn's presentation of Charles Bonnet's 'organ of the soul' makes the strong argument that this seemingly pseudoscientific idea likely appeared methodologically sound from the viewpoint of late eighteenth-century science. The last essays of the volume show the late eighteenth century's turn from reason to myth with Edelstein's look at Jacobin use of ancient Egyptian rites and Tili Boon Cuillé's study of how the discredited Ossian poems were reinvested with Christian meaning by such artists as Staël, Girodet, and Le Sueur. By turning their attention to figures sometimes pejoratively referred to as 'illuminés', the essays of this volume shed a new light on eighteenth-century thought, revalorizing often marginalized thinkers, revealing the complementarity of Super-Enlightenment and Enlightenment, and thus enhancing our understanding of the particular complexity of this period in the history of ideas.