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

In this book, an edited volume composed of ten articles and an introduction, Dan Edelstein and the other contributors propose "to study texts and practices commonly designated as 'illuminist' from a different angle, as forming part of what [they] are calling the 'Super-Enlightenment'" (Edelstein, "Introduction to the Super-Enlightenment" 4). The contents are divided into three sections, resulting from the criteria that Edelstein lays out in his introduction for the study of Enlightenment texts, especially ones traditionally considered "illuminist" or "hermetic," within this new "conceptual category"(6); these three parts are labeled thus: "1. What limits of understanding?" "2. The arts of knowing," "3. Sacred societies." Each section presents case studies of such texts and philosophers, abiding by Edelstein's principles of analysis: in part 1. the philosophy of these authors: how they thought about knowledge and how they subsequently organized and presented it in their writing; in part 2. how these writers hoped to put their ideas into practice, and what social utility they envisioned through their texts; and in part 3. the social context in which these authors worked, and how it shaped and influenced their understanding of the world.

The introduction begins with an example of Antoine-Joseph Pernety's interest in alchemy and in texts of this hermetic tradition, highlighting the continued existence in the supposedly "rational and empirical" world of the eighteenth century of such fields of knowledge, fields that by the 1750s and 1760s are said to have been largely discredited by the intellectual community. Pernety thus appears to our eyes like "an community of chimera," and yet he considered himself to be part of the eighteenth-century philosophes, employing "Enlightenment discourse to portray alchemy as just another science of nature." The existence of such writings "raises the interesting question of how Enlightenment principles could co-exist, seemingly without difficulty, with those lasting currents of mysticism, magic, mystical speculation and hermeticism" (2). It is difficult to make sense of works like Pernety's within the conventional frameworks established for the study of the Enlightenment: the pursuit of order and reason, the rejection of religion and superstition. On the other hand, as Edelstein mentions in his penultimate book, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), it is also a mistake to divide eighteenth-century intellectual and philosophical culture into many separate sub-movements in an attempt to account for the works that seem to diverge from the "ordinary," for running through the majority of Enlightenment texts there is a deep sense of belonging to a movement, to "a matrix in which ideas, actions, and events acquired new meaning" (The Enlightenment 12-13). And finally, we can neither simply disregard these texts, nor the image they give us of eighteenth-century society and culture, nor the particular voice and rhetorical strategies they employ towards the particular public they envision.

From this problem of categorization and methodology comes the idea of the "Super-Enlightenment." As we saw above, authors such as Pernety embody this problem, throwing into question how we should think about, study, and teach the philosophy of the eighteenth century. What did it mean, by the middle of the century, for a text to be called "hermetic" or "illuminist"? "Hermetic," although it had long been associated with mystical and alchemical practices, fundamentally meant "secretive" or "hidden." Many famous authors of the day, notably Isaac Newton, adhered to such conventions in the circulation of their writings, especially when it came to texts about biblical history ancient philosophy and the convergence of scientific and religious traditions. These texts, Newton believed, should not be shown to a larger public, one who would not, and was not worthy of, discerning the true meaning and use. On the other hand, the Enlightenment was in part responsible for giving us the rather negative and dark definitions we have of these terms today, associating them with magic, superstition, and other practices outside of the capacity of human understanding and knowledge. Critics and dictionaries of the period...