Virtue and Freedom in Early Modern French Thought

The research engages with an old problem in seventeenth-century French literary history and a more general theme of European cultural history. Our present-day conceptions of what it is to be a person or an agent are plainly indebted to the work of the great critical thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, who stressed the unconscious determinants of thought and behaviour. But, as I suggested in an earlier work ('Early Modern French Thought: the Age of Suspicion', OUP, 2003) we can acknowledge their originality without resorting to a stereotypical picture of early modern thinkers as caught up in a supposedly Cartesian faith in the accessibility and transparency of the self. Early modern thinkers, it was argued, were acutely aware of the role of illusion in our relationships with ourselves and others. That book dealt with issues of metaphysics and epistemology. 'Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves' (OUP, 2006) took the argument into the sphere of psychology and ethics, dealing with early modern accounts of self-love and self-knowledge (especially the distortions of self-knowledge by self-love). The present project investigates a related problem: what, according to early modern thinkers, makes an action virtuous or disqualifies an apparently virtuous action as such? Its focus is especially on the relationship between morality and religion, especially the questions whether those without divine grace (e.g. the pagan philosophers of antiquity, but, by implication, modern-day unbelievers or sinful Christians) can achieve authentic acts of virtue: if they cannot, to quote St Augustine, 'there can be no true virtue where there is no true religion'; if they can, then there is a relatively autonomous sphere of moral valuations, before religious considerations enter the picture, and this latter view, though perfectly justifiable in terms of orthodox theology, takes on a new significance in a context of (arguably) increasing secularization (though it is easy for us to overestimate the secularized nature of early modern writing on human nature and human values). This link with the themes of illusion and self-deception is this: the critique of spurious virtue often rests on the assumption that the agent is unaware of the true motives for his or her actions, and indeed is not even a free agent.

The project brings together theological and philosphical writing on the one hand with 'literary' texts on the other. It is hoped that it will throw further light on a trend noted by many literary historians: the ethical pessimism of the literature of the late seventeenth century in France. Whereas, in different ways, Corneille and Descartes celebrated human freedom and promoted the value of magnanimity upheld by Aristotle, later writers like La Rochefoucauld, Racine, or Mme de Lafayette put the emphasis on human weakness and self-delusion. La Rochefoucauld in particular suggested that human virtue (or most of what we take to be such) is inauthentic: actions ranked as virtuous are usually performed for ethically neutral or even discreditable motives. This theme is taken up by many Enlightenment writers, e.g. Mandeville or Voltaire, who seek to show how societies can hang together without their members being individually virtuous. The project aims to study the emergence of this critique of virtue. It will acknowledge the influence of social factors (e.g. the absolutist court) but its focus will be chiefly on key concepts (espeically 'virtue' and 'freedom') and the relations different writers establish between them.