Voltaire

FIGURE 3.2. The genius (Voltaire) with his ‘genius,’ source of inspiration and light. The frequent coupling the ‘genii’ and men of genius in the eighteenth century perpetuated the conflation of their powers. The Latin epigraph translates loosely as “One day he will be as dear to all, as he now is to his friends.” Engraving by J. Balcchou after a portrait of Jean Michel Liotard, 1756. (Collection of the author)

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Dinesh ^club

. . . .When educated Europeans surveyed their own mental universe, they were far less likely to grant them a place. Voltaire spoke for many in the new age when he declared, under the entry “genii” in his ‘Philosophical Dictionary,’ that “all that can be said is reduced to this: I have never seen a genius, and no one of my acquaintance has ever seen one; . . . therefore I do not believe a thing of which there is not the least truth.” The same logic was dutifully applied to demons, angles, fairies, and satyrs, who Voltaire confessed might exist in principle, “with little turned-up tails and goats’ feet.” But I would have to see several to believe them,” he stressed, “for if I saw but one, I should still doubt their existence.” If seeing was believing in the eighteenth century, then Voltaire and many like him simply did not believe.

That (lack of) belief significantly transformed their understanding of special individuals and eminent men. Voltaire scoffed at the notion that Socrates had a “good angel” or “genius,” if anything, he joked, his angel must have been bad, since it prompted him to make the rounds of Athens, interrogating his fellow citizens to show that they were imbeciles. Voltaire’s irony, however, concealed a serious question, one that confounded an age otherwise inclined to make the ancient philosopher a hero. If Socrates possessed no ‘daimonion’ or special sign, just what was it that possessed him? Had he lied about his little demon in order to deceive his followers? Perhaps they had invented the story after the fact to accentuate his greatness? Or was he simply deluded? And what of the other great men who had long been regarded as divinely touched or inspired? “So much has been written about this by so many sophists,” the German critic J.G.A. Hamann complained in 1759, himself adding to the cascade of words, that “no cultivated reader of our day lacks talented friends” who could hold forth on the subject t length. ` Page 68

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