Academic prize contests were popular attractions of the eighteenth-century scientific and literary world. Contests were significant occasions for all parties involved: hopeful entrants sought to earn recognition for their work; academies became arbiters of cultural authority by bestowing official accreditation on contest winners; and the crowns who patronized the academies in turn vicariously enjoyed the winners’ prestige. Famously, the prize contest was the means by which Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder first gained international renown, with their winning entries at the academies of Dijon and Berlin in 1749 and 1771 respectively.
The prize question the Academy of Sciences in Berlin posed in 1780 is possibly the most infamous of its kind. Asking if it was ‘useful to the people to be deceived, whether one leads them into new misconceptions, or perpetuates their existing ones’, the question caused a stir in scholarly and literary circles in France and in Prussia.Footnote 1 Hans Adler's verdict that the question ‘was a shock and is one till today’ is testament both to its enduring ability to provoke controversy, as well as to its continued philosophical and political relevance.Footnote 2 But even the Berlin academicians at the time did not know that the Academy owed its controversial prize question to the erstwhile co-editor of the Encyclopédie, the Academy's unofficial president in absentia, and eventual perpetual secretary of the Académie Française, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717–83). In September 1777, in response to the Academy's announcement of a long metaphysical prize question on the foundational force, d'Alembert had written to his long-time correspondent, patron of the Academy, and self-professed philosopher King Frederick II of Prussia (‘the Great’, 1712–86), recommending that the recent question be replaced with a more ‘interesting’ and ‘useful’ question, lest the Academy be subjected to even more ridicule than the unintelligibility of its recent question had already earned it.Footnote 3 D'Alembert's proposed replacement was ‘Is it useful to deceive the people?’ – a topic he had first pressed Frederick to set as an academic prize question back in December 1769.Footnote 4 Eager not to compromise the reputation of his Academy further, Frederick duly complied, issuing the Academy with an order in October 1777 to replace the metaphysics question with d'Alembert's.Footnote 5
The direct and provocative formulation of d'Alembert's question has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention to the prize contest.Footnote 6 Scholars have uniformly recognized the question's peculiar beginnings in the correspondence between a monarch and a philosophe; prize questions were not usually imposed upon scientific academies.Footnote 7 Now we also know that the Academy was uncomfortable not only with Frederick's intervention in their affairs, but also with how openly d'Alembert's initial, pithy suggestion too bluntly questioned the integrity of those in a position to deceive. This discomfort moved the Academy to water down d'Alembert's question into a less incendiary one on the interests of those on the receiving end of deceit.Footnote 8 But the fact that scholarly interest has largely concentrated on the contest and submissions means that our knowledge of the question's significance remains rudimentary. Treating Frederick and d'Alembert's exchanges as little more than a part of the history of the prize contest comes across as lopsided, considering how d'Alembert insisted upon the question's relevance for the Academy almost eight years after his initial request had been brushed aside; how singular it was for prize questions to emerge from anywhere other than discussions amongst the relevant academicians; as well as the question's enduring shock value.
A more thorough contextualization of Frederick and d'Alembert's correspondence confirms that to fixate on the contest itself blinds one to wider debates in which their discussion of deceit was situated. This thread in their correspondence owes its longevity to d'Alembert. Heir to a long-standing conversation on the true purpose of philosophy, and hence on the true duties of philosophers, inflamed in 1750 by Rousseau's Discourse on the sciences and arts, against which he issued a riposte in his Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et les grands (1753), d'Alembert was concerned throughout his career with the question of philosophers’ appropriate relationships with various sections of society: the masses, grandees, and rulers. Underpinned by a reflection on how philosophers’ interactions with the unlettered or the powerful might infringe upon their true pursuits, d'Alembert and Frederick's discussion on whether it was justifiable to deceive ‘the people’ reflects this very preoccupation of d'Alembert's with determining the true nature of philosophy.
This article therefore reconstructs a more complex genealogy for the Berlin Academy's 1780 prize essay question than has been previously appreciated. In so doing, it redresses the asymmetry of emphasis on the contest, and reveals the entire episode's wider relevance for the fraught relationships between philosophy, truth, and politics. Beginning in 1765 as a reflection on the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, Frederick and d'Alembert's initial discussion concerning the philosopher's appropriate response to the political backbiting behind the Jesuits’ downfall became one about the philosopher's relationship to peddlers of religious untruths, and finally mutated into an exchange on the philosopher's relationship to the truth. It is from this wrangling over the true nature of philosophy and the true duties of philosophers that the question ‘Is it useful to deceive the people?’ emerged. Frederick and d'Alembert's differences on this issue made it difficult for Frederick to defend his credentials as a philosopher king whilst being reluctant to denounce – and renounce – deceitful politics.Footnote 9 Only by ensuring that his Academy's – and through it also his – activities were channelled towards publicly useful philosophy could Frederick claw back any legitimacy he had lost in defending politically expedient deceit. The prize contest that took place in 1780 was but an epilogue to this long-standing thread on the true nature of philosophy in the correspondence between king and philosophe.
Viewed from this perspective, the significance of the prize essay question differs dramatically from that presented in current scholarship. What is most remarkable was not so much the scandalous formulation of the question, nor even its unorthodox origins. Instead, it was d'Alembert's insistence – and success – in pressing into Frederick's hands the agenda of reckoning with the delicate questions of deceiving ‘the people’, and hence of what d'Alembert saw as the true duties of philosophers. This suggests that d'Alembert took seriously his declaration in his Essai sur la société des gens de lettres that rulers were allowed to arbitrate in matters of taste and philosophy only if they demonstrated the resoluteness of their commitment to those fields by actually being philosophers and men of letters themselves.Footnote 10 By d'Alembert's standards, although Frederick had long cultivated for himself the persona of a philosopher king, without concrete demonstrations of his commitment to philosophy, that persona remained an empty, inconsequential one. This situation challenges the usual picture of the relationship between eighteenth-century rulers and philosophers. Various scholars have asserted that philosophers were chiefly recruited as adornments to absolutist rulers who sought to cultivate an ‘Enlightened’ public image.Footnote 11 In this case, on the contrary, not only was it the philosophe who had the upper hand; it was also he who recruited the king to his cause by holding the latter accountable to his alleged commitment to philosophy.
The entire episode also helps to complicate accounts of Enlightenment, secularization, and radicalization, especially those that attribute to the diffusion of specific radical ideas in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe an exaggeratedly pivotal place in their narratives.Footnote 12 It does so in three primary ways. First, the evolution of Frederick and d'Alembert's conversation on the place of the Jesuits in French society into one about political ethics shows how conventional, even orthodox ideas followed contingent, sometimes paradoxical paths to more radical or secular destinations.Footnote 13 Frederick and d'Alembert's reflections on deceit underwent precisely such a process of gradual extrication, when both king and philosophe began to ask of political authority the same questions they had asked of the scandal-ridden Society of Jesus. The fact that it was so easy to decry religious imposture raised the question of why denouncing its political equivalent remained so difficult.
Second, d'Alembert's emphasis on the social and political dimensions of philosophy in both his own work and his letters to Frederick sheds important light not only on how philosophy was conceived in the period, but also on the interface between philosophy and political life. Two major implications follow from the assertion that philosophers were bound by an absolute commitment to upholding the truth. First, it suggests that philosophers were defined above all by a particular attitude, rather than their beliefs or occupations. This undermines the view, promulgated in Jonathan Israel's histories of the philosophical underpinnings of the road from ‘radical Enlightenment’ to modernity, that doing ‘philosophy’ entailed subscribing to a specific set of ideas about forms of government, religion, human rights, or the distribution of wealth.Footnote 14 Second, it suggests that philosophy was not just an epistemic pursuit, but also a practical one: the commitment to the truth that defined philosophers ought to make them predisposed to acting in public defence of the truth. Philosophical utterances, as Antoine Lilti has suggested, were therefore manifestations of parrhêsia.Footnote 15 This definition by no means superseded the idea of philosophy as an academic field encompassing subjects ranging from ethics and logic to some aspects of the natural sciences. Rather, alongside its associated fields of study, philosophy was imbued with a social and moral purpose. Philosophical kingship – the originally Platonic idea of government by those who possess a love for knowledge and a capacity to philosophize – therefore also took on this inflection, demanding that philosopher kings disavowed deceitful politics.
The final way in which the whole episode revises broader frameworks within which Enlightenment Europe is generally understood relates to the difficulty of locating Frederick and d'Alembert's exchanges within conventional genres of eighteenth-century media. Indeed, the secrecy of their discussions and even of the negotiations concerning the prize contest itself challenges an existing consensus concerning the public nature of such correspondences and their place in the development of a ‘public sphere’.Footnote 16 Enjoying only a limited, well-defined circulation, and patently disconnected from other contemporaneous debates, such correspondences and the ideas for which they were vehicles belonged – to borrow Kirill Abrosimov's formulation – to an Enlightenment beyond the reaches of the public sphere.Footnote 17
I
The first iteration of the question ‘Is it useful to deceive the people?’ appeared in a letter from d'Alembert to Frederick in December 1769. Asking ‘whether it is possible that people can do without fables in a religious system’, d'Alember's initial enquiry reflected his interest in a specific kind of deceit, and pointed towards the question's origins in a discussion triggered by one of the most controversial events of the period: the suppression of the Society of Jesus.Footnote 18 The expulsion of the Jesuits from France in November 1764, and the French crown's attempts to smoothen out the consequences of their exit, redoubled attention on the role of religious institutions in society, both in and outside France.Footnote 19 Frederick and d'Alembert were keen observers of the unravelling of the Jesuits’ fate throughout the second half of the 1760s. However, it was not the expulsion itself, but a subsequent event, that led to their conversation on the Jesuits. This was the publication of d'Alembert's Sur la destruction des jésuites en France (1765), a copy of which he sent to Frederick on 1 March 1765.Footnote 20 Described by d'Alembert as ‘a philosophical history’, ‘in which [he] [strove] to tell the truth’ about ‘the disaster that the venerable Society of Jesus ha[d] just experienced in France’,Footnote 21 the attack the work launched on both the Jesuits and the Jansenists – the Jesuits’ principal enemies – caused a stir amongst political and parlement circles, among whom the Jansenists counted several supporters.Footnote 22
The most striking aspect of Sur la destruction des jésuites, and the most relevant for this article, was the role it accorded to philosophy in the history of the Jesuits’ downfall. It was this precise thread in the pamphlet that triggered Frederick and d'Alembert's conversation on the true purposes of philosophy. To d'Alembert, the war between the Jesuits and philosophy had been raging for some time. Badly wounded from their long struggle, the Jesuits finally fell, though not at the hands of philosophy, but of the Jansenists and their powerful allies. This was the result of a ‘ridiculous theological feud’ concerning the Jesuit doctrine of casuistic grace that Jansenists had begun.Footnote 23 But d'Alembert thought the Jansenists deserved no credit for the Jesuits’ defeat, for the Society had ‘so many times merited its destruction for more real & more serious reasons’, none of which the Jansenists had entertained in their recent attacks on the Jesuits.Footnote 24 By his account, ‘it was properly philosophy, which, by the mouth of the magistrates, issued the decree against the Jesuits; Jansenism was only the solicitor in it’.Footnote 25 Without philosophy having already prepared the ground, the Jansenists and their allies stood no chance in toppling the Society in France.
Determining what d'Alembert meant by ‘philosophy’ here is an essential prerequisite to understanding his subsequent disagreements with Frederick on the relationship between philosophy, truth, and politics.Footnote 26 Yet d'Alembert's pamphlet never explicitly spelled out how exactly philosophy contributed to the Society's collapse in France, why that collapse constituted a victory for philosophy, and why that victory mattered. D'Alembert's ambiguity on one hand compounds the difficulty of answering those questions, but on the other hand suggests that what he meant by ‘philosophy’ might have been self-evident to his target readers. But because the variety of available contemporaneous significations of the term ‘philosophy’ is so great, identifying which one d'Alembert might have invoked in his pamphlet still poses a challenge to the historian.Footnote 27 To begin with, philosophy was not a well-defined academic discipline in the eighteenth century. It certainly comprised elements of what would today be called philosophy, such as ethics, metaphysics, and logic, but also mingled and overlapped comfortably with the natural and physical sciences, mathematics, and psychology.Footnote 28 It is perhaps because of this breadth that the definitions given in the first four editions of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française are so capacious, stating that philosophy was simply a ‘science consisting in knowing things, by their causes and their effects’.Footnote 29 but the dictionaries also reveal the cultural significance that philosophy and its practitioners had acquired in the previous decades. As examples of usage of the word ‘philosopher’, all editions supply analogies evoking both the Stoic and the libertine philosopher: ‘to lead the life of a Philosopher’ could signify either a lifestyle of withdrawal, or one ‘above the duties & ordinary obligations of civil & Christian life’.Footnote 30
None of these dictionary definitions shed light on why philosophy ought to be credited with toppling one of the Catholic church's most influential Orders. Nowhere in d'Alembert's account of the politics of the Jesuits’ downfall did academic philosophy, the Stoicism, or nonconformism of philosophers feature. The ‘philosophy’ in Sur la destruction des jésuites served a much more explicitly social function. In looking elsewhere for eighteenth-century conceptions of philosophy as a force for social change, however, one encounters another obstacle: philosophy was often described in the most explicit terms not by its own practitioners and their allies, but by those satirizing or censuring philosophers. Take for example what Jonathan Israel has called the anti-philosophie movement. Initially largely comprising Catholic critics of the philosophes and their writings, representatives of anti-philosophie decried ‘philosophy’ for its desire for nothing less than a complete upheaval of existing customs, socio-economic and political structures, and political and religious institutions.Footnote 31 By their definition, to be a philosopher was to be heretical, seditious, and destructive to society at large. Yet taking anti-philosophique voices at their word seems rather questionable. Although Israel sees his ‘radical Enlightenment’ set – including such philosophes and friends of d'Alembert's as Helvétius and d'Holbach – as exhibiting those very qualities highlighted in anti-philosophique writing, even he concedes that such alarmist pictures of philosophy were exaggerated in order to frighten readers and authorities.Footnote 32 Since d'Alembert can hardly be said to have shared the rhetorical and polemical aims of the anti-philosophe movement, the usefulness of their conceptions of philosophy in discerning philosophy's role in his account of the Jesuits’ downfall is certainly limited.
More useful for our purposes is d'Alembert's own writing, as well as that of his close collaborators. It is there that we can find the conception of ‘philosophy’ as a commitment to a particular attitude that conditioned one's behaviour in civil society. Of particular importance are the aforementioned Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et les grands (1753), his Essai sur les éléments de philosophie (1759), and the Encyclopédie’s Preliminary Discourse (1751) – the long preface that served as the project's philosophical manifesto, and also one of the most lauded and well known of d'Alembert's works.Footnote 33 While the Encyclopédie’s full title as well as the opening paragraphs of d'Alembert's Discourse declared that the Encyclopédie encompassed the sciences, arts, and crafts (métiers), the rest of the Discourse showed that philosophy, too, was at the project's core. In his definition of philosophy, d'Alembert was indebted to existing articulations of empiricist science. Whatever knowledge the Encyclopédie presented had been based, d'Alembert stated, on ‘good philosophy’, that is, the study of the world founded on the premise that all knowledge is first received through the senses.Footnote 34 Such knowledge was valued not because it was long-established or ancient – as was the case with philosophia perennis or prisca theologia – but because it was deducible from observable facts.Footnote 35 D'Alembert was to reaffirm these principles in his Essai sur les éléments de philosophie eight years later.Footnote 36
Even more important to ‘good philosophy’, however, were the practical implications that followed from that empirically informed epistemology. Indeed, according to d'Alembert, to do philosophy was also to be unreservedly committed to the betterment of society. He argued that while philosophy remained too impotent to rectify society's existing prejudices, its utility lay in its ability to identify their sources.Footnote 37 One of these sources was religious enthusiasts, who had long been guilty of misleading the people. Whatever measures implemented in order to curb the influence of such impostors, d'Alembert urged, must by no means ‘damage th[e] liberty so necessary to true philosophy’, lest it be unable to bring about change in the gradual, imperceptible steps it was obliged to take in the face of potential persecution.Footnote 38
The view that philosophy was not merely an epistemic pursuit, but also a practical one is even more explicitly underscored in the article ‘Philosopher’, whose author – or, more likely, redactor – remains unknown. The material in the article was certainly not unfamiliar to Diderot and d'Alembert's contemporaries: it was adapted from an earlier article reputedly written by the grammarian and writer César Chesneau Du Marsais which had already become an unofficial manifesto for some of the philosophes in Paris.Footnote 39 But the version of the article in the Encyclopédie significantly amplified Du Marsais's emphasis on the philosopher's social function. The philosopher was ‘a gentleman (honnête homme) who wants to please & to render himself useful’, ‘who always acts according to reason, & who adds to a reflective and judicious mind sociable mores & qualities’.Footnote 40
To be sure, the article's author acknowledged that there existed other, ‘ordinary’ philosophers who did not fit the paradigm set out in the article. ‘Ordinary philosophers who contemplate too much, or rather those who do so poorly’, the author argued, ‘are against everyone; they flee from men, & men avoid them.’ The main target of the author's censure, the Stoics, had been seriously misguided in their advocacy of withdrawal from society. Whereas the philosopher as envisaged in the Encyclopédie delighted in associating with others, the Stoic sage was ‘nothing but a phantom’ – an imaginary being that, owing to its incongruity with man's natural sociability, could not possibly exist.Footnote 41 It was this difference between the attitudes of true philosophers and their ‘ordinary’, Stoic counterparts towards society that made only the former fit for presiding over the organization and government of political and civil life.
II
Frederick and d'Alembert's discussion of Sur la destruction des jésuites demonstrate that d'Alembert had a closely related idea of philosophy in mind, not only in his account of the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, but also in his subsequent exchanges with Frederick. Their discussion began after Frederick complained that d'Alembert's work lacked greater narrative detail on the history of the Jesuits.Footnote 42 Explaining that he thought more historical detail unnecessary, since much of the Society's history was already well known, d'Alembert added that he chose to accord more space to ‘some other [details]’, such as ‘the secret springs that accelerated the destruction of this dangerous society’. Yet d'Alembert also admitted that, having remained in Paris throughout the debacle, he risked persecution had he criticized the Jansenists and their allies in greater detail.Footnote 43 D'Alembert argued that under circumstances where the danger of telling the truth in its entirety was too great, his only viable option was ‘to tell only a quarter of the truth’. ‘In happier times’, ‘if there are no more parlements nor priests, or if the parlements become just, and priests, wise’, however, ‘the three other quarters will be told in their turn.’Footnote 44
It was this role of the philosopher as a champion of the truth that d'Alembert saw himself fulfilling by publishing what he deemed a lesser known, but more honest, account of the politics surrounding the Jesuits’ crisis in France. To do philosophy, then, was to be committed to telling the truth publicly, however little of it one could disseminate under circumstances of potential persecution. In light of this, the role of philosophy in the downfall of the Jesuits becomes clear. It was the philosophers, d'Alembert argued, who had exposed the Jesuits’ monopoly on the provision of education in France as a scheme that simply allowed them to perpetuate corruption and deceit with impunity.Footnote 45 Their dissolution marked a triumph for those who had stood up for the truth. Evidently, three years before d'Alembert was to confront Frederick with the more general question of how useful it was to deceive ‘the people’, the issue of the utility and morality of truth-telling and of deceit already underlay their conversations.
D'Alembert's explanation of his intentions behind the publication of his pamphlet brought the question of the philosopher's duties to the forefront of his subsequent correspondence with Frederick. Indeed, rather than allowing Frederick to weigh in on the expulsion of the Jesuits, d'Alembert took the opportunity to press Frederick – himself a self-professed philosopher and philosopher king – on his commitment to philosophy. After all, philosophy's mission was yet unaccomplished: the Jesuits might have fallen, but other perpetrators of deceit and imposture remained. It was for this reason that d'Alembert declared that philosophers ‘[were] in great need of the protection as enlightened and as powerful as that which [Frederick] accord[ed] to it’, implicitly testing Frederick's willingness to act in philosophy's defence if the need arose.Footnote 46
Their exchanges on d'Alembert's pamphlet and on the Jesuits’ crisis more generally suggest that Frederick had in mind a different, more passive set of duties for philosophers. Reflecting in January 1768 on the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain in 1767, Frederick echoed d'Alembert's sentiments on the distance between their epoch and a ‘happier time’ when no authorities or institutions would prevent the truth from being told. Meanwhile, however, philosophers ought to practise forbearance and patience, while they awaited the ‘daily progress’ that their example made on the worldviews and conduct of an ever greater section of the population.Footnote 47 It was this conception of the philosopher's duties that informed Frederick's lack of hostility towards the Jesuits, whose presence in his domains he declared he would tolerate ‘as long as they [were] peaceful’.Footnote 48
Another aspect of Frederick's conception of philosophy set him in further opposition to his interlocutor. Unlike d'Alembert and the philosophes who rallied around Du Marsais and the Encyclopédie’s ‘modern’ conception of the philosopher, Frederick held the ancient, and especially Stoic, philosophers in high regard. It was the Stoics, Frederick argued – though without naming any in particular, who had conceived the most valuable programme of philosophy for public life, by seeking to shape customs and render society ‘safer, gentler, and more virtuous’. ‘For all their lapses in their metaphysical reasoning’, Frederick continued, the Stoics had shaped the morals of great men, among whom he certainly counted Marcus Aurelius, whose persona of a philosopher king he long emulated, and to whom he was often compared.Footnote 49 The recent scientific progress that d'Alembert so highly esteemed and whose principles informed his conception of philosophy could not boast to have had a comparable impact on society. Indeed, because of its having neglected to shape the ‘morals and customs’ on which ‘the ancients spent all their energy’, modern philosophy had done nothing to reduce the number of highwaymen; to temper the greediness of doctors; to encourage more scrupulous transactions; to reduce incidences of slander; or to eliminate envy.Footnote 50 Only by emulating what Frederick saw as the Stoics’ emphasis on the active life could philosophy be ‘give[n] back’ its social relevance, and hence its ‘ancient lustre’.Footnote 51
The significance of Frederick's wholehearted endorsement of Stoic philosophy was twofold. First, it decisively loosened his conversation with d'Alembert from events in the 1760s. What had begun as a reflection on the fate of the Jesuits in France had now become a discussion on the nature of philosophy and philosophers’ duties to society. The fault lines of this discussion were also remarkably clear from the outset: while d'Alembert prioritized upholding the truth, Frederick insisted on the importance of refining society's mores.
Secondly, and more seriously, Frederick's recent apology for Stoicism gave d'Alembert grounds to question his (Frederick's) credibility as a philosopher, and, by implication, as a philosopher king. This was exacerbated by the fact that, by implicitly rejecting d'Alembert's conception of philosophy as truth-telling, Frederick contradicted an argument he himself had made a few years before, of which d'Alembert was certainly aware. This was in his preface to an edition of extracts from Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), a copy of which he submitted to d'Alembert's inspection in 1764.Footnote 52 In the text, Frederick advanced an account of the duties of the philosopher that was in fact very amenable to that which underlay Sur la destruction des jésuites. ‘The philosopher’, he stated there, ‘rejects everything, other than the truth’, which he would ‘exhaust all his faculties (raisons) to defend’.Footnote 53
This earlier statement sheds crucial light on Frederick and d'Alembert's correspondence on the nature of philosophy in the wake of Sur la destruction des jésuites. Arguably its most significant contribution, however, was its setting of the discursive boundaries of their discussion. Frederick's unequivocal vindication of philosophy as parrhêsia in 1764 established important common ground between him and his interlocutor: both agreed on philosophy's relationship to the truth. D'Alembert's assertions about the nature of philosophy in Sur la destruction des jésuites, therefore, ought to have been agreeable to them both.
The king's expression of preference in 1768 for the Stoics’ more gradualist, more passive social agenda for philosophy betrayed his departure from their original position on philosophy as truth-telling. Their subsequent correspondence was to show just how inadequately this departure had been accounted for. In the following years, under pressure from d'Alembert, Frederick was to discover the difficulties of carving out space for manoeuvre within the discursive boundaries he had helped to establish. Indeed, however incidental his erstwhile declarations of support for philosophy as truth-telling had been, he had nevertheless generated expectations for them to be fulfilled.
Yet Frederick continued to deny the validity of truth-telling, giving d'Alembert further fodder to undermine his credentials as a philosopher in their subsequent exchanges. Writing on 25 November 1769 that his recent thoughts had given rise to ‘the question of whether it is possible that people can do without fables in a religious system’, Frederick had cynically deemed ‘the people’ – whom he dismissed as ‘animals’ – to be lacking in reason, and lamented that ‘the voice’ of ‘some enlightened professors, some wise academicians’ was ‘little understood, and [did] not stretch beyond a narrow sphere’.Footnote 54 The vast majority of mankind, Frederick declared, was nothing but a ‘fine, featherless, two-footed species, which probably will always be the pawn of crooks who want to deceive it’.Footnote 55
D'Alembert had no sympathy for Frederick's views. Raising the possibility of a prize contest for the first time in their correspondence, he answered: ‘The question of whether it is possible that people can do without fables in a religious system, would very well merit, Sire, to be proposed by an academy such as yours.’ Then, weighing in on the question himself, d'Alembert redirected their correspondence to their conversation on the true duties of philosophers. ‘I think’, d'Alembert began,
that one always ought to teach people the truth, and that there has never been a real advantage in deceiving them. The Academy of Berlin, in proposing this question for the metaphysics prize, would garner, I believe, much honour, and distinguish itself from other literary societies, which still have too many prejudices.Footnote 56
D'Alembert's message was only partly a rejoinder to Frederick's dismissive view of mankind's perfectibility. Importantly, it was also a reiteration of the philosopher's true duties, and a reminder of the proper function of the Academy, whose patron, as d'Alembert took pains to emphasize, Frederick was, and whose president in absentia d'Alembert supposedly was.Footnote 57 D'Alembert's point was that, by organizing a prize contest on the question of the necessity of deception in religious contexts, the Academy would be inviting public reflection on an issue of indisputable social relevance. This way, it would demonstrate that its activities, and, by implication, Frederick's leadership and philosophical interests, were channelled towards true – that is, publicly useful – philosophy.
This letter of d'Alembert's marked a watershed moment both in the evolution of the Academy's eventual prize question on the utility of deception, and in their correspondence itself. D'Alembert's declaration that ‘one always ought to teach people the truth, and that there has never been a real advantage in deceiving them’ was significant both substantively and discursively. On one level, it signalled his unwavering commitment to the value of truth-telling and of disseminating the truth to ‘the people’, demonstrating his alignment with his friends and collaborators Diderot, Helvétius, and d'Holbach. On another level, it not only decisively detached their conversation from its original context of the expulsion of the Jesuits; it also served as a provocation to the king. Distilling Frederick's initial question concerning the perpetration of untruths in religion into a more general one about the fundamental merits or disadvantages of deception, regardless of its context, d'Alembert pressed his interlocutor to respond with his own thoughts on the utility of deception. In this, d'Alembert saw some early successes: in his next letter, Frederick took up d'Alembert's gauntlet. Yet while the ensuing discussion saw king and philosophe broadly agree on the value of eliminating superstition and telling ‘the people’ the truth, it also revealed Frederick to be an unreliable ally in the philosophical cause that d'Alembert championed.
Frederick's reasoning concerning the futility of telling the truth was twofold. To him, it was due to both the perennial seductiveness of superstition and of religion's divine promises, and, more fundamentally, faults of human nature, that reason and good sense would never successfully take root amongst mankind. Frederick maintained that in ‘any monarchy’ of ‘ten million inhabitants’, ‘scarcely [would] [one] find a thousand literate people’.Footnote 58 Among these – ‘the smallest part of a nation’ – was where ‘the little common sense of which our species is capable reside[d]’. By their sheer number, the superstitious, and those who believed in the ‘miraculous systems’ that underpinned religions, would overwhelm this educated minority.Footnote 59 A world ‘without error, prejudice, superstition, or fanaticism’, Frederick wrote to d'Alembert on 3 April 1770, was ‘beautiful’: a ‘unique spectacle’, nothing but a chimera.Footnote 60 This was because man was ‘an incorrigible animal, more feeling than reasonable’, naturally more susceptible to believing his imagination than common sense.Footnote 61
This was the reason why philosophy, despite ‘express[ing] itself with more force and courage than it ever has’, had made such little progress in its reforming of society's morals and customs.Footnote 62 Indeed, owing to the sheer imperfection of the objects of their mission, the philosophers’ mission to enlighten men in greater numbers was futile. ‘You other lights of our dark universe’, Frederick asked d'Alembert somewhat derisively, ‘blurt out an abundance of reasons to enlighten them, but when will it happen?’Footnote 63 The persecutions of the chevalier de La Barre, Jean Calas, and the Sirven family (to whom Frederick later offered refuge), and the brutal executions of the former two, were glaring marks of philosophy's failure to replace religious fanaticism with reason and good sense. Following this verdict of philosophy's achievements in their century, therefore, it simply could not have been, as d'Alembert so confidently asserted in his pamphlet, ‘properly philosophy’ which fatally undermined the Jesuits. Instead, Frederick attributed the expulsion of the Jesuits to the precise factors and parties from which d'Alembert sought to wrest the credit for the Society's downfall: neither philosophy, nor reason, but ‘vanity, secret vengeances, cabals, and finally self-interest’ on the part of the Jansenists and the parlements.Footnote 64 Philosophy, its influence being so weakly felt, simply did not play a part.
In his subsequent letters, Frederick gradually revealed just how far he really stood from d'Alembert on the matter of philosophy's relationships to the truth and to society. In so doing, he even appeared to go back on his own admiration for ancient philosophy's emphasis on the active life. Reiterating his belief in man's imperfectibility, Frederick declared it ‘a lost cause’ and ‘often…dangerous’ ‘to set about enlightening (éclairer)’ ‘this globe we inhabit’. Entirely repudiating the view of philosophy as a vehicle by which one could render society ‘safer, gentler, and more virtuous’,Footnote 65 Frederick instead advocated Stoic withdrawal, arguing that ‘one must content in being wise in itself’, and ‘abandon the vulgar to error’, intervening only ‘to thwart the crimes that upset the order of society’. Then, reassessing his response to the question of whether it was useful to deceive ‘the people’, Frederick this time openly acknowledged the utility of deception. Invoking a well-known dictum attributed to d'Alembert's former colleague, the former perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences in Paris Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Frederick wrote, ‘Fontenelle said very well that if he had a hand full of truths, he would not open it to communicate them to the public, because it is not worth the effort’, admitting that he, too, would withhold truths from ‘the people’.Footnote 66
Frederick's considerations struck d'Alembert as misguided and defeatist. In direct opposition to Frederick, d'Alembert argued that ‘reason, even when it arrives too late, cannot but persevere to triumph one day, and to drive out [superstition]’, even amongst ‘the ignorant multitude’ – an echo of his attributing the Jesuits’ downfall to the scarcely perceptible, yet still significant effects of philosophy.Footnote 67 But by expressing approval of Frederick views that, in principle, it was certainly not useful to deceive ‘the people’, and that, if error and superstition did not exist, ‘one ought to be opposed to their emergence by all possible means’, d'Alembert also re-established the philosophical common ground between them that Frederick had sought to destroy.Footnote 68 Upholding his view of philosophy as a potential vehicle for reform, and, of philosophers as its custodians, d'Alembert challenged Frederick's (and Fontenelle's) argument that the truth should be tightly guarded from the multitude. Modifying Fontenelle's metaphor, d'Alembert wrote that ‘one must simply, with wisdom and caution, release the fingers of one's hand one after the other’, until ‘the hand is completely open, and the truth emerges from it totally intact’. While d'Alembert warned against recklessness, arguing that ‘the philosophers who open their hands too suddenly are mad’, and ‘will have their fists cut off’, he also concluded that ‘those who keep [their hands] absolutely shut’ were not in fact prudent, but cynical, cowardly, and ‘do not do what they ought to do for humanity’.Footnote 69
D'Alembert's rejection of both Frederick's and Fontenelle's stances had serious implications for his relationship with the Prussian king, and for the king's claims to philosophical kingship. Not only had d'Alembert successfully coaxed out of Frederick an explicit admission of his scepticism towards truth-telling; he had also established the distance between the king's and his philosophical agendas. If, as d'Alembert implied, Fontenelle's counsel to withhold the truth was against the public interest, should Frederick do as Fontenelle recommended, he, too, would be guilty of not doing ‘what [he] ought to do for humanity’ – the very opposite of what was expected of a philosopher king. Indeed, d'Alembert's letter had decisively gained him the upper hand in his negotiations with his interlocutor: in exposing the king as someone who was in favour of what to true philosophers was anathema, d'Alembert now had strong grounds to question the king's claims to be a philosopher king. In thus policing Frederick's philosophical credentials, d'Alembert put into practice what he had declared in his Essai sur la société des gens de lettres et les grands in 1753: should rulers wish to tread upon the territory of philosophers, they may do so only if they were truly philosophers themselves.Footnote 70
III
This thread on the nature of philosophy and the duties of philosophers remained at the heart of Frederick and d'Alembert's correspondence until 1770, when it became enmeshed with another one concerning the baron d'Holbach's Essai sur les préjugés and Système de la nature, both published anonymously that year.Footnote 71 Addressing the discussion between king and philosophe that these two works engendered is regrettably beyond the scope of this article. It suffices to say, however, that while there were certainly thematic continuities in their correspondence throughout the 1760s and 1770s, the heatedness of their exchanges following d'Holbach's publications meant that d'Alembert put his push for his proposed prize question on the utility of deception on the back burner.
It took seven years, and derisive laughter from the Academy of Sciences in Paris at what it saw as an attachment to an outdated Wolffian metaphysics in Berlin,Footnote 72 to prompt d'Alembert to revive his agenda for the Berlin Academy's prize contests.Footnote 73 But d'Alembert's language demonstrated that it was in the context of their earlier conversation on the nature of philosophy that his new intervention must be read. In his letter of 22 September 1777, d'Alembert made it clear that the Berlin Academy's recently announced prize question on the foundational force intended for their 1779 contest cast serious doubt on Frederick's commitment to true philosophy.Footnote 74 An academy in the service of true philosophy would have posed not such ‘unintelligible’ and ‘strange’ prize questions, but instead ‘very interesting’ and ‘very useful’ ones.Footnote 75 Not having used his patronage to ensure his Academy channelled its activities towards probing such publicly useful questions as ‘Is it useful to deceive the people?’, it was no wonder that ‘the progress of philosophical wisdom (lumières philosophiques)’ in Frederick's realms advanced ‘so slowly’.Footnote 76 Only by complying with d'Alembert's ultimatum could Frederick reclaim his legitimacy as a philosopher king.
D'Alembert's letter amounted to an extremely unfavourable verdict on Frederick's qualifications as a philosopher king. Yet Frederick's eventual acquiescence could not have been more grudging, nor more revealing of his apprehension towards the prospect of a public debate on the utility of deception. In his response, not only did he not promise to deliver on d'Alembert's demands; he also explicitly expressed reservations towards setting such a delicate, predictably controversial prize question at an Academy under his patronage. In so doing, Frederick confirmed that his interlocutor's misgivings towards his commitment to philosophy had been well founded. Reiterating his belief in human imperfectibility, Frederick launched into a full-fledged defence of the political expediency of deceit. In this, he made recourse to commonplaces traditionally marshalled in defence of the noble lie.Footnote 77 ‘Is it not permitted to deceive men’, Frederick asked, ‘when one does it for their good’, such as when one ‘disguise[s] a medicine that a sick man loathes…because it is the only way to cure him’, or ‘diminish[es] the loss of a great battle, so as not to discourage an entire nation?’Footnote 78 None of these arguments was original, and Frederick could not possibly have imagined that they would have surprised or persuaded his interlocutor. Rather, they were simply meant to convey Frederick's continuing reluctance to abandon his position on the utility of deceit. The public course of action he was about to take, Frederick intimated, by no means made him an ally in d'Alembert's philosophical cause.
The inconsistency between Frederick's public and private actions is undeniable. But that inconsistency itself suggests an apparent ease, or at least a far greater incentive, to demonstrate public, if insincere, commitment to the conception of philosophy as truth-telling, and the relative difficulty of doing so in private. This fact is by no means an apology for a Namierite interpretation of the utterances of political actors, that is, the dismissal of their utterances as having little bearing on their ultimately purely self-interested actions.Footnote 79 Instead, the disjuncture between Frederick's public actions and private utterances sheds light on the value that a public association with philosophy offered, and the great lengths to which those who, like Frederick, wavered in their commitment to it, would go in order to capitalize on that value.
Another crucial detail of this episode sheds further light on its significance: both d'Alembert's and Frederick's involvement in the question was kept secret.Footnote 80 This not only means that the significance of the prize essay question as the culmination of a protracted discussion on the true duties of philosophers, and as a public act in service of what d'Alembert deemed true philosophy, remained unknown to contemporary observers. More strikingly, it highlights the distance between Frederick and d'Alembert's exchanges and European intellectual life at large. Indeed, the fact that neither Frederick nor d'Alembert appears to have been aware that their discussions mirrored contemporaneous debates concerning Popularphilosophie in Prussia and other German-speaking principalities further emphasizes the independence of their correspondence from other loci of intellectual life.Footnote 81
This status of Frederick and d'Alembert's discussions in turn raises important questions about the position of a correspondence like theirs vis-à-vis what one might term the ‘public sphere’ – a metaphorical space that allegedly emerged in eighteenth-century Europe, where private individuals collectively participated, initially via literary activity, in rational-critical debate on political matters.Footnote 82 Many historians have attempted to give the skeleton of Jürgen Habermas's model empirical flesh, illustrating how the public sphere was propped up by the infrastructures of the book trade, the periodical press, and, most of all, correspondence.Footnote 83 Because it marked the bridging of literary and political realms so essential to the Habermasian public sphere, the correspondence that various rulers – including Frederick – maintained with philosophers and men of letters has, too, been conventionally thought to be part of the public sphere's structure. The patent, even deliberate disconnect of Frederick and d'Alembert's exchanges from the activities of their contemporaries, however, might give one pause in thinking so.
It still remains to be explained why negating the utility of deception was so important to the adjudication of Frederick's philosophical credentials. Returning to the origins of the question ‘Is it useful to deceive the people?’, the answer becomes clearer. In asking ‘if, in matters of religion, or even in any other area, it is useful to deceive the people’,Footnote 84 d'Alembert suggested that, if one saw value in disabusing people of the true machinations of religious institutions, the step towards exposing similarly fraudulent behaviour in other contexts ought not to be an unnatural one.
This logic better illuminates the function of d'Alembert's exchanges with Frederick. By uncovering an alleged philosopher king's reticence towards true philosophy, d'Alembert's attempts to persuade Frederick to disavow deception were part of a greater cause of championing a parrhêsiastic conception of philosophy – that is, philosophy as truth-telling. This was the overarching agenda of which his attack on the Jesuits’ cunning monopoly over the French educational system in Sur la destruction des jésuites, and his calling out of rulers and grandees for pretending to be qualified to arbitrate in matters of taste and philosophy in his Essai sur la société des gens de lettres, were also part. True philosophers, d'Alembert argued, made themselves publicly useful by exposing and undermining deceit in all contexts. Without necessary aspirations towards particular forms of government, laws, or systems of belief, this conception of philosophy departs substantially from that supposedly espoused by the protagonists of a ‘radical Enlightenment’. Yet, as Frederick's reluctance to reject politically expedient deceit shows, the implications of philosophy thus conceived for political life were by no means less ambitious, or less challenging to accept, than more specific, programmatic proposals for political and social reforms.
