Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy)

Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy

Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy

1. The Soft Underbelly of Reason The Passions in the Seventeenth Century Edited by Stephen Gaukroger 2. Descartes and Method A Search for a Method in Meditations Daniel E. Flage and Clarence A. Bonnen 3. Descartes’ Natural Philosophy Edited by Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster and John Sutton 4. Hobbes and History Edited by G. A. J. Rogers and Tom Sorell 5. The Philosophy of Robert Boyle Peter R. Anstey 6. Descartes Belief, Scepticism and Virtue Richard Davies 7. The Philosophy of John Locke New Perspectives Edited by Peter R. Anstey 8. Receptions of Descartes Cartesianism and Anti-Cartesianism in Early Modern Europe Edited by Tad M. Schmaltz 9. Material Falsity and Error in Descartes’ Meditations Cecilia Wee

10. Leibniz’s Final System Monads, Matter, and Animals Glenn A. Hartz 11. Pierre Bayle’s Cartesian Metaphysics Rediscovering Early Modern Philosophy Todd Ryan 12. Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy Edited by G. A. J. Rogers, Tom Sorell and Jill Kraye

Insiders and Outsiders in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy

Edited by G. A. J. Rogers, Tom Sorell and Jill Kraye

New York

London

First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Insiders and outsiders in seventeenth-century philosophy / edited by G.A.J. Rogers, Tom Sorell, and Jill Kraye. p. cm.—(Routledge studies in seventeenth-century philosophy ; 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Philosophy, Modern—17th century. 2. Philosophers, Modern—Europe. I. Rogers, G. A. J. (Graham Alan John), 1938– II. Sorell, Tom. III. Kraye, Jill. B801.I57 2010 190.9'032—dc22 2009008511 ISBN 0-203-87174-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-80609-7 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-87174-X (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-80609-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-87174-4 (ebk)

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: The Creation of the Canon

ix 1

G. A. J. ROGERS

Part I Outsiders 1

Becoming an Outsider: Gassendi in the History of Philosophy

23

MARGARET J. OSLER

2

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

43

JOHN HENRY

3

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy

76

STEPHEN PIGNEY

4

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

99

BENJAMIN CARTER

5

Nicholas Malebranche: Insider or Outsider?

122

ANDREW PYLE

Part II Insiders Descartes 6

Excusable Caricature and Philosophical Relevance: The Case of Descartes TOM SORELL

153

vi Contents 7

Descartes’ Reputation

164

JOHN COTTINGHAM

8

The Political Motivations of Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism

177

EMMANUEL FAYE

Hobbes 9

Hobbes’ Reputation in Anglo-American Philosophy

192

TOM SORELL

10 A Farewell to Leviathan: Foucault and Hobbes on Power, Sovereignty and War

207

LUC FOISNEAU

Spinoza 11 Spinoza Past and Present

223

WIEP VAN BUNGE

12 Benedictus Pantheissimus

238

STEVEN NADLER

Locke 13 The Standing and Reputation of John Locke

257

G. A. J. ROGERS

14 The Reputation of Locke’s General Philosophy in Britain in the Twentieth Century

269

MICHAEL AYERS

Leibniz 15 Leibniz’s Reputation: The Fontenelle Tradition

281

DANIEL GARBER

16 Leibniz’s Reputation in the Eighteenth Century: Kant and Herder CATHERINE WILSON

294

Contents 17 The Reception of Leibniz’s Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

vii 309

ROBERT MERRIHEW ADAMS

Contributors Index

315 319

Acknowledgments

Some of the chapters in this volume have been specially commissioned. Others were originally delivered at the colloquium ‘Outsiders in Early Modern Philosophy’ (31 October–1 November 2003) or at the seminar series ‘Reputations of Seventeenth-Century Philosophers’ (Autumn, 2004), both held at the Warburg Institute, University of London, under the auspices of a Leverhulme Trust Academic Interchange Award (Grant F/00213A: ‘The New Historiography of Early Modern Philosophy’). The editors acknowledge this support and that of the Warburg Institute with gratitude, and thank all the contributors for their patience. Finally, we would like to thank Jo Rogers for producing the Index.

Introduction The Creation of the Canon G. A. J. Rogers

So far as philosophy is concerned the seventeenth century is often described as ‘the century of genius’ and with good reason. Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke and Leibniz, themselves bracketed between Bacon and Galileo, Bayle and Newton, provide a galaxy that has left an indelible mark on our cultural history. It would not be difficult to add another dozen names whose place in the canon is more problematic and a host of minor figures whose impact was often far from negligible. It is some indication of this that the Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophers alone contains the names of some 400 people who are reckoned to have made some kind of mark on the area of enquiry known as philosophy.1 The corresponding volumes for the Netherlands, which covers both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, list 365 such thinkers. 2 Comparable volumes and figures for France, Germany and Italy are not yet available, but the lists are likely to be at least as extensive. To explain these large numbers, probably larger for philosophy than for any other intellectual discipline, with the possible exception of theology (though most theologians also saw themselves as philosophers), would require extensive enquiries in the intellectual history of Europe. But probably the single most important factor is the nature of religious thought, especially though not exclusively Christianity, in the life of Europeans. From its early days, if not its earliest, 3 Christian thought intermingled with that of classic Greek philosophers, a tradition that was obviously still powerful in the seventeenth century. Theological enquiries presuppose a knowledge of philosophical positions and of classical literature, especially the writings of both Plato and Aristotle, with Cicero and Seneca not far behind. Nor must we forget that philosophy as understood in the seventeenth century was regarded as a much broader subject than it is today, one that encompassed the whole of natural philosophy, including physics and astronomy together with the various sciences of nature, ethics and political theory, as well as traditional disciplines such as logic and metaphysics. So, as Dr Johnson says in his Dictionary of the English Language, philosophy as commonly understood included all the subjects taught in the university schools. In an

2

G. A. J. Rogers

alternative characterisation the discipline was denominated by the works of Aristotle, whose influence from the later Middle Ages remained predominant until the early eighteenth century. Given this breadth, it is not surprising that the notion of who should be regarded as a philosopher and what task such a person was to perform was equally far-ranging. The goal of philosophy was scientia but its subject matter might be that of the astronomer (Kepler), mathematical physicist (Galileo), anatomist (Harvey), moral theorist (Cumberland), and so on. It is a mark of original thought that on its fi rst appearance it often produces hostile reaction. Philosophers are subject to such criticism as much, perhaps more, than anybody else. The claims of philosophers, when they are original, are bound to challenge accepted positions and they do so characteristically by means of argument, and the word argument, at least in one of its senses, suggests disagreement and confl ict, but only of a verbal or intellectual kind, we hope.4 It is widely accepted by philosophers that there is a well-established hierarchy among its practitioners that stretches over the centuries. Those who are at the higher reaches are the authors of works that form the canon of the discipline. It is an interesting fact that, so far as Western cultures are concerned, there is wide agreement about which works fall within the canon, even if those making the judgment vary enormously in their contemporary philosophical positions. In the Western philosophical tradition Plato and Aristotle occupy the pole position as the great founders of the discipline, even though it is also recognised that there were many other distinguished philosophers contemporary or near contemporary with them. It is not just that we are lucky enough to have many of their major works preserved over the centuries, though that is an important factor. There may well have been other thinkers equally talented whose works have not survived at all or only in fragmentary form. But the works of these two thinkers occupy a unique place in philosophy as marking the birth of the discipline as it came to be developed. Both made contributions of the highest intellectual quality that have made their mark on virtually all subsequent philosophy in the Western world. By the seventeenth century, philosophy as an intellectual discipline had been practised for two millennia. Within the course of this century it flourished in a way in which it had perhaps not done since the fourth century BC. There were several reasons for this development. Some of the most important were advances in various branches of what we have come to call the natural sciences, though at the time they were regarded as branches of philosophy. In mid-sixteenth-century Poland, the Copernican hypothesis of a heliocentric universe both challenged the established assumptions about the structure of the cosmos and stimulated a great deal of important research by Kepler, Galileo and others. Nor was it only in astronomy that new ideas about the natural world were put forward. Perhaps equally important were the revival of atomistic theories about the nature of matter, quite

Introduction

3

incompatible with traditional Aristotelian matter theory, and the developments of novel new accounts of the human body which called traditional medicine into question. These changes were linked to the introduction of mechanical explanations of natural change that rejected the teleological Aristotelian models that had so dominated matter theory, mechanics and anatomy, and reached its high point in the anatomy of William Harvey and the natural philosophies of Descartes and Hobbes. Another reason for the exceptional flowering of philosophy in the seventeenth century is the challenge to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church mounted by Luther. His assault on central Catholic doctrine raised crucial questions about the grounding and nature of religious authority which spread into many areas of philosophical enquiry. As the Reformation gathered momentum, the Protestant universities had to respond in their teaching. But it is of great significance that, despite Luther’s assault on Aristotle, after a wobble, the universities returned to his philosophy to supply them with their major texts.5 Other major factors that played a vital part in setting the scene for seventeenth-century philosophy were the effect of printing on the availability of texts and the attempts by ecclesiastical and political authorities to control publications through various mechanisms of censorship. More distant, but nonetheless important, was the impact of the discoveries of remote lands and peoples on Europeans’ perception of their place in the cosmic order. All of these changes, along with many others, encouraged a climate in which, with hindsight, it is no surprise to fi nd a rich variety of philosophical developments taking place. Many of these were also stimulated by the recovery of ancient texts, of which two strands were to be very influential. These were the recovery and translation into Latin of the works of Plato, most of which had not been available in the West since ancient antiquity, and those of ancient sceptical philosophers, of which the writings of Sextus Empiricus are only the most important.6 By the late sixteenth century loud voices were clamouring for the reform of learning. Of these the most notable in terms of philosophy was Francis Bacon, whose highly original vision of the possibility of developing a thorough investigation of all aspects of the natural world for utilitarian objectives was to have a an enormous impact throughout Europe but was most obviously manifested in the foundation of the Royal Society in 1662. Significantly, its home was in London, away from the two English universities. And it is worth noting that most of the thinkers, both British and Continental, who in the course of the century were to become established as insiders philosophically, as well as many whom we now regard as outsiders, were working outside the universities. Of the ten featured in this volume only two, Cudworth and Gassendi, spent their mature lives within university institutions. The others either held university posts for a while or could almost certainly easily have done so if they had wished (the exception is Spinoza). But there were serious alternative forms of life for philosophers,

4

G. A. J. Rogers

as tutors (Gale, Hobbes and Locke), or within the church (Malebranche). Spinoza ground lenses and Leibniz was a diplomat and court librarian. Digby and Descartes had sufficient modest private means not to need to take on employment. Further, many of them preferred not to be attached to institutions that were likely to be hostile to at least some of their views. In short, for the most part they prized their intellectual freedom above security of position. For all of the thinkers considered here, whether they were authors of books that have entered the canon of philosophers or not, to be able to argue and publish their positions was paramount. Two of them, Hobbes and Spinoza, were to be widely reviled as ‘atheists’ and therefore regarded as threats to Christian values by many of their opponents. Why do the works of some philosophers enter the canon while others do not? The obvious answer, that they were better philosophers, fails to tell the whole story. There were special reasons in the case of each of the thinkers considered here which are to a large extent independent of their merit as philosophers. National issues, for instance, have played a role, with certain thinkers entering the canon in some countries but not in others. Religious views were often, perhaps always, a factor. The canon itself has been defi ned by a variety of forces. Some are substantially intellectual and are determined by what are taken to be the shaping positions for the subject. In a liberal university’s philosophy curriculum it is thought desirable to have paradigms of the main possible positions. Perhaps the most enduring distinction in philosophy is the division between those philosophers who believe that it is possible to gain substantial knowledge by reason alone—the rationalists—and those who hold that ultimately knowledge is always the product of experience—the empiricists. It is perhaps not just an accident of history that the two founding fathers of philosophy in the Western world, Plato and Aristotle, fall neatly into these two camps. It is another matter how helpful this distinction is to understanding the positions of philosophers. But the classification immediately gives centre stage to the epistemology at the heart of philosophical enquiry. But epistemic enquires soon lead to questions of ontology. What are the ultimate building blocks of both the universe and our experience? Are they permanent or transitory entities? Are they material objects or something else? The main branches of philosophy are often taken to be logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and political theory. Each branch has to a certain extent its own canon, though how that canon translates into a university syllabus varies. To take logic as an example, for centuries the defi nitive work was the Organon of Aristotle, interpreted by his many commentators, but in the late seventeenth century this was gradually displaced by ‘the new way of ideas’ propounded by Descartes, Arnauld and Locke. This in its turn gave way in the early twentieth century to the new formal logic of Frege and Russell. In epistemology the canon begins with Plato and Aristotle but in more modern times it is taken to include at least Descartes,

Introduction

5

Locke, Hume and Kant. In moral philosophy Plato and Aristotle, perhaps especially Aristotle, provide canonical texts, followed by Hume and, most importantly, Kant. In the Anglo-American world Mill was a late addition. There are a variety of problems in identifying a canon in philosophy. One, as noted previously, is that different canons are acknowledged in different places. Another is that in any one institution, church, university or country, the canon changes over time. Moreover, at any given time there are disputes as to what the canon is or should be. Despite these issues, over time there has been a substantial agreement among the community of philosophers, itself a problematic grouping, about who the really great philosophers are. The list is determined by a variety of factors which include the following three: originality, quality of argument and influence. On all three counts Plato and Aristotle lead the field by some distance, to be followed, some argue, by Augustine and Aquinas. Descartes and Kant rate as highly as any in the post-Renaissance world, with Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume and Hegel close behind. On a measure of originality Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant are probably ahead, but in terms of influence Aquinas and Locke rank very highly, even at the summit. In terms of insight and quality of argument Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Hume and Kant all have a claim to a seat at the top table. It is no mere coincidence that a number of these thinkers are situated within the seventeenth century. Yet, as I already remarked, many others in this period also deserve to be regarded as ‘philosophers’, and the authors in this volume explore the impact not only of the great figures but also of some of the less well-known ones. The phrase ‘insiders and outsiders’ suggests a defi nitive classification which is in some ways misleading. Two good examples are Hobbes and Spinoza. Both of them were strongly attacked in their own lifetimes as atheists when to be so classified was a potential sentence of death. Yet their writings were also widely recognised as expressions of powerful intellects that were likely to be influential. Any list of great works of seventeenth-century philosophy drawn up today would contain both Leviathan and Ethics, and probably some of their other writings. They are, in a sense, outsiders who became insiders, though not until some time after their deaths. Malebranche, on the other hand, is a philosopher who in his day was considered to be the leading figure of the post-Cartesian age. He is still so regarded by many in the francophone world, but his standing has never been so high in anglophone circles and his major works have only recently become available in modern translations.7 Whether this availability of his works will change his standing outside of France remains to be seen. But there is certainly evidence of him now receiving much wider attention.8 This suggests that when we describe some philosopher as an insider or outsider we need to do so with reference to time and context. All that we would claim is that in the anglophone world of philosophy those characterised as insiders and those as outsiders in this volume are currently so regarded.

6

G. A. J. Rogers

Another seventeenth-century French philosopher who does not make it into the canon but who was very highly esteemed by his contemporaries is Pierre Gassendi. He is remembered as the person who did the most in midcentury to advance the cause of Epicurean atomism. Although he remained a priest throughout his life, there has always been some suspicion that, like Hobbes, he was a materialist and a closet atheist, though atomism does not necessarily entail atheism. There can be no doubt that Gassendi was an empiricist and in many ways his account of the world and our knowledge of it anticipates that argued more systematically by Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Gassendi, however, depicted himself as revising an old philosophy rather than propounding a new one, and perhaps his place in history has in part been obscured because he never wrote a work that was likely to be seen as a classic original text, even though he came up with many insights and arguments of his own in support of the Christianised version of atomistic empiricism that he promoted. This volume consists of a series of papers on outsiders and insiders in the seventeenth century, five of each category, though the insiders receive considerably more attention. Those classified as outsiders are Pierre Gassendi, Kenelm Digby, Theophilus Gale, Ralph Cudworth and Nicholas Malebranche. It is immediately obvious that this list could have been indefinitely longer than it is and it is notable for those missing, including no women philosophers, a point to which I shall return. Two of those on our list, Gassendi and Malebranche, are very famous, Cudworth moderately so, and Digby and Gale, as philosophers, much more obscure. The insiders are predictable: Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke and Leibniz. The reputations of all these philosophers, in both categories, have varied from time to time. Digby and Gale have for long periods almost disappeared from view. In a way this may be explicable because they, together with Cudworth, are what we might today describe as ‘transitional figures’ in the movement from medieval to early modern philosophy; however, this was not the case in the seventeenth century, when neither they nor their contemporaries were aware of living in a transitional phase. In their day, these ten figures were considered to be thinkers of substantial repute, and it took some time for them to emerge as worthy, or not, of being regarded as major and original philosophers. Beginning with the outsiders, the fi rst figure considered here is Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). Gassendi is perhaps the fi rst seventeenth-century philosopher to move from being an insider to that of an outsider, and this for reasons that are in significant ways independent of his merits as a philosopher. A clue to his status is given in Margaret Osler’s title ‘Becoming an Outsider . . . ’. Paris in the 1630s and 1640s was the philosophical capital of Europe. The organiser of this important school was Marin Mersenne, the Minim friar who brought Galileo’s new mechanics to France and was personally as close to Descartes as anyone. Other key figures in the Mersenne circle include Gassendi, Hobbes and Digby. Gassendi was brought up in

Introduction

7

Provence and became a priest there and professor of philosophy at the University of Aix before going to Paris in 1628, where he gave private lessons in philosophy and studied Epicurus. He got to know Mersenne and when he returned to Paris in 1641 he regularly attended Mersenne’s weekly meetings at the Minim convent, where he probably met Hobbes, with whom he soon established a friendship based on mutual intellectual interests and admiration. Gassendi’s friendship with Descartes, on the other hand, apparently did not survive his objections to the Meditations in 1641. Descartes’ replies to Gassendi, if not quite as dismissive as those to Hobbes’ arguments in the third set of objections, are nevertheless hardly those of one friend responding to another.9 As Osler argues, to appreciate Gassendi as a philosopher we have to see him as a Renaissance humanist who saw his philosophy as drawing on a classical source and reviving it for modern use within a Christian context. That classical source is the philosophy of Epicurus, or at least the elements that have come down to us. The Epicurean philosophical system, in contrast to that of Plato and Descartes, is strongly empiricist and atomist, and the outcome of enquiries is not scientia, as the followers of Aristotle sought, but only probable knowledge. Gassendi openly followed Epicurus in all these beliefs, well aware of their distance from orthodox views and of the dangerous accusations of heresy to which they exposed him. In linking his style of philosophising so strongly with that of an ancient philosopher Gassendi stood in marked contrast with Descartes. While Gassendi’s works, written in difficult humanist Latin, are thick with classical references that make reading him today a challenge that few are prepared to accept, Descartes’ lucidly written texts, whether in French or Latin, appear to be statements of his intellectual autobiography without recourse to external sources. Of course it does not take much enquiry to realise that they too have debts to earlier thinkers but not in a way that makes his writings inaccessible to students who have yet to enter far into philosophy. Unlike Descartes, Gassendi did not have the confidence to expound his philosophy without recourse to the canons of humanism. Consequently, although he was rightly regarded as a powerful exponent of an alternative philosophy to that of Aristotle he has not been regarded as the modern founder of an epistemological empiricism. That accolade was to be earned later in the century by John Locke. Kenelm Digby (1603–1665) is our second outsider. In his chapter John Henry begins by describing Digby as a natural philosopher, but the difficulty of classifying the various branches of philosophy in the seventeenth century is underlined by the fact that the full title of his major work is Two Treatises, in the One of Which, the Nature of Bodies; in the Other, the Nature of Man’s Soule, Is Looked into: In Way of Discovery of the Immortality of Reasonable Soules. The title correctly implies that Digby held to a fi rm belief in the intimate connection between matter theory and questions about the nature of the mind, soul and wider religious claims. Two Treatises

8

G. A. J. Rogers

was published in 1644, the same year as Descartes’ much more famous and influential Principles of Philosophy. And, like Hobbes and Gassendi, Digby presented a mechanical account of nature based on a material atomism. But he differed from his three contemporaries in remaining committed throughout his life to central aspects of the philosophy of Aristotle, which was ultimately to isolate him from the predominantly anti-Aristotelian philosophy that came to dominate later seventeenth-century thought. As Henry argues, the reason why Digby never abandoned his Aristotelian roots was his lifelong allegiance to the Catholic Church, whose doctrines were inextricably bound up with Aristotelian philosophy. If Hobbes, at the other extreme, was always regarded by the Anglican Church as, at best, dubious, despite his evident hostility to Catholicism, Digby’s Catholicism inevitably distanced him from central institutions and thinkers in England. But even though Digby was linked to radical elements in English Catholicism and his Two Treatises were translated into Latin as early as 1651, with later editions, he never endeared himself to a substantial Catholic audience or to a wider Continental one. Digby was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at its second meeting. But, as Henry shows, there was a certain coolness towards him on the part of many members, including its Protestant secretary, Henry Oldenburg. Despite the intellectual merit of his work, Digby’s supposed proselytising agenda counted strongly against him, especially at a time when the philosophy of Aristotle was already subject to substantial challenge. It is also reasonable to claim that Digby’s attempt to reconcile his version of atomism with Aristotelianism was always a doomed project because of its internal contradictions— a verdict that has not been repudiated by the judgment of history. The next outsider, Theophilus Gale (1628–1678), is one of the earliest English historians of philosophy. His most famous work, The Court of the Gentiles, issued in four large volumes from 1669 to 1678, presents that history, though set in a particular theological framework, which is ultimately the reason why Gale remained an outsider and was largely forgotten after his death. Nevertheless, this lack of sustained impact cannot detract from the fascination that his claims still retain, even if embedded in a picture of the world that no longer retains many followers. The central intellectual vision that dominates Gale’s thought is that in the human condition direct revelation invariably trumps reason. Philosophy is always subordinate to theology regarded as fully contained in the texts of the Old and New Testaments. In this commitment Gale was swimming against the tide of history, at least to the extent that thinkers such as Benjamin Whichcote were claiming that God’s creation is fully rational and explicable by reason if properly applied. Reason, Whichcote and his fellow Cambridge Platonists believed, and were followed in this belief by Locke and a host of other thinkers, is the most important of God’s gifts to humanity, and we abuse it at our peril. From the Cambridge Platonists onwards theological claims were to be measured by their philosophical cogency and

Introduction

9

historical consistency, not the other way round. Although Descartes was careful not to engage in theological dispute, his whole philosophy shows him, by implication, to be perhaps the leading exponent of this position. But Gale was of a very different persuasion. He offered a substantial body of argument and evidence, especially philological, for the view that the Bible contains the true story of the creation and that Hebrew is God’s original language as conveyed to Adam. Knowledge of God’s creation, the prisca sapientia, was passed to Adam, as exemplified by his role in naming the animals, and then passed on to Moses and implanted in the Pentateuch, from which later thinkers attempted to recover it. Gale combined his historical claims with a Platonic philosophy, which, however, he regarded as a plagiarism and corruption of Mosaic wisdom by pagan philosophers. Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) and Henry More (1614–1687) were the most important English philosophers between Francis Bacon and John Locke. Both were at Cambridge for all their adult lives, and although More was the author of many more books, Cudworth was the better philosopher, backed by an impressive knowledge of the history of ancient philosophy and Christian theology. Cudworth’s only published book in his lifetime was his massive The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) of nearly 950 folio-size pages. Like many of the philosophers in Cambridge in the seventeenth century Cudworth was much influenced by Plato and Neoplatonism. He was, in addition, strongly aware of Descartes’ philosophy, many elements of which are featured in his own system. There are, however, also many great differences in their positions, perhaps especially in ontology and the general objectives of philosophy. Cudworth’s thought always had a religious goal that Descartes’ did not, an aspect that distanced him from the more secular directions of modern thought that flowed from the writings of Francis Bacon, Descartes himself and, at the end of the century, Locke. Benjamin Carter notes in his chapter that Cudworth was educated at Calvinist Emmanuel College and spent the rest of his life in Cambridge. But Cudworth nevertheless became critical of both Calvinism and scholasticism as he found it there. He turned to a form of Neoplatonism that was to be rejected in the eighteenth century, and this for a number of reasons. Cudworth was one of the last important modern thinkers to promote a theocratic philosophy, and this, combined with the daunting erudition of the True Intellectual System and the Restoration rise of Anglican royalism—which led naturally to suspicions of someone who had been close to the rulers of the Commonwealth—was enough to ensure that in the eighteenth century Cudworth’s work did not receive the attention it deserved. This places Cudworth in the camp of the outsiders, where he has fi rmly remained, a judgment that does no justice to his scholarship and achievement as a philosopher.10 The fi nal outsider treated in this volume is Nicholas Malebranche (1638– 1715). In some ways Malebranche holds a position in France comparable to that which Cudworth occupies in English thought. Both men were strongly

10

G. A. J. Rogers

influenced by Descartes and both placed God at the centre of their philosophy in all its aspects. And, as with Cudworth, this orientation proved to be out of sympathy with the intellectual trends in the eighteenth century. In his chapter Andrew Pyle begins, surely correctly, by classifying Malebranche as an insider in the early eighteenth century, a status that changed completely in the course of the next fi fty years. This is not because he was uninfluential. Two of the great philosophers of the eighteenth century, George Berkeley and David Hume, borrowed considerably from his philosophy, although they also differed markedly from him in their positions.11 Pyle argues that there are three major reasons why Malebranche’s standing declined. First, there was the rise of empiricism, associated with the philosophy of Locke and the Royal Society, and the corresponding decline of Platonism, to which Malebranche’s philosophy was at least related. Second, there was the hostility of many eighteenth-century philosophers to the influence of the Catholic religion, and Christianity more generally. Third, there was the triumph of Newtonianism over Cartesianism in natural philosophy. The result was that Malebranche slipped from the reckoning, a victim of the triumph of Bayle, Locke and Voltaire over Descartes, Leibniz and Malebranche. But the victory was not achieved because of the philosophical superiority of the former group. The forces moving in that direction were not clear-cut intellectual considerations but were motivated as much by hostility to established religion and ephemeral intellectual fashions. That Malebranche will ever return to the canon again may well be doubted, but, as I have already noted, his sun has certainly been rising in recent years. When we turn to the insiders of the seventeenth century, among all the ‘big names’, one has almost always occupied a central position within the canon: René Descartes. His place has long been the most secure. But it is also true that the title ‘Father of Modern Philosophy’ was not quickly bestowed, especially in his own country. In fact, as noted previously, it is generally a sign of an original philosopher that his or her ideas initially receive a hostile reception. In Descartes’ case this can easily be explained. His philosophy challenged the established Aristotelian teachings in the universities and was rejected by the theologians as a threat to fundamental dogmas of the church. Nonetheless, partly because of Mersenne’s support when his works were published, they immediately received the attention of the leading thinkers of the day. Gassendi and Hobbes, among others, wrote ‘Objections’ to the Meditations that were published with the treatise in 1641. Before that, in 1637, his Discourse on the Method had appeared together with three other works and was soon being read in England by Digby and Hobbes. A major factor in its success was the fact that it did not presuppose a background in humanist learning. Although the presentation appears deceptively simple, hiding a depth of sophistication which is still only being fully appreciated, its accessibility enabled Descartes’ vision to reach a much wider audience than, say, the comparably broad vision of

Introduction

11

Gassendi. Further, Descartes’ account of the natural world fits well with the atomistic or corpuscular systems that were rapidly replacing the plenist theories of the Aristotelians. The impact of Descartes on philosophy in the second half of the century is difficult to overstate, especially in England. The Cambridge Platonists More and Cudworth were early readers and they took many of their assumptions from Descartes’ works, even though neither became ‘Cartesians’ as that term came to be applied to committed disciples. Other thinkers who were early to appreciate the merits of Descartes’ philosophy include Robert Boyle and, perhaps most importantly, Locke and Newton. Without becoming Cartesians, all the great philosophers of the eighteenth century, including Kant, took, in one way or another, their starting point from his philosophy. Despite his unique role in the history of philosophy, Descartes has suffered from a lack of followers or perhaps even sympathetic readers in the second half of the twentieth century. Two contributors, John Cottingham and Tom Sorell, are undoubtedly exceptions to that trend. In their chapters they engage with the question of Descartes’ recent reputation. Cottingham characterises Descartes’ reputation in the educated lay world where he is still highly regarded with that of his standing with modern analytic philosophers who regard ‘Cartesian’ as a word of philosophical abuse. Thus Cottingham challenges Gilbert Ryle’s negative view of Descartes’ account of the mind-body relationship as ‘the ghost in the machine’, arguing that it rests on a badly flawed reading of Descartes’ account of the relationship between mind and body. It is important to remember that Descartes did not see himself as in his body as a captain is in a ship, but, in Molyneux’s translation, as ‘most nighly conjoyn’d thereto’. Other misreadings have led to a large number of misunderstandings of his philosophy. Recent scholarship, for example, has gone some way to correcting the understanding of Descartes as a dogmatic rationalist unaffected by empirical success in the natural sciences. And a reading of Descartes as wedded to a philosophy built upon a commitment to private consciousness alone is open to serious criticism. Cottingham’s account challenges much in many modern negative interpretations of Descartes. Sorell, too, sees much misreading, even caricature, of the historical Descartes in twentieth-century depictions. But he argues that the status of Descartes as a hate figure in current philosophy cannot be dismissed as a simple misreading. It is philosophically important. Historiographical writing is needed that links Descartes’ text sympathetically to current philosophy. For this purpose Sorell turns to another commentator to gain insight into Descartes’ importance, namely, Bernard Williams and his Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978). Williams does not set out to attack the Rylian picture of Descartes; instead he draws attention to a major theme in his philosophy: the notion of an ‘absolute point of view’. Sorell elaborates on this theme to argue that Descartes’ relevance today is that he shows that philosophy cannot be reduced—as it is,

12

G. A. J. Rogers

for example, by Quine—simply to a naturalised activity on a par with the natural sciences. Descartes certainly had a program for the natural sciences but he was also aware that the sciences could not be practised without a metaphysics. It is to this bigger picture that Descartes can still draw our attention. Any attempt to explain what Descartes really said that is not based on a deep knowledge of his writings and their context is liable to go badly wrong. In the third chapter on Descartes, Emmanuel Faye considers a phase of twentieth-century anti-Cartesianism quite different from those discussed by Cottingham and Sorell. In what is undoubtedly the most controversial chapter in the volume, he maintains that the anti-Cartesianism of Heidegger is intimately linked to Heidegger’s support of National Socialism and to his justification for the invasion of France by the Nazis in 1940. Faye argues powerfully that Heidegger saw Descartes’ commitment to the individual self as expressed in the discovery in the intuition of the Cogito as totally alien to the correct metaphysics that is rooted in the (German) people as a whole. He claims that Heidegger’s interpretation of Descartes is based on an ignorance of many of Descartes’ writings, especially his correspondence, and that in his attempt to read Descartes through his scholastic predecessors, such as Suarez and Duns Scotus, Heidegger failed to take account of the way in which he broke with the past. Even if we allow that all great philosophers are to some extent controversial in their own times, Thomas Hobbes is an extreme example of this phenomenon and remains so even in the present. But few today would wish to dispute that he was one of the greatest political philosophers of all time. In his own time it was something of a risk to be associated with ‘the Monster of Malmesbury’, the materialist atheist as he was typically regarded. He was excoriated by contemporary clergy in their sermons and many of them wrote books and pamphlets attacking his philosophy.12 Is he then an outsider who has become an insider? The fact that so many wrote against him shows that he was at least being read, and by many of the leading thinkers in England.13 And although his readers were generally antagonistic, nobody denied that his argument was powerful. He was already fairly well known before Leviathan was published, but its appearance made him notorious. The hostility against him meant that throughout the eighteenth century he was very largely ignored in print and his works unobtainable, and it was not until Molesworth’s editions of his works in the nineteenth century that he was once more taken very seriously as a political theorist.14 As Tom Sorell argues, while Hobbes is today taken very seriously as a political philosopher, he has never achieved recognition as an epistemologist or as a philosopher of mind. He is canonical only in that area of human enquiry in which he himself claimed originality.15 So Hobbes has this rather peculiar status in the insider vs. outsider divide: he was not regarded as an insider in his own day and his claim to have a place in the canon today is as a political theorist, not as a philosopher—like his friend Gassendi, he did

Introduction

13

not write a work that has come down to us as a classic text in epistemology or philosophy of mind. Sorell maintains that too often commentators have taken the early chapters of Leviathan as an expression of a comprehensive natural philosophy. He claims that this is an unwarranted reading and that there is no such generalised philosophy in Leviathan, nor is one required for its argument. This is strongly confi rmed by Hobbes’ own words in the preface to De cive where he explains his philosophy and its construction by saying that he planned his philosophy in three sections. The fi rst ‘would discuss body and its general properties; the second, Man and his particular faculties and passions; the third, the Commonwealth and the duties of citizens’.16 But Hobbes goes on to explain that the third part ‘last in order has come out fi rst; especially as I saw it did not need the preceding parts, since it rests upon its own principles known by reason’.17 So Hobbes claimed that his political theory is intellectually autonomous. But this does not mean that it is in any way incompatible with the other two parts nor that it cannot best be understood by reference to them, even though he never actually states this. Certainly Hobbes’ general philosophy, Sections 1 and 2 of his system, have never been established as central texts in the philosophical canon. Nevertheless, they deserve more attention than they have traditionally been given, perhaps especially his account of the senses, and one wonders if his relegation as a second-league epistemologist may have more to do with his reputation as an atheist than with his qualities as a philosopher. Paris was Hobbes’ home for several years and many of his closest friends and admirers were French. But this recognition was not strongly sustained into the eighteenth century. It is some indication of this that Leviathan was not translated into French until 1971.18 Since then, however, Hobbes studies has been booming with translations into French of his major works under the direction of Yves Charles Zarka. Luc Foisneau, author of the second chapter on Hobbes in this collection, has been much involved with this project. Foisneau links Hobbes with the analysis of power offered by Michel Foucault. Both thinkers were concerned to give an account of power, but while Foucault sees Hobbes’ account as running strongly against his own analysis, Foucault recognises that he has to show Hobbes to have been wrong if his own account is to win favour. Foisneau concludes his introduction with the claim that ‘I would like to show how Foucault’s interpretation of Hobbes has deeply modified Hobbes’s reputation, thus allowing a different understanding of Hobbes’s use of war and conquest’. Central to Foucault’s analysis of power is his rejection of the notion of sovereignty, which itself presupposes the notion of legitimacy and law. Rather we must begin with actual power relationships in society, the family, and so on. Whereas power in the medieval world is linked directly to sovereignty, in modern societies it becomes connected to ‘productive bodies’ in manufacturing, which in its turn gives way to ‘biopower’ associated with the notion of a population, not confi ned to individual atoms as in Hobbes’ system. Foucault draws on

14

G. A. J. Rogers

history to argue for his understanding of power against the philosophical analysis presented in Leviathan. He thus claims that Hobbes’ system conceals a warlike character in sovereigns that masks the actual power structures that exist in modern society. Many readers in France have found this interpretation plausibly challenging. Spinoza is the next thinker to be considered. In ‘Spinoza Past and Present’ Wiep van Bunge offers a magisterial overview of the philosopher’s reception and subsequent reputation. He notes the enormous change in his status from agent of the devil in his lifetime to icon of philosophical probity in the late twentieth century. The variety of readings, especially of the Ethics, put forward over the past century, and especially in the last fifty years, raises serious doubts about the possibility of an interpretation which is likely to command universal allegiance. There are Dutch, Jewish, French and German readings of Spinoza, each drawing attention to different aspects and implications of his work, often based on very different accounts of his objectives, ontology and metaphysics. Some of these leave the text itself well behind in their reconstruction of a view of the world which, while inspired by aspects of Spinoza’s thought, is scarcely deeply rooted in his writings. Nevertheless there is no doubt that Spinoza remains a powerful force in contemporary philosophy, which fully justifies his place in the seventeenth-century canon. Throughout his life and despite his gentle nature Spinoza’s philosophy was a matter of contention, and he was regarded until his death and well beyond as a highly dangerous figure, comparable in many ways to the assessment of Hobbes in England. Like him he was branded an atheist, when to be so branded was a serious charge that might very easily lead to punishment and even death. But was the charge of atheism merited? Most modern commentators have given his philosophy another interpretation. In the twentieth century, especially in the Anglo-American world, he has almost always been regarded as a pantheist. This reading of Spinoza seems to follow from his apparent identity of God and Nature. But in his chapter Steven Nadler argues that ultimately the only way that Spinoza’s philosophy can be understood is on an atheistic reading. According to Nadler Spinoza did not elevate nature to the divine. He reduced the divine to nature. He really believed that most of religion was superstition and his philosophy was designed to correct that fault. The two chapters following Nadler’s examine the most important English insider of the seventeenth century, John Locke. In the fi rst I look at the early reception of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding following its publication in 1689. Locke carefully prepared the world for this treatise, aiming in particular at his fellow members of the Royal Society. It was probably the longest work of epistemology that had ever been published, but it was its assault in the fi rst book on there being innate ideas that attracted the most attention and that produced the most hostile response. Despite its rejection by Anglican clergy it was not long before others were

Introduction

15

hailing it as a profound analysis of the nature and scope of human knowledge. The work was soon regarded as the great justification for an empiricist epistemology that was suited to the empirical science favoured by the Royal Society and paradigmatically exemplified by Newton’s natural philosophy. This epistemology dominated philosophical thinking in England for well over a hundred years and wielded a substantial influence throughout Europe, especially after its favourable comparison with Descartes’ philosophy by Voltaire and its influence on the philosophers of the French Enlightenment. At the end of the eighteenth century, and through the nineteenth, various forms of idealist philosophy came into prominence and Locke’s realism came under severe pressure. In the twentieth century, as Michael Ayers shows, Locke’s reputation has been patchy. Nevertheless, Ayers points out several commentators who have produced a more sympathetic interpretation of Locke based on a contextual reading of his work and a more careful analysis of his argument than had often been offered. Ayers’ own commentary on the Essay itself exemplifies this. The last philosopher considered in this volume, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716), is widely regarded as having one of the sharpest minds in the history of philosophy. Although he is now recognised as an intellectual giant of the seventeenth century, he did not achieve this status in his own lifetime, perhaps mainly because many of his works were published posthumously. It was not until 1765 that many became available in print, and until then he was primarily thought of as a mathematician and physicist and not as a philosopher in the tradition of Descartes and Locke. There is a sense in which his reputation is still growing as modern editions and translations of his works appear. During his own day, his reputation in England was sullied by his dispute with the Newtonians over the priority of the invention of the calculus, and it was further damaged throughout Europe by Voltaire’s caricature of him as the madly optimistic Dr Pangloss in Candide. But that view was transformed by the philosopher Christian Wolff. In her chapter Catherine Wilson shows how this transformation came about. Wolff turned Leibniz’s fragmented philosophy into a profound and comprehensive system. This was aided by a reading of Leibniz that links his supermechanical laws to the vital materialism of the naturalist Buffon. Kant clearly had a certain respect for Leibniz, but this regard was not so evident as to prevent his reputation among German scholars from remaining well below that of Kant himself—a judgment that in part is due to the fact that Leibniz wrote in French and Latin rather than in German. Kant, moreover, was hostile to Leibniz’s metaphysics, especially the doctrine of the best of all possible worlds and that of the ‘fairytale’ aspects of the Monadology. He could never accept, also, the necessity of the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. Herder, by contrast, was powerfully influenced by Leibniz’s concept of vital force. Even though Herder approached a materialist account of

16

G. A. J. Rogers

nature, it had a strong spiritual component which provided a foundation for a unity of his vision of humanity and for the primary place of ethics in his system. On drawing on Leibniz for this vision Herder gave him a place in the canon. In his treatment of Leibniz’s reputation Daniel Garber focuses on three very specific publications. First, he examines the eulogy given by Bernard Le Bouvier de Fontenelle, the secretary of the Académie Royale des Sciences, in 1717 after Leibniz’s death. Second, he considers Jacob Brucker’s account of Leibniz in his monumental, multi-volumed Historia critica philosophiae (1742–1744). And fi nally, he turns to the presentation of Leibniz’s philosophy by Jacques-André Émery in an anthology of his writings, entitled Esprit de Leibniz (1772). Émery’s agenda was to capture Leibniz as man of religion against the sceptical forces of the Enlightenment and the hostility towards the church that emerged in the French Revolution. As one would expect, Émery emphasises Leibniz’s theological writings, with a prominent place given to the Nouveaux essais and the Theodicy, but there are extracts under many other headings including history, education and logic. There is nothing on mathematics, however, and little on natural philosophy. This image of Leibniz thus differed from the views of him typically expressed earlier in the century. The fi nal chapter in the volume is by Robert Merrihew Adams on Leibniz’s reception in the twentieth century. The beginning of the century was marked by the publication of important books on Leibniz by Bertrand Russell and Louis Couturat, who both claimed that he derived his metaphysics from his logic. Both works owed much to the publication in the nineteenth century of large numbers of Leibniz’s philosophical and mathematical papers, which brought to light the richness of Leibniz’s thinking in these areas. The result was a dramatic increase in studies on and editions of Leibniz, which continues undiminished to the present day. The enormous impetus given to logic by the work of Frege, Whitehead and Russell himself no doubt contributed to this interest, as well as reflecting the impact of Leibniz on original philosophical thinking over two centuries after his death. Perhaps the most significant development, Adams argues, is the appropriation of the Leibnizian language of possible worlds for the development of a formal semantics of possibility and necessity. Although the account put forward by Russell and Couturat of the emergence of Leibniz’s metaphysics from his logic is now seen as flawed, Leibniz’s demand for a concept of ‘substantial form’ is a source of inspiration for contemporary philosophy. An obvious omission from this book is any woman philosopher. This is a consideration that deserves some comment. For the fi rst time, in the seventeenth century a substantial number of women philosophers made important contributions to the literature, despite the fact that universities were closed to them and very few were given any kind of chance to learn Latin, the language of learning. The list of women philosophers in the century is impressive and includes, among others, Anna Maria Van Schurman;

Introduction

17

Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia; Margaret Cavendish; Christina, Queen of Sweden; Sophie, Electress of Hanover; Gabrielle Suchon; Anne Conway; Damaris Masham; Mary Astell; and Catherine Trotter Cockburn. All of these, by the criteria of this collection, would count as outsiders. This is not surprising. For well-known reasons there was no serious opportunity for women in the seventeenth century even to aspire to become established philosophers. However, the good news is that in recent years each of these thinkers has begun to receive considerable attention in her own right, and there is now a substantial body of scholarship devoted to them.19 As I suggested at the outset, and as these chapters make clear, the ways in which particular thinkers enter, or fail to enter, the canon turns out not to be a simple function of the quality of their thought. Although all of those classified in this volume as insiders are undoubtedly philosophers of the highest calibre, their place in the canon has often been problematic, while others who might have as good a claim have not made the grade for reasons unrelated to sheer philosophical ability. If the single most important reason for an otherwise great philosopher’s failure to achieve a place in the canon has been the perception that his thought is at odds with contemporary religious predilections, nationalist prejudices also have played a part, as have other wider cultural factors. Nor can the pedagogic dimension be excluded. Not every great philosopher wrote a work that can be explored in a semester. NOTES 1. Andrew Pyle, ed., The Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophers, 2 vols. (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2000). 2. Wiep van Bunge, et al., eds., The Dictionary of Seventeenth and EighteenthCentury Dutch Philosophers, 2 vols. (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003). 3. For some connections between St Paul and Plato, see A. N. Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997) esp. 153–155. 4. Though Popper claimed that he was once threatened by Wittgenstein with a poker! Cf. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker (London: Faber and Faber, 2001). For Popper’s account, see his Unended Quest (London: Routledge, 1992) 140–142. 5. On Aristotle’s moral philosophy in the Protestant Renaissance, see Jill Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 303–386. For the place of Aristotle’s metaphysics in the period, see Charles H. Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 537– 638. See also Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 6. See Anthony Grafton, ‘The Availability of Ancient Works’, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 767– 791, and esp. 786–787, 790. See also James Hankins, Plato and the Italian

18 G. A. J. Rogers

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1990); Sear Jayne, Plato in Renaissance England, International Archives of the History of Ideas (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995) esp. Chaps. 1 and 4; and the papers in Platonism at the Origins of Modernity, ed. Douglas Hedley and Sarah Hutton, International Archives of the History of Ideas (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008). On the recovery of the texts of ancient scepticism, see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), and Luciano Floridi, Sextus Empiricus: The Transmission and Recovery of Pyrrhonism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). The Search after Truth appeared in the fi rst English translation for 250 years in the edition of Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The Treatise on Nature and Grace, ed. Patrick Riley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) was the fi rst translation since 1695. A comparable story can be told about Hobbes in France, where the fi rst translation of Leviathan, by François Tricaud, did not appear until 1971. Modern French editions of Hobbes’ works under the direction of Yves Charles Zarka have provided a major impetus to Hobbes studies in France in recent years. See, for example, The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Cf. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) esp. ‘Objections and Replies’, 121–138 and 241–277. However, it should be remembered that the Latin translation of The True Intellectual System (Jena, 1733) by J. L. Mosheim, with his extensive notes, made Cudworth an important force in the eighteenth century, especially in Germany. Mosheim’s edition was translated and published in London in 1845. On Malebranche’s influence on the British, see Charles J. McCracken. Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). On Malebranche and Berkeley, see also A. A. Luce: Berkeley and Malebranche: A Study in the Origins of Berkeley’s Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). On Hobbes’ reception, see Samual Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962); John Bowle, Hobbes and His Critics: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Constitutionalism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951); and The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), ‘Part V: Hobbes Reception’, with papers by G. A. J. Rogers, Jon Parkin, Perez Zagorin and Jeffrey Collins. For some of the most important texts, see: Leviathan: Contemporary Responses to the Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes, ed. G. A. J. Rogers (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1995). After pressure was brought to bear on his publisher Hobbes’ books appear to have developed a black market of their own. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London, J. Bohn, 1839–1845), Thomæ Hobbes Opera Philosophica Qua Latine Scripsit Omnia in Unum Corpus, edited by William Molesworth, 5 vols. (London: J. Bohn, 1839–1845). These remain the standard edition. In the eighteenth century there was only one edition of his writings in English, The Moral and Political Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1750). On this edition, see Karl Schuhmann, in Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, edited by G. A. J. Rogers and Karl Schuhmann, vol. 1 (London: Continuum, 2003) 184–200. In the Epistle Dedicatory to the Elements of Philosophy Hobbes claimed that the science of politics was no older than his work De cive.

Introduction

19

16. On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 13. 17. On the Citizen 13. 18. Léviathan: Traité de la matiére, de la forme et du pouvoir de la république ecclésiastique et civile, introd., ed. and trans. François Tricaud (Paris: Editions Sirey, 1971). 19. See, for example, Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and the many works cited there; Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); S. Clucas, ed., A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003); Patricia Springborg, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Part I

Outsiders

1

Becoming an Outsider Gassendi in the History of Philosophy Margaret J. Osler

Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) was an influential member of the community of natural philosophers during the fi rst half of the seventeenth century. As a young man, he taught philosophy at the University of Aix; he enjoyed the friendship, collaboration and patronage of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637); and he developed a reputation for his contributions to astronomy. He devoted much of his scholarly life to restoring the philosophy of the ancient Greek atomist and hedonist Epicurus (342–270 BC) by showing how it could be made compatible with Christian theology. He moved in the highest intellectual circles, accepting patronage from Louis-Emmanuel de Valois, count of Alais, the governor of Provence, who was closely connected to the royal family.1 He was named professor of the Collège Royal in 1645, thanks to Cardinal Richelieu. 2 He and René Descartes (1596–1650) were friends until their bitter dispute following the publication of the latter’s Meditationes in 1641. He corresponded with many of the notable scholars, natural philosophers and intellectuals of his day and became a close friend of the intellectual broker Marin Mersenne (1588–1648). Despite Gassendi’s eminence during his lifetime, his later reputation has suffered. He is often judged by comparison to Descartes, who has attracted far more attention from philosophers and historians of philosophy. Gassendi’s declining reputation presents certain paradoxes to the historian attempting to understand his role in early modern philosophy. His contemporaries viewed both him and Descartes as advocates of the new, mechanical philosophy. Despite taking the seemingly radical step of restoring the heterodox philosophy of Epicurus, Gassendi acquired a reputation for conservatism during the Enlightenment for adopting the humanist approach to ancient works, whereas Descartes was viewed as the creator of a new approach to philosophy. Because the two philosophers had engaged in direct controversy in the ‘Objections and Replies’ to Descartes’ Meditations (1641), Gassendi’s philosophy has continued to be compared to Descartes’. Among twentieth- and twenty-fi rst-century analytic philosophers,

24

Margaret J. Osler

that controversy is practically the only context within which Gassendi’s name arises. Yet, ironically, despite Descartes’ reputation as the founder of modern philosophy and his status as a national icon in France, 3 modern philosophy probably owes more of its substance to Gassendi’s ideas. Gassendi wrote in the style of Renaissance humanism.4 Accordingly, he sought an ancient model on which to build a new philosophy of nature.5 The classical systems available to him included Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Sceptics. One might well ask why Gassendi, a Catholic priest, undertook the task of reviving and Christianising the most flagrantly pagan of the ancient philosophies, that of Epicurus, infamous for his materialism and his reputed atheism. One possible explanation for Gassendi’s attraction to Epicurus lies in the seemingly paradoxical fact that he found it easier to accommodate Epicureanism than any other ancient philosophy to his voluntarist theology and providentialist ethics:6 ‘I seemed to observe that many more difficulties are more easily explained from his [Epicurus’] physics of atoms and the void and from his morality of pleasure than from the positions of the other philosophers’.7 Gassendi carried out his project of Christianising Epicureanism in several works, the culmination of which was his posthumous Syntagma philosophicum.8 Gassendi’s thorough exposition of his Christianised version of Epicureanism in the posthumously published Syntagma philosophicum (1658) was a version of the ancient philosophy modified in light of his voluntarist theology and providential account of the creation.9 Gassendi divided this massive work into three parts, each part dealing with one of the traditional divisions of philosophy: Logica, Physica and Ethica. The result was a complete philosophy involving an empiricist theory of knowledge, an atomist philosophy of nature and a hedonistic ethics. In order to make Epicureanism acceptable as an alternative to Aristotelianism, Gassendi had to deal with its theologically objectionable components. Accordingly, he argued for a single, incorporeal God instead of Epicurean polytheism, which had included a corporeal conception of the gods. He replaced the Epicurean denial of all divine interference in the world with an explicitly providential theology. He argued for the creation ex nihilo of a fi nite world instead of the Epicurean claim of the infi nitude and eternity of atoms and the universe. He denied the plurality of worlds and attributed the cause of the world to God’s intelligent creative act rather than to the blind chance of the ancient atomists. He believed that fi nal causes play an important role in natural philosophy, especially in the realm of living things. And he argued for the immateriality and immortality of the human soul.10 In the fi rst part of the Syntagma philosophicum, the ‘Logica’, Gassendi spelled out his approach to epistemology, a task he had initiated in his fi rst published work, the Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos (1624). He questioned whether sensory knowledge could serve as the basis of demonstrable, certain knowledge, what the Aristotelians had called

Becoming an Outsider

25

scientia: ‘I want only to observe that Aristotelian demonstration, being based on the senses and the senses being very deceptive and uncertain, how much certainty can there be in the demonstration and in science?’11 Gassendi’s sceptical critique of the senses in the Exercitationes followed the arguments of Sextus Empiricus (fl. c. AD 200) quite closely.12 Not satisfied with the suspension of judgment advocated by the ancient sceptics, Gassendi sought a middle way, which Richard Popkin has happily called ‘mitigated skepticism’:13 We would do best to hold some middle way between the Skeptics . . . and the dogmatics. For the dogmatics do not really know everything they believe they know, nor do they have the appropriate criteria to determine it; but neither does everything that the Skeptics turn into the subject of debate seem to be so completely unknown that no criteria can be found for determining it.14 Accepting the force of the sceptical arguments but not content with sceptical conclusions, he redefi ned the epistemic goal of science as probability. Accepting probability is the acknowledgment of our own limitations rather than a terrible compromise. Gassendi was thereby rejecting the traditional Aristotelian and Scholastic conception of scientia or demonstrative knowledge.15 On what epistemological foundation did Gassendi think such probable knowledge was based? Despite the cogency of the sceptical critiques of the senses, Gassendi thought that sensation provides a reliable basis for knowledge. He believed that ‘[a]ll the ideas that are contained in the mind derive their origin from the senses . . . The intellect or mind is a tabula rasa in which nothing is engraved [prior to sensation]’.16 Ideas may come into the mind directly from sensation or they may be the product of the action of the mind on those directly received. The mind forms this second kind of idea by the processes of conjoining, enlarging, diminishing, transferring, adapting, analogising and comparing.17 However complex the process by which the mind transforms the ideas coming directly from sensation, the fact remains that sensation—directly or indirectly—is the only source of ideas in the mind. Properly understood, sense never fails. That is to say, the content of a sensation, considered in itself without reference to anything else, is what it is; in that sense it is free from error. Drawing on Epicurus, Gassendi distinguished between truths of being and truths of judgement. ‘True’, in this fi rst sense, refers to the genuineness of things, not to the truth or falsity of propositions. Accordingly, fool’s gold is not false gold but true fool’s gold, and a painting of a man is not a false man but a true image of a man.18 The second kind of truth, ‘truth of existence’, applies to propositions. Truth and falsity, in this sense, apply to judgments about the external referents of our sensations:

26

Margaret J. Osler Secondly . . . there, is a certain truth which consists in the conformity of the judgment and statement with the thing judged and reported in the statement; and it is this truth for which there is in fact a falsehood opposed to it, consisting obviously in the discrepancy between the judgment and statement and the thing judged and reported in the statement.19

It is only in this second sense of ‘truth’ that it makes sense to speak about error. Error arises when we make mistaken judgments about the referents of our sensations. It is on the basis of this distinction between truths of being and truths of judgment that Gassendi claimed the infallibility of the senses: It is not the senses themselves but the intellect which makes the error; and when it makes a mistake, it is not the fault of the senses but of the intellect whose responsibility it is as the higher and dominant faculty before it pronounced what a thing is like to inquire which of the different appearances produced in the senses (each one of them is the result of a necessity that produces them as they are) is in conformity with the thing. 20 Gassendi’s middle way led him to maintain that even if we cannot have science in the Aristotelian sense of demonstrative knowledge about real essences, we can achieve a science of appearances. Given his view that sense itself cannot fail—that is to say, that we have reliable knowledge of the appearances, if not of the intimate natures of things—he claimed that ‘the conditions for science exist, but always an experimental science . . . based on appearances. . . . [A]ll that we are denying is that one can penetrate to the intimate natures of things’. 21 On the basis of the appearances, however, it is possible to seek causal explanations, with the understanding that such reasoning is always conjectural, to be judged by how well the explanations account for other effects too. 22 This science of appearances can never achieve certainty. 23 It can, however, attain a measure of probability that is not an unhappy compromise: ‘As it is certain that probability is neighbor enough of truth, the danger of error . . . is the same when, in seeking the truth you turn away from probability as it is for him who, on his way from Paris to Holland, takes the road which leads to Marseilles’. 24 Gassendi thus redefi ned the goal of natural philosophy, replacing the traditional search for demonstrative knowledge of real essences with probable knowledge of the appearances. Gassendi applied his empiricism to all areas of investigation. He adopted an approach to natural philosophy that, while fully acknowledging the probabilistic status of knowledge, described empirical methods for ferreting out information about hidden things. In the ‘Proemium’ to the ‘Physica’, he wrote, ‘Physics cannot contemplate how things are [in themselves] except

Becoming an Outsider

27

insofar as it can observe them carefully and thus uncover them’. 25 Although we must settle for a science of appearances, ways exist to discover less evident facts about the world, such as reasoning on the basis of signs, appearances that indicate the existence of other things not directly observed. For example, smoke is a sign of fi re, and lactation is a sign of pregnancy: ‘[If] the truth in question is hidden, lying concealed beneath appearances; we must then inquire, since its nature is not open to us, whether we have a criterion by which we may recognize the sign and judge what the thing really is’. 26 Gassendi argued that ‘we may distinguish two criteria in ourselves: one by which we perceive the sign, namely the senses, and the second by which we understand something hidden by means of reasoning, namely the mind, intellect, or reason’. 27 Experiment, which Gassendi described as ‘experience weighed in the ballance of Reason’, 28 was the method he recommended for justifying the explanations of the sensible signs. He thought that the entire edifice of natural philosophy could be constructed in this way on the basis of empirical knowledge. Such a natural philosophy is not without utility, even if it fails to achieve the certainty and knowledge of essences sought by the Aristotelians. In addition to his empiricist and probabilist account of knowledge, Gassendi denied independent existence to both universals and essences:29 These famous universals are nothing other than what Grammarians call appellative nouns, for example, man or horse, for which each is attributed to several objects, the same as individuals are nothing other than proper nouns, such as Plato, Bucephalus, and all those that are only given to simple things.30 Only particulars exist. The mind creates universal concepts by the processes of generalisation and abstraction from singular ideas of sense: Every idea that is transmitted through sensation is singular; it is the mind, however, that makes general ideas from the combination of singular ones, for as with all things that are in the world and can impinge on the senses, they are singular, as Socrates, Bucephalus, this stone, that plant, and the other things demonstrable by pointing.31 Since only particulars exist in the world, no forms, whether Platonic or Aristotelian, have real existence outside of the mind. 32 Universal natures do not exist. Rather, each individual possesses its own nature. Corporeal objects each have their own atomic structure. Individual human beings each have their particular body united with their particular soul.33 For Gassendi, the observed properties of an individual are explained by its own, particular atomic structure, not by the possession of some universal form or essence. It was the identification of universals and essences that gave Aristotelian science the basis for demonstrative knowledge of the

28 Margaret J. Osler natures of things. Gassendi’s nominalism undermined the foundations of Aristotelian essentialism. We cannot know the intimate natures of things. Our knowledge is limited to their accidents. 34 This limitation to our knowledge is not merely a practical limitation resulting from the fact that the appearances that impinge on our senses necessarily come from the external parts of bodies. Rather, [i]t is thus that the all-Powerful Good Lord established the creation and has left it to our use. It is in fact all that it is necessary for us to know . . . he has revealed it to us, giving properties to things, permitting us to recognize them and diverse senses by which we may apprehend them and an interior faculty permitting us to judge them. But for that which is the interior nature . . . as that is the thing which is not necessary to know, he wished that it would be hidden from us; and when we wish presumptuously to give an air of knowing it, we bear the pain of our fault in measure.35 To the extent that we seek to know the secrets of nature—and Gassendi devoted hundreds of pages in his Syntagma philosophicum to unearthing those secrets—the results of our research must be regarded as provisional and probable, never as fully established, certain truths. We cannot know necessary connections between individual natures and the observed qualities of things of the kind that Aristotle sought. The ‘Physica’ is by far the longest part of Gassendi’s tripartite Syntagma philosophicum. In this section he claimed that the fundamental components of the natural world are atoms and the void.36 He argued for the existence of atoms and the void by appealing to traditional arguments, drawn from Lucretius and from Hero of Alexandria, 37 as well as contemporary experiments with the mercury barometer with which Pascal and others argued for the existence of void space. 38 Void space is occupied by atoms, which are perfectly full, solid, hard, indivisible particles, so small that they fall below the threshold of sense. Atoms possess only a few primary qualities: magnitude and figure, resistance or solidity, and heaviness.39 Matter, in the form of atoms, is the material principle in Gassendi’s world. The efficient principle is the causal agent in the world. The fi rst cause is God, who created the world, including the atoms.40 Second causes, the natural causes operating in the physical world, are reduced to collisions among atoms moving in void space.41 In contrast to Epicurus, who had claimed that an endless series of worlds is being produced by an eternal series of chance collisions among an infinite number of uncreated atoms,42 Gassendi argued that the world and its constituent atoms—a large, but fi nite, number of them—had been created by God, who continues to rule the world providentially, with special providence for humankind. Rejecting the random swerve of atoms or clinamen that Epicurus had introduced to account for the collision of atoms that would

Becoming an Outsider

29

otherwise only fall downward in parallel paths, Gassendi maintained that God caused the motions of atoms when he created them.43 Gassendi argued for God’s providential relationship to the creation on the basis of an extended argument from design.44 Having established the material and efficient principles of things, Gassendi proceeded to argue that all of the qualities of bodies can be explained in terms of the motions and configurations of their constituent atoms. He gave mechanical, atomistic explanations of the whole range of qualities, including rarity and density, transparency and opacity, size and shape, smoothness and roughness, heaviness and lightness, fluidity and fi rmness, moistness and dryness, softness and hardness, flexibility and ductility, flavour and odour, sound, light and colour.45 He concluded his account of qualities with a chapter on the so-called occult qualities, in which he argued that there is no action at a distance and that even apparently occult qualities such as magnetism and the sympathies and antipathies favoured by the Renaissance naturalists can be explained in mechanical terms.46 In the remaining sections of the ‘Physica’, Gassendi tried to explain all the phenomena of the world in atomistic terms. His work paralleled Aristotle’s treatises De caelo, Meteorologica, De partibus animalium and De anima; however, he filled his account with recent developments in natural philosophy.47 Having considered the universal principles of physics, Gassendi proceeded to consider the created world, starting with celestial things.48 Gassendi then turned his attention to terrestrial phenomena, considering inanimate things fi rst. He described the properties of earth, the distribution of water and land, the tides, subterranean heat and the saltiness of the sea.49 He then discussed ‘meteorological’ phenomena, which included winds, rain, snow, ice, lightning and thunder, rainbows and parhelia, and the Aurora Borealis.50 Shifting his attention to smaller things, he wrote about stones and metals, paying particular attention to recent observations of the magnet and to the question of the transmutation of gold for which he gave an atomistic explanation.51 Finally, among inanimate things, he discussed plants, considering the varieties of plants and their parts, as well as various physiological processes, including grafting, nutrition, germination, growth and death.52 Gassendi devoted the fi nal section of the ‘Physica’ to terrestrial living things, or animals. This section contains discussions of the varieties of animals, the parts of animals—which he described in explicitly fi nalistic terms, and various physiological topics including generation, nutrition, respiration and motion.53 From physiology he turned to a discussion of sensation, perception and the immortality of the human soul, topics of particular philosophical interest.54 Gassendi’s argument for the immortality of the soul was a key piece in his Christianisation of Epicureanism.55 The ‘Ethica’ comprises the third and fi nal part of the Syntagma philosophicum. Here, Gassendi fulfi lled his youthful determination to Christianise all parts of Epicureanism. Although Gassendi accepted the Epicurean

30

Margaret J. Osler

principle that equated pleasure with the good, he reinterpreted the concepts of pleasure and human action, thereby creating a Christian hedonism which found a natural place in his providential worldview. He claimed that God has instilled in humans a natural desire for pleasure and a natural aversion to pain. In this way, God guides human choices, without negating free will. The prudent pursuit of pleasure will ultimately lead to the greatest pleasure of all, the beatific vision of God in heaven. 56 Following from his Christianised hedonism, Gassendi formulated a political philosophy based on the idea of pactum, or contract. Starting from the idea of a hypothetical state of nature in which there is no secure ownership of property, a state which would inevitably degenerate into turmoil and conflict, Gassendi argued that individuals could secure greater happiness for themselves by forming societies. These societies are based on pacts or contracts in which both individual rights and property rights are defi ned and in which the weaker are protected from the stronger. The contracts establish rights, which Gassendi considered natural in the sense that they follow from the calculus of pleasure and pain. Civil society is thus a natural outcome of human nature. Accordingly, a system of justice comes into being to restore rights that have been violated and to prevent further violations. Gassendi developed his political philosophy in close contact with Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).57 Gassendi’s early reputation seems to have been consistent with his own vision of his project: to restore Epicureanism in a form acceptable to Christians and to use it to replace Aristotelianism as the philosophical foundation for natural philosophy. Succeeding generations of philosophers found Gassendi’s philosophy useful in each of the three major areas that he addressed. His work was disseminated not only by the circulation of his own writings, but also by translations and paraphrases that were published in the second half of the seventeenth century. In the English-speaking world, Gassendi’s works were popularised by the royalist physician Walter Charleton (1620–1707). In several works, Charleton ‘Englished’ Gassendi’s writings. Charleton gave an account of the natural world in Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, or, A Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms, Founded by Epicurus, Repaired by Petrus Gassendus, Augmented by Walter Charleton (1654). The Physiologia is Charleton’s translation and paraphrase of Gassendi’s Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri, which is the account of the physical world in his Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii (1649). It was the fi rst presentation of Gassendi’s Epicurean project in English and one of the important sources of atomism in England. 58 Charleton published a dialogue entitled The Immortality of the Human Soul, Demonstrated by the Light of Nature (1657). The three interlocutors debate the Epicurean theory of the soul as represented by Lucretius, who is a stand-in for the notorious materialist Hobbes. In this work, Charleton rehearsed Gassendi’s arguments for the immateriality and immortality of the soul. In other

Becoming an Outsider

31

works, Charleton argued for a voluntarist and providential theology, very similar to Gassendi’s. 59 Another book—Thomas Stanley’s immensely popular History of Philosophy, fi rst published in 1655—was also responsible for the dissemination of Gassendi’s ideas in the English-speaking world. Stanley devoted twice as many pages to Epicureanism than to any other ancient school. His lengthy account of the philosophy of Epicurus is virtually a translation of Gassendi’s Philosophiae Epicuri syntagma. In Stanley’s History, Epicureanism acquired canonical status, and—if page counting is a meaningful measure—it had supplanted the traditionally authoritative schools of Plato and Aristotle.60 In France, Gassendi’s work was popularised by François Bernier’s multivolume Abrégé de la philosophie de Gassendi, fi rst published in 1674 and subsequently reissued in several enlarged editions. Bernier’s Abrégé is a presentation of Gassendi’s Syntagma philosophicum in the vernacular, stripped of the classical quotations that marked Gassendi’s humanist style of writing. Bernier’s text is not always faithful to Gassendi’s, and Bernier’s ideas change from edition to edition. Nevertheless the Abrégé is a key document in the promulgation of Gassendi’s ideas.61 Gassendi’s ‘Logic’ influenced developments on both sides of the English Channel. In France, the Jansenists Antoine Arnauld (1611–1694) and Pierre Nicole (1625–1695) collaborated on the influential book La logique, ou, L’art de penser (1662), commonly known as the Port-Royal Logic. They followed Gassendi in dividing logic into four parts, in founding their logic on his theory of ideas and in the way they structured the work.62 The epistemology implicit in Gassendi’s theory of ideas profoundly influenced the development of British empiricism. John Locke (1632–1704), whose Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) played a central role in the development of this tradition, became acquainted with Gassendi’s philosophy through contact with Bernier and other Gassendists during his European travels in the 1670s. In the earliest drafts of the Essay, written in 1671, Locke began from a basically Gassendist position, which he modified during the many reworkings of his position over the ensuing twenty years.63 Although John Milton notes the paucity of manuscript evidence that Locke read Gassendi’s writings or even Bernier’s Abrégé, the similarity between Locke’s theory of knowledge and theory of matter and Gassendi’s strongly suggests some kind of influence, albeit indirect.64 Accordingly, Locke’s way of ideas closely resembles Gassendi’s theory of knowledge as developed in the Exercitationes and the ‘Logic’. Indeed there is a striking resonance between Gassendi’s endorsement of mitigated scepticism and Locke’s statement that we [n]ot peremptorily require Demonstration, and demand Certainty, where Probability only is to be had, and which is sufficient to govern all our Concernments. If we disbelieve everything, because we cannot

32

Margaret J. Osler certainly know all things; we shall do much-what as wisely as he, who would not use his Legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no Wings to fly.65

Natural philosophers in the second half of the seventeenth century perceived Gassendi’s modified Epicureanism as one of several possible versions of a mechanical philosophy of nature. His works were widely read. Robert Boyle (1627–1690) viewed the systems of Descartes and Gassendi as alternative versions of the new philosophy. Boyle cited Gassendi at least ninety-two times in his writings, often for his astronomical observations, but frequently as a pious expositor of atomism. Although he objected to Epicurus’ materialist and anti-providential philosophy, Boyle called Gassendi ‘his [Epicurus’] best interpreter’.66 Introducing his book on fi nal causes, Boyle wrote, And an Inquiry of this kind is now the more Seasonable, because two of the Chief Sects of the Modern Philosophizers [the Epicureans and the Cartesians], do both of them, though upon different Grounds, deny that the Naturalist ought at all to trouble or busie himself about Final Causes. For Epicurus, and most of his followers (for I except some few late ones, especially the Learned Gassendus) Banish the Consideration of the Ends of Things; because the World being, according to them, made by Chance, no Ends of any Thing can be suppos’d to have been intended.67 Significantly, Boyle frequently joined his discussions of Gassendi’s philosophy of nature with comments about Descartes, and conversely. Although Boyle had great respect for Descartes’ intelligence, he often found Gassendi’s approach more amenable to his own. A typical example occurs in the preface to An Hydrostatical Discourse: I see not why Cartesius himself may not have overlook’d the bad inferences, that may be drawn from his Principles (if needed they afford any such,) since divers Learned and not a few pious persons, and profess’d Divines of differing Churches, have so little perceiv’d that the things objected are consequences of such Principles, that they not only absolve them as harmless, but extol them as friendly and advantageous to natural Religion. And I see not, why so great and radiant a Truth, as that of the Existence of a God, that has been acknowledg’d by so many meer Philosophers, might not as well impress it self on so capable an intellect as that of Monsieur des Cartes, or that so piercing a wit may not really beliefe he had found out new Mediums to demonstrate it by. And since the Learned Gassendus, though an Ecclesiastick, had been able as well safely as largely to publish the irreligious Philosophy of Epicurus himself, it seems not likely that so dextrous a wit as that

Becoming an Outsider

33

of Monsieur des Cartes, could not have propose’d his notions about the Mechanical Philosophy, without taking so mean a course to shelter himself from danger.68 A number of Boyle’s claims about the theological and epistemological ramifications of his corpuscularian philosophy are remarkably similar to Gassendi’s views on these questions. Boyle shared Gassendi’s voluntarist theology, his empiricist and probabilist theory of knowledge and his nominalist ontology. Boyle was deeply concerned with proving God’s providential relationship to nature and deployed an argument from design to support his belief that the world is a product of divine design and not the result of chance as the ancient Epicureans claimed.69 That Boyle was never completely comfortable with Gassendi’s baptism of Epicurus is evident from the fact that he never embraced atomism in print, even though he unequivocally did so in his unpublished manuscripts. He feared that Epicurean atheism would taint atomism, despite Gassendi’s valiant efforts to prove otherwise.70 The Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–1687) expressed even stronger reservations about Gassendi’s promotion of Epicurus because of the ancient atomist’s reputation for atheism: ‘As for the philosophy of Epicurus, it seemed to me at the very fi rst sight such a foolery that I was much amazed that a person of so commendable parts as P. Gassendus could ever have the patience to rake out such old coarse rags out of that rotten dunghill to stuffe his large Volumes withall’.71 At fi rst, More was taken in by Descartes’ philosophical dexterity and wit: But I must confess I did as much admire Des-Cartes Philosophy as I did despise the Epicurean, who has carried on the power of Matter for the production of the Phaenomena of Nature with that neatness and coherence, that if he had been as ignorant in other things as skilful in Mechanicks, he could not but have fancied him self to have wone that crown that many wits have striven for, that is, the honour of being accounted the most subtil and able Atheist of both the present and past Ages. This made me peruse his Writings with still more and more diligence: and the more I read, the more I admired his Wit; but at last grew the more confi rmed That it was utterly impossible that Matter should be the onely essential Principle of things, as I have in several places of my Writings demonstrated.72 In the end, More rejected what he perceived to be the materialism and thus atheism of the mechanical philosophy.73 Nevertheless, his pairing of Gassendi and Descartes is noteworthy. Isaac Barrow (1630–1677), a mathematician and theologian at Cambridge, before and during Newton’s career at the university, counted Gassendi among those—including Magnenus, Digby, Boulliau and Roberval—who

34

Margaret J. Osler

recovered ancient theories of natural philosophy as alternatives to what he perceived as the stale Aristotelianism of the schools. Others—such as Telesio, Campanella, Gilbert and the chemical philosophers—‘struck out something new’. Pre-eminent among the innovators, however, was Descartes, whose mathematical and empirical contributions Barrow particularly admired.74 After the Restoration, Barrow became increasingly concerned about the theological problems associated with atomism and even Cartesianism, because of their perceived association with the materialist philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.75 Like Boyle, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was thoroughly acquainted with Gassendi’s philosophy of nature, most likely through a reading of Charleton’s Physiologia rather than Gassendi’s own works. In his student notebook, Newton designed thought experiments to evaluate Cartesian and Gassendist explanations of particular phenomena. Frequently he supported Gassendi’s atomism over Descartes’ plenism.76 Although he was acquainted with Gassendi’s physics through the mediation of Charleton, his knowledge of Epicurean atomism derived from his own reading of Book 10 of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers—the classical work containing the extant writings of Epicurus—Newton’s copy of which bears the marks of careful reading.77 In later works, he clearly endorsed an atomic theory of matter and he attacked Descartes’ philosophy, rejecting both his physics and his theology.78 Gassendi’s ‘Ethica’ and political philosophy also left their mark on subsequent thinkers. Because Epicureanism was popular in seventeenth-century England, Gassendi’s influence cannot always be precisely identified. Locke’s ethics, as described in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is based on the calculus of pleasure and pain and in many ways resembles Gassendi’s. Likewise, his political philosophy as enunciated in the Second Treatise on Government (1690), which emphasised the idea of social contract and the consent of the governed, relied on concepts and arguments that he probably borrowed—directly or indirectly—from Gassendi.79 Gassendi’s philosophy was known and admired for many generations after his death. In the early years of the American Republic, Thomas Jefferson told John Quincy Adams that ‘the Epicurean philosophy came nearest to the truth . . . of any system of ancient philosophy, but . . . it had been misunderstood and translated . . . I mentioned Lucretius. He said that was only a part—only the natural philosophy. But the moral philosophy was only to be found in Gassendi’.80 In a milieu in which the republic of letters became increasingly secular and in which moderns won pride of place, philosophers and other scholars were less receptive both to Gassendi’s theological preoccupations and to his humanist style of writing. Although writers during the Enlightenment and beyond regularly gave him credit for recovering Epicurean atomism and hedonism, they were less inclined to credit him with philosophical innovation. If they took his philosophy at all seriously, they usually did

Becoming an Outsider

35

so in connection with the relationship between his philosophy and that of Descartes. For example, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) often mentioned Gassendi in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), but generally as a respected philosopher, paired with Descartes. Bayle seems to have preferred Gassendi’s atomism to Descartes’ plenism.81 But he criticised Gassendi for his providential outlook. In a note in the entry on ‘Rodon (David de) or rather DERODON (David)’, Bayle wrote, ‘It is an absurd thing to say, with Gassendus and Derodon, that God contributes to the preservation of creatures by preventing their destruction’.82 Bayle’s Dictionnaire contains other references to Gassendi, but most of them refer to him in connection with astronomy. Similarly in the Éncyclopédie, Diderot and D’Alembert described Gassendi as the restorer of Epicureanism rather than the creator of a new philosophical system. In the Preliminary Discourse, Jean Le Rond D’Alembert (1717–1783) described the spirit of the age, one which had little use for the appeal to antiquity that had characterised the work of previous thinkers: By the progress that it is making among us, philosophy, which constitutes the dominant taste of our century, seems to be trying to make up for the time that it has lost and to avenge itself for the sort of contempt our fathers showed for it. Today this disdain has fallen on erudition, and is no more just for having changed its object. Men imagine that we have [already] drawn everything worth knowing from the works of the ancients, and on this basis they would willingly spare those who still wish to consult them the trouble.83 D’Alembert himself did not share this disdain for the classics, saying, ‘It would be ignorant and presumptuous to believe that everything is known concerning any subject whatsoever, and that we no longer have any advantage to draw from the study and reading of the ancients’.84 Nevertheless, the prevalence of the dismissive attitude he described goes far to explain a general loss of interest in Gassendi’s philosophical writings. Comparisons with Cartesianism affected the reception of Gassendi’s version of Epicureanism. The mechanical philosophy was slow to penetrate the philosophy curriculum in French schools run largely by Jesuits and Oratorians. During the second half of the seventeenth century, a few professors adopted atomism instead of the traditional Aristotelianism of the schools.85 When Aristotelianism began giving way to mechanism in the 1690s, Cartesianism was chosen and Gassendist atomism rejected because of the ‘unprovable’ assumptions of the existence of atoms and the void.86 The preference for Cartesianism stemmed largely from the authoritative stance of the Académie des Sciences, which established a link between Cartesianism and the experimental philosophy the academicians endorsed.87 Only the failure of the Cartesian theory of vortices in the middle of the

36

Margaret J. Osler

eighteenth century led some natural philosophers to adopt a Newtonian theory of matter that embraced atoms and the void.88 The differential reception of Gassendi’s and Descartes’ philosophies also resulted from their respective styles of presentation. Ironically, although Gassendi’s philosophy was in many ways a more radical departure from tradition than Descartes’, Gassendi wrote in a traditional humanist style that was giving way to the more direct approach elegantly exemplified by Descartes. Gassendi’s humanist style deceived many later historians into dismissing him as nothing more than a reviver of an ancient philosophy. Despite its conservative appearance, however, Gassendi’s Epicureanism was in many ways more radical than Descartes’ self-proclaimed innovations. Gassendi’s philosophy was ‘complete’, incorporating logic and ethics as well as natural philosophy and thus offering a thorough alternative to Aristotelianism. His adoption of the physics of atomism, his anti-essentialist metaphysics, and his probabilist theory of knowledge comprised a more thoroughgoing rejection of Aristotelianism than Descartes’ rationalism and plenism89 and could be interpreted as heterodox because of its association with ancient atomism.90 These factors may explain the French preference for Descartes, but the fact remains that many later historians perceived Gassendi as simply the restorer of Epicureanism. Most writers mention Gassendi’s piety and his project to Christianise Epicureanism. Usually they focus on his debate with Descartes in the ‘Objections and Replies’. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Jean-Philibert Damiron affi rmed Gassendi’s orthodoxy and found it in each of his published works.91 At the turn of the twentieth century, Harald Höffding included a two-page chapter on Gassendi in his History of Modern Philosophy, focusing on Gassendi’s differences from Descartes. Although he attributed Gassendi’s spiritualistic conclusions to the need to conform to the demands of the church, nevertheless, he did not suggest that there was any dissimulation on Gassendi’s part, and he credits him with making it no longer necessary to ‘regard atomism as an absolutely godless doctrine. Natural Science might now undisturbedly avail herself of the atomistic hypothesis’.92 Gassendi’s reputation took a strange turn in the middle of the twentieth century when scholars such as René Pintard,93 Olivier Bloch94 and Tullio Gregory95 sought support for their sceptical, secular and even materialist philosophies, developed in large part as a result of their own resistance to political oppression. Instead of downplaying Gassendi’s philosophy because of his emphasis on theology and his humanist erudition, they enlisted his support for their own causes by arguing that he was a libertine, a sceptic and a materialist who introduced theology only to cover his own subversive tracks.96 Gassendi was not an outsider in his own day, and his philosophy exerted considerable influence on subsequent developments in epistemology, natural philosophy and ethics. He wrote in an erudite, humanist style, and he insisted on the fundamental role of theology in his development of his

Becoming an Outsider

37

complete philosophy. Historians of philosophy, influenced by their own assumptions and aspirations, pushed him into the role of an outsider as they found his style difficult and old-fashioned and his theological presuppositions irrelevant to what they considered philosophical argument. There is a deep irony in these developments because the new insiders have been deeply influenced by the thinker they judged to be an outsider. NOTES 1. Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996) 11. 2. Sylvie Taussig, Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655): Introduction à la vie savante (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003) 290. 3. Two recent books explore this aspect of Descartes’ reputation. See François Azouvi, Descartes et la France: Histoire d’une passion nationale (Paris: Fayard, 2002) and Stéphane Van Damme, Descartes: Essai d’histoire d’une grandeur philosophique (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2002). 4. ‘Humanism is that concern with the legacy of antiquity—and in particular, but not exclusively, with its literary legacy—which characterizes the work of scholars from at least the ninth century onwards. It involves above all the rediscovery and study of ancient Greek and Roman texts, the restoration and interpretation of them and the assimilation of the ideas and values that they contain’. Nicholas Mann, ‘The Origins of Humanism’, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 2. See also Paul Oskar Kristeller, who defines Renaissance humanism, not in terms of particular philosophical view, but in terms of the regard for the authors of classical Greece and Rome; see his Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, ed. Michael Mooney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) 24–25: ‘It was the novel contribution of the humanists to add the fi rm belief that in order to write and to speak well it was necessary to study and to imitate the ancients’. See also Kristeller, ‘Humanism’, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmidt, Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 113–137. On the interpretation of Renaissance humanism, see Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Boston: Houghton Miffl in Company, 1948). For the various historical interpretations of humanism in modern scholarship, see Donald Weinstein, ‘In Whose Image and Likeness? Interpretations of Renaissance Humanism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972): 165–176. See also Jill Kraye, ‘Philologists and Philosophers’, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 142–160. 5. On Gassendi’s humanism and its difference from the earlier humanism of Lorenzo Valla, see Lynn Sumida Joy, ‘Epicureanism in Renaissance Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas 52 (1992): 573–583, and her Gassendi the Atomist: Advocate of History in an Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Chaps. 1–4; and Barry Brundell, Pierre Gassendi: From Aristotelianism to a New Natural Philosophy (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987) 48–51. 6. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics. See also Gianni Paganini, ‘Epicurisme et philosophie au XVIIème siècle: Convention, utilité et droit selon Gassendi’, Studi filosofici 12–13 (1989–1990): 5–45.

38 Margaret J. Osler 7. Pierre Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia, 6 vols. (Lyon: Laurentius Anisson and Joan. Bapt. Devenet, 1658) vol. 1, 30: ‘Et videri quidem potest Epicurus arridere prae caeteris, quod illius mores purgare aggressus, deprehendere mihi visus fuerim posse ex Physica eius positione de Inani et Atomis, et ex Morali de Voluptate, difficultates longe plureis, longeque expeditius, quam ex aliorum Philosophorum positionibus explicari . . . ’. For a thorough account of the development of his Epicurean project, see Bernard Rochot, Les travaux de Gassendi sur Épicure et sur l’atomisme (Paris: J. Vrin 1944). 8. For a thorough account of the development of his Epicurean project, see Rochot, Les travaux de Gassendi. 9. Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Chaps. 2–4 and 8. 10. For a full account of these changes, see Osler, Divine Will, Chaps. 2–4 and 8. 11. ‘ . . . observare solùm contendo, cùm sensu fulciatur Demonstratio Aristotelea, sensúquesit admodum fallax & incertus, quantæ certitudinis esse posit Demonstratio ac proinde scientia, quæ exinde gignitur?’. Pierre Gassendi, Exercitationes Paradoxicae adversus Aristotelos, in Opera Omnia, vol. 3, 18; and Pierre Gassendi, Dissertations en forme de paradoxes contre les Aristotéliciens, Books I and II; edited and translated into French by Bernard Rochot (Paris: Vrin, 1959), 14–15. 12. See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book 1, Chap. 14, trans. R. G. Bury, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) 25–94. See Gassendi, Exercitationes 388–393 (in Opera omnia vol. 3, 182–183). 13. For the revival of the sceptical texts and Gassendi’s use of the sceptical arguments, see Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) 18–41, 101–109, and 129–150; and Charles B. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Infl uence of the Academica in the Renaissance (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972). While Popkin emphasises the influence of Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonian scepticism, Schmitt emphasises the influence of Cicero and Academic scepticism in the Renaissance. See also Henri Berr, Du scepticisme de Gassendi, trans. Bernard Rochot (Paris: Albin Michel, 1960; fi rst published in Latin in 1898); Tullio Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo: Studio su Gassendi (Bari: Laterza, 1961); and Robert Walker, ‘Gassendi and Skepticism’, The Skeptical Tradition, ed. Miles Burnyeat (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983) 319–336. 14. ‘media quædam via inter Scepticos (quo nomine omneis Criteria tollenteis complector) & Dogmaticos videtur tenenda. Nam, non omnia quidem, quæ Dogmatici se scire putant, reuerâ sciunt, aut ad ea diiudicanda congruum habent Criterium; sed neque omnia etiam, quæ in controversiam vertuntur à Scepticis, ita ignorati videntur, ut non Criterium aliquod iis diiudicandis habeatur’. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia vol. 1, 79 (The Selected Works of Pierre Gassendi, Craig Brush (ed. & trans.) (New York and London: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972) 326–327). 15. ‘Probability’, in Scholastic discourse, is an attribute of opinio, ‘beliefs or doctrines not gotten by demonstration. It may also cover propositions which, not being universal, cannot (according to Aquinas) be demonstrated’. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) 21–22. 16. ‘Nihil in Intellectu est, quod prius non fuerit in Sensu. Spectat & quod dicunt Itellectum, seu Metnem esse tabulam rasilem, in qua nihil cælatum, depictúm sit’. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, in Opera omnia vol. 1,

Becoming an Outsider

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

39

92. For the history of earlier views of this statement of the empiricist credo, see Paul F. Cranefield, ‘On the Origin of the Phrase “Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu”’, Journal of the History of Medicine 25 (1970): 77–80. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 93. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 67 (trans. Brush, Selected Works of Gassendi 286). Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 68 (trans. Brush, Selected Works of Gassendi 287). Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 85 (trans. Brush, Selected Works of Gassendi 345–346). Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 504–505 (trans. Brush, Selected Works of Gassendi 207). Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 207. Gassendi, Dissertations 498–501 (Exercitationes in Opera omnia vol. 3, 206). ‘Certe et cum probabilitas proprius a veritate distet, idem tibi est errandi periculum, dum veritatem quaerens a probabilitate intermedia ad fasitatem deflecteris, ac illi, qui Parisiis iturus in Hallandiam, Massiliam versus iter instituat’. Gassendi, Disquisitio metaphysica seu dubitationes et instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii metaphysicam et responsa, ed. and trans. into French by Bernard Rochot (Paris: J. Vrin, 1962) 54–55 (in Opera omnia vol. 3, 283). Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 126. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 80 (trans. Brush, Selected Works of Gassendi 329). Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 81 (trans. Brush, Selected Works of Gassendi 333). Pierre Gassendi, The Vanity of Judiciary Astrology, or, Divination by the Stars. Lately Written in Latin, by That Great Schollar and Mathematician, the Illustrious PETRUS GASSENDUS; Mathematical Professor to the King of France. Translated into English by a Person of Quality (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1659) 130. Gassendi’s views are summarised by Olivier René Bloch, La philosophie de Gassendi: Nominalisme, matérialisme, et métaphysique (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) 113–117. ‘Caeterum ut appareat quam abs re tantae hoc loco contentions excitentur cogita nihilesse aliud grandia haec universalia, quam quae Grammatici vocant nomina Appellativa, verbi causâ hominem, equum, et quaecunque tribuuntur pluribus; quemadmodum individua nihil aliud sunt,quam nomina propriua, ut Plato, Bucephalus, et quaecunque ui soli rei dantur’. Gassendi, Dissertationes 280–281 (Exercitationes in Opera omnia vol. 3, 159). Omnis Idea, que per Sensum transit, singularis est; Mens autem est, quae ex singularibus consimilibus generalem facit Quippe, cum res omnes, quae in Mundo sunt, incurrereque in Sensus possunt, singulars sint, ut Socrates, Bucephalus, hic lapis, haec herba, & ceterae res digito demonstrabiles . . . ’. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, vol. 1, 93. Gassendi gave a standard empiricist account of the formation of concepts of universals. Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 93–95. Gassendi, Dissertationes 280–281 (Exercitationes in Opera omnia vol. 3, 159). Ibid. Gassendi, Disquisitio Metaphysica 186–189 (in Opera omnia vol. 3, 312). ‘Ita videtur instituisse Deus. Opt. Max. cum et naturam dondidit, et nobis usuram illius concessit. Etinem quicquid fuit nobis de re unaquaque nosse necessarium, illud nobit apertum fecit, tribuendo rebus proprietates, per

40 Margaret J. Osler

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

quas innotescerent, et nobis sensu various, quibus illas apprehenderemus, ac facultatem interiorem, qua de iisdem judicaremus. Quod ad internam vero naturam, . . . ut nobis cognitu non necessariam, occultam voluit; et nos, cum nosse affectamus, aut praesumimus, intemperantia laboramus’. Gassendi, Disquisitio Metaphysica 186–189 (in Opera omnia vol. 3, 312). Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 179–282. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 179–203. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 203–216. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 256–282. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 287–333. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 333–337. On atoms and void in Epicurus, see David Furley, ‘Knowledge of Atoms and Void in Epicureanism’, Cosmic Problems: Essays on Greek and Roman Philosophy of Nature, ed. David Furley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 161–171. See also David Furley, The Greek Cosmologists, vol. 1 of The Formation of the Atomic Theory and Its Earliest Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) Chap. 9. For relevant primary sources, see A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 2, 838. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 2, 295–333. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 372–449. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 1, 449–457. See Margaret J. Osler, ‘New Wine in Old Bottles: Gassendi and the Aristotelian Origin of Early Modern Physics’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, special issue on Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy 26 (2002): 167–184. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 2, 495–752. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 2, 1–62. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 2, 63–111. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 2, 112–143. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 2, 144–192. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 2, 193–327. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 2, 620–658. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum vol. 2, 620–658. For an account of Gassendi’s arguments for the immortality of the human soul, see Osler, Divine Will 59–77. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics Chap. 3. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics Chap. 7 Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966) Chap. 8. See also Thomas Franklin Mayo, Epicurus in England (1650–1725) (Dallas: The Southwest Press, 1934) passim. See Margaret J. Osler, ‘Charleton, Walter’, The Dictionary of SeventeenthCentury British Philosophy, ed. Andrew Pyle (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2000) . Of the 1,091 pages in this work, Stanley devoted 80 to the Stoics, 194 to the Epicureans, 96 to the Pythagoreans, 54 to Plato and 52 to Aristotle. See Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy: Containing the Lives, Opinions, Actions and Discourses of the Philosophers of Every Sect, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Thomas Bassett, 1687). Sylvia Murr, ‘Bernier et le gassendisme’, Corpus (Corpus des oeuvres de philosophie en langue française) 20/21 (1992): 115–136. Fred Michael, ‘La place de Gassendi dans l’histoire de la logique’, Corpus (Corpus des oeuvres de philosophie en langue française) 20/21 (1992): 9–36.

Becoming an Outsider

41

63. M. R. Ayers, ‘The Foundations of Knowledge and the Logic of Substance: The Structure of Locke’s General Philosophy’, Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context, ed. G. A. J. Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) 54–56. 64. J. R. Milton, ‘Locke and Gassendi: A Reappraisal’, English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000) 87–109. 65. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) 46. 66. Robert Boyle, The Excellency of Theology, Compar’d with Natural Philosophy (London, 1674), The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, vol. 8 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) 48. 67. Robert Boyle, A Disquisition About the Final Causes of Natural Things: Wherein It Is Inquir’d Whether, And (If at All) With What Cautions, a Naturalist Should Admit Them? (London, 1688), The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, vol. 11 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) 81. 68. Robert Boyle, An Hydrostatical Discourse Occasioned by the Objections of the Learned Dr. Henry More, against Some Explications of New Experiments Made by Mr. Boyle; and Now publish’d by Way of a PREFACE to the Three Ensuing Tracts, The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, vol. 7 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) 143. 69. See Margaret J. Osler, ‘The Intellectual Origins of Robert Boyle’s Philosophy of Nature: Gassendi’s Voluntarism and Boyle’s Physico-Theological Project’, Philosophy, Science, and Religion, 1640–1700, ed. Richard Ashcraft, Richard Kroll and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 178–198. 70. J. J. MacIntosh, Boyle on Atheism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) passim. See also J. J. MacIntosh, ‘Robert Boyle on Epicurean Atheism and Atomism’, Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 197–220. 71. Henry More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness, or, A True and Faithfull Representation of the Everlasting Gospel of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the Onely Begotten Son of God and Sovereign Over Men and Angels (London: Printed by J. Flesher for W. Morden, 1660) vii. 72. More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery vii. 73. See Alan Gabbey, ‘Henry More and the Limits of Mechanism’, in Henry More (1614–1687): Tercentenary Essays, ed. Sarah Hutton with Robert Crocker (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990) 19–35. 74. Mordechai Feingold, ‘Isaac Barrow: Divine, Scholar, Mathematician’, Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 28. 75. John Gascoigne, ’Isaac Barrow’s Academic Milieu’, Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 278. 76. Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 87–90. 77. J. E. McGuire and Martin Tamny, Certain Philosophical Questions: Newton’s Trinity Notebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) 318–319. 78. See J. E. McGuire, ‘The Fate of the Date: The Theology of Newton’s Principia Revisited’, Rethinking the Scientific Revolution, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 271–295. 79. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics Chap. 8.

42

Margaret J. Osler

80. Quoted in Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics 207. 81. Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary: Selections, trans. Richard H. Popkin with the assistance of Craig Brush (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) 128. 82. Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary 128; Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Pierre Bayle, 2nd ed., 5 vols. (London: 1734– 1738; facsimile reprint, London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1997) iv, 886. 83. Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab with the collaboration of Walter E. Rex (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963) 91–92. 84. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse 92. 85. L. W. B. Brockliss, ‘Descartes, Gassendi, and the Reception of the Mechanical Philosophy in the French Collèges de Plein Exercice, 1640–1730’, Perspectives on Science 3 (1995): 458–461. 86. Brockliss, ‘Descartes, Gassendi, and the Reception of the Mechanical Philosophy’ 454–458. 87. Brockliss, ‘Descartes, Gassendi, and the Reception of the Mechanical Philosophy’ 462–463. 88. Brockliss, ‘Descartes, Gassendi, and the Reception of the Mechanical Philosophy’ 458. 89. Descartes’ reliance on the Scholastics is well documented. See Daniel Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Étienne Gilson, Index Scolastico-Cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 1979), and Étienne Gilson, Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien (Paris: Vrin, 1984). 90. Brockliss, ‘Descartes, Gassendi, and the Reception of the Mechanical Philosophy’ 466–469. In fact both thinkers could be interpreted as undermining the faith. Bayle wrote, ‘You cannot get a great many people to stop believing that Descartes and Gassendi were as little convinced about the Real Presence as about the fables of Greece. You would have the same difficulty in convincing people that the followers of these two great philosophers are good Catholics and that, if they received permission to teach their principles publicly, they would not soon undermine all the foundations of the Roman Catholic religion’. Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary 380. 91. ‘[S]i vous y joignez un trait caractéristique de sa manière de penser, qui au reste, paraît en lui aussi sincere qu’invariable, je veux dire son orthodoxie avouée et rappelé hautement dans chacune de ses oeuvres’. Jean-Philibert Damiron, Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en Franc au XVIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1846) i, 385. 92. Harold Höffding, A History of Modern Philosophy: A Sketch of the History of Philosophy from the Close of the Renaissance to Our Own Day, trans. B. E. Meyer, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1900) 255–256. 93. René Pintard, Le libertinage érudit dans la primière moitié du XVIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Boivin, 1943). 94. Bloch, La philosophie de Gassendi. 95. Gregory, Scetticismo ed empirismo. 96. See Margaret J. Osler, ‘When Did Pierre Gassendi Become a Libertine?’ Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, ed. John Brooke and Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 169–192.

2

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher John Henry

INTRODUCTION Sir Kenelm Digby’s posthumous reputation as a natural philosopher ought to be much greater than it is. He was the fi rst English natural philosopher to publish a fully worked-out system of mechanical philosophy. His Treatise on Body appeared in 1644, the same year as Descartes’ Principia philosophiae, and had something like the same range, if not the same intellectual power.1 It also had the advantage, at least for its prospects in anglophone historiography, that it was written in English. Although his system was clearly inspired by the philosophy of Descartes, which Digby knew about thanks to his association with Mersenne and his circle in Paris (Digby read the Discours de la méthode when it fi rst appeared in 1637, corresponded with Descartes the following year and in 1640 he visited Descartes in Amsterdam), 2 and so ultimately derivative, there is a sense, nonetheless, in which Digby’s system of natural philosophy was genuinely original. At the detailed level its differences from all the other versions of the mechanical philosophy mark it out as particularly interesting. He should be given credit, therefore, for developing, and making public, a comprehensive and cogent natural philosophy before those who are more frequently mentioned as philosophical rivals to Descartes, such as Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi or Robert Boyle. Comparisons, as they say, are odious, and certainly arguable, but it could be argued that Digby’s mechanical philosophy is less derivative from that of Descartes than the systems of either Hobbes or Gassendi and compares favourably with theirs even though none of them achieve the internal consistency and power of the Cartesian system. If there are grounds for suggesting that Digby might have been counted as an insider, it is undeniably the case that he was, and remains, an outsider.3 It is perfectly clear that there are both historical and historiographical reasons for his exclusion. And I think he can be contrasted here with Thomas Hobbes, who was undoubtedly an outsider in his own times, but who has now become an insider. That is to say that historically Hobbes was an outsider, but historiographically he has been made an insider. He has been turned into an insider by dint of the fact that he has come to represent

44

John Henry

perfectly the anti-Aristotelianism, secularism and mechanicism which are seen in the prevailing historiography as crucial elements in the Scientific Revolution and the foundations of modern science.4 By contrast, Digby was and remains an outsider both historically and historiographically. I want to focus here on the historical grounds for Digby’s exclusion from the mainstream of seventeenth-century English philosophy, but it is worth pointing out that his exclusion continues because his overt Aristotelianism and Roman Catholicism seem to place him well outside the ranks of those supposed, by current historiography, to have contributed to the Scientific Revolution. The current assumption is that the innovative thinkers rejected Aristotelian authority, and that English innovators were either Protestants (whether Calvinist Puritan or Latitudinarian Anglican) or secularists in so far as they sought to separate their science from their religion.5 In the case of Sir Kenelm Digby, therefore, the major historiographical assumptions called upon to explain his exclusion turn out to coincide with the main historical reasons: his Aristotelianism and his Roman Catholicism. It might be suggested that this is a better state of affairs than the case of Hobbes, where the historiography significantly fails to match the history of Hobbes’ position in Interregnum and Restoration England, but I do not pursue such musings about the writing of history here. Digby always claimed that his system of quasi-atomistic mechanical philosophy was thoroughly Aristotelian. What is more, he did so not simply out of admiration for ancient authority, but specifically because Aristotle’s philosophy was traditionally used to support Roman Catholic theology. The fact is, Digby was not just a natural philosopher who happened to be a Roman Catholic; he was a Roman Catholic natural philosopher. That is to say, he was a natural philosopher who developed his philosophy deliberately to underpin his Catholic religious beliefs. For most seventeenthcentury Englishmen, therefore, Digby’s natural philosophy was seen as suspect, and even dangerous, right from the outset. It is not as if Digby tried to hide his intentions. Even the full title of his philosophical system hints pretty loudly at it: Two Treatises in the One of Which the Nature of Bodies; in the Other the Nature of Men’s Soule Is Looked into: In Way of Discovery of the Immortality of Reasonable Souls. At this time the immortality of the soul was one of the issues dividing Protestants and Catholics. The Roman Church, as a result, perhaps, of the excitement following the Renaissance rediscovery of the writings of Plato, had proclaimed the soul to be immortal by virtue of its nature in 1513, and even went on to insist that all philosophers should defend this view by proving the soul’s immortality by reason. This was the fi rst time that philosophers had been called upon to defend the faith in this way.6 Luther and other Reformers, who saw little Scriptural sanction for the belief in immortal souls, however, preferred to believe that, if there was a soul, it was given immortality by God’s grace, not by philosophical necessity. Even before Digby’s Two Treatises appeared, he announced

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

45

its relevance to this doctrinal debate. In his Observations upon Religio medici, written in 1642 as a response to Thomas Browne, Digby insisted, in accordance with Roman Catholic doctrine, that the immortality of the soul could be demonstrated by philosophy: ‘I take the immortality of the Soule (under his favour) to bee of that nature that to them onely that are not versed in the wayes of proving it by reason, it is article of faith; to others it is an evident conclusion of demonstrative Science’.7 It is at this point that Digby announces the imminent appearance of his Two Treatises. Digby was a bit more cautious about announcing his intentions in the preface to the Two Treatises, but it is not hard to read between his lines. Having described his enterprise as showing how physical phenomena may be ‘effected by an exact disposition, and ordering . . . of quantitative and corporeall parts’, he goes on to declare that I have therein obtained my desire and intent, which is onely, to shew from what principles, all kinds of corporeall operations do proceed; and what kind of principles these must be, which may issue out of these principles: to the end, that I may from thence, make a step to raise my discourse to the contemplation of the soule; and shew, that her operations are such, as cannot proceed from those principles; which being adequate and common to all bodies, we may rest assured, that what cannot issue from them, cannot have a body for its source.8 Although Digby here, and elsewhere in the preface, emphasises the aim of proving the soul to be an immaterial and entirely spiritual entity, he has already made clear, in his title and in the opening paragraph, that the main issue, to which the Treatise on Body is subordinate, is the immortality of the soul. A reading of the Treatise on the Soul makes it perfectly clear that the argument is meant to work by showing that dissolution and destruction of an entity can only be understood in terms of the dissipation of its constituent particles or atoms, and so can only be understood of material entities. An immaterial entity, like the soul, cannot undergo such a process and so must be indestructible, or immortal. The Treatise on Body, therefore, is developed in order to show how physical phenomena are all explicable in terms of easily intelligible interactions between particles of matter. In short, it is an exercise in the mechanical philosophy, of the kind fi rst developed systematically by Descartes in his suppressed Le Monde (c. 1633), but one which was motivated by the need to establish the truth of the Roman Catholic position on the immortality of the soul.9 The force of this motivation is clear, for example, when Digby writes, For what hope could I have, out of the actions of the soule to convince the nature of it to be incorporeall; if I could give no other account of bodies operations, then that they were performed by qualities occult,

46

John Henry specificall, or incomprehensible? Would not my adversary presently answer, that any operation, out of which I should presse the soules being spirituall, was performed by a corporeall occult quality: and that as he must acknowledge it to be incomprehensible, so must I likewise acknowledge other qualities of bodies, to be as incomprehensible: & therefore could not with reason presse him, to shew how such a body was able to doe such an operation: as I should inferre must of necessity proceed from a spirit, since that neither could I give account how the lodestone drew iron, or looked to the North, how a stone, and other heavy things were carried downwards . . . and many other such questions, which are so lightly resolved in the Schooles?10

Now, it might seem from this attack on ‘the Schools’ that, like other new philosophers, Digby rejected the authority of Aristotle and sought to replace his system with the new mechanical philosophy. But this was not so. Certainly, Digby had no admiration for scholastic pedagogy: For what a misery is it, [he wrote] that the flower and best wits of Christendome, which flock to the Universities, under pretence and upon hope of gaining knowledge, should there be deluded; and after many yeares of toyle and expence, bee sent home againe, with nothing more acquired than a faculty, and readinesse to talke like Parrats of many things; but not to understand so much as any one; and withal with a perswasion that in truth nothing can be knowne?11 His attitude to Aristotle, however, remained entirely positive and deferential. It seems clear that Digby wanted to uphold Aristotelianism as the traditional handmaiden to Roman Catholic theology.12 It is worth saying, however, that Digby was in the tradition of those counter-Reformation Roman Catholic thinkers who accepted that the Roman Church needed to change in order to win back the hearts and minds of the Protestants.13 Indeed, Digby was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to develop a would-be ecumenical Catholicism, intended to be more acceptable to English Protestant sentiments. In fact, Digby was a leading supporter of the counter-reforming Catholicism of Thomas White, or Thomas Blacklo, as he was also known.

DIGBY, WHITE AND THE AIMS OF BLACKLOISM Thomas White has been seen, on the one hand, as the most original thinker produced by modern English Catholicism, to rank alongside John Henry Newman, and, on the other, as ‘the nearest approach to a heresiarch that English Catholicism has produced since Cranmer’.14 White was one of those Roman Catholic thinkers who recognised the need for reform within his

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

47

Church and saw the counter-Reformation as an opportunity to win Protestants back to the mother church by making the necessary reforms. In spite of seeming to acknowledge that the Roman Church had drifted into error, White always insisted that the truth of the Roman faith was guaranteed by the fact that it was the only Christian Church with an unbroken tradition back to the Apostles and to Jesus Christ himself. ‘All Christ taught, or the Holy Ghost suggested to the Apostles’, he wrote, ‘is by direct and uninterrupted line, entirely and fully descended to the present Church’. When taking this line, White claimed that church doctrine could not be errant: Now then suppose that one of those (who having been taught by Christ’s own mouth . . . ) should have preached . . . the same doctrine . . . Now let him be gone, and after him all dead who had heard him speake; and then some question arise concerning this doctrine . . . let us see whether error can creep in or no, if the Christians keep unto their hold. Their hold is that they were taught by Christs Apostles. Let therefore the wisest and best men . . . meet together about the controversie, and discusse it out of this principle (what was delivered unto them as taught by the Apostles) will not there be a quick end of their dispute? For every man can say, My father heard the Apostle speak . . . 15 Nevertheless, White and his followers acknowledged that in significant respects their contemporary Roman Catholicism had deviated somehow from the teachings of the primitive church. Instead of seeing this as a reason to break away from the church, however, as Lutherans, Calvinists and others had done, White made what he considered to be the historically and philosophically necessary adjustments to his doctrines, and held them to be the true doctrines of the Roman Church. The fundamental nature, for White, of an unbroken tradition is manifested by the fact that it was consistently and insistently upheld as his ‘rule of faith’, in spite of the fact that White’s supposedly traditionally based beliefs differed markedly from the equally traditionally based beliefs of orthodox Catholicism. Protestant critics of Blackloism were not slow to point to the paradox of an innovatory version of Roman Catholicism which nevertheless laid claims, equal to those of the orthodoxy, to be based upon unbroken tradition from Christ himself. As John Tillotson somewhat facetiously pointed out, The Pope and Mr White, notwithstanding the plainness of oral Tradition, and the impossibility of being ignorant of it, or mistaking it, have yet been so unhappy as to differ about several points of Faith; insomuch that Mr White is unkindly censured for it at Rome, and perhaps here in England the Pope speeds no better; however, the difference continues so wide, that Mr White hath thought it fit to disobey the summons of his chief Pastor, and like a prudent Man, rather to write against him here out of harms-way, than to venture the infallibility of plain oral

48 John Henry Tradition for the Doctrines he maintains against a practical Tradition which they have at Rome of killing Hereticks.16 In the fi nal analysis, of course, White, the secular priest, wanted to uphold the authority of the priest as the intercessor between the ordinary believer and the complexities of the faith, and to reject the Protestant belief in the priesthood of all believers. The role of the priest is nicely hinted at, for example, in a comment by Sir Kenelm Digby, in his Conference with a Lady about Choice of Religion: The substance of all which may be summed up and reduced to this following short question; namely, whether in the election of the faith whereby you hope to be saved, you will be guided by the unanimous consent of the wisest, the learnedest and the piousest men of the whole world, that have been instructed in what they believe by men of the like quality living in the age before them, and soe from age to age untill the Apostles and Christ: and that in this manner have derived from that fountayne, both a perfect and full knowledge of all . . . 17 The Blackloist, and in this case the coincident orthodox Catholic view, can be contrasted with the Protestant encouragement to read and interpret the Bible for oneself: ‘those Principles of yours’, a leading Blackloist wrote, ‘which you take up for a shew, when you write against Catholics, would, if put in practice, in a short time crumble to Atoms all the Churches in the World?’18 Tillotson was perfectly right, however, about the fact that White’s version of the faith differed significantly from Catholic orthodoxy. Being persuaded by Anglican theologians that the early Church accepted chiliasm, for example, White and Digby tried to confi rm this as part of the true tradition of the Catholic Church. It is known that White and the leading Anglican theologian, William Chillingworth, debated the issue of the infallibility of Catholic tradition on a number of occasions between 1635 and 1639; at least one meeting took place at Digby’s lodgings.19 Evidently Chillingworth raised the point about the early chiliasm of the church during these discussions, and the point was repeated in virtually every subsequent attack on Blackloist claims about church tradition. Chillingworth, writing sometime shortly after 1637, for example, and Tillotson, writing in 1666, both point out that, although the ‘doctrine of the millenaries’ was then held by the Catholic Church to be ‘false and heretical’, it was ‘believed and taught by the Eminent Fathers of the Age next after the Apostles, and by none of that Age opposed or condemned’. According to Chillingworth, Irenaeus derived the doctrine ‘from Priests which saw John, the Disciple of the Lord’, who had included the doctrine in the Revelation. It then became an accepted part of the faith within thirty years of John’s death, ‘when in all probability there were many alive that had heard him expound his own words and teach the doctrine’.20

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

49

Almost certainly as a result of these early disputes with Chillingworth and his close associate in the Great Tew Circle, Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland (1610–1643), 21 White and Digby began to re-examine their own stance on eschatological matters. Digby’s Two Treatises can be seen as providing the philosophical underpinning, and justification, for the new eschatology developed by White. The fi rst treatise, On Body, developed a mechanical philosophy in which it was argued that all change could be explained in terms of the rearrangement in space, or change of movement of the constituent particles of bodies. It followed, therefore, that the immortal soul, being immaterial, could not be subject to change once it was separated from the human body. So, although subject to ‘the hammers of corporeall objects beating upon her’ during the soul’s period in the body, ‘[a]s soone as she is out of the passible oore [sic: read ‘ore’?], in which she suffereth by reason of that oore, she presently becometh impassible, as being purely of her own nature, a fi xed substance that is, a pure Being’. 22 ‘We may hence confidently conclude’, Digby goes on, ‘that no change of minde, (that is no change at all) can happen to an abstracted soule’. 23 Digby is even able to use this as a convenient answer to a problem of Christian morality: And thus by discourse, we may arrive, to quitt ourselves easily of that famous objection, so much pestering Christian Religion, how God, can in iustice impose eternall paines upon a soule, for one sinne, acted in a short space of time. For we see, it followeth by the necessary course of nature, that if a man dye in a disorderly affection to any thing, as to his chiefe good, he eternally remaineth by the necessity of his owne nature, in the same affection: and there is no imparity, that to eternall sinne there should be imposed eternall punishment. 24 It follows from this that the concept of Purgatory, another Catholic doctrine which Lucius Cary, Chillingworth and others had pointed out was not part of the original tradition of the church, and in which disembodied souls are purged for their sins, is a nonsense. Accordingly, White is able to reject it from his theology and reassert instead the importance of the general resurrection. In the conclusion to his Middle State of Souls, White’s major investigation of the concept of Purgatory, he insisted [t]hat antiquity did believe that men in the next world, whether their souls are beatifi’d or no, were not admitted locally to Heaven till the day of the fi nal conflagration: That then every ones works were to be examined: . . . That the opinion which holds pure pains, and those in the interval between Death and Judgement, either of their own nature, or by prayers determinable is new in the Church, built upon slight grounds, and such as are uncapable in things Theological to beget Faith . . . 25

50 John Henry It can hardly be coincidental that the doctrine of Purgatory was one of those which most clearly separated Protestants from Catholics. It was, after all, the doctrine underlying the sale of Indulgences which caused such a scandal in the pre-Reformation Church. By rejecting Purgatory as a philosophically unsupportable and traditionally unfounded doctrine, White was bringing his own theology closer to that of the Protestants. But this was not the only doctrinal issue upon which White took an effectively Protestant stance. He rejected the Catholic belief in the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary; ‘Certainly’, he wrote in his Apology for Rushworth’s Dialogues, ‘there is no tradition for it’.26 He also rejected the recently declared infallibility of the pope, not simply on the grounds that it was a recent innovation rather than an old tradition, but also because it was a principle which undermined tradition as the rule of faith. Tradition can be infallible, White declared, because if we looke into the immediate progresse and joints of the descent [of a doctrine] we cannot fi nd where it can misse, for the doctrine being supernaturall, and not delivered by mans skill or wit, the fi rst and main principle of it can be no other, than to know what was delievered them by their Teachers, a thing not surpassing the understanding of any sensible and wise man; so that put twenty wise understanding men to agree, that the Preacher, to their certaine knowledge, said such a thing, there remaineth no probable nor possible doubt, but that it was so. 27 The guarantee lies in the consensus; one man, even if he is the pope, can be mistaken. 28 In a number of highly significant areas, then, Blackloism moved closer to Protestantism than to orthodox Catholicism. In many respects Blackloism can be seen as an English equivalent of the Jansenism emerging from Gallican Catholicism. Just as Jansenism has been referred to as Catholic Puritanism, so might the same be said of Blackloism. 29 The aim of Blackloism was obviously ecumenical. White and his followers must have thought that by reforming their own Catholicism from within, to make it closer to the standard set of Protestant beliefs, their arguments about the strength and reliability of the continuous Catholic tradition would be more likely to win converts back to their mother church. It would not have escaped the notice of their Anglican contemporaries, however, that although they were willing to concede specific points of doctrine, they remained uncompromising with regard to their ‘rule of faith’, the truth of the continuous tradition of the Roman Church, and their theological method, with its claims to certainty. There was another major pillar supporting Blackloism, and that was Aristotelian natural philosophy, the traditional handmaiden to the ‘Queen of the Sciences’, (Catholic) theology. It is impossible to deny, however, that

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

51

just as there was some contradiction in White’s claim that the unbroken tradition of the church guaranteed that no error could creep in, while simultaneously rejecting as false various features of Church doctrine, so there was some contradiction in declaring Digby’s essentially new system of natural philosophy to be Aristotelian.

DIGBY’S ARISTOTELIAN ATOMISM We saw at the beginning that Digby’s Two Treatises was written to provide philosophical underpinning for the Catholic doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul. There can be little doubt that the Treatise on the Soul, although the second of the Two Treatises, was always the fi rst in importance for its author. The Treatise on Body, right from its origins, was clearly conceived as a way of underwriting the pneumatological doctrines of the Catholic Church. Hints of the main thesis of the Two Treatises can be seen as early as 1638 in Digby’s Conference with a Lady about Choice of Religion, where he insisted that once the soul was separated from the body, it was no longer subject to change, because it was then completely immaterial and change is exclusively a material phenomenon.30 At this time Digby was already under the sway of Thomas White. Digby had converted to Anglicanism for reasons of personal expediency in 1630, but returned to Catholicism between 1634 and 1636. It was during these years, or shortly after, that he met White and soon became enthralled by him and his philosophical enterprise. By the time Digby came to write his brief Observations upon Religio medici, in 1642, he was able to use it to provide an advertisement for the Two Treatises. Insisting, against Thomas Browne, author of Religio medici, that the immortality of the soul could be philosophically proven, Digby admitted that such a demonstration required ‘a total survey of the whole science of bodies, and of all the operations that we are conversant with, of a rational creature’. He went on to say that he had already begun this task: ‘[W]hich I having done with all the succinctness I have been able to explicate so knotty a subject with, hath taken me up in the fi rst draught near two hundred sheets of paper’.31 Furthermore, it is in this early work that Digby indicates that he sees the philosophy of Thomas White, from which his own Two Treatises developed, not as an entirely original contribution, but as the long overdue perfecting of traditional Aristotelian philosophy. 32 Acknowledging Browne’s criticisms of Aristotle, Digby wrote, But no great human thing was ever born and perfected at once. It may satisfy us, if one in our age buildeth that magnificent structure upon the other’s foundations; and especially, if, where he fi ndeth any of them unsound, he eradicateth those, and fi xeth new unquestionable ones in

52 John Henry their room; but so as they still, in gross, keep a proportion and bear a harmony with the other great work. This hath now, even now, our learned countryman done; the knowing Mr White . . . in his excellent book ‘De Mundo’ . . . 33 It seems clear from this comment that, just as the Blackloists were willing to reform Catholicism, so were they willing to reform Aristotelianism. Given Digby’s desire to appropriate the new mechanical philosophy to prove the natural immortality of the soul, he had no compunction about developing what might well be called ‘Aristotelian atomism’.34 Although this might seem an unlikely combination, Digby tried to pass it off as authentic Aristotelianism: ‘Let any man read his books of Generation and Corruption, [he wrote, referring to Aristotle] and say whether he doth not expressly teach, that mixtion (which he delivereth to be the generation or making of a mixt body) is done per minimum, that is in our language in one word by atomes’. According to Digby, physical phenomena deriving from the combination of elements were professed by Aristotle to depend upon ‘the mingling of the least partes or atomes of the said Elements, which is in effect to say that all the nature of bodies their qualities and their operations, are compassed by the mingling of atomes: the showing and explicating of which hath been our labour in this whole Treatise’.35 Digby’s mentor also used atomistic explanations, which he claimed traced nature ‘step by step’. He referred to this approach as the ‘Digbaean method’ and equated it to the opinions of Aristotle, who, he insisted, ‘taught the Digbaean way’.36 Here, then, we can see the parallel between White’s insistence upon the utter reliability of Catholic tradition, while explicitly deviating from it, and his vigorous support for the truth of the Aristotelian system, while actually promoting a corpuscularian system of natural philosophy. In spite of the innovatory nature of their new philosophy, both Digby and White tried to pass it off as the true Aristotelian system, before it was corrupted by university scholasticism.37 It is evident from a reading of their works that what appealed to the two leading Blackloists in the 1640s about Aristotelianism, apart from the fact that it was recognised in Catholic tradition as a handmaiden to theology, was its claim to be able to provide certain answers. 38 The aim of philosophical enquiry, Aristotle held, is to explain the way things are. According to Aristotelian precepts, this can only be done by detailing the causes of natural phenomena. To say that the earth moves around the sun is not in itself a philosophical claim, even if complex mathematical calculations based upon numerous observations can be shown to be compatible with that claim. The philosopher must detail the causes which explain how the earth can (or does) move around the sun—and what causes it to stay perpetually in motion.39 At this time, Pierre Gassendi and Marin Mersenne on the Continent, and new philosophers like Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, Walter Charleton, William Petty and others in England, were actually denying

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

53

the possibility of producing certain knowledge,40 and although Descartes and Hobbes were claiming certainty for their new systems, both systems seemed to rely upon highly dubious or implausible principles.41 As John Sergeant, another leading Blackloist, later wrote, The assigning the True Natural Cause for that Effect and explicating it right, must be decided by way of Reason; that is by demonstrating fi rst whose principles of Natural Philosophy are True and Solid, and onely he or they who can approve their Principle to be such, can pretend to explicate that Natural Production right by resolving it into its proper causes, or to have Science [i.e. knowledge] how ’tis done . . . 42 Speculative philosophers, as Sergeant called them, like Descartes and Hobbes, fail to demonstrate the validity of their principles, while experimental philosophers like Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Boyle actually try to do without principles and are therefore ‘utterly incompetent or Unable to beget Science’.43 It would seem, then, that for White, Digby and the other Blackloists, there were two fundamental pillars which supported the truth of Roman Catholicism: the continuity of tradition and the rigorous rationality of the Aristotelian method. If these two unshakeable pillars remained recognisably Roman Catholic, in the hands of the Blackloists they were made to support much that was not only not typical of orthodox Catholic thinking, but in many respects differed markedly from it.

RECUSANCY AND COUNTER-REFORM It is perfectly clear that the aims and intentions of Digby and White were well known to their English Catholic critics who disapproved of their counterreforming deviations from Catholic orthodoxy. Furthermore, it was often the seamless integration of philosophy and theology which attracted comment. One critic, for example, said that Digby was easily wrought upon to help bolster up and spread the Atomical philosophy, which Blacklo persuaded him would shortly prevail in the Christian world . . . which Honour they said he should have of founding this new doctrine, & divinity itself, which was to be new modeled also according to these unheard of principles.44 Another cynical critic wrote of the ‘order’ in which ‘the whole new system of phylosophy and Divinity was made public’, beginning with Digby’s ‘Book of the immortality of the soul’, and then Thomas White revealing in his own writings ‘the great mine of this Phylosophy’.45 It seems clear that for Thomas White, as much a rationalist in philosophy as Descartes, the

54

John Henry

interconnectedness of his philosophy and his theology was its great strength. As he once responded, with gentle sarcasm, to another Catholic critic, You tell your Reader my philosophy and Divinity are so perfectly squar’d that if I had not made a division of the Books it had been impossible to know where one ended and the other began. Honour’d Sir, you know I am but a poor man, and cannot give rewards for good turns done to me, therefore I beseech you to be content with humble thanks: For I owe them from my heart . . . I see not how you could give a schollar a greater praise . . . 46 It is evident from these criticisms of Digby and White that there was a contemporary awareness that their philosophy was being used for what we would think of as blatantly ideological purposes (although the term ‘ideology’ was not yet available). Indeed, in post-Baconian England, it seems clear that there was a strong sense, even before any of the alternative new philosophies had properly established themselves, that Aristotelianism was the philosophy of Roman Catholicism. It is not clear which came fi rst, the chicken or the egg. Either Aristotelianism was already seen this way, and so Digby’s overt insistence that his philosophy was Aristotelian would have marked it out as Roman Catholic (to reinforce his claims in the Two Treatises about his overriding concern with the issue of the immortality of the soul); or it is even possible that Aristotelianism began to be seen in this light as a direct result of Digby’s and White’s use of a reformed Aristotelianism to promote their reformed ecumenical Catholicism. After all, Aristotelianism had remained the mainstay of the Oxbridge university curriculum since the Henrician reformation and throughout the reigns of Edward and Elizabeth, and presumably it was not seen as an exclusively Catholic philosophy throughout these times.47 In the seventeenth century, however, it was identified, at least in some quarters, as a specifically Roman Catholic philosophy, and this must surely have been the result of local circumstances. It is possible that this was simply an aspect of the general distrust of Roman Catholicism at this time, but the machinations of the Blackloist faction in English Catholicism, both intellectually and politically, did not go unnoticed and must have contributed significantly to contemporary anti-Catholic sentiment. Thomas Hobbes was by no means the only one who saw ‘Aristotelity’, as he called it, as nothing other than ‘a handmaid to the Romane Religion’. It is often supposed that Henry Stubbe, self-appointed scourge of the newly founded Royal Society, was willing to say anything, no matter how baseless, to blacken the Society’s name and that his suggestion that the Society was bent on introducing ‘a Popish implicit faith’ back into England was a case in point. It is surely significant, however, that Stubbe explicitly mentions in his Censure upon Certain Passages Contained in the History of the Royal Society, ‘the doctrines of Mr White, Dr Holden, Serenus Cressy and

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

55

such others as endeavour at present (and that with great show of wit and artifices) to seduce the English to that Apostaticall Church’.48 In another of his attacks on the Royal Society, Stubbe singles out Sir Kenelm Digby, among the society’s fellows, as ‘the Pliny of our age for lying’.49 After these somewhat diffuse attacks on the Society, Stubbe concentrated on the charge of crypto-Catholicism in his Campanella Reviv’d (London, 1670). The premise of this polemic was that the Royal Society was designed to distract the greatest minds in England into the pursuit of natural philosophy while Jesuits and others inveigled their way back into the country to re-establish their mother church.50 Similarly, Thomas Barlow, shortly before his elevation to the see of Lincoln, professed himself to be not a little troubled, to see Protestants, nay Clergy-men and Bishops, approve and propagate, that which they miscall New-Philosophy; so that our Universities begin to be infected with it, little considering the Cause or Consequences of it, or how it tends evidently to the advantage of Rome, and the ruine of our Religion. Barlow believed that ‘this New-Philosophy (as they call it) was set on foot, and has been carried on by the Arts of Rome’. 51 We know that the immediate occasion of these comments was a lecture given at the Royal Society not by Sir Kenelm Digby, but by Sir William Petty. However, the fact that there is nothing in Petty’s lecture, at least in its published form, which might have aroused such anxieties, strongly suggests that Barlow was drawing upon more deep-seated, and perhaps longer-held, opinions.52 Further circumstantial evidence on this matter is provided by Joseph Glanvill, one of the society’s most assiduous defenders. After a visit to the west country Glanvill reported, with some dismay, that in Bristol the Royal Society was regarded as ‘a Company of Atheists, Papists, Dunces & utter enemies to all learning’. His subsequent defence of the society attracted a critique from Thomas White and initiated a polemical exchange between the two men. 53 There are at least some grounds, therefore, for supposing that Digby’s continued reaffi rmation that his new philosophy was based upon Aristotelian principles, and was in essence a new Aristotelian philosophy, would have resulted in its being regarded with some suspicion by Protestant English readers, as nothing more than a means of promoting Roman Catholic doctrine. This would have been particularly obvious to his contemporaries because of his explicit insistence that his system of natural philosophy was developed in order to demonstrate the Catholic doctrine that the soul was immortal not just by God’s grace, but according to its very nature. Awareness of the Blackloists’ aim to gain tolerance, if not more, for English Roman Catholics was certainly widespread after the Restoration. It was well known that Digby and White had thrown in their lot with

56

John Henry

the Lord Protector, in what turned out to be a last-ditch effort to bring about their political aims. The fact that their negotiations with Cromwell included not only an oath of loyalty to the Commonwealth but also a denial of fealty to the pope, the establishment of six or eight bishops who were completely independent of Rome and concerned only with spiritual matters and provision of a 10,000-strong Catholic army for the defence of the Commonwealth, provided ample scope for the enemies of the Blackloists to denounce them both at Rome and to fellow Catholics in England. But these efforts also drew the attention of English Protestants. Unlikely though it may seem, Digby became something of a favourite with Cromwell and, as the author of the biography of Digby in Biographia Britannica wrote, ‘[t]his created great jealousies against him on all sides; and the countenance he received from Cromwell, who is said to have been very much taken with him, produced no small clamour against his government’. 54 During this time White published the notorious political tract The Grounds of Obedience and Government, a Hobbesian piece of pragmatism which made the best interests of the people the supreme law and so justified rebellion whenever a government failed to promote the common good.55 White’s position was regarded as even more extreme than Hobbes’s in Leviathan, and it was seen as the unacceptable face of political pragmatism. In an open letter to Cromwell, the leading royalist, Edward Hyde, for example, wrote that White determines positively, That you ought to be so far from performing any promise, or observing any Oath you have taken, if you know that it is for the good of the People, that you break it, albeit they foreseeing all that you now see, did therefore bind you to Oath not to do it . . . 56 Although White’s Grounds of Obedience and Government was presented as a contribution to current debates in political theory, it was difficult for contemporary English Protestants not to see it as simply the latest self-serving attempt to promote Catholicism, and for contemporary English Catholics not to see it as the latest attempt to promote heretical Blackloism. It was well known, after all, that Digby had been appointed by Queen Henrietta Maria as Lord Chancellor of the Court-in-exile in 1644, and that he and White had tried to secure freedom of worship and other benefits for English Catholics through negotiations fi rst with Pope Innocent X, and then with the regicides, before ingratiating himself with the Lord Protector in 1653. Small wonder that White’s book came to be seen as a work of cynical expediency and that Digby was seen to have ‘precisely his father’s principles, and pursued nothing with so much vehemence as the establishment of Popery in England, under any government, and upon any terms’. 57 Remarkably, Digby always managed to remain close to the dowager queen, Henrietta Maria, but after the Restoration he never really found favour with Charles II, and White was certainly persona non grata. Digby

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

57

retreated from public life into alchemical studies, as he had done after the death of his beloved wife in 1633. White, by all accounts, spent his fi nal years in retirement at his dwelling in Drury Lane, London, and after Digby’s death in 1665, engaged in frequent protracted debates with his old rival in natural philosophy, and fellow outsider, Thomas Hobbes. 58

DOCTRINE AND DOGMATISING This is not the whole story, however. It is important to note that Digby was not excluded from the mainstream of English natural philosophy simply because he was a Roman Catholic, or because he was an Aristotelian. His exclusion by his English contemporaries can only properly be understood when seen against the general background of English thought in the Restoration, which was dominated by a set of attitudes which could not possibly accommodate Blackloism. English Protestants, particularly after the civil wars, when numerous radical sects had proliferated, but even before that, were all too aware of the disunity of their church.59 There were, of course, a number of widely differing views on how the fragments might be joined together to provide not only a national church but also one which might lay a genuine claim to being the true Christian church. One of the most prominent attempts to unify English religion was the movement known as Latitudinarianism. Although fi rst developed in something like a systematic way by the group of Anglicans who gathered at Lucius Cary’s home at Great Tew, which included Chillingworth, Henry Hammond, Edward Hyde, Gilbert Sheldon, Robert Sanderson and John Hales, it can be traced back to Edward VI’s reign and the Forty-Two Articles of Thomas Cranmer, issued in 1543, and which were intended as a guide ‘for avoiding of controversy in opinions, and the establishment of a godly concord’.60 The leaders of the Church of England in Edward VI’s reign were strongly influenced by Martin Bucer, who was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in 1549. In his efforts to unite Lutherans, Calvinists and other Protestants, Bucer had developed the notion of adiaphora—things indifferent to salvation, and therefore to faith.61 This idea was taken up by Chillingworth and others in the Great Tew Circle. Here we can see the beginnings of Latitudinarianism. Indeed Lucius Cary himself, the host of the circle, was said by his friend Hyde, later the Earl of Clarendon, to have ‘such a latitude of opinion, he believed nothing in the Church could not be dispensed with’.62 The point of this was to allow unification of the Protestant churches by reducing dogma to a few fundamental principles upon which all could agree. Noticing that many of the issues which separated the churches were concerned either with the practice of the liturgy, or with doctrinal matters of a highly recondite kind, these Anglicans fi rmly believed that such matters could not be crucial to one’s salvation. All that really mattered to the

58

John Henry

faith, therefore, were those basic doctrines which ensured that the believer would be saved. The problem was to determine what those fundamental doctrines were. What was required was a rule of faith. In spite of the best efforts of the Blackloists, however, the Latitudinarians could never accept the twin pillars of Blackloism, a supposedly unbroken Christian tradition coupled with a rigorous rationalism (Aristotelianism), as the correct rule of faith. The Latitudinarians could hardly fail to notice that both Roman Catholics and Calvinists laid equal claims that their theologies derived from a rational approach to the faith. Accordingly, those leaders of the Anglican Church who sought to reconcile different religious views knew that they could not rely upon reason or logic. This is not to say that the Anglicans eschewed rationality entirely. They knew that that way madness lies. But they placed their emphasis upon ‘common sense’ or things which were plain and obvious. They were very distrustful indeed of long chains of reasonings, or complex intellectual manoeuvring of the kind indulged in by mathematicians, logicians and, last but by no means least, scholastic theologians and philosophers. Reasoning of that kind could be used, or abused, to prove almost anything. As Thomas Vaughan (1622– 1666) wrote, for example, ‘Deliver us, O Lord, from logic. And here I must desire the reader not to mistake me. I do not condemn the use, but the abuse of reason, the many subtleties and reaches of it, which man hath so applied that truth and error are equally disputable’.63 Subtlety of reasoning was regarded as beguiling and treacherous; ‘the fetches of art and sophistry’ were used, according to Chillingworth, not for truth but for ‘falsehood and error to use disguise and shadowings’. As Jeremy Taylor famously wrote, Reason is such a boxe of quicksilver that it abides no where; it dwells in no settled mansion; it is like a doves neck, or a changeable taffeta; it looks to me otherwise than it looks to you who do not stand in the same light that I doe: and if we inquire after the laws of Nature by the rules of our reason, we shall be uncertain as the discourses of the people, or the dreams of disturbed fancies.64 Seeking to be able to claim to be free from all such duplicitous ratiocinations, the Anglicans claimed to affi rm only those things which were obvious to all without the need for complex argumentation. Chillingworth claimed that the truth he pleaded for was ‘so strong an argument for itself’ that it needed ‘only light to discover it’. Taylor said that he affi rmed nothing ‘but upon right reason discernible by every disinterested person’. ‘Right reason’, of course, was held to be different from the reasoning used by Catholics, Calvinists, scholastics and the like, including Blackloists.65 This approach to epistemology went hand in hand with the doctrinal minimalism which was the other important pillar of Latitudinarian Anglicanism. Noting, as Bucer had before them, that many of the disputes which separated different factions of the Reformed Church from one another were

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

59

concerned with niceties that seemed unlikely to be held by God to determine one’s salvation, the Latitudinarians declared them to be adiaphora—things indifferent to one’s salvation. Such differences could safely be disregarded, it was believed, until the truth about them would be revealed at the end of days. Taking the Scriptures, rather than tradition, as the source of information about their faith, the Anglicans could avoid descent into tiny details of Biblical exegesis—they might well have said that the Devil was in the details—and could concentrate upon its more plainly obvious and undeniable teachings; for these constituted all that was required for salvation. Of course, it would be naïve in the extreme to take the Anglican claims we have been discussing at face value. They were no doubt forged to some extent with rhetorical and propagandist intentions, and were certainly often observed more in the breach than in the observance. We only have to consider the Trinity, for example, as a doctrine which Anglicans could not exclude from their dogma, even though it was considered highly doubtful by many another English Protestant and could hardly be said to be a truth that required only to be heard to be believed.66 Nevertheless, there was some truth in these claims. Indeed, according to the historian Hugh Kearney, all the factions of the English Reformed Church (Anglican, Presbyterian, Independent, etc.), with the exception of the radical sects, shared a common ‘vision of what the Church of Christ ought to be if it were stripped of externals and inessentials’.67 One recent commentator upon the Church of England at this time has said that it did not so much as provide a theology as a theological method.68 In a sense, then, the Anglican rule of faith, with its twin pillars of a sceptical probabilistic epistemology and doctrinal minimalism, was what characterised Anglicanism. Given that this theological method was developed in order to circumvent the difficulties caused by dogmatic and divisive claims, and the difficulties caused by insistence upon rigid adherence to recondite matters of doctrine, it is hardly surprising that Blackloist proselytising failed to have any effect. White’s own twin pillars of his ‘method to science’—rigorous logical argumentation and the claim that tradition pointed to the absolute and undeniable truth of Catholic doctrine—were exemplary of the kind of divisive approach which the Anglicans sought to avoid. As far as they were concerned, White’s arguments for Blackloism merely served to reinforce their own Latitudinarian theological method as the only hope for church unity. Furthermore, as a result of lingering assumptions derived from the ‘handmaiden’ tradition, in which natural philosophy was always seen as ancillary to religion, there were precisely parallel developments in English natural philosophy. While there was only one version of Christianity in Western Europe, during the long hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church, there were few disputes as to how natural philosophy should be used to bolster the faith (although it cannot have been coincidental that there was also only one natural philosophy during this time—scholastic Aristotelianism).69 The fragmentation of Western Christianity meant that support from

60

John Henry

natural philosophy for each of the different doctrinal systems became more urgent. Inevitably, however, different natural philosophies were used to support different theologies. This was particularly apparent in Interregnum England, where many radical sectarian groups were able to flourish as a result of the proscription of the Church of England and the suspension of church courts and church censorship.70 A number of sects turned to the alchemically based natural philosophy of Paracelsus, which, thanks to the reformist religious ideas of its founder, came with built-in associations to radical Protestantism.71 More orthodox thinkers, meanwhile, could not decide whether Aristotelianism was inextricably linked to Roman Catholicism, or was the only safe natural philosophy, while all the others were being covertly promoted by Rome to distract the learned from the truth.72 The situation was exacerbated—certainly as far as the devout were concerned—by the fact that the new mechanical philosophies were often appropriated by the rising numbers of atheists who were now, evidently, at large in the world. All these things combined together to give the new natural philosophies what would now be called ‘a bad press’. Natural philosophy was now seriously distrusted by many mid-seventeenth-century Englishmen as merely a means of promoting, or at least lending support to, radical sectarianism, Roman Catholicism or atheism. When the Royal Society was founded in 1660, its leading founder members saw that they would have to reassure conservative contemporaries that the natural philosophical work upon which the society was engaged was not affi liated to any potentially subversive religious group, and much less to atheism. What the society’s founders needed to do, essentially, was to establish that their science was, as we would say, objective and ideologically neutral.73 Our concept of objectivity was no more available to Restoration thinkers than the concept of ideology, but it is at just this time that the concept of objectivity in natural knowledge began to be forged.74 What the leading lights of the society did was to insist in various public pronouncements that they dealt only in matters of fact. As far as possible they tried to suggest that the principle aim of the society was to gather information about the natural world and simply to record it without adding any interpretations about the theoretical meaning of those facts. They were able to justify this approach to natural philosophy by reference to the ambitious Great Instauration of Francis Bacon. The Lord Chancellor himself had insisted that natural philosophy was likely to go awry if information about natural phenomena was gathered in the light of a preconceived theory. Rejecting the deductive reason which scholastics regarded as the mainstay of natural philosophy, Bacon insisted that conclusions should only be reached at the end of a long process of fact gathering, when the common feature in all aspects of a natural phenomenon would emerge as a result of induction from the extensive data base.75

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

61

Certainly this was, if anything could be said to be, the ‘official’ policy of the Royal Society. It was an attitude to the production of new and useful knowledge of the natural world which was promulgated in all the pronouncements of the Society, such as its correspondence as maintained by Henry Oldenburg, and its Philosophical Transactions. It is also very evident in what might be called the ‘manifesto’ of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667). Similarly, it can be seen in the published works of its leading members. This is most notable in the works of Robert Boyle, many of which reflect the Baconian aim of compiling natural histories of phenomena, rather than in providing theoretical explanations of them.76 Theory, especially if it depended upon a long chain of complex presuppositions (reminiscent of the complex chains of reasoning invoked by scholastics), could be seen as a way of smuggling in a covert promotion of a particular theological position. To avoid this imputation, it was necessary not only to explicitly state that one was simply dealing in facts, but also to present one’s work in such a way that it was immediately seen to be only concerned with facts.77 Needless to say, not all the work of the leading members of the Society fitted this mould, but this could always be glossed by appropriate rhetoric. Consider, for example, Robert Hooke’s apology to the Society, in the preface to his Micrographia, for deviating from ‘The Rules YOU have prescrib’d YOUR selves in YOUR Philosophical Progress . . . particularly that of avoiding Dogmatizing, and the espousal of any Hypothesis . . . ’. Hooke could not forebear from offering explanations for some of the microscopic processes he observed, and so he had to make clear that these were his own ideas, not the Society’s. Furthermore, he had to acknowledge that the Society’s way was the best one: ‘This way seems the most excellent, and may preserve both Philosophy and Natural History from its former Corruptions’. This same attitude also underwrote Newton’s famous assertion in the Principia mathematica that he dealt with the force of gravity only as an undeniable matter of fact. He freely admitted that he could provide no explanation of the action of this force, because to do so would require him simply to dream up a hypothesis and, as he triumphantly insisted, ‘hypotheses non fi ngo’.78 The chief purpose of this rhetoric was precisely to convince contemporaries that the natural philosophy presented by the Royal Society was not deliberately formulated to serve as a handmaiden to a particular religious faction, but was intended only to be factual, disinterested and (as we would say) ‘objective’. The emphasis upon matters of fact and rejection of hypothesis can be seen as the equivalent of the Anglican sceptical epistemology. Walter Charleton, one of the Society’s most active members in its early years, warned against the ‘unconstant, variable and seductive imposture of Reason’. Robert Hooke, similarly, pointed to the vanity and uncertainty of ‘arguing, concluding, defi ning, judging and all other degrees of Reason’.79 Just as the Anglican epistemology went hand-in-hand with doctrinal

62 John Henry minimalism, so the Royal Society tried to avoid any theoretical presuppositions. As Sprat pointed out, the society was ‘backward from settling of Principles, or fi xing upon Doctrines’. Indeed, he even went so far as to say, ‘[W]e should grant that they have wholly omitted Doctrines’.80 It is important to note that these parallelisms between the method of Anglicanism and the professed method of the Royal Society’s new philosophy was, at least for the leaders of the society, entirely self-conscious. Sprat, whose History of the Royal Society was closely supervised by John Wilkins, one of the society’s founder members, made it perfectly explicit: The present Inquiring Temper of this Age was at fi rst produc’d by the liberty of judging, and searching, and reasoning, which was us’d in the fi rst Reformation. Though I cannot carry the Institution of the Royal Society many years back, yet the seeds of it were sown in King Edward the Sixth’s and Queen Elizabeths Reign: And ever since that time Experimental Learning has still retaind some vital heat, though it wanted the opportunities of ripening itself, which now it injoys. The Church of England therefore may justly be styl’d the Mother of this sort of Knowledge; and so the care of its nourishment and prosperity peculiarly lyes upon it.81 Clearly, the ‘philosophical divinity’ of Digby and his mentor, Thomas White, did not fit into this Anglican mould. Admittedly, Digby was accepted as a fellow of the Society at its second election, only a fortnight after the Society’s fi rst ever meeting, and was fairly active as a fellow during its fi rst year or so. He read a paper on the vegetation of plants to the Society in January 1661, and this even became the fi rst formal publication authorised by the society.82 It is easy to see his election, however, as prompted by the society’s self-professed claim to ‘admit Men of all Religions’: ‘For they openly profess, not to lay the Foundation of an English, Scotch, Irish, Popish, or Protestant Philosophy; but a Philosophy of Mankind’.83 Digby was, after all, the most prominent Catholic natural philosopher working in England. It is hard to imagine the Society excluding him (whereas Thomas White was never elected). And yet there is some suggestive evidence that the leading members of the Society wished, nevertheless, to sideline Digby. Presumably this was precisely because his aim to use the new philosophy in the direct service of the Catholic counter-Reformation was so opposed to the Society’s general position. Given the difficulties the Society had with accusations that it was some kind of crypto-Catholic enclave, and given Digby’s reputation as a promoter of English Catholicism at all costs, we should certainly expect to see the Society trying to distance itself from Digby. Evidence that Digby was indeed being sidelined can be seen, I believe, in the correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, the Royal Society’s indefatigable secretary and intelligencer. Oldenburg’s correspondence was one of the most important ways in which the particular version of the experimental

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

63

philosophy developed by the Royal Society, and its ‘Baconian’ philosophy of science, was communicated to practising natural philosophers all over Europe.84 It seems, however, that where Digby was concerned Oldenburg forgot his role as an ‘intelligencer’ and was completely unhelpful in passing on any information about Digby and his work at all. A significant number of Oldenburg’s foreign correspondents mention Digby in glowing terms (presumably unaware of the liturgical background which marked Digby off from other English thinkers), but Oldenburg, if he replies, never comments on this part of his correspondent’s letter. When one of his correspondents tries to discuss an aspect of Digby’s ideas in detail, Oldenburg simply failed to respond at all. In a letter about ‘the worst sort of Monsters among us which are Witches’, the Ipswich clergyman, Cave Beck, wrote, ‘This and such like undoubted stories seems to favour ye Digbaean Hypothesis, & will exercise ye Curious among you to salve ye Phenomena besides ye service they may doe against ye Vitiosi of ye Saduces Invasions’.85 It would be interesting to know what Oldenburg thought about this, but we will never know. It is important to note, however, that Oldenburg would not have dismissed such stories out of hand as irrelevant to the Royal Society’s remit. On the contrary, Oldenburg’s mentor, Robert Boyle, shared Beck’s view that ghostly phenomena could be used as evidence of the existence of a spiritual realm, thus denying materialism (or Sadducism).86 In view of Boyle’s interest in this kind of phenomenon, it actually seems surprising that Oldenburg did not reply. It is at least possible, therefore, that Oldenburg remained silent because he and Boyle, and like-minded members of the Society, did not want to allow such arguments to be identified with Digby and his schemes to establish a reformed ecumenical Catholicism. When Oldenburg cannot ignore a reference to Digby, he engages in curt dismissal. When Philip Jacob Sachs wrote to Oldenburg, for example, asking, ‘Has the revivification of crabs by the illustrious Digby been confi rmed by experiments?’ Oldenburg replied that this question relates ‘in part to causes, and these we have hitherto refrained from determining, in part to matters of fact’. It seems clear to the disinterested reader that the question is entirely about a matter of fact—can crabs be revivified or not? So, Oldenburg’s reply seems disingenuous. What is more, with regard to that part of the question which Oldenburg acknowledged to be a matter of fact, he simply wrote, ‘[W]e leave to the illustrious author’. It was as if he was telling Sachs to take it up with Digby, but to not bother the Royal Society about such things.87 Foreign correspondents probably had little or no idea that Digby and his philosophy were regarded with some suspicion in his home country. When a British correspondent mentioned Digby, however, we can see something of the concern caused by his kind of ‘theologicophysicall considerations’. James Crawford (known only as a correspondent of Oldenburg and Malpighi), writing to Oldenburg from Venice in November 1674 (some nine

64 John Henry years after Digby’s death), was concerned about the news that Robert Boyle in his Excellency of Theology (1674) was attempting to reconcile reason and religion. Although Crawford approves of this endeavour in principle, he is worried that ‘the fruits there of will prove bitter’. In particular, Crawford sees danger in Boyle’s attempt, in an appendix, to give a natural philosophical account of the general resurrection. Indeed, Crawford seems to be of the opinion that this kind of philosophical theology can only lead to one conclusion, namely, that of both the Socinians and Digby, and which Crawford sees, of course, as erroneous. This is what he writes about Boyle’s account of the resurrection: I doe love the designe but fi nde it a task no less hard than dangerous. I know si pergama dextra [if we proceed rightly] etc it is he can doe it but as it is one of the Mysteries of the Christian religion wch hath most of intricacy so I think that the greatest length he can come must be but to the Socinians who will not admit of Idem corpus numericum [the same numerical body], which all other Christians hold generally . . . yet I should be heartily sorry to hear that they had any of the authority of that worthy name to confi rme them in their opinions. I know indeed that severall doctors have therein aggreed with them, and if I have not forgot our great Naturalist Sr Kennelme Digby doth also insinuate in his writings that it was his Judgement . . . but still I say the illuminal understanding of Mr Boyle and his undoubted integrity makes me lay asside all apprehensions of this kinde.88 It seems perfectly clear that, in spite of his faith in Boyle’s ‘undoubted integrity’, Crawford believed that a rational approach to the doctrine of resurrection could only lead to the Socinian position, or the counter-reforming Catholic position advanced by Digby—which on this issue at least amounted to the same thing.89 Perhaps Boyle had already come to the same fideistic conclusion, since he explicitly denied the Catholic arguments for the natural immortality of the soul. Although he accepted, with Digby, that it is possible to show the categorical distinction between soul and body, by demonstrating ‘operations of the rational soul which matter, however modified, cannot reach’, and that therefore the dissolution of the body cannot imply the destruction of the soul; Boyle insisted, against Digby, that, equally, this did not imply the natural immortality of the soul: ‘God may have so ordain’d . . . [Boyle wrote] That . . . the Soul of Man . . . shall be annihilated when it parts with the body, God withdrawing at death that supporting influence, which alone kept it from relapsing to its fi rst Nothing’.90 It is also surely significant that Boyle made it clear to his readers that the use of the mechanical philosophy to defend and promote the opposite view, about the natural immortality of the soul, was put forward not by Descartes, but by Digby. Exonerating Descartes, Boyle wrote,

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

65

And that you may not doubt of this, I will give you for it his own confession, as he freely writ it in a private Letter to that Admirable Lady, the Princess Elizabeth . . . who seems to have desir’d his opinion on that important Question, about which he sends her this Answer . . . As to the State of the Soul after this life, my knowledge of it is far inferiour to that of Monsieur (he means Sir Kenelm) Digby. For, setting aside that which Religion teaches us of it, I confess, that by mere Natural Reason we may indeed make many conjectures to our own advantage, and have fair Hopes, but not any Assurance.91 It seems, anyway, that Oldenburg’s way of dealing with queries which were explicitly concerned with Digby and his ideas contrasted markedly with his usual enthusiastic engagement with all matters arising from the latest ideas in natural philosophy. It is hard to understand this contrast other than as a deliberate attempt to distance the Society from the natural philosophy of Sir Kenelm Digby.

CONCLUSION Through his writings, White stands out as a major intellect of the seventeenth century, and it is easy to imagine that, had the historical circumstances in which he found himself been different, he might have been a considerable intellectual force. It is by no means difficult to fi nd evidence for the fact that White made a formidable reputation for himself among his contemporaries. Accepted into the circle of natural philosophers connected by the French Minim Friar, Marin Mersenne, White’s fi rst work of natural philosophy, De mundo, became well known to leading philosophers. Christian Huygens (1629–1695) sent a copy to Descartes, who expressed some approval for it. It was also known to Gassendi, Samuel Sorbière and Théodore Deschamps. Thomas Hobbes took it seriously enough to write a major examination and refutation of it.92 Thanks to his collaboration with Digby, White became well known as one of the leading proponents of the current crop of new philosophies, his name regularly appearing alongside those of Descartes and Gassendi.93 His eminence among his fellow Catholics is also obvious. He was president of the Colleges for English Catholics at Lisbon and at Douai for separate periods. He subsequently became a leading figure in the English Chapter and came close to being nominated Bishop of Chalcedon, which was the name given to the English Catholic Bishopric. He was well known to English theologians, although in this more sensitive area his contemporaries were cautious in their praise; he was, after all, well known to the Holy Office. His opponents in theological debate were usually willing to concede that, as well as being the intellectual leader of the English Catholics, he was a ‘learned’ man, and one worthy of esteem. Pierre Bayle included an article on him in his Dictionary, and Francis Blackburne,

66 John Henry author of a history of theories of the soul, judged that White examined the nature of the soul ‘with more precision and greater abilities than any man of his time’. 94 White was recognised in his own time, therefore, as a leading thinker, and yet there can be no denying that he was always very much an outsider. He was even further beyond the pale than his most devoted lay follower, Sir Kenelm Digby. Digby himself, in spite of being a thinker of great ingenuity and some originality, a pioneer in the development of the mechanical philosophy, an author with an international reputation and by all accounts a man of immense personal charm, could not prevail against the developing current in English natural philosophy and prevent himself, and his Roman Catholic philosophy, from also being relegated beyond the pale. As far as the main proponents of the new philosophy in England were concerned Digby must always be regarded as an outsider. This was not just because he was a Roman Catholic. Had Digby been an English Catholic Cartesian, promoting the philosophy of the great French philosopher, he might well have been regarded as a worthy contributor to the intellectual life of Restoration England. The point is that, although Cartesianism was developed by a Roman Catholic thinker, its Roman Catholicism was not built into it the way, say, its Copernicanism was.95 Cartesianism could be, and to some extent was, embraced by English Protestant thinkers.96 The same could not be said of Digby’s natural philosophy as presented in the Two Treatises. The all too explicit purpose of the Treatise on Body, to underwrite the claims of the Treatise on the Soul that the soul was immortal by its very nature, would have been recognised straight away as an attempt to use natural philosophy to promote Roman Catholic dogma. Once this philosophy came to be seen as part and parcel of the wider aims of the Blackloists to reinstate Catholicism in England, this was more than enough to ensure that Digby’s philosophy was seen to be unsafe. At a time when mainstream English philosophers were trying to dissociate themselves from all attempts to use natural philosophy to promote particular religious views, Digby would have been seen to be running against the stream, and to be doing so in a dangerous way. In England, therefore, Digby was seen to be not so much a mechanical philosopher as a Roman Catholic machinator. NOTES 1. Sir Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises in the One of Which the Nature of Bodies; in the Other the Nature of Men’s Soule Is Looked into: In Way of Discovery of the Immortality of Reasonable Souls (Paris, 1644); René Descartes, Principia philosophiae (Paris, 1644). On Digby, see Robert T. Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby: The Ornament of England, 1603–1665 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956). 2. Digby’s name crops up a few times in Descartes’ correspondence. See, for example, René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 of The

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

3.

4.

5.

6.

67

Correspondence, selected and trans. by John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 105, 251, 277. Digby receives no mention in four of the most recent introductory surveys of the Scientific Revolution: James R. Jacob, The Scientific Revolution: Aspirations and Achievements, 1500–1700 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1998); Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999); Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001); and Wilbur Applebaum, The Scientific Revolution and the Foundations of Modern Science (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004). There is a single reference to Digby in a footnote, but none in the text, of Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Even John Henry’s The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001) only makes two brief mentions of Digby, and this author has a particular interest in Digby! In the older introductory literature on the Scientific Revolution there is no mention of Digby at all in Allen G. Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), or in I. Bernard Cohen, The Birth of a New Physics (London: Heinemann, 1961). There is only one passing mention in R. S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). There are five mentions of Digby in A. Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science 1500–1750 (London: Longman, 1983), but three of them are passing references (90, 221, 279) and two are actually brief dismissals of his significance to the history of the Scientific Revolution (91, 200)! Literature on Hobbes is vast (an indication in itself that he is, historiographically speaking, very much an insider), but consider, for example, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Tom Sorell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Howard Fertig, 1970); Barbara J. Shapiro, ‘Latitudinariansim and Science in Seventeenth-Century England’, The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974) 286–316; Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975); James R. Jacob and Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The Anglican Origins of Modern Science: The Metaphysical Foundations of the Whig Constitution’, Isis 71 (1980): 251–267; Lotte Mulligan, ‘Puritans and English Science: A Critique of Webster’, Isis 71 (1980): 457–469; John Henry, ‘England’, The Scientific Revolution in National Context, ed. R. Porter and M. Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 178–210; Lewis Feuer, The Scientific Intellectual: The Psychological and Sociological Origins of Modern Science (New York: Basic Books, 1963). Marsilio Ficino had fi nished his translation of Plato’s dialogues in 1469. The ruling on the immortality of the soul was a direct result of discussions at the eighth session of the fi fth Lateran Council. Pope Leo X issued a Bull (Apostolici regimis) which affi rmed the natural immortality of the soul, against those who upheld the conditional immortality of man. See H. J. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils (St Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1937) 483–487. See also Eckhard Kessler, ‘The Intellective Soul’, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 485–534, 495; and

68

John Henry

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

Emily Michael, ‘Renaissance Theories of Body, Soul, and Mind’, Psyche and Soma: Physicians and Metaphysicians on the Mind-Body Problem from Antiquity to Enlightenment, ed. John P. Wright and Paul Potter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) 147–172, 153. Sir Kenelm Digby, Observations upon Religio medici (London, 1643, but dated 23 December 1642). This work is often reprinted in editions of Thomas Browne’s Religio medici (London, 1643); I have used the edition edited by Henry Morley (London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1886) 145. The comment about ‘his favour’ is, of course, a reference to Thomas Browne. Digby, Two Treatises sig. ũ. Descartes was about to publish his new system of natural philosophy, intended to replace the scholastic Aristotelian system lock, stock and barrel, when he heard of the condemnation of Galileo for upholding the Copernican system, which was integral to Descartes’ own system. See Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) 290–292; and Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 43–51. Digby, Two Treatises Preface, sig. õv. Digby, Two Treatises Preface, sig. õv. On this tradition in medieval natural philosophy, see, for example, David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and God and Reason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On Digby’s Aristotelianism, see Dorothea Krook, John Sergeant and His Circle: A Study of Three Seventeenth-Century English Aristotelians (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993); and Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby. Petersson points out that, after Thomas White (to be introduced shortly), Digby cites Aristotle more than any other authority in his Two Treatises. See Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby 188; see also 342, where he provides a convenient and comprehensive list of all Digby’s Aristotle citations. Robert I. Bradley, ‘Blacklo and the Counter-Reformation: An Inquiry into the Strange Death of Catholic England’, From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honour of Garrett Mattingley, ed. C. H. Carter (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966). J. C. H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London, 1976) 115; and Philip Hughes, Rome and the Counter-Reformation in England (London, 1942) 398, footnote. For a full account of the life and work of White, see Beverley C. Southgate, ‘Covetous of Truth’: The Life and Work of Thomas White, 1593–1676 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1993); and Bradley, ‘Blacklo and the Counter-Reformation’. Thomas White, An Apology for Rushworth’s Dialogues (Paris, 1654) 8, and An Answer to the Lord Faulklands Discourse of Infallibility (London, 1660) 5. John Tillotson, The Rule of Faith, or, An Answer to the Treatise of Mr. I. S. Entitled Sure-Footing, &c., 4th ed., The Works of the Most Reverend Dr John Tillotson, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: Containing Fifty Four Sermons and Discourses, On Several Occasions. Together with the Rule of Faith. Being All that were Published by his Grace Himself. And now Collected into One Volume (London, 1696) 665–779, 684. White was censured by the Holy Office in 1655, 1657, 1661 and 1663. See Bradley, ‘Blacklo and the Counter-Reformation’ 363.

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

69

17. Sir Kenelm Digby, Conference with a Lady about Choice of Religion (Paris, 1638) 109–110. The Lady in question was Frances, Lady Purbeck (1599– 1645). 18. John Sergeant, A Letter to the D[ean] of [St] P[aul’s] in Answer to the Arguing Part of His First Letter to Mr. [Thomas] G[odden] (London, 1687) 27–28. 19. In March 1639. See George Digby, Letters between the Lord George Digby, and Sir Kenelm Digby Knight, Concerning Religion (London, 1651) 85. 20. William Chillingworth, A Discourse Concerning Tradition, in The Works of William Chillingworth, M.A. of the University of Oxford, Containing his Book, entitl’d, The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation: together with his Nine Sermons (London, 1719) 33–37; Tillotson, The Rule of Faith 674. See also Jeremy Taylor, Treatises of 1. The Liberty of Prophesying. 2. Prayer ex Tempore. 3. Episcopacie (London, 1648) 83–85; and Henry Hammond, The Dispatcher Dispatched. Or, an Examination of the Romanists Rejoynder to the replies of D.H.: Being a Third Defence of the Treatise of Schisme. Wherein is inserted a View of their Possession and Orall Tradition in the way of M. White (London, 1659) 210. 21. Lucius Cary et al., A Discourse of Infallibility, with Mr White’s Answer to It, and a Reply to Him, 2nd ed. (London, 1660) 71–73. 22. Digby, Two Treatises 432. 23. Digby, Two Treatises 445. 24. Digby, Two Treatises 449. 25. Thomas White, The Middle State of Souls from the Hour of Death to the Day of Judgement (n.p., 1659) 259–260. 26. Thomas White, Apology for Rushworth’s Dialogues (Paris, 1654) 64–66. 27. White, An Answer to the Lord Falklands Discourse of Infallibility 5. 28. Thomas White, Tabula suffragiales determinandis fi dei ab ecclesia catholicae fi xae (London, 1655). 29. Robin Briggs, ‘The Catholic Puritans: Jansenists and Rigorists in France’, Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill, ed. D. Pennington and K. Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) 333–354; now reprinted in R. Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 339–363; P. Chaunu, ‘Jansénisme et frontière de catholicité (XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles): A propos du Jansénisme lorrain’, Revue Historique 227 (1962): 115–138. 30. Digby, Conference with a Lady about Choice of Religion 23–24. 31. Digby, Observations upon Religio medici, in Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London 1886) 145. 32. The beginnings of Digby’s system can be seen in Thomas White, De mundo dialogi tres (Paris, 1642), but it appeared fully fledged in Digby’s Two Treatises. White’s own account of the full system fi rst appeared in Institutionem peripateticarum (London, 1646) and was translated into English ten years later: Peripateticall institutions (London, 1656). It is possible that this original system of natural philosophy was developed by Digby, but he and White seemed so close during this period, and White was so obviously the dominant intellectual force that it seems hard not to suppose that White played a major role. For a discussion of the significance of Digby’s and White’s natural philosophy, see John Henry, ‘Atomism and Eschatology: Catholicism and Natural Philosophy in the Interregnum’, British Journal for the History of Science 15 (1982): 211–239. But see also K. Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittlealter bis Newton, vol. 2 (Hamburg and Leipzig, 1890) 188– 207; R. H. Kargon, Atomism in England from Harriot to Newton (Oxford:

70 John Henry

33.

34.

35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

Oxford University Press, 1966) 70–73; and B. J. T. Dobbs, ‘Studies in the Natural Philosophy of Sir Kenelm Digby’, Ambix 18 (1971): 1–25; 20 (1973): 143–63; and 21 (1974): 1–28. Digby, Observations upon Religio medici, in Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London, 1886) 150–151. Digby refers to White’s De mundo. For further indications of how much Digby felt indebted to White, see Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby 224. Strictly speaking it should be called Aristotelian corpuscularism, since Digby did not believe the invisibly small particles he invoked in his physics were indivisible. Nevertheless, Digby himself referred to them as atoms (see quotation at next note), so we can. Digby, Two Treatises 343. Digby is drawing upon what is usually called the minima naturalia tradition in scholastic Aristotelianism. See Andrew G. Van Melsen, From Atomos to Atom: The History of the Concept Atom (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960) 41–44, 58–77; Emily Michael, ‘Daniel Sennert on Matter and Form: At the Juncture of the Old and the New’, Early Science and Medicine 11 (1997): 272–299; and John Murdoch, ‘The Medieval and Renaissance Tradition of Minima Naturalia’, Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theory, ed. Christoph Lüthy, John Murdoch and William Newman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001) 91–131. Thomas White, An Exclusion of Scepticks from All Title to Dispute: Being an Answer to the Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1665) 52. See the quotation from Digby’s Two Treatises at note 11. See Southgate, ‘Covetous of Truth’ especially 66–82; and Krook, John Sergeant and His Circle especially 41–66. For a convenient discussion of Aristotelian intentions, see Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientifi c Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also William A. Wallace, ‘Traditional Natural Philosophy’, Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 201–235. R. H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); H. G. van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought, 1630–1690 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963); Charles Webster, ‘Henry More and Descartes: Some New Sources’, British Journal for the History of Science 4 (1969): 359–377. The English disapproval of claims to certainty was so strong, according to one historian, that even Cartesianism was interpreted probabilistically. See Larry Laudan, ‘The Clock Metaphor and Probabilism: The Impact of Descartes on English Methodological Thought, 1650–65’, Annals of Science 22 (1966): 73–104. But see also G. A. J. Rogers, ‘Descartes and the Method of English Science’, Annals of Science 29 (1972): 237–255, which shows English disapproval of Cartesian claims to certainty. But see also Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See, for example, T. M. Lennon, J. M. Nicholas and J. W. Davis, eds., Problems of Cartesianism (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982); and Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump. John Sergeant, The Method to Science (London, 1696) sig. d6r–d6v. On Sergeant, see Krook, John Sergeant and His Circle. John Sergeant, The Method to Science sig. d5v. R. Pugh, Blacklo’s Cabal Discovered in Several of Their Letters: Clearly Experssing Designs Inhumane against Regulars, Uniust against the Laity, Scismatical against [sic] the Pope, Cruel against Orthodox Clergy Men and

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52.

53.

54.

71

Ovvning the Nullity of the Chapter, their Opposition of Episcopall Authority ([Douay?], 1680). ‘The Epistle to the Catholic Reader’. S. W. A Vindication of the Doctrine Contained in Pope Benedict XII, His Bull and in the General Council of Florence under Eugenius the IIII Concerning the State of Departed Souls. (Paris, 1659) 8. Thomas White, Religion and Reason Mutually Corresponding and Assisting Each Other. First Essay. A Reply to the Vindictive Answer Lately Publisht against a Letter, in Which the Sence of a Bull and Council Concerning the Duration of Purgatory Was Discust (Paris, 1660) 25. This was a reply to S. W., A Vindication of the Doctrine. Charles B. Schmitt, John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Montreal and Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983). Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651) Part 4, Chap. 46, 370. Henry Stubbe, A Censure upon Certain Passages Contained in the History of the Royal Society (Oxford, 1670) 13. On Henry Holden and Serenus (Hugh Paulinus) Cressy, both sometime followers of White, see George H. Tavard, The Seventeenth-Century Tradition: A Study in Recusant Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978); A. F. Allison, ‘An English Gallican: Henry Holden (to 1648)’, Recusant History 22 (1994–1995): 319–349; and J. Le Brun, ‘L’Institution dans la théologie de Henry Holden’, Recherche de Sciences Religieuses 71 (1983): 191–202. On Henry Stubbe, see James R. Jacob, Henry Stubbe: Radical Protestantism and the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Henry Stubbe, The Plus Ultra Reduced to a Non Plus (London, 1670) 161. On Digby’s reputation among his contemporaries for mendacity, see Elizabeth Hedrick, ‘Romancing the Salve: Sir Kenelm Digby and the Powder of Sympathy’, British Journal for the History of Science 41 (2007) 161–185. Henry Stubbe, Campanella Reviv’d, or, An Enquiry into the History of the Royal Society, Whether the Virtuosi There Do Not Pursue the Projects of Campanella for the Reducing England unto Popery (London, 1670). Thomas Barlow, The Genuine Remains of that Learned Prelate Dr. Thomas Barlow, late Lord Bishop of Lincoln: containing Divers Discourses Theological, Philosophical, Historical, &c. (London, 1693) 157, quoted in Michael R. G. Spiller, ‘Concerning Natural Experimental Philosophie’: Meric Casaubon and the Royal Society (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980) 30. This was delivered as part of a new programme of ‘experimental entertainment’ designed to stimulate new interest in the Society in the 1670s. Petty’s contribution to this lecture programme was published as the Discourse Made before the Royal Society, the 26 November 1674. Concerning the Use of Duplicate Proportion in Sundry Important Particulars: Together with a new Hypothesis of Springing or Elastique Motions (London, 1674). Letter from Joseph Glanvill to Henry Oldenburg, 31 January 1670, in Henry Oldenburg, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. A. R. and M. B. Hall, vol. 6 1669–1670(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969) 456. Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing, or, Confi dence in Opinions Manifested in a Discourse of the Shortness and Uncertainty of Our Knowledge (London, 1661); Scepsis scientifica, or, Confest Ignorance, the Way to Science. With a Reply [entitled Scire/i tuum nihil est] to the Exceptions of the Learned Thomas Albius (London, 1665); Thomas White, Sciri, sive Sceptices & scepticorum jure disputationis exclusio (London, 1663). On this dispute, and White’s opposition to scepticism, see Southgate, ‘Covetous of Truth’ 66–82. R. Ferrar, ‘Digby (Sir Kenelme)’, Biographia Britannica, or, The Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who Have Flourished in Great Britain and Ireland,

72 John Henry

55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

from the Earliest Ages, Down to the Present Times, vol. 3 (London, 1747– 1766) 184–199, 193. Thomas White, The Grounds of Obedience and Government (London, 1655). Edward Hyde, A Letter from a True and Lawful Member of Parliament, and One faithfully Engaged with it, from the Beginning of the War to the End (London, 1656) 65. R. Ferrar, ‘Digby (Sir Kenelme)’ 194. Digby’s father, Sir Everard Digby, was one of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. For more on the political dimensions of Blackloism, see Henry, ‘Atomism and Eschatology’; Southgate, ‘Covetous of Truth’ 42–65, and ‘“That Damned Booke”: The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655), and the Downfall of Thomas White’, Recusant History 17 (1984–1985): 238–253; Agostino Lupoli, ‘La Filosofia politica di Thomas White’, Miscellanea Secentesca: Saggi su Descartes, Fabri, White (Milan: Cisalpino-Goliardica, 1987); Neil Kamil, Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics, and Material Life in the Hugeuenots’s New World, 1517–1715 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) 492–497; and Stefania Tutino, Thomas White and the Blackloists: Between Politics and Theology during the English Civil War (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008). This story is told by Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, vol. 2 (London, 1691–1692) column 665. See George H. Willams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992); Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Quoted from Bernard M. G. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Reformation (London: Longman, 1981) 260. On the Great Tew Circle, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Great Tew Circle’, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1987) 166– 230; H. R. McAdoo, The Spirit of Anglicanism: A Survey of Anglican Theological Method in the Seventeenth Century (London: A. & C. Black, 1965) 1–23; R. R. Orr, Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); J. W. Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism, 1643–1660, with Special Reference to Henry Hammond (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1969). On Bucer and his influence, see C. Hopf, Martin Bucer and the English Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946); and David F. Wright, ed., Martin Bucer: Reforming Church and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Quoted from Victor D. Sutch, Gilbert Sheldon, Architect of Anglican Survival, 1640–1675 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973) 5. Thomas Vaughan, Anima magica abscondita (London, 1650), The Works, ed. A. E. Waite (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1919) 86. Chillingworth, Works 34; Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, or, The Rule of Conscience (London, 1660) 231. Chillingworth, Works 34; Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor, D.D., Lord Bishop of Down, Connor, and Dromore, edited by Reginald Heber, 15 vols (London, 1828). 356, quoted in McAdoo, Spirit of Anglicanism 53. See Lotte Mulligan, ‘“Reason”, “Right Reason”, and “Revelation” in mid-Seventeenth-Century England’, Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 375–401; and Henry, ‘England’. For a survey of anti-Trintarianism, see Maurice Wiles, Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

73

67. H. F. Kearney, ‘Puritanism and Science: Problems of Defi nition’, The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974) 254–261, see 256. 68. McAdoo, Spirit of Anglicanism. 69. Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), has argued for a plurality of Aristotelianisms. I do not deny that there were many different refinements of Aristotelianism which could be said, therefore, to give rise to many different versions of Aristotelianism. Nevertheless, for the most part these were all seen as paying court to Aristotle, seeking to shore up the original, rather than as real alternatives. 70. See the earlier discussion of this at notes 49–54. 71. P. M. Rattansi, ‘Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution’, Ambix 11 (1963): 24–32; Hugh Trevor Roper, ‘The Paracelsian Movement’, Renaissance Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1985) 149–199; and Peter Forshaw, ‘Vitriolic Reactions: Orthodox Responses to the Alchemical Exegesis of Genesis’, The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, ed. Kevin Killeen and P. J. Forshaw (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007) 111–136. 72. The conspiracy thesis that the new philosophies were intended to distract the learned while Jesuits and others inveigled their way back into England was attributed to Tomasso Campanella. Hence the title of one of Henry Stubbe’s attacks on the Royal Society, Campanella Reviv’d, or, An Enquiry into the History of the Royal Society, Whether the Virtuosi There Do Not Pursue the Projects of Campanella for the Reducing England unto Popery (London, 1670). 73. See, Paul B. Wood, ‘Methodology and Apologetics: Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society’, British Journal for the History of Science 13 (1980): 1–26; Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump; Peter Dear, ‘Totius in verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society’, Isis 76 (1985): 145–161; Henry, ‘The Scientific Revolution in England’, and ‘National Styles in Science: A Factor in the Scientific Revolution?’, Geography and Revolution, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 43–74. 74. For alternative accounts of the rise of the concept of objectivity in ‘science’, see Lorraine Daston, ‘Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective’, Social Studies of Science 22 (1992): 597–618; and Peter Dear, ‘From Truth to Disinterestedness in the Seventeenth Century’, Social Studies of Science, 22 (1992): 619–631; Allan Megill, ed., Rethinking Objectivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); and Perez Zagorin, ‘Francis Bacon’s Concept of Objectivity and the Idols of the Mind’, British Journal for the History of Science 34 (2001): 379–393. 75. The importance of restricting the society to a concern only with matters of fact is made explicit in Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. J. I. Cope and H. W. Jones (St Louis, MO: Washington University Press, 1958), which was fi rst published in 1667; see 99, 334. The only example Bacon himself ever provided concerned the nature of heat. Having compiled extensive ‘Tables of Discovery’, detailing all the ways in which heat was produced, and many ways in which it was not, Bacon concluded that motion was always involved in the production of heat, and so concluded that heat must be associated with motion. See Francis Bacon, Novum organum (London, 1620), Part 2, Aphorism 20. 76. On the background to this, see Wood, ‘Methodology and Apologetics’; Dear, ‘Totius in verba’; Henry, ‘The Scientific Revolution in England’; John Henry, ‘The Origins of Modern Science: Henry Oldenburg’s Contribution’, British Journal for the History of Science 21 (1988): 103–110. See also Iordan

74 John Henry

77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

82.

83. 84.

85.

86.

87.

Avramov, ‘Letter Writing and the Management of Scientific Controversy: The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg’, Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times, ed. Toon van Houdt et al. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002) 337–363; and Sprat, History of the Royal Society. On Boyle, see RoseMary Sargent, The Diffi dent Naturalist: Robert Boyle and the Philosophy of Experiment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Peter Anstey, The Philosophy of Robert Boyle (London: Routledge, 2000). On this, see Steven Shapin, ‘Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology’, Social Studies of Science 14 (1984): 481–520. On Oldenburg’s use of this claim to neutrality, see Henry, ‘Origins of Modern Science’; Sprat, History of the Royal Society; Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies . . . with Observations and Inquiries thereupon (London, 1665), ‘To the Royal Society’, sig. A2v. Isaac Newton’s famous insistence that he does not ‘feign’ hypotheses appears in the ‘General Scholium’ which he added to the second edition of his Philosophiae naturalis pricipia mathematica (London, 1713). For the intellectual background to this remark, see John Henry, ‘Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy: Active Principles in pre-Newtonian Matter Theory’, History of Science 24 (1986): 335–381; and Alan E. Shapiro, ‘Newton’s “Experimental Philosophy”’, Early Science and Medicine 9 (2004): 185–217. Walter Charleton, A Ternary of Paradoxes (London, 1615), sig. f2r. Hooke, Micrographia, sig. av. Sprat, History of the Royal Society 107. For similar comments, see also, for example, 31–32 and 62. Sprat, History of the Royal Society 372. The extent of the supervision of Sprat’s history is disputed. See Michael Hunter, ‘Latitudinarianism and the “Ideology” of the Early Royal Society: Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) Reconsidered’, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1989) 45–71. Sir Kenelm Digby, A Discourse Concerning the Vegetation of Plants. Spoken by Sir Kenelme Digby at Gresham College, on the 23 of January, 1660. At a Meeting of the Society for Promoting Philosophical Knowledge by Experiments (London, 1661). Sprat, History of the Royal Society 63. Henry, ‘Origins of Modern Science’; Michael Hunter, ‘Promoting the New Science: Henry Oldenburg and the Early Royal Society’, Establishing the New Science: The Experience of the Early Royal Society (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1989) 245–260; Avramov, ‘Letter Writing and the Management of Scientific Controversy’. Cave Beck to Oldenburg, August 15, 1668, in Henry Oldenburg, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. and trans. A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, vol. 5 1668–1669 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 14–16, at 16. Michael Hunter, ‘Magic, Science and Reputation: Robert Boyle, the Royal Society and the Occult in the late Seventeenth Century’, Robert Boyle (1627–91): Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000) 223–250. Philip Jacob Sachs to Oldenburg, 12 January 1664–1665, in Henry Oldenburg, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. and trans. A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, vol. 2 1663–1665 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin

Sir Kenelm Digby, Recusant Philosopher

88.

89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95.

96.

75

Press 1966), 342–344, at 344 (translated at 346); Oldenburg to Sachs, 30 May 1665; vol. 2, 399–400, at 400 (translated at 401). James Crawford to Oldenburg, October 30, 1674, in Henry Oldenburg, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. and trans. A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall, vol. 11 May 1674–September 1675; Letters 2490–2754 (London: Mansell, 1977) 119. The editors of Oldenburg’s Correspondence vol. 11, 120, Rupert and Marie Boas Hall, note that ‘Crawford seems confused here; Kenelm Digby as a Catholic can hardly have agreed with the Unitarian views of the Socinians!’ Crawford’s point, which the Halls seem to have missed, is that the Socinians and Digby both sought to establish doctrine on the basis of reason, rather than (as Crawford saw it, at least) on revelation. For a discussion of the role of reason in Blackloist theology, see B. C. Southgate, ‘“A Philosophical Divinity”: Thomas White and an Aspect of Mid-Seventeenth-Century Science and Religion’, History of European Ideas 8 (1987): 45–59. Robert Boyle, The Excellency of Theology, Compar’d with Natural Philosophy (1674), The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, vol. 8 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000) 23. Robert Boyle, The Excellency of Theology, Works, vol. 8, 24. For a translation of the original letter by Descartes, see Descartes, Philosophical Writings vol. 3, 277. See Southgate, ‘Covetous of Truth’ 8; Thomas Hobbes, Thomas White’s De Mundo Examined, ed. and trans. H. W. Jones (London: Bradford University Press, 1976). See Southgate, ‘Covetous of Truth’ 8–9; Henry, ‘Atomism and Eschatology’ 229–230. Pierre Bayle, Dictionary, trans. P. Des Maizeaux, vol. 1 (London, 1734–1738) 358–359. Francis Blackburne, An Historical View of the Controversy Concerning an Intermediate State and the Separate Existence of the Soul between the Death and the General Resurrection, Deduced from the Beginning of the Protestant Reformation to the Present Times (London, 1772) 134. Recall that Descartes suppressed his Le monde after he heard of the condemnation of Galileo’s Copernicanism, because his own system was ineluctably Copernican; see note 10. Moreover, Cartesianism was itself seen to be incompatible with the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. See Nicholas Jolley, ‘The Reception of Descartes’ Philosophy’, The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 393–423. Although, arguably, Gassendi was more influential in England than Descartes. But if this is so, it was not due to a difference in their perceived Catholicity, but in their epistemologies. See Rogers, ‘Descartes and the Method of English Science’; Alan Gabbey, ‘Philosophia Cartesiana Triumphata: Henry More, 1646–71’, Problems of Cartesianism, ed. T. M. Lennon, J. M. Nicholas and J. W. Davis (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982) 171–249; Peter Harrison, ‘The Influence of Cartesian Cosmology in England’, Descartes’ Natural Philosophy, ed. Stephen GaukrogerJohn Schuster and John Sutton (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) 168– 192; and Henry, ‘Occult Qualities and the Experimental Philosophy’.

3

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy Stephen Pigney

Philosophical canon formation depends, in part at least, on historiography of philosophy.1 Historians of philosophy consider such questions as which thinkers count as philosophers and which texts count as philosophical works, and they make judgements on the relative significance of those thinkers and texts. One sense of ‘outsiderness’ concerns the position of a particular thinker in relation to the philosophical canon: whether that thinker is central to, marginal to or outside the canon. That numerous early modern philosophers have been subject to fluctuating fortunes in this respect—Bacon, Hobbes and Spinoza are particularly obvious examples— suggests that the question of where a philosopher is situated in relation to the canon is open as much to historical as to philosophical analysis. Since there has never been a wholly fi xed, timeless philosophical canon, it becomes an interesting question, and one as much to do with history and historiography as with philosophy, why certain thinkers at one time are central to the canon, at other times not. Any inquiry into a particular philosopher’s place in the canon ought to include consideration of a whole range of ‘non-philosophical’ texts and topics—for example, biographies, philosophical dictionaries, the history of printing and the history of education—that concern the way that thinker’s philosophy has been presented (or ‘sold’) and received at different times and in different contexts. Just as historians need to be conscious of historiography, and literary scholars have increasingly moved to a historicist understanding of texts, so philosophers, in that they engage with past texts and thinkers, should also be sensitive to similar historiographical and historicist concerns. In particular, since histories of philosophy are an important part of canon formation, it is important also to understand philosophical historiography and the history of the history of philosophy. The early modern period is especially interesting for the study of historiography of philosophy—and by extension the question of canon formation—since histories of philosophy, as a distinct genre, may be said to have emerged in the mid-seventeenth century. The fi rst use of the Latin term historia philosophica to denote ‘history of philosophy’ seems to have

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy 77 occurred in 1643, in a history of Roman philosophy by the Italian scholar Paganino Gaudenzio. 2 Shortly afterwards the fi rst works bearing the title ‘history of philosophy’ appeared: Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy and Georg Horn’s Historia philosophica, both published in 1655, in London and Leiden, respectively. And in 1659, the publication in Frankfurt of Johannes Jonsius’s De scriptoribus historiæ philosophicæ seemed to confi rm the arrival of historiography of philosophy. In addition to these works, the second half of the seventeenth century saw the publication of several other histories of philosophy, so that by the time Jacob Brucker compiled his monumental Historia critica philosophiæ (1742–1744) he was contributing to a well-established scholarly genre.3 That the fi rst histories of philosophy should have appeared at the same as works now seen to mark the beginning of modern philosophy was not coincidental. As the traditional understanding of philosophy’s past was repeatedly challenged and sometimes rejected, so many writers, for various reasons, turned to the study of that past: to reassess it, to defend it, to use it against the ‘new philosophy’ and to revive a dormant philosophical tradition. It was frequently to history that thinkers turned when confronted by the challenges to philosophy posed by the vigorous theological controversies and scientific advances of the age. Early modern histories of philosophy are important for understanding these topics, and promise to be fertile areas of research. In what follows I shall consider one seventeenth-century historian of philosophy, the nonconformist theologian and philosopher Theophilus Gale (1628–1679), whose Court of the Gentiles (4 vols., 1669–1678; 2nd ed., 1672–1678) was one of the most ambitious philosophical and historiographical enterprises of the age.

I From his birth in the geographical margins of Kingsteignton in Devon to his posthumous obscurity, Gale was unquestionably an ‘outsider’. As a religious nonconformist, his scholarly activity largely took place outside the established institutional milieu. Nevertheless, during the Interregnum he built a promising university career: he was appointed tutor in logic at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1652; in 1657 he was made Junior Dean of Arts; and in 1658 he became Senior Dean of Arts. Prominent within Independent religious circles—he was close to the two leading lights of religious Independency, John Owen (1616–1683) and Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680)—his unwavering adherence to his theological beliefs and refusal to submit to the Act of Uniformity (1662) resulted in ejection from his university post. Henceforth he became a private tutor, establishing a dissenting academy in Newington Green, and a nonconformist preacher at an Independent congregation in Holborn, and he embarked on a remarkably productive period of scholarly activity that resulted in the publication of several works from

78

Stephen Pigney

1669 until his death. Among them are devotional treatises, a spiritual biography, theological and philosophical textbooks and the fi rst study in English of Jansenism.4 Standing out in his corpus was The Court of the Gentiles, a vast treatise defying easy categorisation.5 In part philosophical and theological treatise, in part history of philosophy, in part comprehensive intellectual history, perhaps it is best described as a theologico-philosophical history. Even by contemporary polymath standards, The Court of the Gentiles is remarkable for its breadth of scholarship, scope of argument and sheer prolixity; its description as ‘marvellously erudite, endlessly fascinating and largely misguided’ has some justification.6 The central theme of the work, announced by its subtitle, is the demonstration of ‘the original of human literature, both philologie and philosophie, from the scriptures and Jewish Church’. Gale maintained that prelapsarian wisdom, a divine product of the Creation, was preserved in some form among the Jews after the Fall, and that all subsequent learning was indebted to this Jewish learning and, by extension, its divine original. This was not a new theory. As a means to accommodate pagan thought within Christian doctrine and to explain the historical relationship between paganism and Christianity, the theory was commonplace in late antique and patristic writings: Gale refers to expositions of it by Tertullian, Josephus, Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, Augustine, John Philoponus, Justin Martyr, Theodoret and Ambrose.7 Later scholars, particularly in the Renaissance, took up the theory: most prominent were those working in the prisca theologia tradition, as exemplified by Marsilio Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (1463) and treatise on the immortality of the soul, the Theologia platonica (1469–1474),8 and by the Augustinian theologian and biblical exegete, Agostino Steuco, whose De perenni philosophia (1540) provides perhaps the outstanding Renaissance example of this historiographical thesis.9 Gale was familiar with these Renaissance precursors, citing Steuco frequently and approvingly, but making only sparing reference to Ficino, perhaps conscious of the awkward relationship between Hermeticism, to which Gale did not subscribe, and orthodox Christian historiography. Despite growing scepticism over some of the traditional arguments of this ‘ancient wisdom’ theory, notably concerning the authenticity of the Hermetic corpus,10 it retained currency in the seventeenth century, as Gale’s acknowledgment of numerous contemporary writers pursuing a similar theme indicates. Indeed, it was from a passage in a mainstream and popular work of Protestant theology, Hugo Grotius’s De veritate religionis Christianæ (1622), that Gale took the immediate cue for his own development of the theory: [T]he Grecians, whence al Learning was diffused amongst the Nations, confesse, that they received their Leters elsewhere, which Leters of theirs have the same ancient Order, name, and fashion or draught,

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy 79 with those of the Syriac or Hebrew. As the ancient Attic Laws (whence the Roman Laws were also afterward derived) had their original from Moses’s Laws.11 That this theory appealed across a broad denominational spectrum is clear from three other theologians singled out by Gale as precedents: the Puritan, John Preston (1587–1628); the Anglican, Thomas Jackson (1579–1640); and the ‘latitudinarian’, Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699).12 Preston, in his Life Eternall (1631), maintained that scriptural truth could be confi rmed ‘from the testimonies that are given to them by our enemies; the Gentiles themselves being Iudges’;13 Jackson’s Commentaries upon the Apostles’ Creed posited a similar argument: Truth is the life and nutriment of the world, and the Scriptures as the Veins or Vessels wherein it is contained; which straight corrupts and putrifies, vnlesse it be preserued in them, as in it proper receptacles, as both the fabulous conceits of the Heathen and foolish practises of the Romish Church in many points may witnesse. But as from Asphaltites, or the dead sea, we may fi nde out the pleasant streames and fresh springs of Iordan: so from the degenerate and corrupted rellish of decayed truth, which is frequent in the puddle and standing lakes of Heathen Writers, we may be led into the pure fountaine of truth contained in these sacred volumes of Scripture.14 However, of the various works referred to by Gale, the closest in spirit to The Court of the Gentiles was Stillingfleet’s Origines sacræ (1662), a treatise setting out ‘a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith, as to the Truth and Divine Authority of the Scriptures’ with a view to countering the use of ancient history as proof against biblical truth.15 With regard to philosophy, Stillingfleet argued that the Greeks, notwithstanding their ‘humour of innovating in Philosophy’, had drawn their thought from scriptural wisdom, corrupting that wisdom in the process.16 But in Platonism, and especially late antique and early Christian Neoplatonism, he saw a restoration of philosophy, believing that ‘it is more then probable . . . that whatever is truly generous and noble in the sublimist discourses of the Platonists, had not only its primitive rise, but its accession and improvement from the Scriptures’.17 The similarities between the arguments of Gale and Stillingfleet are many, not least of which was a shared admiration for Platonism: although not associated with the loose group that subsequently came to be known as the Cambridge Platonists, Gale can be placed fi rmly within the general English Platonist movement of the age. But he differed sharply from Stillingfleet (and, more generally, from the prisca theologia writers such as Ficino) on the New Academy, arguing instead that, rather than restored wisdom, it was heresy that emerged from the Greek Fathers of the Alexandrian school, who, desiring to increase

80 Stephen Pigney the reputation of Christian theology, mixed ‘some of the purer and more reformed parts of the Pythagorean and Platonic Philosophie [with Christianity], to the great prejudice, yea corruption thereof, which Antichrist afterwards makes use of for the exaltation of his throne’. In many respects The Court of the Gentiles might be seen as a response to the exaltation of Neoplatonism common in other works, such as the Origines sacræ, which can otherwise be considered within the same tradition—it was a Platonist critique of Neoplatonism.18 Gale also departed from many of his precursors in attempting more thoroughly to ground his argument on a Reformed historiographical and theological basis that sought to critique the rational enquiry of pagan thinkers in favour of the divinely revealed knowledge of the Jewish and Christian tradition. Central to such an endeavour was an explanation of the relationship between Jew and gentile, with an emphasis not only on how the gentiles were entirely indebted to Jewish and scriptural learning but also on how they wilfully corrupted that learning through their application of rational enquiry to it and on the consequences of that corruption.

II The relationship between Jew and gentile is symbolised in the title, The Court of the Gentiles, a reference to the court of that name in the ancient Temple of Jerusalem.19 According to the supposed physical arrangement of the temple, the central and sacred Holy of Holies was adjoined by the courts of the Priests, Israelites and Women, and these courts were surrounded by the outer Court of the Gentiles. 20 Forbidden from the inner courts, the gentiles were allowed access only to this outer court. Revelation 11.2 (‘But the court which is without the temple leave out, and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot for forty and two months’: KJV) provides the only overt scriptural reference to the Court of the Gentiles, and later exegesis accordingly tended to identify the outer court with those outside God’s kingdom. Such an interpretation tallied with Gale’s Reformed notions of election and ecclesiology, 21 but his primary concern in The Court of the Gentiles was the temple’s arrangement as a representation of the truth emanating from the Holy of Holies, illuminating the Jewish courts and ultimately enlightening the gentiles, and its simultaneous signification of the faithlessness of the gentiles and their consequent imperfect understanding: [I]s it not a great Marque of honor, that his poor infant Church, so much despised, and persecuted by the Gentile World, should be, not only the Seat of his own Presence and Worship, but also as the Moon, to reflect some broken Raies, or imperfect Traditions of that Glorious light she received from the Sun of Righteousnesse, to the Pagan World,

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy 81 which lay wrapt up in Night-darknesse? . . . That the poor Temple of Jerusalem should have a Court for the Gentiles, to which they must be al beholding for their choicest Wisdome! how great an honor is this for mount Zion, the Church of God?22 Gale’s depiction in The Court of the Gentiles of the contrast between divinely illuminated Jewish wisdom revealed by God and the scraps of gentile insight spoiled by overconfident reliance on human reason stems from this understanding of the temple as symbolising the role of God’s church within the history of learning. Such an interpretation of the temple and the reason/revelation question echoed that of Nathanael Culverwel in his Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652): Nature has not such a fountain of perfection in it self, but that it may very well draw from another; this Heathenish principle after all its advancement and improvements, after all its whitenings and purifyings, it must stand afar off in Atrio Gentium, it cannot enter into the Temple of God, much lesse into the Sanctum Sanctorum, it cannot pierce within the veile.23 In so functioning as a metaphor for the reason/revelation question, it was possible both to lessen the sharp distinction between the two epistemological positions by pointing to the physical proximity between Jew and gentile in the temple and to view philosophy’s past less as a polarised account of reason versus revelation and more as a complex relationship between the two—without, however, entailing that divine revelation lost its position of primacy. How Gale negotiated the complexities of the reason/revelation debate will be considered shortly. What is certainly clear is that Gale believed the history of learning would prove the central place of revealed knowledge, and that from the historical theory, he could further demonstrate three things: fi rst, the ‘Perfection of God’s word, and Church-light’; second, the ‘Imperfection of Nature’s Light, and mischief of Vain Philosophie’; and third, ‘the right use of Human Learning, and specially sound Philosophie’.24 What The Court of the Gentiles also did was explain how the gentiles, whose outsider status in the temple mirrored their outsider status within a certain Reformed understanding of the history of learning, could in fact be assigned a more important canonical role.

III Underlying Gale’s historical demonstration of revelation’s perfection and reason’s imperfection was a Platonic theory of knowledge. Asserting that human arts and sciences amount to general ideas and notions, and that notions are simply ‘pictures and imitations of things’, Gale maintained

82 Stephen Pigney that the arts and sciences are ‘images, manifestations, or notices of things to the glasse of our understandings’. More precisely, they are ‘the image or likenes of the thing they relate unto’: Whence it followes, that al human Arts and Sciences are but beams and derivations from the Fountain of Lights; created ideas flowing from, and answering unto, that one, simple, increated, eternal idea of Divine Wisdome, which shining forth in things created, receive several formes, shapes, and denominations, according to their respective natures, & Operations: & thence being gathered up, by the inquisitive mind of man, under certain general rules and order, they become universal ideas, or notions; & passe under the denomination of Arts and Sciences. So that an Art may wel be defi ned, An universal idea or image of that statute Law, or order, which the Divine, eternal Wisdome has stampt upon things, whereby he governes them unto those ends, for which they were appointed.25 By understanding all human learning as an inquiry into the ‘Divine, eternal Wisdome’, each art and science amounts to an image of this wisdom, and the history of the arts and sciences is an investigation into their divine origins. Thus, the source and origin of philosophy is God, ‘the fi rst Exemplar, and Efficient of al Philosophie . . . [who had] stamped, and deeply impressed on the very beings and natures of althings made, certain characters or intelligible ideas and resemblances of his own divine wisdome’. Philosophy is nothing other than the study of God’s Creation; it aims at the knowledge of the ‘created emanations, or rayes of light and order stamped on the beings of things, and scattered up and down in the Universe’ and philosophical knowledge is achieved when, as a result of ‘Divine Wisdome irradiating the mind of man’, created wisdom can be contemplated.26 However, because the Fall had resulted in the loss of the natural capacity to comprehend ‘Natural Wisdome [and] objective light, which shines in the book of Nature’, the ability of humanity to understand these universal ideas was dependant on revealed knowledge. Accordingly, God had sent forth ‘a book of Grace, a more resplendent and bright beam of Divine Revelation [which] irradiates and enlightens the world, not only in the more sublime misteries of Salvation, but also in many natural, historical, moral, and civil Truths’. In an indication of how revelation and reason may relate to each other, Gale insisted that only with the assistance of this ‘glorious heavenly Revelation’ could man discover ‘the faint glimmerings of Nature’s light, burning so dimly in human understanding’.27 It was on this foundation, and on the idea that divine revelation was an unfolding historical process, that Gale proceeded to write the history of learning and philosophy. The fi rst volume of The Court of the Gentiles considers ‘philology’, by which several branches of learning are understood: literature, languages, poetry, rhetoric, historiography, theology and

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy 83 law. In each discipline pagan learning is portrayed as a corrupted continuation of Jewish learning. Gale offers an explanation of the mechanics of the transmission of Jewish learning that recognises a certain amount of direct Jewish-gentile contact, but above all focuses on the role of Phoenician navigations. This Phoenician transmission theory owed much to the biblical scholar Samuel Bochart (1599–1667), whom Gale had befriended during a period of employment in Caen in 1664–1665, and whose Geographia sacra (1646–1651) set out a detailed history of the Phoenicians. Gale shared the belief of the man he styles ‘the great Bochart’ that the Phoenicians were ‘the chiefest instrument by whom the Jewish Doctrine and Traditions were conveyed into Grece, and other parts’. 28 Employing etymological arguments and scriptural analysis drawn from the French scholar, Gale identified the Phoenicians with the Canaanites and the Anakim, the latter reputedly a tribe of giants famed for strength and learning. 29 The Phoenicians had benefited from the wisdom of the patriarch Abraham, and their intimacy with the learning of the Israelites was augmented by the geographical proximity and close ‘correspondence’ between the two peoples, a ‘familiar commerce’ that peaked during the rule of Solomon, ‘who entred into a near League with the Phenicians, and so gave them, and their Idolatrous Customes, free Admission’—an explanation for the simultaneous preservation and corruption of wisdom among the Hebrews.30 According to Gale, and once again utilising a raft of (somewhat fanciful) etymological arguments, the Phoenicians had, in their maritime enterprises, visited virtually the entire coast of Europe and the greater part of Asia and Africa, in many places establishing colonies, and everywhere spreading the increasingly corrupted Jewish wisdom. Having rooted the transmission of learning in an account of navigation, colonisation, commerce and communication, Gale turned to a consideration of the various branches of learning. Wherever a Jewish equivalent to gentile learning can be found, he unfailingly maintained that the latter derived from the former. So, for example, languages were derived from the lost and perfect Hebrew of Adam via post-Adamic Hebrew (or Phoenician, which, Gale claims, was itself originally one and the same tongue as Hebrew).31 Pagan theology was ‘borrowed, by an helbred imitation, from that sacred Theologie and Worship seated in the Church of God’. 32 Parallels are suggested between pagan mythology and Jewish history and religion and depend on various euhemerist interpretations: Saturn, for example, was a corrupt misunderstanding of, variously, Adam, Abraham and Noah; Hercules was a pagan form of Joshua and Samson; and Isis was a misunderstanding of Eve.33 The ‘poor blind heathens’ were confused by and unable to understand the oriental traditions, and were guilty of possessing a ‘vain humour of imitation . . . [which] led them to coin fables’ and a misguided intention to restore ‘lapsed mankind to that pristine state of happiness’ it had originally enjoyed, but Gale nevertheless traced discernible development in gentile theology. Notably, the Greek philosophers, especially Plato,

84

Stephen Pigney

increasingly rejected the fabulous traditions of the poets, and by applying greater wisdom endeavoured to reduce this mythologic, to a physic, or more rational theology. And thus they make but one supreme God . . . and many other inferior middling gods . . . As for their supreme God, the wisest of them, Pythagoras and Plato etc., understood him to be the fi rst, eternal, infi nite, and most unchangeable Being.34 Ultimately this rationalising process led to the greater institutionalisation of theology in the form of rites of worship and sacrifices that more closely mirrored their source in the Jewish tradition. Similarly, pagan poetry, drama, rhetoric, laws and historiography were each corrupt but readily detectable versions of original Jewish counterparts. Gale’s conclusion to his account of philology was that the gentiles—partly out of ignorance occasioned by a general decay in knowledge and an increase in barbarism and idolatry, partly out of hatred for the Jews and partly from their own pride and ‘vain humour’—had wilfully misunderstood the divine tradition to which they were so indebted and had gone to considerable lengths to obscure its origins.35 The analysis that leads to this conclusion provided the context for the account of pagan philosophy occupying the remaining volumes of The Court of the Gentiles.36

IV As suggested previously, a key feature of Gale’s account concerns the contrasting claims of human reason and divine revelation, an issue that went to the heart of the debate over the relationship between philosophy and theology. Two positions marked out the poles of the debate: natural theologians, including many scholastic philosophers as well as those now termed ‘rationalists’, were confident that substantial parts of God’s Creation lay open to rational inquiry; at the other pole were those theologians, often though not exclusively Reformed, who rejected the claims of reason to any knowledge of divine truths, and often to many other truths besides, and who insisted that knowledge was founded on divine revelation. The logical endpoint of the latter position was to call into question the practice of philosophy in its entirety and to assign it at best an extremely limited role in the pursuit of truth; for many, Paul’s warning to beware of ‘philosophy and vain deceit’ (Colossians 2.8) was to be interpreted in the most comprehensive and radical way.37 However, the precise separation of the two spheres was not always clear and there was considerable scope for intermediate positions that could accommodate both forms of knowledge. In particular, revealed knowledge might be said to refer not only to truths contained in Scripture

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy 85 or to some other form of Christian truth directly stemming from God, but also to knowledge acquired through divine illumination of the mind—what one thinker may have termed a rational mental act, another thinker may have termed a divinely illuminated mental act. Such a compromise allowed for the rejection of an innate light of reason, while blurring the distinction between reason and revelation. Though Gale would have been unlikely to admit it, in practice his historico-philosophy sought just such a compromise: he attempted to combine a Reformed theological position in line with Paul’s cautions and a belief in philosophy’s utility and possibility of reform, thereby enabling him to accommodate reason and philosophy within his own commitment to the primacy of revelation and theology. The relationship between philosophy and theology is clearly central to such an endeavour, and he devoted some space to the matter, setting out in his Philosophia generalis the different procedures of the two disciplines: It is most appropriate for a philosopher to believe nothing that is not evident by its own light, or that cannot be demonstrated by fi rm reason . . . In theology, however, assent to arguments does not depend on innate things, but rather on divine testimony. In philosophical disputes artificial argument (or reason) comes fi rst, and inartificial argument (or testimony) follows; but in theological disputes divine testimony occupies the fi rst place, and reason the place of a handmaid, and barely even that. Among philosophers reason is the highest authority; among theologians divine authority is the highest reason. The philosopher must measure truth by philosophy; but the theologian must measure philosophy by divine truth. In philosophy nothing is acknowledged as true except that which can be demonstrated rationally; but in theology whatever is revealed in the Holy Scriptures is proved and should be believed, even if it appears to be inconsistent with our depraved reason. 38 Rather than advocate the separation of philosophy from theology, Gale was keen to fence off theology from philosophy, while at the same time making philosophy compatible with theology. This conception of theology as an autonomous discipline with no need for philosophy, and of philosophy as a discipline that can only benefit from theology, led to his view that ‘the less theology is mixed with philosophical ideas, the purer and more inviolate it is’, and that [h]uman reason is not the measure of theological matters . . . We happily allow that human reason, or the intellect, is an instrument by which the truths of theology are perceived; but we resolutely deny that it is the measure of those truths. On the contrary, it is a common belief

86

Stephen Pigney among the orthodox that theological conclusions, deduced from the Word of God via a theological path, can be perceived not by reason but by faith . . . There is the strongest reason for this: for the Word of God and the conclusions which have been deduced from it are of one and the same nature. 39

Philosophy, on the other hand, although acknowledged as a discipline employing a different procedure to theology, must be judged according to theology and the Word of God:40 ‘The more that [philosophy] is in agreement with the exemplar provided by the fi rst and sacred philosophy, the purer and more certain it is’.41 The notion of ‘sacred philosophy’ may be an attempt to keep alive the possibility of philosophy as an autonomous discipline, but given that the original ‘exemplar’ is accessible only through the revealed truths understood by theology it would result in an extremely attenuated form of philosophy. In this analysis the status of philosophy is certainly not promising, at least by modern standards. Indeed, Gale specifies his two main and rather large philosophical targets. Firstly, he was hostile to the contemporary ‘new philosophy’, and clearly had Hobbes and Cartesianism in mind:42 he maintained that modern thinkers (whom he terms ‘ista depravatæ rationis automata’, ‘these automatons of depraved reason’) had neglected moral philosophy, waged war against the Gospel and, by introducing a method of doubt and the demand for ‘clear and distinct perceptions’ as a basis for truth, had introduced strange and unnatural errors into religion, stripping philosophy of all sense of divinity.43 His second target was any philosophy based on one of the ancient schools, notably, and surprisingly enough given his own philosophical sympathies, Platonism: he was intent on countering ‘that fond persuasion, which has of late crept in among, and been openly avowed by, many, too great Admirers of Pagan Philosophie, (specially that of Plato) as if it were al but the Product of Nature’s Light’, based on his conviction that ‘the choisest Contemplations of Gentile Philosophie, were but some corrupt Derivations, or at best but broken Traditions, originally traduced from the Sacred Scriptures, and Jewish Church’.44 Given such a comprehensive condemnation of contemporary philosophy, it is perhaps no less surprising that Gale set about an attempt to shore up the status both of philosophy and of the gentile role in the history of philosophy. As presented by Gale, the history of philosophy revealed that there was nothing new in the philosophical corruptions associated with modern innovations and developments—they were as old as philosophy itself. But The Court of the Gentiles can be read not simply as a critique of both pagan and contemporary philosophy, but also as a discussion on how philosophy’s role in history could be understood and how the history of philosophy provides a platform for the systematic construction of a Reformed philosophy.

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy 87 V The fi nal part of The Court of the Gentiles sets out a ‘Proemial Scheme of Reformed Philosophie’ (Gale also terms it a ‘Systeme or Idea’ of philosophy). Perhaps the most striking feature of this scheme is its insistence on studying the ‘General Historie of Philosophie, and Philosophers; with their several Sects, Dogmes, Modes of Life, Discipline, and Characters’.45 Gale makes few historiographical comments, instead merely according a propaedeutic function to the history of philosophy, noting that it ensured ‘young Students might have a more free and open air of Philosophie to breath in; and not be tied up to the confi ned Dogmes of any one Sect; which has proved a great detriment, not only to Divine, but also to human Wisdome’—an espousal of eclecticism common in early modern histories of philosophy.46 As mentioned previously, the very term ‘history of philosophy’ and the scholarly genre that it denoted were of recent origin, and the idea that studying the history of philosophy formed part of studying philosophy was unusual. Nevertheless, Gale was evidently familiar with the new historiography: he referred to Stanley’s History of Philosophy, though only fleetingly, and made extensive use of two Dutch histories, Horn’s Historia philosophica and Gerardus Joannes Vossius’s De philosophorum sectis (1657), in both of which pagan thought is presented as indebted to earlier philosophies. In Vossius’s De philosophorum sectis he found a history advocating eclecticism,47 and in Horn’s Historia philosophica, a dynamic history that begins with Adam and conceives of all subsequent philosophising as a story of the competing philosophies of the Cainites and Sethites, the former representing Satanic philosophy, the latter embodying the true divine wisdom handed down by God at the Creation.48 Although Gale eschewed Horn’s rigid and schematic approach (which owed much to a tradition of universal history on which Horn had made several theoretical contributions), his history did not, in its formal aspects, radically depart from established historiographical practice. The standard philosophical divisions set out in the classical biographical and doxographical histories, such as Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers, are also present in Gale’s account.49 Thus he repeated the distinction between the Ionian and Italian branches of pre-Socratic philosophy and he treated the major Greek philosophers and their schools in the usual order, giving attention both to biographical elements and to the consideration of philosophical doctrines, always, of course, with an emphasis on explaining the derivation of Greek philosophical ideas from Jewish and scriptural sources. The discussion of Plato is by far the most extensive: the account is distributed between the second volume (which treats Plato’s physics) and the fourth volume (on Plato’s moral philosophy and metaphysics). 50 Likewise he followed standard procedure in commencing his history with the Creation

88

Stephen Pigney

and Adam, and he paid consideration to pre-Greek philosophy, for example, that of the Hebrews, Chaldaeans, Persians and Egyptians. None of this was unusual in seventeenth-century histories of philosophy. Less typically, Gale’s history covered post-Greek philosophy, and he provided extensive analysis of philosophy’s impact on Christian thought. In a sustained and thoroughly Reformed attack on the Roman Church, he explained how the emergence of heresies within the church, above all Pelagianism, was the result of mixing theology and philosophy.51 The history of post-Greek philosophy forms the subject of the third volume of The Court of the Gentiles, The Vanitie of Pagan Philosophie. According to Gale, such ‘vanitie’ was abundant, and it invariably resulted from the overvaluing of human reason and the attempt to acquire knowledge of the divine by rational means. Depicting the Fall as having reduced philosophy to ‘a commun Strumpet for carnal Reason to commit folie with’, he claimed, for example, that the divine mysteries were ‘too big for [the gentiles’] natural Acumen, [and] they soon degenerated into vain imaginations’; that the pagans ‘endeavoured to measure things Reveled and Divine . . . by their corrupt, proud, and vain understandings’; that the central weakness of Aristotle’s philosophy was his giving ‘himself up wholly to the government of his Reason . . . rejecting al [Traditions] which his corrupt Reason could not comprehend, or reduce to demonstration’; and that one of the main failings of scholasticism was its making reason the measure of moral good.52 Gale’s closeness to the Reformed theological position on the question of philosophy seems clear: How little doth the most sagacious Philosopher understand, much lesse comprehend of the Workes and Providence of God? How impossible then is it for poor mortals to comprehend the Essence of God? . . . Alas! how little do we know of the least of Beings? Is not our ignorance much more than our knowledge in the commun products of Nature? How little then must we needs know of the God of Nature? And yet five pages later he wrote, ‘That there is a natural knowlege of God gained by the Book of Nature is most evident’. 53 His attempt to reconcile these two positions hinged on a theory of history, to which I now turn.

VI Although Gale made few explicit theoretical observations on historiography, his history nevertheless embodies at its heart a theory enabling him both to integrate the history of philosophy within the practice of philosophy itself and to address some of the philosophico-theological problems posed by Calvinism. The theory stemmed from the theological principle known as covenant (or federal) theology.54 Covenant theology was an important

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy 89 development within early Reformed theology in general and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Puritanism in particular.55 It was central to the thought of Independent theologians: scarcely any figure of significance in the Independent movement did not advocate some form of covenant theology, and Gale was no exception, treating covenant theology in several works, including The Court of the Gentiles, but most fully in a lengthy preface he contributed to William Strong’s Discourse of the Two Covenants (1678).56 Covenant theology is founded on an interpretation of the relationship between God and humanity, a relationship seen in terms of the history of human redemption and salvation. Covenant theologians maintained that God had instituted mutually binding agreements in which each contracting party was under certain obligations to fulfi l the pact. There were two such covenants: the fi rst, the covenant of works or the Law, was made with Adam and promised eternal life in return for observance of the Law of the Pentateuch. From Adam’s failure to honour his side of the bargain followed original sin, the ensuing corruption of his entire posterity and the resultant impossibility of human observance of the Law. Thus, under the fi rst covenant, human damnation, although in theory avoidable, was in practice inevitable. Consequently God instituted the covenant of grace or the Gospel. Generally regarded as having been enacted between God and Christ prior to the Creation but revealed to humanity in the course of time, this new agreement frees humanity from the covenant of works through Christ’s mediation. Salvation was henceforth guaranteed provided there was faith in Christ. This systematisation of Calvinism served the purpose of fending off the twin dangers of Arminianism and antinomianism.57 In its stress on humanity’s moral responsibilities and its emphasis on an obligation to God it tempered some of the less desirable consequences of the Reformed principle of election. In particular, it maintained a place for observance of the law without making salvation follow from such observance, thereby steering a path between radicals whose emphasis on grace increasingly rendered the Law redundant and Arminians, who (in the eyes of their enemies at least) upheld the saving role of good works and observance of the Law. Although it no longer bound humanity, the Law still served to discover sin and direct the sinner towards grace. As Gale explains, [T]he soul that enters into a covenant of conjugal friendship [i.e., grace] with Christ is divorced from and dead unto the Law . . . Yet this hinders not, but that the friends of Christ are obliged to love and observe the Law, as a Directorie and Instructor, to regulate and guide them in their walking . . . [I]n this regard their hearts have an intimate union with the Law.58 The Law was, therefore, a guide to the proper moral life, and such moral observance could be taken as evidence of the faith in Christ signifying

90 Stephen Pigney salvation. Though no covenant theologian would have admitted it, the end result is that faith seems to operate in a similar way to good works.59 Above all, covenant theology lessened the harsh nature of predestination theory while keeping intact the principle of the elect. It may not have satisfactorily resolved every soteriological problem surrounding grace, election and predestination, but its importance was its flexibility in tackling under one theory both doctrinal truth and practical divinity.60 A feature of the theory particularly relevant to Gale’s works is its historical nature. At the heart of covenant theology was an unfolding history of human salvation, described by one scholar as a philosophy of history in which can be found ‘meaning in history’.61 Gale’s analysis of the Mosaic Law in his preface to Strong’s Discourse makes this apparent: The true Idea of the Mosaic Covenant seems this; it was indeed, as to its interne spirit, mind, form and essence Evangelic, albeit as to its externe form and dispensation, it was mixed and composed of moral Precepts and symbolic Types or shadows; and O! how agreeable was this to the infantile state of the Israelitic Church! Did not the wise God herein act like a curious Limner, who fi rst gives an adumbration and dark shadow with a rude Pencil, and then adds lively colours to compleat his Picture? What were all the Types but Evangelic shadows, whereby the Grace of the second Covenant became visible and sensible?62 Elsewhere he writes that ‘[u]nder the Law the Grace of God was veiled, and wrapped up in Types and Shadows . . . but under the Gospel the Glorious Grace of God shines as in a Glasse’.63 Thus God, ‘the curious limner’, has designed a providential historical plan which is gradually revealed to man; as Gale puts it, the verbum Dei, though essentially timeless, is revealed to man via ‘the various means and courses of the Church’.64 Covenant theology provides the key to comprehending and unravelling this divine plan. The structure of Gale’s history of philosophy and learning is based on two overlapping and interacting divisions that are at the heart of covenant theology: one contrasting Jewish and gentile philosophy, the other marking off the pre-Christian from the Christian era. The covenant of grace applied specifically to the Jews until Christ’s confi rmation of it made it universal. And Gale explicitly ties pagan thought to the fi rst covenant, asserting that ‘the grand Designe of Ethnic Philosophie . . . was to put men under a Covenant of Workes’, and that the pagan philosophers had done this because of a ‘proud nature [affecting] an Independence as to God, and [striving] to procure a Divine life by its own forces’. He lambasts the gentile philosophers for desiring ‘to cultivate, refine and elevate corrupt nature . . . without the superaddition of Medicinal Grace’, and complains that for all their Socratic and Platonic theorising on the divine infusion of virtue, they nevertheless conceived it ‘as the reward of men’s endeavors, without the least regard to the New Covenant or true Mediator’. Gale’s verdict was that

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy 91 pagan philosophy, because of its desire ‘to exalt the Lights and Heats, or Forces of corrupt nature, and to reduce men to the old antiquated Covenant of Workes, [should] in no regard be admitted by Christians, who are under a New Covenant’.65 Nevertheless, just as covenant theology explained the continued relevance of the Old Testament Law, by understanding the history of philosophy in terms of the two covenants Gale was able to explain the continued relevance of pagan philosophy. Crucial to this attempt was a resolution of the reason/revelation problem. Gale made a distinction between subjective and objective reason. The former is the ‘Light or Law of Nature’ and a ‘private Law, which God has deeply engraven on men’s Consciences’ but was ‘in great measure obliterated [by] the Fal’. Objective reason contains ‘those broken Traditions of the Moral Law, which were scattered up and down among the Gentiles’ and is ‘God’s Law [and] The Law of Being’.66 On the face of it this distinction between subjective and objective reason is a reformulation of the Protestant notion of the two spheres of reason and revelation. But Gale came close to conflating the two notions by framing them in covenant terms, and in so doing was able to incorporate a version of natural reason within his theory of knowledge:67 [L]apsed man having lost his subjective Law and Light of Nature . . . our most benigne Lord . . . gave a new Edition of that natural Law . . . So that the World was never without an objective Law and Light of Nature, albeit the subjective was lost in Adam . . . some Divines of great note conceive that those very commun natural Notions . . . lost by Adam are vouchsafed to us by the Covenant of Grace in and by the Mediation of Christ . . . [N]ot only supernatural light vouchsafed to the Elect, but even the natural notices or Light of Nature vouchsafed to the lapsed Sons of Adam is the effect of the second Covenant and Christ’s Mediation . . . So far are we from any real claim to a subjective Light of Nature, by virtue of the fi rst Covenant, as that both subjective and objective Light is from Christ.68 According to Gale, therefore, reason depends upon a twofold light: an objective light, ‘whereby God reveles the things to be known’, and a subjective light, ‘whereby God takes off the veil from the mind’—though it is always the former that yields most knowledge, since ‘God conductes the Rational Creature by an objective light, or Divine Revelation of his Wil’.69 Even subjective reason is here attributed to the workings of God: its foundation is external to us, namely, God’s law and truth mediated through Christ’s grace. Failure to understand this was the great weakness of pagan philosophy, a philosophy premised on the idea that unassisted reason was capable of arriving at knowledge. Thus pagan thought is viewed as a misapplication (through a misunderstanding) of reason, one which perpetuates the sin and human pride associated with living under the covenant of works.

92

Stephen Pigney

Through its casting of the history of philosophy in line with covenant theology, Gale’s Court of the Gentiles offers a redefinition of the notion of reason in line with the covenant of grace. How successful is this accommodation of reason and revelation is certainly open to question—but so too are the basic premises of covenant theology. Covenant theology provided a theologically acceptable means of resolving Reformed difficulties concerning grace, predestination and salvation that retained a role for the Law (and by unstated implication for works); similarly Gale was attempting a theologically acceptable solution to the reason/revelation problem that retained a role for reason. More generally, his history of philosophy is an example of an attempt to reintegrate philosophy’s past in the practice of philosophy itself by endeavouring to do three things: to prove scriptural truth, to demonstrate the shortcomings of pagan philosophy and the reliance on reason within philosophical inquiry and to establish a basis for a Reformed philosophy. In order to achieve the latter he needed to justify the practice of philosophy, which meant justifying pagan philosophy. The symbolism of the temple, and, in particular, covenant theory provided the means to do that. They explained the historical role of the pagan philosophers, by, on the one hand, highlighting their failings and, on the other hand, outlining their place within the divine historical scheme. Just as covenant theory was, theologically, a way of ensuring the importance of the Law, so philosophically, in The Court of the Gentiles, it ensured the continuing relevance of pagan thought. In the eyes of the English Puritans, the good Christian should strive to observe the Law, while always aware that salvation depended on grace alone; so the good philosopher should pursue truth with reason, while always aware that truth ultimately could only ever be attained by divine revelation. An interesting note may be added. In 1671, Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, prompted by a suggestion from the scientific writer John Beale, wrote to the astronomer Edward Bernard, I hear, you have with you Mr Gale, ye Learn’d Author of ye Court of ye Gentiles, wherein is attempted the Derivation of all Philology and Philosophy from the Jewish Church. An Intelligent friend of mine . . . aiming much at ye honor of ye English nation in ye matter of advancing sciences and arts, wisheth very much yt something might be undertaken by yt worthy, I mean, Mr Gale, whereby it might be made publick, how much the World is obliged to ye Noble Lord of Verulam, Gilbert, Harvy, and the Honorable Mr Boyle (among others,) to Experimental and Usefull Philosophy . . . But ye above mentioned Anonymous freind [sic] recommends withall ye Englishing of L. Bacon, as a fundamental work, the setting right his method in his N. Organum . . . If you, Sir, could so insinuate it to Mr Gale, either yrself, or by yr acquaintance yt have an interest in him, as to make it effectual, it might prove a considerable service for ye promotion of Learning, and the glory of England.70

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy 93 This idea appears to have been pursued no further; indeed, it is unknown whether Gale himself was ever informed of it. Given Gale’s misgivings about contemporary philosophy, it is certainly open to doubt whether he would have been especially suited to the task. Nevertheless, this proposed undertaking is intriguing, for it suggests that among those engaged in the new philosophy there were some at least who regarded the history of philosophy as relevant to the practice of philosophy and who regarded The Court of the Gentiles as a successful recasting of the philosophical canon in a way compatible with Christian doctrine. Moreover, it suggests that there were those who believed that for the new philosophy to become established it needed to be written into the history of philosophy and the philosophical canon. NOTES 1. See Richard Rorty, ‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres’, Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 49–75, esp. 56–61. 2. Paganino Gaudenzio, De philosophiæ apud Romanos initio et progressu (Pisa, 1643) 1: ‘De historia philosophica excolenda, Dissertatiuncula habita Pisis ad Studiosos Philosophiæ’. 3. For a full account of early histories of philosophy, see Giovanni Santinello, ed., Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, From Its Origins in the Renaissance to the ‘Historia Philosophica’, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993); and Lucien Braun, Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Ophrys, 1973). 4. For a fuller account of Gale’s life and writings, see Stephen J. Pigney, ‘Theophilus Gale (1628–79), Nonconformist Scholar and Intellectual: An Introduction to His Life and Writings’, Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society 7 (2005): 407–420. 5. Its printing history is not straightforward. The fi rst edition of vol. 1 (Of Philologie) and of vols. 2 and 3 (Of Philosophie and The Vanitie of Pagan Philosophie) were published in Oxford in 1669 and 1671, respectively. The second edition of vol. 1 was published in Oxford in 1672; the second edition of vol. 2 (now entitled Of Barbaric and Grecanic Philosophie) appeared in London in 1676; the second printing (it was not a new edition) of vol. 3 was published in London in 1677. Vol. 4 (Of Reformed Philosophie) appeared in London in 1677, and an additional part to vol. 4 (Of Divine Predetermination) was published separately in London in 1678. Where there is more than one edition, references will be to the later edition. Original spelling and italics are retained in quoted passages; punctuation has been lightly edited. 6. N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later SeventeenthCentury England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987) 168. 7. Theophilus Gale, The Court of the Gentiles, 4 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford and London, 1672–1678), 1, sig. *2r–v; 1.1, 9. Hereafter The Court of the Gentiles is abbreviated to CG in the notes. Since, following its prefatory material, vol. 1 is in three parts with seperate pagination, references to this volume will be to volume and part number; hence CG, 1.1, 9 is a reference to vol. 1, part 1, page 9. 8. On this tradition see D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1972); and Stephen A. McKnight, The Modern Age and the

94 Stephen Pigney

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

Recovery of Ancient Wisdom: A Reconsideration of Historical Consciousness, 1450–1650 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991) esp. 27–59. See Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Perennial Philosophy: From Agostino Steuco to Leibniz’, Journal of the History of Ideas 27 (1966): 505–532; and Maria Muccillo, Platonismo ermetismo e ‘prisca theologia’: Ricerche di storiografi a filosofica rinascimentale (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1996). See Anthony Grafton, ‘Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46 (1983): 78–93. Gale’s translation: CG, 1, sig. *2r; 1.1, 80–81. Grotius, De veritate religionis Christianæ, 3rd ed. (Leiden, 1633) 39–40: ‘Accedit indubitata scriptorum Mosis antiquitas, cui nullum aliud scriptum possit contendere: cujus argumentum et hoc est, quod Graeci, unde omnis ad alias gentes fluxit eruditio, literas se aliunde accepisse fatentur, quae apud ipsos literae et ordinem et nomen et ductum quoque veterem non alium habent, quam Syriacae sive Hebraicae: sicut et antiquissimae leges Atticae, unde et Romanae postea desumptae sunt, ex legibus Mosis originem ducunt’. CG, 1, sig. *2r, *4r, **1v. John Preston, Life Eternall, or, A Treatise of the Knowledge of the Divine Essence and Attributes (London, 1631) Part 1, 53. Thomas Jackson, The Eternall Truth of Scriptures, and Christian Beleefe, Thereon Wholly Depending, Manifested by It[s] Owne Light. Delivered in Two Bookes of Commentaries upon the Apostles’ Creede (London, 1613) 42–43; among other examples of Jackson’s argument, see also 92: ‘Albeit the superstition of later Gentiles was most opposite to the most true, most ancient religion of the Israelites: yet if we trace the most ciuill sort of them backwards in their sinister waies, we shal fi nd it, & the right path of the Israelites’; and 75, where he claims the Greeks were ‘apt to counterfait the forme of ancient truths’. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacræ, or, A Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith (London, 1662), title-page, sig. b2r–v, 14–15. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacræ 429–430. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacræ 501. CG, 3, 143. See E. N. Tigerstedt, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato’, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 52 (1974): 45–47, where Gale’s view on Plato is contrasted to the Neoplatonic leanings of the Cambridge Platonists; and Sarah Hutton, ‘The Neoplatonic Roots of Arianism: Ralph Cudworth and Theophilus Gale’, Socinianism and Its Role in the Culture of the Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Lech Szczucki, Zbigniew Ogonowski and Janusz Tazbir (Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1983) 139–145, esp. 143–144. A poem (not by Gale) prefacing the second volume of CG suggests that the work’s title plays on the idea of a court of law in which pagan thought is tried and judged according to its relationship to Christianity: CG, 2, sig. c3r. Nothing in the main body of CG supports this interpretation, though Luciano Malusa, ‘Theophilus Gale’, Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, From Its Origins in the Renaissance to the ‘Historia Philosophica’, ed. Giovanni Santinello, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993) 297, adopts it. Interest in the physical arrangement of the temple, based principally on Ezekiel 40–48, was common in this period: see, for example, John Lightfoot’s The Temple: Especially As It Stood in the Dayes of Our Saviour (London, 1650); and Samuel Lee’s Orbis miraculum, or, the Temple of Solomon (London, 1659). (Lee was a colleague of Gale’s at the Holborn congrega-

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy 95

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

tion.) See also Wolfgang Herrmann, ‘Unknown Designs for the “Temple of Jerusalem” by Claude Perrault’, Essays Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, vol. 1, Essays in the History of Architecture (London, 1967) 143–158; and Helen Rosenau, Vision of the Temple: The Image of the Temple of Jerusalem in Judaism and Christianity (London: Oresko Books, 1979) 91–100, 133–142. As outlined in, for example, his Anatomie of Infidelitie, or, An Explication of the Nature, Causes, Aggravations, and Punishment of Unbelief (London, 1672), and Idea theologiæ, tam contemplativæ quam activæ (London, 1673). CG, 1, sig. *4v. (Italic and Roman type reversed in the original.) Nathanael Culverwel, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, ed. Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCullum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971) 162. In an epistle to the reader, Nathanael’s brother, Richard Culverwel, makes a similar point: ‘Reason though not permitted . . . to rush into the Holy of Holies, yet may be allowed to be a Proselyte of the gate, and with those devote Greeks, to worship in the Court of the Gentiles’, An Elegant and Learned Discourse 8. CG, 1, t.p. CG, 1.1, 6. See also Gale’s Philosophia generalis in duas partes disterminata (London, 1676) 5, for the same argument: ‘Ita omnes Philosophiæ, tum Contemplativæ tum Activæ, partes, in Systemata collectæ, vel in Intellectu humano inhærentes, nihil aliud videntur esse, quam . . . Idea refl exa Divinæ illius sapientiæ, quæ in ipso Creatore, vel creatura resplendet, & ab intellectu humano, lumine a Sole Justitiæ perfuso percipitur. Unde patet, Deum sapientissimum esse Primam Causam, non solum Exemplarem, & Objectivam, sed & Efficientem omnis Philosophiæ’. CG, 2, 5. CG, 1.1, 7. CG, 1.1, 18. See Bochart, Opera omnia, hoc est Phaleg, Canaan, et Hierozoicon, vol. 3 (Leiden, 1692), vol. 3 (Leiden, 1692) sig. Y1r–Y2r. The strength of the Anakim is recorded in Numbers 13.33; evidence of their learning can be found in two references to Phoenician towns in Joshua 15.15, 49. See CG, 1.1, 19; and Bochart, Opera omnia col. 347. CG, 1.1, 22–23. CG, 1.1, 51–82. The argument that Phoenician was originally identical with Hebrew was also made by Edmund Dickinson, Delphi Phoenicizantes (Oxford, 1655), sig. B2r, a treatise from which Gale borrowed heavily. CG, 1.2, 2. CG, 1.2, 6–10, 57–64, 92–95. Among the many works of comparative mythology in this period, Gale refers in particular to G. J. Vossius’s De theologia gentili (Amsterdam, 1641; 2nd ed. 1668), Hugh Sandford’s De descensu Domini Nostri Iesu Christi ad inferos (Amsterdam, 1611), and Bochart’s contributions to the subject. On comparative mythology and the euhemerist context, see Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972) 250; and Richard H. Popkin, ‘The Crisis of Polytheism and the Answers of Vossius, Cudworth and Newton’, Essays on the Context, Nature, and Infl uence of Isaac Newton’s Theology, ed. J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990) 9–25. CG, 1.2, 124. CG, 1.3, 111–114. Gale initially intended his work to deal solely with philosophy, but came to the view that a discussion of philology was essential to his argument: see CG, 1.1, sig. **1v.

96 Stephen Pigney 37. See Nicholas Jolley, ‘The Relation between Theology and Philosophy’, The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 363–392. 38. Philosophia generalis 912: ‘Philosophi enim proprium est nihil credere, quod vel sua luce non patescit, vel fi rma ratione demonstrari non potest . . . At in Theologia assensus non nititur argumentis rebus insitis, sed testimonio Divino. In Philosophicis præcedat argumentum artificiale sive ratio, & sequatur argumentum inartificiale sive testimonium: at in Theologicis primum locum tenet testimonium divinum, & ratio solummodo ancillæ locum. Apud Philosophum Ratio est summa autoritas: apud Theologum Autoritas divina est summa ratio . . . Philosophus veritatem Philosophia; sed Theologus Philosophiam veritate Divina mensurare debet. In Philosophia nihil ut verum agnoscitur, nisi quod ratione demonstrari possit: At in Theologia, quicquid in S. Scriptura revelatur, fi rmiter credendum est, etsi rationi nostræ depravatæ haud consonum videatur’. 39. Idea theologiæ 11, 12–13: ‘Theologia quo minus Ideis philosophicis est admista, eo magis illibata ac pura est . . . Ratio humana non est mensura rerum Theologicarum . . . Facile patimur Rationem humanam, sive Intellectum, esse Instrumentum, quo percipiuntur veritates Theologiæ; sed earundem mensuram esse pertinaciter negamus. Immo conclusiones Theologicas, ex verbo Dei discursu Theologico deductas non ratione sed fide percipienda esse, communis est orthodoxorum persuasio . . . Et ratio est validissima: Nam verbum Dei, & consequentiæ inde deductæ sunt unius ac ejusdem naturæ’. 40. CG, 3, sig. b1v: ‘[A]l Philosophie [should] be reduced, to and measured by its original and perfect Exemplar, the Divine Word and Light’. See also Philosophia generalis, sig. A3v–A4r: ‘Universa Philosophemata summittenda sunt Verbo Dei . . . Falsum enim est quicquid veritati illi haud consonum est’. 41. Philosophia generalis, sig. A4v: ‘Theologia non ad Philosophiæ amussim exigenda, sed Philosophia æqua Theologiæ sive primæ veritatis lance trutinanda est . . . Hoc est magnum genuinæ philosophiæ indicium, quæ quanto magis est consentanea primæ sacræue philosophiæ exemplari, tanto purior est & certior’. 42. Gale makes few overt references to individual new philosophers. Only Hobbes (‘the great Leviathan of our Age and Nation’) is strongly condemned, on account of his making ‘public profession of his Atheisme, and disbelief of althings, which admit not of sensible Demonstration’: CG, 4, 217. Attacking Hobbes was, of course, standard fare in the seventeenth century. 43. Philosophia generalis, sig. A2v: ‘Ex altera parte quædam Novæ Philosophiæ placita peræue, ne dicam magis, perniciosa esse facile mihi persuaderi patior. Nam omisso, quod totam Philosophiam Moralem missam faciunt recentiores Philosophi, nonne perquam perspicuum est, quosdam inter eos, bellum toti indicere Evangelio? quorum philosophia hisce primis principiis innititur, nimirum, De omnibus dubitandum est: Quicquid clare distincteque percipio id verum est, &c. Nam ex his criteriis veritatis quot novarum opinionum monstra in philosophia comminiscuntur? exindeue quot peregrinis monstrosisue erroribus in Theologia animi eorum indescunt? Imo tandem omni Divinitatis sensu denudantur’. 44. CG, 1.1, sig. *4v. (Italics and Roman type reversed in original.) See also CG, 2, 273, where he condemns the ‘Idolising humor of crying up Platonic Philosophie, and making it equal to, if not above the Scripture’, something which continues ‘to this very day among many Platonists’; and see n. 18. 45. CG, 4, sig. a2r.

Theophilus Gale and Historiography of Philosophy 97 46. CG, 2, sig. a3r; 4, sig. a2r. See also Philosophia generalis, sig. A5v, where eclecticism is described as ‘Optimus quidem philosophandi modus, qui pulcherrimos profert fructus’. Eclecticism might be seen as the most logical choice of approach for the Christian philosopher; Gale referred back to the eclecticism of Clement of Alexandria which formed part of Christian apologetics. Isaac Watts, who studied at the academy founded by Gale, declared that from ‘the Infancy of my Studies I began to be of the Eclectick Sect’, Philosophical Essays on Various Subjects (London, 1733) iv. See also Ulrich Schneider, ‘Eclecticism and the History of Philosophy’, in Donald R. Kelley (ed.), History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1997) 83–101. 47. For instance, De philosophia et philosophorum sectis (The Hague, 1657– 1658) 109–117. 48. The central theme of the work; a clear statement of the theory can be found in Historia philosophica (Leiden, 1655) 57–58. Horn’s history was genuinely universal, extending from the Creation to his own time, and included discussion of philosophy among, for example, the Chinese and Japanese. 49. For a discussion of ancient historiographical practice in relation to philosophy, see Jørgen Mejer, Diogenes Laertius and His Hellenistic Background (Wiesbaden, Germany: Steiner, 1978), and Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Philosophy and Its Historiography’, Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 620–621. 50. This discussion effectively constitutes the basis of Gale’s own natural philosophy, metaphysics and moral philosophy, topics which are beyond the scope of the present essay. 51. Pelgianism, for example, is specifically discussed at CG, 3, 141–147. Pelagianism, the heresy that maintains man can, at least initially, work towards his own salvation without the need of God’s grace, lay at the heart of Reformed controversies and is not surprisingly a particular bugbear of Gale’s. The debate rumbled on in the seventeenth century, the central arguments at the heart of the heresy being (to Reformed eyes at least) analogous to doctrinal differences between Anglicans and Puritans. Gale’s fi rst published work, A True Idea of Jansenisme, presented a history of the heresy and offered a favourable verdict on the arguments of, among others, Augustine, Bradwardine and Jansen against Pelagianism. 52. CG, 2, sig. A2r; 3, 3; 3, 11–12; 2, 427; 3, 160–163. 53. CG, 4, 295, 300. 54. Among the disparate and vast literature on this doctrine, see, for example, John von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986). 55. Some examples of the numerous seventeenth-century English works on covenant theology are John Preston’s The New Covenant, or, The Saint’s Portion (1629), John Ball’s A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace (1645), John Bunyan’s The Doctrine of Law and Grace (1659) and Samuel Petto’s The Difference between the Old and New Covenant Stated (1674). 56. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954) 374, where Gale is described as one of the leading formulators of the theory. 57. Miller, New England Mind 366–371, 384–396. 58. Gale, Theophilie, or, A Discourse of the Saint’s Amitie with God in Christ (London, 1671) 80–82. See also 297–298. 59. Discussing Preston’s New Covenant, R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) 119, suggested that ‘in Preston’s thought federal theology has come full circle, now becoming in effect a covenant of works after all’.

98

Stephen Pigney

60. See Stephen Brachlow, The Communion of Saints: Radical Puritan and Separatist Ecclesiology 1570–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) 34–35. 61. Charles S. McCoy, ‘Johannes Cocceius: Federal Theologian’, Scottish Journal of Theology 16 (1963): 353–370, at 362. See also Jens G. Møller, ‘The Beginnings of Puritan Covenant Theology’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 14 (1963): 47–48. 62. Gale’s preface to William Strong, A Discourse of the Two Covenants (London, 1678), sig. a3r. 63. Theophilie 214. 64. Philosophia generalis, sig. A3r: ‘Per primam Philosophiam intelligo, cum doctissimis inter Judæos ac Christianos, Verbum Dei, variis modis variisue Ecclesiæ curriculis revelatum’. 65. CG, 3, sig. A3r–b1v. 66. CG, 4, 7–8. 67. The virtual identification of the two spheres was a feature of Cambridge Platonist thought: see Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Englightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) 136, 176. See also the discussion in Knud Haakonssen, ‘Divine/Natural Law Theories in Ethics’, Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 1317–1357, particularly 1324–1326, 1343–1344. 68. CG, 4, 51–52. 69. CG, 4, 491. 70. The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. and trans. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, vol. 8, 1671–1672 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971) 126–127. For other letters in this exchange, see also 111–112, 119.

4

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher Benjamin Carter

INTRODUCTION It is a strange irony that the life of Ralph Cudworth, that most unworldly and antiquarian of philosophers, was closer in form to our modern understanding of the professional philosopher than any other of the thinkers profi led in this volume. Unlike, for instance, Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, Cudworth could not rely on patronage and employment within a noble family. Instead Cudworth’s livelihood relied almost entirely on his employment as an educator and administrator within a university, in Cudworth’s case the University of Cambridge. It would be incorrect to stretch the comparison between Cudworth’s life and that of a modern day academic too far; however, it is important to recognise the defi ning role that the intellectual, social and political culture of Cambridge played on Cudworth’s life. Despite this historical fact the vast majority of interpretations of Cudworth’s work centre instead on his use and development of Neoplatonic principles. When Cudworth’s lifetime of service and employment at the University of Cambridge is mentioned it is done so as a biographical necessity, and when commented on it is viewed in a negative light. The comfortable life of the cloistered academic is contrasted with the political and social turmoil of seventeenth-century England. So Cudworth is seen, in the words of W. R. Inge, as ‘standing aside’ from the controversies of his time.1 Cudworth’s life in Cambridge, particularly during the turmoil of the Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration, is understood as a ‘retired scholarly life’, in contrast to ‘the hurly burly of an active city pulpit’. 2 This view of Cudworth has certainly hampered attempts to reconcile his philosophy with the traditional canon of seventeenth-century thought. Rather than be seen as an innovator in matters of philosophy, many traditional interpretations of Cudworth assume this ‘ivory towered’ interpretation of his life in the University of Cambridge. As a consequence it has become all too easy to characterise his idiosyncratic intellectual output as standing Canute-like against the inevitable tide of seventeenth-century thought. In contrast I would argue that Cudworth’s work is intimately related to his experience of seventeenth-century Cambridge. Firstly, it is wrong to see the

100

Benjamin Carter

University of Cambridge as managing to remain separate from the political machinations of seventeenth-century England and the social and cultural turmoil of the Civil War. Secondly, by placing Cudworth in the historical and intellectual context of the University of Cambridge it is possible to gain a richer understanding of how Cambridge made the Platonist. The University of Cambridge dominated every part of Cudworth’s life: from his early years, the only period of his life which he did not spend living in and around the university; through his education as an undergraduate; to his later employment in various institutions within the university. This chapter therefore examines, in a roughly chronological order, the intellectual development of Ralph Cudworth through the historical contexts in which he lived. I argue, unlike the commentators previously mentioned, that Cudworth’s work always developed in direct relation to contemporary issues and debates, and that his life within Cambridge was far from that of the cosseted and cloistered academic. By way of conclusion I show how these intellectual and historical themes can be drawn together in Cudworth’s defi ning work, the fi rst, and only, published volume of his incomplete The True Intellectual System of the Universe. The factors that influenced the composition and form of this fi rst volume, and the reason why Cudworth refused or failed to complete the remaining volumes of this work, help explain both something of his limited reputation as a philosopher in his own lifetime and his subsequent intellectual reputation.

CUDWORTH, THE MAN OF CAMBRIDGE: INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT, 1617–1644 Cudworth was born in 1617 in Aller, Somerset. The influence of Cambridge, and in particular the religious culture of Cambridge, was on Cudworth from birth. Cudworth’s father, also called Ralph, was a product of the great Cambridge ‘nursery of Puritanism’ Emmanuel.3 Cudworth the elder had been a student and later fellow of Emmanuel, and his closeness to the dominant Calvinist theology of Emmanuel is shown by his publication, in 1604, of a supplement to William Perkin’s commentary of the Epistle to the Galatians.4 The author of the ‘Memoirs of Ralph Cudworth D.D. Author of The Intellectual System’, written in 1736, comments that Cudworth’s father ‘wanted neither for Genius or Learning [but] he had not Ambition of appearing in Public as a Writer’. 5 In fact it was the Puritan spirit of Emmanuel that took Cudworth’s father from his fellowship to take up the vicarage at Aller.6 Although Cudworth’s father died in 1624 the Emmanuel influence was continued by Dr Richard Stoughton, also a fellow of Emmanuel, who took on the vicarage at Aller and married Cudworth’s widowed mother. Stoughton took on the role of educating the young Cudworth in what Cudworth would later describe as a ‘diet of Calvinism’.7

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

101

In 1632 Cudworth matriculated at Emmanuel under the tutorship of Benjamin Whichcote. There he took his BA in 1635 and his MA in 1639, ‘with unusual Applause’.8 Following Cudworth’s MA he followed his father and step-father into a fellowship. So strong was the influence of Emmanuel on the intellectual development of Cudworth and the other Cambridge Platonists that John Tulloch in his highly influential account of Cudworth’s thought refers to the intellectual group surrounding Whichcote as the ‘Emmanuel Platonists’.9 Certainly Cudworth’s early writings can be interpreted as a conscious reaction to the two central intellectual influences that he encountered at Emmanuel: Calvinist theology and scholastic philosophy. This reaction, particularly to Calvinism, is commonly recognised in interpretations of Cudworth. However, this reaction was not one that emerged ex nihilo. Rather the introduction by Benjamin Whichcote of Platonic texts to his students’ curriculum was part of a steady move away from the twin bastions of Calvinism and scholasticism in Cambridge at the time.10 Although Calvinism had become the dominant theology of the English church by the early decades of the seventeenth century there existed within Cambridge a healthy scepticism against extremes of Calvinist thought. This fi rst emerged in a sermon preached in 1595 by William Barrat, the chaplain of Gonville and Caius College, who attacked the strict Calvinism being taught by some in Cambridge at the time. Although this controversy led to a clarification of Calvinist orthodoxy in the English church through the publication of the Lambeth Articles by Archbishop Whitgift, as H. C. Porter has argued, the Arminian anti-Calvinism of the 1590s remained in Cambridge, finding its fulfilment in the anti-Calvinism implicit in the writings of the ‘Emmanuel’ Platonism of Whichcote’s circle.11 What have made the interpretation of Cudworth’s anti-Calvinism particularly complicated are the overlapping theological contexts that informed English anti-Calvinism. In many of the traditional historical interpretations of English anti-Calvinism this movement is characterised by the single term ‘Arminian’. From the 1590s the anti-Calvinism common in Cambridge was Arminian in that it drew explicitly from the anti-Calvinist teaching of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius. However, also within this tradition there existed the equally anti-Calvinist, but politically more controversial, reforms of Archbishop William Laud. Laud’s anti-Calvinism is also described as ‘Arminian’. Both Arminianism and Laudianism shared an opposition to orthodox Calvinism; however, there are clear theological differences between these two forms of antiCalvinism. Both argued that human volition played a role in the acceptance of God’s grace. However, Laudianism argued that this occurred through the processes of liturgical ceremony and ritual, whereas Arminianism emphasised the role of personal action and, in the case of the Cambridge Platonists, reason.12 Because of the dominance of Laud’s brand of anti-Calvinism it has been common to characterise all forms of English

102

Benjamin Carter

‘Arminianism’ with almost exclusive reference to Laudianism. However, Cudworth and the other Cambridge Platonists were essentially Puritans in matters of religious practice and as a consequence they were associated with many of the Cambridge institutions which Laud criticised in the 1630s.13 Within this religious context Cudworth’s Puritan anti-Calvinism has meant that he has never been easily categorised in religious histories of the period. For this reason the importance and role of Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists as contemporary opponents of Calvinism has often been undervalued, and as a consequence they are often missing from the wider historical literature on English anti-Calvinism. Cudworth’s theological rejection of Calvinism, which developed through his early years in Cambridge, provided the central context from which his broader philosophical project developed. This development can be defi ned as an intellectualist rejection both of the voluntarism implicit in seventeenthcentury Calvinism and also of the dominant scholastic expression of this Calvinist theology. There is a long and continuing debate on the relationship between scholastic thought and Reformed theology. The traditional reading argues that the utilisation of scholastic forms of argument by the later generations of Reformers shows a break and development between the Reforming humanism of Luther and Calvin and the ‘Protestant Scholasticism’ of late Reformers, in particular Theodore Beza.14 In recent years a revisionist position, largely driven by the work of Richard A. Muller, has argued that there is much greater continuity between the Reformers and the Reformed tradition both in matters of doctrine (orthodoxy) and matters of method (in particular scholasticism). Muller in particular has argued that scholasticism should not be viewed anachronistically as ‘dry’ and ‘sterile’ thinking, but as a rigorous and logical method designed to uncover the truth of a proposition. Using an instrumental account of ‘scholasticism’, he therefore argues against the interpretation of ‘Protestant Scholasticism’ and argues instead for a unified and developing form to Reformed orthodoxy which used scholastic argumentation as one of many forms of argument used by theologians in the Reformed tradition.15 The strong scholastic, philosophical, defences of Calvinist Reformed orthodoxy, which found their zenith in the writings of the Westminster Assembly, provided a main body of thought against which Cudworth’s initial philosophical ideas developed. In particular Cudworth, initially under the guidance of Benjamin Whichcote, developed an intellectualist philosophical system to overcome the philosophical voluntarism and doctrinal rigidity of contemporary Calvinist thought. The philosophical system that Cudworth developed drew on two traditions in the history of philosophy, Neoplatonism and Cartesianism. It has, unsurprisingly, been common to stress Cudworth’s antiquity as consequence of his adoption of Neoplatonism. However, this concentration misses the central role that Cartesianism played in Cudworth’s philosophy and as a consequence downplays the contemporary relevance of Cudworth’s

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

103

thought. Arguably the most important philosophical innovation of Cudworth and the Cambridge Platonists was in the introduction and discussion of Cartesian thought in seventeenth-century England. This is particularly surprising since, as for many of Cudworth’s contemporaries, his Cartesianism was as important as his Neoplatonism in defi ning his philosophy. This comes out in a letter from Cudworth’s daughter Damaris Masham to John Locke where she described her father’s intellectual circle as ‘my friends, the Cartesians, and the Platonists’, 16 and also in one of the earliest defences of the Cambridge Platonists which focused particularly on their use of the ‘New Philosophy’.17 Commentators such as John Tulloch and John Passmore have commented on the centrality of Cartesian philosophy to Cudworth’s system; Passmore goes so far as to say Descartes ‘penetrates every nook and cranny’ of Cudworth’s thought.18 In Cudworth’s thought Descartes is respected, but not taken for granted. Characteristically Cudworth interprets Descartes not as a new development, but as a philosopher who ‘revived and restored the Atomick Philosophy . . . [of] . . . that ancient Moschical and Pythagorick Form’.19 However, Cudworth’s own idiosyncratic interpretations of the developments in seventeenth-century philosophy, particularly his constant claim that all modern philosophy was merely a repetition of ideas from the ancient world (i.e., Descartes as the heir of Pythagoras, Hobbes the heir of Protagoras), should not mask the importance of Cartesianism to the progressive form of Cudworth’s thought. In fact Cudworth’s nuanced engagement with Cartesian philosophy highlights the manner in which the style and form of Cudworth’s thought belies its modernity. Cartesian forms and principles run throughout all of Cudworth’s thought and play a central role in many of the defi ning arguments of his Intellectual System. Most obviously Cudworth turns to Descartes’ revision of the ontological proof for his own argument for the existence of God. Although he criticised much of Descartes’ argument—particularly the circularity of Descartes’ proof which Cudworth said was built on the ‘[f]irmness and Solidity, of such Thin and Subtle Cobwebs’20 —Cudworth’s proof is built on Cartesian foundations. More fundamentally Cudworth’s understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body develops the dualism of Cartesianism. Cudworth’s dualism however is never strictly defi ned as the mind/body distinctions of Descartes’ thought. Instead Cudworth, drawing from his Neoplatonic heritage, stressed the higher and lower faculties of the mind, both of which are united to, and developed in relation to, the body: as Cudworth states in his Intellectual System, there are ‘Higher and Lower Inclinations in Rational Beings Vitally United to Bodies’. 21 Despite this, Cudworth’s thought, which his contemporaries recognised as a melding of Neoplatonism and Cartesianism in almost equal parts, is still widely ignored because of a modern rejection of the philosophical virtues of Neoplatonism. So strong is this ambivalence to Neoplatonism that some, for instance, Ernst Cassirer, have argued that Cudworth the Neoplatonist can have played ‘no decisive part’ in any phase of early-modern philosophy. 22

104

Benjamin Carter

There are two main reasons why Cudworth’s adoption of Neoplatonism has led to a marginalisation of his thought. The fi rst relates to the changing interpretation of the Neoplatonic tradition. In the seventeenth century it was commonly accepted that the defi nitive interpretation of the Platonic tradition was that presented by Plotinus and his followers. The tradition had been reinvigorated by the Florentine Platonism of Marcilio Ficino, and it is from these sources of Platonic philosophy that Benjamin Whichcote drew when he introduced Platonic ideas into his teaching in the 1630s. However, the validity of this Plotinian tradition of Neoplatonic scholarship increasingly came to be questioned in the century after Cudworth’s death. Central to this change was the German scholar J. J. Brucker. Brucker’s work was the fi rst to make a clear distinction between the ‘neo’ Platonism of Plotinus and his followers with the ‘authentic’ Platonism of the Dialogues—a view that was fi rst made popular by Frederick Schliermacher’s German edition of Plato’s Dialogues published in 1804. As a consequence the Neoplatonism of the Cambridge Platonists has been tarred with the nineteenth-century interpretation of Neoplatonism which J. S. Mill described as ‘an aftergrowth of late date and little intrinsic value . . . a hybrid product of Greek and Oriental speculation, and its place in history is by the side of Gnosticism’. 23 The second factor that plays on the reputation of Cudworth’s Neoplatonism is the effect of empiricism, and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in particular, on the philosophical reputation of the Platonic tradition. Although Locke does not state this in his Essay, it has been common to assume that the ‘innatist’ philosophies that Locke attacks included the Neoplatonism of the Cambridge Platonists. It is certainly the case that Locke’s attack did much to undermine the traditional Platonic theory of ‘anamnesis’ which was supported by many of the Cambridge Platonists, particularly Henry More. However, it would be wrong to assume that the historical triumph of Locke’s empiricism rendered Cudworth’s philosophy obsolete. In fact Cudworth’s own epistemology, which was never fully published in his own lifetime, presents a fascinating bridge between the naïve innatism which Locke attacked and the hard-nosed empiricism of Locke’s Essay. Cudworth does, seemingly in contrast with Locke, reject the central empirical view that the mind is a ‘tabula rasa’. 24 Rather he argues that ‘knowledge is not a knock or thrust from without, but consisteth in the awakening and exciting of the inward active powers of the mind’. 25 However, rather than say that all knowledge existed unborn in the mind, as was taught in the Platonic theory of anamnesis, 26 Cudworth argues that the ‘awakening of the mind’ came, in part, from man’s experience of and interaction with the external world. Cudworth’s epistemology therefore presents an account of Platonic epistemology which acknowledges the central role of the external in the defi nition of human understanding, in contrast to the simple innatism suggested by his colleagues and attacked so forcefully by Locke.

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

105

Both these factors have contributed to the development of Cudworth’s intellectual character as removed from the intellectual trends of the time. However, as has been shown, Cudworth’s thought developed as an intellectual reaction to the religious context of the time. The sophisticated intellectualist system which Cudworth developed in this context was informed not only by his context but also by its Neoplatonism, by widely accepted contemporary philosophical forms and by its engagement with and in Cartesianism, the defi ning philosophical movement of the day. Therefore by placing Cudworth in the intellectual context of seventeenth-century Cambridge it is possible to see how the perception of Cudworth as the intellectual outsider is limiting at best.

CUDWORTH AND THE INTERREGNUM, 1644–1660 It is clear therefore that Cudworth’s thought, although seeming to us to be out of step with what we might recognise as the general trends of seventeenth-century philosophy, was itself a reaction to the intellectual and religious concerns of seventeenth-century England, and of the University of Cambridge in particular. For this reason one might expect Cudworth to have been more readily received by his contemporaries, even if his reputation diminished through the ascendancy of empiricism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Cudworth’s philosophical importance was recognised by many of his contemporaries, 27 it appears that Cudworth remained on the outside of English intellectual life even during his own lifetime. It would be tempting to suggest that his career in Cambridge, away from the hurly-burly of London life, might have explained something of this intellectual separation. However, Cudworth was, unlike his direct contemporary Henry More, not completely tied to his college rooms. From what biographical evidence we have it appears that Cudworth was a regular visitor to London and was a regular correspondent with his London acquaintances. 28 In addition Cudworth was accepted, at least on nodding terms, into the intellectual life of London. Cudworth’s two published sermons were preached to London audiences, and he was a founder member of the Royal Society. Also Cudworth was an important intellectual influence on that most metropolitan of seventeenth-century groups, the Latitudinarians. 29 Finally, Cudworth was travelling to London when his bladder burst, leading to the illness that eventually killed him in 1688. 30 It seems clear therefore that a further reason needs to be sought for why Cudworth remained on the outside of contemporary intellectual culture. The answer lies again in Cudworth’s ties to the University of Cambridge, and particularly the role that his closeness to the Parliamentary and later Protectorate regimes played in his preferment within the university. As with his intellectual sources, in his lifetime Cudworth did not reject contemporary interests; rather he had

106

Benjamin Carter

the historical misfortune to back the wrong horse. So just as the historical ascendancy of empiricism has contributed to the interpretation of Cudworth the Platonist as an intellectual outsider, so the eventual triumph of Royalist Anglicanism created a climate of suspicion and distrust around Cudworth the Puritan. Cudworth does not appear to have been an obvious revolutionary. Unlike other intellectuals who prospered under the Protectorate, for instance, Anthony Ascham or John Milton, Cudworth never provided intellectual justification or legitimacy for any of the regimes of the Interregnum. Rather, Cudworth appears to have been somewhat of a political realist, willing to bend and mould himself to the changing regimes of the middle decades of the seventeenth century. This has certainly contributed to the perception of Cudworth the political quietist and casuist, willing to change his mind and religion to maintain his job. This appears to be confirmed by a brief examination of the differing and contradictory political oaths that Cudworth subscribed to during his Cambridge career. In 1644 he accepted the Solemn League and Covenant, which enforced a Presbyterian settlement on the English church. In doing so he avoided the purge of the university led by the Earl of Manchester. As a consequence of Manchester’s purge Cudworth received his fi rst and most dramatic promotions. In 1645, at the age of twenty-eight, Cudworth was appointed to the Mastership of Clare Hall and to the Regius Chair of Hebrew. Cudworth held his chair till his death, although he never took up his post at Clare Hall with any enthusiasm. In 1650 he accepted The Engagement which justified the regicide and legitimised the new republic. By remaining in the university Cudworth was, in 1654, able to leave his post at Clare Hall when he was elected to the Mastership of Christ’s College on the death of Samuel Bolton. By moving from a post in which he was placed to one to which he was elected Cudworth’s position was stronger than many of his contemporaries at the Restoration, and unlike many of his contemporaries, most notably Benjamin Whichcote at King’s, Cudworth remained in post. To do this, however, Cudworth after the Restoration had to take the fi nal of the series of political oaths, in particular those pertaining to the Clarendon code which repudiated The Solemn League and Covenant.31 Although the taking of these oaths would seem to suggest that Cudworth was willing to compromise his opinions to maintain his place in Cambridge, within this political realism there exist certain central political principles which seem to undermine the accusations of casuistry that could be levelled against Cudworth.32 In his unpublished writings Cudworth argues that ‘Promises, Pacts, Covenants, & Promisiory Oaths . . . are ye foundations of politicall societies’. However, these oaths carry with them two qualifications. Firstly, men must enter into them freely and agree to them under the power of their own agency, because the oaths would have no binding moral power if men were coerced into taking them: ‘Oaths would be Errant Nonsence if a man had no-more power over his future Actions

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

107

yn a weather-cock hath of standing North or South tomorrow’. 33 Secondly, it is not the oaths themselves which are binding, but the eternal principles which lie behind them. Following the intellectualism of his entire philosophical system, Cudworth argues that oaths act as tools by which men could publicly subscribe to the eternal and immutable principles of reality. Frustratingly Cudworth remains silent on precisely what these principles are. At the end of his Intellectual System he argues that these principles require man to obey the commands of the civil sovereign. However, this is not mere obedience for the sake of it, but obligation to the ‘lawful commands’ of the civil sovereign, whose legitimacy is derived not from force or coercion, but from the freely willed participation of individual moral actors within the society.34 In his unpublished writings Cudworth develops his view of the limited and ‘participatory’ form of political authority. In a letter to the Puritan jurist John Selden, written in 1643, Cudworth rejects the notion of the divine right of kingship, suggesting that ‘under ye Christian State, there is scarcily any thing of Jus Divinum besides the Universal and Catholick Law of Nature’.35 Even if the powers of the civil sovereign were limited Cudworth also doubted whether noble birth was the soundest means of selecting political leadership, commenting in his manuscripts, Nothing does so crave ye esteem of a Nobleman to himself as ye sense of his honour or greatnesse; this he estemes naturall: but if he do go back, but to 7 ages: he wd see from how low a degree they are risen to ye condition they are in y t they will see it is rather owing to ye industry or fortunes or to ye injustice of their ancestry they fi nd they are the possesser of ye advantages.36 Consequently Cudworth’s private writings in particular give us an impression of a man who both rejected the absolutist excesses of the Stuart crown and also recognised the political realities of the day. To what extent these principles developed from theory into practise within Cudworth’s life must remain a matter of conjecture. However, if Cudworth was willing to express his doubts over the legitimacy of the divine right in a letter to an acquaintance as early as 1643, one can only suppose that Cudworth welcomed the rebellion against the crown in principle if not in practice. Certainly if we take seriously Cudworth’s desire that the ‘divine right’ of eternal and immutable natural laws should remain it is easier to explain his willingness to work with differing regimes. Cudworth’s willingness to work constructively with the political regimes of the time would appear to be at least consistent with his writings on this matter. However, this principled consistency gave ammunition to those who, at the Restoration, wished to prosper at the expense of those who had done well during the Protectorate. This political climate, particularly within Cambridge, affected all aspects of Cudworth’s working life, having an adverse influence both in his intellectual output and subsequent reputation.

108

Benjamin Carter

CUDWORTH THE OUTSIDER, 1660–1688 At the Restoration many of the scholars and fellows who had been purged by the Earl of Manchester returned to the university. As a consequence there was considerable pressure on those who had prospered by the purge. Ten heads of college were removed at the Restoration, including Cudworth’s close friends Benjamin Whichcote and John Worthington, the Master of Jesus. Cudworth’s place came under considerable attack, although it is thought that his position as an elected head helped secure Cudworth’s position. 37 Even the confi rmation of his position by the Crown did not remove the constant attacks and whispering campaign that limited Cudworth’s remaining years in Cambridge. After 1660 Cudworth’s reputation was inextricably linked with his relationship to the Protectorate. Although never commented on by his attackers, it would not have been ignored that Cudworth’s wife, Damaris, had extensive family links to the regimes of the Interregnum. Damaris was a widow when Cudworth married her in 1654. The father of her fi rst husband was Sir Thomas Andrewes, who had acted as one of the judges at the trial of Charles I and later became the fi rst Lord Mayor of London during the Republic. Attacks on Cudworth were led by Ralph Widdrington, a disaffected fellow of Christ’s who clashed with Cudworth in the early 1660s. In 1660 Widdrington was ejected from his fellowship by Cudworth for ‘contumacy and neglect of statutes’. 38 Widdrington took his case directly to the king, to whom he was well connected through his brother Thomas, who was a member of the council of state. The personal confl ict between Cudworth and Widdrington gives us a clear insight of Cudworth’s reputation after the Restoration. Widdrington’s attacks continually concentrated on Cudworth’s closeness to the Protectorate regime. Widdrington, like Cudworth, had found favour in the Interregnum taking the post of Public Orator and Professor of Greek in the University. However, in his appeals to the king over his ejection, Widdrington consciously distances himself from his promotions in the 1650s, claiming never to have had anything to do with ‘the usurper’. 39 This, Widdrington claims, was in stark contrast to Cudworth who, Widdrington alleges, did zealously adhere to the usurper whilst he lived. . . . and in a profane lamentation worship him after he was dead did ye complainent style that excreable villain ‘our sun a man of wonders the great prince whose memory is blessed’ or after this the complaintent blaspheme and write Richard ‘the levin of all eyes’ ‘a light risen up in darkness.’40 There is some basis to Widdrington’s claims. Cudworth corresponded with John Thurloe, Cromwell’s secretary of state, recommending members of the university for state appointments.41 Cudworth’s relationship also appears to have extended to Cromwell himself. In a letter after Cromwell’s death in

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

109

1658 Cudworth suggested to Thurloe that he might dedicate a text to Richard Cromwell ‘to whose noble father I was much obliged’.42 The consistent if not organised whispering campaign to which Cudworth was subject to following the Restoration was easily recognised by Cudworth’s friend and colleague Henry More, who referred to it in a letter to Anne Conway as a ‘very plott against Dr Cudworth’.43 The time taken in opposing and countering these accusations, particularly the legal attacks of Widdrington, greatly affected Cudworth’s ability to work and produce works for publication.44 Complaints against Cudworth concentrated not only on Cudworth’s personal relationship with the Protectorate, but also on the work that Cudworth did in supporting the work of the Protectorate’s policy of religious toleration. The theme of religious toleration had been central to Cudworth’s wider reputation since the publication of his Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons of 1647. Although largely focused on the limitations of Calvinist theology, Cudworth’s sermon presented a powerful defence of religious toleration, arguing that Christ came not into the world to fi ll our heads with mere Speculations; to kindle a fi re or wrangling and contentious dispute amongst us, and to warm our spirits against one another with nothing but angry & pevish debates, whilst in the mean time our hearts remain all ice within towards God, and have not the least spark of true heavenly fi re to melt and thaw them.45 These themes of tolerance and religious latitude remained central to Cudworth’s contemporary reputation. Cudworth’s views were strongly attacked by the newly conforming Widdrington, who complained that Cudworth was at ease working with the leaders of the re-established church and the leading members of the non-conforming community.46 Widdrington attacked Cudworth’s tolerance on two grounds. Firstly, he attacked Cudworth’s role in the readmission of the Jews, complaining that Cudworth had ‘been ye protectors . . . advocate to break the laws and bring in the Jews’.47 Certainly Cudworth had contact with Cromwell over the readmission of the Jews, and in 1655, before their formal readmission on 14 December, Cudworth met with the Menasseh ben Israel. Secondly, Widdrington attacked Cudworth’s belief that ‘every conceited fellow’ was the best judge and arbiter of his religious belief. Widdrington accuses Cudworth of supporting those ‘who desire a greater latitude to walk in than our statute will permit’.48 Consequently, Widdrington argues that Cudworth’s views on religion favoured a break down of the certainties of the re-established church in favour of the religious freedoms and perceived political chaos of the Interregnum. Cudworth’s dispute with Widdrington highlights the great change in Cudworth’s reputation following the Restoration. Although he remained in his position it appears that Cudworth became increasingly marginalised

110 Benjamin Carter within the university. Cudworth and his Cambridge Platonist colleagues were widely derided as ‘Latitudinarians’ because of their calls for religious toleration. Henry More, commenting on this abuse in a letter to Anne Conway, stating that ‘some in their pulipitts call then sons of Belial, others make the Devill a Latitudinarian’.49 On the more formal level Cudworth never served as vice-chancellor, a post which was taken as a yearly office by the heads of houses by election, during the forty-three years that he was a college head in Cambridge. This may have been due to personal reluctance on Cudworth’s part as his role at Christ’s also involved the responsibility of being bursar. However, it is interesting to note that John Covel, Cudworth’s high-church successor as Master of Christ’s, became vice-chancellor almost as soon as he had succeeded Cudworth.50 This social and professional marginalisation had a profound effect on Cudworth’s intellectual output. Because Cudworth could not rely on the fi nancial support of a benefactor or his own private means he was totally reliant on his work and position in the university for his income. This is clear from his early days at Emmanuel, where Cudworth was known to have had up to twenty-eight pupils at one time.51 His fi nancial limitations were such that Cudworth almost quit the university in the early 1650s, only saved by a combination of the gift of the vicarage of Ashwell in Hertfordshire, the fi nancial security offered by his marriage, and gaining the Mastership of Christ’s. Consequently the attacks by Widdrington, and the broader movement to remove Cudworth from Christ’s orchestrated by Humphrey Henchman, Bishop of Salisbury and later London, were not simply personal attacks on Cudworth but also attacks on his livelihood. 52 The implications of these attacks were far-reaching. Because of his relationship to the Protectorate it is clear that Cudworth became an outsider within Restoration society. More importantly Cudworth, and the other Cambridge Platonists, had increasingly to justify their intellectual position. This growing need to defend their moderate position led to the publication of two strong defences of the Cambridge Platonists by Simon Patrick and Edward Fowler, Latitudinarian disciples of the Cambridge Platonists.53 Cudworth’s output during this period was also affected by his need to defend not only his job, but also his intellectual reputation. By the beginning of the 1660s it appears that Cudworth was moving away from his work on Jewish prophesy, which had occupied him during the 1650s, to work on ethics. Although it is not clear what motivated this change it appears that Cudworth was moved in some way to offer a rebuttal to the voluntarist materialism of Thomas Hobbes. Cudworth is traditionally viewed as existing solely to oppose Hobbes. John Passmore in his influential survey of Cudworth’s philosophy stated that ‘Hobbes’s influence is . . . a pervasive one, but in a direction almost entirely negative. Hobbes is never far long out of Cudworth’s mind, but among the multitude of references to that “atheistic politician” (never once mentioned by name—like the Devil) not one is unreservedly favourable’.54 Passmore’s characterisation of Cudworth

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

111

is correct when considered in relation to the Intellectual System alone. Cudworth’s avowed intent to confute ‘all the reason and philosophy of atheism’ would seem to be aimed fi rmly at Hobbes. This view is reinforced with reference to the Eternal and Immutable Morality with its repeated attacks on Hobbist materialism in the guise of ancient Protagorean philosophy.55 Often the influence of Hobbes on Cudworth’s thought has been overplayed, as the quote from Passmore shows. Cudworth’s distain for Hobbes’ thought is clear; however, it would be wrong to see the change in Cudworth’s work in the 1660s as a dramatic reorientation of his interests in response to the rise of Hobbist philosophy. Instead Cudworth’s rejection of Hobbes is a continuation and remodelling of the intellectual interests that dominated his upbringing. In particular Cudworth treats Hobbes as a voluntarist and, in this manner, as the bastard brother of the Calvinism that he rejected in his youth. If Cudworth’s historical context is taken into account it is possible to understand that his rejection of Hobbes is not simply an aspect of Cudworth’s rejection of modernity. Instead Cudworth deploys against Hobbes the same intellectualist arguments which he fi rst developed as a young man against Calvinist ethical philosophy. This is clearly shown in Cudworth’s invocation of the Euthyphro in his Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons. Earlier than this Cudworth, in 1644, delivered two Latin orations—Dantur boni et mali rationes aeternae et indispensabiles and Dantur substantiae incorporae sua natura immortals—which championed the same intellectualist position in ethics that Cudworth would later deploy against Hobbes. It is perhaps a little simplistic to suggest, as Frederick Beiser has, that the God of Hobbes was the ‘God of Calvin spelt out in material terms’. 56 It is however clear that Cudworth felt increasingly compelled to use the intellectualism which he had developed at Cambridge against what he perceived to be the increased threat of voluntarism, either in a resurgence of Calvinism, or a development of Hobbism. Most famously this emerged in Cudworth’s dispute with Henry More over the preparation and publication of a work on ethics. Although traditionally characterised as a simple intellectual dispute amongst colleagues, this controversy also highlights the political and professional disputes that affected Cudworth at this time. As already stated Cudworth’s position in Cambridge was under serious threat in the early years of the 1660s. Although faced with extreme opposition, Cudworth was supported by two influential allies. The fi rst of these was Sir Heneage Finch, half-brother of the philosopher Lady Anne Conway; the second source of support for Cudworth was Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury. It is clear that Cudworth was acutely aware of the personal debt that he owed to both men and wished, in some manner, to repay them. Cudworth repaid Finch with the dedication of his Intellectual System, and it appears from correspondence that Cudworth wished to perform the same courtesy to Sheldon, to whom he owed his ‘living and station’. 57 Cudworth’s initial intention was to publish his work on ethics in honour of Sheldon.

112

Benjamin Carter

However, Cudworth’s work was delayed, probably by a combination of his duties as master and his own slow working techniques. 58 During this period Henry More had also begun work on a text on ethics. Cudworth complained to John Worthington that he was ‘struck into amaze’ by the discovery that More, ‘whom I have been entire friend to’, began work on the text of his Enchiridion ethicum in 1666.59 In his own defence More claimed, also in letters to John Worthington, that he did not know of this overlap in their interests. However, Cudworth argued that, despite More’s apologies, the immanent appearance of More’s work undermined his ability to produce a work which would sufficiently acknowledge his debt to Sheldon.60 Therefore instead of producing a work on ethics, Cudworth published his Sermon Preached to the Honourable Society of Lincolnes-Inne. This text, although corresponding to his interests of the time, particularly his rejection of Calvinism and Hobbism, lacks the profundity and intellectual importance of Cudworth’s unpublished ethical writings.

CONCLUSION: THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE The historical and philosophical themes which defi ned Cudworth’s life within the University of Cambridge come together in his greatest work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe. Published in 1678 this vast text was by far the largest work written by Cudworth. Although containing many of Cudworth’s most progressive and important ideas, the Intellectual System defi nes Cudworth as the consummate outsider. Its literary form, philosophical style and ultimately incomplete form have all meant that the intellectual significance and contemporary importance of Cudworth’s thought has been overlooked. Particularly after Cudworth’s death these factors contributed to a growing interpretation of Cudworth through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both in England and throughout Europe, which have defi ned the modern understanding of Cudworth. The main stumbling block in the interpretation of Cudworth’s text is its very form. The Intellectual System is an enormous text, and inevitably interpretations of Cudworth concentrate greatly on this. As C. A. Patrides has pointed out, ‘Readers of the System have repeatedly attacked its “diffuse repetitions and enormous digressions,” its “vast and unwieldy” size, its lack of “any graces of style.” It has even been called “monstrously obese”— and who can demure?’61 This has led to fundamental problems in the reception of Cudworth’s text. Although the Intellectual System deals with many of the contemporary innovations in philosophy, it does so in such an idiosyncratic manner as to mask the importance of Cudworth’s contributions to contemporary philosophical debate. In particular the Intellectual System is wedded to the concerns of seventeenth-century thought, particularly

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

113

through its critical discussions of Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza; however, it is presented in a manner that looks back to the humanism of the Renaissance. In particular, Cudworth’s adherence to the styles and theories of the philosophia perennis means that all ideas are related continually to intellectual counterparts in the ancient world. Consequently Descartes, as stated, is drawn as the resurrected Pythaogoras, Hobbes as the child of Epicurus and Protagoras, and Spinoza as the heir to Hylophathian atheism. Secondly, and linked to the previous point, is the manner in which Cudworth engages with the ideas of his contemporaries. When Cudworth deals with central questions of, say, Cartesian metaphysics, he does so through the arguments and structures of theological debate. So, for instance, Cudworth presents an extended discussion of Descartes’ theories of immaterial and material substance through a defence of the unity of the Trinity. Considering Cudworth’s very overt theism this discussion is, in itself, not a surprise. However, Cudworth’s constant use of overtly theological forms of argument has meant that, next to the arguably more secularising nature of his contemporaries, Cudworth’s interests have been characterised as ‘theological’ in contrast to the ‘philosophical’ interests of others.62 Notwithstanding the problems inherent in the Intellectual System as a text, it is still very much wedded to the intellectual concerns defi ned through Cudworth’s life. As a consequence it is important to remember that, despite the inherent difficulties of comprehending the Intellectual System, it exists as a rejoinder to what Cudworth interpreted as the dangers of arbitrary power. In the Intellectual System this concern is largely directed at the materialism and determinism of Thomas Hobbes. However, as already shown, these attacks were merely a modification of Cudworth’s earlier rejection of the voluntarism of Calvinism. The Intellectual System therefore should be viewed as part of Cudworth’s wider attacks on voluntarism. In this manner the overarching defence of intellectualism of the Intellectual System not only compliments his early rejection of Calvinism and scholastic Reformed orthodoxy, but also helps defend something of the ambiguity of his political views. In this manner the Intellectual System, as G. R. Cragg has argued, does not show Cudworth’s disconnection with his immediate context but suggests Cudworth as an early prophet of the commonly held values of natural justice and universal rights.63 When placed in its intellectual and political context it is possible to comprehend the Intellectual System as a product of seventeenth-century Cambridge. For this reason it is important to recognise that the incomplete form of the Intellectual System has to be considered, to some extent, in the light the personal difficulties that Cudworth encountered during its composition. The Intellectual System began life in the ethical speculations that Cudworth undertook in the 1660s which, as outlined previously, brought him into confl ict with Henry More. Whether it was due to the publication of More’s Enchiridion, the pressures of leading a college or his idiosyncratic

114 Benjamin Carter working practices, Cudworth’s project morphed and developed from that which he outlined to John Worthington in 1664, to the fi nal volume which received a licence for publication in 1671. This volume was intended as the fi rst of three parts of the True Intellectual System of the Universe dealing with, in turn, atheism, ethics and free will.64 It is impossible to say why the present Intellectual System—the fi rst volume—was the only volume of this project to be published. From Cudworth’s posthumously published works, his Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality and his Treatise on Freewill, as well as his unpublished manuscripts on free will, it is clear that Cudworth had sketched out the central ideas for the two remaining volumes of the True Intellectual System of the Universe. It is certainly the case that Cudworth, despite the constant encouragement of his colleagues, was always reluctant to present his work in print. Also, as we have seen in Cudworth’s dispute with More, he was, unlike More, slow in producing his work. Crucially for the reputation of Cudworth’s project, an inexplicable delay occurred between the granting of the licence to publish in 1671 and the eventual publication date in 1678. It is tempting to blame this delay on Cudworth’s unwillingness to leave the text. This is supported by the enormous size of chapters four and five of the Intellectual System which, in contrast to the fi rst three chapters, are particularly heavily laden with quotations, suggesting that Cudworth could not resist adding just one more example.65 However, Thomas Birch, one of Cudworth’s early biographers, suggests that the delay was because it ‘met with great opposition from some of the Courtiers of King Charles II, who endeavoured to destroy the reputation of it, when it was fi rst published’.66 It is certainly the case that Cudworth’s reputation remained tarred by his association with the Protectorate. Although there is no direct evidence of this plot, the fact that Cudworth dedicates the work to Sir Heneage Finch, who was by this time Lord Chancellor, shows that Cudworth wished the work to have the public approval of his influential supporters. Consequently, if the real animosity with which some viewed Cudworth did affect his ability to publish the fi rst volume of the True Intellectual System of the Universe, it is not a surprise, considering the importance he placed on his status and occupation in the university, that Cudworth might have been reluctant to publish the subsequent volumes of his System. The incomplete nature of Cudworth’s project meant that his initial intellectual reputation was defi ned by the fi rst volume of his Intellectual System. As we have seen Cudworth viewed this text as merely the preparatory volume of his broader system of philosophy. However, the failure to publish the subsequent volumes meant that Cudworth’s reputation became skewed because of the inherent limitations of the fi rst volume. On publication and in the years following Cudworth’s death in 1688 this influence was seen in three central areas. Firstly, Cudworth’s text became one of the central texts and influences on debates on the doctrine of the Trinity which developed through the later decades of the seventeenth century, in particular the

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

115

1690s. Cudworth’s text was used both as a repository of pagan and early Christian arguments for and against the Trinity, and as an inspiration for certain moderate Latitudinarian divines who wished to defend the Trinity against the growing attacks of Unitarianism.67 Secondly, because of the content of the System Cudworth came to be characterised less as philosopher and more as an opponent of atheism in general, and of Thomas Hobbes in particular. The reputation was perpetuated by the publication, in 1706, of Thomas Wise’s abridgement of the True Intellectual System under the title, Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism. Wise’s volume reduced Cudworth’s vast ‘Magazine of Reasoning and Learning’ to 551 pages down from the 899 pages of the original. Wise stated that he was moved to engage in this project of editing and abridgement because he believed that the profound erudition of Cudworth’s System masked the central argument of the project. Wise argued that precisely because Cudworth’s work was so erudite it had become possible to use Cudworth’s text to support indirectly those atheist arguments he wished to refute. Wise’s intention was therefore to remove any confusion over the intention and form of Cudworth’s work. However, in doing this Wise contributed to a change in the understanding of Cudworth’s work, stressing its attacks on atheism over its philosophical worth and influence.68 Thirdly, following the line of Wise’s argument, Cudworth’s System increasingly came to be recognised for its undoubted erudition and scholarship at the expense of the philosophical content of the text. This impression of the text is shown by John Locke’s recommendation of Cudworth’s System in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education.69 The vast erudition of Cudworth’s text was brought to an even wider audience in 1733 by the translation of the complete text into Latin by the German scholar Johann Lorenz Mosheim.70 This project, which shows Mosheim to have had as much if not more knowledge of classical sources even than Cudworth, stressed again the learning of Cudworth’s text over its philosophical value. What marks out Mosheim’s volume is not simply the translation, but the voluminous notes he includes with the text highlighting the depth but also, at times, weakness of Cudworth’s scholarship.71 Mosheim’s text undoubtedly brought Cudworth’s work to a wider audience but in a form that again stressed his erudition and scholarship above his philosophical worth. Something of this imbalance was rectified by the publication in 1736 of Cudworth’s Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality. This edition was prepared from the manuscript by Edward Chandler, Bishop of Durham, at the request of Cudworth’s grandson Francis Cudworth Masham from manuscripts which had been passed to Cudworth’s daughter and John Masham’s mother, Damaris Masham.72 This edition was brought to publication as a contribution to eighteenth-century debates on ethical rationalism in which Cudworth’s text became a defi ning text, raising the ire of David Hume and earning Cudworth’s work a place in many of the standard texts on the ‘British Moralists’.73 In terms of Cudworth’s

116

Benjamin Carter

lasting reputation the posthumous publication of Cudworth’s Morality had a mixed influence on Cudworth’s broader intellectual reputation. On one hand, the wider dissemination of Cudworth’s thought, and in a much more digestible form than the System, allowed Cudworth’s philosophy, and not simply his scholarship, to be more widely recognised. However, because this text was published in an eighteenth-century context it has become easy to interpret Cudworth’s ethical writings away from the seventeenthcentury context in which they were fi rst conceived. In particular it has been common for the ethical epistemology of Cudworth’s Morality to be interpreted not as an extension of his System but as part of an inevitable movement towards the ethical rationalism of Kantian ethics.74 As a consequence of this Cudworth’s Morality has had little influence in changing the standard understanding of Cudworth as an outsider in the canon of seventeenth-century thought. Whatever the reasons that prevented the completion of Cudworth’s complete System, undoubtedly this fact, more than any other, has limited the full appreciation of Cudworth as a philosopher. On this matter it is interesting to speculate what effect the publication of even one of the remaining volumes of Cudworth’s System before his death in 1688 might have had on his reputation. Assuming that the projected second volume of the System would have mirrored the ideas of the posthumously published Morality it is certainly possible to argue that this text would have provided an important counter-balance to Locke’s Essay, which was published the year after Cudworth’s death. Also the development of Cudworth’s system into questions of ethics would have allowed the philosophical ideas of the fi rst volume, on which the Morality is built, to have been seen in clearer and sharper focus. This would not have removed the inherent problems of the fi rst volume, but would certainly have allowed for a fuller and wider appreciation of the contemporary importance of Cudworth’s thought. Such counter-factual speculations are rarely fruitful; however, when considering Cudworth’s intellectual reputation it is important to recognise the central role that Cudworth’s failure to complete his True Intellectual System has had on his subsequent intellectual reputation. As we have seen this failure is, like Cudworth’s work as a whole, inextricably linked with his life in social, cultural and political contexts of the University of Cambridge. Consequently any reappraisal of Cudworth’s place within the canon of seventeenth-century philosophy needs to acknowledge this fact above all others and recognise that just as Ralph Cudworth has always been defined as a Cambridge Platonist, he should also be remembered as a Platonist of Cambridge. NOTES 1. W. R. Inge, introduction to Benjamin Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms, ed. W. R. Inge (London: E. Mathews & Marrot, 1930) iii.

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

117

2. Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationship between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) 107. 3. The non-conforming nature of Emmanuel in the early decades of the seventeenth century were well noted. During this period Emmanuel was criticised for the lack of surplices, communion being taken sitting down and that the chapel (which is now the Old Library) was unconsecrated and orientated north-south; see John Twigg, The University of Cambridge and the English Revolution, 1625–1688 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1990), and Sarah Bendell, Christopher Brooke and Patrick Collinson, A History of Emmanuel College (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999). 4. Ralph Cudworth, the elder, A Commentarie or Exposition, upon the First Chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians (Cambridge, 1604). Michael Gill has suggested that Perkins ‘hand picked’ the elder Cudworth to succeed him into the vicarage of St Andrew’s Church Cambridge. Gill however does not offer any proof for this assertion: Michael Gill, The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 7. 5. ‘Memoirs of Ralph Cudworth D.D. Author of The Intellectual System’, in The Present State of the Republick of Letters, vol. 17 (1736) 24. 6. Bendell, Brooke and Collinson, Emmanuel College 16 7. Frederick J. Powicke, The Cambridge Platonists: A Study (London: J.M. Dent and Co., 1926) 111. 8. ‘Memoirs of Ralph Cudworth’ 24–25. 9. John Tulloch, Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy on England in the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1874). 10. It has been common in recent years to doubt the importance of Neoplatonism on Whichcote’s work; see Jon Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999) 75–80. However, the important role that Whichcote played in the introduction of Platonism to the Cambridge curriculum is acknowledged by contemporary commentators. For instance, Gilbert Burnett comments that it was Whichcote who introduced ‘Plato, Tully, and Plotinus’ to Cambridge; see Gilbert Burnett, History of My Own Time, ed. Osmund Airy, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897) 331. 11. H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); see in particular the fi nal chapter, ‘The Candle of the Lord’, 416–429. 12. Dewey D. Wallace, Jr., Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) 224. For this distinction, also see Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1977) 268–277. 13. It is striking to notice how closely aligned the Cambridge Platonists were to Cambridge institutions which came under direct scrutiny and attack from Laud. Not only Emmanuel, but also Holy Trinity Church where Whichcote gave, from 1636, the Sunday afternoon lectures. Twigg, The University of Cambridge 84. 14. For classic accounts of Protestant Scholasticism, see Brian G. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century France (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); John S. Bray, Theodore Beza’s Doctrine of Predestination (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1975).

118

Benjamin Carter

15. Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca.1725, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Backer Academic, 1987) 27–45. 16. John Locke, The Correspondence of John Locke, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–1989), Vol. 3: L882. 17. S[imon].P[atrick]., A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men Together with Some Refl ections upon the New Philosophy (London, 1662). 18. John Passmore, Ralph Cudworth: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951) 11. 19. Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe: The First Part; Wherein, All the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism is Confuted; and Its Impossibility Demonstrated (London, 1678) 174. 20. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe 725. For Cudworth’s full discussion of the ontological proof, see 715–739. 21. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe 220. 22. Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England, trans. James P. Pettegrove (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1953) 1. 23. J. S. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical and Historical, vol. 3 (London, 1867) 276; also see E. N. Tigerstedt, The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato (Helsinki: Societas Scientarium Fennica, 1974). On the status of nineteenth-century Platonism, see David Newsome, Two Classes of Men: Platonism & English Romantic Thought (London: J. Murray, 1974) and Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). 24. Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 7. 25. Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality 60. 26. Compare Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe 44 with Henry More, The Complete Poems of Dr Henry More (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969) 119. 27. For instance, there was an extended discussion of elements of Cudworth’s philosophy between Pierre Bayle and Jean Le Clerc; see Luisa Simmonutti, ‘Bayle and Le Clerc As Readers of Cudworth: Aspects of the Debate on Plastic Nature in the Dutch Learned Journals’, Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte in Nederland 4.2 (1993): 147–165. 28. For Cudworth’s letters to John Selden in the early 1640s, see Bod.Mss.Selden Supra, 108–109. For Cudworth’s letters to John Worthington in the 1660s, see John Worthington, The Diary and Correspondence of Dr John Worthington 3. vols (Manchester, UK: Printed for the Chetham Society, 1847–1886). 29. Ralph Cudworth, A Sermon Preached before the Honourable House of Commons, On March 31st, 1647: Being a Day of Public Humiliation (London, 1647); Ralph Cudworth, A Sermon Preached to the Honourable Society of Lincolnes-Inne (London, 1664). 30. There is a long account of Cudworth’s death in ‘Memoirs of Ralph Cudworth’, 29–30. In this the anonymous author claims that Cudworth recanted his faith on his death bed, dying ‘a very infidel’. There is no evidence to verify this claim and it seems that Thomas Birch, who plagiarised the ‘Memoir’ widely for his biography of Cudworth, did not respect the provenance of this story. Compare ‘Life of Cudworth’ in BL.Add.Mss.4297 with Thomas Birch, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of R. Cudworth D.D.’, in Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1820). 31. Twigg, The University of Cambridge 293–297 and 302–303. Cudworth’s subscription to the Act of Uniformity is recorded in Bod.Rawl.Mss.B375, 5b.

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

119

32. David Martin Jones has argued persuasively in his book, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth-Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 1999), that casuistry became a central tool of political survival for many members of English society during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. 33. BL.Add.Mss.4980, 177. These arguments are directed against Hobbes’ arguments on oaths. Compare with Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) 198–201. 34. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe 896–899. 35. Bod.Mss.Selden Supra, 108–109, 270. 36. BL.Add. .Mss.4983, 21. 37. Twigg, The University of Cambridge 239–242. 38. John Peile, Biographical Register of Christ’s College 1505–1905 and of the Earlier Foundation, God’s house, 1448–1505, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913) 421–422. 39. On taking the engagement in 1650 Widdrington became public orator and professor of Greek, Peile, Biographical Register 422; CUL.Mss.Mm.5.24, 20. 40. CUL.Mss.Mm.5.24, 16. 41. Bod.Rawl.Mss.28, 116–117; Bod.Rawl.Mss.38, 259–261; Bod.Rawl.Mss.43, 329–330; Bod.Rawl.Mss.58, 196. Also see BL.Add.Mss.4476, 148. 42. Bod.Rawl.Mss.63, 43. 43. Anne Conway, The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and Their Friends, 1642–1684, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, rev. Sarah Hutton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) 238. 44. In a letter to John Worthington dated 8 September 1664, Cudworth complained of ‘a great conspiracy and plot laid not long since’ and the implications that this had had on his abilities to work and conduct the business of the college. Worthington, The Diary and Correspondence, vol. 2, 135. 45. Ralph Cudworth, ‘A Sermon Preached before the House of Commons. March 31st 1647’, The Cambridge Platonists, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Edward Arnold, 1969) 96. 46. CUL.Mss.Mm.5.48, 15. Cudworth’s closeness to non-conformists was also commented on by Gilbert Burnet; see Gilbert Burnet, Supplement to Burnet’s History of My Own Time, ed. H. C. Foxcroft (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902) 464. 47. CUL.Mss.Mm.5.48, 15. 48. CUL.Mss.Mm.5.24, 14b–15. 49. Conway, The Conway Letters 243. 50. Twigg, The University of Cambridge 285. 51. ‘Memoirs of Ralph Cudworth’ 25. 52. Bod.Tanner.Mss.49, 32; Twigg, The University of Cambridge 242. 53. P[atrick]., A Brief Account; and Edward Fowler, The Principle and the Practices of Certain Moderate Divines of the Church of England, (Greatly MisUnderstood) Truly represented and Defended (London, 1670). 54. Passmore, Ralph Cudworth 11. 55. Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality 13, 29–36. 56. Frederick C. Beiser, The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defence of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996) 147–148. 57. Worthington, The Diary and Correspondence, vol. 2, 135.

120

Benjamin Carter

58. In a letter to John Thurloe Cudworth complained of ‘the perpetual distractions of the bursarship’: Bod.Mss.Rawl.A.63, 43. Also Cudworth’s reluctance to publish was noted by John Worthington who, in a letter to Henry More, declared his desire to ‘draw out Dr Cudworth’; Worthington, The Diary and Correspondence, vol. 2, 303. 59. Worthington, The Diary and Correspondence, vol. 1, 157–160, 172. 60. Worthington, The Diary and Correspondence, vol. 2, 141–142. 61. Patrides, The Cambridge Platonists ix. 62. For instance, Tulloch states that the Cambridge Platonists possessed ‘religious perspective’ in contrast to the philosophical outlook of Descartes or Bacon; Tulloch, Rational Theology, vol. 1, 18–19. 63. G.R. Cragg, The Cambridge Platonists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 64. Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe v. 65. It is interesting to note that the fi rst three chapters of Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe amount to 191 pages where the fi nal two chapters take amount to 708 pages of the 899 pages in total. 66. Birch, An Account of the Life and Writings of R. Cudworth D.D. xiii. 67. The following texts are all examples of the defences of the Trinity written in the 1690s which all show the indelible influence of Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe: Edward Fowler, Certain Propositions by Which the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity Is So Explained, According to the Ancient Fathers As to Speak It Not Contradictory to Natural Reason (London, 1719); William Sherlock, A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and Ever Blessed TRINITY, and the Incarnation of the Son of God (London, 1690); John Tillotson, Sermons Concerning the Divinity and Incarnation of Our Blessed Saviour (London, 1690). For Cudworth’s influence on the debates of the 1690s, see Douglas Hedley, ‘Persons of Substance and the Cambridge Connection: Some Roots and Ramifications of the Trinitarian Controversy in Seventeenth-Century England’, Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in SeventeenthCentury Europe, ed. Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls (Leiden: Brill, 2005); and Leslie Armour, ‘Trinity, Community & Love: Cudworth’s Platonism and the Idea of God’, Platonism and the Origins of Modernity, ed. Sarah Hutton and Douglas Hedley (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007). For the best general account of seventeenth-century debates on the Trinity, see Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (London: T & T Clark, 2003). 68. For an account of Cudworth and Wise as sources of information on atheism, see John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660–1750 (London: Thanes and Hudson, 1976). 69. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. John W. Yolton and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 248. 70. Ernst Cassirer suggested that the lasting influence of the Cambridge Platonists came in the Neoplatonism implicit in the Platonism of eighteenth-century German aestheticism. Cassirer argues that the influence of this conduit is the Third Earl of Shaftsbury and does not consider the influence that Mosheim’s edition may have had on German thought in the same period; see Cassirer, Platonic Renaissance 157–202. 71. For a discussion of Mosheim’s interpretation of Cudworth, see Sarah Hutton, ‘Classicism and Baroque: A Note on Mosheim’s Footnotes to Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe’, Johann Lorenz Mosheim: Theologie in sannhugsfeld von Philosophie, Philologie und Geschicte, 1693–1755, ed. Martin Mulsow (Weisbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1997). Mosheim’s

The Standing of Ralph Cudworth As a Philosopher

121

notes were translated by John Harrision and included in the 1848 edition of Cudworth’s The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 3 vols. (London). 72. Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality, ed. Edward Chandler (London, 1731). Jacqueline Broad has suggested that these manuscripts may not have come to the house of Damaris Masham, Oates, on Cudworth’s death, but instead were bequeathed to Cudworth’s eldest son John in 1688. Broad argues that they were then passed to Damaris’ son Francis in 1726 on the death of the childless John Cudworth. It was then at this point that the manuscripts were passed to Chandler explaining the publication date of Cudworth’s A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality in 1731. Jacqueline Broad, ‘A Woman’s Influence? John Locke and Damaris Masham on Moral Accountability’, Journal of the History of Ideas 67 (2006): 489–510, esp. 500–502. Broad’s argument here is to diminish the influence of Cudworth’s manuscripts on the later drafts of John Locke’s Essay as suggested by, in particular, John Passmore and Stephen Darwall: see Passmore, Ralph Cudworth 90–96; Stephen Darwall, British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 172–175. Broad’s argument is persuasive; however, it does not acknowledge the existence of certain contemporary eighteenth-century accounts of Cudworth’s unpublished manuscripts which always place them in the possession of Damaris Masham. Thomas Wise, for instance, stated in 1706 in the introduction to his abridgement of Cudworth’s System that the ‘[r]emainder is said to be in MS’ and in the possession of ‘The Lady Masham, Dr. Cudworth’s Daughter’. See Tho[mas] Wise, A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism (London, 1706) 10. 73. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) 455–470. Also see David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Niddich (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975) 197; L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed., The British Moralists, Being Selections from Writers Principally of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897); D. D. Raphael, ed., British Moralists: 1650–1800 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. Co., 1991). The importance of Cudworth to English ethical rationalism is noted by John Passmore whose short text on Cudworth began life as a fi rst part of a larger work on English ethical rationalism ‘from Cudworth to the present day’, Passmore, Ralph Cudworth vii. 74. The fi rst text to overtly link Cudworth to the forms and structures of Kantian ethics was Arthur O. Lovejoy’s ‘Kant and the English Platonists’, Essays Philosophical and Psychological: In honor of William James by His Colleagues at Columbia University (New York: Longman, 1908). In recent years this neo-Kantian reading of Cudworth has been developed by both Stephen Darwall and Frederick Beiser: see Darwall, British Moralists 109 and 325; Beiser, Sovereignty 174.

5

Nicholas Malebranche Insider or Outsider? Andrew Pyle

PART I. HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION Malebranche’s fame and reputation reached its high point around 1700. The persecution suffered by the young Oratorian at the hands of his superiors was now behind him. The elders of the Paris Oratory knew that they were dealing with an international celebrity and treated him accordingly. His modest cell attracted courtesy calls from foreign dignitaries—even the exiled King James II paid a visit. To be sure, Malebranche’s works found themselves on the index of prohibited books, but this was simply due to the machinations of his enemies, and in any case the power of the Roman Inquisition in France was strictly limited.1 His works were undergoing translation into foreign languages and were read from Naples to Dublin. In terms of our insider-outsider distinction, he surely counts as in insider. By 1750, all this had changed. To the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Malebranche was distinctly a figure of the past. This is not merely a matter of the passage of time: Locke and Newton were close contemporaries of Malebranche, but both were living presences throughout the eighteenth century. It was Malebranche’s whole worldview and conception of philosophy that seemed hopelessly vieux jeu. In Britain, the reaction begins with Locke, who in his posthumously published Examination of Pere Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God (1706) dismisses the Malebranchian ‘vision in God’ as unintelligible.2 There are ‘enthusiasms’ in philosophy as there are in religion, and Malebranche’s fame may be little more than this. Berkeley, we know, owed much to Malebranche,3 although he tried strenuously (and not always fairly) to minimise the extent of the influence. Hume famously rejects Malebranche’s occasionalism in Section 7 of the Enquiry. After borrowing a number of Malebranche’s arguments against necessary connections in nature, he dismisses Malebranche’s own positive theory with the ‘fairy land’ objection.4 In France, the philosophes had little time for Malebranche. Diderot praises him for his style while rejecting his opinions;5 Condillac suggests he was led astray by an over-vivid imagination;6 Voltaire sums him up with a single dismissive paragraph in the Siècle de Louis XIV:

Nicholas Malebranche

123

MALEBRANCHE (Nicholas), born at Paris in 1638, Oratorian, one of the most profound meditatives who has ever written. Animated by that powerful imagination which makes more disciples than the truth, he had followers: in his time there were Malebranchists. He showed admirably the errors of the senses and of the imagination; and when he wanted to sound the nature of the soul he got lost in that abyss like the others. He is, like Descartes, a great man from whom one learns little, and he was not a great geometer like Descartes. He died in 1715.7 What explains this abrupt fall from grace, from being very much an ‘insider’ in 1700 to very much an ‘outsider’ in the philosophical world of 1750? Three important factors spring to mind. They are the rise of empiricism and the corresponding eclipse of Platonism, the Enlightenment conception of the philosopher as independent of and generally hostile to the Christian church and the triumph of Newtonian over Cartesian natural philosophy. In all three respects, Malebranche would appear to the philosophers of the Enlightenment to belong very decidedly to the past. To be a Platonist in late seventeenth-century philosophy was nothing unusual or eccentric. In most of Western Europe, the Neoplatonist and Augustinian tradition was a powerful and ever-present rival to Aristotelianism. In France, there were serious attempts to assimilate Cartesian with Augustinian metaphysics to produce a body of philosophy closer in spirit to Christianity than Aristotelianism.8 In Britain, the Cambridge Platonists sought to rework ancient and modern materials to produce a truly Christian metaphysics and morality. Ralph Cudworth and Henry More now seem like strictly minor figures in the history of philosophy, but that is not how they appeared to Locke and Newton. In Germany, the powerful presence of Platonism in the universities and its influence on the young Leibniz has been ably and amply documented.9 But by 1750 the triumph of Lockean empiricism was almost complete, and the powerful criticisms of empiricism in Malebranche and Leibniz fell on deaf ears. Hume and Hartley, Condillac and Helvétius were scarcely likely to look for illumination in the pages of Malebranche. Another important respect in which the philosophical world had changed almost beyond recognition was in the conception of the proper attitude of the philosopher to the Christian religion. In the late seventeenth century, many practicing philosophers were devout Christians and—more importantly—believed that there were no insuperable barriers or obstacles to reconciling their reason (philosophical argument) with their faith (Christian revelation). The harmonious synthesis between faith and reason sought by Malebranche (and many others) was largely demolished by Pierre Bayle. After Bayle, philosophers tended to work independently of the dogmas of faith and either to set them respectfully on one side when doing philosophy or to attack them outright. Independence from the established churches and their creeds was almost the hallmark of the Enlightenment philosopher.

124 Andrew Pyle There were, to be sure, serious philosophers in both the Catholic and Protestant worlds (e.g., Boscovic, Reid) who remained devout Christians, but the current was defi nitely in the direction of worldly indifference or outright hostility. This may be the most important single reason for Malebranche’s rapid fall from grace in the eighteenth century. A third factor that deserves a mention is the triumph of Newtonian over Cartesian natural philosophy. In Britain, of course, the triumph was swift and decisive and can be dated to the famous edition of Rohault’s Physics in which the Newtonian footnotes (added by Samuel Clarke) refute the Cartesian text. In France, the triumph of the Newtonian worldview was hard won and took more than a generation to achieve.10 But after the efforts of Voltaire, Maupertuis and Mme du Châtelet, the Cartesian theory of the plenum and the vortices was eventually consigned to the rubbish bin of discarded hypotheses. This was not entirely fair to Malebranche, whose physics was in fact significantly superior to Descartes’ in several key respects. He had already accommodated Newton’s discovery of the composition of white light into his version of the wave theory, by identifying colour with frequency, as Newton himself had suggested might be done. And he had modified the Cartesian laws of motion again and again, to accommodate them both to rational critique (Leibniz) and to the results of experiment (Mariotte).11 But the collapse of the entire Cartesian worldview naturally dragged Malebranche’s more sophisticated update of Cartesian natural philosophy in its train. We have seen how and why Malebranche fell from grace in the eighteenth century. From being very much an ‘insider’ in the sense that his working assumptions—Platonist epistemology, Cartesian physics, Christian metaphysics and morality—were widely accepted by a significant proportion of his philosophical contemporaries, he becomes an ‘outsider’ by 1750, when these basic assumptions about the nature, scope and function of philosophy were widely regarded as discredited. But of course we today no longer share the assumptions of a Hume or a Voltaire, so it is perhaps time to revisit the issue of Malebranche’s historical importance and his place in our philosophical canon. We are no longer dogmatic empiricists: we cheerfully admit Christian philosophers like St Thomas Aquinas to the philosophical canon, and Newton’s physics has of course gone the way of Descartes’. The reasons for neglect and indifference that weighed with Hume and Voltaire need not weigh so heavily with us. Malebranche’s place in the current philosophical canon seems largely determined by the accidents of geography. In France, as we have seen, the philosophes of the Enlightenment had little time either for rationalist metaphysics or for Christian theology, and still less for the thought that the former should be placed at the service of the latter. But Malebranche was never forgotten, even if he was sometimes admired more for his style than his substance. After the publication in 1854 of Boullier’s Histoire de la Philosophie Cartésienne, Malebranche began to be taken more seriously

Nicholas Malebranche

125

again as a philosopher, with a series of monumental commentaries by Gouhier, Gueroult, Dreyfus, Rodis-Lewis, Robinet and Alquié, leading down in more recent times to the careful studies of Denis Moreau and Jean-Christophe Bardout.12 In Britain and America, by contrast, there was no comparable Malebranche revival until the last two decades. For Locke, Berkeley and Hume, Malebranche was someone whose views demanded serious consideration and whose arguments—as we shall see—could be borrowed and reused for new purposes. Later anglophone philosophers, however, felt safe in dismissing Malebranche as at best a mere ‘visionary’ or ‘mystic’, at worst a mere time-server for Roman Catholic dogma. Russell, for example, mentions him only three times in his whole History of Western Philosophy (1945), and only once as a serious philosopher.13 Spinoza and Leibniz each receive a chapter; Malebranche is mentioned en passant as one of several secondgeneration Cartesians who abandoned mind-body interaction in favour of occasionalism. By the 1960s, Malebranche’s stock was rising again: Randall’s Career of Philosophy (1962) provides eight pages of generally perceptive criticism,14 while Copleston’s History of Philosophy (1963) assigns him a whole chapter.15 Since then, we have seen works by Daisie Radner, Steven Nadler, Tad Schmaltz, Craig Walton and Andrew Pyle, as well as serious discussions in more general works by Thomas Lennon, Richard Watson, John Yolton, Edward Craig, Nick Jolley and Patrick Riley. A Cambridge Companion to Malebranche16 has even appeared, giving the impression of plenty of ongoing research and lively scholarly debate. Students with no French can now read a fair proportion of Malebranche’s work in translation. We have the Search after Truth17 and the Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion18 in the Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy, and the Treatise on Nature and Grace in a new translation by Patrick Riley.19 The glaring omission is Malebranche’s side of his famous correspondence with Arnauld: we have two new translations of Arnauld’s True and False Ideas, 20 but as yet no English version of Malebranche’s letters. Yet much of Malebranche’s most profound thought and rigorous argumentation can be found in the four volumes of the Oeuvres that contain his polemical exchanges with his fiercest and most persistent critic. Even so, students without French can wrestle with the Search and the Dialogues, the Cambridge Companion provides admirable survey articles and an excellent overview of the literature and there is now a substantial body of high-quality secondary literature on laws of nature, occasionalism, ideas, intelligible extension and our idea of matter, the soul and self-knowledge, moral rationalism, free will and of course theodicy. Anglophone historians of philosophy who teach advanced-level undergraduate options on ‘The Rationalists’ could now choose to offer Malebranche as well as—or in place of—Spinoza or Leibniz. 21 But even if the materials are at last available in English to make such a course possible, does Malebranche deserve a place in the canon alongside

126

Andrew Pyle

Spinoza and Leibniz? Is either his historical importance or his philosophical stature sufficient to merit such elevated status? Or should we relegate him to the second division of relatively minor figures, important in their own time but falling later into deserved neglect? This question has two aspects, corresponding to different approaches to the history of philosophy. We might investigate the historical significance of Malebranche’s work and trace his relations to accepted canonical figures. Or we might seek the intrinsic philosophical interest in Malebranche’s writings and address him as a contemporary, with something to say on a philosophical topic of abiding concern. This chapter seeks to address both of these aspects of Malebranche’s significance. We fi rst seek to document Malebranche’s relations to a variety of canonical figures, and more generally to make a case for the historical importance of his work. We then attempt the harder task of lifting his work out of its historical context and assessing the merits of some of his ideas sub specie eternitatis.

PART II. MALEBRANCHE’S PLACE IN HISTORY

A. Malebranche and Descartes (Substance Dualism) Students of the philosophy of mind generally encounter a position called ‘Cartesian dualism’. According to this theory, a human being consists of two entirely distinct entities or substances, one thinking and unextended (res cogitans) and the other extended and unthinking (res extensa). Every state, action or property of a human being must be a ‘mode’ or modification of one or other of these distinct substances—there is no ontological place for modes that somehow bridge or straddle the basic attributes of thought and extension. The theory is generally introduced merely in order to be knocked down by the usual battery of objections, before the author moves on to articulate and defend some version or other of physicalism. Descartes thus serves a useful—if not exactly honorific—role as a sort of philosophical Aunt Sally. But was Descartes himself ever a ‘Cartesian dualist’? The question is a vexed and difficult one, but there are good reasons—ably articulated by John Cottingham 22 —for a negative answer. When his would-be disciple Regius describes a human being as an ens per accidens, a merely accidental unity of two distinct things, Descartes is quick to rebuke him for his audacity. It is better, he writes to Regius, to say that man is an ens per se, and that ‘the human mind is united in a real and substantial manner to the body’. 23 I am not in my body, he writes in the Sixth Meditation, like a pilot in a ship:24 in sensation and emotion the union of mind and body is felt, even if it is not fully understood. This theme is reinforced in the correspondence with Princess Elizabeth, in which Descartes explicitly introduces a third primitive notion, that of the mind-body union, to go along with the

Nicholas Malebranche

127

notions of res cogitans and res extensa. 25 Sensation, imagination, (corporeal) memory26 and emotion are all states of the mind-body union, not of the disembodied mind. If we are seeking a bona fide champion of ‘Cartesian dualism’, Malebranche is an obvious candidate. In the seventh of the Entretiens, Theodore attacks the notion of the mind-body union as hopelessly obscure. The word ‘union’, he insists, explains nothing, but stands itself in need of explanation. 27 All we can intelligibly mean when we speak of a ‘union’ of mind and body is that God has established certain psychophysical laws. Given the strict ontological separation between the distinct substances involved, this is all that ‘union’ can mean. But the psychophysical laws God has established are in themselves contingent, so there is no reason to suppose that a disembodied mind could not enjoy types of experience (sensation, emotion) normally occasioned in us by bodily stimuli. Indeed, given strict substance dualism and the key principle of constitutive essentialism—that each mode of a substance is an intelligible modification of its essential or constitutive attribute—a disembodied mind must be capable in principle of the same experiences as an embodied mind. To show this one need only specify the precise manner in which mind stuff is modified to produce the human sensation of red, or the feeling of sexual desire, reiterate the standard metaphysical principle of the independent existence of distinct substances, and then ask whether precisely this modification of mind could exist even if no bodies existed. Malebranche thinks that this clearly is possible, making him a much more explicit champion of ‘Cartesian dualism’ than Descartes himself.28 Evidence of this strict dualism is to be found in the correspondence with Dom Robert Desgabets, 29 who argues that Malebranche has failed to distinguish the human soul (essentially embodied) from an angel (which can be given control over a body, but for which embodiment can only ever be accidental). Desgabets thinks that much of our experience, for instance, of time and movement, would be strictly impossible for a disembodied being; Malebranche is committed to denying this. An utterly disembodied mind could, on his view, enjoy exactly the same phenomenology as an embodied one. The strict dualism that is present throughout the Recherche and the Entretiens receives its most explicit formulation in the second of the Entretiens sur la Mort. ‘Do you imagine’, Theodore asks Ariste, ‘that there can be no other occasional cause of our sensations than traces in the brain?’30 After death, the soul ‘cannot de deprived of sensibility by the loss of an occasional cause. For in the end the soul is inseparable from itself’. 31 When Ariste asks if the souls of the damned can burn in hell, Theodore replies that ‘doubtless this fi re can burn and torment spirits, as an occasional cause, or produce in them very lively scorching sensations just like those that burning produces in us’. 32 The damned can be subjected to this fi re without being in any metaphysical sense united to it, and without any need for bodily organs.

128

Andrew Pyle

If the authors of introductory textbooks on the philosophy of mind care at all for historical accuracy, they should remove the label ‘Cartesian’ from their accounts of substance dualism. If this doctrine must be pinned onto a particular historical individual, Malebranche has as good a title as anyone. But I do not expect to read any day soon of Gilbert Ryle’s critique of ‘Malebranchian dualism’—canonical figures and positions in the history of philosophy take on a sort of ‘shadow’ life of their own, with only the most remote and tenuous connection to the historical facts. Serious historians of philosophy, however, should never take such semi-mythical accounts at face value. In this case, close study of the Entretiens sur la Mort and the exchanges between Malebranche and Desgabets33 would repay anyone with a serious interest in the development and articulation of the position we have come to call ‘Cartesian dualism’.

B. Malebranche and Locke (Ideas) In a lecture delivered in 1965, Gilbert Ryle recounts asking Bertrand Russell why Locke has been so influential, given that ‘nearly every youthful student of philosophy both can and does in about his second essay refute Locke’s entire Theory of Knowledge’.34 The fundamental problem Ryle had in mind was, of course, the perceived vulnerability of Locke’s theory of indirect or representative realism to sceptical objections, and the corresponding slide into idealism.35 The same objection was later voiced by Jonathan Bennett, who suggested that Locke’s theory places the whole of physical reality behind the so-called ‘veil of perception’.36 But if Locke holds a textbook theory of indirect or representative realism, and is thus vulnerable to the usual sceptical objections against such a theory, why does he level exactly the same charges against Malebranche? In his Examination of Père Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God, 37 published posthumously in 1706, Locke dismisses the ‘vision in God’ as unintelligible and Malebranche’s eliminative proof of his theory as a broken-backed argument from ignorance. Malebranche’s theory, Locke argues, collapses into scepticism or idealism: [A]ccording to his hypothesis of ‘seeing all things in God’ how can he know that there is any such real being in the world as the sun? Did he ever see the sun? No, but on occasion of the presence of the sun to his eyes, he has seen the idea of the sun in God, which God has exhibited to him; but the sun, because it cannot be united to his soul, he cannot see. How then does he know that there is a sun which he never saw? And since God does all things by the most compendious ways, what need is there that God should make a sun that we might see its idea in him when he pleased to exhibit it, when this might as well be done without any real sun at all?38

Nicholas Malebranche

129

If Locke is fully aware of the ‘veil of perception’ argument against the theory of ideas, he must surely be confident that his own theory is not vulnerable to the same objection. A modicum of charity thus requires us not to attribute to Locke the theory that any undergraduate can refute. Two possibilities open up before us at this point. We can assume that Locke was familiar with the controversy over the nature of ideas between Malebranche and Arnauld and that Locke took Arnauld’s side in the dispute, favouring an ‘act’ conception of ideas and thus identifying them with perceptions. Or we can suppose that what Locke found most objectionable and problematic in Malebranche’s theory was the causal impotence of bodies, and that he felt—rightly or wrongly—that his own insistence on bodies as genuine causes enables him to escape from veil-of-ideas scepticism. That Locke should have been aware of the Arnauld-Malebranche dispute, from Arnauld’s Vraies et Fausses Idées (1683), through the resulting polemical exchange of letters, is a very modest assumption: Locke had good French and very good contacts with philosophers on the Continent. In a number of works, John Yolton has argued that the ‘act’ theory of ideas (identifying ideas with perceptions) was the orthodoxy of second-generation Cartesians such as Arnauld, and that Locke was simply following in this tradition.39 On this view, perception of external objects is direct, and the role of ideas reduces to the tautology that I cannot represent an external object without having a representation of it. There is no direct or immediate awareness of a distinct intermediate object (an idea), followed by a precarious inference to its supposed cause. The textual evidence in the Essay itself is mixed and inconclusive, but Yolton’s view has found plenty of support. The Examination yields a little more evidence from the passage where Locke is quizzing Malebranche over the ontological status of his ideas: ‘So that supposing ideas real spiritual things ever so much, if they are neither substances nor modes, let them be what they will, I am no more instructed in their nature, than when I am told they are perceptions, such as I fi nd them’.40 Here Locke seems to be explicitly siding with Arnauld, who had refused to distinguish ideas from perceptions, against Malebranche, who insisted on a real distinction. For Arnauld, one and the same thing can be viewed in two different lights, as an act of the soul (a perception) and as possessing representative content (an idea)—not two different things, but one thing regarded or conceived in two different ways.41 Arnauld sees Malebranche as committed to an intermediate realm of ideas, forever cutting the mind off from contact with the real world of bodies.42 So when Locke attacks Malebranche’s ‘palace of ideas’ in the Examination and raises the objection that the theory falls into veil-of-perception scepticism, he is not saying anything new but merely reiterating an argument voiced twenty years earlier by Arnauld. But of course Locke does frequently refer to ideas in the Essay as ‘objects of thought’—not just in casual moments, but in his most careful and

130 Andrew Pyle explicit statements. The term ‘idea’, he tells us, stands for ‘whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks’.43 There are numerous passages in which ‘idea’ seems to be used for particular mental images, that is, for essentially mental objects of thought or experience. But if Locke so much as flirts with this notion of ideas as intermediate entities standing between the mind and the external world, why does he not see the threat of veil-of-perception scepticism? Perhaps he thinks not just that external objects cause our ideas but also that, in sense experience, we are directly or immediately aware of this causal connection. This would account for his introduction of ‘sensitive’ knowledge in Book 4 of the Essay, making it a principled part of his overall position rather than an obviously ad hoc move to ward off the threat of scepticism. It would, of course, require Locke to hold a non-Humean view of causation, but that may be independently plausible, given what he says elsewhere (e.g., in the famous chapter on power).44 On this view, what Locke fi nds objectionable in Malebranche is not the ‘reifying’ of ideas as intermediate objects but the causal impotence and hence the redundancy of bodies in Malebranche’s account of sense perception. Malebranche sets out to explain how we perceive bodies and ends up with a theory that effectively denies the phenomenon it purported to explain. My purpose in this section has been a modest one, consistent with the overall aim of this chapter. I have not set out to resolve a difficult and thorny question regarding Locke’s theory of ideas, but to recommend that Locke’s Essay be read in the context of Arnauld’s Vraies et Fausses Idées, Malebranche’s Réponse and Locke’s own Examination of Malebranche. We know that Locke was robustly realistic in his views about our ‘sensitive’ knowledge of the external world and consistently hostile to sceptical or idealist views. So he must have been confident that his theory could escape the veil-of-perception objection that he sees besetting Malebranche. Precisely how he thinks he can escape this difficulty—by siding with Arnauld and identifying ideas with mental acts, or by espousing some direct (nonHumean) knowledge of bodies as causes of sense experience—is a further question that continues to divide the scholars.

C. Malebranche and Leibniz (Nature and Laws) Leibniz met Malebranche during his stay in Paris, after which they engaged in intermittent exchanges of letters.45 Much of this correspondence concerns Leibniz’s searching critique of the Cartesian laws of motion, as set out in Book 2 of Descartes’ Principles. The following objections are levelled against Descartes: 1. Descartes’ rules violate mechanical relativity (as established by Huygens). 2. Given mechanical relativity, the Cartesian notion of a ‘force of rest’ must be abandoned.

Nicholas Malebranche

131

3. Descartes’ rigid bodies would change state instantaneously on collision, violating continuity. 4. Descartes’ rules themselves violate continuity (an indiscernible difference in initial conditions can produce a great difference in end state). 5. Descartes’ scalar conservation principle (Σ bulk × speed = k) principle is false; the true vector principle (Σ mass × velocity = k) is consistent with a universe that is running down; the true scalar principle that prevents universal decay is the conservation of vis viva (Σmv² = k). Malebranche started out as a good Cartesian, but under the combined pressures of reason (Leibniz’s critique) and experience (Mariotte’s experiments), he found himself obliged to make a series of modifications and concessions, dropping the ‘force of rest’, the scalar conservation principle and fi nally the existence of hard bodies.46 But the issues that divided Malebranche from Leibniz went far deeper than the accuracy or otherwise of Descartes’ rules, and on the deeper issues of metaphysics there was no meeting of minds. At the heart of Leibniz’s critique of Cartesian natural philosophy is his rejection of Descartes’ claim that extension in three dimensions constitutes the essence of matter. Extension itself, Leibniz argues, is a mere abstraction: we can make no sense of extension except as the diffusion of some quality or nature. This claim is made many times in Leibniz’s works but receives its clearest expression in the Conversation of Philarète and Ariste,47 written as a sort of continuation of and commentary on Malebranche’s Entretiens. A portion of matter, Philarète explains, requires not just extension but a combination of forces, passive and active. A body resists interpenetration by others (antitypy) and changes of state (inertia); it also possesses active powers in virtue of its vis viva, either as a whole or in its parts. Leibniz thus promises a genuine science of dynamics, explaining the motions and collisions of bodies in terms of these constitutive powers.48 On the great metaphysical issue of the powers of bodies, Malebranche and Leibniz could scarcely be further apart. Malebranche may modify his account of the laws of impact, but for him these remain the rules according to which God redistributes motions on the occasion of collisions between bodies—they tell us nothing about the powers of bodies for the elementary reason that bodies have no powers. The belief in natural powers is, he insists in the Recherche, ‘the most dangerous error of the philosophy of the ancients’, and the reason why the Aristotelian philosophy has a dangerous tendency to slide into pagan naturalism.49 The collision of bodies provides, of course, the occasion for God to redistribute motions, and this redistribution takes place according to fi xed and universal laws, but this is no indication of the presence of real causal powers in creatures. If creatures had real causal powers, there would be discernible necessary connections in nature, but experience presents only regularities, and reason tells us that these regularities are merely contingent, that is, could be denied without self-contradiction.

132

Andrew Pyle

On Leibniz’s view, Malebranche’s occasionalism involves a ‘perpetual miracle’, representing God as a sort of inferior workman who has to forever run around keeping his various created substances in harmony with one another.50 Malebranche will reply, of course, that this is a travesty of his position—that he conceives of God as establishing the laws of nature by way of timeless volontés générales and thus as not having to stoop to particulars. The distinction between the natural and the supernatural, he argues, turns not on what transcends the powers of creatures (the traditional way of drawing the distinction) but on the difference between volontés générales and volontés particulières. But Leibniz’s critique runs much deeper than the parody of Malebranche’s God as an inept workman. In the essay ‘On Nature Itself’, Leibniz discusses the view that God can simply utter some universal commands at the Creation, which laws then determine the actions of creatures. Leibniz rejects this explanation as insufficient: For, I ask, has that volition or command, or, if you prefer, divine law that was once laid down, bestowed a mere extrinsic determination, as it were, on things? Or, on the other hand, has it conferred some kind of enduring impression produced in the thing itself . . . ? The fi rst seems to be the doctrine of the inventors of the system of occasional causes, principally that of the very acute Malebranche, while the latter is the received view, and, as I judge, the one that contains the most truth.51 On Leibniz’s view, the divine command must leave some abiding trace in the creature, in virtue of which its current powers are in principle intelligible. Whoever thinks otherwise ‘renounces all distinct explanation of things; anything could equally well be said to follow from anything else if something absent in place or time could be at work here and now, without an intermediary’.52 If occasionalism were true, there would be no a priori constraints on what types of events can cause (i.e., provide occasion for) what other types of events. Unless we can lay down rules for God, the occasionalist may fi nd himself with a position disturbingly akin to Hume’s claim in the Treatise that, as far as a priori argumentation goes, anything may produce (occasion) anything.53 Malebranche seeks to resist this conclusion—he continues to insist, for example, that bodies are moved only by contact—but he has deprived himself of the grounds for such a claim. As Fontenelle points out in an incisive criticism, God could choose to establish close approach—up to, say, the harmonic mean of the diameters of two colliding spheres—as the occasion for rebound.54 Or God could establish a Newtonian universe, moving bodies in accordance with an inverse-square law of gravity, but without any physical intermediary—Malebranche and his disciples were in a particularly weak position to resist the invasion of Newtonian physics into the Académie des Sciences. Philosophical rationalism, it seems, can pull in very different directions. Malebranche accepts the defi nition of cause in terms of necessary

Nicholas Malebranche

133

connection and concludes that only the volitions of an omnipotent being can be true causes, relegating all second causes to the status of mere occasions. But this in turn leaves him with a strikingly empiricist view about second causes: unless we can lay down rules for God a priori, we fi nd ourselves having to accept that anything can cause (occasion) anything. Leibniz’s rationalism leads him, by contrast, to search for an intelligible ground for causal relations in the natures of creatures and thus to arrive at a much more robust and Aristotelian view of natural powers. This insistence that the powers of X must be grounded in the nature or essence of X provides the basis for Leibniz’s critique of Newtonian universal gravitation (either occult quality or perpetual miracle) and of Locke’s suggestion that matter might have the power of thought ‘superadded’ by God. Leibniz’s ongoing critique of Malebranche on the laws of motion is thus by no means an isolated matter, of interest only to historians of physics. Rather, it should be seen as an integral part of his rejection of occasionalism, which in turn plays a pivotal role in his entire metaphysical system.

D. Malebranche and Berkeley (Idealism) Malebranche tells us plainly, in the sixth Eclaircissement added to the Recherche, that it is very difficult to prove the existence of bodies. 55 What I am directly aware of in experience is not the material world but an intelligible realm of ideas, fi lled with intelligible bodies. 56 There is, of course, a natural belief in bodies, but this penchant extrême à croire is a matter of conviction rather than of evidence. Descartes tried to prove the existence of bodies in the Sixth Meditation, but his argument fails because it rests on the mistaken assumption that bodies cause (many of) our sensations. As far as unaided reason takes us, the belief in the existence of bodies remains plausible but unproved: it is faith (i.e., Scripture) that tells us that God created the heavens and the earth, and that the Word was made flesh.57 In the sixth Entretien, Theodore explains to Ariste that God, not bodies, is the true cause of our sensations. The quick-witted pupil grasps the point and adds that he has just had a very strange thought: ‘I almost dare not suggest it to you, for I fear that you will consider me a visionary. It is that I am beginning to doubt that bodies exist’.58 When Ariste goes on to ask for a strict demonstration of the existence of bodies, Theodore replies that this is demanding too much: ‘“An exact demonstration!” That is a little too much, Aristes. I confess that I do not have one. On the contrary, it seems to me that I have “an exact demonstration” of the impossibility of such a demonstration’.59 We have, of course, our natural belief in bodies. We have a variety of coherence criteria that enable us to distinguish illusory from veridical experience. Our reasons for thinking that colours, tastes and smells are mere sensations do not extend to sizes, shapes and motions—we can intelligibly represent these as features of external objects. And finally we have the testimony of faith. But none of these things amounts to the sort of ‘strict demonstration’ Ariste

134

Andrew Pyle

was demanding. All of our experience could be as it is without the existence of bodies, so there is no proof of the material world from experience. Since God’s creation of the material universe is a matter of choice rather than of metaphysical necessity, there is no demonstration a priori either. For Malebranche, God uses the presence of a body before my sense organs as the occasion to produce in my soul a certain type of sensation. But if He produces all these sensations Himself, it seems more economical to do without bodies altogether. The omniscient deity is surely not in need of a prompt?60 He can act by universal laws (as Malebranche requires) without these needing to be psychophysical laws. It appears, then, that bodies are to all intents and purposes redundant in Malebranche’s system, and that it is simply tidier to get rid of them. When Berkeley’s Principles fi rst appeared, the link to Malebranche was not overlooked. The Jesuits of the Mémoires de Trévoux (no friends to Malebranche) described Berkeley as a ‘Malebranchiste de bon foi’61 for explicitly drawing the idealist conclusions that were already implicit in Malebranche’s premises. The implicit rebuke to Malebranche in this double-edged praise of Berkeley’s frankness would not have been lost on contemporary readers. The links between Malebranche and Berkeley have been ably documented by scholars such as Luce62 and McCracken.63 We now know that Berkeley was not an isolated figure: there was a reading group studying Malebranche at Trinity College Dublin around the year 1700.64 Independently of Berkeley, Arthur Collier arrived at idealist conclusions at around the same time—the coincidence seems much less striking if we regard both Berkeley and Collier as students of Malebranche.65 Of course, Berkeley took some pains to distinguish his philosophy from ‘the enthusiasm of Malebranche’, notably in the Second Dialogue, where he insists—with some exaggeration—that ‘there are no principles more fundamentally opposed than his and mine’.66 The differences he emphasises (abstract ideas, scepticism about the senses) are real and important, but do not suffice to shake our overall sense of a major—and largely unacknowledged—philosophical debt. Berkeley has been described in the recent literature as ‘an Irish Cartesian’, but ‘an Irish Malebranchian’ would be closer to the mark.

E. Malebranche and Hume (Causation) To document Malebranche’s influence on Hume is a straightforward matter.67 We have the external evidence of Hume’s letter of 1737 to Michael Ramsay, recommending study of Malebranche’s Recherche, along with Berkeley’s Principles, Descartes’ Meditations and some key entries of Bayle’s Dictionnaire (Zeno, Spinoza), as useful preparation for grasping ‘the metaphysical parts of my reasoning’.68 We also have the internal evidence provided by the Treatise and the fi rst Enquiry, in which several Malebranchian claims and arguments are repeated almost verbatim. This influence is by no means confi ned to the topic of causation. Hume’s views on natural

Nicholas Malebranche

135

belief, and his denial that we possess an idea of the soul, also reflect debts to Malebranche. In this section, however, we focus exclusively on causation, postponing discussion of natural belief until later and setting aside— for reasons of space—questions about the soul and self-knowledge.69 Malebranche famously argued in the Recherche that only the volitions of an omnipotent being could be true causes, because only in this case is there a necessary connection between cause and effect.70 In the case of the colliding bodies, no necessary connection can be discerned between the cause (motion in one ball leading to impact) and the effect (motion in the ball that is struck). In the case of sensation, the same problem recurs: the impact of a stream of corpuscles on one of our sense organs seems to have no necessary connection with a particular sensation. It seems perfectly conceivable that the former should occur without the latter, and what is conceivable (or can be described without self-contradiction) is metaphysically possible. In the case of the will, we think we have some deeper insight into causal power, but in this we deceive ourselves. The volitions of a fi nite mind, whether to move its own body or to control its own train of thoughts, are also no more than contingently connected to their usual effects. It is only in the case of an omnipotent being that we can discern a necessary connection between ‘God wills that event E occur’ and ‘E occurs’. Malebranche adds in the Recherche a further proof of the non-existence of any power of the will to move the body. When I will to raise my arm, he asks, what physical events normally follow? The answer is that a current of animal spirits starts to flow in some of my nerves rather than others.71 But is this something that I bring about? How can I direct the currents of subtle matter that flow through my nerves when I am entirely ignorant of such matters? And would detailed anatomical knowledge help me in any way? After all, an ignorant yokel may dance better than a skilled anatomist. The argument is reiterated in the Entretiens, where Theodore challenges Ariste to reflect on what he means when he talks about the mind-body union. Upon reflection, Theodore demands, ‘do you really know what must be done in order to pronounce the name of your best friend, in order to flex or straighten those of your fi ngers of which you make the most use?’72 Both these arguments are repeated in Hume’s Enquiry. We can always conceive, or describe without self-contradiction, the cause without the occurrence of the effect. All events, Hume remarks, ‘seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined, but never connected’.73 In the case of the external world, Hume thinks, this conclusion will readily command assent: When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connection; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only fi nd, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other.74

136

Andrew Pyle

When we turn to the workings of the will, however, some philosophers think we are aware of a necessary connection between cause and effect. In response, Hume reminds his readers that the union of soul and body is mysterious and that we learn only from experience which of our limbs we can move at will. He then repeats, almost verbatim, Malebranche’s argument from our ignorance of the anatomy of the nervous system.75 Hume uses Malebranche’s arguments, of course, for distinctly different philosophical purposes. He is arguing either that all there is to causation is regularity plus expectation (the traditional positivist reading of Hume as a regularity theorist) or—in my opinion, more plausibly— that all we can know of causation is regularity plus expectation (the sceptical realist ‘New Hume’).76 Although he borrows arguments from Malebranche, he employs them in distinctive and original ways. In the concluding pages of Part 1 of Section 7 of the Enquiry Hume seeks to distance himself from Malebranche by launching two powerful objections against the theory. Occasionalism, he argues, violates natural belief (the ‘fairy land’ objection77) and offers us mere words in place of an intelligible account of how the real cause, that is, the will of God, produces the effect (the ‘tautology’ objection).78 Malebranche was familiar with both these objections from contemporaries such as Foucher and Fontenelle and attempted a twin-track reply. In the fi rst place, he sought to rebut the objection directly. In the ninth of the Méditations Chrétiennes he admits that we have no clear idea of power and thus cannot adequately conceive of how God creates the world, but he denies that this invalidates his argument.79 The point is repeated in his reply to Fontenelle. To judge that A is the cause of B, he argues, one need only see that A could not occur without B. One need not be in a position to see why this connection holds, that is, how A brings B about.80 The critics think that one can only grasp (have an idea of) a necessary connection between cause and effect when one grasps how the former brings about the latter; Malebranche simply denies this. But then the critics can press their second objection—that Malebranche’s solution of the problem of causation is purely verbal, that is, amounts to nothing more than a tautology. Here Malebranche draws on his deeper account of causation in terms of continuous creation.81 If occasionalism were proposed as an account of causation in its own right, the ‘tautology’ objection would carry the day. But for Malebranche occasionalism is itself a consequence of the deeper metaphysical doctrine of continuous creation, which he believes provides the only intelligible account of the continued existence of creatures. If he is right about this, the ‘empty tautology’ objection to occasionalism can be defeated. The ‘fairy land’ objection, however, survives. We do not—and arguably cannot—regard all creatures as having such a radical ontological dependence on God for their continued existence from each moment to the next.

Nicholas Malebranche

137

PART III MALEBRANCHE AS A MODERN PHILOSOPHER

F. Objective Thought (Anti-Psychologism) To modern readers, Malebranche’s doctrine that ‘we see all things in God’ may seem at best archaic and medieval, at worst downright unintelligible. In fact, however, it is an intelligible response to the sceptical and subjectivist implications that he saw as latent in the theory of ideas. As such, it has striking similarities to Frege’s opposition to psychologism about concepts. For Malebranche, as later for Frege, it is the very possibility of objective thought that is at stake. If ideas are just modifications of our souls, he argues, there can be no escape from Pyrrhonism. On inspecting my idea of X, I see that it represents X as having property F, so I can affirm that I perceive X as F. But if the idea is just my perception, this judgment merely concerns how things appear to me, not how they are in themselves. Every mind will remain forever trapped within its own ideal world, with no escape from subjectivity.82 Without ideas in my sense (i.e., divine archetypes), Malebranche argues against Arnauld, there is no answer to the sceptic. He even cites Arnauld as a witness against himself. The Art de Penser lays down, as a rule of reasoning, that whatever is clearly and distinctly contained in the idea of X can be affi rmed of X. If, for example, our idea of matter (three dimensional extension) represents it as infi nitely divisible, then matter is infi nitely divisible. Descartes had struggled to convince Gassendi on just this point and had in the end given up on argument and resorted to abuse.83 Unless ideas are the divine archetypes in accordance with which things were and are continually created, there is no reason to accept the principle. Things must conform to their divine archetypes, so the vision in God ensures objectivity. But if Arnauld were right and ideas were mere perceptions (modes of the human soul), there would be no escape from scepticism: A creature necessarily conforms to the idea of whoever created it. I agree. But the idea you have of it, you say, is nothing but a modification of your soul. And this modification is certainly not the Creator’s idea on the basis of which He formed this creature. It is thus in no way certain that the thing conforms to your idea, but only that you think it does. Thus, your view establishes Pyrrhonism, but mine destroys it.84 If clear and distinct ideas compel assent, as Descartes taught in the Fourth Meditation, then I may fi nd myself unable to doubt that things are as my ideas represent them, but subjective certainty is no substitute for objective truth. The argument is repeated in the Entretien d’un Philosophe Chrétien et d’un Philosophe Chinois (1708). To maintain that ideas just are perceptions, Malebranche argues, is to eliminate objective standards, which will lead to Pyrrhonism in the sciences and libertinism in morals:

138

Andrew Pyle The principle is generally accepted: That one can affi rm of a thing what one clearly perceives to be contained in the idea one has of it. But if the idea which one has is not distinct from the perception, or from the modification of the mind that produces it, this principle is not certain. For assuredly God has not created things on the basis of our fleeting perceptions, but on the basis of His eternal ideas: which ideas we perceive when they touch us, and by means of them we perceive the things which are necessarily in conformity with them.85

The Cartesians are thus faced with a dilemma: either drop the fundamental principle of their reasoning (that things conform to our ideas), and thus abandon all hope for certainty in the sciences, or embrace the vision in God. The argument might be presented in the form of a transcendental argument in the best Kantian manner, as follows: 1. Objective thought is possible. 2. Objective thought is only possible if the vision in God is true. ⬖ The vision in God is true. The argument is clearly valid, so criticism must focus on the truth of the premises. In support of the fi rst premise, Malebranche will point to the existing sciences of mathematics and (more controversially) morality. That 2+2=4, and that the angles of a triangle sum to two right angles, are necessarily and universally true, not true for some minds rather than others. That God is superior to a man and a man to his dog are for Malebranche just as clear examples of objective and absolute truths. Just as étendue intelligible grounds all the truths of geometry, so ‘order’ grounds all the truths of axiology. Critics of Malebranche would be well advised to grant the fi rst premise and challenge the second. This is Jolley’s strategy.86 He praises Malebranche for his ‘resolute anti-psychologism’ about concepts, hailing him as a precursor of Frege. Malebranche would surely have appreciated the following passage from On Sense and Meaning: If every thought requires a bearer, to the contents of whose consciousness it belongs, then it would be the thought of this bearer only and there would be no science common to many, on which many could work. But I, perhaps, have my own science, namely a whole of thought whose bearer I am and another person has his . . . No contradiction between the two sciences would then be possible and it would really be idle to dispute about truth, as idle, indeed almost ludicrous as it would be for two people to dispute whether a hundred mark note were genuine, when each meant the one he himself had in his pocket and understood the word ‘genuine’ in his own particular sense.87

Nicholas Malebranche

139

Without a common and objective standard, no sense can be given to the question of whether the banknote is genuine, or whether the thought is true. But if meaning is to be explained in terms of truth conditions, meaning itself—that is, the very possibility of language—is undermined by psychologism. Malebranche is not so clear on this point as Frege, but he would have understood the point and purpose of Frege’s argument. He thinks it leads to the vision in God, but perhaps we can enjoy the benefits of objective thought at less cost. It may be one thing to establish the existence of an objective ‘World Three’ of concepts and propositions, and quite another to endorse the vision in God.88 If so, we can accept the fi rst premise of Malebranche’s transcendental argument but reject the second, and thus avoid his conclusion. We simply replace the mind of God with ‘World Three’, the realm of objective thought. But perhaps this insistence on shared concepts and universally binding norms of rationality gives Malebranche all that— at least in this context—he is arguing for? Maybe, in an important sense, ‘World Three’ just is the mind of God? In any event, I hope enough has been said to show that a seemingly archaic and ‘visionary’ part of Malebranche’s system can be seen as an intelligible and perceptive response to a genuine—and abiding—philosophical problem.

G. Moral Rationalism (Consequentialism and Deontology) For Malebranche, as we have seen, there is a perfectly objective science of axiology. The objective order of relations of perfection, he explains in Eclaircissement 10 of the Recherche, is precisely analogous to the objective order of relations of magnitude that grounds the eternal and necessary truths of mathematics: [J]ust as there are necessary and eternal truths because there are relations of magnitude among intelligible beings, there must also be a necessary and immutable order because of the relations of perfection among these same things. An immutable order has it, then, that minds are more noble than bodies, as it is a necessary truth that twice two is four, or that twice two is not five.89 God perceives the precise degree of perfection of each thing, and loves each—as order requires—in exact proportion to its absolute worth. The intellectual perception of order is therefore not merely speculative; it has the force of law for the divine will: It must be considered, then, that God loves Himself with a necessary love, and that thus He loves what in Him represents or contains greater perfection more than what contains less—so much so that if we wish to suppose an intelligible mind to be a thousand times more perfect

140

Andrew Pyle than an intelligible body, the love by which God loves Himself would necessarily be a thousand times greater for the intelligible mind than for the intelligible body; for God’s love is necessarily proportionate among the intelligible beings He contains, since He necessarily loves His own perfections.90

The requirements of order, one might naturally infer, should govern our loves as they do govern those of God. As Rawls says in his discussion of Leibniz’s moral rationalism, ‘[T]he moral life is a form of the imitatio dei’.91 If God loves everything in precise proportion to its objective worth, the obvious implication for us is that we should do so also, that we should make His will the model for ours. In his early works, Malebranche seems content to accept this inference. God cannot, he writes in Book 4 of the Recherche, will that we, his creatures, should prefer a lesser good to a greater.92 In Eclaircissement 10 the inference is explicitly endorsed: ‘Now, this immutable Order that has the force of law with regard to God Himself clearly has the same force with regard to us. For, since God has created us in His image and likeness, He cannot will that we love more what deserves to be loved less—He wills that our will conform with His’.93 Although this seemed a perfectly natural and innocuous implication of Malebranche’s moral rationalism, it soon led him into theological perils. The Quietists, followers of the Spanish mystic Miguel de Molinos (1640– 1697) advocated a ‘disinterested love’ of God and a ‘holy indifference’ to one’s own individual fate. It is better (objectively) that a hundred souls are saved than that a single soul be saved. So if I can save a hundred others by committing a mortal sin myself, I clearly should do so. If God loves everything in proportion to its worth, and His will is the model for my own, I must be prepared to do anything whatsoever that will have such desirable consequences. In Philip Pettit’s terms, the salvation of souls is a goal I should be striving to promote, not necessarily to honour in my own person.94 Friends and foes alike thought that Malebranche’s principles were congenial to Quietism and cited textual evidence. Malebranche’s response was the Traité de l’Amour de Dieu (1697–1698), in which he argues that the ‘disinterested love’ of the Quietists is chimerical, inconsistent with Scripture and morally dangerous. The very notion of a purely disinterested love, Malebranche argues, flies in the face of sentiment intérieur.95 We all have an invincible desire for our own happiness, and thus love whatever we believe—rightly or wrongly— contributes to our happiness. Such self-love is natural and necessary and in itself blameless: we become culpable only when we take pleasure in the wrong things. The desire for happiness must be accepted as a given: ‘Do not ask me why I want to be happy, ask that of Him who made me, since that does not depend at all on me. The love of blessedness is a natural impression: enquire of the Creator’.96 A purely disinterested love is therefore entirely imaginary and chimerical. As for Scripture, it is clearly against

Nicholas Malebranche

141

the Quietists, since it is full of threats and promises. We are indeed told that we may be obliged to sacrifice our earthly lives, but only with the promise of something better by way of recompense.97 The Quietist, Malebranche claims, is in peril of his soul: ‘[I]ndifference for his blessedness, for his perfection, and for his happiness, is not only impossible, but it is very dangerous to pretend to it, because that can only inspire an infi nite carelessness for his own salvation, which one must seek, as the Apostle said, with fear and trembling’.98 God’s will, Malebranche explains, is in accordance with the objective requirements of order. But the rule for my will is not God’s will; it is what God wills that I will: ‘I say moreover that what God wills is not always the rule of what we must will. For example, God wills a hundred just men a hundred times more than a single one. However, I must will to be just preferably to a hundred [others]. For as the Apostle says, one must not do evil in order that good come of it. What God wills that we will, there is precisely our rule’.99 God, it seems, does not want us to see things from His point of view— this is impossible to achieve, and dangerous even to attempt. The parallels here with modern debates between consequentialists and deontologists are striking. Malebranche’s eventual position is structurally the same as various forms of indirect consequentialism. Even if some form of consequentialism is true, it is better (objectively better in terms of consequences) if we humans think in deontological terms rather than consequentialist ones. God thus creates us with an invincible love of our own happiness and enough wisdom to see—at least before sin has corrupted our souls—that our true happiness lies in ever-closer union with Him. In place of the imitatio dei (God’s will as the model or standard for our wills) we have a structured and hierarchic account, in which order requires God to act as He does in creating fi nite spirits, and we are required not to try to model our will on God’s (to ask directly what order demands of us) but to will only as He has intended us to will (to think as order requires us to think).

H. Natural Belief (Nature, Reason and Freedom) The chapters on the senses in Book I of the Recherche present a detailed account of sensation and its relation to judgment. We see things, according to Malebranche, not as they are in themselves but in accordance with the needs of our bodies.100 The proper function of the senses is to inform the mind of the needs of the body by the ‘short way’ of sensation, without any need of tedious inference or calculations. So the sweet taste of a fruit is a reliable sign that it will be good to eat, so long as our tastes remain simple and uncorrupted. In creating our organs of sense and establishing psychophysical laws, God gives us, as it were, the conclusions of a process of chemical analysis without the premises. Likewise when I see the sizes, shapes and motions of surrounding bodies, God provides me with visual sensations that contain such natural judgments as integral parts of the

142

Andrew Pyle

sensory experience. I do not calculate sizes and distances from information about the pattern of stimulation of my retinas; the calculations are all done for me. God does not, of course, perform billions of such calculations every second. He merely creates human sense organs and brains and establishes a general law to the effect that whenever human brains are stimulated in manner Φ, the human mind will have sensation Ψ. This account of natural judgment is sophisticated and perceptive in its own right and consistent with much of what we now know about perception from evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology. Malebranche notices, for example, the phenomenon now known as size constancy101 and gives an account of the moon illusion that anticipates much modern thinking on the topic. These natural judgments are of course involuntary—they occur ‘en nous’, but ‘sans nous, et même malgré nous’102 —and are brought about in my soul by processes entirely beyond my control, ultimately by God through the established laws of the mind-body union. But if the natural judgments are involuntary, what are we to say about the cases where they are erroneous? At the heart of the Recherche is the Cartesian thesis, from the Fourth Meditation, that our errors result from abuse of our free will. If natural judgments are entirely involuntary, this account is undermined and the wisest of men will have no way of guarding against error in the sciences and sin in morals. In answer to this objection, Malebranche seeks to distinguish two different aspects to the judgment involved in sensation: ‘Now this natural judgment is only a sensation, but the sensation or natural judgment is almost always followed by another, free judgment that the soul makes so habitually that it is almost unable to avoid it’.103 The key word here is ‘almost’. If we could not help but assent to the natural judgments of the senses, we would have no protection against their built-in errors. What Malebranche seems to have in mind is a conception of the rational and autonomous self that can, as it were, ‘bracket’ the deliverances of sense. They are still recognised and acknowledged: introspection tells me clearly that theoretical knowledge does not eliminate natural judgment. (I could write a book on the psychology of the moon illusion and still fi nd myself subject to it.) But my rational and autonomous self can refuse to commit itself to the truth of such judgments. In metaphysical and moral reflection, I can free myself from the natural man that is my lower self. I acknowledge my fi rst-order inclinations to believe and to desire, but I refuse to endorse them as reliable indicators of the true and the good, respectively. It is at this reflective or meta-mental level that our true freedom and responsibility are to be found.104 Two obvious objections must be faced at this point. The fi rst concerns the reality of this supposed power of withholding assent. Malebranche admits that it is extremely difficult to do this consistently and that we are ‘almost’ unable to restrain ourselves. Delete the ‘almost’ and Malebranche’s theory is transformed into Hume’s. If, as Hume says, ‘nature, by an absolute and

Nicholas Malebranche

143

uncontrollable necessity, has determin’d us to judge as well as to breathe and feel’,105 then any advice to the effect that I ought to suspend judgment will be idle. The supposed power of the rational autonomous self will be an illusion, and the sort of doubts about the senses recommended alike by Malebranche and the sceptics will be unthinkable, except perhaps as amusing pastimes for the philosopher’s study. The second objection concerns the supposed freedom and autonomy of the rational self when it is operating at the second-order level, that is, assenting to some beliefs and desires and merely bracketing others. Malebranche requires that this power of granting or refusing assent is something we may properly be praised or blamed for, so that my errors and sins are my own fault and not God’s. In establishing the psychophysical laws of the mind-body union God creates me with certain natural inclinations to believe and to desire. Some of my natural beliefs will be false—for instance, that my dog feels pain, or that sun and rain cause plants to grow. Some of my natural desires will equally be misleading, that is, will not be for my true good—for instance, my desire for that extra glass of wine or for my neighbour’s wife. If I withhold assent and meditate, says Malebranche, I can free myself from the bonds of nature, assenting only to those beliefs that are true and those desires that are good. But if these second-order acts of assent and dissent are modes of my soul (and what else can they be?) they too should fall under the theory of continuous creation.106 God recreates my soul from one instant to the next with all its modes, including—it would seem—second-order or reflective thoughts. Like Kant a hundred years later, Malebranche wants to locate our freedom and dignity at the meta-mental level, in our rational capacity to reflect on our everyday fi rst-order inclinations to believe and to desire. But the theory requires the meta-mind both to be psychologically real and causally efficacious and to somehow escape from the general determinism of nature. Malebranche is keenly aware of the difficulty, maintaining that the soul’s acts of consent ‘produce nothing physical’, bring about no new modes of its substance.107 But he also endorses, in his Traité de Morale, the truism that acts produce habits and habits produce acts.108 So my acts of consent to wicked inclinations do produce a bad habit in my soul, and this surely is a mode or ‘modification’ of its substance. It is hard even for the charitable critic to see how Malebranche’s theory can work, that is, how the reflective and rational self can be fully autonomous in its acts of assent and dissent to fi rst-order inclinations to believe and to desire. Perhaps our second-order thoughts are also part of nature? Perhaps Spinoza was right to deny that man is a dominion within a dominion?109 Perhaps our belief in rational autonomy is a sort of necessary illusion? My point has not been to defend Malebranche’s theory but to show that he was dealing with deep issues about freedom and reason that are just as pressing today as in the seventeenth century. The context has changed— most modern philosophers are not exactly worried about continuous

144 Andrew Pyle creation—but the central issue about whether our reason is part of nature or somehow places us above or outside nature is very much still with us.

CONCLUSION I think that both parts of my case have thus been made out and that we can argue persuasively both for Malebranche’s historical importance and for his intrinsic philosophical interest. I am acutely aware, however, that the arguments for the former claim are significantly stronger than the arguments for the latter. To write a history of seventeenth-century philosophy that omitted Malebranche would be simply unforgivable. He was, in his time, right at the heart of all the important debates about knowledge and ideas, mind and body, nature and grace, faith and reason and matter and force that would continue to reverberate through the eighteenth century and beyond. To omit him is to seriously distort our accounts of Leibniz, Bayle, Berkeley and Hume, not to mention any number of lesser figures. The historical case for Malebranche’s significance is unanswerable. The philosophical case, it has to be granted, is less compelling. A competent historian of philosophy might contest this part of my case and argue, perhaps, that there is little light to be gained from Malebranche that cannot be derived from Plato, Descartes and Leibniz, whose place in the canon is uncontested. I do not share this opinion and have said a little in sections F, G, and H to meet it. In conclusion, I would like to venture one further line of thought. Throughout this chapter, I have been assuming a reasonably clear distinction between historical and philosophical enquiries. I deliberately separated questions about Malebranche’s historical importance from questions about his intrinsic philosophical interest.110 But perhaps this is a bogus distinction based on a dangerous abstraction? Perhaps we cannot really understand the content and claims of a philosophical theory except in contextual terms, where the context is provided by the state of the debate at the time the theory was propounded? In that case, ‘Berkeley’s idealism’ or ‘Hume’s theory of causality’ may not be timeless propositions about the nature of things, but essentially time bound. Berkeley might be reflecting on Malebranche’s claim that it is ‘very difficult’ to prove the existence of matter—the obvious explanation for this ‘difficulty’ would be that matter does not in fact exist. Hume might be pondering what difference it would make to experience if Malebranche’s occasionalism were true. If explanation is always contrastive (as many now claim), surely the same holds too in the history of philosophy. If we are interested in why Berkeley and Hume believed what they did, we may fi nd it best to ask why they asserted their characteristic claims rather than some others. If understanding is contrastive, contrast requires foils. So if Malebranche provides an essential foil for Berkeley or Hume, we cannot fully or adequately understand those canonical figures without understanding Malebranche too. The unanswerable

Nicholas Malebranche

145

case for Malebranche’s historical importance may actually carry the second claim—for his intrinsic philosophical interest—as well. It is time he was brought in from the cold. NOTES 1. See Craig Walton, De la Recherche du Bien: A Study of Malebranche’s Science of Ethics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972) Appendix, 160–170. 2. Locke, An Examination of Pere Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God (1706), Posthumous Works of Mr John Locke, ed. Peter King (London, 1706) 210–211. See also Charles J. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) 119–121. 3. For documentation, see A. A. Luce, Berkeley and Malebranche: A Study in the Origin of Berkeley’s Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) and McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy. 4. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L. A. SelbyBigge and P. H. Nidditch, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) Section 7, Part 1, 72. 5. Quoted from Genevieve Rodis-Lewis, Nicolas Malebranche (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963) 328. 6. Condillac, Traité des Systèmes, Oeuvres vol. 2, 98–99. 7. Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV vol. 2, 252–253. 8. See Henri Gouhier, Cartésianisme et Augustinisme au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1978). 9. See Christia Mercer, Leibniz’s Metaphysics: Its Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Stuart Brown, Leibniz (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1984). 10. See Pierre Brunet, L’Introduction des théories de Newton en France au XVIIIe siècle, vol. 1, Avant 1738 (Paris: Libraire Scientifique Albert Blanchard, 1931). 11. For this story, see Andrew Pyle, Malebranche (London: Routledge, 2003) Chap. 6. 12. For the Malebranche literature up to 1989, see Patricia Easton, Thomas Lennon and Gregor Sebba, eds., Bibliographia Malebranchiana (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992). For more recent literature, see Steven Nadler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 13. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946) 444, 545, 564. 14. John Herman Randall, The Career of Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962) 425–433. 15. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 5, Hobbes to Hume (New York: Doubleday, 1959) 180–204. 16. See note 12. 17. Malebranche, The Search after Truth, ed. and trans. by Thomas Lennon and Paul Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 18. Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion, ed. Nicholas Jolley, trans. David Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 19. Malebranche, Treatise on Nature and Grace, trans., introd. and notes Patrick Riley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). 20. Antoine Arnauld, On True and False Ideas, trans. and introd. Stephen Gaukroger (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990).

146

Andrew Pyle

21. I assume that one could not simply substitute Malebranche for Descartes, for the obvious reason that much of Malebranche’s thought is only intelligible against a background of Cartesianism. 22. John Cottingham, ‘Cartesian Trialism’, Mind 94 (1985): 218–230. 23. Descartes’ letter to Regius of January 1642 in Oeuvres de Descartes, 12 volumes, edited by Charles Adam and Adam Tannery (henceforth, AT). For English translations, see The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 volumes, translated and edited by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch and (for volue 3) Anthony Kenny (henceforth CSMK). AT 3 493, CSMK 206. 24. AT 7, 81, CSM 2 56. 25. Letter to Princess Elizabeth, 28 June 1643. AT 3, 692, CSMK 227 26. Whether there is a distinct type of memory that does not depend on the corporeal brain was a difficult issue for Cartesian metaphysicians. 27. Oeuvres Complètes de Malebranche (henceforth, OCM), 20 volumes, edited by André Robinet. OCM 12 153, JS 109. 28. See Recherche Book 1, Chap. 1 (OCM 1, 42, LO 3), Book 2, Part 1, Chap. 5 (OCM 1 383–384, LO 200), Book 5, Chap. 1 (OCM 2 129, LO 339) for clear assertions of dualism. 29. See OCM 18 81–83. For more on the details of Desgabets’ argument, see Tad M. Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). It is significant for my argument that Desgabets represents his position as authentically Cartesian. 30. OCM 13 394. 31. OCM 13 395. 32. OCM 13 396. 33. See Schmaltz’s recent book, Radical Cartesianism. One way to regard the controversy between Desgabets and Malebranche would be to see them as contesting the legacy of Descartes. Are we to take the substance dualism seriously and explain away the ‘union’ in terms of divinely established laws, or are we to take Descartes’ talk of mind-body union more seriously? 34. Gilbert Ryle, ‘John Locke’, Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers, 2 vols. (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes, 1990) vol. 1, 147. 35. Gilbert Ryle, ‘Locke on the Human Understanding’, Collected Papers, vol. 1, 133. 36. Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971) 68–70. 37. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, introd. John Yolton, 2 vols. (London: Everyman, 1972). 38. Locke, An Examination 221. 39. John Yolton, John Locke and the Way of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) and Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 40. Locke, An Examination 220. 41. Arnauld, True and False Ideas 20. See Pyle, Malebranche 77–78. 42. Arnauld, True and False Ideas 38. 43. Locke, An Essay, vol. 1, 1, viii. 44. See Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1991) Chap. 7, 60–69, ‘Ideas as Natural Signs’, and Chap. 18, 155–165, ‘The Authority and Limits of “Sensitive Knowledge”’. 45. See André Robinet, Malebranche et Leibniz: Relations personelles (Paris: Vrin, 1955). 46. For more details of these successive changes, see Pyle, Malebranche Chap. 6, 131–157. For more detailed documentation, see Costabel’s commentary on vol. 17 of the Oeuvres complètes.

Nicholas Malebranche

147

47. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Dan Garber (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989) 257–268; see esp. 261. 48. See Pierre Costabel, Leibniz and Dynamics, trans. R. E. W. Maddison (Paris, Hermann, 1973). 49. OCM 2 309–320, LO 446–452. 50. See the New System in Leibniz, Philosophical Essays 138–145, esp. 143. 51. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays 158. 52. Leibniz, Philosophical Essays 158. 53. See Hume, A Treatise, Book 1, Part 3, Section 15: ‘Any thing may produce any thing. Creation, annihilation, motion, reason, volition; all these may arise from one another, or from any other object we can imagine’. 54. This is discussed in more detail in Pyle, Malebranche 124–128. 55. OCM 3 53, LO 568. 56. OCM 3 61, LO 572–573. 57. OCM 3 64, LO 574. 58. OCM 12 136, JS 94. 59. OCM 12 136, JS 95. 60. See Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Doutes sur le système physique des causes occasionelles (Rotterdam, 1686), Oeuvres de Fontenelle, vol. 1 (Paris, 1818) 630. 61. OCM 19 834. 62. Luce, Berkeley and Malebranche. 63. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy. 64. Luce, Berkeley and Malebranche. 65. Stuart Brown, ‘The Critical Reception of Malebranche, from His Own Time to the End of the Eighteenth Century’, The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, ed. Steven M. Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 275–278. 66. Berkeley, Second Dialogue 177, in The Works of George Berkely. 67. See McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy Chap. 6, 205–253, and Brown, ‘The Critical Reception’ 265–266. 68. Quoted from Richard H. Popkin, The High Road to Pyrrhonism, ed. Richard A. Watson and James E. Force (San Diego, CA: Austin Hill Press, 1980) 291. 69. One might also suggest a link to Kant at this point. In the ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’ in the fi rst Critique, Kant demolishes Cartesian rational psychology. He does not appear to notice that Malebranche had already done so a hundred years before. 70. OCM 2 316, LO 448. 71. OCM 2 315, LO 449–450. 72. OCM 12 JS 19–120. 73. Hume, An Enquiry Section 7, Part 2, 74. 74. Hume, An Enquiry Section 7, Part 1, 63. 75. Hume, An Enquiry Section 7, Part 1, 66–67. 76. See Rupert Read and Kenneth A Richman, eds., The New Hume Debate (London: Routledge, 2000). 77. Hume, An Enquiry, Section 7, Part 1, 72. 78. Hume, An Enquiry, Section 7, Part 1, 72. 79. OCM 10, 97. 80. OCM 17–1, 580. 81. See Pyle, Malebranche 111–114. 82. Steven Nadler, Malebranche and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 145–149, was the fi rst person to see this clearly. See also Nicholas Jolley, The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche,

148

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

Andrew Pyle and Descartes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) Chap. 5, 81–98, and Pyle, Malebranche 85–89. Appendix to Fifth Replies, CSM 2 275. On Gassendi’s view, says Descartes, ‘we must entirely close the door to reason and content ourselves with being monkeys or parrots rather than men . . . ’. OCM 9 925. OCM 4, 50–51. Jolley, The Light of the Soul 56. Gottlob Frege, Philosophical Writings, 3rd ed., ed. and trans. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) 59. Jolley, The Light of the Soul 63. OCM 3 138, LO 618. OCM 3 138, LO 619. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) 109. OCM 2 12, LO 266. OCM 3 13809, LO 619. Philip Pettit, ‘Consequentialism’, A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 230–240. OCM 14, 158. OCM 14, 16. OCM 14, 53. OCM 14, 27. OCM 14, 17. OCM 1 77–78, LO 24. OCM 1 97, LO 34. OCM 15 15. OCM 1 130, LO 52. The similarities with Kant are very striking here, although I know of no evidence of direct influence. Hume, A Treatise, Book 1, Part 2, Section 1, 183. See Pyle, Malebranche 232–233 OCM 16, 41. OCM 11 51. Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics Demonstrated in Geometric Order (1677), A Spinoza Reader, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) Part 3, preface. Perhaps we should speak here of ‘perennial’ rather than of ‘intrinsic’ philosophical interest. Even if there is no timeless core to philosophy, there are certainly topics and problems that have obsessed philosophers for the entire two and a half millennia of the Western tradition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnauld, Antoine. On True and False Ideas, translated with an introductory essay by Stephen Gaukroger, Manchester University Press, 1990. Arnauld, Antoine. On True and False Ideas, translated and edited Elmar J. Kremer, Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter, 1990. Ayers, Michael. Locke: Epistemology and Ontology, Routledge, London, 1991. Bennett, Jonathan. Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes, Clarendon, Oxford, 1971.

Nicholas Malebranche

149

Berkeley, George. The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, 9 Volumes, eds A.A.Luce & T.E.Jessop, London, Nelson, 1948–57. Brown, Stuart. Leibniz, Brighton, Harvester, 1984. Brunet, Pierre. L’Introduction des théories de Newton en France au XVIIIe siècle, Vol 1, avant 1738, Paris, Libraire Scientifique Albert Blanchard, 1931. Bonnot de Condillac, Etienne. Traité des systèmes (1749), Oeuvres completes, 16 Volumes, Geneva, Slatkine Reprints (1970), Volume 2. Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy, Volume 5: Hobbes to Hume, Doubleday, New York, 1959. Costabel, Pierre. Leibniz and Dynamics, translated R.E.W.Maddison, Paris, Hermann, 1973. Cottingham, John. ‘Cartesian Trialism’, Mind 94 (1985) 218–230. Descartes, René. Oeuvres de Descartes, Charles Adam & Paul Tannery, editors, 12 Volumes, Paris, Cerf, 1897–1910. Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated and edited by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and (for Vol 3), Anthony Kenny, 3 Volumes, Cambridge University Press, 1985–1991. Easton, Patricia. Thomas Lennon & Gregor Sebba, eds, Bibliographia Malebranchiana, Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. le Bovier de Fontenelle, Bernard. Doutes sur le système physique des causes occasionelles (Rotterdam, 1686), in Oeuvres de Fontenelle, 4 Volumes, Paris, 1818, Vol 1, 615–638. Frege, Gottlob. Philosophical Writings, 3rd edition, translated and edited Peter Geach and Max Black, Oxford, Blackwell, 1980. Gouhier, Henri. Cartésianisme et Augustinisme au XVIIe siècle, Paris, Vrin, 1978. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed L.A.Selby-Bigge, second edition P.H. Nidditch, Oxford, Clarendon, 1978. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed L.A. SelbyBigge, third edition P.H. Nidditch, Oxford, Clarendon, 1975. Jolley, Nicholas. The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Philosophical Essays, translated & edited Roger Ariew and Dan Garber, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1989. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2 Volumes, with an introduction by John Yolton, Everyman, London, 1972. Locke, John. An Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God, published in Peter King, ed, Posthumous Works of Mr John Locke, London, 1706. Luce, A.A. Berkeley and Malebranche: A Study in the Origin of Berkeley’s Thought, London, Oxford University Press, 1934. McCracken, Charles J. Malebranche and British Philosophy, Oxford, Clarendon, 1983. Malebranche, Nicolas. Oeuvres Complètes, ed André Robinet, 20 Volumes, Paris, 1958–78. Malebranche, Nicolas. The Search After Truth, translated & edited by Thomas Lennon and Paul Olscamp, Cambridge University Press, 1999. Malebranche, Nicolas. Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion, translated by David Scott and edited by Nicholas Jolley, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Malebranche, Nicolas. Treatise on Nature and Grace, translated with an introduction and notes by Patrick Riley, Oxford, Clarendon, 1992. Mercer, Christia. Leibniz’s Metaphysics: its Origins and Development, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

150

Andrew Pyle

Nadler, Steven. Malebranche and Ideas, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1992. Nadler, Steven, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Popkin, Richard H. The High Road to Pyrrhonism, edited Richard A.Watson and James E.Force, San Diego, Austin Hill Press. Pyle, Andrew. Malebranche, Routledge, London, 2003. Randall, John Herman. The Career of Philosophy, 2 Volumes, Columbia University Press, 1962. Rawls, John. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed Barbara Herman, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, 2000. Read, Rupert and Kenneth A. Richman, eds. The New Hume Debate, London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Rodis-Lewis, Genevieve. Nicolas Malebranche, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1963. Robinet, André. Malebranche et Leibniz: relations personelles, Paris, Vrin, 1955. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London, Allen & Unwin, 1946. Ryle, Gilbert. Collected Papers, 2 Volumes, Thoemmes, Bristol, 1990. Schmaltz, Tad M. Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes, Cambridge University Press, 2002. Singer, Peter, ed. A Companion to Ethics, Oxford, Blackwell, 1991. de Spinoza, Benedict. The Ethics Demonstrated in Geometric Order, in A Spinoza Reader, edited and translated Edwin Curley, Princeton University Press, 1994. Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, 2 Volumes, Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1966. Walton, Craig. De la Recherche du Bien: A Study of Malebranche’s Science of Ethics, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1972. Yolton, John. John Locke and the Way of Ideas, Clarendon, Oxford, 1968. Yolton, John. Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to Reid, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Part II

Insiders

6

Excusable Caricature and Philosophical Relevance The Case of Descartes Tom Sorell

Descartes used to be the revered father of modern philosophy. Now he is its great anti-hero. He is regarded this way not just by devotees of postmodernism but by many more mainstream philosophers on both sides of the rift between the Continental and analytic traditions. For these people, Descartes’ doctrines are not there to be endorsed and elaborated but to be refuted and shunned. Thus the familiar negative connotations of the term ‘Cartesian’. Cartesian privacy, like Cartesian dualism or Cartesian scepticism or Cartesian foundationalism or the Cartesian insistence on excluding the subject from nature, is something we are invited or assumed to take a stand against. A Cartesian doctrine is not necessarily considered silly, but it is nearly always claimed to be misconceived, usually deeply so. Sometimes a Cartesian doctrine is shown to be false by arguing against it, but more often argument is bypassed: what happens is that the reader or listener is immersed in questions or practices that make Cartesian practices and questions seem artificial or outmoded—interesting, perhaps, as specimens of a particular philosophical pathology, but not to be entered into sympathetically. What is more, it is usually not hard to get a doctrine to be admitted to be Cartesian by a twentieth-century philosophical audience. It is usually no harder, in fact, than describing it in terms that bring to mind halfremembered passages from the Meditations. This casual treatment of Descartes cannot reasonably be called ‘neglect’, as if he were a figure no one ever read or took seriously. It is closer to the truth to say that Descartes is so firmly ensconced as one of the canon, so unquestioningly taken as represented in the great debates, albeit on the wrong side, so much a figure whose texts are indispensable to a philosophical education from the very beginning, that any one who has been studying the subject for even a short time feels some confidence in saying what they like about him. The vilified Descartes of twentieth-century philosophy is not the same as the canonical Descartes, and not the same, either, as the historical Descartes— the Descartes of most of the best-informed Descartes specialists. But there is some difficulty in saying which the real Descartes is, as if the others were pure impostors who had to be driven out of philosophy. No doubt the historical

154 Tom Sorell Descartes comes closest to being the real Descartes; still, the other figures sometimes have legitimate philosophical uses, as does the idea of Cartesianism when extended beyond the ideas of Descartes’ avowed followers. To see this is to recognise some of the limitations of the history of philosophy. To the extent that the history of philosophy is a historical enterprise it inclines the practitioner to try and enter into the preoccupations of Descartes as a seventeenth-century European scientist/metaphysician. To the extent that the history of philosophy is a philosophical enterprise, it inclines the practitioner to remould Cartesian ideas so as to give them a clear location in live philosophical debates. The second inclination is more likely to produce caricature than the first, but the first can and often does have the drawback of being philosophically boring. As someone who approaches the history of philosophy with an interest in a twentieth-century philosophical agenda as well as with an interest in the early modern period, I do not regard the problem of boringness as insignificant, and so I think that, within limits, caricature is tolerable for the sake of relevance. In this chapter I try in a preliminary way to indicate within what limits caricature is excusable in the case of the much caricatured Descartes.

I It might be thought that the only caricature that is excusable in serious intellectual work of any kind, whether historical or philosophical, is unavoidable caricature. For a caricature is in some sense a distorted image, usually one that exaggerates the features of the original. It is true that an act of caricature fails if it makes the original unrecognisable; however, the effect of a caricature, and often its point, is to make the original recognisable under a new image which emphasises things that might not otherwise leap to the eye of the observer. A caricature does not have to be unflattering and does not have to make the original laughable, but it would not be a caricature if it did not create an image that presented the original in a new and vivid way, with a certain deliberate emphasis or simplification, intended to bring certain aspects, and not others, into prominence. Except where the simplification or emphasis is unintended, it is hard not to receive it as a conscious departure from the ideal of giving a balanced and unbiased impression of one’s subject. So perhaps for this reason, if no other, it should be avoided. This approach to caricature seems to me to be unduly straightlaced. For after all, a caricature can be put about in a place where the original is well known and easily told apart from a cartoon character. Again, a caricature can be an admitted caricature. The audience for the caricature can be told that a depiction of a subject is not entirely true to the original. And there can even be an indication of the aspects of the original that liberties are being taken with. Alternatively, a caricature can be conveyed in an environment in which there is a practice of criticism and debate and sufficient expertise about the caricatured subject, so that even if the caricature is not

Excusable Caricature and Philosophical Relevance 155 admitted to be a caricature, it can be exposed as one. Differently, and coming to the more positive uses of caricature, a caricature can be championed by an expert about the original as being much nearer the truth about the subject than other experts have allowed. Or again, a caricature can be put forward to an audience at a given time, in the knowledge that at some later time, they will be given enough expertise to see for themselves where the caricature departs importantly from the original. In this case, the caricature will be a ladder that is eventually kicked away. Caricatures are often used this way in teaching, not necessarily with bad results. So caricature can sometimes be harmless, and even do some good. When it comes to Descartes in twentieth-century philosophy, the caricature is often unwitting and, consequently, unadmitted, and it is often conveyed to audiences who have no firm, independent hold on Descartes’ writings and no interest in challenging the caricature. Thus, the Cartesian scepticism that Heidegger is reacting against in developing the theory of human existence in Being and Time and the Cartesian scepticism that is often said to be Wittgenstein’s target in On Certainty and elsewhere are only loosely related to the scepticism that Descartes tries to work through in the Meditations, but the audiences for Heidegger and Wittgenstein do not turn to these authors for Descartes commentary. They are attracted by word of a distinctive philosophical style and a philosophical agenda, one which can be introduced by opposition to Descartes, and what they want is to learn about and perhaps apply for themselves the style and agenda—irrespective of Descartes. That is why the occasion for detecting the caricature may never present itself. Does this matter? Suppose the cost of penetrating Wittgenstein and Heidegger is a significant unnoticed distortion of Descartes. What harm does this do, as long as the main application of Wittgensteinian and Heideggerean views is to problems outside Descartes? Why is the caricatured Cartesianism that is used to motivate Wittgenstein and Heidegger not merely a ladder to be kicked away once one feels at home with Wittgenstein and Heidegger? So long as the ladder gets one where one wants to go and is kicked way, why should one worry that it is in some respects a bad ladder? One reason why it matters in relation to Heidegger is that so much of the medium of his philosophy is a sort of history of philosophy. Descartes marks a decisive stage in that history. Nietzsche marks another. Again, there is Heidegger’s repudiation of what he takes to be the misrevived Cartesianism of his teacher, Husserl. The critique of Cartesianism, then, is hardly incidental to Heidegger’s thought, and if the critique misses its mark that is important even from the inside of Heidegger’s philosophy. A further point is the ironic one that, on a perfectly natural reading of Descartes’ use of the distinction between moral and metaphysical certainty, the distance between Descartes and Heidegger is much less than has usually been thought. The quest for metaphysical certainty that dominates the Meditations was always distinguished by Descartes from a quest for practical certainty—what he called ‘moral certainty’. Achieving metaphysical certainty for Descartes was a matter of suspending daily practical life with

156 Tom Sorell its moral certainty and withdrawing for a period of deep reflection on the topics of the Meditations on First Philosophy. Once those reflections were successfully concluded the enquirer would be immunised for life from the doubt that arises when one asks whether one might be of such a nature as to be deceived about what seems most evident.1 At that point, according to Descartes, the enquirer could resume the life of the non-paranoid scientist, that is, the life of an inferrer of at most morally certain mechanistic explanations of the behaviour of light, meteorological phenomena, animals, minerals and the planets. Descartes’ non-paranoid scientist, a scientist entirely immune to the worry that his mind might be defective in nature, is not the same as one of Heidegger’s hammerers, wholly absorbed through their activity in the world; neither is the non-paranoid scientist the radically detached self to which metaphysical reflection reduces one at the end of the First Meditation—disembodied, out of time, out of life and out of nature. According to Descartes, this metaphysical self and its preoccupations were to be abandoned for good, once one had learned the lesson of the Meditations. He did not regard it as an ideal self, or its preoccupations as the right things to occupy the human mind. At most the reduction of the self and the redirection of its preoccupations were a necessary piece of therapy, necessary if one were to meet in a thoroughgoing way the sort of scepticism about science that was familiar in Paris in the 1620s and 1630s.

II Properly understood, Descartes may be an inappropriate target of a criticism of being detached from time, life and even affective response. He may be an inappropriate target of other negative arguments as well. Here I have in mind the adaptation of Wittgenstein’s arguments by some Wittgensteinians—Peter Hacker, Anthony Kenny and Norman Malcolm are the obvious ones—to the criticism of Descartes. For it is the historical figure of Descartes who at any rate some Wittgensteinians take to unify a good many of these negative arguments. If he turns out not to be quite right as a target, does that matter? It matters that there be some substantial target. For Wittgenstein’s philosophy is largely a reactive and deflationary philosophy. It fastens on to confusions we are receptive to as speakers, or as speakers seduced by philosophy, and tries to root them out. Descartes may not always be the source of these tendencies to confusion: for example, there may be invitations to dualism in psychological language itself—quite apart from Descartes’ writings. But if Descartes is traditional philosophy succumbing to those confusions, then Descartes is an important target of Wittgenstein, for the criticism of traditional philosophy is a central Wittgensteinian preoccupation. The question of how far Descartes is caricatured by Wittgenstein and Heidegger is by no means unimportant, then, to the philosophy of Heidegger or to the uses of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. How far, though, do the

Excusable Caricature and Philosophical Relevance 157 features that make Cartesianism important to Heidegger and Wittgensteinianism run through the rest of twentieth-century philosophy? Not very far, it seems, for there are huge tracts of Anglo-American philosophy that are not particularly reactive or therapeutic, still less told in the form of stories about a whole philosophical tradition à la Heidegger. What one finds instead is a constructive, problem-solving, quasi-scientific presentation of the subject. This, too, comes with anti-Cartesianism. Its anti-Cartesianism, too, is full of caricature. But does it matter? Take the programme of naturalised epistemology. This programme began about thirty years ago with a paper in which, with Descartes explicitly in mind, Quine denied that there was any position outside science from which to justify science, and in which he proposed that the traditional preoccupation with justification in the theory of knowledge was also outdated.2 Epistemology, Quine claimed, was better pursued against the background, if not as a part, of the empirical study of the way human beings turn sensory bombardment into theoretical understanding of nature. The natural perspective for a naturalised epistemology would not be the radically confi ned fi rst-person perspective of the radical doubter, but, as Quine saw it in the late 1960s, the wide-open spaces of behaviourist psychology, or, updating a bit, the modern cognitive science that encompasses fi ndings in the brain sciences as well as artificialintelligence laboratories. There are workers in naturalised epistemology who deny that the collapse of epistemology into empirical psychology can be total.3 But this is not because they think that the fi rst-person perspective is indispensable after all, or because they follow Descartes in thinking that there is an Archimedean point from which to support science. It is because they say that there are irreducibly normative questions about belief and about reasoning. Even these dissenters from the strict Quinean programme do not think that the theory of epistemic norms will revive Cartesianism— either in the form of fi rst-person epistemology or as a doctrine of rules for the search after truth. Does it matter to the coherence of naturalised epistemology that, contrary to the naturalised epistemologist’s prejudices about him, Descartes himself interwove his response to scepticism with a good deal of empirical psychology and physiology? Does it matter in particular that he tied his understanding of a posteriori scientific knowledge to his theory of the health of the body?4 In other words, is the fact that the picture of Descartes as a priori theorist of knowledge is a caricature, much of an embarrassment to naturalised epistemology? I think the answer is ‘Not necessarily’. Certainly the fact of caricature is far less of an embarrassment in this connection than it is in connection with Heidegger and Wittgenstein. The reason is that naturalised epistemology is not, except incidentally, a reactive and negative philosophical programme. It is a positive, problem-solving enterprise, which purports to tell us, among other things, what knowledge is, what the different means of arriving reliably at true belief are and how these means are connected to a demythologised human rationality. It aims at telling us all of these things in a way that complements empirical theories

158 Tom Sorell of cognitive development, theories of the cognitive evolution of the species and the brain sciences. Since these aims can be pursued independently of theses about Descartes, the fact that they are sometimes motivated by criticism of Descartes may be of limited interest in turn, as may be the fi nding that the criticism is misplaced. I am saying that naturalised epistemology has more of a right to use a bad critique of Descartes as a ladder that it kicks way, more of a right than a reactive philosophy, especially a reactive philosophy whose medium is history. But even naturalised epistemology should not be let off the hook entirely. Until the ‘naturalised’ in ‘naturalised epistemology’ really seems redundant in Anglo-American philosophy, a caricature of Descartes may be necessary to make clear what the point is of doing epistemology in that way. To the extent the caricature is necessary, the crudeness of the caricature matters. It matters also if naturalised epistemology is the first step in a movement of naturalising everything in philosophy—from ethics to semantics to the theory of mind. If naturalism in philosophy gets its momentum from naturalised epistemology, and a bad caricature of Cartesianism starts off naturalised epistemology, then the momentum of naturalised philosophy may be a bad momentum.5 Although the caricatures used by a positive philosophy are more excusable than the caricatures of a negative and reactive philosophy, there is a residue of inexcusability in all of the uses of caricatures of Cartesianism that we have been considering. For the caricatures belong to a programme of vilification and they sustain and increase the amounts of facile contempt and the numbers of facile and even vicarious dismissals in philosophy. In a famous article reflecting on Wittgenstein’s influence, Ryle noticed how enthusiasm for the author of the Philosophical Investigations resulted in a certain kind of imitative disapproval. Wittgensteinians would adopt a characteristic tone of voice in attacking what Wittgenstein attacked and, as Ryle put it, students who could barely spell his name would ‘wrinkle up their noses at things that had a bad smell for him’.6 Caricature in the service of vilification makes this sort of disapproval at one remove seem legitimate, and this is unfortunate. I am not calling for an end to disapproval. I agree that certain things in Descartes give off a bad smell; however, I do not think this conclusion is to be reached by investigating how Wittgenstein or Heidegger wrinkles his nose. It is important to use one’s own nose. More, the bad smell should not be detected too soon. On the contrary, until Descartes’ claims have a sort of prima facie attractiveness, and the questions he addressed a certain urgency, a person’s philosophical education will remain incomplete. The detection of the bad smell should come later, when one has worked through Descartes’ ideas and found their limitations. Even at this stage of disillusionment the repudiation of Descartes should not and probably cannot be total. There is a great deal in Descartes that is so well absorbed by posterity, even the sections of posterity that are most dismissive of Descartes, that they are now odourless. I mean such things as the idea that we should accept nothing in philosophy as true just on someone

Excusable Caricature and Philosophical Relevance 159 else’s authority, that we should expose our claims to objections, that the intellectual present is as much an occasion for starting something as for admiring or trying to retrieve the accomplishments of the past. It might be objected that while facile dismissal of Descartes and facile contempt for Descartes are obviously worth complaining about, there is no reason for anyone to go out of their way to be nice to Descartes, for what are canonical figures for if not to react against and emancipate ourselves from, and detect the bad smell in? I agree that the canonical figures are to be engaged with critically when engaged with, but I do not believe that all they are good for in their eminence is target practice. A figure is canonical when his standpoint is used to orient people in philosophy as a whole. Even if it is a bad standpoint, concluding as much can reasonably be expected to involve trying to occupy the standpoint, and not just inferring how things look from it. Reading canonical philosophers is a part of this effort. It ought to produce an impression of a philosopher distinct from the impression produced by the caricature mongers. It may not be a more accurate impression just because it is got directly from the text. But reading the text directly does add to the data that a caricature-mongering interpretation has got to square with, and in the case of Descartes it presents a more formidable figure for target practice than the prepackaged anti-hero of the Wittgensteinians and Heidegerreans.

III Between the extremes of understanding the canonical figures through their vilifying modern interpreters and working through their texts, there is the middle ground of consulting specialist commentary. Specialist commentary usually operates a convention of reading sympathetically in the interest of intelligibility. Reading sympathetically means not just agreeing to a truce with the canonical figure, but trying to take his side, figuring out how he might be read so as not to appear to make obvious errors. It does not exclude target practice, but it does not make target practice a priority. Still less does it take target practice to be mandatory whenever the text is by a canonical figure. Specialist commentary is neither too nice nor too nasty to the great dead philosophers. Does the availability of specialist commentary take the edge off the vilification of the caricature mongers? If the commentary gives a much less distorted or even a life-like picture of the caricatured figure, does it not provide the antidote to vilifying caricature? That depends on whether the caricature mongers or someone with equal influence succeeds in directing the audience to the commentary. The caricature mongers are not always aware of the specialist literature or respectful of it when they are. And specialist commentary is often not written for the audience that the caricature mongers reach. It is often directed at other specialist commentators. What is more, the specialist commentators sometimes identify themselves

160

Tom Sorell

as historians rather than philosophers. So the specialisation of the specialist commentators may unintentionally aggravate the bad effects of caricature. There is a sort of two-cultures problem in the history of philosophy, and the question of caricature drives it into prominence. I do not know if there is a solution to this problem. Philosophers who have tried to produce philosophically relevant specialist commentary on Descartes often get disowned or ignored by one party or the other—the caricature-mongering philosophers or the specialist commentators. But their efforts to write a philosophically relevant history of philosophy need to be continued. I conclude by considering briefly one partially successful attempt to write philosophically relevant history of philosophy in relation to Descartes. Then I indicate another possible approach I hope to implement myself in future work. The partially successful attempt I have in mind is Bernard Williams’ in his Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978). Williams’ book is primarily a commentary on the Meditations, but he brings to bear on this work a very detailed knowledge of Descartes’ other philosophical writings and Descartes’ philosophical correspondence. It is also scholarly in a clear sense. For example, Williams produces his own translations of all passages taken from Descartes’ Latin and French, and silently corrects a number of established ones. The book engages with established controversies in the English-language secondary literature over the interpretation of arguments in the Meditations, introducing in addition a number of new angles of its own. In all of these respects it belongs to the genre of specialist commentary. But it is an unusual such specimen. First, it opens with a preface in which Williams assigns his work to the philosophy side of a distinction between history of ideas and history of philosophy, thereby showing a consciousness of what I have been calling the two cultures in the history of philosophy. Second, in motivating the preoccupations of the Meditations Williams develops the interpretative ideas of pure enquiry and of the pursuit of an absolute conception, ideas which he thinks are latent in the concept of knowledge shared by all of his twentieth-century readers. He does not suggest an involved seventeenth-century inspiration for the Meditations. He looks for no agenda for Descartes in debates in Paris in the 1620s, or in puzzles set by Beeckman during Descartes’ army days. Although Descartes himself stressed a crypto-programme in the Meditations of destroying the physics of Aristotle, Williams makes little or nothing of it. There are only four entries under ‘Aristotle’ in Williams’s index. In short, although there is a biographical chapter at the beginning of the book, intellectual context is not much looked into. As far as I can tell from my own regular consultation of the relevant literature in English since 1978, Williams’ book has made a relatively small impact on Descartes’ specialists, and compared to Cottingham, Garber, Hatfield, Voss, Curley, Frankfurt, Wilson and Kenny, Williams is, to my knowledge, little referred to. This is not to say Williams’ book has not been

Excusable Caricature and Philosophical Relevance 161 read by the specialists; only that they have not much discussed its ideas. On the other hand, the idea of the absolute conception has been taken up in writings of leading Anglo-American philosophers—Nagel7 and Rorty8 to name only two. It has been taken up as a free-standing idea which is variously claimed to bring out something importantly true or importantly misleading about the nature of science. The ties of the idea to Descartes interpretation have been dropped or have become invisible. Now this unusual sort of reception for a specialist Descartes commentary in the wider philosophical world, which has to do with Williams’ own celebrity as a philosopher, is desirable from the point of view of breaking down the barriers between the two cultures in the history of philosophy. The idea of the absolute conception is a philosophically arresting idea, and it is not without application to the historical Descartes. The problem is that Williams’ application of it is not an application of it to the historical Descartes. The historical Descartes was concerned to make respectable a form of explanation drawing on extension and motion, and these and other explanatory concepts in Cartesian physics have a stronger claim to apply to a nature independent of the human mind than the sensible qualities and forms, the sense-derived species and genera of Aristotelian physics. In this respect Descartes’ reform of physics was a step on the way to a less speciesspecific and more absolute conception of nature. But these preoccupations have rather little to do with what Williams stresses—the ingredients in the concept of knowledge for a form of representation that is as close as possible to the world’s point of view. On the contrary, to the extent that Descartes is preoccupied with a concept of knowledge at all, it is scientia, which is a doubt-quashing, synoptic, irrevisable survey of a the results of a deduction in Descartes’s special sense—not a prephilosophical concept of knowledge at all, and not one that tries to go beyond representations to a kind of coincidence with what is there anyway. Although Williams’ method of connecting the absolute conception to the project of the Meditations is anachronistic, the absolute conception itself is a good hermeneutic device, with the power both to illuminate some central regions of Descartes’ thought and to enter mainstream philosophical discussion. It does not seem to be the right device, however, for undoing the vilification of Descartes: for the belief in the absolute conception is all too easily represented as one more piece of philosophical illusion along with the belief in the mind as mirror of nature or in a priori foundations of knowledge. And the absolute conception is hard to connect with Descartes’ practical philosophy, which, although developed only in outline during Descartes’ lifetime, was supposed to be the culmination of Cartesian physics and metaphysics. To encompass more of Descartes’ thought while at the same time standing a chance of getting a more sympathetic reception for that thought in twentieth-century philosophy, an account different from Williams’ is needed. The vehicle for this would be neither a work of specialist commentary, nor

162

Tom Sorell

a work of commentary with reference to current philosophical preoccupations, but a bridging work in which what is still defensible in Cartesianism from a twenty-fi rst-century point of view is presented as a live and general philosophical position to as wide a philosophical audience as possible. To implement this approach, one needs to locate in Descartes and in current philosophy some defensible common ground. This turns out to be more extensive than might have been thought. Descartes’ philosophy is realist, anti-sceptical but respectful of scepticism, centred on the fi rst person; it is dualist and doubtful of the completeness of natural science and its supposed independence of metaphysics. Each of these points of view is defensible in some form, and an ensemble of these points of view is reasonably called ‘Cartesian’ even if it departs in some ways from Descartes’ Cartesianism. Although I can only give a sketch of the preferred approach here,9 the key to it seems to me to concentrate on two of Descartes’ negative and meta-philosophical theses. One is that metaphysics is bad for people if indulged in as any more than a brief detour from the straight and narrow of natural science, technology and ethics; the other is that not all questions can be answered by natural science and that metaphysics, however bad for people as a full-time occupation, is also unavoidable if some of the problems that natural science does not touch are to be taken up. These problems include that of what the best sort of human life is like, and also the problem of how natural science is possible. The fi rst negative thesis brings us back to the figure of the non-paranoid working scientist and to his place in a practical life geared to moral rather than metaphysical certainty. It is with this figure—the man busy with dissections of animals or busy with instrument making—that the full-time permanent metaphysical enquirer is unfavourably compared by Descartes. Metaphysical enquiry ought only to be a full-time occupation for a short period away from practical scientific life and practical life more generally, and it should never be carried out for its own sake. Metaphysics, then, however foundational, is not the high point of science but a rather taxing preliminary to its main business—physics—which is itself a step on the way toward the most beneficial sciences—morals, mechanics and medicine, the sciences that change ourselves and the world for human benefit. It is these beneficial sciences, the fruit bearing branches of Descartes’ tree of science, that are the acme of science, not its metaphysical roots below ground. And of the beneficial sciences it is morals that reigns supreme. As Descartes says in the preface to the French edition of the Principles, morals is ‘the ultimate level of wisdom’. This science, of course, is for governing action quite generally. It is a science for life, including natural science but also extending beyond it. It is a science for making choices in the light of a scale of perfections, rather than for making hedonism efficient. And it classifies and gives strategies for cultivating virtues that are moral and social, not just those that are useful to pursuing the life of the mind. Although this science is the furthest removed from metaphysics in Descartes’ scheme of the sciences,

Excusable Caricature and Philosophical Relevance 163 it is this as much as physics that Descartes is laying foundations for. The certainty of non-paranoid science; the reliability of elevated moral choice—in a word, rational practical life is what its opposite—detached, disembodied solitary metaphysical reflection paves the way for, and gets its value from. Descartes’ rational practical life is not the unselfconscious absorbed activity of the happy hammerers, but neither is it detached, alienated and stripped of the affective or the passionate. And it is valued higher than the intense life of the mind that becomes available with detachment from the senses. That is why the science of it is put above metaphysics. Just as Descartes’ insistence on the limitedness and limited use of metaphysics gestures at unsuspected common ground between him and some of his twentieth-century vilifiers, so does his insistence on the necessity of metaphysics. Metaphysics is an autonomous science, prior to natural science, with its own non-natural subject matter—namely, immaterial things. It is important to focus on the anti-naturalism of this conception rather than on its connections with dualism and foundationalism. For Descartes is saying that more things are real than are dreamed of in natural science, and in this thesis, though not of course in his fleshing out of it, he is profoundly in tune with the anti-reductionism of some twentieth-century philosophy— especially in regard to psychological explanation—and with doubts about twentieth-century scientism. Descartes is alive to the need for a space outside science to think about how science works. He is alive to the need for a space outside science to think about the way the mind works, not only the conscious human mind, but also the mind with powers and capacities far greater than our own and disentangled from any sensory input. The limits of naturalism make him see the need for metaphysics, but the requirements of practical life put metaphysics in its place. NOTES 1. Cf. CSM vol. 3, 228, 346. 2. W. V. Quine, ‘Epistemology Naturalized’, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). 3. Alvin I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). 4. See Amelie Rorty, ‘Descartes on Thinking with the Body’, The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 371–423. 5. See Tom Sorell, Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science (London: Routledge, 1991). 6. Ryle, ‘Wittgenstein’, Analysis 12 (1952): 1 7. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) 15, 70. 8. See the introduction to volume 1 of Richard Rorty’s Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 9. I develop it at book length in Descartes Reinvented (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

7

Descartes’ Reputation John Cottingham

There is a curious paradox about Descartes’ current reputation: while in the lay world it generally remains high, in the academic philosophical world it could hardly have sunk lower. The general educated reader’s view of Descartes is that he is one of the maybe half dozen greatest philosophers of all time; everyone has heard of cogito ergo sum, and anyone having even a cursory acquaintance with Descartes through any typical encyclopedia entry knows that he is the ‘father of modern philosophy’. Yet within the academic community, even though Descartes’ official place in the canon of great world philosophers remains secure, almost no one has anything positive to say about his philosophical doctrines. Indeed, the label ‘Cartesian’ has become virtually a term of abuse, signalling all manner of philosophical confusions and errors: an obscurantist immaterialism in the philosophy of mind; a suspect foundationalism in epistemology; an incoherent subjectivism in the theory of meaning; a blinkered apriorism in the philosophy of science. The fertile and nuanced thought manifested in Descartes’ actual texts is seldom allowed to disturb this ritual denunciation of his errors. Modern analytic philosophers tend not to bother themselves with close scrutiny of past thinkers; however, they need their myths. They need a story of a Fall, from which their own salvific efforts have redeemed us, and Descartes, father of the subject, is invariably cast in the role of Adam, original source of all our woe.

1. SPOOKS, SOULS AND SPIRITS Gilbert Ryle gave a major impetus to the negative view of Descartes’ philosophy when, around the middle of the twentieth century, he famously tagged Descartes’ account of the mind using the damning label ‘the doctrine of the ghost in the machine’.1 To the modern philosophical ear, all sorts of implicit criticisms are conveyed by this phrase. In the first place, a ghost, to the standard contemporary way of thinking, is a paradigm of the kind of ‘spooky’ entity that belongs to a prescientific age. It is exactly the sort of thing that is outlawed by the strict naturalist agenda espoused by an increasing

Descartes’ Reputation 165 number of present-day philosophers. Whatever the correct account of the mind turns out to be (and there is currently still no consensus on this), the ruling methodological assumption is that mental phenomena need to be explained in a way that shows how they are causally connected with, supervenient on, identical with or otherwise related to the range of observable natural phenomena studied by the scientist—neurophysiological, chemical, electrical, biological, behavioural, and so on. To be sure, there is a substantial group of modern philosophers who hold (following Thomas Nagel2) that there is a subjective aspect to consciousness—the aspect of the quale, or what a given experience qualitatively feels like—that is simply not revealed in the outward behaviour, or neurophysiology, or information-processing systems, of the organism. But the consensus, again, is that this is a problem (the so called ‘hard problem of consciousness’) whose solution will have to be found within the broadly naturalistic research programmes now being developed and that invoking immaterial or spooky entities is simply not an option. Notwithstanding the ‘spooky’ resonances that have turned out to chime in so well with today’s naturalist agenda in the philosophy of mind, the term ‘ghost’ was in one way an odd one for Ryle to have fastened on for his attack on Descartes. A ghost, as ordinarily understood, is a departed spirit, a soul separated from its former body. In some of the earliest appearances of ghosts in Western literature, those which occur in Homer’s Odyssey, ghosts are presented as thin and feeble beings, mere shadows of their former selves: ‘[W]hen someone dies, the sinews no longer hold the flesh and bones together; these perish in the fierceness of consuming fi re as soon as the spirit has left the white bones, and the soul flits away like a dream and hovers near’.3 Odysseus is told that if he wishes to converse with a ghost, he must fi rst revive it with a drink of blood. He is able to speak to the ghost of his mother in this way, but when he tries to embrace her, she ‘flits from his hands like a shadow’, too insubstantial to be grasped. Ghosts, in short— and this seems to correspond with an enduring popular idea of them—are a kind of thin ectoplasmic residue of a former person, and judging from the things they are described as saying (compare the ghost of Hamlet’s father) they are still very much preoccupied with the human life they once led. One could sum this up by saying that a ghost as traditionally understood is not something that exists in its own right, but is instead something incomplete or lacking—a kind of residual entity, wistfully hankering after the full embodied existence it once enjoyed. It follows from this, simply as a matter of conceptual analysis, that explicating the concept of a ghost must implicitly involve reference to the concept of a complete, embodied human being. So if Descartes did indeed conceive of the mind on analogy with a ghost (as the Rylean tag appears to insinuate), this would not imply the kind of total independence of the mind from anything human and bodily that Ryle was so concerned to denounce. The Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance did not talk much about ghosts, but they did subscribe to the standard theological

166 John Cottingham idea that the soul is separated from the body at death. And the way they talked about such separated souls in some ways calls to mind the common notion of a ghost as something that is somehow lacking or incomplete. Descartes’ scholastic predecessor Eustachius a Sancto Paulo put it like this, contrasting separated souls with genuinely independent incorporeal beings—of the kind that angels, for example, were traditionally supposed to be: ‘Separated souls are not whole subjects that are totally and in every respect complete, as are angels . . . A soul, even when separated, is always apt to inform the body and to be substantially united with it; but this is not true of an angel’.4 This makes it clear that a human ghost or spirit, unlike an angel, cannot be conceived in wholly dualistic terms: it always retains that conceptual link with at least the possibility of embodiment. So given that the essence of Ryle’s complaint was that Descartes conceived the mind in wholly dualistic fashion, as categorially distinct from the body, perhaps he was ill-advised to talk about ghosts. Perhaps ‘angel in the machine’ would have been in this respect an apter phrase for Ryle to have used to characterise the Cartesian model he was attacking.5 It may be helpful here to reflect a little more on the idea of a separated soul as essentially incomplete, which is deployed in the passage from Eustachius just quoted. In asserting that a separated soul is not a whole subject, Eustachius was following the lead of St Thomas: a human soul, says Aquinas, is a substantia incompleta, an incomplete substance.6 Quite unlike an angel, a human soul always in principle needs union with the body that it ‘informs’ for its essential completion; this is why the souls in purgatory are not (as popular myth perhaps represents them) human beings who have passed on to the ‘next world’, but are, rather, temporary beings or quasi-beings in a kind of suspended state, awaiting—indeed requiring as their very raison d’être—restoration to human status, when they will be rejoined to the body at the Last Judgement. In the light of this, one of the crucial questions to ask, for those who want to attack the Cartesian view of the mind along Rylean lines, is whether Descartes was or was not inclined to regard the soul as something complete in itself. There is certainly strong evidence in certain key texts that he was so inclined. In Part IV of the Discourse, Descartes explicitly rejects the orthodox scholastic view of the essential incompleteness of the human soul. I can, he says, form a conception of the complete and total me, ‘this moi, that is to say the soul by which I am what I am’, separated and distinct from the body. And from this I know I am indeed such a wholly independent incorporeal being.7 The implications of this were acutely grasped by Descartes’ contemporary critic, Antoine Arnauld, author of the fourth set of ‘Objections’: ‘[I]t seems that [Descartes’] argument . . . takes us back to the Platonic view . . . that nothing corporeal belongs to our essence, so that man is merely a rational soul and the body merely a vehicle for the soul—a view which gives rise to the defi nition of man as a soul that makes use of a body (anima corpore utens)’.8

Descartes’ Reputation 167 What is striking, however, is that in responding to Arnauld, Descartes fi rmly rebuts the Platonic interpretation of his views and refers Arnauld to the ‘proof’ in the Sixth Meditation that the mind is ‘substantially united with the body’.9 Writing to Regius the following year, he insists that a human being is indeed a genuine unified entity, an ens per se, not merely an ens per accidens: mind and body are united ‘in a real and substantial manner’ by a ‘true mode of union’. If an angel were in a human body, ‘it would not have sensations as we do, but would simply perceive the motions which are caused by external objects, and in this way would differ from a real human being’.10 The real human being, verus homo, for Descartes, is genuinely incarnate—that is to say, essentially and really an embodied creature of flesh and blood—and our distinctive human repertoire of feeling and sensation and emotion is the surest sign of that. As Descartes famously puts it in the Sixth Meditation (I cite the vivid English translation of William Molyneux, published thirty years after Descartes’ death), I am not in my Body, as a Mariner in his Ship, but am most nighly conjoyn’d thereto, and as it were Blended therewith; so that I with It make up one thing; For Otherwise, when the Body were hurt, I, who am only a Thinking Thing, should not therefore feel Pain, but should only perceive the Hurt with the Eye of my Understanding (as a Mariner perceives by his sight whatever is broken in his Ship) . . . For [the senses] of . . . Pain [Thirst, Hunger, etcetera] are . . . Manners of Thought arising from the Union and (as it were) mixture of the Mind and Body.11 The upshot of considering these various texts (something I have done in detail elsewhere12) is that Descartes’ views on the mind are considerably more complex (and considerably more interesting) than is suggested by his reputation as the arch-dualist. This is not, however, to say that the current reputation is based on a complete distortion. Though Descartes regarded our sensory and affective life as a sign of our embodied nature as genuine human beings, in the case of intellection and volition he followed a long tradition going back in part to Aristotle that considered them to be wholly incorporeal faculties. But it is important to notice that this kind of dualism is poles apart from what falls under that label in today’s philosophy of mind. Today’s debates centre around qualia and the supposed ‘hard’ problem of consciousness—the problem of how, for example, the distinctive taste of coffee or smell of a rose could ever be explained in physical (or functional or behavioural) terms. But in Descartes, such sensations as the ‘I-know-not-what tugging sensation’13 that we feel when we are hungry are (as we have just seen) precisely signs of our embodiment. He would, I think, have been wholly baffled by the idea of singling out our sensory experience and its qualitative character as an argument against mechanistic reductionism. What Descartes’ own dualism is about, by contrast, is his conviction that rational understanding (and the capacity for language that

168

John Cottingham

is inseparable from it) cannot be explained in terms of corporeal mechanisms: it is just too complex, too stimulus free (he explains in Part V of the Discourse) to be accounted for in terms of any input-output device. And that position, in a world where the capacities even of a modern computer would have been inconceivable—let alone any electro-chemical models for investigating the neurological complexity of the brain—was one which, in terms of the scientific and conceptual resources available in the seventeenth century, was an entirely reasonable one for Descartes to take.14

2. PRIVACY AND INDIVIDUALISM Cartesian scholarship of the last few decades has uncovered many other areas where Descartes’ reputation has been unfairly sullied. In philosophy of science, to cite one example, the work of Descartes scholars like Dan Garber has shown how far he is from the ‘armchair rationalist’, trying to unravel the nature of the cosmos a priori, from pure defi nitions.15 Yet Descartes’ negative reputation among most philosophers at large remains largely unaffected by such historical work on what Descartes himself actually wrote and thought. This is partly a result of the compartmentalisation that has come to beset much academic philosophy: most of its practitioners tend to occupy themselves entirely with the latest theories of fellow specialists within their chosen ‘cutting-edge’ area. Instead of being proud of the rich heritage of Western philosophical culture, we often seem determined to situate ourselves in a narrow research programme that is exclusively or very largely focused on the views of our contemporaries. Cross-fertilisation from the ideas of those working on the philosophy of earlier periods is surprisingly rare, for the history of philosophy, unfortunately, has itself become yet another academic specialism, its practitioners for the most part engaging in dialogue only with fellow specialists.16 To return to the Cartesian account of the mind, Descartes’ reputation has been the victim of an unwitting pincer movement—unwitting, because unintended by the assailants, who come from completely opposite camps. As suggested at the start of the previous section, the scientistic naturalism of contemporary philosophy has eagerly fastened on Descartes as the archrepresentative of a ‘spooky’ immaterialist theory of the mind. But attacks have also come from quite another quarter, from philosophers who tend to be deeply suspicious of the scientistic agenda of contemporary philosophy; the inspiration for these attacks has been a Wittgensteinian one. An influential protagonist here has been Anthony Kenny, whose own approach to philosophy and philosophical method has been strongly influenced by Wittgenstein. Kenny’s monograph Descartes, published in 1968, remains perhaps the most lucid and engaging concise exposition of the Cartesian system available. One of the objections raised by Kenny against Descartes is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s famous argument against

Descartes’ Reputation 169 ‘privacy’—namely, that the meaning of terms such as ‘pain’ cannot be determined merely by an inner occurrence accessible only to the subject, but must be governed by public rules determining its correct application and use. Drawing on this, Kenny deploys the following pointed challenge: What makes my awareness an awareness of pain cannot simply be the fact that it occurs in conjunction with pain. For the presence of pain is what gives my awareness its truth, not its content. What, then, makes it an awareness of pain at all? Descartes suggests no answer, and it is hard to see what answer he could suggest. If there is no answer, then his concept of consciousness seems doubly faulty. Not only has he no reply to Hobbes’ question: ‘How do you know that your belief that you have a certain thought is true?’; he has no reply either to Wittgenstein’s question, ‘How do you even know what is the content of your belief?’17 I have argued elsewhere that the abusive label ‘Cartesian privacy’—the idea that Descartes supposes we can construct rules of meaningful thought from a wholly isolated fi rst-person perspective—is in fact very wide of the mark.18 Part of the problem here is that much of Descartes’ philosophy is read through an excessively epistemological lens. Because he began his masterpiece, the Meditations on First Philosophy, by pushing doubt to its limits, and fi nding that the awareness of his own existence was the only item of knowledge that could not be impugned by any conceivable sceptical scenario, it is supposed that he wished to build up an entire philosophical system on the foundations of his own private consciousness alone. In the same year that Kenny’s Descartes was published, there appeared a highly impressive theological study, Einführung in das Christentum, by the holder of the Chair in Dogmatics at Tübingen, Joseph Ratzinger. In Part 2, Chapter 1 of that work, we fi nd the following sharp criticism of the Cartesian approach, which (though coming from a very different background from the analytic philosophy of which Kenny had become such a powerful exponent) in effect concurs with the Kenny-Wittgenstein view of the damagingly ‘private’ ethos of Descartes’ philosophy: [Descartes’] grounding of philosophy in self-awareness (cogito ergo sum) has decisively influenced the face of the modern mind . . . Just as self-love is not the primordial form of love but at most a derivative of it, just as one has only arrived at the specific nature of love when one has grasped it as a relation, that is, something coming from another, so, too, human knowledge is only reality when it is being known, brought to knowledge, and thus again ‘from another’. The real man does not come into it at all if I only plumb the loneliness of the ‘I’ of self-knowledge, for then I exclude in advance the point of departure of his ability to come to himself and thus his most specific characteristic . . . Being a man means being a fellow-man in every aspect.19

170 John Cottingham Kenny’s criticism of Descartes is logico-linguistic: the privacy of the Cartesian perspective prevents it from being able to provide a satisfactory account of meaning and content. Ratzinger’s is epistemic and ethical: the Cartesian notion of private self-knowledge could not even get off the ground unless the self were already posited in relation to another. Both criticisms, however, seem to exaggerate the autocentricity of the Cartesian standpoint. It is of course true that Descartes lights on his own individual existence as the indubitable starting point of his philosophical journey. But just as Augustine before him had linked his interior quest for self-knowledge to the quest for God—noverim me, noverim te (‘let me know myself, let me know You’)20 —so Descartes’ own self-awareness almost immediately provides him with an awareness of the infi nite ‘Other’ that dwarfs his own imperfection and fi nitude. Logically and linguistically speaking, his understanding of language and meaning does not after all operate in a private autocentric domain, but on the contrary immediately encounters certain objective semantic and logical necessities which not even the malicious demon could tamper with: ‘Let him deceive me as much as he may, he can never bring it about that two and three are more or less than five’. 21 This objective domain of meaning, to be sure, is generated not socially (as in Wittgenstein) but theologically—in the divinely decreed logical relations that I must conform to volens nolens (‘whether I want to or not’). 22 But either way, there is no suggestion that meaning can be a function of individual consciousness alone. Similarly, with regard to Ratzinger’s point that I am only myself in relation to another, so far from Descartes’ perspective in the Meditations being a radically solipsistic one, the very nature of the self which he investigates turns out to imply a relational structure—the relationship between fi nite created being and infi nite creator: ‘For how could I understand that I doubted or desired—that is lacked something—and that I was not wholly perfect, unless there were in me some idea of a more perfect being which enabled me to recognize my own defects by comparison?’23 Such an idea, Descartes goes on to argue, cannot conceivably be self-generated. What is more, even my very existence would be threatened unless there were a conserving power, not of my own making, that sustains my fleeting cogitations from moment to moment. 24 In all sorts of ways, and utterly at variance with the reputation of Descartes as attempting to generate everything from the subjective mind’s own resources, the prevailing tone of the Meditations is one of submission to something greater and higher—the source of all truth and goodness. 25

3. DESCARTES DESECULARISED Despite the strong tide of modern reaction against Descartes’ ideas which we have been looking at, there is, curiously, one area where Descartes’

Descartes’ Reputation 171 approach seems to have been enthusiastically followed by modern philosophers, namely, the so-called problem of external world scepticism. For hardly a day goes by without another article being offered for publication discussing some variant of the ‘brain in a vat’ scenario—the supposed possibility that you are not really sitting in your study reading this chapter, but instead your brain is floating in a vat of nutrients on Alpha Centauri, stimulated by mad scientists to give you all the sensations and thoughts appropriate to your being in your study on earth. This is often supposed to be a successor argument to Descartes’ own ‘malicious demon’ hypothesis; however, the irony is that Descartes himself would have had little truck with such extravagant agonisings over the basis of our knowledge. As he observed in the synopsis to the Meditations, ‘In producing all the arguments whereby the existence of material things can be inferred, my point was not that I thought them very useful in proving what they establish— namely that there really is a world, and that human beings have bodies and so on—since no sane person has ever seriously doubted these things’.26 This passage makes it quite clear that Descartes is not an ‘epistemologist’ in the modern sense. 27 He knows the arguments are artificial, 28 and in raising them he is following the traditional Platonic exercise of aversio— turning away from the senses—in the direction subsequently taken by St Augustine: the path of interiority. And that path is spelt out in the sentence following our quotation from the synopsis: the sceptical arguments are far less solid and transparent than those which lead to ‘knowledge of our own minds and of God’. We are back once again with Augustine’s Noverim me, noverim te: knowledge of the inner self leads directly to knowledge of God.29 Or as Descartes put it in the Regulae, in a dictum no less pithy and significant than the more famous one that is always associated with his name, Sum ergo Deus est, ‘I exist, therefore God exists’.30 The theocentric character of the Cartesian system brings me in conclusion to perhaps the most striking area where Descartes’ reputation has been subject to systematic distortions. Notoriously, his writings were placed by the Church on its Index librorum prohibitorum after his death and remained so for a very considerable period, and although not many philosophers working today would be influenced one way or another by that fact, it does nonetheless connect with the widespread perception of his system as inaugurating a secular turn in philosophy.31 Descartes, a lifelong Catholic, was not, of course, a naturalist: the current orthodoxy of dogmatic naturalism that has gripped the anglophone philosophical academy must look elsewhere for its heroes (perhaps to Hobbes or Spinoza); however, Descartes may nevertheless be thought to have paved the way for that movement. For although God is, in Descartes, the author of the laws of physics, the character of those laws remains austerely abstract and mathematical; moreover, if the scientist has the right equations, the movements of bodies can be predicted, and the entire subsequent unravelling of the universe explained, without recourse to any teleology or divine plan, but simply in terms of

172 John Cottingham the interaction of particles of a certain size, shape and motion. God is not exactly redundant in this system (indeed he is the cause of the creation and conservation of motion in extended substance), 32 but once the initial postulates of the laws of motion are granted, physics is, as it were, essentially left alone—set to become an autonomous discipline on its own terms. To say, as I shall in a moment, that the secularising interpretation of Descartes is nevertheless a distorting one, may in the present climate not seem to do much to rehabilitate his reputation. For the majority view among analytic philosophers today is probably that philosophy and science are much better off without God, and that if Descartes’ thinking moves us a tad towards dispensing with the deity, that is perhaps at least one thing to be said in his favour—one reason for looking a little less severely on the catalogue of ‘Cartesian’ errors. However that may be, it seems to me quite clear that the secularising view of Descartes is radically mistaken. This is not so much because of his mathematical and mechanistic approach to scientific explanation, for the latter is, I think, ultimately neutral with respect to theism or its contrary. Whether we take the ultimate laws of physics as brute constants, or as manifestations of the divine will, in the end makes no difference in practical terms: the devout believer and the rampant atheist still have exactly the same work to do in physics, namely, formulating the correct equations and systematically checking their implications against the observed data. The main reason why conceiving of Descartes as protosecularist is unfair is that it compartmentalises his system: it slices off the physics from the metaphysics and separates the metaphysics from the psychology and ethics. Yet Descartes, as we know, was deeply committed to the idea of philosophy as an organic unity—a growing tree.33 Central to Descartes’ metaphysics is a vision of the eternal and infinite source of truth and goodness, the ‘immense light’ whose beauty the Cartesian meditator ‘gazes on, wonders at and adores’ in a kind of rapture of contemplation.34 This vision, it needs to be emphasised, involves contemplation of the good as well as the true: Descartes insists, in a strongly Platonic moment, a strict match between how the mind responds to the ratio veri and to the ratio boni.35 The metaphysical journey from darkness and confusion to divine illumination, whether in the pursuit of truth or of goodness, involves a co-operation between intellect and will: the will must be exercised fi rst in rejecting what is doubtful and unreliable, and then in focusing attention on the innate indubitable deliverances of the natural light that survive this process. Once the eye of the soul has turned on the relevant objects, they reveal themselves with irresistible clarity to the intellect as good or as true, and the assent of the will (to affi rm, or to pursue) follows automatically: ‘from a great light in the intellect, there follows a great inclination in the will’.36 Descartes’ pervasive use of the Platonic-Christian metaphor of light signals the centrality of God in his system. And this turns out to be crucially important not just for his metaphysics, but for his ethics also—an area of

Descartes’ Reputation 173 his thought which has been curiously neglected, amounting to little more than a blank as far as Descartes’ modern reputation is concerned. The ethical proposals Descartes outlined in his last work, The Passions of the Soul (1649) are largely concerned with techniques for the management of the mind-body complex;37 however, this programme could not even get off the ground—not at least with any pretensions to be a moral philosophy as opposed to a mere technology—without the divine source of light that lies at the metaphysical heart of the Cartesian system. Philosophy can show us how to live because the divine light of reason implanted in the human mind can (provided it is used attentively and diligently) enable us to perceive the nature of what is truly good and fulfi lling. Given the weakness of our nature38 we can often be led astray and be drawn away from the light by the allure of lesser goods. But as long as we are determined to hold the image of the good before our eyes ‘in so far as the eye of the darkened intellect can bear it’,39 then we can see the correct way ahead. Cartesian virtue flows from this, since it consists in the ‘fi rm and constant resolution to use our freedom well, that is, never to lack the will to undertake and carry out what we judge to be best’.40 In moral philosophy, as well as in metaphysics, the Cartesian approach presupposes a deliberate act of will, indeed a kind of intellectual and spiritual discipline, which will keep us focused on the light of truth and goodness.41 All this shows Descartes to be in important respects a very traditional philosopher, having much more in common with his Augustinian and Thomistic predecessors than is often recognised. Never one to acknowledge his predecessors, Descartes often liked to represent himself as breaking new ground—and of course so he did. But there remains, in the end, a great deal of his metaphysics and his ethics that follows the pattern laid down, on the one hand, by Augustine, with his Platonic-inspired vision of philosophy,42 and, on the other hand, by Thomas Aquinas, inspired by Aristotle, for whom wisdom, the highest of the intellectual virtues, operates properly when it is ‘directed towards knowledge of the highest and most exalted cause’, that is, God.43 It is only with these pieces of the jigsaw in place that we can properly understand Descartes’ ambitions to produce a moral philosophy that would crown his philosophical system44 —ambitions that followed, in this respect, the lead of the scholastic philosopher he had read as a schoolboy, Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, who had declared that ‘the aim of a complete system of philosophy is human happiness’.45 We may or may not like the resulting picture, and may wonder whether it still presents us with someone who can rightly be called the father of modern philosophy. But I think in the end Descartes’ vision is an encouraging one. For what it implies is that philosophy is more than a series of fragmented and specialised academic disciplines, each with its own selfcontained agenda; that, on the contrary, the philosophical quest might aspire to regain its ancient and traditional purpose—that of forming an integrated view of the nature of the world around us, of how our own

174

John Cottingham

human nature fits into that world and of what this implies for the value and meaning of human life. Descartes’ philosophy has a great deal to say about all of this, and if, as I believe, what he says remains full of resonance and power, then perhaps his reputation deserves not just to be rescued, but to be higher than it has ever been; for his thought can be seen as pointing us towards a conception of what ultimately makes philosophy worth doing. NOTES 1. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949) Chap. 1. 2. In Nagel’s seminal paper ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ (1974), reprinted in Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) Chap. 12. 3. Homer, Odyssey (c. eighth cent. BC), Book 9, lines 218–222. 4. Eustachius a Sancto Paulo, Summa philosophiae quadripartita (1609) Part 3, Treatise 4, Discourse 1, Question 1; trans. in R. Ariew, J. Cottingham and T. Sorell, eds., Descartes Meditations: Background Source Materials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 91. 5. Compare Jacques Maritain: ‘The sin of Descartes is a sin of angelism. He turned knowledge and thought into a hopeless perplexity . . . because he conceived human thought after the model of angelic thought. To sum it up in three words: what he saw in man’s thought was independence of things’. Jacques Maritain, Three Reformers (London: Sheed & Ward, 1928, repr. 1947) 54–55. 6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (1266–1273), Part 1, Question 75, Article 4, and Part 1, Question 118, Article 2. Compare Francisco Suarez, Disputationes metaphysicae (1597) Disputation 33, section 1, §11: ‘anima etiamsi sit separata est pars . . . essentialis, habetque incompletam esssentiam . . . et ideo semper est substantia incompleta’ (‘A soul, even if it is separated, is essentially a part, and has an incomplete essence, and hence is always an incomplete substance’). 7. Discours de la méthode (1637) Part 4 (AT VI 33: CSM I 127). In this chapter, ‘AT’ refers to the standard Franco-Latin edition of Descartes by C. Adam and P. Tannery, Œuvres de Descartes, 12 vols. (revised ed. Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–1976); ‘CSM’ refers to the English translation by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vols 1 and 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and ‘CSMK’ to vol. 3, The Correspondence, by the same translators along with A. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, l991). 8. Objections and Replies to Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641), Fourth Objections, AT VII 203: CSM II 143. Plato may not anywhere have actually employed the Greek equivalent of this latter phrase, but it is a recognisably Platonic conception. Certainly St Augustine, whose philosophy was of course strongly influenced by Plato, does use the phrase: he says that a human being is a ‘rational soul using a mortal and earthly body’. De moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae (c. AD 387–389) 1.27.52. Compare also the following passage on pain, which puts Augustine fi rmly in the Platonic camp and is strikingly at variance with Descartes’ account: ‘The soul itself, which by its presence rules and governs the body, can feel pain and yet not pass away . . . If we consider the matter more carefully, pain, which is said to belong to the body, is more pertinent to the soul. For feeling pain is a feature of the soul, not the body,

Descartes’ Reputation 175

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

even then the reason for its pain existed in the body’ (De civitate Dei [c. AD 413–426] 21.3). Fourth Replies, AT 7 227–228: CSM 2 160. He goes on to explain that ‘we perceive that sensations such a pain are not pure thoughts of a mind distinct from a body, but confused perceptions of a mind really united to a body’. Letter to Regius of January 1642 (AT 3 493: CSMK 206). AT 7 78 (CSM 2 54), trans. William Molyneux (London, 1680). See, for example, ‘Cartesian Trialism’, Mind 94 (1978): 374, reprinted in John Cottingham, Cartesian Refl ections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Chap. 7, 173–187; for further qualifications and additions, see ‘Descartes: The Synoptic Philosopher’, Section 3 (d), Cartesian Refl ections 22–36. nescio quae vellicatio (AT 7 76: CSM 2 53). For more on this, see John Cottingham, ‘Cartesian Dualism: Theology, Metaphysics and Science’, The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 236–257. Compare D. Garber, Descartes Embodied: Reading Cartesian Philosophy through Cartesian Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Chap. 5. For an extended discussion of some of these issues, see John Cottingham, ‘What Is Humane Philosophy and Why Is It At Risk?’, forthcoming in A. O’Hear, ed., Conceptions of Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). A. Kenny, Descartes (New York: Random House, 1968) 78. For Hobbes’ question, see his Third Objections, AT 7 173: CSM 2 122, and Kenny, Descartes 76. For Wittgenstein’s private language argument, see Philosophische Untersuchungen (1953) Part 1, §293. John Cottingham, ‘“The only sure sign . . .” Descartes on Thought and Language’, Thought and Language, ed. J. M. Preston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 29–50. J. Ratzinger Einfuhrung in das Christentum, trans. J. Forster (1968; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000) 246–247. St Augustine Soliloquia (c. AD 386–387), 1, 2, and 2, 4. Third Meditation, AT VII 36: CSM II 25. Fifth Meditation, AT VII 64: CSM II 45. Third Meditation, AT VII 46: CSM II 31. Third Meditation, AT VII 49: CSM II 33. Among the key passages in this respect are the closing paragraphs of the Third Meditation (AT VII 52: CSM II 35), the discussion of goodness and truth in the Fourth Meditation (AT VII 58: CSM II 40), the close of the Fifth Meditation (AT VII 71: CSM II 49) and the resounding theodicy of the Sixth Meditation (AT VII 87–90: CSM II 60–62). Meditations, Synopsis (AT VII 15–16: CSM II 11; emphasis added). For more on this, see John Cottingham ‘Descartes As Sage: Spiritual askesis in Cartesian Philosophy’, The Philosopher in Early-Modern Europe, ed. I. Hunter, C. Condren and S. Gaukroger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Chap. 8, 182–201; reprinted in Cottingham, Cartesian Refl ections Chap. 14. A point which was fastened on in the period immediately after Descartes’ death, when the sincerity of the programme of Cartesian doubt became an issue. For this, see Thomas M. Lennon, ‘Huet on the Reality of Cartesian Doubt’, Receptions of Descartes: Cartesianism and anti-Cartesianism in Early Modern Europe, ed. T. Schmaltz (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) Chap. 4. St Augustine, Soliloquies (c. AD 386–387) 2.1.1.

176 John Cottingham 30. Regulae ad directionem ingenii (c. 1628), Rule 12 (AT X 422: CSM I 46). See further John Cottingham, ‘The Role of God in Descartes’s Philosophy’, A Companion to Descartes, ed. Janet Broughton and John Carriero (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) Chap. 17, 287–301; reprinted in Cottingham, Cartesian Refl ections Chap. 13. 31. For a systematic attempt to deconstruct this view, see John Cottingham, ‘The Desecularization of Descartes’, forthcoming in Rethinking the Enlightenment, ed. N. Jacobs and Chris Firestone (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 32. Principia philosophiae (1644) Part 2, Article 36. 33. Preface to the 1647 French edition of the Principles of Philosophy (AT IXB 14: CSM I 186). 34. Placet hic aliquamdiu in ipsius Dei contemplatione immorari . . . et immensi hujus luminis pulchritudinem . . . intueri, admirari, adorare. AT VII 52: CSM II 36. 35. My spontaneous inclination to assent to the truth, or to pursue the good, is a function of my ‘clearly understanding that reasons of truth and goodness point that way’ (quia rationem veri et boni in ea evidenter intelligo); Descartes suggests that this may also be thought of as resulting from a ‘divinely produced disposition of my inmost thoughts’ (AT VII 58: CSM II 40). 36. ‘ex magna luce in intellectu magna consequuta est propensio in voluntate’ (AT VII 59: CSM II 41). 37. See John Cottingham, Philosophy and The Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Chap. 3. 38. Compare the last sentence of the Meditations: ‘Naturae nostrae infi rmitas est agnoscenda’, ‘We must acknowledge the weakness of our nature’ (AT VII 90: CSM II 62). 39. AT VII 52: CSM II 36 (end of the Third Meditation). 40. Passions of the Soul Article 153 (speaking of the master virtue of ‘generosity’). 41. There are many aspects of the Meditations, for example, that call to mind the model of a set of spiritual exercises; for more on this claim, see John Cottingham, ‘Descartes As Sage’. 42. See, in this connection, the rich and beautifully researched study by Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 43. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (1266–1273), 2a 2ae (Part 2 of Part 2), Question 45. 44. ‘[Par la morale] j’entends la plus haute et la plus parfaite morale, qui présupposant une entière connaissance des autres sciences, est le dernier degré de la sagesse’. Preface to the 1647 French translation of the Principles of Philosophy, AT IXB 14–15: CSM I 186. 45. Eustachius, Summa philosophiae quadripartita, preface to Part 2, in Ariew, Cottingham and Sorell, Descartes Meditations 77.

8

The Political Motivations of Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism* Emmanuel Faye

The great attention given in Germany to Descartes by neo-Kantianism and Husserl’s phenomenology gave way, throughout the 1920s, to a mounting wave of anti-Cartesianism. That wave broke in the 1930s. It culminated with the activities of the German delegation to Paris in 1937 and with the publication, the following year, of Franz Bõhm’s Anti-Cartesianismus. Based much more on politics than philosophy, this anti-Cartesianism was tied to the rise of National Socialism. Did it end with the fall of the Third Reich? Do we not have here a historical episode that now belongs to the past? It is possible that in a philosophical form this politically motivated anti-Cartesianism has survived and that it has even won France over, through the considerable influence exercised by Heidegger: in his philosophy, too, anti-Cartesianism may be inspired by considerations that are not purely philosophical. That is why it may be necessary to examine it in the round, taking into account some texts that have only recently become available.

1. HEIDEGGER’S SCHOLASTIC INTERPRETATION OF DESCARTES IN 1923–1924 AND GILSON’S INFLUENCE Very early on, Heidegger set about locating the Cartesian metaphysics of liberty in a scholastic and theological context from which it had explicitly broken away.1 This reductive interpretation reflects the fact that Heidegger had been formed in a neo-scholastic Catholic tradition well represented by authors like Carl Braig, whose treatise Vom Sein left a big impression on Heidegger. In the years 1923–1927, at the time he was teaching at the University of Marburg, Heidegger flatly denied Descartes’ originality, Cartesian metaphysics being reduced to an outgrowth of scholasticism. Thus, in his course of 1927, Heidegger confidently claimed that ‘the fundamental ontological categories of Descartes are drawn directly from Suarez, Duns Scotus, and Thomas Aquinas’.2 This markedly reductive approach is followed from the very fi rst course he taught at Marburg, in the winter of 1923/1924, which is mostly devoted

178 Emmanuel Faye to commentary on the Meditations and the Regulae.3 The title of the second part, ‘Return to Descartes and His Underlying Scholastic Ontology’, already expresses the reductive principle of Heidegger’s interpretation. The most significant example of this comes in chapter 3 (§23–28), which concerns the Third and Fourth Meditations and their alleged relation to scholastic ontology. In this chapter, Heidegger’s purpose is to show that Cartesian metaphysics is rooted in scholastic ontology. Commenting on the title of the Meditations, he declares baldly that, by using the term ‘prima philosophia,’ Descartes places himself in the sphere of general ontology.4 Heidegger appears entirely oblivious to Descartes’ correspondence and the explanations of his philosophical project in the letters to Mersenne and Clerselier, which he never cites. 5 His procedure consists mainly in citing and paraphrasing the Third and Fourth Meditations and modifying Cartesian formulations so as to give them the most scholastic gloss possible. Thus, cogito sum becomes ‘besser’ [sic] ‘die res cogitans qua ens’, and the Cogitatio ‘gleich intentio’, whereas it is on the contrary quite essential to see that Descartes refuses to defi ne fi rst philosophy as the science of ens qua ens, and that he had in any case abandoned the psychology of intentio—which supposes the effective presence beforehand of the thing from which the intellect can extract the form of an intelligible species. Because he ignores these crucial departures from tradition, it is not difficult for Heidegger to speak in connection with Descartes of a ‘return to ancient metaphysics’.6 It is in the interpretation of the Fourth Meditation that Heidegger’s deformation of Cartesian metaphysics is at its clearest. In §27, which deals with these questions, the reader is surprised to fi nd that Heidegger takes his cue very directly from a thesis proposed in 1913 by Etienne Gilson, in La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie. 7 According to this thesis, Descartes, in his doctrine of human freedom, takes up two irreconcilable theological conceptions of freedom in relation to grace: on the one hand, the Molinist conception of liberty as indifference; on the other, the Thomist or Augustinian conception, which presents liberty as a turning towards the good. Gilson argued that ‘Meditation Four is no more than a series of borrowings from the theology of Aquinas and the Oratory’, to the point where it ‘contains nothing original’;8 Heidegger echoes this almost word for word: ‘überhaupt diese ganze IV. Meditation nicht die mindeste Originalität hat’,9 before underlining, exactly as Gilson does, the opposition of the Jesuits and the influence of the Oratory (and of Gibieuf in particular) on the doctrine of freedom in the Meditations. People frequently comment on Gilson’s debt to Heidegger: now we discover that the influence is in the other direction, in Heidegger’s use of Gilson’s reading of Descartes. This helps us to understand why French Descartes specialists influenced by Heidegger, from Jean-Luc Marion to Vincent Carraud, have generally tried to bring his thought nearer to the

The Political Motivations of Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism

179

scholastics, in particular Suarez, to whom Heiddegger accords great importance in the constitution of modern metaphysics. Again, Heidegger’s reliance on Gilson throws light on Heidegger’s claim that Descartes’ conception of truth as certainty has its origin in the Christian theology of salvation. Gilson was in fact the fi rst to suggest that Descartes transferred ‘what Thomist theologians said about the supernatural operation of grace to the natural action of the will’.10 Heidegger takes up this Gilsonian reading and gives it a highly questionable further twist: he makes it cover not only human freedom, but also the Cartesian conception of truth. Thus, he writes that ‘the role of grace determines clear and distinct perception’.11 In short, for Heidegger, the Cartesian conception of truth in relation to free will takes its origin and foundation from the theology of grace. This scholastic and theologising conception of Descartes’ metaphysics seriously distorts it. It does not follow the order of Descartes’ text, which does not go from grace to truth naturally known, but, on the contrary, starts by eliciting a clear intellection of the true and the good, and only afterwards, and very briefly, broaches the question of God’s controlling the content of human thoughts. Thus, not only is Heidegger’s interpretation unoriginal, which is problem enough; it is tendentious, in view of its insensitivity to the cardinal distinction between metaphysics and theology. Returning now to the Fourth Meditation, it is in connection with the theme of the perfection of man that one best sees how Heidegger misunderstands the great insight Descartes achieves in this connection. Heidegger paraphrases at great length the important passage at the end of the Fourth Meditation, returning three times to the theme der spezifi schen perfectio des Menschen,12 but instead of seeing in the thematisation of perfectio hominis a point of rupture between Descartes and the scholastics, he speaks only of an ‘extreme Pelagianism’ (ein extremer Pelagianismus).13 This reproduces the harshest and most reductive judgement ever made on Descartes: that of the theologians at Leyden who, in 1647, tried to have him condemned, accusing him of being plus quam Pelagianus.14 We now see to what extent Heidegger’s interpretation in 1923–1934 encloses Descartes in what he called, in the preface to the Meditations, the circle of scholastic theology, affording no opening for a philosophical understanding of human perfection. The Heideggerian insistence on denying Descartes’ originality and reducing him to medieval scholasticism is a way of calling into question the originality of Husserl and the neo-Kantians who claim to be Descartes’ heirs. But the fact is that it is rather Heidegger’s ‘hermeneutics’ that lacks originality. On the one hand, we have seen him borrowing from Gilson and retaining only the most reductive aspect of Gilson’s reading; on the other hand, in Being and Time, it is mainly the Cartesian use of the term ‘substance’ that he takes issue with, and he never does any more than repeat criticisms made by the neo-Kantians and Husserl himself. On the other hand, in the programme for destroying the Cartesian ontology announced

180

Emmanuel Faye

and sketched out in paragraphs 6, 10, and 19–21 of Being and Time, an intention begins to emerge that has nothing to do with pure philosophy. It is this crucial point that we want to emphasise as we go through Heidegger’s writings in the decade from the lectures of 1925 up to the courses of 1933–1934. It is during this period that the struggle against Descartes and his philosophy of the ‘I’ became most violent.

2. DESCARTES, THE I AND THE UMWELT IN THE 1925 LECTURES ON THE PRESENT STRUGGLE FOR A HISTORICAL VISION OF THE WORLD. The lectures delivered in Cassel in 1925 are the matrix for Being and Time, composed the following year. For anyone who knows German history and what could have been read in editorials of the period, the association in the lecture titles of the words Kampf and Weltanschauung related to the present (Gegenwart) and to historicity (Geschichtlichkeit), could not have been innocent in 1925. The critique of Descartes is intimately connected with the reconsideration of Husserl’s phenomenology and the neo-Kantian theory of knowledge. Heidegger blames phenomenology for thinking of man ‘as a kind of lived assembly’, cohering only because of a unity of the ‘I’ as a set of acts, without inquiring about the ‘character of being’ of this centre (Zentrum).15 To do this, one needs to make use of a ground, which according to Heidegger is lacking in Husserl. It does not seem to be the notion of the centre that is objected to. Earlier, in the third lecture, Heideg ger commented positively on Dilthey’s essays on Novalis, Hölderin and Goethe in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, and, subsequently, on the efforts at understanding concrete historical individuals starting from their ‘spiritual core’ or ‘centre’ or ‘middle’, terms used by the school or circle of Stefan George (Georg-Schule).16 What Heidegger rejects is not, then, the idea of the middle, but consciousness and the ‘I’ taken as centre. For him, this middle is not constituted by human consciousness but the ‘surrounding world’ (Umwelt) and the ground (Boden) in which Dasein is rooted. The term ‘Umwelt’ was not invented by Heidegger. It is taken from the non-Darwinian biology of Uexkull, and, before Heidegger, one fi nds it used as early as 1923 by a writer coming from phenomenology, Ludwig F. Clauss, who applies Husserl’s method to racial doctrine and the description of the ‘common destiny’ (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) of the people, in The Nordic Soul.17 This book was published by Max Niemeyer, who would shortly bring out Being and Time. In 1925, Heidegger is certainly more moderate or less explicit than Clauss, but it is important to see what could have been the significance of substituting the surrounding world for awareness, Umwelt for Bewusstsein. In the sixth lecture, Heidegger castigates Descartes for being the one who constituted man as the ‘I’, not being able to see that this is not Descartes’

The Political Motivations of Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism

181

view at all, and apparently being unaware of the Cartesian doctrine of the union of mind and body expounded in letters to Princess Elizabeth in 1643. All that Heidegger retains is the point of departure of the ‘I’, inasmuch as it is taken up in the ‘Kantian interrogation’ of the subject-object relation from the angle of the ‘theory of knowledge’. According to him, Descartes, in turning to geometry, wanted no more than an axiom for a deduction. He was not interested in the ‘total being of man’. Once again, one sees in Heidegger a reader who is more than selective, who stops at the Second Meditation, and who passes over in silence the Cartesian conception of man as a unitary thing (unum quid) which is developed in the Sixth Meditation. The interpretation is in any case questionable, since the je suis, j’existe of the Second Meditation constitutes less an axiom for a deduction than a principle of invention. Again, Heidegger should have taken into account the distinction between the method of analysis or of invention followed in the Meditations and the method of geometry or deduction adopted at the end of the Second Replies, where the cogito makes no appearance. It might be said that a ‘great thinker’ is spared the obligation to be accurate in his reading of his predecessors, but what is great about so fundamental a misreading of an author, especially when one aspires to refute or destroy his claims? In fact, Heidegger does not succeed in invalidating any of the claims of Descartes’ fi rst philosophy, as he only brings into play a very sketchy and deformed version of his thought. Heidegger then criticises Descartes for conceiving of consciousness as a ‘box with the “I” inside and reality outside’. Apart from the fact that, from a Cartesian point of view, it makes no sense to say that the ‘I’ is in consciousness, this crude spatial metaphor is no more apt than Ryle’s ‘ghost in the machine’ which at least has a kind of caustic wit to be counted in its favour. But the real challenge appears where Heidegger goes on to postulate what originally belongs to Dasein, that which is ‘in a world’, what leads him to insist on the primacy of the Umwelt, taking his cue from Uexkull’s biology. The point cannot be developed here, because it would take us too far away from Descartes. But to understand something of Heidegger, it is essential to see that he always opposed Darwinian biology and, in the 1930s, what he would call ‘liberal biology’, using the resources of ‘the new biology’ as he called Uexkull’s, in a letter to Elizabeth Blochmann. Uexkull was the editor in 1928 of the race theorist H. S. Chamberlain, and it was from his biology that Heidegger, and, before him, Clauss,18 took the term ‘Umwelt’. In 1934, Heidegger gave a very warm reception to Erich Rothacker’s Philosophy of History,19 a virulently Nazi study concerned with race theory, in which Rothacker twice associates Heidegger and Clauss and insists on the influence of Uexkull. 20 The fact that Heidegger showed no discomfort at being associated with Clauss is noteworthy. The 1925 lectures enable one to form a picture of Heidegger’s general orientation at the time: to work on the elaboration of a ground, to liberate the past where we can discern ‘the authentic roots of our existence’

182

Emmanuel Faye

from which to intensify the vital forces of our present. 21 This search for a ground, for an authentic rootedness, for a release of vital forces—these are the things Heidegger makes use of in his struggle for a historical vision of the world, it being understood that for him history is nothing other than the process of ‘our becoming ourselves’. 22 As for who might be meant by ‘ourselves’ he evidently means the Germans: he gives as the frame of reference for his lectures not humanity or Europe, but, as he says, ‘the existence of our Nation as a whole’. 23 He therefore has to take issue with conceptions foreign to this community: Cartesian philosophy, neo-Kantianism, phenomenology as developed by Husserl and characterised in part by the loss of history (Geschichtslosigkeit) and its hostility to history (Geschichtsfeindlichkeit). 24 There is no doubt in this period who the enemies are.

3. THE OPPOSITION TO DESCARTES IN BEING AND TIME: FROM THE INDIVIDUAL ‘I’ TO THE ‘SELFSAMENESS’ OF THE COMMON DESTINY OF THE PEOPLE Heidegger’s opposition to Descartes is developed more strongly in Being and Time. The work is geared to a double objection. Heidegger rejects any attempt to clarify Dasein by an understanding of foreign cultures or by a search for a supposedly ‘universal’ understanding of Dasein. Any such attempt would estrange Dasein from itself and result in a loss of the ground: ‘Entfremdung’ and ‘Bodenlosigkeit’ are the words he uses repeatedly in this repudiation of the universal.25 He also repudiates any philosophy of the ‘I’ or of human individuality. To the ‘I’ reduced to nothing but a formal indication, Heidegger opposes the ‘itself’ (Selbst) of Dasein understood as a being in common (Mitdasein). 26 In section 27, he says that ‘there is an ontological gap separating the selfsameness of the authentically existing Self from the identity of the “I”’. 27 This authenticity of the self has nothing to do with individualism. It can only be attained via the temporality and historicity of existence understood as destiny. This destiny is itself an impending happening ‘advenir’ (Geschehen) and a fate (Geschick) which is not at all composed of individual destinies, since human being cannot be expressed as the simple gathering of individualities. On this point Heidegger could not be more explicit. Existence, the authentic Dasein, has nothing to do with individual human being. It is realised in a common destiny, in the coming about of the people’s community (das Geschehen der Gemeinschaft, des Volkes). In section 74, page 384, which expresses the culmination of historicity’s development and thus of the entire work, the ideas and terminology of National Socialism are already present in the notion of community of destiny and community of a people. The will to destroy the ego, which gives way to a more radical individualisation (radikalsten Individuation)28 —one which does not materialise in

The Political Motivations of Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism

183

an individual human being, but in the organic indivisibility of the community of the people—reflects the true project of Being and Time. The destruction of Cartesian ontology, announced at the beginning of the work as the main second part of the book, 29 would never be published and was probably never written. However, the persuasive strength of Heidegger’s rhetoric is such that its simple enunciation was sufficient to convince many readers of the reality of an unfi nished project. For instance, even Habermas praises Being and Time for taking a decisive step on the road to overturning the philosophy of consciousness, 30 without recognising that—in the entire work—there is no philosophical analysis or detailed critique of the Cartesian metaphysics of the ‘I think’ (ego cogito). Nor does Heidegger make explicit the doctrine of community towards which he led his readers. All there is in Being and Time about the Cartesian ‘je suis’ is a few lines at the beginning of §19, where Heidegger claims that ‘the position of an I or a subject given immediately lacks all the phenomenal reality of Dasein.31 Even §§19–21, which contain the only developed discussion of Descartes, but which bear on res extensa rather than the ego cogito, are presented by Heidegger as tentative and incapable of a complete justification until the ‘phenomenological destruction of cogito sum’.32 This lack shows that Heidegger has no real philosophical refutation of the Cartesian je pense. The destruction of the individual and the human ‘I’ in order to make way for the common destiny of the people is not, either in conception or execution, a purely philosophical project, but a political one that takes its place alongside his doctrine of Volksgemeinschaft in the elements of National Socialism. Confi rmation of the deeply non-philosophical character of the attack on Descartes comes from the pages on Descartes from the recently published lecture on The Fundamental Question of Philosophy from the summer semester of 1933.

4. THE TEACHING OF DESCARTES IN GERMAN UNIVERSITIES TRACED BY HEIDEGGER IN 1933 TO A ‘SPIRITUAL DECLINE’ The lecture, presented in May–June 1933, reveals the incredible hostility Heidegger felt towards Descartes’ philosophy when Heidegger was appointed Rector of Freiburg University and had recently joined the NSDAP. He went so far as to denigrate Descartes studies in German universities as a manifestation of ‘spiritual decline’: Descartes with his general doubt and his emphasis on the ego is the most common and popular subject for exams and written philosophical exams supposedly in German universities. This trend, current during the past decades, is only a sign, but an unambiguous one, of the loss of thought and the irresponsibility thus propagated. This spiritual

184

Emmanuel Faye downfall of students and of the spirit of exams would not have taken place had the teaching profession refused to tolerate it.33

These remarks suggest that if Heidegger had his way, Descartes would no longer have been taught in German universities. It was a practice Heidegger himself followed after 1930: from then on he never explicitly devoted a seminar or a lecture to Descartes. Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism in 1933 is not the expression of a passing political involvement, but derives from the deep-seated struggle against Descartes already initiated in 1927 in Being and Time. Heidegger never ceased to criticise Descartes for having begun from the ego rather than the self (Selbst) of mankind. In sum, Heidegger reproached Descartes for having defi ned the ego as consciousness (Bewusstsein) and having missed human historicity and man’s essential link to his ‘Being in common’. Behind this rather unclear distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ of human being lies the charge that Descartes conceptualised human being from the standpoint of individual consciousness and not qua historical community of the Volk—that is, the National Socialist concept of Volksgemeinschaft. Heidegger’s diatribes against Descartes in 1933 harmonise with Nazi attacks during the 1930s against the French philosopher (see, for example, Franz Böhm’s Anti-Cartesianimus). In the Nazi attacks, the thinker of the human spirit’s freedom (mens humana) is identified with democracy as well as with ‘liberalism’, that is—in keeping with the Nazi language of the day—with the recognition of the value of human individuality. In the brochure announcing Franz Böhm’s book, published by Felix Meiner in 1938 in Leipzig, we read the following assertion: Los von Descartes und dem Cartesianismus! Enough of Descartes and Cartesianism! This demand must be registered at the very beginning of German philosophy and its historical opening based on the spirit of the people. In the global scope of the worldview (Weltanschauung), the centuries of the modern era stand on foundations originated by Descartes. It’s not only in the Cartesian ramifications of its philosophy, but also in expressions of modern thought, in the fundamental conceptions of our historical understanding, that the spirit of occidental rationalism has expanded. Today, confrontation with secret and avowed Cartesianism is no longer only a matter for historians of philosophy; one can’t escape the task of cultural politics according to our Weltanschauung. Heidegger personally participated in the mobilisation of Nazi philosophers which culminated in the Descartes Congress in Paris in 1937. This mobilisation was conceived as a struggle against the Western spirit. In Heidegger’s service records, held by the Ministry of the Reich and now archived in Berlin, I have found a reference to his ‘participating, in 1935,

The Political Motivations of Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism

185

in a demonstration in Paris in honor of Descartes’ (35. Teilnahme an Kundgebung in Paris zu Ehren von Descartes): Heidegger had been officially authorised to take part in the preparations of the Paris congress, two years before the congress itself. Ultimately, Heidegger gave up the idea of attending the Descartes Congress when his former student Hans Heyse was chosen instead of him to lead the delegation of German philosophers. But in 1937, he published a short text titled ‘Pathways of Expression’ (Wege zur Aussprache), in an ultra-Nazi yearbook of Dr. Franz Kerber, the mayor of Freiburg and highlevel SS official. In that text, he asserts that ‘the youngest forces in France’ (jüngere Kräfte in Frankreich) have understood the necessity of abandoning the framework of Cartesian philosophy and of rising to ‘a metaphysical knowledge of the modality of being of history’.34 This yearbook, to which Heidegger contributed, announced and prepared the collaboration with Germany that developed under the Vichy government. Fellow participants in that work were Jean-Édouard Spenle, who got the ‘Aryanisation’ of the Sorbonne underway during the Occupation, and Alphonse de Châteaubriant, the author of an article on Hitler’s ‘kindness’, who took over the direction of the collaborationist newspaper La Gerbe in 1940.

5. HEIDEGGER’S INTERPRETATION OF DESCARTES IN 1940–1942 In the Spring of 1940, in his lecture on Nietzsche and European Nihilism, Heidegger presents Cartesian metaphysics as the anticipation of the infinite ‘domination of the subject in the modern epoch’, which would fi nd its highest expression in Hegelian absolute knowledge before realising itself in Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’.35 Here his deformation of the Cartesian project reaches its zenith. In reality, Descartes’ fi rst philosophy is a philosophy of the clear perception of truth and not the self-assertion of strength, and the Cartesian spirit is neither an infi nite spirit à la Hegel nor an act of selfpositing à la Fichte or Gentile, but a human spirit, a mens humana, which has no pretensions to infi nite being (ens infinitum). The originality of the metaphysics of the Meditations actually lies in the equilibrium subtly preserved between human certainty and divine truth. Descartes avoids two pitfalls: one constituted by the pure self-affi rmation of mind or spirit as an absolute foundation; the other by the submission of human being to an irrational foundation. In fact, if we are not able to understand the infi nite, we can get a clear and distinct ‘intellection’ of it: an idea and not a belief. Heidegger’s thought fails to recognise this aspect and destroys this equilibrium of thought by suppressing the metaphysical quest for divine truth. Moreover, the recent publication of the 1940 lecture in its unexpurgated version (as opposed to its 1961 rewriting) reveals Heidegger’s real intentions. Delivered as Nazi armies were surging into France, he concludes the

186

Emmanuel Faye

lecture with a vindication of Wehrmacht Motorisierung, which he views as a ‘metaphysical act’. I shall return to this point later. In the original lecture one also detects a disconcerting focus on Heidegger’s part: modern subjectivity is construed in absolute opposition to Cartesian philosophy. Indeed, Heidegger no longer associates spirit and the human self with the ‘I’, instead viewing it as a ‘degeneration’ (Entartung) of human being itself. (In this passage Heidegger repeatedly uses the word Entartung, which belongs to Nazi racial doctrine.) For Heidegger subjectivity lies not with human being in its individual value but, instead, with the people and in the nation—that is, with the community and the Volksgemeinschaft: When a man sacrifices himself, he can do it only insofar as he is completely himself—from the being itself and the renunciation of his individuality. Subjectivity can in no way be determined by egocentrism, nor be based on it. But it is difficult to disregard the misleading inflection of individualism, when one hears the words ‘subject’ and ‘subjective’. Nevertheless, we must insist on this: the more unilaterally the human being lies in himself—as far as historical humanity is concerned (people, nation)—, the more subjective human being becomes in a metaphysical sense. The emphasis placed on the community in opposition to human being is not the negation of subjectivism,—on a metaphysical basis—, but its fulfillment, because the human being in its essence— not the separate individual—is at issue: Whatever exists, whatever is implemented and created as well as suffered or conquered must rely on itself and be under its domination.36 Here we see the National Socialist theme of individual sacrifice (Opfer), which ensures a subject’s belonging to the community. Under the cover of the National Socialist attack on individualism, Heidegger identifies, in 1940, the fulfi lment of modern subjectivity with the domination of the Nazi community of the people (Volksgemeinschaft). It is clear that what Heidegger understands as ‘metaphysical subjectivity’ has nothing to do with Descartes’ thought, or with metaphysics as such, which derives from philosophical judgment and not from the affi rmation of the self and the domination of a national community. Heidegger’s very unusual use of the word ‘metaphysical’ is displayed once again in his ‘metaphysical’ interpretation of the invasion of France by the armies of the Nazi Reich. One is struck by Heidegger’s identification of what he calls ‘metaphysics’ and the brutality of military events—and this during the years when, in hundreds of unpublished pages selectively put together afterward (Beiträge zur philosophie, Besinnung, etc.) and published posthumously, he adopts the pose of a thinker of ‘the event’ (Ereignis) and of what he calls ‘the other beginning’—all the while reaffi rming in these same pages his adherence to ‘the new German will’. 37 In a crucial passage from

The Political Motivations of Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism

187

the course of 1940, which comes after long developments of the theme of Cartesian subjectivity, he comments on the defeat of France: these days we ourselves are witnesses to a mysterious law of history, according to which there comes a day when a people is no longer at the height of the metaphysical surge of its own history, and that at the very moment when this metaphysics is converted into the absolute. 38 This shows clearly that for Heidegger, the invasion of France by the German army was not only a military event but a ‘metaphysical’ one, which revealed to the Germans—referred to in these pages by the expression wir selbst—that France, as a people, was no longer at the height of the new metaphysic initiated by Descartes. In the context of the invasion of France by the Nazi armies and the signing of the armistice on 22 June 1940 between Hitler and representatives of Petain, Descartes no longer appeared, as in 1933, the old enemy to be fought. Instead he could be incorporated into a ‘history of being’ culminating in the domination of the German Nazis and its allies and outposts of the time on the European continent. Contrary to what has been claimed by one commentator keen to pass off this course as a critique of National Socialism instead of—what it is—an explicit legitimisation of it, the people being discussed in this class of June 1940 are the French and not the Germans.39 The Germans are referred to afterwards: it is necessary to ‘modern technology and its metaphysical truth’ that there be a ‘new humanity’, which surpasses the man of today, a new human type dedicated to unconditioned domination on earth. That by ‘new humanity’ is meant, above all, the German people under Nazism is confi rmed by the fact that it is in the ‘recapitulation’ of these pages that one fi nds the passage cited previously about the ‘subjectivity’ that realises itself in the people, the nation and the community, and in relation to which the attention accorded to the ‘I’ is degenerate. Unfortunately, the rewritings of Nietzsche in 1961 have misled many readers, above all in France. They thought that Heidegger was criticising the Nazi domination of Europe in 1940, when the opposite was the case. Many passages from the course as it was actually delivered prove the point. Apart from the text cited on the community, one could mention, among other things, the changes to the conclusion of the course. In 1961, Heidegger added a paragraph on the ‘history of being’ and suppressed three pages of the actual course of 1940. Again in this conclusion, he suggests that the ‘mechanization of the Wehrmacht’—which had just brought about the military victories of the Nazi Reich in France—was not a phenomenon relevant to ‘technicism’ but a ‘metaphysical act’,40 one that was more important, according to Heidegger, than the risk of a ‘suppression of philosophy’ in teaching. Victor Klemperer has shown that the word ‘historicity’ had become a key to the language of the Third Reich, or LTI.41 With Heidegger, one can say that the word ‘metaphysics’ was on the way to becoming a term of LTI.

188

Emmanuel Faye

6. HEIDEGGERIAN LEGITIMATION OF RACIAL SELECTION AS METAPHYSICALLY NECESSARY In his attempt to force Descartes into a ‘history of metaphysics’ identified with the globalisation of relations of power and domination, Heidegger claims— by an induction that remains unclear—that the essence of subjectivity runs necessarily from the ‘rational animal’ (a formula he mistakenly presents as assumed by Descartes42) to brutalitas of bestialitas that, according to him, is claimed by Nietzsche in his evocation of the ‘blonde beast’.43 This is not a criticism, but, on the contrary, a legitimisation of Nazism, provided by Heidegger as a participant in the ‘history of being’ and in the fulfilment of ‘metaphysics’, inasmuch as, according to him, it consisted of the globalisation of human domination over all of being. This is just what Heidegger helped with: from the first lectures on Nietzsche, in an important passage from the course of 1936–1937—suppressed in the Nietzsche of 1961, but restored in the 1985 edition of the course—he spoke of democracy as ‘the historic death of Europe’44 in which lay only values, not the form-giving forces (gestaltgebende Kräfte) of great politics. In 1941–1942, in a lecture written but not delivered on the metaphysics of Nietzsche, he does not hesitate to present the ‘upbringing [Zuchtung] of man’ and the ‘principle of racial selection’ (Rassenzuchtung) as ‘metaphysically necessary’ (metaphysisch notwendig).45 At the same time, Heidegger speaks in this connection of Rassengedanke (his emphasis), thus raising his racial doctrine to the level of a ‘thought’, which confers on it not just a historical but also a philosophical legitimacy. In the cold light of this perspective, in which the justification of the very elements of Nazism, in which ‘the racial selection of man’ (rassischen Zuchtung des Menschen) is presented as a metaphysical necessity—which one could say constitutes a perversion of the sense of the word ‘metaphysics’—Heidegger leads us to the destitution of the human being, the diametrical opposite of the Cartesian philosophy of human improvement. In Heidegger’s progress, then, the contribution of Descartes is completely destroyed: he no longer even plays the role of an adversary, and thus a possible alternative or source of resistance. In the judgement, unequivocal and dictatorial, of what Heidegger abusively calls ‘the history of metaphysics’ and which led in 1940 to the legitimation of the domination, believed soon to be worldwide, of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft under Hitler’s leadership, the manipulation—or, better, the negation—of the contribution of Descartes is close to its peak. We are very far from any philosophical approach of Descartes, and after the war we get even further away, if that is possible. Following the defeat of the Nazis, Heidegger modified his text yet again, saying that ‘the war had decided nothing’46 (that war that had delivered Europe from Nazi domination), and letting it be understood—as would be very amply developed by various followers—that metaphysics itself and Cartesian subjectivity in particular were what was truly responsible for the explosion of technology. The gas chambers in the extermination camps

The Political Motivations of Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism

189

of the Nazis are presented in the 1949 Bremen lectures as little more than one example among many of modern technology. It is a particularly serious form of revisionism that tends to excuse National Socialism from its deep responsibility for the annihilation of the Jews and the destruction of humanity, to which Nazi industry was dedicated. It is therefore vital for the future of thought that room be found for a humane and philosophical approach to Descartes’ philosophy and the modern philosophy which preceded it, freed of the politically motivated distortions of Heidegger.47 NOTES * Translated from the French by Tom Sorell. 1. See Descartes’ letter to Mersenne, 27 April 1637, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul . Tannery, revised edition, (Paris, Vrin/C.N.R.S., 1964-76) 10 vols., (hereafter AT), AT 1, 366. 2. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Principles of Phenomenology, Heidegger Gesamtausgabe, edited by Hermann Heidegger and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann edn. 102 vols. projected, (Frankfurt an Main: Klostermann Verlag,, 1975-) (hereafter GA) , GA 24, 174. 3. Heidegger, The Beginning of Modern Times GA 17. On this course, see Helmut Vetter, ‘Heideggers Descartes-Kritik in der ersten Marburger Vorlesungen’, Bewusstsein und Unbewusstes, ed. Jurgen Trinks (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2000) 179–185. The author does not take up Heidegger’s critique of the Fourth Meditation, where Gilson’s influence is visible. There are few studies on Descartes and Heidegger in France, and most are already out of date. Thus, the two articles by Jean-Luc Marion on the question come well before the publication in 1994 of the 1923–1924 course, and therefore do not call attention to it; see ‘Heidegger et la situation metaphysique de Descartes’, Bulletin cartésien IV, Archives de philosophie 38.2 (1975): 253–265, and ‘L’ego et le Dasein, Heidegger et la “destruction” de Descartes dans “Sein und Zeit”’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 1 (1987): 25–53. The recent article by Francois Jaran, ‘Heidegger et la constitution onto-théologique de la métaphysique’, Heidegger Studies, vol. 19 (2003): 65–80, highlights differences in Heidegger’s interpretation of Descartes between the 1920s and the years 1936–1940, but it has more of a bearing on Marion’s interpretation than on the series of Heidegger’s not very well-developed texts on Descartes. 4. GA 17, 132. 5. Heidegger does not read the Meditations in the Adam and Tannery edition, which he uses only for the Principia, but follows the pagination of the Meiner edition, which appeared in Leipzig in 1915. 6. GA 17, 133. 7. See mainly Part 2, Chap. 3 and the conclusion. 8. Étienne Gilson, La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie (Paris: Alcon, 1913) 441. 9. GA 17, 309. 10. Gilson, La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie 311. 11. GA 17, 57. 12. GA 17, 225; see also 196 and 202. 13. GA 17, 228. 14. See the letter to Descartes to the Curators of Leyden University, 4 May 1647, AT 5 5, 11.

190 Emmanuel Faye 15. Heidegger, Les conferences de Cassel (1925), trans. Jean-Claude Gens (Paris: Vrin, 2003) 116. 16. Les conférences de Cassel 154. On Stefan George, see Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2002). The biography of Thomas Karlauf, Stefan George: Die Entdeckung des Charisma (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2007) does not highlight sufficiently evidence of the radical political dimension and the influence of George between 1920 and 1930. 17. Ludwig F. Clauss, Die nordische Seele: Artung, Pragung, Ausdruck (Halle a/d Saale: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1923). 18. Clauss, Die nordische Seele 87, 107. 19. See Heidegger’s letter to Rothacker of 11 August 1934 in Theodore Kisiel, ‘Martin Heidegger und die Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift’, Dilthey-Jarbuch 8 (1993): 223. 20. Erich Rothacker, Geschichtsphilosophie 86 and 1098–1099, Handbuch der Philosophie, ed. A Baeumler and M Schroter, vol. 4, Staat und Geschichte (Munich and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1934). 21. Les conférences de Cassel 204–206. 22. Les conférences de Cassel 202. 23. Les conférences de Cassel 148. 24. Les conférences de Cassel 206. 25. Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1957) §38, 178. 26. Sein und Zeit 116 and 118. 27. Sein und Zeit 130; Being and Time, trans. MacQuarrie and Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) 168. 28. GA 36/37, 38. 29. GA 36/37, 40. 30. Jürgen Habermas, Martin Heidegger, l’œuvre et l’engagement (Paris: Cerf, 1988) 21. 31. Sein und Zeit §10, 46. 32. Sein und Zeit §18, 89. 33. Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit, vol. 1, Die Grundfrage der Philosophie (sommersemester 1933), GA 36/37, §10, 38–39. 34. See M. Heidegger, ‘Wege zur Aussprache’, Alemannenland. Ein Buch von Volkstum und Sendung, ed. Franz Kerber (Stuttgart: J. Engelhorns, 1937). 35. See ‘Die Herrschaft des Subjekts in der Neuzeit’, Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 2, (Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske, 1961) 141–147. 36. GA 48, 211–212. 37. Beiträge zur Philosophie GA 65, 54 38. Nietzsche 165. See also GA 48, 205 39. See Silvio Vietta, Heidegger, critique du national-socialisme et de la technique (Puiseaux : Pardès, 1989) 117. Apart from his erroneous interpretation of the passage on the invasion of France, the author feels obliged, in order to lend credibility his thesis of a critique of Nazism in 1940, to comment on the 1940 courses with the help of the lectures from the 1950s (118–119). 40. ‘In Warheit ist dies [“Motorisierung” der Wermacht] ein metaphysischer Akt’, GA 48, 333. This whole passage is suppressed in Nietzsche II 256. 41. Victor Klemperer, LTI, La langue du IIIe Reich (Paris: Albin Michel, 1996) 73–74. 42. Heidegger maintains both in his Nietzsche and his Letter on Humanism that ‘the interpretation which has held sway up to now, that is, the metaphysical interpretation of man, would be that of man as a rational animal; Nietzsche 193; Über den Humanismus (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2001) 13. Whereas we know to the contrary that the scholastic defi nition of man as a rational

The Political Motivations of Heidegger’s anti-Cartesianism

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

191

animal was explicitly reflected by Montaigne (Essais, ed. Villey-Saulnier (Paris: PUF, 1978) vol. 2, 1069) and by Descartes himself in the Second Meditation and in the Recherche de la vérité (AT 7, 25; AT 10 515–516). The modernity of Descartes’s philosophical thought about man lies in his refusal to allow a ready-made defi nition to free us of the need for further enquiry. GA 48, 267; Nietzsche 200. GA 43, 193. GA 50, 56–55; Nietzsche 309. Heidegger, Was heißt denken? (Tübigen: Max Niemeyer, 1971) 65. For a more extended study on the same topic, see Emmanuel Faye, ‘La pensée métaphysique de Descartes et son “interprétation” par Heidegger’, Y a-til une histoire de la métaphysique?, ed. Bruno Pinchard and Yves-Charles Zarka (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005) 263–301. For a general critic on Martin Heidegger, see Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009).

9

Hobbes’ Reputation in Anglo-American Philosophy Tom Sorell

Hobbes was both famous and notorious during his lifetime, and he has several reputations today, not only in professional philosophy but beyond. During his lifetime, he seems to have been highly regarded on the Continent as a social thinker, a working natural scientist, even as a mathematician; in England, on the other hand, he was excluded from the Royal Society, abused by Wallis for his mathematical inadequacies and treated as untrustworthy for his political theory by people on both sides in the Civil War. How he was regarded mattered enormously to Hobbes, and he tried when attacked to defend his reputation as an intellectual, as a participant in English political life and as a Protestant believer. His reputation is the subject of at least one of his works, Considerations on the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners and Religion, of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (1662), and his attempts to defend and promote his good name are visible in his autobiographical verse and in some Epistles Dedicatory to his works, notably that of De Corpore. Hobbes’ reputation among his contemporaries is a big subject, but I am going to steer clear of it. I shall concentrate instead on his standing in recent and current philosophy in the English-speaking world.

I There are two types of philosophers who might be considered here: specialised historians of philosophy, on the one hand, and mainstream philosophers, on the other. Historians of philosophy are expected to interpret philosophers of the past by reference not only to their texts, but also to the political and intellectual currents which affected a particular philosopher’s agenda. They are supposed to produce a reading which, after taking into account the many different things a given philosopher wrote about in the seventeenth century, describes the distinctive angles adopted and doctrines developed by a particular philosopher, if possible by identifying ideas that link together most or all of his work. They are also supposed to make judgements about the overall impact the philosopher made on his

Hobbes’ Reputation in Anglo-American Philosophy

193

contemporaries and successors. I am quite sure that there is no consensus among English-speaking historians of philosophy about the distinctive doctrines of Hobbes, the way his philosophy hangs together or how it fits into a longer story about early modern philosophy. There are signs of a radical nominalism and conventionalism, of materialism, of determinism, of moral egoism and contractualism, to name some of the ‘isms’ most often associated with Hobbes. But whether they add up and, if so, how they add up, are big, and still open, questions. There are those who, following Popkin, locate Hobbes within a so-called sceptical crisis that is supposed to have involved Mersenne, Gassendi, Descartes and others as well.1 Competing interpretations take Hobbes’ nonsceptical empiricism to be crucial to understanding his place among the likes of Descartes, Gassendi, Locke and Spinoza.2 There are others, including me, who think that his view of science is crucial to unifying his work and to placing Hobbes among his contemporaries.3 For me, it is not the idea of science or scientific method simply that plays the unifying role, but the idea of science as a remedy for what is bad or limited in human cognition and human practical thought. This idea does more than unify Hobbes’ work: properly understood, it distinguishes him from many of his interlocutors. To be sure, other philosophers of his time also thought of science as a remedy—Bacon notably; however, they conceived science differently, and also conceived differently the ills that science was supposed to act against.4 Although the idea of science as remedy for natural human ills seems to me, once it is explained, to give a view of Hobbes’ thought as a whole and what is distinctive about it, it does not give a view of a particularly successful or credible system of thought. On the contrary, on my reading,5 Hobbes overdrew human cognitive limitations and had a conception of a remedy for them that could not account satisfactorily for the superiority of the fledgling natural sciences of his day over native common sense. His theory of human nature makes it a mystery how people form concepts, his conception of the concepts required for natural scientific explanation is too austere, and his account of how natural scientific explanations are true is confused with an account of how scientific explanations can be above controversy. When it comes to his so-called science of how we should behave and, in particular, how most of us should obey and a few of us should rule, his picture of what needs to be remedied in human nature is at times brilliant, and his picture of the remedy also impressive. But whether this science is science in the same sense as natural science, and how it depends on natural science, if it depends on it at all—these matters, though highly relevant to Hobbes’ own claims about his distinctive contribution, are left very obscure in his writings. So my reading does not go with a very admiring assessment of Hobbes’ philosophical achievement. In particular, it tells against his reputation as a highly systematic philosopher. It is true that there are the trappings of system in his writing. His trilogy is supposed to have realised a master plan for teaching the elements of philosophy. In fact, the books do not come close

194

Tom Sorell

to resembling the realisation of a master plan, and where they come closest to talking about order in general and imposing it on science as a whole, as in Part 1 of De Corpore, they are either controversial, or too abbreviated, to be made much of. I do not know of other, general interpretations of Hobbes that both fit his actual writings and make his philosophy seem to be more of a success. The empiricist interpretation does not really touch his morals and politics, and a Hobbes who is significantly impressed by scepticism and its problems seems to me to be largely a figment of certain interpreters’ imaginations. There is very little evidence that Hobbes had anything like the Cartesian project of sketching a scepticism-proof physics, still less that he brought this or any other anti-sceptical or post-sceptical project to a successful conclusion. There is a well-known principle of interpretation, the principle of charity, that says that one ought to seek a hearing or a reading of a person that makes as many of his sentences as possible true by the interpreter’s lights. There is another, more plausible, principle of charity that tells the interpreter not to banish error on the part of the person under interpretation, but to minimise inexplicable error. These principles apply to figures in the history of philosophy. An interpreter who tries to avoid attributions to Hobbes of plain falsehoods or irrationality or inconsistency is to be preferred to one who does not try to do so. And an overall interpretation that credits him with an attractive or defensible big idea, even one he does not defend very well himself or make as attractive as he could have himself, is to be preferred to one that does not. If there is no such interpretation forthcoming, despite efforts to arrive at one in a spirit of charity, then so much the worse for the philosopher in question and his reputation. Of course, failure to arrive at a plausible overall interpretation that puts a philosopher in a good light from the interpreter’s point of view is compatible with extracting from the body of his writings outstandingly strong lines of thought or aperçus. This is certainly possible for Hobbes. Indeed more than this is possible, since his political philosophy as a whole is full of big, arresting and credible ideas, not least the idea that politics is in one form or another a permanent struggle against the permanent possibility of large-scale emergency. But there is a trade-off. The bigger and more attractive the idea credited to Hobbes’ political philosophy, the smaller the reach of that idea in relation to Hobbes’ philosophy as a whole. Cannot a whole philosophy or a whole political philosophy be considered great by us in the twenty-fi rst century—and be assigned to the canon of the history of political philosophy—but not be considered great because its central idea is plausible or true or the result of applying any principle of charity? Yes, of course. A philosophy can be considered great because of the way it seems to articulate a challenge to, or systematically undermine or subvert, ideas with tremendous power and influence. Berkeley’s greatness surely does not derive from the plausibility of Berkeley’s immaterialism, but

Hobbes’ Reputation in Anglo-American Philosophy

195

from the way this immaterialism—whether believable or not—is able to subvert a certain sort of doctrine of matter from starting points about ideas that Berkeley and some of his opponents took as common ground. In this way Berkeley’s greatness is connected with his elaborating a position that is hard for a Lockean sort of believer in matter, or even a Cartesian believer in matter, to dismiss lightly. Its systematic connection with Locke and its position in time makes Berkeley hard to leave out of the story of early modern metaphysics and epistemology. But in this sort of role Berkeley’s is a sort of anti-philosophy. It is not out of the question to interpret Hobbes’ philosophy as an anti-philosophy as well, with Aristotle playing the role that Locke does in relation to Berkeley. Indeed, it is in part as an antiAristotelian anti-philosophy that Hobbes himself regarded his whole system. Can we consider Hobbes’ system great as an anti-philosophy, even if it has drawbacks taken as a free-standing positive philosophy? I think not. Partly this is because much of canonical early modern philosophy, not just Hobbes, stands corporately to Aristotle as an anti-philosophy. It is doubtful that Hobbes has pride of place as an articulator of that anti-philosophy. So we do not get from its status as a large-scale anti-philosophy a credible claim to greatness for Hobbes’ system. It is a reflection of what I am claiming is his failure to arrive at either a great constructive philosophy or a great anti-philosophy that, in Anglo-American philosophy at least, Hobbes does not seem as indispensable as Berkeley to the usual story of early modern metaphysics and epistemology. Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley and Hume—these are indispensable. But Hobbes is not usually granted star-billing alongside them.6 Hobbes’ claim to greatness grows in strength the more he is identified with his moral and political philosophy and not with his general philosophy. His moral and political philosophy is both great anti-philosophy— proceeding as it does from a denial of the cardinal Aristotelian idea that man only realises his nature within the polis—and great constructive philosophy, deriving what a state ought to be, and what rulers and ruled out to do, from the need to avoid war. I have long argued that Hobbes’ political philosophy is autonomous in this sense: it does not inherit its scientific status from a supposed basis in natural science or in a method borrowed from natural science. To the extent it has a distinctive method that is actually followed by Hobbes, and I think this is to a small extent, that method is not the one that Hobbes advertises as governing, say, physics. His political philosophy, in short, is autonomously scientific, that is, autonomously effective at counteracting what is anti-social about human beings. I think it is also autonomously great, not owing what is striking or arresting in it to Hobbes’ empiricism or materialism or determinism. In a way my reading supports the pedagogical orthodoxy in the Englishspeaking world. However content historians of philosophy are to give him a secondary place in early modern metaphysics and epistemology, no one would dream of doing the same in a history of political theory, and because

196

Tom Sorell

political theory is often taught historically, many people would not dream of giving Hobbes anything less than canonical status in political theory full stop. In political theory or political philosophy, Hobbes is commonly regarded as great, and deservedly so. There are of course different views in political theory and political philosophy about how Hobbes fits in, and what his distinctive contribution is, and sometimes his connections with other figures in the conventional survey—for example, Locke and Rousseau and his associations with a so-called ‘social contract’ tradition skew the reading of Hobbes himself in ways that are distorting. When it comes to Hobbes’ place in current Anglo-American political philosophy, however, the distortions seem to be worse. This is partly to do with the fact that Hobbes’ political philosophy seems to be largely identified with the answer to the Foole in Leviathan, and with the fact that Hobbes’ aims are sometimes identified with the aims of appropriators of his ideas in current Anglo-American philosophy, such as Gauthier,7 Kavka8 and Hampton.9 Hobbes is sometimes seen as a foil of Rawls in the social-contract tradition, because he legitimises the state or morality on rational but non-idealised grounds. Like some of his contractarian successors, Hobbes assumes that ‘individuals in the state of nature are ordinary human beings with the same knowledge and capacities that human beings normally have’, including the usual limitations of fellow-feeling and tendency towards short-termism. Hobbesian agents are assumed to have a kind of non-exotic rational self-interest and to be rational only in that sense. The original position, on the other hand, deprives people of biasing information and equips them with a capacity for choice in the light of high-order interests. Hobbes’ claim to enduring importance in Anglo-American philosophy is supposed to reside in the unassuming and unidealistic basis for choosing life in the state in particular, and the moral precepts connected with co-operation in general. Or, in other words, he is understood as anticipating, in both unsophisticated and sophisticated ways, the justifications for life in the state and for morality given with up-to-date rigour by Gauthier, Kavka and Hampton.10 Not only does this conception make Hobbes’ reputation depend on Rawls’; it misses the debt Rawls has to Hobbes via Kant. The rest of this chapter divides into three parts. I fi rst indicate (Section II) how Hobbes’ general philosophy is marginalised in standard courses in early modern epistemology and metaphysics, marginalised in ways that would be unthinkable the case of his political philosophy. I trace this in part to the lack of a single manageable, authoritative statement of his metaphysical and epistemological views in the corpus of his writings. His standing outside what is currently regarded as the canon in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistemology and metaphysics, despite his importance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries themselves, makes him comparable to Gassendi and perhaps Malebranche. Not only has his general philosophy tended to be eclipsed by his political philosophy; it tends to be

Hobbes’ Reputation in Anglo-American Philosophy

197

distorted by interpretations that are based predominantly on Leviathan. Or so I argue in Section III. Finally, I complain about interpretations which reduce what is of interest in his political to philosophy to his application of a theory of rational self-interest (Section IV).

II One way of gathering evidence about Hobbes’ current reputation among Anglo-American historians of philosophy is by surveying syllabi of early modern philosophy courses at leading American and British universities. If Hobbes is included routinely, that is evidence of his having canonical status; if not, not. To judge by a sample of syllabi accessible over the internet, Hobbes lacks canonical status. At the University of Michigan, for example, Philosophy 389, a course in the history of philosophy focused on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has this description in the fall term of 2005: ‘An important formative period in Western philosophy. Writings of all or most of the following are studied. Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. The course is planned with the needs of philosophy majors in mind and concentrates on metaphysical and epistemological issues’.11 Hobbes is left out. On the other hand, the introductory course in political philosophy, Philosophy 366, does include Hobbes among a list of historical figures whose writings supply the material to be studied.12 At the University of Minnesota, the early modern philosophy course description for fall 2000 is virtually identical to Michigan’s: Hobbes is nowhere mentioned.13 New York University’s modern philosophy course in fall 2005 advertises coverage of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, and Locke, Berkeley and Hume.14 The description of the corresponding course at Williams College is similar.15 The Harvard introduction to early modern philosophy in spring 2005 mentions only Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant.16 Princeton’s many history of philosophy courses include one in early modern philosophy in which Hobbes is one of the possible philosophers studied. But another course, on British empiricism, leaves him out.17 At Oxford, the current description of the course in history of philosophy from Descartes to Kant contains no reference to Hobbes, though one of the set texts contains a chapter on him.18 History of Philosophy I in Part IB of the Cambridge Tripos leaves out Hobbes.19 Many further examples can be given. 20 I hope it will be agreed that there is a clear pattern here, and it is one of omitting Hobbes from the history of early modern metaphysics and epistemology. When Hobbes is covered in a course, it is as a political philosopher and, more specifically, as the author of Leviathan. No doubt the explanation of his exclusion from the central area of the history of metaphysics and epistemology is complicated. It probably has more to do with the way the history of philosophy has been taught in the last hundred years in the English-speaking world than it has to do with Hobbes. During this period,

198

Tom Sorell

not only Hobbes but also the history of philosophy itself has been given less attention, and ahistorical, impersonally formulated problems much more. 21 But the marginalisation of Hobbes does, I think, have something to do with Hobbes’ writings themselves. Though the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers are the best studied of the historical figures recognised in the English-speaking world, the canonical figures tend to be associated with one great systematic text each. 22 Hobbes has no one book that is a good vehicle for his metaphysics and epistemology. There are works that are vehicles of a kind. His ‘Objections’ to Descartes’ Meditations is one. His commentary on Thomas White’s De mundo (1643), long overlooked, is also something of a guide to his views, though it is not a work of Hobbes’ philosophical maturity. Of Liberty and Necessity (1654) and his side of the debate with Bramhall (1656) are relevant, as well. But none of these books is both general enough and late enough to be the official statement of Hobbes’ epistemology and metaphysics. A better contender is De corpore (1655). But it is neither a free-standing book, being part of Hobbes’ trilogy of The Elements of Philosophy, nor is its intended audience the uninitiated in philosophy. Nor, again, is it supposed to be an introduction to Hobbes’ personal philosophy. As I read it, De corpore is intended as a general introduction to the new philosophy—the new natural and the new civil philosophy—an introduction from ‘elements’ Hobbes draws from the work of others—Galileo, Gassendi, Mersenne, Harvey, Kepler, Copernicus—as well as his own work in optics and political philosophy. The ‘elements’ in De corpore are defi nitions of philosophy, of the parts of language, of logic and of the analytic and the synthetic method, a classification of different kinds of motions. With these as background, he outlines, usually at a very high level of generality, some geometry, mechanics and physics. Not his geometry, mechanics and physics, but something like the new geometry, mechanics and geometry as expounded in different writings mainly of Hobbes’ Continental contemporaries. Hobbes’ contribution is not the content of the new sciences, except in a few areas, but a certain synthesis and ordering of the elements. The synthesis might have impressed those working in the new philosophy who did not have developed views about how different programmes of research in it went together. De corpore is not, however, suitable as an introduction to the general study of bodies for those entirely new to science, still less for those steeped in the usual Aristotelian teaching of the day. Instead of providing an Aristotelian with ways of understanding the new science, Hobbes seems to be writing for those already committed to and familiar with untraditional science, though perhaps people who knew the wood less well than the trees. This audience is even further removed from twenty-fi rstcentury philosophy undergraduates than Hobbes’ Aristotelian contemporaries. Then there is the fact that De corpore, apart from being technical and more scientific than philosophical in the twenty-fi rst-century senses of

Hobbes’ Reputation in Anglo-American Philosophy

199

those terms, is very, very long. This, too, unsuits it to the role of canonical book, or at least a place in a course with a book of metaphysics for each of the main philosophers studied. Without a handy source for Hobbes’ metaphysics and epistemology, it tends to be presented in a fragmentary and misleading way. For example, Hobbes is regularly made the spokesman in English-language philosophy for an extreme materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Although his position can fairly be regarded as materialist in some sense, it seems to me to belong to his philosophy of science or his philosophy of language, rather than a philosophy of mind. In Chapter 46 of Leviathan, Hobbes says, The World, (I mean not the Earth onely, that denominates the Lovers of it Worldly men, but the Universe, that is, the whole masse of things that are ) is Corporeall, that is to say, Body; and hath the dimensions of Magnitude, namely, Length, Bredth, and Depth; also every part of Body, is likewise Body, and hath the like dimensions; and consequently every part of the Universe, is Body; and that which is not Body, is no part of the Universe; and because the Universe is All, that which is no part of it, is Nothing; and consequently no where. 23 This passage is part of an attack on the supposed existence of substantial forms and essences, not a reaction against, for example, Cartesian dualism. And substantial forms had an important role not only in theology but also in the Aristotelian natural philosophy that the new science broke from. Even in the Third Objections, the motivation for Hobbes’ departures from Descartes’ immaterialism seem to be motivated by what he took to be the requirements of scientific explanation, not by a disagreement in the philosophy of mind.24 Although early chapters of Leviathan and of The Elements of Law do state a philosophy of mind, and can be understood as materialistic, these chapters are not primarily motivated by disagreement with a particularly mentalist theory of sense or of imagination. They are motivated instead by disagreement with scholastic theories of sense and imagination, and in particular with the idea that there has to be a strong resemblance between sense experience and its causes. This motivation makes it difficult to locate Hobbesian preoccupations within the framework of the contemporary philosophy of mind. There is no direct connection between Hobbes’ repeated references to the brain as the seat of consciousness, on the one hand, and eliminativism or neurophilosophy, on the other. Nor can Hobbes’ talk of ratiocination as computation (e.g., in Leviathan 25) be regarded as a genuine anticipation of the programme of artificial intelligence. The lack of these connections with contemporary philosophy may go some way towards justifying Hobbes’ exclusion from early modern philosophy courses that are partly supposed to prepare philosophy majors for issues in the philosophy of mind. Descartes undoubtedly fits into such a

200 Tom Sorell course, just as he fits into a contemporary course in the philosophy of mind itself. Hobbes at best fits into a course in early modern metaphysics and epistemology as part of a story about how the thought of one canonical figure (Spinoza) develops out of, by repudiating, the thought of some of his important contemporaries, not only Descartes, who is canonical anyway, but also Hobbes. Spinoza’s ideas about substance develop from the inadequacies of materialism as much as immaterialism. For Spinoza’s theory of substance, with its implication that the realm of ideas is parallel to but quite separate from the realm of matter or extension, counts strongly against much of what Hobbes says about sense and imagination, general thought and reasoning.

III When it comes to Hobbes’ politics, readers have not one but three texts to choose from. That the choice now in the English-speaking world should almost invariably be Leviathan is surprising, for two reasons. First, De cive is Hobbes’ preferred statement of his politics, the one he consistently presents as a science of politics and the version that he included in his Elements of Philosophy. Second, in the hands of twenty-fi rst-century readers, Leviathan tends to shrink to Parts 1 and 2 of the book. The last two parts (on Christian Commonwealth and ‘The Kingdom of Darkness’) are often ignored, though they are intended to establish the important conclusion that obedience to ecclesiastical authorities, unless with the civil sovereign’s approval, is neither reasonable, nor biblically warranted. This de facto truncation reduces the scope of Leviathan to something like that of The Elements of Law. No doubt its literary qualities account in large part for the favouritism of Leviathan. But there is also the fact that Leviathan refi nes the political doctrine of Hobbes’ earlier books. The theory of authorisation is new, for example. Leviathan is not only the pre-eminent text for the study of Hobbes’ political philosophy; it is pre-eminent in Hobbes studies generally. This is because it has non-political material in its fi rst thirteen chapters. The non-political, opening chapters of Leviathan are often taken to be a sort of abridgment or summary of the rest of Hobbes’ natural philosophy and metaphysics. This is unfortunate, because so little of Hobbes’ non-political philosophy is in fact represented in Leviathan, and because some of what is included is not always representative of what is to be found elsewhere. Very little of the content of De corpore corresponds to anything in Leviathan, for example, and the same seems to be true of De Homine, Liberty and Necessity and the critical commentary on Thomas White, not to mention more minor works with a bearing on Hobbes’ metaphysics, like Six Lessons to the . . . Professors of Mathematicks (1656). The non-political chapters of Leviathan are strongly comparable to those in Part 1 of The

Hobbes’ Reputation in Anglo-American Philosophy

201

Elements of Law. As Hobbes makes clear in the latter work, the purpose of those chapters is to throw light on human nature. It is not a sketch of his metaphysics in general or, if this is different, an account of what has to exist in order for science in general to have a subject matter. The same seems to me to be true of the early chapters of Leviathan, since their correspondence with The Elements of Law is pretty exact. Those chapters cannot go proxy, either, for Hobbes’ general philosophy, his metaphysics and epistemology or his natural philosophy. It is one thing for teachers of political theory with no training in philosophy to miss this and think that Hobbes’ whole system or whole theory of nature is in play in these early chapters. It is quite another for editors of many editions of Leviathan consistently to overgeneralise their subject matter. For example, the very recent Broadview edition, by A. J. Martinich, says, As great as Leviathan is as a work of political philosophy, it is much more than that. Its opening chapters adumbrate a world view that is thoroughly materialist, mechanist, and reductionist. Everything that exists is a body; all changes occur through the contact of one body with another; life is nothing but a certain kind of complex motion; human life is strictly analogous to the motion of machines; and qualitative experience of the world is reducible to motions in the brain and heart. In short, Hobbes challenged the most basic beliefs of his contemporaries.26 This seems to be misleading on several counts. First, Hobbes is not adumbrating a worldview, but a view of human nature—a mechanistic view of human nature, to be sure, but not the principles of natural philosophy in general or even a sketch of mechanics in general. The claim that everything exists is body is not in the opening chapters. Again, it is unlikely that Hobbes wanted to challenge the most basic beliefs of his readers, since, on many of topics of the early chapters, unless they were natural philosophers themselves, his readers would not have had any beliefs. Nor would the strategy of challenging beliefs have fitted in with the aim, absolutely explicit in The Elements of Law, of communicating principles of obedience or citizenship that readers would not distrust on account of an adverse emotional reaction to them. 27 Martinich is not alone among Hobbes specialists in exaggerating the scope of the theory that introduces Leviathan. In the introduction to his edition, Curley writes, Leviathan starts with topics apparently far removed from the topic of civil obedience: the nature of thought, language and science. Why start this way? Like Descartes, Hobbes thinks of himself as providing new foundations for philosophy, in his case, as making civil philosophy, the knowledge of rules of life in society, scientific for the fi rst time. To claim this, he must give some account of science. 28

202

Tom Sorell

This sounds as if what unifies the opening chapters of Leviathan is a philosophy of science, rather than a philosophy of human nature, and as if Hobbes tried to make good a claim he made in Leviathan that in his hands civil philosophy rose to the status of a science. In fact, the chapter on science in Leviathan is itself preceded by others that do not contribute to a philosophy of science; the account of science in that chapter is out of keeping with others in his writings; and the claim that he has devised a science of politics, though visible toward the middle of Leviathan, is more to do with De cive than his other political treatises, and the claim is made (and referred to by Curley) in De corpore, not Leviathan. Other editors of Leviathan and influential commentators also connect the introductory, non-political chapters of Leviathan with the supposed scientific status of Leviathan. Though Curley takes scientific status to be conferred in Hobbes by the derivability of a doctrine from defi nitions, Macpherson claims that it is the application of a method of resolution and composition to human actions that gives the politics a scientific basis.29 This seems wrong. It is the application of resolution to human nature— yielding the cognitive, sensitive, appetitive and deliberative powers—not the application of any method to actions, that yields the starting point of Hobbes’ moral and political theory. Hobbes shows that a mix of even mostly quite benign sensory and appetitive constitutions will yield reasons for human beings who are self-governing to resort to violence when they live together. And the general fear of death and desire for commodious life gives people a reason to live together in submission and then obedience to a sovereign whose power to decide the means to general security and well-being is unlimited. The science of morals and politics is more to do with showing that ‘[s]eek peace’, ‘[a]bandon self-government’, ‘[l]ay down the right of nature’ and ‘[o]bey the sovereign’s laws’ are highly reasonable, and nearly interchangeable, precepts, than it has to do with the nature of action in general, sense in general or knowledge in general. And it is not true that one has to know the nature of action in general, sense in general or knowledge in general to arrive at the ‘argument from the passions’ for the inevitability of war in the state of nature. This argument can probably be arrived at with very few preliminaries, as it is in De cive. Even according to Leviathan, we are far along the path to knowing that we have to obey when we reflect that we ride armed and keep our belongings under lock and key. We do not also need the argument from the passions in full generality, for self-knowledge in the relevant sense—knowledge of human nature—is supposed by Hobbes to be available from candid prescientific reflection on what we are like (see his introduction to Leviathan). The organisation of Leviathan obscures this. It is as if the vacuum in Hobbes’ writings left by the absence of a systematic treatise on metaphysics and epistemology is filled by Part 1 of Leviathan, thanks to its brilliance as a political treatise, and its excursions into the science of human nature. No wonder Hobbes’ general philosophy is so

Hobbes’ Reputation in Anglo-American Philosophy

203

often misunderstood by those who extrapolate from the content of Hobbes’ masterpiece.

IV Leviathan not only casts an unhelpfully long shadow over the rest of Hobbes’ philosophy; there is even a sense in which it darkens other writings in political philosophy. At least in the hands of his recent Anglo-American commentators, Leviathan is taken as the sole or defi nitive statement of his political philosophy, with attention being lavished on passages that appear only in the third of the three political treatises. The most glaring example of this one-sidedness is a literature30 that connects the main thrust of Hobbes’ political philosophy with his answer in Leviathan to the Foole [who] hath sayd in his heart, there is no such thing as Justice; . . . seriously alleging that every mans conservation, and contentment, being committed to his own care, there could be no reason why every man might not do what he thought conduced thereunto; and therefore also you make, or not make; keep, or not Keep Covenants, was not against Reason, when it conduced to ones benefit . . . The Kingdome of God is got by violence; but what if it could be gotten by unjust violence? Were it against Reason so to get it, when it is impossible to receive hurt by it? And if it be not against Reason, it is not against Justice; or else Justice is not to be approved for good . . . This specious reasoning is nevertheless false. For the question is not of promises mutuall, where there is no security of Performance on either side . . . But either where one of the parties has performed already; or where there is a Power to make him performe; there is the question whether it be against reason, that is against the benefit of the other to perform, or not. And I say it is not against reason.31 The reason it is not against reason, Hobbes goes on to say, is that failure to perform in these circumstances is not against one’s benefit; it may even invite violent reprisal from the disappointed covenanter or the relevant ‘Power’ that enforces performance.32 This passage has been interpreted as an endorsement of the kind of reasoning appropriate to prisoner’s dilemmas, where an outcome that is less than optimal for a self-interested agent is rational to choose. Commentators go on to read into Leviathan a project in Hobbes of deriving from self-interest a motivation for following all of the precepts of morality. This is the approach to meta-ethics that twentieth-century philosophers and economists interested in the theory of rational choice think is least

204

Tom Sorell

question-begging and the least transcendental. Their reading is supposed to pay a compliment to Hobbes by making him a pioneer of their kind of meta-ethics. But the reading places great weight on a passage that has only perfunctory counterparts in Hobbes’ other political treatises. In those other books, he does not feel that he has to go into great detail to say why a covenanter whose opposite number has already performed loses nothing, all things considered, by performing also. In The Elements of Law Hobbes make the point that the covenanter who has already enjoyed performance on the other side is not in the position of someone who performs fi rst with no expectation of performance. In that sort of case, covenants are ‘of non effect’. 33 But in the case under consideration, performance is reasonable, as the foreseen benefit for the so far non-performing party has already been delivered by the other side. In De cive, he makes the rather different point that it is irrational, because in a way self-contradictory, both to will (by making an agreement) to do something and to will not to do it (by non-performance).34 There is no hint in the two earlier political treatises, which are otherwise substantially parallel to Leviathan, that anything much hangs on the issue of the rationality of second-party performance to covenants, or that the issue is hard to resolve. Nor is there very much direct evidence in any of the political treatises that Hobbes was a pioneer of a meta-ethics equating what it is rational and morally obligatory to do with what will benefit oneself. On the contrary. Not only do Hobbes’ (and the Bible’s) moral requirements of compleasance, pardon and restrained revenge seem to call upon agents to swallow their appetite for getting even with, or getting the better of, their fellows, requiring them to forgo benefit; Hobbes’ main preoccupation seems to be normative ethics rather than meta-ethics. He wants to argue above all for the moral necessity of submission and obedience and a moral prohibition on rebellion and disobedience, and his strategy is to show that the need to seek peace, which justifies uncontroversial moral requirements, such as the biblically warranted requirement to forgive or the biblical golden rule, also justifies keeping contracts, which in turn justifies civil obedience, if obedience is what one exchanges for peace in being a member of a commonwealth. The Reply to the Foole is not irrelevant to this project, but nor is it crucial. On the other hand, a reading of Leviathan that fits in with the other political treatises does not necessarily deprive Leviathan or the other political treatises of enduring or contemporary philosophical interest. Between the World Wars in the twentieth century a number of philosophers saw the great relevance of Leviathan to the situation of Europe. Whether in the form of the fragility of civilisation (Collingwood) or the value of dictatorship and the liberal illusions surrounding the ideal of the rule of law (Schmitt), one or another message of Leviathan was easy to relate to the disorders of the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps messages equally close to Hobbes’ preoccupations—for example, the message that security

Hobbes’ Reputation in Anglo-American Philosophy

205

is more valuable than liberty—are relevant in our own day, when some of the responses to terrorism seem authoritarian. None of these messages lies very far from the surface of Hobbes’ text, whether the text is that of Leviathan or that of De Cive and The Elements of Law. What is more, these messages are of much greater general importance, both philosophical and political, in our own day, than supposed traces of rational choice theory in the Reply to the Foole. NOTES 1. Richard H. Popkin, History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). For the application of this interpretation to Hobbes at its most general, see Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) and many of Tuck’s articles. I have been a consistent critic of this interpretation. See Tom Sorell, ‘Descartes, Hobbes, and the Body of Natural Science’, The Monist 71 (1988): 515–525, ‘Hobbes Without Doubt’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 10 (1993): 121–136, and ‘Hobbes’s Objections and Hobbes’s System’, Descartes and His Contemporaries, ed. R. Ariew and M. Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 83–96. 2. McCracken, ‘Knowledge of the Soul’, The Cambridge History of Seventeenth Century Philosophy, ed. D. Garber and M. Ayers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 818ff; R. Woolhouse, The Empiricists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 3. See, for example, John W. N. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas (London: Hutchinson, 1965) and Tom Sorell, Hobbes (London: Routledge, 1986). M. M. Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966) is also relevant. 4. See Tom Sorell, ‘Hobbes’s Scheme of the Sciences’, The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 45–61. 5. See Sorell, Hobbes and, more recently, ‘The Normative and the Explanatory in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy’, Revista di Storia della Filosofi a 59.1 (2004): 205–218. 6. For widely used surveys which leave him out, see Louis E. Loeb, From Descartes to Hume: Continental Metaphysics and the Development of Modern Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); and Richard Schacht, Classical Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant (London: Routledge, 1984). See also Richard Francks, Modern Philosophy: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Routledge, 2003). The point that Hobbes is left out of textbook surveys corresponds to the point that he is left out of the relevant syllabi. I return to this. 7. David P. Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) 8. Gregory S. Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 9. Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 10. For the details, see Jody Kraus, The Limits of Hobbesian Contractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 11. http://www.lsa.umich.edu/lsa/cg_results/0,2025,8,00.html?termArray=w_0 5_1520&cgtype=ug&cgtype=gr&allsections=true&keyword=&withdescr= true&show=50&department=PHIL&x=15&y=10

206 Tom Sorell 12. In fall 2005, this course was taught by a leading Hobbes scholar, Edwin Curley. 13. http://cda.mrs.umn.edu/~okeefets/modern00-syl.html 14. http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/philosophy.ug.coursesfl 05.html 15. http://www.williams.edu/philosophy/fourth_layer/faculty_pages/jcruz/ courses/earlymodern.html 16. http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~phil8/syllabus/Syllabus05.htm 17. http://web.princeton.edu/sites/philosph/ugradcourses.htm 18. http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/handbooks/2000_All_Undergraduate_ Courses_Informal_Description.shtml 19. But Leviathan is among the set texts in Part IA. 20. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=History+of+Modern+ Philosophy+Syllabus&meta= 21. For a general account of the tensions between analytic philosophy and history of philosophy, see Tom Sorell and John Rogers, eds., Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005). 22. Leibniz is the exception to this rule. 23. Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 463. 24. See Sorell, ‘Hobbes’s System and Hobbes’s Objections’. 25. Leviathan, ed. Tuck, Chap. 5, 31–32. 26. Leviathan, ed. Aloysius J. Martinich (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2005) ix. 27. ‘ . . . To reduce this doctrine to the rules and infallibility of reason, there is no way, but fi rst, to put such principles down for a foundation, as passion not mistrusting may not seek to displace’. Epistle Dedicatory, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 19. 28. Leviathan: With Selected Variants from the Latin Edition of 1668, ed. Edwin M. Curley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994) ix. 29. See C. B. Macpherson, introduction to Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) 28–29. 30. See Gauthier, Morals by Agreement, Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, Kavka, Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory, and others. 31. Leviathan, ed. Tuck, Chap. 15, 101–102. 32. Leviathan, ed. Tuck, Chap. 15, 102. 33. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic Part 1, Chap. 15, 10. 34. On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Chap. 3.

10 A Farewell to Leviathan Foucault and Hobbes on Power, Sovereignty and War Luc Foisneau

There are many reasons why Foucault should have been interested in Hobbes, but the most prominent one is their common interest in power—what it means, how it applies to subjects—and their use of the concept of war as a means of understanding power. The discussion of Hobbes appears rather late in Foucault’s intellectual development. Although there is a brief reference to the ‘war of everyone against everyone’ in the 1973 lectures at the Collège de France,1 it is only in the 1976 lectures, entitled ‘Society Must Be Defended’, that the debate is further developed. It comes at a turning point in Foucault’s reflection on power: after five years of teaching at the Collège de France, where he had been elected in 1970, he felt the need for a retrospective look at his past research, and Hobbes appeared at this stage as the best author to discuss. It is precisely the fact that Hobbes is both one of the fi rst modern theorists of power2 and a paradigmatic defender of sovereignty which makes him such a central figure in Foucault’s discussion. Foucault has to explain why the Hobbesian conception of power as a man’s ‘present means to obtain some future apparent good’3 is not equivalent to his own (Foucault’s) conception, and why the classical Hobbesian conception of sovereignty does not suffice to describe the effects of the human sciences on human life. If Foucault thinks of Hobbes as a source of opposition to his view of power, it is not diametrical opposition. The farewell to Leviathan, addressed to Hobbes in the second lecture of the 1976 course,4 attests to a complex relationship. Using the famous notion forged by Gaston Bachelard, but also used by Foucault’s teacher, Georges Canguilhem, one could say that Hobbes’ political philosophy plays the role of epistemological obstacle in Foucault’s reading of the history of power. If he wants to maintain his defi nition of power and his general programme of a critique of human sciences, Foucault must be able not only to refute Hobbes, but also to understand what uses the latter makes of sovereignty and war. In what follows I try and show how Foucault attempts to overcome the Hobbesian epistemological obstacle in relation to two questions. First, the question of sovereignty: Hobbes obviously plays an important part in

208

Luc Foisneau

setting the scene in which the whole debate takes place; second, the question of war: Hobbes seems to be saying exactly the same thing as Foucault, namely, that war is everywhere, but drawing opposite conclusions as to the nature of social life. The notions of sovereignty and war should help us to make clearer what Foucault is trying to do in the field traditionally called ‘political philosophy’, and we shall see that what he does has much to do with historicism. Ultimately, I would like to show how Foucault’s interpretation of Hobbes has deeply affected Hobbes’ reputation, paving the way for a novel understanding of Hobbes’ use of war and conquest.

A FAREWELL TO SOVEREIGNTY? We need to begin with Foucault’s wish to bid farewell to theories of sovereignty, that is, to a juridical approach to the question of power: ‘What we need is a political philosophy that does not start with the problem of sovereignty, therefore with the problem of law, hence with the problem of prohibition; what is to be done is to behead the king, and it has not yet been done in political theory’.5 The starting point of a reflection on power must be the various power relationships in society, within the family, the university, and so on, as those relations are prior to the state and a condition of the latter’s development. Foucault opposes a view that reduces the problem of power to the following questions: ‘What is a sovereign? How was a sovereign established? What is the nature of the link between individuals and their sovereign?’6 But at the same time, Foucault is well aware of the extraordinary longevity of the theory of sovereignty. How is it that a theory that has lasted so long should have to be given up? To begin with, one must notice that there was once a time in Western history when this theory corresponded to a social reality. It was broadly speaking the time of feudal-type societies, in which ‘the problems dealt with by the theory of sovereignty, or to which it referred, were actually coextensive with the general mechanics of power, or the way power was exercised from the highest to the lowest levels’.7 There was, then, a possibility of interpreting the power relations between the king and his vassals, and the vassals and their subjects in terms of the sovereign/subject relationship. There is indeed an exact correspondence between the reactivation of the Roman law and the defi nition of the place and function of the monarch in terms of sovereignty. Thus, behind the theory of sovereignty, there is a ‘massive historical fact’,8 which is that sovereignty is all about royal power: the fi rst function of the theory was, in fact, to show that royal power could be entirely defined in juridical terms, that it was, in this sense at least, legitimate from top to bottom; it was, of course, the role of the royal lawyers to provide this demonstration, using all the resources they could fi nd in Roman law. The second function of the theory of sovereignty was to demonstrate that royal power had limits. More precisely, Foucault

A Farewell to Leviathan

209

assigns four historical roles to the theory of sovereignty: fi rst, to express in legal terms a real power structure, that of the feudal monarchy; second, to serve as an instrument ‘to constitute and justify the great monarchical administration’;9 third, to supply arguments for strengthening or weakening royal power; and fourth, to replace the model of absolute monarchical administration, and to found the new parliamentary democracies. Those four functions correspond to different historical periods: the Middle Ages, the early modern period, the fi rst half of the eighteenth century and the latter part of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, respectively. But they all legitimise royal power in some way. The problem is that the later the historical period considered, the less the general theory corresponded to the actual relations of power. It is clear that, in Foucault’s view, the privilege of sovereignty is based on the huge support it received from those it benefited the most—that is, monarchs and their courts. Right from the beginning, theories of sovereignty were meant to put the doctrine of right at the service of royal power; it was in that sense a juridical disguise for a situation of domination: ‘The system of right is completely centred on the king; it is, in other words, ultimately an elimination of domination and its consequences’.10 But this way of thinking became less and less apt from the end of seventeenth century onwards, although most political theorists went on defending one version or another of the theory of sovereignty. If there is an enigma then in sovereignty, it rests in its perpetuation, long after the time it ceased to be adequate to what was going on in actual power relations. It must be noted that this enduring success can be observed until the very recent past, as theories of sovereignty of representative democracies are often referred to as the ultimate justification of actual power relations, even when they are based on military invasion. The fi rst change of paradigm, which should have rendered sovereignty obsolete, appears, according to Foucault, at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. At this point there appears for the fi rst time ‘disciplinary’ power—which breaks with the ancient sovereign form of power on land property. This new power is described as antithetical, in all its aspects, to sovereign power: whereas sovereignty was linked to the production of commodities and wealth on a rural basis, the new power aimed at extracting time and labour from individual bodies; whereas the former power was based on ‘chronologically defi ned systems of taxation and obligation’,11 the latter was ‘exercised through constant surveillance’.12 The disciplinary power, which appears as ‘one of the basic tools for the establishment of industrial capitalism and the corresponding type of society’,13 transforms the bodies of the subjects into productive bodies, anticipating the invention of industrial workshops. The enigma of the perseverance of the model of sovereignty can thus be formulated as follows: if the new disciplinary power is so different from the sovereign power, why should the theory of the latter have continued to exist as an ideology of right, as well as organising the juridical codes in

210 Luc Foisneau nineteenth-century Europe? Foucault suggests two answers: fi rst, the theory of sovereignty survived as means of criticising the monarchical system, which could have stood in the way of the emergence of a disciplinary society; second, it survived as a juridical discourse covering what was really going on in the fabric of the modern world, that is, the extension of disciplinary power to more and more of society. Paradoxically, the theory of sovereignty survived because it was subservient to the extension of disciplinary power, which it both paved the way for and distracted attention from. This function was continued also when what Foucault calls biopolitics or biopower emerges for the fi rst time in the nineteenth century.14 This latter power is no longer related to the individual body, but to the phenomena linked to the notion of a population (death, birth ratio, etc.). Although it, too, should have resisted the traditional theory of sovereignty, it exploited it in new ways. As Foucault puts it, ‘[O]ne of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century was [not that . . . ] sovereignty’s old right—to take life or death—was replaced, but that it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it’.15 The emergence of this new right, which cannot be discussed here, can be taken as a new proof that the theory of sovereignty has been able to adapt itself to forms of power relations completely foreign to the feudal power relations from which it originally stemmed. Why therefore should Foucault bid farewell to Hobbes, when he might to the contrary hail him as one of the most productive political thinkers ever? It is precisely because of the great success of sovereignty and representation that we fail to see what is really going on beneath the surface of law and right. Leviathan is a trap, into which we have all fallen, and the sign of a good critical method is that it should allow us to get out of this trap. Foucault makes that point very clear: We have to study power outside the model of Leviathan, outside the field delineated by juridical sovereignty and the institution of the State. We have to analyse it by beginning with the techniques and tactics of domination. That, I think, is the methodological line we have to follow, and which I have tried to follow in the different research projects we have undertaken in previous years on psychiatric power, infantile sexuality, the punitive system, and so on.16 What the farewell to Hobbes means is that, in order to understand power relations in the real world, we have to ‘bypass or get around the problem of sovereignty’.17 Before turning in more detail to the engagement of Foucault with Hobbes’ theory, we should note that Hobbes is very much present in the five methodological preliminaries which Foucault calls attention to.18 First, he stresses that his object is ‘not to analyse rule-governed and legitimate forms of power which have a single centre’, for which Leviathan supplies a clear

A Farewell to Leviathan

211

model, but to understand power through the particular techniques he is interested in (e.g., the panoptical device in Discipline and Punish); second, not to analyse power from the point of view of the sovereign, of his intentions or decisions, but from the perspective of the effective practices of power and practical consequences of power relations. Explicitly referring to Hobbes on that point, Foucault says that he wants to do the ‘opposite of what Hobbes was trying to do in Leviathan’,19 that is, not to ‘discover how a multiplicity of individuals and wills can be shaped into a single will’, 20 but to understand ‘the material agency of subjugation insofar as it constitutes subjects’. 21 He also adds, which is quite illuminating, that what Hobbes has been doing is exactly what jurists in general try to do, that is, to understand how a multiplicity unites into a single, namely, sovereign, will. The third caveat is that power must not be considered as something substantial, but as a relation, that is, as something that circulates through individuals; contrary to Hobbes’ thesis, there is no such thing as a primitive human atom, which has power and circulates it as a commodity; the individual himself is the effect of power relations, or as Foucault puts it, the ‘individual is in fact a power-effect’. 22 Fourthly, we must not deduce power from the top, but start with the infi nitesimal power mechanisms and see how they combine, or do not combine, to form bigger systems of domination, such as economic domination in a capitalist economy, for example. In this perspective, Foucault is quite critical of the Marxist approach to bourgeois rule, when it seeks to deduce particular forms of power (over the mentally ill, for example) from the general economical domination of the bourgeois class.23 Power relations simply do not work in that way. The fifth and fi nal point is that power relations are not reducible to ideological constructs, and the multiplicity of knowledge enmeshed in them is very different from a coherent set of ideological propositions; the implicit reference to Hobbes, if there is one, may relate here to the ideological function of the Hobbesian sovereign, who is in charge of enforcing from the top, through the church and university, uniformity in religion and doctrine in general. Let us now turn to the details of the critique of what might be called the Hobbesian trap, that is, fi rst to the description of this trap, then of the nature of the solution and fi nally of the way Hobbes’ theory functions as a radical and paradoxical critique of discourse about war.

GETTING OUT OF THE HOBBESIAN TRAP The Hobbesian trap attends all theories of sovereignty, and one general aspect of it can be captured by asking, ‘How, why, and by what right are subjects who are endowed with natural rights and capacities able to agree to submit to a sovereign power?’ This question presupposes three things: fi rst, that there are naturally existing subjects endowed with rights independently of power relations; second, that the natural capacities, potentials

212 Luc Foisneau or possibilities of the subjects are not properly speaking political powers, but only become so, or acquire a political dimension, when they become united in a sovereign power; and third, that political power, in the form of sovereign power, coincides with the notion of a legitimate power.24 Those three theses constitute what Foucault calls a ‘subject-to-subject cycle’, 25 in which the fi nal answer—power only exists thanks to the unity of the sovereign—is already contained in the premises—the subject endowed with natural capacities. In this circular scheme, the aim of political philosophy is to prove that subjects, conceived as owners of natural capacities, have very good reasons to, and indeed must, become political subjects, that is, subjects subjected to a unitary power. What Foucault wants to do is not to take the subject for granted, not to take the subject for a ‘natural’ subject, not to take unitary political power as the fi rst or natural form of power structure, but to start from a concrete relation of power and see ‘how that relationship itself determines the elements to which it is applied’. 26 The further development in Foucault’s reflection on the constitution of subjectivity, which would come to the fore in his History of Sexuality, 27 appears here under the heading ‘how actual relations of subjugation manufacture subjects’.28 But at this stage his problem is that of getting out of the Hobbesian trap, that is, out of the subject-tosubject cycle which characterises a theory of sovereignty. In order to do so, it is necessary fi rst to start not with natural rights but with actual relations of power; second, to show, in opposition to the unitary character of sovereign power, that there is a multiplicity of power relations; and, third, that, instead of formulating power problems in terms of legitimacy or illegitimacy, one should rather consider the way domination works and identify the ‘technical instruments’ used in particular power relations. All of this, we might say, is still only programmatic. We are so used to theories of sovereignty that we have some difficulty in seeing what kind of political discourse could correspond to the different abstract descriptions given here by Foucault. There is one more general and radical claim of Foucault’s to note: the discourse which opposes the pacifying and legitimising discourse of sovereignty is a discourse of war, that is, a discourse which considers that under the ‘calm order of subordinations, beneath the State and State apparatuses, beneath the laws’, there is a ‘primitive and permanent war’. 29 This is a radical move, as there is no a priori reason for thinking that a power relation should be equivalent to waging some kind of war. 30 But this is the move Foucault makes: he wants to rest his own methodology in dealing with power relations (asylum, prison, etc.) on a historical antecedent, on a type of discourse, which would already have existed historically and which would have contributed to the critique he has been presenting of sovereignty. The question is not so much, now, to analyse power relations proper but, rather, to help him to get out of the Hobbesian trap. It might be said that Foucault is looking for allies in the theoretical war he wages against theories of sovereignty. Indeed, if there were only theorists

A Farewell to Leviathan

213

of sovereignty in the history of political thought, it would be almost impossible to bid farewell to Leviathan. But was there a political discourse putting war at the centre of social relations in Hobbes’ day? Such a discourse would have been paradoxical, as the development of the states from the Middle Ages had been aiming at establishing a state monopoly on the institutions of war, and above all, on armies. And is Hobbes himself not the defender of a philosophy in which war—even a radical war of all against all—is placed at the very foundation of the state? Why should we look outside Leviathan to fi nd out what seems to many commentators and readers to be obviously already inside it? Before answering this second question, it is of course necessary to try and fi nd an answer to the fi rst. To the fi rst question, one has to answer ‘Yes’. It is precisely when war was rejected at the frontiers of the state, after the end of the French religious wars and before the start of the English Civil War, that a new discourse on war and society appeared. In order to stress the contrast with the discourse of sovereignty, Foucault calls the new discourse a historico-political one. This discourse is somewhat strange, and heterogeneous, as it is not simply the result of an analysis of the French civil and religious wars of the sixteenth century, and the transposition of this analysis in the prerevolutionary England, 31 but also a kind of discourse that spread through France and England from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. The examples given by Foucault are the following: the Levellers and Diggers during the English Civil War, the aristocratic reaction at the end of Louis XIV’s reign (Boulainvilliers, Freret, Comte d’Estaing) and, later in the eighteenth century, the discourse taken up by Sieyès, Buonarroti and Augustin Thierry, the historian of the Restoration period in France. But it would also reappear with the racist biologists and eugenicists of the late nineteenth century. What is the link between those heterogeneous contexts? What is this discourse saying about society that is so different from what was being said by the theorists of sovereignty? Foucault sums it up in quite striking terms, of which I shall extract seven major elements: (1) ‘the law is born of real battles, victories, massacres, and conquests which can be dated and which have their horrific heroes’;32 (2) ‘[l]aw is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular’;33 (3) ‘[w]e are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other’;34 (4) ‘[t]here are two groups, two categories of individuals, or two armies, and they are opposed to each other’;35 (5) ‘beneath the lies that would have us believe that the social body is governed by either natural necessities or functional demands, we must rediscover the war that is going on, war with all its accidents and incidents’;36 (6) ‘[i]n a discourse such as this, being on one side and not the other means that you are in a better position to speak the truth’;37 and (7) this discourse

214 Luc Foisneau speaks of the two groups as races that struggle one against the other, but the word ‘race’ does not have a strict biological meaning before the end of the nineteenth century. If the discourses speak of races, it is because ‘there are two groups which, although they coexist, have not become mixed because of the differences . . . created by privileges, customs and rights, the distribution of wealth, or the way in which power is exercised’.38 This historico-political discourse, which Foucault opposes to the philosophico-political one of Leviathan, has several varieties. Although most of Foucault’s examples are taken from French history from the end of the seventeenth to the fi rst half of the nineteenth centuries, I shall confi ne myself to the few comments that he makes on the English context. This restriction is in a way quite legitimate, as Foucault stresses the fact that ‘this discourse [i.e., the historico-political one] was born twice’, 39 ‘once in the 1630s, in the context of the popular or petit bourgeois demands that were being put forward in prerevolutionary and revolutionary England’40 and ‘then fifty years later, in France at the end of the reign of Louis XIV’,41 as a discourse of aristocratic protest against the absolute monarchy. Before turning to the discourse of ‘race struggle’ in the English context, it is necessary to recall why Foucault needs to go into those contextual developments. The context is here construed with the discourses against which Hobbes’ Leviathan was written. Hobbes’ philosophical defence of sovereignty is supposed to be an indirect answer to the historico-political discourse of the race struggle, or, if one prefers, of the permanent civil war. The fi rst element to be stressed is that this discourse is engaged in not only by one group, but also by everyone from the king himself to the lower middle classes. The second element is that those different groups, although saying different things, were all referring to the same major event in English history, that is, the Norman Conquest of 1066, and to the fact that ‘the Conquest had produced a long-standing division, and that it was a historical fact’.42 This conquest was present in the rituals of power until the early sixteenth century (Henry VII), as royal acts mentioned the fact that the king’s sovereignty rights were by right of conquest; it was also present in the practice of the law, as legal proceedings took place in French, whereas common people demanded a law of their own, formulated in their own language, to become common law; and lastly, the divide introduced by the conquest was present in ‘the conflict between two heterogeneous sets of legends’,43 with, on the one hand, a set of Saxon stories, such as the Robin Hood tale, and, on the other hand, a set of aristocratic legends, mainly about the Arthurian cycle, reactivated by the Normans and their Tudor followers. Moreover, many revolts that took place after the conquest referred to the latter and centred on the question of the right of the English people—as opposed to the Normans—and were linked to the will to expel foreigners. The discourse of the race struggle was thus a central element in the expression of the conflicts that permeated English society. The main feature of this discourse is that it was used by most social groups in early

A Farewell to Leviathan

215

modern England: it was present in the language of James I, for example,44 who referred to the Norman conquest to justify his absolute rights over England; however, it was also used by the parliamentarians, who disputed the claims of the monarch, by saying that William the Conqueror was the legitimate king of England, not by right of conquest but by right of succession, and was therefore bound to respect the laws of the Saxon regime. If there was a conquest, it only began after the legitimate transfer of power to William, when the usurpation of Saxon liberties began, that is, when the ‘Norman yoke’ was imposed, against which the parliamentarians were still fighting when they fought against the absolute sovereignty of Charles I. There is a third group which referred to the conquest, namely, the Levellers and Diggers, who claimed that the conquest invalidated all laws, social differences and property settlements. John Warr’s text on The Corruption and Deficiency of the Laws of England (London, 1649) said quite clearly that the ‘laws of England are full of tricks, doubts and contrary to themselves; for they were invented and established by the Normans, which were of all nations the most quarrelsome and most fallacious in contriving of controversies and suits’.45 In short, Foucault tried to show that the groups that were in confl ict during the English Civil War had at least one thing in common: they developed their justifications by reference to the same historical event. They were all developing a historical-political discourse centred on the conquest. For this reason, they all escaped the Hobbesian trap, simply because they ignored it. And the solution proposed by Foucault to get out of the trap is to follow their lead, that is, to follow the lines of historico-political discourses, and not the line of theories of sovereignty. The situation now appears more clearly: it is not the Levellers who tried to criticise the discourse of sovereignty, but Hobbes, who was trying to escape and to invalidate the discourse of the race struggle, who was to try and get out of what might be called the historicist trap.

GETTING OUT OF THE HISTORICIST TRAP In his attempt to bypass theories of sovereignty and to make way for a radical historical discourse based on war, Foucault has to disassociate himself from two tendencies ‘that are usually mentioned in connection with this historico-political discourse’,46 the Machiavellian and the Hobbesian ones. Of Machiavelli he says almost nothing; his main concern is with Hobbes, whose argument about the war of all against all could lead people to believe that Hobbes is on the side of the historico-political discourse. What Foucault tries to show is that on two cardinal points, that is, the war of all against all and the theory of sovereignty by acquisition, Hobbes does not support the discourse of the race struggle, and that his arguments can be read as belonging to a strategy of invalidating this kind of discourse.

216 Luc Foisneau Let us consider fi rst the Hobbesian state of war argument. This argument seems to go in the same direction as the historico-political one, as war gives rise to the state and goes on, even after the state has been constituted. Do we not behave as if there were a permanent war with our fellow citizens when we lock our doors when leaving our homes? Moreover, says Hobbes, the war is still raging in the forests of America, and also between the countries of Europe, as is clearly shown by the fact that those countries ‘have their weapons pointed, and their eyes fi xed on one another’.47 Those three famous points from Chapter 13 of Leviathan show that war is a ‘threat that wells up in the State’s interstices’.48 Does all of this show that, according to Hobbes, civil society is based on a permanent civil war? Of course not. On the contrary, Foucault’s reading of Hobbes is an attempt to demonstrate that the so-called state of war has very little to do with war proper, war in its historical and dramatic context of dead soldiers, dead civilians, devastation, and so on. The whole interpretation is thus based on the distinction between what Hobbes calls a ‘state of war’49 and what is ordinarily understood by the word ‘war’. Indeed, the argument consists in showing that the Hobbesian state of war is no war at all. The fi rst element of the demonstration establishes that the so-called war of all against all is precisely not a war of one group against another group; it is neither a war of the strong against the weak, nor a war of the violent against the timorous, nor a war of the titled against the common people, and so on. The second element of the argument is that there are no strongly marked differences between the combatants of this war, but a range of small differences. If there were big differences, there would be no state of war, but a decisive battle which would create a major divide between the winners and the losers. The third element is to the effect that the Hobbesian state of nature is not ‘a brutish state of nature in which forces clash directly with one another’, 50 but rather a ‘theatre where presentations are exchanged, in a relationship of fear in which there are no time limits’. 51 Foucault concludes his demonstration with a striking characterisation of the Hobbesian state of war: ‘There are no battles in Hobbes’ primitive war, there is no blood and there are no corpses. There are presentations, manifestations, signs, emphatic expressions, wiles, and deceitful expressions’. 52 To put it another way, the Hobbesian state of war is not a battlefield on which people are killed, but a system of representations, in which what is important are not the forces, nor the weapons, but the wills. It is a ‘field of primal diplomacy’.53 It is not a real war, but an abstract state of human relations. There is still one objection to be met, however, if one wants to defend Foucault’s thesis that Hobbes is engaged in a theoretical response to war. If the transition from the state of war to the commonwealth by institution can be understood to happen without one bullet being fi red, it certainly cannot be the case with commonwealths by acquisition, since these by defi nition result from conquest. Whereas in the case of the commonwealth

A Farewell to Leviathan

217

by institution, the transition from a state of war is based on a decision of the subjects to be represented by a sovereign, in sovereignty by acquisition one has to presuppose the event of a battle, won by some and lost by the others. There is no doubt, apparently, that a real war has been waged and that a real relationship of force has been established. There is a clear divide between winners and losers, and the latter are at the mercy of the winners. But what happens next? Do we have, in Hobbes’ view, a sovereignty based on war, which could be said to be identical to a domination based on armed forces? The case is not that simple, and careful distinctions between cases must be made. A fi rst case is that the winners kill all the vanquished: there is, then, no longer any sovereignty, because there is nobody on which it could be exercised. A second possibility is that the vanquished immediately start to rebel against the winners: in this case, there is no sovereignty, because there is no ending to the war, but only an apparent victory. A last case is that the losers submit to the winners: this, Hobbes says, is no different from the situation we have in a commonwealth by institution, where the subjects acknowledge a sovereign. Those distinctions between cases clearly show that Hobbes is not using the distinction between institution and acquisition to distinguish between sovereignty and domination. Instead, he is trying to prove that there is nothing like domination in politics proper, that is, the politics of sovereignty. So it does not matter if the mechanisms of representation—for instance, an election—come after a defeat: all that matters is that subjects agree to be represented by a sovereign. A sovereign, whatever its form (democracy, aristocracy or monarchy), is always founded on the will of the subjects, a will to prefer life to death, whatever the historical circumstances may be, and, whatever the nature of this power, it is based on the will to be represented by an overwhelming power. The important fact is, in Hobbes’ view, not the war which has preceded the political contract, but the fear which has led someone to relinquish her right to be represented by herself. And, as a matter of fact—or rather, of theory—there is fear also in the mutual relationships of men in the state of nature. That the fear is horizontal in one case (commonwealth by institution), and vertical in the other (commonwealth by acquisition), does not change the nature of sovereignty. In both cases, it is fear that motivates the will to acknowledge a sovereign. There is indeed, as Foucault points out, a relative indifference in Hobbes as to the historical circumstances from which a sovereignty stems; there is also a determination in him to eliminate the relevance of war to political philosophy. Those two complementary features can be attributed to his voluntarist conception of the law. But that is not all. The fact that theories of sovereignty are so much concerned with the possibility of unified power explains why they so often neglect the historical processes by which this power has been established. Hence, for example, the stress on the need to forget about the historical origins of democratic regimes, and the fact that

218 Luc Foisneau party systems try to represent historically opposed groups. What Foucault intended to do in his defence of historical-political discourses was to bypass this preoccupation with the unifying effect of sovereignty, in order to allow divergent views about the making of society to express themselves. It was also to allow a new critical approach to political thought, based on the never-ending process of history and the acknowledgment of the real struggles at work in this process. The avowed paradox of this method is that it rests on a discourse of race struggle which would eventually—at the end of the nineteenth century—fuel state racism, when theories of sovereignty would meet with biopolitics. But this is another story and another series of lectures at the Collège de France. 54

HOBBES’ REPUTATION AND FOUCAULT’S INTERPRETATION We have become familiar with the idea that the war of all against all is merely a rough and ready concept. Darwin and his descendants have succeeded in taking this idea out of the field of political anthropology and, in conferring upon it the scientific legitimacy of biology, giving it a new lease on life in a sadly applied form (socio-biology). The interest of Foucault’s reading is to remind us that the very idea of a war of all against all threatens to disguise the fact that modern states are fully engaged parties in confl icts that divide societies: Hobbes makes these confl icts seem the responsibility of individuals. Instead of appearing as they really are, that is, as machines of war, states are transformed into agents of civilisation, as machines for producing peace. This Foucauldian intuition can be confi rmed by an attentive reading of Chapter 13 of Leviathan. The arguments in this celebrated chapter are supposed to unsettle the widespread impression that war is not primarily a matter of individuals, but of collectivities and, in the modern world, of states. Although private wars existed in the Middle Ages, they nevertheless engaged groups rather than individuals, and states progressively outlawed them. The theoretical point that Hobbes makes in the chapter on ‘the Natural Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity, and Misery’55 is that the responsibility for war belongs to individuals and not to states: the individual passions of desire for gain, fear and pride are the real causes of all wars. Not only was the state not the cause of the wars that had devastated Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire, according to Hobbes: war was the principal agent of civilisation. In other words, the cause of war is not tied to a political organisation founded on the permanent rivalry between states, as might have been thought, but to the natural condition of men, which is a war of all against all. This point helps to highlight three argumentative and rhetorical characteristics of the argument about the state of nature. Firstly, it is clear that Hobbes does not overlook the common-sense argument that it is states that make wars. He recognises that

A Farewell to Leviathan

219

Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority, because of their Independency, are in continuall jealousies, and in the state and posture of Gladiators; having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fi xed on one another; that is, their Forts, Garrisons, and Guns upon the Frontiers of their Kingdomes; and continuall Spyes upon their neighbours, which is a posture of War.56 The existence of defensive frontiers and the presence of spies constitute a proof of the real nature of international relations. Hobbes cannot be accused here of a lack of ‘realism’. Nevertheless, used as an argument of last resort to prove the warlike character of the state of nature, it is introduced by a highly restrictive clause—‘But though there had never been any time, wherein particular men were in a condition of warre one against another’57—and it concludes by denying that states can make trouble for individuals—‘But because they uphold thereby, the Industry of their Subjects; there does not follow from it, that misery, which accompanies the Liberty of particular men’. 58 In other words, Hobbes does not use the thesis of international war except to prove that warlike states assure peace and civilisation, and that it is individuals who are the real disturbers of the peace. Secondly, the general argument that individuals in the state of nature are the real causes of wars uses the vocabulary of conquest and invasion usually reserved for the description of relations between states. After having shown that, paradoxically, it is the equality between individuals, not inequality or state domination, that produces warlike behaviour, Hobbes shows how a warlike dynamic between individuals develops. It is striking to consider wars of conquest in the light of the factors that give rise to the war of all against all in Leviathan. In connection with gain, Hobbes refers to an ‘Invader’59 who seeks to take over resources that the isolated individual has planted, sown or built—an invader who, strangely, does not arrive on his own, but in a group, having joined forces with other individuals.60 As for the pursuit of security, the invaders are once again and even more clearly alluded to, this time as some that take ‘pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires’.61 The last cause of war supposedly present in the state of nature is glory or pride, which leads men to fight over ‘trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other signe of undervalue, either direct in their Persons, or by reflection in their Kindred, their Friends, their Nation, their Profession, their Name’.62 National honour clearly plays an essential role in the logic of conquests. One thus observes, in the description of the state of nature, a privatisation of the commonest cause of wars between states. It is no longer sovereigns, or even sovereigns primarily, who mistrust one another or assert their precedence, but rather subjects or, more specifically, future subjects, whose conduct in the state of nature amply justifies their later subjection to sovereigns.

220

Luc Foisneau

The last stage of the unsettlement in Chapter 13 of Leviathan consists of presenting the principle of sovereignty, which requires everyone to obey the law, as a condition of civilisation itself. If the state of nature is the state of men relying on their own strength and ingenuity, and, what is more, a state of permanent insecurity, then by nature we can expect only barbarism, that is, the absence of all the fruits of industry and intelligence: ‘[N]o Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.63 By contrast, the state can be presented as the necessary condition of the goods of civilisation, not only the arts and sciences, but also the values which are the basis of civil life, namely, the distinction between good and evil, just and unjust. Not only can the principle of sovereignty not be considered the source of war and the destruction it brings with it, but, on the contrary, it is the source of all of the goods that come from human civilisation. If human beings continue to mistrust one another in the commonwealth, the fault is not that of the state, which organises the competition between them, but of their nature, which has to be disciplined and controlled ceaselessly if the state is to produce peace and civilisation in accordance with the plan of the sovereign power. One can therefore say that Foucault’s polemical reading of Hobbes permits us to see Hobbes as the philosopher who succeeds in concealing the warlike character of holders of sovereignty. Treating war in Hobbes’ way does not make the aggression of heads of state disappear, but covers it up by means of the contrast between the state of nature and life in the state. Foucault teaches us that Hobbes does not put an end to the war between nations, but contributes to presenting the administrative state of absolute monarchy as a civilising and pacifying force, cut off from the deep confl icts which divide modern society. NOTES 1. Lecture of 10 January 1973, in the course on ‘The Punitive Society’ (unpublished). See Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, ‘Situating the Lectures’, in Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003) 281. I shall be quoting the English translation, but checking in the French original version: Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société: Cours au Collège de France. 1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandra Fontana (Paris: Hautes études/Gallimard/Le Seuil, 1997). 2. The relevant chapter in Leviathan is Chapter 10, unambiguously entitled, ‘Of Power, Worth, Dignity, Honour, and Worthinesse’. In the following, we shall follow page numbers in the original 1651 edition of Leviathan and in the Richard Tuck’s edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 3. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 10, 41/62. 4. ‘Last time, we said a sort of farewell to the theory of sovereignty insofar as it could—and can—be described as a method for analyzing power relations’. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 43.

A Farewell to Leviathan

221

5. Foucault, Dits et écrits: 1954–1988, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), n. 192, p. 150; initially published as ‘Intervista a Michel Foucault’, in A. Fontana and P. Pasquino (eds), Microfi sica del potere: interventi politici (Turin, Einaudi, 1977), pp. 3–28. This interview comments the programme of research developed in the 1976 lessons. English translations are mine, when references are given to French editions only. 6. Foucault, Dits et écrits, n. 197, p. 231; initially published as ‘Les rapports de pouvoir passent à l’intérieur des corps’ (interview with L. Finas), La Quinzaine littéraire 247 (1977), pp. 4–6. 7. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 35. See also Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits: 1954–1988, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001) n. 192, 150. 8. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 34. 9. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 34. 10. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 26. 11. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 37. 12. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 37. 13. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 37. 14. ‘Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new non-disciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being; ultimately, if you like, to man-as-species’. This new technology of power, this ‘biopolitics, this biopower’, involves ‘a set of processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of the population, and so on’. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 242–243. 15. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 241. 16. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 34. 17. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 27. 18. Ibid., p. 27: ‘ . . . a certain number of methodological precautions had to be taken in order to follow this line, which was an attempt to bypass or deviate from the general line of the juridical analysis.’ 19. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 28. 20. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 29. 21. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 28. 22. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 30. 23. ‘[W]hat we have to realise is precisely that there was no such thing as a bourgeoisie that thought that madness should be excluded or that infantile sexuality had to be repressed; but there were mechanisms to exclude madness and techniques to keep infantile sexuality under surveillance’. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 32–33. 24. See on this Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 43–44. 25. Cf. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 43. 26. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 45. 27. M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, I. La volonté de savoir, Paris, Gallimard, 1976; II. L’usage des plaisirs, Paris, Gallimard, 1984; III. Le souci de soi, Paris, Gallimard, 1984. 28. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 45. 29. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 46–47. 30. Ibid., p. 46: ‘You might say to me that we cannot, from the outset, confuse power relations with relations of war. Of course not. I am smiply taking an extreme [case] to the extent that war can be regarded as the point of maximum tension, or as force-relations laid bare.’ 31. For a presentation of the transposition thesis, see J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). 32. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 50.

222 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Luc Foisneau Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 50. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 51. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 51. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 51. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 53. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 77. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 59. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 59. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 59. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 99. Most of the developments on Hobbes are to be found in the fi fth lecture, given on 4 February 1976. Foucault, Society Must be Defended 100. ‘And when he was still only king of Scotland, James I said that because the Normans had taken possession of England, the laws of the kingdom were established by them’. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 102. Quoted in Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 113, note 27. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 59. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 13, 63. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 90. ‘For WARRE, consisteth not in battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battell is sufficiently known’. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 13, 62/88. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 92. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 92. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 92. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended 93. Cf. Michel Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Paris : Gallimard/Seuil, 2004); Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Paris : Gallimard/Seuil, 2004). A fi rst formulation of this hypothesis is to be found in Chapter 5 of Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1, La volonté de savoir (Paris : Gallimard, 1976) 177–211. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 13, title, 60/86. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 13, 63/90. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 13, 63/90. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 13, 63/90. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 13, 61/87. ‘ . . . others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united . . . ’. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 13, 61/87. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 13, 61/88. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 13, 61/88. Hobbes, Leviathan Chap. 13, 62/89.

1

11 Spinoza Past and Present Wiep van Bunge

Over the last three and a half centuries few philosophers’ reputations have enjoyed reversals of fortune as dramatic as Spinoza’s. Today there are Spinoza societies in the United States, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Israel and the Netherlands. The Vereniging Het Spinozahuis, the society that owns the house Spinoza lived in at Rijnsburg, has over a thousand members, making it the largest philosophical society in the Netherlands. It holds lectures twice a year, inviting many of the leading scholars around the world. On an annual basis it organises summer schools on all aspects of Spinoza’s legacy, attracting scores of visitors. In 1997, in celebration of the centenary of Het Spinozahuis, a major exhibition of paintings, sculptures and installations inspired by Spinoza’s life and work was staged in Amsterdam. 2 Before the introduction of the euro, the Dutch thousand guilders banknote bore the portrait of Spinoza, and no major city in the Netherlands is without its Spinozalaan, -straat or -weg. Just as Rotterdam has a Gymnasium Erasmianum and an Erasmus Universiteit, Amsterdam is proud of its Spinoza Lyceum. The visiting chair in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, held among others by Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam and Judith Butler, is named the Spinoza Chair, and the most prestigious prize awarded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) is known as the Spinoza Premie. To a seventeenth-century observer these public tokens of appreciation if not veneration would have seemed very odd. From the early 1660s, before Spinoza had published a single word, until the end of the eighteenth century, there appears to have been general agreement about the subversive nature of his philosophy. Both Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) and the Opera posthuma (1677), including most famously the Ethics, were banned even in the Dutch Republic. Spinoza’s views were widely held to be those of an atheist, materialist and fatalist. Indeed, his views were deemed a serious threat to the very basis of decent society. Although during the early Enlightenment Spinoza continued to inspire dozens of radical thinkers, particularly on the European continent, he only attained his nearly canonical status as one of the three main continental ‘rationalists’ thanks to the highly specific view of the history of philosophy that was developed in

224

Wiep van Bunge

German idealism. Following the sketch drawn in the fi nal chapter of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781–1789), entitled ‘Zur Geschichte der reinen Vernunft’, and in particular after Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie (1837), Spinoza was put on a par with Descartes and Leibniz as one of the historical ‘opponents’ of British empiricism, represented of course by Locke, Berkeley and Hume.3 The famous Pantheismusstreit that broke out in 1785 over Lessing’s confession to Jacobi, that he had secretly been a ‘Spinozist’, ensured that around 1800 the assessment of Spinoza’s thought was high on the philosophical agenda.4 It has become a cliché to warn against the historical pitfalls of this essentially Kantian picture of early Enlightenment thought, which clearly served highly specific philosophical objectives and more in particular Kant’s personal ambition to present his own ‘critical’ philosophy as the solution to the mid-eighteenth-century stalemate between empiricist ‘scepticism’ and rationalist ‘dogmatism’. Much of what has recently been written on early modern philosophy aims to come to an alternative understanding of the history of philosophy from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. 5 Spinoza’s ‘rationalism’, for instance, does not so much reflect his views on the source as on the scope of our knowledge. And although his epistemology differed significantly from Bacon’s or Locke’s, it makes little sense to regard Spinoza as an anti-empiricist.6 But so far, no convincing alternative interpretation of eighteenth-century thought has been put forward, and the now dominant tendency to situate Enlightenment culture in a national context is a further obstacle to developing such an alternative.7 Despite Kant’s own reticence about Spinoza, and although Fichte based his Wissenschaftslehre on the notion that a truly critical philosophy would fi rst and foremost have to oppose dogmatism (i.e., Spinozism), both Schelling and Hegel regarded Spinoza as one of their main sources of inspiration. Shortly after Hegel’s death, Heinrich Heine went so far as to claim that, in fact, Spinoza’s ‘pantheism’ had been Germany’s ‘secret religion’.8 Over the next two centuries Spinoza’s philosophical reputation would continue to be closely linked especially to Hegel’s: during the second half of the nineteenth century, when interest in Spinoza in some countries such as the Netherlands grew spectacularly, Spinozism was conceived of as the most reliable antidote to idealism. Freethinkers like Johannes van Vloten, who incidentally published the fi rst edition of the Korte Verhandeling, clashed repeatedly with academic philosophers defending Kantian, ‘critical’ epistemologies.9 In Britain, where until the late nineteenth century interest in Spinoza had remained largely sporadic, the rise of Hegelianism first provoked substantial debate about the Dutch philosopher.10 During the fi rst half of the twentieth century, however, until the 1960s, interest in Spinoza waned again. As long as neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, existentialism and logical positivism and their various offshoots set the agenda both in Europe and the United States, Spinozism remained at best a source of historical inquiry. But all this changed dramatically in the 1960s, and again, this

Spinoza Past and Present

225

resurgence of interest was closely linked to the fate of Hegelianism. Pierre Macherey, today one of the most influential interpreters of Spinoza and the author of a five-volume commentary on the Ethics, in 1979 explicitly put the question in the title of one of his books: Hegel ou Spinoza.11

THE WORKS Macherey is part of a much larger intellectual phenomenon in France (that is, Paris) that fi rst emerged in the late 1960s. During the second half of this fateful decade Spinoza was suddenly rediscovered by a an entire generation of left-wing philosophers, who all in one way or another followed Louis Althusser’s advice to study the Ethics in order to reinform Marxism. This movement was bolstered by two brilliant commentaries on the Ethics written by Martial Gueroult and Alexandre Matheron.12 In 1968 Gueroult published his massive book on Ethics 1, to be followed in 1974 by the posthumous publication of his study of Ethics 2. Gueroult had already become a major authority on Descartes, Malebranche and Fichte after introducing a new method of studying philosophical texts. For what seem to have been primarily aesthetic reasons, he consciously ignored the wider context in which these texts served a variety of purposes. He was exclusively interested in the internal logic of philosophical ‘systems’, and the Ethics, in all its ‘geometric’ rigour, turned out to be an ideal ‘object’ for this internal reading. Thus, Gueroult inspired several generations of French scholars who studied the texts of Spinoza in this way. The work currently being done by Étienne Balibar, Pierre-François Moreau, Chantal Jacquet, Laurent Bove, Charles Ramond, Lorenzo Vinciguerra, Yves Citton and many others would have been unthinkable had it not been for Gueroult, who may not have been inspired by any personal philosophical ambitions, but whose ‘poststructuralist’ analyses also inspired contemporaries such as Michel Foucault.13 Today, several of Gueroult’s insights are being discussed anew, but the heart of his interpretation of the Ethics still seems to stand, for in particular his attack on any attempt to interpret Spinoza’s philosophy along idealist lines was indeed lethal. This attack informs his entire commentary and is made explicit in a long appendix directed against Harry Wolfson’s Spinoza (1934).14 It concerns Spinoza’s ambiguous defi nition of God’s ‘attributes’. As will be only too familiar, Spinoza conceives of the whole of reality as a substance consisting of infi nite attributes that are defi ned as ‘what the intellect perceives of a substance as constituting its essence’ (Ethics 1, def. 4).15 From the seventeenth century onwards this defi nition has left readers of the Ethics wondering whether attributes should be interpreted in an idealist fashion or realistically. Do they merely reflect our subjective perception of reality or do they express the very essence of substance itself? Gueroult was the fi rst commentator to demonstrate clearly

226

Wiep van Bunge

that in Spinoza’s view substance is nothing but the totality of its attributes, each of which produces an infi nite number of modes, including individual minds produced by the attribute of thought. (One of the curious aspects of Spinoza’s theory is, of course, his view that the mind is an idea, a product of the attribute of thought.) As a consequence, Gueroult argued, turning attributes into the subjective result of man’s perception of substance subverts the logical order of Spinoza’s metaphysics, according to which attributes produce modes instead of the other way around. Thus Gueroult closed the door to all possible Platonist readings of the Ethics. Although Spinoza’s earliest work, including the Korte Verhandeling (c. 1660), does reveal traces of Neoplatonism, the mature philosopher can in no way be associated with the view that the (modal) world emanates from a single principle, that is, substance. Gueroult dealt a fi nal blow to idealist readings of the Ethics in his second commentary, on Spinoza’s epistemology. It is true that Spinoza’s theory of knowledge is formulated in a Cartesian vocabulary, as a result of which knowledge becomes something to be analysed in terms of ideas the mind has of objects, but Gueroult’s analysis of what Spinoza calls adequate ideas only goes to confi rm the latter’s ‘realism’: because our adequate ideas are identical to the ideas God has in his infi nite intellect (i.e., all ideas, of which our mind, which is also an idea, is a part), we are able to understand the world in a truly objective manner, God or his attributes being the real cause of both objects and ideas, which express the same ordo et connectio (Ethics 2, 7). The fact that there are adequate ideas, that real knowledge is possible, does not hinge on our ability to form ideas that can be identified as objective owing to their specific characteristics, such as their clarity and distinctness. Instead, Spinoza justifies the adequacy of clear and distinct ideas by outlining a metaphysics that demonstrates what ideas actually are, or to put it differently, how they relate to the rest of the world.16 By forestalling idealist interpretations of Ethics 1 and 2 and subsequently by highlighting the ‘structure’ of Spinoza’s rationalism—which in Gueroult’s analysis is essentially the outcome of Spinoza’s denial of the Cartesian doctrine of God’s will having decreed the ‘eternal truths’ of mathematics and physics17—Gueroult paved the way for a gradual acceptance of Matheron’s understanding of the politics implied by Ethics 3, 4 and 5. The latter’s Individu et communauté chez Spinoza appeared in 1969, after having been put forward as grande thèse at the Sorbonne the previous year. In Matheron’s analysis, which is now shared by most French and even by many English and American specialists, Spinoza’s ‘horizontal’, that is, anti-hierarchical, ontology fits hand in glove with the essentially democratic orientation of his political philosophy, according to which single modes act on the basis of their individual conatus, itself the outcome of the infi nitely complex causally determined relationship of individual beings with their surroundings. What is more, both Gueroult’s and Matheron’s conclusions have inspired a large generation of Continental and several anglophone philosophers who

Spinoza Past and Present

227

turned towards Spinoza as an ally of what for the lack of a better word has come to be known as ‘postmodernism’. In the long run, a third French book on Spinoza, dating from 1968, may well turn out to have been decisive in this respect. For of all the major French postmodernists, Gilles Deleuze was the only one to write an in-depth commentary on Spinoza, and his Spinoza et le problème de l’expression appeared almost simultaneously with Gueroult’s and Matheron’s analyses.18 To the extent that French philosophers during the 1960s grew particularly disaffected with the canon of ‘modern’ philosophy that took its cue from the Cartesian Cogito, and which reached the twentieth century through mediation of Kant’s ‘transcendental’ philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology, it would seem that especially Spinoza’s refusal to take his point of departure from an examination of the subject will remain one of the principal sources for any future attempt to redefi ne modernity as such. The closest Spinoza comes to identifying the Cogito is his proposition that ‘man thinks’ (Ethics 2, 9). But this, he adds, should in no way be perceived as implying that man is a substance. Individual minds being modes of thought, and individual bodies being modes of the attribute extension, man is the natural product of his surroundings. It is indeed from the interaction between ‘my’ body and the bodies that affect it that ideas concerning the world and myself originate. Deleuze’s anti-humanism, his materialism, his insistence on ‘affects’ as ‘productive forces’ generating rationality rather than opposing it and his quest for a philosophical ‘ethology’ all appear to be critically informed by his study of the Ethics. By the same token, it would be naïve to expect of this appropriating analysis even the pretence of textual fidelity.19 Deleuze and his admirers are trying not so much to approach or, to put it more fashionably, to ‘colonise’ Spinoza as an object of historical and analytical scrutiny, as to stay loyal to Spinozism as a creative ‘force’ itself. To them, to be a ‘Spinozist’ does not require adherence to a defi nite set of propositions concerning the world, man and his salvation, but the recognition that this particular philosophy offers fi rst and foremost a way of looking at the world, man, and so on, and is itself a creative force, characterised by its ability to duplicate itself continuously, as Macherey once put it. 20

THE MAN In view of the drastic changes Spinoza’s reputation as a philosopher has undergone over the last three centuries, the image of the man himself appears to have been fairly stable. Two elements have always dominated the appreciation of Spinoza’s life. On the one hand, there is the sobering recognition that much in his biography is unclear to say the least, while on the other, even many of his harshest critics agreed that Spinoza’s walk of life left little to be desired. Most famously, Pierre Bayle, in the article he

228

Wiep van Bunge

devoted to the philosopher in his Dictionaire (1697), arrived at the conclusion that Spinoza’s life confi rmed the possibility of virtuous atheism. 21 Of course, the occasional opposing voice could be heard. Some of Spinoza’s earliest critics felt his separation of philosophy and theology and the way in which he read the Old Testament revealed bad faith since his metaphysics clearly excluded the possibility of any meaningful theology.22 Others, most notably Schopenhauer, made much of what Colerus’ biography (1705) had to say on Spinoza’s habit ‘to divert himself’: ‘[H]e look’d for some Spiders, and made’em fight together, or he threw some Flies into the Cobweb, and was so well pleased with that Battel, that he wou’d sometimes break into laughter’.23 But for the occasional exception, a deep-felt respect for Spinoza’s personality appears to have prevailed. Even Bertrand Russell, who felt Spinozism was deeply flawed, started his chapter on Spinoza in his History of Philosophy with the affi rmation that in his view Spinoza was ‘the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers’: ‘[E]thically he is supreme’. 24 What fellow philosophers seem to have found most appealing in Spinoza’s biography, in addition to the obvious sincerity it reveals, is the total dedication it revealed to his work. Especially the letters, fi rst published by his friends in the Opera posthuma, provide a near-perfect illustration of a life completely devoted to the production of philosophy. It would seem, however, that the correspondence now available—little has been added since the seventeenth century—was the outcome of careful censorship on the part of Spinoza’s friends. It was edited by friends and, quite apart from the obvious fact that they must have ignored essential letters still available in 1677, the almost complete lack of personal references suggests that they were at pains not only to protect friends and acquaintances, but also to construct a vita that would not in any way inculpate Spinoza’s opera.25 They were fully aware of the notoriety surrounding Spinoza’s views for some time already. Indeed, they themselves had prevented Spinoza from publishing the Ethics in 1675, two years before he passed away. 26 Any comparison with the correspondence of philosophers like Descartes and Locke, let alone Bayle and Leibniz, each of whom left behind at least many hundreds if not several thousands of letters, turns the collection of eighty odd letters to and from Spinoza into a very meagre collection. What is more, there are at least two crucial episodes in Spinoza’s life about which we know next to nothing. Both the events leading up to the ban from the Portuguese synagogue of Amsterdam in 1656 and the pivotal years immediately following his break up with the Jewish community are still shrouded in mystery. 27 As a result, to this day we must satisfy ourselves with data concerning Spinoza’s personal life that hardly allow for the composition of a biography revealing anything like a psychological portrait. In a sense, the impersonal biography we are left with reflects Spinoza’s refusal to formulate, as Matheron once put it, a proper philosophical anthropology. 28 Recently, two biographers have tried to meet this challenge, and they did so in very different ways. 29 Margaret Gullan-Whur has attempted to reconstruct

Spinoza Past and Present

229

Spinoza’s personality on the basis of the moral psychology delivered in the Ethics. Assuming that Spinoza’s analysis of man’s emotional constitution was rooted in personal experience, she arrived at highly speculative conclusions. In particular her assessment of what she considers to have been Spinoza’s misogynous tendencies, supposedly deriving from the unfortunate relationship with his step-mother, and the homosexual overtones she feels able to detect in Spinoza’s relationship to Simon Joosten de Vries, have made her biography something of a succès de scandale. Steven Nadler, on the other hand, was far more circumspect in his assessment of the sources now available. As a consequence, his biography does not present us with a psychological portrait of any depth. Instead, Nadler chose to situate Spinoza in a context from which the latter’s philosophy can be seen to have emerged. As far as I am concerned, the heavy emphasis Nadler lays on Spinoza’s Jewish background fails to convince, since so far no relevant connection has been established between the history of the Portuguese Jews living in seventeenth-century Amsterdam and the mature philosophy of Spinoza. 30 The fact is, however, that Spinoza’s Jewish origins have always been an integral part of his reputation, and recently several attempts have been launched again to turn him into an essentially Jewish thinker. At this point it is important to be precise. From the late seventeenth century onwards many books have been written in order to show that Spinoza’s philosophy was crucially dependent on Jewish sources, including the Kabbalah, Maimonides, Gersonides, Crescas and many others.31 It is evident that especially Spinoza’s early writings testify to his acquaintance with a variety of Jewish authors like Leon Ebreo and Abraham Cohen Herrera. In addition the Tractatus theologico-politicus deals at some length with Maimonides, whose views on scriptural interpretation Spinoza rejected emphatically, and it goes without saying that his analysis of the Old Testament is deeply indebted to his Jewish upbringing. But as Ze’ev Levy put it, it seems equally clear that ‘the Jewish thinkers exerted little influence on the shaping of Spinoza’s general philosophical system’.32 As far as his metaphysics, his theory of knowledge, his moral psychology and his political philosophy are concerned, Descartes and Hobbes were far more important to Spinoza than any Jewish author. And it just so happened that both Descartes and Hobbes were widely read in the Dutch Republic at the time when Spinoza came into his own as a philosopher.33 Nevertheless, the tradition to present Spinoza as a Jewish thinker has undoubtedly had a great impact on his reputation and will probably continue to do so. However one may feel about, for instance, the Marranohypothesis made famous by Yirmiyahu Yovel, his Spinoza and Other Heretics was a success, drawing some rave reviews, and over the last few years many, mostly Jewish, scholars have joined the effort to demonstrate that despite the fact that Spinoza was cast out from the synagogue, he remained at heart a Jewish thinker, heir to an Ibero-Jewish tradition of

230 Wiep van Bunge concealment and subterfuge.34 In connection with Spinoza’s reputation, however, another line of inquiry should be taken notice of as well, namely, the debate on what Spinoza’s philosophy might mean for Jews today. Could Spinoza perhaps serve as a common point of reference for all those modern Jews who have abandoned their religious tradition but who are looking for ways of thinking that in their view Jews should cultivate? Not, of course, to the exclusion of non-Jews, but with a view to being both secular and modern, and yet remaining attached in some way to the intellectual and moral example set by a distant cousin.35

SPINOZA TODAY Shortly after the Second World War, a young American scholar sent in a paper on Spinoza to an Anglo-American journal, only to be told by the editors, ‘We are not now and never will be interested in Spinoza’. 36 Despite the efforts of such formidable historians and philosophers as Richard Popkin, Jonathan Bennett, Edwin Curley and Michael della Rocca, there is as yet little to suggest that philosophers working in the analytical tradition are prepared to include Spinoza into the canon of their Great Thinkers, and especially the Deleuzian twist of much recent French scholarship may well prove to be an obstacle to a further proliferation of interest in the English-speaking world.37 The few inroads French Spinozism has made into the Anglo-Saxon world involve literary criticism and feminism, domains that hardly belong to the core curriculum of the average Anglo-American philosophy department.38 The same holds, I presume, for Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s Empire (2000)—a massive, playful ‘post-Marxist’ analysis of ‘the new political order’ produced by globalisation, packed with references to Spinoza. Interestingly, the otherwise favourable review published by the London Review of Books cast doubt especially on Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza as well as on the revolutionary implications of Spinoza’s political philosophy.39 Perhaps Radical Enlightenment, together with Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza (2003), will be able to accomplish a resurgence of interest, but over the last few years Donald Davidson’s essay on Ethics 3 has remained an exception to the rule that major AngloSaxon philosophers tend to regard Spinoza as a probably deep but basically obscure philosopher, whose outdated terminology prevents his work from being taken into account in current debates about God, Man and His WellBeing.40 What is more, the left-wing appropriation of Spinoza’s works has recently been challenged both from a conservative perspective and by the Slovenian ‘ultra-Deleuzian’ Slavoj Žižek.41 And then, there is yet another, internal tendency at work in French Spinozism, affecting the representation of Spinoza as a philosopher, that may well complicate the future development of Spinoza scholarship as such. While attempts to include Spinoza into the canon of Judaism suffer from

Spinoza Past and Present

231

the inability to connect the fi rst part of his life as a Jew to the philosophy he developed during the latter half, the Deleuzian disregard for the fact that this philosophy was formulated by a historical person by the name of Spinoza runs the risk of undermining the very basis on which the preeminence of French Spinoza scholarship was built. Above all, Gueroult and Matheron shared the conviction that interpreting philosophical texts demands absolute fidelity to the letter of the texts involved. Yet Deleuze’s as well as Macherey’s analyses reveal a defi nite ambiguity once it comes to situating the author of Spinozism in his seventeenth-century context. For all their efforts to present Spinozism as an anonymous force itself, they fi nd it difficult to resist the temptation to explain how it could come to pass that this particular force fi rst took shape in the writings of this particular man.42 Philosophical flamboyance and textual accuracy do not necessarily exclude each other, but both Deleuze’s insistence that in a sense Spinoza cannot be considered part of the history of philosophy since his work subverts the very principles of this history and his conviction that truly comprehending Spinozism involves somehow becoming a Spinozist oneself simply undermine any serious attempt at situating and understanding the philosophy of Spinoza.43 Fuelled by the widespread dissatisfaction with the Kantian historiography of early modern philosophy and inspired by the unfortunate lack of documentary evidence concerning Spinoza’s life, this ambivalent attitude towards the past and our (in)ability to come to terms with it, together with this radical interpretation of what it might mean to stay loyal to a text, has, again, inspired some scholars to identify Spinoza’s ‘otherness’ or the ‘anomaly’ his thought represents with ‘the Scandal of his Jewishness’.44 Thus, the lacunae in our historical understanding of Spinoza, which at fi rst made it possible to think of Spinozism as some kind of anonymous ‘force’, have subsequently been used to construct an essentially Jewish otherness, which, however, is no longer supported by any fi rm, textual basis. Finally, any consideration of the reputation of early modern philosophers should take heed of the remarkable degree of professionalisation historical scholarship has enjoyed over the last few decades. The fact that today Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz and Spinoza each bring together dozens if not hundreds of academic ‘specialists’ annually producing a staggering amount of professional literature on their chosen field of expertise, forces us to address the question whose perception of, for example, Spinoza results in a genuine reputation. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Spinoza was never the exclusive property of professional historians of philosophy. The fi rst major British expert, Sir Frederick Pollock (1845–1937), was an Oxford professor of jurisprudence, and in particular during the second half of the nineteenth century theologians, free thinkers and rabbis all construed their own Spinozas, sometimes with remarkable results. In 1864, E. A. Hitchcock, a West Point graduate and major-general

232 Wiep van Bunge during the American Civil War, but also the author of several studies on the history of Hermeticism, took it upon himself to demonstrate the kinship of Spinozism with the ravings of Swedenborg.45 A few years later J. R. Leifchild, British commissioner of coal fields and expert on life insurances, fisheries and weather forecasting, set out to prove the resemblance between Spinoza’s thought and Buddhism.46 Novelists from Berthold Auerbach and I. B. Singer to Bernard Malamud and even P. G. Wodehouse have also in one way or another contributed to the reputation of the philosopher beyond the confi nes of the modern department of philosophy.47 The Dutch author Leon de Winter wrote a novel and a screenplay in which Spinoza plays a prominent part, entitled Hoffman’s Honger. The Hollywood actors Elliott Gould and Jacqueline Bisset starred in the movie (1993), in which Spinoza was portrayed (quite convincingly) as a cynical sage by Huub Stapel. More recently, in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers and the assassinations of the right-wing politician (and overtly gay dandy) Pim Fortuyn and the film director and columnist (and great-grandson to Vincent’s brother) Theo van Gogh, both Dutch newspaper columnists and politicians have started to refer to Spinoza as the first truly modern thinker and the first Dutchman to herald the Enlightenment. Apparently, Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment has found its way to Dutch opinion leaders, who from the early 2000s onwards have been feverishly trying to redefine the concepts of tolerance and citizenship. By doing so, they are actually reassessing what it might mean to be Dutch. In the fall of 2004, Israel, together with the Louvain philosopher and long-time president of the Spinozahuis society Herman de Dijn, gave a lecture on Spinoza, Toleration and the Enlightenment at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, in the presence of Queen Beatrix, accompanied by the Princess of Orange and over a hundred academics, politicians and journalists. This event took place only four days after the assassination of Theo van Gogh, the memory of which hang as a dark cloud over the proceedings. Clearly, Spinoza’s philosophy is just as urgent in the Dutch as in the French context, although the reasons of Dutch intellectuals to return to Spinoza are very different from those of the French. What is more, professional philosophers in the Netherlands are quickly turning into anglophone academics, and in view of the predominant philosophical tradition in the Anglo-American world and its global impact it very much remains to be seen to what extent Spinoza’s reputation will remain as powerful elsewhere in Europe as it is in France and the Netherlands today.48 NOTES 1. I am grateful to Henri Krop, Han van Ruler, Paul Schuurman, Piet Steenbakkers and Michiel Wielema for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 2. The catalogue, issued by the society Arti et Amicitiae, is entitled De steen vliegt (A Stone in Flight). Verkenningen geïnspireerd door het gedachtengoed

Spinoza Past and Present

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

233

van (Artistic Explorations Inspired by Benedictus de Spinoza) (AmsterdamRijnsburg, 1995). Apart from such isolated studies as those of Ernst Altkirch, Maledictus und Benedictus: Spinoza im Urteil des Volkes und der Geistigen bis auf Constantin Brunner (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1924) and Paul Vernière, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1954), serious research into the reception of Spinoza’s philosophy only took off during the 1980s. By far the most comprehensive syntheses available are Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). It should be added that during the eighteenth century there seems to have been far more German interest in Spinoza prior to the rise of idealism than has been acknowledged so far. See besides Israel, Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested: Rüdiger Otto, Studien zur Spinozarezeption in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M.: P. Lang, 1994) Part 1; Martin Mulsow, Moderne aus dem Untergrund. Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland, 1680–1720 (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 2002); John C. Zammito, ‘“The Most Hidden Conditions of Men of the First Rank”: The Pantheist Current in Eighteenth-Century Germany “Uncovered” by the Spinoza Controversy’, Eighteenth-Century Thought 1 (2003): 335–368; Henri Krop, ‘A Dutch Spinozismusstreit: The New View of Spinoza at the End of the Eighteenth Century’, Lias 32 (2005): 185–211. The literature is of course predominantly German. See, most notably, Manfred Walther, ed., Spinoza und der deutsche Idealismus (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1991); Klaus-Jürgen Grün, Das Erwachen der Materie: Studie über die spinozistische Gehalte der Naturphilosophie Schellings (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1993); Hanna Delf, Julius H. Schoeps and Manfred Walther, eds., Spinoza in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: Hentrich, 1994); Otto, Studien zur Spinozarezeption Part 2; Detlev Pätzold, Spinoza—Aufklärung— Idealismus: Die Substanz der Moderne (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2002); Michael Czelinski et al., eds., Transformation der Metaphysik in die Moderne: Zur Gegenwärtigkeit der theoretischen und praktische Philosophies Spinozas (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003). For an impressive attempt to construct an alternative interpretation of German eighteenth-century thought, in which Spinozism plays no signifi cant part, see Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civic and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Pierre-François Moreau, Spinoza. L’Expérience et l’éternité (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994). See Wiep van Bunge, introduction to The Early Enlightenment in the Dutch Republic, 1650–1750, ed. Wiep van Bunge (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Heinrich Heine, Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr, vol. 8 (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1979) Part 1, 62. See Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). Siebe Thissen, De spinozisten: Wijsgerige beweging in Nederland (1850– 1907) (The Hague: SDU Uitgevers, 2000); Wiep van Bunge, ‘Johannes van Vloten et le “premier” spinozisme néerlandais’, Spinoza au XIXe siècle, ed. André Tosel, Pierre-François Moreau and Jean Salem (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007) 197–216.

234

Wiep van Bunge

10. See Wayne I. Boucher, ed., Spinoza in English: A Bibliography from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, 2nd ed. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999) and the six volumes, edited by Boucher, entitled Spinoza: Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Discussions (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999). For an interesting discussion of nineteenth-century interest in Spinoza, see PierreFrançois Moreau, ‘Spinoza’s Reception and Influence’, The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 408–433. 11. Pierre Macherey, Hegel ou Spinoza (Paris: F. Maspero, 1979). See also his Avec Spinoza: Études sur la doctrine et l’histoire du spinozisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992) and Introduction à l’Éthique de Spinoza, 5 vols. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994–1998). The first volume to appear in this running commentary concerned Ethics 5, the last one Ethics 1. 12. Martial Gueroult, Spinoza I (Dieu) (Hildesheim-Paris: Georg Olms-Aubier, 1968) and Spinoza II (L’Âme) (Hildesheim-Paris: Georg Olms-Aubier, 1974); Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969). 13. Michel Foucault, introduction to L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). For a collection of essays, translated into English, by Althusser, Deleuze, Matheron, Macherey, Moreau and others, see Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, eds., The New Spinoza (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 14. Gueroult, Spinoza I (Dieu) Appendix 3; Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza: Unfolding the Latent Processes of His Reasoning, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934). 15. Ethics refers to the fi rst part of the Ethics; def. means defi nition; Ethics 2, 7 refers to the seventh proposition of the second part of the Ethics; I have consulted a Spinoza reder. The Ethics and Other Works. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 16. Gueroult, Spinoza II Chaps. 4 and 5; Matheron, Individu et communauté Chap. 1. 17. The importance of this doctrine for Descartes’ metaphysics has been established relatively recently. See Ferdinand Alquié (with whom Gueroult clashed repeatedly), La Découverte métaphysique de l’homme chez Descartes (Paris: Presses universitiaires de France, 1950). 18. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1968), followed by the brief but brilliant Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981). Although Deleuze’s interpretation, in particular of Ethics 1, differs significantly from Gueroult’s, he wrote a glowing review, claiming that now, at last, a scientifi c interpretation of Spinozism was available: ‘Spinoza et la méthode générale de M. Gueroult’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (1969): 426–437. 19. See Macherey, Avec Spinoza 237–244 and ‘The Encounter with Spinoza’, Deleuze: Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (London: Blackwell, 1996) 139– 161; Gillian Howie, Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expressionism (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 20. Macherey, Avec Spinoza 31: ‘[Q]u’est-ce qu’être “spinoziste”? Ce n’est certainement pas proclamer, et prétendre justifier, l’adhésion à un ensemble d’idées don’t la figure serait parfaitement délimitées et close. Mais c’est plutôt se laisser prendre, et comme aspirer, par l’ouverture d’une rationalité, d’une puissance intellectuelle, perpétuellement ouverte, qui trouve son adéquation en s’identifi ant au mouvement de la réalité, et non simplement en en effectuant un double conforme’. Similar sentiments were expressed more than a century ago by Sir Frederick Pollock: ‘Spinozism, as a living

Spinoza Past and Present

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

235

and constructive force, is not a system, but a habit of mind’, quoted in Boucher, Spinoza, vol. 1, vi. This idea was also the point of departure of the essays collected in Lorenzo Vinciguerra, ed., Quel avenir pour Spinoza? Enquête sur les spinozismes à venir (Paris: Kimé, 2001). Many of the authors involved have found a common platform on http://multitudes. samizdat.net/. See in particular David Wootton, ‘Pierre Bayle: Libertine?’, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) 197–226; Gianluca Mori, Bayle philosophe (Paris: Champion, 1999) Chaps. 4 and 5; Israel, Radical Enlightenment Chap. 18. Wiep van Bunge, From Stevin to Spinoza: An Essay on Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2001) Chap. 4. Quoted from the 1706 translation: Boucher, Spinoza, vol. 1, 73. See, by the way, Deleuze, Spinoza 21, note 9. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946) Chap. 10. Piet Steenbakkers, Spinoza’s Ethica from Manuscript to Print: Studies on Text, Form and Related Topics (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1994) Chap. 1. It is, for instance, hard to believe that Spinoza never exchanged letters with Franciscus van den Enden and Adriaan Koerbagh. Spinoza, September 1675, Letter 68 to Henry Oldenburg, The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995) 321–322. Still fundamental: Filippo Mignini, ‘Données et problèmes de la chronologie spinozienne entre 1656 et 1665’, Revue des sciences théologiques et philosophiques 71 (1987): 9–21. Alexandre Matheron, Anthropologie et politique au XVIIe siècle (Paris: J. Vrin, 1986) Chap. 2. Margaret Gullan-Whur, Within Reason: A Life of Spinoza (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998); Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); Wiep van Bunge, ‘Spinoza’s Jewish Identity and the Use of Context’, Studia Spinozana 13 (1997) [=2003]: 100–118. A small selection of relevant titles besides Wolfson, Spinoza include: Johann Georg Wachter, Der Spinozismus im Jüdenthumb (1699), ed. Winfried Schröder (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994); Manuel Joël, Zur Genesis der Lehre Spinozas, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des kurzen Traktats von Gott, dem Menschen und desselben Glückseligkeit (Breslau: Schletter’sche Buchhandlung, 1871); Israel Revah, Des Marranes à Spinoza (Paris: J. Vrin, 1994); Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn M. Goodman, eds., Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2002). Ze’ev Levy, Baruch or Benedict: On Some Jewish Aspects of Spinoza’s Philosophy (New York: P. Lang, 1989) 20. See Theo Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy, 1637–1650 (Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992); Israel, Radical Enlightenment Parts 1 and 2; Van Bunge, From Stevin to Spinoza; Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002) Chap. 14. Severely critical, however, were Richard H. Popkin, ‘Was Spinoza a Marrano of Reason?’, Philosophia 20 (1990): 243–246 and Seymour Feldmann, ‘Spinoza a Marrano of Reason?’, Inquiry 35 (1992): 37–53. A new dimension

236

35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

Wiep van Bunge was brought to the debate by Odette Vlessing, who on the basis of newly discovered archival data concerning the history of Spinoza’s commercial life as a young man concluded that his ban was entirely unconnected to the ideas he may have held in the mid-1650s: ‘The Excommunication of Baruch Spinoza: A Confl ict between Jewish and Dutch Law’, Studia Spinozana 13 (1997) [=2003]: 15–47. On the seventeenth-century Jewish community of Amsterdam, see Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1989) and An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2000). See, for instance, R. M. Silverman, Baruch Spinoza: Outcast Jew, Universal Sage (Northwood, UK: Symposium Press, 1995); Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Steven B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003) ix, referring to a story told by Richard H. Popkin. Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Michael della Rocca, Representation and the Mind-Body Problem in Spinoza (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). For a recent synthesis of Popkin’s efforts over the last few decades, see his Spinoza (Oxford: Oneworld, 2004). Christopher Norris, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1999). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Michael Bull’s review appeared in London Review of Books 23.19, 4 October 2001. Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003); Donald Davidson, ‘Spinoza’s Causal Theory of the Affects’, Desire and Affect: Spinoza as Psychologist, ed. Yirmiyahu Yovel (New York: Little Room Press, 1999) 95–111. In September 1986 American and Continental scholars met in Chicago, and a constructive dialogue appears to have taken place: Edwin Curley and Pierre François Moreau, eds., Spinoza: Issues and Directions: The Proceedings of the Chicago Spinoza Conference (Leiden: Brill, 1990). See also The God of Spinoza: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) by Richard Mason, a Cambridge philosopher and logician who had the audacity not only to refer to Deleuze, but even to quote Derrida. In the latest major collection of essays on Spinoza to appear in English, however, a new generation of anglophone experts shows hardly any interest in the results of Continental scholarship: Olli Koistinen and John Biro, eds., Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Theo Verbeek, Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise: Exploring ‘the Will of God’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004) 33–40, ‘Is It Possible Not to Love Spinoza?’ See, for instance, Macherey, Avec Spinoza 25–29. See Macherey, ‘The Encounter with Spinoza’. Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity. See also Geneviève Brykman, La Judéite de Spinoza (Paris: J. Vrin, 1972); Gabriel Albiac, La Synagogue vide: Les

Spinoza Past and Present

45. 46. 47. 48.

237

sources marranes du spinozisme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994). Boucher, Spinoza vol. 3, 179–198. Boucher, Spinoza vol. 4, 46–54. See Studia Spinozana 5 (1989), theme issue Spinoza and Literature. In 2003, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW) issued a report on the state of affairs in Dutch academic philosophy, entitled Wegen in de wijsbegeerte, which, on the one hand, established both the inevitability and the desirability of this increasingly anglophone profi le, while, on the other, warning against some of its possible consequences. For the wider context, see J. C. C. Rupp, Van oude en nieuwe universiteiten: De verdringing van Duitse door Amerikaanse invloeden op de wetenschapsbeoefening en het hoger onderwijs in Nederland, 1945–1995 (The Hague: SDU Uitgevers, 1997).

12 Benedictus Pantheissimus Steven Nadler

Among the great, dead philosophers of the early modern period, Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch Jew of the seventeenth century, is perhaps the most deeply fascinating but mysterious and enigmatic of them all. Although his philosophical thought is notoriously difficult to understand, and some of his ideas impenetrable even to specialists, most of his contemporaries felt they had a pretty good idea of what he was saying. Even when they did not quite get the details right, it was nonetheless clear to them, and it is clear to us today, that he was the most radical thinker of his time. Not coincidentally, he was also the most despised. He was widely attacked, by both secular and ecclesiastic authorities, for his ‘blasphemous’ and ‘heretical’ opinions on God, the Bible and religion. His harsh (and, as yet, unexplained) excommunication from the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community— the most vitriolic herem ever issued by that congregation—represented only the beginning of a long period of vilification. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the term ‘Spinozist’—like the term ‘communist’ in the United States in the 1950s—was a convenient and effective label for casting suspicion upon one’s intellectual opponents. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Spinoza has also become one of the most mythologised philosophers in history. Legends abound regarding his thought, his life and his character. He has come to represent many things to many different people and causes. He is a hero or a villain to a variety of philosophical, political, religious and social movements. He also makes an appearance in numerous works of literature, under one guise or another.1 There is even a movie ostensibly about his life, although set in present-day Tel Aviv and taking some artistic license with the sex lives of the people around him. 2 The character known as ‘Spinoza’ has certainly taken hold of the popular imagination, especially in Jewish culture, and this in turn has come to colour the way the philosophy of the real Spinoza has been understood. Thus, in the case of Spinoza, arguably more so than any other early modern philosopher, it has become rather difficult to distinguish reality from fiction in his reputation. One of the more important issues involving Spinoza’s reputation—an issue on which we see an enormous degree of mythologising—concerns

Benedictus Pantheissimus 239 his attitude toward God. Is Spinoza the most pious thinker of his time, eschewing Descartes’ spare metaphysical and epistemological conception of a distant ‘philosophical’ God for a more ubiquitous, spiritually endowed and awe-inspiring deity? The German romantics, to whom Spinoza was something of a hero, certainly thought so. To Novalis, Spinoza was a ‘God intoxicated man’, while Goethe called him simply theissimus, ‘most theistic’. Or, on the other hand, is Spinoza a devious atheist, someone whose theistic language is only a thin veneer for a rejection of all things divine? I would like to address this question by looking at a widespread and apparently very popular way of thinking about Spinoza and his conception of God. It is often claimed that Spinoza’s system is, above all else, a pantheism. We fi nd this interpretation among his early modern readers, admirers and critics alike. More recently, it also appears in both the scholarly literature and popular presentations of his thought. I believe, however, that to call Spinoza a pantheist is actually to misunderstand both his metaphysics of God and, especially, its psychological and moral implications. Spinoza is not a pantheist; he is an atheist, albeit one who is, in the context of his metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, willing to use traditional theistic language to make his point.

I Spinoza began work on his philosophical masterpiece, the Ethics, probably around mid-1662, and he apparently had a fi nal draft in hand by 1675, two years before his untimely death. Nonetheless, because of the furore aroused by the appearance of his ‘scandalous’ Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) in 1670, he decided not to publish the Ethics. It did not appear in print until 1677, when his circle of friends brought out a posthumous collection of his previously unpublished works. In the Latin edition of the Ethics, but not the vernacular Dutch edition, which would be more accessible to the general public, there appears a short, simple but densely packed phrase: Deus sive Natura, ‘God or Nature’. This is where our problems begin. As we shall see, Spinoza clearly means to identify God with nature in some way. But what exactly does he have in mind? Despite the prevalence of the ‘pantheist’ label over the centuries, the common view of Spinoza in the seventeenth century was that he was in fact an ‘atheist’, although it is not exactly clear what this is supposed to mean. At fi rst, during his lifetime, the label was based not on any reading of the metaphysical doctrines of the still unpublished Ethics, with which only a handful of individuals (mostly friends) were familiar. Rather, it was grounded on the religious and theological material in the TTP, a good deal of which echoes the claims about God and nature in the Ethics. 3 Denunciations of the TTP—along with Socinian writings, Thomas Hobbes’

240

Steven Nadler

Leviathan and the Philosophy, Interpreter of Scripture (Philosophia, S. Scripturae Interpres) by Lodewijk Meijer, a close friend of Spinoza’s—as ‘harmful [schadelijcke]’, ‘blasphemous [godslasterlijcke]’ and ‘dangerous [gevaarelijcke]’ were already being issued by various local and provincial bodies of the Dutch Reformed Church and a number of secular institutions within the year of its publication.4 Throughout the early 1670s, ecclesiastic and political authorities in the Netherlands regularly urged that Spinoza be prevented from spreading ‘his impiety and his atheism’.5 Even before the publication of the TTP, Spinoza had somehow acquired a reputation among his neighbours in Voorburg (to which he had moved from Rijnsburg in 1663) for being an atheist. In a document related to a church dispute in that small town outside The Hague in 1665, we fi nd a reference to ‘Spinosa, born of Jewish parents, is now (so it is said) an atheist, or someone who mocks all religions and thus is surely a harmful instrument in this republic’.6 More rigorous thinkers of the time were also given to calling Spinoza an ‘atheist’. Leibniz, for one, in a letter for Arnauld of August 1683, remarks ‘à propos de Spinosa que Mons. Arnaud appelle le plus impie et le plus dangereux homme de ce siècle; il estoit veritablement Athée’.7 The intellectual impressario Pierre Bayle, in the article on Spinoza in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; 2nd ed., 1702), describes Spinoza as ‘Juif de naissance et puis deserter du Judaïsme et enfi n athée’.8 Bayle, who by this point had had the opportunity to read the Ethics and nonetheless admired Spinoza’s personal character, calls the TTP ‘[un] livre pernicieux et detestable, où il fit glisser toutes les semences de l’atheïsme, qui se voit à découvert dans ses Opera posthuma’, and notes that ‘il mourut, dit-on, bien persuadé de son atheïsme’.9 And according to Samuel Clarke, Spinoza was ‘the most celebrated Patron of Atheism in our Time’.10 It was a charge that Spinoza deeply resented. When another one of his critics, Lambert van Velthuysen, accused him of ‘teaching sheer atheism’,11 Spinoza responded by saying that van Velthuysen ‘perversely misinterpreted my meaning’, and protested that he should be ashamed of levelling such a charge against him.12 Still, the label stuck—perhaps not without good reason—and, by the last decades of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century, ‘Spinozism’ became, in the minds of many, synonymous with atheism. The term ‘atheist’, however, is certainly ambiguous, and it often serves as an all-purpose pejorative epithet. The meaning of the word becomes particularly hazy when viewed in the context of early modern theological polemics, and especially in the volatile religious and political environment of the Dutch Republic in the late seventeenth century. It is not entirely clear whether these critics are claiming that Spinoza truly did not believe in God at all, or simply departed too far from their own ‘orthodox’ conception. For the most part, it seems to be the latter. To Leibniz, familiar with the contents of the Ethics by 1676, when he paid a visit to Spinoza,

Benedictus Pantheissimus 241 ‘atheist’ apparently means only that Spinoza ‘n’admettoit point de providence dispensatrice des biens et des maux suivant la justice’.13 To many of Spinoza’s Dutch contemporaries, it means—as we can see in the Voorburg document—someone who simply shows disrespect for religion, and the Reformed religion in particular. Now Spinoza did not, to be sure, have a very high opinion of most organised religions, especially as they existed in his day. But he did believe in what he called the ‘true religion’, a kind of non-sectarian moral piety that his non-confessional friends (particularly Collegiants) probably practiced. Thus, he was taken aback by the claim that he had ‘renounced all religion’. As he says in reply to Velthuysen, ‘[D]oes that man, pray, renounce all religion, who declares that God must be acknowledged as the highest good, and that he must be loved as such in a free spirit? And that in this alone does our supreme happiness and our highest freedom consist?’14 Of course, Spinoza’s rejection of the label is just as ambiguous as the label itself. If by ‘atheist’ is meant someone who rejects religion per se, Spinoza is saying to van Velthuysen, then he denies that he is an atheist. At another point in the same correspondence, however, he seems to take the charge to refer not to his religious beliefs but to his morals and mode of living: ‘If he [van Velthuysen] had known [what manner of life I pursue], he would not have been so readily convinced that I teach atheism. For atheists are usually inordinately fond of honors and riches, which I have always despised, as is known to all who are acquainted with me’.15 While the seventeenth-century version of the charge that Spinoza is an atheist can often be read simply as the charge that his views on God are highly unorthodox, even so far as to be what we would now call pantheistic, the explicit claim that Spinoza is a pantheist does not appear until the early eighteenth century. This is, in part, because the term ‘pantheism’ itself did not enjoy currency until it appeared in a pamphlet published in 1705 by the English philosopher John Toland.16 Toland, in fact, insists in his writings that the terms ‘pantheist’ and ‘Spinozist’ are synonyms: ‘Moses was, to be sure, a Pantheist, or, if you please, in more current terms, a Spinosist’.17 Spinoza’s pantheism is also taken for granted in the famous Pantheismusstreit of 1785, although its meaning and implications are, to a large measure, what is at issue in that debate. When Friedrich Jacobi insisted that the recently deceased Gotthold Lessing had fallen for Spinoza’s pantheism and, ultimately, his irreligion, Lessing’s friend Moses Mendelssohn rose to his defence. Mendelssohn does not dispute the claim that Lessing was a Spinozist, or even ipso facto a pantheist, but he argues that this does not imply that Lessing (or even, perhaps, Spinoza) was an atheist.18 While the debate is a highly complex one, with a good deal of philosophical and exegetical disagreement—about Lessing, about Spinoza himself and about what pantheism is—and even personal rancour, one thing that all the participating parties agree on is that Spinoza is (in some sense, depending on who is making the claim) a pantheist.

242

Steven Nadler

Unfortunately, there seems to be among early modern thinkers as much ambiguity in the term ‘pantheism’ as there is in the term ‘atheism’. Indeed, the terms are sometimes taken to refer to the same thing. While Toland insists that ‘pantheists are . . . opposed to atheists’,19 and Mendelssohn (if not Jacobi) is certainly clear on the fact that there is a difference between the two, others are not so conceptually precise. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an admirer of Spinoza who nevertheless regarded him as a pantheist, also says that he is an atheist—not because he denied God’s existence altogether, but because he denied the existence of a certain kind of God. ‘Spinozism’— and, by implication, for Coleridge, pantheism—‘consists in the exclusion of intelligence and consciousness from Deity—therefore it is Atheism’.20 Coleridge insists that ‘pantheism is equivalent to Atheism . . . there is no other Atheism actually existing, or speculatively conceivable, but Pantheism’. 21 For Jacobi, as we can see in the conversations he reports having had with Lessing, Spinoza’s pantheism (and, again, his atheism) stems from his rejection of a God who transcends the world. The ‘Spinozist or Pantheist’ is, to his mind, represented by the Greek motto ‘One and All [Hen kai Pan]’, that is, the identification of God with the totality of things. Lessing, his interlocutor, seems to agree that this denial of ‘any cause distinct from the world itself’ is the essence of Spinoza’s pantheism (while refusing to concede that it is an atheism), but then goes on to claim that it is a position to which he himself is sympathetic: ‘I have no more use for the orthodox concepts of the deity’, that is, for what he calls Jacobi’s ‘personal, extramundane deity’ who is an intelligent cause of the universe. ‘They give me no satisfaction’, Lessing says, ‘Hen kai Pan. I know nothing else’. 22 According to Toland, the fi rst to claim that Spinoza is a pantheist, ‘pantheism’ refers to ‘an opinion concerning God and the universe’ that can be summed up in the following phrase: ‘All things are from the Whole, and the Whole is from all things’. What is meant by this, Toland explains, is that the universe is infi nite, eternal, unmoveable as a whole, incorruptible, necessarily existing and even intelligent. 23 Moreover, there is nothing beyond the universe; the infi nite whole that is the universe is all that there is. The universe or nature is therefore one with God. ‘What is all in all things is God, eternal and immense, neither begotten nor ever to perish’. 24 But, to complicate things a bit—since this would appear to represent a retreat from the claim that God is identical with the whole universe—Toland also believes that pantheists admit that God is in fact ‘the force and energy of the whole, the creator and ruler of all, and always tending to the best end . . . whom you may call the Mind, if you please, and Soul of the Universe’— a force that is within and inseparable from the world but, one would think, distinguishable from it.25 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then, and contrary to the narrower way in which we use the word today, to claim that Spinoza was an atheist seems often to have meant only that he denied the transcendence and providence of God, including any ‘personal’ or anthropomorphic

Benedictus Pantheissimus 243 nature supposedly required to exercise such providence. And that, by the time Toland, Jacobi and Coleridge were able to give a label to the view, was pantheism. Moreover, the label has stayed with Spinoza, so much so that in the recently published Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy we read that ‘Spinoza is the most distinguished pantheist in Western philosophy’.26 I would like to argue, however, that this aspect of Spinoza’s reputation is not deserved. Spinoza is not a pantheist. He is, on the other hand, an atheist: not in Leibniz’s, Jacobi’s or Coleridge’s sense of the term—which may be practically indistinguishable from what we think of (and what some eighteenth-century thinkers thought of) as pantheism—but according to our more contemporary understanding of what atheism is, which I discuss next. Spinoza may use the word ‘God [Deus]’ in his metaphysics and even in his conception of the ‘true religion’, but his understanding of what God is, how God relates to nature and above all how we are to relate to God or nature is not a true theism of any kind, pan- or otherwise.

II In very general terms, pantheism is the view that rejects the transcendence of God. According to the pantheist, God is, in some way, identical with or immanent in the world (and there are many varieties of pantheism, differing according to how they understand this claim). There may be aspects of God that are ontologically or epistemologically distinct from the world, but for pantheism this must not imply that God is itself essentially separate from the world. The pantheist is also likely to reject any kind of anthropomorphising of God, or attributing to the deity psychological and moral characteristics modelled on human nature. The pantheist’s God is (usually) not a personal God. 27 Still, pantheism is notoriously difficult to defi ne. As one recent scholar who has wrestled with the question notes, ‘[T]he central problem of pantheism, unlike theism, is to determine just what pantheism is’.28 Providing an all-purpose, all-encompassing defi nition of pantheism is beyond the scope of this chapter. What I shall do instead is add some specificity to the preceding general sketch by distinguishing two varieties of pantheism that are useful for my purposes here. First, pantheism can be understood as (A) the denial of any distinction whatsoever between God and the world and the assertion that God is in fact identical with everything that exists, considered as a systematic unity or whole: ‘God is everything and everything is God’.29 On this view, which can be called ‘reductive pantheism’, God is the world/unity and all its natural contents, and nothing distinct from them. Second, pantheism can be understood as (B) asserting that God is distinct from the world and its natural contents but nonetheless ‘contained’ or ‘immanent’ within them, perhaps in the way in which water is contained in a saturated sponge. God is everything

244 Steven Nadler and everywhere and confers unity thereupon, on this version (which can be called ‘immanentist pantheism’), by virtue of being within everything. (This may be what Toland has in mind when he describes pantheism’s commitment to God as the indwelling ‘Mind . . . and Soul’ of the universe.) What distinguishes pantheism—and in particular the reductive (A) variety, which identifies God with the natural world—from atheism does not really lie in any difference in their ontological claims. Indeed, in ontological terms, reductive pantheism and atheism are extensionally equivalent. They agree on what there is and what there is not: all there is, is nature. Rather, the difference between the two lies in their respective psychological or epistemic demands. The pantheist who asserts that God is nature is presumably divinising nature and claiming that the world is in some sense holy or sacred. This means that one’s psychological attitude towards nature, in the face of this recognition of the divinity of nature, must be akin to a religious attitude. Nature or the world is to be regarded with worshipful awe, perhaps even fear and dread. The pantheist’s world is, to use Rudolf Otto’s formulation, ‘what evokes the numinous experience’. 30 The atheist, by contrast, while he, too, may (at least in terminology if not in substance) identify God with the natural world, is not divinising nature but naturalising God. The atheist’s is a more extreme reductive project. Thus, he argues, there is no justification for regarding nature or the world with anything like worshipful awe. We may, of course, still fear nature and its destructive forces or admire its sometimes awesome beauty. But (the atheist insists, and the pantheist agrees) this is very different from religious fear and awe in the face of the inscrutable and ineffable divine. While Spinoza explicitly tells us that God is ‘immanent’ in nature, he clearly is not a pantheist in the immanentist (B) sense. The phrase ‘God or Nature’ is intended to assert a strict identity between God and nature (or some aspect of nature), not a containment relationship. God is not ‘in’ nature in such a way that nature contains, in addition to its natural contents, a distinct divine and supernatural content. There is no supernatural divine spark or spirit or juice either in natural things or in or under nature as a whole. Thus, my inquiry is limited to considering whether it is appropriate to call Spinoza a pantheist in the reductive (A) sense. I argue that it is not.

III Spinoza’s God is a far cry from the providential God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. His God is not a transcendent being, absolutely ontologically distinct from the world and responsible for its creation. (Even after bringing the world into being and, most thinkers would agree, continuously sustaining its existence, and despite various trends of immanency in Jewish and Christian mystical thought, the Judeo-Christian God essentially stands

Benedictus Pantheissimus 245 outside its creation.) Nor is Spinoza’s God endowed with any of the traditional psychological and moral characteristics that are attributed to it in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Spinoza’s Deus has no will, no goodness, no wisdom and no justice, and it exercises no providential care. His God sets no plans, commands no laws and makes no judgments. God, he says, just is the one, necessarily existing, active, eternal, infi nite substance of nature (‘Except God, no substance can be or be conceived’ [1P14]). 31 Everything else, it follows, is ‘in’ this substance (‘Whatever is, is in God and nothing can be conceived without God’ [1P15]). Of course, what these claims mean has been subject to enormous debate for centuries. Deus sive Natura clearly implies some kind of identification of God with nature, but exactly what kind of identification does Spinoza have in mind? The idea that God is the only substance in nature, and in fact is identical with nature itself (or some fundamental part of nature), is something that had long been a part of Spinoza’s thinking, although he struggled with ways to express this most basic metaphysical truth. In the Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being, composed around 1660 but abandoned by 1662, we fi nd him claiming that ‘Nature consists of infi nite attributes, of which each is perfect in its kind. This agrees perfectly with the defi nition one gives of God . . . [A]ll these attributes which are in Nature are only one, single being, and by no means different ones’. This is what explains ‘the unity which we see everywhere in Nature’.32 Nature is one because the substance of it is one, and everything in nature is a mode or affection of that one substance. ‘Nature’, he says, ‘which comes from no cause, and which we nevertheless know to exist, must necessarily be a perfect being, to which existence belongs’. The various strands in this doctrine are more clearly laid out and argued for in the Ethics, and to that extent the later work represents a vast improvement over the aborted Short Treatise. But even in the Ethics it is still exasperatingly unclear what Spinoza means by saying that ‘whatever is, is in God’. What can it mean to say that something is in God? There are many ways in which something can be in something else: it can be the way in which parts are in the whole that they compose or the way in which an object is in a container that holds it or the way in which properties or qualities belong to subject (such as wisdom is in Socrates or hardness is in the rock). In Spinoza’s ontology, there are substances, attributes and modes. An attribute just is the nature or essence of a substance. Modes or affections, by defi nition, must exist in and be conceived through the substance (and its attribute) which they modify. And there is and can be nothing that is neither a substance/attribute nor a mode/affection. But because God is the only substance—albeit with infi nite attributes, including the attributes thought and extension—whatever else exists (including all minds and all bodies) besides God/infi nite substance must be a mode of one of those attributes, and therefore must exist in God. Thus, whatever is ‘can be in the divine nature alone, and can be conceived through it alone’ (1P15d).

246 Steven Nadler When Spinoza says that all things are in God, it is important to keep in mind the ‘things’ about which he is speaking. The things that are supposed to be in God or nature precisely as modes or affections are in substance include some unfamiliar things (such as what Spinoza scholars have come to call the ‘infi nite modes’, which are basically the laws of nature), but also all of those familiar items that populate our world and that we, in our pre-Spinozistic and unphilosophical way of thinking, ordinarily take to be substantial in their own right: physical objects (trees, chairs, human bodies) and human minds or souls. Like Aristotle (and, to a degree, Descartes), we believe that these are things that are ‘in themselves’, things in which other items (such as properties) exist but which themselves do not exist in anything else. Now Spinoza seems to be telling us that, in all metaphysical rigour, we are wrong. But then what is the correct way to conceive of the ontological status of these items? One common interpretation of Spinoza’s conception of the relationship between substance (God) and its modes (everything else that exists) is perhaps also the most natural way to think of it. According to this interpretation, for Spinoza things are in God in the sense of being properties or states or qualities of God. They inhere in God as in a subject or substratum. This makes Spinoza’s account of the substance-mode relationship similar to that of Descartes, for whom the modes of a substance are the properties that inhere in it—or, more precisely, in its principal attribute or nature—and for that reason are predicable of it. For Spinoza, then, just as motion is a state of the moving body, so the moving body itself would be a property or state of God (in one of God’s infinite attributes, extension). And just as my thought at this moment is a property or state of my mind, so my mind is a property or state of God (in another of God’s infinite attributes, thought). The moving body and my mind just are God’s nature (or, more precisely, natures) existing or expressing itself in one way (mode) or another. As Spinoza says, ‘Particular things are nothing but affections of God’s attributes, or modes by which God’s attributes are expressed in a certain and determinate way’ (1P25C). This is how Bayle read Spinoza.33 Bayle may have admired Spinoza’s character, but he abhorred his philosophy, ‘the most monstrous that could be imagined, the most absurd, and the most diametrically opposed to the most evident notions of our mind’. Bayle was offended in particular by what he took to be Spinoza’s conception of God and of God’s relationship to things. According to Spinoza, Bayle says, There is only one being, and only one nature; and this nature produces in itself by an immanent action all that we call creatures . . . It produces nothing that is not its own modifications. There is a hypothesis that surpasses all the heap of all the extravagances that can be said. The most infamous things the pagan poets have dared to sing against Venus and Jupiter do not approach the horrible idea that Spinoza gives us of God.34

Benedictus Pantheissimus 247 Bayle objected that if things and their properties are themselves nothing but properties of God and therefore predicable of God, then a number of unacceptable conclusions follow. First, there is the logical problem that God would have incompatible properties. The happy person and the sad person would equally be states of God, and thus God would itself be both happy and sad, or a happy person and a sad person at the same time; this, Bayle insists, is absurd. Second, there is the theological problem that God itself would be subject to change, division and motion, since the things that are modes of God are divisible and are constantly changing and moving. Spinoza’s God is thus ‘a nature actually changing, and which continually passes through different states that differ from one another internally and actually. It is therefore not at all the supremely perfect being, “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17)’. 35 This is not just a theological problem, but also a question of philosophical consistency in Spinoza’s system, since Spinoza himself seems to say that God is immutable and not subject to change (cf. 1P20c2). Finally, and (in Bayle’s eyes) most problematic of all, God would be the ultimate author of all the thoughts and actions of human beings, including not only all of our loves, hates and desires, but also the most evil thoughts and deeds conceivable: ‘Here is a philosopher who fi nds it good that God be both the agent and the victim of all the crimes and miseries of man’. 36 When one person kills another, God is, on Spinoza’s account, the true author of the crime, or so Bayle would have it. Bayle, seeing these as the necessary implications of Spinoza’s view of God, concluded ‘so much the worse for Spinoza’. Other, more recent commentators have said ‘so much the worse for that reading of Spinoza’. Surely, one might think, Spinoza could not have held a theory that had such clear and obviously problematic philosophical and theological consequences. Moreover, one scholar has claimed, it is simply odd to regard the items that we think of as ‘things’ and as real individuals (houses, chairs, human souls) as actually being properties or states of something else. That seems to be quite a serious category mistake, one of which Spinoza should not be accused: Spinoza’s modes are, prima facie, of the wrong logical type to be related to substance in the same way Descartes’ modes are related to substance, for they are particular things, not qualities. And it is difficult to know what it would mean to say that particular things inhere in substance . . . What it would mean to say that one thing is predicated of another is a mystery that needs solving. 37 For those who would reject Bayle’s ‘inherence’ reading of the relationship between God and nature in Spinoza, a second interpretation of what Spinoza means by saying that ‘whatever is, is in God’ is made possible by a subtle but important change in his approach as of 1P16.38 The language so suggestive of properties inhering in a substratum gives way to a new kind

248

Steven Nadler

of model. 1P16 says that ‘from the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infi nitely many things in infi nitely many modes’. The relationship between God and things, or substance and modes, is now described in causal terms. The shift is not total, since Spinoza will continue to refer to particular things as ‘affections of God’s attributes’ (for example, in 1P25c), but it is something that cannot be ignored. In the demonstration of 1P18, God is described as ‘the cause of all things’; in 1P24, we are told that things are ‘produced’ by God; and 1P28 describes the ways in which things have been ‘determined’ by God or by God’s attributes. On this model, God or substance is not the subject in which things inhere as properties, but rather the infi nite, eternal, necessarily existing (uncaused) cause of all things. More particularly, God’s attributes can be seen as the universal causal principles of everything that falls under them—which, as we now know, is absolutely everything. The attribute of extension just is the nature of extension and involves the laws governing all material things (including the truths of geometry, since geometrical objects just are extended objects); the attribute of thought just is the nature of thought and involves the laws governing all thinking things (understood, perhaps, as the laws of logic). Nature is governed by a necessary order as the active ground of all things, and to speak of God or substance just is, on this second interpretation, to refer to that universal causal framework. The relationship between God and things is to be understood not in terms of subject and inhering properties, but in terms of laws and the phenomena determined by them. Support for this kind of reading can be found in texts like 1P15s, where Spinoza seems to identify being in God with being causally generated by certain laws: ‘All things, I say, are in God, and all things that happen, happen only through the laws of God’s infi nite nature and follow (as I shall show) from the necessity of his essence’. In a letter to Jacob Ostens, in which Spinoza replies to charges made against him by van Velthuysen, he seems to reduce the ontological relationship between God and the world to a causal claim when he says that ‘it is the same, or not very different, to assert that all things emanate necessarily from God’s nature and that the universe is God’.39 There is something to be said for both of these readings of the relationship between substance and mode/God and things in Spinoza’s metaphysics. Each of them must also face some difficult although not necessarily insuperable questions. There are, of course, the puzzles that Bayle raises for the ‘subject/property inherence’ model. But Spinoza could reply to the fi rst objection that it is certainly not the case that God has the incompatible properties in absolutely the same respects, which is what would be required in order to generate the alleged contradiction. Just because God is happy in so far as God is one person and God is sad in so far as God is another person, it does not follow that God itself, absolutely, is both happy and sad in the same respect—for it is explicitly specified that God is happy and sad in different respects. And while Spinoza does indeed say that ‘God, or all

Benedictus Pantheissimus 249 of God’s attributes, are immutable’ (1P20c), this does not mean that there is and can be no change in God; rather, it is a claim about the permanence of the existence and the nature of each attribute. Spinoza is saying that despite the variability at the level of modes, the attributes themselves do not change. As for Bayle’s third objection, based on the apparent impiety of making God the cause of evils, Spinoza both argues that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ do not refer to anything real in nature40 and refuses to concede that God has any moral characteristics that need to be preserved; therefore, he would not be very troubled by this objection. Nor would Spinoza have been bothered by the oddity of thinking of ordinary things as properties of something else; after all, his metaphysical project is to get us to radically rethink our ontology and way of looking at things. The second interpretation, on the other hand, must take care to do justice to Spinoza’s understanding of the precise nature of God’s causal relationship to things. God (or nature) is, above all, the ultimate and general efficient cause of all things, the active agent whose power explains their coming into being. This much is absolutely true, certain and non-negotiable about Spinoza’s account. No matter which interpretation of the substance/ mode relationship that one adopts, one must preserve the special causal relationship that exists between God and things. The question that divides the two interpretations is, is it also a relationship of inherence? The second interpretation says no to this question. But—and here is the problem—Spinoza insists that God or substance is also the immanent cause of its modes: ‘God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things’ (1P18). An immanent cause is ordinarily understood to be a cause whose effects belong to or are a part of itself (much as the mind can be said to be the cause of its own ideas).41 A transitive cause, on the other hand, brings about effects that are ontologically distinct from itself (as the baseball is the cause of the broken window and the sun is the cause of the melted ice). It might seem that unless we think of the things causally brought about by God as properties or states of God—that is, unless we adopt the fi rst, ‘inherence’ interpretation—we will be unable to explain God’s causation of things as an immanent causation, as Spinoza demands. This, to my mind, is an insuperable problem for the second reading. Unless some way can be found of explaining God’s immanent causation without employing the inherence model—and I am sceptical that this is possible—the austere causal reading fails to capture an essential feature of Spinoza’s metaphysics. Be that as it may, the question of how to interpret the in of 1P15, ‘Whatever is, is in God’, goes to the heart of the question of how to understand Spinoza’s identification of God with nature. There can be no question that, at the very least, the identity he has in mind is a literal and numerical one. He is denying that God is anything distinct from nature, whether one understands this to mean ‘distinct from and outside Nature’ (as a transcendent God is ordinarily conceived) or even ‘distinct from but within Nature’

250 Steven Nadler (as the immanentist [B] version of pantheism would have it). As Spinoza says in a letter to Henry Oldenburg of April 1662, ‘I do not separate God from nature as everyone known to me has done’.42 When he is well along in the Ethics, Spinoza will employ his infamous phrase, ‘That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature’ (4P4d). The sive of Deus sive Natura 43 is clearly the ‘or’ of identification: ‘God, that is, Nature’, or ‘God, or—which is the same thing—Nature’. This is why the immanentist version of pantheism, which would fi nd a supernatural divine element within nature, cannot possibly be the right way to read Spinoza. But what is the extent of the identification of the two items, God and nature? This is what is not clear and what is at stake between the two readings examined previously. Is God the whole of nature, the entire universe and everything in it? Or is God just some fundamental, unchanging, eternal and universal aspects of nature? On the fi rst interpretation of the relationship between God/substance and modes, whereby all things inhere in God as properties, God must be identical with the whole of nature, including all of its contents. This is because the properties or states of a thing are the thing, existing in particular manner. Thus, God is both the universal elements of nature—substance, its attributes and whatever they involve—as well as all of the things that are (immanently) caused by and belong to those natures, right down to the lowest level of particularity. God is material nature (extension) and its most general features, as well as every particular material thing and state of a material thing that expresses that nature; God is thinking nature (thought) and its most general features, as well as every individual ‘idea’ or mind that expresses that nature, and all of the particular ideas had by these; and so on for every attribute. On the second interpretation, whereby the relationship between God and particular things is a more external, causal one, God/substance is identified only with the attributes, the universal natures and causal principles that govern all things. Particular things are not literally and numerically identical with God, since they are not in God in the way in which properties are in a subject, but only necessarily and eternally causally generated by (and thus perpetually dependent upon) God. God is the invisible but active dimension of nature, its essences and laws. All of the rest, including the visible furniture of the world, is but an effect of God’s powers.44 Now Spinoza certainly does recognise active and passive aspects of nature. There is, in fact, an important distinction that he draws in 1P29s, one that shows that the term ‘nature’ is, when left unqualified, ambiguous: I wish to explain here . . . what must be understood by Natura naturans [literally: naturing Nature] and Natura naturata [natured Nature] . . . [B]y Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infi nite essence, i.e., God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause.

Benedictus Pantheissimus 251 But by Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God’s nature, or from any of God’s attributes, i.e., all the modes of God’s attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God, and be neither be nor be conceived without God. According to the second, purely causal interpretation of God’s relationship to things, God is to be identified not with all of nature, but solely with Natura naturans. God is only substance and its attributes. Everything that follows from or is caused by—or, to use the passive participle employed by Spinoza, natured by—substance (that is, absolutely everything else) belongs to Natura naturata and is thus distinct from (albeit dependent upon) God. According to the fi rst, substance/property inherence interpretation, favoured by Bayle, God is both Natura naturans and Natura naturata. Despite the neatness and sophistication of the causal interpretation, it must be granted that, in the light of this distinction between Natura naturans and Natura naturata, there is a certain further advantage to the reading according to which God is identical to the whole universe, in both its active invisible and passive visible aspects. Spinoza identifies Deus with Natura. Thus, when he tells us that Natura includes both a naturans aspect and a naturata aspect, the natural conclusion would seem to be that Deus is to be identified with both of these. God is both the active and the passive dimensions of nature, what causes (or ‘natures’) and what is caused (or ‘natured’). If, as 1P29s claims, Natura naturans just is God, ‘insofar as he is considered as a free cause’, it would seem to follow that Natura naturata is also God, in so far as he is considered in some other way.

IV With his general identification of God and substance and the consequent doctrine of immanent causation (whereby everything else is ‘in’ God), we can see how far Spinoza has departed from the traditional theistic conception of a transcendent God. It is also evident to any reader of the Ethics how much Spinoza de-personalises God. God is no longer an agent endowed with the usual psychological and moral characteristics. But the question is, is Spinoza a pantheist, as so many have insisted? Any adequate analysis of Spinoza’s identification of God and nature will show clearly that Spinoza cannot be a pantheist in the immanentist (B) sense, outlined previously. But is he a pantheist in the reductive (A) sense? The debate over whether God is to be identified with the whole of nature or only a part of nature (i.e., Natura naturans), examined in the previous section, might be seen as crucial to the question of Spinoza’s alleged pantheism. After all, if pantheism is the view that God is everything, then Spinoza is a pantheist only if he identifies God with all of nature—that is, only if we adopt the fi rst (viz., inherence) interpretation of the relationship

252 Steven Nadler between substance and modes in his metaphysics. Indeed, this is exactly how the issue is framed in the recent literature (which, unlike the debates over Spinoza’s view of God in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, involves less religious and political passion and more clear-eyed analysis). Both those who believe that Spinoza is a pantheist and those who believe that he is not a pantheist focus on the question of whether God is to be identified with the whole of nature, including fi nite modes, or only with substance and attributes but not modes.45 I want to suggest, however, that this debate about the extent of Spinoza’s identification of God with nature is not really to the point. To be sure, if by ‘pantheism’ is meant the idea that God is everything, and if one reads Spinoza as saying that God is only Natura naturans, then Spinoza’s God is not everything and consequently he is not a pantheist. Finite things, on this reading, while caused by the eternal, necessary and active aspects of nature, are not identical with God or substance, but rather are its effects. But this is not the interesting sense in which Spinoza is not a pantheist. For even if Spinoza does indeed identify God with the whole of nature, it does not follow that Spinoza is a pantheist. The real issue is not which is the proper reading of the metaphysics of Spinoza’s conception of God. On either interpretation, Spinoza’s move is a naturalistic and reductive one. God is identical either with all of nature or with only a part of nature; for this reason, Spinoza shares something with the reductive pantheist. But—and this is the important point—even the atheist can, without too much difficulty, admit that God is (there is) nothing but nature. As I mention previously, pantheism and atheism are, in ontological terms, extensionally equivalent. Rather, the question of Spinoza’s pantheism is really going to be answered on the psychological side of things, with regard to the proper attitude to take toward Deus sive Natura. I would insist that, whichever of the two readings of the substance/mode relationship that one adopts, it is a mistake to call Spinoza a ‘pantheist’ in so far as pantheism is still a kind of religious theism. What really distinguishes the pantheist from the atheist is that the pantheist does not reject as inappropriate the religious psychological (and especially affective) attitudes demanded by theism. Rather, the pantheist simply asserts that God—conceived as a being before which one is to adopt an attitude of worshipful awe—is or is in nature. And nothing could be further from the spirit of Spinoza’s philosophy. Spinoza does not believe that worshipful awe is an appropriate attitude to take before God or nature.46 There is nothing holy or sacred about nature, and it is certainly not the object of a religious experience. Instead, one should strive to understand God or nature, with the kind of adequate or clear and distinct intellectual knowledge that reveals nature’s most important truths and shows how everything depends essentially and existentially on higher natural causes. The key to discovering and experiencing God, for Spinoza, is philosophy and science, not religious awe and worshipful submission. The latter give rise only to superstitious behaviour and subservience to ecclesiastic

Benedictus Pantheissimus 253 authorities; the former leads to enlightenment, freedom and true blessedness (i.e., peace of mind). To be sure, Spinoza is at times capable of language that seems deeply religious. He says that ‘we feel and know by experience that we are eternal’ (VP23s), and that virtue and perfection are accompanied by a ‘love of God [amor Dei]’ (VP15, VP32s, VP33). But such phrases are not to be given their traditional religious meaning. Spinoza’s naturalist and rationalist project demands that we provide these notions with a proper intellectualist interpretation. Thus, the love of God is simply an awareness of the ultimate natural cause of the joy that accompanies the improvement in one’s condition that the third kind of knowledge (intuitus) brings; to love God is nothing but to understand nature. And the eternity in which one participates is represented solely by the knowledge of eternal truths that makes up a part of one’s mind.47 There is no place in Spinoza’s system for a sense of mystery in the face of nature. Such an attitude is to be dispelled by the intelligibility of things. Religious wonder is bred by ignorance, he believes. In the all-important appendix to Part 1 of the Ethics, Spinoza contrasts the person who ‘is eager, like an educated man, to understand natural things’ with the person who ‘wonders [admirari studet] at them, like a fool’.48 It strikes me as obvious that, for Spinoza, anyone who would approach nature with the kind of worshipful awe usually demanded by the religious attitude represents the latter.

V By defi nition, and in substance, pantheism is not atheism. And it is absolutely clear, to me at least, that Spinoza is an atheist. Novalis got it wrong. Spinoza did not elevate nature into the divine. On the contrary, he reduced the divine to nature—he naturalised God—in the hopes of diminishing the power of the passions and superstitious beliefs to which the traditional and even untraditional conceptions of God give rise. If there is a theism in Spinoza, it is only a nominal one. He uses the word ‘God’ to refer to ‘nature’, but only because the basic characteristics of nature or substance—eternity, necessity, infi nity—are those traditionally attributed to God. It is Spinoza’s way of illuminating his view of nature and substance and getting his reader to see the ultimate implications of the theologians’ and philosophers’ most common defi nition of God (the eternal, infi nite, necessarily existing Being); it is not a way of introducing a divine dimension to the world. NOTES 1. To mention only two: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story, ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’ in The Collected Stories (New York: Harper Collins, 1953) pp. 79–93

254 Steven Nadler

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

and Lawrence Block’s The Burglar Who Read Spinoza (New York: Signet, 1980). Infi nite Joy: The Life of B. Spinoza As Told by His Neighbors. For example, Spinoza claims in chapter three of the TTP that ‘by God’s direction I mean the fi xed and immutable order of Nature, or chain of natural events’. Spinoza Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt, ed., 5 vols. (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitaetsbuchandlung, 1925), vol. 3, 45–46 (henceforth abbreviated as G, followed by volume number.page number). Translation from Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2001) 36. See the long series of resolutions in Jacob Freudenthal, ed., Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s in Quellenschriften, Urkunden un Nichtamtlichen Nachrichten (Leipzig: Von Veit, 1899) 121–154. Synod of the Wallonian Church, 13 September 1675, in Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s 150. Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s 118. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, Zlucite Reihe, Erster Band (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986), 535. Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s 29. Freudenthal, Die Lebensgeschichte Spinoza’s 30, 32. Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1704), Clarke’s Works, vol. 4 (London, 1711) 28. Letter 42 (January 1671), G 4.218; translation from Spinoza: The Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley, trans. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1995; henceforth abbreviated as SL) 236. Letter 43, G 4.219/SL 237. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe II. 1, 535. Letter 43, G 4.220/SL 238. Letter 43, G 4.219/SL 237. It is unclear whether Toland invented the term. Many believe that he did; however, for a contrary view, see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) 266–267. John Toland, J. Tolandi Dissertationes Duae, Adeisidaemon et Origines Judaicae (Hagae-Comitis, 1709) 117. For the texts of the controversy, see The Spinoza Conversations between Lessing and Jacobi, trans. Gérard Vallée (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988). See also Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ‘Conversations on Spinoza [Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Recollections of conversations with Lessing in July and August 1780]’, Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 241–256. Pantheisticon (London: Samuel Patterson, 1751). Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Critical Annotations of S. T. Coleridge, ed. William F. Taylor (Harrow, 1889) 32. For a study of Coleridge and Spinoza, see Thomas McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) esp. Chaps. 2 and 3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. W. G. T. Shedd, vol. 5 (New York, 1853) 406. These remarks from Jacobi and Lessing can be found in Lessing, Philosophical and Theological Writings 243–245, 247, 256. Some caution is needed here, since it is unclear from the texts whether Jacobi and Lessing (and Mendelssohn) share the same conception of what Spinoza’s views are and thus what his pantheism is supposed to consist in. For a discussion of the complexities of the debate, see Vallée, The Spinoza Conversations Between

Benedictus Pantheissimus 255

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

Lessing and Jacobi and D. Bell, Spinoza in Germany from 1670 to the Age of Goethe (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1984). Pantheisticon 15. Pantheisticon 70. Pantheisticon 17–18. ‘Pantheism’, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See also Michael P. Levine, Pantheism: A Non-Theistic Concept of Deity (London: Routledge, 1994) 137, note 21. Among Spinoza scholars, see Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1984) 32–35; and Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, vol. 1, The Marrano of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989) 76. Martial Gueroult, while insisting that Spinoza’s doctrine of ‘l’immanence des choses à Dieu’ represents ‘le premier fondement du panthéisme’, prefers to speak of Spinoza’s ‘panenthéisme’, since ‘les modes sont en Dieu, sans cependent être Dieu à la rigeur’. Spinoza, vol. 1, Dieu (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968) 223. For an analysis of pantheism, especially with regard to these two features, see Levine, Pantheism 1–22. Michael Levine, ‘Pantheism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.) 2007. ,http://plato.standford.edu/entries/pantheism/> H. P. Owen, Concepts of Deity (London: Macmillan, 1971) 74. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950) 5. References to the Ethics are by the standard method of Part, Proposition (P), demonstration (d), scholium (s), and corollary (c). Thus, 1P11s is Part 1, Proposition 11, scholium. Page citations refer both to the Gebhardt edition (Spinoza Opera) and to the translation by Edwin Curley, The Collected Works of Spinoza, vol. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), abbreviated as ‘C’. G 1.22–23/C 68–70. More recently, this is how Bennett reads Spinoza; see A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, esp. 92–96. Bayle, ‘Spinoza’, Historical and Critical Dictionary, trans. Richard Popkin (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) 301. Bayle, ‘Spinoza’ 308. Bayle, ‘Spinoza’ 311. Edwin Curley, Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969) 18. This second interpretation was fi rst offered by Curley in Spinoza’s Metaphysics and can also be found in Henry Allison, Benedictus de Spinoza: An Introduction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987) Chap. 3. For an exchange between Curley and Bennett on this question, see Curley, ‘On Bennett’s Interpretation of Spinoza’s Monism’, and Bennett, ‘Spinoza’s Monism: A Reply to Curley’, both in Yirmiyahu Yovel, ed., God and Nature: Spinoza’s Metaphysics (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991) 35–60. Letter 43, G 4.223/SL 239. Ethics 4, Preface. It should not, however, be confused with a cause that is immanent in its effects. Letter 6, G 4.36/C 188 At Ethics 4, Preface (G 2.206/C 544), Spinoza says, ‘Deus, seu Natura’. Indeed, Curley himself grants that on his interpretation God is acting on ‘things other than God’.

256 Steven Nadler 45. Thus, on one side, Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics 58, argues that Spinoza is a pantheist because God is identical to the whole of nature; Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics 76, takes a similar line. On the other side, Donagan argues that ‘Spinoza is not a pantheist’ since he denies that ‘the totality of fi nite things is God’. Alan Donagan, Spinoza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 90. Agreeing with him, and for the same reasons, are Curley ‘On Bennett’s Interpretation of Spinoza’s Monism’, and Sylvain Zac, ‘On the Idea of Creation in Spinoza’, God and Nature: Spinoza’s Metaphysics, in Yovel (ed.) 231–241, 238. 46. Bennett dissents from this reading. He rightly sees that a major part of the question of Spinoza’s pantheism is about the appropriate attitude to take towards God or nature. However, he insists that Spinoza is indeed a theist (pantheist) for just this reason: ‘Spinoza had another reason for using the name “God” for Nature as a whole—namely his view of Nature as a fit object for reverence, awe, and humble love . . . He could thus regard Nature not only as the best subject for the metaphysical descriptions applied to God in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but also as the best object of the attitudes which in that tradition are adopted towards God alone’. ‘Spinoza’, he concludes, ‘did accept pantheism as a kind of religion’. A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics 34–35. 47. The intellectual love of God and the eternity of the mind are two of Spinoza’s more difficult doctrines, and a proper analysis of them goes beyond the scope of this chapter. For an examination of the eternity of the mind, see Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). 48. G 2.81/C 443. See also Theological-Political Treatise, Chap. 6, where wonder (admiratio) is linked with an absence of understanding (G 3.83–84).

13 The Standing and Reputation of John Locke G. A. J. Rogers

There can be no doubt that Locke occupies a place among the insiders in the history of seventeenth-century philosophy. And as that is so obvious I shall not argue for it here. He, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz are the most unproblematic figures in the landscape of the century, and it was he, above all, who was to dominate the following century. So the object of this chapter is to say something about the factors which contributed to that outcome rather than to proving that it occurred. It is worth pointing out, however, that for a philosopher to dominate a period of history is not to say that everybody became his disciple. It is, rather, to say that most of the discussions of philosophy began from answers which he gave and issues which he raised. None of the great philosophers of the following century were Lockeans, though many were empiricists, even though they were all indebted to his work. It was in this sense that he set the philosophical landscape for a century or more. Although Locke was active in many fields, especially in medicine, botany, natural philosophy, education and economics he is remembered primarily for his two great works, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government. They were published within months of each other in 1689, with only the former bearing his name. Earlier in that same year, also anonymously, had been published in Holland his Epistola de Tolerantia. In August of that year Locke was fi fty-seven, well regarded by his friends, who themselves included some of the leading thinkers and natural philosophers of the age, such as the leading physician Thomas Sydenham and the almost universally admired Robert Boyle. Shaftesbury trusted him to the extent of allowing him to supervise an operation on his stomach, to fi nd a wife for his son and to manage the birth and education of his grandson, later, as the third Earl of Shaftesbury, also to be a noted philosopher. Although the Essay Concerning Human Understanding was the only major work that Locke published in his lifetime with his name on it, its appearance was sufficiently well noticed to establish him as a noted figure within weeks of its publication, receiving accolades from the virtuosi of the Royal Society such as John Evelyn, Samuel Pepys and

258 G. A. J. Rogers John Aubrey. In 1694 Aubrey wrote to Locke to tell him that the physician Richard Blackburn shared his, Aubrey’s, opinion that ‘your Humane Understanding, is the best Booke that ever was writt by one man’.1 Others were not so sure. Locke’s close friend James Tyrrell reported to Locke from Oxford on its publication that Locke’s opening thesis, the rejection of innate ideas, was not well received by the theologians: ‘I fi nd the divines much scandalized that so sweet and easy a part of their sermons: as that the Law written in the heart is rendred false and uselesse: but you know the narrownesse of most of their principles’. 2 And a month later Tyrrell wrote again from Oxford: I will let you know what, the good nature of some people of this place, have invented to disparage your booke: A Friend told me the other day that he had it from one who pretends to be a great Judge of bookes: that you had taken all that was good in it; from divers moderne French Authours. not only as to the notions but the manner of connexion of them. 3 So, for the most part, if Locke’s work was welcomed and admired from within the circles associated with the Royal Society, there were plenty of others, including, as it was to turn out, many among the clergy, who saw the Essay as a work that was likely to undermine the twin pillars of much of their intellectual position, the beliefs that we have an innate knowledge of the existence of God and of central moral truths. A story told by Gilbert Ryle brings out some important points about Locke’s reputation. Ryle recounted a conversation about Locke that he once had with Bertrand Russell. Ryle, with some hyperbole, put to Russell the following question: ‘Why is it that, although nearly every youthful student of philosophy both can and does in about his second essay refute Locke’s entire Theory of Knowledge, yet Locke made a bigger difference to the whole intellectual climate of mankind than anyone had done since Aristotle?’ Russell agreed the facts were so, and suggested an answer which dissatisfied Ryle. He said, ‘Locke was the spokesman for Common Sense’. To which Ryle retorted, ‘I think Locke invented Common Sense’. Russell rejoined, ‘By God, Ryle, I believe you are right. No one had Common Sense before John Locke—and no one but Englishmen have ever had it since!’4 For our purposes the story implies that both Ryle and Russell saw at least one major flaw in Locke’s philosophy, and it is clear what that flaw was. It was the supposed vulnerability of Locke’s account of the external world. Locke appears to say that all we are ever aware of are ideas, but also claims there is a physical world external to our selves. But how, on his own empiricist principles, could we ever know this if all we can ever be aware of are the mental entities, ideas? There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between ideas and any kind of possible knowledge of the physical world. Whether Locke is open to the charge as stated is a much-debated issue in

The Standing and Reputation of John Locke

259

Locke scholarship which in part turns on whether ideas are construed as entities or modes of experience. We cannot enter that dispute now. But it is worth noting that for most readers of the Essay in the late seventeenth century it was not seen as a major problem and this is because philosophers were not at this point much committed to investigating in detail the subtleties of epistemology. In order to appreciate why this was so we need to go back to the philosophy of Descartes. Descartes is rightly regarded as ‘the Father of Modern Philosophy’. His influence in the middle to later decades of the seventeenth century was pivotal in turning the attention of thinkers to a whole gamut of questions which had scarcely been asked before, and his immediate influence in England was probably even greater than it was in France where the church was initially hostile to his philosophy. Today, Descartes is studied in philosophy departments around the world and the work which receives most attention is his Meditationes de prima philosophia which lead to a deep exploration of the epistemological and metaphysical issues that the Meditations raise. But in the seventeenth century the aspect of Descartes’ thought which received the most attention and which was enormously influential was his natural philosophy. As an illustration we may take his impact on Locke himself. Locke read most of Descartes’ works in the late 1650s or early 1660s. But his notes reveal that the works that held his attention were not the Meditationes de prima philosophia or even the Discours de la méthode but his accounts of the natural world. It was from the Principia philosophiæ that the bulk of his notes were taken. 5 Nor was Locke’s reading of Descartes untypical. Similar remarks apply to Newton, for example, and to many other English readers of his works. Of course this is not to suggest that his epistemology and ontology were not influential. Locke drew much of his own commitment to the place of ideas in his philosophy directly from Descartes and from Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole whose La Logique ou l’Art de Penser he almost certainly read in France in the 1670s.6 If detailed argument about epistemic issues connected with the so-called problem of the veil of perception did not occupy the place in philosophical discussion they were later to acquire, especially in the fi rst half of the twentieth century, they nevertheless had a place in contemporary responses to the Essay. Perhaps the most important of these philosophically, if not in terms of its wider impact, was that of John Sergeant (1623–1707) who, after obtaining his BA at St John’s College, Cambridge, and serving as secretary to the Bishop of Durham, converted to Catholicism and, after studying at the English college in Lisbon, became ordained as a priest. He had become a disciple of the Catholic philosopher Thomas White (‘Blacklo’) before he went to Lisbon, and it was from his Aristotelian background that he attacked Locke’s philosophy. His Solid Philosophy Asserted against the Fancies of the Ideists, or, The Method to Science Farther Illustrated. With Refl exions on Mr Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding was published in 1697. Although Sergeant is complimentary about Locke’s

260 G. A. J. Rogers intellect he claims that, like Descartes, he has gone badly wrong in assuming that ideas are the immediate objects of the understanding. Instead Sergeant introduces the concept of notions. But it is far from clear that Sergeant’s notions are not subject to the same problems as he claims for Locke’s ideas. The book is a chapter-by-chapter critique of Locke’s Essay. At all events there is little evidence that Sergeant made much impact on the English-speaking philosophers at which his book was aimed. Locke read Solid Philosophy and made marginal notes in his copy but, to Sergeant’s disappointment, he never replied to Sergeant’s points publicly. Sergeant was no Platonist. But a man who was strongly influenced by the Cambridge Platonists and by Nicolas Malebranche was John Norris. His Cursory Refl ections upon a Book Call’d, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was the fi rst published critical response to the Essay and is notable for its concentration on philosophical argument rather than theological objections. The work was reprinted in 1692 and Norris attacked Locke directly or indirectly in several other later works. The primary objection was to Locke’s rejection of innate ideas. It would be impossible to list all the sermons that either defended or attacked Locke’s rejection of innate ideas. As Ryle noted, when reading later seventeenth-century sermons it is often possible to tell if they were given before or after the Essay was published, such was its immediate impact. If this impact was more hostile than sympathetic, especially among the clergy, this can be no surprise. Every major philosopher from Socrates onwards has generated a great deal of opposition to his new understanding of knowledge and its source. Perhaps in the case of Locke that hostility was tempered by two factors. The fi rst was the lengths that Locke had taken to encourage a positive reception of his book with both a prepublication of an abstract of it in the Bibliothèque universelle et historique in 1688 and sending bound copies of that abstract to key thinkers in England such as Lord Pembroke and Robert Boyle. There can be no doubt that in the coffee houses and the circles of the Royal Society Locke’s work was being discussed before it appeared. Nor was Locke slow to give about forty copies of the Essay to his friends which obviously did no harm to its wider dissemination. When the book fi nally appeared after its long gestation (Locke had been working on it intermittently for seventeen years) its reception was mixed. As one would expect it was generally welcomed by members of the Royal Society and treated with suspicion and often hostility both in the universities and clerical circles. It is no surprise that Cambridge, the home of Cudworth, More and other Platonists, was at best cautious. But Cambridge was also the home of the Latitudinarians, who, like Locke, saw the faculty of reason as the key to man’s superiority to the rest of earthly creation. This commitment was combined with a liberal outlook on matters of religious practice. Nor was this outlook confi ned to Cambridge, though many famous liberals such as Falkland and Chillingworth were dead well before the Essay was published.

The Standing and Reputation of John Locke

261

An important, though not altogether typical reaction was that engendered in Newton by his reading of the Essay. By the time that it was published Locke and Newton had become acquainted and even friends, and Locke sent Newton a presentation copy. That Newton read it can be in no doubt as his copy is extant and reveals that reading.7 In a letter to Locke of September 1693 he wrote, ‘I beg your pardon . . . for representing that that you struck at the root of morality in a principle you laid down in your book of Ideas and designed to pursue in another book and that I took you for a Hobbist’.8 Once again, the hostility to the Essay is directed at the rejection of innate ideas, a philosophical position that Newton, the friend of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More had almost certainly held for some time. But by the time that Newton was revising the third edition of the Principia he had apparently become a Lockean. In a projected draft of regula 5 he writes, inter alia, ‘Sed non sentio quod Idea alique sit innate’9 (‘But I do not perceive that any idea whatever may be innate’)—as complete a commitment to Lockean empiricism as one could hope to fi nd. One must assume that the change in Newton’s position is due to his coming to agree with Locke’s argument in the Essay, perhaps after discussions with Locke himself, who had persuaded him that the empiricist epistemology held no threats for either morality or religion. Newton was, of course, the most famous natural philosopher in England and soon to be the most famous in the world. And the world soon began to see Locke and Newton as twin thinkers in the empiricist mould. It was this picture that came to dominate early eighteenth-century thinking and the whole period until the philosophy of Kant was to mark a new departure one hundred years later, though never wholly to displace the Lockean view. If we are to assess a book’s influence by its editions then we must allow that the Essay on that score alone had a great deal. According to his bibliographer it went through twenty editions in English up until 180010 and fortyeight printings in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Oxford, Boston, New York and Philadelphia in the nineteenth century, as well as numerous abridgements and translations into the major European languages. And despite the hostility of many clergymen in the early years it was soon widely read in the universities of the British Isles from the late seventeenth century onwards. John Wynne, a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a great admirer of the Essay, produced an abridgment of the Essay in 1696. By 1737 it had gone through five editions, and there were later printings in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Boston. It had been produced by Wynne ‘to bring [the Essay] into vogue and credit and thereby into common and general use’.11 There can be no doubt that it allowed many a student and others to come to appreciate Locke’s argument and it had the enormous advantage, perhaps unique, that it was an abridgement of which the author himself approved.12 Wynne later became Bishop of St Asaph and therefore a powerful supporter of Locke within the Anglican community. When in 1771 the fi rst edition of

262

G. A. J. Rogers

the Encyclopædia Britannica was published in Edinburgh ‘by a Society of Gentlemen in Scotland’, it was Locke’s account of knowledge and its limitations that it contained. With Locke’s death in 1704 the poorly kept secret that he was the author of various other works besides the Essay and the Education was officially known. These included Two Treatises of Government, An Essay on Toleration and The Reasonableness of Christianity. It now became de rigueur for every gentleman’s library to acquire a set of Locke’s Works. The collection appeared in fourteen editions or reprints by 1854. He was clearly by some margin the widest read—or, at least, bought—English philosopher there had ever been and perhaps ever has been. As an example we might note that the future Duke of Wellington took a set of his works with him to India on his fi rst foreign posting in 1796. When we turn to Locke’s standing and impact on the English universities in the eighteenth century the story is very clear. Although change in the universities was slow and uneven, varying from college to college, the evidence shows conclusively that Locke soon became a prominent feature in teaching and in examinations. It was in logic that this impact was most obvious. In John Yolton’s authoritative account ‘Schoolmen, Logic and Philosophy’,13 he describes how the seventeenth-century logics gave way in the reading lists to those drawing directly on the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Probably the most important of these were Isaac Watts Logick (fi rst edition 1724 but many later editions) and William Duncan’s The Elements of Logick (1748, with numerous later printings up to 1830). These works combined Locke’s epistemology with an account of valid reasoning. Watts’ debt to Locke emerges in the opening words of Part 1 titled ‘Of Perceptions and Ideas’. Since, he says, all our knowledge is founded on our perceptions and ideas, he will begin with an account of those. Similar debts are to be found in Edward Bentham’s later An Introduction to Logick (1773). Trinity College, Dublin, was probably the fi rst university to include Locke’s Essay on the syllabus. Locke’s admirer and friend, the Irishman William Molyneux, the author of Dioptrica nova (1692) and a leading figure in founding the Dublin Philosophical Society, seems to have played a part in making Locke well known in Dublin and encouraging the study of his works at Trinity. One of his early readers there was the young George Berkeley, who graduated BA from Trinity in 1704, the year that Locke died. We shall return later to Locke’s relation to Berkeley and other eighteenthcentury philosophers, but it is clear that in Trinity, Molyneux’s encouragement led to a strong link between Locke’s work and the advances in natural science, especially those associated with Newton. In that sense it would appear that it was at Trinity and among the Fellows of the Royal Society in London that strong links between Newton’s scientific achievements and Locke’s empirical philosophy came to dominate the intellectual outlook throughout the eighteenth century and beyond.

The Standing and Reputation of John Locke

263

Locke’s impact on religious thought in eighteenth-century England is difficult to overstate. Although Locke always claimed, and with reason, to be a practicing member of the Church of England he was regarded with the utmost suspicion by many members of that body and found himself at odds with some of its leading practitioners, of whom Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, was just the most famous. For the most part, however, during the course of the century Locke’s epistemology and his liberal theology, as expressed in his The Reasonableness of Christianity (fi rst published anonymously in 1695, with Locke’s authorship only acknowledged in his will after his death), came to dominate orthodox Anglican theology. The empiricism of the Essay when combined with the theology expounded by Samuel Clarke in the Boyle lectures encouraged a view of religion based solidly in experience of the natural world, itself seen as the creation of a system—Newton’s system—governed by immutable laws of nature—ordained by a benevolent deity. On this view the new natural philosophy was seen not to be hostile to religious views and they were widely seen to be mutually reinforcing. Locke was himself of this persuasion and although he may have shared with Newton doubts about the textual basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, it was his fundamental belief that the basic tenets required to be a Christian were small in number and simple in nature. The most fundamental of all was the conviction that Jesus was the Messiah and it was through him that salvation was possible. Locke’s position was echoed in 1735 by the Presbyterian minister Josiah Owen: The Almighty can take no Pleasure in puzzling his Creatures or bewildering their weak Understandings: the Truth is . . . the Fundamentals of Christianity are few and Obvious. That there is a God, that Jesus is the Messiah promis’d; that Salvation is to be attain’d in the way he has appointed, are Truths adapted to the Capacities of All but such as stubbornly resist Conviction. The Man who believes these Things and discovers the Sincerity of his Belief by a suitable Conduct, stands as fair for Happiness as those who rack their Brains with School Sophistry, and Ecclesiastical Jargon.14 Locke, of course, wished his message to be accepted not only by dissenting ministers like Owen but also by the wider Anglican Church, and it is probably true to say that, by the second half of the century, in general it was. But from the publication of any of his works there were always critics of his positions. The Essay Concerning Human Understanding was attacked primarily because its theological and ethical implications were thought to be unacceptable, not only because of his rejection of innate ideas. Like Hobbes before him, he was regarded by many as a threat to orthodox Anglican religion. Within months of its publication John Norris, a Wiltshire vicar, had published a short pamphlet Cursory Refl ections upon a Book Call’d, An Essay concerning Human Understanding.

264

G. A. J. Rogers

Although educated at Oxford, Norris was in several ways closer to the traditions of the Cambridge Platonists, and it is not therefore surprising that he could not accept Locke’s empiricist position. Locke, he said, had no good arguments for rejecting some kinds of innate idea and Locke had not, in any case, explained what ideas were. Such themes were to be echoed in the works of a score of critics in the next decade. The most formidable of these was doubtless the Bishop of Worcester, Edward Stillingfleet, and, with regard to the Essay, he and Thomas Burnet were the only ones that Locke chose to answer directly in print. What emerges from any survey of theology in England in the eighteenth century is that few, if any, of the major religious writers were uninfluenced by Locke’s philosophy or his theology. Granted that Alan Sell is right to remind us that ‘influence’ is a very slippery concept,15 it is no difficult task to fi nd Locke’s presence in all the major figures in English, Scottish, Irish and American religious writers throughout the eighteenth century, often most overtly in those who most strongly rejected his positions, such as in the theology of Jonathan Edwards. But he is also to be found in John Wesley and committed Lockeans such as Samuel Bold and Catherine Cockburn. It has been well demonstrated by Sell that Locke held centre stage for the whole of theology in the anglophone world throughout the eighteenth century. In philosophy his reach was at least as great. It is in the nature of philosophy that critics are more prominent than supporters of a philosophical position. But, excepting Leibniz who outlived Locke by twelve years, there was scarcely any philosopher of any note who did not subscribe to the Lockean doctrine of the rejection of innate ideas. In Ireland George Berkeley appears to have accepted Locke’s starting point from his earliest engagements with philosophy, as we discover from his ‘Common-Place Book’.16 Of course Berkeley was one of the great critics of Locke, but his point of philosophical departure was entirely Lockean. The opening words of The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) are as follows: It is evident to anyone who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the human mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways.17 That Berkeley was to go on to attack Locke’s account of the causes of those ideas in his own highly original philosophy cannot mask the fact that Locke is the fi rst great influence on his own thought, followed closely by that of Malebranche.18 It is Locke’s empiricism and ideas in his philosophy that take centre place in David Hume’s philosophy, though ideas of sensation are renamed

The Standing and Reputation of John Locke

265

‘impressions’. Hume’s aspiration to be the Newton of the moral sciences was never Locke’s goal. The latter had characterised himself as an ‘underlabourer’ clearing the ground a little of the rubbish that hinders the work of ‘the masterbuilders’ such as Boyle, Sydenham, Huygens and ‘the incomparable Mr Newton’, and, unlike Hobbes, he never advertised himself as contributing a new science to the panoply of human knowledge, even though others were to see him in that light, most notably Voltaire, who saw him as having created a natural history of the human soul, in contrast to the romances of Descartes and other philosophers.19 Voltaire’s enthusiastic response to Locke’s philosophy was by no means the fi rst on the mainland of Europe. It is worth recalling that Locke had spent many years in France in the 1670s and had a number of French friendships especially among the Protestant community associated with the medical school in Montpelier as well as in Paris, Toulouse and elsewhere. In his years in Holland from 1683 until 1689 he had made new friends and it was there that he completed the writing of the Essay. Indeed, it was in Jean le Clerc’s journal, the Bibliothèque universellee & historique of 1688, that his Abregé of the Essay was fi rst published and his philosophical position declared to the world. As it was in French it was in a sense a continental audience that was fi rst made aware of Locke the philosopher. Through le Clerc’s assistance a French translation of the Essay (by Pierre Coste) was published in Amsterdam in 1700 and followed the Education of 1693 which had been published in French in 1695, with a Dutch translation in 1696. The Reasonableness was published in London in 1695, with ten later printings in the century, and French and Dutch translations in 1696 with several later printings. But in the early decades of the eighteenth century, although references to Locke crops up in the contemporary journals fairly frequently he does not begin to make a substantial impact on wider French thought, especially thought outside of the Protestant circles, until later in the century. 20 In the Netherlands, as Paul Schuurman has shown, 21 Descartes and Locke were widely regarded as philosophers on the same side—the side of a new logic dominated by the concept of ideas rather than the syllogism, against the old guard still subscribing to Aristotle’s logic. In his Introductio ad Philosophiam Metaphysicam et Logicam continens (1736) Willem Jacob’s Gravesande built a defence and explication of Newtonian physics that presupposed much of Locke’s epistemology. A similar verdict applies to Petrus van Mussschenbroek’s Institiones logicæ præcipue comprehendentes artem argumentandi (1748) where he follows Locke’s definition of ideas and his narrow conception of knowledge. Although Dutch logic in the fi rst half of the century was predominantly eclectic, drawing on Aristotelianism, Cartesianism and empiricism, its dominant theme was hostile to Aristotelianism, which ‘allowed Dutch philosophers to consider Descartes and Locke not as adversaries, but as joint defenders of an alternative logic of ideas’ to classic Aristotelianism. 22

266 G. A. J. Rogers In France, as we have already noted, he was known through the translations of his major works and from the praise he had received from Voltaire in Lettres philosophiques, in which he championed Locke’s empiricism over Descartes’ philosophy. Étienne Bonnot de Condillac argued for an empiricism that, while highly indebted to Locke, went further in denying the place that Locke had given to reflection in his epistemology. A major feature of French readings of Locke, though this was not true of Voltaire, was to treat him as a materialist because of his suggestion that for all we know God might give to matter the power of thought. It was a reading that was followed by many of the philosophes associated with the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert of 1765. In short, Locke was a major figure and often the starting point for much progressive French thought throughout the century.23 The range of this influence is also worth underlining. It was not confi ned to epistemology but ranged over theories of education and linguistics—as can be seen in the writings of the Jesuit Claude Buffier—as well as in his straightforward philosophical writings.24 Also important to French political thought was his second Treatise of Government.25 The whole place of Locke within eighteenth-century thought was neatly expressed by Hegel in the 1820s: The philosophy of Locke is much esteemed; it is still, for the most part, the philosophy of the English and the French, and likewise in a certain sense of the Germans. To put it in a few words, it asserts on the one hand that truth and knowledge rest upon experience and observation; and on the other the analysis of abstraction from general determinations is prescribed as the method of knowledge; it is, so to speak, a metaphysical empiricism, and this is the ordinary method adopted in the sciences. 26 Or, as Roy Porter, in his Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, described Locke’s role, he was not a sceptic but, playing down the Fall, he resolutely insisted on the capabilities of the human understanding: the existence of God could be known, as could Nature and Nature’s laws. He sought not to deny truth but to set it on a sound basis. His philosophy proved to be a great watershed, and became the presiding spirit of the English Enlightenment.27 Hegel and his great predecessor, Kant, were the two forces that ripped Locke from his central place in philosophy, and the empiricism of Locke and Hume took backstage to that of the German school from the 1800s until the early decades of the twentieth century, when once again—through the logical empiricism of Rudolph Carnap, the logical positivists in Austria and Russell and Ayer in England and Quine in America—an empiricist approach to epistemology again found favour. 28 Of course through his period of intellectual dominance Locke was never everybody’s favourite

The Standing and Reputation of John Locke

267

philosopher. Dean Swift, for one, was consistently hostile. And he and Newton were, famously, anathema to Blake and the romantics. But if philosophers are not contentious, they risk being nothing. It is a measure of the man that many of Locke’s questions and his answers to central philosophical problems remain at the heart of contemporary debate. NOTES 1. The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. Esmund de Beer, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–1989) vol. 5, 25. 2. The Correspondence vol. 4, 11. 3. The Correspondence vol. 4, 36. 4. Cf. Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers, vol. 1 (1971; Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990) 147. 5. Cf. Locke’s commonplace book in the British Library BL Add MS 32554. f. 11. 6. Locke owned two copies of the 1674 French edition as well as the Latin edition published in London in the same year. 7. Cf. G. A. J. Rogers, ‘Locke, Newton and the Cambridge Platonists on Innate Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 191–206, esp. 199–201. Since writing that paper I have the opportunity to examine Newton’s copy of the Essay which confi rmed Newton’s careful reading of it. 8. Locke, The Correspondence vol. 4, 727. 9. University Library, Cambridge MS Ad. 3965 13f. 419r. 10. Jean S. Yolton, John Locke: A Descriptive Bibliography (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1998) 67–189. 11. Locke, The Correspondence vol. 5, 261. 12. Jean Yolton lists sixteen editions or reprints up until 1800, published in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Boston, and there were translations into French, German and Italian. 13. John W. Yolton, ‘Schoolmen, Logic and Philosophy’, The History of the University of Oxford, ed. L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) 567–591. 14. Quoted in Alan P. F. Sell, John Locke and the Eighteenth Century Divines (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997) 200. Sell’s book is the best account yet of Locke’s interaction with religious thought in the eighteenth century. 15. Cf. Sell, John Locke 4. 16. Cf. Alexander Campbell Fraser, Life and Letters of Gerorge Berkeley D.D. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871) 25–26. 17. George Berkeley, Philosophical Works, ed. Michael R. Ayers (London: Dent, 1975) 89. 18. For Malebranche and Berkeley, see Charles J. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) Chap. 6, and the references cited on 208–209. 19. See Voltaire, ‘Locke’, Lettres Philosophique (1764), English translation in Voltaire’s England, ed. Desmond Flower (London: Folio Society, 1950) 175–183. 20. For an account of Locke’s reception in France in the period, see Ross Hutchison, Locke in France: 1688–1734 (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1991). 21. Paul Schuurman, Ideas, Mental Faculties and Method: The Logic of Ideas of Descartes and Locke and Its Reception in the Dutch Republic, 1630–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

268

G. A. J. Rogers

22. Schuurman, Ideas, Mental Faculties and Method 166. 23. For the story of this impact, see John W. Yolton, Locke and French Materialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 24. On Buffier, see Ross Hutchison, Locke in France Chap. 4, ‘Buffier and Locke: A Study of Influence’. 25. The second Treatise of Government, in French, appeared in 1695 with many later editions, especially in the 1780s and 1790s, testifying to its perceived relevance to the French Revolution. 26. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson, vol. 3 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1896) 298. 27. Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2000) 66. 28. These few words are only a gesture at a long and complicated story.

14 The Reputation of Locke’s General Philosophy in Britain in the Twentieth Century Michael Ayers

Given the profound effect on philosophical thought that Locke’s general philosophy had throughout the eighteenth century, not only on what we now consider to be ‘philosophy’,1 the question arises of why so many twentieth-century British philosophers seem to have settled for a view of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding in particular as the work of a second-rate, coarse and muddled intellect, lucky in having his ideas developed or criticised by subtler minds. Such a disparaging estimate, encapsulated some years ago in the introduction to a popular presentation of his philosophy by the remark that ‘no other philosopher has had as great an influence in proportion to his merits’, 2 is by no means dead. Given the reasonable assumption that it would be virtually impossible for anybody but a fi rst-rate thinker to produce such a varied and broadly influential oeuvre as Locke’s, not to speak of his distinguished role in government, some explanation would seem called for. One explanation simply draws attention to supposed faults of the Essay, plain (it is supposed) for everyone to see. Here is Bertrand Russell, with an account of Locke’s early popularity and current disrepute: When, knowing [the historical effects of Locke’s philosophy], one comes to read Locke himself, it is difficult to resist a feeling of disappointment. He is sensible, enlightened, minute, but uninspired and (to moderns) uninspiring. One has to remember that his contemporaries found common sense exhilarating after a century of wars of religion and a long struggle with obscurantism.3 It seems that the very quality of ‘common sense’ that, as Russell supposes, made Locke a welcome relief from contemporary religious dogmatism now makes him, for us moderns, a dreary bore. The implicit contrast is with the paradoxical, still enchanting or disconcerting worldviews of such as Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley or Hume. Locke at his best, we seem invited to suppose, states the obvious at tedious length. But the suggestion that the Essay contains no significant or profound ideas does gross injustice to

270 Michael Ayers Locke’s achievement in building on ancient foundations a modern empiricism sophisticated enough, at any rate, to match and overmatch the authority of Cartesian and other active traditions, as well as supplying a reasoned basis for a more general anti-dogmatism.4 Perhaps Locke had the luck to formulate ideas whose time had come (including some that survived into the twentieth century), but the radical, combative nature of his overall programme, which was certainly not received as ‘common sense’ by many of his contemporaries, deserves more recognition than Russell gave it.5 Nor does the term ‘minute’ do justice to the thoughtful, often ingenious detail of Locke’s arguments. It should be recognised that, although his style is not opaque (if less than succinct or pure), his continuously polemical arguments often need detailed knowledge of his targets if they are to be well understood or appreciated. Like every great philosopher, Locke was a technical philosopher, and by no means a naïve one. But the technicality is often the technicality of his time. Many of his critical arguments constitute a rewriting of the philosophical dictionary not so much by rejecting or replacing the vocabulary of the doctrines under criticism as by arguing for a change in its theoretical basis or meaning in accordance with his concept empiricism, with his epistemic caution and with his qualified penchant for corpuscular mechanism. Consequently he expresses his own theses by means of such terms as ‘substance’ (with ‘substances’ opposed to ‘modes’), ‘essences’ (‘real’ and ‘nominal’), ‘species’, ‘properties’ and ‘accidents’. His favourite term, ‘idea’, with ideas variously distinguished as ‘clear and distinct’, ‘adequate and inadequate’, ‘true and false’, would also have been familiar to his fi rst readers, but Locke employs all these expressions with a worked-out understanding of them that is self-consciously both closely related to and radically different from those of his scholastic, Cartesian or Platonist opponents. It was a strategy that invited and still invites misunderstanding, not less in being pursued in language concrete and graphic rather than abstract and precise. One suspects that Russell lacked the patience to follow, for example, the subtle moves made in the course of Locke’s long critique of the Aristotelian conception of species, itself employing the Aristotelian ‘predicables’, an argument that has plausibly been assigned a decisive influence on later biological taxonomy.6 Like many today, Russell may simply have found Locke too tediously demanding to read him with sympathetic care. Not that that would have been, or is, a terrible intellectual fault. We all make judgements of cost-effectiveness in choosing what to read with care, and if Russell skimmed through the Essay, one does not suppose that that vitiated his philosophy. My point is offered simply in partial explanation of a typical and, no doubt, influential twentieth-century failure to do justice to the sophistication and interest of Locke’s thought. Nevertheless, Russell’s unflattering opinion of Locke is in some respects surprising. Despite certain rather transitory points of affi nity between his ideas and those of Leibniz (the object of his most scholarly work in the history of philosophy), Russell aligned himself fi rmly with the tradition

Locke’s General Philosophy in Britain in the Twentieth Century

271

of ‘British empiricism’ as opposed to rationalism.7 Moreover, much of his philosophical theorising (most obviously, perhaps, in Problems of Philosophy, but also in some later works) appears to owe more to Locke than to Hume. One motive for his disparagement of Locke, however, a motive rather more interesting philosophically than disdain for ‘common sense’ or for pedestrian style, may be that twentieth-century realists had reason to think of Locke as an unreliable ally in their cause, as both too vulnerable to idealist criticism and too capable of being read as making concessions to rationalism and, therefore, to idealism itself. Locke’s general philosophy had taken such a battering from idealists in the nineteenth century that their opponents were at best reduced to defending him from criticism, at worst to ignoring him. Certainly, he could no longer be appealed to as an accepted authority.8 That remained the case in the early years of the twentieth century, the period of which Matthieu Marion has recently written, in a revealing study of the ‘Oxford Realists’: ‘[The British so-called neo-Hegelians] were idealists in the sense that they shared the monism of their German predecessors but they tried instead to secure it via a criticism and transformation of Locke’s theory of sensation’.9 Marion cites Bradley’s claim that the object of knowledge is inseparable from the act of knowing, and Bradley laid some emphasis on Berkeley’s arguments against Locke. But the general point is borne out by the annotated edition of Locke’s Essay by A. C. Fraser in1894 and by the abridgement published by his protégé A. S. Pringle-Pattison in 1924.10 Both editors read and criticised Locke in ways consonant with their idealist beliefs. For ‘realists’, as Marion puts it, ‘some form of the Lockean account of sensation had to be vindicated against idealists’. Accordingly there were more sympathetic studies of Locke’s achievement. Samuel Alexander, a realist, published a short introduction to Locke in 1908 in the same series as Fraser’s favourable exposition of Berkeley’s philosophy. A decade later came a major study of the Essay, James Gibson’s Locke’s Theory of Knowledge and Its Historical Relations (1917). This clear and readable work, although not uncritical, presents Locke as a sophisticated and systematic empiricist whose philosophy is acceptably coherent, intelligible and effective, especially when put into its historical context.11 Shrewd comparisons are drawn, most notably with Leibniz and Kant, that are by no means unfavourable to Locke. Gibson, it seems, was well aware of the philosophical proclivities and motives of Locke’s main detractors. It is notable that Gibson does not rigidly interpret Lockean ideas as blank psychological intermediaries that are all that we perceive immediately, without inference. He notes that Locke himself wrote of ideas as intermediaries, but emphasises that many passages treat ‘ideas’ less as blank psychological data than as intrinsically intentional acts or states or, indeed, as the intentional objects of experience and thought themselves— things as we perceive and think of them: if they are ‘intermediaries’, they

272

Michael Ayers

are such as essentially point to independent objects. Another idealist criticism is to some extent disarmed by Gibson’s insight that Locke’s seemingly ‘atomistic’ compositionalism was less than wholehearted, and that the simple-complex distinction in the Essay is subordinated to a fi rmer, more comprehensive distinction between ideas necessarily drawn from experience and ideas such as can be constructed in some way or other (not necessarily by crude composition) employing such original data. Moreover Gibson was unusual in recognising that for Locke, although our perceptual knowledge of the world is shaped by the ways in which we experience things, ‘sensitive knowledge’ of the existence of external objects is nonetheless direct in the sense that it is not inferential. Nevertheless Gibson offers a reading of Locke’s treatment of the idea of substance that is of a kind with more or less hostile readings going back to Leibniz, Berkeley and Kant (although Kant’s response is both less hostile than those of Leibniz and Berkeley and more sensitive to Locke’s actual intentions). The history of this particular point of interpretation is worth considering not only for its connections with the dispute between realists and idealists in the fi rst half of the twentieth century, but also for its continuing relation to the character of Locke’s reputation right up to the present. On the kind of reading favoured by both Leibniz and Gibson, Locke’s view is or, at any rate, implies that the idea of the ‘substance’ of bodies or matter is the idea of a ‘something’ that is unknowable just because it is an entity that underlies and supports all physical attributes, not only sensible qualities and powers but also the more fundamental properties constituting the essence of body.12 In other words, the ‘substance’ is unknowable because it is featureless, and it is featureless because it is an entity distinct from all the features predicable of it. It is the ‘thing which has’ those features. This reading was attractive to transcendental idealists either as an intimation of the idea that the ultimate subject of primitive predication is unknowable (whether the Kantian ‘thing in itself’ or the undifferentiated absolute of neo-Hegelian idealism) or as a fault or concession in Locke’s empiricist realism enabling the next steps by Berkeley and Hume in ‘the historical development’ towards idealism.13 Gibson, on the other hand, while agreeing that for Locke the unknowable ‘substance’ underlies all properties and is therefore unknowable in principle, explained the presence of this strange notion within Locke’s empiricism as an insufficiently critical relic of ‘unhappy’ scholastic doctrine, rather than as a dim insight into idealist truth. Gibson’s book became the recognised authority on the Essay, the only one for twenty years, until Richard Aaron’s John Locke (1937). Aaron offered a different reading of Locke on substance, closer to friendly interpretations of Locke’s own time and no doubt influenced by his detailed editorial acquaintance with ‘Draft A’, Locke’s fi rst manuscript anticipation of the Essay. On Aaron’s more accurate account, Locke did not mean the ‘substance’ to be something that is unknowable just because it is not

Locke’s General Philosophy in Britain in the Twentieth Century

273

a property, but on the contrary was proposing that it is because we do not know the fundamental properties or essence of matter that we draw a distinction between, on the one hand, the qualities and powers that we do know any body to possess and, on the other hand, the thing or substance that possesses them (so also in the case of spirit).14 What is unknown is the fundamental general nature or essence of matter (or spirit), not some purely logically conceived entity, even more mysterious because inherently indeterminate, which supposedly underlies even that unknown nature. Although Aaron did not say so, the logical or ‘logico-linguistic’ element in Locke’s argument (which did not appear in the extant drafts of the Essay until after Locke had read Malebranche15) becomes intelligible when it is seen as a hostile response to the Cartesian claim that the distinction between substance and principle attribute is a merely logical one.16 Leibniz’s famous criticism of Locke is in effect a defence of one part of the Cartesian position. Leibniz saw the notion of substance not as a place-marker for something unknown (whether or not unknowable), but more traditionally and, no doubt, correctly as a categorical notion—a notion that he understood to mark off the fundamental unities and principles of activity in the universe.17 There were, then, several major issues in the interpretation and criticism of Locke’s philosophy that were closely related to the dispute between idealists and realists ongoing in Britain throughout the fi rst forty years of the twentieth century. There was the question of the status of Locke’s ‘ideas’— that is, whether an ‘idea’ is to be understood as a blank psychological ‘act’ or happening (an element of experience or thought), or as the intentional object of such an ‘act’, or as somehow encompassing both act and object. There is the related question of how far Locke was committed to an ‘atomistic’ compositionalism. There is the question of whether our knowledge of external objects, on Locke’s account, is inferential or immediate. And there is the question of the status and role of ‘the idea of substance in general’ in his philosophy. It is interesting that some of these issues also correspond to differences of opinion among the realists themselves. At Cambridge G. E. Moore and Russell, like Samuel Alexander at Manchester, argued for an understanding of sensation as a relation between a mind and an immediately perceived ‘object’ or sense datum distinct from the perceiving mind. The realist Thomas Case had also argued, in 1888, for the ontological separateness of the immediately perceived object, which he conceived of as neurophysiological. But John Cook-Wilson, professor of logic at Oxford and formerly a pupil of Case, came to reject any notion of an immediately perceived intermediary in perception, advancing a ‘direct realist’ theory, rather like that of the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and critic of Locke, Thomas Reid, 18 according to which the external object itself is immediately apprehended. In 1904 he argued the issue with G. F. Stout, another realist at Oxford, in the context of the very Lockean topic of primary and secondary qualities. The question of how far such views were in fact a

274

Michael Ayers

departure from Locke has been canvassed throughout the century, not only by Gibson. Locke held that ‘sensitive knowledge of existence’ is, as Aaron put it, ‘no inference’, but the problem has been to reconcile that thesis with Locke’s apparently representationalist analysis of experience and thought.19 Berkeley, Reid and others seem simply to have assumed that Locke’s representationalism committed him to the view that our acceptance of the existence of external objects is, if justified, an inference, and a popular criticism of Lockean realism has been that such an inference could not be justified. Aaron, like Gibson, gave a more accurate account of Locke’s ‘sensitive knowledge’ than that, but concluded that Locke’s theory of knowledge is incoherent, with parts that do not fit together. Later commentators writing in the second half of the century, most prominently John Yolton (an American, but with close connections to British Lockeans), were to maintain Locke’s consistency by following Gibson’s lead in playing down or even denying the representationalism. Yolton has ascribed to Locke a direct realism not unlike Cook-Wilson’s, with an understanding of Lockean ‘ideas’ as the intentional objects of experience and thought, things as we perceive and think of them. J. L. Mackie and Peter Alexander also explained Locke’s account of perception by understanding ‘ideas’ to be intentional objects or physical things themselves, as we perceive them. 20 Cook-Wilson adopted a more clearly Lockean stance in another respect, however, since he drew a sharp distinction between knowledge and belief, rejecting any analysis of the former in terms of the latter. All these views were developed by his pupils H. A. Prichard and H. W. B. Joseph, 21 and the topics were kept in play, if in a different style, for more than one further generation by Gilbert Ryle, W. O. Urmson, J. L. Austin and others. 22 Ryle was one of those called on to give a lecture in 1932 to celebrate the tercentenary of Locke’s birth, and he took the opportunity to be highly critical of Locke’s supposed imprecision and, in particular, of the ‘ruinous ambiguity’ of his term ‘idea’. 23 Nevertheless sense-data had an eminent Oxford advocate in Ryle’s contemporary H. H. Price, although Price expressly set up Hume rather than Locke for admiration. A. J. Ayer also embraced the notion of sense-data in Language, Truth and Logic (1936) and later works. The version of logical positivism that Ayer imported from Vienna was phenomenalist rather than realist, with no room for Russellian universals, but like other positivists he enthusiastically adopted a quasi-Russellian programme of analysis, in his case with particular statements about ‘sense-contents’ as basic. Ayer divided previous philosophy into ‘metaphysics’, which lacked cognitive meaning, and meaningful ‘analysis’. Accordingly, while Locke’s general intention to analyse thought received Ayer’s somewhat patronising approval, his notion of substance was excoriated as a crude mistake based on a naïve misunderstanding of linguistic form, a mistake avoided by Berkeley and, more completely, by Hume. Effectively the same view was taken in a book on Locke by Ayer’s pupil D. J. O’Connor. According to O’Connor, Locke’s doctrine evinced a

Locke’s General Philosophy in Britain in the Twentieth Century

275

naïve assumption that the collections of sensible qualities that constitute physical objects need a metaphysical glue to bind them together. These claims were made in the context of the much wider rejection or critique of traditional metaphysics that constituted the founding of ‘analytic’ or ‘linguistic’ philosophy. Very different ideas of Russell and Moore, of Oxford realists, 24 of logical positivists and of the later Wittgenstein somehow came together, not in substantive or even methodological agreement, but under the large, self-consciously revolutionary idea that traditional metaphysics could be revealed as mistaken, and the traditional problems of philosophy resolved, through an understanding or analysis of natural language, or else through its creative improvement in the light of scientific advances. This shift in view, proclaimed as revolutionary, did not prevent hoary philosophical ideas re-emerging under the new banner. Even idealist arguments were sucked into the mix. 25 But the consciousness of a new leaf turned did encourage either neglect of canonical texts or a somewhat cavalier approach to their interpretation. As I have suggested, even before the ‘revolution’ the ways in which Locke’s arguments had been interpreted and subjected to positive or negative evaluation tended to go hand in hand with the philosophical proclivities of the expositor. The same was no doubt true of commentary on other philosophers. But in the better and more highly regarded commentaries, such as Gibson’s and Aaron’s commentaries on Locke, the philosophical inclinations of the author were at least held in check or even shaped and directed by historical scholarship. There was some understanding of the significance of what Gibson called the ‘historical relations’ of a text for its interpretation and, indeed, evaluation. With the dominance of ‘analytic’ philosophy, however, it became overtly, even enthusiastically, recommended that exposition of the thoughts of a ‘great philosopher’ be subordinated to the exploration of what is ‘interesting’ according to a present understanding of good philosophy. One result of this approach, seen, for example, in the influential treatment of Locke by Jonathan Bennett or John Mackie, 26 was a piecemeal emphasis on what the commentator conceived of as separable ‘topics’, ‘problems’ or tasks for analysis. Such work generally gave little idea of a philosopher’s overall motivation, strategy or struggle for system—that is, his struggle for an approach to the issues and problems of his time that was consistent, convincing and (in the case of most canonical philosophers and certainly in Locke’s case) comprehensive. Accordingly, throughout the last three or four decades of the century much of the interest in the content of Locke’s philosophy was affected by a methodological dispute with respect to the historiography of philosophy. Bennett’s discussions received a lot of attention and were pedagogically popular, helping to keep the reading of canonical texts alive in university departments of philosophy. Like Ayer and O’Connor, he assigned much of Locke’s thought to confusions of one kind or another, but he was not entirely dismissive. He tried to make sense of many of the details of Locke’s

276

Michael Ayers

argument and he looked in the text for analytic insights, however dim. But his approach was in sharp contrast to that of historians of philosophy who were endeavouring to understand the significance and, indeed, intended meaning of Locke’s arguments in the light of their intellectual context. Some of this work was promoted by improved access to manuscript material, in particular the Lovelace collection of Locke’s papers.27 In 1954 W. Von Leyden published the fi rst edition, with translation, of the so-called Essays on the Law of Nature, a work that cast light on the early development of Locke’s empiricism and ethical theory. Aaron added discussions of ‘Draft C’ and of the Lovelace Collection to the second edition of John Locke in 1955. But perhaps the work of the 1950s that most stands out as a contribution to the contextualist approach to Locke was John Yolton’s John Locke and the Way of Ideas, a study of English epistemology before and after the Essay that was originally a doctoral thesis in philosophy at Oxford. As such, it was highly atypical in both topic and style, but Yolton came to Oxford from the University of California, where his mentor, C. A. Strong, was a critical realist and admirer of A. O. Lovejoy’s history of ideas. Yolton moved back to North America, where (among other activities) he remained an influential exponent of the contextual approach to Locke for five decades, often visiting Britain. He more or less ignored unhistorical commentary, but another American contextualist and critical realist, Maurice Mandelbaum, wrote against it in the 1960s. 28 Within Britain my own papers, 29 written in reaction to the ‘timeless’ or ahistorical approach, were perhaps as influential as any in structuring a methodological debate to which issues in the interpretation of Locke’s philosophy were strikingly (and reciprocally) relevant. A similar debate had already been instigated by the Cambridge historian Quentin Skinner with respect to the historiography of political philosophy. The contextualist methodology was forcefully illustrated in 1969 by John Dunn’s illuminating and influential book on Locke’s Two Treatises.30 The campaign for a more historically sensitive approach to the interpretation of past general philosophy was also abetted by a similar development in the overlapping historiography of science. In Locke studies the connection soon showed itself in discussions of his relationships to Bacon, to Boyle and to Newton, 31 of his apparent commitment to mechanistic corpuscularianism, of his conception of ‘natural history’ and of his attitude to ‘hypotheses’. For a time in the sixties1960s and 1970s there was a tendency to suggest that Locke’s epistemology simply followed in the wake of Boyle’s corpuscularianism.32 Among other considerations, the evidence for the actual development of his thought has made that view untenable. Locke drew on many sources, ancient and modern. His respect for corpuscularianism came relatively late and was always qualified by the earlier-formed sceptical attitude towards all claims to have knowledge of the fundamental nature of matter. The result was a distinctive and important voice in the history of the philosophy of science.

Locke’s General Philosophy in Britain in the Twentieth Century

277

It is, then, difficult to generalise about Locke’s reputation in Britain in the twentieth century. Although the belief that Locke was a second-rate philosopher ranks with the belief that Hannibal or Napoleon was a second-rate general, it is a belief that many twentieth-century philosophers have shared. I have suggested that the belief is itself historically intelligible, and (to generalise dangerously) that it has tended to diminish in rough proportion to the efforts made to recapture the historical content of Locke’s thought and to see past an unfashionable style and received deconstructive interpretations, idealist or ‘analytic’. Stylistically successful as the Essay was in and for its own time, the increasing distance from our own philosophical style has made it hard to admire outright. It may be that, over the twentieth century as a whole, the commonest attitude to Locke among British academic philosophers, inadequate as it is, has been an acceptance of the old charge of wordy confusion and incoherence, a charge mitigated for some by the feeling that, of all the great early modern systems, Locke’s cautious realism (his renowned ‘common sense’) is likely to be the nearest to the truth.33 NOTES 1. For a view of him as one of the founders of modern liberal theology, see Victor Nuovo, ‘Locke’s Christology As a Key to Understanding His Philosophy’, The Philosophy of John Locke: New perspectives, ed. Peter R. Anstey (London: Routledge, 2003) 129–153. For an informative overview of his influence, including influence on linguistic theory and anthropological ideas, see Hans Aarsleff, ‘Locke’s Influence’, The Cambridge Companion to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 252–289. Aarsleff asserts boldly, but not unreasonably, ‘John Locke is the most influential philosopher of modern times’. As far as general philosophy is concerned, the only serious rival to the title is Kant. 2. Brian McGee offered this characterisation in his introduction to ‘Locke and Berkeley’ in the television series The Great Philosophers (BBC 1988). Edited out of the printed version, it echoes Bertrand Russell’s comment, ‘[Locke’s] influence has been enormous, greater in fact than his abilities would seem to warrant; and this influence was not only philosophical, but quite as much political and social’. An Outline of Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927) 255. Twentieth-century political theorists have on the whole taken a less censorious view of Locke’s intellect and achievement. And the focus of the present chapter, it should be emphasised, is on the British reputation of Locke’s general philosophy, which may have been more widely respected in America. 3. Russell, An Outline of Philosophy 256. 4. It is true that he employed largely ancient materials already enjoying a certain revival, but that is also true of Descartes and the other ‘rationalists’, whose theories are reasonably regarded as unorthodox forms of Platonism. 5. That hard thought went into the construction of Locke’s empiricism is apparent from the course of its development in earlier writings. See, for example, Michael Ayers, ‘The Foundations of Knowledge and the Logic of Substance: The Structure of Locke’s General Philosophy’, in Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context, ed. G. A. J. Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) 48–73.

278 Michael Ayers 6. Cf. P. R. Sloan, ‘John Locke, John Ray and the Problem of the Natural System’, Journal of the History of Biology 5.1 (1972): 1–53. 7. Cf. Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy 255. 8. Cf. Aarsleff, ‘Locke’s Influence’ 280, where G. H. Lewes’ ironical comment of 1845 is cited, that so frequent had been the ‘sneers and off-hand charges’ against Locke that ‘we, who had read him in our youth with delight, began to suspect that the admiration had been rash’. 9. Mathieu Marion, ‘Oxford Realism: Knowledge and Perception I’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 8.2 (2000): 299–338. Part 2 is in 8.3 (2000): 485–520. The passage quoted is on 301. 10. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Campbell Fraser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894); A. S. Pringle-Pattison, ed., John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924). Aarsleff points out that Fraser’s edition (which treats ‘Locke rather like a schoolboy who should have known better’) received poor reviews and was not reissued until 1959, when it appeared as a cheap paperback. Consequently An Essay was out of print in English for many years, unless abridged. 11. Cf. Roland Hall and Roger Woodhouse, 50 Years of Locke Scholarship (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983) 1, write, ‘not much light was thrown on Locke in the nineteenth century. But in the twentieth this was to change, with the appearance of Gibson’s excellent book . . . and with Aaron’s very successful John Locke (1937). It was not that startling new interpretations were proposed, but that for the fi rst time a sufficiently professional approach was made to the details of Locke’s philosophy . . . so that problems emerged that could be of interest even at the present time’. 12. In fact Leibniz probably had a better idea of what Locke was about than this might suggest, and was offering a consciously polemical reconstruction (or deconstruction) of Locke’s argument. Cf. Ayers, ‘The Foundations of Knowledge’ 65–71. Kant moves from the Leibnizian premise that, whatever we knew, the distinction between subject and predicate could continue to be drawn, to the quasi-Lockean (but idealist) conclusion that the very nature of human cognition prevents us from grasping the substantial as it is in itself. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 85. Section 46. 13. Pringle-Pattison’s words, John Locke 269, footnote on Essay Book 4, Chapter 3, Section 6. Cf. John Locke, Introduction, xxv. 14. See especially Aaron, John Locke 176–179. 15. That is, until Draft C. 16. Cf. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy 1.63. This point is taken to extremes in Malebranche’s critique of Aristotelian matter, in which he argues flatly that extension is a substance, and that the distinction between matter and extension is the product of misguided abstraction. Recherche de la vérité 3.2.8. 17. The issue between Locke and Malebranche is somewhat different from that between Leibniz and Locke. The former hinges on the question of whether Descartes has indeed given us the essence of either matter or spirit, the latter on the question of whether the abstract notion of substance is clear enough to be employed in metaphysical reasoning. Aaron seems aware of how Locke saw the two as connected. Cf. John Locke 176, and Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology (London: Routledge, 1991) vol. 2, Part I, esp. 31–50. 18. Cf. Marion, ‘Oxford Realism’ 316–325. 19. Representationalism seems assumed or stated in many other passages, including such general accounts of knowledge as at 4.1.1; 4.2.1; and 4.3.1, and accounts of the reality and truth of ideas at 2.30.2; 2.31.2, and 2.32.14-16.

Locke’s General Philosophy in Britain in the Twentieth Century

279

20. J. L. Mackie, Problems from Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) Chap. 2; Peter Alexander, Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles: Locke and Boyle on the External World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) Chap. 4. They differ in that Mackie suggests that, whether or not a corresponding external object exists, the intentional object of perception exists, whereas Alexander lays more emphasis on passages that suggest that ‘ideas’ are objects or qualities appearing out there, to be pointed at. My own view is that Locke operates with more than one model for ‘ideas’, but that in any case, so far from being in conflict, causal representationalism and the conception of uninferred ‘sensitive knowledge’ are neatly tied together in an ingenious, if ultimately vulnerable, argument. See Ayers, Locke vol. 1, Part 1, Chaps. 17 and 18. 21. Stuart Hampshire told the story in conversation of how, at the end of a course on the history of philosophy that Hampshire had attended, Joseph had been asked what he himself believed of all the theories expounded. Joseph replied that, in the end, with whatever emendations, it must be Locke’s philosophy that approximates to the truth. 22. For influential criticisms of ‘sense-data’ as objects of sensory awareness, see Gilbert Ryle, Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949) Chap. 9, and J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), which was critical of Ayer in particular. On the concept of knowledge, see Ryle, Concept of Mind Chap. 7 and J. L. Austin, ‘Other Minds’ in his Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961) pp. 44–84. 23. Gilbert Ryle, John Locke: Tercentenary Addresses (London: Oxford University Press, 1933) 15–38. The Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad, in celebration of the same anniversary, wrote of the ‘plain wholesome nonsense’ of Locke ‘John Locke’, The Hibbert Journal 31, 1933, p. 249. Astonishingly, the dust-jacket of the second edition of Aaron’s book, John Locke (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1955) bore a sentence from Broad’s review of the fi rst: ‘For those who want a clear, reliable, and readable account of Locke’s doctrines without the trouble of wading through his works this book should be a boon’. In the form of an accolade, this remark managed to be unjust to both Locke and Aaron. 24. Marion, ‘Oxford Realism’ Part 2, presents a persuasive account of the influence of Oxford Realism on the ‘Ordinary Language’ or ‘Oxford’ philosophy of the 1950s. 25. For example, via the Pragmatist element in Quine’s philosophy, or Peter F. Strawson’s employment of Kantian arguments in Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959) (London: Methuer, 1959). 26. Jonathan Bennett, Locke, Berkeley and Hume: Central Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Mackie, Problems from Locke. 27. Aaron had co-edited ‘Draft A’ in the 1930s: An Early Draft of Locke’s ‘Essay’, Together with Excerpts from His Journals, ed. R. I. Aaron and Jocelyn Gibb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). But the project of cataloguing Locke’s papers and editing and discussing hitherto unpublished manuscripts did not get seriously under way until the Lovelace Collection was made available by the Bodleian Library in 1947. Comprehensive publication under the aegis of the Clarendon Edition of Locke’s Works has been on the road since 1969. An important landmark in study of the Essay was the outstanding critical edition by Peter Nidditch, then general editor of the Clarendon project, in 1975. 28. Cf. Maurice Mendelbaum, Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception: Historical and Critical Studies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964). 29. Cf. Michael Ayers, ‘Substance, Reality and the Great, Dead Philosophers’, American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970): 38–49 , ‘The Ideas of. Power and Substance in Locke’s Philosophy’, Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1975):

280 Michael Ayers

30.

31. 32. 33.

1–27, ‘Analytic Philosophy and the History of Philosophy’, in Jonathan Reé et al, Philosophy and Its Past (Hassocks, UK: Harvester Press, 1978), ‘Locke versus Aristotle on Natural Kinds’, Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981) 247– 271. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969). This book inspired me to think that it would be worth attempting to do something similar with respect to Locke’s general philosophy, both for the light that might be cast on its meaning and as a methodological exemplar. Hence, eventually, Locke (1991), a two-volume work on An Essay which attempted to demonstrate that a contextualist approach enables greater philosophical returns from the study of the history of philosophy. Only very recently has his formative relationship with Thomas Sydenham received much discussion. There is something of this tendency in Mandelbaum, Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception, and Alexander, Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles. Towards the end of his career as an active philosopher, Bertrand Russell, perhaps chastened by the experience of his own circuitous pursuit of a coherent realism, wrote the following paragraph: ‘No one has invented a system that is at once credible and self-consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consistent cannot be wholly true, but a philosophy which is self-consistent can very well be wholly false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true. There is no reason to suppose that a self-consistent system contains more truth than one which, like Locke’s, is obviously more or less wrong’. History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946) 637.

15 Leibniz’s Reputation The Fontenelle Tradition Daniel Garber

There is a temptation to think of philosophical systems as Platonic ideals, which exist in a realm outside of history. But be that as it may, philosophers exist at a time and in a place and are read and commented on by other creatures who are equally time bound. In this chapter, I would like to capture something of the peculiarity of how Leibniz was understood and regarded by his contemporaries and by those who lived in the century that followed. Leibniz is a particularly interesting character to consider in this way. Today his fame rests largely on his contributions to logic and metaphysics, including his account of the ultimate metaphysical grounding of the world in terms of non-extended and mind-like monads, his accounts of necessity and contingency, his conception of the divine creation of the best of all possible worlds and his remarkable attempts to create a symbolic logic and mechanise thought. More and more of Leibniz’s voluminous writings are appearing every year from the Leibniz research centres connected with the publication of the massive Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, currently under the direction of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen. And with those new texts, we are gaining a deeper understanding of Leibniz’s own conception of himself and his wide-ranging intellectual projects. But this was not the Leibniz who was known to his contemporaries. Many of the texts on which we base our current conception of Leibniz were not published until long after his death, in the case of many, not until the nineteenth or even the twentieth centuries. Furthermore, their Leibniz was not exclusively, or even primarily, Leibniz the philosopher, understood as we understand what it now means to be a philosopher. Leibniz was a very important figure for the eighteenth century and it would be impossible in a short essay even to survey what Leibniz and Leibnizianism meant to his followers and opponents who lived later in the century in which he died. Instead I would like to examine three interesting documents which give us important indications of his reputation in the years that followed his death in 1716. I will begin with an examination of the Éloge that Fontenelle wrote and delivered at the Académie Royale des Sciences a

282 Daniel Garber year after Leibniz’s death. I will then turn to the account of Leibniz found in Jacob Brucker’s monumental Historia critica philosophiae in 1744. I will end with a more popular work, a collection of Leibniz’s texts edited by a French priest, Jacques-André Émery, published in French in 1772. I make no claims that these texts exhaust the subject, or that they are completely representative. In particular, I am completely leaving aside the enormous influence Leibniz had in German academic philosophy in the eighteenth century, a subject that has been much studied.1 But each of the three texts I have chosen to discuss both represents how Leibniz was understood by at least some segment of the intellectual world and shaped the view that the eighteenth century had of this monumental figure. Though the three accounts are written in very different circumstances, based on different bodies of information and addressed at different audiences, they show a remarkably consistent picture of Leibniz the man and Leibniz the thinker.

FONTENELLE Bernard Le Bouvier de Fontenelle was the famous secretary of the Académie Royale des Sciences. One of his responsibilities in that role was to deliver to the Académie eulogies for deceased members. Leibniz fi rst approached the Académie in 1671, when he was only twenty-five years old. He sent them his Theoria motus abstracti, his fi rst serious work in physics, which he dedicated to the distinguished group, at the same time as he had sent the Royal Society of London his Hypothesis physica nova or Theoria motus concreti. The Royal Society responded by electing the young Leibniz a member in 1673, but it was not until 1700 that he was admitted to the Académie in Paris. Leibniz died on 14 November 1716. A year later, on 13 November 1717, Fontenelle delivered his Éloge. Fontenelle begins with the facts of Leibniz’s birth and upbringing, including the well-known stories about his early years spent reading everything in his late father’s extensive library. But very quickly he passes to some very general remarks about Leibniz’s intellectual standing. He remarks, ‘In a way like the ancients who had the skill to drive up to eight horses harnessed abreast, he drove all of the sciences abreast’ (F 425). 2 This, in turn, shapes Fontenelle’s Éloge, ‘Thus, we are obligated to divide him up here, and, to speak philosophically, to decompose him. While antiquity made one Hercules out of many, we make many savants out of one M. Leibniz’ (F 425–426). In the éloge that follows, Fontenelle breaks from a purely chronological presentation of Leibniz’s life and work, and follows the individual threads of the different domains in which Leibniz worked. One comment that Fontenelle made in connection with Leibniz’s mathematical work is also important for understanding his conception of Leibniz. Fontenelle noted that Leibniz did not write anything in the way of a

Leibniz’s Reputation

283

grand treatise on his mathematics, something which also characterises his style of working in a number of other domains. Instead he published many rather shorter articles and communicated many of his views only in letters. About this Fontenelle makes the following comment: He did not publish any body of mathematical works, but only a quantity of detached pieces, of which he could have made books, if he had wanted . . . He said that he liked to see the plants for which he had furnished the seeds growing in other people’s gardens. These seeds are often more important than the plants themselves. (F 448–449) This conception shapes Fontenelle’s view of Leibniz more generally. What were the areas that Fontenelle highlighted? Fontenelle begins in a place that we might fi nd surprising, with Leibniz’s poetry. Fontenelle goes on for some pages about his Latin and French poetry, which excited his great admiration. However, Fontenelle notes, he did not succeed so well in German poetry, which he excuses on account of the nature of that language: ‘Our prejudice for our own language, and the estimation which is due to this poet makes us believe that this [i.e. his lack of success in German poetry] was not entirely his fault’ (F 428). Fontenelle then goes on at considerable length about Leibniz’s work as a historian. He goes through each of the historical investigations that Leibniz undertook, from his fi rst work at age twenty-two concerning Polish history and the problem of succession (F 428), through to the work at the very end of his life about the origin of the French nation (F 438). Fontenelle was particularly impressed with the enormous quantity of important historical documents that Leibniz discovered and published from archives and collections all over Europe. Fontenelle then goes on to discuss at length Leibniz’s work as a jurisprudent, his writings on law and the teaching of law. It is only fairly far into the account that Fontenelle discusses Leibniz’s work as a philosopher and a mathematician. We should remember when reading this section that what Fontenelle means by philosophy is not exactly what we do. For him, the domain of philosophy includes much of what we would now think of as physics. And so, Fontenelle begins his account of Leibniz’s philosophy with an amusing story about Leibniz’s early interest in alchemy. After receiving his doctorate in law at Altdorf in 1666, Fontenelle tells us that the young Leibniz, then barely twenty years old, went to Nuremburg ‘to see the savants there’. Hearing that there was a secret alchemical society there, Leibniz decided that he wanted to find out what they knew. But not just anyone could attend their meetings. So, Fontenelle relates, Leibniz gathered up a bunch of alchemical books and copied out the most obscure expressions that they contained. He strung these together into a letter that he himself did not understand and submitted it to the society. They took him to be a genuine alchemical adept. Not only did they admit him to their society, but they made him secretary and offered him a

284 Daniel Garber pension, so eager were they to be instructed by this remarkable young man, so learned in the alchemical arts (F 440–441)! Fontenelle then discusses what he considers Leibniz’s fi rst philosophical publication, the introduction to the edition of Marius Nizolius in 1670, where Leibniz declares himself to be a mechanical philosopher, who believes that everything can be explained in terms of size, shape and motion (F 441–444). After a lengthy discussion of Leibniz’s positions on a variety of issues in this early and now largely neglected work, Fontenelle turns to another early work of Leibniz, the twin treatises on physics that Leibniz wrote in 1671 for the two great academies of Europe, the Theoria motus abstracti for the Académie Royale des Sciences of Paris and the Hypothesis physica nova for the Royal Society of London (F 441–446). Fontenelle then turns towards Leibniz’s revival of substantial forms, the critique of Cartesianism and the science of dynamics, the science of force that Leibniz claims to have founded. He discusses his attempt to combat both the Cartesian conception of matter (which Leibniz wanted to replace by one grounded in the revival of the notions of form or entelechy and matter) and the Cartesian law of the conservation of quantity of motion (which he wanted to replace with the conservation of mv²), as well as the revival of fi nal causes (F 446–448). In this Fontenelle did not think that Leibniz has succeeded, interestingly enough. He notes that while Leibniz responded vigorously to the Cartesian attacks against him, ‘it does not appear as if his view prevailed; matter remains without force, at least active force, and entelechy remains without application and without use’ (F 447). So, at least the view from Paris and the Académie Royale des Sciences, where Cartesianism was apparently alive and well as late as 1717. Fontenelle then turns away from physics (philosophy) and towards mathematics. He seems to consider this Leibniz’s greatest area of achievement: ‘The story of the differential calculus or the calculus of the infi nitely small, suffices to show us just what his genius was’ (F 449). But the real story here is the story of the priority dispute between Leibniz and Newton over the discovery of the principles of this calculus. Fontenelle goes into considerable detail on this vexed affair, devoting many, many pages to the ins and outs of the accusations and counter-accusations. Fontenelle claims neutrality in the matter: ‘It is not up to an historian, and still less to me to decide’ (F 457). But his sympathies are clearly on the side of Leibniz, both mathematically and in terms of his superior character, as demonstrated in the affair. Fontenelle then discusses Leibniz’s practical works. He mentions the story that Leibniz had wanted to invent a carriage that could go from Hannover to Amsterdam in a mere twenty-four hours, which Fontenelle claims was only meant as a joke. But he also notes Leibniz’s serious work on an automatic calculating machine and on the windmills to drain the silver mines in the Harz mountains. Fontenelle generously attributes the failure of this project to the maliciousness of the workmen who were supposed to construct the machines, who, he claims, had their reasons for wanting the project to fail.

Leibniz’s Reputation

285

It is only at this point, roughly two-thirds of the way through his éloge, that Fontenelle mentions the work that we would consider philosophical. Leibniz’s metaphysics is presented not as a central part of his intellectual personality, but as a kind of afterthought: ‘He was a metaphysician, and it was something almost impossible that he not be, since he had a mind too universal’ (F 460). The implication seems to be that Leibniz had to be interested in metaphysics simply because he was interested in everything! After a brief discussion of Leibniz’s central philosophical principles—the principle of sufficient reason, the principle of continuity, the principle of the best—Fontenelle turns to Leibniz’s philosophy. The central philosophical thesis that Fontenelle discusses—and, again, only briefly—is the hypothesis of pre-established harmony. As ingenious as it is, though, Fontenelle does not seem convinced: ‘This system gives a marvelous idea of the infi nite intelligence of the creator, but perhaps this very thing makes it too sublime for us’ (F 462). As for Leibniz’s monads, Fontenelle’s account of that is even briefer than his other discussions of Leibniz’s metaphysics. The entire theory of monads gets barely more than a page (F 462–463). Fontenelle considers Leibniz’s main metaphysical work not the Monadology, which he could not have known, but the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, which Clarke published shortly after Leibniz’s death (F 463–464). This work, of course, barely mentions the monads. After so long a familiarity with the Monadology and with other texts, mostly letters unpublished in Leibniz’s lifetime where he discusses the theory of monads in great detail, it is somewhat difficult to imagine a time when Leibniz was not associated with the metaphysics of monads. But to the contemporaries who did not have access to these texts, the Leibnizian world of monads was little more than a rumour. Writing to Leibniz on 5 May 1714, Remond remarked that a friend ‘spoke rightly when he compared the knowledge we have of your system of monads to that which one would have of the sun by the single rays that escape the clouds that cover it’.3 What we think of as central—Leibniz’s philosophical writings, his monads, his discussions of necessity and freedom and the creation of the best of all possible worlds—were hardly central in Fontenelle’s view of our philosopher. Leibniz’s theological ideas get somewhat more treatment than his metaphysics. Although he discusses a number of Leibniz’s earlier theological writings, including a very early one from 1671, Fontenelle considers the Theodicy of 1710 Leibniz’s major theological statement and discusses it in some detail. Indeed, Fontenelle claims, ‘the Theodicy alone is sufficient to represent M. Leibniz’ (F 468). Fontenelle’s account of Leibniz’s thought ends with a brief discussion of his project for a philosophical language. The Éloge also includes many interesting observations about Leibniz’s life and character. It discusses Leibniz’s role as a counsellor to a number of princes, his interest in reconciling the churches of Europe and his role in founding scientific academies. It also relates stories of a more personal nature. One concerns Leibniz’s marital state: ‘M. Leibniz never married.

286

Daniel Garber

He thought of it at the age of fifty, but the person he contemplated marrying wanted time to reflect on it. This gave M. Leibniz the leisure to do the same, and he did not marry after all’ (F 476). Another story concerns his working habits: He didn’t organize his meals by the clock, but in accordance with his studies. He didn’t have a real household, but sent out to the delicatessen for the fi rst thing he came upon . . . Often he slept only sitting up in his chair, and awoke no less refreshed at seven or eight o’clock in the morning, after which he returned to his studies. He stayed for whole months without leaving his seat, a practice well suited for advancing work, but very unhealthy. (F 476–477) It is interesting that Fontenelle hardly mentions Leibniz’s own personal faith. He notes that during his Paris years in the early 1670s, Leibniz was offered a seat in the Académie Royale des Sciences, on the condition that he convert to Catholicism, but that he refused (F 472). There is also a somewhat cryptic comment on his adherence to natural law: ‘He has been accused of having been only a great and rigid observer of natural law. His pastors made public but useless reprimands against him for that’ (F 479). The implication here seems to be that his faith was in reason (‘natural law’) rather than in revealed religion. What emerges from Fontenelle’s Éloge is the picture of a polymath, a universal genius who was interested in virtually every area of intellectual inquiry. He was a great mathematician, but he also had something interesting to say about almost everything else. And he could write elegant poetry too! Along with this went the personality of a kind of charming eccentric, too absorbed in his intellectual life to marry or even to go to bed most nights. But, at the same time, this picture suggests a kind of dissipated activity. In working on everything at once, Leibniz seemed to threaten a lack of intellectual focus, his immense energy dispersed in every direction at once, works started but not finished, ideas thrown out in embryonic form, seeds tossed out on fertile fields for others to cultivate but threatening to lie fallow. Fontenelle notes that ‘le savant Monsieur Eckard’ (F 476), Leibniz’s assistant and, in a sense, his literary executor, was planning to collect some of Leibniz’s published articles together. Fontenelle remarks, ‘[T]hat would be, so to speak, a resurection of a body whose limbs had been widely disbursed, and the whole would gain a new life through this reunification’ (F 480). This, in a sense, would put back together the one Leibniz that Fontenelle himself had dissected into a multitude of parts. But clearly it was a problem for these early readers, how to put the parts together to get a sense of the disconnected, or, at very least, very complicated whole. What is interesting here is how different this view of Leibniz is from our own. For us, Leibniz is primarily the metaphysician, a philosopher focused on the problems of the ultimate makeup of reality, on necessity

Leibniz’s Reputation

287

and contingency and on other problems that are recognisably philosophical for us. Not so for Fontenelle. For him, Leibniz was a thinker whose genius could not be confined within any single domain. This view of Leibniz that Fontenelle articulated was to shape the way readers saw him for the rest of the century.

BRUCKER At this point I would like to turn to a text published almost thirty years later, in Johann Jakob Brucker’s monumental history of philosophy. This work, the Historia critica philosophiae a mundi incunabulis ad nostram usque aetatem deducta, was fi rst published in five volumes (vols. 1–3, with a fourth volume that appeared in two parts) in Leipzig between 1642 and 1644. A second edition came out in 1766–1767, also in Leipzig, with a sixth volume added. Brucker begins with the ante-deluvians, including Adam and Noah, and ends with surveys of the philosophy of his time, including discussions of philosophy in Japan, China and other exotic places. This truly extraordinary history was written in Latin and obviously meant for a scholarly audience. In a way it marks the beginning of the academic study of the history of philosophy and influenced the way in which later thinkers saw the past.4 The chapter on Leibniz is the penultimate chapter devoted to a single author in the fi nal volume of the fi rst edition, an essay of more than a hundred pages which underlines the importance that Brucker gave to Leibniz’s thought. Since Brucker is writing a history of philosophy, it is not surprising that he emphasises Leibniz’s broadly philosophical thought more than Fontenelle did. Though there is a lengthy biographical sketch and a discussion of his character, his accomplishments and his larger intellectual context, questions to which we later turn, the discussion of his philosophy takes up almost half the chapter, roughly 50 pages out of a total of 110. In terms of texts, Brucker has very little more to work with than Fontenelle did. The philosophy is divided into five parts: logic, metaphysics, natural theology, what might be call his philosophy of nature and his precepts of natural law. What Brucker calls his logic (B § 36)5 is a summary of the theses that Leibniz put forward in the ‘Meditationes de cognitione, veritate, et ideis’, fi rst published in the Acta eruditorum in 1684 and republished a number of times afterwards. What Brucker calls his theology (B § 38) is taken from Leibniz’s Causa dei, a kind of methodical summary of the argument of the Theodicy, originally published as an independent work in 1710 but integrated with the Theodicy as an appendix starting in the second edition of 1712 and in all subsequent editions. This is followed by a summary of the theses taken from the Leibniz/Clarke letters (B § 39) and what Brucker labels as ‘juris naturalis praecepta Leibnizianae’ (B § 40), taken largely from the preface to the Codex juris gentium

288

Daniel Garber

diplomaticus (1692). But the longest section of Brucker’s discussion of Leibniz’s philosophy is his discussion of metaphysics (B § 37), and this is taken from a text that Fontenelle did not know when he was writing his Éloge, the Monadology. The Monadology was written in 1714, though after considerable study, it is still not clear exactly who the intended audience was and why it was written.6 But whatever the answers to those questions, it was not published during Leibniz’s lifetime and was not available to Fontenelle when he wrote his Éloge in 1717. However, it was available shortly thereafter. In 1720 it came out in a volume entitled Lehr-Sätze über die Monadologie, published in Frankfurt and Leipzig. The following year, in 1721, it appeared in Latin in a supplementary volume of the Acta eruditorum under the title ‘Principia philosophiae, autore G. G. Leibnitio’.7 It was a grand success. It is not surprising that the Monadology was quickly adopted, and quickly regarded as a central text in Leibniz’s philosophy. This is exactly how Brucker regarded it. His account of Leibniz’s metaphysics is a very heavily annotated and commented version of the Latin text of the Monadology, which occupies thirty pages of the fi fty pages that take up his account of Leibniz’s philosophy. The discussion of Leibniz’s philosophy at the end of Brucker’s chapter makes Leibniz look like a serious, systematic philosopher. (Unlike Fontenelle, Brucker sees Leibniz’s talent [ingenium] as being ‘almost born for metaphysical speculations’ [B 356].) But it is important to read this in the context of the full chapter. As I noted, Brucker begins with a biographical summary of Leibniz’s life, times and temperament. And here the picture that we get is much more like that which we fi nd in Fontenelle. In the course of his biographical sketch, Brucker documents the full range of Leibniz’s intellectual activity, including his studies of metaphysics, theology, mathematics, physics, politics, law, history and poetry. Brucker does highlight Leibniz’s contributions to philosophy; this is, after all, a chapter in a history of philosophy. However, philosophy is hardly highlighted in the biographical sketch. As in Fontenelle, Brucker’s Leibniz is a polymath, someone interested in and involved in everything. And even within the discussion of the theory of monads, Brucker notes that ‘Leibniz scattered the fi rst seeds of the monadology in the Theodicy’ (B 401, note 0), suggesting that it was an idea that he came to fairly late in life and thus not to be thought of as central to his philosophy. Brucker often praises Leibniz for his wide-ranging intellect and for his general powers of judgment. He writes that ‘he had not devoted himself to one science, but having published widely in the whole circuit of the disciplines, there is no science which he did not touch, examine, and enlarge’ (B 373; cf. 369f). In discussing a poem that Leibniz wrote on the death of his employer, the Elector Johann Friedrich in 1679, Brucker remarks that in the poem ‘he set forward such a faculty of poetic art and elegance in writing, that it seemed genuinely remarkable that a man so wholly occupied in exploring the abstruse mysteries of geometrical speculation and in examining political

Leibniz’s Reputation

289

argument could reveal such an easy and happy vein’ (B 352). But at the same time there is an implicit criticism of Leibniz’s breadth. Brucker writes that ‘even though Leibniz was most industrious and most patient in work, he didn’t publish large works . . . Most of what he published were shorter essays, inserted in journals, or epistolary tracts and sketches’ (B 394). Brucker further notes that ‘the full Leibnizian system of philosophy has not been constituted . . . whence it was necessary to gather it from the philosophical writings of the most excellent gentleman [i.e., Leibniz]’ (B 398). At the end of the sixth volume, a supplementary volume published in the second edition of his Historia in 1767, Brucker offers the reader a ‘Tabula Mneumonica’, a listing of the main figures treated in the body of the work, with brief descriptions in order to keep them straight in the reader’s mind. This is the entire entry for Leibniz: ‘Godfredus Guilelmus Leibnitzius, who diffused in Germany what Descartes did in France. Indeed, he did not write a body of philosophy, but only gave the foundations on which an orderly edifice of philosophy could be constructed in accordance with his conception’ (B, vol. 6, 1030). This, evidently, is Brucker’s fi nal judgment on Leibniz, what the reader is supposed to take away from the long chapter on his thought and development: that Leibniz was never able to fi nish his philosophy, that Leibniz’s thought is a series of brilliant insights, which he left for others to develop. Given Brucker’s focus on philosophy rather than on Leibniz’s more general intellectual interests, the judgment is narrower in scope than Fontenelle’s.8 But it is very much consistent with the view of Leibniz that Fontenelle presents. Like Fontenelle’s, Brucker’s Leibniz is not the philosopher narrowly focused on questions of metaphysics and logic, but the broad thinker, interested in everything, unable to limit himself to a single domain long enough to fi nish a project.

ÉMERY About fifty years after Leibniz’s death a book entitled Esprit de Leibniz, ou, Recueil des pensées choisis, sur la religion, la morale, l’histoire, la philosophie. &c. appeared anonymously in two volumes in Lyon in 1772. The Esprit de Leibniz follows closely on two important publications of Leibniz’s writings. First there was a volume edited by Rudolph Erich Raspe, Oeuvres philosophiques latines et françoises de feu Mr. De Leibnitz (1765). Despite its grand title, the overwhelming bulk of the volume is given over to the fi rst publication of the important Nouveaux Essais sur l’entendement humain. But perhaps even more important is the six-volume collection of writings edited by Louis Dutens, ambitiously entitled Opera omnia, nunc primum collecta . . . (1768). This is the fi rst of the monumental collections of Leibniz’s writings to appear. Dutens begins with Fontenelle’s Éloge, followed by excerpts from Brucker’s life of Leibniz. Then follows all of the papers that Dutens could get his hands on. Unfortunately for his contemporaries, he was not allowed access to the manuscripts in Hanover, but even

290 Daniel Garber so, the collection is impressive, indeed, overwhelming for those who had access only to the bits and pieces available in his published writings and in the smaller collections that preceded it. In this grand work Dutens collected together all the published pieces he could fi nd, pieces which, while in principle available, were often rare and hard to fi nd. In addition, he made inquiries throughout the circles of the learned in Europe to fi nd unpublished material.9 Important as such a collection is, it is not for the average reader, though. The editor of the Esprit begins by noting the publication of these two monumental volumes, but, he continues, our intention is not to criticize a collection that is extremely precious to the learned, or to diminish the recognition so justly due to the illustrious editor. We have called these observations to mind only because they gave us the idea of the collection which we present to the public, and which they [i.e., the other collections] justify in part. How many people are prevented from acquiring the complete collection by its price, and among those who have the means, how many of them are there who have neither the leisure nor the patience to dig through it in its totality, and in whose eyes a multitude of thoughts both curious and useful will never gleam? (E 1, vij)10 In this way, the Esprit represents a kind of digest of Leibniz’s thought, something accessible (and affordable) to the common reader who has neither the time nor the money for the grand editions. But there is something more to this collection of texts. Though it was published anonymously, it was edited by Jacques-André Émery. Émery was later to be a very interesting and important figure in the French church, a solid advocate for the church and for the pope during a series of rather difficult times for the church: the French Enlightenment and its rejection of religion; the Revolution, during which church properties were seized and organised religion disbanded; and the Napoleonic period, in which Napoleon claimed to be above the pope. But in 1772, he was forty years old, an up-and-coming young priest in the Order of St Sulpice who had taught at Orléons and Lyon. The Esprit de Leibniz was the first of a number of philosophical anthologies that Émery published. Others include the Le Christianisme de François Bacon (1798).11 There was an agenda behind the Leibniz book, just as there was to be an agenda behind the later books on Bacon and Descartes. Leibniz had come to be thought of as something of a freethinker after his death, as we saw in Fontenelle’s Éloge. This view of Leibniz continued through the century. Émery writes in his introduction, ‘We don’t at all hide the fact that M. Leibniz is accused of having been only a rigid adherent of natural religion’ (E 1 xx). Émery goes on to report that in Germany, Leibniz’s lack of faith is proverbial: ‘Leibniz glaube nitz’, that is, ‘Leibniz believes in nothing’ (E 1, xxvj). But Émery does not believe this: ‘[This accusation] is sufficiently destroyed by the multitude of tracts related to Christianity which we have

Leibniz’s Reputation

291

gathered in this work, tracts which carry all of the impression of the most intimate persuasion, and which are taken from all of the periods of Leibniz’s life’ (E 1 xx). But there was a further agenda behind this. Smart people are generally thought to reject religion. They advance the view that ‘incredulity is necessarily the share of someone who thinks’ and support their view by appealing to the philosophers (E 1, x). Indeed, it must have been difficult to be a genuine believer in the intellectual circles of Enlightenment France! In that context, Émery is bringing forward the views of someone generally thought to be an unbeliever in order to combat this view, and to show that as clever and accomplished a philosopher as Leibniz was also a genuine Christian. There is a slight embarrassment here for Émery, a Catholic, insofar as Leibniz was a Lutheran. Émery’s solution is to downplay Leibniz’s Lutheranism and to emphasise his sympathy towards Catholicism (E 1, xxxiv–xxxv). The selections in the two volumes are taken from two main sources, Dutens’ large collection and the Nouveaux essais that Raspe had published in his collection. There are many selections from letters, but most of the selections come either from the Nouveaux essais or from the Theodicy. (In Émery’s view, the Theodicy is Leibniz’s most important work [E 1, xxxiii– xxxiv].) Given Émery’s agenda, it is not at all surprising that there is a clear focus on passages that discuss religion, theology and the church. But Émery covers a lot of other subjects as well. The book begins with a complete reprint of Fontenelle’s Éloge. The collection that follows is, in many ways, a reflection of that conception of Leibniz. The selections on religion cover all the topics that one might expect in such a work. Much of the two volumes are concerned with Leibniz’s views on religion. There are excerpts from Leibniz’s writings about atheism (E 1, 69–70), and there are various arguments for the existence of God. Émery joins together an argument from the Confessio naturae contra atheistas (E 1, 73–78), a piece from 1668 or 1669, when Leibniz was only twenty-two or twenty-three, with an excerpt from the Theodicy, one of Leibniz’s very latest writings (E 1, 78–180). There are also proofs of the immortality of the soul (E 1, 80–82) and a long discussion largely focused on the establishment of the truth of the Christian religion (E 1, 89–124, 166–173). There are also discussions of anti-Trinitarianism (E 1, 324–326), Islam (E 1, 326–332) and Chinese religion (E 1, 332–357), as well as discussions of theological questions in specific authors, including Pierre-Daniel Huet (E 1, 89–106), John Toland (E 1, 125–146), John Locke (E 1, 253–310) and Pierre Bayle (E 1, 229–252). In addition there are discussions of religion as it is organised, including the papacy (E 2, 6–7, 13–28), individual popes (E 1, 28–31), the horoscope of Jesus (E 2, 52–53), witches and heretics (E 2, 63–65) and other topics of interest to Émery and his audience. The section on morals (E 2, 358–456) takes up some fairly straightforward questions in moral philosophy, such as disinterested virtue, the control of thoughts and passions and the confl ict between the passions and reason. But in this section Émery also discusses some further questions that relate to religion, including the relation between natural law

292 Daniel Garber and God as a legislator, natural theology, true piety, the effects of the love of God, toleration and the question as to the morals of an atheist. But there are also sections on many topics that are not directly connected with religion. There is a section on education, though very short (E 2, 119–136), and a longer section on logic, taken mostly from the Nouveaux essais (E 2, 137–169). There is a section labelled ‘psychologie’, which contains a number of observations about the soul (E 2, 169–201). The section on languages (E 2 202–267) includes discussions about the universal characteristic that Leibniz had envisioned, as well as discussions of particular natural languages, the origin of languages and the origin of the name of Jupiter. The section on physics (E 2, 267–342) is quite curious. While it includes little of what a learned contemporary would call physics, it does include discussions of what we can know about other planets and their inhabitants, monsters, the generation of animals, fossils, including some mammoth teeth found in Germany, as well as some remarks about Newton. The section on medicine (E 2, 343–366) is very short, but includes discussions of alchemical medicine and Chinese medical thought. On the other hand, the section on history (E 2, 367–452) is rather lengthy and includes discussions of many particular historical events and figures, as well as some general observations about both. The anthology also contains a selection of Leibniz’s own poetry, as well as some general remarks about poetry and literature and anecdotes about particular figures (E 2, 453–497). Mathematics and metaphysics are, in general, not included in the anthology, because, Émery implies in his introduction, they are too difficult for the average reader to follow (E 1, xliij). But at the end of the second volume (E 2, 499–535), he includes the Monadology, ‘for those who want to get a general idea of the philosophy of M. Leibniz, and want to see it as if in a picture’ (E 1 xliij–xliv). It is interesting to note here that what he provides is not the French text, which was not yet available, but a French translation of the Latin translation published in 1721 in the Acta eruditorum and reprinted in Dutens. What emerges from this anthology is very much what emerges from Fontenelle’s Éloge: the picture of a polymath, a universal genius who was interested in virtually every area of intellectual inquiry. He was a great mathematician, but he also had something interesting to say about almost everything else. Even with the Monadology tacked onto the end, the overwhelming impression that Émery’s collection gives is that of a Leibniz whose efforts are spread throughout virtually all the different domains of learning, but who lacks a central focus. Émery’s collection proved popular enough to appear three years later in a German translation,12 and then in an augmented French edition in 1803, published interestingly enough after the French Revolution.13 After his death in 1811 the book was published again in 1838 and in 1870. In this way Fontenelle’s picture of Leibniz survived well into the nineteenth century.

Leibniz’s Reputation

293

NOTES 1. For a general discussion focusing on Leibniz’s reception in Germany in Catherine Wilson, “The Reception of Leibniz in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Jolley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 442–74. For somewhat more specialized studies, see Giorgio Tonelli, “Leibniz on Innate Ideas and the Early Reaction to the Publication of the Nouveauz Essais (1765),” Journal of the History of Philosophy 12 (1974), 437–54; Henry Allison, ed., The KantEberhard Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) and Eric Watkins, “From Pre-Established Harmony to Physical Influx: Leibniz’s Reception in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Perspectives on Science 6 (1998), 136–203. See also the numerous references to earlier literature in these essays. Thanks to Desmond Hogan for his help on this question. 2. References to Fontenelle’s Éloge are to its publication in Tome I of Eloges des academiciens avec l’histoire de l’Academie royale des sciences en M. DC. XCIX (The Hague: Chez Isaac vander Kloot, 1740) 424–480. References will be given in parentheses in the body of the text, preceded by ‘F’. All translations are mine. 3. Leibniz, Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. Carl Immanuel Gerhardt, vol. 3 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–1890) 616. 4. On Brucker, see Lucien Braun, Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1973) 119–137; Frances Bottin, Mario Longo and Gregario Piaia, Dall’età cartesiana a Brucker, vol. 2 of Storia delle storie generali della filosofi a, ed. Giovanni Santinello (Brescia: Editrice La Scuola, 1979) 527–635; Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann and Theo Stammen, eds., Jacob Brucker (1696–1770): Philosoph und Historiker der europäischen Aufklärung (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998). 5. References will be given in the text, either to section numbers or to page numbers, in both cases preceded by ‘B’. When no volume number is given the reference will be to the fi fth volume of the fi rst edition (i.e., part II of volume 4), where the main entry on Leibniz is found. 6. For a recent view on the composition of the Monadology, see Enrico Pasini, ‘La Monadologie: histoire de naissance’, La Monadologie de Leibniz: Genèse et contexte, ed. Enrico Pasini (Paris and Milan: Mimesis, 2005) 85–122. 7. On the history of the first publication of the Monadology in German and Latin, see Antonis Lamarra, Roberto Palaia and Pietro Pimpinella, Le prime traduzioni della Monadologie di Leibniz (1720–1721) (Florence: Olschki, 2001). 8. Brucker knew Fontenelle’s Éloge of Leibniz, and mentions it favourably at the beginning of his own chapter on Leibniz. See B 336. 9. On Dutens, see Émile Ravier, Bibliographie des oeuvres de Leibniz (Hildesheim: Olms, 1966) 175–178. 10. Page references to the Esprit de Leibniz are given in the text, ‘E’ followed by the volume number (1 or 2) and the page. 11. The biographical information is based on the entry in volume 12 of Roman D’Amat, ed., Dictionnaire de Biographie Française (Paris: Letouzey at Ané, 1970). 12. Geist des Herrn von Leibnitz oder auserlesene Gedanken über die Religion, Moral, Sprachen und Geschichte aus allen seinen Werken zusammengatragen aus dem Französischen übersetzt (Wittenberg and Zerbst: Bey Samuel Gottfried Zimmermann, 1775). Interestingly enough, the German version does not contain the Monadology. 13. Pensées de Leibniz sur la Religion et la Morale. Seconde édition de l’Ouvrage intitulé Esprit de Leibniz, considérablement augmenté (Paris and Noyons, 1803).

16 Leibniz’s Reputation in the Eighteenth Century Kant and Herder Catherine Wilson

Until the publication of multi-volume editions of his work by Rudolf Raspé in 1765 and Louis Dutens in 1768, Leibniz was remembered in Europe as a mathematician, a physicist, a founder of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, a diplomat and a historian. He was chiefly remembered in England as the opponent of Newton, as the wronging party in the vicious priority dispute over the invention of the calculus. In France he did not fare much better among philosophers, thanks to the anti-metaphysical scorn of Condillac and Voltaire. His reputation was based on a small sample of his writings, chiefly on the popular Theodicy, which was printed in about fi fteen separate editions, the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, his Protogaea and the essays on natural philosophy that he had published in the Acta Eruditorum. His quarrels with the Cartesians over forces and with the Newtonians over space and time were registered, but he was not regarded as a systematic metaphysician, certainly not as an idealist and theist—though Dutens’ motives in publishing his edition according to Albert Heinekamp were to wage war against Enlightenment scepticism.1 Leibniz had been considered by his contemporaries an ‘indifferentist’ in matters of religion, neither a heretic nor a professor; as one who recognised religious belief as politically expedient, but not a man of deep religious feeling. The Discourse on Metaphysics, his first attempt to construct a philosophical theory of substance, causality, perception, mind-body and God-world relations, was unknown. In the years following Leibniz’s death in 1716, Christian Wolff was regarded as the philosopher who transformed Leibniz’s fragmentary and fragmented thoughts into a profound and comprehensive system. Although the reconstruction of Leibniz as a systematic philosopher was not accomplished in the eighteenth century, by 1800 he had decisively eclipsed his once celebrated follower. At least three developments are implicated in the installation of Leibniz in the historian’s pantheon.2 First, as experimental and observational philosophy turned to chemistry, plant and animal life, and psychological phenomena, such as imagination, sensibility, emotion and mesmerism, the unfolding of latent structures through the action of vital forces interior to them, and the development of latent capacities through the action of environmental agents external

Leibniz’s Reputation in the Eighteenth Century

295

to them, became the dominant descriptive-explanatory schemes of natural philosophy, displacing corpuscles and mechanisms. Though Leibniz had in fact thought that corpuscularian mechanism was the correct theory of what he sometimes refers to as ‘mere physical science’, his critique of Cartesianism and his insistence on the existence of supra-mechanical laws were remembered. The vital materialism of Buffon, whose ‘organic molecules’ resembled the minute animated beings portrayed in the Monadology, seemed to vindicate speculative metaphysics by quasi-science. To be sure, not all of what Yvon Belaval refers to as ‘coloration leibnizienne’3 derived from a direct reading of Leibniz, but the temporalisation of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ owed much to what A. O. Lovejoy called the ‘labyrinth of the Leibnitian metaphysics, cosmology, and embryology’.4 Second, Platonism, as it was interpreted in the late eighteenth century, fulfi lled a longing for a mystical, spiritistic philosophy independent of Christian dogma and furnished an intellectual refuge from the harsher forms of materialism, such as those represented by the uncompromising determinist and hedonist Baron Holbach.5 The publication of the New Essays, the pièce de resistance brought out by Raspé in his six-volume Amsterdam edition of Leibniz’s works, was a landmark in this respect. In the preface to his imaginary dialogue with Locke, Leibniz declared his allegiance to Plato and assigned Locke to the Aristotelian camp, by the late eighteenth century fatally associated with defunct scholasticism. Third, as Wolff’s reputation was collapsing under Kant’s assault, lovers of metaphysics turned to Spinoza and Leibniz.6 For the most part, Kant was ready to attack the ‘errors’ of the Leibnizians and was little concerned with the differences between Leibniz and his followers, at least until he was forced to acknowledge them, at which point he admitted to a kind of grudging respect for Leibniz, who, unlike Wolff, had not tried to dominate philosophy with his personal system. Kant, despite his description of the Critique of Pure Reason as ‘the true apology for Leibniz’,7 probably did not win any new readers for his predecessor. The fact that Kant, and not Leibniz, is regarded as the first great German philosopher is partly explained by the disunified state of the German-speaking provinces in the late seventeenth century, partly by Leibniz’s preference for French and Latin as philosophical languages, but also by Kant’s own domination of German philosophy with his personal system. This domination appears in retrospect to need some form of genuinely clarifying explanation, that is, some explanation that does not cite Kant’s being the fi rst great German philosopher as the cause of his being regarded as the fi rst great German philosopher. A very different, almost reverential image of Leibniz appears in Kant’s pupil and rival, J. G. Herder. In the remainder of this chapter, I try to show how Leibniz’s standing with each of them affected and was affected by their broader concerns and doctrines.8 It is generally conceded that the New Essays did not specially interest Kant.9 The post-Kantian generation by contrast was deeply receptive to their doctrines and to their literary quality. Modern commentators tend to consider them a reactive work with little or no relationship to authentic

296

Catherine Wilson

Leibnizian metaphysics. Leibniz appears to make substantial concessions to his interlocutor with respect to the theory of names, species and essences and personal identity, and the views of Leibniz and Locke on these issues turn out to be surprisingly close. In the preface, however, Leibniz maintains that he and Locke are poles apart and that he, Leibniz, is the more ‘more esoteric and abstract’ philosopher. However, although he insists throughout the work on the importance of the correct understanding of metaphysical concepts such as that of substance and on the importance of formal reasoning and mathematical rigour, there is a vividness and concreteness in his imagery that is anything but esoteric and abstract. He refers to the ‘living fi res or flashes of light hidden inside us but made visible by the stimulation of the senses, as sparks can be struck from a steel’—flashes revealing ‘something divine and eternal’ in us. He alludes to the ‘immeasurable fi neness of things’ and the ‘infi nity of perceptions [within us] . . . of which we are unaware because these impressions are either too minute and too numerous, or else too unvarying’. He says that the ‘present is big with the future and burdened with the past’ and that ‘eyes as piercing as God’s could read in the lowliest substance the universe’s whole sequence of events’ (NE A 44–68).10 And he allows to beasts a ‘shadow of reason’. Leibniz agrees with Locke that the organic bodies of living creatures are, as Philonous puts it, ‘constantly fleeting particles of matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized body’ (NE A 233). A human being is, for Leibniz, a fi nely tuned apparatus, composed of (literally) innumerable parts, fluttering in response to the most delicate unconscious stimuli, moved by barely discernible forms of inquiétude, and experiencing a constant play of images and thoughts (NE A 164–166). But living things cannot be mere machines. Without souls, there cannot be vital unity or moral identity. The causal theory of perception, while adequate for mere physical science, obscures the metaphysical truth as Leibniz saw it. Perception is not a passive process of imprinting by the environment; rather, all thoughts, feelings and experiences are produced by subject itself, brought to consciousness from its inner depths. All this resonated with the romantic philosophers who agreed that sensibility, imagination and understanding were aspects of a single, active representational faculty.

I. KANT Kant set himself the task of defeating hedonistic materialism on the one hand and spiritualistic enthusiasm on the other. The ‘critical philosophy’ derived from Locke and Hume would complete the task of critique they had begun, but without derailing into Humeaen atheism and sentimental ethics. Instead, the critical philosophy would preserve the deontological ethics with a stoic flavour to which Kant was drawn for reasons of temperament and upbringing, as well as for reasons of logic and rationality, ensuring its applicability even to a world in which Newtonian mechanics offered the

Leibniz’s Reputation in the Eighteenth Century

297

best possible empirical account of nature, and even in case a punishing and rewarding God did not actually exist, but was only a thought-object, as critical philosophers suggested. In the metaphysics of Wolff and his followers, Kant saw an irrelevancy, a distraction and to some extent even a danger to his programme. Wolff’s version of Leibnizian metaphysics was not, in Kant’s view, adequate to the moral and political demands of the age. It insisted on the clarification of concepts, but it was also impersonal, deterministic—indeed, fatalistic. The interminable quarrels of metaphysicians over space, time, substance, free will and creation provoked in observers little except cynicism about moral and theological concepts. Kant saw Leibniz’s philosophy through the Wolffian lens. The fairytale aspects of the monadology could not survive, he thought, the withering critique of metaphysics of Locke and Hume. Leibnizian metaphysics, insofar as it represented the world as perfect from the moment of its creation, was also contrary to the spirit of reform, static and ahistorical. (As Lovejoy notes, developmental imagery and doctrines co-existed in Leibniz with a strong commitment to an atemporal best of all possible worlds doctrine.) Human striving, in full recognition of the evil nature of man, in Kant’s view, had to replace complacent metaphysical optimism. His method of critical attack was to tackle Leibnizian concepts and doctrines—sufficient reason, preestablished harmony, theodicy, unextended atoms, the identity of indiscernibles, the ideality of space and time—one by one, with the aim of showing how Leibniz was philosophically mistaken with respect to the metaphysical basics.11 His claim that the Leibnizians confused perception with thought and abolished the distinction between phenomena and noumena makes a simple point, but one that is rarely explained clearly. So it is worth reviewing it and pointing out its connection with other Kantian theses. The theory of monads posited immaterial, indivisible soul-like entities, each one of which is perfectly unique, in place of material atoms of a certain sameness. Space and time, according to Leibniz, are not vast pre-existing containers in which these items are distributed. Space and time are somehow ‘founded upon’ the monads. Because each monad perceptually represents to itself a universe of things, as if from a particular point of view, in the intuitive but purely phenomenological sense of that phrase, and because monads are differentiated one from another by their perceptions, there cannot, Leibniz thought, exist two different monadic perceivers that are identical. Kant’s response to this argument was that while we cannot conceive of two water droplets that are exactly alike, qualitatively speaking, and yet exist in duplicate, there is no reason why we should not be able to perceive or to imagine two water droplets that are exactly alike in space. By ‘that one’, we can know which one we meant. Space is not a vast container, but it is not imaginary either—it is, Kant said (inventing a third category for it, or rather drawing on the old distinction between ‘matter’ and ‘form’), a ‘form of intuition’. Perceiving is not just a way of conceiving, and the Leibnizian thesis of the identity of indiscernibles is accordingly gratuitous. The fundamental elements of things do not need to be unique, discernible

298

Catherine Wilson

individuals if there is to be a genuine plurality of them, and this argument for the existence and uniqueness of monads evaporates. Leibniz could not have known, moreover, of the existence of monads— subvisible animate beings with representational and appetitive capacities— and if we are restricted to what can be inferred from experience or what must be posited on the basis of experience, we will be led, Kant thought, to an approximately Newtonian scientific ontology of attractive and repulsive forces, together with whatever other forces of nature empirical research conducted along the same lines as existing physics will reveal. Newtonian science does not permit us to deal with an infi nity of unique individuals determined by their own laws of inner development, but posits particles and masses whose behaviour is described by the laws of nature. Nevertheless, Kant maintained, we cannot establish that material atoms are the fundamental elements of the external world and that particles and mechanical forces are all there is. For fi rst, the truly fundamental entities that give rise to the appearances that we systematise in natural science cannot be revealed by experimentation, because they are in principle unobservable, or by logic, which tells us what is possible, not what is actual. Second, the development and reproduction of plants and animals probably cannot be explained mechanically. Third, we cannot apply a Newtonian analysis to ourselves, conceiving ourselves as automatic machines. We do not perceive souls and their powers, even confusedly, any more than we perceive God. But to explain to ourselves why moral endeavour is not futile, we need to think of God as a lawgiver and of free will as universal human endowment. As Leibniz and Wolff thought of a mechanical world as one face of a moral world of compensation and divine justice, Kant thought of the ‘Newtonian plus’ theory of the natural order—Newtonian mechanics plus whatever vital principles needed to be introduced to explain life scientifically—as accompanied by a theory of the moral order resting on concepts that were not ‘mere ideas’—fanciful inventions or ideology. These concepts—God, the soul, free will and immortality—were necessary, he claimed, for completing a rational picture of the world. Anything but an optimist about human nature, Kant saw human beings as afflicted by radical evil, as persistent and ineluctable as original sin.12 His Anthropology could be described as, in early modern terms, a ‘satire’— a mordant, supposedly objective, examination of the greed, vanity and hypocrisy of natural man. Where Leibniz was charmed by the notion that one might be determined yet spontaneous, Kant tended to mistrust human spontaneity outside of controlled artistic contexts. Freedom was most clearly manifested, in his view, in self-control of pathological impulses. Though he famously maintained in one of his essays against Herder that ‘man needs a master’, Kant was somewhat hopeful that humans could shift from obedience to external sources of command to obedience to internal sources of command. Resisting, in this respect, the desacralisation trends of Enlightenment political theory,13 Kant saw the pacification of the savage

Leibniz’s Reputation in the Eighteenth Century

299

as a cruel but historically inevitable process of metaphysical significance. It recapitulated the moralisation process in the individual as he brought his natural drives and instincts under the control of his autonomous will. The development of his latent talents was a duty for the individual, implying, like the fulfilment of all duties, combat with his natural inclinations, while the emergence of a uniformly civilised global political community depended on combat in the geopolitical arena. Though Kant deplored war, he perceived it as having a meaning and a use: ‘So long as human culture remains at its present stage, war is . . . an indispensable means of advancing it further’; he argued against Herder, ‘and only when culture has reached its full development—and only God knows when that will be—will perpetual peace become possible and of benefit to us’.14 Thus the pietistic concern with inward discipline and the objective and cynical perspective of the historian came into a strange alignment. All this was very far from the spirit of Leibniz, whose views about moral and political progress were not phrased in the language of conquest. It might seem strange to think of Leibniz as a materialist of any stamp, but, as Margaret Wilson fi rst pointed out, his critique of Cartesian mentalism was thorough and profound;15 as an anti-anti-materialist, his doctrines were eminently co-optable. His theory of ‘pre-established harmony’, advanced in his New System of the Nature and Communication of Substances, implied that every bodily state in a living creature corresponded to some inner sensitive or appetitive state, and vice versa. He insisted further that souls are everywhere in nature attatched to organic bodies: ‘I think that there is no smallest animal or living thing, that there is none without an organic body, none whose body is not, in turn, divided into many substances. Therefore, one will never arrive at living points, that is, points endowed with forms’.16 Neither implication is present in Cartesianism or in occasionalism, insofar as there is no reason why every bodily state should cause or occasion God to bring about some mental state. The Cartesians further insisted that some mental states had no physical correlates and that separated minds not only were conceivable, but also really existed, at least insofar as they claimed to have demonstrated the immortality of the soul. For all its seeming quaintness, Leibniz’s parallelist theory approached more closely to an identity theory of mind and body than his predecessors’ had. As the clarity of our vision depends on the focusing power of the eye, the quality of the experiences of a creature depends upon the type of organisation it sustains in its body. Though every animal is infinitely complex, there is a hierarchy of organic types with more complex bodies exhibiting more sensitive and subtle sets of capacities. The immortality of the soul requires the immortality of the organism, though not necessarily always in the shape and size that we associate with organisms of that type. These views have generated a great deal of puzzlement in the literature. How does Leibniz’s commitment to embodiment co-exist with the metaphysical doctrines of immateriality, windowlessness and acausality characterising

300

Catherine Wilson

the entities of the fundamental ontological level—the monads? Nevertheless, there are good reasons not to take the embodiment theory as any less authentic than the monadology. Leibniz’s theory of the organism thus invited speculation as to the particularities of thinking, feeling and agency that might accompany bodies and brains of various sorts, and it was congenial to eighteenth-century philosophical anthropologists who were fascinated by questions of temperamental, racial and sexual difference in emotion and mentality. Insofar, as one of Kant’s aims after his ‘critical’ turn was to distinguish pure philosophy—the repository of such a priori knowledge as could be obtained after the pruning operations of critique—from anthropology and empirical psychology, he dismissed the question of the relationship of the brain and body to thought and perception and of constitution to character. ‘I seek . . . the possibility of the modification of human nature in general’, he wrote to Marcus Herz in 1773. ‘Thus, that subtle enquiry into the manner in which bodily organs are related to thoughts is omitted’.17 There is a quick attempted refutation in the second edition of the First Critique of the possibility ‘of any explanation in materialist terms of the constitution of the self as a merely thinking subject’,18 but detailed investigation of that question would have, in the terms of Kant’s system, implied the confused and repugnant blending together in theory of a transcendental concept— the soul—with a biomedical one—the body. The world of living forms remained for Kant puzzling and, in some ways, disturbing. The a priori element—present to some extent in Newtonian physics—seemed to be lacking in the theory of living nature. There was no necessity at all to the existence of the plant and animal forms around us, or of any living forms at all, and although Kant tried to speak to the topic, philosophical reflection gave few positive results when it came to understanding the origins of life, generation, transformation or the existence of species and races.19 The conclusions of the second part of Critique of Judgement are agnostic. Relative to his contemporaries, Kant was not biophilic; he occasionally mentions his approval of gardens and leafy decorations, and he disapproved of cruelty to animals, but one cannot say he felt, intuitively, the unity of the living world as his romantic successors professed to, and as Leibniz had before them. Largely on the basis of a widely circulated letter he did not, in the opinion of modern scholars, write, the ‘Letter to Hansch’, Leibniz was ascribed radical views on continuity that evidently denied the reality of species. In any event, rather than attending to the gradations and continuities that were salient to mainstream natural historians, Kant focused on ruptures and levels—between the species, between man and animal and between philosophy—which studied the necessary and universal endowments of humans, and anthropology, which studied their contingent and local characteristics. He described Leibniz’s principle of continuity as mere intellectual prejudice, insisting that observation did not objectively support it, allowing only that the ‘law of the ladder of continuity among creatures’ had regulative importance in natural history.20 His view, expressed in his

Leibniz’s Reputation in the Eighteenth Century

301

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, that the drives and instincts humans share with animals are pathological and exist in an ongoing state of conflict with our moral motives, and that our relation to moral good is mediated only through the noumenal will, were orthogonal to English and French trends towards ethical naturalism.

II. HERDER Johann Gottfried von Herder’s claim to be considered Kant’s equal as a moral and political philosopher is not negligible. He was admired by no less a moralist than John Stuart Mill, but his difficult, somewhat impressionistic style, and the unsavoury associations that developed in the twentieth century between romanticism and fascism21 affected his subsequent reputation as much as did Kant’s scorn. One can well imagine Kant’s annoyance at the opening sentence of Herder’s Uebers Erkennen und Empfinden in der Menschlichen Seele,22 a work whose premise is that intellection, perception and feeling are the capabilities of a single faculty. ‘With regards to simple ideas’, said Herder, ‘Locke is as inferior to Leibniz as the old opticians of the past who took the sunbeam for something simple were inferior to Newton. If Leibniz has written the story of the human mind, and Locke too, that of the former is like the account of an insect by Roesel, that of the latter, the sketch of a Frisch’.23 He described Leibniz as the author of the Monadenpoem, and in an essay on the ‘two sisters’— philosophy and enthusiasm—he distinguished sharply between Leibniz and Wolff, who as follower and interpreter, ‘made out of flashes of wit and insight [mere] theorems . . . Leibniz, Leibniz, where was your spirit?’24 Herder had encountered the Principles of Nature and Grace, the Theodicy, the essay On the Nature and Communication of Substances and the New Essays by 1769, and he made long extracts from the preface of the last-named work under the title ‘Truths out of Leibniz’. Despite his occasional criticisms, he was a passionate and lifelong admirer. ‘How often have I thought in these times’, he wrote in 1795 in his Letters on the Development of Humanity, ‘if only Leibniz were alive!’25 He approved of Leibniz’s tireless efforts to unify the confessions, his investigations into the structure and history of languages, his endeavours on behalf of the Prussian Academy and his intellectual generosity and distaste for the sectarian spirit. 26 He quoted with approval the passage in the New Essays in which Leibniz spoke despairingly of the appearance of men who had lost—through the adoption of false philosophies, or failure at least to adopt the true one— all sense of personal morality and public spiritedness.27 Beyond the philosopher’s admirable concern with public institutions and the state of the profession, Leibniz’s views on continuity, force and individuality were of particular interest to this late eighteenth-century reader. As noted, Kant saw no reason why two identical leaves, water drops or material particles should not exist, and it would have been equally a matter of indifference to him if two identical persons should happen to exist.

302

Catherine Wilson

Individuality has no positive role to play in his philosophy. It is important, according to Kant’s moral theory, to be a separate person—one who is not presumed on, who is not a slave to others, whose boundaries are respected. The philosophical moralist, however, unlike the anthropologist, need not take into account personality, character or differences in physical constitution, only the characteristics of any creature endowed with reason and will. The individual is, in any case, a transitory actor, and the enlightenment of the human race, as Kant envisioned it, did not require the enlightenment of each individual, or even a universal standard of education. In one of his essays against Herder, he insisted that ‘[i]n Man, the capacities for the exercise of his reason will never develop themselves fully in the individual but only in the species as a whole’. 28 Thus Kant could believe in his optimistic moments that the human race was advancing, or could advance, while denying, for example, the appropriateness of the education of women. This indifference to the development of individual capacities Herder found alarming, referring in the second part of the Ideen to Kant’s ‘Averroism’, according to which ‘the entire species of men possesses only a single and rather meagre soul which is shared out amongst individual men’.29 He prized individuality and self-consciousness and gave them a kind of eudaemonistic glazing: ‘Each person, each period, each nation, has its centre of happiness within itself’.30 In his best-known work, the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschchichte der Menschheit, published in sections between 1784–1791 and treated with no little severity by Kant, Herder recorded his knowledge of and views on cosmogenesis and cosmology; comparative plant and animal anatomy; forces, drives and instincts; mentality, religion; comparative social and political systems; climate; imagination; sensibility; and the development of human talents. All this was followed by another 450 pages or so on geography, ancient history and cultures, the Roman occupation, the empire of the Arabs, the crusades and other topics. Not a critical philosopher in the sense of his teacher, Herder disclaimed Kantian agnosticism about vital forces and enthusiastically insisted on the relation of thought to its material substrate: ‘All active forces of nature are living ones; there must be something within that corresponds to their effects seen from without, as Leibniz divined and taught us. That we have no name for the inner condition of the plant or the forces working underneath it, is only a deficiency in our language’.31 His understanding of forces and substances is virtually hylomorphic, like Leibniz’s. ‘No force of nature is without its organ . . . Wherever we see a force at work, it is in a organ and acting harmoniously’.32 Rejecting Leibniz’s typically seventeenthcentury preformation theory and his restriction of empirically detectable forces to the vis viva, the principle of life, Herder decided, is a kind of aethereal or electrical current that circulates ‘in the vessels of plants, in the arteries, veins and muscles of animals, and finally in the nervous apparatus’. The ‘inner organic forces’ of nature build the snail’s shell, the bee’s cells and the spider’s web.33 He echoes the vitalism of the Monadology:

Leibniz’s Reputation in the Eighteenth Century

303

However great the variety of terrains and climates, of the stones, and plants of our earth, how much greater is the differentiation of its living inhabitants. They are not limited to the earth; air, the water, even the inner parts of plants and animals throng with living things . . . The world’s lively surface, upon which everything, as far and wide as the sun reaches, enjoys, acts, and lives.34 Though he sometimes referred to speech and reason as divine endowments, Herder essentially regarded all powers as divine endowments and tended to materialism, leavened by the appeal to forces.35 Human beings were animals with large and complex brains whose upright posture had freed their hands for manufacture and who possessed exceptionally well-developed powers of speech. ‘I do not abruptly endow man with new powers’, he claimed, and the orang-utan is anatomically so similar to man that ‘his powers of thought lie on the edge of reason’.36 The quality of experience and feeling of any creature depends entirely on its organisation and nervous system.37 Leibniz had advanced the ancestor of this claim in the Monadology: ‘We see . . . that nature has given heightened perceptions to animals from the care she has taken to furnish them organs that collect [numerous] rays of light or . . . waves of air’.38 And he offered markedly somatic accounts of volition, desire and happiness in some of the most memorable passage of the New Essays: ‘The choice that we make [when we turn right or left at the end of a lane] arises from . . . insensible stimuli, which, mingled with the actions of objects and of our bodily interiors, make us fi nd one direction of movement more comfortable than the other’ (NE A 166). Happiness is defi ned as ‘lasting pleasure’ which, ‘in metaphysical strictness’, originates in the soul but, insofar as it depends on ‘minute insensible perceptions’, pleasurable thoughts ‘come from the body’ (NE A 194). This somatic view of happiness is shared by Herder, for whom merely living and being had a kind of ethical significance: Every living being enjoys its existence; it does not inquire into or brood over, the reasons of its existence. Its purpose is intrinsic to itself. No savage commits suicide, no animal destroys itself. They propagate their species without knowing why, and submit to every toil and exertion under the severest climate merely in order to live. This simple, deeprooted feeling of existence, this something sui generis is happiness.39 Kant, for his part, acknowledged the ‘strongest and deepest inclination to happiness’ in all people, but he constructed a set of oppositions between happiness and morality. ‘It must seem strange’, he remarks in the Critique of Practical Reason, that philosophers both of ancient and modern times could have found ‘happiness in proportion to virtue already in this life . . . or persuaded themselves that they were conscious of it’.40 Happiness is for heaven, where it is the appropriate reward of virtue—not for this world.

304

Catherine Wilson

Though we are said to have a duty to assure our own happiness, lest we experience temptations to moral transgression, happiness is more typically the subject of hypothetical but not category imperatives: If [in a human being] the proper end of nature were its preservation, its welfare, in a word its happiness, then nature would have hit upon a very bad arrangement in selecting the reason of the creature to carry out this purpose . . . [T]he cultivation of reason, which is requisite to the fi rst and unconditional purpose, limits in many ways—at least in this life—the attainment of the second, namely happiness, which is always conditional.41 Kant does not entirely discount happiness, which he defines in terms similar to Herder’s, as ‘a rational being’s consciousness of the agreeableness of life, uninterruptedly accompanying his whole existence’.42 He responded to his critic Garve’s accusations of excessive rigour and harshness that happiness, provided it was perfectly unified with moral worth, was the creator’s intention for man. But he repeated his view that ‘man . . . must totally separate his desire for happiness from the concept of duty, in order to preserve the latter’s purity’.43 Despite his views that confl ict and a struggle for existence were pervasive in nature, that cultural evolution always involved losses as well as gains, and despite his fascination with ancient Teutonic tribes, Herder was not a proponent of the militaristic nationalism that is often contrasted with Kant’s alleged cosmopolitan outlook. He was moved by the Leibnizian notion of unity in variety and rejected authoritarian—in favour of distributed—political power. He deemed the existence of separate cultures valuable on the grounds that the world is more glorious when experienced from a multitude of distinct perspectives. The world presents ‘infi nite diversity, striving to become a unity, that lies in everyone, that advances us all’.44 The sublime metaphysical solitude of the striving monads held no interest for him however; ‘[n]ature has no more made us scattered stones in a field than egoistic monads’.45

CONCLUSION The Kantian image of Leibniz as the proponent of a set of mostly disjoint metaphysical theses reflected the Kantian ambition to purify philosophy from the admixture of everything empirical; to consider only the necessary forms of experience and agency as they would have to apply to all sentient, ratiocinative and active beings; and to not confuse the tasks of philosophy with the tasks of natural history, physiology or psychology. Leibniz was, in Kant’s view, often a victim of this confusion: he resorted to images and metaphors in a metaphysical context in which non-picturable concepts were in play, and he repeatedly confused psychology with epistemology, logic with physics. So Kant ignored or ridiculed the pictures and dealt in an abstract manner with

Leibniz’s Reputation in the Eighteenth Century

305

the words of the chief Leibnizian doctrines. This approach is followed by historians of philosophy who—without necessarily trying to refute the Leibnizian doctrines as Kant did—focus on problems arising from the consideration of particular statements in Leibniz, such as the question how a philosopher who maintains that an individual corresponds to a unique infinite list of predicates can account for counterfactual statements about persons, or how Leibnizian determinism is compatible with any kind of free will sufficient to establish moral responsibility or exempt God from blame. Herder, who mistrusted what he considered the hypertrophy of analytic rationality, read Leibniz differently—for the pictures, one might say, rather than for the propositions. The vivid imagery of the Monadology and the New Essays impressed him, as it did other sentimental and romantic philosophers, including Schelling, who attempted to pursue nature philosophy in a Kantian vein.46 The continuity between man and animal, the multiplicity of possible perspectives, the ubiquity of sensitivity and appetite, the intrinsic value of individual personality and distinct cultures and the hints of materialism and eudaemonism—co-existing with a strong sense of virtue and moral progress—comprised for him the ‘truths out of Leibniz’. While both philosophers were preoccupied with the Leibnizian themes of progress and improvement, Herder’s Letters on the Improvement of Humanity have a more recognisably Leibnizian ring to them than Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’: The divine in our species is the construction of humanity; all the great and good men, legislators, inventors, philosophers, poets, arts, every elevated man in his own condition who by the raising of his children, the observation of his duties, through example, labour, foundation, and doctrine, has helped in this task . . . The cultivation of humanity is an effort that must be tirelessly pursued, lest we sink, from all levels, back into raw animality and brutality.47 Herder denied, in the words of one of his interpreters, ‘that autonomy or rationality are able to produce ethical humanism in the absence of recognizably moral sanctions’.48 An opponent of colonialism, along with Diderot and others among the French philosophes, he insisted that ‘[n]ature is a living whole and must be gently pursued and improved, not mastered by force’. Morality depended upon, he said—though it was not exhausted by—a ‘lively, quick displacement of oneself into the position of the weak, the wandering, the suffering, the victimized’.49 Kant’s ambition to uncover the a priori element in human knowledge to the extent that it could be uncovered within a critical framework and to purify morals, politics and the theory of knowledge from what he regarded as empirical contamination motivated his criticisms of Leibniz. Reciprocally, Herder’s enthusiasm for Leibniz helps to explain his rejection of Kantian pure philosophy. Kantian pure philosophy is currently in retreat,50 and recent Kant scholarship seeks to construct a new image of Kant as a philosopher

306

Catherine Wilson

for whom the concepts of beauty, genius, spontaneity and the sublime play a central role.51 Whether this new Kant, one endowed with both enthusiasms and sensitivities, will replace the more familiar figure remains to be seen, but, in any event, the Leibniz admired by Herder has been returned to view.52 NOTES 1. Albert Heinekamp, ‘Louis Dutens und seine Ausgabe der Opera Omnia von Leibniz’, Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa 20 (l986): 1–28. 2. See the collection of papers in Beiträge zur Wirkungs-und Rezeptionsgeschichte von Gottfried W. Leibniz, ed. Albert Heinekamp, Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa 26 Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1986); see also Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964) 262 and Catherine Wilson, “The Reception of Leibniz in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz, ed. Nicholas Jolley, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 442–474. 3. Yvon Belaval, ‘Diderot lecteur de Leibniz ?’, Etudes leibniziennes, de Leibniz à Hegel (Paris; Gallimard, 1976) 244–263. Diderot’s seemingly Leibnizian article ‘Animal’ in the Encyclopédie described a ladder ascending from inanimate matter to man, the occupants of its rungs endowed with various grades of mind and sensibility, but Belaval argues that its direct sources are probably LaMetrrie, Maupertuis and Robinet, not Leibniz. 4. On the relevance of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence for the theory of evolution, see Philip R. Sloan, ‘The Historical Interpretation of Biological Species’, British Journal for the History of Science 12 (1979): 109–153. 5. Max Wundt, ‘Die Wiederentdeckung Platons im 18. Jahrhundert’, Blaetter fuer deutsche Philosophie 15 (1941): 149–158. 6. Frederic C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) 359. 7. In his polemic against the early romantic philosopher Johann August Eberhard. See ‘On a Discovery According to Which Any Critique of Pure Reason Has Been Made Superfluous by an Earlier One’, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy, ed. Henry Allison (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 8. Leibniz’s presence in Herder’s philosophy of nature is treated by Beate Dreike; she concludes that ‘Herder ohne die Leibnizische Philosophie nicht zu seinem dynamischen Naturbild haette kommen koennen’. Herders Naturauffassung in ihrer Beeinfl ussung durch Leibniz’ Philosophie, Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa 10 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1973) 1. Herder’s intellectual relationship to his former teacher is treated by John Zammito in Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002) esp. Chaps. 4 and 9. 9. Giorgio Tonelli, ‘Leibniz on Innate Ideas and the Early Reaction to the Publication of the Nouveaux Essais (1765)’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 12 (1974): 437–454. 10. References here and below to the NE are to Leibniz: New Essays, tr. and ed., Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981. Page numbers are correlated to the Akademie Ausgabe (A) Series VI, vol. 6 of Leibniz’s Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1990). 11. A positive case for Leibniz’s influence on Kant (which is not inconsistent with a generally negative presentation of Leibniz by Kant) is presented by Frank Tasche “Von der Monade zum Ding an sich. Bemerkungen zur Leibniz-Rezeption Kants,” Beiträge zur Wirkungs-und Rezeptionsgeschichte

Leibniz’s Reputation in the Eighteenth Century

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

307

von Gottfried W. Leibniz, ed. Albert Heinekamp, Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa 26 Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1986) 198–212; more recently by Eric Watkins, Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. On Kantian pessimism, see Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). See the chapter of Ian Hunter, ‘Kant and the Preservation of Metaphysics’, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 274–337. Kant, ‘Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History’, A 8:121 in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, tr. Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 232. “A” references here and below are to volume: page number of Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Akademie der Wissenschaften, (Berlin: Reimer, later de Gruyter, 1910) Margaret Wilson, ‘Leibniz and Materialism’, repr. in Ideas and Mechanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999) 388–406. Leibniz, Letter to Bernoulli, 18 November 1698, GM 3 552. In G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989; printed with revisions in 1999) 168. Kant, Selected Pre-Critical Writings, ed. George B. Kerferd and David E. Walford (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1968) 120. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason tr. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965) 376; A 3: B 420. As John Zammito remarks, Kant was, on this issue, ‘sharply estranged from the [eighteenth-century’s] most effective currents’. The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 190. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 668/ B696. Though, in the desperate and necessary search for the intellectual origins of modern fascism, Kantian autonomy theory was also cited, by Isaiah Berlin in ‘Kant As an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism’, The Sense of Reality (London: Pimlico, 1996) 232–248. ‘Erkennen und Empfinden scheinet fuer uns vermischte, zusammengesetzte Wesen in der Entfernung zweierlei; forschen wir aber naeher, so laesst sich in unserem Zustande die Natur des Einen ohne die Natur des anderen nicht voellig begreifen’. Herder, Saemtliche Werke, 33 vols., ed. Bernhard Suphan (Hildesheim: Olms, 1968) 8:236 (hereafter SW, cited by volume: page number). Johann Gottfried von Herder, SW 33:212. This obscure reference compares Leibniz’s psychology to the remarkably beautifully series of coloured prints of insects in August Johann Roesel von Rosenhof’s Die monatlich-herausgegebenen Insecten-Belustigungen, 4 vols. (Nueremberg, 1746–1761). SW 32:500. Herder, Briefe zur Beföerderung der Humanität, SW 17:331. See Matthias Luserke, ‘Die Ordnung der Dinge und das Triktrak philosophischer Sprache: Zur Genese des Leibniz-Bildes bei J. G. Herder’, Leibniz: Tradition und Actualität, 497–505. Herder, SW 17:333 ‘[T]hey are capable of setting fi re to the four corners of the earth, for their pleasure or advancement . . .”[P]ublic spirit”, as the English call it, is dwindling away and is no longer in fashion; it will die away all the more when it ceases being sustained by the good morality and true religion which natural reason itself teaches us’. Leibniz, NE A 462–464. Kant, ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlichen Absicht’ A 8:18. Herder, SW 13:346. My translations except where noted.

308 Catherine Wilson 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

Herder, SW 5:502. Herder, SW 13:98. Herder, SW 13:172. Herder, SW 13:99. Herder, SW 13:62. Cf. Leibniz, Monadology 66–69. See Hugh Barr Nisbet, Herder and the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) 50–51. (This is a shorter version of the same author’s doctoral dissertation, Herder and the Philosophy and History of Science [Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1970].) Herder SW 13:115. Herder, SW 13:98, 175. Leibniz, Monadology 25, 216. Herder, SW 13:337. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason A 5:115, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals A 4:395–396; tr. in Practical Philosophy, 50–51. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals A 5:22; tr. in Practical Philosophy, 56. Cf. Kant’s endorsement of Epicurus’ claim that ‘gratification’ (Vergnuegen as opposed to Glueckseligkeit) is always a bodily sensation. Critique of Judgement A 5:278, 331. The ability of aesthetic objects to stimulate feelings of life is subjective and apparently does not contribute to their objective excellence. Kant, ‘On the Common Saying, “This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice”’, Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 69. Herder, Letter 123 SW 18:300. Herder, SW 5:215. Other admirers of Leibniz included Johann August Eberhard, Friedrich Willhelm Schelling and F. W. Schlegel. On Schelling as the most important early nineteenth-century reader of Leibniz, see Guido Zingari, ‘Die LeibnizRezeption im Deutschen Idealismus und bei Hegel’, Beiträge zur Wirkungsund Rezeptionsgeschichte von Gottfried W. Leibniz, ed. Albert Heinekamp, Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa 26 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1986) 268–288. Herder, SW 17:138. Frederick M. Barnard, Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003) 97. See, for discussion and references, Barnard, Herder 163. The exhaustion of the Kantian programme of pure philosophy is implied in Bas van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), though see the defence of Michael Friedman in Dynamics of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). See Zammito’s comments on Paul Guyer’s Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), in Kant, Herder 349– 350. For instance, ‘We fi nd [in Leibniz] an organic orientation which, like the vitalism of his predecessors in its reverence for the pervasive life of the cosmos, can be construed as antiexploitative’. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1980) 283. See further Pauline Phemister, ‘Leibniz and Ecology’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 18 (2001): 236–258, who points out that Leibniz is a more credible hero for deep ecology than the earlier favourite, Spinoza.

17 The Reception of Leibniz’s Philosophy in the Twentieth Century Robert Merrihew Adams

Comprehensively Leibnizian philosophical views did not fi nd many advocates in the twentieth century. But if we measure philosophers’ reputations by the quantity and quality of work published about them by historians of philosophy, we must surely conclude that no pre-Kantian modern philosopher’s reputation stood higher than Leibniz’s in the twentieth century. In these remarks I reflect briefly on why that has been so and on some of the main trends in what has been an exceptionally rich secondary literature. The turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century was marked in philosophical studies of Leibniz by the publication of three famous books, in English, French and German, by Bertrand Russell,1 Louis Couturat2 and Ernst Cassirer.3 Couturat’s book, on Leibniz’s logic, and Russell’s, which presented Leibniz as deriving his metaphysics from his logic (a reading with which Couturat agreed) may fairly be said to have set the dominant theme of Leibniz interpretation for the first two-thirds or so of the twentieth century. Russell and Couturat enjoyed two important advantages, which I think proved also to be advantages for Leibniz’s reputation. They serve to introduce my remarks, first, about external factors affecting the reception of his work and, second, about factors more internal to the content of his philosophy. The fi rst of the advantages I mentioned is that Russell and Couturat had access to philosophical letters and papers of Leibniz that were not generally available to the public in the early modern period. The previous six decades had seen the beginnings of a stream of publications drawn from the Leibniz archive at Hannover, which would continue and increase into, throughout and beyond the twentieth century. Particularly important for Russell was the publication in 1846, by C. L. Grotefend, of Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics and correspondence with Antoine Arnauld.4 The two massive series of Leibniz’s mathematical and philosophical writings published by C. I. Gerhardt between 1849 and 1890 should also be mentioned. 5 Incomplete though they were, and very imperfect from a text-critical standpoint, they made available much previously unpublished material, were a major resource for Leibniz interpreters writing at the turn of the century and are still important today.

310 Robert Merrihew Adams Couturat’s work was also backed by his own large and excellent edition of Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz,6 which included several texts that provided fascinating support for his and Russell’s view of the influence of Leibniz’s logic on his metaphysics. A similar significance can be ascribed to the other most important collection of previously unpublished writings of Leibniz to appear during the fi rst half of the twentieth century, Gaston Grua’s two-volume edition of Textes inédits, published in 1948 but based on his research in the archive at Hannover before the Second World War.7 Grua assembled the material as background for his study of relations between Leibniz’s moral and legal philosophy and his theodicy; however, that study embraced a wide range of metaphysical and theological topics, and the parts of the Textes inédits that have probably had the greatest impact on the study of Leibniz are those concerned with metaphysical themes that are closely related to logic. For the long run the weightiest, in every sense, of modern editions of Leibniz is the Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe being produced under the auspices of the Berlin Academy in eight multi-volume series.8 Its major achievements, thus far, belong to the second half of the twentieth century; some of them will belong to the twenty-fi rst. A few of its volumes were published between the two world wars, but they were not really what we would now call critical editions. Much of the critical work that should have been done on them has had to be redone in the postwar period, or still remains to be redone. The postwar volumes have been produced slowly, in the series of most interest to philosophers, but to an admirable critical standard. We now probably have Leibniz’s philosophical writings to the end of the 1680s, apart from his correspondence, as complete as we will ever have them, and there is probably not much that will surprise us in his philosophical correspondence of that period, of which we already have a lot.9 I am a fan of the Berlin Academy edition and of the work that has been done on its philosophical series at the Leibnizforschungsstelle at Münster, but I should note a major lacuna. The project includes as yet no plan for a complete or systematic publication of Leibniz’s theological papers, which form, I believe, the largest category in the catalogue of his surviving manuscripts—though some theological papers of recognised philosophical interest have found a place in the academy edition. It is hard not to see this omission as reflecting late modern rationalist discomfort with the pervasively theological character of much early modern rationalism. Perhaps it also reflects the fact that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theology has also been rather unfashionable in theology and religious studies during the twentieth century. Whatever the reasons for the omission, Leibniz’s theological papers are a major resource for historical scholarship and should not remain inaccessible. He was a significant participant in contemporary theological discussions, across confessional lines, and was also an encyclopaedic, shrewd and very well informed commentator on them. Moreover, some of the topics of his theological interests are by no means irrelevant

The Reception of Leibniz’s Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

311

to issues that are very much alive today, concerning, for instance, ways in which diverse religious traditions might relate to each other. This omission notwithstanding, the achievement of the twentieth century in publishing previously unedited Leibniz texts is very large, and twentieth-century interpreters of Leibniz have increasingly been in a position to know quite a bit more of what he thought than their predecessors in previous centuries. Not that I am prepared to claim that we—nor even, perhaps, any of us—do yet effectively know all that we are now in a position to know, because the corpus (most of it still not translated from the original Latin or French) is so vast. I believe that this vastness of his corpus is in fact one of the causes of the flourishing, the intensity and the productivity of Leibniz scholarship in the twentieth century, and especially in the last few decades. Leibniz repays study. In choosing a research project, philosophers, like other academics, tend to select topics about which they think they have a good chance of discovering something interesting and being able to say something novel or original. One way in which a great, dead philosopher can pass this test of being a good research subject is by writing so obscurely that it is easy to read his writings in ways in which no one has read them before. Leibniz did not prepare for fame in that way. His writing is virtually always lucid and to the point. There is so much of it, however, and it comes in such scattered fragments, that a talented student who has enough of an antiquarian bent to explore some of the less familiar corners of the corpus can be pretty confident of coming up with something new and interesting to say. Leibniz repays study, further, in the frequency with which he offers an answer to philosophical questions we have reason to address to him. In this he has an advantage over Descartes, for instance. Descartes was a very careful writer, and also very discreet, as writers in the seventeenth century had reason to be. He was discreet not only in what he published and sent to correspondents, but also in not keeping and passing on to posterity much that did not fall in those public and semi-public categories. This can be frustrating for those who would interpret him today. There is a real danger, in working on Descartes, that one’s project will develop a central question about which one cannot fi nd even a plausible and interesting hint of an answer in the Cartesian corpus. Not so with Leibniz. He too was discreet in publishing and corresponding; for his own use, however, he wrote down very free explorations of ideas. He rarely if ever threw away what he had written, and his private explorations make up a major part of Hannover’s treasure of manuscripts. As a result it is relatively rare that Leibniz’s thought suggests an important question to which no answer is suggested, or at least interestingly hinted, in his writings. I cannot resist the temptation to mention another way in which Leibniz repays study, though here I stray even farther from my starting point and roam perhaps across the border between intellectual and economic history.

312

Robert Merrihew Adams

In North America, anyway, the institutional position of early modern philosophy has changed dramatically in the last thirty years or so. Formerly studied, for the most part, by people who were philosophical professionals but historical amateurs, it is now a full-fledged academic specialty (as ancient philosophy has been for a much longer time), with recognised professional demands in its historical as well as its philosophical dimension. North American philosophy departments recognise it as such and want to hire fully qualified professionals to teach it. It has in fact become one of the most advantageous specialisations for philosophers entering the academic job market. That is, it is one of the fields in which the ratio of supply and demand is most favourable (or—let us face it—least unfavourable) to the applicants. Why is that? One of the most important factors, I believe, is the increasingly prevalent perception that fully qualified professionals in early modern philosophy should be able to read the texts in their original languages. That puts up the bar to entry, keeping the supply relatively small in relation to demand. But writing a dissertation on Hume proves nothing, and suggests nothing, about your competence in a foreign language. This is an economic way in which Leibniz, along with other continental philosophers of the early modern period, but not the British philosophers, repays study. I have wandered pretty far from my starting point, which was the advantage Russell and Couturat enjoyed in access to texts. In the wandering, however, I have covered what I want to say about those factors in the twentieth-century reception of Leibniz’s philosophy that are relatively external to its content. I promised to mention another advantage that Russell and Couturat had; with that one we begin to engage Leibniz’s thought more directly. The impact of Russell’s and Couturat’s logic-emphasising readings of Leibniz was certainly enhanced by the fact that they appeared during the years in which modern logic was being created, largely by Frege and Whitehead and Russell himself. By virtue of this timing, the impetus that their symbolic logic gave to interest in Leibniz was in all probability greater than any influence that Leibniz’s ideas may have had on their logical theorising.10 In this aspect of the Leibniz renaissance there was perhaps something of the familiar temptation to see, boringly enough, a bit of ourselves in the great, dead philosophers. But that was surely not all. Major currents in twentiethcentury philosophy aspired to give formal logic a major role in philosophical theorising. One might hope to fi nd in Leibniz a historic archetype whose example might yield instruction or inspiration for such a project. The clearest case of such interaction between Leibniz’s thought and twentieth-century formal philosophy is the appropriation of the language of possible worlds for the development of a formal semantics for the logic of possibility and necessity. That development, and related developments in metaphysics and other areas of philosophy, particularly in North America from the 1960s into the 1980s, sparked enormous excitement that marked in my opinion a coming of age of American philosophy. In that context

The Reception of Leibniz’s Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

313

Leibniz’s conception of possible worlds, and his views about necessity and contingency, aroused a significant echo of that excitement—though I believe (and have argued elsewhere) that his use of the idea of possible worlds was rather different from that which figures now in formal semantics for modalities.11 By the 1980s, however, the emphasis on the relation of Leibniz’s metaphysics to his logic, still powerfully represented in the 1960s by G. H. R. Parkinson’s fi ne book Logic and Reality in Leibniz’s Metaphysics,12 had come to seem to many of us one-sided, and interest had begun to move in other directions. One topic of increasing prominence, by that time, in the study of Leibniz, and of seventeenth-century philosophers more generally, was the imprint that their thought retains of the scholastic Aristotelianism that most of them sought to overturn. This is particularly important in relation to Leibniz, who, while self-consciously ‘modern’ in some important respects, also sought quite explicitly to breathe new life into some Aristotelian ideas, most specifically into that of substantial form. It had long been recognised that the derivation of Leibniz’s metaphysics from his theory of complete individual concepts that lay at the centre of Russell’s and Couturat’s interpretation could not go through as a purely logical derivation—that the derivation must depend on the assumption of something concretely real and powerful in the individual, corresponding to the complete concept. Where in Leibniz’s philosophy should we look for such a metaphysical correlate to the complete concept? ‘In his conception of substantial form’ is the obvious answer for scholars attuned to the neoAristotelian themes in his thought. A focus on the concept of substantial form connects with a rather different narrative of Leibniz’s development from that suggested by Russell and Couturat. In their version of the story, Leibniz’s mature philosophy dates from his realisation of the logical power of the complete concept theory in the mid-1680s. In the alternative, now increasingly prevalent version, the most important crystallising event from which one might date Leibniz’s philosophical maturity is his decision to rehabilitate the concept of substantial form, which came somewhat earlier (just how early is still debated.) By virtue of the metaphysical and far from purely logical character of the notion of substantial form, this shift in narrative focus goes along with a shift in topical focus, to one in which Leibniz’s philosophising is seen as driven as much by interests in physics as by interests in logic. Whether for this reason or others, I think it is fair to say that whereas in the 1970s the most heated discussions about Leibniz’s philosophy revolved around his logic and philosophy of logic, including especially his treatment of possibility and necessity, by the end of the twentieth century the most heated discussions concerned his philosophy of body.13 I shall not presume to make any pronouncement here as to what will come of those discussions, except to predict with some confidence that Leibniz will retain his fascination and his stature as an archetypal source of theses worthy of philosophical discussion.

314

Robert Merrihew Adams

NOTES 1. Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, with an Appendix of Leading Passages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900). 2. Louis Couturat, La logique de Leibniz (Paris: Alcan, 1901). 3. Ernst Cassirer, Leibniz’s System in seinen wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen (Marburg: N. G. Elwert’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1902). 4. Briefwechsel zwischen Leibniz, Arnauld und dem Landgrafen Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels, ed. C. L. Grotefend (Hannover: Verlag der Hahn’schen Hofbuchhandlung, 1846). 5. Leibnizens mathematische Schriften, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin: A. Asher; Halle: H. W. Schmidt, 1849–1863), and Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1875–1890). 6. Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz, ed. Louis Couturat (Paris, 1903). 7. Leibniz, Textes inédits, ed. Gaston Grua (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1948). 8. Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, edition of the Berlin Academy (Darmstadt and Berlin, 1923–). 9. Since these lines were written, Leibniz, Sämtliche Schriften und Breife, series II, vol. ii (Berlin, 2009) has appeared, completing the Berlin Academy edition of Leibniz’s philosophical correspondence through 1694. 10. On the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reception of Leibniz’s work in logic, see Massimo Mugnai’s introduction to his translation of Leibniz, Ricerche generali sull’analisi delle nozioni e delle verità, e altri scritti di logica (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2008) 40–54. 11. See Robert Merrihew Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 46–50. 12. G. H. R. Parkinson, Logic and Reality in Leibniz’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). 13. See, for instance, Daniel Garber, ‘Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics: The Middle Years’, The Natural Philosophy of Leibniz, ed. Kathleen Okruhlik and James Robert Brown (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985) 27–130; Adams, Leibniz 217–399; and Daniel Garber, ‘Leibniz and Idealism’, in Hans Poser ed., Nihil sine ratione, VII. Internationaler Leibniz-Kongreβ (Berlin, 10–14 September 2001), Nachtragsband, (Hannover: Gottfried-Wilhelm-LeibnizGesellschaft, 2002), 19–28.

Contributors

Robert Merrihew Adams FBA is a Senior Research Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford, and, from July 2009, Distinguished Research Professor in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has taught philosophy at the University of Michigan, UCLA and Yale, and is the author of a book on the metaphysics of Leibniz and of other books and papers on metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of religion and the history of modern philosophy. Michael Ayers is Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College and was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and member of Academia Europaea. Many of his publications, including Locke (1991), a two-volume commentary on Locke’s Essay, have been written with the aim of illustrating the thesis that detailed knowledge of its relation to its intellectual context is essential to an understanding of the argument of any great philosophical work. Benjamin Carter is a visiting fellow at the Department of Theology and a member of the Network for Religion in Public Life at the University of Exeter. He has written a full-length study of Ralph Cudworth’s philosophy which will be published by Peeters-Leuven. He is also an Anglican Ordinand at St John’s College, Durham. John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. His recent books include On the Meaning of Life (2003), The Spiritual Dimension (2005) and Cartesian Refl ections (2008). He is editor of Ratio, the international journal of analytic philosophy. His next book, Why Believe?, will be published by Continuum in 2009. Emmanuel Faye is Associate Professor at the University Paris OuestNanterre La Défense. He has published Philosophie et perfection de l’homme: De la Renaissance à Descartes (1998) and Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2009).

316

Contributors

Luc Foisneau is Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. He is the author of Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu (2000) and the general editor of the Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century French Philosophers (2008). Daniel Garber (PhD, Harvard, 1975) is Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and Associated Faculty in the Program in the History of Science. Garber specialises in the history of philosophy and science in the early modern period and is also interested in issues in epistemology and the philosophy of science. Garber is the author of Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (1992), Descartes Embodied (2001), Leibniz: Body, Substance, Monad (2009) and is the co-editor (with Michael Ayers) of The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1998). John Henry is a Reader in the Science Studies Unit of the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely in the history of science from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century but has a special interest in the seventeenth century. The third edition of his textbook, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science (2008) has recently appeared. Steven Nadler is William H. Hay II Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Margaret J. Osler is Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary, where she teaches the history of science. Her research focuses on the relationships among early modern natural philosophy and theology. Dr Stephen Pigney is a researcher on early modern intellectual and cultural history at Birkbeck, University of London. Andrew Pyle is Reader in Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Bristol and author of Malebranche (2003) in Routledge’s Arguments of the Philosophers series. G. A. J. Rogers is Professor Emeritus of the History of Philosophy, Keele University, and founder-editor of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. Tom Sorell is John Ferguson Professor of Global Ethics and Director, Centre for the Study of Global Ethics Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham. His publications include Hobbes (1986) in Routledge’s Arguments of the Philosophers series and Descartes Reinvented (2005).

Contributors

317

Wiep van Bunge is Professor of the History of Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has published mainly on the history of philosophy in the Dutch Republic. Catherine Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. She specialises in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science and philosophy and is the author most recently of Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (2008).

Index

A Aaron, Richard 272–6 Abraham 83, 244 Académie Royale des Sciences 16, 281, 282, 284, 286 Adam 9, 83, 87, 88, 89, 91, 164, 287 Adams, John Quincy 34 Alexander, Peter 274 Alexander, Samuel 271, 273 Alquié, Ferdinand 125 Althusser, Louis 225 Andrewes, Thomas 108 Aristotle 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 24, 28, 29, 31, 44, 46, 51, 52, 88, 160, 167, 173, 246 Arminius, Jacob 101 Arnauld, Antoine 4, 31, 125, 129–30, 137, 166–7, 240, 259, 309 Ascham, Anthony 106 Astell, Mary 17 Aubrey, John 258 Auerbach, Berthold 232 Austin, J.L. 274 Ayer, A.J. 266, 274, 275

B Bachelard, Gaston 207 Bacon, Francis 1, 3, 9, 53, 60, 76, 92, 193, 224, 276, 290 Balibar, Étienne 225 Bardout, Jean-Christophe 125 Barlow, Thomas 55 Barrat, William 101 Barrow, Isaac 33–4 Bayle, Pierre 1, 10, 35, 65, 123, 134, 144, 227, 228, 240, 246–9, 251, 291 Beale, John 92

Beck, Cave 63 Beeckman, Isaac 160 Beiser, Frederick 111 Belaval, Yvon 295 Bennett, Jonathan 128, 230, 275 Bentham, Edward 262 Berkeley, George 10, 122, 133–4, 144, 194, 195, 197, 224, 262, 264, 269–71, 272, 274 Bernard, Edward 92 Bernier, François 31 Beza, Theodore 102 Birch, Thomas 114 Blackburn, Richard 258 Blackburne, Francis 65 Blacklo, Thomas see White, Thomas Blake, William 267 Bloch, Olivier 36 Blochmann, Elisabeth 181 Bochart, Samuel 83 Böhm, Franz 177, 184 Bold, Samuel 264 Bolton, Samuel 106 Boscovic, Roger Joseph 124 Boulliau, Ismael 33 Bouillier, Francisque 124 Boulainvilliers de, Henri 213 Bove, Laurent 225 Boyle, Robert 11, 32–3, 34, 43, 52, 61, 63, 64, 92, 257, 260, 265, 276 Bradley, F.H. 271 Braig, Carol 177 Bramhall, John 198 Browne, Thomas 45, 51 Brucker, Jacob 77, 104, 282, 287–9 Buonarroti, Philippe 213 Bucephalus 27 Bucer, Martin 57, 58

320 Index Buffier, Claude 266 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de 15, 295 Burnet, Thomas 264 Butler, Judith 223

C Calvin, John 102 Campanella, Tommaso 34 Canguilhem, Georges 207 Carnap, Rudolph 266 Carraud, Vincent 178 Cary, Lucius, Viscount Falkland 49, 57, 260 Case, Thomas 273 Cassirer, Ernst 103, 309 Cavendish, Margaret 17 Chamberlain, H.S. 181 Chandler, Edward, Bishop of Durham 115 Charles I, King of England 108 Charles II, King of England 56, 114 Charleton, Walter 30–1, 34, 52, 61 Châteaubriant de, Alphonse 185 Châtelet du, Mme Émilie 124 Chillingworth, William 48, 49, 57, 58, 260 Christina, Queen of Sweden 17 Cicero 1 Citton, Yves 225 Clarke, Samuel 124, 240, 263, 285, 287 Clauss, Ludwig F 180, 181 Clement of Alexandria 78 Clerselier, Claude 178 Cockburn, Catherine 264 Cohen, Abraham Herrera 229 Colerus, Egmont 228 Collier, Arthur 134 Collingwood, R.G. 204 Condillac de, Étienne Bonnot 122, 123, 266,294 Conway, Anne 17, 109, 110, 111 Cook-Wilson, John 273, 274 Copernicus, Nicolaus 198 Copleston, Frederick 125 Coste, Pierre 265 Cottingham, John 126, 160 Couturat, Louis 16, 309–13 Covel, John 110 Craig, Edward 125 Cragg,G.R. 113 Cranmer, Thomas 46 Crawford, James 63, 64

Crescas, Hasdai 229 Cressy, Serenus 54 Cromwell, Oliver 56, 108, 109 Cromwell, Richard 109 Cudworth, Damaris 108 Cudworth, Ralph 3, 6, 9, 10, 11, 99–116, 123 Cudworth, Ralph, the elder 100 Culverwel, Nathanael 81 Cumberland, Richard 2 Curley, Edwin M. 160, 202, 230

D D’Alembert, Jean le Rond 35, 266 Damasio, Antonio 230 Damiron, Jean-Philibert 36 Darwin, Charles 218 Davidson, Donald 230 Deleuze, Gilles 227, 231 Derodon, David 35 Descartes, Rene 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 23, 24, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 43, 45, 53, 64, 65, 103, 113, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 133, 137, 144, 153–63, 164–74, 177–89, 193, 197, 199, 200, 224, 225, 228, 229, 231, 239, 246, 257, 259, 260, 265, 289, 290, 311 Deschamps, Théodore 65 Desgabets, Dom Robert 127, 128 Diderot, Denis 35, 122, 265. 305 Digby, Kenelm 4, 6, 7–8, 10, 33, 43–66 Diggers The 213, 215 Dijn de, Herman 232 Dilthey, Wilhelm 180 Diogenes Laertius 34, 87 Dreyfus, Ginette 125 Duncan, William 262 Dunn, John 276 Duns Scotus 12, 177 Dutens, Louis 289–90, 291, 294

E Ebreo, Leon 229 Eckhard, Arnold 286 Edward VI, King of England 54, 57, 62 Edwards, Jonathan 264 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 54, 62 Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia 17, 126, 181 Émery, Jacques-André 16, 282, 289–92 Epicurus 7, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34. 113

Index Estaing, Charles Hector, comte d’ 213 Euserbius 78 Eustachius a Sancto Paulo 166, 173 Eve 83 Evelyn, John 257

F Fabri de Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude 23 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 185, 224, 225 Ficino, Marsilio 78, 79, 104 Finch, Sir Hineage 111, 114 Fontenelle de, Bernard le Bovier 132, 136, 281–89, 290, 292 Fortuyn, Pim 232 Foucault, Michel 13, 207–220, 225 Foucher, Simon 136 Fowler, Edward 110 Frankfurt, Harry 160 Fraser, A.C. 271 Frege, Gottlob 4, 16, 137, 138, 139, 312 Freret, Nicolas 213 Frisch 301

G Gale, Theophilus 4, 6, 8–9, 77–93 Galilei, Galileo 1, 2, 6, 198 Garber, Daniel 160, 168 Garve, Christian 304 Gassendi, Pierre 3, 6–7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 23–37, 43, 52, 65, 137, 193, 196, 198 Gaudenzio, Paganino 77 Gauhier, Henri 125 Gauthier, David P. 196 Gentile, Giovanni 185 George, Stefan 180 Gerhardt, C.I. 309 Gersonides 229 Gibson, James 271–2, 274, 275 Gilbert, William 34, 92 Gilson, Etienne 178, 179 Glanvill, Joseph 55 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 180, 239 Goodwin, Thomas 77 Gregory, Tullio 36 Grotefend, C.L. 309 Grotius, Hugo 78 Grua, Gaston 310 Guéroult, Martial 125, 225–7, 231 Gullan-Whur, Margaret 228

H Habermas, Jűrgen 183

321

Hacker, Peter 156 Hales, John 57 Hamlet 165 Hammond, Henry 57 Hampton, Jean 196 Hannibal 277 Hansch, M.G. 300 Hardt, Michael 230 Hartley , David 123 Harvey, William 2, 3, 92, 198 Hatfield, Gary 160 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich 5, 185, 224, 266 Heidegger, Martin 12, 155–59, 177–189 Heine, Heinrich 224 Heinekamp, Albert 294 Helvetius, Claude Adrien 123 Henchman, Humphrey 110 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England 56 Henry VII, King of England 214 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 15, 16, 294–306 Hero of Alexandria 28 Herz, Marcus 300 Heyse, Hans 185 Hitchcock, E.A. 231 Hitler, Adolf 183, 187, 188 Hobbes, Thomas 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12–14, 30, 34, 43, 44, 53, 54, 56, 57, 76, 86, 99, 103, 110, 111, 113, 115, 171, 192–205, 207–20, 229, 231, 239, 263 Höffding, Harald 36 Holbach, Baron 295 Holden, Henry 54 Hölderin, Friedrich 180 Homer 165 Hood Robin 214 Hooke, Robert 61 Horn, Georg 77, 87 Huet, Pierre-Daniel 291 Hume, David 5, 10, 115, 122, 123, 124, 132, 134–6, 142, 144, 195, 197, 224, 264–5, 266, 269, 271, 272, 274, 296, 297, 312 Husserl, Edmund 155, 177, 179, 180, 182 Huygens, Christian 65, 130, 265 Hyde, Edward 56, 57

I Inge, W.R. 99 Innocent X, Pope 56

322

Index

Iranaeus 48 Isaac 244 Israel, Jonathan 232

J Jackson, Thomas 79 Jacob 244 Jacob, Willem 265 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 224, 241–243 Jacquet, Chantal 225 James I, King of England 215 James II, King of England 122 Jefferson, Thomas 34 Johann Frederich, Elector 288 Johnson, Dr 1 Jolley, Nicholas 125, 138 Jonsius, Johannes 77 Joseph, H.W.B. 274 Josephus 78 Joshua 83 Justin Martyr 78

K Kabbalah 229 Kant, Immanuel 5, 11, 15, 143, 196, 197, 224, 261, 266, 271, 272, 294–306 Kavka, Gregory S. 196 Kearney, Hugh 59 Kenny, Anthony 156, 160, 168–70 Kepler, Johannes 2, 198 Kerber, Franz 185 Klemperer, Victor 187

L Latitudinarians The 105 Laud, William, Archbishop 101 Le Bouvier de Fontenelle, Bernard 16 Leclerc, Jean 265 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 1, 4, 5, 6, 10, 15–16, 12, 124, 125, 126, 130–33, 140, 144, 195, 197, 224, 228, 231, 240, 257, 264, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 281–92, 294–306, 309–13 Leifchild, J.R. 232 Lennon, Thomas 125 Lessing, G.F. 224, 241 Levellers The 213, 215 Levi, Ze’ev 229 Leyden von, Wolfgang 276 Locke, John 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 31, 34, 99, 102, 104,

115, 116,122, 123, 128–130, 133, 193, 195, 196, 197, 224, 228, 231, 257–67, 269–77, 291, 295, 296, 297, 301 LouisXIV, King of France 213, 214 Lovejoy, A.O. 276, 295, 297 Luce, A.A. 134 Lucretius 28, 30 Luther, Martin 3, 44, 102

M Macherey, Pierre 225, 227, 231 Machiavelli, Niccolò 215 Mackie, J.L. 274, 275 Macpherson C.B. 202 Magnenus, Johann Chrysostom 33 Maimonides 229 Malamud, Bernard 232 Malcolm, Norman 156 Malebranche, Nicholas 4, 5, 6, 9–10, 122–45, 196, 225, 260, 264, 273 Manchester, Earl of 106, 108 Mandelbaum, Maurice 276 Marion, Jean-Luc 178 Marion, Matthieu 271 Mariotte, Edme 124, 131 Martinich, Aloysius J. 201 Masham, Damaris 17, 103 Masham, Francis Cudworth 115 Matheron, Alexandre 225, 226, 228, 231 Maupertius, Pierre Louis 124 McCracken, Charles J. 134 Meijer, Lodewijk 240 Meiner, Felix 184 Menasseh ben Israel109 Mendelssohn, Moses 241, 242 Mersenne, Marin 6, 7, 10, 23, 43, 52, 65, 178, 192, 198 Mill, John Stuart 5, 104, 301 Milton John 106 Milton, John R. 31 Molesworth, Sir William 12 Molinos de, Miguel 140 Molyneux, William 11, 167, 262 Moore, G.E. 273, 275 More, Henry 9, 11, 33, 104, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 123, 261 Moreau, Denis 125 Moreau, Pierre-François 225 Moses 9, 241

Index Mosheim, Johann Lorenz 115 Muller, Richard A. 102 Musschenbroek van, Petrus 265

N Nader, Steven 125 Nadler, Steven 229 Nagel, Thomas 160, 165 Napoleon 277, 290 Negri, Antonio 230 Newman, John Henry 46 Newton, Isaac 1, 11, 15, 34, 61, 122, 123, 124, 259, 261, 263, 265, 267, 276, 284, 292, 294, 301 Nicole, Pierre 31, 259 Niemayer, Max 180 Nietzsche, Friedrich 155, 185, 188 Nizolius, Marius 284 Noah 83, 287 Norris, John 260, 263–4 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) 180, 239

O O’Connor, D.J. 274, 275 Odysseus 165 Oldenburg, Henry 8, 61, 62, 63, 65, 92, 250 Origen 78 Ormson, W.O. 274 Ostens, Jacob 248 Otto, Rudolf 244 Owen, John 77 Owen, Josiah 263

P Paracelsus 60 Paris Oratory 122 Parkinson, G.H.R. 313 Pascal, Blaise 28 Passmore, John 103, 110, 111 Patrick, Simon 110 Patrides, C.A. 112 Pembroke, Lord 260 Pepys, Samuel 257 Perkins, William 100 Petain, Marshal 189 Pettit, Philip 140 Petty, William 52, 55 Philonous 296 Philoponus, John 78 Pintard, René 36

323

Plato 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 24, 17, 31, 83, 84, 86, 89, 104, 144, 295 Pliny 55 Plotinus 104 Pollock, Frederick 231 Popkin, Richard 25, 193, 230 Porter, H.C. 101 Porter, Roy 266 Preston, John 79 Price, H.H. 274 Prichard, H.A. 274 Pringle-Pattison, A.S. 271 Prussian Academy of Sciences 294, 301 Protagoras 103, 113 Putnam, Hilary 223 Pyle, Andrew 125 Pythagoras 84, 103, 113

Q Quietists The 140–1 Quine, Willard Van Orman 12, 157, 266

R Radner, Daisie 125 Ramond, Charles 225 Ramsey, Michael 134 Randall, John Herman 125 Raspe, Rudolph Erich 289, 291, 294, 295 Ratzinger, Joseph 169–70 Rawls, John 140, 196 Regius, Henricus 167 Reid, Thomas 124, 273, 274 Remond, Nicholas 285 Richelieu, Cardinal 23 Riley, Patrick 125 Roberval, Gilles 33 Robinet, André 125 Rocca della, Michael 230 Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève 125 Roesel von Rosenhof, August Johann 301 Rohault, Jacques 124 Rorty, Richard 160, 223 Rothacker, Erich 181 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 196 Royal Society 3, 8, 10, 14, 15, 54, 55, 60, 61, 62, 63, 105, 192, 257, 258, 260, 262, 282, 284 Russell, Bertrand 4, 16, 125, 128, 228, 258, 266, 269–70, 273, 275, 309–13

324

Index

Ryle, Gilbert 11, 128, 158, 164–66, 181, 258, 260, 274

S Sachs, Philip Jacob 63 Saint Ambrose 78 Saint Augustine 5, 78, 170, 171, 173 Saint Paul 84, 85 Saint Theodoret 78 Saint Thomas Aquinas 5, 124,166, 173, 117 Samson 83 Sanderson, Robert 57 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von 224, 305 Schliermacher, Frederick 104 Schmalz, Tad M. 125 Schmitt, Carl 204 Schopenhauer, Arthur 228 Schuurman, Paul 265 Selden, John 107 Sell, Alan 264 Seneca 1 Sergeant, John 53, 259–60 Sextus Empiricus 3, 25 Shaftesbury, First Earl of 257 Shaftesbury, Third Earl of 257 Sheldon, Gilbert 57, 111, 112 Sieyès Emmanuel-Joseph 213 Singer, I.B. 232 Skinner, Quentin 276 Socrates 27, 260 Solomon 83 Sophie, Electress of Hanover 17 Sorbiere, Samuel 65 Spenle, Jean-Edouard 185 Spinoza, Baruch 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 14, 76, 113, 125, 126, 134, 143, 171, 193, 195, 197, 200, 223–32, 238–53, 257, 269, 295 Sprat, Thomas 61, 62 Stanley, Thomas 31, 77, 87 Steuco, Agostino 78 Stillingfleet, Edward 79, 263, 264 Stoughton, Richard 100 Stout, G.F. 273 Strong, C.A. 276 Strong, William 89, 90 Stubbe, Henry 54 Suárez, Francisco 12, 177, 179 Suchon, Gabrielle 17 Swift, Dean 267 Sydenham, Thomas 257, 265

T Taylor, Jeremy 58 Telesio, Bernardino 34 Tertullian 78 Thierry, Augustin 213 Thurloe, John 108 Tillotson, John 47 Toland, John 241–3, 244, 291 Trotter Cockburn, Catherine 17 Tulloch, John 101, 103 Tyrrell, James 258

U Uexküll, Jakob von 180, 181

V Valois, Louis Emmanuel de, comte d’Alais 23 Van Gogh, Theo 232 Van Schurman, Anna-Marie 16 Vaughan, Thomas 58 Velthuysen, Lambert van 240, 241, 248 Vinciguerra, Lorenzo 225 Vloten, Johannes van 224 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de 15, 122, 124, 265, 266, 294 Voss, Stephen 160 Vossius, Gerardus Joannes 87 Vries de, Simon Joosten 229

W Wallis, John 192 Walton, Craig 125 Warr, John 215 Watson, Richard 125 Watts, Isaac 262 Wellington, Duke of 262 Wesley, John 264 Whichcote, Benjamin 8, 101, 102, 104, 106,108 White, Thomas (Blacklo) 46–66, 198, 200, 259 Whitehead, A.N. 16, 312 Whitgift, Archbishop 101 Widdrington, Ralph 108. 109 Widdrington, Thomas 108 Wilkins, John 52, 62 William the Conquerer, King of England 215 Williams, Bernard 11, 160–61 Wilson, Catherine 160 Wilson, Margaret 299 Winter de, Leon 232

Index Wise, Thomas 115 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 155–59, 168–70, 275 Wodehouse P.G. 232 Wolff, Christian 15, 294, 295, 297, 298, 301 Wolfson, Harry 225 Worthington, John 108, 112, 114 Wynne, John 261

Y Yolton, John 125, 129, 262, 274, 276 Yovel, Yirmiyahu 229

Z Zarka, Yves Charles 13 Zeno 134 Žižek, Slavoj 230

325