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Overview
Delving beneath the principal discourses of philosophyfrom Descartes through Kant, Bernard Freydberg plumbs the previously concealed dark forces that ignite the inner power of modern thought. He contends that reason itself issues from an implicit and unconscious suppression of the nonrational. Even the modern philosophical concerns of nature and limits are undergirded by a dark side that dwells in them and makes them possible.
Freydberg traces these dark sources to the poetry of Hesiod, the fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and the Platonic dialogues and claims that they rear their heads again in the work of Spinoza, Schelling, and Nietzsche. Freydberg does not set forth a critique of modern philosophy but explores its intrinsic continuity with its ancient roots.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253030245 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Studies in Continental Thought |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 153 |
| File size: | 933 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Bernard Freydberg is Scholar in Residence at Duquesne University. He is author of Imagination in Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (IUP, 2005) and Philosophy and Comedy: Aristophanes, Logos, and Eros (IUP, 2008).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Fissures in the History of Modern Philosophy
Despite the customary practice of treating the history of modern philosophy as the evolution of fundamentally coherent doctrine, heterogeneity is an unmistakable feature in the thought of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Kant. Hetero–geneity, "other–birthing" or "other–genus" summons thought to the fissure, the gap that allows for its occurrence. This characteristic can take surprising shapes and can lead to unexpected developments. Spinoza as the most rigorous of the rationalists and Hume as the most rigorous of the empiricists leave little or no room for a gap between different sources that bear upon our condition. However, even in these thinkers one can discern abysses, fissures that open onto dark regions where sight becomes most difficult, and another way of sensing is required.
What I am proposing is the following alteration of the standard narrative even as it seems most incontestable. The divisions within the standard narrative do not concern — at least do not essentially concern — the role of "reason" on one side and the role of "experience" on the other. Rather, both of these putative divisions respond to the darkness to which we are all given over. While this darkness can be called by many names, it escapes all of them: abyss, ignorance, death, impenetrability, Hades. At Theaetetus 155c, the eponymous figure around whom the dialogue takes place, confesses that he finds himself wondering excessively (hyperphyos), to which Socrates famously replies that all philosophy begins in wonder and that wonder is the mark of the philosopher.
The nature of the concealment I shall attempt to disclose finds its precursor in Aristotle's response to the matter of wonder. While wonder is the origin of all philosophy, its overcoming in epistêmê — in knowledge or in "science" — constitutes its purpose or end, its telos. Aristotle's creation of a series of sciences, from physics through psychology and animal studies to meteorology — not to mention metaphysics, logic, and aesthetics, which remain proper philosophical disciplines — bears out his "post-wonder" ambitions. Since Aristotle was wrong on a vast majority of even his most fundamental scientific pronouncements according to more recent and contemporary developments, there can be no doubt that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century developments in physics and mathematics inspired the great philosophers of this period; it has even been claimed that, despite the qualitative advances by Newton, Leibniz, and others, it was still possible for one person to "know everything there is to know" in the natural sciences and mathematics.
Descartes
When both sides of the current philosophical divide agree on a particular matter, my rule of thumb is to regard both sides as mistaken and to proceed under that assumption until proven wrong. In the case of René Descartes, this rule of thumb has provided the correct course. In the thought of Descartes, long honored with what I consider faint praise as the more-or-less bumbling but important founder of modern philosophy, both Anglo-American and Continental philosophers find a doctrine called "mind–body dualism." They are led to this view by passages such as the following:
Now my first observation here is that there is a great difference between a mind and a body in that a body, by its very nature, is always divisible. On the other hand, a mind is always indivisible. For when I consider my mind, that is, myself insofar as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish any parts within me; I understand myself to be manifestly one complete thing. Although the entire mind seems to be united to the entire body, nevertheless, were a foot or an arm or any other bodily part to be amputated, I know that nothing has been taken away from the mind on that account. Nor can the faculties of willing, sensing, and understanding, and so on be called "parts" of the mind, since it is one and the same mind that wills, senses, and understands. On the other hand there is no corporeal or extended thing I can think of that in my thought easily divides into parts; and in this way I understand that it is divisible. This consideration alone would suffice to teach me that the soul is wholly diverse from the body, had I not yet known it well enough in any other way.
Descartes's declaration of a "vast" difference between mind and body clearly refers to a quantitative difference, or more precisely to a difference that remains within the realm of mathematics: "divisibility" and "indivisibility" are mathematical concepts. By employing the well-known Latin distinction between thinking substance (res cogitans) and extended substance (res extensa), this vast difference between mind and body amounts to a difference for and within res cogitans. Bodies so conceived are nothing more and nothing less than the objects of pure geometry.
But what about those entities that are normally considered to be bodies? What about (to list several items from Descartes's text) hands, head, feet, sky, earth, and sea? What about feelings of hunger and thirst, and of pleasure and pain? What is their status? At first, Descartes ascribes our knowledge of them to "nature"; but upon attaining more self-knowledge he sees these very differently, though hardly less paradoxically: "For clearly these sensations of hunger, thirst, and so on, etc., are nothing but confused modes of thinking, arising from the union and, as it were, intermingling of the mind with the body."
Hunger and thirst, pleasure and pain as confused thoughts — what can this mean? Can it mean, for example, that a toothache that requires root canal surgery is a confused thought in the way, perhaps, that the attempt to grasp the proof of an abstruse theorem in higher mathematics results in confused thought? I strongly suggest that the answer is affirmative. In the Discourse on Method, Descartes called the human body "a machine made by God," a phrase that offends many of my contemporary Continental colleagues who ascribe more differentiated qualities to bodies, often at the expense of the analogous qualities once located in souls. What he meant, and what has by and large determined the course of most successful Western medicine since, is that like all bodies the human body behaves in accord with mechanical laws.
For Descartes, such laws were regular unchanging fixed laws, as distinguished from teleological constructions that can vary with the variability of individual wills, and, in addition, the means to them can vary even when the goal is the same. Medical diagnosis surely has elements of an art given the complexity of the human body, but the general workings remain constant: no man has yet carried a child to term and delivered one, the course of life runs through the same stages except when some other mechanical event intervenes, the same or similar medicines ameliorate the same or similar illnesses except when, once again, some other mechanical event intervenes. A person who goes to see a medical doctor believes this, no matter what philosophical view that person might air.
The Cartesian doctrine, then, properly understood, admits of no qualitative distinction between thoughts, feelings, and impulses. These are one and all intelligible. Some are clear, fewer are both clear and distinct, and a great many are confused, but they are one and all thoughts. What then, must we say about our bodies insofar as they are erotic? How can eros be accounted for within the Cartesian system? In what sense can eros be regarded as mechanical? A response that is tied entirely to the sciences of biology and chemistry falls short of this unmistakable phenomenon, which puzzles everyone — from the most profound sage to the most heartsick teenager — except the very few who are not puzzled but suppose that they understand eros and/or can bring it under some control. Those people have an appropriate designation: fool.
What, then, becomes of the so-called Cartesian mind/body dualism? In truth, as doctrinally presented it is no duality at all, but shows itself to be a "monism" within which only quantitative differences can be discerned (if any "ism" can be regarded as appropriate). Rather, one can count to two — but with the most scrupulous care. On one side is found res cogitans and the twofold division within it. All else is radically other.
Unsurprisingly, the analogy recurs in Descartes's more precise and circumscribed formulation of "nature": "And surely there is no doubt that all I am taught by nature has some truth in it; for by 'nature,' taken generally, I understand nothing but God himself or the ordered network of created things which was instituted by God. By my own peculiar nature I understand nothing other than those things bestowed upon me by God." The "or" is inclusive, embracing either God himself, the order and disposition of created things, or both. It does not embrace the things insofar as what belongs to them falls outside the idea of God and/or order and disposition, that is, outside the rational order of the universe. Thus, Descartes rejects the Aristotelian and Scholastic notion(s) of underlying substances and final causes in nature, regarding them as creations not of reason but of the lower and untrustworthy faculty of imagination. A mechanistic model consisting of efficient causes is far more in accord with the evidence and more economical as well.
Descartes offers his belief that we have probable knowledge of bodies on the basis of the argument that God could not be a deceiver. However, there is nothing in any of his arguments for the determination of probability from reason alone. We might say that our senses or our imaginations deceive us, and that reason can correct this deception by means of the sciences of arithmetic and geometry, often with the help of instrumentation that expands our ability to discern such information. One can even speak of mathematical approximations.
Probability, however, does not take its departure from reason at all, but requires sense and imagination as its initial spurs. Hume in his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding has ably captured probability's strangeness:
Here then it seems evident that when we transfer the past to the future, in order to determine the effect, which will result from any cause, we transfer all the different events in the same proportion as they have appeared in the past, and conceive one to have existed a hundred times, for instance, another ten times, and another once. As a great number of views do here concur in one event, they fortify and confirm it to the imagination, beget that sentiment which we call belief, and give its object the preference above the contrary event which is not supported by an equal number of experiments, and recurs not so frequently to the thought in transferring the past to the future. Let any one try to account for this operation of the mind upon any of the received systems of philosophy, and he will be sensible of the difficulty. For my part, I shall think it sufficient, if the present hints excite the curiosity of philosophers, and make them sensible how defective all common theories are in treating of such curious and such sublime subjects.
A fissure discloses itself in the Cartesian system that has nothing to do with "mind–body dualism." The fissure is no flaw, but rather issues from the exemplary thoroughness and daring of a great thinker. What the fissure discloses in and through its depth shall be the subject matter of this book.
Leibniz
With this so-called rationalist, both substantial forms and final causes recur under modern auspices. Both Descartes and Leibniz contributed in major and lasting ways to mathematics. Descartes invented analytic geometry; Leibniz was coinventor of calculus and a major contributor to what would become formal logic. In his Discourse on Metaphysics (1686), he writes:
Thus the subject term must always contain the predicate term, so one who understands perfectly the notion of the subject would also know that the predicate belongs to it.
Since this is so, we can say that the nature of an individual substance or of a complete being is to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to contain and to allow us to deduce from it all the predicates of the subject to which this notion is attributed....
When the proposition is not an identity, that is, when the predicate is not explicitly contained in the subject, it must be contained in it virtually.
Leibniz is often credited with influencing analytic philosophy, despite the distaste for anything "metaphysical" in that orientation. One can attribute this odd interpretation to Leibniz's implicit notion that all propositions are logically necessary or, in our terms, "analytic!" This highly selective and, to my mind, unjustified and incompetent reading strips everything philosophically absorbing that the great Leibniz has to offer.
Given our finite perspective, we cannot know most individual substances completely and (most significant) deductively. Thus, from our standpoint we might know only certain facts about Alexander the Great, for example, that he was a king, a student of Aristotle, a conqueror of Darius and Poros, and so on, but "God, seeing Alexander's individual notion or haecceity, sees in it at the same time the basis and reason for all the predicates which can be said truly of him." On a somewhat less exalted level, yours truly Bernie Freydberg is the husband of Akiko Kotani, the father of Malika Freydberg, is overweight by a few (several?) pounds, a Pittsburgh sports fan, and so on, all of which is contingent from a finite standpoint. But from God's perspective, all of this — including all the predicates that compose my future (oh, no!) — is beheld in a single glance.
How different is this treatment from that of Descartes? A kinship certainly obtains on one side. The universe occurs as a rational and deductive order in both thinkers. The difference on this side consists of Descartes's mathematical model and Leibniz's logical model. In neither model does anything occur that could disturb this necessary order. Both admit mechanical efficient causality into their respective systems. On the other side, one finds a sharp contrast that issues from their respective notions of substance. For Descartes, substance = being = intelligibility. With arithmetic and geometry as the model for substance, all propositions are intrinsically identical. However, for Leibniz many if not most propositions are not intrinsically identical, but — in his language — virtually identical. There are no contingent events, but this "no" can be declared only in an ultimate sense. Thus, the notion of final cause announces its presence to account for what otherwise would be an undetermined future, or perhaps better, a future that might not follow necessarily. The name for this ultimate cause is goodness, which for Leibniz is inscribed in the very conception of God. But as the citation below demonstrates, "goodness," together with the famous doctrine of preestablished harmony, can indeed be thought nontheologically: "I find that the method of efficient causes, which goes much deeper and is in some sense more immediate and a priori, is, on the other hand, quite difficult when one comes to details, and I believe that, for the most part, our philosophers are still far from it. But the way of final causes is easier, and not infrequently of use in divining important and useful truths which one would be a long time in seeking by the other, more physical way; anatomy can provide significant examples of this."
However, a fissure occurs within Leibniz's conception of goodness. This fissure, points to a gap that cannot be closed within his thought. Goodness means (1) disposition of everything in the best manner, and (2) a way of truth disclosure that is unavailable to a merely mechanical approach. Though ridiculed by Voltaire in Candide (more specifically, the concluding line of the Monadology that declared this "the best of all possible worlds"), that gifted satirist clearly lacked the kind of philosophical insight or even a competent imagination that might have led him to see how a world where outrages occur regularly might yet be seen as the best of those that are possible. That is to say, he seized cleverly but clumsily on (1) above, but missed (2) entirely.
Leibniz did not employ a Panglossian illustration that would celebrate, for example, why the suffering brought about by the Seven Years' War happened "for the best." Rather, he used the scientific work of Snellius, who discovered the laws of refraction by employing the method of final cause in seeking the "easiest" way to conduct a ray of light from one point to another, rather than the mechanical method of first determining how light was formed. In another way, the apparent "dualism" in Leibniz that issues from preestablished harmony reduces to two different methods of causal explanation within a rationally unified whole.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Dark History of Modern Philosophy"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Bernard Freydberg.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preliminary Matters
1. Fissures in the History of Modern Philosophy
Prelude: On Anteriority
2. Spinoza's Abysmal Rationalism
Intermezzo: On the Putative History of German Idealism
3. Unruly Greek Schelling
Coda: Nietzsche as Crux
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Concise, fresh, and energetic, this kind of book can only be written by someone like Bernard Freydberg who displays deep perspective and mastery of the material, thinks quickly and efficiently, and writes with great clarity and wit."
Concise, fresh, and energetic, this kind of book can only be written by someone like Bernard Freydberg who displays deep perspective and mastery of the material, thinks quickly and efficiently, and writes with great clarity and wit.
Bernard Freydberg's purpose is to rewrite the history of modern philosophy focusing on the various ways each thinker is given to think in relation to darkness or the abyss. These dark sources throb beneath the surface of the contemporary Continental tradition.
Concise, fresh, and energetic, this kind of book can only be written by someone like Bernard Freydberg who displays deep perspective and mastery of the material, thinks quickly and efficiently, and writes with great clarity and wit.