The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655-1715
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The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655-1715
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| ISBN-13: | 9780691633916 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Studies in Intellectual History and the History of Philosophy , #255 |
| Pages: | 436 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.20(d) |
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The Battle of the Gods and Giants
The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655â?"1715
By Thomas M. Lennon
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1993 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07400-9
CHAPTER 1
The Philosophical Terrain
§1 THE GASSENDIST FAILURE
The great nineteenth-century historian of Cartesianism, Francisque Bouillier, wrote that "during more than half a century, there did not appear in France a single book of philosophy, there was not a single philosophical discussion which did not have Descartes for its object, which was not for or against his system." Bouillier was a Cartesian historian in two senses of the expression, both of which contribute to the exaggeration of his statement. Even so, he draws attention to what seems to me beyond dispute: that the philosophy of Descartes (1596–1650) dominates the latter half of the seventeenth century in a way that the thought of no one else even approximated. During his lifetime, however, it was not clear that Descartes was to occupy so utterly exalted a position in the history of philosophy. Gassendi (1592–1655) in particular seemed as likely, certainly to many at the time, to enjoy at least as high a place in the philosophical pantheon. Yet the judgment of history has been clear, and it was a judgment that was formed very early. On first view, the question of philosophical importance may not be decidable in terms of whether the candidate has initiated a movement bearing his name, for example, or has succeeded in attracting followers. With the terms given sufficiently broad interpretation, it is even more difficult to argue this with respect to historical importance. I shall have some things to say about these questions. Meanwhile it is clear, in any case, that there were no Gassendists and there was no Gassendism as there were Cartesians and Cartesianism. Those few who were called Gassendists in the latter half of the seventeenth century often were concerned mainly with defending the person of Gassendi against the charge of loose morality rather than with adhering dogmatically to his views.
Very different was the behavior of the self-styled Cartesians, who debated questions of orthodoxy as vigorously, and as bitterly, as any political or religious movement. It is clear as well that while Descartes is nowadays read by first-year students in philosophy, Gassendi is likely unknown even to graduate students. Conferences on Descartes or Cartesianism are events of ongoing philosophical significance, while the most significant conference thus far devoted specifically to Gassendi has been a provincial event of largely antiquarian inspiration. There is an Equipe Descartes at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which annually publishes a "Bulletin Cartésien." Although its appearance and disappearance were meteoric, the recent journal devoted to Cartesian studies at least had the opportunity to demonstrate the credibility of its intellectual goals. No such activities have been tried with respect to Gassendi. The eventual downfall of Cartesianism was a momentous collapse still worth writing about, while it is not clear that anything at all called Gassendism ever existed.
This sketch of the relative statures of Descartes and Gassendi has long seemed to me as problematic as it might have to some contemporary of theirs. How could the star of Gassendism, once so much in the ascendancy, have set so definitively when reasons for its former position continued to seem cogent? Leibniz often complained of the weakness or outright lack of Cartesian technology, a sure sign for him of the infirmity of the science on which it should have been based. The main theoretical question here may be framed by asking why history never carried Leibniz's complaint a level deeper to lodge it more generally against the ontology he in fact shared with the Cartesians, namely, that this ontology was systematically at odds with the Galilean-Newtonian axis of empiricist atomism that spanned the seventeenth century. More particularly, the question is why rationalist plenum theories, particularly the Cartesian, should have endured so successfully, on the Continent at least, as the ontology of the New Science. As it stands, the question of course involves gross simplifications. For example, it was not until well into the eighteenth century that Newtonian physics finally prevailed against the Cartesian; and Descartes felt that he was doing more than merely accommodating the undeniable advances of Galileo. That is, during the heyday of Cartesianism the Galilean-Newtonian axis of empiricist atomism was far from apparent; the Principia after all was not published until 1687. But the question yet stands as to why in particular the philosophy of Gassendi, the more natural vehicle of atomism between Galileo and Newton, remained, while always a plausible alternative to Cartesianism, an also-ran in the competition with it. Despite his presence and authority recognized in a host of spheres, Gassendi had no discernible school, had very little exposition of his doctrines by others, and was soon headed for near-oblivion. Why?
My early research on the question immediately suggested a number of hypotheses. Rehearsing them will begin to clarify the questions, or set of questions, I intend to treat. As part of this, the set of philosophical views I have attached to the name of Gassendi will begin to emerge. There are three main hypotheses. One is that Gassendi's position had theological implications that were hopelessly unacceptable; this I treat under the heading, "Opprobrium Theologicum." Under the heading, "A Distinction without a Difference," I insinuate the possibility that Gassendi did not fail at all. "Cleopatra's Nose" is a third hypothesis, which draws attention to the nonrational circumstances affecting the competing positions. Once again, while many factors will be seen to contribute to the Cartesian success noted above, the Gassendist cause will emerge in one circumstance as relatively successful against the Cartesians, namely, in the academies of the period. They will be the topic of this chapter's second section below. In the third section we shall be in a position to focus the philosophical issues at stake between the Gassendists and Cartesians; and in the final section we note that they were not the only contestants in the period.
Opprobrium Theologicum
The major project of Gassendi's philosophical career was the Christian rehabilitation of Epicurus. His aim was to do for Epicurus what Augustine had done for Plato, or, more obviously, Aquinas for Aristotle, namely, to show that a philosopher living before Christ and in ignorance of the Judaic tradition should nonetheless produce a philosophy of use in answering not only profane questions but also those arising from faith. On the face of it this project was exceedingly implausible. As early as Lactantius and Arnobius, and rather continuously thereafter, Epicurus had been roundly condemned as inimical to Christianity; Dante consigns him and his followers to the sixth circle of hell, among the arch-heretics; and the recovery of the complete text of Lucretius's De rerum natura in 1417 did not much alter the near-universal perception of Epicureanism.
There were two related kinds of objections. Morally, Epicureanism was regarded as involving hedonism of the grossest and most uncontrolled sort. Horace had branded it "pig philosophy" (de grege porcum), a characterization from which J. S. Mill was still explicitly trying to recover it in the nineteenth century. Gassendi tried to argue that hedonism properly understood inclined to asceticism rather than antinomianism, and that contrary to the calumnies of history this inclination had been true of Epicurus himself. But his arguments were increasingly less effective as hedonism came to characterize the libertinage érudit that flourished in the 1630s. The significance of this Lebensform, as we might call it, has divided historians, but all agree that it combined a freedom of speculation with the pursuit of pleasure. To what extent the pleasure pursued was merely sensual or the speculation went beyond the epistemic bounds imposed by the Church are the questions that divide the historians. Gassendi was in any case a notable part of it all, forming along with Gabriel Naude, François de La Mothe Le Vayer, and Elie Diodati, the Tétrade that Pintard placed at the center of libertinage érudit. It might credibly be argued that the views and conduct of the Tétrade were not necessarily opposed to those required by the Church. The argument is less credible, however, when applied to François Luillier, for example, with whom Gassendi was on terms intimate enough that he lodged with Luillier in Paris in the 1640s. Still less is it applicable to some of those of whom Gassendi was supposed to have been the teacher; especially Chapelle (Claude Emmanuel, natural son of Luillier), François Bernier, of whom we shall have a great deal more to say below, perhaps Moliere (at least according to his biography by Grimarest in 1705), and even Cyrano de Bergerac. The moral objection to Epicureanism was based as much on contemporary grounds as historical.
A second objection was based on metaphysical grounds. Historically, Epicureanism had come to signify the two doctrines of materialism, specifically the doctrine that everything is composed of atoms, including people in all their aspects, and, if not outright atheism, at least the rejection of any significant and purposeful divine intervention in human affairs. The one view was read to entail the denial of immortality, and the other, obviously, the denial of Providence. Nor were these viewed as peripheral, dispensable components of Epicureanism. The point of the celebrated clinamen, the inexplicable change of inclination in the top to bottom fall of material bodies through the deep void, is that any given order of things is ultimately a product of chance and a fortiori that human fate is not determined by anything divine. As in the case of the moral objection, the metaphysical objection was continuous into and throughout the seventeenth century. Cudworth as late as the penultimate decade of the century was complaining as much of his latter-day sympathizers as of Epicurus himself: "that monstrous Dotage and Sottishness of Epicurus ... [to] make not only the power of Sensation, but also of Intellection and Ratiocination, and therefore all human Souls, to arise from the mere Contexture of corporeal Atoms, and utterly explode all incorporated Substances.
Gassendi had tried to show (1) that the intellectual operations of the soul argued that at least it was not entirely material, and (2) that while void space may be infinite in extent the number of atoms it contained was finite and thus the world-order could not be the product of mere chance. In his view traditional Epicureanism had gotten the connections right among materialism, theism, order. Providence, and the like, but had argued them the wrong way round. To be sure, if the number of atoms is infinite, no appeal need be made to design for the purpose of explaining order, but the argument is modus tollens, not modus ponens.
In addition to such ad hoc modifications there seems to me a historically more interesting development at stake here. The seventeenth century is perhaps most notable for the rise of the New Science, the mechanico-mathematical conception of the world that replaced the Old Science of Aristotelianism. By giving the New Science a realist interpretation, that is. by regarding its undefined descriptive terms such as 'matter' as referring to what is real, one opens up a chasm between the real world and the world we experience (or at least between the real world and the world as we experience it). Both Descartes and Gassendi figure as prominently as anyone in the promulgation of the New Science with its realist interpretation. But right from the outset there were important differences in their positions. For one thing, the Cartesian real world is both knowable and in some sense necessary; for Gassendi it is contingent and at best knowable only hypothetically. At a minimum, this difference very usefully characterizes the followers of theirs whom we shall be discussing at some length. In addition, the Cartesian position, for reasons we shall also discuss, invited the inclusion among the real things of the world at large nonmaterial elements that both made it more attractive in Christian terms and highlighted its difference from Gassendi's position. Put simply, Gassendi's version of the New Science looked to be more obviously a revival of the old despised materialism.
Now, one response to this danger was to reject outright the theoretical aspects of the New Science. This was the response of the more theologically minded members of the early Royal Society such as Richard Baxter, Samuel Parker, and ultimately Joseph Glanvil, who rejected all such hypotheses and called instead for a crude empiricism, namely, a collection of facts in the fashion supposedly recommended by Bacon. Whether the undeniable advances of the New Science could ever have been accomplished in this fashion is highly doubtful. It was not until Berkeley's instrumentalism restored the reality of the world we experience by reducing the role of theory to predictions about this world that this threat of the New Science to religion was removed. Berkeley is better known for his criticism of certain implications he saw of the New Science; in this regard, however, he was its best champion.
Yet these theological difficulties do not explain, even in the short run, Gassendi's failure against Descartes. For one thing, many included the Cartesians with the followers of Gassendi as advocating materialism. Richard Baxter, for example, complained of those "who in this age adhere to the Epicurean (or Cartesian) Hypothesis ... and [who] reduce all to matter and motion because matter and motion is thoroughly studied by them." More spectacular is the case of Henry More, who began by viewing Cartesianism as a useful weapon against Epicurean materialism but came to regard it as ammunition for just that view; in the end it was for him "the womb of impiety and godlessness." The Cartesians themselves were not unaware that they were being identified with the new Epicureans. In his Entretiens (1666) Jacques Rohault has his antagonist report that "certain people" were saying that the new philosophy was "nothing but a revival of Epicurus's." To emphasize that the principles of these types and those of the Cartesians were "not only different, but even contrary to each other and that between Descartes and Epicurus there is almost nothing in common," Rohault argues that Epicurus advanced important positions completely contrary to both Aristotle and Descartes. Rohault then reads Epicurus as a materialist denying the immortality of the soul. His explanation of why such an antimaterialist philosophy as Cartesianism should be given so mistaken a reading is interesting. He observes that while Epicurus's atomism does not seem contrary to religion, and only his materialist-mortalist view of souls is objectionable, one view can taint all the others. In the same way, he says, Cartesianism has been tainted by Epicureanism because of an alleged similarity between them. Both are said to explain the properties of material things on the basis of the size and shape of their minute parts. But for the Epicureans those parts are indivisible, he explains, while for the Cartesians such parts follow from the infinite divisibility of matter, which they allow following Aristotle. Now, this stance by Rohault is a curious reversal. He began with an attempt to differentiate Epicureanism from Cartesianism but he ends essentially with an apology for it, minimizing its differences from Cartesianism. What this suggests is that theological difficulties do not fully explain Gassendi's failure against Descartes, whose followers were faced with the same difficulties. Indeed, the reversal suggests a rather different attitude toward the whole question of Gassendi's failure.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Battle of the Gods and Giants by Thomas M. Lennon. Copyright © 1993 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Note on Documentation
I The Philosophical Terrain 3
1 The Gassendist Failure 3
2 The Gassendist Success 26
3 The Interminable Battle 34
4 Other Wars 52
II The Giants of the Seventeenth Century 63
5 Dramatis Personae 63
6 Mind versus Flesh 106
7 Gassendist Theories of Space: Apotheosis and Annihilation 117
8 Physical and Metaphysical Atomism 137
III Locke: Gassendist Anti-Cartesian 149
9 Locke and Gassendi 149
10 Locke and Descartes 163
11 Enthusiasm 169
IV The Gods of the Seventeenth Century 191
12 Descartes's Idealism 191
13 Malebranche's Realism 210
14 Malebranche's Idealism 229
V Ideas and Representation 240
15 Two Patterns of Ideas 240
16 Arguments for Representationalism 248
17 Two Versions of the Causal Argument 255
VI The Untouchable and the Uncuttable 274
18 Space and Solidity 276
19 Simple and Complex Ideas 288
20 Primary and Secondary Qualities 298
21 Powers 304
22 Matter and Creation 309
23 The Bestial Soul 314
VII Innateness, Abstraction, and Essences 334
24 Innateness 334
25 Essences and Abstraction 340
26 The Polemic with Stillingfleet 354
VIII Philosophy and the Historiography of Philosophy 367
27 Dissimulation and Meaning 368
28 What Locke Said 374
29 Two Camps of Historians 378
30 History and Interpretation 383
Works Cited 393
Index 411