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Enlightenment and Its Critics
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Alan Kors, Ph.D. Scope: The generation of readers and authors from 1680 to 1715 was one of the most revolutionary in European history, because it was marked by a fundamental change of attitudes toward knowledge and nature. This change was not obvious at the time it was occurring—scholasticism remained entrenched in the universities; fideism and, indeed, mysticism, were vital forces in the culture—but the new philosophers were coming to dominate the learned world, winning the debates, interest, and affection of the reading public. If we examine the attitude of this generation toward the terms of the scholastic disputatio that had dominated prior education, we see clearly the profound transformation of European thought in the seventeenth century.
The generation of 1680 to 1715 increasingly rejected the presumptive authority of the past. This generation increasingly believed induction from data, not deduction from inherited premises, to be the path of truth, and it made the systematic inquiry into experience, now seen as "the book of nature,” the heart of natural philosophy. Further, the rejection of the presumptive authority of the past in natural philosophy led quite naturally to a rejection of the presumptive authority of the past in general. Europe possessed a growing sense that it had acquired something unique from seventeenth-century thinkers—proper method—that would alter both knowledge and the human relationship to nature.
The new philosophers increasingly created and inhabited new centers of intellectual and cultural change, including academies, learned journals, coffeehouses, and non-university learned societies. They also popularized and began to extend the arguments of the celebrated figures of the seventeenth century. Their heroes were Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Locke, and Newton, from whom they took what was most general, far reaching, and innovative. They were drawn to empiricism, quantification, and the naturalization of their worldview. They increasingly assailed what they took to be superstition and brought an end to the persecution of alleged witches. The new philosophers were determined to remove theology from areas not properly, in their view, in its sphere, and they wished to devise both an independent domain of natural inquiry and a theology consistent with the new knowledge. This raised extraordinary dilemmas concerning miracles, revelation, and ethics, dilemmas that would dominate much of eighteenth-century intellectual life. By the end of the seventeenth century, we stand at the birth of modern consciousness and the problems that it will raise for its critics: fear of materialism and naturalism and recoiling from emerging notions of ‘progress.” Outline I. Although it would not have been obvious at the time, in retrospect, we know that the generation of 1685 to 1715 embodied a fundamental change of attitude toward the means of knowing truth in Christian culture. A. The intellectual world was still very mixed. I. Traditional Aristotelian scholastics still dominated the universities. 2. Skepticism and fideism remained vital but were formally condemned in Catholic Europe and about to be swept away by the new confidence in natural philosophy. 3. Mysticism was strong but increasingly seen as dangerous enthusiasm and superstition. B. The emergence of the “new philosophers” set the terms of debate and increasingly won the affections of the growing reading public. The public perceived the new philosophy as having both theoretical strength (Bacon and Locke) and concrete accomplishments (Newton and the new science). C. The disputatio, the form of argument inherited from the Middle Ages, was overturned. 1. The presumptive authority of the past was rejected, and a growing recognition developed of the rights of natural reason even in the presence of theological authority. 2. Syllogistic deduction, or premises drawn from authority, changed to induction, or the logic of inference from experience. 3. “The book of nature” was linked to experiment: let experience and nature decide. D. Europe was free to reject the past as a model. The seventeenth-century revolution in natural philosophy and the means of new knowledge and reexamination of all claims of truth were seen as analogous. 1. Intellectuals had a growing sense that Europe had acquired something that would alter both knowledge and the human relationship to nature: a proper method. 2. Rightly or wrongly, Europe associated the awesome accomplishments of seventeenth-century natural philosophy with induction from nature, ordered by reason into laws as general and universal as possible, confirmed by experiment and experience, and, wherever possible, put to the use of mankind. E. A new locus of change and influence arose. 1. The movement was away from the universities and clerical orders to the academies, the journals, and the coffeehouses. 2. The growing secular reading public, with a will to know, read the new philosophy with exhilaration. 3. Beyond abstruse philosophy was the popularization and commercialization of the discipline.
II. The self-image of the "new philosophers” can be seen in their emerging heroes. What views of our seventeenth-century authors became their legacy for the eighteenth century?
A. The new generation passionately read Bacon on learning from nature. 1. One must avoid the Idols of the Theater. 2. Induction is the essential intellectual method (the metaphor of the path). 3. Knowledge is human power. B. Descartes proclaimed the rights of reason. 1. Philosophy has the right to begin in doubt. 2. Descartes was read for his quest for order and clarity. 3. We can have a mechanical knowledge of the natural world. C. Galileo was a symbol of the freedom of natural philosophy. 1. Nature, not human books, is the real source of human knowledge. 2. Mathematics is the language of our view of nature. D. Locke said that the boundaries of experience are the limits of our world. 1. We should admit ignorance on matters beyond experience. 2. All knowledge was constructed from units of simple experience that can be confirmed, and all claims may be examined in that light. E. In Newton, one sees the model of the power of natural knowledge. 1. After three laws of motion and the law of gravity, both celestial and terrestrial physics fall into place. Newton is the very model of inductive, natural power. 2. According to Newton, nature was lawful and designed: we see through nature to nature’s God.
III. Attitudes underlying intellectual life underwent a sea change.
A. The new philosophy was marked by several characteristics: 1. The presumptive authority of the past was rejected. 2. Empiricism was fundamental. 3. Quantification was embraced through mathematics. 4. The more universal the law, the more powerful would be its explanation. B. The new philosophy was a cultural and religious revolution. 1. Belief in witchcraft and superstition was challenged. 2. The location of God’s providence was increasingly seen in natural laws. Wisdom lay in the design of the original clockmaker. 3. The new religious aesthetic developed with the idea of general laws versus particular providence. 4. This new idea presented the problem of miracle: if God’s providence is in general laws of nature, then an intervention would be similar to a repair. C. In both England and France at the end of the seventeenth and dawn of the eighteenth centuries, the debate of “the ancients versus the moderns” was posed. 1. The past may well be superior in its art; Homer and Sophocles may be incomparable. 2. Knowledge and science, however, are cumulative. 3. What's more, knowledge creates progress. The more we know about the real causes of things, the more we may change the world according to the heart's desire for human happiness.
IV. Theology was removed from areas not properly its sphere, and the new philosophy desired to devise a theology consistent with and evolving through increases in natural knowledge. These revolutionary phenomena further secularized the West.
A. The new philosophy’s implications for notions of miracle and revelation in theology can hardly be overstated. Not revelation, but the book of nature prevails in the new philosophy. B. The new philosophy’s implications for ethical thinking were great: one might even conclude that the idea that the pursuit of happiness was ordained by God was self-evident. C. This was not a revolution from without. Rather, the revolution occurred within Christian culture, which itself produced the intellectual currents that made its displacement from the center of European culture possible. D. The eighteenth century began with intense theological commitments by a literate and learned world; in this course, we need to understand how anti-religious attitudes and secularism arose, as unintended consequences, from that initial deep theological perspective.
V. By the end of the seventeenth century, we stand at the birth of modem consciousness.
A. A movement scientific, secular, inquiring, seeking a principle of authority apart from mere tradition and repetition of the past, the new consciousness was also tempted by skepticism and leaps of faith and, for certain, was confused by the range of choices it created for itself. B. For better or for worse, we are the heirs of the seventeenth-century mind, living in its light and its shadows. Those ‘shadows” would be described by many in the eighteenth century: the fear of materialism and naturalism and the problem of “progress.” Essential Reading: Alan Charles Kors and Paul Korshin, eds., Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany (Philadelphia: 1987). Supplementary Reading: Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680—1 715 (New York: 1963). Questions to Consider: 1. What are the implications of the growing critique of “superstition” and witchcraft persecutions? 2. In what ways did the generation of 1680 to 1715 distort the intentions of the authors whose works it appropriated? Commercial society: A society that has an extensive division of labor and the rule of law and in which people’s activities are coordinated largely by contracts and market mechanisms. Consequentialism: The idea, central to utilitarianism, that an action should be valued according to its consequences rather than from any supposed intrinsic worth or character. Division of labor: Tasks, such as pin making, in Adam Smith’s example, are split up into component parts in which particular individuals specialize. Empiricism: The philosophical doctrine that all knowledge arises from experience and that what cannot be confirmed by experience is not known (or naturally known). Enlightenment: A period of European intellectual history roughly congruent with the eighteenth century; the era saw a spirited rejection of the presumptive authority of the past for a reliance on experience and reason. Idealism: The philosophical doctrine that reality is fundamentally mental. Invisible hand: The idea that socially desirable unintended consequences may derive from self-interested individual action. Labor theory of value: The idea, per Locke, that property is worth only so much as the labor invested in it. Laissez-faire: The doctrine that government should not intervene in the economy, beyond action to secure people’s persons and property rights. Materialism: The philosophical view, opposed to dualism, that the world is composed entirely of matter. Nominalism: The belief that the world is composed of particulars, not universals, asserted by Boethius. Rationalism: The philosophical doctrine that all true knowledge is found by reason alone, independent of the senses. Tabula rasa: A blank slate (the Lockean view of the human mind at birth). Berkeley, George (1685—1753). Berkeley was born near Kilkenny, Ireland, of English lineage. At age fifteen, he enrolled in Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied divinity. In 1707, three years after graduating, he became a fellow of the college and in 1709, he published his Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision. At age twenty-six, he published his most important book, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), which established his reputation as one of the three great British empiricists (with Locke and Hume). During the 1720s, Berkeley planned (but ultimately failed to establish) a new college in Bermuda to educate Native Americans and the sons of English planters. After his return to Ireland, he was appointed the Anglican bishop of the poor and isolated diocese of Cloyne (in 1734). He died in Oxford, England, in 1753. Hume, David (1711—1776). Hume was born into a well-to-do family in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was admitted to Edinburgh University at age eleven but left the university without graduating and spent the following years studying at home. In 1734, Hume moved to France, where he wrote his brilliant Treatise of Human Nature. He was greatly disappointed by the widespread neglect and ridicule of the Treatise following its publication. To improve the work’s accessibility to readers, Hume published anonymously An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and reworked sections of the Treatise as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). In 1752, Hume published his Political Discourses and, in 1755, his Natural History of Religion. During these years, he sought but was denied two professorships, one at Edinburgh and the other at Glasgow, largely because of his unacceptable religious views. In 1752, Hume was appointed librarian to the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, a position that allowed him to continue work on his six-volume History of England (1754— 1761). In 1767, Hume became Undersecretary of the Northern Department of the Secretary of State in London, a post that he held for two years. He spent his final years in Scotland. Locke, John (1632—1704). Locke was born into a middle-class English family and educated at the best British schools (first Westminster in London, then Oxford) in both philosophy and medicine. A royal scholar and a diplomat, he was elected in 1668 to Britain’s prestigious scientific academy. the Royal Society. He published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Letter on Toleration and Two Treatises of Government in 1689. Locke may be characterized as an "insider” in the reformist tradition of Aristotle, particularly in relation to their views on property. Like Hobbes, Locke sought to resolve the political crisis and sense of intellectual disorder around him by producing a coherent and compelling system of political theory. Yet the differences between Hobbes and Locke outweigh their similarities. Although both were Englishmen of the seventeenth century and set forth theories of a social contract (or compact), Locke did not follow Hobbes’s prescriptions of absolute government. Instead, Locke wrote a powerful statement for liberty, albeit for the propertied classes. Mandeville, Bernard (1670—1733). Born in Holland, Mandeville went to England to study the language and stayed on permanently. In his most famous work, The Fable of the Bees (1714), he argued that the self-interest of the individual was the basis for society and that social codes fashioned by the church or state are imposed merely to check this impulse. Mandeville, criticized in his own day by Bishop Berkeley, had an important effect on the later utilitarians. Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de (1689—1755). Son and heir of an aristocratic family of the parlement de Bordeaux (the supreme provincial law court), and educated first by the Oratorians. then in the law, Montesquieu became one of the most widely read political theorists of the eighteenth century and wielded international influence. Participating early in the academies of Bordeaux, then in the Academie Francaise. Montesquieu came to prominence with his satiric and probing Lettres Persanes in 1721. He also published a work on the greatness and decline of Rome in 1734 and is known for his groundbreaking work L’Esprit des loix (The Spirit of the Laws), published in 1748. This book earned him the widest range of criticism and admiration, and many believe that it lays the foundation of sociological thinking. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (17 12—1778). A self-educated refugee in France from Geneva (from which he fled an unhappy apprenticeship to an engraver), Rousseau became one of the most beloved and one of the most hated thinkers of the eighteenth century, a thinker of immediate and ongoing importance. In Paris from the 1740s until 1756, he moved in Enlightenment circles, but he offered foundational criticism of the philosophes’ belief in progress and what he saw as their over-reliance on reason. From 1756 to 1761, he lived outside of Paris, writing in a variety of genres with great success. In 1762, the year that his influential works Emile and The Social Contract were published, Rousseau was banished from Paris for his criticisms of Christianity in Emile. He fled to Switzerland, where he was the subject of Protestant persecution. He spent an unhappy stretch in England, returning to France in 1767 and composing major works of self-examination, including his celebrated Confessions. Smith, Adam (1723—1790). Smith was born at Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and educated at the University of Glasgow and Oxford University. Though known today as the founder of modem political economy, his initial successes were in moral philosophy. His first major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), was culled from the lectures he gave as professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Smith was a friend of David Hume, who entrusted him with the publication, after Hume’s death, of the Discourse on Natural Religion. After a brief stint as a lecturer at Edinburgh University and a decade as a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow, Smith accepted a position as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch, with whom he traveled on the Continent between 1764 and 1766. While in Paris, Smith met a number of French physiocrats and began work on an Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. He spent the following decade at home in Kirkcaldy working on the text, which he published in 1776. In 1778, Smith was appointed Commissioner of Customs for Scotland. His Philosophical Subjects was published posthumously in 1795. Vico, Giambattista (1668—1744). Vico was born in Naples, where as a youth he could often be found studying in the seclusion of his father’s bookshop. He attended a Jesuit college and subsequently tutored, for some years, the nephews of the bishop of Ischia. In 1699, Vico was named professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples, a post that he held until shortly before his death. Vico is regarded by many as the first modern historian, a great philosopher of history, and a brilliant social theorist. His major work, Scienza Nuova (The New Science), portrays history as offering descriptions of the creation and development of human cultures and institutions. Vico’s work seems to have been largely unacknowledged during the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century. however, his work influenced the French historian Jules Michelet and was esteemed in England by the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Arnold. In the twentieth century, his work has been admired and written about by such intellectuals as Benedetto Croce and R. G. Collingwood. Dennis Dalton, Ph.D. Among all the European political theorists, John Locke most influenced early American ideas about government. The Declaration of Independence reflects his conceptions of human rights and liberties.
Locke contrasts with Hobbes in his theory of the state of nature, which he regards as benign, unlike the aggressive and violent condition perceived by Hobbes. Because of this differing viewpoint, Locke recommends a type of government that is much more limited in its power and scope than Hobbes’s omnipotent Leviathan.
Locke envisaged a social contract among reasonable men, in the state of nature, to legitimize a moderate government ruled not by an authoritarian sovereign, but by a majority of propertied citizens. Locke insisted on the values of liberty and the right to hold private property, but these must be under laws determined by a legislature, not by a monarch. The rule of parliament was essential to Locke, who feared that the king could usurp power, which could produce tyranny. His cry that absolute, arbitrary power was illegitimate and should be resisted influenced American colonists who wanted revolution against British imperial rule. I. John Locke was an influential political theorist. A. Locke’s political philosophy greatly influenced the authors of the American Declaration of Independence and other later political thinkers. The Declaration of independence reflects the ideas of Locke by proclaiming, “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” B. Locke held that all people have a natural right to life, liberty, and property. Just governments, in his view, derive their power from the consent of the governed.
II. Locke posits two types of power: legitimate and illegitimate.
A. Hobbes, a realist, sees man’s political situation as one of desperate crisis that requires a desperate remedy: strong central government led by a powerful sovereign. B. Reformists, led by Aristotle and including Locke, assume that man’s natural state is not one of crisis, as Plato and Hobbes suggest, inviting an arbitrary and illegitimate form of power. 1. Locke denies that humans are in a state of crisis and require powerful leadership, which, as he warns, tends inevitably toward despotism and tyranny. 2. The solution to the imperfections of the human political condition, Locke argues, consists above all in respect for institutions and liberty under law. C. Locke and Hobbes offer differing prescriptions for man’s condition. 1. Hobbes goes to extremes; he creates an all-powerful central state to resolve the perceived crisis facing men in the state of nature. 2. Locke speaks not of leadership but of institutions, laws, political culture, and the sacred nature of property. His key concern is to fashion a polity that will secure freedom under law.
III. Locke views the state of nature in far more benign terms than Hobbes does.
A. Locke views power as the right to make laws for regulating and preserving property (understood both as one’s possessions and as life itself). Power can be exercised legitimately only for the public good. B. According to both Hobbes and Locke, the state of nature is not a historical “golden age.” It refers to the intrinsic human impulses that would manifest themselves in the absence of government. 1. Unlike Hobbes, who sees a warlike state of nature, Locke views the state of nature as an original benign condition of perfect equality and perfect freedom from the arbitrary power of others. 2. For Locke, liberty in the state of nature is governed by the laws of nature, which enjoin respect for the lives and welfare of others. Liberty exists but not license. C. Locke’s social contract is a compact among free and equal men to exit the state of nature by forming a limited polity. 1. Locke differs profoundly in this respect from Hobbes, who holds that desperate individuals are driven by fear to create an all-powerful sovereign. 2. Locke holds that one must consent to become subject to another’s power, a benign vision of human nature. The majority has the right to rule the minority. This “majority” consists of propertied males. 3. Locke, not Hobbes, marks the beginnings of modern democratic political theory, which emphasizes the rights of the majority. D. Locke’s theory of property begins with the labor theory of value, or property as valued according to the amount of labor invested in it. 1. Human beings consent to unequal possession of property, based on the labor one expends in acquiring it. The invention of money advanced this inequality.
IV. Lockean natural liberty consists not in license hut in freedom from another’s arbitrary power.
A. Man is free when he is subject only to political authority to which he has given his consent. B. The purpose of law is to preserve and enlarge liberty. Liberty is impossible without law. C. The form of government that is least injurious to liberty vests power in the legislature rather than the monarch. I. The legislature is the least likely of the branches of government to abuse power, because it represents the middle class, which holds property and is thus unlikely to go to revolutionary or disruptive extremes. 2. Legislative power is constrained by specific boundaries that apply in all circumstances: the legislature must apply the same rules to all citizens, both rich and poor; its laws must promote the public good; it must not seize property via taxation without the people’s direct and continuing consent. D. Legitimate political power is exercised only for the common benefit, and it requires continuing consent of the governed. 1. Political power becomes illegitimate when it is exercised arbitrarily and without regard for the public good. Absolute arbitrary power can and must be resisted. 2. This was a powerful idea for the Founding Fathers: liberty under law and resistance to despotism. Essential Reading: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis, IN: 1980).
Supplementary Reading: Frederick, S.J. Copteston. A History of Philosophy (New York: 1985), Book II, Vol. V, pp. 123—143. John Dunn, Locke (New York: 1984).
Steven Dworetz, The Unvarnished Doctrine: Locke, Liberalism, and the American
Revolution (Durham, NC: 1990). Questions to Consider: 1. According to Locke, does the existence of government enhance or diminish individual freedom? 2. According to Locke and Hobbes, what makes political power legitimate? Under what circumstances, if any, may people rightfully rebel against their government? 3. Can liberty and equality coexist under Locke’s system of government?
Locke - The Revolution in Knowledge Alan Kors, Ph.D. Contemporary philosophers may not read John Locke with great attention or enthusiasm today, but his influence on the late seventeenth and the entire eighteenth century can scarcely be overestimated, because he changed the way that the culture thought about knowledge. The classic distinction between Locke’s “empiricism” and Descartes’s “rationalism” is overdrawn, however, because both thinkers show elements of each tendency. Locke’s empiricism resides above all in his view of the origin of our ideas and in his sense of the implications of identifying that source. For Descartes, ideas are both innate and yield truth about the real qualities of the world; for Locke, ideas are acquired and our knowledge is only of our experience of the world. Ideas arise either from sensation (the senses) or reflection (the mind’s awareness of its own behaviors), with simple sensations and simple reflections combining to form complex ideas. Our knowledge, thus, is limited strictly to our experience, and we must humbly admit our ignorance of the real essences of things. Locke appears to lean toward Cartesian mind-body dualism, but he believes the philosophical issue to be unprovable. The problem for Locke is not to know what the world is—we are not made for such knowledge—but to know how the world behaves.
Locke was read very diversely by his audiences, who linked him in remarkably different ways to earlier philosophers and schools of philosophy (nominalism, Francis Bacon, and Hobbes). His often equivocal and “commonsensical” approaches to perennial issues of philosophy permitted his influence to operate in a number of directions. Locke’s epistemology shaped the thinking of the entire eighteenth century, occasioning and reinforcing a revolution in the culture’s sense of the nature (and limits) of knowledge. In Locke’s view, the mind begins as a blank slate on which experience prints ideas via the senses and reflection. Propositions about the world depend on those acquired ideas, which in turn depend on their relationship to experience. We cannot know what is not within our experience, and because experience is not logically determined, our knowledge of the world is merely probable. For early-modern readers and thinkers, Locke’s model demystified the world of knowledge and ideas: even if a proposition or system is complex, if it is based on reality, it can be broken down into its component ideas, all grounded in experience, and those ideas may be tested against the behavior of the world. Although some later authors would attempt to mechanize Locke’s model of mind, it is one that insists on the mind as an active agency.
The implications of Locke’s thinking are dramatic: we learn our ethical ideas from experience and we are products of our environment, which, if changed, would change the kinds of human beings it produces. Our characters and senses of the world are, thus, relative to time, place, circumstance, and experience. Locke did not believe that any of the implications of his system were dangerous for religion. In fact, he undertook a work of empirical Christian apologetics, The Reasonableness of Christianity’, to demonstrate that the truth of Christianity follows empirically from the evidence of the historicity of Christ’s miracles and the fulfillment of prophecies. I. Although Locke is not highly thought of by twentieth-century philosophers, his role in intellectual history is almost incalculable in its importance. A. The triumph of John Locke is that for one hundred years, his epistemological authority was of crucial importance in Europe. B. The essential aspect of epistemology (theory of knowledge) is that it sets the foundation and framework of one’s thinking about all areas of human thought.
II. Textbooks typically highlight the debate between rationalism and empiricism—Descartes versus Locke.
A. The distinction between Descartes’s rationalism and Locke’s empiricism has been overdrawn. For example, Descartes put forth mechanistic natural science and Locke, rationalistic criterion of truth. So what are the real debates between them? 1. The goal of fundamental natural philosophy. 2. The source of our ideas and what follows from identifying that source. B. The goal of fundamental natural philosophy. 1. For Descartes, the goal of philosophy is to reveal the real qualities of the world. 2. For Locke, philosophy’s goal is to order our experience of the world. C. The source of our ideas. 1. For Descartes, our ideas are innate. 2. For Locke, they are acquired by experience. D. Locke’s criterion for certain rational truth is intuitive certainty. Our knowledge of the world, however, is known only by acquired ideas.
III. The role of experience is central to natural philosophy.
A. For Locke, all ideas are acquired by two kinds of experience. 1. Sensations are the impressions our senses leave on the mind. 2. Reflection is the mind’s experience of its own operations while dealing with sensation. B. Simple sensations or reflections combine to form complex ideas. Locke was influenced by seventeenth-century French philosopher Pierre Gassendi’s resurrection of ancient ideas on atomism. C. For Locke, there are no innate ideas; thus, our knowledge is limited to our experience of the world. D. What follows is that we have no knowledge of what underlies experience. I. Thus, we have no rational knowledge of what mind and matter are; this is in contrast to Descartes. 2. For Locke, we know the nominal sense, not the real essence, of matter. E. This admission of ontological incapacity is properly humble. 1. Although he leans to dualism, Locke maintains that we have no knowledge of dualism. 2. We need to admit ignorance. The proper response to questions beyond our experience is an admission of ignorance. 3. We need to revise the claims of philosophy.
IV. The Lockean agenda is, therefore, humble.
A. The problem is not to know what the mind is, but how, in experience, the mind behaves; not to know what matter is, but how, in experience, the world behaves. B. Because such knowledge is based not on logic but on experience, it is always open to correction by further experience. A person from the tropics may infer from his experience that ice is impossible. If he encounters it, he must alter his views about water.
V. Locke’s epistemology will become the dominant theory of knowledge in the eighteenth century, effecting a vast revolution in the culture’s sense of the nature and limits of natural knowing. What were its essential qualities?
A. In Locke’s model, the mind is a tabula rasa - a blank slate—on which nature imprints ideas via sensations and in which the mind becomes aware of its own operations on sensations, via reflection. B. Some ideas naturally attract each other by association. C. The mind is active and, by abstraction and combination, it forms complex ideas. D. Therefore, propositions about the world may be only probable and depend for their probability on their relationship to experience.
VI. Locke’s influence on subsequent philosophy is vital.
A. His model leads to a demand for analysis, clarity, and confirmation. In theory, any proposition may be analyzed into its component ideas, then into its component experiences, and may be judged in relationship to our actual experience of the world. B. The world of real knowledge becomes, by analysis and experimental confirmation, a lucid world, an accessible and demystified world, devoid of obscurity. C. Locke’s advice is to take what was complex and analyze it into its simple parts; then to confirm or disconfirm propositions about the world by comparing them to the behavior of the things described. D. This advice became, in many ways, the mission of the eighteenth century.
VII. The roots and implications of Locke’s model are dramatic.
A. Locke, who draws widely on the past, has a relationship to nominalism, Bacon (method), and Hobbes (language). B. Some thinkers in the eighteenth century tried to mechanize Locke (e.g., Claude Adrienne Helvetius’s formulation that “to sense is to judge”). This distorts Locke, however, as Rousseau clearly saw. Different readings of Locke led to great debates about the implications of his thinking for materialism. C. For Locke, we learn ethical ideas by experience also, which implies that ethics are relative to experience. What we call “good” is what causes well-being; what we call “evil” is what causes pain. This model, if not joined by providence,would be subversive. D. Consider the following implications: I. Environmentalism: if experience decides all, then environment would seem determinative. 2. Relativism: what we believe is relative to our experience. 3. Character is not essential or fixed but developed by experience. E. Locke bequeathed to the eighteenth century the specter of philosophical idealism. F. A dramatic question is raised by Locke’s epistemology: how do we base religious belief on empirical knowledge? G. Locke’s own empiricist apologetics, The Reasonableness of Christianity, recognizes that we need empirical evidence for Christian truth. Essential Reading: John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, abridged and edited by A. D. Woozley (New York: 1974). Supplementary Reading:
The Reasonableness of Christianity with A Discourse of Miracles and part of a Third Letter Concerning Toleration, edited and abridged by I. T. Ramsey (Stanford: 1958). Questions to Consider:
2. For many readers, Locke removed the danger of Hobbes from empirical philosophy and from the belief that ethics were learned by experience of pleasure and pain. Were they correct? 3. What are the most “revolutionary” implications of Locke’s theory of knowledge?
Vico and the
New Science of History Darren Staloff, Ph.D. Scope: Vico’s philosophy of history had an immense intluence on nineteenth-and twentieth-century thought. Vico replaced the cogito of Cartesian epistemology with his own principle of verutnfacturn, which states that we know the truth about matters that we have cognitively constructed or "made.” Vico’s work has several interesting implications for the study of the human past. In addition, he uses modern scientific methods to demonstrate the potential dangers of using those same methods. Outline An obscure figure in his own lifetime (1688—1744), Vico’s philosophy of history had an immense influence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. Vico’s New Science occupies a curious place in the normal trajectory of eighteenth-century intellectual history. He offered an evolutionary view of human history, as Marx and Darwin would do.
I.
A. On the one hand, Vico’s analysis of history fulfills the Enlightenment’s project of a "science of man,” based on an empirical study of psychology, society, politics, and culture. B. On the other hand, Vico’s New Science is intended as a warning against the central tendencies of Enlightenment thought, thus turning Enlightenment criticism against itself.
11. Vico addressed the epistemic status of history, which had been placed in jeopardy.
A. The Cartesian epistemology of clear and distinct ideas precluded any possibility of scientific history. B. Vico replaced the cogito with his own principle of i’erumfricturn, which states that we know the truth about matters that we have cognitively constructed or "made.” Because history is made exclusively by man, it can be known by him with scientific certainty.
III. Vico holds to a cyclical theory of history for fallen gentile man.
Without direct divine instruction, the post-diluvian gentile nations undergo a
common course of development through three stages that represent distinct levels
of cultural activity and consciousness. The mechanism that moves any culture
through these stages is class struggle. Vico uses new methods to understand the
past: philology and archaeology, achieving a rudimentary kind of anthropological
perspective. A. The first stage Vico calls the age of gods.
IV. Once a culture or nation has run its course, it continues to degenerate—a second barbarism—until it can recover the religious and primal spontaneity of the primitive mind.
A. The early Christian church heralded a new age of the gods among Europeans. B. Medieval Europe was a heroic age of patriarchal warnors. C. The contemporary Enlightenment announced the next age of man in Europe.
V. Vico’s work has several interesting implications for the study of the human past.
A. Artifacts, such as Homer’s Iliad and heraldic paraphernalia, as well as etymology, are sources for reconstructing a worldview or culture. This is the basis for cultural anthropology and history. B. Contra to Hobbes and Locke, political society is not the result of a social contract but a slow evolution from customs and mores, rather than agreed-upon rational principles. C. Although rational philosophic criticism and speculation might be the fruit of high civilization, such thinking is poisonous because it dissolves the irrational customary and religious beliefs that allow cultures and society to cohere and develop. Thus, Vico deploys modem scientific method to demonstrate the potential dangers of the deployment of modem scientific methods.
Essential Reading: Frederick, S.J. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume VI, pp. 154-163. The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: 1968). Supplementary Reading: Mark Lilla, GB. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (Cambridge: 1993). Questions to Consider: 1. Does Vico’s cyclical theory of history lend itself to later ideas of human progress and evolution? 2. In what ways do Vico’s methodology anticipate later tenets of academic disciplines such as anthropology’?
Montesquieu and Political Thought Alan Kors, Ph.D. Scope: The intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century dramatically increased both the culture’s sense of the order of nature and its sense of the relativity of human association and social arrangements. Montesquieu’s extraordinary contribution to Enlightenment political thought was his effort to systematize our understanding, through natural inquiry, of both the order and the instabilities of human political and social forms. For some, this makes him, above all, a foundational thinker in the development of political science and sociology. For others, it makes him a particularly subtle and nuanced observer of the human condition. From the 1720s to the 1740s, Montesquieu, whose own life made the study of society a vital and open-ended inquiry, published The Persian Letters (a mordant view of contemporary France and, in part, Persia), Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (an inquiry into the flowering and death of a dominant civilization), and The Spirit of the Laws (an attempt to explain, often systematically, the sources of social, political, and legal phenomena). These works posed the two central questions of his intellectual life in ways that would have dramatic influence on Western thought: What is relative to time and place? What is natural and universal? He links these two domains—the relative and the natural—by exploring the reality of difference and the reality of natural consequences. Human beings may live and believe in a startling variety of ways, but a reality principle of objective natural causes and consequences exists that allows us to understand the course of human phenomena and sets limits to our malleability and our ephemeral human systems. Variety prevails, but we may understand that variety and learn from it. We learn, among other things, that we ignore objective conditions of justice and survival at our peril and that despotism, so prevalent in human affairs, is both objectively against nature and inherently unstable. Like Machiavelli, Montesquieu seeks to understand in wholly natural terms the contingencies of time and place in politics, but he makes his moral agenda explicit. His understanding and his moral agenda had a deep influence on the American Revolution. Outline I. Montesquieu was a relativist but always in search of order. For him, eighteenth-century relativism clearly had a “problem.” A. Despite obviously encouraging the view of knowledge as social and communicable, the new Lockean epistemology (theory of knowledge) carried in it the seeds of relativism. I. If, as Locke taught, one’s knowledge and moral ideas are bounded and determined by one’s experience, then one’s sense of the world, one’s values, and one’s beliefs are relative to time, place, and personal experience. 2. Locke’s doctrine of nominal and real essences establishes that we know only the appearances of things. 3. Locke’s doctrine makes one’s beliefs relative to the nature of the human senses. Locke himself had asked what we would believe about the world if we had microscopic eyes or additional or fewer senses. Voltaire’s popularization of Locke imagines visitors to earth from distant space: despite exponentially longer lives and more senses than humans, they lament their ignorance.
B. Europe’s encounter with foreign and “exotic” peoples, the effect of which was multiplied by the growth of printing and the reading public, produced a curiosity about, and astonishment over, differences among cultures, an awareness by which Europeans seemed as strange to others as others did to them. Such cultural divergences included: 1. The differences in treatment of women and the elderly. 2. The diversity of religions, moral codes, and beliefs. 3. The difficulties of translation. 4. The very fact of flourishing non-Christian cultures. (Voltaire began his history of the world with China.) 5. Bestsellers, such as The Turkish Spy and 1001 Nights, and accounts of American Indians brought other exotic places to light.
C. Montesquieu’s background made him sensitive to difference and particular perspectives. 1. The milieu of the parlement of Bordeaux inculcated an awareness of absolutism and arbitrary power. 2. Montesquieu’s Huguenot (Protestant) wife inculcated an awareness of toleration and of the accident of birth. 3. The savants at the Academy of Inscriptions became students of chronology and comparative ancient religions and beliefs; they were shocked by the functional resemblance and substantive difference between cultures. 4. Montesquieu’s educated Chinese friend who had converted to Christianity in China was astonished at what he found in Europe, expecting to find a Europe of gentle souls.
II. Montesquieu ‘s Persian Letters (1721) enjoyed an extraordinary literary success.
A. The structure of the Persian Letters—an epistolary novel in which “Persian” travelers see France and the West through Persian eyes—allowed Montesquieu great freedom to comment on his world and to deepen his readers’ sense of the relativity of belief to time and place. B. The Persian Letters used relativism to great effect. 1. In a satire of relativism, the pope, the king, nobles, and bishops are seen through “Persian” eyes. 2. Montesquieu raises the humor of ethnocentrism: a Frenchman asks, “How could anyone be a Persian?” 3. The Letters consider the deepest questions: What is relative to time and place? What is natural and absolute? Montesquieu seeks to distinguish between what is malleable and what is common to all human experience. 4. He considers the implications for politics, in particular the varieties of despotism and the natural law of liberty. 5. The implications for ethics are striking: Montesquieu examines the varieties of moral codes and the reality of natural consequences.
III. Montesquieu, in the Persian Letters (1721), the Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734), and The Spirit of the Laws (1748), sought to reconcile the order of nature and the variety of human forms of association.
A. A view central to all three of these works is that science is a unifying truth amid the relativity of perspective. I. The laws of natural philosophy are demonstrable across cultural boundaries. From ancient history we can derive a model of social phenomena and move on to a science of history. 2. We can discern the regularity of human nature from the variety of circumstance. The task is to recognize the common forms at work beneath the surface differences of human affairs. B. Montesquieu classified the essential varieties of political association according to the spirit that animates them. 1. In republics (animated by virtue), people or an aristocracy rule. 2. In monarchies (honor), one man is guided by law and custom. 3. In despotism (fear), people are ruled by the caprice of an individual. 4. Thus, Montesquieu sees the problem of human history: what would seem morally the most desirable, given these alternatives, is a democratic republic, which is one of the least stable forms of human association. C. The cycles of human history contain both instability and predictability. 1. In the case of the Troglodytes in The Persian Letters, Montesquieu suggests that they cannot cohere until self-governance and virtue produce prosperity, which, in turn, leads to selfishness and greed. 2. In the case of Rome, the virtue of the Republic proved too successful, leading to militarism and monarchy and despotism. 3. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu asks the deeper question: What kind of society falls from the loss of one battle? D. The scientific and tragic lesson is that an independent natural reality exists in which behaviors have real consequences. This idea points to universal values. Human societies can achieve any number of forms, but they cannot survive unless they solve the problem of linking the individual to the broader society—problems of security, of equity, of justice. Such success, however, given human nature, will not be permanent.
IV. Despotism presents a deeper problem.
A. All cultures, in general, and power, in particular, assume that their particular forms of association are “natural.” B. The irony of despotism is that the Persian Uzbek sees all despotism around him except his own. C. Despotism is the subjection of one person’s life to the whim and caprice of another’s will. When the despot is unable to exercise terror, freedom reasserts itself against the arbitrary will of an individual man. Only terror makes despotism seem stable and permanent. D. Can one overcome despotism? 1. The society must have rights without anarchy. 2. The society must also have a separation of powers, each acting as a check and balance on the other.
V. Montesquieu’s influence on the American Revolution was considerable.
A. The American founders thought it their purpose to learn from nature, not the past. B. They understood the necessity of mutual restraints on centers of power. C. They knew that, absent public virtue, nothing wrought on paper would be stable. Essential Reading: Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, translated by C. J. Betts. (London: 1973); The Spirit of the Laws, translated and edited by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge and New York: 1989). Supplementary Reading: Montesquieu The Spirit of the Laws, Part II. Considerations on the Greatness of the Ronzans and Their Decline. Questions to Consider: 1. Why don’t Montesquieu’s relativistic insights lead to skepticism about a science of society? 2. Is there any way, in Montesquieu’s system, to limit the depradations of power by means of written laws?
The Worldly Philosophy of Bernard Mandeville Darren Staloff, Ph.D. Scope: Bernard Mandeville’s career and thought both exemplify several central themes of the Enlightenment. Mandeville’s most famous work, The Fable of the Bees, presented his central paradox in moral theory, namely that private vices make public benefits. N4andeville’s rigorism and focus on consequences revealed the fundamental tensions between Judeo-Christian and classical virtues versus modern commercial and secular society. Outline
I. Bernard Mandeville was the Machiavelli or Hobbes of the Anglophone II. Mandeville’s life and career exemplify several central features of the Enlightenment in early eighteenth-century England.
A. Although he wrote wonderfully playful English verse and prose, Mandeville was actually Dutch. 1. Born in Rotterdam in 1670, Mandeville was raised in a commercial city in the foremost commercial society and power of the seventeenth century. Mandeville’s move to London exemplifies the urban cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment that celebrated the fashionable life of the town over the simpler rusticity of country life. 2. Mandeville studied at the prestigious University of Leyden, where he was trained as a physician. He also read widely in philosophy, including Descartes, Spinoza, and Bayle. B. A client of the Earl of Macclesfield, the Lord Chancellor of England, in politics Mandeville was an outspoken Court Whig. 1. The Court Whigs represented the new commercial and financial oligarchy that came to dominate in the early to mid-century. 2. Like Hume after him, Mandeville came to see that a certain amount of patronage (corruption) was necessary to oil the machinery of “ministerial government,” just as a certain amount of private selfishness was essential to commercial society. C. Mandeville’s career exemplifies that of the new ‘"gentleman of letters,” the early English version of what the French would call the philosophe. 1. Mandeville’s works were widely read and discussed in “polite” London society. 2. Mandeville engaged in epistolary exchanges and philosophic debates with other key figures in the English Enlightenment, thus exercising his “franchise” in the newly emerging “republic of letters.” 3. Mandeville was a participant in the Enlightenment’s “club” culture. |