Modern Philosophy

The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries

Richard Francks

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135363109
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophie
• Categoría: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Modern Philosophy is an exploration of the ideas of six major thinkers from Descartes to Hume. It takes a fresh and engaging look at the common themes that dominate this period, as well as examining the differences in the work of the six philosophers.Through vivid and witty prose, Richard Francks skilfully presents ideas that have informed the development of philosophy as we know it, and which present a challenge to beliefs and attitudes that most of us now share. In this work we find the source of modern philosophical inquiry - questions such as the existence of God, the Mind and Body problem, the idea of self, and the existence of the world had their birth in these texts - as well as broader questions about political and social philosophy. Thinkers discussed: Rene Descartes
Baruch Spinoza
Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz
John Locke
George Berkeley
David HumeThis will be ideal for anybody coming to the ideas of these philosophers for the first time.

Chapter 1
Introduction

How modern is ‘Modern’ philosophy?

Six ‘Modern’ philosophers

Is there such a thing as the Modern Age? And if there is, are we in it?

The six philosophers who are the subject of this book are Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. They are all standardly referred to as ‘modern’ philosophers, even though the most recent of them died well over 200 years ago. It is a title they used of themselves, and one that was used about them by their contemporaries, but its use today suggests two things, neither of which is obviously true: that there is something which is common to all six of them, and that they are somehow connected to us, but not to the people who went before them – in other words, it suggests that there is such a thing as Modernity, or The Modern Age, to which both we and they belong.

When you come to look at what they actually wrote, though, that suggestion seems hard to sustain. For one thing, they are very different one from another. Not only were they a diverse group in terms of nationality, language, tradition, religion, politics, social group and personality, but they also lived in very different times and places, and wrote about different subjects. Their lives cover a period of some 180 years, from the birth of Descartes in 1596 to the death of Hume in 1776. One hundred and eighty years is a long time, and a lot happened in the world they knew between those dates. When we come to look at them in detail, we will see that their lives and their ideas overlapped and criss-crossed in a whole variety of different ways. There is no single theory or belief that they all share, and which marks them out as belonging to the same epoch. There is no one clearly stateable question which was the burning issue of that long and eventful period and which they all tried to answer. Instead, we will see theories and questions come and go in their writings, issues sometimes moving into centre stage, and at other times receding into the background. Sometimes they agree on a certain topic, sometimes they disagree; most often they deal with related issues in significantly different ways and with very different emphasis, so that you would be hard pushed to say for certain whether it was the same question they were asking, or a different one.

Not only do they seem to be disparate and diverse, but when you read them they also seem almost impossibly remote from our present lives and concerns. Three of them we read in modern translations, of course, which takes some of the edge off their remoteness, and even with the three who wrote in English we usually have updated typography, spelling and punctuation, which do a lot to make them seem a little less alien. But still their writings seem at best seriously archaic, and sometimes downright bizarre. Their interests, their concerns, their attitudes, their judgments all seem seriously foreign, irrelevant to our lives. What is obvious to them just seems weird to us, and what is obvious to us they have no knowledge of.

For all their diversity and remoteness, though, I think it does still make sense to say that they are all in a significant sense modern thinkers, and that we ourselves are still recognizably of their era. The problem is that, as is often the case with our families and friends, what holds us all together is much less obvious than what divides us. So here is my theory of Modernity, and with it comes a little test for you to apply to yourself, by means of which you can decide whether you yourself are a Modern thinker, or whether you want to say that, as far as you are concerned, Modernity is a thing of the past.

Appearance and Reality, or two kinds of expert

In the seventeenth century people began to think in a new way.¹ The basis of that new way of thinking was a fundamental distinction, which I am going to call the distinction between Appearance and Reality. Here is an example of it in operation.

Imagine you’re sitting in the garden, eating an apple. The weather’s decent, the light’s good. Your eyes, ears, taste buds and other sensory equipment are in normal working order, and you are not currently under the influence of any distorting passions or of any mind-affecting drugs. You are, however, a philosopher, and so half-way through eating your apple you suddenly stop, and start to think about it.

‘Here’, you think, ‘is this apple. It is round and green and shiny and sweet, and I pulled it off my next-door-neighbor’s tree not half an hour since (when she wasn’t looking). I can see the apple, I can feel it in my hand, I can smell it and taste it, and I can hear the crunching noise it makes when I bite it. I know where it came from, and I know what kind of apple it is. All in all, I think I know this apple pretty well. But I wonder what it’s really like, deep down, in itself. I wonder what a scientist would say about it.’

Does that little story make sense to you? If it does, then you understand what it is to be Modern. I think the chief distinguishing feature of the Modern era is that distinction between on the one hand our subjective experience of the world – the way it looks, and feels – and on the other its independent, objective reality – the way it really is. The six philosophers in this book are all of them involved in some way or other with defending, explaining, clarifying, using, opposing or re-interpreting some distinction of this kind, and I think it is still a central part of the way that our society understands itself and the world around it. But before the seventeenth century it was not standardly made out in anything like the same way.²

It is important to realize that the distinction I am talking about here is not simply that between real and illusory, actual and non-actual, true and false. It is very hard to imagine people who could live without being able to make out that kind of distinction in some form or other.³ But that is not at all the same as saying that we have to operate with a systematic distinction between Appearance and Reality, subjective and objective, the world as we know it and the world as it really is. Because not only did people before the seventeenth century not standardly make a distinction like that, but we ourselves manage to get along without it in large parts of our lives.

Think, for example, about tables, physicists, and stamp collectors.

The table in your kitchen (if you have one) is to all intents and purposes solid, brown, wooden and (except when you move it out of the way to hoover) stationary. But as we all know, it isn’t really like that. Really, the physicist tells us, it is in itself a whole world of microscopic and submicroscopic particles, waves, or fields of matter. Those particles are not themselves wooden, but are made of more elemental stuff, and they are not really brown, but invisible; and they are certainly not stationary – in reality, they are whizzing around at high speed, and the whole thing is really no more solid than is a cloud of water droplets, or a swarm of bees.⁴

That is a classic example of the Appearance/Reality distinction in operation: the table as it appears to be, as it features in our daily lives, is quite different from the way it really is, as the physicist knows it. Three points in particular to notice:

1. The properties which objects really possess are in fact radically different from the ones they seem to possess. (The table looked solid, brown and immobile, but is really none of those things.)
2. But more than that, not only do things seem to be other than they really are, but in fact many (at least) of the properties that things seem to possess turn out not to be possessed by anything at all. It isn’t that the table, which seems to be brown, is really yellow, or pink, or a tasteful shade of puce; really, as it is in itself, the table isn’t any color. Color has turned out to be a feature not of the world, but our experience so that not only is the table not brown, but nothing (really, in itself) is brown. And really nothing, in itself, is solid or immobile, either.
3. And the third point is just an extension of that second one. Not only does the world not really possess a lot of the properties it appears to have, but it turns out to have a lot of properties which nothing in our experience does possess. Valency, for example, or non-locality are contemporary examples of properties which we say that things in themselves do possess, but which we have never directly experienced anything as having.

It is important to realize that we make this distinction in some places, but not in others. Think of stamp collecting as an example. The expert philatelist knows massively more about stamps than does an ignorant person like me. I see a funny-looking green stamp with a picture of some mountains on it and a couple of flags; the expert sees a Swiss two-cent commemorative issued in 1887 to celebrate the visit of Crown Prince Helmut of Bavaria and his wife Pauline, or whatever it might be. The expert knows the stamp’s history, the way it was made, and which factory it was printed in. She can tell you its place in the history of the Swiss postal service, its current value, how many examples are known to survive and where they all are, and a whole mass of other stuff that I can’t even dream up to use in this example. Is that the same as the physicist’s expert knowledge of the table?

It seems to me it’s quite different, and the reason it is different is that we don’t make any kind of appearance/reality distinction in the case of stamp collecting.

Try it. Does the philatelist know what the stamp is really like, while I know only how it appears?

No. My knowledge of the stamp is superficial, trivial, limited to what you can see in a cursory inspection, while hers is encyclopaedic, broad and deep and informed by a lifetime of devotion to the subject – but my view of the stamp is not mistaken, as my view of the table was. The properties I thought the stamp had are still there in the expert’s account, though they are incorporated into a very different context. And the new properties which she detects in it and I don’t, like the overprinting of the price or the dodgy perforation, are things which I too can come to see, just as she does. In general we can say that my understanding of the stamp is preserved in the expert’s account – though greatly enhanced and expanded – whereas in the case of the physicist my account was replaced by a very different kind of story.

Stamp collecting is not in any way peculiar in not making the kind of systematic Appearance/Reality distinction we saw in physics: the same is true of large areas of our day-to-day knowledge⁵ The point I am making is that before the seventeenth century the distinction was not standardly made in relation to the expert’s knowledge of nature, but it has been ever since. And that is what I think makes it true to say that our six philosophers, like us, were living in, and trying to come to terms with, the Modern world.

The shock of the old

The fact that the Appearance/Reality distinction is now so familiar makes it hard for us to realize that in the seventeenth century it was anything but. Yet in the time of Descartes the idea of a distinction of this kind was not only not obvious, it was also politically and socially dangerous, theologically unacceptable and intellectually plainly absurd.

That absurdity is not easy for us to see; but try to imagine how crazy it must have appeared when people first began seriously to claim that the sky is not in fact blue, that there is a world of invisible creatures living and dying in the clearest water, and that the earth itself, the solid center of our world and of our lives, is in reality racing through the heavens and spinning round at enormous speed. When you think about it, any one of those claims would take a great deal of swallowing to anyone who hasn’t been brought up to believe it, and who has not been trained since an early age into the Cartesian, Modern belief that the reality of things is not revealed to the casual observer, but is established by the subtle calculations of the expert.

In its religious aspect the shock of the new metaphysic was no less acute. If Descartes and his kind were right, then most people in the world were guilty of a kind of large-scale and seemingly inevitable misunderstanding of the way things really are, and that seemed to call into question people’s views of their relation to the world and to the God who made them. Traditional theology had been made out in terms of traditional metaphysics, and by this time was very strongly Aristotelian in character; if the world was not as it had always been taken to be, then large areas of theological doctrine and biblical interpretation would have to be rethought – a process which was bound to be difficult and dangerous in the context of the ongoing battles over the Reformation.

Politically, too, the new ideas raised problems: traditional learning cannot be questioned without calling into doubt traditional authorities and traditional educational systems. A large-scale error of this kind seemed to make fools of all established authorities, and like the Reformation to invite people to make up their own account of the world, and to recast it anew. Even thinkers like Descartes who were careful not to enter directly into religious or political argument therefore came to be seen for what they were – dangerous radicals with new ideas which if accepted called into question all existing authorities and institutions.

Since that time, of course, we have learned to adjust our political, social and theological opinions in such a way as to preserve the Modern conception of science. Our view of ourselves and of our relations to each other, to nature, to other peoples and to other ages are all of them intimately bound up with the parts played in our lives and in our consciousness by the practice and products of science. And for that reason it is still true to describe us as living in the Modern age which came into being in the seventeenth century. It may well be true (I think myself it is to be hoped) that we are now at the very end of that period, and that the culture we inhabit will soon move into some kind of Post-Modern age; but it hasn’t happened yet. And until it does, the attempt to understand and respond to the different carefully worked-out versions of Modernity which were produced by our six thinkers can help us to make sense of the ragbag of disparate Modernist views that we call our contemporary common sense, and which play such a large part in the lives that we lead, and the attitudes and beliefs that we currently inhabit.

So try these six views for size, and see if any of them fits with the kind of life you want to lead, and the kind of views you want to live with. All you will find here is a rough sketch of these philosophers’ thoughts, a broad outline of how they saw the world: I hope it will be enough to give you some sort of a feel of what it would be like to see things the way they seem to have done. Some of their ideas I hope you will find ridiculous, some infuriating, some exciting; some I expect you will find dull. However you find them, I hope they will make sense as genuine alternatives to the attitudes and beliefs you started out with, and that through seeing them and learning to distinguish your own views from them you will come to understand some aspects of your own life a little better.

PART 1
René Descartes

Biography

René Descartes was born in 1596, when Francis Bacon was thirty-five years old, William Shakespeare nearly thirty-two, and Kepler only twenty-four. He was fourteen when Galileo published his epoch-making telescopic observations, and a nervous 37-year-old when Galileo was condemned for his advocacy of a heliocentric system. He died in 1650, a year after the execution of Charles I in England, and two years after the end of the Thirty Years’ War. His best-known publications are Discourse on Method (1637), Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and Principles of Philosophy (1644).

Descartes was born in the town of Châtellerault¹ in west-central France, some 70 kilometres south of Tours, into a family of provincial gentry. His mother died when he was a baby. He was brought up by his grandmother, and went away to school at the Jesuit college in La Flèche when he was ten years old. As a young man he spent four years as a gentleman soldier in the Netherlands and Germany, but he gave up plans for a legal career and for the rest of his life lived for the most part on the income he derived from the sale of his share of the family property. Most of his productive life (1628–49) was spent at various addresses in the Netherlands, but at the age of fifty-four he moved to Sweden at the invitation of Queen Christina, only to die of pneumonia within six months. He never married, and his only daughter (her mother was a maid at a house he stayed at in Amsterdam) died at the age of five.

He was persuaded very early on that the traditional learning in which he had been trained was dead, and that truth lay with the new approaches advocated by people like Bacon, Kepler and Galileo. He carried out his own investigations in such fields as optics, meteorology, mechanics and anatomy; but his real achievements were not in his practical inquiries into natural phenomena, but in the theories he produced to accommodate his own and other people’s discoveries, and in his literary success as an expositor of and publicist for those views. His written output was huge, from formal Latin treatises dedicated to the learned fathers of the Sorbonne, to more popular French-language pamphlets for the reading public, and countless formal and informal letters to friends and people in power, explaining and defending his views, criticizing those of his opponents, and generally doing everything he could to sell his gradually developing revolutionary theory of the nature of the world, of God and of human beings.

His ideas were always controversial, and his works were banned by the Catholic church after his death. This didn’t prevent him from being enormously influential in all areas of intellectual inquiry, from physics and biology to politics and art criticism. He came to be seen as the great revolutionary, the great modernizer, the first true champion of the Enlightenment, and his name was invoked with reverence right up to the nineteenth century even by people who knew nothing of what he actually thought and wrote.

Chapter 2
Material Monism or the Great Soup of Being

Descartes’ account of the natural world

Overview

I said in the Introduction that what binds our six philosophers together, and to us, is their involvement with and reaction to the distinction between appearance and reality – between the way we subjectively experience the world and the way it objectively is. Descartes is the clearest example of that, and although he is the earliest of the six, and so the most distant from us in time, he is, despite the seeming strangeness of some of his ideas, perhaps the most recognizably modern thinker of them all.

Descartes’ whole work is concerned with explaining and defending his idea of science, and with setting up and justifying the distinction between appearance and reality. I shall start by setting out something of what he thought the world is really like when you look beyond the appearance to the reality underneath, looking first at his account of nature (ch. 2), then at the relation of God to that new world (ch. 3), and finally at the place of human beings in it (ch. 4). But among philosophers Descartes is famous as much for the way he seeks to sell his ideas as for the content of them, so we will then look at the way he tries to persuade you that his is the right view...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part 1: René Descartes
• Part 2: Baruch Spinoza
• Part 3: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• Part 4: John Locke
• Part 5: George Berkeley
• Part 6: David Hume
• Notes
• Bibliography