Anthony Gottlieb - The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

THE DREAM OF
ENLIGHTENMENT

Also by Anthony Gottlieb

The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the
Greeks to the Renaissance

THE DREAM OF
ENLIGHTENMENT

The Rise of Modern Philosophy

ANTHONY GOTTLIEB

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Copyright 2016 by Anthony Gottlieb

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Gottlieb, Anthony, author.

Title: The dream of enlightenment : the rise of modern philosophy /
Anthony Gottlieb.

Description: First edition. | New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a

division of W. W. Norton & Company, [2016] | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016015063 | ISBN 9780871404435 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, ModernHistory.

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For my father and in memory of my mother

W ESTERN PHILOSOPHY IS NOW TWO AND A HALF MILLENNIA OLD, BUT a great deal of it came in just two staccato bursts lasting some 150 years each. The first was in the Athens of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, from the middle of the fifth century to the late fourth century BC. The second was in northern Europe, in the wake of Europes wars of religion and the rise of Galilean science. It stretches from the 1630s to the eve of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. In those relatively few years, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau and Voltairemost, that is, of the best-known modern philosophersmade their mark. All these people were amateurs: none had much to do with any university. They explored the implications of the new science and of religious upheaval, which led them to reject many traditional teachings and attitudes. What does the advance of science entail for our understanding of ourselves and for our ideas of God? How is a government to deal with religious diversity? What, actually, is a government for? Such questions remain our questions, which is why Descartes, Hobbes and the others are still invoked and argued with today.

It is because they still have something to say to us that we can easily get these philosophers wrong. It is tempting to think that they speak our language and live in our world. But to understand them properly, we must step back into their shoes. That is what this book tries to do.

The seeds of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were sown in the seventeenth century, when some people came to think that history was the wrong way round. It was not Plato and Aristotle who were the ancients to be revered: the admirable ancients are us. Francis Bacon (15611626) was apparently the first to crystallise this thought. But among the many who echoed Bacon, Blaise Pascal (16231662) perhaps put it best, in his writings about vacuumwhich was not abhorred by nature at all, according to recent experiments, despite what the ancients had said:

Those whom we call ancient were really new in all things, and properly constituted the infancy of mankind; and as we have joined to their knowledge the experience of the centuries which have followed them, it is in ourselves that we should find this antiquity that we revere in others.

Pascal also pointed out that if the ancient Greeks had shown the same overawed reverence for their predecessors that later ages showed to the Greeks, they would never have achieved the things for which they are admired.

Bacon was an effective propagandist for the new idea that all old ideas are suspect. We must, he insisted, go out and find the facts instead of wasting our days in dusty books. This will let us unlock the secrets of nature, which we can then exploit to make the world a better place for mankind. Bacons advocacy of careful and systematic observation won him adoption as the mascot of the Royal Society of London, one of Europes first clubs of scientific investigators, which was formed in 1660. A hundred years later, he was proclaimed a hero of mankinds new dawn by the French Enlightenments Encyclopdie, though these French admirers conceded that his own scientific ideas had come to seem misguided. Bacon overlooked, misunderstood or failed to see the point of what we now regard as the most notable scientific developments of his time. He had little time for Galileo or Kepler, because they were tiresomely mathematical, and he did not think much of Copernicus, whose astronomy I am convinced is most false. Nevertheless, what Bacon had set out to achieve was, in his words, to ring a bell to call other wits together, and in this he succeeded. His condemnation of the degenerate learning of recent centuries rang true to some of the keener minds of what was becoming a new age:

the schoolmen... having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their bookscobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.

To Thomas Hobbes (15881679), who was briefly Bacons assistant, the medieval style of philosophy, which still had all too much influence in universities, was part of the Kingdome of Darknesse. Superstition and intolerance were also at work in this metaphorical kingdom. The challenge was to find ways of escaping it.

H OW IT CAME about that some people in the seventeenth century were ready to look askance at the ancients, and at the authority of the Church and at medieval science and philosophy, is discussed in The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, to which this book is a sequel. (A revised edition of The Dream of Reason is being published simultaneously with this book.) A future volume will take up the story of philosophy again, starting with Immanuel Kant, whose most influential work was published in 1781, three years after the deaths of Voltaire and Rousseau. A new phase of the subject started with him.

All histories of philosophy are selective: some suggestions for further reading about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be found at the end of this book.