Contrary to recent historiographical consensus, we shall find that Newton did not hold an elaborate 'metaphysics' that explained God's relationship with the world and thus the operation of forces such as gravity - rather, he despised the discipline of metaphysics, and his seemingly 'metaphysical' statements were, in fact, anti-scholastic polemical salvoes: a crucial fact that has been missed in all the previous literature.--Dmitri Levitin (2016) "Newton and scholastic philosophy" British Journal for the History of Science; 49(1), (Mar 2016): 54-55. [HT Somebody on twitter]
While many anti-metaphysical readings of Newton are Kantian or positivist retrodictions, no such claim can be lodged against Dmitri Levitin's broadside. The subtext of Levitin's polemic is: let me tell philosophical bunglers what real historical scholarship is about. Levitin is especially critical of philosophers who, among fellow historians of philosophy, are, in fact, known as 'contextualists.' And so one might expect from somebody like me, trained by such contextualists, but who now embraces methodological anachronism and defends the utility of history of philosophy as prophecy, schadenfreude. Somewhat unexpectedly I will treat Levitin as an anti-exemplar of a bad form of criticism of philosophical historians of philosophy (to distinguish them from intellectual historians, historians of ideas, and science study types).
Levitin claims that Newton “had no time for metaphysics as a discipline,” (68). And this claim is part of a much larger argument, rooted in a study of Newton’s manuscripts and with repeated appeals to ‘contextual’ evidence that Newton affirmed the “rejection of metaphysics.” (70; I counted ten polemical uses of 'context/contextual'!) Levitin claims that Newton was “far from engaging in an elaborate metaphysical enterprise,” (73). Since I am about to publish a volume of my own papers with “Newton’s Metaphysics” in its title, it may be thought useful to respond to Levitin’s arguments.
First, I agree with Levitin that Newton rejected metaphysics as a discipline, especially as it was still taught in universities. Second, I also agree with his quite salutary criticism of those (especially, my friend, Ducheyne 2011) that have tried firmly to connect Newton’s use of the analytic/synthetic distinction to the Aristotelian regressus tradition. In re-reading and editing my own essays I was pleased and relieved I was never tempted to do so myself.
Third, one strain of Levitin’s argument is directed at the claim that for Newton causes are forces, which Levitin calls the “causal reading of Newton on force.” If this can be denied then ipse facto, for Levitin, Newton is anti-metaphysical. This is one of the points singled out as a “larger philosophical significance” of his argument by Levitin (65). Even if 'the causal reading of Newton on force' were false it does not follow one cannot attribute to Newton a metaphysics. (One may even say, as I say below, that one has done so!)
But in his arguments against the causal reading of Newton on force, Levitin conflates treating (i) forces as causes and (ii) the causes of forces. There is a further conflation by Levitin in treating Newton’s professed (iii) agnosticism (in the Principia) about the cause of the gravitational force as (iv) agnosticism about the causes of all forces. The 'causal reading of Newton on force' (which I happen to endorse) claims that Newton treats forces as causes, but in the Principia denies knowing the cause of forces.
It's only if you think -- say because you embrace a Bradley-esque version of the PSR -- that in order to treat X as a cause of Y, you must know Z (the cause of X) that (i) and (ii) start to collapse on each other. But in the Principia there is no sign that Newton conflates (i) and (ii) or embraces a version the PSR. I have explained elsewhere (here; here) why these distinctions matters to understanding Newton.[1] But is worth noting here that Newton needed (i) in order to settle or at least provide a new kind and compelling answer to the Copernican controversy. This is why, in his preface, Newton writes about his own view,
“rational mechanics will be the science, expressed in exact propositions and demonstrations, of the motions that result from any forces whatever and of the forces that are required for any motions whatever...For the basic problem of philosophy seems to be to discover the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces. (Newton 1999: 382)
Levitin himself seems to embrace what he calls a ‘phenomenalist’ interpretation of Newton ( 65-67). In so far as properly categorizing Newton’s causal talk as either phenomenalist, structural realist, instrumentalist, naïve realist (etc.), and drawing the kind of distinctions I have in the previous paragraph counts as ‘metaphysics’ that’s metaphysics enough for my present purposes.
Of course, lurking here is a kind of fetishism of actor's categories. Because it's possible that what I call 'metaphysics' in the previous paragraph is not what Newton has in mind when he uses 'metaphysics' according to Levitin. Now I am not against attention to actor's categories as such. But to adopt them as one's own is. as Daniel Schneider first noted to me, often no better than to take sides in the polemics of the past. This is precisely such an instance. Newton is critical of certain kind of metaphysicians and metaphysical practices, but from that one can't infer he is not doing metaphysics (by 'our' lights) at all (even if he were to say so). Levitin actually offers no evidence that Newton rejects all metaphysics.
As it happens, I agree with some of Levitin’s exegetical claims.[2] For example, Levitin claims that Newton professes agnosticism about the nature of the interaction between God and the world (Levitin 2016: 70). He relies on manuscript evidence to argue this. That is what Newton explicitly says in the General Scholium: "he is all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all force of sensing, of understanding, and of acting, but in a way not at all human, in a way not at all corporeal, in a way utterly unknown to us, (Newton 1999: 942). I think Newton's language is, in context, ratherLockean.[3] In my own work I use this agnosticism about the interaction between God and the world as an argument against those (Kochiras, Janiak, Ducheyne, etc.) that attribute to Newton a Principle of Local Action. But it does not follow from this that Newton is not doing metaphysics. For, pretty much on the same page, Newton himself asserts that there is a relationship of necessity between God and space as well as God and time (Newton 1999: 942). To appeal to necessity may not be a species of metaphysics. But to rely on arguments from necessity to settle claims about the nature of, say, space and time, and even the reality of final causes, I consider a contribution to metaphysics, or at least worth puzzling through as metaphysics.
Even so, there is a broader methodological point to be made here (in addition to the risk of using actor's categories to settle present disputes over the philosophical significance, if any, of thinkers). And this is the use of ‘context’ as a neutral and decisive arbiter of significance. I am open to Levitin’s invitation to “delve into the scholastic textbooks” (73), which he treats as the privileged context to treat many of Newton’s more speculative remarks. That it is useful and appropriate to do so, if only for debunking purposes, he shows with great expertise. But he closes his polemic with the claim that “Ralph Bathurst or Nathaniel Highmore” are the most important figures (he even uses “heroes” behind the “institutionalized intellectual culture” that Newton inhabited. (77) And the implication is that this institutional culture is really the most fundamental context for understanding Newton “mature” philosophy (Levitin uses variants on “mature” throughout his paper).
In my own work on Newton I explore how the Principia got embroiled in the reception of Spinoza and a much broader history of Spinozism, including views we would not consider Spinozist at all (such as Epicureanism). This system of metaphysics is not Newton’s. But as I show, to articulate differences with it required not just polemical tropes but some subtle distinctions. And to mark that fact, and use it fruitfully does not require to treat it (Spinoza/Spinozism) as the only or most important context for thinking about Newton’s (to use Levitin’s phrase) ‘mature philosophy.’[5]
That Newton’s mature philosophy got embroiled in the reception of Spinozism is clear since Rosalie Coli 1959 & 1963). But it does not follow from that that Newton was not also responding to say, Descartes and Huygens or very engaged in various priority disputes with (say) Leibniz and Hooke. I take that to heart.
So, I close by distinguishing three uses of context. First, one stipulate that a certain corpus is the relevant material one is going to use to establish the historical meaning of a text. (Mogens Laerke has explained how to do so. Justin Smith has offered a different account.) While judgment is involved here, this is really a matter of stipulation or legislation.
Second, one uses a certain corpus to rule out causal claims of influence or significance (by showing that a certain transmission is, say, impossible) This is what Levitin does in his criticism of Ducheyne. In these two approaches, one can use only one context at a time. And this is why they appeal to those who wish to be professional scholars. Notice that once context has been set in such a way one can make further decisions about which categories an distinctions to rely on and what disciplinary standards one will use to explain what one has done.
Third, one uses real interlocutors of Newton and those that read/edited Newton to explicate a construct an abstract entity, (say) 'Newton's metaphysics'. This construct can be projected onto a scholarly community of a time, which read particular and overlapping texts, or onto Newton's own mind (say, in a period; Levitin's use of 'mature' engages in such a practice without being explicit about it). Or it can be a construct that it is in some sense unmoored from the lived experience of any historical agent, but rooted in some texts and their evolving reception or in a disciplinary practice today (etc.).
The downside of this approach is that it looks undisciplined and unprofessional because eclectic and in principle open-ended. The upside, if there is one, is that one can approach a fairly limited number of Newtonian texts (as I do) from different mutually supporting and refining angles. In so doing I draw on scholarship about the variety of contexts (in the first two senses) that Newton inhabited and was received in as well as more reconstructive scholarship by philosophers about the underlying arguments and concepts. By using these different angles one may build such a construction. Depending on one's claims such a construct can be very robust or fragile.
One may wonder what the benefits of this third kind of use of context is. As I noted yesterday, it is likely that what I call "Newton's metaphysics" made possible evidential arguments that helped completely re-shaped how we understand science, philosophy, and their interaction. If that is so, then understanding Newton's metaphysics is a way to understand much larger forces that shape our philosophical and scientific scene. Such a construct, thus, enters into philosophical and historical understanding.
[1] Since Levitin cites the first of these as one of the culprits of a bad scholarly tendency, it is a bit peculiar he misses this point.
[2] I also agree with his caution against using De Gravitatione “as some kind of metaphysical” key “to Newton’s mature natural philosophy” (Levitin 2016: 15). I say as much in works (here; especially here) published several years before Levitin’s piece. I say this not to establish priority, but rather to suggest that Levitin's engagement with the philosophers he ridicules is rather superficial.
[3] Levitin’s treatment of Locke is no less unsubtle. He discusses Locke as another anti-metaphysician (Levitin 2016: 75). Here is an instance of the more general problem that if one adopts actor’s categories one risks merely reproducing their polemics.
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