Digressions&Impressions

Quining Quine, Dennett/Borges and Tocqueville's Spinosizing Spinozism

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I like to imagine that Dan Dennett started his celebrated (1988) "Quining qualia" as an attempt to publish a journal article in the manner of a comic, Borges story. (In fairness to my teacher, this was in the age before blogs!) How else to explain the erudite reference to Descartes in the first paragraph of the essay, and then the mock-ironic, scholarly reference to the eight (!) edition of "The Philosophical Lexicon (Dennett 1978c"--I love that well-placed 'c'!-- in the second paragraph. The give away, the tell, is the earnest claim that "I don't deny the reality of conscious experience" in the fourth paragraph. 

Perhaps because I tend to read "Quining qualia" as high comedy, I started to misremember the title as 'Quining Quine' in graduate school. As memetic evolution goes, this is minor slippage. Now, in the original 'to quine' means "To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant." But in my fictitious Quining Quine, 'to quine' means "to offer an immanent criticism and/or a reductio that turns out to be an extreme example of what's being criticized." {Look up it up in the fifteenth edition!}

I was reminded of these halcyon days by the sixth chapter of Russell Kirk's (1953) The Conservative Mind, which repeatedly reminds the reader that Tocqueville is a critic of the so-called system or "doctrine of necessity," (p. 197 & 201) that is, Spinozism. And Kirk hints at a neat argument -- a Quining Quine par excellence -- in which Spinozism is itself historicized. Before I allowed myself a further flight of fancy, I thought it useful to re-open Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and take a sober look at Volume 2, Chapter VII: "Of The Cause Of A Leaning To Pantheism Amongst Democratic Nations" in the Henry Reeve translation of 1840 (for any scholars complaining, it's the edition reviewed by J.S. Mill). 

The chapter is a very brief two paragraphs. For the sake of simplicity I just quote it:

I shall take occasion hereafter to show under what form the preponderating taste of a democratic people for very general ideas manifests itself in politics; but I would point out, at the present stage of my work, its principal effect on philosophy. It cannot be denied that pantheism has made great progress in our age. The writings of a part of Europe bear visible marks of it: the Germans introduce it into philosophy, and the French into literature. Most of the works of imagination published in France contain some opinions or some tinge caught from pantheistical doctrines, or they disclose some tendency to such doctrines in their authors. This appears to me not only to proceed from an accidental, but from a permanent cause.

When the conditions of society are becoming more equal, and each individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and more insignificant, a habit grows up of ceasing to notice the citizens to consider only the people, and of overlooking individuals to think only of their kind. At such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once; and it constantly strives to succeed in connecting a variety of consequences with a single cause. The idea of unity so possesses itself of man, and is sought for by him so universally, that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself up to repose in that belief. Nor does he content himself with the discovery that nothing is in the world but a creation and a Creator; still embarrassed by this primary division of things, he seeks to expand and to simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole. If there be a philosophical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains, are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense Being, which alone remains unchanged amidst the continual change and ceaseless transformation of all that constitutes it, we may readily infer that such a system, although it destroy the individuality of man – nay, rather because it destroys that individuality – will have secret charms for men living in democracies. All their habits of thought prepare them to conceive it, and predispose them to adopt it. It naturally attracts and fixes their imagination; it fosters the pride, whilst it soothes the indolence, of their minds. Amongst the different systems by whose aid philosophy endeavors to explain the universe, I believe pantheism to be one of those most fitted to seduce the human mind in democratic ages. Against it all who abide in their attachment to the true greatness of man should struggle and combine.

So, the first thing to notice is that Tocqueville is treating of Spinozism, which he associates with "the Germans" (Hegel, Schelling, etc.), not Spinoza. I return to that below. But writing in the nineteenth century, Tocqueville sees Spinozism as the rising ("most of the works") background ideology of the age.

Somewhat surprisingly, Tocqueville, who is purportedly critical of the doctrine of necessity, ascribes the rise of Spinozism not to chance (an 'accidental cause'), as one might expect, but to a structural (in his terminology a 'general') cause. To be sure, I am not accusing Tocqueville of a kind of inconsistency, because a general cause is compatible with the working of providence (itself the effect of the most general cause, after all). That is, Tocqueville is critical not just of Spinozism, but also the system of chance (Epicureanism). 

The structural cause of Spinozism is, in fact, egalitarianism (or democracy), or in Nietzsche's terms (which Tocqueville anticipates) the homogeneity or uniformity of last men. And because it eliminates all hierarchy of being (no angels, demons, superior men), Spinozism "fosters the pride, whilst it soothes the indolence, of their minds." The chapter closes with a call to arms (again anticipating Nietzsche) that against the false magnanimity of such Spinozisms those who wish to foster true magnanimity must organize ('combine') and fight (struggle).   

Now, it's a core commitment of Spinozism to historicize the holy texts inspired by revelation. And so, I joked on twitter that here Tocqueville is Spinozing Spinozism (in the manner of Quining Quine).

I could stop here, but as always the joke is on me.

In the "preface" of Spinoza's (1670) Theological Political Treatise (hereafter TTP) Spinoza claims, in aside, that already before his time all lead the same kind of life [vita eadem omnibus est]. Long before Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and (echoing Foucault [recall Lecture 5 on, 7 February 1979, pp. 113 and 117]) Sombart, and Marcuse, Spinoza diagnoses a flattening of human kind such that within modernity the differences among people become very narrow and track shallow exterior features, opinions, and religious practices. (See my paper on Spinoza.)* So, while Tocqueville may be Spinozing Spinozism critically, Spinoza got there first. Spinoza, too, understands his own era as an age of flattening homogeneity. And, in fact, the main point of the aside is the conclusion that the existing church has lost its way; nothing [nihl] remains of the religion; it's an empty shell with some adornment [externum cultum], lacking in inner refinement and substance.

Again, I could stop. But it is worth noting that in Chapter VII of TTP Spinoza explicitly alerts his reader to the fact sometimes, when dealing with "simple and most intelligible" matters (of the sort we find in Euclid) we don't need biographical and contextual knowledge in order to understand the intentions of an author. Geometrical entities lack power and have simple (generative) definitions, and so are simple and most intelligible in his terminology. In context, Spinoza seems to imply that in order to understand the author(s) of biblical texts "we need to know about his life, concerns and customs, or in what language, to whom and when he wrote, or the fate of his book, or its various readings, or how and by whose deliberation it was accepted." [VII.67] To be sure, in order to understand the moral teachings, which are also fairly simple and straightforward, of the Bible, such historicism is unnecessary Spinoza suggests.  Oddly, in the following chapter, Spinoza goes on to suggest that Ezra is the author of the (first main parts) of the Hebrew Bible and then goes on to historize Ezra who gave Israel the Bible as we have it in order to provide the re-founding of Israel with a religion that simultaneously teaches politics.

I have long thought that Spinoza invites us here to be alert to the circumstances of his own life and times, that is, to historicize his own text. And that's because unlike Euclid, Spinoza's works (even the ones in geometric order) do not merely deal with the simple and most intelligible matters. Spinoza is concerned with power and its differentiated effects. In fact, as an aside, in returning to Spinoza's text, I noticed that Spinoza introduces VII.67, with a proverbial remark that "For things which by their nature are easily perceived can’t be said so obscurely that they aren’t easily understood. As the proverb says: to one who understands a word is enough.” [VII.66] Caution ahead. Be that as it may, Spinoza is explicit that he is writing in a leveling age. 

Again, I could stop here. But I was reminded that Spinoza, too, hints at an account of greatness of soul in the Ethics. At E4p46, Spinoza writes, "He who lives according to the guidance of reason strives, as far as he can, to repay the other's Hate, Anger, and Disdain toward him, with Love, or Nobility." Now what Curley translates with 'nobility' is generositate in the Latin. In the glossary, Curley explains he avoided the use of 'high-mindedness' because it has negative connotations nowadays (in, we might add, our democratic, leveling age). Curley notes that Spinoza's generositas echoes Descartes' générosité, which in Descartes explicitly replaces magnanimity (see Passions of the Soul, paragraph 161).** In the Dutch translation of Spinoza in De nagelaten schriften, the connection with magnanimity is explicit because 'edelmoedigheit' (literally 'noble courageousness') just is the common translation of magnanimous. So, Spinoza, understands his own philosophy as a defense of magnanimity.

And, now we're back to Tocqueville. That Tocqueville understands Spinozism/patheism as a religious seduction of democratic man that is simultaneously a self-confirming projection of democratic man is compatible with (even Tocqueville being aware of  the fact that) Spinoza generates a project of Spinozism in order to make true religion, namely living under the guidance of reason, possible. However, my interest today is not to resolve to what degree Tocqueville and Spinoza are on the same side, or not. I leave that open.

Rather, I want to turn the knob one more time and return to a passage in Dennett that long intrigued me. It's from near the end of the book (chapter eighteen) that he taught in a seminar I attended while still in manuscript, Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

In chapter 3, I quoted the physicist Paul Davies proclaiming that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless purposeless forces," and suggested that being a byproduct of mindless purposeless forces was no disqualification for importance. And I have argued that Darwin has shown us how, in fact, everything of importance is just such a product. Spinoza called his highest being God or Nature (Deus sive Natura), expressing a sort of pantheism. There have been many varieties of pantheism, but they usually lack a convincing explanation about just how God is distributed in the whole of nature. As we saw in chapter 7, Darwin offers us one: it is in the distribution of Design throughout nature, creating, in the Tree of Life, an utterly unique and irreplaceable creation, an actual pattern in the immeasurable reaches of Design Space that could never be exactly duplicated in its many details. What is design work? It is that wonderful wedding of chance and necessity, happening in a trillion places at once, at a trillion different levels. And what miracle caused it? None. It just happened to happen, in the fullness of time. You could even say, in a way, that the Tree of Life created itself. Not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly, over billions of years.

Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not. But it did make the ivy twine and the sky so blue, so perhaps the song I love tells a truth after all. The Tree of Life is neither perfect nor infinite in space or time, but it is actual, and if it is not Anselm's "Being greater than which nothing can be conceived," it is surely a being that is greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. Is something sacred? Yes, say I with Nietzsche. I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.

Amor fati! (Some other time I return to Dennett's life-long fascination with Nietzsche.) Several of us have noticed Dennett's flirtations with Spinozism before (see Huebner (2017); Schliesser (2018) here; Veit (2021)). Here Dennett assimilates Darwinism to pantheism. What's neat about Dennett's interpretation of Darwinism is that it explicitly, "chance and necessity," combines the doctrine of necessity (Spinozism) with the doctrine of chance (Epicureanism).  Dennett eliminates the need for worship altogether and displaces it with pure affirmation.

Dennett explains his Darwinism as a strand of pantheism through his own Darwinism. However, from Tocqueville's perspective Dennett's  Quining elimination of providence and any distinction in kind in nature is (anticipatorily) itself to be explained through social causes in virtue of the democratic age we live in. Do you place your bets on natural or a social explanation? Dennett and Tocqueville insist that there is a real choice here, but I prefer a Borgesian, skeptical solution in which, inspired by Escher’s Drawing Hands, the left hand and the right hand write each other. 

• This first appeared at: <Quining Quine and Spinosizing Spinoza; reflections on Dennett and Tocqueville (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*Here's what Spinoza writes: "Long ago things reached the point where you can hardly know what anyone is, whether Christian, Turk, Jew, or Pagan, except by the external dress and adornment of his body, or because he frequents this or that Place of Worship, or because he’s attached to this or that opinion, or because he’s accustomed to swear by the words of some master. They all lead the same kind of life." (In Curley's translation.)

**"J’ai nommé cette vertu Générosité, suivant l’usage de notre langue, plutôt que Magnanimité, suivant l’usage de l’École, où elle n’est pas fort connue.
I have called this virtue ‘nobility of soul’, in keeping with the usage of our language, rather than ‘magnanimity’, according to the usage of the schools, where this virtue is not much in evidence." (Quoted from Michael Moriarty's chapter, "Cartesian Générosité and Its Antecedents.")

Again, Foucault, Kuhn, Carnap and Incommensurability

Despite the reassuring pleasure that historians of medicine may feel when they recognise in the great ledgers of confinement what they consider to be the timeless, familiar face of psychotic hallucinations, cognitive deficiencies, organic consequences or paranoid states, it is impossible to draw up a coherent nosological map from the descriptions that were used to confine the insane. The formulations that justify confinement are not presentiments of our diseases, but represent instead an experience of madness that occasionally intersects with our pathological analyses, but which could never coincide with them in any coherent manner. The following are some examples taken at random from entries on confinement registers for those of ‘unsound mind’: ‘obstinate plaintiff’, ‘has obsessive recourse to legal procedures’, ‘wicked cheat’, ‘man who spends days and nights deafening others with his songs and shocking their ears with horrible blasphemy’, ‘bill poster’, ‘great liar’, ‘gruff, sad, unquiet spirit’. There is little sense in wondering if such people were sick or not, and to what degree, and it is for psychiatrists to identify the paranoid in the ‘gruff’, or to diagnose a ‘deranged mind inventing its own devotion’ as a clear case of obsessional neurosis. What these formulae indicate are not so much sicknesses as forms of madness perceived as character faults taken to an extreme degree, as though in confinement the sensibility to madness was not autonomous, but linked to a moral order where it appeared merely as a disturbance. Reading through the descriptions next to the names on the register, one is transported back to the world of Brant and Erasmus, a world where madness leads the round of moral failings, the senseless dance of immoral lives.

And yet the experience is quite different. In 1704, an abbot named Bargedé was confined in Saint-Lazare. He was seventy years old, and he was locked up so that he might be ‘treated like the other insane’. His principal occupation was 

lending money at high interest, beyond the most outrageous, odious usury, for the benefit of the priesthood and the Church. He will neither repent from his excesses nor acknowledge that usury is a sin. He takes pride in his greed. Michel Foucault (1961) [2006] History of Madness, Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, pp. 132-133

In larger context, Foucault is describing how during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called 'classical age') a great number of people (Foucault suggests a number of 1% of the urban population) were locked up in a system of confinement orthogonal to the juridical system (even though such confinement was often practically indistinguishable from prison--both aimed at moral reform through work and sermons). This 'great confinement' included people with venereal disease, those who engaged in sodomy and libertine practices as well as (inter alia) those who brought dishonor (and financial loss) to their families alongside the mad and frenzied.

To the modern reader the population caught up in the 'great confinement' seems rather heterogeneous in character, but their commonality becomes visible, according to Foucault, when one realizes that it's (moral) disorder that they have in common from the perspective of classical learning. According to Foucault there is "no rigorous distinction between moral failings and madness." (p. 138) Foucault inscribes this (moral disorder of the soul/will) category into a history of 'Western unreason' that helps constitute (by way of negation) the history of early modern rationalism (with special mention of Descartes and Spinoza). Like a true Kantian, Foucault sees (theoretical) reason as shaped by practical decision as constitutive of the whole classical era (see especially p. 139).  My present interest is not to relitigate the great Derrida-Foucault debate over this latter move, or Foucault's tendency to treat -- despite his nominalist sensibilities -- whole cultural eras as de facto organically closed systems (of the kind familiar from nineteenth century historiography).

My interest here is in the first two sentences of the quoted passage. It describes what Thomas Kuhn called 'incommensurability' in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's Structure appeared in 1962, and initially there seems to have been no mutual influence. I don't want to make Foucault more precise than he is, but we can fruitfully suggest that for Foucault incommensurability involves the general inability to create a coherent mapping between two theoretical systems based on their purported descriptive content. I phrase it like to capture Foucault's emphasis on 'descriptions' and to allow -- mindful of Earman and Fine ca 1977 -- that some isolated terms may well be so mapped. As an aside, I am not enough of a historian of medicine (or philosopher of psychology) to know whether nosological maps can be used for such an exercise. (It seems like a neat idea!) 

So, Foucault is thinking about ruptures between different successive scientific cultures pretty much from the start of his academic writing (recall this post on the later The Order of Things). In fact, reading History of Madness after reading a lot of Foucault's other writings suggests a great deal of continuity in Foucault's thought--pretty much all the major themes of his later work are foreshadowed in it (and it also helps explain that he often didn't have to start researching from scratch in later writings and lectures). 

In fact, reading Foucault with Kuhn lurking in the background helps one see how important a kind of Kantianism is to Foucault's diagnosis of incommensurability. I quote another passage in the vicinity that I found illuminating:

The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ‘positive’ science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.--pp. 129-130

For Foucault, a concrete a priori is itself the effect of often indirect cultural construction or stabilization. In fact, for Foucault it tends to be an effect of quite large-scale and enduring ('solidly') social institutions (e.g., the law, penal/medical institutions) and material practices/norms. The discontinuity between concrete a priori's track what we may call scientific revolutions in virtue of the fact that systems of knowledge before and after a shift in a concrete a priori cannot possibly be tracking the same system of 'objects' (or 'empirical basis'). 

I don't mean to suggest that for Foucault a system of knowledge cannot be itself a source/cause of what he calls a 'synthesis' that makes a concrete a priori possible. That possibility is explicitly explored in (his discussion of Adam Smith in) his The Order of Things. But on the whole a system of knowledge tends to lag the major cultural shifts that produce a concrete a priori. 

Let me wrap up. A full generation after Structure appeared there was a belated and at the time revisionary realization that Structure could be read as a kind of neo-Kantian text and, as such, was actually not very far removed from Carnap's focus on frameworks and other projects in the vicinity that were committed to various kinds of relativized or constitutive a prioris. This literature started, I think, with Reisch 1991. (My own scholarship has explored [see here; here] the surprising resonances between Kuhn's Structure and the self-conception of economists and the sociology of Talcott Parsons at the start of twentieth century and the peculiar fact that Kuhn's Structure was foreshadowed in Adam Smith's philosophy of science.) I mention Carnap explicitly because not unlike Carnap [see Stone; Sachs, and the literature it inspired], Foucault does not hide his debts to Nietzsche. 

So here's my hypothesis and diagnosis: it would have been much more natural to read Structure as a neo/soft/extended-Kantian text if analytic philosophers had not cut themselves off from developments in Paris. While I do not want to ignore major differences of emphasis on scope between Kuhn and Foucault, their work of 1960 and 1962 has a great deal of family resemblance despite non-trivial differences in intellectual milieus. I actually think this commonality is not an effect of a kind of zeitgeist or the existence of an episteme--as I suggested in this post, it seems to be a natural effect of starting from a broadly domesticated Kantianism. But having said that, that it was so difficult initially to discern the neo-Kantian themes in Kuhn also suggests that not reading the French developments -- by treating 'continental thought' as instances of unreason (which is Foucault's great theme) -- also created a kind of Kuhn loss in the present within analytic philosophy. 

 

 

Zera Yacob and Intellectual traditions; a note on the origins of Africana Philosophy

What should we make of this similarity? Note that it would be anachronistic to describe Zera Yacob’s argument as “Lockean,” for the Second Treatise of Government was published over two decades after Zera Yacob wrote his Hatäta. This points us toward the limits on the usefulness of viewing Zera Yacob and Locke as sharing an early modern world. Consider Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (1979), which explores categories of Roman law, locates the birth of natural rights discourse in the late medieval period, and examines figures like Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Thomas Hobbes before giving Locke attention in the final chapter. Scholarship like this places Locke in a certain lineage of thought, which shaped him just as much as the political context of his times. Zera Yacob does not stand in that lineage. Indeed, when comparing Zera Yacob to Descartes and Locke, we should remember that Locke read and was influenced by Descartes, learning from his approach to philosophy even while rejecting central views of his. There is a sense in which Locke and Descartes share a modernity that Zera Yacob does not, a point that need not lead us to deny that Zera Yacob is a modern philosopher but rather to say that he inhabits a different modernity. (p. 130)

[W]hile Zera Yacob can be seen as similar to Descartes but must be recognized as outside the lineage leading to and branching out from him, Amo, like Locke, did philosophy in the wake of Descartes and critically responded to his work. (p. 132)

 

What I think this means is that, for Cugoano, as for Zera Yacob, the idea of natural rights is not really embedded within a modern European intellectual tradition. Certain formulations of it may be paradigmatically European, but it is ultimately a concept that transcends cultural boundaries, which also means that one can come up with paradigmatically Fanti formulations of it. Cugoano thus does not fit neatly into the framework of modern Africana philosophy as a form of modern European philosophy into which Amo and Haynes fit. But, of course, neither is he disconnected from the European tradition in the way Zera Yacob is. Cugoano, I believe, represents modern Africana philosophy as a convergence of African and European intellectual trajectories, a hybrid case of radicalizing European thought from within, as with Haynes, while also modernizing African thought through comparing indigenous and foreign viewpoints and using reason to decide what makes the most sense, like Zera Yacob.

I take Cugoano to be, in this way, a model for Africana philosophy going forward. The riches of the Western philosophical tradition must be valued but also made sharper and more liberating through the use of a critical philosophy of race lens. At the same time, there must be constant efforts to transcend the Western framework by rooting Africana philosophy in oral and literary traditions from Africa and the diaspora. In many instances, we may come to a conclusion like Cugoano’s about natural rights: that what we thought of as particularly Western is not and that the cross-cultural recognition of a shared concept may strengthen our sense of commitment to the value at stake. (p. 138)

The quoted passages are all from Chike Jeffers' (2017) "Rights, Race, and the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy." The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race. This is a text that I assign as required background reading to the session that roughly goes from Las Casas to Cugoano and discusses slavery, mercantile political economy, and rights in my lecture course on the History of Political Theory. This is a required course with enrollments between 500 and 600 students. Jeffers' paper is short and hits the sweet spot because it offers helpful historical context, makes important distinctions, and it explains the ongoing significance of the material discussed. It's also astonishingly brief, and clear. I warmly recommend it. 

 

But as I was preparing my quiz about the text, and so re-reading it, I became uneasy in reflecting on the passages quoted above. To be sure, the underlying idea of what Africana philosophy should be going forward (articulated in final paragraph, but also made available throughout the chapter) strikes me as rather attractive and is not something I am going to challenge here. In fact, in some ways I am going to reinforce Jeffers' main point because I want to suggest that Zera Yacob is much more connected to what Jeffers calls 'the European tradition,' although what I prefer to call the (partially overlapping) 'Abrahamic-Platonic traditions' that also shaped non-trivially Descartes and Locke. What do I have in mind?

 

First, Yacob (1599 – 1692) is, in part, polemicizing against the Jesuits and, now I quote Jeffers, "as “Franğ,” a Ge’ez word that literally means “foreigner.” But note that he uses that word in a way that is interchangeable with “Catholic.”" (p. 131) And, in fact, if you read Zera Yacob’s Hatäta "or “inquiry,” commonly called his Treatise" (p. 128) it's very clear that Yacob was rather acquainted with their teachings (which he largely rejects).+ Now, Descartes was taught by Jesuits at La Flèche. (Descartes was there between 1607-1614.) So, there is a non-trivial sense in which they were exposed to largely the same views. (The Jesuits standardized their curriculum.) Obviously, I am not claiming that they had the same teachers (although Jesuits did move around so it's not wholly impossible they encountered the same people--how cool would that be?), but I would be amazed if the Iberian Jesuits who are his targets did not bring with them ideas shaped by, say, Francisco Suárez's metaphysics and moral/political theory, including his theory of rights. (Suárez was an intellectual celebrity of the age.) Suárez is rather important to Descartes and, as I have noted (here), Suárez also shaped the social contract tradition (including Hobbes and perhaps -- I will not make the case today -- Locke).

 

Second, Yacob is quite clearly evoking Augustine's Confessions at various points. This is not just in virtue of the auto-biographical style, but also in particular details of the narrative (not the least the early sinful behavior and the attraction to various alternative intellectual traditions). One important commonality is the significance of David's Psalms to both. I don't think either can do without an explicit or implicit allusion to Psalms on a single page! (I suspect one can write a PhD about this.) I return to this below. Either way, Descartes' debts to Augustine, and Augustine's Confessions has itself generated a huge scholarly enterprise. In saying this, I don't mean to suggest there are no differences between Descartes or Yacob, but just to point to the fact that they share in an overlapping tradition even if they may be mediated by different sources and contexts. (I don't mean to suggest that Descartes himself was especially shaped by Psalms--I leave that aside, although intrigued to reflect on it.)

 

Third, a good chunk of (what we might call) the philosophy in the Hatäta draws on the Book of Wisdom (which Yacob, as is common, attributes to Salomon). I don't want to make this claim more precise here. But while Yacob is plenty critical of the particularity and some of the laws of Judaism, the Hebraic sources in his text are abundant. This he does share with Hobbes and Locke. I don't mean to suggest that the sources are exclusively Jewish; I would love to know, for example, if Al-Ghazali's Deliverance of Error (with with the Hatäta and the Meditations share non-trivial commonalities) was circulating among the Muslim scholars he encountered and debated. 

 

But it's only if one denies that the Book of Wisdom (which itself is shaped by Hellenistic philosophy) is philosophy or insists that the Hebrew Bible is non-philosophy (as some who are in the grip of  the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens might claim) that this is not part of the overlapping tradition(s). (I have argued against this claim in many digressions, but start here.) In addition, it's quite clear that Yacob identifies with David's enforced exile from court, and perhaps (I put this more tentatively) even the Israelites in the dessert. 

 

So, while it is undoubtedly true that Yacob and Descartes and/or Locke did not share the exact same modernity, I also suspect that in some non-trivial respects they did. It is striking that both politically and religiously the question of religious pluralism and the role of using state authority to impose a single religion dominate France and Ethiopia (and England) in their life-times, including rather dramatic reversals of fortune. I am not especially fond of 'modernity' because it is often inscribed in complex conceptual hierarchies (involving 'feudalism,' civilization vs barbarism, etc.), but it can be useful to point to the symmetry of conditions that these thinkers faced.

 

Does anything hinge on this? Well, I am certainly not the first to note debts of Africana philosophy to Hebraic and Abrahamic sources more broadly. But when in 2019 Peter Adamson (who has collaborated with Jeffers) writes, in the context of Zera Yacob that the "Ethiopian philosophical tradition simultaneously belongs to at least two larger stories: that of philosophy within various Christian traditions of the East, and that of African philosophy," that is factually true, but it effaces the Hebraic contribution to at least the former (and, perhaps the latter--in so far as Hebraic philosophy itself was developed, in part, under African skies). A similar claim can be made "about ancient Egyptian philosophy" (which Adamson goes on to mention) in so far as Philo is a rather signicant presence in it. 

I don't think this is merely a matter of geographic score-keeping. It has important contemporary political salience when 'philosophy' plays a role in identity formation and articulation (as it seems to do within Africana philosophy--that is not a criticism!). That there is also a very clear Hebraic root in Yacob [!] and all the figures discussed in the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy (with perhaps partial exception of Amo) is, thus, non-trivial (if only because the bondage and exodus of Israel resonate within it). It also may facilitate discussion today among Africana philosophers and those philosophers that takes Hebraic sources seriously. This is no small matter given the polarizing effects of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism in our world.

 

Including the Hebraic tradition(s) into the narrative may also be epistemically useful if Yacob is right. Because he thinks that when different traditions agree, we are more likely to find truth, whereas their differences reveal their errors--and in religious conflict we de facto always defend error. It's probably more natural to read him as saying that this is so because when traditions agree they latch onto the truth (a thought like this can be found in Montaigne, too). But I'd like to read him Spinozistically as suggesting, and I'd like to argue for this at some point that this is his view, that through dialogue when we find ways to agree, and so live in peace with each other, we instantiate or generate the truth.*

 

Hobbes and Descartes on the Distribution of Wit, and some Plato

Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.

And as to the faculties of the mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat els,) I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For Prudence, is but Experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceipt of ones owne wisdome, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by Fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equall, than unequall. For there is not ordinarily a greater signe of the equall distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.--Hobbes (1651) Leviathan, Chapter 13.

As regular readers know I am rather fond of these two paragrahs in Hobbes and I treat them as foundational to my own methodological analytic egalitarianism (MAE) [recall here; here and originally here]. But recently, during a seminar discussion, I noticed two features that invite reconsideration. First, in the top paragraph, it is striking that when Hobbes justifies that the strength of body is sufficiently equal, he appeals to a political mechanism that has solved what  we may call the original coordination problem (confederacy). This is a bit awkward for two reasons (;) because such fundamental equality is a kind of premise or step in the argment that is supposed to lead to the social contract in the state of nature. But here we are informed that even in nature, political alliance secures such equality. This is not the place to elaborate what this signifies, but the paragraph suggests to me that for Hobbes politics ("secret machination") is constitutive of human co-existence. The state of nature is not, as it sometimes taken to be, pre-political. About that some other time more. But (ii) the capacity to enter into sucessful confederacy with others (or to execute "secret machination" successfully) seems to presuppose non-trivial social intelligence. And while it can provide evidence for bodily equality, it seems to undermine the idea that we are truly equal (intellectually). I return to this in the paragraph below the next one.

It's also worth noting that in that first paragraph, Hobbes here is recalling some key features of Glaucon's version of the social contract in at Republic 358E-359B: that is, "those who lack the power to avoid [being harmed by others] and [unable to impose harms on others] determine that it is for their profit to make a compact with one another" (translated by Shorey).I don't mean to suggest Hobbes is deliberately evoking Plato here, but I do think it possible that there is a more general moral lurking here: in order to argue for the conceptual possibility for an egalitarian social contract that has normative or political authority, the construct seems to rest on a prior step in which the many collaborate in subdueing the strong.

My second point pertains to the final three sentences of the second quoted paragraph above (and these I will connect to Hobbes below). Here, in line with my remark above, Hobbes does not really affirm equal mental capacity in extensional terms. (The existence of rhetoric and science, and perhaps education more generally undermines it.) But this extensional perspective is not really doing the work there. He switches to an intensional context, and points out that we all tend to believe we're smart (in the way at Lake Wobegon parents think their child above average) and that we do not tend to envy other people their smarts. Hobbes is articulating here an envy-free distributive principle, which is a key criterion for an egalitarian distribution of an item.

He explains the endorsement of one's own sufficient keen intelligence ('wit') in terms of a kind of perspectival bias--we are too close to ourselves to judge this really impartially. But interestingly enough, the fact that we're free of envy of other people's smarts suggests that this kind of perspectival bias is itself equally distributed among us.

Of course, Hobbes is also being very funny here (and kind of implying he is smarter for noticing this), because on the whole wisdom is in short supply. In conversation, some people deny what Hobbes attributes to them--they are modest and genuinely wish they were as smart as others. In my view these putative counterexamples are not very problematic to Hobbes because such people are not a source of the kind of political trouble he worries about (ambition): as he puts it in chapter XI, "Men that have a strong opinion of their own wisdome in matter of government, are disposed to Ambition. " In chapter 13, he is not too worried that people will think they are not sufficiently equal to others and so can be rightfully denied political equality. (A theorist of adaptive preferences or structural injustice may well worry more.)  

It occurred to me,  too, that in these three sentences, Hobbes is trolling Descartes with whom he had an unfruitful, acrimonious exchange, published in 1641 as part of the "Objections and Replies" to/in the Meditations. For Hobbes is here evoking, even adopting for his own ends, the then famous opening lines of Part 1 of Descartes' (1637) Discourse on method. Descartes starts with pretty much the same envy-free criterion to establish the equal distribution of good sense:

Good sense [bon sens] is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess. And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken the conviction is rather to be held as testifying that the power of judging aright and of distinguishing truth from error, which is properly what is called good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men; and that the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.--Descartes (1637) Discourse on Method, part 1.*

The Discourse on Method is not read much in political philosophy/theory, even though it has quite a bit of pertinent material (recall here; and here).

Of course, Hobbes and Descartes may not saying exactly the same thing (wisdom is not often thought identical to good sense/reason). I am unsure what Hobbes' definition of wisdom in Leviathan is, but in the dedication to  his (1651) De Cive, Hobbes writes that "Wisdome properly so call'd is nothing else but this, The perfect knowledge of the Truth in all matters whatsoever." Leaving aside if wisdom is then possible in reality, this definition suggests that wisdom is considerably rarer than we tend to think it.

Whereas Descartes is suggesting that the capacity to distinguish truth from error is available to us all. That we are led into error is fundamentally the effect of the diversity of or developmental paths and our diverging interests (we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects.) Our life's experience corrupts our capacity to distinguish true from false.

Somewhat surprisingly Descartes goes on to deny the natural equality he had just diagnosed with an intentional envy free criterion, by offering the following extentional judgment: "The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations." Descartes here echoes a rather important passage [491D] Plato's Republic that one can naturally read as concerned with the inductive risk of the teaching of philosophy to ambitious and smart types  [like Alcibiades].[Recall also Ibn Rushd's commentary here.]

Descartes treats reason as the capacity to distinguish truth from falsity. It's pretty clear that Hobbes thinks this a mistake (and I suspect that's the trolling). For Hobbes defines reason, in deflationary fashion, as "nothing but Reckoning" and, in particular, of tracking "the Consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the Marking and Signifying of our thoughts; I say Marking them, when we reckon by our selves; and Signifying, when we demonstrate, or approve our reckonings to other men." (see chapter 5 of Leviathan, emphasis added). What reason really does, for Hobbes, is keep track of our linguistic conventions. 

 

 

The PSR, Spinoza and Hudde

I shall presuppose that:
(1) The true definition of each thing contains nothing beyond the simple nature of the thing defined.
From this it follows that
(2) No definition involves or expresses any multiplicity or any definite number of individuals since it involves or expresses nothing but the nature of the thing, as it is in itself.
For example, the Definition of a triangle contains nothing but the simple nature of the triangle, not some definite number of triangles, just as the definition of the Mind, that it is a thinking thing, or the definition of God, that he is a perfect Being, contains nothing but the nature of the Mind, or of God. It does not contain a definite number of Minds or Gods.
(3) There must necessarily be a positive cause of each existing thing, through which it exists.
(4) That this cause must be affirmed to exist either in the nature and definition of the thing itself—because existence pertains to its nature, or its nature necessarily contains existence—or outside the thing.

From these presuppositions it follows that [A] if some definite number of individuals exists in nature, there must be one or more causes which were able to produce precisely that number of Individuals, neither more nor fewer. For example, if twenty men exist in nature—to avoid all confusion I shall suppose that they exist together and without predecessors in nature—it will not be sufficient, to give a reason why the twenty exist, to investigate the cause of human nature in general. [B] What must also be investigated is the reason why neither more nor fewer than twenty men exist. For (according to the third hypothesis) concerning each man a reason and cause must be given why he exists. But (according to the second and third hypotheses) that cause cannot be contained in the nature of the man himself, for the true definition of man does not involve the number of twenty men. Therefore (according to the fourth hypothesis), the cause of the existence of these twenty men, and hence of each of them separately, must exist outside them.--Spinoza to H [Hudde], Letter 34, Voorburg, 7 January 1666. Translated by E. Curley, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. II, (Princeton 2016), pp 25-26. [Emphasis added.]

This post is triggered by an invite from Karolina Hubner and Justin Steinberg to write on the Spinoza and Hudde (1628 – 1704)) exchange. If we only had the second quoted paragraph above, and not the earlier part of the letter, we might infer that the third hypothesis is a causal principle in the spirit of “ex nihilo, nihil fit” (“from nothing, nothing comes”). What's notable is that rather than using what we may call its negative formulation (ex nihilo, nihi) 'from nothing, nothing...', Spinoza opts for what we may call a positive formulation: "(3) There must necessarily be a positive cause of each..."

The positive formulation of Hypothesis (3) echoes Axiom 11, from Spinoza's (1663) The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy,:

Nothing exists of which it cannot be asked, what is the cause, or reason, why it exists. See Descartes’ Al.
Since existing is something positive, we cannot say that it has nothing as its cause (by A7). Therefore we must assign some positive cause, or reason, why [a thing] exists—either an external one, i.e., one outside the thing itself, or an internal one, i.e., one comprehended in the nature and definition of the existing thing itself. (Curley (1985), Vol 1, p. 246; emphasis in original)

It is worth noting that Spinoza here is explicitly riffing on Descartes' Replies to the Second Objections (of the Meditations), and in the context of his treatment of the Cogito; and that Spinoza does so, as he tells us, because it is "impossible for" him "to think that something may come from nothing." (PCP, Vol 1, p. 242) 

In their SEP entry, Yitzhak Melamed and Martin Lin claim that Axiom 11 is "Spinoza’s earliest statement of the PSR." (They omit the causal principle on p. 242 perhaps because it's possible to read it as Spinoza attributing it to Descartes.) It's worth mention that there is a version of the PSR in the Short Treatise, which may well date from before 1663. (I thank John Grey and Daniel Schneider for alerting me to this.) In part 1, Chapter 6 (the one on predestination), paragraph 4, Spinoza writes:

Regarding our second question: whether there is any thing in Nature of which one cannot ask why it exists? our saying this indicates that we must investigate through what cause a thing exists. For if that [cause] did not exist, it would be impossible for this something to exist.
We must seek this cause, then, either in the thing or outside it. But if someone asks what rule we should follow in this investigation, we say it does not seem that any at all is necessary. For if existence belongs to the nature of the thing, then certainly we must not seek the cause outside it. But if existence does not belong to the nature of the thing, then we must always seek its cause outside it. And since the former is true only of God, this shows (as we have already proven before) that God alone is the first cause of everything. (Curley (1985), VOL 1, p. 86)

Be that as it may, let's return to the first letter to Hudde. Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument that Spinoza's conclusion, which I labelled [A], follows from the four 'hypotheses.'* My interest is in the final clause, "neither more nor fewer." That [A] includes 'neither more nor fewer' [nec maiorem, nec minorem] looks, at first glance, a kind of redundant exactitude requirement. To count as a proper explanation (or ground, etc.) the cause of the existence of some entity (or group) may not overshoot or undershoot. I call it 'redundant' because Spinoza already has stated 'precisely' [in Latin: illum iuste].+ [A] anticipates a principle we find in the Ethics, “if a certain number of individuals exists, there must be a cause why those individuals, and why neither more nor fewer, exist.” (E1p8s2) 

But in the letter to Hudde, from the exactitude requirement in [A] Spinoza infers the requirement/demand [B].++ And [B] seems to demand that the cause X of some entity (or number of entities) Y also explains the omissions of possible entities (Yn) such that only Y. If you think that my gloss on [B] is too strong, fair enough. But it is not wholly improbable interpretation because later, in the Ethics, Spinoza articulates an even stronger version of this principle: “For each thing there must be assigned a cause, or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence”. (E1p11dem). And so it looks like [B] anticipates some such demand for providing causes of nonexistence(s).

I should note that depending on how one thinks of what a cause or reason is, it's not silly to think that an explanation for Y simultaneously helps rule out why all kinds of not Ys do not obtain. If I can show why a projectile with a particular velocity breaks a particular window at a particular time, I can probably also show why given that velocity it is only breaking that window (and not other windows) at that time. If you agree with Spinoza that a definition is a kind of (formal) cause you can run this example through properties of triangles (and which help explain why it's not a hexagon).

So, crucially, then, compared to the Short Treatise and the Cartesian Principles of philosophy, in the letter to Hudde, Spinoza starts packing quite a bit more into what counts as a proper causal explanation of things existing in nature and so also starts developing a heavier duty version of the PSR to be used in explanations of nature.

The foregoing also helps explain why Hudde was confused in the first place. His question to Spinoza was (according to Spinoza) to provide "a demonstration of the Unity of God from the fact that his Nature involves necessary existence." In the Cartesian Principles of philosophy, at the end of his demonstration to proposition 11 ("there is not more than one God") Spinoza had added the following remark:

It should be noted here that it follows necessarily from the mere fact that some thing involves necessary existence from itself (as God does) that it is unique. Everyone will be able to see this for himself, provided he meditates attentively. I could also have demonstrated it here, but not in a way perceptible by everyone, as has been done in this proposition. (Curley (1985), p. 255)**

Spinoza returns to this material in Chapter 2 of the Appendix. And he says somewhat cryptically, "I advise the Reader that by right we infer God’s Unity from the nature of his existence, which is not distinguished from his essence, or which necessarily follows from his essence." (Curley (1985), p 319)

Clearly Hudde -- himself a very accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher [not to say eventually one of the most powerful people in Amsterdam and Holland [and so Europe]] --- had tried to meditate attentively, but had failed in seeing it for himself. And the reason why he had failed in this is, I submit, that Spinoza had actually not yet articulated [A] and [B].

For without such precification or extension of the causal principle it is not obvious how one can even begin to rule out multiple Gods. (I am not suggesting that Spinoza has successfully done so here. Clearly some folk think even the Ethics version fails.) This is especially so if one thinks, not implausibly, that the cause of (a) God can itself be not limited in particular ways  (since it it is powerful enough to cause God and neither involves any multiplicity or any definite number of individuals).

 

Descartes on Indignation

The 195 Article. Of Indignation.

Indignation is a sort of Hatred or Aversion, that a man naturally beares to those who doe some evil, of what nature soever it be. And it is often mixed with Envy, or Pity, but yet, the object thereof is altogether different from them. For he carryes an Indignation onely against those who doe good or evil to persons unworthy of it: but he envies those who receive this good, and pities those who receive this evil. It is true, in some respects it is evil to possesse a good whereof a man is not worthy. Which may be the reason wherefore Aristotle and his followers, supposing that Envy is alwayes a vice, have cal­led that Indignation which is not vicious.

...

The 198 Article. Of the use of it.

Furthermore, Indignation is observed to be more in those who would seem vertuous, than those who really are. For althought they who love vertue cannot without some Aversion look upon the vices of others, they are Passio­nate onely against the great and extraordinary ones. For it is to be nice, and squamish, to have much Indignation for things of little concern­ment; it is to be unjust to have any for those which are not blameworthy; and it is to be im­pertinent and absurd not to confine this Passion to the Actions of men, but extend them to the works of God or nature: as they do who being snever contented with their condition or fortune, dare controule the government of the world, and the secrets of providence.--Descartes, René, 1596-1650., 2013, The passions of the soule in three books the first, treating of the passions in generall, and occasionally of the whole nature of man. The second, of the number, and order of the passions, and the explication of the six primitive ones. The third, of particular passions. By R. des Cartes. And translated out of French into English., Oxford Text Archive, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/A81352.

I was triggered to return to Descartes' Passions while preparing a review of Michelle Schwarze's wonderful book Recognizing Resentment: Sympathy, Injustice, and Liberal Political Thought (Cambridge: 2020). This book is primarily focused on Butler, Hume, and Adam Smith, but it has a preliminary chapter on seventeenth century ideas on resentment and indignation in which Descartes is omitted. This omission is no surprise because Schwarze is focused on recovering and articulating a distinctly liberal understanding of sympathetic resentment and Descartes is no precursor to liberalism or especially interested in promoting commerce and sociability.  Even so, I think Descartes plays an important part of the story she wants to tell, so, here goes.

Early in Passions (article 65), Descartes define or characterizes indignation as follows "evil done by others, having no relation to us, breeds only in us Indignati­on against them." Indignation is, thus, an impartial response ("no relation to us") to the witnessing or experience of harms done to others by third parties. It has, thus, a kind of spectatorship and impartiality built into its very possibility. In addition, it presupposes that these harms are in some sense moralized and intentional ('evils').  This is nicely conveyed by the seventeenth century Dutch translation by Spinoza's acquaintance Jan Glazemaker, where Descartes' indignation is translated as 'euvelneming' literally the experience of evil. 

As an aside, when we are harmed by others, according to Descartes, we feel something stronger than indignation: colere translated nicely as 'wrath'. This passion is very similar to indignation, but also includes the desire of revenge. So it is action-guiding (and can actuate bold and/or courageous actions (see sect 199 of  the Passions). In fact, the somatic instantiation of wrath divers among people, and Descartes is careful to distinguish between a sudden wrath and a carefully nurtured wrath, which when it is joined with love for another may well be a kind of indignation on their behalf. ("interest themselves in the behalfe of those they love, as if it were for themselves;" sect 201).

If we now look at Descartes' treatment of indignation in sections 195-198, we see that he adds an important qualification, that is, that we only feel it when we judge the victim unworthy of the harm ("he carryes an Indignation onely against those who doe good or evil to persons unworthy of it"). It has, thus, an evaluative feature built into its very triggering conditions. So, to sum up the discussion so far, according to Descartes indignation is a  moralized reactive attitude that presupposes considerable impartiality by an observer to intentional harm done to someone not deserving of it. That is to say, the spectator most share a moral universe with the perpetrator and victim. It's not especially action guiding, and seems to have more a role in what we might want to call moral score-keeping and, perhaps, recognition of harms done to other.

When we to turn to the section on the use of indignation (198), we see that Descartes de facto distinguishes two uses of it: first, it has a social role -- I will call it virtue-signaling -- to make us seem virtuous in the eyes of others. And we can infer from Descartes' terse analysis that in its signaling capacity, there is a tendency for an overuse of indignation. This clearly suggests that being thought virtuous creates what we might call social credit. And since indignation is not action guiding (and so has little consequences or negative feedback), there are incentives for being too oft indignant on  behalf of others without qualification because there are no drawbacks. 

It's worth noting that Descartes does not really spell out what's wrong with excessive virtue-signaling, except that he seems to rely on some kind of proportionality requirement that the passion needs to be commensurate with the triggering cause(s). I actually think this kind of principle plays a huge role in Hume's and Smith's moral psychology, and I am kind of sad I just noticed this feature in Descartes today. Of course, that causes and effects have to be proportional to each other is an important element in Descartes' physics (see, for example, his letter to Huygens, 5 October, 1637: “L’effet doit toujours être proportionné à l’action qui est nécessaire pour le produire.” [Quoted from S. Roux]), so  it is not ad hoc. But it has moved from a natural principle to a normative one that can be violated (and again that's not untypical of Hume and Smith). 

Be that as it may, presumably Descartes things that too-frequent indignation destroys the signaling quality of indignation when it is proper. (If X is a cheap source of social credit then X may well become inflationary.) So, second, there is a proper form of indignation of those who truly love virtue (and are not merely virtue signaling) at "great and extraordinary harms." Unlike, say, Hobbes (as described wonderfully by Theresa Bejan (recall)), Descartes really takes (to be anachronistic for a second) micro-aggressions for granted as not needing to be registered by bystanders and spectators. Perhaps this is due to the Stoic element in his thought.

It's not quite clear what the measure is that allows a spectator to distinguish between small-ish harms not deserving a passionate response and those so worthy. But indignation at the harms to others worthy of note is appropriate according to Descartes. Since it's not action guiding its primary function seems to be let victims (and their aggressors) know that evils done to them are recognized by outsiders. So I infer that its main role according to Descartes is as a kind of social score keeping that make victims of harms be seen by the community (and which establishes, thereby, to perpetrators that the have violated important social norms).

Interestingly enough, Descartes wants to rule out indignation at the greatest cause of all (and he puts this in surprisingly Spinozistic fashion) God or Nature [Dieu, ou de la Nature]. Again, we see a kind of appeal to a normative proportionality principle here. But lurking here is also an idea that we cannot make our indignation felt on God or Nature, and that in an important sense we are not fundamentally equal. 

I think it's pretty clear that by Descartes' lights, wrath -- as action guiding and nurtured over time under the sway of, say, anger or revenge, -- is taken as potentially more destabilizing to society than indignation. For, wrath can undermine good judgment. And so wrath must be moderated according to Descartes by generosity (sect 203).

You haven't read Schwarze's book, but I hope you trust me when I say that Descartes's account of indignation has already a lot of the building blocks that will be deployed by Butler, Hume, and Smith and that she analyzes with great skill. From the eighteen century perspective, what's really lacking in Descartes is a proper analysis of the role of sympathy in calibrating indignation. (Descartes was famously averse to sympathy because he associates it with the kind of philosophy he thinks is baloney.) And Descartes does not spell out the normative features that enter into judgment of the impartial bystander. If I am right about this it does raise an interesting historical-sociological question why Descartes' view of indignation was only really developed and elaborated during the eighteenth century by folk commonly portrayed as his critics.

 

Newton and Passivity of Matter

In an unpublished manuscript sheet, which was part of Newton’s preparations for the second edition of the Principia, Newton recorded that the most wise order of things could not have arisen “from matter alone and motion or from the nature of things [a materia sola et motu aut a rerum Natura].”102 Newton argued that God regulates the natural world by means of certain “active Principles,” which cause—inter alia—gravitation, fermentation, and cohesion.103 Correspondingly, in an unpublished draft version of what was to become Query 31, he wrote,

Whence it seems to have been an ancient opinion that matter depends upon a Deity for its ↓laws of↓ motion as well as for its existence. The Cartesians make God the author of all motion & its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion. Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed. It receives motion proportional to the force impressing it. And resists as much as it is resisted. These are passive laws & to affirm that there are no other is to speak against experience. For we find in or selves a power of moving our bodies by or thought ↓Life & thinking ↓will↓ are active Principles by wch we move our bodies, & thence arise other laws of motion unknown to us↓==Newton [CUL Add. Ms. 3970, 619r [drafts prepared for Opticks (1717)].]

The above remarks square nicely with Newton’s denial that motion results from qualities that are inherent to matter itself and with his belief that for their motions bodies require divinely governed secondary causes, which serve as the immaterial sources of activity and motion. Steffen Ducheyne, "Newton on Action at a Distance." Journal of the History of Philosophy 52.4 (2014): 691-692

As I noted yesterday, inspired by, and partially correcting, Howard Stein, according to my interpretation of Newton, as Newton developed the ideas of the Principia in the 1680s, Newton came to the following position: a body has (at least) two dispositions: (i) a “passive” disposition to respond to impressed forces which is codified in the second law of motion; (ii) whereas an “active” disposition to produce gravitational force is treated as a distinct interaction codified in the third law of motion. And the “cause” of the action is “the conspiring nature of both” bodies. For the “conspiring” to occur, the bodies must share a “nature.” (For the full defense of these ideas see here and here.) And I argue that for Newton the disposition to gravitate is a universal, albeit contingent, relational quality of matter.  Despite grounding my views in a textial analysis Treatise of the System of the World (a work that appeared shortly after Newton died), my view has not generated consensus.

Among my critics, Ducheyne is most inclined to draw on archival material. And the passage quoted above is especially important to his (2014) attempt to refute my position. He refers back to it twice more (on pp. 692-693). The reason why it is important to Ducheyne's argument is that it seems to give him the smoking gun he needs. It's one of the few places where Newton explicitly says that matter is passive.

Now, I had already (in 2011) responded to this passage, in a (2009) criticism of Hylarie Kochiras (who had criticized an early version of my argument). (Looking back, I am quite amazed by how polemical we all were!) I wrote (now quoting myself): "Yet, the published version of the Opticks, is agnostic on this matter. In Query 31 he contrasts the “passive principle by which the bodies persist in their motion or rest, receive motion in proportion to the force impressing it, and resist as much as they are resisted” with “active principles, such as are the cause of gravity, by which planets and comets keep their motions in their orbits, and bodies acquire great motion in falling; and the cause of fermentation,” and so on. Shortly thereafter, he lists “gravity, and that which causes fermentation, and the cohesion of bodies” among the “active principles” (Newton, 1952, pp. 400–401)." 

My response to Kochiras clearly did not convince Ducheyne (who cites Kochiras' exchange with me, so he is aware of it). So, normally I would now throw up my hands and leave it to others to figure out who gets the better of the burden shifting. But two distinct new, additional arguments occur to me. The first argument would be to concede Ducheyne's (and Kochiras's!) reading of this passage, and fall back on the acknowledgment that Newton changed his mind and that after 1700 he was more inclined to accept the passivity of matter as the draft suggests. This response would be open to me because officially I am primarily committed to attributing to Newton the view sketched above to the mid 1680s (as he was drafting the Principia). In the Principia itself he is explicitly agnostic, after all--and this is agreed by everybody.

This (first) concessive response fits would also allow me to take on board some of Ducheyne's arguments about the theological significance of embracing the passivity of matter; or at least recognizing that Newton actively distanced himself from being taken to embrace active matter after the initial reception of the Principia. These theological issues and the question of the nature of mature are related to the challenge to Newton being taken as a kind of neo-Epicurean (and Kant and Adam Smith hint) or a(adherent of "blind fate") crypto-Spinozist (as Leibniz suggested at the start of his correspondence with Clarke). I have explored this connection in various places; see here & and forthcoming.

But as Ducheyne correctly notes in his paper, I have been greedy; I have also used other passages from different periods in Newton's life as converging evidence for my  interpretation of his view in the mid 1680s. And so I have kind of suggested that except for when Newton toys with ether theories, my reconstruction of his dispositional account of gravity is Newton's fall-back position. And so now I would have give up on that material.

However, another position, is not to be concessive at all. So, second, I can also simply deny that in the unpublished draft version of what was to become Query 31, Newton is presenting his own view about the passivity of matter at all. For it seems to me that one can read the italicized passage (the italics are Ducheyne's [here is an image of the manuscript; [here is a transcription] as Newton simply reporting or summarizing the Cartesian position on matter. Before I explain that let me quote a wider version of the passage (with a lot of editorial markings removed--Newton obsessively corrected his own texts): 

Qu. 23. By what means do bodies act on one another at a distance. The ancient Philosophers who held Atoms & Vacuum attributed gravity to Atoms without telling us the means unless perhaps in figures: as by calling God Harmony & representing him & matter by the God Pan & his Pipe, or by calling the Sun the prison of Jupiter because he keeps the Planets in their orbs. Whence it seems to have been an ancient opinion that matter depends upon a Deity for its laws of motion as well as for its existence. The Cartesians make God the author of all motion & its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion. Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed. It receives motion proportional to the force impressing it. And resists as much as it is resisted. These are passive laws & to affirm that there are no other is to speak against experience. For we find in our selves a power of moving our bodies by our thought Life & will are active Principles by which we move our bodies, & thence arise other laws of motion unknown to us.

So, Newton here is taking on the question of action at a distance. And he first describes the innate gravity position of the ancient atomists. He also calls attention to the possibility that they used esoteric and figurative speech to explain the mechanism behind their position. (This sentence inspired one of the most famous papers by McGuire and Rattansi in contemporary Newton scholarship.) He sums up his treatment of the ancients by suggesting they thought God was needed to account for the laws of motion and the existence of matter.

As an aside, something of this view of the Ancients survives in the General Scholium added to the second (1713) edition of the Principia. Against the evidence of the Ancients, who freely speculated about to what degree God/Gods are dispensable to the Epicurean natural philosophy (and who claimed that the Gods were introduced to modify larger population), Newton reads them here as natural philosophical theists of a certain sort.  My own view is that he is doing this in order to try out saying that the a-typical epicureanism people are attributing to him need not be "Atheists" in character. (And he may have even sincerely thought that this was a solid reading of the Epicureans.) That fits a lot of other material in this manuscript (which offers a robust assertion, inter alia, for the reality of final causes in experience).

He then moves on to describing the cartesian position. Now on the reading advanced by Ducheyene (and Kochiras) the description of the cartesian position is a sentence: "The Cartesians make God the author of all motion." This would attribute to the Cartesians, in effect, Malebranche's interpretation of Descartes (or at least his own preferred position) being a kind of occasionalists such that God is the author of all motion. But there is an equally respectable Cartesian interpretation in which occasionalism is not the proper Cartesian position, but rather that  God is responsible (or the author of) the laws of motion, that's the next half of the sentence ("its as reasonable to make him the author of the laws of motion.")

And on the reading advanced by Ducheyne and Kochiras, Newton then moves on to state his own view. But it is equally plausible, and in fact, I think more plausible (yes, really), that here Newton gives a summary of the Cartesian metaphysics of nature: "Matter is a passive principle & cannot move it self. It continues in its state of moving or resting unless disturbed." So, pace Ducheyne and Kochiras, I think the natural reading here is that what they take to be Newton's position is really just Newton giving a quick and dirty summary of the Cartesian natural philosophy he rejects! 

To be sure, I do not mean to deny that in this manuscript Newton does shift to explaining features of his own position--he regularly invokes the authority of experiments. And where exactly he does that is a matter of judgment. But at the same time he also keeps shifting toward describing alternative views he rejects. 

So, if we read the manuscript in the way proposed by Kochiras and Ducheyne then Newton draws a sharp contrast between entities with minds, who can be active, and passive entities that lack such power. In fact, Kochiras and Ducheyne end up treating Newton by implication as a property dualist (with living things being the only kind of entities that can be substances). 

But Newton himself is much more cautious than that in the manuscript quoted. He makes it clear that all living things are active. And it is, for Newton in this very document, an open question whether (as the Stoics thought) all of nature is alive in that relevant sense: "We find in our selves a power of moving our bodies by our thoughts ] & see the same power in other living creatures but how this is done & by what laws we do not know. We cannot say that all Nature is not alive. not know her laws or powers any further then we gather them from Phænomena." (Emphasis added.) Nobody has doubted that this is Newton's own position. And this suggests to me that Newton is  much more agnostic about the nature of matter in this document than Kochiras and Ducheyne have allowed. Because Newton allows (as Spinoza did) that there may be as of yet undiscovered principles and laws that can explain the materiality of living things. On my reading, these would also be laws and principles of matter.

What Newton does explicitly deny is that vis inertia can explain the generation of (new) motion: "vis inertiæ they continue in their state of moving or resting & receive motion proportional to the force impressing it & resiste as much as they are resisted, but they cannot move themselves; & without some other principle hen the vis inertiæ there could be no motion in the world." For reasons I do not fully understand Ducheyne thinks this shows that for Newton matter is passive. But that's not right. For even I assert -- and this also follows naturally from the second law of motion -- that vis inertiæ is a passive principle, but does not constitute the whole of Newton's matter theory in the Principia. 

 

 

 

 

Whewell, Newton, Kant, and Hershel's Double Stars

We may observe, however, that the law of gravitation according to the inverse square of the distance, which thus regulates the motions of the solar system, is not confined to that province of the universe, as has been shown by recent researches. It appears by the observations and calculations of Sir John Herschel, that several of the stars, called double stars, consist of a pair of luminous bodies which revolve about each other in ellipses, in such a manner as to show that the force, by which they are attracted to each other, varies according to the law of the inverse square. We thus learn a remarkable fact concerning bodies which seemed so far removed from us that no effort of our science could reach them; and we find that the same law of mutual attraction which we have before traced to the farthest bounds of the solar system, prevails also in spaces at a distance compared with which the orbit of Saturn shrinks into a point. The establishment of such a truth certainly suggests, as highly probably, the prevalence of this law among all the bodies of the universe. And we may therefore suppose, that the same ordinance which gave to the parts of our system that rule by which they fulfil the purposes of their creation, impressed the same rule on the other portions of matter which are scattered in the most remote parts of the universe; and thus gave to their movements the same grounds of simplicity and harmony which we find reason to admire, as far as we can acquire any knowledge of our own more immediate neighbourhood.--William Whewell Astronomy and General Physics, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, 1864, (Bridgewater Treatise, "New Edition, with New Preface"),pp 229-230 [HT David Haig]

I quote from the edition of Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise in which he adds a new preface in order to respond to Darwin's Origin (which he quotes, but doesn't name). In the preface, Whewell makes a point of associating Darwin with the system of Epicurean chance, which at the cosmogenic level is to be associated with the nebular hypothesis as developed by Kant and Laplace. In the Bridgewater Treatise Kant is not mentioned only Laplace. (I suspect that Whewell, who was one of the greatest historians of science of his age, was not unfamiliar with the Kantian provenance because he alludes to it in his treatment of copernican turn of the critical philosophy elsewhere.*) So, arguments against one (the nebular hypothesis) reinforce the arguments against the other (Darwinism), and vice versa. 

One may wonder why, after after the empirical success of the Principia, and its Rule 3, anybody would have doubted the universality of the law of gravity. But, as a matter of fact, Newton himself had opened to the door to this possibility, in the 1706 Latin edition of the Opticks which ultimately ended up in Query 31 of the later English edition.+ It reads:

Since Space is Divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allowed that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions to Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several Parts of the Universe. 

Newton sometimes uses ‘world’ in a metaphysically neutral sense, to mean a solar system or, more generally, a closed (or virtually closed) system of interacting celestial bodies. In the above passage, however, ‘world’ is a metaphysically richer notion. A world in this sense is constituted by the kinds of particles and forces it contains, particles and forces that are ontologically prior to the world they constitute. Moreover, the above passage suggests that within ‘worlds’ of this kind particles and forces are prior, in some sense, to the laws of nature.

For Newton laws are clearly contingent. They are not grounded in God’s immutability (as Descartes’s were), but depend on God’s will. Their contingency stands in stark contrast to the necessity of Newtonian space and time. For Newton, space and time could not have been otherwise and are a consequence of God’s necessary existence. As he writes in the General Scholium to the Principia, “by existing always and every where, [God] constitutes Duration and Space . . . ’Tis allowed by all that the supreme God exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists always and every where.” Physical laws do not possess such necessity. (Although Newton’s laws are contingent, they are necessary in relation to God’s will. Given God’s edicts, they could not be otherwise. ) As Roger Cotes wrote in the editor’s preface to the second edition: “From this source [God], then, have all the laws that are called laws of nature come, in which many traces of the highest wisdom and counsel certainly appear, but no traces of necessity” (Newton 1999: 397; the denial of necessity distances Newton from the charge of Spinozism and its attack on design arguments.)

In the above passage, the contingency of Newton’s laws is also coupled to the claim that they may not be universal. They may hold of some worlds (in the metaphysical sense), but not all. Their variability has at least two consequences. First, a universe with metaphysically distinct worlds entails causal disconnectedness among (some of) its parts. This disconnectedness appealed to Newton, because it could prevent different solar systems from collapsing in on each other. It thus supports the argument from design of the General Scholium. 

So, while in the eighteenth century the Huygensian claim that the law of gravity only held for celestial bodies in our solar system was defeated by the stronger claim that it held throughout the solar system, including terrestrially, it was not obvious it would hold in other solar systems throughout the galaxy. Huygens (recall here; here) and Newton seemed to posit a universe with tenuously connected solar systems (light could pass among them), even though Newton encouraged us to take or hold true the laws universally in context of inquiry. 

In 1802, Herschel wrote (in the Transaction of the Royal Society):

If, on the contrary, two stars should really be situated very near each other, and at the same time so far insulated as not to be materially affected by the attractions of neighbouring stars, they will then compose a separate system, and remain united by the bond of their own mutual gravitation towards each other. This should be called a real double star; and any two stars that are thus mutually connected, form the binary sidereal system which we are now to consider. (Vol. 92, 481)

Herschel's language here is conditional. But on p. 486 he goes on to claim there is overwhelming empirical evidence for the reality of binary systems. Interestingly, on. p. 485 Herschel claims that Binary systems are themselves causes by law of gravity because their production and the phenomena they give rise to cannot be the effect of "casual situations" that is, chance.

So, from the point of view of physical astronomy, Herschel's discovery of binary systems was analogous to the seventeenth century discovery that the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn obeyed Keplerian motion. But from a cosmological perspective, Herschell provided empirical evidence for the hitherto unavailable "simplicity and harmony;" whatever else might be discovered, Hershel showed "a remarkable fact" that the motions of bodies obeyed at least one law or set of laws. This claim which was taken for granted by Descartes on metaphysical grounds, and left open empirically by Huygens and Newton, could now be taken as established, or at least "as highly probable." 

Let me close with three observations. First, Whewell clearly thinks that (strong evidence for) the actual university of the law of gravity points to a single, unified cause of the universe. In itself that does not settle the debate with the systems of necessity and chance, in favor of theism. But it does burden shift in one non-trivial way against the system of chance (but not the system of necessity). 

For, Whewell thinks, not entirely unfairly, that the system of chance must assume that the present laws of nature are themselves the effect of historical evolution. That's the "supposition that the universe has gradually approximated to that state of harmony among the operations of its different parts," (p. 30).** For, the system of chance has, if it accepts the principle of sufficient reason (which it may not, of course) no right to positing, without further explanation, the existence of natural law that governs motions of bodies.++ (The system of necessity gets this posit for free.) 

Second, and this is the burden shifting against the necessitarian, if one accepts the principle of sufficient reason, the now universal law of gravity appears without foundation at all: "no [sufficient] reason, at all satisfactory, can be given why such a law must, of necessity, be what it is." (216) In particular, while gravity is a universal quality of matter there is no reason to think (here Whewell explicitly disagrees with Newton's editor, Cotes) it is a necessary quality (p. 222).

Third, while Whewell's language is still voluntarist ("ordinance"), Whewell changes the character of God's voluntarism. For Newton, theological voluntarism is compatible with God choosing different laws of motion for different parts of the universe. Newton allows the genuine possible that God settled for a dappled universe. Whewell's nature, by contrast, obeys a single ordinance/decree by God, who could choose differently in different parts of the universe, but did not.

 

 

 

 

On Foucault on 24 January 1979: On Enlightened Despotism (IX)

    I have tried to indicate three features: veridiction of the market, limitation by the calculation of governmental utility, and now the position of Europe as a region of unlimited economic development in relation to a world market. This is what I have called liberalism.
    Why speak of liberalism, and why speak of a liberal art of government, when it is quite clear that the things I have referred to and the features I have tried to indicate basically point to a much more general phenomenon than the pure and simple economic doctrine, or the pure and simple political doctrine, or the pure and simple economic-political choice of liberalism in the strict sense? If we take things up a bit further back, if we take them up at their origin, you can see that what characterizes this new art of government I have spoken about would be much more a naturalism than liberalism, inasmuch as the freedom that the physiocrats and Adam Smith talk about is much more the spontaneity, the internal and intrinsic mechanics of economic processes than a juridical freedom of the individual recognized as such. Even in Kant, who is much more a jurist than an economist, you have seen that perpetual peace is not guaranteed by law, but by nature. In actual fact, it is something like a governmental naturalism which emerges in the middle of the eighteenth century. And yet I think we can speak of liberalism. I could also tell you—but I will come back to this—that this naturalism, which I think is fundamental or at any rate original in this art of government, appears very clearly in the physiocratic conception of enlightened despotism. I will come back to this at greater length, but, in a few words, what conclusions do the physiocrats draw from their discovery of the existence of spontaneous mechanisms of the economy which must be respected by every government if it does not want to induce effects counter to or even the opposite of its objectives? Is it that people must be given the freedom to act as they wish? Is it that governments must recognize the essential, basic natural rights of individuals? Is it that government must be as little authoritarian as possible? It is none of these things. What the physiocrats deduce from their discovery is that the government must know these mechanisms in their innermost and complex nature. Once it knows these mechanisms, it must, of course, undertake to respect them. But this does not mean that it provide itself with a juridical framework respecting individual freedoms and the basic rights of individuals. It means, simply, that it arm its politics with a precise, continuous, clear and distinct knowledge of what is taking place in society, in the market, and in the economic circuits, so that the limitation of its power is not given by respect for the freedom of individuals, but simply by the evidence of economic analysis which it knows has to be respected. It is limited by evidence, not by the freedom of individuals.
    So, what we see appearing in the middle of the eighteenth century really is a naturalism much more than a liberalism. Nevertheless, I think we can employ the word liberalism inasmuch as freedom really is at the heart of this practice or of the problems it confronts. Actually, I think we should be clear that when we speak of liberalism with regard to this new art of government, this does not mean that we are passing from an authoritarian government in the seventeenth century and at the start of the eighteenth century to a government which becomes more tolerant, more lax, and more flexible. I do not want to say that this is not the case, but neither do I want to say that it is. It does not seem to me that a proposition like that has much historical or political meaning. Michel Foucault, 24 January 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 3, The Birth of Biopolitics. 61-62

Liberalism's complex relationship to despotism is a major sub-theme of the Birth of Biopolitics, which he introduces (recall) in the first lecture. And not to put too fine point on Foucault's diagnosis: enlightened despotism is a recurring even natural temptation and possibility within liberalism. And according to Foucault this is so in virtue of liberalism's occasional self-identification with or embrace of a particular image of science, of political economy. Foucault calls this the privileging of 'naturalism' over 'freedom' within the tradition. 

To Foucault's audience -- aware of the controversies connected to Friedman's Nobel after his visit to Pinochet's Chile --  the connection between enlightened despotism and liberalism need not be emphasized much, although Foucault is not subtle about its French roots. The audience of the third lecture might easily miss that in the quote above Foucault already distinguishes between the physiocrats and Adam Smith on this very issue (note how he first groups them together: "the freedom that the physiocrats and Adam Smith"; he then moves "the physiocratic conception of enlightened despotism.") He makes the contrast more explicit in lecture eleven, 28 march, 1979 (286).

So, we can see that Foucault is diagnosing a dynamic within liberalism, with one pole pulling toward despotism, and the other pole (recall here on Mill, who is battling a trend within utilitarianism itself); here on Buchanan; and Shklar, also here, and here) pulling away from it sometimes focused on rights. That is to say, there is a permanent risk in liberalism's struggle with older forms tyranny (associated with feudalism, the Church, Royal absolutism) and its more recent struggles with new forms of collectivist despotisms, and in its attempt to ameliorate and mitigate mercantile tendencies, that it gives rise to its own form of despotism. 

It is important to note that both (a) the connection between what Foucault calls 'naturalism' and despotism  as well as (b) the dynamic opposition between two poles of top-down systemic order and a bottom up spontaneity order predate liberalism (in his sense). We find (recall), as Abe Stone first noted to me, (a-b) already articulated in the second part of Descartes' Discourse on Method with Descartes himself expressing a tendency toward despotism. (The connection between naturalism in Foucault's sense and Descartes need not surprise.)

It is easy to discern (recall) that with the cost of computing low, with the wide availability of massive data, and the lure of automatic AI, the despotic tendency has reasserted itself. For, previous limitations on evidence may now seem feeble to the scientist. And, so the promise that "the government must know" society's "mechanisms in their innermost and complex nature" now seems eminently reasonable again. 

Let me close with an observation. If one's vantage point is to extend the liberal tradition, yet honor Foucault's warning to us, there are two strategies: one -- and it is the one he emphasizes -- is to strengthen the (undoubtedly fallible, recall Isaiah Berlin) countervailing tendencies away from despotism. (In my blogging I tend to associate this, both the dynamic understanding of liberalism, and the stratetic significance of adopting countervailing tendencies, with Jacob Levy's writings.) Another strategy is to conceptualize scientific evidence in such a way such that the tendency toward despotism is minimized within what Foucault calls naturalism; on may understand Frank Knight's deployment of uncertainty and, more recently, methodological analytical egalitarianism [MAE]  (inspired by Levy & Peart) as  attempts to develop that insight. Given the magnitude of the challenge, these two strategies must be pursued simultaneously.

On the interaction between bodies and abstract Mathematical quantities; on Newton's Vis Insita as Inherent, Innate, and essential

Def. 11 12.  The force of a body or inherent and innate to a  body The _Ùinherent, innate, and essential force [vis insita, innata, et essentialis]_Ù of a body is the power by which it endeavors to perseveres in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a straight line.  It is proportional to the quantity of the body, and is in fact exercised proportionally to the change of bearing [allatae] state, _Ùand in so far as it is exercised it can be said to be the exercised force of the body endeavoring and struggling against [conatus et reluctatio]   Of this kind  , of which one kind is the centrifugal force of rotating [bodies] [gyrantium]_Ù.--Isaac Newton "De Motu Corpurum in mediis regulariter cedentibus," translated by George Smith. 

The quoted passage is from one of the sequence of manuscripts that Newton wrote between Halley's famous visit to Cambridge and the Principia. It caught my eye while I was editing one of George's entries forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Isaac Newton. In his biography of Newton, Richard Westfall mentions the first sentence, in passing, as part of a "struggle" to clarify the relation between inherent and impressed force. And, in fact, since we are dealing with a conceptualization of inertial motion, what Newton means by vis insita or inherent forces is of central importance to understanding the Principia. So, for example, in his classic (2006) article, on the subject of inherent and centrifugal forces, Domenico Bertoloni Meli also quotes the passage. But the fact that Newton couples this vis insita with innateness and essence goes unremarked. I mention Westfall, Smith, and Bertoloni Meli as exemplars of a certain kind of reticence among leading Newton scholars to analyze some of Newton's metaphysics while he was developing the Principia. More surprisingly, Alan Gabbey, who -- together with the two giants of Newton's metaphysics, Howard Stein and Ted McGuire -- has never exhibited such reticence, also quotes the passage (back in 1971), but does not explore its meaning.

Recently, George, in a recent paper devoted to confirming Stein's conjecture "that Newton's conception of forces of nature as forces of interaction “was actually developed by Newton at the same time that he was discovering the law of gravitation,”" (Smith quoting Stein) notes, while commenting on a disagreement between Stein and me "about metaphysics of Newtonian gravity," "I have no objections to anyone's citing passages from Newton's writings in an effort to extract his “metaphysical” thinking, for where else can one turn to. I question, however, how much weight can be put on Article 21 [that appeared posthumously]. As already noted, nothing remotely akin to it appears in any edition of the Principia, nor for that matter in any other publication or extant manuscript."* Smith is right about that. (The implicature of his comment puzzles me: on the first two pages of my paper, I had, in fact, asserted three times that I was attributing a view to Newton that he held when he was drafting/writing the Principia, but no more than that.) But even metaphysical ephemera can be interesting, even illuminating.

This post makes no claim about the wider significance in Newton's thought of the passage quoted above. The first thing to notice about the first sentence is that the power of a body by which it  perseveres in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a straight line is not treated as a property or quality, but as a force of that body. Descartes' first two laws of motion do not such thing.+ 

So, there are three questions worth asking: first, what is a force of a body? Second, what makes a force inherent, innate, and essential.' Third, why, in the Principia, did Newton drop the claim that this force is 'innate and essential.' For (on this third question), when in the Principia, he returns to something very much like the idea of definition 12 (quoted above), is to be found in definition 3 (of the Principia): "Inherent force of matter is the power of resisting by which every body, so far as it is able, perseveres in its state either of resting or of moving uniformly straight forward." And in the very next sentence, Newton adds "This force is always proportional to the body and does not differ in any way from the inertia of the mass except in the manner in which it is conceived."  Of course, in comparison to the quoted passage above, in the Principia, Newton adds the very striking claim that vis insita is identical to the inertia of the mass, except (and this is no less striking) in the manner of conceiving them. 

As it happens, for independent reasons scholars have argued (and agreed, I think) that in the Principia, Newton treats forces are abstract mathematical quantities (this is pretty clear from the corollaries to the laws.)  Of course, it is not entirely clear what to make of the claim that a body's force just is an abstract mathematical quantity. Earlier Newton has explained that when he uses 'mass' he just means the "quantity of matter" which "is a measure of matter that arises from its density and volume jointly." (This is definition 1 of the Principia.) So, while it is tempting to treat inertia as a property of body, it too, is a feature of mass, which is a quantity, and in turn, a measure of two physical parameters (density and volume). So, that vis insita is identical to the inertia of the mass just is to say that two abstract mathematical quantities related to bodies are alike. (Newton's conception of mass is an abstract feature shared by all bodies.)

Because it is common since the advent of relativity theory and the quantum revolution to present Newton's ontology as kind of commonsensical (with modest allowance for the strangeness of the possibility of action at a distance), that it is sometimes forgotten or underestimated that even the building blocks of Newton's physics are, from an ontological perspective, quite unusual. That Newton was innovating helps explain that, as Zvi Biener and Chris Smeenk have shown in an eye-opening article, that there are tensions lurking here between a geometric conception of body and what they call dynamic conception of body (looking forward to Boscovitch), as a collection of forces.** 

This generates a hypotheses about why Newton dropped the very idea of inertia as "an innate and essential force" from the Principia. Once one starts treating forces as abstract mathematical quantities that can be measured (mediated by theory, perhaps) and that are (interpreted as) causes of motion, it is unclear what is gained by treated them as innate or essential or not.  (And one can discern an interest in measurement behind the idea of 'exercised proportionally.') That's just the kind of metaphysics that, say, George Smith finds irrelevant to the evidential practice (and something similar seems to lie behind Parker's comment quoted in the note).* Fair enough.**

Be that as it may, as it happens, in Rule 3 of the Principia, Newton explicitly claims that vis insita is "immutable." In addition, he is explicit that vis insita is a means to establish that movability and perseverance are universal properties in bodies given the third rule that encourages us to make an inductive leap from the finding of particular properties of bodies without exception to the commitment that these "be taken as qualities of all bodies universally." And Newton then suggests that there is a contrast between universal and essential qualities of matter. The third rule is a means toward the former not the latter. Interestingly, it is quite natural to read Newton in the third rule as claiming that while gravity is merely universal and not an essential quality of matter, vis insita is not just universal and an essential quality of matter (as evinced by its immutability). This would be an echo then of definition 12 in the passage quoted from De Motu at the top of this post.

At this point, I need to make a modest detour. The trio, 'inherent, innate, and essential,' has a notorious afterlife because, in a famous letter to Bentley, of february 1693 (it's been frequently cited by physicists and scholars), Newton denies "that gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter." In the previous sentence, Newton had asserted that 'it is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact, as it must be, if gravitation in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it." In earlier letters Newton had complained that Bentley had attributed to him the idea that gravity is inherent and essential to matter. Presumably, Bentley had sent Newton the sermon he had preached (the seventh of the Boyle lecturers), on November 7, 1692, and which he was preparing for publication, for comments to Newton.

As an aside, in the published (1693) version of Bentley's sermons, Bentley continued to tie Newton's theory to Epicurus', but limited the similarity to the claim "that the weight of all Bodies around the Earth is ever proportional to the quantity of their Matter." (Bentley, a famous classicist, adds a footnote to Lucretius.) Bentley goes on to add that Newton and the Epicureans also agree on the existence of a vast vacuum of empty space in the universe. He then draws a distinction between two kinds of atheist cosmogonies (one he labels epicurean, and another which is more crypto-Spinozist, of a sort later defended more explicitly by Toland.) He then insists that both will be refuted on the assumption that "mutual gravitation or spontaneous attraction can neither be inherent and eſſential to Matter; nor even supervene to it, unless impressed and infused into it by a divine power." This superaddition of gravity thesis has been recently defended (not by me, but) by John Henry as indeed Newton's own view (in part on the basis of Newton's letter to Bentley.)

What Newton has meant by his rejection that gravity is 'inherent, innate, and essential' quality of matter has been subject of much scholarly controversy (and I have been one of the partisans). But because of that debate, it seems to be agreed that by an 'essential quality' of matter Newton means it is a quality, or necessary condition, required for the existence of matter. And so understood one can see why Newton would have been tempted in De Motu to call vis insita essential, because it is the feature that is required for (to speak anachronistically) the physics he is pursuing. Without the power by which a body "perseveres in its state of rest or of moving uniformly in a straight line" it wouldn't be the kind of entity Newton is studying.++ 

Now, in the previous paragraph I moved from ontology to epistemology. That's partially because the Rules for the Study of Natural Philosophy in the Principia themselves seem to give the reader, as Zvi Biener and I argued, at most the ontology apt for the epistemic attitude to be taken in the context of natural philosophical research. And this ontology is, thus, more provisional than talk of 'essential' qualities seem to suggest.

Andrew Janiak has suggested, that for a quality to be “innate”  is to think of it as due to no other physical process, entity, or medium between material bodies.*** So, an innate quality is to be a kind of contrast to a relational quality (which generates from, say, an interaction). To the best of my knowledge Newton calls no quality or power innate in the Principia.

That Newton dropped the claim that vis insita is an innate quality of body can then be readily explained I think. Between the draft quoted at the top of the post, Newton came to think of natural forces as forces of interaction. This is, in fact, the very point of Smith's recent article on Stein I quoted above (and was assumed by me under the influence of Stein).+++ And, evidentially, these forces are manifested in and measured by interactions (in part, as 'struggle' against change, etc.) And, in the Principia, Newton is explicit that these forces are both causes and effects of the interactions of bodies.

Famously, Descartes' metaphysics floundered on the mysterious interaction between bodies and souls. It is worth noting that in Newton there is an interaction between bodies and abstract mathematical quantities. If we focus on the measurement practice this is not mysterious at all and it generates, as Smith shows in his majestic "Closing the Loop" ever more stringent evidence. But if we step back, and ask ourselves how to conceive of the interaction between bodies and abstract mathematical quantities, one is left somewhat speechless.