Digressions&Impressions

On Sex Equality, Original Sin, Rousseau, and François Poullain de la Barre

Even the wisest legislators found no interesting role for women when they founded their republics. All laws seem to have been made to keep men in their present position of power. Men we regard as fonts of wisdom have never said anything good about women. In fact, men’s behavior towards women in all places and at all times is so uniform that it seems to be part of an organized movement. Some people have even thought that men are impelled to behave this way through some hidden instinct ordained universally by the Creator of nature.
This view is all the more easily justifiable when we consider the way women themselves tolerate their situation. They see it as being their natural place. Either because they do not think at all about what they are, or because they are born and raised in a state of dependency, they share the male point of view. In all these things, both men and women tend to believe that their minds are as different as their bodies and that the distinctions that necessarily exist between them should be extended to all aspects of life. This opinion, however, like most of the ones we hold about custom and usage, is pure prejudice, and is dictated by superficial appearance rather than close analysis. We would certainly reject it if we took the trouble to go back to its origin. We could find many examples of things that were done formerly that we could compare with the things we do now, and we could weigh ancient customs against present-day ones. If we had followed this rule more often, we would have avoided a lot of mistakes. As far as women’s present situation is concerned, we would have realized that it is simply the rule of the stronger that has put them in such a subservient position, and we would understand that it is not through any natural deficiencies that they have been denied the advantages enjoyed by our sex.
Indeed, when we think honestly about human history, both past and present, we realize that there is one common denominator: reason has always been the weakest element in our decisions, and all stories seem to have been made up for the sole purpose of demonstrating what we see in any lifetime, that from man’s very origins might has always prevailed. The greatest empires of Asia owe their beginnings to usurpers and brigands, and the inheritors of the ruins of Greece and Rome were upstarts who thought they could resist their masters and dominate their equals. All societies exhibit the same kind of conduct. If men behave in this way towards their equals, then it is most likely that they behaved in the same way first of all towards women. Here, more or less, is how it came about.
Men, realizing they were the stronger and physically superior sex, imagined they were superior in all respects. This was of no great consequence for women at the beginning of the world, when a very different state of affairs prevailed from today. There was no government, no learning, no employment, no established religion; dependence was not considered irksome. I imagine that people lived like children, and winning or losing was part of the game. Both men and women, who were naive and innocent, contributed equally to the tasks of tilling and hunting as savages do today. A man went about his business and a woman hers; the person who made the greatest contribution was the most respected.--François Poullain de la Barre (1673) On the Equality of the Two Sexes Translation by Vivien Bosley, Part 1.**

I tend to ignore Poullain de la Barre because he lacks the biting satire I enjoy so much in Gournay or Mandeville, and because I find many of his arguments a bit cringe-worthy, especially because he is so sincere . But re-reading the passage -- made famous by Simone de Beauvoir (see also Marina Reuter here) -- above reminded me that it is quite amazing that Poullain de la Barre died of natural causes.  Beauvoir uses the passage in her argument that men "sought to make the fact of their supremacy a right." I don't disagree with Beauvoir, but there is more here worth noting.

First, the whole paragraph is structured around a contrast between what "some people" think and the truth (according to Poullain de la Barre). What most people think is that the male instinct to dominate, and to dominate in solidarity with each other, is part of human nature. And that this is part of God's providence. This view has a complex relationship to original sin. 

By contrast, according to Poullain people, are naturally cooperative, naturally embrace the division of labor, and more or less accurately track in their praise and blame people's contribution to group welfare. This natural sociability view comes very close to denying original sin altogether by suggesting that an original golden age was actually possible. 

Second, as it happens, our natural sociability is a bit like Locke's pre-political state of nature because there does exist some property. I mention Locke because Poullain de la Barre also associates this child-like friendly state of nature with really existing 'savages.' But, and this indeed anticipates Rousseau (as Reuter notes), it's when states are originated that (great) inequality and permanent gendered structures of hierarchy come into being. And, in fact, according to Poullain de la Barre all polities (I am avoiding the confusing use of 'societies') originate in acts of theft and overthrowing of basically pacific social orders.  This is not just true of all the great empires of the past, but "All...exhibit the same kind of conduct." He is essentially saying that all polities have illegitimate origins that they perpetuate in present conduct.

Third, this last point is a feature and not a bog of his argument because he thinks all (socially significant) gender inequality is grounded, ultimately, in a social order that is inherently violent (see also Reuter) and devalues reason and peace.  So, rather than seeing political society as a solution to the problem of violent or Hobbesian state of nature, it just is the Hobbesian state of nature. To be sure, Poullain is not an anarchist. He ultimately wishes to reform/re-order society on rational grounds in which peace and our true intellectual contributions (not just by women, but also women) are valued--but that is a normative ideal nowhere reality.*

Fourth, political dominance founded in violence and hierarchy always generates an ideology in which the superiority is projected onto other features of the dominant group. He associates the workings of such ideological projection with imagination. (For Poullain de la Barre reason seems both pacific and truth-apt in ways the imagination is.) 

Fifth, and most striking organized religion is itself one of the institutions that facilitate domination and is an exercise of such imaginative ideological projections.+ It only comes into being after polities come into being and then it is inevitably tainted by, if not a tool of, the violence of male hierarchy. 

Let me close with a modest moral. It is a recurring feature to situate Poullain in the Cartesianism of his age (see this excellent piece by Schmitter) That's not all false, and I will return to that link some time. But it also raises expectations about the philosophical nature of his work. In many ways, his evidential and conceptual arguments do not really make one think one is dealing with an especially promising Cartesian (natural philosopher or metaphysician). But unlike most of the Cartesians of his age (and here I am relying on Alex Douglas' wonderful book on Spinoza), who preferred to focus on medicine and science, Poullain did not shy away from very important political and theological issues and consequences of the Cartesian revolution in philosophy. And in so doing he landed in a place that is as radical and far-reaching as, say, Hobbes and Spinoza, and in some ways closer to enduring significance. 

RIP: Richard "Red" Allan Watson (February 23, 1931 - September 18, 2019)

I have been exploring caves in the Mammoth Cave region of Kentucky for over fifty years. The Mammoth Cave System is now more than 365 miles long, and will probably reach 500 miles.

THE LONGEST CAVE (written with Roger W. Brucker, published in 1976 by Alfred A. Knopf) has never been out of print. Roger and I fancy that it never will be out of print as long as there are people who read adventure books.

My novels and, as far as that goes, all my books, are grounded in obsessions. UNDER PLOWMAN'S FLOOR is about caving; THE RUNNER running; and NIAGARA the passion to do something no one else has ever done: to be the first to walk across Niagara Falls on a high wire, and the first to go over the Falls in a barrel. These are philosophical novels, but they are absolutely non-didactic.

The translation of NIAGARA into French led to my being invited to the Saint-Malo Etonnants Voyageurs Festival International du Livre in 1997, where an award was given to its French translator, Jacques Chabert. That was year the Montana writers were invited to the festival, and I rode on the train from Paris to Saint-Malo in a seat beside William Kittredge, who told me what a fine place Missoula, Montana is for writers. The result of that conversation is that Pat and I now live and write in a passive solar earth house bordering the Lolo National Forest on a mountain slope above Missoula.--Richard "Red" Watson, "Autobiography"

Eric Brown informed me that Red Watson died September 19, 2019.

Red Watson taught me to write. In the Summer of 2003, I arrived, with a freshly minted PhD, in St. Louis after a glorious year at Wesleyan. I was struggling on the job market and with journal editors and their referees. I spent two unhappy years in St. Louis.

While there, I learned from Larry May that it might help to 'situate' my papers 'in the literature' in the first footnote(s). I learned from Red to cut 30% of the word-count and improve clarity. I arrived in town with one publication. I left with eight acceptances, and a tenure track job in a wonderful department (Syracuse).  Red insisted I should keep sending him my draft papers. He would use his pencil simply deleting sentences and sentence fragments, revealing, like a sculptor chipping away marble, the underlying thought to my astonished eyes.

Once, he felt I needed an extra scolding:

Remind me to attack you for your picking up contemporary misuse of the word 'share'. A share is like a piece of pie. Keep this story in mind. A woman of my acquaintance was asked if she would like to share her telephone number. "Why I'd be delighted," she said. "Which digit would you like to have?"

At one point, long after we stopped expecting to see each other again, he complained that I had stopped sending him draft chapters. (By that time I was a father and a research professor.) I explained I had stopped because he had made such a point of complaining about the email connection in the library. (This was 2010.) He responded by sending me his (snail) mail address in Missoula. 

Red was proud of his wife (Patty Jo Watson, a world class scientist) and daughter, his writing (fiction and philosophical), and his students--in that order. He was the first professional philosopher I met who presented himself as a writer. For many years, he tried to enlist me as an agent to get his quirky Descartes biography translated and published into Dutch. No professional failure has weighted more on me.  

When he was not talking about spelunking or his better half, Red understood himself as a student of Popkin, and he belonged to that pioneering group of historians of philosophy who used archives to help shape philosophical understanding. I didn't think of him of as analytic philosopher, although at times I thought of him as the last living logical positivist. He helped contribute to the polemical atmosphere in the WashU department. 

In 2005, Red authored (with Harry Bracken) a "few paragraphs" which "are meant to be neither an obituary nor an adequate memorial. We were Dick's first two PhDs, and we were barely five years his junior. He treated us from the beginning as colleagues and he became a lifelong friend. He changed our lives, as he did the lives of many other aspiring scholars. We miss him." In 463 words they were able to convey the significance of Richard Popkin's life and scholarship. 

One of our last exchanges (in 2010) was about the title of a book manuscript, Descartes and Pascal: Faith And Reason. I expressed surprise at the coupling. He explained:

Descartes is the man of faith (so unworried) and Pascal is the man of reason (so worried to death). 

 

Chiang on metahumans (and the great chain of being)

The question is, are these worthwhile undertakings for scientists? Some call them a waste of time, likening them to a Native American research effort into bronze smelting when steel tools of European manufacture are readily available. This comparison might be more apt if humans were in competition with metahumans, but in today's economy of abundance there is no evidence of such competition. In fact, it is important to recognize that — unlike most previous low-technology cultures confronted with a high-technology one — humans are in no danger of assimilation or extinction.

There is still no way to augment a human brain into a metahuman one; the Sugimoto gene therapy must be performed before the embryo begins neurogenesis in order for a brain to be compatible with DNT. This lack of an assimilation mechanism means that human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch him or her grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser. It is not surprising that the percentage of human parents choosing the Sugimoto gene therapy for their children has dropped almost to zero in recent years.

As a result, human culture is likely to survive well into the future, and the scientific tradition is a vital part of that culture. Hermeneutics is a legitimate method of scientific inquiry and increases the body of human knowledge just as original research did. Moreover, human researchers may discern applications overlooked by metahumans, whose advantages tend to make them unaware of our concerns.

For example, imagine if research offered hope of a different intelligence-enhancing therapy, one that would allow individuals to gradually ‘upgrade’ their minds to a level equivalent to that of a metahuman. Such a therapy would offer a bridge across what has become the greatest cultural divide in our species' history, yet it might not even occur to metahumans to explore it; that possibility alone justifies the continuation of human research.

We need not be intimidated by the accomplishments of metahuman science. We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally invented by humans, and they were no smarter than we. Ted Chiang (2000) "Catching crumbs from the table," in Nature.*

The existence of metahumans (or enhanced, human cyborgs) reminds us that developments in technologies generate violations of Descartes' causal principle: what is more perfect can arise from what is less perfect. Technologies change how we conceive of what is humanly possible.+ In addition, technology helps generate violations of the great chain of being; there are  in-commensurable gaps between humans and metahumans.

Whether any technology can remove scarcity may well be doubted unless the metahumans can practice moral checks on themselves and nudge the humans into breeding at a replacement rate. Of course, if the metahumans did so, it's possible the humans would not know about it ([recall] in the way the machines/artificial intelligence nudge humans in Iain Banks' The Culture series).

The narration assumes that scarcity is the main motive for genocide. It also implies that being capable of developing science and technology, including presumably meta weapons of meta mass destruction, would generate an ethics of their proper use. Since metahumans were initially invented by humans no smarter than us, this is to be doubted. Perhaps the thought is that the ability to dominate nature (abundance, etc.) removes the desire to dominate (destroy/exploit, etc.) lesser beings. But let's leave that aside.

When I was reflecting on the story, I was initially unsure parents would indeed choose to be able to communicate with their children, and so continue their traditions even form of life, rather than choosing for their kids to be among the cognitive elite (the metahumans). Often today, it seems, designer babies represent not just the desire for healthy kids, but parents' status and economic aspirations for their children. Such parents appear to act for their childrens' good. 

But, upon second thought, Chiang's moral psychology seems persuasive. Because despite the emphasis on 'choice' in selling human enhancement technologies, our contemporary parents of designer babies are not really showing much respect for the (let's call it) autonomy of their children. Rather what they de facto do is lengthen the odds that the structure of their (parental/social) values/traditions are passed on and reproduced. 

Part of the joke of the story -- which first appeared in Nature -- is that academic journals have stopped being the vehicle for publishing original research. They are now mostly in the business of hermeneutics trying and trailing to understand metahuman science. For us the joke may be less funny because with the opacity of machine learning this possibility may well be shading into reality. Even so, it would indeed be funny if the success of an all-knowing data science would regenerate the felt need for a kind of science of interpretation that could help decode the revelations of a hidden intelligence. When computer science departments start hiring big-data-hermeneuticists, the heirs of Gadamer or Davidson can laugh at our analytic philosophers.++ Of course, with machine algorithms, there may simply be no there, there. And so this hermeneutics may well have to rely on an intentional stance.

Not unlike AL-Farabi's God (at least this is Al-Ghazali's charge), the metahumans may be t uninterested in the physical going-ons of mere mortals. One's position reflects one's choices of research topic. Chiang suggests that faced with the existence of scientifically superior metahumans, scientific humans would embrace if not standpoint epistemology, then the argument from epistemic diversity, from self-interest. If these human scientists are right, then the great chain of being would be restored.

 

On the Philosophical Attack on Heritable Intellectual Rank

If there is any good in philosophy, it is this, – that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods....[a] noble mind is free to all men; according to this test, we may all gain distinction. Philosophy neither rejects nor selects anyone; its light shines for all. Socrates was no aristocrat. Cleanthes worked at a well and served as a hired man watering a garden. Philosophy did not find Plato already a nobleman; it made him one. Why then should you despair of becoming able to rank with men like these? They are all your ancestors, if you conduct yourself in a manner worthy of them; and you will do so if you convince yourself at the outset that no man outdoes you in real nobility. We have all had the same number of forefathers; there is no man whose first beginning does not transcend memory. Plato says: "Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors." The flight of time, with its vicissitudes, has jumbled all such things together, and Fortune has turned them upside down. Then who is well-born? He who is by nature well fitted for virtue. That is the one point to be considered; otherwise, if you hark back to antiquity, every one traces back to a date before which there is nothing. From the earliest beginnings of the universe to the present time, we have been led forward out of origins that were alternately illustrious and ignoble. A hall full of smoke-begrimed busts does not make the nobleman. No past life has been lived to lend us glory, and that which has existed before us is not ours; the soul alone renders us noble, and it may rise superior to Fortune out of any earlier condition, no matter what that condition has been.

Suppose, then, that you were not a Roman knight, but a freedman, you might nevertheless by your own efforts come to be the only free man amid a throng of gentlemen. "How?" you ask. Simply by distinguishing between good and bad things without patterning your opinion from the populace. You should look, not to the source from which these things come, but to the goal towards which they tend. --Seneca, Letter 44 Translated by Richard Mott Gummere.

In Morgenröte, Nietzsche treats the invention of Darwinism as the undoing of heritable grandeur, "This however has now become a forbidden path for the ape stands at its entrance and likewise other fearsome animals grinning knowingly as if to say: no further this way!" But as Seneca reminds us, one does not need Darwinsim to make the argument. There are five  key features of Seneca's argument: first, the argument relies on a distinction between what we may call history and pre-history (or the unreliable past). If you think this distinction is too anachronistic, recall this post, prompted by Adrienne Mayor, on the  nature of deep time in Ancient Greek thought. Because of the existence of pre-history, the origin and hence purity of no lineage is secure. This, second, relies on the idea that a noble-making character of the lineage is essential to the lineage and gets handed down through the lineage. The existence of pre-history makes all lineages epistemically suspect hostage to fortune.* In addition, third, and this is more of an empirical claim, what we know of human nature, all lineages will contain the ignoble. Fourth, he relies on the idea, one we have seen him develop through all the Letters, that there is no property right in the truly noble. While his sages have a certain amount of individuality -- given their differing circumstances -- the noble, which instantiates the infinite, lacks individuality (recall letter 3).

Finally, and fifth, he relies on the idea that superior qualities can be caused by a chain of inferior qualities. This point is notable because it goes against the idea -- familiar to modern readers from Descartes's Meditations (but often associated with a species of Platonism) -- that what is more perfect — that is, contains in itself more reality — cannot arise from what is less perfect. But Seneca clearly thinks this would involve one in a kind of genetic fallacy (You should look, not to the source from which these things come, but to the goal towards which they tend.). While the past is full of excellent exemplars, natural genealogy has no special status 

Seneca here anticipates the Hobbesian and Smithian idea that one is not a philosopher by nature, but that one is made into a philosopher. From this vantage point all are noble [omnes...hoc sumus nobiles] or at least capable of attaining it.+ (This is a core commitment of what I call methodological analytic egalitarianism) Now, as David Levy and Sandra Peart always insist to me, that a Stoic is in some sense a radical egalitarian is no surprise (given the known radical strain of early Stoicism--I warmly recommend René Brouwer's book). But Seneca insists that the point can also be found in Plato. This is a bit more surprising because while Plato is not Aristotle (think natural slaves/rulers), Plato tends to be associated with the idea that there is a hierarchy of human types (and  philosophers can be bred accordingly). Sometimes Plato presents  as thinking that natural hierarchy can be irrelevant politically or morally (see this post for some of these claims). This got me curious about the passage quoted by Seneca. (A helpful note by the translator directed me to the Theatetus): 

Hence it is, my friend, such a man, both in private, when he meets with individuals, and in public, as I said in the beginning, [174c] when he is obliged to speak in court or elsewhere about the things at his feet and before his eyes, is a laughing-stock not only to Thracian girls but to the multitude in general, for he [like Thales] falls into pits and all sorts of perplexities through inexperience, and his awkwardness is terrible, making him seem a fool; for when it comes to abusing people he has no personal abuse to offer against anyone, because he knows no evil of any man, never having cared for such things; so his perplexity makes him appear ridiculous; and as to laudatory speeches [174d] and the boastings of others, it becomes manifest that he is laughing at them—not pretending to laugh, but really laughing—and so he is thought to be a fool. When he hears a panegyric of a despot or a king he fancies he is listening to the praises of some herdsman—a swineherd, a shepherd, or a neatherd, for instance—who gets much milk from his beasts; but he thinks that the ruler tends and milks a more perverse and treacherous creature than the herdsmen, and that he must grow coarse and uncivilized, [174e] no less than they, for he has no leisure and lives surrounded by a wall, as the herdsmen live in their mountain pens. And when he hears that someone is amazingly rich, because he owns ten thousand acres of land or more, to him, accustomed as he is to think of the whole earth, this seems very little. And when people sing the praises of lineage and say someone is of noble birth, because he can show seven wealthy ancestors, he thinks that such praises betray an altogether dull and narrow vision on the part of those who utter them; because of lack of education they cannot keep their eyes fixed upon the whole and are unable to calculate that every man has had countless thousands of ancestors and progenitors, among whom have been in any instance rich and poor, kings and slaves, barbarians and Greeks. And when people pride themselves on a list of twenty-five ancestors and trace their pedigree back to Heracles, the son of Amphitryon, the pettiness of their ideas seems absurd to him; he laughs at them because they cannot free their silly minds of vanity by calculating that [175b] Amphitryon's twenty-fifth ancestor was such as fortune happened to make him, and the fiftieth for that matter. In all these cases the philosopher is derided by the common herd, partly because he seems to be contemptuous, partly because he is ignorant of common things and is always in perplexity. Plato Theaetetus translated by Harold N. Fowler. C 

Regular readers know I have a minor obsession about the representation of Thales at the origin of philosophy (recall here; here; here; here); even in scholarship, and also here). And so re-reading this familiar passage -- which so clearly articulates the tense relationship between philosophy and ordinary opinion/commitments [i call that the Socratic Problem; see here]-- in light of Seneca came as a shock to me. For, indeed, Socrates here ruthlessly attacks the idea of nobility by birth as alien to a truly philosophical mind.+ And Socrates' argument anticipates Seneca's in claiming that all lineages are impure: the products of mixture and extremely long chains themselves the product of fortune.*

Seneca, of course, invokes Socrates and Cleanthes as intellectual exemplars. And he implies that Socrates supports his argument that it is constitutive of philosophy to reject inherited social distinctions, including ones based on ethnicity, as relevant to evaluations of philosophical distinction.** I am inclined to think Seneca is right here. And so while there are original sins in the Platonic tradition of philosophy -- its hostility toward rustic wisdom is one --, its known origins (see what I did there?) also point the way toward some noble commitments. 

 

On Impartiality, And the Equality of All Planetarians; Huygens on Beauty and the Infinite Universe

But still the main and most diverting Point of the Enquiry is behind, which is the placing some Spectators in these new Discoveries, to enjoy these Creatures we have planted them with, and to admire their Beauty and Variety. And among all, that have never so slightly meddled with these matters, I don’t find any that have scrupled to allow them their Inhabitants: not Men perhaps like ours, but [37] some Creatures or other endued with Reason. For all this Furniture and Beauty the Planets are stock’d with seem to have been made in vain, without any design or end, unless there were some in them that might at the same time enjoy the Fruits, and adore the wise Creator of them. But this alone would be no prevailing Argument with me to allow them such Creatures. For what if we should say, that God made them for no other design, but that he himself might see (not as we do ’tis true; but that he that made the Eye sees, who can doubt?) and delight himself in the contemplation of them? For was not Man himself, and all that the whole World contains, made upon this very account? That which makes me of this opinion, that those Worlds are not without such a Creature endued with Reason, is, that otherwise our Earth would have too much the advantage of them, in being the only part of the Universe that could boast of such a Creature so far above, not only Plants and Trees, but all [38] Animals whatsoever: a Creature that has a Divine somewhat within him, that knows, and understands, and remembers such an innumerable number of things; that deliberates, weighs and judges of the Truth: a Creature upon whose account, and for whose use, whatsoever the Earth brings forth seems to be provided. For every thing here he converts to his own ends. With the Trees, Stones, and Metals, he builds himself Houses: the Birds and Fishes he sustains himself with: and the Water and Winds he makes subservient to his Navigation; as he doth the sweet Smell and glorious Colours of the Flowers to his Delight. What can there be in the Planets that can make up for its Defects in the want of so noble an Animal? If we should allow Jupiter a greater variety of other Creatures, more Trees, Herbs and Metals, all these would not advantage or dignify that Planet so much as that one Animal doth ours by the admirable Productions of his penetrating Wit. If I am out in this, I do not know when [39] to trust my Reason, and must allow my self to be but a poor Judg in the true estimate of things. C. Huygens, Cosmotheoros, “Rational Animals in the Planets”.

I have mentioned before (recall here) that in an unpublished manuscript (from 1691) Huygens embraced what one may call an ‘aesthetic-maximazation-conservation principle.’ This principle asserts that no natural beauty is wasted and so requires spectators to enjoy it. Because the night-skies on other planets are lovely there must be extraterrestrials to enjoy it (Newton, too, embraces this implication). Huygens's God would not waste the opportunity to have sentient beings enjoy the aesthetic pleasure. Neither God nor nature does anything in vain, after all. " I had noted that Huygens mentions the principle in the (posthumously published) Cosmotheoros, but rejects it as decisive (“this alone would be no prevailing Argument with me to allow them such Creatures.”)

It’s not entirely clear why Huygens rejects it the ‘aesthetic-maximazation-conservation principle’ as offering us grounds to infer extraterrestrials. Perhaps, it’s because he comes to see that there are wasted aesthetic opportunities in the universe: while he is firm that our Sun’s planets have inhabitants, and that this is so of planets of other Suns throughout the universe, he has decided that moons (and Suns) do not have inhabitants.

Another possible ground for rejecting the ‘aesthetic-maximazation-conservation principle’ is that it entails, as Huygens notes, that we humans may exist for God’s aesthetic pleasure (“God made them for no other design, but that he himself might see…and delight himself in the contemplation of them?”) I believe Huygens’s suggestion to this effect is a rhetorical question (even if Huygens embraces providential deism in the Cosmotheoros.)) A reason for thinking this is a rhetorical question is that in the quoted passage, Huygens does not consider this answer – we exist for God’s aesthetic pleasure – as decisive, not to mention that this position would bring Huygens uncomfortably close to Epicureanism --a position he rejects explicitly in the Cosmotheoros.

Rather, Huygens embraces a more Copernican, ‘all Solar Systems are Created Equal,’ principle. A more modest version of the principle is used within solar systems: ‘all planets are Created Equal’ principle. Of course, Huygens recognizes that gravity and heat will be different in different planets, and that the night sky will offer different opportunities to develop one’s astronomy. In fact, part of the fun of the book is having Huygens imagine for his reader what experiencing the galaxy would be like for extraterrestrials. Here’s a nice example:

if Amazement and Fear at the Eclipses of the Moon and Sun gave the first occasion to the study of Astronomy [on Earth], as they say it did, then it’s almost impossible that Jupiter and Saturn should be without it; the Argument being of much greater force in them, by reason of the; daily Eclipses of their Moons, and the frequent ones of the Sun to their Inhabitants. So that if a Person disinterested in his Judgment, and equally ignorant of the Affairs of all the Planets, were to give his Opinion in the matter, I don’t doubt he would give the cause for Astronomy to those two Planets rather than us.

It is notable that Huygens here draws on (Epicurean) tropes which became central to Enlightenment thought (in fact, the parallels with Adam Smith's History of Astronomy are uncanny):+ ancient science is grounded in the unpleasant experience of the spectacle the heavens offer us. The early inhabitants of the outer planets have more regular reasons – and better potential data! -- to begin to track their heavens. An implication that Huygens leaves hanging is that some extraterrestrials will surpass us in scientific knowledge. (Later, when he explicitly gets to the issue, he goes no further than to say that: “there’s no reason to think the Planetarians less ingenious or happy than our selves; we have gained our point, and ’tis probable that they are as skilful Astronomers as we can pretend to be.”)

On the whole Huygens’s reasons for suggesting his ‘all Solar Systems are Created Equal,’ principle are not very interesting (or persuasive--they rely on analogies). But after driving home the vast distances of the visible universe, and reminding his readers of the even vaster distances of the (infinite) universe invisible to us, he introduces a striking, and I think consequential, thought experiment, near the end of his book that helps explain why he adopts this principle:

For then why may not every one of these Stars or Suns have as great a Retinue as our Sun, of Planets, with their Moons, to wait upon them? Nay there’s a manifest reason why they should. For let us fancy our selves placed at an equal distance from the Sun and fix’d Stars; we should then perceive no difference between them. For, as for all the Planets that we now see attend the Sun, we should not have the least glimpse of them, either that their Light would be too weak to affect us, or that all the Orbs in which they move would make up one lucid point with the Sun. In this station we should have no occasion to imagine any difference between the Stars, and should make no doubt if we had but the sight, and knew the nature of one of them, to make that the Standard of all the rest. We are then plac’d near one of them, namely, our Sun, and so near as to discover six other Globes moving round him, some of them having others performing them the same Office. Why then shall not we make use of the same Judgment that we would in that case; and conclude, that our Star has no better attendance than the others? So that what we allow’d the Planets, upon the account of our enjoying it, we must likewise grant to all those Planets that surround that prodigious number of Suns. They must have their Plants and Animals, nay and their rational ones too, and those as great Admirers, and as diligent Observers of the Heavens as our selves; and must consequently enjoy whatsoever is subservient to, and requisit for such Knowledge.[1] (Italics added.)

There are three underlying intuitions here: first, on a cosmic scale, all Suns are equal with no marks to distinguish them and so no marks to elevate them over others. Second, most planets, including ours, are invisible at most points in the universe, and so have no claim to privileged status. Third, there is no rational ground to make one planet (ours) the measure of others.[2] Man is not the measure of things once we see ourselves in our proper place. The nod to Protagoras is important.

It is, by now, a familiar claim that Copernicanism decenters humans and our solar system. We are not at the center of creation anymore. But even so various species of humanism have survived, even thrived in the ages of Copernicanism. (Huygens knew this up close; his father was one of the great Renaissance men of his age.) Throughout the Cosmotheoros, Huygens hesitates to grant that we humans are at the pinnacle of earthly life. He is especially impressed by birds (challenging Descartes's treatment of them as  mere mechanical entities):

Birds, liv’d with more pleasure and happiness than Man could with all his Wisdom. For they have as great a gusto of bodily Pleasures as we, let the new Philosophers say what they will, who would have them go for nothing but Clocks and Engines of Flesh; a thing which Beasts so plainly confute by crying and running away from a stick, and all other actions, that I wonder how anyone could subscribe to so absurd and cruel an Opinion. Nay I can scarce doubt but that Birds feel no small pleasure in their easy, smooth sailing through the Air; and would much more if they but knew the advantages it hath above our slow and laborious Progression.*

Huygens notes that from the impartial and disinterested perspective of the universe [as it were, sub species universalis], our planet is just a “small speck of dirt."* That is, Huygens thinks embracing the 'Solar Systems are Created Equal,’ principle also has obvious implications for "Wisdom and Morality," but about that some other time more.

On the Significance of an Anonymous Review of Newton

The work of M. Newton is a mechanics, the most perfect that one could imagine, as it is not possible to make demonstrations more precise or more exact than those that he gives in the first two books on lightness, on springiness, on the resistance of fluid bodies, and on the attractive and repulsive forces that are the principal basis of Physics. But one has to confess that one cannot regard these demonstrations otherwise than as only mechanical; indeed, the author recognizes himself at the end of page four and the beginning of page five that he has not considered their Prin­ciples as a Physicist, but as a mere Geometer.
He confesses the same thing at the beginning of the third book, where he endeavors nevertheless to explain the System of the World. But it is [done] only by hypotheses that are, most of them, arbitrary, and that, conse­quently, can serve as foundation only to a treatise of pure mechanics. He bases the explanation of the inequality of the tides on the principle that all the planets gravitate reciprocally toward each other ... But this supposi­tion is arbitrary as it has not been proved; the demonstration that depends on it can therefore only be mechanics. In order to make an opus as perfect as possible, M. Newton has only to give us a Physics as exact as his Mechanics. He will achieve this when he substitutes true motions for those he has supposed.---Anonymous, Journal des Scavans (2 August 1688), pp. 153 sq., translated by Alexandre Koyré, Newtonian Studies, p.115. [see also here]

The 1688 review was the first public continental response to Isaac Newton. It is often taken to be the expression of a (neo-)Cartesian rejection of the Principia along the lines of Huygens or Leibniz. This is undoubtedly influenced by Koyré suggestion (he's not the first) that the reviewer was probably the Cartesian Regius. On the now standard reading the reviewer is rejecting action at a distance and asking for an explanation in terms of colliding bodies. I now think this standard reading does not do justice to the details of the review. I was prompted to re-think the review by a fascinating paper, "Beyond the “Continental Translation” of Newtonian Mechanics: The Beginnings of Rational Mechanics Reconsidered" (forthcoming in a OUP Handbook on Isaac Newton edited by Smeenk & Schliesser) by J.B. Shank (who has independent grounds to think the reviewer is Varignon).+

There are two oddities in the review that are incompatible with the reviewer being a standard neo-Cartesian-mechanical philosopher: the author of the review (i) rejects hypotheses; and s/he (ii) insists that knowledge of "true motions" of the planets is possible. But, as Huygens affirmed in his introduction in the Treatise on Light and Discourage on Gravity (which includes his published response to Newton's Principia) the mechanical philosophy was a hypothetical philosophy, relying on reduction to intelligible models, and it insisted that motions of the planets were too complex to be fully known with certainty. (Descartes himself had thought the motions of planets could only be known with rough approximation.) They were, in fact, in no position to complain about a science grounded on hypotheses or suppositions--that was, in fact, Newton's complaint about them. (They could, of course, claim that different hypotheses than those adopted by Newton's were preferable, but not that they were hypotheses.) In fact, for the first time since the Copernican hypothesis had errupted, Newton's Principia gave genuine hope that the true motions of the planets and their causes could be found and were within possible reach.

But the anonymous reviewer is attacking Newton from a more rationalist side: action at a distance is criticized for being (a) arbitrary and (b) un-grounded in indubitable foundations (that track the causal structure of the world).* In the Preface to the Principia, Newton himself had allowed that his foundations were, in an important sense, provisional: "the principles set down here will shed some light on either this mode of philosophizing or some truer one." Unfortunately, the reviewer does not explain what the starting points or standards of an exact and certain physics look like.

There is a sense, in fact, in which the reviewer can be read as a disappointed Newtonian. For, in the early 1670s, in his early lectures and correspondence on color, Newton had grown infamous for his assertion that his mathematical science of optics could be certain. The claim was watered down in print such that Newton granted Hooke that "the absolute certainty of a science cannot exceed the certainty of its principles." In fact, one can discern in the anonymous reviewer somebody who, after all the high flowing rhetoric of the 1670s (say), had expected from Newton more certain principles than the ones he had supplied in the Principia.

If I am right about this then one can say that rather than representing the informed response of a leading figure in an old paradigm, the 1688 review expresses the perspective of a new possible paradigm, what we may be dub -- with a glance ahead toward Émilie du Châtelet -- Newtonian-rationalism.

Guest Post by Lisa Shapiro: RiP: Eileen O'Neill (1953-2017)

[This is an invited guest post by Lisa Shapiro.--ES]

Thanks to Eric for giving me a part of his space to share these thoughts. These are simply my memories of someone who was certainly an influence, and probably fit into a category that one might call a professional friend -- not as close as a proper friend, but also someone more than an acquaintance either. They resonate, I think, with Eric's own experience in meeting Eileen at the library.

While in graduate school, first in a seminar on Descartes, and later in my dissertation, I read Eileen O’Neill’s work. Her article “Mind-Body Interaction and Metaphysical Consistency: A Defense of Descartes” was a lucidly written, scholarly, takedown of the what had been prior to its publication in 1987 a litany of complaints that Descartes’s claims of mind-body interaction violated the Third Meditation’s causal principle. O’Neill cut through the nonsense to remind everyone that (a) the Causal Principle concerned metaphysical hierarchies – substances could only be affected by other substances or an infinite substance, and infinite substance could only be affected by itself (or another infinite substance, which as Spinoza argues is absurd), and (b) insofar as mind and body were both substances, there is no violation of the causal principle in their interaction. The scholarliness came out in her appeal to Cartesians, like Simon Foucher, who shared her reading. The lesson to a fledgling historian of philosophy was to avoid the cottage industry and cut to the chase.

I first met Eileen in person at the ground breaking conference she organized at UMass-Amherst in Fall 1997 on early modern women philosophers. She had invited my supervisor Annette Baier to give a talk at the conference – perhaps surprising, but not so much if you think about Annette’s 1990 Eastern APA Presidential Address, ‘A Naturalist View of Persons’. Annette suggested that she invite me to give a talk on Princess Elisabeth. I remember being astonished and thrilled at the email and invitation (Annette had said nothing). I had started working on a translation of the correspondence, in imitation of the Beyssade edition. I accepted, and the talk I gave became “Princess Elisabeth and Descartes: The Union of Soul and Body and the Practice of Philosophy.” I cannot recall with clarity now whether the talk preceded or followed another, by a very distinguished philosopher, who claimed that women of the period were not proper philosophers but learned maids. They could not be better counterpoints. I was terrified. The conference was truly incredible. It seemed as if there were 100s of people there. It was an event. I did not fully appreciate its significance. [Charlotte Witt reminds me that she and Lilli Alanen first me there, and their volume Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy  emerged from that meeting.]

I realize that when she organized that conference she must have been in her early 40s, far younger than I am now.  Strangely, though I recall the event, I do not really recall the event. I was shy, I was definitely a nervous wreck about giving the talk, and I was probably a nervous wreck at meeting her. I have a vision of her sweeping around the room greeting people in a fabulous outfit.

A year later, I moved from the College of Charleston to Hampshire College, just down the street from UMass. Despite some concerns that Hampshire and I might not be the best fit, working in the same region as Eileen, as well as Vere Chappell and Bob Sleigh, was a huge draw. I took advantage of the opportunity to sit in on a seminar Eileen was teaching on early modern women philosophers. I still have the course reader. Marcy Lascano was in the class, not yet committed to working on early modern women. So was Dan Kaufman.

I recall having the experience of recognizing just how easy Eileen made something that was extraordinarily difficult seem: providing the framework and then articulating what was philosophically significant – the arguments, the positions – in the writings of these women. I read Marie de Gournay for the first time. I became enthusiastic about working on early modern women. In parallel, I made a connection with Jutta Sperling at Hampshire, an historian whose work involved the writings of women in the 16^th century. Jutta and I co-taught a course on early modern women, in which I continued to learn more about the writings of early modern women. I discovered the Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series.

Eileen and I lived not far from one another in Northampton at the time, and we socialized a bit, though Eileen was a very private person. She had a penchant for the heavy oak of Stickley furniture, for Persian cats, for telling stories. She was an amazing story teller. I remember tales of her obsession with 70s serial killers, of her tale of after sixth months of trying finally finding a way in with the woman at the stationary store on Main St. and the resulting theory of the selection principles for inclusion in small town New England. She had the kind of style that would allow her to sport clothing far more elegant than the occasion required in a way that seemed effortless, that allowed us all to bask in her beauty, and yet to feel perfectly comfortable in our own ordinariness. I think many of us, men and women alike, have aspired to that kind of poise. I know I have, and I know I have never come anywhere near close. Somewhere in those three years in Northampton, I met Gary, her partner, who introduced me to some great music. One band has always stuck in my mind – Sparklehorse.

In 2001 Eileen published her edition of Margaret Cavendish’s Observations on the Experimental Philosophy with Cambridge. While I was in no way involved in that edition, I can, from where I sit now, appreciate the work that went into it, and into its philosophically substantive introduction. I think the amount of work involved is very difficult to appreciate, especially for those who have only relied on modern editions of works. Eileen established a text, making it accessible and providing robust guidance for how to enter into it. It is no wonder that it has brought forth what is now a large body of scholarship on Cavendish.

I can only imagine just how much determination was involved in her continuing to do what she continued to do. In 2001, I moved away from Hampshire and so from Eileen, spending a year at Cornell before coming to SFU. I taught a course on early modern women philosophers at Cornell. There were only a handful of students in the course. It was quite clearly of marginal interest to students there. And it seemed like such an uphill battle to be waged. I did not feel I had the energy and determination, and I certainly did not have the infectious enthusiasm and grace of Eileen. Too often imagined pressures prevent us from doing what we want to do.  For me, it wasn't until I was well past tenure that I started working on women (other than Elisabeth) into my third year history courses, though I was happy to lead reading groups focused on the works of a particular female philosopher. I think we are finally starting to get past that. Eileen’s courses in the area were not large either, but nonetheless she was clearly certain that the material was worth pushing. She taught those courses anyway, long before it was fashionable, as it is now. I can only assume her colleagues valued what she worked on.

Hers was a field of dreams – if you built it, they would come. And she was right. She played the long game. She built connections with the handful of people already working on women philosophers: Karen Green at Melbourne, Sarah Hutton then at Aberystwyth. Getting her students on board: Dan Kaufman organized a conference in his first year at University of Florida. And look at the work Marcy Lascano has done. Roping in people, like me, like Karen Detlefsen, whenever she could. She was impossible to say ‘no’ to. Karen and I are now editing a Routledge Handbook on Women and European Early Modern Philosophy. We have 42 chapters each with a unique author (we might actually have a couple more…). I know from exchanges with others that Eileen in many ways provided a realization that they could work on the women in whom they were interested. It was as if before talking with her, they had never realized they could go there professionally. Given where things were even just a decade ago, this is really a testament to Eileen’s ground game. She worked the room. She brought people in, she got us all to be excited about what she was excited about. She somehow enabled us to be excited about what we were excited about, but were fearful of pushing forward.

One of the most compelling articles I have every read, and one that always bears rereading is her “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and their Fate in History.” The list of names alone. Dear god, how did she even find out about all those women? I know that Eileen connected with those in other departments who were also working on women's intellectual history. Her work shows the fruit of interdisciplinary research.

When I moved to SFU, my focus narrowed on finishing the Elisabeth-Descartes volume, and with Eileen’s help I was put in touch with Theo Verbeek, who, through his connections had finally located the missing manuscript copies of Elisabeth’s letters to Descartes. I made a trip to examine them. Again, something important that would not have happened without her, and her generosity.

A conference was organized in her honour at Barnard in 2009. The video of her remarks at that conference captures a lot of the character I am trying to describe. The event itself brought people together, people who already knew one another, and people who did not. While I might have met Marguerite Deslauriers before, I got to know her a bit better there.  I seem to recall spending the weekend with a sinus infection, so I don’t recall it as clearly as I ought. I do recall Eileen walking in in a spectacular red dress and matching jacket. Perfectly tailored. I brought two students along: Lauren Kopajtic, who is still in philosophy, at the Society of Fellows at Columbia and Jen Liderth, who teaches philosophy at a community college in LA. I know that the event made some impact on them. I hope perhaps as they learn of Eileen’s passing, they remember it again.  The talk I gave there, “The Outward and Inward Beauty of Early Modern Women” was very much written with Eileen in mind: her own honed aesthetic sensibility inspired the topic, her own generosity, her own intelligence.

I did not see Eileen much, if at all, after that conference (I do recall a Skype call as we brainstormed about the New Narratives project grant applications -- she managed to look fantastic even on skype).

Eileen made an impression. She has changed a subdiscipline. And she did so by hard work, but also by working with people, scholars both younger and those more established, by encouraging us all, by infecting us with her enthusiasm.

People far closer to her than I will miss her terribly, of that I am absolutely sure. I will miss her too. But I also know that she, like my own supervisor, will always be with me.  While of course, lots of people have and continue to influence me, without either Annette Baier or Eileen O’Neill,  I would not be the philosopher I am.

On Linguistic Narrowness in Philosophy

If you want to read most philosophical classics it is sufficient to master Middle Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Chinese, Arabic,  Aramaic, French, German, English, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Pali, Korean, Japanese,  and maybe a dozen more languages that contain multiple written philosophical classics.* A few such languages are not really living anymore. Because I am ignorant of most philosophical traditions, I am happy to revise that number upwards (for my Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, and Italian friends), and to let you, my dear reader, decide what "philosophy'' and "classics" mean. Allowing for partisan voting, I bet we end up with around 50-100 languages, or so. Regular readers know I am a partisan of the claims by those that profess rustic wisdom (and here) so I am not suggesting that being written down is a mark of philosophical distinction or any other sign of moral excellence.

Now consider that "of the currently listed 7,099 living languages, 3,866 have a developed writing system." Let's stipulate that the vast majority of the writings in these writing systems involves accounting and mating/family matters. Even so, that's a lot of living writing systems in which people can muse about, say, reality, the point of it all, the nature of value, or social order, or beauty, etc. I feel extremely confident in saying that these writing systems and the non-living ones pretty much go un-surveyed by the vast majority of most professional philosophers (for some quantitative evidence see this work by Eric Schwitzgebel, Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Andrew Higgins, and Ivan Gonzales-Cabrera). In addition, there exist many oral philosophical cultures (and many more that are presumably extinct). That is to say, we behave, by and large, as if we are operating in an efficient market in philosophical ideas, insights, and arguments. This state of affairs is, while intelligible and even rational in some sense, just bizarre. 

Before I continue, a qualification: of course, my use of 'we' in the previous paragraph is problematic (it always is). Not everybody is really fooled by the state of affairs least of all, one presumes, those working in or on philosophical traditions not well represented in today's scholarly lingua franca(e).  There are times, when even thinkers in the politically (economically, etc.) dominant cultures are aware that they lack access to crucial texts.  For example, Ibn Rushd, writing in what we would call Islamic Spain, notes the significance of his lack of access to (a translation of) Aristotle's Politics. (It influences his decision, he says, to write on Plato's Republic instead.) Of course, lack of access to a text is not only a linguistic issue: Ibn Rushd's mentor, Ibn Tufayl, who is self-aware that he is writing in the periphery, and who knows that not all texts of his own intellectual tradition -- he mentions Al-Farabi's amongst others -- have circulated to his (Western) part of the Islamic world. Even today, in an age of Google, books and journal articles are expensive and not easy to acquire for those on, say, academic salaries and working in underfunded institutions in many parts of the world. 

When I started drafting the first sentence, I consulted, as the first note below shows, a few experts because it dawned upon me that I had literally no idea in what language some of the Buddhist and Dao (etc.) classics, whose names I was familiar with, were originally written in. It was a moment I allowed myself to recognize my own ignorance about pretty basic facts. And this alerted me that my normal state of affairs is that my own ignorance about my ignorance is my ordinary state of affairs. Now, obviously, -- time is short -- it's okay to be ignorant of lots of non-salient facts. It is clear that the would-be-salience of the very wide linguistic diversity to philosophical thought is not something  I contemplate much, despite the fact that in my scholarly life I bump up against my linguistic limitations all the time. If we allow -- following Samuelson -- that mathematics is a language, then this is, I say this without pride, a near daily occurrence. 

A few days ago I noted that without translator-advocates even superb philosophical texts written in small languages can become, as it were, cul-de-sacs. My use of 'markets' above makes it tempting, if one were to model this, to treat translator-advocates as sources or agents of arbitrage.** The relative lack of translator-advocates, and the relative lack of interest in their significance, suggests that our profession does not incentivize the sometimes onerous efforts of translation and advocacy, and the even more laborious efforts to seek out wisdom and insight in linguistically hard to get to places. This is why one often hears, about translations, that they are a labor of love.  

In earlier times, in the philosophical traditions of European early moderns, the search for occult or hidden knowledge also involved the seeking out of linguistically and temporally distant works. Sometimes (Newton, Locke, etc.) this is relatively narrowly centered on original Hebrew sources that may illuminate the pristine true religion, sometimes (Newton, Locke), this is narrowly focused on esoteric, alchemical wisdom (which involves purpose-made codes), but sometimes -- Leibniz and Bayle come to mind -- one senses an omnivorous hunger that is fueled by an awareness there is always more to learn. (The previous does not mean to suggest that the motives of the omnivore are pure.) This omnivorous hunger is not part of our professional DNA, because for every Leibniz, there is a Descartes or a Carnap, alas, who proudly announces that other traditions are irrelevant and -- this is what I find so remarkable -- the temptation they offer, of willed self-ignorance, is at bottom more seductive and alluring.*** 

 

 

On Four or Five Methods of History of Philososphy (and the debates over Stoicism and Spinozism that Encouraged them)

In the middle of the seventeenth century, [I] the standard approach to the historiography of philosophy, which at this time almost universally meant writing the history of ancient philosophy, was still closely modelled on Diogenes Laertius's book on the Lives of Eminent Philosophers. A typical work would be organized by sect, each section being subdivided by author, with a doxography of the sect's distinctive arguments presented in the section to devoted to its founder--in the case of the Stoics, Zeno of Citium. Passages on later philosophers adhering to the particular school would follow the treatment of the founder, in broadly chronological order. While mention would be made of particular specialisms or idiosyncracies which appeared in the work of these later adherents, there would be no detailed treatment of what scholars would today recognize as the basic stuff of the history of philosophy, [II] the presentation of how the course of philosophical argument over time led to modifications in the doctrines maintained by the philosophers and the schools. Those who wrote on the history of philosophy could discuss whether theses were true or false, in light of the best philosophical accounts of their own age, or of revealed religion, but they provided no serious account of how progress in philosophy might be made, of how within a certain tradition of philosophical argument, arguments might be found wanting and replaced, where possible, with better ones. [Emphasis and numbering added--ES] Christopher Brooke Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau, pp. 139-140. (For an earlier version of Brooke's argument, see here.)

I have quoted from the opening lines of a section on changes in the historiography of philosophy that Christopher Brooke recounts in chapter six of his impressive monograph (from which I learned a lot). Before I get to that, let me say something about Brooke's wonderful book. The main thrust tells the story of the miraculous come-back of Stoic ideas in political theory (and ethics, meta-ethics) after Machiavelli's seeming knock-out blows against them. The Stoic political theory that Machiavelli undermined is associated with Seneca's views on the ruler's constancy. As Brooke nicely notes a key move made by the re-founder of Stoicism, Lipsius, is to switch constancy as a virtue from the ruler to the subject. In an unusual oversight, Brooke fails to note the significance of this move  to Descartes, whose philosophy is -- as I have noted before (here; see also this post on Descartes's pride and generosity) -- written from the perspective of the technocratic (and constant) subject and, which, in  fact, embraces constancy as a key virtue in his second methodological and regulative maxim in the Discourse on Method.  Be that as it may, a more fundamental difference, and this is nicely emphasized by Brooke, is that the Machiavellian prince is not immanent in the political order (she acquires dominions and subjects for her own glory) whereas for Lipsius she is serving the common good (32-33). Lipsius's position comes under attack from both Christian (Augustianian) moralists as well as 'secular' (61--Montaigne)and (Hobbesian) political realists and Brooke ably recounts the developments of Stoic ideas (switching from Seneca to Marcus Aurelius along the way) all the way to Rousseau.*

Okay, let me turn to methodology. In chapter six, Brooke recounts a "revolution" (141) in the historiography of philosophy away from doxography (which, it is worth noting, itself imposed an order on its source material). One of the innovations was (III) to think of philosophy as "problem-driven," in particular,

examining particular philosophical questions, the arguments to which these had historically given rise, and, crucially, those moments at which the participants in those arguments appeared to agree that the state of the question had changed, or that the argu­ment had moved on. In considering the topics that were debated between the artisans of the different schools, furthermore, the new historians of philosophy had the highest praise for those they considered to be 'eclectic' philosophers, those who were not beholden to the dogmas of a particular school, but who enjoyed the freedom to draw as they saw fit from among the various authorities and arguments that were available to them. (141)

This revolution is associated with Pufendorf and Thomasius and makes a narrative of "progress" possible. (I go over some of the same material here, where I provide an analysis of how the new early modern historiography creates revolutionary baselines from which progress is to be discerned.) Brooke correctly notes that this historiography is itself made possible by the embrace of eclecticism -- the selection (of what is best) -- as a respectable philosophical stance. It also involves a more subtle shift from philosophy as a coherent way of life as philosophy as arguments (of course, arguments are possible in the former and the latter is compatible with a life-style). In context, Brooke notes that it, thereby, rejects a focus on schools and their internal tradition/development. While problem driven philosophy is still familiar to us, it is important to emphasize that such eclecticism is also incompatible with another way of thinking about philosophy, systematicity.

Systematicity is mentioned when Brooke discusses another methodological innovation (one responding to the ways in which Stoicism and Spinozism were seen as species of atheism or at least hostile to "religious orthodoxy" (141)) pioneered by Buddeaus:

Rather than examining each of the ancient philosophical schools by list­ing their opinions on various topics, Buddeus sought (IV) to identify the nuclear or constitutive principles of those philosophical schools, the key teachings from which other doctrines were considered to flow. This was then a way of dist­inguishing the core from the peripheral arguments of the various schools...(141)

The core is here like a timeless, but knowable essence from which other less essential doctrines flow. (This is the central explanatory framework of seventeenth  century science before it gets displaced by a focus on laws.) Buddeus treats a temporal tradition here as akin to a substance. But once such a body of knowledge is treated as a substance with an essence it is not a huge step to seeing it as a system with a core and a periphery. This allows then a comparison, as Brooke notes, in Spinozism before Spinoza, between Stoicism and Spinozisms and the identification of these as instances of the same system. (Leo Catana has done fine work (see here, and here) on how Buddeus's ideas on systematicity were carefully developed (and partially transformed) and made influential in the work of Brucker whose ideas were taken up in the critical (Kantian) philosophy and its historiography.)

Okay, so we have here three methods of history of philosophy:

• Doxography of potentially many sects (I)
• A focus on the innovations in arguments that solve (philosophical) problems and, thereby, produce new doctrines (II&III)
• A focus on systems with a core and a periphery. (IV)

In Brooke's hands the views of Pufendorf and Thomasius (III) are very close to what he takes to be the contemporary understanding ('scholars today') of the history of philosophy (IV) which is why I don't distinguish them in this list. To be sure, and Brooke ignores this, there are able adherents of IV today (see Alan Nelson; not to mention those of us that reject I-IV).

Of course, there is a non-trivial difference between II & III: many scholars today would, while not eschewing evaluation altogether ('does an argument succeed on its own terms?;' 'are there hidden tensions?;', etc.), understand  themselves primarily as describing the arguments that lead to novel doctrines of the past finding, as it were, the historical truth or historical meaning (see Lærke); while the eclectic historians (of the seventeenth and eighteenth century) are seeing themselves as paving the way for improved doctrines, that is, more progress (say in a 'science of morality' (144)) by learning from other people's mistakes.

That is to say the eclectic historians share  something in common with Lipsius and Machiavelli. For, one commonality between Lipsius and Machiavelli noted by Brooke is that both believe (V) that history can be instructive. For Lipsius and Machiavelli, the instruction does not generate "general rules with universal application" (31), but maxims which rely on contextual judgment and prudence in knowing then and knowing when to apply them.  That is the historian can also aim

• to be instructed by the past (III&V)

Now, here my point is not to collapse entirely the distinction between political history and the history of political theory, although a too rigorous separation makes one misunderstand, even underestimate, contributions to both genres (Thucydides  Machiavelli, Hume, maybe Tacitus),--about which another time very soon. Rather, I want to close with a pet-peeve about the contemporary stance that Brooke subscribes and exemplifies so ably: it privileges recent scholarship and, thus, exhibits a certain unwillingness to learn from the source material. So, for example, Brooke does not treat his sources (many of which are offering philosophical interpretations about the nature of Stoicism) as symmetrical in understanding with recent scholars. So, for example, the sources are never allowed to challenge the findings about ancient Stoicism by recent scholars (although he ably notes controversies among them and also ably shows when material was or was not available). Now, undoubtedly recent scholars have the advantage of using more sources and better technical tools (about dating, authorship, etc.), and I would not wish to deny that classical philology advances (say, from the days of Lipsius). But Brooke always privileges the perspectives of recent scholars over his early modern sources.

So, for example, as we have seen, in chapter six (in fact, the argument starts at the end of chapter five), Brooke treats the interest in the Stoic attitude toward providence and divinity as a modern phenomenon primarily as  a result of the rise of Spinozism, Pantheism, and Deism and the ways these (each) swerve uncomfortably close to atheism. I agree with his reading of the early moderns. But he treats their interpretation of Stoicism as a distinctly (early) modern phenomenon. This is odd because it is a recurring theme in a widely read text and important source, Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, that (recall) ancient schools disguise their true doctrines on the gods out of fear of popular odium. (In Cicero the topic is raised polemically about the Epicureans twice, but it is also discussed in the context of other schools and himself). Early Modern readers did not miss the point and often treated fear of popular odium as a danger for all of the ancient, philosophical sects (recall here, and here on Smith and Toland on Pythogoreans). While this seems apt for Epicureans, it may seem odd to raise this concern about the Stoics. But while, the Stoics often talked of (partial) providence (for the virtuous [for evidence and this terminology, see Runia]), they also embrace fatalism and so the early modern suspicion of the nature of their theism is not without ground. The point here is not to defend esotericism or the early modern readings of the Stoics (who, inspired, by Plutarch often treat Stoics as religious hypocrites);** rather the point is to nudge us toward a methodology that treats our historical subjects as equal partners in our intellectual voyage(s).

 

On the Politics of Fear And Trump as Would-be-Dictator

Now, of course, nothing I say is meant to downplay the threat at all; it’s all designed to get us to see it more clearly (clearly, of course, by my lights), and while I don’t see my posts or tweets primarily or even secondarily as organizing tools, I’d like to think they give us some potential sense of leverage over the situation....

In any event, among the many reasons the election of Trump has so depressed me, and why I’ve not commented much since the election and have mostly stayed off social media, is that it has given license to the politics of fear on the left. Particularly on social media. Once again, we have that sense that we are face-to-face with some deep, dark truth of the republic. Once again, we have that sense that those of us who insist the horribles of the world should not and cannot have the last word, are somehow naifs, with our silly faith in the Enlightenment, in politics, in the possibility that we can change these things, that politics can be about something else, something better. I find that sensibility deeply conservative (not in my sense of the word but in the more conventional sense), and I resist it with every fiber of my being....

So while I won’t ever look away from what Trump is, I insist on looking upon him through the categories that I would look upon any other political formation. I insist on focusing on things like policy, law, institutions, coalitions, ideology, elites, and so on. (Matt Yglesias is quite good on this issue.) I insist on seeing in him the normal rules of politics and the established institutions of politics: it wasn’t the beating heart of darkness that sent him to the White House, after all; it was, in the most immediate and proximate sense of a cause, the fucking Electoral College.--Corey Robin Against the Politics of Fear @Jacobin.

If you think that President-Elect Donald Trump will be a ruthless dictator (think, say Putin, Castro, or, more recently Erdogan--somebody that jails or assassinates political opponents, confiscates their wealth, etc. ), then, unless you are eager to become a dead or mutilated hero, the wise thing to do is to lay low if you can and hope you, your loved ones and children to ride out the awful days ahead, while praying for a coup d'état that will restore a Republican order (while knowing that civil war is the likely consequence of such a coup).* Since a President-for-life Trump will not live forever one can hope for regime change sooner rather than later.

A slightly more courageous strategy is to lay low, but quietly develop allies in the armed forces and the decentralized court system to slow down and obstruct any grab for power. Ensuring that the media stays partially outside the new government's control means that it cannot impose its narrative on events. Given that support and opposition to Trump are geographically unequally distributed, this could slow down totalizing government considerably. After all, a would-be-dictator Trump also has to recognize limits to his power because some of the the wealthiest and most populous parts of the nation are not exactly strong areas of support (although we should not underestimate the ability of totalizing governments to bribe and seduce would be opponents).

Because I like to think that my friends are wise (lots of them are philosophers, after all), but have no reason to suspect that they have above average likelihood to be courageous, I suspect that lots of them, who have been outspokenly opposed to and extremely fearful about Trump on social media (which we know leaves traces for the national security state) recently, do not really believe right now that President Trump will really be a dictator of the sort that assassinates, jails, confiscates, prevents fair elections, etc. (Putin, Castro, increasingly Erdogan, etc.) To believe he will not be a dictator is compatible with the thought that Trump will be bad for civil liberties, the environment, the rule of law, illegal immigrants, and international peace--all reasons for genuine concern sometimes even existential concern.

Correy Robin managed to put words to my bafflement about my friends' reactions, which manifest what he calls 'the politics of fear.' This is a politics that is grounded on fear, that takes inspiration and meaning from fear, that sees in fear a wealth of experience and a layer of profundity that cannot be found in other experiences (experiences that are more humdrum, that are more indebted to Enlightenment principles of reason and progress, that put more emphasis on the amenability of politics and culture to intervention and change), a politics that sees in Trump the revelation of some deep truth about who we are, as political agents, as people, as a people.

As it happens, I agree with Robin's analysis that many of our political friends exhibit the politics of fear. Even so, I don't share Robin's particular Manichean opposition between the politics of fear vs Enlightenment reason and progress. In part, that's because I have always been attracted to the more skeptical party of the Enlightenment -- the one that thinks reason often undermines itself or is deployed by overconfident experts; the one that recognize that progress tends to rely on a teleological conception of history which so much Enlightenment thought allows us to question --, especially because so much Enlightenment thought itself has been implicated in awful political enterprises (of imperial domination and racialized colonization, of the embrace of humanitarian war to bring the 'fruits' of 'progress' to others, etc.) and because of the many ways in which Enlightenment thought becomes a fig leaf for ideology. (So, one can like the Enlightenment but be clear about its warts and worse.) But also, because fear can be healthy when it recognizes reality for what it is, and is properly redirected to prudent and far-sighted action, especially when hope is not extinguished. As Descartes wrote (omitting his theory of spirits):

Hope is a disposition of the soul to persuade itself that what it desires will come to pass.... And fear is another disposition of the soul, which persuades it that the thing will not come to pass. And it is to be noted that, although these two passions are contrary, one may nonetheless have them both together, that is, when one considers different reasons at the same time, some of which cause one to judge that the fulfillment of one’s desires is a straightforward matter, while others make it seem difficult. And neither of these passions ever accompanies desire without leaving some room for the other.--The Passions of the Soul, 165.

That is to say, my own view (recall) is not far removed from the politics of fear, but one that always leaves room for some hope. In particular, my politics recognizes the imperfection of all political agents and that recent political history provides ample room for creative (and simultaneously true) narratives of progress and decline along many dimensions. It is to recognize that (always other people's) naivete is often a crucial ingredient in generating political improvements, while allowing that it can also cause moral disasters; to recognize that bad things happen to good people, and that bad people can have good fortune. It is to recognize that the bullet can silence the pen, but that ideas can be more powerful than a squadron of drones, sometimes.