Practical Stupidity
Unlike Bacon, the French
philosopher Descartes allowed himself few explicitly utopian moments. While as a good English Protestant
Bacon could live his life at home, in the 1630s Descartes stayed out of France and
found freedom abroad. In the safe
haven of the Dutch city Leiden, he published his Discourse on Method as an alternative to the medieval philosophies taught
by the clergy who controlled the French universities. Illustrated on its title page by a peasant digging his
field, it insisted in clear and
simple language that every movement or change in nature had to be explained
mechanically, that is, by the pulling and pushing of bodies against one
another. No spirits or magical
agents, no inherent tendencies, belonged in a philosophy of nature that
encompassed everything from the movement of the planets to the action of the
nerve endings in the human hand.
In the Cartesian universe, pain results not from an affliction of the
soul, but from impulses travelling to the brain. In the place of speculations by medieval philosophers and
theologians, Descartes proclaimed that “a practical philosophy can be found
by which… we thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of
nature.”
Safe from the Inquisition
that in 1613 had condemned Galileo, Descartes lived and wrote in the Dutch and
largely Protestant cities because, as he explained, in them men got on with
their business and left others to their speculations… (Telling
the Truth About History, by Joyce
Appleby, Lynn Hunt & Margaret Jacob.
My emphasis.)
Non-utopian; tending to one’s own business; the emphasis on
practical knowledge; a reference to “a peasant digging his field”… Sound
familiar?
It is Candide!
My
last two pieces were based on the
assumption that Voltaire’s inspiration came from his Anglomania; especially his
addiction to the British empiricists, which he used to attack the continental
metaphysicians who he believed were upholders of an outdated intellectual
system and purveyors of an inhumane philosophy. It now appears that a Frenchman may have inspired him after
all. How explain this anomaly? Peter Gay suggests an answer.
The propagandists of the
Enlightenment were French, but its patron saints and pioneers were British:
Bacon, Newton, and Locke had such splendid reputations on the Continent that
they quite overshadowed the revolutionary ideas of a Descartes or a Fontenelle,
and it became not only tactically useful but intellectually respectable in
eighteenth-century France to attribute to British savants ideas they may well
have learned from Frenchmen. (The
Enlightenment: An Interpretation; The Rise of Modern Paganism)
Descartes was at the cusp of an intellectual revolution when
knowledge was rapidly accumulating; and therefore changing.1 Inevitably some of his ideas went
quickly out of date. Academics
being what they are he was severely criticised, mocked even, for his mistakes;
particularly by Locke and Newton, two thinkers who proved politically useful to
the Philosophes in their intellectual
battles with the Catholic Church.
No longer quite the authority he once was, his reputation on the wane,
he was to be displaced by more fashionable thinkers who used the revolution he
started to destroy the intellectual foundations of the system he created – God
was on the way out in the 18th century. The most radical effects of his thought occurring not when
he was alive but a century after his death, although typically he wasn’t given the credit.2 The result? We believe Candide is an English Locke rather than the
French Descartes he has been all along.
Was Voltaire aware of this injustice? Was this his irony?
It is not the origin of ideas that is important so much as
their influence; especially in the wider intellectual community. This is often determined by the
epigones of an original genius, who canalise the richness and variety of his
thought into ideologies that although more limited are usually more logical,
and thus easier to communicate than the source material, which is too diffuse
and difficult to be readily understood.
Thinkers such as Descartes and Newton need interpreters who can simplify
their thought, and thereby give it popular appeal. Disciples like cleaners tidying up the house after the great
man has left.
Followers tend to simplify their founder’s ideas in order to
support a prevailing ideology,3 such as the entrenched views of the followers of Cartesian and Newtonian
science,4 or to tame them so as to buttress an existing religion - Descartes’ thought
having a complex (and partially modernising) influence on a Christianity which
the Philosophes sort to debunk.5 And it is these ideologies that have the most impact; intellectuals on the
whole wanting a stable system of ideas that gives them a secure meaning, which
they can absorb and then communicate; to willing pupils and a curious public. Most intellectuals are preachers at
heart. Pangloss is their
archetype. He doesn’t think for
himself; instead he regurgitates a revealed message, which his students are
expected to memorise but not question.
Candide highlighting the danger if they do…
The English thinkers were consciously used as a weapon by
the Philosophes to attack the Catholic
Church and the absolutism it supported; and while Descartes could sometimes be
used as an ally, Voltaire contrasting his exile from France with Britain’s tolerance
of Newton, he was too useful a target, his rationalist system building too
similar to the hated scholasticism, not to be lambasted and lampooned.6 By ridiculing the Cartesians Voltaire
and his friends were seeking to undermine Catholicism; for by equating its
scholastic underpinnings with Descartes’ discredited physics it could be
portrayed as being defeated by the new science; which proved it to be
antiquated and useless. And indeed
in his introduction to Candide
Professor Butt emphasises the essentially Christian message of the philosophic
Optimists; a message requiring the subtlety of a profound thinker that was too
often propagated by the clever but crude - the followers of Leibniz not Leibniz
himself; intelligent men who being too rational missed the essence of their
master’s thought. Their soul not large enough to think deeply.
On the surface they appeared uncaring, the ostensible object of
Voltaire’s attack, but this is a sign of a more serious intellectual failing:
they lacked the requisite feeling, the “touch”, to question their own premises;
that is, to think new thoughts.7 Unable to create new knowledge they can
only copy and manipulate what already exists; Pangloss filing away all the
rough edges of the world so that it fits smoothly into his too capacious
theory. How easy it is to explain
away the facts we do not like.
Ideology is like maquillage!
It hides all the defects in our thinking. Reason the make-up bag an intellectual carries in his
briefcase. Lipstick, eyeliner and
foundation are his logical
arguments!
And yet… Descartes was to have his revenge, sneaking in
between Voltaire’s covers.
Although it is a curious victory, because Candide must give
up serious thinking in order to find earthly satisfaction. Is this the sacrifice Voltaire himself
had to make when he became a polemicist?
For by simplifying the Englishmen’s ideas, by turning them into the
crudest of experimental empiricism,8 he filtered out the rationalism on which all science and serious inquiry
depends. By leaving Mr Profundity
behind on this way to popularity Voltaire thus loses thought’s most important
attribute – abstract reason - in a polemic that is brilliant but
superficial. Reduced to a utopian
caricature pure reason is misrepresented; which in turn falsifies the nature of
the scientific revolution; the empiricist bricks that built that great edifice
now believed to be held together without any rationalist cement. No wonder Voltaire’s conclusion is so shaky! His mistake is to equate Pangloss with Leibniz,
a mediocrity with a thinker of genius; the richness of one thus lost to the
poverty of the other. It is why
the comedy is so sharp - because it is so crude. Candide, we now realise, an
unfortunate victim of his author’s propaganda. The reason he suffers so.
Descartes, as befits an original thinker, was wiser: he
makes a distinction between those who “got on with their business” and those
who were allowed “their speculations”.
Both are important. Voltaire’s
mistake is to worship one at the expense of the other; at base, it seems, this
great writer wanted to be a commercial success. Bourgeois riches more important that poorly paid thought,
popularity preferred over profundity, practical utility over creative
reason… Of course these
preferences are disguised; a fool standing in for the greats who are too
dangerous to be confronted directly.
They have too much to say;
their words flowing over the stereotypes their epigones and critics have
constructed to control their influence.
Whatever happens these
ideas must not be contaminated by the outpourings of their genius; a Pangloss
cannot afford to meet a Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, who would demolish his
childish concepts. Instead a
disciple builds his own irrigation ditches to feed his own neatly tended
fields; leaving the great river to flow on safely between the high banks of
conventional wisdom that have been erected to prevent their flood. The rest can be forgotten. A great philosopher reduced to a simple
phrase, and an unimaginative bourgeois elevated to the epitome of human
society. It is a scandal. It is so unjust. But how we love it!
[i] Basil Wiley captures this turmoil and oddness in his The
Eighteenth Century Background,
where he describes the intellectual confusion of a later period; where thinkers
would try to reconcile Christian theology to the new knowledge; the Bible
with the discovery of America.
Newton
famously was both a scientist of genius and a searcher after arcane knowledge;
which included alchemy and the decoding of ancient religious texts.
For
a brilliant summary of Descartes’ intellectual relationship to Newton and his
complex influence on the Philosophes see Peter Gay’s The
Enlightenment: An Interpretation; The Science of Freedom.
For a wider survey of the overlapping influences of
the three great systems of thought (British Empiricism, Cartesianism and
Leibniz’s accommodation between the new science and the old theology) see
Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment. For
Israel, controversially, it is a particular brand of Cartesian, Spinoza’s, that
was the most radical, even revolutionary, of them all. While the thesis may be overstated the
brilliance of this book lies in its depiction of the intellectual complexity
and movement of the period, where no settled system of thought dominated; the new
ideologies battling it out between themselves and with orthodox religion;
Catholic, Protestant and Jewish.
[ii] Peter Gay calls Descartes both one of the teachers of
the Enlightenment and one of its victims (The Enlightenment: An
Interpretation; The Science of Freedom).
[iii] A marvellous quote from Nietzsche captures this
quality of change in the nature of ideas as they move from their original
creation to their later systematization:
“Doubt
as sin. Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and
declared even doubt to be sin. One
is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then
on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a
glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something
else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature –
is sin! And notice that all this
means that the foundation of belief and reflection on its origin is likewise
excluded as sinful. What is wanted
are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which
reason has drowned!” (Daybreak;
Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality)
The
remarkable feature of a disciple is their intoxication with the thought of
their founder. Once they have
achieved this miracle of belief, the moment, for example, when Descartes is
experienced as a revelation, the rest of their lives are an endless attempt to
deepen and extend the doctrine, now accepted as divine truth. Disciples are natural evangelists. This evangelism preferred to an
understanding the world, which would need to put the founder’s ideas to one
side, or even to question them; the essence of an original thinker their
capacity to doubt what they have been told. A genius starts with the world; their epigones with his ideas about it.
Nietzsche
is here writing about faith, but in other places he writes about the blindness
of reason; of a particular kind of reason to be sure; a reason that shares many
of the same features of a belief - a mode of thought that does not question its
own premises. This is a
characteristic of the disciple who usually relies too much on rationality, and
is thus misled by it. Believing in
the ideologies they have created over time disciples tend to simplify the world
into cliché; an original insight into the class struggle becoming the only
explanation for social conflict a few generations down the line… It is this tendency to expand over
time, until a point is reached where they can explain everything, that is an
ideology’s undoing - emptied of all particular content they become absurd. This is the moment when they are ripe for dissolution. It is the moment when Pangloss
describes poverty as the best of all possible worlds.
[iv] For a study of how Newton’s ideas became an ideology
see Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs and Margaret C. Jacobs, Newton
and the Culture of Newtonianism.
[v] Nicely captured by Norman Hampson:
“The
Roman Church put all Descartes’ works on the Index of prohibited books, but his
influence permeated much of Christian Europe to an extent that would have been
impossible if he had been an adversary of the faith.” (The
Enlightenment)
Peter
Gay fills in the details:
“…Descartes
became fashionable in high society and valuable to highly placed apologists;
gradually, in the hands of the philosophers like Malebranche and Fénelon and
biographers like Baillet, there emerged a pious, safe, modern but wholly
reliable Descartes… not an invitation to, but a bulwark against, atheism.” (Science of Freedom)
[vi] The Science of Freedom
[vii] Although this doesn’t apply to Pangloss, he is indifferent to his enemies, we often find
that ideologues are good haters with little sympathy with those different from
themselves. They want to be in a
club of the like-minded. Members
only please! It is as if ideas
exist only to protect them from other people (and from experience – is it so
terrible?). It is as if… they…
have a fear of the unknown. Are
they scared of the fluidity and amorphousness of emotion? Hate and worship, those two emotional
extremes, the two emotions one can be sure about, are preferred to the infinite
graduations, the complexity, of ordinary feelings that cannot be so easily
categorised; and which rely on judgements that require “touch” and “feel”, and
which are relative to the moment.
There are no clearly defined labels in ordinary feeling. They are too complex and subtle, too
often shading into each other, for that.
Thus they create uncertainty; and unease in those used to the absolutism
of their own minds. Their minds must always be in charge. They want precise descriptions and clear commands. They are jury and judge, and always they know the guilty from the innocent. Believing themselves different from everybody else they have a tendency to separate out thought from feeling. Reason is their god. They believe they have more of it than anyone else. Always they must remain aloof - from others and from their own body. They will not lose themselves in
themselves! Thus the usefulness
of an ideology – it helps them “fix” an identity by securing for themselves ideas that never change. Now they
know who they are! “I am what I
believe”. What an odd idea. That mistakes the instrument for the
person who holds it; a human for a machine; thought for feeling… Now we
see! They use ideas to protect
themselves from their own mutability.
They are a Marxist. A Darwinian. Even a Libertarian… (The last one particularly odd – think about it.)
How they like their labels!
It is the only way they can identify themselves. For an ideologue ideas are like
mirrors; they look at them to confirm their own existence.
[viii] John Locke was always far more complicated than
this. See his An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
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