Based on the readings in Dupre, the Enlightenment represented a…

Question Answered step-by-step Based on the readings in Dupre, the Enlightenment represented a… Based on the readings in Dupre, the Enlightenment represented a metaphorical “different cosmos.” In terms of mechanism, materialism, and nature, describe this scientific shift in cosmological outlook. These are the links for the readings of Dupre. I will also have the text below just in case the links are not available.https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/reader.action?docID=3420193&ppg=12https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/reader.action?docID=3420193&ppg=18https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/reader.action?docID=3420193&ppg=35https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/reader.action?docID=3420193&ppg=351 The readings from Dupre IntroductionThis book had its origin in the surprise I experienced many years ago when considering the fundamental change in thinking and valuing that occurred during the period stretching from the second half of the seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. Curious to know what the intellectual principles of modern thought were, I made a study of the beginnings of modern culture before turning to the critical epoch that forms the subject of the present book. It soon appeared that no direct causal succession links the humanism of the fifteenth century with the Enlightenment. When Max Weber described modernity as the loss of an unquestioned legitimacy of a divinely instituted order, his definition applies to the Enlightenment and the subsequent centuries, not to the previous period. We ought to avoid the mistake made by Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, and often repeated in the twentieth century, of interpreting the Renaissance as the first stage of the Enlightenment. It is true, though, that the early period introduced one fundamental characteristic of modern culture, namely, the creative role of the person. Yet that idea did not imply that the mind alone is the source of meaning and value, as Enlightenment thought began to assume. To investigate what is new in the basic concepts of this later period of modernity and to find out how it has affected our own culture has been the purpose of this study. The Enlightenment enjoys no high regard in our time. Many consider its thinking abstract, its feeling artificial. To its modern critics, the very term evokes form without substance, universality without particularity. They are dismayed by the claim that the Enlightenment, concluding centuries of darkness and superstition, introduced a new age of freedom and progress. The condescending attitude of the ”enlightened” toward the rest of our species impresses them as arrogant. Certainly the French philosophes felt little respect for the herd they were so confidently leading to truth. They also tended to exaggerate the significance of their achievements. Baron Grimm, a friend of Diderot who issued a bulletin about cultural life in Paris, cast an ironical eye on the pretenses of his age: ”Il me semble que le dix-huitième siècle a surpassé tous les autres dans les éloges qu’il s’est attribué lui-même. . . . Je suis bien éloigné d’imaginer que nous touchons un siècle de la raison.”∞ Rarely did the Enlightenment attain true greatness in the visual arts. Some painters have left us major works. Watteau, Chardin, La Tour, Tiepolo, Reynolds, and Gainesborough immediately come to mind. But the eighteenth century lacked the explosive creativity of the preceding two centuries. This holds true even more for sculpture: we remember most of the works only because of the models they portrayed. The case of literature is more complex. French, English, and German prose attained classic perfection during that period. The works of Hume, Johnson, Fielding, and Gibbon in Britain, of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Fénelon in France, and of Wieland and Lessing in the German lands continue to serve as models of elegant, precise, and powerful expression. But little memorable lyrical poetry appeared between Milton and Wordsworth. Or between Ronsard and Lamartine. Dramas were better performed than ever, particularly in England, which also produced excellent comedies. But few major tragedies were written between Racine and Schiller. Music and architecture enjoyed a glorious season. Yet some of its greatest composers—Handel, Bach, Haydn—still drew their inspiration from the spiritual impetus of an earlier age. Significantly, we refer to eighteenth-century composers as Baroque artists. The splendid architecture of the time also, by large part, continued to build on earlier foundations. In Spain, Bavaria, and Austria, the Baroque style culminated in the eighteenth century, while English and French classicism continued to be inspired by Renaissance principles. In contrast to the often mediocre quality of its artistic achievements, the Enlightenment displays a veritable passion for ideas. The second half of the seventeenth century and the first one of the eighteenth witnessed the breakthrough of modern science and the establishment of new scientific methods. Newton changed not only our world picture but our very perspective on reality. There is hardly a field in which his influence does not appear. The historical works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Herder form the majestic entrance to modern historiography. Equally striking is the sudden emergence of major philosophers: Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Kant, the most gifted thinker of the period and the one who brought its ideas to a synthesis, largely defined the course of philosophical reflection for the next two centuries. The very contrast between the Enlightenment’s stunning accomplishments in history, science, and philosophy and the lesser ones in the fine arts (again, with the exceptions of music and architecture) highlights its intellectual orientation. It was first and foremost a breakthrough in critical consciousness. Those who criticize its one-sidedness are unquestionably right. But they ought to remember that they attack the movement with the very weapon forged by the object of their attack: that of critical reflectiveness. In this book I intend to analyze some of the guiding ideas of the Enlightenment, in particular those that have been instrumental in shaping our own assumptions, attitudes, and values. By tracing them to their origins we may hope to gain some insight into principles we had long taken for granted but have recently come to question. The catastrophic wars fought during the twentieth century, its social upheaval, and the environmental predicaments caused by the very technology responsible for that century’s greatest triumphs force us to reexamine its moral foundations. Because of their problematic consequences in our own time, many now reject the assumptions of the Enlightenment. My own assessment will be more favorable and my critique less radical. One severely oversimplifies the nature of eighteenth-century thought in dismissing it as rationalism. The rationalist tendency did indeed exist, but so did others pointing in the opposite direction. One might just as well describe the Enlightenment as an era of sentimentality. In disregarding the variety of these currents we risk projecting our own aspirations and aversions upon a selfmade image of the past. To understand our relation to the Enlightenment we must attempt to describe it as it understood itself, even while trying to understand its role in shaping the present. The starting date of this study, 1648, marked the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the beginning of a restructuring of Europe’s political powers. The half-century that followed shaped the scientific ideas of the modern age. Thinking became simpler, more rational, and more methodic. Religion and morality continued to be primary concerns, but they became subjected to a critical examination. The year 1789, the end date of this book, witnessed an event that shook the political and cultural foundations of Western Europe. The excesses of the French Revolution introduced a strong reaction against the ideals of the Enlightenment, but it did not bring the movement to an end. On the contrary, the French armies spread its ideas to the more remote parts of Europe. The ideals, however, underwent a mutation. This book is not intended to be an intellectual history of the Enlightenment. Rather have I attempted to draw an intellectual portrait of a crucial epoch in European history with particular emphasis on the development and interaction of those ideas that most contributed to the formation of our own spiritual identity. This ought to explain why some writers receive more attention than others who were perhaps equally significant yet less representative of the movement or less influential in its effect on the present. In referring to my sources I have as much as possible quoted from readily available editions. Translations are mine except when explicitly attributed to others. A number of thinkers have influenced my approach. If I had to mention names, they would be those of Ernst Cassirer, Henry Gouhier, and HansGeorg Gadamer. They taught me that it is possible to understand how the past shaped the present without being reduced to it. A Definition and a Provisional Justification The ideas of the Enlightenment continue to influence our present culture. The ideal of human emancipation still occupies a central place among them, though it has since passed through a number of changes. Marxism, which until recently played a leading role in European life, may serve as an example both of the continuity with and the transformation of the original ideal. It derived its goal of social liberation from the eighteenth-century ideal of emancipation. Yet the kind of social liberation Marx had in mind obviously differs from the emancipation pursued by the Enlightenment. Eighteenthcentury thought had at least in principle continued to maintain the traditional primacy of theoretical reason. Marx replaced this primacy with that of instrumental reason. Human emancipation was to result from changes in the social process of production. In the West, Marxism now appears to belong to a perfect past and most of us consider ourselves more legitimate heirs of the Enlightenment legacy. Still, the Enlightenment itself contained a less overt but no less consequential pragmatism. The eighteenth-century notion of rationality included a universal pattern of order to be imposed upon nature and society. The idea of an enforced rationality inspired and motivated the French Revolution. Albrecht Wellmer has described the dangers implied in this project: ”Enlightenment became a world-historical project of the human species, in which the species simultaneously creates itself and threatens its own destruction; its ultimate aim is social freedom, happiness, and the independence of the individual, but its secret logic aims at the extinction of the self-liberating subjects and the selfelevation of social bondage and constraint.”∞ Jürgen Habermas has made a vigorous effort to disconnect at least the Enlightenment’s idea of emancipation from a narrowly practical interpretation and to restore some of the metaphysical content that practical reason, at least for its major thinkers, possessed. Deprived of all metaphysical and religious content, he claims, practical reason tends to degenerate to a utilitarian calculus, ”rationality in the service of self-preservation gone wild.”≤ He seeks to return to what he considers the original emancipatory project of the Enlightenment. The modern concept of reason is indeed linked to emancipatory action, as Kant had shown. But that call for action does not imply that theoretical reason must ever yield its primacy to practical intelligence. When subordinate to practice, theoretical reason forfeits the authority to raise critical questions of legitimacy. Both Nazism and Communism have shown the catastrophic consequences to which this leads. Other contemporary thinkers have recently criticized the Enlightenment for the opposite reason. According to them, it intensified a one-sided intellectualism that had been inherent in Western thought since its Greek beginnings. In particular, they object to the typically modern concern with absolute foundations. That concern, according to Richard Rorty, originated in the early seventeenth century.≥ Western thought did not always require the support of ultimate foundations, even though it has always insisted on the necessity to justify the real. Plato’s philosophy began with ”nonfoundational” conversations. His dialogues remain wide open to all viewpoints, as long as the speakers do not contradict themselves. To make sense, an argument must remain consistent, but nothing should or can prevent it from admitting unproven assumptions. Premodern thinkers have never felt the need to prove all of the presuppositions of their thought. Yet, as I understand them, the concerns of Rorty and some other postmodern thinkers move beyond the intellectualism of the Enlightenment. Their critique of modernity forms part of a more comprehensive attack on a logocentrism that allegedly has obsessed Western thought from the beginning. Modern rationalism, then, would be merely a distinct, more selfconscious stage of that ancient rationalism.∂ In my opinion, that critique of the Enlightenment continues to rely on principles inherent in the Enlightenment itself. Its summons to uninhibited critical thinking—sapere aude—challenges any principles that stand in the way of such a critique, including the Enlightenment’s own. Formerly few dared to turn the power of their critique on the rule of reason itself. Today’s critics are prepared to do so, though the source of the critical impulse lies in the very movement they criticize. Michel Foucault’s thought presents an amazing example of opposition to Enlightenment in the name of Enlightenment principles. In his view, the fact that the human subject imposes meaning transforms the meaning-giving act itself into an exercise of power. Structures of meaning that appear as determinations of reason express in fact an underlying will to power.∑ So, he rejects the primacy of reason, essential to Enlightenment project, altogether. Here also, however, it must be said that antecedents of this critique may be found in the Enlightenment itself. Rousseau continuously attacked the rationalism on which his political critique was based. In others, such as Diderot, the inconsistency is less obvious. Yet their personal and fictional writings substantially differ from the rationalist principles that lie at the ground of their critique. It has been said with some justification that the socalled Age of Reason was reason’s worst enemy.∏ In the course of this book I have repeatedly indicated that one of the main problems of the Enlightenment stems from the assumption that the mind alone is the source of meaning. This often led to an unwarranted intellectual confidence. Many appeared insufficiently aware of the limitations of the historically conditioned individual mind and tended to identify it with the universal, transcendental reason. Kant, who coined the term ”transcendental ego,” warned against equating it with the empirical self. Others did not adequately distinguish them and ended up with an idea of reason that badly needed to be desublimated. One effect of it was that they tended to overestimate the realistic chances of their projects. Utopian treatises on perpetual peace, on a permanent international brotherhood, on the unification of all sciences, and on the future extinction of crime, bear the sign of a naive presumptuousness. For a brief period many intellectuals, especially but not exclusively in France, expected that the French Revolution, the ultimate utopia, was about to realize all the Enlightenment’s hopes. Contrary to the religious utopias of earlier ages, those of the Enlightenment appeared realistic because their supporters intended to realize them by scientific means and methods. But, as Karl Mannheim remarks, that did not make them any less utopian. ”Nothing is more removed from actual events than the closed rational system. Under certain circumstances, nothing contains more irrational drive than a fully self-contained, intellectualistic world-view.”π In fact, religious utopias, believed to be long suppressed, continued to inspire the allegedly scientific projects of the Enlightenment. Behind the rationalist outlines of the stages of world history we still detect traces of apocalyptic speculations that began with Joachim of Fiore. Lessing’s essay on ”The Education of the Human Race,” directly influenced by Pietist sources, shows how easily a religious view of history could be transferred to a secular one. In France, the young Turgot initiated a similar transition in his ”Discours sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humain,” which his admirer Condorcet developed into a fail-proof, scientific utopia. His certainty of the future as that of other utopians rested entirely on an unrestricted trust in the compelling force of reason. Having reached full intellectual maturity, humans, they assumed, would have no choice but freely to obey the voice of reason and thereby to realize the ideal state of humanity. Since then we have learned what Voltaire knew: how little reason directs human conduct. Finally, I return to the question raised at the beginning of this book concerning the Enlightenment’s relation to early and late modernity. From the preceding chapters it should appear that in the Enlightenment the original thesis of modern thought, namely, that the mind plays a creative role in the constitution of the real, found its strongest expression. That does not imply, however, that the Enlightenment’s intellectual position can be derived from early modern premises. In many respects it deviated from them. Early modern thought had none of the abstract universalism characteristic of the later period. The Enlightenment reinterpreted the humanist idea of human creativity. The characteristic inclination of Enlightenment thought to universalize its concepts deprived the Renaissance notion of human creativity of the tragic limitations restricting each individual’s potential to realize it, of which precisely the most creative men of genius—Michelangelo, Galileo, Leonardo—had remained so acutely conscious. We rarely perceive those limitations in the Enlightenment. For the later thinkers, no meaning is given with reality itself. This belief constitutes the basis of what we consider to be the Enlightenment’s rationalism taken in the comprehensive sense that includes empiricist as well as philosophically ”rationalist” thought. Within that rationalism, the principle of universality, crucial in our intellectual tradition since its Greek beginnings, turned into an abstract, logical principle of reasoning. On a practical level, it became a tool of instrumental reason that enabled the West to develop a technical superiority, which allowed it to impose its views and politics on most of the world. Through colonization, technical advances, and economic power, it has attempted and mostly succeeded in restructuring other societies on a Western pattern. These developments were not accidental: they were direct consequences of the new concept of reason. That concept was isolated from the historical context in which it had previously been embedded. In premodern thought reason was never taken to be free of presuppositions. To overcome the skepticism created by the nominalist crisis, however, Descartes considered it necessary for reason to be its own foundation and not to rely on anything outside itself. That abstraction by now has shown its limitations, both the theoretical and practical. With many others, Alasdair MacIntyre has called for a return to a way of thinking that recognizes its link to a particular tradition. ”What Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and we now need to recover is . . . a conception according to which the standards of rational justification themselves emerge from and are part of a history.”∫ Since the Enlightenment has now come under such a severe revision, many have begun to wonder whether it was more than an unfortunate cultural interlude, a deviation from the course of our intellectual development. Against this position I have argued that the Enlightenment, though flawed and onesided, accomplished an indispensable task in the development of Western thought. With admirable persistency it pursued the principle that has dominated our intellectual tradition since its beginning, namely, that things ought to be justified rather than blindly accepted from habit and custom. In its single-minded attempt to make that principle into the guiding rule of thought, the Enlightenment achieved a veritable breakthrough on the way toward consistent rationality and even provided the tools for correcting its own onesidedness. Though the eighteenth century rarely made those corrections, its intellectual achievement remains unsurpassed. The Enlightenment has given us some of our most important ideas: an expressive conception of art, a nonauthoritarian view of morality, political theories that build freedom and democracy within the very structures of society. These were rationally sound positions, even when the arguments that supported them often rested on questionable grounds. A theory of human rights conceived in a judicial vacuum may be hard to defend juridically, yet the very concept of such rights expresses the profoundly rational insight that human beings are by nature entitled to rights. The same applies to the doubtful arguments by which political philosophers legitimated the idea of a social contract. They were right in believing that political structures must serve people’s needs rather than being self-justifying structures. If today we feel that the undesirable conditions in which many humans have to live impose a universal obligation on the conscience of the more fortunate ones, we may find it hard to justify that insight, but we nevertheless know it to be true. Time and again the rational insights of the Enlightenment surpass the arguments invoked to justify them. Even in its attitude toward religion, which has most severely been criticized, the Enlightenment deserves considerable credit. Religious tolerance; the separation between cult and public life; the protection of the individual conscience against religious compulsion, social pressure, or cultural prejudice—all of these have become nonnegotiable positions to Western believers. The sad events mentioned at the beginning of this book show the evil a religion may do when it refuses to accept those positions. The critique of the so-called arguments for the existence of God, themselves a modern, rationalist invention, forced theology at last to abandon a long surpassed pre-Copernican conception of the world. The idea of creation conceived as a divine imparting of motion, held over from an Aristotelian cosmology, lost its meaning after Newton’s theory and Diderot’s attacks. The critique of religion proved painful, particularly in the irreverent form in which it was often administered; yet it was necessary and overdue. In the end religion benefited from it. It forced the religious community to seek the proper domain of religion in symbols of transcendence rather than in science, and compelled it to begin a search for the kind of spiritual depth needed to live in accordance with this insight. Paradoxically, it was the critique of the Enlightenment, however one-sided and intolerant of alternative views, that opened the eyes of Western believers to the truth and value of religions other than their own. Even deism, rationalism’s own defective product, was capable of inspiring genuine piety as the example of the deeply religious Moses Mendelssohn showed and as Lessing’s play based on that example proved. However we assess the Enlightenment’s achievements, we could commit no greater error than to deny or reject them. They have become an essential part of what we are. A Different CosmosDuring the Enlightenment the concept of power that had dominated ancient and medieval physics underwent a profound transformation. Previously thought to derive from a source beyond the physical world, it came to be viewed as immanent in that world and eventually as coinciding with the very nature of bodiliness. Aristotle’s theory that all motion originated from an unmoved mover had continued to influence Scholastic theories throughout the Middle Ages. For Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers, the impact of divine power went beyond motion and extended to the very existence of finite beings. According to the doctrine of creation, the dependence of nature on God was intrinsic and total. The defining quality of finite being was absolute contingency. Scholasticism supported this claim of contingency with Aristotle’s principle of generation and corruption. All that has a beginning must come to an end, and for Jewish, Christian, and most Muslim thinkers, the universe did have a beginning. A contingent thing’s existence is not justified by the nature of its being, nor does that nature ensure its continued existence in the future. Late medieval thought strengthened this creaturely contingency by undermining the certainty, rooted in the idea of divine wisdom, that beings would continue to be and to act in accordance with invariable laws. When nominalist theology shifted the emphasis from God’s wisdom to God’s absolute power, everything became dependent on an inscrutable divine decision. Creation itself became a discontinuous act to be renewed at each moment of a creature’s existence. Thus, the doctrine of divine preservation implied in the act of creation now became one of constant re-creation. Much of this nominalism survives in Descartes. He strongly asserted the dependence of each being on a constantly renewed creation. Other tendencies in Descartes’s philosophy, however, qualify this voluntarist notion of contingency, among them a confidence that the divinely instituted laws of nature follow an invariable mathematical pattern. For Spinoza, contingency did not exist. Within the one, all-inclusive substance, nothing is contingent because nothing depends on another substance. Finite modes share the necessity of the infinite substance. No external influx of power is needed: the drive to be (conatus essendi) coincides with the very nature of a thing. ”Everything, insofar as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being” and that endeavor is ”nothing but its actual essence” (Ethica, bk. III, 6 and 7). Once a being exists, it will continue to do so until destroyed by a cause outside itself (III, 4). The power to continue one’s being requires no divine intervention: it is inherent in the nature of being itself. Spinoza’s substance acts as a center of power, but the effect of that power remains within the cause.∞ The notion that the substance is a center of power became one of the leading ideas of the Enlightenment. We shall encounter it in many forms. Mechanism: The Newtonian Revolution British scientists remained to a great extent faithful to the principles established by Francis Bacon, according to which science is essentially practiced by means of induction based on observation and ought to yield practical results. Newton himself shared this practical orientation. Michael J. Petry has called him ”the most distinguished proponent of the idea that nature was to be mastered in the practical interests of man through the application of the Baconian inductive method.”≤ Nor did Newton assume that the course of nature necessarily and in all respects follows mathematical laws. His diffidence with respect to an absolute mathematical a priori may be traced to the nominalist belief that God’s absolute power overrules the normal, ”ordained” exercise of that power and may, at least in principle, interrupt it at any time. The contingency of nature implies the possibility of exceptions in the normal order. Indeed, for nominalist thinkers, though less for Newton, exceptions constituted an integral part of the normal.≥ Our experience that nature follows a rational course does not allow us to consider that an a priori, necessary principle. Modesty as well as intellectual probity requires the mind to test its calculations by actual observation. If in the end Newton’s method in physics won out over Descartes’s, it was at least in part due to his refusal to take the mathematical nature of the universe for granted. Therein lies, I think, the primary meaning of his famous declaration ”Hypotheses non fingo.” He did in fact construe hypotheses but avoided doing so independently of observation. At the same time Newton’s investigations moved him in a direction that eventually undermined the traditional idea that motion results from a constantly infused divine power. Motion and rest have an equal status: a body does not change from motion to rest or from rest to motion unless an external force impels it to do so. Hence if we assume it to be originally moving, no additional input of power is needed to keep it in motion, though motion may decrease under the impact of external resistance. This principle of inertia obviously contradicts the Scholastic theory, according to which motion had to be constantly induced by a transcendent source. It rather corresponds to Spinoza’s axiom that a thing perseveres in being until a cause outside itself forces it to change. The fourth definition of book I of Newton’s Principia mathematica reads: ”Perseverat enim corpus in statu omni novo per suam vim inertiae” (A body maintains every new state it acquires by its force of inertia). So, not motion was to be explained, but the change from one state to another. No less significant was the fundamental change the new philosophy introduced in the notion of causality. In classical and Scholastic philosophy the term ”cause” had referred to various modes of dependence of one being upon another—one of which was that of extrinsic, efficient causality. More intimate forms of causality had been the formal one whereby a being participates in that on which it depends, and the final one that directs it toward a goal. Descartes and all mechanistic philosophers who came after him had conceived of nature as essentially static and affected only by the so-called efficient causality that induces motion from without. Mechanistic philosophers considered any appeal to final causes pure speculation, an undesirable intrusion in a selfcontained structure. Newton himself avoided using teleological arguments, not in the first place because they interfered with mathematical deduction, but because they escaped observation. Yet another change ought to be mentioned: The concept of matter, even as that of nature, had received a meaning that differed from the one it had in Aristotle and the Scholastics. For them, it had been a metaphysical principle. Giordano Bruno had first described it as the very essence of physical nature and its immanent center of power. Like Descartes, Newton defines matter as extension. Yet he adds other, empirically observed qualities to it: impenetrability, hardness, and mobility (rather than motion).∂ In addition, he distinguishes extension from space. Attraction, though a universal quality of our world system, may not be an ”essential” attribute of matter. Our knowledge of the universe is insufficient to justify the claim that matter possesses this quality in all possible universes. Most significant, Newton defined the qualities of matter as vires (forces), a term that implies a dynamic quality. Even inertia, which, according to the third definition of the Principia, ”differs nothing from the inactivity of mass” since it merely conserves the existing motion, is more than passive extension: it actively resists any force pressing against it. ”It is impulse, insofar as the body, by not easily giving way to the impressed force of another, endeavors to change the state of that other.”∑ But there is more. If the mechanical system contained only reactive forces, motion would soon become exhausted. In the Opticks Newton states: ”By this principle [the vis inertiae] alone there never could have been any motion in the world. Some other principle was necessary for putting bodies into motion, and now they are in motion, some other principle is necessary for conserving the motion.”∏ Motion decreases and must be recharged from sources other than the reactive forces of matter. Among the forces that actively cause change (rather than resist change), he mentions (in the fifth definition) percussion, pressure, and centrifugal force. Gravity belongs to this kind of force: in our universe it is the force that draws all bodies ”toward a point as to a center.” The passive forces of resistance and preservation that, for the Cartesians, constituted the whole of mechanics, cannot explain this force. One might even wonder whether the concept of gravity is still compatible with the mechanical principles formulated by Descartes since it operates in spaces empty of resisting matter where no direct contact between bodies occurs. How could there be mechanical action at a distance? How could a wholly active force be an essential quality of inert matter?π Newton himself continued to hesitate about the place of gravity within a mechanical system.∫ In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century all philosophers still assumed that active power must come from God. So did Newton. But his method forbade him to introduce metaphysical speculations about a transcendent cause. Only at the end of the Principia, after his system of mechanics had been proven, does he mention divine causality. At that point he even refers to a ”spiritual” presence in matter. Immediately following his declaration in the General Scholium that he was unable to derive the cause of gravity from the phenomena themselves and yet unwilling to frame ”hypotheses” (i.e., positions not established by induction from observations), he asserts: ”Now we might add something concerning a certain more subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which spirit the particles of bodies attract one another at near distances and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to greater distances, as well repelling as attracting the neighboring corpuscles.” This notion of a spiritual force, working at a distance and immanent in matter without coinciding with it, suggests the influence of alchemical and Neoplatonic sources. Newton, who had studied both with considerable interest, accepted the idea of spirit residing within matter rather than being exclusively above or outside it, as the Cartesians held.Ω Later the idea of an active force immanent in matter contributed to the formation of a concept of evolutionary, creative matter by Diderot, d’Holbach, and other materialists. Newton’s admission of active forces, such as gravity, enabled him to move beyond the mechanistic conception of matter as being totally passive. In fact, his notion of forces of resistance had already extended mechanical thought beyond Cartesian limits. It supported the idea of self-preservation as an essential drive of all being—comparable to Spinoza’s conatus essendi. The presence of an active force in matter had the potential to bridge the gap that separated the totally passive nature of matter from the active nature of mind in the Cartesian system. At the time of Newton’s writing Leibniz was laying the groundwork for such a bridge by defining substance itself as a center of force, thereby asserting the dynamic quality of all nature. Newton’s concepts of absolute time and space also move beyond a narrowly mechanistic theory. Absolute time and space are not derived from experience. They are in fact metaphysical concepts. In the Scholium that follows the definitions of book I, Newton justifies their admission as being necessary for the idea of absolute motion, that is, motion not as measured by the distance from one point in space to another but as related to space as such. Even a body at rest moves with the earth on which it rests. The mathematical concept of ”true or absolute motion” presupposes an absolute space and an absolute time. ”Entire and absolute motions can be no otherwise determined than by immovable places. . . . Now no other places are immovable but those that, from infinity to infinity, do @ll retain the same given position one to another.”∞≠ One wonders, however, how an absolute space, which provides no points of reference whatever, can be truly helpful in the calculation of ”true or absolute motion.” Similarly, what could the concept of absolute time, that is, pure duration unrelated to any actual motion, contribute to the understanding of actual motion?∞∞ The concepts of absolute space and time would have been less controversial if they had merely served as mathematical, ideal assumptions. But Newton insisted that they are real as well as ideal. On what grounds did he base this claim, for they remain inaccessible to experience? Their reality status appears to follow from the very argument that led him to introduce the notions of absolute time and space in the first place. If motion presupposes space, absolute motion requires the existence of absolute space. In the transmission of motion from its source to any given object, this particular motion presupposes a more comprehensive motion, which in turn presupposes a more comprehensive space. They again presuppose a more comprehensive motion and space, and so on to infinity. Kant, who criticizes this argument, agrees that the idea of an absolute space that synthesizes all relative spaces within a single unit may be essential to mathematical physics, yet he considers its reality both unnecessary and unjustified.∞≤ The General Scholium at the end of book III conveys a theological meaning to the metaphysical concepts of infinite time and space. In the preceding argument Newton had claimed to be incapable of justifying the cause of gravity within a closed mechanical system. At the conclusion of his work he attributes it to a source that lies outside the mechanical order. ”This is certain, that it must proceed from a cause that penetrates to the very centres of sun and planets, without suffering the least diminution of its force” (General Scholium, p. 446). He also concludes that other mechanically unexplainable facts, such as the ”diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places,” could not result from ”a blind metaphysical necessity which is certainly the same always and everywhere” but must be the work of an infinite, perfect mind and will (ibid.). Yet the transition from an infinite Creator to a finite universe requires a being that mediates between the infinite and the finite. At the same time, Newton assumes that God is directly present to creation: only a substantially present force can be causally effective in a mechanistic system. He attempts to overcome the apparent discrepancy by postulating that God’s primary expression must be infinite, as God himself is, yet able to mediate with a finite creation. Only an absolute space and an absolute time, he thinks, would make it possible for God to be present in all places at all times. ”He endures forever and is everywhere present; and by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space” (p. 445). In Query 28 of the Opticks Newton writes: ”And these things rightly dispatched, does it not appear from Phaenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite Space, as it were in her Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and perceives them and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself.”∞≥ The question of absolute space and time had a long history. Aristotle had attacked the idea of a void existing beyond the cosmos: neither place nor void could exist outside the heavens.∞∂ Nor did he believe the cosmos to be infinite in space and time. Yet the Stoics held that an infinite void was needed to include an infinite cosmos. Aquinas in this dispute sided with Aristotle. Nominalist philosophers (specially Thomas Bradwardine), judging that a space restricted to the cosmos itself would unduly limit God’s creative power to this universe (excluding a greater or a smaller one), had concluded that only an infinite space would allow God’s omnipotence to create @ universe of any size He pleased.∞∑ This void, infinite as God himself, was a purely negative space that shared none of the qualities of experienced space. One might possibly interpret it as the emptiness within God, a precondition for the possibility of creating otherness within the divine fullness. Newton’s conception of absolute space and time appears to have been influenced by some of these earlier discussions. Specifically the Cambridge theologian Henry More, whom Newton admired, may have inspired the concept of an extended void-space. More had argued that extension itself could not exist without the substratum of an infinite, incorporeal space. This spiritual space constituted both the medium within which God creates and, for nature, the condition of its being and operating. For Newton also, God had to be present everywhere: within and outside creation. Was this outside ”void” a real, threedimensional space as we normally conceive ours to be? Clarke appears to have understood Newton as affirming that it was, if I read his assertion correctly: ”By void space, we never mean space void of everything, but void of body only.”∞∏ One may find Newton’s argument very ”hypothetical” indeed! But we should remember that it appears in the concluding General Scholium of the Principia, where, at last, he feels free to express his deeply held conviction without being constrained by the self-imposed restrictions of mechanical physics. His theological speculation merely provides additional support for the idea of absolute space and time established by his physical theory. Bishop Berkeley was to object: either that infinite time-space is God, or it must be a reality beside God that nevertheless possesses divine attributes since it is eternal, infinite, immutable, and uncreated.∞π But Newton’s absolute time and space merely constitute an empty infinity within which God creates. They do not ”precede” God’s creative act yet accompany it. Newton calls it the divine sensorium in analogy with the sensory apparatus in and through which a remote object becomes present in perception. Theologians considered the name not wholly appropriate, since, unlike sense perception, divine knowledge does not depend on a pre-existing object. For God, knowing an object consists of creating and sustaining it. It appears, then, that serious tensions lurk at the heart of Newton’s theory. One was between the nominalist and the Platonic elements of his theory. All power comes from God. Yet in the nominalist version, divine power does not become immanently present as it does in Neoplatonic thought but is imposed from without. God’s causality is total yet remains external. Divine power, rather than consisting in the divine presence within the world, becomes mediated through the laws of nature. Mechanism functions as a closed system impervious to any influence from outside, even though all that occurs within it results from a transcendent source of motion. In the Neoplatonic version, the effect participates in the divine cause. Moreover it is endowed with a divine teleology that enables the higher spheres to communicate power to the lower ones. Mechanical philosophy replaced the classical and medieval teleological order by a nonhierarchical world of nature.∞∫ Newton’s philosophical adversaries objected to the absence of meaning or purpose in a cosmos that had no higher end than remaining in motion. The American theologian Jonathan Edwards uses the favorite mechanistic comparison of the world to a gigantic clockwork against him. If the only purpose of the clock is to have parts that assist one another in their motions, the clock itself is worthless. Similarly, if the world has no higher end than to allow its parts to support one another, the world as a whole serves no purpose. ”It is nonsense to say of a machine whose highest end is to have one part move another, for the whole is useless.”∞Ω Neither does a consistent mechanical theory have room for freedom—which Newton never questioned. Materialists attempted to rid the mechanical system of its inconsistencies by eliminating any extrinsic source of power and conceiving of it as an autodynamic, selfgenerating system of reality. Mechanism had begun as a scientific theory. It soon became a controlling concept for the interpretation of all reality, including life and, with some, of the mind itself. Thus it developed into a worldview, an ambitious attempt to capture all reality within a comprehensive, undifferentiated system ruled by identical laws. This worldview implied an all-encompassing determinism that threatened the very possibility of freedom.≤≠ It assumed that the mind, being the single source of meaning, is able to capture all reality within a single vision. That assumption, as Heidegger has shown in an essay bearing the same name, belongs exclusively to the modern age. Descartes and Newton, who had restricted mechanism to a scientific interpretation of the physical universe, were, of course, not determinists. But for materialists, nature was a single, homogeneous system that tolerated no exceptions. The naturalism underlying this concept was to survive long after the mechanistic theory had been abandoned. Romantic opponents of Enlightenment culture rejected the mechanist worldview (none more vehemently than Blake). But many retained its subjacent naturalism, including the idea that humanity becomes crushed by nature. Individuals may resist, but in the end nature smothers their futile efforts. The introduction of mathematical physics drastically changed the knowledge of nature. Instead of conforming the mind to a pre-existing reality, it defined the mind’s ideal relation to that reality. In Newton’s time mechanistic thought had already begun to penetrate popular culture in England and France. Poets hesitated whether they ought to welcome it. Some considered it the ultimate key to the universe. In ”A View of Death, or The Soul’s Departure from the World,” the poet John Reynolds (1666-1727) looks forward to death when the scientific mysteries of the universe will be fully revealed and the mind will understand that Newton’s attraction is God’s love operating in matter! Others distrusted the ambitious science. Thus Matthew Prior (1664- 1726), in his lengthy poem ”Salomon,” wonders: Can thought beyond the bounds of matter climb? Or who shall tell me what is space or time? In vain we lift up our presumptuous eyes To what our Maker to their ken denies.≤∞ From Mechanism to Materialism Two diverging theories claimed Newton’s authority. One used his mechanistic principles as foundation for a philosophical determinism. The other developed the concept of active forces into an organic theory of nature. Eventually the two converged in a dynamic materialism. Newton’s definition of inertia as the force that keeps a body in its present state, ”whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line” (Third Definition), disposed of the traditional belief that rest is a body’s natural state while motion must be externally induced. If one assumes that the universe never had a beginning (a position which even Aquinas considered not refutable on rational grounds) and has always been in a state of motion, no external cause is needed to justify the beginning of motion. For eighteenth-century materialists, this proved to be a sufficient ground for overturning the millennia old adage, Quidquid movetur ab alio movetur (Whatever moves must be moved by another), on which Scholastics had based one of their arguments for the existence of God. Combining a dynamic concept of matter with an organic concept of nature, materialists attributed to matter a developmental power that accounted for the emergence of plants, animals, and even humans. But even those dynamic materialists never abandoned one of the basic principles of the mechanistic system itself. They denied that even organic nature required the kind of teleology which nonmaterialists like Buffon and Leibniz granted her. To them, nature was a dynamic force, but a blind one, not directed toward any particular goal. All materialists, dynamic as well as mechanistic ones, agreed that reality was homogeneous and to be explained through material forces alone. The physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie in his two books, Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745) (which led to his banishment from France) and L’homme machine (1748) (which earned him a second exile, this time from Holland), attempted to achieve a more consistent mechanism than either Descartes or Newton had conceived. He reduced Descartes’s two kinds of substances, body and mind, to one material substance and thus overcame the previously unexplainable cooperation of two heterogeneous functions that produced a single effect. According to La Mettrie, nothing prevents matter from exercising the functions commonly attributed to the mind. ”Man is a machine and in the whole universe there is but a simple substance variously modified.”≤≤ In his theory of the body, Descartes had already conceded half the mechanistic thesis. Had he not declared animals to be no more than material substances? But the distinction between humans and animals consisted merely in a higher complexity of motion. Animals also feel and remember. They even possess some primitive moral sense. The dog shows shame or remorse after having broken rules it was trained to observe. It is sad when its master leaves and happy when he returns. The lack of instincts made language a necessity for humans, which their physiology allowed them to develop. Without speech they would have remained below the level of apes. Psychic capacities depend entirely on anatomical and physiological endowments. Thinking, willing, and feeling consist of motions of the brain: ”L’âme n’est qu’un principe de mouvement ou une partie matérielle du cerveau.” La Mettrie astutely perceived that the deists’ concern was not with the existence of God as such, but with their need of a transcendent support for physics and morality. A consistently materialist theory rendered that support superfluous. He grounded his materialism in a sensationalist theory of knowledge. Knowledge originates in sensations that follow mechanistic principles. Hobbes had earlier defined them as endeavors inward followed by endeavors outward. ”All mutation or alteration is motion or endeavour (and endeavour also is motion) in the internal parts of the thing that is altered.”≤≥ Thus the sensation of seeing, for instance, is nothing but a motion first produced in the eye, thence transmitted to the optic nerve, and from the nerve to the brain.≤∂ The higher functions of thinking, remembering, and judging are developed from primitive forms of imagining—which itself is no more than structured motion. ”Pourquoi diviser le principe sensitif qui pense dans l’homme?” Why indeed, if one regards all questions concerning the distinction between ”sensing” and ”thinking” (which merely demands plus de génie) as meaningless. Diderot’s more dynamic materialism succeeded far better in synthesizing mechanism with organic being. To La Mettrie’s ”dead” mechanism he opposed a concept of matter that possessed creative powers capable of exceeding the purely mechanical. He saw those forces at work in the generative process. New life results from the union of sperm and ovum, neither one of which, he thought, has a life of its own. In his early Philosophical Thoughts (1746) he had still held that generative creativity was restricted to the species and that it required a transcendent design. Later he interpreted the emergence of different species as a result of matter’s evolutionary powers. He recognized essential differences between the degrees of being but still traced them to a common source, namely, a developing universe that attains order by chance and perfection by excluding defective forms. Trembley’s stunning discovery of the minuscule hydra (chlorohydra viridissima) that acted both as plant and as animal had suggested that the boundaries around species might not be as rigorous as had previously been assumed. Different thinkers drew different conclusions from this discovery. Leibniz had welcomed it as a resounding confirmation of his principle of perfection, according to which nature had to be without gaps between species. For Diderot, it meant that the restrictions philosophy had formerly imposed on the creative forces of matter had completely broken down. The entire order of nature might be no more than the random outcome of the powers of motion. Still, there remained the question of the beginning. What started the process? Diderot gradually came to regard the very assumption of a beginning as a scientifically unnecessary postulate derived from creationist theology. Why should we postulate a beginning and extrapolate the source of nature’s creative power outside nature? In his Letter on the Blind for Those Who See (1749) Diderot showed how the need for a cause beyond nature ceases to be compelling when we abstract from the overwhelming but deceptive impression of designed order and beauty. That impression stems entirely from our own aesthetic vision. If we suspend that subjective sense, the issue boils down to a logical question: Does the order of nature indeed require a divine designer? The Letter contains a pseudo-historical account of the death of a Cambridge professor of mathematics, the blind Nicholas Saunderson. A minister called to his bedside attempts to awaken the patient’s faith by evoking the marvelous order in the universe. Saunderson admits the existence of order but questions whether it conveys any insight about its origin. ”I cannot see anything. Yet I am admitting that there is a wonderful order in the universe, though I hope that you will require no more of me. I am yielding to you on the present state of the universe so that you will permit me, in return, to think as I please about its former and first state, in regard to which you are no less blind than I.”≤∑ Not being confused by the multiplicity of sights, the blind, according to Diderot’s Saunderson, are more capable of abstract thinking and less inclined to introduce an unnecessary cause. At the same time their own bodily defect renders them more aware of nature’s imperfection and less given to assume the need of a perfect designer. The order of the universe, he suggests, may be the effect of a struggle among incompatible forces. Ill-formed creatures were, for the most part, eliminated by their deficient ability to adjust to their environment. Still some survive, as Saunderson’s blindness testifies. He comments: ”I conjecture that in the beginning, when fermenting matter was hatching out the universe, men such as myself were quite common. . . . And why should I not assert what I believe about animals to be true of worlds also? How many maimed and botched worlds have melted away, reformed themselves, and are perhaps dispersing again at any given moment, far away in space.”≤∏ To the paradox of a divine designer creating an imperfect world Diderot opposes the hypothesis of the ancient atomists that in millions of years matter has, by mere chance, organized itself into a more or less orderly cosmos, as Lucretius had claimed: Surely the atoms never began by forming a conscious pact, a treaty with each other, where they should stay apart, where come together. More likely, being so many, in many ways harassed and driven through the universe from an infinity of time, by trying all kinds of motion, every combination, They came at last into such disposition as now establishes the sum of things.≤π Descartes himself had conceived of matter as moving, and Newton’s principle of inertia had abrogated the natural priority of rest over motion. If matter had always existed and always moved, some elements would in time combine with others, and these islands of order would be able to resist the destructive forces of the original chaos. To Diderot, such a scenario appeared far more probable than that of an all-wise, omnipotent God creating a chaos out of which a never perfect universe was to develop. Diderot dearly paid for placing his irreverent opinions in Saunderson’s pious mouth: he was imprisoned for a while and permanently banned from membership in the Royal Society. But, undeterred by censorship, he proceeded to answer the questions he had raised in his aphoristic Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature. This time the biologist Maupertuis served as mouthpiece for Diderot’s opinions. Why, he wondered, do we fear to attribute to the material universe as a whole the perceptive qualities we observe in all animals? If we overcome this irrational aversion, we may find nature itself capable of introducing the modifications we now ascribe to the Creator. Nothing prevents the sum of all molecules to be to some extent ”endowed with the powers of thought and feeling.”≤∫ ”If faith did not teach us that animals sprang from the hands of their Creator just as we know them, . . . might the philosopher not suspect, having given himself up entirely to his own conjectures, that the particular elements needed to constitute animal life had existed from all eternity, scattered and mixed with the whole mass of matter; that these elements happening to come together, had combined because it was possible for them to do so?”≤Ω It had long been assumed that all organic beings were built in accordance with a common form and function. The idea of a form that, in a variety of ways, strives toward perfect expression prepared the acceptance of a natural evolution from a single primitive one to a multiplicity of developed forms. The prototypical form had to be conceived as a living force. ”When we see the successive metamorphoses of the prototype’s outward appearance, whatever it may have been in the first place, bring one kingdom gradually and imperceptibly nearer to another kingdom and people the boundaries of those two kingdoms . . . with uncertain, ambiguous beings stripped to a great degree of the forms, the qualities, and the functions of the one and taking on the forms, qualities, and functions of the other, is it not difficult to resist the belief that there was never more than one first being, a prototype of all other beings?”≥≠ The purpose of Diderot’s rudimentary hypothesis of a spontaneous evolution of the species was inspired by philosophical reasons rather than derived from scientific observations. He merely wanted to show that the creative power might well reside within the universe—like a divine world soul—rather than above it. Still the origin of mental life posed special problems. In three dialogical essays, ”Conversation with d’Alembert,” ”D’Alembert’s Dream,” and ”Conclusion of the Conversation” (written in 1769 but not published during his lifetime), Diderot moves from a theory of universal motion to one of universal sensation. The difference between dead matter and sensitive matter is one of degree, not of presence or absence. In nonorganic matter sensation remains an inanimate force, but it becomes animated in plants and animals. That it can pass from one state to another, Diderot presumed to be established by the transformation of inanimate into living matter in metabolic and genetic processes. ”Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. What is it, this egg, before the seed is introduced into it? An insentient mass. And after the seed has been introduced into it? What is it then? An insentient mass. For what is the seed itself other than a crude and animate fluid? How is this mass to make the transition to a different structure, to sentience, to life? Through heat. And what will produce that heat in it? Motion. To derive consciousness from this sensing matter Diderot had to overcome the basic Cartesian distinction between res extensa and res cogitans. Crucial for this transition was the role of memory—the power to hold on to a past sensation. Diderot simply postulated it through an analogy of covibrating chords that allow a sensing organism to retain past sounds and to recombine them with present ones. At no point does this process move beyond matter. Nor does it require any divine intervention for the creation of a ”soul.” Diderot’s idea of a natural evolution was based on a hunch that acquired traits are inheritable, which Lamarck soon afterward developed into a scientific theory. ”Imagine a long succession of generations born without arms; imagine their continued efforts and you will slowly see the two ends of this pair of pincers grow longer, longer still, cross over at the back, grow forward again, perhaps develop fingers at their ends, and create arms and hands once more.”≥≤ With this argument Diderot thinks he has accomplished his goal of uniting the mechanistic theories of Descartes and Newton with a sensationalism derived from Locke and thus of having eliminated the separation between material and mental principles of reality. Diderot’s friend and coeditor of the Encyclopédie, d’Alembert, resisted such hazardous generalizations. Like Newton, he opposed metaphysical speculation. He even refused to define the primary properties of matter; he was interested only in how they functioned. ”The purpose of philosophy is not to become lost in the universal properties of being and of substance, in useless questions about abstract concepts, in arbitrary divisions and eternal nomenclatures: it is the science either of facts or of chimeras.”≥≥ By means of definitions philosophers merely generalize particular phenomena in order thereby to make them appear universal and necessary. In fact, the complexity of nature defies comprehensive description.≥∂ The creation of abstract universals obstructs rather than favors the possibility of subsuming experience under mathematical laws. D’Alembert, an eminent mathematician, abstained from construing general philosophical theories on the basis of particular phenomena. Observation never results in apodictic truth, but if duly repeated and formulated into law, it asymptotically approaches mathematical certainty.≥∑ In the end the very possibility of a universal science of ”nature” can be no more than a postulate. Cassirer confirms d’Alembert’s doubts: ”Where is the guarantee, the decisive proof, that at least this general system of phenomena is completely self-contained, homogeneous, and uniform?”≥∏ More orthodox mechanists were not happy with d’Alembert’s methodic asceticism. In his funeral oration for d’Alembert, Condorcet regretted that the great mathematician had pushed the demands of mathematical rigor too far. ”He may have imposed too narrow limitations upon the human mind. Too accustomed to truths demonstrated and formed by simple, precisely defined ideas, he may have been insufficiently aware of truths of a different order that have more complex ideas as their object, for the discussion of which we may even need to articulate definitions and, so to speak, new ideas, because the words employed in these sciences taken from ordinary language and used in common parlance have only vague and indeterminate meanings.”≥π Paul-Henri Dietrich d’Holbach’s Système de la nature (1771) stayed closer to Diderot’s views, except for its peremptory dogmatism. In this work, published anonymously, the German baron, who in Paris kept an open house for scientists, philosophes, and radical thinkers, construed a coherent materialist system of the universe and of all it contains. Matter is an all-comprehensive, eternal substance that, with the sole support of motion, accounts for the entire scale of the real—from mineral to mind. The author combines a naive reductionism and a simplistic determinism with an impressive erudition and an occasionally incisive critique of established positions. He lacks any esprit de finesse, but his passionate eloquence against ”superstition” carries the weary reader along through a dense brush of learning and bias. Single-mindedly intent on proving the truth of atheistic naturalism, he borrows from any source likely to provide ammunition for his unholy war. Empedocles, Epicurus, and Lucretius appear side by side with Descartes and Newton, whose theories he thoroughly distorts. ”Descartes asked but matter and motion: diversity of matter sufficed for him; variety of motion was the consequence of its existence, of its essence, of its properties.”≥∫ As matter moves, it determines bodies in different modes of being and they result in different modes of action. D’Holbach claims to follow the ”rules” of the Principia, but his own theory of creative vital forces moves far beyond what Newton’s principles allow. In fact, he superimposes Leibniz’s dynamic theory of substance upon Newton’s mechanism. He also appeals to Leibniz’s identity of indiscernibles—two individuals even of the same species can never possess identical qualities—in order to show the infinite fertility of a nature, which he defines as bound by rigorous, mechanistic determinism (I, 9, 60). Nature is ”the great whole that results from the assemblage of motions which the universe offers to our view” (I, 1, 15). Endowed with the attributes of a transcendent principle, d’Holbach’s Nature is eternal, comprehensive, organizing, and the sole source of motion. Typical of the baron’s breezy way of marching through an argument are his far-reaching equations. Attraction and repulsion are identified with Empedocles’ love and hatred (I, 4, 29-32). Physical motion rules the internal functions of willing and thinking. Intelligence results from a particular combination of matter that produces unique modes of action, called ”reflection” and ”decision.” Everything happens necessarily and forms part of an uninterrupted chain of cause and effect. ”Chance” and ”freedom” merely describe series of events where we fail to perceive the causal link. D’Holbach ascribes unlimited powers to nature. It suffices to consider matter to be animated by motion, rather than dead and inert, to understand the entire order of nature as self-produced (I, 5, 38). A secret theology has wormed its way into his deterministic system. Nature becomes personified, endowed with divine attributes, and invested with a capacity to act in view of self-chosen ends. ”It is part of her [Nature’s] plan, that certain portions of the earth shall bring forth delicious fruits, whilst others shall only furnish brambles and noxious vegetables: she has been willing that some societies should produce wise men and great heroes, that others should only give birth to contemptible men” (I, 12, 113). But Nature is indifferent to human life, d’Holbach had asserted in a lyrical passage reminiscent of that earlier rhapsodist of an all-inclusive nature, Giordano Bruno. ”Suns encrust themselves and are extinguished; planets perish and disperse themselves in the vast plains of air; other suns are kindled; new planets form themselves, either to make revolutions round these suns, or to describe new routes; and man, an infinitely small portion of the globe, which is itself but an imperceptible point in the immensity of space, believes it is for himself this universe is made” (I, 6, 46).≥Ω Despite the apparent indifference to human life of d’Holbach’s matter, the emergence of forms of being follows a strict hierarchy from the inert to the intelligent, as if mental life were its anticipated goal. Is matter able to produce new species and to make old ones disappear? D’Holbach does not doubt it. Only the shortness of human life prevents us from seeing species emerging or vanishing. An organic nature constantly transforms itself into ever more complex forms of life, in accordance with climatic and geographical conditions (I, 6, 44). ”Everything seems to authorize the conjecture that the human species is a production peculiar to our sphere, in the position in which it is found: that, when this position may happen to change, the human species will, of consequence, either be changed, or will be obliged to disappear” (I, 6, 45). This admission of a possible extinction of the human race is exceptional in d’Holbach’s system. Most of the time his concept of nature was inspired by an eighteenth-century belief in progress rather than by biological evidence. Not the struggle for survival nor ”mutational” accidents determine the process, but Nature’s teleological orientation toward the highest form of life. Once civilization appears it becomes a powerful instrument for the preservation and improvement of the human species. For all their learning and passion, d’Holbach’s tomes failed to impress his fellow philosophes. In his Correspondance littéraire about cultural developments in France, the sarcastic Grimm writes: ”I find no other danger in them than that of boredom: all of it becomes exceedingly repetitious. The earth keeps on turning and the impact of the most daring opinions equals zero.” Grimm’s remark cautions us not to exaggerate the esteem d’Holbach enjoyed even in the minds of his enlightened contemporaries. The baron’s goal was not scientific but ideological: to justify materialism and theories of progress by sweeping but unproven statements about physics and biology. D’Holbach’s originality consisted in popularizing the scientific conclusions of arguments presented by others and in transforming them, well beyond what their scientific support warranted, into tools for a social program. His work may have enjoyed little authority among scientists and even among philosophers, but it effectively served a social project. His materialism prematurely brought to completion what by its very nature must remain an asymptotic process. The project of scientific research never ends since the gap between thinking and reality never closes. The idea of progress is inherent in the scientific enterprise itself.∂≠ Although we assume that science comes ever closer to its ideal, it will never succeed in fully justifying why the world continues to appear different from what our accumulated knowledge proves it to be. The materialist resolves this permanent tension between subject and object by simply assuming that subjectivity itself is a mode of the known or knowable object. Once this thesis is accepted the possibility of an exhaustive knowledge is in principle attained. Further progress then consists merely in filling in the details. The Organic View of Nature BUFFON By the middle of the eighteenth century even such loyal apostles of mechanism as d’Alembert, Diderot, and La Mettrie had begun to attribute forces to nature that exceeded Descartes’s and Newton’s concepts of motion. Buffon and Leibniz’s organic theories of nature broke away from mechanism altogether. George-Louis Buffon, a noted mathematician and in his early years an orthodox mechanist, attempted to apply Newton’s principles to the organic world. But even the introductory Discours to the first volume of his enormous Histoire Naturelle spells trouble for the theory. To reduce the order of living organisms to a single homogeneous order, he writes, is an exercise that can satisfy only ”the mind of those who know nature poorly.” The Creator has dispensed ”an infinite number of harmonious and contrary combinations, as well as perpetual destructions and renewals.”∂∞ Buffon even objects to his great contemporary Linné’s classification into genus, species, and subspecies. In botany and zoology only empirical observation yields worthwhile results. Amazingly, Buffon still believed that his battle was only with the Cartesian deductive method, not with mechanism itself. Not until the majestic ”Vue de la Nature” that introduces volume XII did he become fully aware of his differences with the mechanistic interpretation of nature. Until then he continued to describe zoological developments as the work of Newtonian forces, though he considered them subordinate to the higher purpose of life. ”Motion and life are its scope.” Life still obeys the laws of attraction and repulsion, but it does so in a manner that renders the force of gravity subservient to its own goal. As he gradually became aware of the conflict between the mechanistic forces of attraction and repulsion on one side, and the dynamic, teleological thrust of organic life, on the other, Buffon began to separate the living forces from the ”dead” ones. Attraction affects all bodies, yet in the organic ones repulsion dominates. Finally, in the general ”Vue de la Nature” Buffon abandoned the notion of a homogeneous system of forces altogether. Nature as a self-moving, animated, and animating power resists being constrained within a single system. Although all bodies remain subject to physical laws, the effect of these laws differs from one kind to another. Condillac and d’Alembert, the watchdogs of mechanistic orthodoxy, objected to such an ”unscientific” teleology. How could the order of nature be preserved with a number of uncoordinated systems operating at once? Had the artist Buffon gotten the better of the scientist?.∂≤ Buffon’s synthesis was indeed a work of the imagination. But that may have been its greatest merit. For him, nature itself was a postulate of the imagination, a projected unity that included a constantly expanding and changing content. By abandoning the belief in a homogeneous reality Buffon succeeded in liberating nature from the prison house within which mechanism had locked the endless variety of bodies living and dead. It was indeed an aesthetic intuition that guided Buffon’s scientific observation. With his work the idea of harmony, unity in diversity, that had long since made its way into art, poetry, and philosophy entered science. Nature was an organic body composed of different systems that held each other in balance. A faith in a natural harmony inspires those exquisite reflections that, much to the delight of the reader, Buffon has dispersed at regular (though seldom predictable) intervals over his entire work. One of them, accompanying the description of the ox, presents an opportunity to discuss the ecology of mutual destruction among animals. To survive, animals must eat plants or other animals. But in order to keep the quantity of life constant, nature comme une mère économe has fixed the limits of destruction and granted only few animals carnivorous instincts, while outnumbering them with herbivores. Problems begin with the human species. They use their power to domesticate, overbreed, and slaughter animals well beyond their needs. Humans hunt and fish without restriction. ”All of nature hardly seems to suffice for their intemperance and the inconstant variety of their appetites. By themselves humans consume and swallow more meat than all animals together devour. They are the great destroyers and move by abuse rather than by necessity.”∂≥ Buffon frequently insists on the relative insignificance of the human person in the whole of nature, yet in other passages he stresses his transforming power—for good or ill. Without human care nature becomes ”hideous and moribund.” We alone can render it beautiful and wholesome—by draining marshes and digging canals. ”Let us put the torch at this superfluous growth, at these old, half perished forests, and let us destroy with iron what fire did not consume. Instead of rushes and water lilies from which the toad draws its venom[!], we shall see buttercups, clover, sweet and salubrious herbs.”∂∂ Thus the pioneer naturalist returns home from his walk on the wild side to the artificial French garden and its ideal of transforming nature into a work of art. Enlightenment rationalism and emerging romanticism remain locked in an undecided struggle in Buffon’s conception of nature. Even his later study on the formation of the earth, Les époques de la nature (1778), by many considered his best, remains ambiguous. After having been separated from the sun, the planet stayed incandescent for 2,936 years(!). Once it had cooled off, water constantly transformed it during the later epochs. The theory may appear fanciful in the light of modern geology, but its significance lies in Buffon’s admission of change in an area of nature that even he, in his earlier works, had considered subject only to immutable mechanical laws. He now views the cosmos that mechanists from Galileo to Newton had held to be static as passing through a succession of stages, each of which had its own history in the total harmony of nature. Surprisingly, Buffon considered presently living species as ancient as nature itself. The geological foundations of nature and the living individuals in it are subject to change, but not the species. Buffon had engaged the young Lamarck (who had published a study on the flora of France) as a travel companion for his son. Yet he would strongly have resisted the theory of evolution that Lamarck later developed. Still, Buffon’s own theory called for change on every level. ”Nature has passed through different stages; the surface of the earth has taken different forms; the heavens themselves have changed, and all things in the physical universe are, even as those in the moral world, in a continuous movement of successive variations.”∂∑ In addition, the great botanist and zoologist adduces the kind of evidence that was to lead later scientists to an evolutionary theory of nature. He mentions seashells found on mountains, as well as remnants of species that have ceased to exist. Some of those shells reappear in continents now separated from each other. What we today would count as clear signs of genetic mutations remained merely an intriguing phenomenon for one who persisted in his belief that animal species are fixed. Even so, the evidence Buffon produced was sufficient to alarm Newtonians as well as theologians. Voltaire dismissed the seashells on the mountains as remnants of travelers’ picnics or as relics of shell-bearing pilgrims crossing the Pyrenees or Alps on their way to Compostella. A crucial step in overcoming mechanism was the different conception of form that emerged from the new life sciences—biology, botany, and zoology. The issue first came up in a dispute about the nature of organic species. Are natural forms continuous so that any classification, though useful for purposes of investigation, must be artificial? Or are species distinct steps in the hierarchy of nature, as Linné thought? Since Trembley’s discovery of the zoophyte hydra, the issue of continuity ceased to divide the scientific community. Henceforth it centered on the question of whether in a continuous system forms might be classified as permanent. Ever since Newton’s theory of force the idea of form as a dynamic, teleological principle had been working itself to the surface. It definitively broke through in Leibniz’s philosophy. LEIBNIZ The scientific study of nature presupposes a trust that all the pieces of the puzzle somehow fit together and that the various lines of investigation converge at a center. Around this assumption of a universal harmony Leibniz built an all-inclusive system of reality. But rather than reducing all things to a single substance, as Spinoza had done, he started from an irreducible plurality of substances. Each one, except the simple divine substance, contained a spiritual core, a simple ”monad” surrounded by a cluster of subordinate ”monads” that made the substance receptive to outside influences. This radical departure from the mechanistic concept of reality remained a mere hypothesis until the mechanistic thesis had, at least in principle, been falsified by the empirical evidence on which it claimed to be based. Buffon and other naturalists of Leibniz’s time had begun to show that animals and plants followed other laws than the mechanistic one of action and reaction. Leibniz’s thought, the most comprehensive and one of the most original of the Enlightenment period, requires a more detailed analysis than appears in this chapter. (More will be said about him in a later one.) Here I shall discuss only his remarkable alternative to mechanist philosophy. Crucial thereby was the restoration of the notion of form, once the determining category of Western thought. The philosophies of Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke all had replaced it by the concept of substance.∂∏ Substance soon became so allencompassing as to lose its distinct meaning. Descartes had identified the entire physical nature with extended substance, and Spinoza, anxious to eliminate the absolute dualism between extension and thought, equated substance with the totality of the real. Hume subsequently showed how easily one could dispense with such a broad category altogether. In an article in the Journal des Savans (in June 1695) Leibniz justified his reviving what had fallen into such a profound disrepute. I realized that it is impossible to find the principles of a true unity in matter alone, since everything in it is only a collection or mass of parts to infinity. Now multitude can only get in reality from true unities which come from elsewhere and are quite different from points (it is known that the continuum cannot be composed of points). Therefore to find their real unities I was compelled to have recourse to a formal atom, since a material being cannot be both material and perfectly indivisible or endowed with true unity. It was necessary, hence, to recall and, so to speak, rehabilitate the substantial forms so decried today, but in a way which would make them intelligible and which would separate the use we should make of them from the abuse that has been made of them.∂π By interpreting Newton’s notion of force in the sense of Aristotle’s goaldirected form principle (the entelecheia), he hoped to reconcile the mechanistic with the dynamic theories of matter while at the same time relinking the new physics to the ancient metaphysics. ”I grant that the consideration of these [substantial] forms is of no service in the details of physics and ought not to be employed in the explanation of particular phenomena.”∂∫ But if Descartes’s collapse of all material substances into one and Spinoza’s universal monism were to be avoided, the notion of substance had to be defined in a more specific manner than ”that which is in itself and is conceived through itself.” The universe contains a multiplicity of qualities, some of them conflicting with others. They cannot be attributed to a single substance without logical contradiction. The differentiating note of form would prevent this. By the same token Leibniz excluded Descartes’s equation of material substance with extension. If forces are an essential feature of the mechanic system, material substances had to consist of more than extension, which is not even an objective quality but a concept needed to describe continuity among material substances.∂Ω The phenomenon of extension, far from defining the essence of material substance, results from the mind’s tendency to equate what is merely similar and continuous. Material entities do indeed share a common passive quality. But, as Newton had shown, a mechanistic system also contains active forces. They require the presence of the spiritual principle of form. Leibniz disagreed with Newton’s theory of physics on one fundamental issue. He rejected the notion of absolute space as an abstraction that freezes into a single, static reality the dynamic relations that all coexisting things in the universe entertain with one another. ”I hold it [space] to be an order of coexistences, as time is an order of successions. For space denotes, in terms of possibility, an order of things which exist at the same time, considered as existing together, without inquiring into their particular manner of existing.”∑≠ Newton’s absolute space is independent of the objects in it and hence indifferent with respect to the position of the objects. This means that objects could occupy any other position than the one they actually occupy. But then no reason could be given why things are where they actually are, a thesis that directly conflicts with Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason. ”The fiction of a material finite universe, moving forward in an infinite empty space, cannot be admitted. For, besides that there is no real space out of the material universe, such an action would be without any design in it.”∑∞ A spatial vacuum exists neither outside the universe nor inside it. The concept of space refers to the phenomenal order of coexistence in which objects are related to one another. Leibniz excluded the very possibility of a void surrounding the universe by assuming that it is infinite. (”It does not appear reasonable that the material universe should be finite.”)∑≤ Time also refers to a relation, rather than to an independent being as it did for Newton.∑≥ Since time is no more than the appearing order of succession, Leibniz needs no idea of an absolute infinite time surrounding the duration of the cosmos. A substance may last eternally but there is no such thing as an eternal duration.∑∂ Nor could the world have been created ”sooner” or ”later”: time originates with the world, being nothing but the order in which existing realities relate to one another. A time before the world would be ”a thing absolute, independent of God; whereas time must coexist with creatures, and is only conceived by the order and quantity of their changes.”∑∑ Moreover, the idea that God would create the world at a particular segment of an absolute time conflicts with the principle of sufficient reason: Why at this moment rather than at another when in an infinite empty time no moment would have an ontological priority over any other? Surprisingly, Leibniz holds that duration, in contrast to extension, must have a beginning. ”If it is the nature of things in the whole, to grow uniformly in perfection, the universe of creatures must have had a beginning. And therefore, there will be reasons to limit the duration of things, even though there were none to limit their extension.”∑∏ Yet the fact that time has a beginning does not prevent it from stretching out indefinitely into the future. Leibniz’s position may have been inspired by a theological concern that if the world had always existed, the divine act of creation would have been jeopardized. But does creation imply more than an absolute dependence of all finite being upon an absolute being? What then is time for Leibniz? An ideal concept resulting not from a single perception but from ”a train of perceptions [that] awakens in us the idea of duration.”∑π The synthetic concepts of time and space possess an ideal truth, though not a real one: they condition our ability to perceive phenomena in an orderly, connected series. On one other critical issue Leibniz disagrees with Newton, namely, the need for God’s occasional interventions to redress the small deviations from the regular concentric orbits the planets describe. In the Opticks Newton had written: ” ‘Tis not possible it should have been caused by blind fate, that the planets all move with one familiar direction in concentric orbs; excepting only some very small irregularities, which may have arisen from the mutual actions of the planets and comets one upon another; and which ’tis probable will in length of time increase be anew put in order by its Author.”∑∫ Leibniz objected to such shoddy workmanship that required the Creator ”to wind up his watch from time to time.”∑Ω If the order can be repaired, what prevented God from making it perfect from the start? Does the principle of perfection not require that everything made by a perfect Creator must be as perfect as it can possibly be? This principle of perfection, as all Leibniz’s principles, follows from the comprehensive rule of sufficient reason. That principle most radically formulates the rationalist assumption that the real must be rational in all respects. All that exists or occurs must be justified by a reason for its particular existence or occurrence. That principle also implies that substances must be continuous with one another. Gaps or abrupt transitions in the line of being cannot be rationally justified. It further requires that each substance qualitatively differ from all others, since the existence of a substance that is in no way distinct from another would have no reason for existing. It suffices not for a substance to occupy a quantitatively different position, or to have a different ”weight.” If simple substances were without differentiating qualities, reality would be totally homogeneous. The Monadology, Leibniz’s last major writing, may be read as his final response to mechanistic philosophy. For Leibniz, as for all rationalists, the ultimate condition of rationality is simplicity. Thought operates on the basis of a small number of principles and this implies, according to them, that the real itself may be broken down into simple elements.∏≠ Leibniz called simple substances monads rather than atoms, because physical atoms remain subject to division.∏∞ ”Physical points are indivisible only in appearance; mathematical points are indivisible only in appearance; mathematical points are exact, but they are only modalities; only metaphysical or substantial points (constituted by forms or souls) are exact and real.”∏≤ Each substance, then, even the complex physical one is built around a simple spiritual core. Contrary to the materialist notion of atoms, these spiritual monads are not moved by external forces but exclusively by their own internal teleology. Each monad expresses a unique perspective on the totality of the real. All complement one another and, indirectly, influence each other by their greater or smaller power of expression.∏≥ ”Activity belongs to the essence of substance in general.”∏∂ In a letter to the Dutch philosopher De Volder, Leibniz writes: ”I believe that our thought of [material] substance is perfectly satisfied in the conception of force and not in that of extension. Besides, there should be no need to seek any other explanation for the conception of power or force than that it is the attitude from which change follows and its subject is substance itself.”∏∑ In describing the material substance as an expressive force directed by an inner teleology, Leibniz contradicts mechanism on the most fundamental level. The dynamic qualities that mechanism had reserved to God and humans, he predicated of all substances: ”Substance is a being capable of action.”∏∏ Leibniz even attributes perception, though not apperception (i.e., fully conscious perception) to all beings. The principle of perfection excludes a sudden break between the organic and the inorganic, the mental and the corporeal. Perception is an expressive act and because each substance, even the lowest in the hierarchy of being, is a center of expressive power, each substance must be perceptive. Each reflects in its own way the state of all others with which it is united in a universal harmony. In declaring power to be the essence of substance—not the kind of causally induced power of mechanistic philosophy but spontaneous power that originates within the substance—Leibniz laid a new foundation for the harmony between mind and body. All physical reality is ontologically linked to a spiritual core; in the case of humans, the mind is the spiritual core of the body. Conclusion: Kant’s Internalization of Nature In Kant’s thought empiricist and rationalist theories converged. From the former he retained that only empirical knowledge can convey reliable information about nature; from the latter, that knowledge to be scientific (and hence universal) had to be rooted in a priori principles to become necessary. A mere description of nature as the sum of empirical observations was inadequate for scientific as well as for philosophical purposes. In the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Kant replaces the traditional description of nature as ”the totality of all objects of experience” by ”the existence of things so far as it is determined according to universal laws.”∏π These laws are more than generalized observations: they consist of the mind’s own rules of experience. ”We must not seek the universal laws of nature in nature by means of experience, but conversely must seek nature, as to its universal conformity to law, in the conditions of the possibility of experience, which lie in our sensibility and in our understanding” (Gesammelte Schriften, IV, § 36, p. 319; Ellington, p. 61). Kant distinguishes these pure and universal laws from the empirical laws of nature known through particular observations. The ”pure” laws, inherent in the knowing subject, prescribe the general conditions of space and time within which the experience of nature occurs. Kant thereby justified what had remained implicit in modern physical theories since Descartes and Newton, namely, that our knowledge of the world clarifies our relation to the world rather than defining the nature of the world. His subjective interpretation of space and time laid this contested issue to rest, at least for a while. In his Dissertation of 1770, he had rejected the earlier theories of space and time, Newton’s as well as Leibniz’s. From Newton’s concept of absolute space and time he nevertheless retained the idea that the very possibility of conceiving nature depends on an a priori intuition of space and time. But what Newton had called God’s sensorium Kant reinterpreted as the subjective conditions that enable the mind to think the world. Leibniz’s conception of space and time as a priori concepts of coexistence and succession would seem to come closer to Kant’s own idea. In fact, it became the main target of his attack. Space and time, he objected, are not concepts: they are intuitions of the senses and hence they are not universal as concepts are, but singular. In his judgment Leibniz failed to distinguish the a priori of reason from the a priori conditions of sense perception.∏∫ For Kant, the intuition of time, prior to any actual experience, establishes the subjective requirements for coordinating all sense data. Similarly, space is neither abstracted from external sensations nor constituted by the mind but an a priori form of sensibility that, without any content of its own, links the successive perceptions together. To perceive reality as a coherent whole requires that things be situated within a single frame of space and time. In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), Kant adds a new element to his theory. He shows how a priori principles of judgment determine the laws of mechanical physics. Obviously, the philosopher does not ”deduce” the laws of physics from metaphysical premises: they have to be established by methodic observation. Yet reflecting on those laws the philosopher understands how each of them presupposes definite a priori structures of knowledge. The physicist need not know those structures, yet they form the foundation of his science and give its laws their apodictic quality. ”A rational doctrine of nature, then, deserves the name natural science only when the natural laws that underlie it are cognized a priori and are not mere laws of experience.”∏Ω In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), Kant reformulates the fundamental concept of matter. At the ground of it lies the a priori intuition of space. Matter is pure or ”absolute” space to the extent that it forms the basis of motion (Gesammelte Schriften, IV, p. 480; Ellington, p. 18). Still the a priori intuition of space in no way grounds our understanding of the dynamics of nature. The concept of force, on which the physical law of action and reaction rests, requires a different philosophical justification. If matter were wholly impenetrable, no motion would occur at all. On the other side, if matter offered no resistance to external pressure, it would become totally diffused—and, again, no motion would be possible. Matter, then, must consist of forces that render it intrinsically active, that is, both penetrable and resistant. This a priori quality of matter is, according to Kant, the foundation of physical dynamics. One may question whether these allegedly a priori principles philosophically justify the physical concept of force; indeed, whether they add anything to a mere description. Kant’s intention leaves no doubt. He is waging a battle with what he considers to be the philosophical assumptions of Newton’s Principia, specifically the notions of absolute space and absolute time. Those notions may be needed as ideal hypotheses for rendering an ever-shifting relative motion measurable, but they are unfit to serve as foundational concepts of physics. ”Absolute space is, then, necessary not as a concept of an actual object but as an idea that is to serve as a rule for considering all motion therein only as relative” (Gesammelte Schriften, IV, p. 560; Ellington, p. 127). At this point the purpose of his sharp critique of Newton’s assumptions becomes clear. If absolute space and time were indeed the objective foundations of physical reality, Kant’s claim of having accomplished a ”Copernican revolution” in reversing the relation between the knowing subject and nature would become meaningless. In fact, his victory over the objectivist philosophy of nature proved decisive at least in one respect: no major thinker after him continued to speak or write of nature as of a reality wholly independent of the perceiver. The process of knowing plays a crucial role in constituting the object of that knowledge. By the end of the eighteenth century the revolution begun by Copernicus and Galileo was reaching completion. Not only was the universe larger— infinitely so—than previous generations had thought, but it also had become self-empowered. Nor did it appear to be there for our benefit: we and our planet formed only one minuscule part of it, among billions of others. The very notion that this planet might have a purpose had become questionable. Nonetheless, as Pascal had stated, the mind infinitely surpasses a universe that does not know itself. Kant’s philosophy supported and strengthened this awareness of the mind’s unique place in the order of reality. Not only does the mind know the universe; its knowledge constitutes it as ideal entity. The change in the cosmological outlook caused both a feeling of disorientation and a new sense of freedom. Many felt lost in a universe that had ceased to provide a firm dwelling place. At the same time, others welcomed the liberation from a prefixed order that restricted all thinking and acting by clearly defined limits of space and time. Henceforth the mind itself was to determine the coordinates of its position. For the first time people, no longer confined to this earth, started speculating about a plurality of worlds. Other planets might be inhabited. Eventually this new worldview was to affect all other aspects of life—the person’s view of himself or herself, the nature of religion, ethics, and aesthetics. ConclusionThe ideas of the Enlightenment continue to influence our present culture. The ideal of human emancipation still occupies a central place among them, though it has since passed through a number of changes. Marxism, which until recently played a leading role in European life, may serve as an example both of the continuity with and the transformation of the original ideal. It derived its goal of social liberation from the eighteenth-century ideal of emancipation. Yet the kind of social liberation Marx had in mind obviously differs from the emancipation pursued by the Enlightenment. Eighteenthcentury thought had at least in principle continued to maintain the traditional primacy of theoretical reason. Marx replaced this primacy with that of instrumental reason. Human emancipation was to result from changes in the social process of production. In the West, Marxism now appears to belong to a perfect past and most of us consider ourselves more legitimate heirs of the Enlightenment legacy. Still, the Enlightenment itself contained a less overt but no less consequential pragmatism. The eighteenth-century notion of rationality included a universal pattern of order to be imposed upon nature and society. The idea of an enforced rationality inspired and motivated the French Revolution. Albrecht Wellmer has described the dangers implied in this project: ”Enlightenment became a world-historical project of the human species, in which the species simultaneously creates itself and threatens its own destruction; its ultimate aim is social freedom, happiness, and the independence of the individual, but its secret logic aims at the extinction of the self-liberating subjects and the selfelevation of social bondage and constraint.”∞ Jürgen Habermas has made a vigorous effort to disconnect at least the Enlightenment’s idea of emancipation from a narrowly practical interpretation and to restore some of the metaphysical content that practical reason, at least for its major thinkers, possessed. Deprived of all metaphysical and religious content, he claims, practical reason tends to degenerate to a utilitarian calculus, ”rationality in the service of self-preservation gone wild.”≤ He seeks to return to what he considers the original emancipatory project of the Enlightenment. The modern concept of reason is indeed linked to emancipatory action, as Kant had shown. But that call for action does not imply that theoretical reason must ever yield its primacy to practical intelligence. When subordinate to practice, theoretical reason forfeits the authority to raise critical questions of legitimacy. Both Nazism and Communism have shown the catastrophic consequences to which this leads. Other contemporary thinkers have recently criticized the Enlightenment for the opposite reason. According to them, it intensified a one-sided intellectualism that had been inherent in Western thought since its Greek beginnings. In particular, they object to the typically modern concern with absolute foundations. That concern, according to Richard Rorty, originated in the early seventeenth century.≥ Western thought did not always require the support of ultimate foundations, even though it has always insisted on the necessity to justify the real. Plato’s philosophy began with ”nonfoundational” conversations. His dialogues remain wide open to all viewpoints, as long as the speakers do not contradict themselves. To make sense, an argument must remain consistent, but nothing should or can prevent it from admitting unproven assumptions. Premodern thinkers have never felt the need to prove all of the presuppositions of their thought. Yet, as I understand them, the concerns of Rorty and some other postmodern thinkers move beyond the intellectualism of the Enlightenment. Their critique of modernity forms part of a more comprehensive attack on a logocentrism that allegedly has obsessed Western thought from the beginning. Modern rationalism, then, would be merely a distinct, more selfconscious stage of that ancient rationalism.∂ In my opinion, that critique of the Enlightenment continues to rely on principles inherent in the Enlightenment itself. Its summons to uninhibited critical thinking—sapere aude—challenges any principles that stand in the way of such a critique, including the Enlightenment’s own. Formerly few dared to turn the power of their critique on the rule of reason itself. Today’s critics are prepared to do so, though the source of the critical impulse lies in the very movement they criticize. Michel Foucault’s thought presents an amazing example of opposition to Enlightenment in the name of Enlightenment principles. In his view, the fact that the human subject imposes meaning transforms the meaning-giving act itself into an exercise of power. Structures of meaning that appear as determinations of reason express in fact an underlying will to power.∑ So, he rejects the primacy of reason, essential to Enlightenment project, altogether. Here also, however, it must be said that antecedents of this critique may be found in the Enlightenment itself. Rousseau continuously attacked the rationalism on which his political critique was based. In others, such as Diderot, the inconsistency is less obvious. Yet their personal and fictional writings substantially differ from the rationalist principles that lie at the ground of their critique. It has been said with some justification that the socalled Age of Reason was reason’s worst enemy.∏ In the course of this book I have repeatedly indicated that one of the main problems of the Enlightenment stems from the assumption that the mind alone is the source of meaning. This often led to an unwarranted intellectual confidence. Many appeared insufficiently aware of the limitations of the historically conditioned individual mind and tended to identify it with the universal, transcendental reason. Kant, who coined the term ”transcendental ego,” warned against equating it with the empirical self. Others did not adequately distinguish them and ended up with an idea of reason that badly needed to be desublimated. One effect of it was that they tended to overestimate the realistic chances of their projects. Utopian treatises on perpetual peace, on a permanent international brotherhood, on the unification of all sciences, and on the future extinction of crime, bear the sign of a naive presumptuousness. For a brief period many intellectuals, especially but not exclusively in France, expected that the French Revolution, the ultimate utopia, was about to realize all the Enlightenment’s hopes. Contrary to the religious utopias of earlier ages, those of the Enlightenment appeared realistic because their supporters intended to realize them by scientific means and methods. But, as Karl Mannheim remarks, that did not make them any less utopian. ”Nothing is more removed from actual events than the closed rational system. Under certain circumstances, nothing contains more irrational drive than a fully self-contained, intellectualistic world-view.”π In fact, religious utopias, believed to be long suppressed, continued to inspire the allegedly scientific projects of the Enlightenment. Behind the rationalist outlines of the stages of world history we still detect traces of apocalyptic speculations that began with Joachim of Fiore. Lessing’s essay on ”The Education of the Human Race,” directly influenced by Pietist sources, shows how easily a religious view of history could be transferred to a secular one. In France, the young Turgot initiated a similar transition in his ”Discours sur les progrès successifs de l’esprit humain,” which his admirer Condorcet developed into a fail-proof, scientific utopia. His certainty of the future as that of other utopians rested entirely on an unrestricted trust in the compelling force of reason. Having reached full intellectual maturity, humans, they assumed, would have no choice but freely to obey the voice of reason and thereby to realize the ideal state of humanity. Since then we have learned what Voltaire knew: how little reason directs human conduct. Finally, I return to the question raised at the beginning of this book concerning the Enlightenment’s relation to early and late modernity. From the preceding chapters it should appear that in the Enlightenment the original thesis of modern thought, namely, that the mind plays a creative role in the constitution of the real, found its strongest expression. That does not imply, however, that the Enlightenment’s intellectual position can be derived from early modern premises. In many respects it deviated from them. Early modern thought had none of the abstract universalism characteristic of the later period. The Enlightenment reinterpreted the humanist idea of human creativity. The characteristic inclination of Enlightenment thought to universalize its concepts deprived the Renaissance notion of human creativity of the tragic limitations restricting each individual’s potential to realize it, of which precisely the most creative men of genius—Michelangelo, Galileo, Leonardo—had remained so acutely conscious. We rarely perceive those limitations in the Enlightenment. For the later thinkers, no meaning is given with reality itself. This belief constitutes the basis of what we consider to be the Enlightenment’s rationalism taken in the comprehensive sense that includes empiricist as well as philosophically ”rationalist” thought. Within that rationalism, the principle of universality, crucial in our intellectual tradition since its Greek beginnings, turned into an abstract, logical principle of reasoning. On a practical level, it became a tool of instrumental reason that enabled the West to develop a technical superiority, which allowed it to impose its views and politics on most of the world. Through colonization, technical advances, and economic power, it has attempted and mostly succeeded in restructuring other societies on a Western pattern. These developments were not accidental: they were direct consequences of the new concept of reason. That concept was isolated from the historical context in which it had previously been embedded. In premodern thought reason was never taken to be free of presuppositions. To overcome the skepticism created by the nominalist crisis, however, Descartes considered it necessary for reason to be its own foundation and not to rely on anything outside itself. That abstraction by now has shown its limitations, both the theoretical and practical. With many others, Alasdair MacIntyre has called for a return to a way of thinking that recognizes its link to a particular tradition. ”What Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and we now need to recover is . . . a conception according to which the standards of rational justification themselves emerge from and are part of a history.”∫ Since the Enlightenment has now come under such a severe revision, many have begun to wonder whether it was more than an unfortunate cultural interlude, a deviation from the course of our intellectual development. Against this position I have argued that the Enlightenment, though flawed and onesided, accomplished an indispensable task in the development of Western thought. With admirable persistency it pursued the principle that has dominated our intellectual tradition since its beginning, namely, that things ought to be justified rather than blindly accepted from habit and custom. In its single-minded attempt to make that principle into the guiding rule of thought, the Enlightenment achieved a veritable breakthrough on the way toward consistent rationality and even provided the tools for correcting its own onesidedness. Though the eighteenth century rarely made those corrections, its intellectual achievement remains unsurpassed. The Enlightenment has given us some of our most important ideas: an expressive conception of art, a nonauthoritarian view of morality, political theories that build freedom and democracy within the very structures of society. These were rationally sound positions, even when the arguments that supported them often rested on questionable grounds. A theory of human rights conceived in a judicial vacuum may be hard to defend juridically, yet the very concept of such rights expresses the profoundly rational insight that human beings are by nature entitled to rights. The same applies to the doubtful arguments by which political philosophers legitimated the idea of a social contract. They were right in believing that political structures must serve people’s needs rather than being self-justifying structures. If today we feel that the undesirable conditions in which many humans have to live impose a universal obligation on the conscience of the more fortunate ones, we may find it hard to justify that insight, but we nevertheless know it to be true. Time and again the rational insights of the Enlightenment surpass the arguments invoked to justify them. Even in its attitude toward religion, which has most severely been criticized, the Enlightenment deserves considerable credit. Religious tolerance; the separation between cult and public life; the protection of the individual conscience against religious compulsion, social pressure, or cultural prejudice—all of these have become nonnegotiable positions to Western believers. The sad events mentioned at the beginning of this book show the evil a religion may do when it refuses to accept those positions. The critique of the so-called arguments for the existence of God, themselves a modern, rationalist invention, forced theology at last to abandon a long surpassed pre-Copernican conception of the world. The idea of creation conceived as a divine imparting of motion, held over from an Aristotelian cosmology, lost its meaning after Newton’s theory and Diderot’s attacks. The critique of religion proved painful, particularly in the irreverent form in which it was often administered; yet it was necessary and overdue. In the end religion benefited from it. It forced the religious community to seek the proper domain of religion in symbols of transcendence rather than in science, and compelled it to begin a search for the kind of spiritual depth needed to live in accordance with this insight. Paradoxically, it was the critique of the Enlightenment, however one-sided and intolerant of alternative views, that opened the eyes of Western believers to the truth and value of religions other than their own. Even deism, rationalism’s own defective product, was capable of inspiring genuine piety as the example of the deeply religious Moses Mendelssohn showed and as Lessing’s play based on that example proved. However we assess the Enlightenment’s achievements, we could commit no greater error than to deny or reject them. They have become an essential part of what we are. History World History HISTORY 270 Share QuestionEmailCopy link Comments (0)