Clandestine Philosophies

One of the aspects of early modern philosophy I know almost nothing about, an ignorance I certainly wish to remedy at some point, is what is usually called the clandestine philosophy. Clandestine philosophical texts circulated in a sort of European philosophical underground; their exact purpose is not always clear. Some texts seem to be deistic, others atheistic, but some are harder to pin down since (to name just one example) some of them seem to be Cartesianized materialist texts. Some of them play with paradox and irony; some may even be intended as elaborate jokes. It's an area in which there are many unanswered questions.

Adam Sutcliffe, in his "Judaism in the Anti-Religious Thought of the Clandestine French Early Enlightenment" [Journal of the History of Ideas 64.1 (2003) 97-117] describes one strand of this clandestine philosophizing in the following way:

There is still a great deal that is unknown about the culture of the French philosophical underground. The manner in which clandestine manuscripts were written, circulated, and discussed remains to a considerable extent a subject on which historians can only speculate. Leading authors and collectors have been identified. It is striking that many intellectuals prominent in the official academies of Paris, such as Bernard Fontenelle, Nicolas Fréret, and Jean Baptiste de Mirabaud, also dabbled in clandestine philosophy. However, in doing so they entered into another conceptual world, sharply segregated from their approved public personae....The ways in which these writers understood the relationship between open and clandestine texts and between their public lives and their clandestine philosophizing is clearly a subject of extreme complexity, and it suggests a striking fluidity in intellectual identities. (pp. 103-104)

There is an excellent online selection of some of the better-known texts (mostly in French) at Clandestine E-Texts from the Eighteenth Century.

It's a very cool topic; and when people ask you what you study, you can say, "Oh, I study Clandestine Enlightenment."

(Cross-posted at Houyhnhnm Land.)

UPDATE: Sharon points out this article by Margaret Jacob, on the works associated with the imprint of Philippe Marteau: The Clandestine Universe of the Eighteenth Century.

Foucault's Pendulum

This looks interesting; there'll be a discussion of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum later this month. I love the description of the book:

To give you a basic idea without ruining the plot, it's basically The Da Vinci Code if it had been written by someone literate, intelligent, with a superb grasp of character and plot, and who had actually bothered to do some original research.

I'll have to re-read it. (HT: EMN.)

Peirce on Whewell

Being in the pro-Whewell and anti-Mill camp, I just had to blog the following passages from another pro-Whewell and anti-Mill person (more anti-Mill than pro-Whewell, whereas I'm more pro-Whewell than anti-Mill).

Whewell described the reasoning just as it appeared to a man deeply conversant with several branches of science as only a genuine researcher can know them, and adding to that knowledge a full acquaintance with the history of science. These results, as might be expected, are of the highest value, although there are important distinctions and reasons which he overlooked. John Stuart Mill endeavored to explain the reasonings of science by the nominalistic metaphysics of his father. The superficial perspicuity of that kind of metaphysics rendered his logic extremely popular with those who think, but do not think profoundly; who know something of science, but more from the outside than the inside, and how for one reason or another delight in the simplest theories even if they fail to cover the facts.

Quite a good description of the Omniscientist, I'd say; and I like the description of Mill. He says elsewhere:

I am very far from holding that experience is our only light; Whewell's views of scientific method seem to me truer than Mill's; so much so that I should pronounce the known principles of physics to be but a development of original instinctive beliefs.

This is C. S. Peirce, quoted in John Wettersten, Whewell's Critics, Rodopi (New York: 2005) 102. (The citations are to Peirce 1960, vol. I, sect. 70, and Peirce 1960, vol. I, sect. 404.) Wettersten's work is a good history of the non-reception of Whewell's philosophy of science after the general prevalence of Mill's Baconian/Newtonian inductivism.

Good and God

An interesting post by Velleman at "Left2Right". I think it involves a bit of ambiguity, since "You can't be good without believing in God" could mean 'you can't be good at all without believing in God'; or it could mean, 'without belief in God any human goodness is missing something very important and, indeed, essential'; or it could mean, 'ultimately, it is not possible to be good consistently, if you don't believe in God'; or it could mean something like 'any good deed done is only completely good if it also involves giving God His due, which cannot be done without belief in God'. Velleman seems to take it in the first sense, but I don't think that's how it is usually meant at all.

Velleman says that, if we came across a new species without religious beliefs, "we would be perfectly astounded...if they had come up with the ten commandments." On the other hand, he says, we would have expected them to have discovered the idea of reciprocity, so "we would not be at all astounded to find that the inhabitants of Planet X had discovered the Golden Rule".

I think this involves an equivocation on what the discovery of reciprocity would be. Obviously in some sense they would have had to discovery reciprocity since they would have to be able to engage in some sort of social interaction. But this is a long way from a Golden Rule. All one really needs for this sort of reciprocity is a general sense of exchange, which can easily enough be capsulated in a plethora of positive laws and customary rules of etiquette, without any Golden Rule at all. Much more likely, I think, would be laws and manners, of a very ordinary sort, and any sense of reciprocity would be encoded in precise rules about hospitality or honor or what have you. Going beyond this is actually a surprising thing, and not generally to be expected. To do so one needs at least the minimal recognition that the laws and manners don't ground reciprocity but are grounded in it. And when one has gotten this far, one still doesn't have a Golden Rule; one has what is sometimes called a Silver Rule, which goes beyond laws and manners primarily by requiring restraint. The Golden Rule, however, is a very strong principle; except in a perspective that involves a very robust notion of moral order and authority, I don't think it is particularly obvious that it is even right.

So the end result is that we should expect something much more like the Decalogue, and much less like the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule is actually fairly rare even among human beings; why should we expect it to be common knowledge among aliens, however advanced? One can do without it; it has practical ramifications, but its value has largely been metaethical. But the Ten Commandments are basically about setting the actual boundaries of respect -- respect God, respect parents, respect others in society -- and just give some specifications of these. A society would be much more likely to have something like this.

But the issue was, I think, supposed to be what used to be called the First Tablet: the commandments that deal in one way or another with God. Clearly a species that had no belief in God would not have such a commandments; and the idea, I think, is that they would still have a notion of the transcendence of moral truths. I find this rather doubtful, as well. Consider the passage quoted from Dennett:

But it would still be arithmetic. Now, we can say: "And would it share ethical principles with us?" And I think, in some regards, "Yes, it would." Now, does that make those principles transcendent? Yeah.

But this seems mere semantics, taking 'transcendent' as just a synonym of 'able to be found everywhere'; as, I suppose, dust particles are transcendent, or force-vectors are transcendent, or energy is transcendent. The idea seems to be that they would be true in any universe, and so surpass any particular universe; but they really don't surpass anything in virtue of being true everywhere -- if one can even legitimately talk about them being true anywhere. They're just true, end of story, and the question is why this should be considered as particularly important. Usually by 'transcendent' we mean something that surpasses the categorical. What is transcendent about the universality of arithmetic? How in the world could the universality of ethical principles give them 'transcendence'? The reason we associate math and morals with transcendence is the perfectly straightforward reason that historically they became associated with what was deemed a higher order of reality: the divine -- either gods or something, as Platonists have at various times said, more divine than mere gods, something even gods have to respect as more fundamental than they are. The truths were regarded as transcendent because they were caught up in something that is immensely greater than us and the ordinary things we could know. And I think this move was a fortunate one, since I think they are caught up in something immensely greater than us, something that is, as it were, more real and fundamental than the rest. But one has to be trained to see it. There are lots of people who never do. There are societies that have functioned perfectly well without ever seeing it. An atheist trained to see it may, in seeing it, come to be a theist; but there is simply no reason whatsoever to think that any atheist would see it in a culture where it had never previously been associated with something that genuinely transcends ordinary limits, like a god or a divine order or a higher level of reality.

For that's precisely the trouble: math and morals can just as easily be treated as ordinary, and they often have been. I see no reason why a society can't Humeanize them and do just fine. They would lose something, to be sure; they would lose what some of us regard as their religious associations, and what others regard as their superstitious associations. But to see math or morals as transcendent requires seeing that they involve or are involved in something extraordinary, something that can't be boxed up into ordinary categories. It would not strictly have to be a personal deity; but there is every reason to think that it would have to be the sort of thing we tend to call divine. And any talk of the transcendence of mathematical or moral truth is either fuzzy-talk or is a borrowing, direct or indirect, from this. Close the age of God and you close the age of Transcendent Truth. You still have truth, and that will get you some way. But it will not get you anything transcendent, unless you have already been trained to see it in that light. And that presupposes being trained to see it as part of a higher order, either of gods or of something more divine than any mere gods. How anyone could recognize this without any notion of divinity, or something closely analogous, is anyone's guess.

Of course, if one just means by 'transcendent' something like 'universal', one could just say so, and skip all the nonsense about their being transcendent.

But, as I said, it's a good post, and worth reading.

Avalon

From Geoffry of Monmouth's Vita Merlini:

Insula pomorum que fortunata vocatur
Ex re nomen habet quia per se singula profert
Non opus est illi sulcantibus arva colonis
Omnis abest cultus nisi quem natura ministrat
Ultro fecundas segetes producit et uvas
Nataque poma suis pretonso germine silvis
Omnia gignit humus vice graminis ultro redundans
Annis centenis aut ultra viviter illic. (lines 908-915)

Taliesin is speaking to Merlin here. Roughly, the Latin (which is a bit advanced for me, I'm afraid, particularly without laboriously going through it bit-by-bit, so I can only approximate) means, "The Island of Apples, which is called Fortunate, gets its name from the fact that it produces all things of itself; the fields don't need the ploughs of farmers and there is no cultivation except what nature provides. It produces crops and grapes without help, and apple trees grow in the short grass in the woods. The earth brings forth all things on its own, not merely grass, and people there live a hundred years or more."

He goes on to say:

Illic iura novem geniali lege sorores
Dant his qui veniunt nostris ex partibus ad se
Quarum que prior est fit doctior arte medendi
Exceditque suas forma prestante sorores
Morgen ei nomen didicitque quid utilitatis
Gramina cuncta ferant ut languida corpora curet
Ars quoque nota sibi qua scit mutare figuram
Et resecare novis quasi Dedalus aera pennis
Cum vult est Bristi- Carnoti- sive Papie
Cum vult in vestris ex aere labitur horis

Which is to say (again, this is just an approximation): "There is the benevolent rule by the nine sisters of those who come from our land. The one who is first is more learned in the art of healing and excels the form of our sisters. Morgan is her name, and she has learned the uses of plants in curing the ills of the body. She also knows the art of changing her shape and of flying through the air, like Daedelus on new wings. At will she is at Brest, at Chartres, or at Pavia; at will she glides from the air to your shores."

Then he mentions the other sisters briefly:

Hanc que mathematicam dicunt didicisse sorores
Moronoe- Mazoe- Gliten- Glitonea- Gliton
Tyronoe- Thiten- cithara notissima Thiten

Which only gives us with Morgan eight sisters in all, since we here have Morgan teaching mathematics to her sisters, with seven names -- unless 'Thiten' and 'Thiten, known for her lyre' are supposed to be different. But then we get into the meat:

Illuc post bellum Camblani vulnere lesum
Duximus Arcturum nos conducente Barintho
Equora cui fuerant et celi sydera nota
Hoc rectore ratis cum principe venimus illuc
Et nos quo decuit Morgen suscepit honore
Inque suis talamis posuit super aurea regem
Fulcra manuque sibi detexit vulnus honesta
Inspexitque diu, tandemque redire salutem
Posse sibi dixit, si secum tempore longo
Esset et ipsius vellet medicamine fungi
Gaudentes igitur regem commisimus illi
Et dedimus ventis redeundo vela secundis

(Need I say, another approximation.) "There, after the battle of Camlan, where he had been wounded, we took Arthur, conducted by Barinthus who knew the seas and the stars of the heavens. With him at the tiller, we arrived there with the prince, and Morgan received us with honor. placing the king in her chamber on a golden bed, uncovering his wound with her noble hand, and examining it. At length she said he could be returned to health only if he stayed with her a long time and made use of her medical art. Happily, therefore, we committed the king to her, and spread our sails to return again."

Memed

I was memed by Johnny-Dee. So here it goes:

Number of Books I Own: I honestly cannot say. My shelves are two-deep and then some, but on the other hand, I don't actually have much shelf-space. On the other hand again, I own more books than are in my apartment, since I have boxes of books that I didn't bring to Canada. Before I went off to college, the number of books I owned was somewhere about a hundred, including old children's books and the like, but it has certainly undergone a massive expansion since then.

Last Book Bought: I think the last book I bought was Dorothy Sayers' The Documents in the Case, but I'm always losing track. It could also have been this one.

Five Books that Mean a Lot to Me:
In no particular order, and without committing to these being the books that mean the most to me:

1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae.

2. G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday.

3. C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

4. Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker.

5. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Course of Nature.

I could also add Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, Euripides' The Bacchae, Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonnus, Shakespeare's Henry V, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, or Eliot's Romola.

Since I had such difficulty answering the questions myself, I won't tag anybody. Feel free to chime in with your own answers, though.

Beattie on Slavery

It is easy to see, with what views some modern authors throw out these hints to prove the natural inferiority of negroes. But let every friend to humanity pray, that they may be disappointed. Britons are famous for generosity; a virtue in which it is easy for them to excel both the Romans and the Greeks.

Let it never be said, that slavery is countenanced by the bravest and most generous people on earth; by a people who are animated with that heroic passion, the love of liberty, beyond all nations ancient or modern; and the fame of whose toilsome, but unwearied perseverance, in vindicating, at the expense of life and fortune, the sacred rights of mankind, will strike terror into the hearts of sycophants and tyrants, and excite the admiration and gratitude of all good men, to the latest posterity.

[James Beattie: Selected Philosophical Writings, James A. Harris, ed. Imprint Academic (Charlottesville, VA: 2004) 137. This is part of the excellent new series, The Library of Scottish Philosophy.]

The particular modern author Beattie has in his sights is one David Hume, and in particular, Hume's notorious footnote in the essay "Of Natural Characters":

I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient GERMANS, the present TARTARS, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are NEGROE slaves dispersed all over EUROPE, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In JAMAICA, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.

As Beattie notes in great detail, this whole line of reasoning is complete nonsense from one end to the other. Annette Baier once tried -- half-heartedly, I'm sure -- to give a partial defense of the footnote by saying that it showed Hume's emphasis on empirical data; but any reading of Beattie's response to it blows that possibility out of the water.

Hume himself is against what he calls 'slavery'; but whenever he talks about 'slavery', it often seems that he isn't thinking of slavery but of lack of liberty under tyranny, which is a different thing. Beattie, on the other hand, is quite explicitly egalitarian; he believes that all men are created in the image of God. He's also an egalitarian when it comes to the sexes, by the way, although he doesn't (as far as I can recall) discuss the matter in any of his published writings. It comes through in one or two of his letters, however. He allows for the possibility that God might have given the sexes different strengths, but insists that, whether that be the case or not, the sexes are fundamentally equal, particularly in their rational natures.