Table Of ContentTHE DREAM OF
ENLIGHTENMENT
The Rise of Modern Philosophy
ANTHONY GOTTLIEB
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
A Division of W. W. Norton & Company
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York London
For my father and in memory of my mother
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Kingdome of Darknesse
Chronological Chart
1. Starting Afresh: Descartes
2. The Monster of Malmesbury: Hobbes
3. A Breeze of the Future: Spinoza
4. Philosophy for the British: Locke
5. An Interlude on a Comet: Bayle
6. The Best of All Possible Compromises: Leibniz
7. A Treatise of Animal Nature: Hume
8. What Has the Enlightenment Ever Done for Us?
Voltaire, Rousseau and the Philosophes
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
INTRODUCTION
The Kingdome of Darknesse
W
ESTERN PHILOSOPHY IS NOW TWO AND A HALF MILLENNIA OLD, BUT a great deal of
it came in just two staccato bursts lasting some 150 years each. The first was in
the Athens of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, from the middle of the fifth century
to the late fourth century BC. The second was in northern Europe, in the wake of
Europe’s wars of religion and the rise of Galilean science. It stretches from the
1630s to the eve of the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. In those
relatively few years, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume,
Rousseau and Voltaire—most, that is, of the best-known modern philosophers—
made their mark. All these people were amateurs: none had much to do with any
university. They explored the implications of the new science and of religious
upheaval, which led them to reject many traditional teachings and attitudes.
What does the advance of science entail for our understanding of ourselves and
for our ideas of God? How is a government to deal with religious diversity?
What, actually, is a government for? Such questions remain our questions, which
is why Descartes, Hobbes and the others are still invoked and argued with today.
It is because they still have something to say to us that we can easily get these
philosophers wrong. It is tempting to think that they speak our language and live
in our world. But to understand them properly, we must step back into their
shoes. That is what this book tries to do.
The seeds of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment were sown in the
seventeenth century, when some people came to think that history was the wrong
way round. It was not Plato and Aristotle who were the ancients to be revered:
the admirable ancients are us. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was apparently the
first to crystallise this thought. But among the many who echoed Bacon, Blaise
Pascal (1623–1662) perhaps put it best, in his writings about vacuum—which
was not abhorred by nature at all, according to recent experiments, despite what
the ancients had said:
Those whom we call ancient were really new in all things, and properly constituted the infancy of
mankind; and as we have joined to their knowledge the experience of the centuries which have
followed them, it is in ourselves that we should find this antiquity that we revere in others.
Pascal also pointed out that if the ancient Greeks had shown the same overawed
reverence for their predecessors that later ages showed to the Greeks, they would
never have achieved the things for which they are admired.
Bacon was an effective propagandist for the new idea that all old ideas are
suspect. We must, he insisted, go out and find the facts instead of wasting our
days in dusty books. This will let us unlock the secrets of nature, which we can
then exploit to make the world a better place for mankind. Bacon’s advocacy of
careful and systematic observation won him adoption as the mascot of the Royal
Society of London, one of Europe’s first clubs of scientific investigators, which
was formed in 1660. A hundred years later, he was proclaimed a hero of
mankind’s new dawn by the French Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie, though these
French admirers conceded that his own scientific ideas had come to seem
misguided. Bacon overlooked, misunderstood or failed to see the point of what
we now regard as the most notable scientific developments of his time. He had
little time for Galileo or Kepler, because they were tiresomely mathematical, and
he did not think much of Copernicus, whose astronomy “I am convinced is most
false.” Nevertheless, what Bacon had set out to achieve was, in his words, “to
ring a bell to call other wits together,” and in this he succeeded. His
condemnation of the “degenerate learning” of recent centuries rang true to some
of the keener minds of what was becoming a new age:
the schoolmen . . . having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of
reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as
their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either
of nature or time, did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto us
those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books—cobwebs of learning, admirable for
the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.
To Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who was briefly Bacon’s assistant, the
medieval style of philosophy, which still had all too much influence in
universities, was part of “the Kingdome of Darknesse.” Superstition and
intolerance were also at work in this metaphorical kingdom. The challenge was
to find ways of escaping it.
H
OW IT CAME about that some people in the seventeenth century were ready to
look askance at the ancients, and at the authority of the Church and at medieval
science and philosophy, is discussed in The Dream of Reason: A History of
Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, to which this book is a sequel.
(A revised edition of The Dream of Reason is being published simultaneously
with this book.) A future volume will take up the story of philosophy again,
starting with Immanuel Kant, whose most influential work was published in
1781, three years after the deaths of Voltaire and Rousseau. A new phase of the
subject started with him.
All histories of philosophy are selective: some suggestions for further reading
about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be found at the end of this
book.
Chronological Chart
THE DREAM OF
ENLIGHTENMENT
Description:The author of the classic The Dream of Reason vividly explains the rise of modern thought.Western philosophy is now two and a half millennia old, but much of it came in just two staccato bursts, each lasting only about 150 years. In his landmark survey of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Re
