← History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online@historyoffphilosophy.net Today's episode Honorable French Skepticism we learn two things from the fact that Descartes compared the skeptical arguments that begin his meditations to stale cabbage that he had reheated for his audience. First, Even in the 17th century, people didn't like cabbage enough to finish it at the first attempt. Second, skeptical strategies were at this time familiar, or even over familiar to an educated readership. That was an outcome of a long process of forgetting and remembering. In antiquity, the skeptics had been a formidable presence on the philosophical scene. Critical thinkers who took over at Plato's Academy, like Carneades and Arcesilaus, offered the most penetrating criticism of Stoic philosophy. The arguments of this so called new academy were taken up by other skeptics like Philo of Larissa and Cicero, with the significant caveat that they allowed for the embrace of beliefs that seemed to have the balance of probability on their side. But while it wouldn't be appropriate to be dogmatic about it, I'd venture to say that ancient skepticism reached its peak in the second century CE with Sextus Empiricus, because he looked back to the classical skeptic Pyrrho as a predecessor. He called his style of skepticism Pyronism. It involved juxtaposing arguments on both sides of an issue with the effect that the issue seemed unresolved or in balance, leading to what he called epoche or or suspension of judgment. In the medieval period, skepticism itself was then largely suspended. One effect of the rise of dogmatic Platonism in late antiquity. As long time listeners will know, it's not as if skepticism was completely absent. And some medieval authors even knew about the ancient skeptics, for instance, John of Salisbury in the 12th century. In the 14th century, Nicola of Hautreicht adopted a nuanced and for the time provocative skeptical position. But they were exceptions in general, medieval thinkers raised skeptical arguments rarely and only as a threat to be overcome, with a particularly dramatic case being the Persian theologian Al Ghazali, who experienced a psychological breakdown after considering arguments that cast doubt on all his beliefs. The return of skepticism as a serious player came only with the Renaissance and the printing press, which greatly improved access to Sextus and other skeptical authors. Of course, the works of the moderate skeptic Cicero were also being avidly read at this time the upshot was a resurgence of skepticism around the turn of the 17th century in France. We looked at this development back in episode 413, focusing especially on Montaigne, Sanchez and Charon. Their work set the table for the stale cabbage served up by Descartes. But he was not their true heir after all. In a parallel that has not gone unnoticed, Descartes strategy was not unlike Al Ghazali's. For both of them, skepticism served as a self imposed methodological constraint requiring them to doubt anything that is not known with certainty. The point of this though, was to find something that is known with certainty and build on it. Even during Descartes lifetime there were other thinkers who were adopting skepticism as a settled position rather than as a hurdle to be surmounted. The leading names here include Gavriel Naudet, Guy Patin, Francois Moth Levall, Pierre Gossendi and Samuel Sobiere. They are sometimes collectively called libertines, which in English at least suggests that they were indulging in a lot more than skeptical arguments. At the risk of disappointing you, we're not in fact talking about people with an unrestrained attitude towards sex as well as sextus. In a letter that describes a debauch planned by Patain, Naudet and Gassandi. During a visit at Naudet's house, Patin says that the group doesn't even care much for drinking wine. So he says, it will be a debauch, but a philosophical one and perhaps something more. For all three of us are cured of superstition and freed from the evil of scruples. We which is the tyrant of consciences. Looking back on a previous occasion of the same kind, Patain remarks, we spoke most freely about everything without scandalizing a soul. So this was about free thinking, not about free love or other pleasures. Indeed, it was freedom that gave the libertines their name. They were liberated in terms of what they were willing to discuss, and also freed from superstition and the chains of traditional belief. A libertine was thus said to be a powerful spirit, an esprit fort with the courage and intelligence to think for himself. The libertines were also free in acknowledging inspiration from the earlier generation of skeptics. Nodet said that Charon's skeptical meditation on wisdom was the best book there is, apart from the Bible. He also looked back to antiquity, embracing suspension of judgment and the Pyrrhonian conclusion that apparently no one knows anything. That caveat apparently was crucial for Sextus Empiricus, who distinguished the true Pyrrhonian attitude from that of the Skeptical Academy. For him, the academics were in truth negative dogmatists because they asserted that knowledge is impossible. A Pyronian, by contrast, would be careful to suspend judgment about whether knowledge is possible or not, just as on any other philosophical question. Provisionally, he simply follows appearances without commitment. And this includes the appearance that philosophers have never achieved knowledge. Our French skeptics are not always so careful about this distinction, which opened the door to a self refutation argument. Critics could charge them with claiming to know for certain that certain knowledge is impossible. A more sympathetic reading of the libertines, and for that matter, of the Skeptical Academy in antiquity, might stress that they were only giving up on knowledge as it is envisioned by systematic dogmatists like the Stoics and Aristotelians. For Nantet, the teachings of the Scholastics were a mere mass of opinions, while Gossendi said in his frankly titled 1624 treatise, Paradoxical Exercises against the Aristotelians, that the intellect does not know anything in an Aristotelian fashion, nor does there exist any demonstration such such as Aristotle describes it. To say that there is no knowledge that rises to the rigorous standards of Aristotle's theory of science is not to insist that there is no knowledge at all. Cassandi did allow for reliance on cessation, which tells us such things as that fire is hot and that honey is sweet and is made by bees. Then there's the knowledge we have by religious faith. At the time and still today. Many have suspected that the libertines were in fact atheists whose skeptical tactics had eliminated religious beliefs along with all the other established verities. But the authors themselves were at pains to suggest otherwise. Instead, the skeptic's soul was like a field that had been cleared of weeds in preparation for divine grace, which falls like blessed rain. If you have a hard time believing this, then maybe I can convince you by looking at the example of Francois la Morte Levaille, probably the most philosophically interesting of the skeptical libertines. He was representative of the movement as a whole in terms of his social status. For all the controversy they caused, these were highly placed aristocrats attached to the statesmen who were running France at the time, namely Ruceelieu and then Mazarin. Already in 1624, a secretary of Richelieu, Leonard Marandet, had written a treatise inspired by ancient skepticism, which concluded that there is nothing more certain than doubt. A new edition of Sextus had appeared in 1621, which would have helped to inspire both Marandais and the early Gassandi. As for Le Vaille, he was born into the nobility, served as Attorney General to the Paris Parlement, and tutored the Duke of Anjou and his brother, the future King Louis xiv. Of course, this was a time when the highly educated and wealthy delighted in disdaining convention. Like any number of other authors, Le Vaillier celebrated the advances of the moderns over the ancients. Like Harvey's recent discovery of the circulation of the blood, he had no time for common sense either, precisely because it was so common. There is, he said, nothing more stupid than the multitude. No other opinions are more certainly false than those which are the most universally received. One virtue of skepticism indeed, is that it can steer us away from the ignorant beliefs of the masses. Of course, one could reject widespread superstition and classical philosophy without giving up entirely on non skeptical philosophy. Just consider Descartes, who wanted to get past skeptical considerations to a metaphysics of the mind and God and to a physics grounded in geometry. But Le Vaille wasn't impressed by this project either. Dismissing the idea that nature could be subjected to the rules of mathematics, he instead he concluded that human efforts to understand the world are doomed to failure. Evidently, God simply doesn't want us to understand what he has created, and it is a sort of impiety to want to fix the same boundaries to the works of God and of nature that the philosophers have imposed on our knowledge. So while Le Ve did value philosophy, it was not for any positive theories philosophers had put forward. Rather, in lines that nicely express the skeptical core of his libertinism, he my parents wishes had destined me for a thousand servitudes. Philosophy placed me in complete and true liberty. Law and custom seemed to obligate me to shamefully laborious acts. Philosophy exempted me and gave me unlimited repose and felicity. Le Ve was a fan of the skeptical modes found in Sextus, which provide a battery of weapons for undermining dogmatic truth claims. For instance, one can cast doubt on sensation by saying that vision often disagrees with hearing, or that animals must sense the world in different ways than us. There's no neutral court of appeal that can decide such conflicts. Similarly, one can cast doubt on the beliefs current in our society by pointing out that elsewhere people believe very different things. This was an especially important case for Le Vaillier, who was fascinated by accounts of travelers who had gone to different parts of the world and impressed by the variation between the peoples they found there. Sounding a lot like Montaigne, he delighted in the different habits of the Japanese who put on coats when they get inside and take them off to go out again, and of the Native Americans who dance when they're sad. Using a metaphor appropriate to his aristocratic station, Le Vaill compared the skeptic to a man at a dinner party who, by sitting at the middle of the table, can reach and sample all the dishes. One sense in which the skeptic stays in the middle is that he suspends judgment, remaining undecided between conflicting claims. In a rhetorical outburst, Le Ve oh precious epoch, and praises it as an inestimable antidote to the presumptuous knowledge of the pedants. You can see why a man like this might have seemed problematic from a religious point of view. Those pedants, namely the Scholastics, would have insisted that his rejection of Aristotelian science undermined theology and more generally, if you're suspending judgment about everything, then don't you have to suspend judgment about Christianity, too? Such suspicions were exacerbated by Le Ve's authorship of a treatise called on the Virtue of the Pagans. He wrote it at the behest of Cardinal Richelieu, who wanted him to refute the Jansenists. I introduced them briefly in episode 465, but just as a reminder, they were Catholics who adopted a position on grace that looked disturbingly close to that of the Calvinists. Le Vayer's goal with the treatise was to show that people can manage to be virtuous and even have implicit faith in the true God, using their natural resources. In one remarkable passage, he imagines a Native American praying to God and asking forgiveness for ignorance and guidance toward the divine will. The point being that there is nothing impossible about someone engaging in such a prayer, despite lacking the merest acquaintance with Christian teaching. Similarly, great pagan thinkers like Socrates and Seneca were thoroughly admirable in character. An especially striking inclusion on Le Ver's list of virtuous pagans is Confucius. Reports from Europeans who had traveled to China encouraged Le Ve to claim that Confucius believed in a single God and recommended the rule never to do to someone what you wouldn't want them to do to you. The latter point is correct, by the way, as you'll know if you're following the podcast series we're now doing on Chinese philosophy. Le Ver's ability to value other ways of experiencing the world is attractively on show in a little treatise he wrote after meeting someone who had been born blind. Even here, he takes the opportunity to question the authority of the ancients, both Plato and Aristotle, had spoken enthusiastically of the value of eyesight and its role in leading us to philosophical wisdom. But Le Verier is not so sure. He's impressed by the way his blind acquaintance can move around at home without bumping into anything, and notes that some sites are a source of misery. He says of the blind, they are to be pitied for the loss of the many pleasures that sight could afford them. But how much unpleasantness are they spared in return? In general, Levalle's tone in this brief work is one of dispassionate, almost scientific curiosity. He notes, for example, that the blind man lacks direct knowledge of things he has not been able to see, a reminder that our concepts are indeed derived from sense perception. But at the very end, the rhetoric becomes more heated. After quoting Aristotle's remark that pigs need eyesight to live, Le Verrier says that we humans would be more like pigs than reasonable men yet if we could not live without eyes. If that treatise earns Le Vaill a small but honorable place in the history of the philosophy of disability, his overall stance may earn him a large and controversial place in the history of atheism. That treatise on the pagans provoked a response from the Jansenist sympathizer Antoine Arnaud, who wrote a work called the Necessity of Faith in Jesus Christ. Here he charged Le Version with irreligion and Pelagianism, that is the heretical idea that humans can merit salvation without divine grace. Some interpreters today agree that Le Ve was a fundamentally anti religious thinker. Admittedly, his investigations of religious diversity around the globe do not explicitly put Christianity on the same level with all the other faiths. Still, one modern commentator says that his intention of casting doubt on Christian revelation must have been perfectly clear to the select audience to whom the work is really addressed. But I tend to be, well, skeptical about this sort of interpretation, which prioritizes our intuition about implicit messages over the philosopher's explicit remarks. So let's look at what he actually says. In on the Virtue of the Pagans, Revali directly warns the reader that skepticism should not be taken to undermine Christian faith because there are no doubts when it is a question of religion. And as we've already seen, he explains our lack of certain knowledge by saying that God simply did not want us to know more. Let us, he urges, satisfy ourselves with the boundaries that the divinity has imposed upon us. One could go even further and say that Le Vaill, like Charon and Naudet, may have valued skepticism precisely because it makes space for Belief by faith, allowing us to avoid the mistake of basing religion on the shaky foundations of philosophical reasoning. Thus, Levallier also wrote that we should profess the honorable ignorance of our beloved skeptic because this prepares the soul for knowledge revealed by God. But what about his favorable attitude towards religious toleration, something that even leads him to commend the societies of India, China and ancient Rome because of their openness to a diversity of belief? I think this can readily be explained in light of the historical context. You may remember Montaigne's remark. It is to put a very high value on your surmises to roast a man alive for them. Le Ve may have had a similar attitude. In an age of religious conflict, the way to peaceful coexistence traveled through the rigors of skeptical doubt. The notion that Le Ver simply withheld belief about all topics, including religious ones, also conflicts with the more positive dimension of his epistemology. Though he consistently rejects claims to certainty, he follows moderate skeptics like Cicero by accepting claims of probability. One word he uses for this is vraisem bable, meaning similar to truth. God has not allowed us certainty, but has given us plenty to go on. Nonetheless, since we can adopt the sort of plausible belief that is proper to our humanity, there's no need to be disappointed about this either, since you believe the same thing when you judge it to be probable as you do when you judge it to be certain. Practically speaking, it makes no difference. The risk in fact lies with insisting on certainty. Whereas those who do this have iron souls. Skeptics are flexible and can shift ground depending on the balance of probability. From this perspective, Le Vaill's position turns out to be rather like that of Descartes friend and frequent correspondent Marine Marsenne. That's rather ironic, because Marsenne is known for his strident condemnation of skepticism. In A treatise from 1625 called on the Truth of the Sciences against the Skeptics or Pyrenists, Mersenne insists that there are many things in the sciences which are true, and it is necessary to give up Pyrrhonism if one does not want to lose his judgment and his reason. He sees the mathematics as an especially clear source of certainty, which might help explain why he shared Descartes fascination for this discipline. Just consider, he says, that Euclid's elements have been read for thousands of years without anyone finding a problem with the proofs. But when it comes to physics, Mersenne is a lot less confident. He writes, we see only the outside, the surface of nature. Without being able to enter inside. And we shall never possess any other science than that of its exterior effects, without being able to find out the reasons for them, and without knowing how they act until it pleases God to deliver us from this misery. On this sort of topic, then, we must satisfy ourselves with mere probabilities, a bar lowering strategy. We also saw with some defenders of Descartes physics. We find Massen applying the strategy to specific questions in his own physics too, as when he says that it is not entirely certain whether the heavens are solid or fluid, but the balance of probability lies with fluidity. Mersenne's education may have encouraged him to adopt this sort of epistemology. Like Descartes, he studied at La Fleche, where he would have encountered the probabilist approach of his Jesuit teachers. So that would give us a different religious context for understanding the modest knowledge claims of philosophers in this period. But of course, religion could also motivate people to condemn skepticism. An author named Jean de silans remarked in 1626. Montaigne and some other troublemakers, even though they are Catholic, say that we cannot be certain of anything except what God has revealed to us. If that is true, then we certainly cannot be certain even of what is revealed. Here he responds to the skeptics claim that their critical stance was intended to make room for faith. That just won't work, argues De Salon. Our faith depends on belief in revelation, and we only know about revelation thanks to sensation and testimony, things the skeptic is determined to put in question. Amidst these debates between skeptics and anti skeptics, an interesting position was occupied by Pierre Gassandi, or rather more than one position. As I've said, the early Gassandi can be grouped with skeptical libertines like Naudet and Le Vaille. This is the Gossanti of whom his follower and editor, Samuel Sobiet, could rightly this learned man does not assert anything very affirmatively. And following the maxims of his profound wisdom, he does not depart from the epoche which protects him from the imprudence and presumption to which all the other philosophers have fallen. But as Gossendi's career went on, he adopted a range of positive doctrines, doctrines associated not with ancient skepticism, but with another Hellenistic school, the Epicureans. Gossendi exempted empirical knowledge from the skeptical suspension of judgment and believe that our sense experiences could best be explained by postulating an atomic theory of matter. I hope I'll have your undivided attention for that next time here on the History of philosophy without any gaps.