← 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 True Fool's Gold Pierre Garcandi we all admire visionary thinkers, the type we credit with being ahead of their time. But I've always had an additional soft spot for those who seem a bit behind their time, those who can see the value in things that have gone out of use, or at least out of fashion. Maybe that's because I'm a fan of silent films that were made about a century ago, or maybe it's because I'm a historian of philosophy. Either way, I can't help warming to Pierre Gassandi, who was something of a historian of philosophy in his own right. Though a major figure of 17th century philosophy, in many ways he seems to belong to an earlier era, namely the Renaissance. Like many a humanist of the 15th and 16th centuries, he was at first educated in the scholastic system, but then turned against Aristotelianism. In its place he sought inspiration in Hellenistic philosophy. This too is familiar from the history of humanism. Think of Machiavelli's interest in Epicureanism, Gianfresco Pica della Mirandola praising the value of skepticism and Lipsius, making Stoicism the core of his own ethics of constancy. Gossendi was at first especially impressed by the skeptics after I had been given to see how great a gulf divides the spirit of nature from the human mind. What else could I think but that the inner causes of natural effects totally elude human investigation? But as his career developed, he moved away from skepticism and toward Epicureanism. Or at least that's the usual story. As usual, the real story is in fact somewhat more complicated. There's no doubting Gosandi's credentials as a humanist scholar, his antipathy towards Aristotelianism, or his fascination with Epicureanism. After the usual scholastic training, he was ordained as a priest in 1616 and taught at the University of Aix in the Provence for six years, but he was forced out when it was taken over by the Jesuits. While at Aix, Gassandi had encouraged his students to familiarize themselves with Aristotle, but also lectured against Aristotelianism. In 1624 he published the first book of a projected seven book work based on those lectures called Paradoxical Exercises against the Aristotelians. It was never completed. Ghassandi added only the second of the planned books, and even that appeared only posthumously. His failure to finish what he had started has been explained in a couple of ways. First he met that forgotten leading citizen of the Republic of Letters, Nicolas Claude Perec, and through him got to know another leading light of the Republic, most Marine Marsenne. It's possible that the more moderate Maussen persuaded Gassandi to adopt a less skeptical philosophical stance. But a more significant factor might have been what Gassandi found when he came to Paris from the Provence. Out in the provinces, one could more easily get away with lectures that were, in Gassandi's phrasing, paradoxical in the sense that they departed from scholastic orthodoxy. In the Metropole, a ideas were monitored more carefully. Just around the time Gassandi arrived in Paris, a group of three philosophical troublemakers named Antoine Vaillon, Jean Bitold and Etienne Declaves did what troublemakers usually do. They got into trouble. After they advertised a public event in which they would refute a list of Aristotelian principles, the authorities expelled them from the city. One man who attacked the three was the traditionalist and polemicist Jean Baptiste Morin, who was taking no chances with this sort of rebellious thinking. He wrote that almost all heresies have been departures from the philosophy of Aristotle and have either denied it or perverted it, or understood it badly. Morin would later attack Gassandism too, trading argument and counterargument with Gossandi himself in a series of pamphlets and describing Gassandi's follower Francois Bernier as a heretic. For good measure, Mohan used astrology to predict Gosandi's death. You have to say that today's academic spats pale in comparison. But then I would say that given my admittedly old fashioned tastes, and as I say, Gosandi shared those tastes, devoting enormous time and effort to studying the ancient texts that inform us about Epicureanism. Again, Lipsius would be an apt comparison here. Just as he produced philological work and historical reconstruction for Seneca and other Stoics, Gosandi produced a series of writings on Epicurus and Lucretius. He edited the part of Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers, that contains the two most important surviving works of Epicurus and defended Epicureanism against the accusations commonly thrown against it that it was an atheistic and crassly hedonist philosophy. Ghassandi then wrote a systematic treatise of his own, the Syntagma Philosophicum, or Philosophical Composition. It appeared only after Ghassandi's death in 1655, meaning that his two greatest original works, the Paradoxical Exercises and the Syntagma, remained respectively mostly unwritten and unpublished during his lifetime. Not an obvious strategy for becoming a major European thinker. Yet, thanks to his labors on Epicurus and the personal connections he built up through Mersenne and his great friend Perec, Gasandi's philosophy had a significant impact across Europe. What, then, was Gassendism? Just the same thing as Epicureanism? Not quite. In truth, Gosandi did not just shift from skepticism to Epicureanism. He never fully gave up his skeptical concerns, and he never fully embraced Epicurean thought. Let's take these two points in turn. In the first book of the Exercises, Gosandi does reject the possibility of attaining certain knowledge, at least if we understand knowledge the way the Aristotelians do. In part, this is because of the weaknesses of Aristotelian science itself, despite his protestations in the preface to the Exercises that he will in fact be attacking contemporary followers of Aristotle and not Aristotle himself. In fact, he is clear that no coherent philosophy can be extracted from the original Aristotelian texts. We often can't even tell what he was trying to say. And that sound you hear in the background, his undergraduates across the world crying out in agreement. And some of the views Aristotle does express clearly are false or useless. For instance, his analysis of substances into matter and form. But even in this early work, Gasanti is not adopting the radically skeptical position that knowledge is entirely impossible. That would be self defeating. How can you know that knowledge is impossible? And anyway, we know things all the time, just not the way the Aristotelians want. Take the standard example of honey, which normally tastes sweet but may taste bitter to people suffering from an illness. Ghassandi takes such cases to show that we have no direct access to the inner natures or essences of things. But they also show that we have direct access to the way those natures affect us. Healthy people do know that honey tastes sweet to them, and sick people know that the honey seems bitter. In general, Gossandi says, we cannot know what anything is like according to itself or to its own nature, but only how it appears to some men or others. By suspending judgment about inner essences, as the ancient skeptics recommended, we avoid rash judgments and error, something Gosandi refers to as a safe harbor. But since we do know how things appear to us, we have access to a huge amount of information, information that will allow us to do science. This brings us to Epicureanism, and in particular to Epicurus claim that the senses are the criterion of truth because they are never wrong. Already in antiquity, this doctrine provoked flabbergasted disbelief from the Epicurean's opponents. What about familiar examples like the stick that looks bent when it is half submerged in water? Indeed, what about honey tasting bitter to people with the flu? But we already know the answer. Sticks do in fact look bent in water. And there is some causal mechanism that explains the link between illness and sweet things tasting bitter. As Gossendi nicely puts it, even fool's gold is not false gold, but true fool's gold. And a painting of a man is not a false man, but a true image of a man. This doesn't immediately sound reassuring. To do science, surely we need to do more than register the way things are appearing to us just at the moment. Kasanti agrees, and to this extent moves away from skepticism. He points out that we can compare sensory impressions to know whether the stick is really bent. Run your fingers along it and look at it when it's out of the water. Such knowledge as we can have is attained by ensuring that we find consistency between our experiences and and that we are depending on a causal process that is, as far as we know, reliable. Like by tasting things when we're healthy and not when we're sick. We should also supplement our own impressions by consulting the sensory experiences of other people, including records from the past. Then too, we can explain why sensations are sometimes misleading. For example, the sun looks bigger when it's setting than when it is high in the sky. And this is because the vapors hanging lower to the earth on the horizon are distorting our view of it. He still admits that all this will not get us to the essences of things. The science that results will be at the level of what Aristotelians would consider mere opinion. But Ghassandi is willing to describe it as certain. His advice is to settle for less. If we cannot be admitted into the very shrines of nature, we can still live among certain of the outer altars. A science founded on nothing but sense experience will be just as reliable and. And take us just as far as sense experience itself. Which is not to say that in science we never try to say anything about what cannot be sensed. To the contrary, the central idea of Gossandi's physics involves postulating something inaccessible to the invisibly small atoms. These atoms come together to make up corpuscles which are still too small to see. These Corpuscles in turn make up the bigger bodies that we are able to grasp with the senses. We'll get into this physical theory in depth next time. For now, the question to ask is how could a rigorous empiricism like Gassandi's allow him to throw around claims about invisible atoms and corpuscles? Again, the answer is provided by the Epicureans. They used a method called inference from signs, where we infer from what we can see something we can't see, and likewise with the other senses. Classic examples are that lactation in a woman is a sign of pregnancy and that sweat is a sign that there are invisible pores in the skin. Gosandi repeats both ancient examples in his Syntagma and then adds one of more recent vintage. Mites are so tiny that we can't see their bodies in any detail, but from the fact that they scurry around, we can infer that they must have legs. Ghassandi then triumphantly adds that when. When the microscope was invented, one could finally see that mites do indeed have legs. Even holds out hope that as microscopes improve, we will be able to perceive directly the corpuscular structures that underlie the larger bodies we can grasp with our normal senses. Until that happens, Gosandi thinks, we need to live with what might be called a mitigated or moderate skepticism, one that accepts serious limits on human knowledge while confidently devising plausible scientific theories. They will get more plausible still as we test them and compare them with further experiences. Ghassandi's epistemic modesty comes out in his critical response to Descartes Meditations. When I discussed his Objections in episode 471, I mentioned his rejection of the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas. And what we've just seen provides us with helpful context for that. Ghassandi's own epistemology says that all our knowledge, such as it is, is. Is derived from sensation. We have no ideas and no knowledge for free, as it were simply inborn within us or given by human nature. In keeping with this, Versandi also criticized Descartes use of clear and distinct ideas. His own experience showed him that things he seemed to perceive clearly and distinctly are in fact false. When he was young, he would have considered it clear and distinct that two lines that are getting steadily closer to would eventually have to meet. But when he got older and encountered the mathematical theory of asymptotes, he abandoned that assumption. Beyond his disagreement with Descartes on such technical points, Kasandi could not accept the whole strategy of the Meditations it begins by adopting a skeptical posture so radical that it can only be insincere. Can you really doubt Descartes that you're sitting by a fire, or that there are stars in the sky? Then, from this unrealistic starting point, Descartes tries to get us to a kind of knowledge beyond all possibility of error, a knowledge more perfect than anything Ghassandi would allow. Thus Descartes is too skeptical at the beginning and not skeptical enough at the end, what with his atomism and his empiricism. It's clear that Gassandi was powerfully influenced by Epicureanism, and he readily admitted as much. But he did not agree with Epicurus and Lucretius about everything. Indeed, the points of disagreement are numerous enough that one might hesitate to call him an Epicurean at all. One article that rejects this label provides the following list of Epicurean claims denied by that the universe is infinite, immobile and immutable that there are an infinite number of worlds that the number and figures of the atoms are infinite that the atoms and void are eternal that the cause and history of order in the world is wholly natural that the world is not governed by the providence of the divine and that this world will end like all other natural things. These rejected doctrines have something in common, namely, that they would somehow restrict God's untrammeled power to shape the world as he sees fit, for instance, by denying that God created the universe or that he oversees worldly events. It's been said that Gossandism is baptized Epicureanism, that is, the Epicurean system with modifications to bring it into line with Christianity. But given the distance between Epicureanism and Christianity, that might be a contradiction in terms. Gossandi saw this problem very clearly. On the one hand, he wanted to defend the Epicureans from unfair accusations. Their abandonment of the traditional pagan gods should not make us condemn them as atheists. After all, they were right to reject those gods. One chapter of his overview of the school even reads, epicurus is readmitted to the company of the philosophers. On the other hand, Gosandi insisted that he was beholden to no one's authority. So even in his careful and sympathetic survey of the Epicurean teachings, he adds notes of correction to signal his disagreement on the points I just mentioned. And not only those points. Today's readers of Epicurus and Lucretius are invariably taken with their argument against the fear of death. Death is nothing to us, because when we stop existing we will have no experiences at all. Anymore a condition just like the time before we were born. Since you don't look back with horror on the time before you were born, why should you contemplate the time after your death with horror? Ghassandi has no use for this whole line of argument because, as a good Christian and indeed a Catholic priest, he believes that we will live on after death. It's true that we have nothing to fear, but. But that's because we should look forward to salvation and eternal beatitude in the company of our Creator. Yet, precisely on this topic of happiness and the dispelling of fear, we can also find Gosandi drawing heavily on the Epicureans. He agrees with them and other Hellenistic philosophers that freedom from disturbance is a suitable goal for ethical reflection. Moreover, he agrees with the Epicureans that the best life lies in a state of untroubled pleasure, with all our needs satisfied and all pain eliminated. Unlike Epicurus, he thinks that such a state is impossible in this life. Nonetheless, his conception of perfect happiness is the same. In faithfully Epicurean fashion, he builds on that conception a theory of virtue and of political life. Since we take pleasure in doing the right thing, virtue becomes a means by which to achieve happiness. God deliberately created us as hedonists precisely because he knew that the pursuit of pleasure would take us along the path of virtue. As for politics, here, Gassandi's views bear comparison with those of Thomas Hobbes, whom Gassandi met when Hobbes was in Paris, associating with the circle around Mersenne. Hobbes was also strongly influenced by Epicureanism. Both he and Gassandi adopted versions of the Epicurean social contract theory, in which we make agreements to cooperate with other people in order to escape from a situation of constant conflict. But there's a crucial difference between Hobbes and Gosandi on this point. Hobbes believed that human cooperative structures and above all political structures, are artificial. The state is a kind of machine we build to stop ourselves from killing each other. Gassandi was more optimistic. He thought it is natural for humans to enter into compacts with one another, as Aristotle might say are political or sociable animals. This makes good sense within an Epicurean framework. It is in our nature to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, and the uncooperative state of nature involves a lot of pain and not much pleasure. It is in this sense that the state is produced or devised by nature. It's not unlikely that Gosandi helped to push Hobbes towards his own brand of Neo Epicureanism. If so, then Hobbes was only one of several English philosophers to take inspiration from him. It's been said that Ghassandi can be considered the foreign parent of British empiricism, a judgment that gets support from Leibdance. He wrote that the great empiricist John Locke was pretty much in agreement with Gossendi's system, which is fundamentally that of Democritus. The British reception of Gossendi gives us yet another example of the power of the Republic of Letters, since it was through Mersenne and Samuel Hartleb that Gossandian ideas were disseminated across the channel. Of course, not everyone was impressed. Ghassandi's antagonist, Jean Baptiste Marin, condemned him as vain, arrogant, malevolent, slanderous and unfriendly to Aristotle. But to all accounts, this assessment of Gossandi's personality was wide of the mark. In fact, he was reputed to be far more modest than, say, Descartes, admittedly a low bar. Still, he might have been proud to know how great his impact would be, especially in the area of physics. His account of matter became a leading alternative to that of Descartes, who also spoke of corpuscles but was explicitly opposed to atomism. So Gassandism did offer a real theoretical alternative to Cartesianism in this period, along with very different explanations of a wide range of concrete physical phenomena. This is why, as you might remember, some more strictly faithful Cartesians attacked Coeur de Moi for accepting atomism as a kind of betrayal of their school. Both the Gossandists and the Cartesians were relentless in their attacks on Aristotelianism. But the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. I hope then to have your undivided attention as we turn to atomism in Ghassandi and other authors of the period next time. Actually, I'm pretty sure I've used that joke before. But what can I say? I like things that are old enough to be cozily familiar, like tired jokes, the silent films of Buster Keaton, and the history of philosophy without any gaps.