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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 Better the French Garden the story goes that a young Descartes, recently graduated from his studies with the Jesuits, lived in a village outside of Paris called Saint Germain. Here he would have been able to visit royal gardens, which featured a grotto with dramatic lighting, music from a hydraulic organ and songs made by mechanical birds. It's almost irresistible to think that these gardens helped to inspire his mechanistic approach to nature. If so, Descartes would return the favor, because the story also goes that 17th century French gardens were inspired by his philosophy. With their geometric layout, they put his rationalistic approach to nature into physical form, creating what we might venture to call Cartesian spaces. This is the most obvious and familiar connection between intellectual history and the sort of garden built by Louis XIV at Versailles. But. But there are others. These gardens grew from many seeds, including contemporary science, the colonialist enterprise, and the political ideology and iconography of the French crown. And that's before we even get to the story about the cuckold and the deceased elephant, which makes this a good occasion, finally, to say something about plants. I've been remiss about addressing this subject. We're almost 500 episodes in and have spoken plenty about animals and goodness knows, more than enough about humans. But plants have had to wait their turn quietly, which, fortunately, is something they should be pretty good at. Aristotle already observed that their lack of motion must be connected to the fact that they get by without the power of sensation. Whereas animals use their senses to go after food, plants can just take nutrition from the soil. In fact, absorbing nutrition is one of the two main functions performed by plants, the other being reproduction. Aristotle would have appreciated that the German word for reproduction is in fact fortflanzung, literally planting forth. He didn't dedicate a treatise to plants, but this gap was filled by his student Theophrastus. And there were other ancient texts on the topic, like a manual of medical ingredients written in the first century by Dioscorides, which contains extensive physical description of plants and their possible uses. Plants continued to crop up now and again in subsequent natural philosophy. In the 11th century, Avicenna included a treatise on them in his massive philosophical collection, the Healing. And Albert the Great studied plants alongside animals. In the 13th century, botanists in early modern Europe were in a good position to Draw from these roots. Renaissance scholars had made the relevant ancient texts available, for instance, by translating Theophrastus's on plants in 1483. Scientists now had better equipment for examining plant bodies, notably the microscope and a wider range of specimens to study. Thanks to the colonialist invasion of the Americas and other parts of the world. This went nicely with a deep commitment to empirical observation, as captured by Tommaso Campanella's remark, I learn more from the anatomy of a plant than from all the books in the world. Descartes would no doubt have agreed with that sentiment and intended to include plants within the remit of his new science. The original plan for his treatise Principles of Philosophy, called for it to include a section on plants. This didn't come to fruition, but we know from notes left in manuscript and from letters that he did devote himself to studying plants. Over the winter of 1637 and 1638, while in the Netherlands, he and his friend Henricus Raineri did botanical experiments. For instance, by letting the same type of plant grow in different mixtures of soil. See what would result. Descartes observed that when farmers and gardeners hoe the earth, this mixes the particles in the earth, which generates more flavorful fruits and vegetables. That's typical of his ideas in botany and of course, in natural science generally. A combination of mechanistic assumptions and plausible guesses. In retrospect, it doesn't seem to be the most fertile of mixtures. But at the time it helped the Cartesians to offer persuasive improvements to Aristotelian science. Take the plant called Mimosa pudica, whose name comes from its remarkable ability to retract its leaves when touched and at a certain time in the evening. Pudica means modest, a pretty neat trick, and one exceedingly difficult to explain from an Aristotelian perspective, given that, as I just mentioned, plants aren't supposed to have a power for self motion. Aristotle himself had acknowledged that some species seem to blur the plant animal dividend, admitting that the most advanced plants seem to have powers similar to those of the most rudimentary animals. Aristotelians thus spoke of zoophytes, literally meaning animal plants. It's not only the Germans who have a penchant for highly literal compound words, but the scholastic thinkers with their penchant for clear distinctions, couldn't restrain themselves from asking whether the mimosa has a plant soul or an animal soul. The Parisian professor Guillaume Duval argued against ascribing genuine animal powers to any plant. Rather, the mimosa closes its leaves through some kind of brute natural force akin to magnetism or weight. Of course, this was exactly the sort of explanation the Cartesians were well placed to offer. Descartes discussed the mimosa in correspondence with Mersenne, and his disciple Regius offered an unimpeachably mechanist explanation for the plant's behavior. When its leaves are touched, the microscopic particles inside are agitated and sift downwards, pulling the leaves closed as they move. This is broadly in keeping with Descartes conviction that a plant has uncountably many tiny invisible ducts for conducting juices along their stems and branches. When these fluids reach the extremities, they dry out, forming leaves, flowers and fruits. This is why plants that grow in soil are drier and harder than those that grow in water. Think of an oak tree as opposed to a water lily. The juices flowing within them are made of particles with a lower ratio of moist to dry. To explain all such phenomena, he insisted, we need invoke no vegetative soul, only a certain constitution of the parts of the body. In light of this, there was in fact no need to decide whether the mimosa pudica, or for that matter, a very basic creature like a sea urchin, is a plant or an animal. All plants and all animals are nothing but machines, albeit machines more sophisticated than the artificial songbirds Descartes saw at the gardens of Saint Germain. It's an irony of early modern science that even as the firm borders within Aristotelian natural philosophy were being erased in this way, great efforts were also being made in the direction of classifying plant and animal species. Plants attracted special attention from early on because they are easier to study. They could be classified in terms of their organs, which are much more available to inspection than the messy innards of animals. Also, plants helpfully stay put while you examine them, even while they are still alive. Anyone who has tried to get their cat to the vet will appreciate the contrast. The greatest name of early modern scientific classification is Karl Linnaeus, an 18th century Swedish scientist. We'll get to him at some point, but now would be the time to mention his predecessors, such as the Swiss botanist Casper Barhan. His 1623 botanical reference work described and classified some 6,000 specimens purely on the basis of their physical features. He did still make Aristotelian presuppositions, organizing his classes in terms of nutritive and reproductive organs of the plants, with reference to the two powers of the vegetative soul. So here we have Aristotelian theory grafted together with careful empirical observation. I mentioned last time that empiricism was a hallmark of the scientific institutions founded in 17th century France. 1 of them was the Jardin du Roi, or Royal Garden. Founded under Louis XIII in 1626, it would become the Natural History Museum in 1793, in the midst of the French Revolution. Unlike many an aristocrat, it survived the years of political upheaval. A contemporary observed that it was perhaps the only establishment that has remained intact in the midst of the Revolution. The destructive hand of vandals, which has broken so many precious monuments of the arts, has respected the Temple of Nature across the one and a half centuries between its foundation and the Revolution. It served as a base for botanical research and natural science more generally. In the 18th century, a director of the Royal Garden, Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon, wrote a three volume treatise called Natural History General and Particular. During this period, the Royal Garden became France's premier repository of colonial flora and fauna, as one scholar has put it, including the natural historical collection of the intriguingly named Michel Adon Son. That's with an N, not an M, which he gathered as a colonialist in Senegal. The Royal Garden was also the scene of less refined pursuits, driven by desires originating within their vegetative souls. A married woman and her gentleman friend were exercising their faculties of reproduction in the secluded bowers of the garden when they were discovered by the woman's husband. This led to fisticuffs, a breach of decorum that had to be punished. The authorities decided to teach the vengeful husband a lesson by locking him in a case that contained the skeleton of an elephant that had died at Versailles and then been dissected for scientific research. I wonder what lesson the man did in fact learn. Perhaps that he had given the phrase animal husbandry a whole new meaning. Or if he had a scientific bent of mind, he may have been struck that his family drama had become part of a far more significant story. Elephants are, as I hardly need to point out, not native to France. Nor were many of the plants and animals on show at the Royal Gardens and the menagerie and orangery of Versailles, but were brought from around the world to the metropole. This greatly impressed a bishop of the time, who commented that under Louis xiv, plants from foreign climes were prospering in French soil. Our king, having conquered entire provinces, has tamed all of the elements. Like the cuckolded husband leaning against one of the elephant's tusks, this bishop got the point. The collection of plants and animals did serve the high minded purpose of scientific research, but but also displayed the reach and power of the regime. We can say the same about the formal gardens built by the French aristocracy of this period. While they do seem to reflect contemporary philosophical ideas about nature, they also make powerful political statements that remain clear today and would have been still clearer to observers at the time. But let's take those philosophical ideas about nature first. If you've ever been to Versailles or other similar gardens like the one at Nymphenburg here, where I live in Munich, then you'll know that viewing them is an experience shaped by geometry. The design is like an architectural plan, which was in fact invented around this time. Laid down upon the landscape, flat plains with beds of flowers are set off by round pools and fountains and by rows of trees of identical height. Seen from above, the gardens also resemble carpets from the east, another import made possible by colonial exploits, and one that might well be seen on a floor in the chateau overlooking the garden. Indeed, these are gardens made to be seen from above as well as to walk through. From a high vantage point, one could behold the subordination of the created world to rigorous artificiality. Nature, but better indeed. The Duke of St Simon said, in reference to Versailles, that the formal garden tyrannizes nature. There's a good deal of truth in this. The grounds at Versailles were originally very different, an uneven marshland that was transformed to geometrical perfection, with all the water carefully channeled into pools and fountains. The typical English garden is a reaction against this aesthetic. Though devised with no less effort, it presents a landscape that is also a portrait of nature, but now of Nature untamed, beautiful in its disorder. This was appreciated by no less a philosopher than Immanuel Kant. He criticized formal gardens for their stiffness and mathematical regularity, and praised English gardens for capturing the sublimity of nature. A philosopher more wedded to Cartesian philosophy might instead celebrate the French garden as revealing the underlying principles of nature. It makes visible what is usually invisible. After all, Cartesian physics is in its essence a reduction of nature to geometry. Anyone who thinks there are no straight lines in nature has forgotten the simple laws of motion. So it is a physics well represented by, say, a rectangular flower bed made perfectly flat through painstaking engineering work, or by a spout of water projected over a riding path with such precision that a man on horseback could pass under it without getting wet. That parabolic arc was a phenomenon Galileo and others had analyzed using mathematics, though the real world application they usually discussed was the flight of a cannonball. Treatises about the art of gardening, written in 17th century France by authors like Jacques Boisseau and Claude Mollet, thus contained discussions of geometrical proportion alongside more practical advice. In this sense, the formal garden was a realization of the ideas of nature current in the period. As the scholar Chandra Mukherjee has pointed out, Boisseau wrote that nature is above all characterized by two order and diversity. So a good garden should feature both. Hence the profusion of different plants, the variation in size of the plots and the various entertainments for visitors to enjoy. Like earlier Italian gardens of the Renaissance, the French version used engineering and mathematics to delight and surprise its visitors, as with those mechanical singing birds or optical effects achieved by layering and placement of terraces. A simple example is that the size of the terraced beds would increase with distance from the main house, so as to seem equally large from that vantage point, thanks to the laws of perspective. This single view was not the only way to take in the garden, though. There were hidden waterways, grottoes and nooks that would reveal themselves only as the visitor moved through the space. The effect created by the sunlight falling on pools would add to this sense of dynamism. Above all, the clean lines of the garden did not just lie inert on the ground. They drew the viewer's gaze towards the horizon, giving them an intuition of infinity. Such, at least, is the interpretation of Alan Weiss, who has written that the formal garden captures the rationalized theology of Descartes discourse, the leap of faith of Pascal's Pensee, and the synthesis of the latter two in Arnaud and Nicot's Port Royal. Logic a dramatic claim but then these were dramatic spaces. Madame de Scudery, in the midst of a novelistic description of visiting Versailles, wrote, the eyes are ravished, the ears are charmed, the mind is astonished, and the imagination is overcome. To see all this as a modern day tourist is one thing. To do so as the subject of the king who built the place would have been quite another. Which brings us back to the second political dimension of the gardens. The aforementioned Chandra Mukherjee has written extensively on this, making a persuasive argument that Versailles and other aristocratic gardens played a range of political roles, some more obvious than others. Way over at the obvious end, we have the story of how the gardens at Versailles were built in the first place. King Louis XIV was invited to a summer fte at the spectacular grounds of Vaux de Vicomte, built for the finance minister Nicolas Fouquet in 1661. Taking in the spectacular vistas and extraordinary artistry of the place, Louis concluded that Fouquet was a too big for his britches and b enriching himself beyond even the accepted standards of the time. He had Fouquet arrested and hired the team who had designed the gardens for him to create something similar at Versailles. These included Andre Le Notre, who had already worked on the gardens of the King's father, Louis XIII. The Versailles gardens even feature 1200 trees transplanted from the previous gardens at Vaux de Vicomte. Not for nothing did they call the king Louis xiv. This was a political message that could hardly have gone unheeded. Versailles was a demonstration of power over the aristocracy as well as over nature and the land. In this latter respect, the King's message was more subtle, but still clear enough. The aerial view over a formal garden might also remind us of the maps displaying the extent of royal power over the territories in France itself and overseas. In fact, the very same engineering techniques that were used in warfare for erecting battlements, embankments and moats were put to work in the formal gardens to reshape the land and steer water through canals and into pools and fountains. In that novel by Madame de Scudery, one character jokes that the King moves pools of water from their places as easily as one moves chess pieces. Not a bad analogy, since chess is also simulated warfare. And remember, in the 17th century, land was equivalent to wealth. Taking a big piece of it and devoting it not to crops, but to decorative displays created at eye watering expense was an ostentatious form of conspicuous consumption. On the other hand, the gardens were also bound up with economic endeavor. At Paris and around the world, botany was moving from pure scientific research to a focus on cash crops like coffee, with devastating results in colonies like Saint Domingue, later known as Haiti. The gardens demonstrated the global reach of the French elite by serving as showpieces for the collections of their owners. Those exotic plants and animals came from newly discovered lands across the sea, even as statues and other classicizing elements invited viewers to draw connections to the culture of ancient Rome. These would have featured in any elite garden of the time. But the case of Versailles is especially interesting. You presumably know that Louis XIV was called the Sun King, but you may not know how far he and his court took the point. As a teenager, he actually dressed up as Apollo, the Greek God of the sun, to perform in a ballet. The assaille is duly full of references to this pagan God, including a fountain with Apollo steering his chariot. Another structure is an arc of columns connected by arches, which tellingly, support nothing at all apart from the King's vanity decorative Features like cherubs with musical instruments are another allusion to Apollo, who was also the God of music. Contemporary viewers would have understood all this immediately. The poet Roald de Rohan flattered the king with the observation that ancient philosophers had always grasped that harmony binds the world together. In modern times, he added, it was Louis alone who had restored political and musical harmony to the world. Another poet, Jean Lafontaine, wrote verses about Versailles itself, in which he describes four friends touring the newly built gardens. In this poem, he enthuses about the king. I celebrate him under the name of Apollo, and imagines these two solar figures side by side. The one and the other. A son, unique in their kind, appear in their pomp and wealth. Phoebus glows with envy for the French monarch. To appreciate this political message and the geometrization of nature at the same time, visit Versailles. In the early evening, watch as the setting sun nestles to a place low in the sky that coincides with the perspectival vanishing point of the lines running along the length of the garden. It's an effect mentioned in the treatise on gardening by Boisseau, which speaks of creating long, straight lines that render the alleys long and beautiful, giving them a pleasant perspective and tend towards a point which makes them seem still more agreeable. The Sun King may have been symbolized by a vanishing point, but his subjects were meant to take the point that he wasn't going anywhere. With this episode, we've begun to branch out from the scientific aspects of 17th century French thought to more aesthetic concerns. And we're going to continue that over the next couple of installments as we end our tour of this intellectual culture. On a more literary note, I just mentioned Madame de Scudery in this episode, and her name will come up again as we look at the authors collectively called the French moralists. Above all, Francois de la Rochefoucauld. He and the other moralists didn't need to go to Versailles to have an intuition of divine infinity and the puny triviality of humanity in comparison. So plant yourself down and have a listen to that next time here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.