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Early Modern philosophy is the philosophy that accompanies in the West the rise of Modern science. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) is the herald, Kant (1724-1804) and Hegel (1770-1831) mark the transition to something new. Descartes (1596-1650) Hobbes (1588-1679), Locke (1632-1704), Spinoza (1632-77), Leibniz (1646-1716), The Philosophes (eighteenth century) and Hume (1711-76) mark the way.
In the medieval period, the project of the learned was to transmit knowledge from authoritative sources to their own times. Learning was important, because sound teaching of correct doctrine contributed to the salvation of human beings and so to their ultimate happiness in the world to come. The beginning of the Modern period was marked by the innovative argument that learning might be useful in quite another way: it had the potential to make life in this world more comfortable.
Francis Bacon () was the early Modern who developed this argument in his Advancement of Learning, published in 1605, and can be counted as perhaps the first early Modern philosopher.
His first point was that knowledge might be practically useful. But also, if so, we had to abandon the assumption that had ruled hitherto, namely that all important knowledge was essentially already there in the books or thinking of either the Bible or Antiquity. The methodology of learning, which before Modern science had relied on re-presenting (through translations) Ancient and sacred texts, and preparing aids to their correct construal through 'commentaries', had to be supplemented by a very different approach. What had to happen, argued Bacon, was the application of the human senses to observe phenomena in the world, the devising of experiments, and the derivation of defensible conclusions from them.
Bacon insisted on the importance of the senses because he thought that the new search for knowledge had to focus on 'secondary' causes - what we call simply 'causes' today - in contrast to the medieval preoccupation with purposes and functions (what was God's purpose in creating the world? what was the function of eg 'the firmness of the skins and hides of living creatures' (AL p.74)?). He thought that the way to study secondary causes was through observation and experiment (contrasting with the medieval emphasis on argumentaion, in book or classroom).
It was part of the idea of cause in this sense that change followed rules that were general.[Newton panel]
Bacon's conception of 'new' knowledge took hold, and as it did so, a new conception of the Universe emerged. The backdrop is set by Descartes (), often noticed as the originator of a new concept of 'mind', but more importantly a sponsor of a new way of thinking about physicality. The medieval assumption was that everything had a non-physical aspect called its 'form'. (In the case of the human being, the 'form' was considered to be the human soul.) Descartes argued on the contrary that the universe consisted of a 'material' or 'stuff' without any 'form'; adding that in the case of a limited number of small bits of this universal matter there was, associated with each bit, a non-material 'mental' substance. These mental substances, though attached to bits of matter (bodies), were for Descartes the essential core of the human being, their minds.
It is argued that what is happening here is the elimination of the 'spiritual' from those bits of the created universe that are not human beings, 'the descralisation of nature'. The restriction of mentality to human beings is also argued to have supported the conclusion that animals have no feeling and are therefore free of any kind of suffering. (But see Cottingham)
Descartes thought of the physical universe as a single expanse of continuous stuff. There were however a number of 'eddies' or whirlpool-like swirlings within the 'plenum': these, theorised Descartes, were the ordinary objects of our experience, including people's bodies (which were associated with minds)
Boyle() modified the plenum theory by adding that at a first approximation the physical universe was to be thought of as consisting of a tremendous swarm of small particles or corpuscles, and that the things of ordinary experience were made up of these. (Boyle thought of each of these elementary particles as a distinguishable swirl in the plenum). The 'corpuscularian' theory became accepted by most of the new seekers after new knowledge - the 'virtuosi' as they were known - by the end of the 17th Century. Opinions differed over what properties the corpuscles possessed, [Primary and secondary qualities. Galileo()] and over what forces there were that might impact on them, but they were considered (by the corpuscualarians) to be lifeless and mindless, inert entities moving under the influence of a limited number of forces. The movements of these corpuscles, and the configurations they got into, were responsible for all the features of the experienced universe.
If that was the developing new conception of physicality, what of the other substance that Descartes had identified, mentality? It was early Modern philosophy that took this question further.
John Locke's work was to develop the notion that mentality like physicality consisted essentially of 'corpuscles' - but mental 'corpuscles', not physical ones. Just as physics proposed to explain physical phenomena in terms of the corpuscle and forces acting upon it, so the mind was to be studied scientifically with a parallel assumption - that everything mental was to be understood in terms of 'ideas' and the 'mental forces' to which they were subject. Locke's theory was later dubbed 'associationism' because of the 'laws of association' that were assumed to govern the linking up of ideas.
Locke considered himself to be in a good position to prosecute the 'sense-based' study of the mind and its workings because he thought a person could 'look inside' him or her self and observe 'what was going on in their own minds'. 'Introspection' was a kind of sense.
Expressing the so-called empiricist manifesto that knowledge had to be based on sense experience, Locke insisted that all 'ideas', must come from sense experience - either from the 'outer' senses of sight, hearing etc, or the inner sense of 'reflection'. One of the ways of challenging the new Lockean programme therefore was to try and find an 'idea' (eg 'infinity', 'cause') whose derivation from sense could not be explained. In anticipation therefore Locke devotes great attention to offering explanations of how this concept or that could be seen indeed to derive (immediately or ultimately) from sense experience.
Bacon had advocated experiment and observation as the key to establishing new knowledge but others placed the emphasis elsewhere. They looked to the role of mathematics in advancing knowledge of the movements of heavenly bodies, and then of a universal physics, and thought the way forward lay with the more general application of reasoning. Descartes was one of these, founding his whole philosophy on the idea that whenever a thought was 'clear and distinct' it was bound to be true. (Descartes' examples included "I think, I exist" and "God exists")
Spinoza () took the idea that human reason was an instrument of discovery to its limits, maintaining that the universe was governed by laws which could be worked out by thinking, just as geometrical theses can be proved in the study without resort to experiment or even observation. (In a wonderful irony, he earned his living grinding spectacle lenses.)
(More important for the Romantics [link] was his suggestion that Nature was divine - either because infused with God or actually identical with Him.)
As interesting was Leibniz attempt to explain how reasoning worked.
According to his theory it exploited the fact that some concepts contained others: all reason did was to spot identities between concepts.
For example by Leibniz' analysis, the concept of man, was the concept of a rational animal. If it was then asserted that 'a man is an animal' your reason could see that this was bound to be correct, because it could see that the one concept 'animal' appeared twice, once as part of the concept 'man' and once on its own, on the other side of the 'is'.
Leibniz thought all truths were like this, but that many of the concepts human beings had in his time were imperfect: that is, they failed to reflect the true natures of things. Empirical study was necessary in order to adjust our concepts so that they properly reflected the true composition of things. But once that was done, we would be able to work out what propositions were true and what were false simply by inspecting the (scientifically corrected) concepts used.
The human being for Descartes was an association of something physical with something mental. By physical he meant whatever occupied space. By mental he meant that which thought.
It was the mental for him that had the key significance for what a human being was: a thinking thing. A person was to be identified with their 'mind'. (And now that the Scholastic 'form' was no longer credited, the Cartesian mind became identified with the human soul.)
Once the framework of the mental and the physical as two different types of existent had been introduced different possibilities within that framework were explored. Hobbes defended the idea that there was only the physical. Berkeley() claimed that there wasn't any physical at all - all was mental. With his wonderful notion of monads, each representing the whole Universe, each a closed windowless world - a sort of uber-individualism - so did Leibniz().
Locke thought of almost everything in the body and in the mind of the human being as governed by determinstic causal laws. There was one exception: the feelings of what he called 'uneasiness' which on his account often drove human action. Hunger was a particular case. On feeling hunger, Locke said, a human being would normally attempt to do something to alleviate it. (What we have here is an explanation in terms of a goal being pursued - a teleological explanation.)
(Other philosophers of the period eliminated that element of teleology. De la Mettrie, author of l'homme machine, was amongst these and so was Hobbes.)
The idea that human behaviour and thought were susceptible for the most part to (secondary) causal analysis brought with it the threat of determinism, of major concern to a Christain theology based on the possibility of sinners freely embracing the salvation offered by Christ - as well as and to open-minded thinkers anxious to maintain traditional understandings of human agency. Such worries were brushed aside by most early Modern thinkers prior to Kant. Locke for example held that free actions were those amongst the causal anticedents of which there was the operation of the power called the will : but the direction taken by the will was not causeless, nor random, but determined by desire. Hobbes said roundly... Hume argued that since the operation of the will was manifestly not random it was exactly on a par with everything else in the world, whose patterning in sum comprised in fact the causal nexus.
Locke's rejection of 'innate ideas' was a key expression of empiricism, but the conception of the human being as a tabula rasa at birth made the individual out to be essentially plastic: he or she was made what they were by the causal influences that came to bear on them as they grew into maturity. Charles Taylor calls this the conception of the punctual self, a self that is dimensionless until shaped by their environment. Two opposing doctrines exploited this conceptual innovation: Rousseau () arguing that the environment of high European civilisation served to 'enchain', writers such as Voltaire () horrified by Rousseau's vision, maintaining that a civilised education liberated and enriched.
Both the Ancients and the medievals had taken it that human beings sought 'happiness' - though there were differences about how this was to be achieved, and over what exactly happiness was. For Plato it was contemplation of the Good. While not exactly disagreeing, the Moderns interpreted ' happiness' as of a state of mind, something that Aristotle for example had specifically argued against. Human behaviour according to the Moderns was in large part driven by a person striving to rid themselves of uncomfortable feeelings and enrich themselves with enjoyable ones. Locke reached for the term 'uneasiness' to make the point. Pain is a species of 'uneasiness', and so is hunger and lust and cold. Whenever human beings initiate behaviour, they do so in order to lessen their 'uneasiness'. Bentham spoke simply of 'mankind's twin masters, pain and pleasure'. Hume agreed: "".
This perspective on the drivers of human behaviour left room for a morality that continued to think of commandments issued by God, as defended by Locke and a tradition that continued into the Enlightenment and beyond, but it was also possible to think of morality (as well as law) as a human invention - as in Hobbes. In David Hume, however, we find the most compelling application of Baconianism to thinking about morality. Even in Hume the application is incomplete, since he invokes the teleological notion that the human creature tries to maximise pleasure and avoid pain, but he sees morality as no more than a product of this elementary principle. One source of pain, Hume believes, is the suffering of others: seeing them suffer by secondary causation causes pain in us. He calls this phenomenon 'sympathy', and it is sympathy, he theorises, that leads to behaviour that would otherwise appear to be altruistic.
When it came to working out what social policies should be adopted, it was clear to Bentham () that the touchstone should be: do that which produces the greatest pleasure - which he, pace Aristotle, simply equated with 'happiness'. Later (principally with JS Mil lin the 19th Century) this perspective was taken up as a principle for guiding the actions of individuals and became the moral creed known as utilitarianism. It is a principle that continues to recommend itself, as it does to environmental thinkers once those whose happiness is to be taken into account has been widened to include animals and all other sentient entities. (Singer).
The Cartesian emphasis on the conscious experience of the individual, experience which was moreover, according to Decartes, essentially private, was but one aspect of a developing theme of early Modernity: the rise of the individual.
An early landmark was The Prince, by Machiavelli (1469-1527) published what purported to be a manual for the guidance of those who would be rulers in the new world, guidance based on the assumption that both would-be ruler and each prospective subject could be counted on to pursue with total focus their own individual interest. Others began to look at social life not as a given but as the outcome of individuals coming together. What reason would individuals have for giving up their independence and agreeing to put themselves under restrictions which living communally necessitated? asked Hobbes (1588-1679). His answer was: security. The individual person is prey to every other individual person unless they agree to set up some kind of authority charged with keeping the peace. We should think of society as bound together by a kind of conditional agreement: individuals agreeing with each other to give up their freedom so long as some kind of effective security was established. For this Hobbes thought there needed to be a central authority, which with some prudence Hobbes declared could be one person, such as a King, or a collective body, such as a Parliament: he called it a 'mortal God', and it was this entity, in pursuit of its mission, which devised both morality and law.
For Locke, a different starting point: morality must be considered God-given and therefore in place before society was established, and a natural law endowed individuals with rights - such as the right to own 'property'; and in an innovation which had direct implications for conceptions of the 'environment', Locke endowed the new individual with the capacity to own land. Not only to own it, but to acquire it through the simple expedient of using it in some way. There had been a regime of land rights in Feudal times of course, but land ownership was a new invention. This element of Locke's political philosophy - has been argued by some to structure environmental attitudes today. (See Hargrove)
Even though people were considered by Locke to be esseniailly 'equal', a central authority was necessary according to Locke, because rights needed enforcing. His theory was that we can think of people transferring whatever little power to enforce each individual possessed to a single entity, which ended up therefore with sufficient power to do what was asked of it. Unlike Hobbes' sovereign power, Locke's was not the author of all law but the subject of natural laws legislated prior to society by God. If these constraints were flouted, citizens were justified in rebelling. The rebellion of the United States against the British monarch was thought by the rebels - much influnced by Locke - to be a case in point.
Rousseau's 'Social Contract' was another variant on the theme of individuals having reasons to come together. To preserve their essential freedom at the same time as setting up a central authority, Rousseau proposed that we should think of each person contributing their individual 'will' to a sort of composite, a new entity, one thereby legitimised as the supreme authority. Rousseau called it called the 'General Will', and Napoleon for one thought it to have been massively influential in shaping the revolution of 1789 and its aftermath.
The backdrop to the changes in conceptions of the universe and its denizens is developing secularism.
In insisting that what happened in the world was the result of the operation of secondary causes (maybe in the service of the aims of the Creator) the early Moderns became committed to the tenet that events were determined by laws that were universal [side box]. It was on this point that Bacon had drawn most criticism, since it was a repudiation of belief in God's providence: the assumption that He cared for the individual person by taking into account all that was morally relevant to their particular case. Amongst those that sought to retain their religious commitment (perhaps for prudential reasons) this led to a theology called deism: there was a Creator, but what He had created was essentially a set of universal laws and a machine which had been running ever since in obediance to those laws.
This was the creed of Voltaire (1694-1778), one of the group of thinkers known as the Philosophes who drove the great Dictionary project that does much to define the Enlightenment. Under the editorship of Diderot and D'Alembert a register was to be made of all the knowledge that could be seen as sponsored by the new science, by then a mighty undertaking. It conveyed the message that the Baconian enterprise had already yielded substantial improvements to the human condition and that as it continued to do so progress would continue to be made. It was eventually curtailed for its anticlericalism but not before its anticlericalism had been clearly conveyed. Socialising in the salons of mid-18th Century Paris were a mix of theists and deists, atheists and 'sceptics' and 'agnostics': the common ground was not religious commitment but the Modern project of developing new knowledge in the service of human well-being.
Amongst them was the philosopher David Hume. It was Hume who gave the profoundest exposition of 'anticlericalism' dissent the sceptical position. There were no valid proofs of the existence of God, our senses, which were the only sources of substantial knowledge, could tell us very little indeed, presenting us only with a passing chaos of unconnected 'impressions', and the 'us' to which they made their presentations were only passing 'impressions' themselves. Hume's challenge, of explaining how from these unpromising raw materials we derive our belief that we are persistent items in an persistent world is with us today - being addressed most promisingly of course by cognitive science.
At the end of the early Modern period the Baconian plea to concentrate on secondary causation is challenged - not within the now established and flourishing science but by a new turn in philosophy. Kant (1724-1804), fearful of the implications of Baconianism when applied to human beings argues that the human being lives partly in a world which is not subject to causality. This 'noumenal' domain is neither physical nor mental as Descrates had articulated these concepts. It is a domain within which we can speak of a person acting in pursuit of goals while denying that this can be analysed in terms of the operation of secondary causes. The ends that are pursued within the noumenal domain are therefore 'freely chosen'.
In another sense they are not: they are given to human beings by their possession of rationality: a rational being has to aim to avoid inconsistency and this, thinks Kant, is the fount of morality. Kantians today would aspire to demonstrate for example that willing unlimited exploitation of oil is inconsistent with willing the indefinite stability of the planet. (Someone)
To understand morality then according to Kant we had to think of the moral agent as somehow independent of the rigid nexus of causality which ruled the phenomenal world. It was helpful he argued to think of the development of animals and plants in the same way.
Kant in his late and rather inchoate work the Critique of Judgement appears to have thought that works of art should be seen as free of the causal nexus too. At least, when the appreciation of them relies he suggests on responding to them as though they were free of the categories (of which causality is one) that rule the phenomenal world. That response cannot be cognitive, since that requires the application of concepts: it is in fact a feeling, namely the feeling of pleasure.
He offers a parallel understanding of the appreciation of beauty in nature: it is the pleasure we get when looking at natural forms when we have put on one side (bracketed, as the phenomenologists would say) the thought that the forms are carried by objects (mountains, streams) in the causal nexus.
The licence Kant had issued to invoke teleological concepts was countersigned by contemporaries such as Herder (1744-1803) and Goethe (1749-1832) and exploited with some exuberance by the next philosophical generation. Herder spoke of the human being gradually realizing their potential as they developed towards maturity, and more famously Hegel (1770-1831) spoke of human beings seeking fulfilment and offered an account of the history of a nation or people which spoke of it pursuing the fulflment of its potential. Schopenhauer thought the striving of something he called 'the Will' lay at the heart of all reality and all change(??)
A divorce between 'philosophy' and the Baconian project which had become Modern science (the identification of secondary causes) had thus been effected. There were those like JS Mill () who looked back to Bentham and Hume and Locke and addressed within that tradituon such topics as were left when empirical psychology had been subtracted (it became a discipline on its own with the interventions of Wundt and Coddlebugger): and there were those who leapt through the door Kant had opened, free they felt to discourse at length about the self (or the 'will' as Schopenhauer preferred to call it) and about the seeking of goals by people - and indeed, as in Hegel, by 'nations' or 'peoples'.
There is something of a received opinion that the Early Modern outlook, as partially reflected in its philosophising, nourished the roots of a profligate and careless - and disastrous - attitude to 'the environment'.
It is not clear that this charge is justified. Bacon, at the outset, despite some vivid writing, was urging that we should do what we could to improve the world our children and theirs would have to live in. This ambition contrasts with the focus of almost all the medieval thinkers, fixed on the world to come, and the shocking pessimism of many of them, with such a grim view of this life and the 'prison' it had to be lived in that historians are pushed to suggest the there must have been something in the water. And it contrasts with modern neo-Romantics who seek guidance not from evidence-based science but from faith-based authorities and intuition. It was after all the heirs of Bacon who hoisted the warning flags against what presently threatens us, for a long while ignored by the non-scientific world. And it is they, it may be argued, who have the most promising policy for addressing it.
Isaac Newton's work as a mathematician and physicist was fundamental to the 'scientific' conception of the physical universe that took shape at the end of the 17th Century and remained broadly intact for two centuries, and which is still in the background of much thought today. His most dramatic discoveries are said - by him - to have coincided with another great marker of the birth of Modernity, the great Plague Year of 1665-6. Newton however was not in London, nor in Cambridge, where he had just graduated (in 16xx), but in Lincolnshire, his birthplace, and his refuge from the pestilence. He returned to Cambridge and was elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1669. In 1703 he was elected President of the Royal Society (which had grown out of informal discussions of Bacon's ideas in the 1640s). Alongside the ideas which fuelled the Enlightenment, Newton reached through extensive and lifelong theological and biblical studies, religious convictions that were within the Christian tradition but unequivocally heretical.
Newton's physics displaced that of Decartes, whose plenum theory involved the claim that there was no such thing as empty space, and sought to explain all change as movement within the plenum brought about by a sort of 'friction' - through some regions of the plenum influencing other regions through contact. Descartes was a corpuscularian in the sense that he thought at a first approximation you can think of bodies as made up of corpuscles: but what the corpuscles actually were, in Descartes' view, were eddies or whirlpools in the plenum. Gassendi () defended corpuscularianism in a stronger sense: there were corpuscles, but they were not part of any continuous material plenum. They were located in 'space' that was otherwise empty. This made it easier to think coherently about movement of the corpuscles, but it highlighted a question which Descartes' plenum theory obscured, or indeed rendered inappropriate: if a body was made up of corpuscles, what kept the corpuscles together?
Newton proposed an answer, though an enigmatic one: gravity. The easiest construal of his proposal is to have him positing a 'force' acting across the empty space that separates corpuscles. To posit such a force involved the possibility of 'action at a distance', one body affecting another even though they were separated by absolutely empty space and even though absolutely nothing 'material' crossed the space between them. Many people in Newton's day - and now - find this idea profoundly counterintuitive. But by the end of his life at any rate Newton himself seems to have accepted that there were forces of this kind - electricity and magnetism besides gravity.
The other construal of Newton's physics is to take him to be describing a patterning among events without saying anything about what underlies that patterning. His formulae, of which the law of gravitation is just one - that the force between two bodies is proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them - would then be understood as yielding ways of summarising certain aspects of the movement of bodies, and allowing reliable predictions. This way of thinking about the nature of the quest for Baconian secondary causes - a search for regularities amongst phenomena - was developed later more explictly by George Berkeley () and then more decisively by David Hume ().
Part of Newton's achievement was to show that one and the same set of formulae covered bodies of all kinds wherever in the universe they were: to bodies falling to the earth, to planets moving round the sun. And this did much to consolidate the assumption that everything that happened, wherever it was, whatever it was, happened in a regular, law-governed way. This was an innovation with Modernity. Not only had Aristotle and his medieval followers thought of there being to quite distinct realms, the heavens and the sublunary region - the earth - but there was also a fundamental belief amongs medieval thinkers that God excercised providence. He apportioned suffering to reflect the merit of individuals.
[Bacon attracting criticism on this point]
It was Newtonian physics not Cartesian that won almost universal assent until well after the end of the early Modern period and it was Newtonian physics which underpinned the determinstic vision at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, The Works of Lord Bacon, Moral and Historical, Ed Anon, London, undated, Ward, Lock, and Co. First published 1605, London.
Descartes: The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge, 1985, CUP
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. (Everyman Ed.) London (1690) 1961 Dent
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. First published 1738. Page references are to Everyman edition, London, 1911, Dent
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, Gutenberg edition, translation by J. M. D. Meiklejohn eeditor Charles Aldarondo
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement , translation by James Creed Meredith, Oxford, 1928/1952, Clarendon. E-text courtesy The University of Adelaide Library Electronic Texts Collection. First published in German, 1790.
Anthony Kenny, The Rise of Modern Philosophy, Volume 3 of A New History of Western Philosophy, Oxford, 2006, OUP
John Cottingham: The Rationalists, No 4 of History of Western Philosophy, Oxford, 1988, OPUS.
Roger Woolhouse: The Empiricists, No 5 of History of Western Philosophy, Oxford, 1988, OPUS .
Interpretative
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, London, 1970, Tavistock (UK Ed)
The idea of their having been 'designed', he maintained, while strictly inapplicable, was nevertheless useful as what he called a 'regulatory' idea. Once evolutionary theory was in place such an approach became appropriate. In Kant's own day it encouraged the distractions of Naturephilosophie.
Kant changed the agenda of philosophical thought away from the quasi-empirical study of the mind to - something else. He saw clearly that empirical research should be left to the scientists. Empirical psychology, with Wundt and Leiertoft detached psychology from philosophy. In addition, Kant opened a window for teleological conceptions which his heirs exploited with, it has to be said, none of the restraint that he himself excercised. The essential human being for Kant was neither mental nor physical, since both these belonged to the aspect of reality that, structured by causality, was the field of empirical science. The essential human being was for Kant a being free of causality and free to pursue ends. But he or she was the possessor of rationality, and that is to say, Kant argued, they were called to pursue consistency as their highest aim. It proved difficult for Kantians to suggest plausable examples of where the aim of avoiding inconsistency yielded substantive guidance.
He offers a parallel understanding of the appreciation of beauty in nature: it is the pleasure we get when looking at natural forms when we have put on one side (bracketed, as the phenomenologists would say) the thought that the forms are carried by objects (mountains, streams) in the causal nexus.
That is to say, to appreciate beauty - in nature as in art - you have to set aside the thought that it is a product of deterministic processes and think of it as created: constructed by an agency capable of aiming at an outcome, not locked into the causal nexus. You have to appreciate the object as the outcome of an agency's pursuing an aim. Your response will be non-cognitive - the feeling of pleasure.
There would appear to be a question: what is the mechanism that produces this pleasure? Kant seems to acknowledge that there is such a question, and sketches in the idea that it has to to do with the 'free play of imagination and understanding'. This suggests that what generates the pleasure is the realization that what creativity appears to have created (something that must be done in the noumenal world) is something we can understand - ie think of as a configuration of objects (mountains, trees, streams) in the phenomenal world.
Is the thought here this:
Creativity could produce anything - it is limited by nothing, certainly not by causality. Only some of these outcomes produce pleasure. What is it about them that results in pleasure? Answer: some outcomes mirror those that are produced by the operation of causality. The products of causality - ie the world as it appears to us - are things we can understand - they are things which we experience under the categories. So sometimes creativity produces something we can also understand, and sometimes not. It's nice when we do.
He has a suggestion to make as to the mechanism which produces the pleasure - which is difficult to follow. Is it this? - that this 'form' you are aware of when its belonging to a phenomenal object has been bracketed off is something you can in a sense 'understand'...
What on earth can this mean?
Kant theorizing about the appreciation of beauty suggested that nature as well as art might be appraised from this point of view: as though it had been created by an agency free of the nexus of causality. One of his definitions of beauty is 'the form of finality in an object so far as perceived in it apart from the presentation of an end'. Ju 236 See Korner 184)
Kant's theorizing about our attributions of beauty still has its appeal and plays a role in contemporary discussions of beauty to be found in nature. (Emily)
The licence Kant had issued to invoke teleological concepts was exploited with ome exuberance by by later philosophers. Herder () spoke of the human being gradually realizing their potential as they developed towards maturity, and more famously Hegel () offered an account of the history of a nation or people which spoke of it pursuing the fulflment of its potential. Schopenhauer thought the striving of something he called 'the Will' lay at the heart of all reality and all change(??)
People were beginning to need Donne's plangent reminder: 'no man is an island'.
What was individualism a rejection of? In the medieval period, the emphasis was not on the experience of the individual
Application of the idea that a knowledge of causation (in the modern sense) was crucial if useful knowledge was to be discovered involved the assumption that whatever happened happened in accordance with strict general rules.
The new world-view that emerged once copuscularianism had achieved consensus at the end of the 17th Century was therefore simply this: the universe is a set of entities which move only and always according to general rules.
[Newton came at the idea that change in the universe proceeded according to universal laws from another perspective: the idea that it was in essence mathematical. See sidebar]
The new conception of the universe that took shape with the establishment of Modern science is well expressed by Laplace in the 18th Century:
"An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis: to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes."
Laplace (1749-1827)
How did these leading ideas of early Modern philosophy find expression in a perspective on what we now call 'the environment'?
0.
2. The senses come to seem more and more important.
3. Pleasure comes to be seen as centrally important as a human goal. (Bentham)
(The idea that people are sub-mechanical devices driven by the pursuit of pleasure/avoidance of pain takes hold.)
The conception of the human being as a collection of particles, with some of them perhaps mental particles( 'ideas'), was very congenial to the idea that it was indeed a piece of mechanism. Some early Modern philosophers took this step - Thomas Hobbes ()for example. Others relied on the conception of the 'will' to make the difference. One key question made sense to all parties however: What brings it about hat the human being does this rather than that ?
The dominant answer given was this: the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. (Butler, Locke, Bentham, Hume).
[Draw moral for attitude to the environment from this: pleasure was something available in this life, whereas happiness, involving living with God, was not. Also, it weakened the distinction between brutes and human beings, because,as Bentham had insisted, the brutes were capable of feeling: It was no longer decisive that they were considered incapable of rationality, the prerequisite, in Medieval thought, of eternal happiness through the contemplation of God. Societies for the protection of various animal species were to gain great momentum in the 19th Century, but the philosophical foundations were laid in the 18th.
With pleasure sponsored as a legitimate motivator, the enjoyment of worldy things was something to be seriously explored. Beauty becomes a source of philosphical study (known since Kant (?)) as aesthetics; and Westminster Bridge gets written. This was a developing appreciation not only of landscape but of the fine things human architects and builders were capable of too.
How was ethics to be thout about by those who conceived of the human being in robot-like terms? For Hobbes, you simply had to do, you simply did do, whatever produced the most pleasure for you. ??
For Butler
For Hume behaviour that responded helpfully to the pain of others flowed from the human capacity for sympathy. He meant by this the psychological mechanism he supposed human beings to have whereby an observer of someone in pain feels pain him or self: it is avoiding pain for oneself that motivates the mitigation of pain in others.
This idea has been taken up by environmental philosophers in recent decades. If Hume's thory of morality is correct, the planet will only be saved if human sympathy can be extended beyond family and neighbours and the wider human family to embrace animals and plants and, as may be then necessary, the world itself.
Rousseau
How is the new conception of the human being linked to Rousseau's insistence that the human being is 'corrupted' by civilisation?
The Augustinian idea that nature is corrupt is reversed by Rousseau: nature is fine, civilisation is corrupting.
Social Contract?
Locke maintains that there is something called ownership of land, and that it is created by mixing your labour with it. Ownership had previously not been thought of as applying to land: instead you had a regimen of rights and duties pertaining to it. This is the origin of the modern notion of property. This comes with the rise of the individual.
Associated with the new conecption of the human being is individualism. How are these connected?
One link is the religious rejection of the intermediaries between God and the human being.
Individualism as a perspective on social issues is the parallel of Locke's tabula rasa picture of the mind. The human being starts off clear of knowledge - every human being does. There is an epistemological equality here, just as there is a social equality at the outset of life, an expression of the social égalité at the heart of the Revolutionary manifesto.
The common ground is the punctual self, as Taylor articulates it. The Modern self can become anything: Rousseau preached that in the process it would be corrupted by civilisation; Voltaire and the other mainstream Enlightenment figures held that the socialisation process, the process of the self becoming something, would make for a sensitive liberated individual.
"Landownership became an official legal distinction in England after 1660 with the abolishment of feudal dues. The concept of landownership was introduced into British social and political philosophy thirty years later as part of John Locke's theory of property." p. 178.
Eugene C. Hargrove, "Anglo American Land Use Attitudes", in Richard G. Botzler and Susan J. Armstrong (eds), Environmetal Ethics, Boston Mass etc, 1998, , McGraw Hill, (2nd Edition) pp.171-184.
4. Animals are seen as capable of suffering and this is deemed relevant.
6. Politically Locke holds that property is acquired by mixing labour.
7. There is a growing concern for improvement.
8. There is a new take on education - Locke.
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This view of the human being was another sharp break with medieval thought. A human being, in Medieval thought, was conceived of as matter organised by a form (to simplify somewhat) and the form was identified with the Christian soul. In early modern thought, the soul was identified with a person's mind, a completely different idea.
These two breaks with medieval thought created a new picture of the human being. Medieval thought had thought of a human being as 'prime-matter-with-Form': the Moderns thought of the human being as a collection of material 'atoms' (the human body) with some of them believing there was associated with the body a collection of mental atoms. And in thinking about the 'material' atoms of which the body was considered to be composed, the Moderns abandoned the medieval insistence that these in their turn must be thought of as 'prime-matter- with-Form'. There was discussion of whether material atoms were small bits of matter, or, instead, small material particles (In what sense must atoms to be thought of as 'divisible'?): but soon after Bacon the concept of a 'Form' ceased to play a role in early Modern thought (despite a powerful rearguard defence by Leibniz).
In effect, Bacon's manifesto was accepted, and as Modern science became established a new conception of the Universe emerged.
Application of the idea that a knowledge of causation (in the modern sense) was crucial if useful knowledge was to be discovered involved the assumption that whatever happened happened in accordance with strict general rules. (Bacon's critics had seen clearly from the beginning that the idea of God's Providence was undermined by this assumption: a regime of general rules seemed incompatible with a Creator steering events so that each individual got what they deserved.) The new world-view was complete when corpuscularianism achieved consensus at the end of the 17th Century: the universe was a set of entities which moved only and always according to general rules.
Philosophers coming after Bacon devoted themselves partly to 'clearing the way' for the new science - Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant - but partly also to applying the new concentration on secondary causes to the case of human thought and behaviour. John Locke's great work was titled 'An Essay concerning Human Understanding', and at its core was the attempt to explain how thinking was to be understood on the basis of the new 'scientific' perspective.
Bacon:
We should regard knowledge as 'a rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.'
Advancement ..., (11)
We should understand knowledge not 'as a courtesan, for pleasure and vanity only, or as a bond-woman, to acquire and gain to her master’s use; but as a spouse, for generation, fruit, and comfort.'
Ibid
'God’s commandments or prohibitions ... the originals of good and evil' - Bacon describing a theory of morailty. Ibid (6)
[Put later as a consequence of the new world view:]
The invalidation of any sense of God's caring everyday providence left the doctrine known as deism, articulated for example by Voltaire (1694-1778): the universe had indeed a Inventor, but it ran on its own. Diderot is said to have observed that a deist is 'someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist'. (Quoted in Blackburn's Dictionary, p.97b)
20:07:07
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Early Modern philosophy is the philosophy that accompanies in the West the rise of Modern science. Francis Bacon argued in 16nn that the emphasis placed by medieval thinkers on 'final' causes - purposes and functions - was disproportionate, and should shift to the identification of 'secondary' causes, by which he meant the things we speak of as 'causes' today. The key to studying secondary causes was observation, and especially experimentation. The tight focus of knowledge-seekers in Bacon's time on argument - in the classroom or book - should be liberalised and room made for sense-based enquiry.
Bacon's manifesto chimed in with new approaches to the human interest in knowledge being made by Galileo (1564 - 1642) and others whose reputation is as pioneers of 'science' rather than as philosophers.
Philosophers continued to address the new approach to knowledge and its growth which had been outlined by Bacon. Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) exposed the weakness of thinking that important knowledge was to be acquired through observation by pointing out that we knew that the senses sometimes deceived us, and had no sense-based evidence for thinking that they didn't do so all the time. John Locke () accepted that sense-based belief was indeed corrigible, but would have to do - although he had no good rejoinder to Descartes he appealed to the intuition that a lot of the time our senses serve us well enough. The end of the early Modern period was marked philosophically by the acceptance, in the person of David Hume () , of almost total ignorance. The only way we have of acquiring knowledge is through the senses, and we have no reason at all to think they are telling us the truth.
This was the outcome of philosophers exploring the idea that new knowledge about the world could only be established by the use of the senses (without ruling out the involvement of reasoning in addition). Meanwhile, those who were increasingly identified distinctively as scientists were forging ahead, and with great success in a variety of fields, with the sense-based methodology. As philosophical scepticism increased, so scientific knowledge grew. The common ground was that if there were such a thing as knowledge or even useful belief, acquiring it had to involve observation and experiment.
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In the early Modern period awareness of the environment as the human being's only home and human responsibility for it emerges.
Francis Bacon
The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects. [Holbach, System of Nature, 15]
...Man is, as a whole, the result of a certain combination of matter, endowed with particular properties, competent to give, capable of receiving, certain impulses, the arrangement of which is called organization, of which the essence is, to feel, to think, to act, to move, after a manner distinguished from other beings with which he can be compared. Man, therefore, ranks in an order, in a system, in a class by himself, which differs from that of other animals, in whom we do not perceive those properties of which he is possessed. [ System of Nature 15]
From Wikepaedia, Holbach
Locke "has displayed to mankind the human reason just like a good anatomist explaining the machinery of the human body" Voltaire, quoted by Kenny, RMP, p.91.
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Bacon's call was for 'learning' to realize its potential for making life more comfortable. His recommendation was that it should concentrate on secondary causes, and that if it was to be successful in this new endeavour it must rely on observation and especially on the specially devised occasion for observation, experiment.
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Revised 05:12:04
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