Stoic disintegration in Philosophy and Literature.

Primary version of this post, with visual content, at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

‘Stoic’ ethics and reason (the position that reason is sovereign, is sovereign over the self, and is tested in living) is both reaffirmed and taken apart in the 16th and 17th Centuries. This can be seen in Montaigne and Descartes; Shakespeare’s plays and Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Descartes seems to parallel Cervantes in Discourse on Method, Part I when he refers to the fantastic stories that people may believe in enclosed in the world of books

But I believed I had already given enough time to languages and even to reading ancient books as well, and to their histories and stories. For talking with those from other ages is the same as travelling. It is good to know something about the customs of various people, so that we can judge our own more sensibly and do not think everything different from our own ways ridiculous and irrational, as those who have seen nothing are accustomed to do. But when one spends too much time travelling, one finally becomes a stranger in one's own country, and when one is too curious about things which went on in past ages, one usually lives in considerable ignorance about what goes on in this one. In addition, fables make us imagine several totally impossible events as possible, and the most faithful histories, even if they neither change nor increase the importance of things to make them more worth reading, at the very least almost always omit the most menial and less admirable circumstances, with the result that what's left in does not depict the truth. Hence, those who regulate their habits by the examples which they derive from these histories are prone to fall into the extravagances of the knights of our romances and to dream up projects which surpass their powers.

Descartes refers to the knights of romances and their influence on those who give too much importance to old fables and histories. Paying too much attention to such old books is like travelling away from our own country too much (this from Descartes who spent his life in the Netherlands, Bohemian and Sweden, rather than France). It is useful to travel so that we can compare customs, but if we travel too much we forget our on country and don’t belong anywhere. The reading of old books may take us away from the home of our own time. The interest in the value of comparing customs may come from Montaigne, though for Montaigne such knowledge comes from reading and writing at home, and sometimes from meeting people in France. The emphasis on journey into the past, and its dangers, marks a deep sense of the difference between past and present. A difference great enough that to be in a past time for too long is too become alienated from the present, and from our own mind.

Accidentally, or not, Descartes seem to describe the premiss of Don Quixote, the crazy poverty stricken minor aristocrat who reads so many books of chivalry, he thinks he is living in such a story full of magicians and giants. In this we see the breakdown of the ‘Stoic’ ideal of the sovereignty of reason, a sense that unreason is something pressing in on us, which is something Descartes deals with in the idea of the deceiving demon. With that thought, Descartes tries to push back into some deep core of the sovereign reason of the self, going well beyond the Stoic sense of self-regulation through reason. The defence of Stoic reason is just as much a recognition of its breakdown as a defence. Once reason is pushed back into this inner sphere of absolute rationality, it is losing its contact with the philosophy tested by how we live life. Descartes appeals to reason as an ethic of life, but that disappears in the purely internal struggle of mind to exclude deception.

Montaigne had already started this disintegration of ‘Stoic’ ethics and reason exploring itself. For Montaigne, reason does not just reflection on reason, or lead the will and the passions to a proper place under reason. Reason reflects on itself as something subjective and embedded in passions and will. The point becomes to understand the self as subjective self, and to understand others in their subjective selves better.

Pascal at the beginning of Modern Philosophy

Primary version of this post, with visual content, is at Barry Stocker's Weblog.

The question of where modern philosophy begins is clearly not answerable, There’s always an earlier precedent for what someone has said, or a later really significant step beyond archaic residues, But let’s at least not just passively assume that modern philosophy began with Descartes. Even in Descartes’ time, Antoine Arnauld pointed out precedents for in Augustine for Descartes’ Cogito, in his ‘Fourth Objection’ to the Meditations on the First Philosophy (fourth of five ‘authorised’ objections to the Meditations printed with Descartes’ reply as an appendix). Of course it was Arnauld that Pascal was defending from his religious enemies, in The Provincial Letters. Søren Kierkegaard pointed out the paradoxes around saying that philosophy became modern in Descartes, as if philosophy was not claiming to be atemporal, and as if it could be reinvented again from nothing, in Johannes Climacus. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger suggested the idebtedness of Descartes to his contemporary, the late Scholastic Francisco Suárez, somewhat messing up Descartes’ claims to have put the Scholastics in their place. Kierkegaard’s point rather undermines the discussion I have proposed, but I think Kierkegaard appreciated that we have to periodise; as always he wanted to show the inherent paradoxes of knowledge, and the absurdity of some of the formulations of Descartes’ place.

It could be Suárez, it could be Francis Bacon, it could be Montaigne, no doubt there are other contenders, so why Pascal?

1. Pascal might be the first to really give a sense that the human individual grasps itself as alien to the universe.

2. Pascal might be the first to give the sense that human nature is contradictory (between passion and reason, between reason and the senses, between mind and body), and not in a way which can be resolved by balance, moderation, or the sovereignty of reason.

3. Pascal might be the first to break with Antique notions, still very present in Montaigne and Descartes, of moderation, balance, and tranquillity, as achievable and as guiding principles for ethics and rationality.

4. Pascal might be the first to give the sense that human individual grasps itself as a concrete, particular existence preceding description or any particular perception.

5. Pascal might be the first to give a really strong sense of how different the universe is after New Science from older conceptions, when he talks about infinitely large and small, for example.

6. Pascal might be the first to give a really strong sense of humans as alien to nature.

7. Pascal may have taken a big step in scepticism beyond his predecessors. There are various ways in which Pascal picks up on sceptical elements in Ancient philosophy, and in Montaigne and Descartes. But he gets beyond the sense the earlier scepticism always has of offering a cure for illusion in a healthy life style, Scepticism is traumatic in Pascal and tied in with the trauma inherent to human existence. For Descartes scepticism cannot affect actions.

8. Pascal’s Wager might be the first bit of economic reasoning about action, an account of the trade off of benefits and costs in believing in God. It’s missing the point to think this argument is about proof of God’s existence or proof of the grounds of faith. It theorises choices and actions as guided by calculations about costs and benefits, though it looks at the conscious level it hints at the power of that at the habitual level, because the wager is about how you form a habit of belief.

9. Though Pascal takes the idea of ‘mystic foundation of law’ from Montaigne, he really creates the idea that law is absolutely and inherently unjust and violent in principle, not just in application, as I suggested in Sunday’s post.

Link of the Day: Chris Bertram Podcast on Rousseau

Primary version of this post is at Barry Stocker's Weblog, with visual content!

Why Rousseau Matters

I found this at Alexander Bird’s Philosophy at Bristol blog which links to podcasts of philosophy talks given at the University of Bristol. The last entry is for July, and that is Chris Bertram’s Inaugural Lecture as a Professor. Bertram is one of the contributors to the collective blog Crooked Timber, which is perhaps the most influential political though blog around. Bertram is a leading Rousseau commentator, so I was very interest in hearing this (particularly as I as discussing matters relevant to Rousseau in both of yesterday’s posts) and was not disappointed.

Bertram disposes of the very persistent idea that Rousseau’ philosophy is based on a belief in the natural savage, explaining that what Rousseau is concerned with is how civilisation adds a different kind of self-love to immediate self-love of natural man. Rousseau’s goal is not the return to a ‘noble savage’ but to resist the most negative aspects of the self love which seeks recognition from others. Rousseau’s gaol is to mitigate, and eliminate social status anxiety and envy. Bertram perhaps slightly underestimates the degree to which Rousseau sees humans torn between the two kinds of self-love, between natural and social selves, and as he mentions himself, Rousseau thinks there is an ideal balance at a very early stage of social existence before inequality grows. I would say there is always a tension in Rousseau between the immediacy, the non-anxiety of he natural self and the anxious self-consciousness of the social self. There is always a wish to be more in accordance with nature, but as Bertram is explaining also a positive theory of social development. As I mentioned Pascal in both of yesterday’s posts, it’s appropriate to mention that I think there are some broad similarities on those issues (a divide in man between greatness and fallenness and what comes out of that).

Bertram gets in a few jokey remarks about academic status in relation to other professions, individual academic status anxieties, and rankings of university departments. These do bring the issues in Rousseau to life. Bertram finishes with some remarks on Raws’ version of egalitarianism and Rawls’ work on global justice, arguing for a more radical egalitarian approach. This is not my approach, but Bertram does a good job of presenting his approach in relation to Rousseau. Bertram’s approach is that of Marxist who has moved to a very radical form liberal egalitarianism, so paralleling the development of the late G.A. Cohen, who I posted on a few days ago, with reference to his sad death.

One small think which caught my ear was that Étienne de la Boétie, and his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, was mentioned as a forerunner of Rousseau’s criticisms of authority. That connected with yesterdays comments on Montaigne as a Boétie was a close friend of Motaigne and is mentioned in the Essays. I have noticed something recently about the reception of de la Boétie and I will deal with that tomorrow.

Montaigne and Pascal on the Foundation of Law

Primary version of this post at Barry Stocker's Weblog, with visual content!

I’m more familiar with Blaise Pascal than with Michel de Montaigne, but I am doing some work on Montaigne at present. I’ve noticed something that I had not noticed before, how much Pascal takes from Motaignes’s Essays and uses in his Pensées. That include Pascal’s famous phrase about the mystical foundation of law.

What is the difference between them in the context of that phrase, something which will give me a start in thinking about the relationship between them. Montaigne, who had been a judge, refers in the immediate context to the impossibility of justice in law, There is always a contrast between following the forms of law and what the sense of justice tells the judge. There are always mistakes so that the innocent are punished. Montaigne concedes that as a judge he must have been involved in many mistakes and many occasions in which his sense of justice collided with the decision he had to bring. In the broader context, he refers to the endless possibilities of interpreting law. The law is never obvious, it can always be debated and there is no end to the debate or the number of positions that can arise in the debate. So justice is not present for at least three reasons: inevitable mistakes, the conflict between intuitions of justice and what the existing law requires, the impossibility of certainty in knowing what the law says. Legal judgements can only arise through a biased interpretation of law, there simply is no interpretation which will not be endlessly discussed if we try to be completely objective. The way law works as whole is that it is there and has to be applied, it has not foundation beyond the fact of its existence. This acceptance of legal institutions though they cannot be just is the mystic foundation of authority.

Pascal’s contextualisation refers to the force of law. This does not exactly contradict Montaigne, but Montaigne seems to think more in the sense of law as a habit rather than something imposed by force. Pascal also refers to the link between custom and equity. Equity, the sense of the broad justice of law as a whole, is an outcome of custom. This does not exactly contradict Montaigne either, but it seems more radical to emphasise that any sense of equity is a product of custom. Pascal directly criticises Montaigne’s view by saying that people do not not follow law through custom, but because they believe it is just. Again, even here, Pascal does not really contradict Montaigne, he is also concerned with the role of custom and habit. What marks out Pascal’s position is he thinks irrational beliefs are necessary to laws and the state. Montaigne emphasises imagination, but Pascal goes further in seeing the social world as something that depends on what people imagine.

Montaigne does not really emphasise contradiction, he presents a self that knows it is highly fallible but does it best to follow a modestly defined reason. Legal institutions are not just, but people obey them because they are used to them.

Pascal strongly emphasises contradiction. He strongly emphasises the irrationality of the self; and the way it imagines itself and the world. People obey legal institutions because they believe them to be just. The process by which people come to believe they are just must be a least partly as in Montaigne, habit. But for `Pascal, the habit builds on force and the imagination. The human self is not just confused, it is driven by imagination, by the search for glory, and external force.

Montaigne versus Pascal, is like Montesquieu versus Rousseau?

I don’t suggest that will completely work, but it would be a useful comparison.

Montaigne and Montesquieu see moral imperfection, errors of judgement and lapses into violence, intruding into social life.

Pascal and Rousseau see constitutive egotism, illusion, and violence, at the origin of social life.