The rise of modern philosophy

THE DREAM OF ENLIGHTENMENT
The Rise of Modern Philosophy
Anthony Gottlieb
Liveright Publishing
300 pages; $27.95

A man is asleep at a table, his arms half-covering a drawing. Behind him a whole crowd of owls, bats, cats and less easily definable creatures hovers, crouches and flutters. One of the most humanoid of them is holding out a pen, and seems keen for the man to wake up. On the side of his table, written in large letters, are the words El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. We are looking at one of the etchings in Goya's late-18th-century work "Los Caprichos." The sleep of reason produces monsters. Or is it the dream of reason? The Spanish word allows either meaning. Goya's note on the etching suggests he inclined to the former sense: The monsters arrive when reason is no longer alert. But the other reading has a long and persuasive history: When reason dreams, it dreams of monsters.

The Dream of Reason the first volume in a history of Western philosophy by Anthony Gottlieb, a former executive editor of The Economist, appeared in 2,000, and took us from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance. The new work starts with Descartes and ends on "the eve of the French Revolution." Another book is promised, picking up the tale with Kant. Mr Gottlieb's aim, admirably fulfilled, is to help us see what older and newer philosophers have to say to us but not to turn them into mouthpieces for what we already think we know.

Philosophy is many things, Mr Gottlieb suggests, including much that we no longer call philosophy, but one of its recurring features is what William James called "a peculiarly stubborn effort to think clearly." Sometimes it fails entirely, and the dream "seems merely a mirage." At other times, though, "it succeeds magnificently, and the dream is revealed as a fruitful inspiration." The dream appears as either fantasy or revelation, and Mr Gottlieb skillfully tells "both sides of the story." But what about the monsters?

Mr Gottlieb reminds us that, for Bertrand Russell, Rousseau was responsible for the rise of Hitler, because his idea of a general will "made possible the mystic identification of a leader with his people." Leibniz was inclined "to confuse his own mind with that of God." Descartes "was too quick to assume that whatever seemed to him to be necessarily true was in fact so." Hobbes was "almost charmingly naïve" about the supposed rationality of sovereigns with absolute power.

Mr Gottlieb is fully aware of the monsters in the dream, but doesn't allow them to dominate his book. He is committed to the positive aspects of inquiry, especially where scientific advances are involved. "It is by virtue of its engagement with the special problems posed by modern science that modern philosophy is distinguished from premodern philosophy."

Mr Gottlieb often makes fun of his philosophers, but as a way of bringing us closer to them, and they emerge as brilliant, vulnerable humans rather than monsters. Descartes worried about "the divine insurance plan"; "Hobbes got rather carried away" when he told us how solitary, poor, nasty, and short life was. "If Leibniz had been a composer, most of his symphonies would have been unfinished."

All of Mr Gottlieb's chief subjects - Descartes himself, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume - are engaged, precisely and in a new way, with the world outside the head. Even geometry led to politics and social theory; advanced theoretical thought constantly engaged with the physical and mechanical sciences - for a long time these disciplines were still housed under the name of philosophy. There was plenty of room for work inside the head, of course, and as Mr Gottlieb says, "philosophers always travel in several directions at once," but the material world was a laboratory and an authority replacing, even for religious thinkers, the old, unappealable orders of the church.

Thus Hobbes sought to "disentangle politics and religion." Spinoza said, "I do not differentiate between God and Nature in the way all those known to me have done." Locke was suspicious of unempirical theories that "make the mind sound lazier than it is." And Descartes, despite overdoing his mental homework, did not maintain, as he is often supposed to have done, that the mind and the body are irrevocably split from each other. "He could not explain how it is that mind and body are united, but he was sure that they were."

The "Age of Reason" is a phrase usually applied to the 18th century, but Mr Gottlieb invites us to take it all the way back to Descartes's "Discourse on Method" (1637) and his "Meditations" (1641), as long as we are willing to see reason as part of the puzzle rather than its solution. Is reason the same as enlightenment? For their conservative enemies, both are equally dangerous.

Mr Gottlieb's description of his 18th­ century philosophers actually applies to all of those he discusses: "They were asking difficult questions where no questions should be asked." Did they spread light? Of course, but they didn't always know the answers to their questions, and this is why it is appropriate to think of enlightenment as a dream: It won't always translate into the working day.

It's still a great achievement, of course, and Mr Gottlieb gives the last quoted word to the French philosopher d'Alembert, who is defending knowledge against those who claim it is dangerous. He doesn't believe "that anything would be gained by destroying it. Vices would remain with us, and we would have ignorance in addition."

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