## Metadata - Author: [[Anthony Gottlieb]] - Full Title: The Dream of Enlightenment - Category: #books ## Highlights - Despite Descartes’s current reputation, the man himself seems to have been less interested in metaphysics than in applying algebra to geometry, and delving into the innards of cows. While living in Amsterdam in around 1630, he visited butchers’ shops every day to fetch carcasses for dissection. His explanation of the rainbow was a landmark in experimental science, and it was almost right. He independently discovered, and was the first to publish, the law of refraction, known in English-speaking countries as Snell’s Law, which explains why a straight stick can appear bent when partly immersed in water. ([Location 124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=124)) - Descartes’s theories in physics held the stage until they were superseded by those of Newton at the start of the next century. Newton himself was a more or less orthodox Cartesian in the 1660s, and it is sometimes said that his later work would have been unthinkable without the start that Descartes had made in overthrowing the Aristotelian system to put a “mechanical” one in its place. ([Location 491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=491)) - By the eighteenth century, Descartes, and especially the topics of his Meditations, was a popular starting-point for any philosophy that regarded itself as modern. Even Voltaire’s hero, Locke, who was often as far removed from Descartes’s opinions as anyone of the times, said that he got his first “relish of philosophical studies” from reading Descartes. ([Location 561](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=561)) - Descartes’s quest for “infallible demonstrations” in all branches of science, even including medicine, and his confident deduction of proofs about God, the soul and matter, showed the excessive influence of mathematics on his mind. Perhaps this is understandable in a mathematician of genius. Locke, by contrast, advocated a more cautious and experimental approach to philosophical questions, and this difference between Locke and Descartes came to seem crucially important. Voltaire believed that it accounted for their many differences of opinion about the soul and other matters. Later historians went even further. It was said that all the main battles of modern philosophy stemmed from this dispute between indubitable reason versus fallible experience. ([Location 605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=605)) - In his Critique of Pure Reason, which was published in 1781, Kant contrasted two rival schools of philosophers, the “empiricists” and the “noologists” (from the Greek word for intellect, nous). Two prize pupils from the first school were said to be Aristotle and Locke, who stressed the role of experience in the formation of knowledge. Two from the second were Plato and Leibniz, who emphasised reason instead. This way of dividing philosophers into opposing teams derives from two rival sects of Greek medicine in the third century BC. One sect developed ambitious theories about the inner workings of the body; the other aimed to do without any theories, and based its treatments on whatever seemed to have worked in the past. As the great medical writer Galen (c. 129–c. 200) put it: “[doctors] who rely on experience alone are . . . called empiricists . . . those who rely on reason are called rationalists.” ([Location 610](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=610)) - Bacon maintained that there are really three kinds of philosophers: ants, spiders and bees. Empiricists are like ants. They “simply accumulate and use; Rationalists, like spiders, spin webs from themselves; the way of the bee is in between; it takes material from the flowers of the garden and the field; but it has the ability to convert and digest them. . . .” Bacon advocated the way of the bee: one should combine the best parts of the experimental and rational faculties. ([Location 652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=652)) - Hobbes drew the inevitable theological conclusion from his materialism. Only matter exists, so even God himself must be a physical being. This made Hobbes an “atheist” to practically everyone except himself; to most other people, a physical God did not really count as a God at all. The belief in a material God is one of the rarest heresies in the history of Christianity. Tertullian (c. 160–c. 220), one of the Latin Fathers of the Church, believed it, and nothing in the Bible contradicts it, as Hobbes pointed out in a futile attempt to render it palatable. The early church councils never ruled on the question, but the notion was abhorrent to all good Christians from at least the thirteenth century, if not before, until the nineteenth century, when the new American religion of Mormonism embraced it. Mormons maintain that the Bible means what it says in the passages that describe man as made in God’s image. Their own scriptures state that God the Father (though not the Holy Ghost) “has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s.” ([Location 704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=704)) - Early in the twentieth century, an American philosopher, John Dewey, wrote that in Hobbes’s day politics was by common consent “a branch of theology,” and that “Hobbes’s great work was in freeing, once for all, morals and politics from subservience to divinity.” ([Location 737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=737)) - Hobbes lived through England’s civil wars, and several wars of religion on the Continent. Did these terrifying times prompt him to offer a cure that was worse than the disease? Many have thought so. Denis Diderot (1713–1784), the principal editor of the French Enlightenment’s Encyclopédie, wrote in the 1760s that Hobbes had mistaken the particularly dangerous circumstances of his own day for a universal phenomenon. Hobbes had therefore adopted too grim a view of human nature and proposed too drastic a remedy for it. That is also the gist of some virtuosic invective by Hugh Trevor-Roper (later Lord Dacre), a British historian who died in 2003. Dacre summed up Leviathan curtly: “The axiom, fear; the method, logic; the conclusion, despotism.” ([Location 751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=751)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Hobbes also made the better reply that, even if a sovereign is not granted absolute power, but instead just enough to do his job, there is still some danger that he will abuse it, since “he who has enough strength to protect everybody, has enough to oppress everybody.” ([Location 797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=797)) - A “totalitarian” state was characterised by the Italian fascist leader, Mussolini, as one which is not “limited to . . . enforcing law and order, as the Liberal doctrine would have it,” but is “all-embracing,” and concerns itself with “all the manifestations of the moral and intellectual life of man.” ([Location 807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=807)) - In his old age, Hobbes made some strikingly immodest claims about the importance of his own contributions to science and mathematics; but the only other elements of his biography that may even raise an eyebrow are instances of mild eccentricity. He was, for example, in the habit of singing to himself in bed, because he believed that this would prolong his life. Singing was not the only unusual thing he did in bed: he was also wont to indulge his passion for geometry by drawing triangles on the sheets and on his leg. These curious facts, like most anecdotes about him, come from his close friend and admirer, John Aubrey, a historian and antiquary. ([Location 871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=871)) - Hobbes and Descartes did not think much of each other as philosophers. One bone of contention between them concerned the limits of mechanical explanation. Hobbes did not think that there were any. Descartes, as we have seen, believed that mechanical explanation stopped short of the thinking self, which was beyond the reach of physics. ([Location 944](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=944)) - Hobbes is usually careful to say that being in a state of war does not necessarily mean constant mayhem. In fact, on his understanding of the term “war,” its nature “consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.” In other words, it is the continuing threat of violence, not necessarily bloodshed itself, which qualifies as a state of war. He compared the situation to “foul weather,” which may not consist in actual downpours “but in an inclination thereto of many days together”—a state of the elements that is particularly familiar in Britain. ([Location 1078](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=1078)) - What inclined him to believe that “all society . . . is a product of love of self, not of love of friends,” and that “all the heart’s joy and pleasure lies in being able to compare oneself favourably with others and form a high opinion of oneself”? Hobbes’s cynicism extended even to laughter, which was to be explained as “nothing else but” a sudden feeling of superiority. In part he was led to such unflattering and simplistic generalisations by his desire to set psychology on a scientific footing. Simplicity is a virtue in science: if laughter and all our other pleasures can be traced to a single cause, so much the better. The powerful force by which “each man is drawn to desire that which is good for him and to avoid what is bad for him,” which Hobbes had compared to the force of gravity, seemed to him to provide the most economical and best-confirmed explanation of our psychology. It was therefore a suitable cornerstone for the mechanical science of human behaviour that he sought to provide. ([Location 1145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=1145)) - Hume argued that self-interest did not in fact provide a simple explanation of human psychology but rather a convoluted one. He aptly characterised Hobbes’s type of theory as the idea that “whatever affection one may feel, or imagine he feels for others, no passion is, or can be disinterested.” According to this way of thinking, even sincere friendship or benevolence are forms of self-love, since “unknown to ourselves, we seek only our own gratification.” But, Hume pointed out, the most economical way to account for the gratification that we obtain from our benevolent actions or friendships is to acknowledge the simple fact that we sometimes take pleasure in the well-being of others. ([Location 1169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=1169)) - Nowadays, the term “law of nature” means something rather different. It is used almost exclusively to refer to scientific generalisations such as Newton’s laws of motion. This scientific sense of the term is older than modern science itself: Roman writers in the first century BC already described physical processes and events as bound by laws. Thus Lucretius wrote that iron is attracted to magnets by a law of nature. ([Location 1188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=1188)) - In 1683, four years after his death, Oxford University issued a decree condemning twenty-seven “impious doctrines” and the “pernicious” publications that defended them. Copies of Hobbes’s Leviathan and De cive were ceremonially burned in a quad, together with some two dozen works by other authors, while a crowd of scholars stood by the bonfire and hummed their approval. This seems to have been the last large public book-burning at Oxford. Here are two of the doctrines attributed to Hobbes in the decree: Self-preservation is the fundamental law of nature, and supersedes the obligation of all others, whenever they stand in competition with it. In the state of nature, there is no difference between good and evil, right and wrong; the state of nature is a state of war, in which every man hath a right to all things. ([Location 1245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B016CAJIZO&location=1245))