Great Ideas of Philosophy

2. His Letters on the English makes this clear and ties the achievements in Britain to the intellectuallyliberated climate of thought: He compares membership in the Royal Society (science and achievement)to the French Academy (birth and orthodoxy).IV. Voltaire has a splendid model for this mode of casual criticism—Michel de Montaigne, whose famous Essais(1575) celebrates secular knowledge, common sense, common decency, the right way to work throughproblems, the philosophies worth having, and the gentle ridicule of the pomposity of self-appointed authority.A. With Montaigne, too, there is an enlargement of the discursive community, a movement toward thedemocratization of knowledge.B. Voltaire is in the direct patrimony of Montaigne: Knowledge is not meant to vindicate belief but to help usdetermine which beliefs are worth having.V. The wit and iconoclasm, the attention to precision and machines duly noted, it is time to turn to a mind of aradically different cast, that of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778).A. Against the attention to science and technology, Rousseau looks to nature in the raw, unanalyzed, sparedthe “resolutive-compositive” methods of the tinkering classes.B. Against the rationalism of the Enlightenment—its contempt for superstition and its reverence for highcivilization—Rousseau draws attention to the inauthentic lives constrained and corrupted by civilization.C. Rousseau is the harbinger of the Romantic rebellion but bears the same tools of high culture and literaryastuteness that are the mark of Enlightenment thought.D. In Emile, Rousseau takes the position that civilization works to the disadvantage of what is most authenticabout us, that the very process of civilizing someone strips him of certain natural tendencies andsentiments.E. In Du Contrat Social (1762), Rousseau offers one of the most summoning lines in all of politicalphilosophy: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”1. Rousseau referred to the chained mind—the mind tied to orthodoxies that render it incapable of itsown natural functions.2. We find in Rousseau, too, a particular form of naturalism, a concession to nature as the last word, askepticism toward merely human contrivances and merely habitual modes of conduct.VI. In La Mettrie (1709–1751), naturalism tends toward materialism. Man—A Machine, La Mettrie’s banned bookof 1748, extends to its logical conclusion the materialistic drift of Descartes’s own psychology.A. The human body is a machine that winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual movement.B. Given that all the faculties of the soul depend on the actions of the body, the soul is an “enlightenedmachine.”C. La Mettrie calls on the reader to come to grips with the fact that human life is biologically organized andthat this organization is shaped by external conditions.VII. Locke’s translator in France, Etienne Condillac (1715–1780), introduces in his 1754 Treatise of Sensation themodel of the sentient statue, a block of stone, shaped by its environment.A. As the result of an incessant interaction with a stimulating environment, the statue comes to formelementary Lockean sensations, ideas, and more complex ideas.B. The point, of course, is that our essence does not precede our actual existence in the world and that thekinds of beings we are serve as a record of the experiences we’ve had.C. Not long after this, Thomas Paine, in his Common Sense, will speak of rank and titles as “a magician’swand, which circumscribes human felicity.” Again, the guide in all things is nature. Newton and Baconinstructed us in how to read the book of nature without adding our own preconceptions to the facts.VIII. Helvetius is in the same tradition of a radical environmentalist.A. But Helvetius recognizes that the classes that exist in this world must have been made, because it isobvious that political forces are needed to preserve them.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 23