Human knowledge is like a tree, Descartes once wrote, with each branch and twig representing one of the disciplines or fields of study. But the trunk of the tree, he insisted, is mathematical physics. And the root—the basis of all we know—is metaphysics. Thought begins in philosophy, and the deepest thinkers are the philosophers.
Were all that true, we would welcome a book such as Anthony Gottlieb’s new popular history of modern philosophy. A former executive editor of The Economist, Gottlieb published back in 2000 an accessible and enjoyable volume called The Dream of Reason, sketching the history of philosophy from the Ancient Greeks to the Renaissance. And now, with The Dream of Enlightenment sixteen years later, he carries the story forward, examining the early thinkers of the modern age.
Of course, the reputation of early modern philosophy has taken a beating over the last fifty years or so. Every schoolchild once knew that modern times began in November 1619, when a French soldier named René Descartes curled up in an oven-heated room and began to think about the proper method for thinking. Every college graduate could once have distinguished the Rationalists Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz from the Empiricists Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and all the rest: We may not have had philosopher-kings, but we did have philosopher-heroes—the colossal figures who, we were told, wrenched the world out of medieval darkness and into the light of modern times. Their systems varied greatly, they struggled and argued against one another, but they shared something vital nonetheless. We expected ordinary schooling to teach us their names and a little about their philosophies, for by their intellectual courage and mental power they had created the world in which we lived.
Those days are gone. In the great failure of nerve in recent decades, the universities became increasingly uncertain about their old general-ed requirements—for who’s to say what’s really foundational? Besides, we were no longer sure the Modern Age, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment were such great things. For a good portion of contemporary academia, their names are practically curse words.
Gottlieb is a pleasant writer, unwilling to force onto his readers any grand theory about modernity, and The Dream of Enlightenment is meant more as general history than as thesis-driven criticism. Still, to the extent he intends a specific purpose for the book, Gottlieb aims at convincing us to reject the easy notion that these thinkers can be dismissed as intellectual monsters whose baleful effects make them unworthy of being read today. We may be told that these early modern thinkers are responsible for "fascism, communism, psychiatric malpractice, economic exploitation, sexism, the extinction of species, madcap utopian schemes, environmental degradation, and much else," but it just isn’t true.
Gottlieb argues the point by putting his subjects in the context of their time: "It is tempting to think that they speak our language and live in our world," he writes. "But to understand them properly, we must step back into their shoes." And so he shows them, warts and all, as something more complicated than the pure heroes they were depicted as being in the old way of telling their story. But he demands that we also recognize all they achieved in their quest for pure reason. If we late moderns are not quite standing on the shoulders of giants, as we once imagined, neither are we standing on the shoulders of midgets.
In the usual kind of intellectual history, the Age of Enlightenment is said to begin around the time that a weak king named Louis XV ascended the throne of France in 1715. In other words, the Enlightenment started only a few years before Anthony Gottlieb’s new book on the Enlightenment ends.
But if we take seriously his choice of the word dream for his titles, then The Dream of Enlightenment becomes a reasonable description of the work these pre-Enlightenment thinkers attempted. In Gottlieb’s view, they were all incurable optimists. "Surely," they imagined, "truth was now just around the corner." Even the word optimist was coined to describe Leibniz’s claim that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and Gottlieb insists that the early modern philosophers shared an astonishingly refreshing naiveté about the likelihood that reason was near to seeing its way through from the roots of philosophy to the furthest reaches of the universe.
It’s a convincing claim when speaking of, say, Spinoza and Berkeley. It’s a harder sell when the subject is Hobbes or Hume. But Gottlieb has nonetheless identified a characteristic of every modern thinker before Rousseau. They did not manage to discover all that reason would reveal, but they did at least dream of enlightenment. They all believed that philosophy would finally place science, ethics, and politics on the firm foundation these disciplines lacked.
So, is reason reasonable? Is a system of rationality a rational thing to seek? Or were their dreams filled with monsters? It was the novelist A.S. Byatt, I think, who once suggested that the archetypal document of the Age of Enlightenment would be a careful description, complete with sketches of the numbered parts, of a cleverly designed machine for paddling the behinds of a dozen naked milkmaids, all in a row. She was thinking primarily of the next era of modern philosophy, the eighteenth century from Rousseau to the Marquis de Sade. Sex, like death, would prove more resistant to reason’s charms than advanced geometry or cosmological physics, and the dream of reason would sometimes prove a nightmare.
Not often for these early moderns, however, and in The Dream of Enlightenment Gottlieb captures something of the joy with which they worked. Even Hobbes, the dourest of them all, could be an optimist. As Gottlieb notes, "Hobbes’s claim that a scientific grasp of human nature could put an end to most civil wars is in one respect even more extravagant than Descartes’ prediction that science would abolish all disease within his own lifetime."
If there is a villain in The Dream of Enlightenment, it proves to be Descartes. In The Dream of Reason, his earlier volume, Gottlieb generally praised the Frenchman. But now he seems to think that Descartes sent reason down several constricting rabbit holes, and Gottlieb’s fellow Englishmen only barely managed to dig philosophy back out. The Dream of Enlightenment rejects the usual division of philosophers intro Rationalists and Empiricists, but Descartes, Gottlieb writes, "tried to work out too much in his head." Worried about "the divine insurance plan," he "was too quick to assume that whatever seemed to him to be necessarily true was in fact so." In the end, "God’s guarantee is not worth the paper Descartes wrote it on."
That won’t do, as an account of the man who was the first to dream that he had found the key to reason’s triumph, that cold winter’s day in 1619. No Descartes, no modernity. But in his descriptions of Leibniz, Berkeley, and Spinoza, Gottlieb reminds us why his previous volume was so successful. The early modern world comes vibrantly alive in The Dream of Enlightenment. What more could you want from a popular history of philosophy?