Silva Rerum | 17.08.2015 Cet étrange secret, dans lequel Dieu s’est retiré, impénétrable à la vue des hommes, est une grande leçon pour nous porter à la solitude loin de la vue des hommes. Il est demeuré caché sous le voile de la nature qui nous le couvre jusques à l’Incarnation; et quand il a fallu qu’il ait paru, il s’est encore plus caché en se couvrant de l’humanité. Il était bien plus reconnaisable quand il était invisible, que non pas quand il s’est rendu visible.
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Toutes choses couvrent quelque mystère; toutes choses sont des voiles qui couvrent Dieu.
Blaise Pascal
Speaking about the philosophy of the Baroque may seem to be an undertaking that promises very little cognitively. It is obvious, of course, that however we set the limits of a given era, we can then describe what was happening within that period in any given area of culture, including philosophy. However, while in the case of eras such as the Enlightenment or Romanticism, the relationships between philosophy and the main trends of culture are relatively easy to reconstruct, these relationships and the way in which they form are decidedly less clear. As a result, historians of philosophy, when it comes to talking about the philosophy of this period, usually refer to purely chronological categories, such as “the philosophy of the 17th century”, avoiding describing it as the philosophy of the Baroque. This difference may be, I believe, explained by the fact that the basis for the distinction of the Baroque as a certain cultural period is comprised in part of phenomena from other disciplines than in the case of the Enlightenment or Romanticism. While in the case of the latter two eras, these are mainly phenomena from the fields of philosophy and literature, the concept of the Baroque is commonly defined primarily by reference to the architecture, art, music and to a certain extent literature, mainly poetry. The matters of expression inherent to these fields are in an obvious way less translatable into the language of philosophy, as a result of which the relationship between them and philosophy, although undoubtedly deep, are much harder to describe in philosophical categories. In other words, the relations between the philosophy of the Baroque with the most important areas of its culture are situated in deeper layers of philosophical thought that those that usually constitute the object of historical and philosophical studies. Paradoxically, in order to see what the “Baroqueness” of the philosophy of the Baroque is about, the philosophy must be framed and described in a way that is mostly free of historical relativisation and distance that characterises a typical narrative of a historian of philosophy. Only in this way can we reach those deeper layers of concepts and problems, in which the philosophy of the Baroque is connected in a meaningful and interesting way with other phenomena that make up contemporary culture.
In other words, what is most important from an intellectual and scientific point of view when talking about the philosophy of the Baroque is the fact that this is the first – in the strictest sense of the word – modernthought. If we overlook the various problems connected with the very term “modernity”, this can be reduced to the fact that this is the first philosophy systematically and on a grand scale undertaking exactly the same questions which contemporary thought is faced with. To put it in other words, it is exactly the philosophy to which we owe the appearance of a set of questions, concepts and problems, with the help of which we can today attempt to define the undertaking called philosophy. At the same time, both the non-human world is concerned, that is the fundamental structure of physical reality, the nature of time and space, or a causal link, as well as questions belonging to the theory of knowledge or the widely understood philosophy of man, that is philosophy of the mind, theory of operation, moral philosophy as well as social and political philosophy. Another interesting characteristic of philosophy of the Baroque is the fact that most of the problems it was concerned with, it considered from the wider religious-theological perspective, while using the central idea of God as a tool for asking posing and solving metaphysical, cognitive and anthropological questions.
The novelty and modernity of emerging philosophy in the Baroque period can be partly explained by the fact that it was then that a stricter than previously thought possible union between philosophy and the natural sciences that had been developing since 16th century, with physics at the fore, was discovered. An important role was played by the unprecedented progress in the field of mathematics, just beginning to take shape, of which a basic outline remains to this day. These advances were often a direct response to the challenged from the natural sciences which, building a more and dynamic picture of other world needed mathematical tools capable of describing the evolution of various physical systems over time. These tools were supplied by infinite analysis, created at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, mainly by Newton and Leibniz, which later became the core of modern mathematics.
Thinking about these facts from the history of science, we should always remember that they were in no small way the work of people who were at the same time the leading philosophers of their time. First and foremost, we should mention such thinkers as Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz – these are certainly the most prominent philosophers of the era, yet each of them has made a substantial – and in the case of Descartes and Leibniz, epoch-making – contribution to mathematics and the natural sciences. We should also be aware that the fundamental studies performed in the Baroque were treated as part of philosophy at the time (for example, Newton’s main work from 1687 is titled Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, or Mathematic Principles of Natural Philosophy), which was not merely a tribute paid to tradition, but also reflected the fact that at the basis of these studies and theories were numerous assumptions and solutions of a purely philosophical nature.
Philosophising in constant relation to developing science, thinkers of the Baroque era – and this is the fundamental characteristic of the modernity of their view of the world – were the first to see a substantial disparity between the scientific picture of the world and man and everything that made up the ordinary image, or its interpretations provided by traditional philosophy, religion and theology. Although some of the concepts and theories developed by scholars such as Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and above all Newton, are currently the subject of an elementary school education, in many respects they contradict everyday experience and common sense, and yet their unprecedented efficacy in explaining and predicting physical phenomena would have us believe that they describe the world as it truly is, or at least that they describe it better than common thinking. This tension between the existing image of the world and its image shaped by science did not concern only physical issues, of course. More important was probably the tension between what might be called the religious and moral self-consciousness of man and what science had to say about the nature of man. Is there room – if a scientific description of the world is to be taken seriously as its true description – for human liberty and moral responsibility? In a world governed by laws of physics, what is the place for the human mind, subjective experience and awareness? How should we think about God as the creator of the world? Is it possible to maintain the concept of a personal God, acting with the aim of goodness and salvation, or do we need to replace this idea with the concept of God as a kind of metaphysical necessity? These and similar questions very well illustrated what kind of dilemmas faced the Baroque era philosophers, and also give us an idea of the degree – unprecedented in previous history of philosophy – to which their thinking was marked by contradiction, how much it was torn between conflicting and impossible to reconcile aspirations. This antinomy is another striking feature of the Baroque, as well as another mark of its modernity and timeliness.
When speaking about the leading thinkers of the Baroque era – leading not necessarily in terms of recognition from contemporaries, but certainly in terms of influence on philosophy (and not only philosophy), we should name Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Blaise Pascal, Baruch Spinoza, Arnold Geulincx, Nicolas Malebranche, Antoine Arnauld, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, George Berkeley and David Hume. While the latter is considered to be the most important representative of British Enlightenment, important theoretical considerations make it necessary to accept his ideas as having evolved from the main problems and dilemmas of philosophy of the Baroque and constituting its culmination – similarly to Leibniz’s philosophy on the Continent. Striking among these thinkers is the enormous variety of their positions on many of the fundamental metaphysical, epistemological, anthropological and theological issues, as well as the great diversity of styles of practicing philosophical reflection, from a treatise written in a “geometric” mode like Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, or especially Spinoza’s The Ethics, to the literary, non-technical language of Pascal’s Pensées or the mostly short but extremely dense essays and dissertations of Leibniz. We can also specify at least one striking feature in common: almost all these scholars and philosophers remained outside their contemporary universities. They maintained lively contacts, mainly via letters, with the academic world, but they did not play an important role in it and in that sense, they remained outsiders. This is obviously not unique to the Baroque period, but it seems to be a generally important feature of modern philosophy that outstanding, creative thinking often develops outside the university and against the model of philosophy imposed by it. However, it is precisely in the period we are concerned with that this characteristic occurred with particular force. We could probably venture to say that the philosophy of the Baroque era was not an academic philosophy.
There are of course deeper features common to outstanding philosophers of the era. I have mentioned some of them in a general way, now it is time to substantiate those remarks.
The idea of God and his place in the structure of philosophical theory underwent an interesting change in the philosophical thought of the Baroque. It is safe to say that for all the authors mentioned, philosophy began to seek support in the area of – so to speak – the secular and the finite, and in this sense to do without God. I do not mean that any of these authors was an atheist in the sense that became widespread only in the 19th century. The problem was that God – to recall one of Pascal’s famous formulations – became for Baroque thought more and more of a hidden God. Philosophy must start from the assumptions localised either in the physical world, or in its sensory perception, or finally in thinking itself – that is, exclusively in the area of the finite and the created. Within this framework, God allows himself to be thought; however, much more as a matter of theory than a directly given reality. This can only be in faith, which, however, is an external realm in relation to philosophy. Although, for every one of the great thinkers of the Baroque, God occupies a central place in their vision of the world, he is not the basis for philosophy anymore, not in a metaphysical or epistemological sense. It is hard to find a more glaring example of the antinomy of contemporary ways of thinking.
Let us demonstrate this with two examples, forming a kind of frame of the Baroque era in philosophy. The first is Descartes, in whose philosophy God plays a role as seemingly basic as can be imagined. He is the guarantor of this validity of our knowledge, through which Descartes understands the judgements and beliefs, stemming directly from clear and distinct concepts, having their source in God, not in the sensual perception or thinking. God, implanting us with these concepts, makes certain that we cannot stop ourselves from certain judgements, thus if they were to be false, that would speak to the imperfection of God, since the desire to deceive and mislead is an imperfection. God cannot lie to us, thus we cannot be mistaken in what he suggests to us in a clear and distinct way. We can only be mistake in that which we do not understand clearly and distinctly, which therefore does not come directly from God, but – for example – from our senses. Let us note, however, that although God’s truthfulness is a crucial link in Descartes’ argument attempting to show the truth of certain fragments of our knowledge, the criterion allowing us to extract beliefs, in the case of which we can recall this divine virtue, is the clarity and explicitness of concepts, a quality that belongs to the order of finite human thinking. God is thus a postulant of a theory, not something directly given to thinking. In this sense, already in Descartes, God is a generally hidden God, who manifests himself through clear and explicit ideas in the order of thoughts, but the understanding of it as a manifestation of God each time requires aninterpretation, which is our, human work.
In Leibniz’s work, the concept of God occurs primarily in the order of metaphysical considerations, in the form of a particularly understood necessity, substantially different from a purely logical necessity. The characteristic feature of Baroque thinking is that the basic concepts – for metaphysical considerations – of possibility, necessity and contingency are framed in formulas referring to the feasibility for God. Metaphysically, what is necessary is what could not be done otherwise, even by God; what is possible is what could be made so by God, and contingent is what indeed actually exists, but could be made otherwise by divine power.
These concepts were framed thusly already by Descartes for whom metaphysical possibility and necessity overlapped in scope with logical possibility and necessity, the criterion of which was not divine omnipotence, but the ability to think of a state of things in a consistent way. For Leibniz, a drastic divergence of the logical and metaphysical order occurred. That which we are capable of thinking in a consistent way in no way teaches us what is possible, what could be – that is, what God could make. That is in no way accessible in the order of pure thinking, but it is also not directly accessible in any other order, even in the order of faith. For Leibniz, there are essentially two roads leading to partial insight into this metaphysical order of that which is possible and necessary, both – which should be emphasised – completely independent of any direct references to God. The first is the sensory experience enlightening us about the so-called factual truths, the other is the experience and reasoning that comes from this experience. In this concept as well, God remains a certain postulate, and the image of the world stretching out from the divine point of view remains essentially inaccessible to man, is something hidden forever.
Even Pascal, the relatively most “fideistically” inclined among the great thinkers of the era, when speaking about a strictly philosophical order, reduces God down to a kind of projection of human rationality, although not a purely theoretical rationality, but a practical one, calculated primarily to make choices and decisions relevant to human life. The famous Pascal’s Wager is an attempt to show that then we take into account all possible scenarios, the winning strategy assumes that God exists (and a life according to the tenets of a religion), but the concept of God, whose existence we are to get on, had its source in the order of pure thinking is a certain purely intellectual ability, which does not in the slightest move us closer to understanding divine mysteries.
Accordingly, although for the philosophy of the Baroque God remains an important – perhaps the most important – horizon of thought, thought itself becomes increasingly aware of its distance from the absolute, and at the same time becomes increasingly based on itself and its finite principles. It is a way of thinking that will become, in later history of philosophy, a practically mandatory model which later, at the end of the Age of Enlightenment will gain – with the help of Kant and the German idealists – the popular name of transcendentalism. And through American thinkers of the late 19th century – mainly pragmatists – and in Europe through Husserl and the phenomenologists, transcendentalism will become – not always conscious – the basic way of thinking of a large number of philosophers of the 20th century.
The theme of transcendentalism is closely related to another great achievement of the Baroque thinkers, namely the discovery of consciousness. Although it may seem surprising, before the 17th century, neither in philosophy nor in common thought, no idea existed that would at least approximately correspond to what we call consciousness – a concept highlighting the particular perspective from which a creature endowed with a developed intellectual life perceives the world, and from which it is capable of experiencing, understanding and evaluating its own mental states.
Speaking to this lack of an earlier concept of consciousness is, among others, the fact that thinkers of the 17th century initially expressed it with the Latin term conscientia (and its French equivalent conscience), meaning, especially in the stoic tradition, a conscience in the sense of the power of moral judgement. It was, therefore, Descartes and his successors who began to use the term to denote knowledge of one’s own mental states. The first author who coined a district term for this concept was Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), from whom comes the commonly used in philosophy of the mind term “consciousness”.
In a short time, consciousness had grown to the level of a central problem in philosophy, focusing all relevant metaphysical, epistemological and practical ethical topics. It was an enormous challenge for philosophy primarily because it did not integrate into a picture of reality increasingly dominated by science in any obvious way. This is another example of the antinomic nature of the Barque: the transcendental turn inherent to this thought, of which I spoke of earlier, required treating human perception, thought and consciousness as a distinguished frame of reference, against which we can only sensibly speak of something like reality and its description, be it scientific or metaphysical. At the same time, however, everything that, in this modern perspective, appeared as reality, left increasingly less room for the perspective from which only a reality thus perceived made sense. Various attempts at solving this dilemma were undertaken in the Baroque period and the decades of the 18th century that directly followed it. In this respect, in which the ideas of Spinoza and Leibniz on one side, and those of Berkeley and Hume on the other, can be considered representative, it seems that these attempts headed in two main directions. The first of these was an attempt of incorporating consciousness and the mind into a basic metaphysical structure of the world, somewhat contrary to the logic of its scientific, physical description. Spinoza made thinking, and the mind as part of it, an equal attribute of divine substance on par with the corporeality that contains the whole physical world. In turn, Leibniz postulated (because he was never able to verify it empirically) that the world, on the fundamental level of its organisation, consists solely of incorporeal, spiritual substances (monads), whose only properties are perceptions (the clearest of them are characterised by consciousness – apperception).
In turn, empiricists in the type of Berkeley and Hume paid tribute to various versions of phenomenalism, or the position in which we can think about physical reality only in categories of what manifests in our mind by means of the appropriate experiences and observations, and above all the empirical order ascertainable in them. We can also venture to say that speaking in favour of this solution were not only epistemological considerations, but also metaphysical and anthropological: the belief that making the mind a condition of the appearance and knowability of the world would provide the mind with an indisputable place in the basic structure of reality.
We can of course look at these and other similar dilemmas of the philosophy of the Baroque from a purely historical perspective, as an expression of the transitional nature of this era, only opening the early modern thought and culture, but at the same time stuck firmly in the traditional ways of thinking and notions about the world. At closer inspection, the diagnosis turns out to be completely misguided. There is of course a certain irrefutable, but at the same time completely trivial, sense, in which the Baroque, both in philosophy and in other fields, draws on the heritage and accomplishments of earlier periods. The same can be said of any era in the history of culture. The perspective blurs, however, that there are eras more or less revolutionary, more of less breaking with the past. Baroque, also in philosophy, decidedly belongs to the latter.
When confronted with the nascent – beginning in the 16th century – new image of the world, made up of both revolutionary discoveries and scientific theories, as well as new experiences and social concepts (we should remember that it was at this time – thanks to, among others, John Locke – that the foundations of liberalism were created, which to this day remains a leading mainstream of social and political thought), the traditional image of the world, in the measure in which it was still important to Baroque thinkers, underwent far-reaching changes. These philosophers by no means tried to reconcile tradition and modernity, but rather reconstructedwhat they considered to be tradition, in light of the new ways of thinking, as a result of which its image also underwent revolutionary changes. The concept of man as a conscious, free, and morally responsible subject, similarly to the concept of God as a metaphysical and ethical absolute, took on a whole new meaning. This is where they had to find their place in the context of the world, revised through history, science and politics.
The antinomy of the Baroque image of the world, attempting to combine disproportionate threads, derived from various circles of idea and experience – scientific, metaphysical, common and moral – resulted in philosophy on the one hand, gaining theories with an enormous, unprecedented levels of complexity and difficulty of interpretation (we can say that beginning in the Baroque, philosophy became a difficult discipline, untranslatable into the everyday language and discourse), and on the other hand, it was expressed in the previously unseen in philosophy sense of the mystery of the world. It is thanks to the philosophers of the Baroque era that an important motif in European thought became the fact that everything is different than it seems, that everything hides secrets, and a double secret at that – on the one hand connected with its structure, inaccessible on a daily basis to experience and discovered by science, and on the other hand with its place in the whole sense of the world, defined by the moral and eschatological destiny of man.
Translation: Lingua Lab
