LEARNING FROM SIX PHILOSOPHERS, BY JONATHAN BENNETT

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© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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CRITICAL NOTICE

LEARNING FROM JONATHAN BENNETT

Derby, United Kingdom

I

The appearance of Jonathan Bennett’s two-volume work on the great ration-alists and empiricists is a very important event.

1

He has of course publisheda number of books and articles on all of these philosophers over the years,beginning with the book on Locke, Berkeley and Hume, but it is a greatpleasure to read his most recent and concentrated thoughts on all six of them,and the relations between them. For two reasons, the author of the bookjacketsis absurdly optimistic in claiming that the book is “an excellent introduc-tion” to the early modern period. First, although Bennett’s style is as clear asit is possible to be, the material is very dense and often very difficult. Second,as Bennett himself points out, even allowing for the fact that he confineshimself to metaphysics and epistemology, he has not tried to be comprehens-ive, and a number of topics are either treated very cursorily, or not discussedat all (such as Descartes’s arguments for the existence of God, or Spinoza’saccount of freedom). He has chosen topics which he finds “interesting andnourishing to wrestle with” (Vols. 1 and 2, p. v). Those who are alreadyfamiliar with Bennett’s work will know what to expect. Although he clearlyknows the texts inside out (both the familiar and the less familiar), the em-phasis throughout is on depth rather than breadth. The general atmosphereis that of a well-conducted seminar, where issues are thrashed out to the end.There are two bibliographies and two sets of indices, but the sections andchapters are numbered consecutively straight through both Volumes, andI guess that the decision to split the work into two (the first principally onDescartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, the second principally on Locke, Berkeleyand Hume) was for commercial rather than philosophical reasons. Bennett isconstantly drawn into making interesting comparisons that do not fit even approx-imately into the encyclopaedists’ distinction between rationalism and empiri-cism, and we are constantly and rightly reminded that the distinction is notparticularly helpful. For example, Spinoza and Leibniz had no interest in

1. Jonathan Bennett,

Learning from Six Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley and Hume

(Oxford University Press, 2001. Volume 1: xx + 404 pp. Volume 2: xx + 376 pp. Each volume£30.00).

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© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2003

Descartes’s first-person approach to metaphysics, the stance of “methodologicalsolipsism” (Vol. 1, p. 357). Leibniz in particular “seems to have thoughtof minds rather in an external or third-person manner, taking them as sub-stances endowed with certain powers and properties. Nothing in this concep-tion of the mind enforces self-awareness” (Vol. 1, p. 284). Conversely, the bestexamples of Cartesian theories of mind are to be found in Locke, Berkeleyand Hume. (Incidentally, Bennett himself seems to have much less sympathythese days for the view that our knowledge of the world has a “Cartesianbasis”, as he once put it.) Some readers may wonder why Bennett did not gothe whole hog and arrange the main material in the right chronological order,with Leibniz coming between Locke and Berkeley. This reader also thoughtthat the indices were inadequate for a work of such length and complexity.

II

There is something more than faintly absurd in trying to summarise, and tocomment on, such a dense, rich and fertile work, so my summary will havebe comparatively brief and the comments will be restricted to a few pointsthat particularly caught my attention. Most of the material in the first volumefalls naturally into three parts, the first on Descartes—his physics and hisaccount of space, matter and causation, and the ‘dualisms’ that generate hisdivision of the world into two entirely different kinds of substance; the secondon Spinoza—his accounts of substance, of the parallelism between mind andbody, of belief and of desire; the third on Leibniz’s physics and metaphysics,and on the central but extremely implausible doctrine that all true proposi-tions are necessarily true. The highlights include a discussion of a problemthat would eventually exercise Kant in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason: in theunity of self-consciousness I am presented to myself as a single, unitary, indi-visible (and perhaps persisting) thing, but it is far from obvious, as Descartessupposed, that I (whatever I may be) am really single, unitary and indivisible.Indeed, all the other evidence available to me suggests otherwise (Vol. 1,pp. 69–71). Another highlight, to which I shall return, is a very careful analysisof various threads in the notion of substance. One thread arises from a dis-tinction between object and property; another from a concern with objectsthat persist through alteration; another from an Aristotelian view that somethings are basic or primary, others secondary; another from the equallyAristotelian view that some things exist independently of everything else, insome sense of ‘independent’, which in some philosophers generates the furtherthought that only simple and indivisible things can be substances; and so on(Vol. 1, pp. 133f., p. 225f. and elsewhere). There are numerous interestingasides and thought-provoking historical points. For example, we are remindedthat, despite all the noise that Descartes makes about thinking substances, hetells us nothing whatever about their internal mechanisms. All his explana-tions of the mechanics of mind are actually accounts of the workings of thebrain (Vol. 1, pp. 108–9). Indeed, if Descartes had thought too much aboutthe possibility that introspection must involve some kind of mechanism, he

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would have had to allow that it could break down, and that would have fatallyundermined his view that we have completely transparent and infallibleaccess to the contents of consciousness. Another example is Bennett’s claimthat Spinoza’s

Ethics

belongs in certain respects more to the late twentiethcentury than to the seventeenth, especially in the insistence that events in themind must be matched by events in the body (Vol. 1, p. 132). I wonderwhether Bennett is being too kind here. One of the pleasures, and agonies, ofreading seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers is to discover theoften ambiguous signs of an emerging modern conception of efficient causa-tion, and in particular an understanding of psychophysical causation. Spinozaalso has links with the twentieth century in seeing that teleological explana-tions are prima facie problematic, though Bennett argues that his preferredsolution, that of denying the existence of teleology altogether in favour of adoctrine about

conatus

, is both unnecessary and implausible (Vol. 1, §86). Athird example is Bennett’s simple, no-nonsense explanation of the origin andmeaning of the word ‘apperception’ (Vol. 1, p. 283).

Throughout this first volume readers are given a very vivid sense of the wayin which, in each of the rationalist philosophers, every doctrine is bolted toevery other, the physics to the metaphysics, the metaphysics to the logic andthe philosophy of mind. Perhaps that explains why Bennett feels he mustdevote twenty pages to Descartes’s account of causation, while remarking that“Descartes had no considered views about the nature of causation” (Vol. 1,p. 84). It is, however, certainly true that we can only fully appreciateDescartes’s view of extended substance by grasping his view of space andmatter;

mutatis mutandis

the same is true of Leibniz’s story about monads, hisphysics, and his resolute rejection of transeunt causation. Bennett has thehappy knack of guiding us patiently and sympathetically through philosophicalsystems that are, to put it mildly, very strange indeed—particularly in the caseof Spinoza and Leibniz. He also has a gift for the telling and economicalphrase: “Spinoza holds that rocks and galaxies are not substances because theyare too small, whereas Leibniz says that they are not substances because they aretoo big” (Vol. 1, pp. 232–3). However, there is at least one engaging admissionof disappointment, at the end of a chapter on Spinoza’s views about mind-body parallelism: “the exegetical aspects of this chapter have been plodding,conservative and uncreative” (Vol. 1, p. 169).

The first volume closes with two dispiriting chapters on the Cartesianmethod and the search for indubitability. Bennett’s Descartes turns out to bea very muddled fellow. He escapes the famous charge of circularity, but onlybecause he has a short attention span. By the time he reaches the thirdMeditation, he has rather lost interest in his main rule of method (to acceptthose beliefs he clearly and distinctly perceives to be true) and effectively startsagain, by putting his trust in God. Furthermore, his metaphysical route—and that of many of his opponents—is determined by a series of alternatingattacks of panic and relaxation, rather than by any appreciation of the import-ance and force of arguments. He is looking for psychological stability, notintellectual conviction. “Descartes is concerned with reasons, arguments,considerations, etc. in their role as causes, not as justifiers, of doubt or

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confidence” (Vol. 1, p. 377). I can’t really see the point of reading this Descartes,unless you have an interest in philosophical psychiatry. I prefer to read theDescartes who panics because sceptical arguments are good arguments, andbegins to relax when he finds arguments for the existence of a non-deceivingGod that he (wrongly) believes to be good arguments. And my Descartes canavoid the threat of circularity by using his principle of method to underpinthe arguments for the existence of God, rather than pretending belatedly tounderpin the principle with the arguments.

III

The second volume opens with a knotty and ultimately inconclusive discus-sion of what Locke might have meant by ‘ideas’. It is inconclusive becauseLocke’s initial inclination to think of ideas as mental images (as “

extremely

thincoloured pictures”, as Wisdom put it) had to be modified radically as he wentalong, but he was never clear exactly what modifications should be made. Myown feeling, for what it is worth, is that ‘idea’ and other empiricist technicalterms, such as Hume’s ‘impression’, were introduced and used as terms of artwithout anyone thinking too hard and too long about what they were sup-posed to mean. It was hardly surprising, for example, that the argumentbetween Locke and Berkeley over abstraction proved so fruitless. Bennettpoints out how two of the main connected pillars of empiricism graduallycrumbled: the claim that simple ideas are the basic materials of knowledge,and the claim that words get their meaning by standing for ideas. The last ofthe great empiricist trinity, Hume, was prepared to concede that we can thinkabout all sorts of things without any relevant ideas in the offing, and con-versely that some of our ideas, most notably the idea of necessary connection,have no basis in reality. At this point we should begin to wonder whether theway of ideas is any longer doing any work (Vol. 2, p. 25).

We then move to Locke’s attack on innate ideas and Leibniz’s reply in the

New Essays

, and in turn to discussions of our knowledge of necessity and ofthe secondary qualities. Bennett does wonderfully well in his discussion ofinnate ideas, but as he points out, one fundamental difficulty is that Lockeand Leibniz never seemed to be quite sure what the argument was about.I applaud Bennett’s choice of the Lockean dispositional account of the sec-ondary qualities, where, for example, colour is a disposition to cause a certainidea in normal perceivers in normal circumstances, but I think that he iswrong to reject out of hand Locke’s (and Mackie’s) attempt to make some-thing of a point about resemblance—that is, the claim that ideas of primaryqualities resemble objects, ideas of secondary qualities do not. Crudely, we seeshapes as shapes, but we do not see the disposition to reflect mixes of light asthe disposition to reflect mixes of light, but as a peculiar property evenlyspread across things. We need to say more about this, though I have to confessthat I have never succeeded in saying it. I was also puzzled by Bennett’s claim(Vol. 2, p. 148) that there is no “hint” of secondary qualities associated withtouch. What about hot and cold? Rough and smooth? Abrasive, ticklish, velvety?

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Slippery, watery, soggy, clammy? Possibly some of these shade imperceptiblyinto primary qualities, but I think that at least some are concerned with howthings feel to us, how they are disposed to produce perceptions of a distinctivekind that belong with perceptions of colour, smell, sound and taste.

We then reach a very important set of chapters on essentialism. Curiously,one of the best statements of the Kripke/Putnam view of natural kind terms—albeit more as a metaphysical doctrine than as an account of language—is set out in detail in the

Essay

and in the

New Essays

, with Leibniz deserv-ing the credit for seeing one crucial point, that general words have an indexicalrole, and for tying their use to stereotypical examples of each kind. Locke ofcourse eventually rejected all talk of real essences, but for an interesting pair, notto say muddle, of reasons. Bennett successfully identifies one of them (Vol. 2,p. 98): Locke the empiricist believed that we would never be able to perceivethe very small structures that constitute the real essences of things. But heoverlooks the other one: in a number of places in the

Essay

, especially in BookIV, Locke the pessimistic rationalist complains that, even if we could observe“insensible particles”, we could never understand why they attract and repelone another, why causes bring about their effects, and how one set of propertiesdetermines or excludes another. I should also note in passing that it is far moredifficult to treat biological kinds as natural kinds than Bennett seems to think(Vol. 2, p. 104). For example, the obvious proposal, that biological species arenatural kinds, rapidly collapses, because typically the members of any givenspecies are genetically too diverse, and any reference to identity of descentfalls foul of the assumption that a real essence consists in intrinsic properties.

There is a thoroughly sane discussion of Berkeley’s account of the physicalworld and of finite spirits, though I was surprised to learn that Berkeley’s viewof causation (the view that causes and effects are not causally related, but aresigns of the presence of God, who causes all of them directly) is “excellent”(Vol. 2, p. 162). Perverse, certainly; potty, possibly; but excellent? Perhaps thisis just a disingenuous way of reminding us how much Hume’s account ofcausation owes to Berkeley. The rest of Volume 2 is devoted to Hume’s viewson belief, relations, causation, the existence of bodies, reason and reasoning,and identity (the last of which allows an interesting comparison with Leibnizand Locke). Although most of it is splendid, I was rather disappointed by thechapters on causation, because, for much of the time, the discussion is moreredolent of the nineteen sixties than that of the recent past. Apart from a verybrief passage on pp. 279–81, there is no serious hint of any alternative toHumean scepticism about necessary connection. This is doubly unfortunate.First, Hume’s one and only argument against our belief in necessary connec-tions in nature is the utterly weedy thought that we cannot observe them. Hiseventual account of causation is not an intellectual triumph, but a reductio ofsimple-minded empiricism. Second, there have been many worthwhileattempts over the last forty years to develop non-Humean accounts of causa-tion. (One notable example is Harré and Madden’s book on

Causal Powers

(Basil Blackwell, 1975).) One of the many sources of such accounts is Kripke’saccount of natural kind terms. Bennett doesn’t seem to notice that the Leibnizianessentialism about natural kinds for which he apparently has some sympathy

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pushes us very strongly towards the view that causal laws are necessary truths.Since members of natural kinds have certain properties essentially (namelythose that determine membership of the kind), and since those properties inturn determine their causal powers, certain features of their behaviour occuras a matter of necessity. If

per impossibile

they didn’t behave like

that

, theywouldn’t be members of

that

kind.The final chapters on identity caught my attention for three reasons. First,

I was interested in the suggestion that, in his account of identity, Locke usesa notion of substance that he does not use elsewhere, the notion of somethingthat “would be listed in a basic ontology” (Vol. 2, pp. 329–30). This notionis quite different from that of substance determined by real essence, and alsofrom that of substance in general, or the substratum of properties. Second,I disagreed entirely with his interpretation of Hume’s account of personalidentity. He underestimates the sheer peculiarity of the account. According toBennett and Pears (Vol. 2, pp. 354–5), Hume is in effect offering an accountof minds and simply ignoring the role of bodies in our conception of personalidentity. According to me, his account of persons is merely a special case ofhis general account of objects, and he believes that every object whateverconsists, strictly speaking, of a more or less organised collection of impressionsand ideas. We may speak with the vulgar of things such as ‘minds’, ‘persons’or ‘bodies’ but all of these things are ultimately constructions from variousimpressions and ideas. So, when he says that he is a bundle of perceptions,the perceptions will include, not merely the contents of his own mind, butalso, for example, other people’s perceptions of his body. In other words,we can make most sense of his account of identity by refusing to force it intothe tattered relics of a Cartesian distinction between mind and body, andby supposing that he is anticipating William James’s account of objects orRussell’s neutral monism. Or, to put the point less anachronistically, Hume’sontology is Berkeley’s without the spirits.

Third, I was provoked into thinking about woods and trees. Those whowrite about the history of philosophy have to strike a difficult balance betweenfollowing all the fine detail of some historical work and standing back toconsider any philosophical problems that are of general interest and import-ance, irrespective of the historical context. Bennett is surely as good as any-one at striking that balance, though he does have a slight tendency to bringdiscussions to a sudden halt with a stark instruction to read selected modernauthors. In particular, I thought that he might have said more about animportant ontological problem that turns up regularly, in some form or other,throughout both volumes. There is a tradition running from Aristotle to Kantand beyond, in which the basic objects of the world are thought of as unitary,continuous substances, which persist through alteration. Descartes, Locke andBerkeley certainly belong to that tradition. Spinoza and Leibniz probably doso as well, though their respective baroque splendours make it more difficultto place them neatly within it. According to another tradition, exemplified byWhitehead, Quine and Ayer in some of his phenomenalist phases, the basicobjects are discrete and discontinuous events or states or processes or stagesor slices or whatever, and a so-called substance is merely a well-organised

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collection of such things. Hume clearly belongs to that second tradition, forin his account of the existence of bodies and of personal identity he explicitlydenies that anything persists through alteration, and he advises us to think ofevery object and every person as a well-organised collection of perceptions.(I guess incidentally that Bennett also sees himself as belonging to that tradi-tion, since he introduces his favourite notion of tropes whenever he can, eventhough it is only in the discussion of causation where it does any useful work.)Now, as we have seen, Bennett has a lot to say directly or indirectly aboutthese matters, since he discusses all sorts of different conceptions of substancethroughout both volumes. But his remarks are usually directed at their respect-ive local targets, and I think it might have been interesting to tie all thedifferent threads together in a general chapter or two on ontology.

IV

Prima facie the book could reasonably have been called

Assorted Thoughts onSix of my Favourite Philosophers

, but Bennett expects us to take his chosen titleseriously: we should “learn” from them. In the Introduction he concedes thatan interest in the Great and Dead is neither “

necessary

nor

more important

thanstudying our contemporaries” (Vol. 1, p. 3), and mentions David Lewis assomeone whose philosophical work was not apparently informed by aprofound knowledge of historical figures. (He might also have mentionedQuine.) But he argues that we can none the less learn from them in severalways. We can learn from “successes”, which will include, not merely thediscovery of truths, but also “warnings and pointers and suggestions” (Vol. 1,p. 4); we can learn from “struggles and failures”; and we can learn fromcontrasts between the approaches of different philosophers. Moreover, thisencouraging thought is reinforced by Bennett’s enviable capacity to manu-facture unlimited numbers of silk purses from sows’ ears, for example in hisdiscussion of Descartes’s bizarre view that God freely chooses the modalities,and decides what is necessary, possible or impossible. But I am not convincedthat we can or should expect to ‘learn’ something in the process. One obviousdifficulty is that different readers will learn very different things. All of us wantto read Hume’s account of causation. Bennett learns that our yearnings forpowers, makings and necessary connections, for a cement of the universe, aremisplaced. In contrast, I learn that great philosophers can devote excep-tional ingenuity to defending a very crude and ultimately worthless versionof empiricism.

But more generally, I wonder whether we need any kind of solemn missionstatement to preface our study of the history of philosophy. Of course we findthese six philosophers interesting, and of course our interest is philosophicalrather than purely antiquarian. They were exceptionally intelligent, they wereclearly involved in philosophical discussion, and their work has a direct his-torical link with modern philosophical fashions and obsessions. For good orill, they set a philosophical agenda that is still very much with us. But that isall the justification we can have, or should have, for reading them.

Philosophici

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nil a nobis alienum putamus.

Any attempt to say more about the justification willinevitably be flat, pedestrian and even comical. For example, if pressed veryhard, I would find it extremely difficult to name anything of philosophicalinterest that I have ‘learned’ from Spinoza’s

Ethics

, though there is no doubtthat it is a magnificent and fascinating intellectual edifice. Even in moreobviously nourishing areas, there is often very little bread to an intolerabledeal of sack. For example, Bennett may be right to claim that Hume canresolve some of his difficulties over belief by moving towards functionalism(Vol. 2, pp. 225, 228), but many readers may well feel that life is short, andthat it would be far more profitable simply to cut the cackle, start (at the veryearliest) with Ryle’s

Concept of Mind

in 1949, and move on swiftly towards2003.

In short, the Introduction is the one place in Bennett’s book where he isuncharacteristically leaden-footed. I was particularly unimpressed by theclaim that we learn from ‘struggles and failures’. I do not for one momentbelieve that “some of our best learning from a philosopher such as Leibnizcomes from seeing him try to make bricks without straw, and thereby learningabout the right way to make bricks” (Vol. 1, p. 250). We don’t learn to swimby watching others drown, and we learn nothing about singing by listeningto Florence Foster Jenkins. Bennett offers us the precious metaphor of “col-legial early modern studies”, “in which one studies the texts in the spirit of acolleague, an antagonist, a student, a teacher” and quotes Grice with evidentapproval: “I ‘treat those who are great but dead as if they were great andliving, as persons who have something to say to us

now

’ ” (Vol. 1, p. 1). I rathersuspect that, if we invited Spinoza, Leibniz or Berkeley into the SeniorCommon Room one evening to give an outline of their philosophical views,we would almost certainly conclude that they were completely mad.

Ignore the Introduction; wallow in the rest.

LEARNING FROM SIX PHILOSOPHERS, BY JONATHAN BENNETT

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