A Dark History of Modern Philosophy

By Bernard Freydberg

This provocative reassessment of modern philosophy explores its nonrational dimensions and connection to ancient mysteries.

Delving beneath the principal discourses of philosophyfrom Descartes through Kant, Bernard Freydberg plumbs the previously concealed dark forces that ignite the inner power of modern thought. He contends that reason itself issues from an implicit and unconscious suppression of the nonrational. Even the modern philosophical concerns of nature and limits are undergirded by a dark side that dwells in them and makes them possible.

Freydberg traces these dark sources to the poetry of Hesiod, the fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and the Platonic dialogues and claims that they rear their heads again in the work of Spinoza, Schelling, and Nietzsche. Freydberg does not set forth a critique of modern philosophy but explores its intrinsic continuity with its ancient roots.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9780253030245

Book preview

1  Fissures in the History of Modern Philosophy

DESPITE THE CUSTOMARY practice of treating the history of modern philosophy as the evolution of fundamentally coherent doctrine, heterogeneity is an unmistakable feature in the thought of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Kant. Hetero–geneity, other–birthing or other–genus summons thought to the fissure, the gap that allows for its occurrence. This characteristic can take surprising shapes and can lead to unexpected developments. Spinoza as the most rigorous of the rationalists and Hume as the most rigorous of the empiricists leave little or no room for a gap between different sources that bear upon our condition. However, even in these thinkers one can discern abysses, fissures that open onto dark regions where sight becomes most difficult, and another way of sensing is required.

What I am proposing is the following alteration of the standard narrative even as it seems most incontestable. The divisions within the standard narrative do not concern—at least do not essentially concern—the role of reason on one side and the role of experience on the other. Rather, both of these putative divisions respond to the darkness to which we are all given over. While this darkness can be called by many names, it escapes all of them: abyss, ignorance, death, impenetrability, Hades. At Theaetetus 155c, the eponymous figure around whom the dialogue takes place, confesses that he finds himself wondering excessively (hyperphyos), to which Socrates famously replies that all philosophy begins in wonder and that wonder is the mark of the philosopher.

The nature of the concealment I shall attempt to disclose finds its precursor in Aristotle’s response to the matter of wonder. While wonder is the origin of all philosophy, its overcoming in epistêmê—in knowledge or in science—constitutes its purpose or end, its telos. Aristotle’s creation of a series of sciences, from physics through psychology and animal studies to meteorology—not to mention metaphysics, logic, and aesthetics, which remain proper philosophical disciplines—bears out his post-wonder ambitions. Since Aristotle was wrong on a vast majority of even his most fundamental scientific pronouncements according to more recent and contemporary developments, there can be no doubt that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century developments in physics and mathematics inspired the great philosophers of this period; it has even been claimed that, despite the qualitative advances by Newton, Leibniz, and others, it was still possible for one person to know everything there is to know in the natural sciences and mathematics.

Descartes

When both sides of the current philosophical divide agree on a particular matter, my rule of thumb is to regard both sides as mistaken and to proceed under that assumption until proven wrong. In the case of René Descartes, this rule of thumb has provided the correct course. In the thought of Descartes, long honored with what I consider faint praise as the more-or-less bumbling but important founder of modern philosophy, both Anglo-American and Continental philosophers find a doctrine called mind–body dualism. They are led to this view by passages such as the following:

Now my first observation here is that there is a great difference between a mind and a body in that a body, by its very nature, is always divisible. On the other hand, a mind is always indivisible. For when I consider my mind, that is, myself insofar as I am only a thinking thing, I cannot distinguish any parts within me; I understand myself to be manifestly one complete thing. Although the entire mind seems to be united to the entire body, nevertheless, were a foot or an arm or any other bodily part to be amputated, I know that nothing has been taken away from the mind on that account. Nor can the faculties of willing, sensing, and understanding, and so on be called parts of the mind, since it is one and the same mind that wills, senses, and understands. On the other hand there is no corporeal or extended thing I can think of that in my thought easily divides into parts; and in this way I understand that it is divisible. This consideration alone would suffice to teach me that the soul is wholly diverse from the body, had I not yet known it well enough in any other way.¹

Descartes’s declaration of a vast difference between mind and body clearly refers to a quantitative difference, or more precisely to a difference that remains within the realm of mathematics: divisibility and indivisibility are mathematical concepts. By employing the well-known Latin distinction between thinking substance (res cogitans) and extended substance (res extensa), this vast difference between mind and body amounts to a difference for and within res cogitans. Bodies so conceived are nothing more and nothing less than the objects of pure geometry.

But what about those entities that are normally considered to be bodies? What about (to list several items from Descartes’s text) hands, head, feet, sky, earth, and sea? What about feelings of hunger and thirst, and of pleasure and pain? What is their status? At first, Descartes ascribes our knowledge of them to nature; but upon attaining more self-knowledge he sees these very differently, though hardly less paradoxically: For clearly these sensations of hunger, thirst, and so on, etc., are nothing but confused modes of thinking, arising from the union and, as it were, intermingling of the mind with the body.²

Hunger and thirst, pleasure and pain as confused thoughts—what can this mean? Can it mean, for example, that a toothache that requires root canal surgery is a confused thought in the way, perhaps, that the attempt to grasp the proof of an abstruse theorem in higher mathematics results in confused thought? I strongly suggest that the answer is affirmative. In the Discourse on Method, Descartes called the human body a machine made by God, a phrase that offends many of my contemporary Continental colleagues who ascribe more differentiated qualities to bodies, often at the expense of the analogous qualities once located in souls. What he meant, and what has by and large determined the course of most successful Western medicine since, is that like all bodies the human body behaves in accord with mechanical