Читать книгу Politics and Scepticism in La Mothe Le Vayer - Ioana Manea - Страница 8

It is certainly natural to ask whether, as a convinced defender of curiosity, La Mothe Le Vayer also tries to grasp the causes of the phenomena that arouse his admiration. In this respect, he partly challenges the tendency of his time, which consists in going beyond the observation of natural phenomena in order to try to clarify their causes. As we have already seen, he is well aware of the latest scientific discoveries. Nonetheless, his rather dark view of the way in which God regards the knowledge searched for by humankind stops him from entirely accepting its results.

Concerning the existence of an author of the universe, for instance, he takes up an argument which had been developed during the polemic that opposed the Stoics to the atomists:

For Democritus who made fun of everything will allow us to make fun in our turn of his atoms, whose fortuitous meeting he held to have produced the world and everything it contains. Rather than that, I would believe that the alphabet letters shuffled in a bag and then thrown on a table could have composed by chance Homer’s Iliad or the most beautiful of Seneca’s tragedies.

Car Démocrite qui riait de tout, nous permettra de rire à notre tour de ses atomes, dont il voulait, que la rencontre fortuite eût produit le monde, et tout ce qu’il contient. Je croirais aussitôt, que les lettres de l’alphabet brouillées dans un sac, et puis jetées sur une table, auraient pu hasardeusement composer l’Iliade d’Homère, ou la plus belle des tragédies de Sénèque.1

In the view of the Greek atomists and of Lucretius, the relationship between the atoms and the body is similar to the one between the letters and the words.2 Governed by chance, the atoms form bodies which either function or are monstrous in the same way in which the letters form words that may be articulated or not. Although they manage to compose words and languages, the letters may not always succeed in forming a meaningful text. Comparable to languages, which result from the encounters of letters incapable of forming a text, the worlds composed of atoms are marred by failures. The latter invalidate the existence of an author who is supposed to be behind the universe formed by different worlds. By reacting against the atomists whom, however, they do not understand entirely, the Stoics refuse to acknowledge that the world stemming from the meetings of atoms governed by chance can be compared to a book. As it results, for instance, from Cicero’s De Natura deorum (II, xxxvii, 93-94), the followers of the Portico argue that the big book of the world implies the existence of an author.

The argument for the existence of an author of nature can be implicitly connected to the plea for the limits that should circumscribe human curiosity. In order to illustrate the necessity to impose restrictions on the knowledge that humankind is searching for, La Mothe Le Vayer uses, for instance, the metaphor of the world as a puppet show:

If this is as enough philosophers imagined it; and that Aristotle was right to compare in his book On the Universe (supposing it belongs to him) the first engine to a puppet player, who holds hidden the subtle and deceptive cords on which the movement of his small characters depends; isn’t it right to say that for him it is an offence to go further than he wants and to try, although uselessly, to discover the devices of this divine game, which exposes to our sight all the operations of Nature?

Si cela est ainsi, selon qu’assez de philosophes se le sont imaginé ; et qu’Aristote ait eu raison de comparer dans son livre Du Monde (présupposant qu’il soit de lui) le premier moteur à un joueur de marionnettes, qui tient cachées les cordes subtiles et artificieuses d’où dépend le mouvement de ses petits personnages ; Ne peut-on pas dire que c’est lui faire injure que de vouloir pénétrer plus avant qu’il ne désire, et de tâcher, quoiqu’inutilement, à découvrir les engins de ce jeu divin, qui expose à notre vue toutes les opérations de la nature ?3

In this respect, Gianni Paganini proves that La Mothe Le Vayer’s approach, which consists in relating the Aristotelian first engine with the pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo ad Alexandrum, does not lack soundness.4 More precisely, according to the treatise falsely attributed to Aristotle all throughout the Middle Ages, since it would be dishonourable for God to deal directly with human or terrestrial life, divine “power” (“puissance”) shows itself through “communication at a distance” (“communication à distance”). Nevertheless, according to Paganini, La Mothe Le Vayer is not entirely faithful to De Mundo when he applies the metaphor of the “puppet players” to humankind. The metaphor that is used in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise for illustrating God’s action at a distance does not concern humankind in particular, but the world in general. Additionally, in order to compare humankind and the world with a puppet show, La Mothe Le Vayer also relies on Plato’s Laws.5 By taking up the point of the Greek philosopher, the author holds that, despite its status of “masterpiece” of the divine creation, humankind has “only been made by the hands of God only as if he were playing” (“[l’homme] n’a été fait des mains de Dieu que comme en jouant”) ,6 or “has only been produced by him [God] while frolicking ” (“n’a été fabriqué par lui [Dieu] qu’en s’ébattant”).7 Besides that, the world itself is a “work that God has made by playing” (“était un ouvrage, que Dieu avait fait en se jouant”).8 By means of these references, the author aims, on the one hand, to argue for the “playful status” (“statut ludique”)9 of philosophy, which would be in harmony with the entertainment to which the divinity devoted itself while creating the world. On the other hand, the references to Plato’s work are also likely to be used by the writer because they highlight the balance of power that governs the relationship between people as creatures and God as Creator.

On the whole, La Mothe Le Vayer compares the world with a puppet theatre in order to emphasise the illusion which is inherent in it and that humankind is condemned to be its victim. The trick responsible for the success of the show relies on the secret surrounding the strings that move the characters appearing on the stage. That is to say that the divinity does not use its power only in order to stage the magnificent show of the world, but also in order to carefully keep the secrets on which it establishes the performance. In so doing, the divinity is likely to adopt a similar attitude to that of any other puppet player who is, by definition, jealous of the secrets of the show that it stages in front of the public. It goes without saying that no director would like to see his show fail because of the unveiling of the strings he hides behind the curtain and uses in order to move his puppets: “It is certain that in the play wherein these small characters which we call puppets can be seen, the master who makes them move would feel offended if we lifted the cover whence come all their movements” (“Il est certain, qu’au jeu qui se voit de ces petites figures que nous appelons marionnettes, le maître, qui les fait remuer, s’offenserait, si on levait le tapis, qui couvre les ressorts d’où viennent tous leurs mouvements”).10

Furthermore, when he disapproves of human attempts to break through the illusions of the show staged by the divinity, La Mothe Le Vayer seems to be influenced by a conception of knowledge that has resulted from a mistake in the translation of an expression extracted from St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Romans, Noli altum sapere, sed time.11 Unlike the interpretation given to this phrase by the Middle Ages, Lorenzo Valla has shown that it did not refer to an intellectual, but to a moral vice. Persisting even after the discovery of the Italian humanist, the error in the understanding of the Apostle’s words caused them to be interpreted as a prohibition on the attempts to decipher the secrets of the divinity, of political power and of nature.

Likely to draw at least partly inspiration from this triple prohibition, La Mothe Le Vayer is worried about the results to which can lead the curiosity that seeks to unveil the secrets of theology, politics and physics. Concerning the former one, the attempt to go beyond the knowledge revealed by the divinity can provoke an outcome similar to that of Icarus who, counter to his rehabilitation carried out during the 17^th century, is seen as the symbol of the unavoidable failure to which the intellectual boldness is doomed.12 Besides that, in the field of politics, the triple interdiction derived from the first Pauline epistle to the Romans means that the secrets of power should be kept away from the intrusive looks since, through a comparison borrowed from the proverbs of Solomon, the princes’ hearts are as impenetrable as “the heights of the sky” (“la hauteur du Ciel”) and the “depths of the earth” (“la profondeur de la Terre”).13

Concerning physics, the obscurity of nature for the human mind makes La Mothe Le Vayer condemn the attempts which aim at shedding light on the causes and principles that flesh out the phenomena of the universe: “We do not make a negligible mistake when we want to submit it [nature] to the rules of mathematics, or to the subtle conclusions of logic, as has been uselessly attempted recently” (“nous ne commettons pas une petite faute quand nous la [Nature] voulons assujettir aux règles des mathématiques, ou aux fines conclusions de la logique, comme depuis peu l’on a tâché de faire inutilement”).14 The writer obviously refers to the path followed by his contemporaries, who were using “systematic and quantitative theoretical analysis and experimentation” in order to reveal what they considered to be the “mathematical and mechanical structure” of nature.15 For the pioneers of this way of investigating the universe like Galileo Galilei in Il Saggiatore, the “book of the world” was written in a “mathematical language”, with geometric characters. The curiosity for the “book of the world” advocated by La Mothe Le Vayer did not involve the examination of the model followed by the letters that constructed it. Our author rejects the mathematical explanations provided by the science of his time because, in his view, the diversity of the world is incommensurable with the uniformity of the mathematics invented by humankind:

And relying on the fantasy of much more order that it [nature] can presumably observe, although it is everywhere very ordered, we search for mathematical certainties and unchanging regularities in the material things, which only exist in those that are delivered from all matter, like the first of all the dogmatic philosophers is forced to acknowledge in the last chapter of the second book of the Metaphysics.

Et sur l’imagination de beaucoup plus d’ordre qu’elle n’en veut vraisemblablement observer, encore qu’elle soit très ordonnée partout, nous cherchons des certitudes mathématiques, et des régularités invariables aux choses matérielles, qui ne se trouvent jamais qu’en celles qui sont délivrées de toute matière, comme le premier de tous les dogmatiques est contraint de l’avouer au dernier chapitre du second livre de sa Métaphysique.16

Without being necessarily unfamiliar to organisation, the variety that characterises the world is nevertheless irreducible to the order to which humankind’s mathematical theories aim at submitting it. Besides that, Aristotle, the dogmatic philosopher par excellence, who although exposed to the strong opposition of the innovators admired by La Mothe Le Vayer, still exerted a considerable authority over the philosophy of the time, admitted that a philosophy seeking to account for the world through mathematics would be inefficient because of its dogmatism. The passage that La Mothe Le Vayer uses for proving the discrepancy between the rigour of mathematics and the physical world is also the one he uses, as we will see further on, for justifying the existence of political science.17

In the attack he launches against mathematics, La Mothe Le Vayer does not target its capacity to make natural phenomena understandable to a certain extent, but the arrogance of the dogmatic philosophy, which transforms it into a system that pretends to be able to explain the universe’s deepest secrets. By using abstract principles like those of mathematics, which are more related to intellectual invention than to the material world, philosophers try to impose on the universe a regularity that is foreign to it: “After having established certain rules that are more subtle than real, we want all its [nature’s] operations to come down to them, as if it would be impossible for it to exceed the boundaries that our mind has prescribed upon it” (“Après avoir établi de certaines maximes plus subtiles que réelles, nous voulons que toutes ses opérations s’y rapportent, comme s’il lui était impossible de passer les bornes que notre esprit lui a prescrites”).18 The uniformity of the rules on which they base their theories does not allow philosophers to really clarify the functioning of the universe, but to give it a simplified explanation, which can be grasped by the human mind. As soon as they pretend to have reached results that are likely to allow them to make the world comprehensible, they are seized by an arrogance that stops them from acknowledging the existence of natural phenomena to which their systems cannot be applied. Therefore, instead of admitting their ignorance, they prefer to describe as monstrous the cases that remain untranslatable through the terms of their theories.

Without doubt, the beings which are treated as monsters are “against the order of nature”,19 but the order of nature that emerges from the principles invented by humankind. The rigidity of thought that results from arrogance is likely to encourage the individuals it dominates to depreciate phenomena whose conformity with nature they ignore: “Indeed we overestimate our knowledge and I am not at all beyond the suspicion that it is some sort of impiety to want to fix the same boundaries to the works of God and of nature that they have imposed on our knowledge” (“En vérité nous présumons trop de notre savoir, et je ne suis pas même hors de soupçon que ce ne soit quelque sorte d’impiété, de vouloir établir les mêmes bornes aux œuvres de Dieu et de la nature, qu’ils ont données à notre connaissance”).20

Philosophers’ incapacity to understand the world is not visible only at a practical level, like in the case of monsters, but also at a theoretical level. In the view of La Mothe Le Vayer, the philosophical systems that claim to clarify the structure and the functioning of nature are discredited by the fierce disagreements which oppose them to one another:

The principles of this natural science, its elements and everything that depends on it are differently considered by the ones than by the others; and the different sects of philosophers have fought more battles, with more violence and stubbornness about everything that concerns the world and its organisation; than all the conquerors have done in order to become its masters.

Les principes de cette science naturelle, ses éléments, et tout ce qui en dépend, sont autrement envisagés par les uns que par les autres ; et les sectes différentes des philosophes ont donné plus de combats, et avec plus de violence et plus d’opiniâtreté, sur tout ce qui concerne le monde, et sa constitution ; que tous les conquérants n’ont fait pour s’en rendre les maîtres.21

The polemics between the different philosophical systems are the obvious proof of the oppositions that separate them. The battles fought in the field of philosophy are inflamed by the pride that prompts philosophers to impose themselves to the detriment of their adversaries. Similarly to the war leaders who try to take hold of the physical world, the followers of the different philosophical trends aim at dominating the world of ideas. However, according to our author, philosophical quarrels are far from allowing their participants to show that they managed to clarify the questions that they debate. The absence of any consensus about the so-called science of nature compromises the pretentions to possess the absolute truth that are voiced by all the philosophical theories.22

Although they are sharpened by the philosophers’ pride, the contradictions that divide the philosophical schools and that materialise in intense quarrels are far from being the consequence of a mere misunderstanding. In this respect, La Mothe Le Vayer does not ignore the tendency that aims at downplaying the dissensions between the different philosophical trends by restricting them especially to the level of language: “I am well aware of the desire to reconcile all these party leaders and to prove that their terms and ways of speaking, as dissimilar as they seem, may mean the same thing in a favourable interpretation” (“Je sais bien qu’on a voulu concilier tous ces chefs de parti, et prouver, que leurs termes et leurs façons de parler, pour dissemblables qu’elles paraissent, peuvent signifier une même chose avec une favorable interprétation”).23 In the view of La Mothe Le Vayer, to think that the conflict among the philosophical schools could be solved by the clarification of the terms that they use would be nothing else than a strategy to “deceive oneself” (“se tromper soi-même”).24 The contradictions among the philosophical trends are unquestionable and demonstrate humankind’s incapacity to make out the giant show that is the world.