L'anti-humanisme au XVIIe siècle (review)

Abstract

Boor: REVIV.WS 299 major theoretical issues in the history of science. By constituting his own neoEpicurean contributions to physics as features of a historical narrative which debates their claims and successes relative to other postulates, Gassendi sought to mediate between a sociology of knowledge (in which knowledge of the world might merely be the construct of successive culturally constituted fictions), and an empirical knowledge (in which some models of the physical world could at least contingently assist in research programs). But like most important books, there are important lacunae. For lack of space, I will only mention the most troubling. I heartily embrace the idea that Gassendi's program found its most enabling vehicle in Epicureanism since that ancient philosophy perfectly expressed Gassendi's determination to engage with method, history , and physics. At the same time, and precisely because this is the case, we must ask what has happened, in Joy's analysis, to ethics, which goes unmentioned except for some emphasis on Gassendi's moderation in debate. Most commentators on Hellenistic philosophy predicate the content of Scepticism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism on some overriding ethical purpose which, responding to a diffracted cultural climate, they all share. That Gassendi could not imagine Epicureanism outside its threefold division into logic, physics, and ethics is inadvertently implied by Joy (though never fully addressed), and proven by the material circumstances in which the Animadversiones were published: the "third edition" of a675 devotes the entire second volume--roughly half the entire text--to ethics. (One of the most substantial Gassendist publications in Restoration England was a translation from Bernier's Abr~gg entitled Three Discourses of Happiness, Virtue, and Liberty [London, x699]). Given the intelligence and mastery of Joy's general treatment, I can only explain this oversight either as a deference to Louise T. Sarasohn's excellent but still unpublished dissertation on Gassendi's moral philosophy (U.C.L.A., x979), or to a failure to extrapolate from Gassendi's notions of physical and historical contingency to a notion of contingency which (in contrast to Descartes) might predicate a distinctly permissive ethic on his cognitive principles. Bernard Frischer's The Sculpted Word (Berkeley, I98~) describes an Epicurean mode of cultural imagery along just such lines. Unlike Joy, I still believe that Gassendi contributed significantly to the construction of English empiricism, but precisely on grounds her argument excludes. To distinguish Gassendi from Restoration thinkers, Joy must first assume the emergence of a discursive specialization she never adequately proves; and she can indulge that discrimination only by having already quarantined Gassendi's physics and history from ethics and politics. This is to commit a violence her central methodological claims prohibit. RICHARD W. F. KROLL Princeton University Henri Gouhier. L'Anti-humanisme au XVII" si~cle. Biblioth~que d'Histoire de la Philosophie. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1987. Pp. 179. Paper, F 16u. The "humanism" that Gouhier talks about is the belief that human beings have a measure of self-sufficiency and that, even if God exists, he leaves them some room of 300 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:2 APRIL 1990 their own. The "anti-humanism" of the title is thus a theological position, but one which Gouhier thinks we can use to organize and explain a good many philosophical arguments of the seventeenth century. Gouhier admits that he is imposing a word on the period--"humanisme" was not at home in French until the nineteenth century-but he insists that the problem of human self-sufficiency shaped natural theology, metaphysics, and moral theory. Gouhier has no difficulty in showing that there was a "humanisme libertin," the doctrine of skeptics, atheists, and deists who held that man was on his own. He denies that there was an "anti-humanisme libertin," but the reader may wonder if the skeptical argument should go the other way. Are not human beings, without knowledge, helpless in the face of fate? That skepticism generally did not suggest this is an indication that the skeptics of the time were convinced of the power of human beings to free themselves from the burdens of belief. The notion of a "Christian humanism" is trickier. Gouhier calls the Thomist tradition (33...