Tocqueville, Democratic Customs, and the Influence of Science on Descartes, Kant and Marx

Orientation #

The recording begins mid-sentence, already inside Tocqueville’s chapters on the influence of democratic customs on “the whole life of the mind”; he refers back to “these three major sources of the modern world as customs” and to what he said “when we were doing the ninth book of wisdom” (prev. lecture / earlier classes). The previous class introduced the three formative sources of the modern world and ended by opening Tocqueville. A text-matching system found a handout (“The Royal Fragment”, p. 1) and a printed page (DHB Vol I, The First Philosophers, p. 17) in the audio; the transcript itself shows only his summary of Anaxagoras’s fragment on Mind, not an extended reading, so that identification is probable rather than shown.

The class, in order #

1. Democratic customs and the life of the mind: practical emphasis, fiction turned to the future (“look to the future for their poetic inspiration”) #

Point: Tocqueville says democratic customs push thought toward the practical and immediately applicable, and turn fiction toward the future.

• The practical emphasis of democratic customs (the crowd wants what makes life easier; every such invention is “the most wonderful”) reinforces the customs coming from the mathematical union of natural and technical science, which (per Heisenberg) changed the attitude toward nature from contemplative to pragmatic.
• Aristocratic customs look to the past, democratic to the future: the Iliad goes back into the dim past and imaginatively enhances it; the tragedians go back to Oedipus; Shakespeare is still in the aristocratic tradition because he always goes back to something past. Star Wars, 1984 (future when written), Brave New World are set in the future.
• A further democratic influence, not from Tocqueville explicitly (“probably”): prose rather than verse; Homer and the tragedians in metre seem too formal, aristocratic.

2. Fiction shaped by the second source: science fiction, the detective story, the horror story (“the admirable stories of Sherlock Holmes”) #

Point: not every feature of modern fiction traces to democratic customs; three genres come from the union of natural science and technology.

• Science fiction: the obvious case, “all technology,” gadgets.
• The detective story takes off from the theoretical side of modern science. Einstein (he thinks in The Evolution of Physics) refers to the Sherlock Holmes stories as like science in its theoretical aspect; Einstein also said creating a scientific theory is like writing a novel. His teaching example: the prize (transcript: “prime”) racehorse that disappears; Scotland Yard can’t find evidence; Holmes arrives, goes to the grass and finds it at once — “I was looking for it”: a framed hypothesis tells you where to look, so you find what would otherwise be hard to find. Einstein said the same of Kepler: the theory in mind pointed to one precise place to check. Detective stories also resemble science in having a narrow problem (“who done it?”, what happened to the horse), whereas great Greek fiction is about happiness and misery, more universal.
• The horror story (Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein, men turning into flies, the Incredible Shrinking Man): monsters originally mean the unnatural; modern science interferes with nature and so may produce the unnatural, the monstrous. Nothing like it in ancient fiction.

3. Democratic customs on religion and government: pantheism and centralization (“naturally suggest pantheistic ideas”) #

Point: Tocqueville’s remaining observations, confirmed by experience.

• Religion: democratic customs “naturally suggest pantheistic ideas”; Tocqueville notes them in German philosophy and French literature. The Enchiridion Symbolorum (collected Roman documents and condemnations) in the 19th century repeatedly corrects some German Catholic theologian for pantheism; Küng and Rahner in the 20th century at times seem to fall into it. Student example: “the force” in Star Wars — after death you become part of the force; a pantheistic idea of God with “no thought behind this,” just custom.
• Government (fourth part): tendency to centralization; in American history local and state governments at first spent far more than the federal, then concentration grew, and within the three branches the legislature loses power to the executive.

4. Equality: the democratic love, the equation, and pantheism; Anaxagoras against Einstein (“the ruler must be separated from the ruled”) #

Point: he asks whether the equality dominant in democratic customs and the equation dominant in modern science harmonize, and whether both dispose to pantheism.

• He does not want “to push things too far,” but there is a likeness. Heisenberg, in his Gifford lectures on the early Greeks, says that to understand the plethora of things one must introduce order, and order means unity — for him, equality.
• Contrast: Thomas’s proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics, following Aristotle in Metaphysics XII on the universe, distinguishes the order of things to each other from the order of all to an end, and the order to the end is the reason for the order among themselves. Chair example: all parts are ordered to sitting, and sitting explains why the back meets the seat at a slightly obtuse rather than acute angle. But the end is better, not equal, than what is for its sake; Thomas often says that when many are ordered to one end, one must rule and the other be ruled. So Thomas thinks of order first in terms of inequality, Heisenberg in terms of equality — Heisenberg “undoubtedly influenced” by the equation, named from equal.
• Pantheism treats things as more equal, against a God entirely distinct from things and ruling them, like Anaxagoras’s Mind. So scientific customs, like democratic ones, may incline toward pantheism.
• Anaxagoras and Einstein compared. Alike: both reach a greater mind revealed in the order and intelligibility of nature, and both as natural philosophers, not as believers in the religions of their time. Differ: Anaxagoras says the greater mind must be separated from things, with a good reason — the ruler must be separated from the ruled or he cannot rule them; Einstein speaks of the greater mind as mixed with things, called his own position pantheistic, and gives no reason. In the absence of a reason, he suspects custom. “We’re all part of the big mishmash”; the force is not superior to those who make it up.
• He is not saying one equality is the other or its cause: “kind of a harmony, kind of a fitting together.”

5. The three sources on modern philosophers; the first source: Adam Smith and Karl Marx (“the economic mode of what production”) #

Point: the second source has the greatest influence on the philosophers, then the third, but even the first shows.

• Adam Smith: his most famous work is The Wealth of Nations (also read: Theory of Moral Sentiments). Strange that a philosopher’s chief work is on wealth — hard to imagine of Plato or Aristotle, though they discussed wealth and its dangers — a sign of the mercantile character of the modern city. Scotland in the 18th century is a classic “economic takeoff”: very poor and inferior to England at the start, learning from the English, and by century’s end the English learning from the Scots; this may have inspired him.
• Marx explains everything ultimately by the economic mode of production: it influences the social structure, this the political, this the “higher reaches.” Greatest work Das Kapital, a work of economics — again the mercantile origin of the modern city making such things “the most important things in life.” Not the only influence on Marx or Smith, but something central that the Greek philosophers would never have made central.
• Aside: his Laval joke, a Marxist reading of Thales — sitting by the pool cut off from the economic mode of production, watching people delight in the water, he concludes water is the beginning of all things. Aside: UMass economics still has many Marxists while market economies succeed.

6. The second source: Descartes, Bacon, Locke — lovers of wisdom or lovers of power? (“the union of knowledge and what power”) #

Point: the union of natural and technical science, turning “what is it?” into “what can we do with it?”, shows already in the first rationalist and the first empiricists.

• Descartes (father of modern philosophy, contributor through analytical geometry) images knowledge as a tree: roots metaphysics (“whatever that is for him”), trunk physics, fruit mechanics, medicine, ethics — all practical; everything subordinated to that. The Discourse on Method wants a knowledge quite different from the schools’, giving power over bodies for medical reasons. He is a propagandist for the new knowledge while partaking in it.
• Bacon talks of nothing else: the union of knowledge and power; Weizsäcker, on the physicist’s world view in the 20th century, says that is what it is, more than ever. His question: since the sine qua non of the knowledge they pursue is that it give power, not wisdom, “are they lovers of wisdom anymore? Are we calling them philosophers equivocally?” They may say some Greek things, but is the end wisdom or power?
• Locke: “I’m just clearing the paths for more Newtons”; Cassirer (Philosophy of the Enlightenment) says Newton became the model for all human knowledge.
• Whether Bacon, Descartes (and before them Machiavelli) caused the union: partly, as propagandists (Heisenberg refers back to Bacon), sometimes as participants; how far a man follows a custom already forming versus propagates or opposes it is “a somewhat muddy question.” What matters is that the union, however it arose, is a major source of the modern world: remove everything that runs on electricity and our whole civilization, and our fiction, would be quite different.

7. Kant’s second preface: we know by making; Marx: we know only what we make (“we have to make in order to what know”) #

Point: once the union is established, thinkers are born into it and it is prior to them; Kant was a Newtonian physicist before he was a philosopher (proposed a theory of the origin of the solar system that Weizsäcker, Heisenberg’s other pupil, is said to have perfected). Some physicists say his becoming a philosopher was “a step down.”

• The second preface to the Critique of Pure Reason stands back from the work, “like I said, we have to do sometimes.” First point: the success of ancient geometry came when they stopped merely contemplating the triangle and had to do something, make something, draw the lines (cf. his earlier class on Metaphysics IX); Kant sees a likeness with Galileo and Torricelli experimenting on a hypothesis. So we know by making. Weizsäcker says the same: as we go to the outer reaches of space, only what could be of our making can be understood by us.
• Custom: if one is accustomed only to that knowledge of nature, one takes it as universal — the only way man knows. Heisenberg: going down into matter, natural and artificial cannot be separated, since you know only by acting upon the thing in a way that significantly changes it. Paradox: the distinction between natural and artificial is made in the philosophical part of natural science (the books of natural hearing), and the more particular knowledge of physics cannot make it — “in one sense, it’s more confused” — partly because mathematics abstracts from the natural/artificial distinction, partly because experiment acts upon nature: are you knowing the natural, or interfering with it? Kant sees the whole of both parts of speculative philosophy, mathematics and natural science, as knowing by making.
• Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (Engels: “the brilliant germ of the new world outlook”; “the rest of us were at best talented, but Marx was a genius”; he recalls Jacques de Monléon spending a semester on them): we can only know what we make; what cannot be made is a figment. Argument: (1) we know only by making (Kant); (2) the way we know is the way things are (most philosophers say yes; Aristotle said no); therefore (3) we know only what we make. Hence Marx is more anti-Christian than Kant, seeing himself as God; preface to his doctoral thesis: reject anything that does not admit the human mind as the highest divinity; Prometheus the first hero in philosophy for revolting against Zeus.
• Bohr and even Einstein, without agreeing with Kant in detail, have a Kantian orientation in how they ask questions: “the tremendous influence” — not of democratic customs but of the customs from the mathematical union of natural science and the mechanical arts.

8. Kant’s two proportions: student and teacher, or judge and witness (“as a judge learns from the witness”) #

Point: the second thing in the preface — should reason learn from nature as a student from his teacher, or as a judge (or lawyer) from the witness? Kant states the conclusion rather than asking: the second way, and the only way to make progress.

• The difference: the student listens to what the professor has to say; the witness has nothing to say until the judge or lawyer puts a question, then answers it. In experimental science this holds: a definite hypothesis leads to a definite question, and nature answers. A trial lawyer he read: know what you are going to ask before you enter the courtroom, or the witness may harm your case.
• Schrödinger (who perfected wave mechanics and showed its equivalence with quantum mechanics), essay “Is Science a Fashion of the Times?” (Dover collection under the titles Science, Theory, and Man / Science and Humanism): other questions could have been put to nature, other experiments performed, or in another order; the structure of science is historically contingent on the hypotheses held — “a little bit arbitrary,” like a courtroom with only one lawyer. Louis de Broglie similarly on the history of science being somewhat history and not science.
• His own answer: both ways, in order — first as a student from a teacher, then later as a judge from a witness. In the philosophy of nature in the narrow sense (the general first part of natural science, the eight books of natural hearing) the Greeks listen to nature like a student. Heraclitus’s fragment: wisdom is to speak the truth and act according to nature, “giving ear thereto”; the ear is the sense of learning from another. One meaning of the title “natural hearing”: you hear about nature, and you hear nature speak, nature as teacher.
• Confirmation: Aristotle in Metaphysics I after the proemium sees whether he can learn wisdom from his predecessors, first narrating their opinions and reasons, then examining their sufficiency; in the narration he speaks as if nature was leading them on to the next question, as a teacher leads a student. Kant rejects being in “nature’s leading strings” (the harness a harassed mother attaches to a child to pull it back).
• The student’s way “can take you a considerable distance,” but later experiments are needed: without experiment we would still hold water an element in Empedocles’ sense. Kant may be right about experimental science, but says it is the only way — the influence of custom, since he was immersed in physics, a working and fairly good physicist; as Aristotle says, a man accustomed to one way thinks it the only way. “Very piquant… very significant.”

His words #

• “the three major sources of the modern world as customs”: mercantile city, mathematical union of natural and technical science, democratic customs.
• “contemplative” vs “pragmatic” attitude toward nature (Heisenberg’s terms as he reports them).
• “monster”: originally something unnatural.
• “the twelfth book of Wisdom”, “ninth book of wisdom”, “first book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics XII, IX, I].
• “order of things among themselves” vs “order of all of them to an end”; the latter the reason for the former.
• “economic takeoff”: rapid economic development of a country (Scotland).
• “sine qua non” of modern knowledge: that it give power.
• “philosophers equivocally”: his suggestion that lovers of power are not philosophers in the Greek sense.
• “we know by making” (Kant) vs “we know only what we make” (Marx).
• “the way we know is the way things are”: premise most philosophers accept, Aristotle denies.
• “natural hearing” [ed.: Physics]: hearing about nature and hearing nature speak, nature as teacher.
• “leading strings”: Kant’s image, glossed as a child’s harness.
• “philosophy of nature” in the narrow sense: the general first part of natural science (the eight books).

Texts #

Read in class (summarized or quoted from memory rather than read aloud):

• Tocqueville, Democracy in America, chapters on democratic customs and fiction, religion, and (fourth part) government.
• Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, second preface (geometry and experiment; student/teacher vs judge/witness; “leading strings”).
• Heraclitus, fragment on wisdom, truth, and acting according to nature, “giving ear thereto”.
• Anaxagoras’s fragment on Mind (probably the handout “The Royal Fragment”, p. 1, per text-matching; DHB Vol I, p. 17).

Mentioned:

• Thomas Aquinas, proemium to the Nicomachean Ethics; Aristotle, Metaphysics XII, IX, I.
• Aristotle, Physics (“natural hearing”), eight books.
• Heisenberg, Gifford lectures (early Greeks; nature and art; Bacon).
• Einstein, The Evolution of Physics (inferred) on Sherlock Holmes; Einstein on Kepler and on theory as novel-writing.
• Enchiridion Symbolorum; Küng; Rahner.
• Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations; Theory of Moral Sentiments.
• Marx, Das Kapital; Theses on Feuerbach; preface to doctoral thesis; Engels on Marx.
• Descartes, Discourse on Method; tree of knowledge image.
• Bacon; Weizsäcker, world view of physics; Locke; Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment; Machiavelli; Newton.
• Schrödinger, “Is Science a Fashion of the Times?”; Louis de Broglie on history of science.
• Homer, Iliad; Greek tragedians; Shakespeare; Star Wars; 1984; Brave New World; Sherlock Holmes stories; Jekyll and Hyde; Frankenstein; Incredible Shrinking Man.

His questions #

• Why does democratic fiction look to the future and aristocratic fiction to the past? Tocqueville’s observation; Iliad, tragedians, Shakespeare vs Star Wars, 1984, Brave New World.
• Is there a connection between democratic equality and the equation in modern science? A likeness or harmony, not identity or causation; both may incline to pantheism.
• How are Anaxagoras and Einstein alike and how do they differ? Both reach a greater mind from nature; Anaxagoras separates it (ruler from ruled), Einstein mixes it, without reason — custom suspected.
• What’s the most famous book of Adam Smith? The Wealth of Nations — a sign of the mercantile influence.
• Are they lovers of wisdom or lovers of power? Left open as a question; he suggests “philosophers equivocally.”
• How do you get from Kant to Marx? From “we know only by making” plus “the way we know is the way things are” to “we know only what we make.”
• Should reason learn from nature as a student from his teacher, or as a judge from the witness? Kant: judge/witness only; Berquist: both, first as student, then as judge.
• What is the difference between the two ways? The student listens; the witness answers only the question put to him.