Modern Philosophy - Study Materials

Lesson 2: The Modern Project: Origin and Scope

The unique concerns and perspectives of modern philosophy can be traced back to multiple sources - the rise of modern mathematical physics (Copernicus and Galileo); the new approach to politics (Machiavelli); the weakening and undermining of religious authority due to the reformation. Langan points out in his history that scholastic philosophy was already a spent force at this time. Skepticism was the position adopted by the learned. In this new situation it took the genius of Descartes to consolidate a new project for philosophy and politics. What is called the modern project is a combination of the new science of nature and the new science of politics. The former is characterized by an abandonment of teleological nature in favor of a MECHANISTIC approach to nature. Its dangers are that this approach to nature is abstractive (using mathematical intelligibility) and it is reductive (reads the higher in terms of the lower). It dovetails with the new science of politics. Machivaelli claimed to study man as he is and not he ought to be. It assumes a new notion of nature - nature as the low, nature as origins. Man is passionate and selfish. He recommends that men learn how to do evil; to find an effectual truth - to be practical. It is Descartes who brings those together in a coherent notion of the modern project.

B. Outlines and Study Guides:

1. Major Figures

2. Major Concepts

THE NEW SCIENCE OF NATURE
Unified heaven and earth: uniform laws of motion -- Galileo 1564-1642; Newton 1642-1727 Mechanism: nature as a machine: extended parts in motion; no purpose or "telos"; mathematical analysis Practical: orientation to technology and increase of power -- Bacon 1561-1626 New Organon; New Atlantis

THE NEW ETHICS AND POLITICS
Machiavelli 1469-1527 The Prince; Hobbes 1588-1679 Leviathan Realism: study man as he is, not as he ought to be Lower goal: comfortable self-preservation no highest good thin theory of good: life, liberty, property as conditions for the pursuit of happiness Rights over duties; individualism or atomism; derivation of moral law from self-interest

THE MODERN PROJECT
Mastery of nature for the relief of human condition-- Descartes 1596-1650 Discourse on Method; Meditations Liberty and protection of property as necessary and sufficient condition for just society Locke 1632-1704 Two Treatises of Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Letters on Toleration Science as a means for practical ends - knowledge is power

3. Three Waves of Modernity

Three Waves Of Modernity From Leo Strauss, Essays in Political Philosophy

4. Study Guide And Outline For C.S. Lewis Abolition Of Man Chap 3

1. "Man's mastery of nature turns out to be man's mastery of man with the help of nature as an instrument." Explain in the case of airplanes, radios (wireless) and contraceptives. Can you think of other examples that show the same point?
2. Explain the two sides - the ambivalence - of human progress, and why there is no simple increase of power on man's side.
3. What is the last part of Nature to surrender to Man?
4. The power for man to make himself means what?
5. What are the two respects in which the power acquired is novel or new? Elaborate on each novel difference.
6. What is the problem faced by the new "motivators" of the human race?
7. Explain the case of duty in light of the above.
8. Does Lewis suppose the conditioners to bad men? Explain.
9. How and why do the conditioners step into a "void"?
10. Why is man's final conquest an "abolition of man"?
11. What is the last basis upon which their values can be based?
12. When the "good" is debunked, what remains?
13. How can one prefer one impulse over another without the TAO?
14. In the fully planned and conditioned world what kind of chatter will no longer be heard?
15. What is the new scientific view of nature that lends it to being dominated?
16. The wresting of power from nature is also ... ?
17. To get power what must we give up? How are magic and applied science alike?
18. For this wise men of old what was the cardinal problem? The solution?
19. Why is reconsideration and perhaps repentance now required?

Abolition of Man, chap. 3

Philosophical expression of utopian ideas; following out the logic.

• I. Conquest of Nature
  • A. Man's mastery of nature turns out to mean man's mastery of man with the help of nature as an instrument (69).
    • 1. Airplane and
    • 2. Electronics and propaganda.
    • 3. Contraceptives and eugenics.
    • 4. Drugs and mind control.
    • 5. Atom and bombs.
  • B. Private men over others, nation over nation, government over people, generation over generation. 
    Ambivalence of progress: we get weaker as well as stronger.
  • C. Final stage: master human nature: {some men make others what they please}
    • 1. Scientific technique and state power have grown.
    • 2. Man worked on man by circumventing human context of speech and symbolic deeds. Reason morality is product, hence conditioner is outside world of values.
• II. The Conditioners
  • A. Ethical void
    • 1. Good and duty are determined by them; no standard or principle no value response: inhuman.
    • 2. Filled by impulse "What I Want"; no ground for choice.
    • 3. Irrational will to power.
    • 4. At best - the good of the group (mankind, nation, race) hence totalitarian
• III. The Conditioned
  • A. [Reductionism,:] man is reduced to matter, material to be used 
    In order to master nature we must first reduce nature to the empirical and quantifiable. This allows it to be manipulated. Technology strives for efficiency, predictability, and repeatability. Consider steel for a bridge. Trees for paper. Even with nature something is lost. We lose a sense of mystery and qualities of nature. The ecologists remind us of this. But when it comes to man, the result is more startling. Can we be human without spontaneity and adventure; without uniqueness? Worst of all, the circumvention of speech and symbolic deeds. The person is denied responsibility and freedom. The person is denied his intrinsic worth, as an end in himself. The person is viewed merely as useful for the group.
• B. Human integrity
  • 1. Personal dignity (intrinsic teleology).
  • 2. Freedom and responsibility (capable of living a moral meaning).
  • 3. Physical integrity.
• C. Hence - only objective value can save us from slavery & tyranny (84).

C. READINGS

1. Swift, A full and true Account of the Battle fought last Friday Between the Ancient and the Modern Books

(The spider to the bee): "...Your livelihood is an universal plunder upon nature; a freebooter over fields and gardens; and for the sake of stealing will rob a nettle as easily as a violet. Whereas I am a domestic animal, furnished with a native stock within myself. This large castle (to show my improvements in the mathematics) is all built with my own hands, and the materials extracted altogether out of my own person."

2. Rene Descartes - Discourse on Method

The Project: It is possible to attain knowledge which is very useful in life, and instead of the Speculative knowledge of the Schools, we may find a practical philosophy by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all other bodies which environs us, as distinctly as we know the different crafts of our artisans, we can in the same way employ them in all those uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves like the masters and possessors of nature." "...to have the fruits of life without pain... principally, health."

3. Bacon, "The Great Instauration," Preface & plan:

. . . that wisdom which we have derived principally from the Greeks is but like the boyhood of knowledge, and has the characteristic property of boys: it can talk, but it cannot generate...barren of works, full of questions...This doctrine then of the expurgation of the intellect to qualify it for dealing with truth, is comprised in three refutations: the refutation of the Philosophies, the refutation of the Demonstrations; and the refutation of the Natural Human Reason. The explanation of which things, and of the true relation between the nature of things and the nature of the mind, is as the strewing and decoration of the bridal chamber of the Mind and the Universe, the Divine Goodness assisting; out of the marriage of which let us hope (and be this the prayer of the bridal song) there may spring helps to man, and a line and race of inventions that may in some degree subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity...a history not only of nature free and at large (when she is left to her own course and does her work her own way), -- such as that of the heavenly bodies, meteors, earth and sea, minerals, plants, animals, -- but much more of nature under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and molded...the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the (vexations of art) then in its natural freedom.

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