by Allan Bloom
On the face of this, it seems absurd to me to say that Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, Montesquieu and even Voltaire (who might be considered a mere popularizer of these others) were less deep than Jacques Maritain or T. S. Eliot—to mention two famous contemporaries from whose mouths I learned as a young man that the Enlightenment was shallow. Rousseau, who initiated the profound school of criticism of Enlightenment’s effects, nevertheless says that Bacon, Descartes and Newton were very great men, and he speaks of the “wise Locke.” He knew that these were his theoretical kin, although he disagreed with them in crucial respects. The vulgarity of modern society, the object of so many complaints by intellectuals, is something the philosophers were willing to live with. After all, as Socrates points out, all societies look pretty much the same from the heights, be they Periclean Athens or Des Moines, Iowa. A peaceful, wealthy society where the people look up to science and have enough money to support it is worth more than splendid imperia where there are slaves and no philosophy. Locke appears superficial because he was not a snob. There is no way he could make a parade of the magnificence of what he saw.
There is no doubt that these were serious men and that their contrivances have had a public effect unlike that of any philosophers or scientists before or since. The only comparable political events are the founding of what Machiavelli called new modes and orders by prophets—by Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, Romulus and (he implies) Jesus—which he called on the philosophers to imitate. Modernity is largely of these philosophers’ making, and our self-awareness depends on understanding what they wanted to do and what they did do, grasping thus why our situation is different from all other situations. However contrary it may be to contemporary historical wisdom, the leading thread that runs through all the accidents of modern history is the philosophical doctrine of Enlightenment. Modern regimes were conceived by reason and depend on the reasonableness of their members. And those regimes required the reason of natural science in every aspect of their activity, and the requirements of scientific advance largely determine their policy. Whether it is called liberal democracy or bourgeois society, whether the regime of the rights of man or that of acquisitiveness, whether technology is used in a positive or a negative sense, everyone knows that these terms describe the central aspects of our world. They are demonstrably the results of the thought of a small group of men with deep insight into the nature of things, who collaborated in an enterprise the success of which is almost beyond belief. It penetrated and informed every detail of life. These are not men to be dismissed—but they can be questioned.
Swift’s Doubts
One of the earliest questioners was Jonathan Swift, who saw what was intended and spoke up against it in the name of the ancients and of poetry. Gulliver’s Travels is to early modern philosophy what Aristophanes’ The Clouds was to early ancient philosophy. Gulliver’s Travels is nothing but a comic statement of Swift’s preference for antiquity, casting his ancients as giants and noble horses, his moderns as midgets and Yahoos. He addresses the aspect that most concerns us, the establishment of the academies and universities—the Republic of Letters, to use Pierre Bayle’s expression—in the chapter entitled “A Voyage to Laputa.” Gulliver, after observing modern politics in Lilliput, goes to Laputa to see modern science and its effects on life. Laputa is a flying island ruled by natural scientists. It is, of course, a parody of the British Royal Society, in Swift’s time a relatively recent association of the philosophers and scientists who had been tempted more into public and public life by modern thought. In this strange new land Gulliver finds a theoretical preoccupation abstracted from primary human concerns, one whose beginning point was not the human dimension, but which ends up altering it. On the Flying Island the men have one eye turned inward, the other toward the zenith. They are perfect Cartesians—one egotistical eye contemplating the self, one cosmological eye surveying the most distant things. The intermediate range, which previously was the center of concentration and defined both the ego and the pattern for the study of the stars, is not within the Laputian purview. The only studies are astronomy and music, and the world is reduced to these two sciences. The men have no contact with ordinary sense experiences. This is what permits them to remain content with their science. Communication with others outside their circle is unnecessary. Rather than making their mathematics follow the natural shapes of things, they change things so as to fit their mathematics. Their food is cut into all sorts of geometrical figures. Their admiration for women, such as it is, is due to the resemblance of women’s various parts to specific figures. Jealousy is unknown to them. Their wives can commit adultery before their eyes without its being noticed. This absence of eroticism is connected with an absence of poetic sensibility. These scientists cannot understand poetry, and hence, in Gulliver’s view, their science cannot be a science of man.
Another peculiarity of these men is described by Gulliver as follows. “What I chiefly admired, and thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong disposition I observed in them towards news and politics, perpetually inquiring into public affairs, giving their judgments in matters of state and passionately disputing every inch of a party opinion. I have indeed observed the same disposition among most of the mathematicians I have known in Europe, although I could never discover the least analogy between the two sciences.” Gulliver recognizes the political concern of theoretical science and doubts that it can comprehend the actual practice of politics. He also thinks the scientists have a sense of special right to manipulate politics. The Laputians’ political power rests on the new science. The Flying Island is built on the principles of physics founded by Gilbert and Newton. Applied science can open new roads to political power. This island allows the king and the nobles to live free from conspiracies by the people—in fact, free from contact with them—while still making use of them and receiving the tribute that is necessary to the maintenance and leisure of the rulers. They can crush the terrestrial cities. Their power is almost unlimited and their responsibilities nil. Power is concentrated in the hands of the rulers; hence they are not forced even by fear to develop a truly political intelligence. They require no virtue. Everything runs itself, so there is no danger that their incompetence, indifference or vice will harm them. Their island allows their characteristic deformity to grow to the point of monstrosity. Science, in freeing men, destroys the natural conditions that make them human. Hence, for the first time in history, there is the possibility of tyranny grounded not on ignorance, but on science.
Swift objects to Enlightenment because it encourages a hypertrophic development of mathematics, physics and astronomy, thus returning to the pre-Socratic philosophy that Aristophanes had criticized for being unselfconscious or unable to understand man. Enlightenment rejected that moderate Socratic compromise between society and philosophy, poetry and science, which had governed intellectual life for so long and had made possible the foundation of political science. But, unlike pre-Socratic philosophy, which had no interest in politics at all, this science wished to rule and could rule. The new science had indeed generated sufficient power to rule, but in order to do so had had to lose the human perspective. In other words, Swift denied that modern science had actually established a human or political science. All to the contrary, it had destroyed it. Such a political science would, in the first place, have to understand man as man, and not as a geometric figure with flesh on it. In the second place, it would have to ensure the harmony between the good of science or scientists and that of a decent political community. On the Flying Island, neither condition is met. In particular, the scientists exploit the nonscientists so as to live their version of the contemplative life in safety and comfort.
More simply put, Swift says that the scientists in power and with power don’t give a damn about mankind at large. The whole conspiracy is like any other. The potential tyrant speaks in the name of the common good but is seeking a private good. Bacon’s House of Solomon in the New Atlantis is just propaganda for the
Flying Island. The scientists want to live as they please—delighting in numbers, figures, and stars—and are no longer obliged to hide their desires. The people still have means of making themselves felt, but they are essentially enslaved to what scientists provide for them. The scientists can cut off the sun’s light to the world below.
There were elements of uncanny prescience in Swift’s misanthropic and cranky satire on science. Natural science very quickly withdrew from the Enlightenment project as a whole, leaving the human parts of it to fend for themselves. The laws of nature were scientific, but natural science no longer claimed to be able to legislate human laws, leaving political science out in the cold, without a rational or scientific basis. Instead of being real partners in the business of overthrowing the antiscientific regimes of the past, the scientists became fellow travelers. Once theological supervision was defeated and everyone accepted the need for scientists instead of priests, science was free and, in principle, indifferent to the political regimes that need and use them. Early Enlightenment thinkers appear to have believed that there was a perfect coincidence between rational consent of the governed and the freedom of science. But science could not rationalize all men, and turned out not to have to, inasmuch as it became able to force whatever rulers there are to support it and leave it alone. When there were still rulers who would in principle persecute a Galileo if they found out what he was up to—because his investigations undermined their legitimacy, founded on sacred texts—scientists were natural allies of all opponents of these rulers. The fascination of early modern thought with the ecclesiastical authority as the one great danger to freedom of thought caused the philosophers to believe that the alliance formed to overthrow it was permanent. In the event, it turned out that once there were secular rulers who had no absolute commitment to a nonrational or unscientific view of nature, the nonhuman part of the Enlightenment was immune. Self-interest, the great modern motivating principle, no longer dictated concern for the other thinkers, and science or reason, which appeared now to belong utterly to the natural philosopher, no longer gave the political and moral thinkers any warrant. In short, the common front presented by human and natural science in the name of democracy became an ideology.
The condition of natural science in the Soviet Union is the dreadful culmination of Swift’s prediction. It is a tyranny founded on science. And natural science, alone among the learned disciplines, and natural scientists, alone among human beings, have been able to force the tyrants to leave them alone. A Soviet mathematician is as much a mathematician as an American mathematician, whereas a historian or a political scientist must be a sham, a party hack. Natural science can now flourish in the Soviet Union, because the Soviet tyrants have finally recognized their unconditional need of the scientists. They cannot endure the historians or political scientists, and they do not have to. These latter are not of the same species as the natural scientists, either in the eyes of the natural scientists or those of the tyrants.
Most unpleasant of all is that this dreadful regime gets its power to maintain its rule from the natural sciences. As sciences they are neutral, except with respect to what concerns their interests, and cannot judge Roosevelt to be superior to Stalin. This would have probably been true of pre-Socratics too, but they did not generate political power. They were indifferent to political regimes and provided aid and comfort to none. The new scientists are the cause of all. The pre-Socratics lived in splendid isolation as models of the theoretical life. Natural scientists now project an ambiguous image. Although they may be truly theoretical, they do not appear that way to untheoretical men. Their involvement in human things gives them a public role as curers of diseases and inventors of nuclear weapons, as bastions of democracy and bastions of totalitarianism. Andrei Sakharov is humanly most impressive, but his stand for human rights does not follow from his science and, to say the least, does not guarantee him the fellowship of other Soviet scientists. The new dispensation has protected science; it has done nothing to give scientists control over the uses of the results of science, or the wherewithal to know how to use those results, if they were indeed able to gain control over them. Natural science in the long run won out over the Party when its results clashed with Marxist orthodoxy, but it could not control the Party’s political action. And no future tyrant is likely to imitate Hitler’s mad doctrinairism, which caused him to send Jewish scientists to his enemies to insure his defeat. Science in that sense moderates potential Hitlers—but only in that sense. In general it increases man’s power without increasing his virtue, hence increasing his power to do both good and evil.
The total picture is one of great danger resulting from the political involvement of science. Some people assert that we have to reinvent politics in order to meet the danger. Swift tells us that politics was already reinvented by the founders of Enlightenment, and that is the problem. It turned out that natural science had nothing to say about human things, about the uses of science for life or about the scientist. When a poet writes about a poet, he does so as a poet. When a scientist talks about scientists, he does not do so as a scientist. If he does so, he uses none of the tools he uses in his scientific activity, and his conclusions have none of the demonstrative character he demands in his science. Science has broken off from the self-consciousness about science that was the core of ancient science. This loss of self-consciousness is somehow connected with the banishment of poetry.
Rouseau’s Radicalization and the German
University
Here Rousseau bursts on the scene, just at the moment of Enlightenment’s victory and the establishment of the institutions of learning as the crown of society. An inverse Socrates, he reasserted the permanent tension between science and society, arguing that scientific progress corrupts morals and hence society, and he took the side of society. Virtue, “the science of simple souls,” is what is most necessary, and science undermines virtue. It teaches a slack and selfish relation to other men and to civil society, it calls into question the principles of virtue, and it requires a luxurious and loose society in which to flourish.
The knowers who inhabit the academies lose sight of this, become easygoing and self-satisfied. The Ciceros and Bacons would not have been what they were if they had been professors. It was in living life as it really is, rather than in the artificially structured and protected universities, that they were able to grasp the human situation as a whole, recognize its inner tensions and take responsibility, without the protective cover of a faith in progress and without the vanity of society’s ignorantly bestowed honors. Professors had made reason into a public prejudice and were now among the prejudiced. They represented an unsatisfactory halfway house between the two harsh disciplines that make a man serious—community and solitude.
Rousseau insisted on making explicit the ambiguity about the relative dignity of theory and practice implicit in Enlightenment. Enlightenment presented the thinker not as the best man but as the most useful one. Happiness is the most important thing; if thinking is not happiness, it must be judged by its relationship to happiness. It is, Rousseau argues, more than doubtful that science produces happiness. Moreover, although Hobbes and Locke teach that man is rational, his rationality is in the service of passions or sentiments, which are more fundamental than reason. Thinking through their position that man is naturally a solitary being results in the recognition that speech, the condition of reason, is not natural to man. Man’s specific difference from the other animals cannot, therefore, be reason. Enlightenment misunderstands both reason and feeling.
Rousseau’s reasoning and rhetoric were so potent that hardly anyone who thought, as well as many who did not, could avoid his influence. After him, community, virtue, compassion, feeling, enthusiasm, the beautiful and the sublime, and even imagination, the banished faculty, had their innings against modern philosophy and science. The fringe bohemian, the sentimentalist, the artist became at least as much the teacher and the model as the scientist. Inspired by Rousseau, Kan
t undertook a systematic overhauling of Enlightenment’s project in such a way as to make coherent the relationship between theory and practice, reason and morality, science and poetry, all of which had been made so problematic by Rousseau. Kant’s survey of the whole of knowledge can also be read as a project for the fruitful coexistence of the disciplines in the universities. Rousseau had pointed out that the ancient tension between the thinker and society, supposedly resolved by Enlightenment, had resurfaced in new and very dangerous ways. Kant tried again to resolve it.
He, too, agreed that natural science had read free, moral, artistic man out of nature. He did not try to reform natural science, to translate man back into nature after the fashion of the ancients. What he did was to demonstrate that nature, as understood by natural science, does not comprehend the whole of things. There are other realms, not grasped or graspable by natural science, which are real and leave a place for the reality of the experience of humanity. Reason does not have to be abandoned to defend humanity, for reason can demonstrate that science has limits that it did not know, and reason can demonstrate the possibility of a freedom illegitimately denied by natural science. Possibility and ground become the themes in Kant, for much that is human had begun to appear to be impossible and groundless.
Kant accepted Rousseau’s reasoning that freedom must be what distinguishes man, that it is denied by the kind of causation accepted in natural science, and that therefore the practical life, the exercise of moral freedom, is higher than the theoretical life, the use of scientific reason. In one of the most arduous and powerful theoretical efforts undertaken by man, he tried to demonstrate that nature is not all, that reason and spontaneity are not contraries. All this is established by reason, not by passion against reason. That effort lives in the three Critiques, the last great statement of liberal Enlightenment, the other strand of rationalism that coexists in the universities with Baconian-Cartesian-Lockean rationalism. The primary effort is to set limits to pure reason, to say to “proud reason, ‘this far and no further,’” in such a way that reason will submit rationally. Kant’s critical philosophy does not dictate to science what it must discover; it establishes the limits within which pure reason operates. It does the same for practical reason, thus turning David Humer’s distinction between the is and the ought from a humiliation for moral reasoning into the basis for its triumph and its dignity. It further establishes the faculty of judgment, which can again allow man to speak about ends and the beautiful.
