An Epistemological Appeal

Ruins, slave quarters, Monticello. Photo Katherine Heline Botkin.

Jefferson built his case for American freedom on an epistemological foundation - an epistemology derived from Enlightenment philosophy. The book to read is Inventing America, by Gerry Wills. I refer to this moment in American history simply to emphasize the strong influence Enlightenment belief and methods had on social and political movement in the eighteenth century. Consider Jefferson's declaration:
...the course of human events...implies a flow fixed by natural laws.
..Nature and Nature's God...make no mistake, this is not the God of the ancien regimen.
...we hold these truths to be self-evident.. why not 'evident'? Why not 'truth as revealed from Heaven'?
...let facts be submitted...political science, like physical science, could construct irresistible proofs through rigorous application of deductive method. The necessary elements in this process were 1) good measurements giving solid facts, and 2) a candid starting point.
...submitted to a candid world...the inductive and deductive processes which produce truth have this prerequisite: one must begin without prejudice, bias or interest. This was the candid state of the soul, wiped clean of the foul stains of tradition, custom, or creed. The American appeal to an international brotherhood of states would presuppose such whitened judgment...for without such beginnings, the rational processes which produce truth must inevitably fail.

A side note: the fireplace above looks like it was hastily constructed from a wide assortment of gleaned materials. But the firebox - look at that. Shallow firewall, high mantle, forward throat... this is a Count Rumsford design, the most scientifically advanced concept in fireplace engineering in Jefferson's time. I guess I am not surprised that this complicated man would find a way to order even waste materials into scientific form.

The American Experiment

This is Jefferson's sundial at Monticello (photo Katherine Heline). Jefferson was, in many ways, a child of the Enlightenment, and in his own way found room to retain some of the optimism which had withered in France. Whatever one has to say about Jefferson's philosophy, I have always found it easy to sympathize with his foundational confidence - that we could be a republic where strength and liberty rose up from the land itself. America would be a practical, agrarian realization of the sound principles of Enlightenment. His head may have been in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground, and he stood on good earth. And his neighbors, however unsophisticated their philosophies, were lords of something fresh and limitless and bursting with life. It was a powerful application of the scientific and moral constructions coming out of Europe.

...But we (as opposed to Europe) have an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman. Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.... Dependence (mean commerce) begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.
Thom. Jefferson
Notes on Virginia, query XIX

After 1755

Writers, like painters, sometimes need drama to quicken their work. Strong, angular (c.s.) lighting works because of the contrasts and depth it creates. Commentary such as Voltaire cast aside his optimism is pretty strong. Lots of contrast there. Maybe the writer is striking for effect, without much basis for his theory. Such were my thoughts after yesterday's post. This morning, reading Mss'r Barzun, I noticed his quiet assertion:

In Candide (published 1759), moreover, though the fact has been strangely overlooked, Voltaire no longer believes in progress through light and reason.

Perhaps noting the sharp contrast in the great man's life is important.

Even so, life goes on, with or without the optimism. In France, Enlightenment philosophy had provided a system useful for exploding all manner of inconvenient traditions and claims - especially Christianity. Such a tool wants to be retained. And if religious authority could be dismantled, why not political and economic authority? Already in France the philosophe was undermining the foundations of Divine Right and privilege, with only modest opposition by those threatened powers. But across the Atlantic the methodological criticism supplied in French thought would prove useful to American colonists seeking separation from the British crown.

"le mal est sur la terre."

For the honest man who would remain the optimist this world lays traps at every turn. Voltaire was sixty one years old in 1755. He had never been physically strong. We can only guess what the burden of personal physical decay might have added to the disappointments borne as he surveyed a crumbling philosophical landscape.

The greatest blow was the disaster at Lisbon. On All Saint's Day, 1755 a violent earthquake struck the city which was filled for the holiday. Gaping streets engulfed citizens and pilgrims, and churches collapsed on the massed celebrants. The destruction was unprecedented in modern Europe, and the tragedy was acutely sensed by the intelligentsia of the day. Voltaire was deeply disturbed - not only by the tragedy, but also by the modern thinker's responses to it. His troubled thoughts are expressed in his work Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne. Here are a few lines:

Nay, press not upon my agitated heart
These iron and irrevocable laws,
This rigid chain of bodies, minds and worlds,
Dreams of the bloodless thinker are such thoughts.

Much of the poem expresses the difficulty of the continuation of evil in the presence of a just God. In Voltaire's poem the problem is unresolved.

Whatever side we take we must needs groan,
We nothing know, and everything must fear,
Nature is dumb, in vain appeal to it,
The human race demands a word of God.

What is man?

Tormented atoms in a bed of mud,
Devoured by death, a mockery of fate.
But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes,
Guided by thought, have measured the faint stars,
Our being mingles with the infinite;

Toward the end, we see a significant renouncement of the popular Enlightenment optimism. I see an interesting replacement:

All will be well one day - so runs our hope.
All now is well is but an idle dream.

('All is well' was the idiotic axiom of the day, universally applicable to every inconvenience or happy accident. Voltaire was through with it.)

The poem ends with hope.

A Bright Moment - and Only a Moment

The intoxicating optimism of the early Enlightenment was a prairie fire - it flamed up brightly, fueling itself on the rotten fodder that lay before it. It raced across the culture, fanned by the winds of European change. And it died down as quickly as it had sprung up. Enlightenment constructions and prejudices would linger for generations with mixed effect, but the optimism that had inspired its French beginnings lay in a heap some twenty five years after its illustrious birth.

Voltaire was in England in 1726, returning to France in '28 or '29. Details are scarce about his time there, but we know he was deeply impressed by the English mood, especially with regard to religious toleration, political reform, and physical science. He witnessed Newton's funeral, where "...a mathematician was buried with the honors of a king". He and his contemporaries succeeded in importing something of this society into France during the next two decades; the happy effects and the unlimited potential of the new philosophy provided an impetus which was received worldwide - and especially in colonial America.

Here are comments from Christine North in her introduction to Voltaire's Candide:

...men were at length acquiring enough knowledge to throw off the fetters of ignorance and superstition which had so long weighed them down, and were ready to gain control over their environment and themselves. If they could, through the works of Newton, explain the apparently unfathomable movement of matter by a few simple physical laws, and with Locke move toward a rational analysis of the mysterious mind of man, why should they not learn to understand and control their own nature, and then their own surroundings?

Men rose in their own estimation. As they made more discoveries and arrived at explanations of what had been inexplicable, so they criticized more and more the old way of life, the so-called Ancien Regime, with its oppressive religious, political and philosophical bases...

This criticism, so effectively developed, would acquire a life all its own, and the echoes of its shouts would sound around the world for decades. The optimism, based on the superficiality of the human self, died an uneasy death. The tombstone might well site November 1, 1755 as the day it died.

Conflict, Part III

I am suggesting that in our global society the epistemological map is being redrawn, and that the lines may be a little more clear than they were twenty years ago. It is an epistemology built upon deep psychological footings, and it is pervasive, that is, it is part of the shared cultural experience. Economic alliances will enforce its claims on the everyday lives of our neighbors. This is a strong philosophical trend, even if it is poorly defined in the citizen's mind. But let's define it:

Truth is what the computers generate (or what we get from institutions most closely associated with powerful computer technology).

I began a couple of days ago under the headline "We've Done this Dance Before". I think there is an historical period which is analogous to our present age, especially with respect to our allegiance to the increasing powers of computer processes. It was an age in which popular confidence was eagerly lent to a new philosophical system; a system promising individual liberation, political and scientific strength, and a prospect for growth unlike anything that came before it. I know of no writer who conveys the feel of this period better than Jacques Barzun, one of the premier scholars of the twentieth century. Mss'r Barzun was born in France in 1907, came to the States in 1920, and developed his brilliant academic career at Columbia. In the year 2000 he published From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present. It is a beautifully written account of western cultural decline. Here is Mss'r Barzun on the early Enlightenment:

Encyclopedia - the "circle of teachings" -may be taken as the emblem of the 18th century. Like the Renaissance, the age was confident that the new knowledge, the fullness of knowledge, was in its grasp and was a means of EMANCIPATION. Confidence came from the visible progress in scientific thought. Science was the application of reason to all questions, no matter what tradition might have handed down. Everything will ultimately be known and "encircled".

Sounds like the cutline from yesterday, no? But back to Mss'r Barzun:

The goal of exploring nature and mind and broadcasting results was to make Man everywhere of one mind, rational and humane. Language, nation, mores, and religion would cease to create differences, deadly as everybody knew. With a single religion and its universal morals and with French as the international medium of the educated it would be a world peopled with - or at least managed by - philosophes.

Conflict, Part II

The current issue of Popular Science (December 2009) includes an article in which a photograph carries this cutline:

WOLFRAM WANTS IT TO COMPUTE ALL OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

The article is about Stephen Wolfram, the creator of the Mathematica software, author of A New Kind of Science and designer of the analytical engine WolframAlpha.com. The article neatly summarizes Mr. Wolfram's accomplishments, which demonstrate how much a brilliant man can accomplish working outside the traditional boundaries imposed by state, corporation and academia.

My point is not about Mr. Wolfram's work, but about the cutline, and how we might read it. And my hypothesis is this: those words, and any similar phrase celebrating the broad powers of computing, are going to have a much different feel to the reader born into homes where computers were present and influential. If one was born after, say, 1995, and experienced an association with a home computer throughout the formative years, and came to know its utility and adaptability in learning, shopping, entertainment, socializing and simply exploring human knowledge, he or she will perhaps have an instinctive sympathy for ideas which champion the strength of computing. And this sympathy may be complex - not simply an optimistic observation, but psychologically deep, especially as it becomes intertwined with the unique neurobiological processes instilled by intense personal computing.

The "yeah, right" scepticism is becoming "cool. whatever." What, if anything, is lost here?