John Phillips
30/10/06
The culminating essay, “de l’experience,” of Michel de
Montaigne’s influential Essais makes
the classic case for “experience” as a source of knowledge and justice. The final version of the Essays from 1592, the year of Montaigne’s death, is an enormous
work in three books containing 107 substantial essays. As groundbreaking as the “new” essay form is,
Montaigne here exhibits not an original but an entirely generic humanist
suspicion of scientific and encyclopaedic tendencies. The word “humanist” is of course the
problematic nineteenth century translation designed to cover the Latin terms
like humanitatis and humaniores that were used to designate
the education systems of early modern
Montaigne repeats the
point a little later, evoking a fluid and chaotic archive of texts about texts,
an incessant “grafting” as he puts it of opinions upon opinions: “It is more of
a business,” he asserts, “to interpret the interpretations than to interpret
the texts, and there are more books on books than there are on any other
subject: all we do is gloss each other.
All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth”
(1212). As further illustration,
Montaigne quotes some verse of Etienne de la Boëtie:
Thus do we see
on a flowing stream,
Water rolling
endlessly on water,
Ripple upon
ripple as, in its unchanging bed,
Water flees
and water pursues,
The first
water driven by what follows
And drawn on
by what went before,
Water
eternally driving into water
Even the same
stream with its waters ever changing. (1212).
What is at stake in
observations like these (which occur regularly throughout the Essays) is the status of the authority
of the author himself, which is protected, Montaigne suggests, only by the
growing multitude of commentaries and commentaries upon commentaries.
The same problem,
Montaigne argues, exists in law: “We give force of law to an infinite number of
legal authorities, an infinite number of decisions, and just as many
interpretations. Yet do we ever find an
end to our need to interpret?” (1210). Montaigne thus mobilizes what is already
by that time a forceful humanist rejection of encyclopaedic and methodical
science in the fraught and critical sphere of social justice. “Now laws remain
respected,” he famously suggests, “not because they are just but because they
are laws. That is the mystical basis of
their authority. They have no other”
(1216). So there is much at stake in
what by then is only the latest version of an explicit historical attempt to
undermine the encyclopaedic traditions of Arabian, European, Islamic, Jewish
and Christian onto-theological exegesis (carried out, notably, in explication
of Aristotle). While Montaigne could
insist on a kind of “common sense” certainty about empirical experience his assertion
of this seems quite disingenuous in texts that are rich with allusions to, and
subtly altered repetitions of, texts from the entire fund of traditional and
classical literature.
Against this sceptical
backdrop there emerges, not for the first time or for the last, a counter
movement towards the establishment of supposedly “new” scientific grounds for
knowledge. Moreover this is carried out
under the chronically ambiguous banner of Method. René Descartes’s Discours de la Méthode [Discourse
on the Method …] from 1697 repeats Montaigne’s (and the entire humanist
tradition’s) rejection of scholastic Aristotelianism but instead promises to
establish scientific grounds for knowledge that are neither empirical nor
scholastic. The full title of Descartes’s
work is Discours de la method pour bien
conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences [Discourse on the Method for Correctly
Directing one’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences]. Before dealing with Descartes’s method in more detail
it may be helpful to examine the conditions that he wishes by its application
to emerge from.
In presenting on method it
may seem that we have a choice between two seemingly different kinds of
approach. One might follow what is said on method, pursuing well defined paths
or principles—one talks of the structuralist method or the several methods of
dialectical materialism—thus conducting our thoughts along tried and tested
ways. Discourse on the Method is often considered as a key moment in the
establishment of the modern conception of the subject of knowledge.
Descartes’s text on method
is as complex a work of literature as an epic poem by Milton, his near
contemporary. If the emergent interest
in human psychology and the paradigmatic institution of ways of relating the
individual to the object world outside him animate this text, it is also
haunted by the texts of Aristotle (themselves obscured by encyclopaedic and
methodical commentaries for diverse ends) and the revolutionary—and deliberately
populist—texts of the time (written of course in the so called vulgar tongues
as opposed to Latin and adding force to the emergent linguistic sovereignty of
French)—like mémoires of travellers
and the ever present Essays of
Montaigne. To abstract from Descartes a
method for establishing the truth in knowledge (as many people, even today,
have done) is to ignore the irreducible textual and historical phenomenality of
the work. Every time, in fact, that a
philosopher or (social) scientist attempts to establish knowledge on firm
grounds against the vagaries of diverse opinion Descartes’s perhaps
disingenuous ways are
re-enacted. This is why the
re-examination of these so called founding texts remain rewarding for those who
seek a method.
Descartes asserts (or
seems to) at the start of the Discourse
that “the diversity of our opinion does not spring from some of us being more
able to reason than others, but only from our conducting our thoughts along
different lines [par diverses voies]
and not examining the same things” (27).
Against this his text seems, again, to offer “the right path,” which he
opposes to “wandering.” But this
observation (which he elaborates further along these lines throughout the first
Chapter) seems to be less an assertion than an outright imitation of passages
from Montaigne, who had written:
Those people who perch
astride the epicycle of Mercury, and who see so far into the heavens, are an
excruciating pain in the neck: for in the study I am undertaking, the subject
of which is Man, I find such extreme variation of judgement, such a deep
labyrinth of difficulties one on top of another, so much disagreement and
uncertainty in the very school of wisdom, you will understand that, since these
fellows have not been able to reach any knowledgeable conclusions about
themselves and their own mode of being (which is continually before their eyes
and which is within them) … I cannot believe them, can I, about the cause of
the ebb and flow of the Nile! (721).
This is Montaigne, once again, as the sceptical culmination
of the humanist
dissociation of knowledge from scientific methodological constraints. The study of “Man” is now the principal
interest and the key value of knowledge.
So, in canonical terms, Descartes sets himself the task of emerging from
two distinct and antagonistic attitudes to knowledge, which he does through
both refutation (of alternative empirical and scholastic doctrines) yet at the
same time a kind of “inhabitation” of the earlier texts that is nothing less than
a baroque performance. The so called
“method of doubt” is sometimes regarded as a kind of radical scepticism, yet it
resembles Montaigne (and others) in a fairly generic manner.
The raising of the power
of judgement (the mind, reason) above a dubious environment of experience and
knowledge is nothing less than an Aristotelian gesture for the seventeenth
century. Furthermore, two sovereign
languages are at stake: the philosophical language of the day (Latin) and the
official, legal language of the day (French).
Descartes writes now in French while at the same time translating into
Latin (though this may—notoriously—have happened the other way as well). The issues of language, translation, politics
and law, thus reside at the very heart of the text (often regarded as a
founding work of modern positive science) concerned with method.
Descartes has, it seems,
on a more careful contextual reading, constructed the crisis, to which his method
is a response, through the subtle allusive restatement of Montaigne’s
iconoclastic populism (which is itself implicated in the French Sovereignty’s
program of replacing Latin with French as the official language). Our question about method then can more
usefully be focused on the saying of Descartes’s text (his discourse)
than on what he says (his
teaching). Method in this sense implies at least the bringing about of the statement about. The inevitable circularity that is signalled
every time a scientific project is undermined by a sceptical response or
critique (or every time a sceptical position forms the backdrop for a renewed
attempt to establish the metaphysical foundations for science) is already
implied at the level of the statement itself: in the double genitive: the
saying of the said (or the enunciation
of the statement).