Now I want to make a distinction that will turn out to, again, be consequential in
this course between what I'm going to call the early enlightenment and
the mature enlightenment.
And they, the, this is the particular has to do with the view of science that was
embraced, because the early enlightenment thinkers, while they
were committed to scientific principles, had a very different conception of
knowledge than we intuitively all have as creatures of the mature enlightenment.
And so we, we,
we're going to have to spend a little bit of time getting that straight.
The most important idea of the early enlightenment,
which you already mentioned in relation to Bacon, was a preoccupation with certainty.
They thought that knowledge can't be scientific unless it's indubitable,
unless it's beyond question, beyond doubt.
We only can think of something as scientifically established if
it's certain.
And this, so when we think of the early enlightenment it's, and
the early enlightenment commitment to science,
the scientific method is all about arriving at certainty.
One of the most famous philosophical propositions of, of,
French think, 17th century thinker of, by, of the name of Descartes
is the so-called Cogito, Cogito ergo sum,
is the Latin translation of the famous phrase, I think, therefore I am.
The, the longer version of this is that Descartes was looking for
propositions he could doubt because he wanted to throw them out and
only retain the things that couldn't be thrown out.
And in, in his Principles of Philosophy,
he says in rejecting everything which we can in any way doubt, it is easy for
us to suppose that there is no God and no heaven, that there are no bodies, and
even that we ourselves have no hands or feet, or indeed any body at all.
But we cannot for all that suppose that we,
who are having such thoughts are nothing.
For it is a contradiction to suppose that what thinks does not,
at the very time of its thinking, exist.
Accordingly this piece of knowledge, I think, therefore I am, is the first and
most certain of all, to occur to anyone who philosophizes in an orderly way.
So that's the so-called Cogito argument.
Descartes says I'm going to find something it's impossible to doubt, and
that's then going to be my standard for what counts as true knowledge.
So the search for certainty was the, was the hallmark of genuine knowledge.
So let's turn up
the headlights on this idea in the following way.
I'm going to put three assertions up on the, on the slide here.
And I want to talk about each of them for a minute.
One assertion is that ocean tides are effected by the gravitational
forces of the moon.
A second assertion is that consent supplies the basis for
political legitimacy.
And a third assertion is that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle make,
add, add up to 180 degrees.
If I were to say to you, which of these propositions can be known with
the most certainty wh, which would you say?
>> Let me see.
I would say that the most certain is the sum of the interior
angles of the triangle.
This would be the most certain.
>> Okay, would you agree with that?
>> Without a doubt.
>> Okay, which is the least certain?
>> The consent that is the basis of-.
>> Consent is the least certain so that, do you agree with that?
>> Yes. >> So, and then and where would that, so
the ocean tides come in the middle?
Okay, why do the ocean tides
come before consent as the basis of political legitimacy?
Do you have a sense of that?
>> It's not, I mean if that's the way things are, but
it doesn't necessarily have to be.
I think gravitational forces can change, for whatever reason.
>> Okay, so that maybe why they're less certain than the triangles, but
why are they are more certain than the claim that consent
is the basis of political legitimacy?
>> Because not every political order has consent.
>> Okay.
All right.
So the way you guys ordered them
is exactly the way almost anybody in the modern would would order them.
And that we'll see later, when we, we have done more work
establishes that you are children of the mature enlightenment.
They, now if I were to say to you just,
just to underscore this a little bit more, what's at stake here.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Why is it?
Why is it that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle equal
180 degrees goes to the top of the list?
>> Because we can measure it.
We can demonstrate that over and over and over again.
>> Okay.
So, so let's take that and run with it.
Imagine you, you, you find a triangle and you get a little, out your protractor.
And you measure the three angles and you add them up and it comes to 180 degrees.
And then you find a differently-shaped triangle.
You do that one and it comes to ano, and you see it comes.
And then, you know, 11, 12, 15, 130 triangles.
Are you still going to keep going and say
maybe the 131st triangle is going to be different, I better check, or not?
>> Well, I mi, I might say I, I, I'm going to check, but
there is still this mathematical truth to it.
>> It's a mathematical proof, okay.
So what does that mean?
>> It means that we've created a system to.
To figure it out, [CROSSTALK] so we don't have to keep asking.
>> So that you don't have to look at the 131st triangle.
You know that, right.
>> Yes. >> You know, you know with certainty.
>> Right?
>> So that is why you say it's the most certain.
So that's what we would think of as well, a mathma,
a mathematician would say there must be a theorem.
Maybe I can't prove it right, sitting right here now, but
there's gotta be a theorem that tells you why
the sum of the interior angles add up to 180 and not to 163, right?
And once you know there's a theorem you're going to, not going to keep going and
measuring the next triangle, you, there's no point.
Right?
And so if, another way of putting it is that it, it follows analytically,
it follows definitionally.
It's likewise if we said a bachelor is an unmarried man.
We wouldn't have to say, well, this, this person is a bachelor and he's not married.
This one is, is, what about the 15th bachelor?
Well, the 16th bachelor, will, will we find one?
No, you're not.
Right? It's, because it's, it's nonsense.
It, it follows definitionally.
Whereas when we look at the ocean tides this,
the current theory is that the moon affects them.
And it's probably right, but it might not be.
It cer, it's certainly no theorem, right?
And, and when we talk about consent as being the basis for
political legitimacy, well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
People disagree about such things, and some regimes are based on consent.
Some that are not seem to endure for a very long time.
So okay, so you know, what you said is very commonsensical and
comports with you know, if, if we had, if we'd gone through 300 students,
probably they all would have ordered these propositions in the ways that you did.
Now, you've got to make a big imaginative leap because
the theorists of the early enlightenment thought about them differently.
And you, you may find this hard to believe going in,
but you will find it easy to understand coming out.
So let's go through it like this.
The theorists of the early enlightenment would have put,
again, the mathematical proposition at the top.
They would have put the proposition that consent is the basis of political
legitimacy co-equal with that, which you might find shocking.
And then the empirical proposition about the tides would have come in last.
And understanding why they thought that way might seem like an arcane project,
but actually it's going to turn out to be central to their theories of politics.
So we need to dig into that.
And to explain what's driving them,
I want to go to Locke's contemporary who's actually somewhat older than Locke,
the other famous English philosopher who we'll talk about more later in the course,
Thomas Hobbes who wrote a book called Leviathan, which is
maybe the greatest work of political theory written in the English language.
Certainly was the first great work of political theory written in the English
language during the English civil war in the mid part of the century,
which terrified Hobbes, and which he was determined to try and help end.
But we're not going to talk about that part of Hobbes today,
we'll get to that when we get to the social contract.
Instead, we're going to talk about Hobbes' theory of science.
And I'm going to give you this rather remarkable passage to think about and ex,
and it'll help us explain why they order those propositions as I said they did.
The arts here, in the second word of this paragraph, refers to knowledge.
That, arts was a, a term that referred to knowledge.
So they said of the arts, some are demonstrable, others indemonstrable.
And the demonstrable are those the construction of the subject whereof is
in the power of the artist himself, who, in his demonstration,
does no more but deduce the consequences of his own operation.
The reason whereof is this, that the science of every subject is derived
from a precognition of the causes, generation, and construction of the same.
And consequently, where the causes are known there is place for
demonstration, but not where the causes are to seek for.
Geometry, we were just talking about geometry.
Geometry therefore, is demonstrable, for the lines and
figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves.
Right? He, he doesn't say there's a theorem.
He doesn't say there's a proof.
He says it's because we make the triangles.
And civil philosophy is demonstrable
because we make the commonwealth ourselves.
But because of natural bodies, we know not the construction,
but seek them from the effects.
There lies no demonstration of what the causes be we seek for,
but only what they may be.
So.
Hobbes is saying here what the triangle and the commonwealth have in
common is that we make them, that they're the product of human wills.
Therefore, we can understand what it is that we made,
whereas when you look at the natural world, well, God made the natural world.
We, we have, you know?
We can, we can come up obviously the, the theory of the tidal influent
the moon's influence on the tide is long after Hobbes' time, maybe they would have
had some other theory at the, at, in, in the 17th century about the tides.
But we can observe more or less rigorously, but we can never get the kind
of certainty that we can get with, with the things that we ourselves make.
So it's not that it's a deductive proposition, or
that it's an analytic proposition it, that puts the triangle up at the top,
or the geometrical question up at the top.
It's because it's a product of human creation.
And because civil society, at civil institutions,
are also created by human beings, we can know them, as well.
Now just to,
to, I, I, did this partly because that's such a dramatic statement of this view.
But also I didn't want you to think that Locke's view, which is
on this particular point, identical to Hobbes' maybe the only thing they really
agreed on, because I didn't want you to think Locke's view was idiosyncratic.
This was a very standard view.
So Locke divides objective knowledge up in the following ways.
He, the, the natural world, which he calls ectype ideas, the world of ectype ideas.
He said, he says God knows the real essence, real essence being how it
really is, but human beings can only know what Locke called the nominal essence.
We, we, it's, here's Locke's analog with saying, as with Hobbes,
saying we can only guess.
We can't really know for sure, because we didn't make it.
Whereas when you turn to the social world, God knows the real essence,
because he knows everything.
He's omniscient, as we said.
But humans know the real essence as well.
So human beings can have a kind of maker's knowledge of the political and
social world that they can not have of the physical world.
And so that is why Locke, as I said,
on this particular question, agrees, all the way to the bottom,
with, with Hobbes' statement, that civil philosophy is demonstrable,
because we make the commonwealth ourselves.
But because of natural bodies we know not the construction, but
seek it from its effects, all we can do is yes.
Right?
So this, this is a very important thing to understand because it
shaped their whole worldview.
And as they started to shed that view in the 18th century and
the 19th century, the way in which they shed it had knock-on effects for
what they had to say about politics.
So, it's very important that we get our minds around this.
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