On Gaukroger, and Lucian in the History of Philosophy
Yesterday was the 19th anniversary of my first date with my spouse. During our celebratory dinner, I mentioned that I had received Charles Wolfe’s & Anik Waldow’s Festschrift for Stephen Gaukroger (1950 – 2023) [recall this post], Science and the Shaping of Modernity: Essays in Honor of Stephen Gaukroger (Springer 2024) in the mail earlier in the day. Despite the loss of Stephen, my presence in the volume is a source of satisfaction to me because a year earlier, during the on-line memorial conference, I was still too sick to participate, and now I zoom with some regularity without giving it a second thought. Convalescence is an exalting feeling.
We reminisced a bit about our interactions with Stephen, Helen, and their daughter Cressida. We came to the conclusion that he had been a true benefactor to me professionally (he had in fact recruited me to and offered me a great job once) and intellectually, and that he was one of the most emotionally sound people I knew in the Academy. He was far more important in other people’s academic lives, but his absence is a real loss for me.
So, this morning I set aside time to look at other people’s contributions to the volume. Wolfe & Waldow sensibly solicited relatively short pieces (more blog length than journal article), which range from reminiscence, intellectual homage, to polite final settling of intellectual scores. The rounded picture is delightful.
Conal Condren’s (New South Wales) contribution to the volume, “Where’s Lucian? Failure and Historical Compromise in the History of Philosophy,” argues that “Lucian has just been written out of the history of philosophy, a symptom of the erasure of satire from philosophical purview.” (p. 252) I felt a pang of futility. Ever since my first publication (2003) out of my dissertation I have been alert to the significance of Lucian to Adam Smith. My friend Spiros Tegos (Crete), who is also included in the Gaukroger festschrift, recently published a beautiful (2023) paper, “The joke is not funny anymore: Irony, laughter and ridicule in Adam Smith” that puts Smith’s life-long engagement with Lucian in much wider intellectual, literary, and cultural contexts.
Condren notes that in “De Copore [sic] Hobbes explicitly associated himself with Lucian’s derision of ancient philosophy” (p. 253.) This last point I had missed somehow. I went to Hobbes.* And found the reference in the epistle dedicatory, where he inscribes his “almost new” philosophy in a wider history of philosophy. It’s a bit of a long block quote, but since it’s Hobbes it’s always worth reading. (I am unsure who the translator is.)
This first section of the Elements of Philosophy…A little book, but full; and great enough, if men count well for great; and to an attentive reader versed in the demonstrations of mathematicians, that is, to your Lordship, clear and easy to understand, and almost new throughout, without any offensive novelty. I know that that part of philosophy, wherein are considered lines and figures, has been delivered to us notably improved by the ancients; and withal a most perfect pattern of the logic by which they were enabled to find out and demonstrate such excellent theorems as they have done. I know also that the hypothesis of the earth's diurnal motion was the invention of the ancients; but that both it, and astronomy, that is, celestial physics, springing up together with it, were by succeeding philosophers strangled with the snares of words. And therefore the beginning of astronomy, except observations, I think is not to be derived from farther time than from Nicolaus Copernicus; who in the age next preceding the present revived the opinion of Pythagoras, Aristarchus, and Philolaus. After him, the doctrine of the motion of the earth being now received, and a difficult question thereupon arising concerning the descent of heavy bodies, Galileus in our time, striving with that difficulty, was the first that opened to us the gate of natural philosophy universal, which is the knowledge of the nature of motion. So that neither can the age of natural philosophy be reckoned higher than to him. Lastly, the science of man's body, the most profitable part of natural science, was first discovered with admirable sagacity by our countryman Doctor Harvey, principal Physician to King James and King Charles, in his books of the Motion of the Blood, and of the Generation of Living Creatures; who is the only man I know, that conquering envy, hath established a new doctrine in his life-time. Before these, there was nothing certain in natural philosophy but every man's experiments to himself, and the natural histories, if they may be called certain, that are no certainer than civil histories. But since these, astronomy and natural philosophy in general have, for so little time, been extraordinarily advanced by Joannes Keplerus, Petrus Gassendus, and Marinus Mersennus; and the science of human bodies in special by the wit and industry of physicians, the only true natural philosophers, especially of our most learned men of the College of Physicians in London. Natural Philosophy is therefore but young; but Civil Philosophy yet much younger, as being no older (I say it provoked, and that my detractors may know how little they have wrought upon me) than my own book De Cive. But what? were there no philosophers natural nor civil among the ancient Greeks? There were men so called; witness Lucian, by whom they are derided; witness divers cities, from which they have been often by public edicts banished. But it follows not that there was philosophy. There walked in old Greece a certain phantasm, for superficial gravity, though full within of fraud and filth, a little like philosophy; which unwary men, thinking to be it, adhered to the professors of it, some to one, some to another, though they disagreed among themselves, and with great salary put their children to them to be taught, instead of wisdom, nothing but to dispute, and, neglecting the laws, to determine every question according to their own fancies.
So for Hobbes prior to Copernicus there were self-styled philosophers but there was no philosophy. And I take it that for Hobbes, a philosophy most be law-governed and truth-apt or certain which is exhibited by the capacity to create a proper consensus (that is, establishing a doctrine) among the learned. (I use ‘proper’ because the consensus must be bottom up or spontaneous in some sense.)
By “civil philosophy” Hobbes means something like what we would call “moral and political philosophy” of which he considers himself the inventor. So, in Hobbes’ day natural philosophy was less than a century old (dating from the 1540s), and civil philosophy wholly new.
A century later (ca 1738), in the Introduction to the Treatise, David Hume wrote:
'Tis no astonishing reflection to consider, that the application of experimental philosophy to moral subjects should come after that to natural at the distance of above a whole century; since we find in fact, that there was about the same interval betwixt the origins of these sciences; and that reckoning from Thales to Socrates, the space of time is nearly equal to that betwixt my Lord Bacon[1] and some late philosophers in England, who have begun to put the science of man on a new footing, and have engaged the attention, and excited the curiosity of the public.
The accompanying footnote reads: “Mr. Locke, my Lord Shaftsbury, Dr. Mandeville, Mr. Hutchinson, Dr. Butler, &c.”
So, Hume tacitly echoes Hobbes in allowing that natural philosophy precedes ‘moral’ philosophy by a century. And Hume gives Hobbes’ former boss, Bacon, pride of place in his own narrative. (Hobbes had been Bacon’s secretary.) But otherwise writes Hobbes and Hobbes’ more general framework out of his own genealogical narrative. (Elsewhere Hume treats Hobbes as a rationalist and not sufficiently experimental.)
As an aside, while I have published on Hume’s tendency to invent his own genealogies that lead up to him (see here), I have largely kept quiet on a fierce scholarly debate on Hume’s relationship to Hobbes (cf. Paull Russell with James Harris)—not that anyone has asked me to chime in. Sometimes, it’s best to keep mum.
Be that as it may, primed by Condren, you might think at this point that Lucian is then kept at arm’s length by Hume. But, in fact, Hume greatly admires Lucian treating him not only as a reliable source, but often pointing to his admirable literary and philosophic qualities (go [here] through all the explicit references to Lucian).
So where is Lucian? we know from Adam Smith’s so-called “Letter to Strahan” that Hume made a great show of reading Lucian on his deathbed. And Hume and Smith made sure that this narrative was appended to Hume’s brief obituary (“My Own Life”). The closing image of Hume’s life as a philosopher, friend, and ‘man of letters’ — we don’t encounter his last minutes as a dying man— is a coupling of himself with Lucian and Hume’s jocular inserting of himself into one of Lucian’s dialogues.+
*See also other positive references to Lucian in Hobbes collected by Condren in a different work (here.)
+Elsewhere, Hume praises Lucian for his imagination and lack of superstition. And Hume’s own attack on religious superstition is the theme of Hume’s dialogue with Lucian’s character.