Having finished writing my second book (tentatively title “Evolutionary Politics” and due to be published later this year, stay tuned), I’ve shifted my reading habits away from theoretical biology and radical theory to lighter and more mainstream pastures. So while in self-isolation this last few weeks (hello, Disaster Socialism), I’ve had the pleasure to read the first two volumes in Anthony Gottlieb’s history of Western Philosophy, “The Dream of Reason” (first published in 2000) & “The Dream of Enlightenment” (first published in 2016). Gottlieb, a former editor of The Economist, is a superb writer and his prose is light, economical and easy to parse. For anyone looking for a high-quality introduction to the field, I can highly recommend these books.

They are, however, very much histories of Western philosophy of the ‘dead white man’ variety. Gottleib apes Hegel (who devoted 800 pages to the ancient Greeks in his history of philosophy and 400 pages to the moderns) in his choice of subjects. The first volume, “The Dream of Reason” is less a history of philosophy up ‘to the Renaissance’ as advertised and more an introduction to Greek thought, with the majority of its time spent on the giants of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The second, “The Dream of Enlightenment” covers the pre-modern philosophers from Descartes to Hume, and a third volume covering Kant and beyond is reportedly on its way. Gottlieb combines brief biographical sketches of each thinker, to put them in their social context, with an in-depth discussion of two or three of their main philosophical arguments. Each subject is well-described, but the total absence of women or any thinker from outside Western Europe is glaring.

That said, Gottlieb is on the whole a fair and impartial biographer. He has little to say about the preservation and development of Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought by early Christian and Muslim philosophers, but at least the key figures are name-checked. Gottlieb is definitely a little too fond of Plato and Leibniz (both of whom he describes as geniuses despite their odd beliefs), and too critical of the Greek Heraclitus, and the French philosophes such as Voltaire and Rousseau. He prosecutes some of the ingrained prejudices of a liberal philosophical education, notably an rejection of moral relativism, a defense of free will and scepticism of a probabilistic universe, but these are generally minor digressions from the flow of his story-telling and easily forgivable.

A bunch of WEIRD-os.

Gottlieb’s biographical sketches demonstrate a point that perhaps the publishers who selected his book titles might like to disguise: very few of the heroes of the Western canon had a firm grasp on what Reason or the Enlightenment even were. The degree to which these founders of Western philosophy constituted a collections of weirdos, prophets and sages cannot be underestimated. Very few participated in formal education or empirical research, and most spent their time focused on questions of what we might think of today as theology and mysticism. Gottlieb notes how much of later Christian thought is infused with the mysticism of earlier Greek thinkers such as the numerology of the Pythagoreans, the Orphic belief in souls and Plato’s music of the spheres.

Descartes and Leibniz were also very much of this mould. Descartes, of course, is largely responsible for the metaphysical tendency in Western thinking that sees the mind and body as separate entities; two centuries later, Leibniz constructed an elaborate system of ‘monads’ in which material entities are merely imperfect reflections of abstracted pure entities. For these thinkers, Ideas were not only real entities but in some way more real than the material world which could be observed, sensed and experienced. Reason was not merely a tool, but a fragment of divinity that provided the only source of True knowledge, including about moral and ethical subjects. In these terms, many of Gottlieb’s subjects were effectively panpsychics - an equivalently absurd modern revival of such beliefs. In contrast, empiricists such as Democritus, Epicurus and Hume come across as eminently sensible.

Never go full Euclid

Gottlieb’s heroes are not the pragmatists who looked at human society with a sceptical eye, but proto-scientists such as Euclid, Galileo and Newton, and to a lesser extent Aristotle - whose system of syllogistic logic and biological investigations get a generous treatment. Gottlieb often comes across in awe of the power of the scientific method to produce knowledge that is both true and useful. But unlike many modern rationalists (“With a Capital-R”), he is cautious - or sensible - enough to recognise that a full embrace of scepticism would make some of the cultural and ethnical assumptions of Western philosophy untenable. Even though Descartes “I think, therefore I am” forms part of a system of mystical nonsense that is no longer explicit, we still rely on it to know anything at all.

Many of Gottlieb’s pre-modern subjects were obsessed with geometry, logic and the potential of the new ‘mechanical’ sciences (in much that same way of some modern analytic philosophers) - and he is fond of calling out the flaws of treating all knowledge this way. The ‘great’ philosophers tend to be such committed synthesisers of ideas that they embraced conclusions that appear absurd, monstrous or unintelligible. This includes Hobbes and Locke, two figures whom modern students of social science are most likely to know from their political philosophy. Hobbes was so committed to materialism that he believed, like the ancient Greeks Democritus and Epicurus, in a material God. And as anyone who has read Locke knows, his prose is so dense with definitions and exceptions that his work is less theory and more encyclopaedia. Despite their later reputation as the originators of modern liberalism and the social contract, both men were thoroughgoing authoritarians - as many men who think think highly of their own abilities tend to be.

The philosopher I personally enjoyed reading about the most was the thinker I had previously known the least - Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza’s reputation as a mystic is well deserved, but he was certainly less conventionally devout than Hobbes, Leibniz or Newton. It is a mistake, says Spinoza, to think of laws of nature - be their divine, philosophical or mathematical - in the same way as human laws. To note patterns in nature is not to infer a patriarchal law-giver, but this is just what modern psychologists would label an agency bias. Natural laws cannot be otherwise than as they are - they are descriptive, not prescriptive. Nothing, therefore, could be considered good or evil, sacred or profane other than in the human mind.

Spinoza was a European Jew, and one of the few uncritical supporters of liberal democracy in pre-nineteenth century philosophy. Positive traits and behaviours tended to increase the happiness of individuals and societies, but they are merely guideposts, not divine commands. For Spinoza, the mind and the body were one, and the body was subject to natural laws of cause and effect. Human beings are free to the extent that they can sometimes - but not always - understand the constraints imposed on them by natural laws. Spinoza was therefore something of a modern Stoic, resigned to the study of a world that was difficult, if not impossible to change.

Conclusion

For all our modern sophistication, much of modern Western philosophy is built upon a foundation that was first fixed in place more than 2500 years ago. What is remarkable in reading Gottlieb, quite frankly, is how little the pre-Enlightenment philosophers added to the diversity of opinions held by the ancient Greeks. For all their modernity, they were human beings just the same and ran up against the same limits to their imagination. The value of intellectual histories such as these therefore lies not in parsing how the ancients answered the big questions, but the way in which they highlight that some questions can never have satisfactory answers at all.