by ADAM KIRSCH
IMAGE/Amazon
e like to think of ourselves as living in an age of unprecedented disruption. Just look at all the commonplace features of our world that didn’t exist a century ago—jet travel, television, space flight, the Internet. If you could transport someone from the year 1916 to the present, we ask a little proudly, wouldn’t that person be stupefied by the changes? And, of course, he would be, at least for a few days, until he figured out how everything worked. But one thing would be very familiar to such a time traveller: the pride, and the anxiety, we feel about being so modern. For people in the early twentieth century were as acutely aware of their modernity as we are of ours, and with just as good reason. After all, they might have said, imagine someone transported from 1816 to 1916: what would that person have thought of railroads, telegraphs, machine guns, and steamships?
Modernity cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough. Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us. Modern life, which we tend to think of as an accelerating series of gains in knowledge, wealth, and power over nature, is predicated on a loss: the loss of contact with the past. Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as either a disinheritance or an emancipation; much of modern politics is determined by which side you take on this question. But it is always disorienting.
If we are looking for the real origins of the modern world, then, we have to look for the moment when that world was literally disoriented—stripped of its sense of direction. Heliocentrism, the doctrine that the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa, was announced by Copernicus in 1543 and championed by Galileo in the early sixteen-hundreds. This revelation was immediately experienced as a profound dislocation, as John Donne testified in his 1611 poem “An Anatomy of the World”: “The sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s wit / Can well direct him where to look for it.” More than two hundred and fifty years later, Nietzsche was reeling from the same cosmic loss of direction: “What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? . . . Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down?” Modernity is a vertigo that began in the sixteenth century and shows no sign of letting up.
Nietzsche is usually classified as a philosopher, Donne as a poet, and Galileo as a scientist. But one of the premises of Anthony Gottlieb’s new book, “The Dream of Enlightenment” (Liveright)—the second installment of his lucid, accessible history of Western philosophy—is that thought cannot be divided according to disciplines in this way. For philosophy, in particular, such a division is misleading. Today, we tend to think of philosophy as a specialized academic pursuit: a philosopher is a professor of philosophy. But none of the founders of modern philosophy whom Gottlieb discusses fit that description. Some were mathematicians: René Descartes invented the Cartesian coördinate system with its x- and y-axes, and Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus (around the same time as, but independently of, Isaac Newton). Some were professionals: Baruch Spinoza ground lenses for optical equipment; John Locke was a doctor and a diplomat. And some were literary writers, like David Hume, who was better known in his lifetime for his “History of England” than for his philosophical works. Usually, they overlapped several categories.
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