Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (review)

A philosophy that paid no attention to the obscurity of the self might be intriguing, but it would be difficult to sympathize with. Steeped as we are in the work of those 'masters of suspicion', Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, one of the themes that most fascinates us is the emergence of a conception of decentred subjectivity. Efforts to trace the history of this phenomenon have resulted in a variety of influential narratives, and in many of them the canonical philosophers of the seventeenth century appear as benighted souls who lacked the crucial insight that our ignorance extends to ourselves. The fruit of their delusion, moreover, was a purportedly Cartesian soul, transparent to itself, but separated from the body, from its material environment and from the social world.

As Michael Moriarty notes in his exhilarating and deeply learned book, some scholars have resisted this caricature and have instead explored early modern attempts to examine and engage with the limits of self-knowledge. None the less, the caricature remains in circulation, and the central aim of Early Modern French Thought is to discredit it. In three insightful and persuasive chapters on Descartes, Pascal and Malebranche, Moriarty shows how an Augustinian theological tradition provided these authors with a representation of a divided sensibility, and nourished a critical attitude to spontaneous experience. Some elements of his story are relatively familiar. Recent work on scepticism has focused attention on an early modern preoccupation with the fallibility of the senses, and many contemporary readers, partly through their acquaintance with the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger, are au fait with Pascal's explorations of individual and collective self-deception. However, Moriarty connects these themes by embedding them ina powerful, overarching analysis of seventeenth-century interpretations of imagination. It is the processes of the imagination, he shows, that are held to conceal from us a range of interrelated truths about the material world, our bodies and our own thoughts, and that enmesh us in social relationships whose significance we do not understand. The investment of living philosophers and critics in a 'pitiably impoverished vision' of Cartesian subjectivity makes it difficult to get this argument across. Moriarty begins with a deft presentation of Descartes's account of a soul united to the body, whose perceptions, passions and prejudices are largely shaped by corporeal processes at odds with its spontaneous experience. Here, he argues, we encounter not only the orientation to the senses and affects that is subsequently taken up in different ways by Malebranche and Pascal, but also something of their attentiveness to the way that a distorted sense of self is sustained by an individual's social relationships and history. Mental transparency, when it exists at all, is an achievement rather than a given. Cartesianism is therefore one of the sources on which both Pascal and Malebranche draw in order to delineate an imagination that enters still more deeply into the self, all but annihilating its capacity to understand the moral and political norms around which everyday life is organized. As Moriarty shows, imagination is for them 'the atmosphere a whole society breathes. If it is, in some sense, a fake currency, it nonetheless enables real social transactions that take the place of violence.' This magnificent study gives us the means to overcome a set of prejudices that distort our conception of early-modern philosophy, and provides a subtle and authoritative interpretation of the veils that shroud the seventeenth-century self. At the same time, it offers the categories for a longer account of the breaks and connections between early modern and nineteenth-century forms of suspicion. Moriarty remarks that such an account would need to resist the temptations of genealogy by reading individual authors 'not in terms of a future we know, but in a kind of precarious contact between their present and ours'. This kind of precarious and rewarding contact is exactly what he has established in his admirable book.