Pierre Bayle’s Cartesian Metaphysics: Rediscovering Early Modern Philosophy (review)

Given the difficulties of Pierre Bayle’s writing—its occasional nature, its digressive and wandering style, and its sheer size—it is no small task to present him as an author of a coherent metaphysical doctrine. But Todd Ryan does just that in this cogently-argued analysis of Bayle’s encounters with, among others, Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Leibniz, and Spinoza. We are thus invited, as the subtitle indicates, to “rediscover early modern philosophy” by way of Bayle’s philosophical engagements.

The main fault line in Bayle scholarship concerns the sincerity of the philosopher’s religious and philosophical commitments, and scholars have had recourse to biographical and contextual scholarship to solve some of these problems. Ryan sidesteps context, simply approaching Bayle’s texts as coherent arguments and analyzing them philosophically—a fruitful approach generally. That said, he periodically finds himself drawn into the debates about Bayle’s intentions, since he wishes to insist upon a single coherent interpretation of the philosopher as a Cartesian, something that requires one to confront instances where Bayle expresses doubts about Cartesian principles. Ryan’s strategy is to insist that Bayle takes evidence to be “a matter of degree” (25), and thus to suggest that Bayle takes the side of an argument that has the most evidence. Bayle emerges as someone who “is far more inclined to dogmatism than the standard reading of him as an unmitigated sceptic would have us believe” (32). In Ryan’s view, Bayle is largely devoted to Cartesian res extensa, a claim for which Ryan provides evidence drawn from throughout Bayle’s oeuvre (but mostly from the Historical and Critical Dictionary). He bolsters this evidence with thoughtful attempts to fill in the argument where Bayle’s writing is elliptic or enigmatic.

The result is an illuminating and complex piece of philosophical reconstruction that I shall hereby attempt to simplify drastically: Ryan argues that Bayle held a Cartesian substance ontology, that he viewed matter as res extensa, and that he insisted on the distinction between mind and body. Mind cannot be understood materially since coherent thought is singular and indivisible, whereas extension is, by its very nature, divisible. Bayle did not thereby think he had proven the immortality of the soul, but merely that thought cannot be material. Bayle was equally unimpressed with Locke’s suggestion that God had “super-added” thought to matter, a view that is erroneous because it entails the rejection of the res extensa. With regard to the problem of causation, we learn that Bayle was quite sympathetic to Malebranchean occasionalism, though this position becomes unsatisfactory when dealing with the problems of evil and free will. But on these questions Bayle appears to throw up his hands and declare human reason inadequate. Bayle found Leibniz’s pre-established harmony problematic because it entailed too strict a separation between mind and body, and was thus unable to account for mental change. A commitment to Cartesian extension is also an important factor behind Bayle’s response to Spinoza—something Ryan presents as much more philosophically compelling than has generally been admitted. (While Ryan suggests that the authors were mostly speaking past one another, he argues that Bayle perceived some problems that have dogged Spinoza scholars to this day. More importantly, he fleshes out the presuppositions at work behind Bayle’s responses to the Ethics.) Finally, Bayle displays some concerns about mechanism’s inability to explain complexity and animal generation, and he evinces deep doubts about the cogency of materialistic atheism.

The interpreter Ryan is keenest to refute is Gianluca Mori, a champion of the reading that Bayle was intent on destroying l’infâme. Those wedded to the story of Bayle the philosophical libertine will doubtless accuse Ryan of failing to see Bayle’s subtle, world-shaking mission as a sower of doubt, as a universal protestant who, in his own words, “protest[s] against everything that is said, and everything that is done.” Thus arguments that appear to the reader of...