Materialism and Freedom: Commentary on Papers by Robert E. Schofield and Aram Vartanian

M a teria lism a n d F reed o m : C o m m en ta rymlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONM o n P a p ers b y R o b ert E . S ch o field a n d A ra m V a rta n ia n J E F F R E Y B A R N O U W The two preceding papers touch, if they do not quite intersect, at the point where theories involved in the scientific understanding of the natural world are seen to have implications or consequences for human self-knowledge and conduct. I will try to comment on each paper with adequate attention to its specific concerns, without exaggerating the points of contact and possible conflict between them. But I would also like to attempt to sketch a framework which would allow us to consider the papers together in their bearing on the general intellectual and cultural importance and import of natural science in the eighteenth century. Robert Schofield has traced for us the emergence of a series of relatively discrete and divergent Newtonianisms, with the intent of helping us to discard and guard against facile generalizations about the influence of Newton on an age that is sometimes named after him. In his introduction to Newton’s letters to Bentley in connection with the first Boyle Lectures Perry Miller has suggested “that Newton was not quite a Newtonian. He was holding something in reserve, not giving 193 194 / WVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA J E F F R E Y B A R N O U W himse lfe ntire lyto his own discoveries?’ Miller points to the following sentence in the third letter as an index of Newton’s distance from the Newtonianism of Bentley: “Gravity must be caused by an Agent act­ ing constantly according to certain Laws; but whether this Agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the Consideration of my Readers.”1 This mental reservation means something more than Marx’s “Je ne suis pas marxiste,” for it points to an element in New­ ton’s view of science that would seem to resist or repel the “ism.” Voltaire expressed something like this in his preface to Mme du Chate let’s French translation of the P rincipia: “If there were still some­ body absurd enough to defend subtle and twisted (screw-formed) mat­ ter.. . as the cause of gravity, one would say: this man is a Cartesian; if he should believe in monads, one would say he is a Leibnizian. But there are no Newtonians, as there are no Euclidians. It is the privilege of error to give its name to a sect.”2 Voltaire was a “Newtonian,” as Schofield has shown, and of a particular sort or sect. But the difference which Voltaire suggests here, between Cartesians and Newtonians like himself, is less a matter of disagreement on what the cause of gravity is than a radical divergence as to whether, or rather in what way, such causes are the concern of science. We must recognize this tactful or tactical reservation and self-limitation, paradoxically perhaps, as a powerfully attractive nucleus in Newtonian science for the formation of a new “ism.” W hether it was taken as freeing positive science from metaphysical presuppositions and pursuits, or as delimiting science to make room for such speculation and religious revelation and faith, or even as itself a vindication of and support for rational belief, Newtonianism of every variety in the eighteenth century drew significantly on the new con­ ception and self-consciousness of modem science, which was seen as expressed in Newton’s famous words “H ypotheses n o n fingo. ” Much has been written on the meaning of this utterance,3 and we must come back to try to assess the attitude which it suggests. But its various general misinterpretations are also significant for the cultural historian of science, for they were in many ways more influential. The “ism” which is most frequently associated with this conception of science is positivism. “Positivism” is by now less a descriptive label M a teria lism a n d F reed o m ImlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHG 195 than a te rm of opprobrium, in the...