Traité des premières vérités by Claude G. Buffier

Born in Poland to French parents, Claude G. Buffier, SJ (1661–1737) emerged as one of the most influential of the Parisian scriptores librorum in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Buffier is perhaps best known as one of the founding editors of, and contributors to, the influential French Jesuit periodical Mémoires de Trévoux, but his works on general grammar, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and logic earned him widespread renown. His Grammaire française achieved translation into Spanish, German, Italian, and English, and his Cours de sciences sur des principes nouveaux et simples pour former le langage, l'esprit, et le cœur dans l'usage ordinaire de la vie (1715) was widely adopted in France and Spain throughout the eighteenth century. Buffier's eclectic approach to philosophy, science, moral philosophy, and practical theology developed across several significant works: Principes du raisonnement (1714), Traité des premières vérités (1724), Éléments de métaphysique (1725), and Exposition des preuves les plus sensibles de la véritable religion (1732). In these works, Buffier was prescient in selectively adopting perspectives from Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke, evincing thereby his avid interest and participation in early Enlightenment discussions. Many of Buffier's texts proved to be influential on contributors to the Encyclopédie, on Voltaire, and perhaps later, as harbingers of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Given the growing recognition of Buffier's importance thanks to the work of Kathleen Wilkins, Catherine Northeast, Jeffrey Burson, Katharine Hammerton, and others, Louis Rouquayrol's new critical edition of Buffier's most influential work, Traité des premières vérités (Treatise of First Truths) is most welcome. Rouquayrol's critical edition of the Traité is replete with helpful intertextual explanatory notes to the texts and debates that Buffier addressed, and it includes an insightful synthetic introduction, which summarizes the Traité and addresses aspects of its philosophical and historical significance. The editor also helpfully includes a detailed chronology of Buffier's life and works, a note about the textual bases for the edition, several instructive appendices to later editions and related works by Buffier, and a profoundly helpful bibliography that includes existing editions, copies, and translations of the Traité, in addition to scholarly studies of Buffier's life and work. Rouquayrol's critical edition is, in short, the best one currently available, and it is likely to remain the standard published edition for some time.

In the editor's view, Buffier's primary significance is as the inaugural eighteenth-century figure who attempted to redress the weaknesses at the heart of Cartesian "innate ideas" in ways that might have avoided Berkeley's or Malebranche's immaterialism or Hume's skepticism: "pour lutter contre les 'conséquences idéalistes du cartésianisme,'" Buffier "avait eu plutôt recours au sens commun comme à un 'complément nécessaire du sense intime, qui garantit l'existence du monde extérieur'" (13n2, quoting Étienne Gilson). This "solution mitigée" allowed for a certain reconciliation between Descartes and the "empirisme tempéré" of Locke, and more broadly, a way of moderating "les principes des Modernes" with "les poncifs des Anciens" (13). This conciliation of Lockean empiricism and certain strands of Cartesianism found in Buffier was in fact a central point made by my earlier work on Buffier's contribution to eighteenth-century Enlightenment Catholicism (see Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment [South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010]; also "Claude G. Buffier and the Maturation of the Jesuit Synthesis in the Age of Enlightenment," Intellectual History Review 21 [2011]: 449–72). Rouquayrol's effort to revisit the complexities of this conciliation in his introduction is a welcome development. He explicitly reminds us that while Jesuits such as Buffier were prohibited from teaching particular theses associated with Descartes after 1706, they were nevertheless increasingly influenced by aspects of Cartesianism (15–17). In many respects, Rouquayrol shows that Buffier's Traité, a fundamentally metaphysical work, in effect put into practice his earlier Principes du raisonnement (1714)—a work of logic heavily indebted, he argues, to Cartesian method (17–19).

But Buffier also insisted that sound philosophy derives from the clear use of language (19). For Buffier, sound, practical metaphysics rests on "faire l'analyse du langage, des définitions, des discours, et attacher à ceux-ci des idées déterminées" (22). Thus, insists Rouquayrol, Buffier's Traité des premières vérités actually did not concern itself with the origin of ideas, but rather with the linguistic concretization of how an idea might be adjudged true or false (22–25). Rouquayrol convincingly argues that this seemingly fine distinction is actually vital to understanding much about Buffier's thought. For example, it allowed Buffier to sidestep the Cartesian impossibility of explaining the soul's interaction with the body (and therefore the speculative impossibility of explaining the origin of ideas and actions), while instead insisting on the common sentiment of humankind that the soul can act on the body through willful actions, and the body, on the soul through sensations (25–27). In this way, Buffier reveals himself to be indebted to Malebranche when speaking of the "dualité des substances," but when focusing on the "expérience de l'union," he shows himself to be indebted to a more empiricist understanding of Descartes (28–29). This, Rouquayrol contends, renders Buffier's empiricism somewhat distinct from the concern of Locke (28–29). These observations could certainly have been strengthened with references to Tad Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Thomas Lennon and Patricia Easton, The Cartesian Empiricism of François Bayle (London: Garland Publishing, 1992); and my recent chapter, "Healing the Skeptical Crisis and Rectifying Cartesianisms: The Notion of the Jesuit Synthesis Revisited," in The Skeptical Enlightenment: Doubt and Certainty in the Age of Reason, ed. Jeffrey Burson and Anton Matytsin (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 29–52. Nevertheless, Buffier's formulation of self-consciousness—in experiential, empirical terms—as first principle is, as Rouquayrol argues, just as deeply indebted to scholastic arguments as it is to Descartes and Locke; furthermore, it is foundational, both to Buffier's "psychologie rationnelle" and to Buffier's notion of common sense (32–42).

If the first foundational principle of truth is "sens intime" or "sentiment intérieur," then "sens commun" is the second (47). Because of the inevitable limits of logic and speculative reason, and because of our intimate sense of ourselves as a union of soul and body, Buffier maintains that an intersubjective common sense "se fonde sans cesse sur le témoignage des autres" (60). Rouquayrol develops his treatment of Buffier's notion of common sense with a useful comparison of Buffier and Thomas Reid drawn from his own close readings of the two, as much as from the important study by Louise Marcil-Lacoste, Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers ([Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1982], 52–57). Like so many early modern philosophers and érudits of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century studied by Richard Popkin in The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), and more recently, Anton Matytsin in The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), the common sense of Buffier proceeded from a species of "practical reason" or "mitigated skepticism," not as a means of deducing a metaphysical system, but as principles of acting in the world on the basis of practical moral certitude (60).

Beyond its instructive front matter and scholarly bibliography, the Rouquayrol edition of Buffier's Traité des premières vérités also includes the less well-known appendix to the 1732 edition of the Traité (291–306); Buffier's earlier and separately published remarks on the metaphysical principles of Descartes (307–17); his remarks on the metaphysics of John Locke published in response to Pierre Coste's first translation of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1700 (318–30); and his "Observations sur la métaphysique du Père Malebranche" published in the latter's 1712 work, De la recherche de la verité (331–35). As if that were not enough, Rouquayrol publishes Buffier's observations on the metaphysics of LeClerc (336), the logic of de Crousaz (337–43), and the logic of Pierre Sylvain Régis (344–46). Having all of these scattered reflections by the famed Jesuit philosopher and longtime editor of Mémoires de Trévoux published in one place will undoubtedly prove immensely useful to many scholars, in a way that enriches what is sure to be the standard edition of Buffier's Traité des premières vérités for years to come.