[In the following essay, Bloch discusses Gassendi as a transitional figure in the development of modern thought, focusing on his materialism and his epistemology. Bloch argues for the unrecognized importance of Gassendi both to British materialist thought, from John Locke to Immanuel Kant, and to political philosophy through modern times. This essay was translated by T. J. Reiss.]

“In the English materialists, nominalism is an all-important element and broadly speaking it constitutes the first expression of materialism.” The philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) was the compatriot and contemporary of Descartes. Yet this remark of Marx in the Holy Family concerning the birth of modern materialism from the womb of medieval theology may equally well be applied to him.¹ The very real role played by him in the history of ideas is due no doubt less to his work's immediate public than to the loud echo it provoked in the English scholars and philosophers of the second half of the seventeenth century. In a way they acted as the intermediaries who transmitted his message to the thought of the eighteenth century; such that I feel we may speak of a veritable fusion, beginning in the years 1660-70, of Gassendism with the British philosophical tradition.² His role and message, in any case, move towards materialism, a materialism of which his attempted restoration of Epicurean atomism certainly served as a basis, though perhaps more in the sense of a point of reference than in that of foundation. And it is certain that in his case the “first expression” of this materialism was the acceptance in his early Exercitationes Paradoxicae of the essential theses of medieval nominalism.³

We may thus see in Gassendi the last link binding the materialism, or rather the prematerialism, of the Middle Ages with the thought of the classical era, in so far as its materialist aspects are concerned, whatever may be the diversity, contradictions and ambiguities of that thought in other ways, like that of Gassendi himself. Taking up once again some of the conclusions to which I have previously come,⁴ I would like to demonstrate here this transitional function of Gassendist thought as it applies to certain aspects of his conception of nature, his theory of knowledge, and his views on society.

If we are going to talk about Gassendi's world view, it is view that must first of all be emphasized. The importance of the theme of visuality in the seventeenth century is well known: if we want to use a term made fashionable by one of those who have recently brought out its importance,⁵ it is an integral part of the substitution of a classical episteme for the medieval and Renaissance episteme of word and sign. In the seventeenth century this theme of visuality is vastly over-determined. It institutes, in a way, a structure in which come together significations of a technical, methodological and scientific, epistemological, and ideological kind. For the first, we need but think of the perfecting and use of optical instruments; for the second, those concerning for instance the role and import of celestial observations; for the third, the notion of vision as the model of knowledge; and, finally, the substitution of a universe which reveals itself to man through the transparency of his gaze for a world which was the mediator of the divine word. It is a structure elaborated via a return to the thought of antiquity—Platonism and the view of essences, Epicureanism and the primacy of sensuous vision.

There is no doubt that Gassendi is at once a privileged witness to and a founder of the polysemous structure thus elaborated. The theme of visuality runs through his work and thought in all its dimensions and its ambiguities: from the astronomical observations that he was making and recording without interruption from 1618 to his last days,⁶ and the anatomical ones undertaken with his friend Peiresc in 1634-35 in a study of the eye, together with the psycho-physiological, methodological and epistemological reflections that both inspired in him,⁷ to the theological position he takes, particularly during the polemic with Descartes of 1641-42,⁸ and in the posthumous Syntagma Philosophicum,⁹ of assigning to metaphysics the mission of comtemplating divine finality at work in the universe. Between these two poles, the same theme is revealed in the epistemological critique, stemming from his initial nominalism and reinforced by the contribution of the Epicurean theory of knowledge, that he never ceased making of the idea of intellectual intuition which constitutes one of the axes of the Disquisitio Metaphysica: if it is true that knowledge has no other function but that of representing reality, then man has no other material for such a representation than the visual sense, and intellectual processes, presupposed by the latter in any case if it is to have any objective value, can only serve to extend this sight by applying discursive operations to its decipherment.¹⁰

In Gassendi, as his contemporaries, this visualization of object, situation, and processes of knowledge is one with a mechanistic representation of the universe, in the sense according to which it is considered as a complex of displacements of matter in space; which first of all supposes a new conception of the latter and, correlatively, of time. It is indeed such a conception that Gassendi strove to evolve, or rather, it was he who was the first to express, in formulae of a striking clarity, the characteristics which constitute the classical notions of space and time.¹¹ Space, and entity at once immobile, homogeneous, infinite and infinitely divisible, indifferent of all content, freed of the traditional ontological categories of substance and accident, is conceived as a kind of object/medium of an ideal visualization of the sensible, which is achieved only by its negating itself in its abstraction as a limit case: it is a seeing which is view of nothing, of a nothing which is object, and site of all viewing of objects. At the same time it serves as the model for the new representation of time, which is conceived and defined from now on—by virtue of its “parallelism” with space—as an infinite, continuous, invariable flow, indifferent of events, the frame of succession in the same way as space is the condition of localization.

Linked with the “geometrization of space” which is responsible for the transition from the “closed world” to the “infinite universe,”¹² these notions, which are none other than the presuppositions of classical mechanics, were in fact constructed by Gassendi from his contact with the work of Galileo, of whom, like his friend Mersenne, he made himself the vulgarizer and propagandist in several minor writings of the 1640s.¹³ Indeed, the comparison of published and unpublished texts reveals that it is in these very years that he perfected the central element—and the one most difficult to establish—of this conceptual edifice: the strict parallelism of time and space for which he was obliged, whether he would or no, to break with the Epicurean thesis which held time to be the “accident of accidents.” And, together with the representation of matter provided by the atomism of antiquity and with that dynamism, drawn from, though doubtless surpassing, Epicurus—Democritus, rather—which he posited in the thesis regarding the “active matter” and the “innate mobility” of the atom,¹⁴ it is these notions which for him condition the principles of mechanics: the principle of inertia of which he was the first, as we know, to publish a correct statement,¹⁵ principles of conservation which he tried, in a very concise if not quite precise formulation, to deduce from the “mobility” of the atom.¹⁶

It may be that this visualization of science and the world helped him to extend this mechanism to chemistry for which, taking seriously methodological and experimental elements which were as much hidden as revealed in the researches of the “chymistes” of his age, he proposed an atomistic and “molecular” interpretation.¹⁷ Even more likely is it at work in the cosmological descriptions in which, despite the restrictions he imposed—partly out of prudence, but just as certainly from a real concern for orthodoxy—upon his scientific and philosophical tendencies in this area, he maintained as far as possible the Copernico-Galilean heliocentric theory, and in which, despite his theological creationism and finitism, he revealed his partiality for Bruno's thesis of the infinity of worlds, and narrowly managed to repress the temptation of proposing a materialist cosmogonic model.¹⁸

In brief, if we but take the trouble of freeing them from the mass of erudition in which they are enveloped, Gassendi's work in the realm of physical thought provides quite an imposing array of astonishingly modern ideas which lead essentially in the direction of scientific materialism, such as it was in his time, and many of which form an integral part of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century world view. This is particularly striking in the case of his ideas on space and time, where it is clear that the Gassendist formulae, prior even to his publication of them, were a direct inspiration to Pascal in his writings on the vacuum,¹⁹ and will be taken up again in very similar terms by Newton in the celebrated opening pages of the Principia Mathematica. And yet to a very great extent Gassendi worked out these novel expositions on the basis of the past: the distant past represented by the atomism of antiquity and the past of the Renaissance, whose “humanistic” concerns permitted the reintroduction of this atomism in the presence of the new science; the past of the Middle Ages, whose theological notions of “imaginary” spaces and times and, more precisely perhaps, the nominalist theologians' arguments,²⁰ provided a primary support for the new concepts he was proposing; and the more recent past of the Italian naturalism of novatores like Patrizzi and Telesio, of whose speculations he certainly made use, correcting and surpassing them, fertilizing them through contact with scientific development.²¹

This process of transmutation by means of which old-style thinking and data come to furnish the bases of the philosophy of modern times is no doubt even more apparent, or at least, other things equal, better known, in the Gassendist concept of knowledge. Because it is better known, but also because there is less originality evident in it, we need not discuss this point at any great length. I will limit myself to a few reminders and comments.

There is no doubt that nominalism is a feature common to all the important philosophies of the seventeenth century: with greater or less explicitness, with more or less divergence of meaning and intention, Descartes is as much of a nominalist as Hobbes, Spinoza as Locke. But their common refusal to attribute the value of real essence to general concepts formed by the understanding through the abstraction of individual characteristics, appears within their systems without direct reference to medieval nominalism. Gassendi, on the other hand, as I indicated at the beginning, refers explicitly to it in 1624 in Book II of his Exercitationes Paradoxicae in order to maintain that universals exist only in the understanding, that only individual cases are real, that concept and essence have no common measure.²² But for the name alone, it is this same nominalism that he will oppose to Cartesian metaphysics: if, as far as the reality of all things is concerned, existence and essence are one, then we must beware of confusing this undivided and individual reality with existence as an idea or with essence as an idea. For this last is nothing but the universal concept which, for lack of intellectual intuition, is forged out of experience by the human mind and which, as such, is no more than a relative instrument inadequate to the profound nature of things. It is from this confusion that is born the illusion of “eternal essences” to which existence is supposed to be added as a real “property” and as a “predicate” of judgment, an illusion on which rests the ontological proof of God's existence in Descartes' Fifth Meditation.²³ While Gassendi, then, links himself from the outset with medieval nominalism, and while, in a more general sense, he draws on the scholastic sensualist tradition according to which the understanding cannot think without an image, both this nominalism and sensualism eventually meet in him with the more distant past represented in the Epicurean doctrine which he first sought to restore then to defend, but only from 1626 on. The unpublished version of the Logique of what was to become the Syntagma Philosophicum reveals furthermore that it is his initial nominalism which forms the link between the “skeptic” critique developed in the Exercitationes Paradoxicae and the Epicurean gnoseology which serves henceforth as Gassendi's inspiration, though he never adopted it unequivocally.²⁴ It is this encounter and inspiration indeed that led him to the constitution of a relatively original empiricism, which gains in coherence at the time of the polemic with Descartes, and whose structure seems quite close to that of Locke's. The latter certainly draws on Gassendi, and not only through such intermediaries as Boyle, Charleton or Bernier, but also doubtless as a result of a direct acquaintance with his writings:²⁵ the critique of the notions of essence, substance, or infinity, the rejection of intellectual intuition and Cartesian innateness, the construction of a system of knowledge on the basis of sensation and reflection, all these major themes of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding are often more than merely prefigured during the polemics of the Disquisitio Metaphysica, then later in the Logique of the Syntagma Philosophicum and the Books on “Imagination” and “Entendement,”²⁶ and even before in many a passage of the Exercitationes Paradoxicae. By means of this intermediary, Gassendi's empiricism, itself due to the inspiration of the Middle Ages and antiquity, acts to a considerable degree as the remote source of the dominating stream of thought throughout the eighteenth century which took Locke's Essay as its breviary, up to and including the issue it finds in Kantian philosophy.

While these facts are relatively well known, Gassendi's ideas concerning the social world and political order are much less so. We may almost say that they are not known at all. However apparently minor may be their place in his work, and however doubtful their coherence, certain of their aspects seem to me of great interest, taking into consideration their historical significance and the very real role they may perhaps have played in the history of juridico-political ideas. There may therefore be some point in emphasizing them here somewhat.

As often in the Syntagma Philosophicum, Gassendi presents these ideas in a traditional framework: the treatment of questions of political Prudence and Justice, of Right and Laws,²⁷ the classic theme of the theological treatise, to which indeed, if we are to believe his secretary and biographer La Poterie, he had intended to devote his first theological teaching as early as 1616. In the case of the chapter of the Syntagma entitled De Justitia, Jure ac Legibus, it is furthermore at the moment of a commentary on Epicurean doctrine and texts (the Principal Doctrines of Epicurus, the fifth canto of Lucretius' poem, and a long fragment of Hermarchus cited in Porphyry's De Abstinentia) that the most striking concepts appear. But it is quite clearly Hobbes' doctrine of the De Cive, whose name is never mentioned, that forms the center of Gassendi's reflections in these pages. It is this that is paraphrased and indeed criticized there on the basis of positions inherited from the sixteenth century, not to mention the medieval traditions. At the same time this reflection and criticism take their place, de facto, in the history of theories concerning the social contract and natural right.

Like Hobbes and Lucretius, but also such theologians as Mariana for example,²⁸ Gassendi in fact connects the problem of Right with that of society's origin, as though to its source. He thus refers it back to the state of nature taken as preceding it and to the process by which men are supposed to have passed from one to the other for reasons of utility.²⁹ But when he comes to give his own opinion, he in fact opposes to the Hobbesian theory a kind of dualistic one resting on a distinction between the point of view of man considered in himself, singly and “absolutely,” and that of man considered in his relationship with others.³⁰ The first corresponds to a state of pure nature, basis of a “primary” natural Right, a state and a Right of which Gassendi draws a picture no different from Hobbes': a state of struggle and warfare in which there is a confrontation resulting from everyone's equal claim over all things, and where each man's right is none other than his strength. But according to Gassendi, this state is joined from the start with a state of nature which, though no less natural, is “as though modified,” and predisposes man naturally to the social condition as it establishes a “secondary” natural Right of a contractual kind. It is nature itself that, having already and always placed in man the desire to escape from the state of “pure” nature, grants him the capacity to conclude agreements with others for that end. Man is possessed, in short, of a social predisposition no less fundamental than the individual's tendency towards the satisfaction of his egoistic needs by any means whatever. On the other hand, in so far as the first agreements themselves are concerned, Gassendi substitutes for the single pact by which, for Hobbes, all by common accord place the totality of their rights and powers in the hands of a third party and thus by a single act constitute at once society and absolute power, a series of three basic contracts: the first, veritable birth certificate of the social condition, by which each individual renounces his right over all things so as to retain it only over a few, institutes property therefore; the second, according to which each gives over to the collectivity his power of “vengeance” (vindicandi facultatem), constitutes sovereignty, laws and penal justice; the third, finally, which for reasons of convenience confers on one or more leaders the exercise of the sovereign power thus constituted, is properly speaking the foundation of the State.³¹ The separation of these contracts, particularly that of the last two, has the explicit effect of rendering conditional in theory the transfer of collective sovereignty to the chosen leaders whose power is supposed to respect previously established laws or modify them only with the at least tacit consent of the collectivity.³²

By conferring on “nature” itself the principle of sociability which for Hobbes was only the calculation of a reason which, in order to survive, is obliged to denature nature, by splitting into successive contracts the single pact which in Hobbes is the result of this calculation, there is no doubt that Gassendi is interpreting and correcting the Hobbesian doctrine in the light of a return to the traditions of antiquity and the Scholastics, and to the contractualist theories that had been born or reborn as a result of the politico-religious struggles of the sixteenth century. In doing so he reveals, it seems to me, the “feudal” orientation of his political leanings. In the context of the first half of the seventeenth century, and particularly of the 1640s in France, the presentation of the act which constitutes the State's power as a last act, incapable of annulling those which precede it, as an act of delegation of power rather than of transfer, presupposing laws antedating it and of which it is not the basis, such a presentation is very likely to be used to justify the feudal claim to oppose the progress of absolute monarchy with the “fundamental laws of the kingdom,” in other words with the prerogatives of constituted bodies and the privileges of the feudal orders. At the same time, the placing of this claim within a contractualist theory inspired by Hobbes, the correction thus imposed of the views of the author of the De Cive by the appeal to “nature,” in short the critical conceptualization of a political concern, result in the production of a schema which at the very least prefigures the classical theory of contract of the school of Natural Right and the liberal doctrine of the State as they will appear in the second half of the century.

Indeed, despite the antecedents which have been claimed for it, to my knowledge it is only in Pufendorff that the first explicit formulation of the double contract is to be found, generally held to be typical of the traditional conception of the State and society held by the school of Natural Right.³³ While the “contract of submission” by which the subjects promise obedience to the monarch in exchange for protection is clearly expressed during the sixteenth century in the libels of the protestant monarchomachs, followed by those of the Ligue, while the “contract of association” by which individuals decide to become a society can be connected with such traditional—and vague—formulations as those found in Cicero, and while it is also true that the Hobbesian concept aims at placing in a single contract the origins of society and State, I do not think that the explicit statement of two successive contracts instituting first the one then the other can be found before the end of the seventeenth century. On the other hand, nothing seems nearer to it than the Gassendist distinction between the three contracts which establish in succession the right of property simultaneously with the social condition, then sovereignty and laws, and only afterwards the State. And it may be asked, though I do not for the moment see a way to answer the question, whether the indications contained in the Syntagma could have been used by the theorists of Natural Right, and if so how.³⁴ Furthermore, the liberal theory of the State in the form whose foundations are laid by Locke rests precisely for him upon the preexistence to the State of rights which already have a value in the state of nature, and in particular of the right of property, such that, far from being endowed with an absolute power, the State has as its first function that of making sure these rights are respected. Now, whatever may have been Gassendi's no doubt very different intentions, and however much his affirmation of the monarch's or the “magistrates'” obligation to respect preexisting laws may have remained a matter of theory, the schema he proposes arrives expressly at the same conclusion. In this case the certainty we have otherwise of Locke's knowledge in other areas of Gassendist ideas and texts may lead us to suppose that here, too, the views of the Syntagma's author may not have left him indifferent.

We can discover here again then, in so far at least as the question of the foundations of political right is concerned, a process analogous to that which I have tried to describe in the area of the theory of knowledge and the conception of the world. Using old theoretical bases, retrograde political concerns even, to approach the problem of the politics and political doctrine of his age, Gassendi manages in a sense to open the way to the theses which will be fundamental to the thinking of the following century.

The ambiguity which characterizes the content of Gassendist thought is thus joined by that of his historical situation. While Gassendi seems at once a materialist thinker and one eager to remain within the bounds of orthodoxy, he also stands out as one of the last—the last?—thinkers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as one of the first classical thinkers. As I have tried to show, this pivotal position, this privileged transitional moment reveals itself characteristically in the application of the same thought process to the most varied objects. It is a process which, starting with old schemas and concepts drawn at one from Greco-Latin antiquity, from scholastic traditions, and from the humanism of the Renaissance, ends with the formulation of theses and themes which inaugurate the science, gnoseology, and even political thought, of modern times.

Notes

1. Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt, 1927-35), Part. I, vol. III, p. 304.

2. We may note that in the above-quoted text, Marx, for his part, linked Gassendi with Hobbes in materialism's opposition to Cartesian metaphysics (op. cit., p. 302).

3. Exercitationes Paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos, in Pierre Gassendi, Opera Omnia (Lyon 1658), III, pp. 95-210. Saving indication to the contrary, all future references here will be by volume and page to this posthumous edition.

4. O. R. Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi: Nominalisme, matérialisme et métaphysique (The Hague, 1971).

5. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris, 1966).

6. Commentarii de Rebus Caelestibus, IV, pp. 75-498.

7. See for example the De Apparente Magnitudine Solis Humilis et Sublimis, III, pp. 420-77.

8. Disquisitio Metaphysica seu Dubitationes et Instantiae adversus Renati Cartesii Metaphysicam, et Responsa, III, pp. 269-410.

9. This essential work occupies in their entirety the first and second volumes of the Lyon edition cited in note 3. The text of volume I goes back to 1649-55, that of volume II to 1644-45 (or perhaps 1646). It was preceded by a work of quite different appearance but whose content is essentially identical, the Animadversiones in Decimum Librum Diogenis Laertii, which was published at Lyon in 1649. Manuscripts of almost the whole of a previous version, entitled De Vita et Doctrina Epicuri, exist in the libraries of Tours, Carpentras and Florence. It is the end of this version which, for lack of anything more recent, was reproduced as the second volume of the printed Syntagma, while the beginning, which dates from 1633-34, had already been published as early as 1647, also at Lyon, with the title De Vita et Moribus Epicuri (the manuscript of which has not survived). The remainder, written between 1636 and 1643 (with a long interruption between 1637 and 1641), remains unpublished.

10. On this point, see my article, “Gassendi critique de Descartes,” Revue Philosophique (1966), pp. 217-36.

11. See, in the Syntagma Philosophicum, the Book De Loco et Tempore (I, pp. 179-228), and earlier the substantially identical development in the Animadversiones (pp. 605-30).

12. See Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957).

13. See the De Motu impresso a Motore translato (III, p. 478-563) and the De Proportione qua Gravia decidentia accelerantur (III, pp. 564-650).

14. See, particularly, I, pp. 335b-336a.

15. In Letter I (dated November 20, 1640) of the De Motu impresso, published in 1642 (see III, pp. 489a-b and 495b-496b).

16. I, p. 343b.

17. Particularly, I, pp. 243b-245b and 472a.

18. For the first, see especially, I, pp. 667b-669a; for the second, see I, pp. 480b-486b—particularly if this passage is read in the light of the earlier unpublished version.

19. See the letter to Le Pailleur of February or March 1648, in the Brunschvicg and Boutroux edition (Paris, 1908), II, p. 188.

20. Alexandre Koyré, “Vide et espace infinis au 14e siècle,” in Etudes d'histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris, 1961), pp. 33-84. The matter was also treated in Paul Vignaux's lecture given at the XXVIIIe Semaine de Synthèse in Paris in 1967, though to my knowledge this remains unpublished as yet.

21. I, pp. 245b-246b.

22. III, pp. 159a ff.

23. See, particularly, III, pp. 374b-383a.

24. See above, note 9: the “Logique” of the De Vita et Doctrina Epicuri was written in 1636; a manuscript of it (not an autograph one) is to be found in the Bibliothèque de Carpentras.

25. Valuable indications on this point are to be found in Locke's manuscript notebooks, especially those of the Lovelace Collection owned by the Bodleian Library, and in the Medical Commonplace Book preserved in the British Museum.

26. I, pp. 31-124; II, pp. 398-468.

27. II, pp. 754b-765a; II, pp. 783a-808a.

28. Juan Mariana, De Rege et Regis Institutione Libri III (Toledo, 1599).

29. II, pp. 787b ff.

30. II, pp. 794a ff.

31. II, pp. 795b-796a.

32. II, p. 796a. This explicitness is true at least of the development I am resuming here, but the parallel development of the Prudentia (II, pp. 755a-b) seems to lean in the opposite direction, though it is true that it is less explicit. It must needs be said that the De Prudentia is strongly marked by the influence of Jean Bodin, which helps to explain the contradiction.

33. Samuel Pufendorff, De Jure Naturae et Gentium Libri octo (Lund, 1672), Book VII, Ch. II.

34. Despite the personal relations between him and Gassendi, I think we must set aside any mediation on the part of Grotius here, for his ideas, on this subject, are not relevant.