Journal of the History of Philosophy

Among English-speaking scholars, Pierre Gassendi is best known as a skeptical empiricist and atomist who carried on acrimonious debates with Descartes. Our sparse acquaintance with him is based primarily on his Fifth Objections to Descartes’s Meditations, and most commentary concerns his views of knowledge and reality. Lisa Sarasohn attempts to redress this situation. By focusing on Gassendi’s ethics and social philosophy, she hopes to display the coherence of his entire system and his significance for Enlightenment thinkers. Unfortunately her treatment is too sketchy and unsystematic to satisfy her aims. She is doubtless right that Gassendi has been underappreciated, but her book does not make the case.

Gassendi’s Ethics consists of a short preface, nine chapters, and an appendix on the dating of the “Ethics” of Gassendi’s Syntagma Philosophicum. The first chapter discusses [End Page 322] Gassendi’s life and the broad outlines of his thought. Chapter 2 relates his probabilistic empiricism to the revival of Academic skepticism. Chapter 3 explains how Gassendi Christianized Epicurean philosophy to develop a rational hedonism compatible with human freedom. Chapter 4 then sets Gassendi’s views of freedom and error against Descartes’s. After a look at Gassendi’s objections to astrology in Chapter 5, Sarasohn compares Gassendi’s and Hobbes’s moral psychologies and theories of society in Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 8 argues for Gassendi’s influence on Locke, and Chapter 9 summarizes his anticipation of the Enlightenment emphasis on individual liberty and social utilitarianism.

This organization suggests one source of my criticism. Because Sarasohn spotlights comparisons with other thinkers, there is no systematic, detailed account of Gassendi’s moral theory. Chapter 3 shows how Gassendi accepts the Epicurean view that the highest human good is ataraxia, a state of tranquillity free of disturbance. Here we learn that although he thinks pleasure motivates all human action, he emphasizes the role of reason in obtaining ataraxia. He also assigns human freedom to the intellect rather than the will. Because he rejects Epicurus’ indeterminism, Gassendi has to reconcile freedom with the natural necessity ordained by God. In comparing Gassendi to Hobbes in Chapter 6, Sarasohn returns to Gassendi’s view of the soul and the relations between various faculties. But these discussions do not describe the precise roles of pleasure, desire, appetite, and passion in action. As Thomas explains in La philosophie de Gassendi, although appetites are natural tendencies to seek pleasure and avoid pain, generally the aim of the inclination is to remove pain. With irrational appetites, a disturbance in the organism produces a desire to return to the normal state (desire is intermediate between pleasure and pain). Once the desire is satisfied, a state of pleasure results. Where the imagination intervenes, pleasure alone may be the aim. Nevertheless, to portray all action for Gassendi as motivated by pleasure (or the desire for it—Sarasohn is not precise) is just oversimplification. Similarly, the reader is given scant idea of the complex relations among the passions, imagination, intellect and will. Clearly two discussions totalling thirty pages cannot hope to do justice to this subtle theory.

Similar problems arise in the sketchy treatment of human freedom. Sarasohn rightly points out disagreements between Gassendi and Descartes: Gassendi interprets freedom as the liberty of indifference by which the intellect judges good and evil, which judgment then determines the will. Descartes rejects liberty of indifference as the lowest grade of liberty, and locates human freedom in the will rather than the intellect. But it escapes Sarasohn’s notice that Gassendi and Descartes assign judging to different faculties. She also does not clarify the “liberty of indifference” belonging to the intellect, which turns out to be the ability to direct attention. (She mentions attention only once, at 96 n. 76, on a commentary on Descartes.) Since Descartes also thinks attention is a free act (albeit of the will), it is not apparent how much of their disagreement is substantive and how much is verbal. In...