Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de

One of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment period, Condillac is the author of three highly influential books, published between 1746 and 1754, in which he attempted to refine and expand the empirical method of inquiry so as to make it applicable to a broader range of studies than hitherto. In the half-century following the publication of Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687, intellectual life in Europe had been engaged upon a fierce debate between the partisans of Cartesian physics, who accepted Descartes' principles of metaphysical dualism and God's veracity as the hallmark of scientific truth, and those who accepted Newton's demonstration that the natural order constituted a single system under laws which could be known through painstaking observation and experiment. By the mid-eighteenth century Newton had gained the ascendancy, and it was the guiding inspiration of the French thinkers, known collectively as the philosophes, to appropriate the methods by which Newton had achieved his awesome results and apply them across a broader range of inquiries in the hope of attaining a similar expansion of human knowledge. Condillac was at the centre of this campaign. Condillac's first book, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (1746), bears the subtitle A Supplement to Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. While Condillac is usually seen as merely a disciple and popularizer of Locke offering little of any genuine originality, and while he did indeed agree with Locke that experience is the sole source of human knowledge, he attempted to improve on Locke by arguing that sensation alone - and not sensation together with reflection - provided the foundation for knowledge. His most famous book, the Treatise on the Sensations (1754) is based upon the thought-experiment of a statue whose senses are activated one by one, beginning with the sense of smell, with the intention of showing how all the higher cognitive faculties of the mind can be shown to derive from the notice the mind takes of the primitive inputs of the sense organs. Condillac also went beyond Locke in his carefully argued claims regarding the extent to which language affects the growth and reliability of knowledge. His Treatise on Systems (1749) offers a detailed critique of how language had beguiled the great seventeenth-century systems-builders like Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza and led them into erroneous conceptions of the mind and human knowledge, the influence of which conceptions was as insidious as it was difficult to eradicate. 1 Life and historical context Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac, was born in Grenoble. His father was a successful lawyer and the family was prosperous. He was educated for the priesthood and took holy orders in 1740. While he remained a priest and was accustomed to wearing the cassock throughout his life, it appears that he celebrated Mass only once and neglected for the most part the other duties which attended his office. Dissatisfied with the education provided for him, he devoted himself to the study of philosophy, immersing himself in the works of Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz and Spinoza. He read no English, but acquired his knowledge of Locke through the French translation of the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) by Pierre Coste and read Voltaire's books on Newton. He was the contemporary of such Enlightenment luminaries as Helvetius, Diderot, Buffon, La Mettrie and Holbach. Voltaire and Diderot both expressed the very highest regard for his writings. Condillac was on friendly terms with Rousseau, and was frequently to be seen at the salons in and around Paris where so much of the intellectual activity of the Enlightenment took place. He spent nine years (1758-67) in Italy as tutor to the prince of Parma, and wrote a thirteen-volume course of studies which encompassed history, grammar, poetics and scientific methodology. The Enlightenment was a period of intense intellectual ferment whose major currents are both multifarious and complex (see Enlightenment, Continental). It is possible nonetheless to isolate several trends and commitments which define more or less the general tendency of thought and the aspirations of those who worked to articulate them. The philosophes thought of themselves, perhaps first and foremost, as the champions of the new methods in the natural sciences. They could see important progress being made in so many areas, not only in physics under the aegis of Newton but in chemistry, in navigational technique, in medicine and so on. Their first commitment was to bring the method of the new sciences to bear on as many different lines of inquiry as possible, their guiding assumption being that there was no field of research that could be placed beyond the purview of scientific investigation. But this commitment to the ways of natural science inevitably brought them into conflict with the authority and power of the religious establishment. Though the prestige and political strength of the Catholic Church had been eroding in France over the first decades of the eighteenth century, it was still a force to be reckoned with, especially where its authority to pronounce on matters of fundamental truth about the world and about the human place within it were challenged. In their attempts to advance the cause of science, the philosophes had to contend at every turn with what they called the powers of ‘superstition' and ‘enthusiasm', slightly veiled code words for the doctrinal chauvinism of the Church and what to their minds was its reactionary and stultifying influence upon the political institutions and social conditions of the day. These three currents, the defence and advancement of the cause of natural science, the challenge to the traditional authority and power of the Church and a political agenda directed towards the progress of humanity, define what may be taken as the essential thrust of the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement. Condillac's own contribution to this movement must be set in this context. His philosophy as a whole may be understood as the attempt to hold science and theology together in a single systematic vision of nature, together with a more benign and accommodating perception of man's place within the natural order. 2 Epistemology All Condillac's philosophy begins in the empiricism of John Locke, but he introduces a further methodological component which, he believes, takes him beyond Locke in his treatment of the nature of human knowledge. Disappointed with what appeared to him the idle speculation and dogmatism of the philosophers of the seventeenth century, he writes: It seemed to me that we might reason in metaphysics and in morals with as great exactness as in geometry; that we might frame as accurate ideas as the geometricians; that we might determine, as well as they, the meaning of words in a precise and invariable manner; in short that we might prescribe, perhaps better than they have done, a plain and easy order for the attainment of demonstration. (1746: 2) Condillac's epistemology represents the attempt to bring together Locke's insistence that all knowledge begins with experience with the rigour of a quasi-geometrical method of inference. With Locke, Condillac rejects Descartes' doctrine of innate ideas, but he wishes to preserve something of the latter's deductive logic as we move from the simple ideas received through sensation to the more abstract and complex ideas of scientific theory (see Descartes, R.). This attempt to combine elements of Lockean empiricism with Cartesian rationalism is representative of one of the most important aspirations of the Enlightenment thinkers generally. Condillac's historical importance lies in the fact that he, more than anyone else, tried to work out the details of such a combination with care and precision, and to formulate once and for all the method by which a sure and steady progress could be attained in virtually all areas of human inquiry. It was his hope, and that of all the French thinkers of the time, that the broader application of such a method would yield the same remarkable results in any number of different domains that Newton had achieved in physics through his combination of painstaking observation and mathematical rigour. Condillac believed that he had made two important advances on Locke by showing, first, how sensation alone, and not sensation and reflection as Locke held, provided all the ideational resources necessary for knowledge and, second, how ‘signs' or language provided the essential means for moving beyond our personal awareness of our sensations in the direction of objective knowledge. It is for the sake of demonstrating the first of these claims that Condillac constructed the elaborate thought-experiment of the living statue he discusses in his most famous book, the Treatise on the Sensations (1754). He asks the reader to imagine a statue whose senses are to be activated one at a time beginning with the sense of smell. His purpose is to show how all the higher cognitive faculties of the mind are generated out of the sequential occurrence of the most primitive of sensory experiences. The statue is presented with the smell of a rose. It immediately discerns the alteration of its ‘mode' from the utter lack of sensation to the manifestation of the rose's scent. This awareness of alteration within itself constitutes what Condillac calls ‘attention', the first and most basic operation of the mind upon the input provided by sensation. The statue is then presented with the scent of jasmine. It attends to the alteration of its own mode and immediately perceives the difference between the rose and the jasmine. This immediate recognition of the difference between the two, and then again the recognition of identity when presented subsequently with the rose, is a manifestation of the mind's power of judgment. ‘A judgment', Condillac writes, ‘is only the perception of a relation between two ideas which are compared', arising from the mind's implicit capacity to attend to the ideas separately (1754). The larger significance here is that identity and difference, two notions of fundamental importance for logic itself, are shown to derive from sensation and not to repose in the mind as innate principles or ‘clear and distinct ideas' available a priori and suited to provide an initiation point for the construction of knowledge. The statue is able not only to attend to the single presented sensation but to retain an ‘impression' of the rose while attending to the jasmine. This is memory, which too, according to Condillac, is only a function of sensation. The mind, then, is both passive, in receiving sensations, and active, in making comparisons between sensations present and remembered. With this much of the mind's capacities described, Condillac asks what might have occurred if the statue had first been presented with an unpleasant smell. If it lacked all experience of pleasant scents, the statue would not, in the presence of the unpleasant one, immediately have experience of anything we could call discomfort or pain, nor would it desire the removal of the unpleasant smell and a return to its former state of utter privation: ‘Suffering can no more make it desire a good it does not know than enjoyment can make it fear an ill it does not know' (1754: 5). Pleasure and pain, desire and aversion are thus also shown to arise from primitive sensations, but only through the operation of the mind's capacity for retention, comparison and judgment. Simply put, pleasure and pain are not themselves primitive sensations but learned responses to the mind's reflection upon the various sensations which come through to conscious experience by way of the organs of sense. None the less, Condillac claims, no sensations are completely indifferent, as any two of them will inspire within the statue not only a recognition of their difference but also a preference for one over the other. This immediately discernible preference of one sensation over another engenders, over time, the whole vast range of our desires and aversions; with the experience of desire and aversion the primitive capacities of the mind are magnified. On Condillac's view, our preference for one sensation over another provides a stimulus to the power of attention, enhancing the mind's ability to focus more keenly and resolutely on ideas stored in memory and leading in turn to a greater discernment and affinity for those sensations which are preferred. ‘If we bear in mind that there are absolutely no indifferent sensations', Condillac writes, ‘we shall conclude that the different degrees of pleasure and pain are the law by which the germ of all we are is developed, and that they have produced all our faculties' (1754: 46). Towards the end of the Treatise Condillac reaffirms this claim: ‘As without experience there is no knowledge, so without needs there is no experience, and there are no needs without the alternatives of pleasures and pains. Everything then results from the principle which we laid down at the beginning of this work' (1754: 209). In the ensuing pages of the Treatise Condillac's statue is endowed, one by one, with the remaining four senses. Condillac attaches special importance to the sense of touch, arguing that it is only with the addition of this inlet of sensory experience that the statue comes to have ideas of space, extension and external objects, and to acquire awareness of itself as something distinct from its own representations of objects. 3 Knowledge and nature as systems While the Treatise on the Sensations is Condillac's most famous and influential text, it is only in the Treatise on Systems (1749) and several less well known works, especially The Logic (1780), that Condillac offers his most thoroughgoing exposition of what he conceived of as a system of human knowledge. Having demonstrated the merits of Lockean empiricism in the Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, he proceeds, in the Treatise on Systems, to offer a critical analysis of the rationalistic systems of thought contrived by the great seventeenth-century philosophers, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz and Spinoza. Condillac argues that it was their failure to understand the nature and function of language, and the need to derive even the most general and abstract terms from materials provided through sensation, which led these thinkers astray from the very outset of their labours. Much of their deductive method could be preserved, but each link in the chain of inferences must be subjected to linguistic scrutiny to assure that the developing system of concepts allowed in nothing that could not ultimately be shown to derive from sensory experience. ‘The language of philosophy has been nothing else but a gibberish for many centuries past. At length that gibberish has been banished from the sciences' (1780: 64). Condillac believed that the language of science might be brought to a clarity and precision analogous to mathematical symbols and equations through what he called the method of analysis. This method requires that we examine each term in our language and try to trace it back to the point at which it connects up with immediate experience. At a simpler, more primitive point in their history, Condillac conjectures, humans were able to make an apt assignment of ‘signs' to those things in our experience which stood out as particularly relevant to our needs and wants. The human capacity for speech is itself a natural endowment neatly insinuated amidst the various other faculties of the mind where it augments and facilitates their operation. ‘There is an innate language, though there are no innate ideas' (1780: 56). Nature itself teaches us the method of analysis. So long as we had hitherto comported ourselves in the construction of our language in accordance with its natural tendency, and to the extent today that we come to understand better the ways in which it was originally adapted to our needs and wants, the knowledge we construct on the basis of our growing stock of abstract terms and concepts can be certified as valid and reliable. ‘Error begins when nature ceases to inform us of our mistakes; that is, where judging of things which have little relation to the wants of first necessity, we do not know how to try our judgments in order to discover whether they are true or false' (1780: 6). Condillac's method of analysis can and must be applied in other directions also. Once the basic terms of our scientific vocabulary are correlated accurately and unambiguously with experientially derived ideas, we are able to exercise the power of judgment over the propositions in which they occur in such a way as to extract and formulate with precision the relations and interconnections our linguistic signs implicitly bear to one another. In this way a systematic structure of concepts begins to emerge which in turn enables us to attend more carefully, especially through the use of controlled experiments, to the continued stream of input from sensation. Our knowledge of the world grows through a sequence of inferential steps, and the emergent system of knowledge could be imbued with the same precision and rigour as is to be found in mathematics itself if we would but attend to the clarity and accuracy of our basic terms. There is much in Condillac which might plausibly be construed as anticipating certain basic themes in the mid-twentieth century movement of Logical positivism. It would be a mistake, however, to impute too great a prescience to Condillac as a precursor of later philosophical movements because there are other, deeply ingrained aspects of his thought which are wholly characteristic of his historical moment and utterly foreign to the later developments. According to Condillac, all human knowledge will ultimately fall together into one vast system of concepts which reflects with perfect accuracy the systematic structure of nature itself. In using the analytic method to trace the meanings of our words back to their origins in sensory experience we are only following out the order in which our ideas themselves were generated in our encounter with nature. The perfect congruence between human knowledge as a system of concepts and nature itself as a systematic whole is ultimately a reflection of the divine intelligence which designed and brought nature into existence. Human nature, and human intelligence as the highest expression of our nature, have been ‘conformed' by the creator as an integral part of the natural order and all our needs, desires and cognitive faculties can be brought to reside in perfect harmony with that order. By coming to understand nature as a system we grow in our knowledge of God. Condillac, in short, was a deist and his philosophy as a whole gives magnificent expression to the eighteenth-century conception of God as cosmic law-giver (see Deism). The laws of nature which Newton had articulated, and all the other laws of nature which science was in process of discovering, were written into the natural order at its inception. But just as nature had its laws, so too there was a set of laws governing human nature, every bit as objective and every bit as amenable to the method of analysis as any other domain of science. The faculties and wants of man being given, the laws are given themselves; and though we make them, yet God who created us with such wants and such faculties, is, in truth, our sole legislator. When, therefore we follow these laws which are conformable to our nature, it is Him we obey, and this accomplishes the morality of actions. (1780: 27) It was not only human knowledge which could be brought into perfect systematic harmony between all the parts; human conduct too, all of our various personal and social interrelations could be harmonized in accordance with the law of human nature. It was one of the highest aspirations of the Enlightenment period, and of Condillac as one of its philosophically most astute representatives, to raise humankind to the more civilized and prosperous state that would emerge as we gained better knowledge of God's laws, both natural and human. The ‘moral sciences' themselves - including the nascent sciences of economics, psychology and politics - could be fully integrated into the whole vast system of natural laws, and to the extent that they were thus integrated and conceived in such a way as to permit a thoroughgoing application of the method of analysis, it was only to be expected that our knowledge of the human order and hence our ability to secure for ourselves a greater happiness in this world would be enhanced. 4 Reputation and influence In his own day, Condillac enjoyed a very high reputation in French intellectual circles as the one writer who had devoted his energies to the elaboration of the theory of knowledge required to support the ideals and political agenda of the Enlightenment movement. His works continued to be published in new editions well into the nineteenth century. His philosophy provided the stimulus and inspiration for the early nineteenth-century thinkers known as the idéologues, such as Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis. Condillac is often cited in textbooks on the history of psychology as one of the first to bring methodical scrutiny to bear on the subtle dynamics of such cognitive functions as attention, memory and habit formation. It remains a matter of scholarly controversy whether Condillac really made any important advances over Locke in his treatment of the empirical basis of knowledge. With regard to the two specific points on which Condillac himself believed he had gone beyond Locke, in reducing the source of ideas to sensation alone instead of sensation and reflection and in his theory of language, there is much that could be argued in Locke's defence. Nonetheless, it can hardly be denied that Condillac brought a much greater coherence and clarity to Locke's often tentative and disorganized discussions in the Essay concerning Human Understanding. By doing so he is responsible for bringing the empirical spirit of inquiry into a much broader currency on the Continent that it might otherwise have enjoyed. Condillac has not yet been given the careful attention that he deserves, and the full story of how his philosophy has influenced and shaped the later course of the history of ideas has yet to be written.