Lettres Latines.
Jones, Matthew L.
Pierre Gassendi. Lettres Latines.
Ed. and trans. Sylvie Taussig. 2 Vols. Monotheismes et Philosophie
5. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2004. xxxiv + 622 pp.; x + 609 pp.
[euro]175. ISBN: 2-503-51353-0.
Sylvie Taussig. Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), introduction a la vie
savante. Monotheismes et Philosophie 6. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers,
2003. 456 pp. illus. bibl. [euro]60. ISBN: 2-503-52182-7.
In the volumes under review, Sylvie Taussig has translated,
annotated, and written an introduction to the Latin letters of Pierre
Gassendi. These letters appear in the final volume of his Opera omnia;
the volume also includes letters written to Gassendi, which Taussig does
not translate. The Opera excludes Gassendi's personal
correspondence with his closer friends, much of it originally in French
and long available in serviceable editions. The Latin letters were for a
readership far wider than their addressees; even the Latin letters
written to those close to him were often public statements on issues and
debates of the day.
Gassendi's Latin letters fall into three major groups. The
first group demonstrates the collective labor of a community of
scholars, and documents Gassendi's advance from mere aspirant to an
important node in the republic of letters. The letters show Gassendi
striving to persuade others to conform to this community's norms
and to heal the rifts within it. We see Gassendi getting help with
Greek, collecting and distributing astronomical observations, and
working to reconcile hostile parties, such as Galileo and the Jesuit
Christoph Scheiner, or Descartes and the artisan Ferrier. He writes a
poem upon the death of Wilhelm Schickard, a model for combining
philology and astronomical interests; he tells Galileo to be
philosophical about his blindness in one eye; he considers lexical and
metrological tools; he discusses vegetarianism with van Helmont--while
stressing the purposeful nature of living things. These letters make up
the practical work that accompanied his philosophical views: not
individual intellection, but collective empirical activity alone could
attain those truths about nature and history available to human beings.
Historians of science and scholarship will find these early letters
crucial for understanding the relationship between the late Renaissance
and mid-seventeenth-century learning, in doctrines, empirical methods,
and social organization.
An explicit ethical drive dominates the second group of letters,
almost all written to Gassendi's protector Prince Louis-Emmanuel de
Valois, the governor of Provence from 1637; these letters constitute
what Taussig calls a "course of philosophy," designed to form
the prince into a more philosophical person and leader. The letters
detail Gassendi's project of restoring and correcting Epicurus by
refuting the long tradition of denouncing him, by placing him in the
history of philosophy, and by explaining his doctrines and standards for
judging. Rebutting at length the oft-repeated claim that Epicurus
repudiated all the liberal arts, Gassendi claims that Epicurus sought
rather to orient those arts toward their proper propaedeutic role in
aiding us in living better--a theme central to much early modern
consideration of the sciences. This course, Taussig claims, "has as
much importance for studying his Epicureanism as the apparently more
accomplished treatises" (Intro., 210). She's right. These
letters should be central for understanding debates about the purposes
and methods of early modern philosophy, and its relation to its
predecessors.
With the third group of letters, roughly demarcated by the end of
his course for Valois, we return to a less-focused correspondence like
that of the younger Gassendi. Now an authority well known for his Life
of Peiresc and his observations of Mercury, Gassendi in his letters of
the 1640s and 1650s includes discussions of the vacuum and circulation
of the blood, and numerous criticisms of Descartes. His collective
astronomical and scientific labor continues: he corresponds with
Hevelius on instrumentation and observation, encourages the Jesuit
Honore Fabry to publish, and discusses Hobbes with Sorbiere. His letters
to Valois are full of news of political events, religious conflict, and
war.
Taussig's often-eloquent translation of the letters appears in
one volume; her seven thousand notes, numbered consecutively, appear in
a second volume in miniscule print. Two explicit goals frame her notes:
first, clarifying all references and situations mentioned or hinted at
in the correspondence, insofar as possible; second, grasping why
Gassendi and his editors might have chosen to include each letter. The
notes exhaustively document classical turns of phrase and quotations,
scientific and philosophical terms and disputes, holidays, political and
religious events, geographical locations, and biographies; a smaller
number present substantial philosophical discussion of the issues
involved in the letters.
Taussig's will to totality accounts both for the greatness and
weakness of her notes: they are great in that they illuminate so many
facets of every letter, weak in that the refusal to prioritize often
leaves her key findings and theses undistinguished amid the plethora of
profound erudition. Insightful philosophical points are too often
buried; so too are many central bits of philological commentary, such as
importance of the Greek salutations used by Gassendi and Louis de
Valois. I wished for some form of mark to distinguish the most important
notes. Many notes could be edited down: for example, it probably
suffices in this context to explain what the feast of the Assumption is,
not that it rested on disputed foundations.
Superb in cross-referencing Gassendi's other works, the notes
rarely refer to the major discussions in the secondary literature.
Taussig comments at length, for example, on Gassendi's important
letter to Mersenne concerning the relationship between mathematical and
physical points, without citing the crucial chapter considering the
letter in Lynn S. Joy's Gassendi the Atomist (1987). Vast numbers
of her notes offer no citations whatsoever: it is interesting to learn,
for example, about the ratios of populations of different states active
in the military during the Thirty Years' War, but strange to offer
no source for the information (Letters n. 4492).
No index accompanies the translation and the 7491 notes: while a
table of letters organized by correspondent, taken from the original
Latin, provides a general survey of topics, it hardly suffices. These
letters deserve no less than a series of indices by name, subject, and
work cited, as in the Akademie Edition of the works of Leibniz.
The introduction to the letters comes in a third volume. After a
brief biographical sketch, cued to the letters, Taussig offers a series
of topical chapters on correspondence, on the shared humanistic cultural
heritage, on the learning of the time, on the Epicurean project, on
Gassendi's involvement with the nobility, and on his relations of
the political and religious events of the day. Particularly instructive
are Taussig's discussion of the practice of correspondence, its
codes, and its vicissitudes; her consideration of Gassendi's
defense of the role of the sciences helpful for becoming a sage; and her
nuanced account of Gassendi's care in negotiating his relationship
with Louis de Valois, and in providing him philosophical instruction.
Taussig underscores the importance of ideals and practices of friendship
for understanding the doctrines and practice of the letters; Gassendi
viewed the practical and philosophical problems of organizing collective
scholarly and scientific effort through the analytical frame of
friendship. Taussig leads us to see the dialogical form of the letters,
the open give-and-take of discussion and empirical observation, as a
reflection of Gassendi's philosophical and scientific methods
themselves, and to see them as essential aspects of the learned life of
the philosophical sage. I would have greatly appreciated a chapter on
the reception history of these letters: they offer, for example, potent
models of collective labor and epistemic humility--but how widely were
they read? And by whom? How widely were they cited?
Despite its extensive bibliography, the text of the introduction
fails, with a few exceptions, to refer, even in its footnotes, to the
major secondary works on Gassendi and his contexts: the
introduction's notes are comprised almost entirely of references to
the letters themselves. In neither her introduction nor her notes does
Taussig point to the major secondary works discussing the questions at
issue in the letters, such as those of Joy, Bloch, Osler, Darmon, and
Lennon (just to list some of the most important of the works duly cited
in the bibliography). As well as a chronology, the introduction includes
a fine series of mini-biographies of the people addressed or invoked in
the letters; these biographies, again, largely lack suitable secondary
documentation.
To be sure, indices and references would take up valuable page
space; a hundred pages could easily be recovered simply by reducing the
frequency and length of quotation of the more easily available sources
in the notes. The publisher should make at least a name index available
to readers and libraries purchasing the rather overpriced volumes, so
that Taussig's copious labor will prove more fruitful, and her
insights and erudition more accessible.
Although their insufficient editorial and citational apparatus
makes these volumes less easy to use than they should be, they are
essential reading for Gassendi scholars and for anyone interested in the
republic of letters in the seventeenth century; historians of science,
scholarship, and literature should feast on them for years to come.
MATTHEW L. JONES
Columbia University
