What Does it Mean to be an Empiricist? by Siegfried Bodenmann & Anne-Lise Rey

Author:Siegfried Bodenmann & Anne-Lise Rey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

8.3.4 Buffon’s Rejection of Moral or the Fight Against Theology

This epistemological reflexion on the causes which have to be looked for goes together with a typology of scientific questions: naturalists only concerned with the “how (comment)” are leaning to atheism, while supporters of a sacred physics stress the importance of “why (pourquoi)”.

The role devoted to moral and metaphysics should be clarified: those sciences are partly rejected and partly transmuted and integrated within the new system of knowledge which Buffon calls Histoire naturelle. Our presentation of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle as reframing the classical form of the philosophical system, gives a satisfying account of the first three volumes of the Histoire naturelle, published in 1749: Buffon’s logic is included in the First Discourse (De la manière d’étudier et de traiter l’histoire naturelle); physics are instanced in the three essays which form the essential part of the first three volumes. But how are the following volumes to be interpreted? More particularly, how can we understand the first 15 volumes, published from 1749 to 1767? In other words: can our hypothesis account for those quantitatively numerous portions of Buffon’s natural history?

Many readers of the Histoire naturelle have felt that deeply moral considerations pervade the complete set of monographies, ranging from the horse in volume IV (1753) to the Mico which closes the volume XV (1767). Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle is famous for its praise of the nobleness of the horse, its condemnation of the sanguinary instincts of the tiger, or its charming description of the charms of the squirrel.

Thus understood, Buffon would not be giving an Epicurean physical system, but would be a moralist in disguise. However, the monographies describing the various species confirm the hypothesis of a rejection of the moral dimensions of natural history. The monographies/articles dealing with the favourite animals of the moral bestiary (namely the elephant, the dog and the horse), help us understand the general matrix through which all the other monographies are to be read. Buffon offers an Epicurean rewriting of the moral providentialist bestiary.

Providentialists like W. Derham, B. Nieuwentijt or N.A. Pluche, understand the science of nature as two different and parallel series: a deductive series that goes down from God to the characters of the creatures; an inductive one, that goes up from the natural entities to the nature of God, discovering and exhibiting the natural signs of his/her Wisdom, Power, Justice, Freedom. Providentialism understands the history of nature as a bestiary: the animals are treated as places in a moral system: the fox symbolizes shrewdness and wit, the lion embodies power and authority, the tiger blood-thirst…

Buffon takes up some of those moral determinations; but he inscribes them in a network of physical relationships. When he describes the horse, he translates the beauty of the animal into a system of technical devices: the history of the horse displays how the tools of domestication (bit, spurs and bridles) give us power over animal bodies. Buffon exhibits the principles of animal movements, according to the classical laws of movement

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