Pierre Gassendi

• 1. Introduction

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  Pierre Gassendi was born on the 22nd of January 1592 in a village called Champtercier, near Digne, in the south of France. By his mid-twenties he held a university chair in philosophy, a cathedral post as Canon Theologian, and a growing reputation for dismantling the intellectual orthodoxies that had governed European thought for centuries.

  What made Gassendi strange was the combination. He was a Catholic priest who championed the atomism of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, a man ancient Christians had regarded with deep suspicion. He was an astronomer who made history by being the first person ever to observe a planet crossing the face of the Sun. He was a philosopher who picked a public fight with Descartes and, according to many scholars, got the better of it on at least one crucial point.

  And then there was his private conviction about meat. He never gave it up, but he wrote with uncommon honesty that if he were wise, he would abandon it bit by bit and nourish himself solely on the gifts of the earth. He did not doubt he would be happier for longer.

  How a priest from a small French village became a central figure in the scientific revolution, and why his ideas about atoms, the senses, and the limits of human knowledge still matter, is the story this documentary tells.

• 2. A Prodigy From Champtercier

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  Gassendi's first teacher was his maternal uncle, Thomas Fabry, the curé of the church at Champtercier. That early grounding in a small parish set the pattern for his whole life: combining serious scholarly work with a clerical existence that was never purely academic.

  At the collège in Digne, he showed a particular aptitude for languages and mathematics. In 1609 he entered the University of Aix-en-Provence to study philosophy under Philibert Fesaye, a Carmelite friar at the Collège Royal de Bourbon. Three years later, the college of Digne called the twenty-year-old back to lecture on theology.

  His ecclesiastical career moved quickly. He received minor orders at Senez from Bishop Jacques Martin, earned a doctorate in theology from the University of Avignon in 1614, and was elected Theologian in the Cathedral Chapter of Digne. On the 1st of August 1617, he received holy orders from Bishop Jacques Turricella of Marseille. That same year, at twenty-four, he accepted the chair of philosophy at Aix-en-Provence, handing the theology chair back to his old teacher Fesaye.

  His lectures ran along Aristotelian lines, since that was what the curriculum required. But he was simultaneously following the discoveries of Galileo and Kepler, and had come into contact with the astronomer Joseph Gaultier de la Vallette, Grand Vicar of the Archbishopric of Aix, who shared his appetite for the new science. Gassendi's break with the official philosophy was already forming beneath the surface of his respectable university career.

• 3. Against Aristotle

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  In 1623 the Society of Jesus took over the University of Aix and filled every position with Jesuits, which forced Gassendi out. He left on the 10th of February 1623, and spent the following months observing a lunar eclipse on the 14th of April and the position of Mars in Sagittarius on the 7th of June.

  The previous year he had printed the first part of his Exercitationes paradoxicae adversus Aristoteleos, a systematic attack on Aristotelian philosophy. The first book made the case that blind deference to Aristotle had damaged both physical and philosophical inquiry. The second book examined Aristotle's logic and reflected, throughout, the influence of Ramism. A fragment of a planned second book eventually appeared in print at The Hague in 1659, but Gassendi never completed the remaining five books he had originally envisioned. He concluded that Francesco Patrizzi's Discussiones Peripateticae had already left little space for him.

  The Exercitationes excited attention even though, as later commentators noted, the specific arguments it deployed were not entirely novel. What was new was the clarity and force of the attack. Gassendi was not simply disagreeing with Aristotle; he was arguing that the entire tradition of uncritical deference to ancient authority was an obstacle to understanding the world.

  His patron during this period was Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a man whose death in 1637 would afflict Gassendi deeply enough to produce what many considered his most praised literary work.

• 4. First Light on Mercury

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  Gassendi returned to France in 1631 after travelling in Flanders and Holland, where he had encountered Isaac Beeckman and François Luillier. That same year he achieved the observation for which he is most securely remembered in the history of science.

  Johannes Kepler had predicted that Mercury would cross the face of the Sun. On the appointed day in 1631, Gassendi watched, and he saw it. He became the first person in recorded history to observe the transit of a planet across the Sun. Later that December he positioned himself to watch for the transit of Venus, but the event occurred at night in Paris, and he missed it.

  His scientific firsts did not stop there. In 1629 he had explained the optical phenomenon known as parhelia, the bright spots that sometimes flank the Sun, as the product of ice crystals in the atmosphere. He used a camera obscura to measure the apparent diameter of the Moon. He measured the speed of sound to within roughly twenty-five percent accuracy, and showed that the speed was the same regardless of the pitch of the source. He addressed free fall in his De motu (1642) and in De proportione qua gravia decidentia accelerantur (1646). His demonstration that dropping a stone from a ship's mast preserves horizontal momentum served as an argument for the Earth's rotation. He also provided a satisfactory account of Blaise Pascal's Puy-de-Dôme barometer experiment in the late 1640s, supporting the possibility that a created vacuum exists.

  In 1634 the Cathedral Chapter of Digne voted to depose its wasteful provost, Blaise Ausset. A parliamentary order dated the 19th of December 1634 authorized the deposition. Gassendi was formally installed as Provost on the 24th of December 1634, a position he held until his death.

• 5. The Quarrel With Descartes

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  Gassendi met Thomas Hobbes in Paris in 1641. That same year his objections to René Descartes appeared in print as the Fifth Set of Objections in Descartes's works, and separately as the Disquisitio Metaphysica, complete with Descartes's rejoinders.

  Marin Mersenne had engineered the exchange in 1640 by drawing Gassendi into controversy with Descartes. The disagreement ran deep. Descartes believed that the mind could achieve certain knowledge through reason alone, independent of the senses. Gassendi held that the evidence of the senses remained the only convincing evidence for knowledge of the physical world.

  Descartes is often credited with identifying the mind-body problem, the puzzle of how an immaterial mind can interact with a physical body. Scholars have noted that Gassendi, reacting to Descartes's mind-body dualism, was actually the first to state it explicitly. His empirical tendency showed itself most clearly in these objections to Descartes than in any of his other writings.

  One of Gassendi's objections became especially famous through the way Descartes restated it in the appendix to the Meditations. The two men were not personally reconciled until around 1648, when César d'Estrées acted as intermediary after years of coldness between them.

  In 1645, before that reconciliation, Gassendi accepted the chair of mathematics at the Collège Royal in Paris and lectured there for several years to considerable success. Ill-health forced him to give up those lectures in 1648.

• 6. Atoms and Christianity

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  Gassendi's most ambitious intellectual project was to reconcile Epicurean atomism with Christianity. In 1647 he published De vita, moribus, et doctrina Epicuri libri octo, which received a warm reception. Two years later came both his commentary on the tenth book of Diogenes Laërtius and his more substantial Syntagma philosophiae Epicuri.

  Epicurus had taught that everything is made of atoms moving through a void, that the gods take no interest in human affairs, and that the soul dissolves at death. Each of those positions was incompatible with Catholic doctrine. Gassendi kept the atoms and the void while rejecting what he could not accept. He defended the existence of an immaterial, infinite God, endorsed divine providence, and maintained the immortality of a rational soul he described as immaterial and capable of free will.

  Critics both then and later found the synthesis strained. The German philosopher Friedrich Albert Lange concluded that the theological sections of Gassendi's system contained nothing of his own genuine opinions and were inserted purely as self-protection. Gassendi himself acknowledged the tensions but did not resolve them in any way that satisfied everyone.

  His maxim for the theory of knowledge was the Latin phrase: nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu, meaning nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses. He accepted that the senses give us knowledge of qualities rather than of things in themselves, and that we reach the idea of substance through inductive reasoning. He also acknowledged that inductive reasoning, as Francis Bacon conceived it, rests on a general proposition not itself proved by induction. Walter Charleton, the English Epicurean, produced an English adaptation of the Animadversiones in 1654 under the title Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletonia.

• 7. A Life in Letters

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  Edward Gibbon described Gassendi as the greatest philosopher among literary men, and the greatest literary man among philosophers. The remark, made in French, captured something real about how Gassendi worked: his scholarship extended across biography, music theory, astronomy, and the history of philosophy, often at the same time.

  His Life of Peiresc, written after his patron's death in 1637, received frequent reprintings and was translated into English. In 1653 he published lives of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. His collected works were published posthumously by Henri Louis Habert de Montmor in 1658 in six volumes at Lyons; a second six-volume edition appeared in 1727 under the editorship of Nicolaus Averanius. The fifth volume alone covered his commentary on Diogenes Laërtius, biographies of Epicurus, Peiresc, Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Georg von Peuerbach, and Regiomontanus, and included tracts on ancient money, the Roman calendar, and the theory of music.

  Gassendi spent time in Paris in the 1640s giving informal philosophy classes. Among those who attended, according to the biographer Grimarest, were Molière and Cyrano de Bergerac, though the latter's participation was disputed. Jean Hesnault and Claude-Emmanuel Chapelle, son of François Luillier, were also listed among his pupils.

  An abridgment of his philosophy was produced by his friend and secretary François Bernier in eight volumes in 1678, with a second edition in seven volumes in 1684. Samuel Sorbière, another disciple, recorded his life in the first collected edition of the works. Jean Philibert Damiron published a separate memoir on Gassendi in 1839. A bronze statue by the sculptor Joseph Ramus was erected at Digne in 1852, paid for by public subscription.

• 8. The Final Years

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  Gassendi spent his last years travelling between the south of France and Paris, with François Bernier as his secretary and companion. He spent nearly two years at Toulon, where the climate suited a man suffering from a lung complaint.

  He returned to Paris in 1653 and took up residence in the house of Montmor, where he resumed writing and published his lives of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe that same year. The lung disease had by then taken a firm hold, and his strength declined gradually. He died in Paris in 1655, the same year he had held the Provostship at Digne since its beginning.

  A large crater on the Moon carries his name, a recognition of the man who first watched Mercury move across the Sun. The lunar crater Gassendi stands alongside that observational achievement as the form his memory took in the sky he spent his life studying.