Marc's Reviews> St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence

I do not know how representative these Petersburg dialogues are for the work of the conservative French writer Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821). I have the impression that his core themes are somewhat less discussed here and that he limits himself to loose shots. But perhaps that is due to the form. De Maistre has a count, a senator and a young nobleman in the then Russian capital of St. Petersburg (where de Maistre himself was stationed as a diplomat) have various conversations about all kinds of weighty themes, such as divine versus human justice, the usefulness of prayer and sacrifices, etc. Perhaps ‘conversations’ is not the right term, because each of the participants gives a shorter or longer speech, with the consequence that the topics sometimes get mixed up. Because of this fragmentation, consistency is rather hard to find.

What is striking are the recurring fierce attacks on Francis Bacon, John Locke and David Hume. These are not the classical Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century, but they do belong to a tradition of a rationalistic-empiristic approach that was partly the breeding ground for the Enlightenment. Also Jean-Jacques Rousseau regularly gets slapped in the face, and that's remarkable because Rousseau partly distanced himself from Enlightenment. De Maistre's criticism (or at least of the characters he uses) almost always comes down to the same thing: science and empiricism in general are misleading at the very least, because they can never reveal the ultimate cause of phenomena (which, of course, can only be God). According to de Maistre, science and empiricist rationalism also assume too much that natural laws are unchangeable, causing them to ridiculize praying and rituals.

Now, although this is somewhat of a semantic discussion, de Maistre does touch some ground with his criticism of the universalistic ambitions and deterministic slant of science and empiricism, as is also recognized in contemporary philosophy. And so his pleas to see the world as a complex, unfathomable reality certainly is not lost on our time neither. Only with him, and with all reactionary movements that followed him, that is sufficient reason to simply push science and empiricism aside and swear by a vague form of religiosity (I have to concede that his argument on this in this book are somewhat ambiguous). And that is of course more than a bridge too far. I have the impression that de Maistre did like a bit of provocation. In any case, this book is quite interesting for those who like a Platonic dialogue/monologue, and a critical stand towards rationalism. But because of the fragmented and jerky argumentation style, this is quite tough reading.