BASSON (BASSO), SéBASTIEN (SEBASTIAN, SEBASTIANO)

b. near Metz, c. 1580; d. after 1625)

natural philosophy. For the original article on Basso see DSB, vol. 1.

Basson has been famous since the seventeenth century for his fairly aggressive attempt to replace Aristotelian natural philosophy with his own system, which relied on a unique combination of atoms and other material and spiritual entities. Scholarship in the early twenty-first century presents a fuller understanding of his life and work.

Basson’s Life. Basson was a stranger to the Republic of Letters and moreover tried hard to conceal his identity. On the title page of his only known publication, the Philosophia naturalis, he described himself only as a doctor of medicine. As a consequence, since the mid-seventeenth century a variety of erroneous biographical assumptions have sprung up. Of these his identification as a Parisian doctor and as a sixteenth-century Italian philosopher have been the most tenacious. As to his nationality, the question is still not settled. In the Philosophia naturalis, he identified as his birthplace a region called Le Saulnois, near Metz, in the Duchy of Lorraine. However, there is some circumstantial evidence that he may have been the scion of an Italian family by the name of Basso, who were courtiers in the service of Christina of Denmark, duchess dowager of Lorraine. But because in the only known autograph signature, he wrote his name as Basson, this spelling must at this stage be considered the only legitimate one.

Basson received his college education at the Jesuit Academy of Pont-à-Mousson, also in Lorraine. Pierre Sinson, the only professor he mentioned in the Philosophia naturalis, taught there between 1593 and 1599, which provides the only clue as to Basson’s approximate date of birth. About the period between his graduation from Pont-à-Mousson and the year 1611, it may be inferred that he obtained a medical degree somewhere, visited Rome, converted to Calvinism, and got engaged to his later wife in the Swiss town of Lausanne. A university professor in that town recommended him in 1611 to the Academy of Die, a minuscule and poor Calvinist college in the French Alps. There, Basson served from 1611 to 1625 in the double capacity of first regent, responsible for the graduating class of schoolboys, and of professor of eloquence. At various moments, he unsuccessfully tried to be promoted to one of the vacant professorships in theology, Hebrew, or philosophy. Judging by the archival record, Basson became increasingly frustrated in the litigious and precarious atmosphere of the little city of Die, whose Jesuits tried hard to squeeze the Protestant academy out of existence. After a series of clashes with his superiors. Basson threatened before the academic senate in September 1625 to publish an atheist tract, was thereupon expelled from the academy, and disappeared from Die, and from the historical record. Where he went and when he died is not known.

While Basson’s Philosophia naturalis was being printed at Geneva, representatives of the Company of Ministers and Professors caught sight of the manuscript and found that it was not only “full of peculiar opinions and directly contrary to Aristotle as taught and accepted” at Calvinist Geneva, but more in particular that “many dangerous things were proposed in it, be it against the Deity, the Providence of God, and the truth of the divine nature of the Son or of the eternal word of God” (Registres de la Compagnie des Pasteurs, 20 October 1620 [Archives de l’État et de la République de Genève, R.Cp.Past.7, fol. 14v]). The printing was stopped, and only after Basson’s personal appearance before the company in January 1621 was it resumed. What portions of his text were changed, if any, to satisfy the theological censors is not known.

Basson’s Natural Philosophy. The worries of the Genevan theologians are not hard to understand, for Basson’s philosophical treatise is above all a polemical text. In fact, his irately anti-Aristotelian epistle “To the Reader,” which is the most eloquent and lively part of his book, was reprinted as an independent chapter in the third, 1662 edition of Jean de Launoy’s history of Aristotle’s changing fortuna at the University of Paris. Basson there attacked the authority of Aristotle by arguing that he was a lonely voice dissenting from a venerable chorus of ancient authorities, that included not only the pre-Socratics and Plato, but also Hippocrates and later representatives of Greek medicine. Basson’s main objective was to abolish the principles of prime matter and of substantial forms. His sustained attempt to explain away all Aristotelian forms may have influenced René Descartes, who was acquainted with it. Nevertheless, the frequently heard description of Basson as a precursor of Descartes's

mechanical philosophy is quite misleading. In fact, as a substitute for the active Aristotelian forms, Basson offered a plethora of entities that were neither mechanical nor, as it turns out, easily reconciled with one another. Most famously, he offered atoms as the ultimate components of matter, and equally famously, he allowed for atomic clusters of various orders, of which each is a bearer of a distinct set of properties. For this proposal, Basson has repeatedly been celebrated as one of the inventors of the molecule. What Aristotle had described as the generation and corruption of higher forms, Basson explained away as the aggregation and resolution of such complex atomic aggregates.

However, only one type of atom was described in detail, namely the wedge-shaped fire atoms of Platonic extraction and naturally endowed with dissecting power. Basson believed these to be responsible for a whole range of natural phenomena, including rarefaction, heat, distillation, and light. Inflammation, explosion, and evaporation, in turn, must be viewed as the effects of the liberation of fire particles that had been locked up in a tight nexus of other particles. But because atoms are inert, Basson needed additional entities as causal agents, so as to explain natural processes. He was, however, torn between a variety of explanatory models. The most radical was presented in book four of his Philosophia naturalis, where Basson presented God as the only cause tout court and dismissed all secondary causal agents. His proposal that God personally “does all things continuously, and moves them himself, and leads them singly to their sundry destinations” (Philosophia naturalis, 1621, p. 197) is retraceable, albeit somewhat indirectly, to the Islamic atomists of the Kalam. Fire burns, Basson wrote, because “in the presence” of fire particles, God causes burning—a view that not only echoed the atomism of the Kalam, but also anticipated the doctrines of such seventeenth-century occasionalists as Arnold Geulincx or Nicolas de Malebranche. Using the same line of reasoning, Basson rejected the existence of the vegetative and sentient souls, attributing to God the functions that had traditionally been attributed to these higher forms. Of equally Islamic origin and equally rife with post-Cartesian adumbrations is Basson’s claim that “the conservation of things by God is their continuous creation” in each atom of time (Philosophia naturalis, p. 304).

The divine absolutism of books four and five of the Philosophia naturalis is, however, absent from all other parts of this work. Basson’s frequently heard nominalist battle cry that redundant entities ought to be rejected from the explanatory tool kit becomes almost inaudible from book six onward, where a plethora of agencies of Neoplatonic, Stoic, and Pythagorean extraction were introduced so as to mitigate between God’s omnipotence and particular physical phenomena. Among them, a certain type of material spirit, ether or pneuma was the most prominent. Basson, like Giordano Bruno (whom he did not seem to have known), took this spirit from the Stoics. Ether is said to fill the pores between the atoms and activates each of them according to their preordained aptitude, but it also fills the roles of a Neoplatonic world soul and motor of all things and that as a medium, and mediator, between God and the physical world.

For early Catholic readers, including Marin Mersenne, it was beyond doubt that Basson’s doctrines were not only false, but outright heretical. But even Protestant readers such as Isaac Beeckman and Daniel Sennert, who nurtured sympathies for atomism, found much of it incoherent and absurd. The causal setup of the world was indeed explained by Basson in mutually incompatible ways, and the same was true for his atoms, which are sometimes depicted as possessing independent agency and causally efficient properties (such as the fire particles’ lacerating wedge shape), but at others as mere instruments in God’s hands. But whereas some of Basson’s atomist explanations did have a traceable impact on the evolution of seventeenth-century matter theory, most of his technical explanations in such diverse fields as meteorology, astronomy, mechanics, or (Paracelsian-style) pharmacology were so aberrant and ad hoc that few appear to have taken them seriously. If one takes into account that Basson, in the isolated Alpine town of Die (which moreover had a pitiful university library), had even in 1621 not yet heard of Galileo Galilei’s celestial discoveries of 1610 (that had become common knowledge in all major European cities by the end of that same year) his lack of sophistication in the less philosophical and more applied scientific disciplines becomes explicable. Still, Basson’s reputation as an anti-Aristotelian and atomist was such that in 1649, his treatise went through a second edition, in the hands of no lesser a publisher than the Elsevier’s Amsterdam press.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORK BY BASSON

Philosophiae naturalis adversus Aristotelem libri XII, in quibus abstrusa veterum physiologia restauratur et Aristotelis errores solidis rationibus refelluntur. Geneva: Pierre de la Rouière, 1621. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: Ludovicus Elsevier, 1649. The editions earmarked for exportation to Catholic lands carry the deceitful place name “Aureliana,” instead of “Geneva.”

OTHER SOURCES

Brugger, Walter. “Sebastian Basso. Ein Vorläufer des

Okkasionalismus (1621).” In Kleine Schriften zur Philosophie und Theologie. Munich, Germany: Johann Bachmann Verlag, 1984, pp. 118–138. The first author to have noticed the occasionalist elements in Basson.

Gregory, Tullio. “Studi sull’atomismo del Seicento. I. Sebastiano Basson.” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 43 (1964): 38–65. An erudite article that places Basson in the context of late Renaissance criticism of Aristotle; although Basson comes out looking like a humanist scholar.

Kubbinga, H. H. “Les premières théories ‘moléculaires’: Isaac Beeckman (1620) and Sébastien Basson (1621).” Revue d’Historie des Sciences 37 (1984): 215–233. This is a reliable, though somewhat celebrative, analysis of Basson’s multilevel atomism.

Lasswitz, Kurd. Geschichte der Atomistik vom Mittelalter bis Newton. 2 vols. Hamburg, Germany: Leopold Voss, 1890. Reprinted. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms, 1984, pp. 467–481. Still an excellent doctrinal starting point.

Lüthy, Christoph. “Thoughts and Circumstances of Sébastien Basson. Analysis, Micro-History, Questions.” Early Science and Medicine 2 (1997): 1–73. This work reconstructs Basson’s biography and doctrine on the basis of archival sources.

Nielsen, Lauge Olaf. “A Seventeenth-Century Physician on God and Atoms: Sebastian Basso.” In Meaning and Inference in Medieval Philosophy: Studies in Memory of Jan Pinborg, edited by Norman Kretzmann, 297–369. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishing, 1988. A good analysis of Basson’s atomism in the framework of Protestant theological thought.

Christoph Lüthy