The Enlightenment and the Intellectual

Foundations of Modern Culture

 LOUIS DUPRÉ

The Enlightenment and the

Intellectual Foundations
of Modern Culture

Yale University Press

New Haven &
London
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip
Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.

Copyright ∫ 2004 by Louis Dupré.

All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in
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Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dupré, Louis.
The Enlightenment and the intellectual foundations of modern culture /
Louis Dupré.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-300-10032-9 (hardcover)
1. Enlightenment. 2. Civilization, Modern. 3. Philosophy and civilization. I. Title.
B802 .D86 2004
190%.9%033—dc22
2003023865
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Edith,
after twenty-five years, with gratitude
 Contents

Preface ix
Introduction xi
1. A Definition and a Provisional Justification 1
2. A Different Cosmos 18
3. A New Sense of Selfhood 45
4. Toward a New Conception of Art 78
5. The Moral Crisis 112
6. The Origin of Modern Social Theories 153
7. The New Science of History 187
8. The Religious Crisis 229
9. The Faith of the Philosophers 269
10. Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 312
Conclusion 334
Notes 341
Index 383
 Preface

Stunned by the attacks on September 11, 2001, I wondered if there was

any purpose in writing about the Enlightenment at a time that so brutally
seemed to announce the end of its values and ideals. It later dawned on me that
the events of that fatal day might not be unrelated to the subject of my reflec-
tions. I do not mean, of course, that Islamic culture is or was ‘‘unenlightened.’’
It flourished well before that of the Christian West and for centuries surpassed
it. But Islam never had to go through a prolonged period of critically examin-
ing the validity of its spiritual vision, as the West did during the eighteenth
century. The doubt and anxiety that accompanied the West’s reassessment of
its past have marked the rest of the modern age. Since then Europe has known
its own horrors, causing us to question the adequacy of the Enlightenment’s
answers as well as the effectiveness of its solutions. But it permanently inured
us against one thing: the willingness to accept authority uncritically. The par-
ticular merit of the Enlightenment did not consist, as some have claimed, in
abolishing moral or religious absolutes. Indeed, the loss of moral absolutes,
whether caused by the Enlightenment or not, lies at the root of the inhumanity
of the past century. But the need to question has advantageously distinguished
our culture from others. Islamic culture has, of course, known its own crises,
none more painful and less deserved than the loss of its status in the modern
world, yet it was never forced to question its traditional worldview. The

ix
x Preface

Enlightenment was a Western phenomenon that defined the future of the

West. In this book I intend to study its implications.
I owe thanks to many for their assistance with this book. In the first place to
Jonathan Brent, editorial director of the Yale University Press, who supported
this project from the start, to his assistant, the ever-patient Kate Shepard,
and to my uncommonly observant copy editor, Eliza Childs. Cyrus Hamlin,
Giuseppe Mazotta, James B. Murphy, Kenneth Schmitz, Edward Stankiewicz,
Donald Verene, David Walsh, James Wiseman, and Allen Wood read parts of
the text and generously commented on it. To Stefano Penna I owe a particular
debt. In addition to the many discussions through which he helped me to refine
my ideas, he spent days rescuing the book from an early demise caused by
computer problems. Finally, my wife Edith patiently and impatiently suffered
with me while I wrote and rewrote one slow chapter after another. Despite
urgent work of her own, she prepared the final version of several chapters. To
her I dedicate the still imperfect result.
 Introduction

This book had its origin in the surprise I experienced many years ago
when considering the fundamental change in thinking and valuing that oc-
curred during the period stretching from the second half of the seventeenth
century until the end of the eighteenth. Curious to know what the intellectual
principles of modern thought were, I made a study of the beginnings of mod-
ern culture before turning to the critical epoch that forms the subject of the
present book. It soon appeared that no direct causal succession links the hu-
manism of the fifteenth century with the Enlightenment. When Max Weber
described modernity as the loss of an unquestioned legitimacy of a divinely
instituted order, his definition applies to the Enlightenment and the subse-
quent centuries, not to the previous period. We ought to avoid the mistake
made by Jacob Burckhardt in The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, and
often repeated in the twentieth century, of interpreting the Renaissance as the
first stage of the Enlightenment. It is true, though, that the early period intro-
duced one fundamental characteristic of modern culture, namely, the creative
role of the person. Yet that idea did not imply that the mind alone is the source
of meaning and value, as Enlightenment thought began to assume. To investi-
gate what is new in the basic concepts of this later period of modernity and to
find out how it has affected our own culture has been the purpose of this study.
The Enlightenment enjoys no high regard in our time. Many consider its

xi
xii Introduction

thinking abstract, its feeling artificial. To its modern critics, the very term
evokes form without substance, universality without particularity. They are
dismayed by the claim that the Enlightenment, concluding centuries of dark-
ness and superstition, introduced a new age of freedom and progress. The
condescending attitude of the ‘‘enlightened’’ toward the rest of our species
impresses them as arrogant. Certainly the French philosophes felt little respect
for the herd they were so confidently leading to truth. They also tended to
exaggerate the significance of their achievements. Baron Grimm, a friend of
Diderot who issued a bulletin about cultural life in Paris, cast an ironical eye
on the pretenses of his age: ‘‘Il me semble que le dix-huitième siècle a surpassé
tous les autres dans les éloges qu’il s’est attribué lui-même. . . . Je suis bien
éloigné d’imaginer que nous touchons un siècle de la raison.’’∞
Rarely did the Enlightenment attain true greatness in the visual arts. Some
painters have left us major works. Watteau, Chardin, La Tour, Tiepolo, Rey-
nolds, and Gainesborough immediately come to mind. But the eighteenth
century lacked the explosive creativity of the preceding two centuries. This
holds true even more for sculpture: we remember most of the works only
because of the models they portrayed. The case of literature is more complex.
French, English, and German prose attained classic perfection during that
period. The works of Hume, Johnson, Fielding, and Gibbon in Britain, of
Voltaire, Rousseau, and Fénelon in France, and of Wieland and Lessing in the
German lands continue to serve as models of elegant, precise, and powerful
expression. But little memorable lyrical poetry appeared between Milton and
Wordsworth. Or between Ronsard and Lamartine. Dramas were better per-
formed than ever, particularly in England, which also produced excellent com-
edies. But few major tragedies were written between Racine and Schiller.
Music and architecture enjoyed a glorious season. Yet some of its greatest
composers—Handel, Bach, Haydn—still drew their inspiration from the spir-
itual impetus of an earlier age. Significantly, we refer to eighteenth-century
composers as Baroque artists. The splendid architecture of the time also, by
large part, continued to build on earlier foundations. In Spain, Bavaria, and
Austria, the Baroque style culminated in the eighteenth century, while English
and French classicism continued to be inspired by Renaissance principles.
In contrast to the often mediocre quality of its artistic achievements, the
Enlightenment displays a veritable passion for ideas. The second half of the
seventeenth century and the first one of the eighteenth witnessed the break-
through of modern science and the establishment of new scientific methods.
Newton changed not only our world picture but our very perspective on
reality. There is hardly a field in which his influence does not appear. The
historical works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Herder form the ma-
 Introduction xiii

jestic entrance to modern historiography. Equally striking is the sudden emer-

gence of major philosophers: Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
Kant, the most gifted thinker of the period and the one who brought its ideas
to a synthesis, largely defined the course of philosophical reflection for the
next two centuries. The very contrast between the Enlightenment’s stunning
accomplishments in history, science, and philosophy and the lesser ones in the
fine arts (again, with the exceptions of music and architecture) highlights its
intellectual orientation. It was first and foremost a breakthrough in critical
consciousness. Those who criticize its one-sidedness are unquestionably right.
But they ought to remember that they attack the movement with the very
weapon forged by the object of their attack: that of critical reflectiveness.
In this book I intend to analyze some of the guiding ideas of the Enlighten-
ment, in particular those that have been instrumental in shaping our own
assumptions, attitudes, and values. By tracing them to their origins we may
hope to gain some insight into principles we had long taken for granted but
have recently come to question. The catastrophic wars fought during the
twentieth century, its social upheaval, and the environmental predicaments
caused by the very technology responsible for that century’s greatest triumphs
force us to reexamine its moral foundations. Because of their problematic con-
sequences in our own time, many now reject the assumptions of the Enlighten-
ment. My own assessment will be more favorable and my critique less radical.
One severely oversimplifies the nature of eighteenth-century thought in dis-
missing it as rationalism. The rationalist tendency did indeed exist, but so did
others pointing in the opposite direction. One might just as well describe the
Enlightenment as an era of sentimentality. In disregarding the variety of these
currents we risk projecting our own aspirations and aversions upon a self-
made image of the past. To understand our relation to the Enlightenment we
must attempt to describe it as it understood itself, even while trying to under-
stand its role in shaping the present.
The starting date of this study, 1648, marked the end of the Thirty Years’
War and the beginning of a restructuring of Europe’s political powers. The
half-century that followed shaped the scientific ideas of the modern age.
Thinking became simpler, more rational, and more methodic. Religion and
morality continued to be primary concerns, but they became subjected to a
critical examination. The year 1789, the end date of this book, witnessed an
event that shook the political and cultural foundations of Western Europe.
The excesses of the French Revolution introduced a strong reaction against the
ideals of the Enlightenment, but it did not bring the movement to an end. On
the contrary, the French armies spread its ideas to the more remote parts of
Europe. The ideals, however, underwent a mutation.
xiv Introduction

This book is not intended to be an intellectual history of the Enlightenment.

Rather have I attempted to draw an intellectual portrait of a crucial epoch in
European history with particular emphasis on the development and interac-
tion of those ideas that most contributed to the formation of our own spiritual
identity. This ought to explain why some writers receive more attention than
others who were perhaps equally significant yet less representative of the
movement or less influential in its effect on the present.
In referring to my sources I have as much as possible quoted from readily
available editions. Translations are mine except when explicitly attributed to
others.
A number of thinkers have influenced my approach. If I had to mention
names, they would be those of Ernst Cassirer, Henry Gouhier, and Hans-
Georg Gadamer. They taught me that it is possible to understand how the past
shaped the present without being reduced to it.
The Enlightenment and the Intellectual
Foundations of Modern Culture
 1

A Definition and a Provisional Justification

In 1783 the writer of the article ‘‘Was ist Aufklärung?’’ (What Is Enlight-
enment?), published in the Berlinische Monatschrift, confessed himself unable
to answer the question he had raised.∞ Today it remains as difficult to define
the Enlightenment. The uncertainty appears in the conflicting assessments of
the movement. The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary describes
it as inspired by a ‘‘shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable con-
tempt for tradition and authority.’’ Obviously a definition of this nature is not
very helpful for understanding a phenomenon distinct by its complexity. But
neither is Kant’s famous description of it as ‘‘man’s release from his self-incurred
tutelage’’—today mainly used as a butt for attacks on the Enlightenment.
Rather than beginning with a definition, I prefer to start my discussion by
briefly tracing the movement to its sources. The Enlightenment concluded
a search for a new cultural synthesis begun at the end of the Middle Ages
when the traditional cosmological, anthropological, and theological one had
disintegrated.
European culture rests on a relatively small number of ideas. One of them is
the assumption that reality as we observe or experience it does not coincide
with the principles that justify it. Plato made this distinction a central thesis of
his philosophy: appearances are separate from the ideas that ground and legit-
imate them. He knew well that the theory would be challenged. Why should

1
2 A Definition

what is not contain within itself the reason for its being? He himself ques-
tioned the theory in the dialogue that ironically bears the name of the great
thinker who inspired it—Parmenides. Later, his most illustrious disciple so
radically criticized Plato’s theory of the Ideas that it rarely reappeared in its
original form. Yet Aristotle did not question the principle itself. He, no less
than Plato, distinguished the reason for a thing’s existence from that existence
itself. This in fact is why the notion of causality assumed such an importance
in his thought. In Enlightenment philosophy that distinction received what
may well have been its strongest formulation in the principle of sufficient
reason: everything must have a reason why it should be rather than not be.
Many consider that the essence of rationalism. But the axiom that the real is
rooted in an ideal principle does not imply that the human mind is necessarily
capable of justifying it. The latter is a rationalist position that the Greeks never
held.
Greek philosophy of the classical age incorporated three areas of reality that
modern thought has divided into the separate domains of cosmology, anthro-
pology, and theology. Gods and humans were included in an all-comprehensive
nature, the physis of the Presocratics, the cosmos of Plato and Aristotle. Both
gods and cosmos had always existed. Hence, the former did not justify the
latter. Neither did Plato’s Demiurge explain the existence of the world. The
myth of the Timaeus, according to which some semidivine being composed
the cosmos, does indeed attempt to justify the nature of reality, not, however,
through its origin, but through an analysis of its metaphysical components.
Aristotle might have called this analysis a search for the formal cause of nature.
The Semitic teaching that a God created the world justified the world’s exis-
tence through a transcendent origin. The Creator of the biblical story belongs
to a different realm of reality than creation itself.
Despite this opposition between the Greek and the Hebrew-Christian inter-
pretations, Christians started using Platonic concepts for expressing the inti-
mate union between Creator and creature. In and through the human person
all creation participated in the divine realm. The doctrine of the Incarnation,
according to which God had become part of the world, seemed to facilitate the
union. In fact, a profound opposition separated the two views. In the Greek
synthesis, an immanent necessity ruled the cosmos. In the Jewish and Chris-
tian traditions, a free act of God stood at the origin of all other reality. Inevita-
bly, the classical-Christian synthesis ran into major difficulties. As nominalist
theologians began to attribute the origin of all things to the inscrutable will of
God, they abrogated the link of intelligibility that connected the source of
reality with its created effect. As a result, by the beginning of the modern age
reality had ceased to be intrinsically intelligible and God no longer provided
 A Definition 3

the rational justification of the world. Henceforth meaning was no longer

embedded in the nature of things: it had to be imposed by the human mind.

The Second Wave of Modernity

It has been written that modernity has reached us in waves. The first
wave arrived in the fifteenth century, as the effect of two causes: the collapse of
the intellectual synthesis of ancient and Christian thought and the rise of a new
humanism. When Descartes, who died in 1650, succeeded in overcoming the
skepticism that had resulted from the nominalist crisis by transferring the
source of intelligibility to the mind, he brought the first stage of modernity to a
close. In establishing self-consciousness as the one point of absolute certainty
from which all other certainties could be deduced, he initiated a new stage in
philosophical thought. Its validity seemed confirmed by the success of the
mathematical method in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.
The new trust in the power of human reason was to inspire the culture of the
Enlightenment, the second wave of modernity. Still Descartes’s restoration of
the authority of reason remained incomplete. A lingering nominalism sur-
rounded his notion of truth. (It is by divine decree, he had argued, that mathe-
matical conclusions are true!)
In fact, all subsequent rationalism continued to bear unmistakable traces of
nominalist dualism in the way it separated the universal from the particular.
The synthesis of the universal and the particular, established by ancient phi-
losophy and surviving until the end of the Middle Ages, had come under
severe strain in nominalist philosophy. That strain only increased in rationalist
thought. It may seem far-fetched to link modern rationalism to a medieval
position with which it had so unambiguously broken. Did the rationalist con-
cept of reason not imply a rejection of nominalist particularism and a return to
classical sources? In fact, the rationalist universal differed substantially from
the ancient one. For Aristotle as well as for Plato, things owed their identity to
a universal form that included all particular determinations. The Enlighten-
ment concept of the universal, to the contrary, was a rational a priori void of
any particular content, a category of thought imposed upon the real, rather
than expressive of it. Its formalist character shows a surprising similarity with
the universal names that, in nominalist philosophy, the mind imposes upon
reality in order to gain purchase on a chaotic multiplicity.
To be sure, post-Cartesian thought, in which the mind alone establishes
truth, differs from nominalist theology in which the will of God does so. But
that distinction does not weaken a fundamental relation between the two.
Social factors also presented a powerful incentive for stressing the primacy of
4 A Definition

universal concepts and values over particular differences. Regionalism and

sectarianism had turned Europe into a thirty-year bloodbath. The restoration
of peace in 1648 required that the destructive forces of political and religious
particularism be neutralized. To the ‘‘enlightened,’’ the differences that had
caused the strife were no more than superstitious quibbles or nationalist preju-
dices. Did the entire cosmos not obey a single law of reason? Did humans,
however different from each other, not share a common nature? Destined to
live under the rule of reason, they would never attain this goal, according to
Voltaire and Gibbon, unless religious particularism was abolished altogether.
The Christian religion that had so bitterly divided Europe had to be subordi-
nated to the rule of universal reason.
The Enlightenment’s confidence in the powers of reason, its often-naive
optimism, as well as its contempt for tradition were too one-sided to remain
unchallenged. The excesses of the French Revolution and the rationalist prin-
ciples that supported it caused a return of the authority of tradition and a
revival of much that rationalism had suppressed. The period that followed the
revolution introduced a third wave of modernity. It was at first mostly a
reactionary movement, yet in time it developed a new, more comprehensive
humanism that reincorporated many of the positions established by the En-
lightenment while integrating them within a more complex idea of person-
hood. In Great Britain and in the German lands the transition was gradual:
romantic trends had existed all through the Enlightenment.
I assume that the Enlightenment was indeed a distinct epoch in modern
culture. Yet this assumption does not entail that there was no continuity in the
flow of modern thought nor that it was a homogeneous movement. The En-
lightenment remained a project; it never became a full achievement. It con-
tinued to question the past and to anticipate the future, but various groups and
individuals held different views concerning past and future. It has become
increasingly common to exclude traditionalist thinkers such as Vico, Male-
branche, Burke, and Herder from the Enlightenment as if they belonged to
what Isaiah Berlin has called the Counter-Enlightenment. Yet these writers
were not reactionaries. They held modern, though different views concerning
their epoch’s relation to past and future, and they may have exercised a deeper
influence upon future thought than radical critics like Voltaire or Condorcet
did. To be sure, in many ways they disagreed with their more radical contem-
poraries. But those contemporaries in turn found it necessary to respond to
their challenges. This dynamic exchange, rather than the static rationalism
with which is often identified, characterizes the Enlightenment. It was essen-
tially a dialectical movement.
 A Definition 5

Finally, conditions and attitudes differed enormously from one area to an-
other. In Western Europe the Enlightenment was mainly a movement of urban
intellectuals; in the American colonies, of landed gentry.≤ Nowhere are these
differences more visible than in the field of religion. While in France the bat-
tle against ‘‘superstition’’ was reaching its pitch, in Bavaria and Austria the
Counter-Reformation and Baroque still flourished. French philosophes mostly
rejected Christianity; German thinkers consistently sought a compromise with
it. In Britain rationalists and anti-rationalists appear to have lived rather
peacefully, though often incommunicatively, side by side.
I have restricted my investigation in this book to the ideas of the Enlighten-
ment, leaving their economic, social, and political applications to social histo-
rians. The battles over the identity, direction, past, and future of a culture are,
Husserl claimed, fought by ‘‘men of ideas’’—philosophers, scientists, theolo-
gians, and intellectual historians. Of course, ideas are never born in a vacuum.
In an earlier study (Marx’s Social Critique of Culture) I attempted to show that
they originate in, and remain intimately linked to, the immediate practical
concerns of society. Yet the influence moves in both directions. For ideas in
turn change the social concerns to which they owe their origin. As one distin-
guished intellectual historian put it: ‘‘Ideas powerfully act upon, often de-
cisively shape, the very culture from which they have emerged.’’≥ My focus
here resembles in this respect the eighteenth century’s own. Still, a reflection on
the ideas of an epoch raises a philosophical problem. Ideas possess by their
very nature a timeless quality. We assume that they will last forever. Yet they
are conceived in, and form an integral part of, a particular historical conjunc-
tion. How can what is essentially transient and historically conditioned have a
permanent significance? All thought, including all philosophy, originates in a
particular place at a particular time and reflects the concerns of that time.
Nonetheless, philosophers, while expressing those concerns, move beyond
these limitations and raise them to a universal level.
In an insightful passage R. G. Collingwood describes the dialectical relation
between the historical and the eternal roles of ideas. ‘‘In part, the problems of
philosophy are unchanging; in part they vary from age to age, according to the
special characteristics of human life and thought at the time; and in the best
philosophers of every age these two parts are so interwoven that the perma-
nent problems appear sub specie saeculi, and the special problems of the
age sub specie aeternitatis. Whenever human thought has been dominated by
some special interest, the most fruitful philosophy of the age has reflected that
domination; not passively, by mere submission to its influence, but actively,
by making a special attempt to understand it and placing it in the focus of
6 A Definition

philosophical inquiry.’’∂ We inevitably think and judge with the categories,

schemes, and metaphors of our own time, however critical of them we may be.
At the same time we believe that ideas are bound to be permanent.
This confronts us with the question: How can ideas conceived for coping
with the problems of one time remain meaningful at a later epoch? If indeed a
rigid line divides the necessary and eternal from the historically contingent, as
rationalist philosophers assumed, then the particular events, achievements,
and ideas of an earlier generation hold little meaning for a later one. But the
meaning of an epoch lies not only and not even primarily in the ‘‘universal’’
ideas it produces. The significance of a culture exceeds that of the ‘‘eternal’’
ideas we may extract from it. A philosophical reflection on the past differs in
this respect from the way mathematics, logic, or the positive sciences reach
their conclusions. Past thinkers showed little concern about the question of
how their ideas originated. But a reflection on the meaning of a particular age
requires more than lifting certain ideas out of the cultural complex in which
they were conceived. Each culture possesses an ideal identity within which
these ideas have their place and, as Ernst Cassirer pointed out, the task of the
philosophy of culture consists in seeking to understand how the elements that
compose it form a system, an organic whole.∑ Cultures, like living beings,
possess a unity of their own. This unity enables successive generations to build
up a collective identity.∏ Over a period of time the various symbolic processes
of science, art, religion, and language coalesce into a comprehensive unity.
Premodern metaphysics had neither a need nor a place for a philosophy of
culture. The epochs of history may yield lasting results, but their coming or
going belonged to a realm of historical contingency that fell outside a reflec-
tion on true reality. In modern philosophy, however, the human subject plays a
central part in the constitution of meaning. The fact that this subject exists and
thinks in time thereby assumes a philosophical significance. Nor is this signifi-
cance restricted to the individual consciousness. A philosophical reflection on
the temporal nature of the subject must take what Ricoeur calls ‘‘the long
detour around the selves’ objective achievements in history’’ and focus on the
symbols human consciousness has left us in its various cultural achievements.
Only through history do we acquire a true knowledge of ourselves. ‘‘What
would we know of love and hate, of moral feelings and in general of all that
we call self, if they had not been brought to language and articulated by
literature?’’π
The primary function of culture is to provide a society with the norms,
values, and means needed for coping with the conditions of its existence.
Through their various engagements with nature, humans subdue nature’s
otherness. The domestication of nature begins when humans start naming
 A Definition 7

things. Yet a culture also aims at a spiritual ‘‘surplus’’ that drives its members
beyond the satisfaction of immediate, physical needs. In Georg Simmel’s
words: ‘‘Man, unlike the animals, does not allow himself simply to be ab-
sorbed by the naturally given order of the world. Instead he tears himself loose
from it. Somehow beneath and above [the accomplishment of ordinary tasks
and the pursuit of material interests] there stands the demand that through all
of these tasks and pursuit of material interests a transcendent promise should
be fulfilled.’’∫ Culture raises the phenomenally transient to ideal permanence
and so establishes a symbolic chain in which each historical period acquires an
ideal, lasting significance.Ω Levinas captured this potential of cultural symbols
to convey an ideal meaning to the temporal in a lapidary sentence: ‘‘La culture
c’est le sens venant à l’être.’’ If Being becomes disclosed in time, then the
passage of time itself is more than a subjective quality of consciousness: it
possesses an ontological significance. This position runs counter to Parmeni-
des’ thesis, today publicly abandoned but often still tacitly accepted, that
Being is and becoming is not. It responds affirmatively to the question Heideg-
ger raised at the end of Being and Time: ‘‘Is there a way which leads from
primordial time to the meaning of Being?’’∞≠

A Provisional Profile
Two qualities are commonly considered characteristic of Enlightenment
thought: rationalism and emancipationism. The dual meaning of the term
‘‘rationalism’’ has led to misunderstandings. It refers to a philosophical doc-
trine that insists on the primacy of a priori concepts in the process of knowl-
edge. As such it is opposed to empiricism according to which the origin of our
ideas lies in experience. Historically the former was embodied in the theories
of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Wolff. Yet those who refer to the Enlight-
enment as a ‘‘rationalist’’ period usually understand this to include philosophi-
cal empiricists as well as rationalists. This use of the term assumes that the
human mind is the sole source of truth and hence must reject faith as a possible
source of truth. Descartes who is often regarded as the father of the rationalist
method in philosophy never subscribed to this second, ideological rationalism.
For him, at the ground of reality as well as of truth lies a transcendent cause.
Nonetheless, he created the conditions for an ideological rationalism when he
transferred the question of truth from its traditional ontological basis (accord-
ing to which truth resides primarily in the nature of the real) to an epistemic
one whereby it becomes the result of a method of thinking.
We all know Kant’s description of the Enlightenment as an emancipation of
mankind through an unconditional acceptance of the authority of reason.
8 A Definition

‘‘Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is

man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from an-
other. . . . Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’ That is the
motto of enlightenment.’’∞∞ Kant here expresses his unambiguous opposition
to any unexamined authority. Further in the text he more specifically addresses
the conditions needed for educating people toward thinking for themselves.
This, he claims, requires ‘‘the freedom to make public use of one’s freedom in
every respect’’ (Freiheit von seiner Vernunft . . . öffentlichen Gebrauch zu
machen). Concretely this means for the ‘‘learned’’ the right to educate the
masses through an uncensored press. The ideal of a full human emancipation
through uncensored knowledge had already supported the program of the
editors of the Encyclopédie. They regarded themselves in the first place as edu-
cators. Diderot’s description, however self-serving, expressed a keen aware-
ness of the social role of the intellectual: ‘‘The magistrate deals out justice; the
philosophe teaches the magistrate what is just and unjust. The soldier defends
his country; the philosophe teaches the soldier what his fatherland is. The
priest recommends to his people the love and respect of the gods; the phi-
losophe teaches the priest what the gods are.’’∞≤
Kant’s educational project appears legitimate and, by today’s standards,
uncontroversial. Yet his definition of enlightenment as the ‘‘release from a self-
imposed tutelage’’ contains more than the need to think for oneself, which all
educated people do and have always done. It has a polemical edge: many
deprive themselves of that right by their willingness to accept uncritically the
opinions of political and religious authorities. Kant condemns such a submis-
sive attitude as immature (Unmündigkeit) and morally irresponsible. Still one
wonders: Could anyone survive without accepting a number of unexamined
ideas on the authority of others? Or, for that matter, what gives a decisive au-
thority to the one whom the public considers a Gelehrter, a learned person?∞≥
In many respects Moses Mendelssohn’s earlier, more modest contribution
to the German debate on the nature of the Enlightenment proves more helpful
than Kant’s clarion call. In a few pages Mendelssohn attempted to clarify the
meaning of the terms that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, had begun
to circulate. He distinguishes Aufklärung from Kultur and Bildung. Bildung
(in this context: ‘‘education’’) refers to people’s response to their vocation as
human beings, Kultur to the practical agenda for reaching this goal, and
Aufklärung to the more theoretical program—science and philosophy. Ideally,
Bildung includes the other two terms and largely defines their meaning. Lan-
guage constitutes the link among them. ‘‘A language attains enlightenment
through the sciences and attains culture through social intercourse, poetry,
and eloquence.’’∞∂ The German Enlightenment with Lessing, Mendelssohn,
 A Definition 9

and Kant, was more self-consciously reflective than either the French or the
British. The French Enlightenment may well have been more influential, both
because of the impact of its writings (especially the Encyclopédie) in a lan-
guage common to educated Europeans and because of its radical conclusions.
But its simplified concepts and radical break with tradition made it also the
more controversial one. In this respect it differed not only from the German
but also from the English Enlightenment that proceeded at a gradual pace,
without causing an abrupt break with the past.
It should be observed that, beside the diversity of expressions of the Enlight-
enment in different regions, there was also a considerable difference in the
degree to which its principles were accepted. Even those who regarded the
mind as constitutive of meaning did not necessarily consider its contribution
sufficient. Philosophers like Malebranche, Berkeley, and Leibniz grounded the
mind’s constituting activity upon a transcendent basis—as Descartes himself
had done. For all of them, God remained the ultimate source of truth. Nor
were rationalists always consistent. A blind belief in progress often conflicted
with their thesis of the unchangeable laws of nature. The inconsistency was
particularly striking among such materialists as d’Holbach and La Mettrie.
Also, men and women of the Enlightenment did not live more in accordance
with the rules of morality and reason than their ancestors. One needs only to
remember Saint-Simon’s reports on life at the French Court, Rousseau’s aban-
donment of his children, Casanova’s memoirs of his philandering, and de
Sade’s account of his sexual gymnastics. People’s everyday lives are rarely
ruled by reason, despite their frequent appeals to it. Far less than their pre-
decessors in the seventeenth century did men and women of the Enlightenment
period submit their passions, feelings, and emotions to the control of rea-
son. The Enlightenment was not so much an age of reason as an age of self-
consciousness. People became more reflective about their feelings, their social
positions, their rights and duties, the state of religion, and all that touched
them near or far. They also became more critical than any previous generation,
and this self-consciously critical mentality induced them to question tradition.
The battle against unexamined tradition has continued ever since Kant’s
declaration of war against it. A social-economic variant of it appeared in
Marx’s critique of ideologies. The term ‘‘ideology’’ originated in the eighteenth
century, and its meaning initially pointed in an opposite direction. When the
French aristocrat Destutt de Tracy first used the word in a paper read at the
Institut National des Sciences et des Arts, idéologie referred to scientific rather
than metaphysical knowledge of human nature. Later he expanded the con-
cept, using it against any kind of social prejudice.∞∑ Soon the critique turned
against ideology itself. Napoleon felt that those social theorists whom he
10 A Definition

contemptuously called ‘‘les idéologues’’ had been responsible for the French
Revolution. With Marx the term came to stand for ideas uncritically accepted
by most members of a society, even though they merely reflect the interests of
the ruling classes. Ideologies serve to confirm the prejudices and interests of
those classes. Later commentators qualified Marx’s attack on ideologies. Thus
Louis Althusser argued that they consist mainly of the unproven assumptions
that form an indispensable part of every social structure, not necessarily one
that supports the interests of one class. All groups need to hold on to a number
of unproven ideas, myths, or representations to preserve their identity. The
task of the social critique consists not in destroying those assumptions but in
rendering them conscious.∞∏
In our own time the controversy about the Enlightenment’s attack on preju-
dices has resurfaced. In his great work on hermeneutics, Truth and Method,
H. G. Gadamer argued against the Enlightenment’s critique of prejudice. He
may appear to repeat Edmund Burke’s defense of political prejudice: ‘‘Instead
of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a considerable
degree, and, to take more shame upon ourselves, we cherish them because they
are prejudices.’’∞π Burke assumed that a healthy community, like any normal
organism, needs no external interference to overcome its problems. It is capa-
ble of correcting itself. Criticism, Gadamer argues, must be guided by a return
to the roots of one’s tradition rather than by an alleged rule of absolute ‘‘ra-
tionality.’’ The rationalist critique of the Enlightenment failed to recognize the
unproven assumptions on which it rested.
The limitation of the human mind excludes the possibility that it should ever
be free of prejudices. Indeed, prejudices constitute an essential part of human
reasoning. The Enlightenment’s fight against them stemmed itself from a prej-
udice and followed the Cartesian methodical rule that no position ought to be
considered intellectually ‘‘justified’’ before it was proven. Of course, the mind
must remain critically conscious of its unproven assumptions and free itself
from demonstrably false prejudices. But the rule that traditional authority
must in all instances be submitted to the critique of reason is impossible to
maintain and hence unjustified. According to Gadamer, the ongoing dialogue
among the members of a society should suffice for eradicating those assump-
tions that would harm a society’s rational development.∞∫ Others have ques-
tioned whether a critique based upon the very principles of the tradition it
criticizes can ever be effective. On that ground Jürgen Habermas has defended
the critical principles of the Enlightenment. If the movement failed, he main-
tains, it was not because of them, but because they were abandoned before
having had the time to prove their effectiveness. I shall consider his argument
in the next section.
 A Definition 11

Ever since Kant described the Enlightenment as an intellectual and political

emancipation, we have come to consider freedom the dominant idea of the
age. Of course, the idea of freedom, no less than that of reason, had long been
a primary concept in Western thought. But with Kant it acquired a more
intellectual content. He regarded no act as truly free unless it was based on
reason and promoted the rule of reason. Good and evil depend on the law of
reason: they are constituted in and through that law. Moreover, freedom came
to be viewed primarily as an emancipation of the individual. The emphasis
upon individual freedom had been implied in the modern theory of the sub-
ject, which assumed that the source of value is the human subject itself.
The anthropocentric orientation of Enlightenment culture also affected aes-
thetic theories. Since the early Renaissance, Western artists had continued to
pay homage to the classical ideal of form. Painters had traditionally inter-
preted it as consisting in simplicity of composition, harmony of color, and
clarity of design. What distinguished the eighteenth century ‘‘classicist’’ style
was the rigorously rational, at times geometrical way in which these qualities
came to be understood. Even Jacques Louis David, the great classicist painter,
has been called ‘‘puritanically rational.’’∞Ω Compared with the dynamic style of
the Baroque, much art of the Enlightenment era impresses us today as static
and cold. Artists were torn between two conflicting tendencies. On the one
hand, they favored a form idealized in accordance with rational norms of
simplicity, clarity, and harmony. On the other hand, a rational concern for
literal truth required that reality be painted as it is, however far removed
from that formal ideal. Thus the representation of ordinary life and the expres-
sion of passions and emotions, foreign to classical art, entered the art of the
Enlightenment.
At the same time and due to the same subjective source that had affected the
notion of freedom, aesthetics was developing a far more radical theory, which
did not have its full impact upon the creation of works of art until the next
century. According to this theory, art, rather than imitating or idealizing a
given form, had to be in the first place expressive. The new idea entered
gradually and not without a major struggle, as we shall see. Artists and even
the more progressive theorists continued to repeat the adage that art had to
imitate nature. Yet, eventually ‘‘imitation’’ came to be understood in a manner
that had little to do with a realistic or idealized representation of nature, but
everything to do with nature as a symbol of the artist’s inner self. This inter-
pretation differs substantially from that of ancient and even early modern
aesthetics. Whereas both had placed the ideal beyond the mind, advanced
Enlightenment aesthetics located it within the mind. The expressive theory did
not reach full maturity until the era of Romanticism. In this instance also,
12 A Definition

Romanticism rather than being a mere reversal of the principles of the Enlight-
enment fully developed their implications.

The Crisis of the Enlightenment

None of the changes described in the preceding profile warrant speaking
of the Enlightenment as a cultural crisis. Taken singularly the shifts were rarely
abrupt or disruptive, but together they fundamentally altered the direction of
Western culture and some major thinkers have regarded this change as a crisis.
In a lecture delivered in Prague, entitled ‘‘The Crisis of the European People’’
(1935), Edmund Husserl argued that modern rationalism had moved away
from the Greek idea of reason and deviated from Europe’s spiritual destiny.
According to the founder of phenomenological philosophy, the rationalism of
the Enlightenment transformed the Greek concept of reason that had ruled
European thought since its beginning. A narrowly objectist idea of reason had
deflected Western culture from its original development ‘‘in the direction of an
ideal image of life and of being, moving toward an eternal pole.’’≤≠ Husserl’s
diagnosis is all the more remarkable in that his own philosophical goal had
been to reform philosophy into a ‘‘rigorous science.’’≤∞ Now he dismissed the
modern objectivism implied in that project as a betrayal of the principle of
rationality to which it continued to appeal.
While Husserl referred to an intellectual crisis caused by the slide into objec-
tivism, Hegel in a well-known passage of the Phenomenology of Spirit had
described the Enlightenment as a general cultural crisis. Significantly, in doing
so he attributed to a particular historical period the full responsibility for a
change in the ideal development of mind. All through the Phenomenology he
inserts cryptic allusions to historical figures and events, such as ancient skepti-
cism, the coming of Christ, monastic life, the French Revolution, and Napo-
leon. The Enlightenment Hegel mentions by name, as if it were a historical
interruption in an ideal process. That particular event raised consciousness to
the universality of reason, enabling it to view reality as expressive of itself.≤≤
Not before reality appears as the objective expression of mind, does civil-
ization become culture—a Western concept with a uniquely spiritual conno-
tation. Those intent on attaining culture must abandon their natural, self-
centered attitude and assume a universal, spiritual one. This change requires
effort and denial. Hegel therefore referred to culture as an alienation from
one’s natural self. Beyond this subjective alienation required by the process of
education, there is also an objective one inherent in the nature of culture itself.
It directly corresponds to what others have called the ‘‘crisis’’ of the Enlighten-
ment. Having intended to build a culture expressive of, and appropriate to,
 A Definition 13

reason, the builders of the Enlightenment had to confront the melancholy fact
that culture leads a life of its own, escapes control, and fails to correspond to
their intentions. This estrangement has caused a rupture within the modern
consciousness. Two tendencies emerge. One uninhibitedly criticizes any con-
tent in which the mind does not fully recognize itself; the other, solicitous to
avoid reducing mental life to a mere critique without content, projects its
essential content into an otherworldly realm where it will be safe from the
assaults of critical insight. Hegel refers to this latter attitude as faith. Enlight-
enment for him consists neither in the critical rationalism of pure insight nor in
the conservative one of faith, but in a constant struggle between the two.
This esoteric account of the Enlightenment contains two important ideas.
One, the very notion of culture belongs to a particular stage of Western con-
sciousness—one that, as Freud was later to confirm in Civilization [a more
accurate translation would be Culture] and Its Discontents, imposes severe
demands upon the natural consciousness and may degenerate into antinatural
perversions. The second idea directly bears upon the concept of the Enlighten-
ment as a cultural crisis. The view of culture as the mind’s ‘‘own’’ expression
inevitably leads to a split (entfremdet [alienated]) consciousness. On the one
hand, the mind knows culture to be an expression of itself. On the other hand,
once it is objectively established, it begins to lead a life of its own with many
restrictions and limitations that make it increasingly difficult for people to
recognize it as a self-expression. That sense of alienation from the traditional
culture reached a critical point during the Enlightenment.
In addition, Hegel first grasped a crucial feature of the Enlightenment that
had been ignored by his predecessors and was often neglected by his followers,
namely, that it was essentially a dialectical movement. At no point did that
movement ever develop into a simple rationalism or an unambiguous anti-
rationalism. Without the simultaneous presence of, and the productive strug-
gle between the two currents, it remains unintelligible how the Enlighten-
ment could ever have resulted in Romanticism. In all chapters of this book,
therefore, I have given attention to anti-rationalist thinkers (often misnamed
‘‘Counter-Enlightenment’’ thinkers), such as Herder, Shaftesbury, Rousseau,
and Fénelon.
This dialectical principle also explains the considerable part religion, the
main target of the critique, occupies in this work. Both the critique and the
resistance to it have been responsible for the way the Enlightenment has
reached us. Even such spiritual movements as Quietism and Pietism that never
came to grips with the rationalist critique but instead took refuge in a secluded
interiority at a safe distance from the intellectual currents of the time, played a
significant role within the culture of the Enlightenment. They initiated a search
14 A Definition

for interiority that corresponded to the Enlightenment’s drive toward self-

understanding. For that reason, I have included a chapter on those spiritual
movements at the end of this book. The effect of the Enlightenment in the
succeeding periods can be understood only if both currents, the rationalist and
the anti-rationalist, combine their influence.
Still this dialectical quality of the Enlightenment should not be interpreted
as if it were already a synthesis in nucleo. The Enlightenment remains a period
of tension, opposition, and strife. The two currents never came to peace with
one another. They were united only in combat. This appears most clearly in
the area of religion, perhaps the only one to which the term ‘‘crisis’’ properly
applies. In fact, Paul Hazard in his classic La crise de la conscience européenne
(published the same year [1935] as Husserl’s lecture) held the abandonment of
the transcendent source of meaning responsible for a crisis in the European
consciousness.≤≥ Two contemporary scholars of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay
(in The Enlightenment) and Michael Buckley (in At the Origins of Modern
Atheism) have in different ways confirmed the dramatic effect of this shift.≤∂ I
also believe that the most drastic transformation of the Enlightenment took
place in the religious consciousness. Still, this change occurred over an exten-
sive period of time. People in Scotland, the Low Countries, Rhineland, Aus-
tria, Italy, or Spain (to mention only Western Europe) did not think of them-
selves or their religion as being ‘‘in crisis.’’ Even in France whose intellectuals
spearheaded the secular revolution, the great majority of the population con-
tinued to live unaware of the disturbing questions that had been raised about
their traditional beliefs and practices. Not until a long-smoldering resentment
against ecclesiastical privileges and against a higher clergy closely linked to an
oppressive political regime burst into revolutionary flames can one speak of a
religious ‘‘crisis’’ among the general population. In Britain religious decline
may have been even more gradual. The constant denominational changes, the
unpopular Puritan revolution, and after the Restoration, the constant tensions
between the established Church and the nonconformists slowly eroded faith
and spread skepticism.
Christianity, for centuries the core of European culture, had left a tradition
of values on which even secular intellectuals remained dependent long after
having abandoned their faith. Most professed a belief in God even while
adhering to a philosophy that emptied the idea of God of its traditional con-
tent. They continued to regard the idea as indispensable for morality, though
morality had largely ceased to rely on it. Voltaire and Rousseau displayed an
uncommon proselytic zeal for their deist faith and an aggressive hostility to-
ward any kind of atheism. But this pragmatic use of the idea of God as founda-
tional principle of the cosmos and as the basis of ethics had too little coherence
 A Definition 15

to resist further deconstruction. Beginning with Hume and Diderot the suspi-
cion grew that neither the origin and preservation of the cosmos nor the
sanctioning of morality might require a personal God.
No part of Enlightenment thought has deservedly met with more criticism
than the absence of genuine otherness, related to a lack of internal differenti-
ation within the rationalist universals. For ancient and for most medieval
thinkers, reason had involved a dialectical relation between the universal and
the particular. In his later dialogues Plato became intensely aware of the com-
plexity of this relation. In deducing the primary categories of thought he
considered it of primary importance that the universal should contain the
particular within itself. Hence to prevent the concept of Being, the most uni-
versal of all, from excluding particularization—as had occurred in Parmeni-
des’ philosophy—he distinguished in it the categories of motion and rest.
Next, he protected them from collapsing into one another and into Being by
adding otherness and sameness (the principle of identity) (Sophist, 254D–
255E). Identity comes from the universal form, yet it cannot exist without
being related to an other. Hence otherness, though opposed to identity, is
nonetheless intrinsically linked to it.≤∑ It is by its own intrinsic momentum,
then, that the universal moves toward particularization, not by being ‘‘ap-
plied’’ to particular instances. Universals convert particular perceptions into
ideal structures. Yet if these structures be conceived as independent of the
concrete particularity in which they originated, they become permanently re-
moved from the real. Often rationalists treated universals as categories of the
mind that remain on the ideal level of mathematics, paralleling the real with-
out ever meeting it.
Spinoza understood the inappropriateness of such a procedure. He consid-
ered philosophical definition adequate only if it included not merely the uni-
versal idea of an object but also the conditions of its particular existence. So
did Leibniz. Most thinkers of the Enlightenment appear to have conceived of
universals as patterns of meaning either abstracted from (in empiricist philoso-
phy) or imposed upon reality (in rationalist thought). This accounts for the
neat, homogeneous picture they drew of a reality undisturbed by the confus-
ing, disorderly array of the concrete. Plato had shown how a recognition of
otherness will move knowledge beyond the static identity of pure universals to
the particularity of concrete existence.
The preceding reflections may seem exceedingly speculative until one real-
izes the consequences the imposition of abstract universals had upon practical
life. We know the excesses to which the rift between the universal and the
particular led during and after the French Revolution. Even the idea of a
universal humanity, unless it allows for a diversity of traditions, inevitably
16 A Definition

results in political repression. I hope to show the presence and influence of

those abstractions in philosophical texts, practical attitudes, literary works,
and artistic criticism.
I must postpone a critical assessment of Enlightenment culture to the con-
clusion of this book, but not without at least raising the fundamental question
which so much preoccupies us today: Is the Enlightenment project still valid?
Habermas, in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, claims that its move-
ment toward human emancipation was diverted from its critical course. New
oppressive modes of thought, pseudo-religions he calls them, gradually reoc-
cupied the place from which the Enlightenment had evicted the old religion.
Thus he turns Hegel’s critique of the Enlightenment against Hegel’s own the-
ory of the Absolute Spirit. This all-including pseudo-religious category al-
lowed no outside criticism because there was no ‘‘outside.’’ In its frozen system
of reality the call to emancipation was lost altogether. Habermas therefrom
concludes that the valid program of the Enlightenment had been prematurely
abandoned.
In contrast to this conclusion, I believe that the problems of the Enlighten-
ment are due not to a subsequent deviation from the original plan, but rather
to an inadequate conception of that plan, which later thinkers attempted to
remedy. The principle of rationality that lies at the core of the Enlightenment
project was undoubtedly legitimate. Its origin goes back to the Greek begin-
nings of Western thought. The Enlightenment, much to its credit, attempted to
restore that principle to its full force. Yet by making reason an exclusive
construction of the mind, it fundamentally transformed its nature. The Greeks
had conceived of reason as an ordering principle inherent in reality. The mind
possesses the unique ability to understand its inner structure and consciously
to pursue its immanent designs. Modern thinkers, however, reversed the rela-
tion and submitted all reality to the structures of the mind. They imposed the
rules of the one science that the mind could indeed claim full authorship of
and which depended on no external content, namely, mathematics. The mind
thereby acquired an unprecedented control over nature, yet it ceased to be an
integral part of it.
The transformation did not occur all at once. The culture of the Renaissance
had fully asserted the mind’s creative role in the constitution of meaning, yet
the mind itself had remained part of a single, hierarchical order of reality that
depended upon a transcendent source of power. We find a remnant of this dual
creativity in Descartes’s epistemology, where the mind alone constitutes mean-
ing yet truth ultimately depends upon the will of God. The Enlightenment
drew far more extensive conclusions from the modern premises. Its thinkers
detached the subjective principle from the given order. At first this was a
 A Definition 17

purely methodical issue: for all we know, meaning originates in the subject. Of
other sources we remain scientifically ignorant and hence they ought not be
introduced into the process of knowledge. Later some denied the very exis-
tence of an order that apparently contributes nothing to our knowledge of the
world. The Frankfurt philosopher Max Horkheimer considered the discon-
nection of the link with a transcendent source a crucial moment in the new
conception of reason: ‘‘The divorce of reason from religion marked a further
step in the weakening of its objective aspect and a higher degree of formaliza-
tion, as became manifest during the period of the Enlightenment. The neutral-
ization of religion . . . contradicted its total claim that it incorporates objective
truth, and emasculated it.’’≤∏ What first was neutralized ended up being dis-
carded from the concept of reason.
Two consequences followed from the transformation of reason. One, the
subject, now sole source of meaning, lost all objective content of its own and
became a mere instrument for endowing an equally empty nature with a ra-
tional structure. Two, since reality thereby lost the inherent intelligibility it
had possessed for the ancients and the Schoolmen, the nature of theoria funda-
mentally changed. Thinking ceased to consist of perceiving the nature of the
real. It came to consist of forcing reality to answer the subject’s question or, as
Kant put it in his famous comparison, of compelling a witness to respond to
the judge’s inquiry. Contemplation, for the Greeks the highest end of life,
became an instrument in the hands of, and for the benefit of, an all-powerful
subject. This explains the utilitarian streak of the Enlightenment. Reason
ceases to be an ultimate good. Henceforth it functions in a system where
everything has become both end and means. It has ceased to be an ultimate
goal. Yet, as we saw, that was only one current in the dialectic of the Enlighten-
ment. A countermovement, intent on saving the traditional content of reason
paralleled this functionalism. It rarely spoke with the eloquence and confi-
dence of the rationalist voice. Moreover, it fell back upon a tradition that was
under fire and whose advocates seldom possessed the critical weapons needed
to defend it. Nonetheless, those who so lacked the critical power of the En-
lightenment may in the end have achieved much toward broadening the En-
lightenment’s concept of reason. They helped to restore the spiritual content of
that subject which had come to occupy a central place in the modern concept
of reason. During the time of the Enlightenment the two remained mostly
opposed. Yet they were to become, at least in part, reconciled during the
subsequent Romantic era.
 2

A Different Cosmos

During the Enlightenment the concept of power that had dominated

ancient and medieval physics underwent a profound transformation. Previ-
ously thought to derive from a source beyond the physical world, it came to be
viewed as immanent in that world and eventually as coinciding with the very
nature of bodiliness. Aristotle’s theory that all motion originated from an
unmoved mover had continued to influence Scholastic theories throughout the
Middle Ages. For Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers, the impact of divine
power went beyond motion and extended to the very existence of finite beings.
According to the doctrine of creation, the dependence of nature on God was
intrinsic and total. The defining quality of finite being was absolute contin-
gency. Scholasticism supported this claim of contingency with Aristotle’s prin-
ciple of generation and corruption. All that has a beginning must come to an
end, and for Jewish, Christian, and most Muslim thinkers, the universe did
have a beginning. A contingent thing’s existence is not justified by the nature of
its being, nor does that nature ensure its continued existence in the future.
Late medieval thought strengthened this creaturely contingency by under-
mining the certainty, rooted in the idea of divine wisdom, that beings would
continue to be and to act in accordance with invariable laws. When nominalist
theology shifted the emphasis from God’s wisdom to God’s absolute power,
everything became dependent on an inscrutable divine decision. Creation itself

18
 A Different Cosmos 19

became a discontinuous act to be renewed at each moment of a creature’s

existence. Thus, the doctrine of divine preservation implied in the act of cre-
ation now became one of constant re-creation. Much of this nominalism sur-
vives in Descartes. He strongly asserted the dependence of each being on
a constantly renewed creation. Other tendencies in Descartes’s philosophy,
however, qualify this voluntarist notion of contingency, among them a confi-
dence that the divinely instituted laws of nature follow an invariable mathe-
matical pattern.
For Spinoza, contingency did not exist. Within the one, all-inclusive sub-
stance, nothing is contingent because nothing depends on another substance.
Finite modes share the necessity of the infinite substance. No external influx of
power is needed: the drive to be (conatus essendi) coincides with the very
nature of a thing. ‘‘Everything, insofar as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in
its own being’’ and that endeavor is ‘‘nothing but its actual essence’’ (Ethica,
bk. III, 6 and 7). Once a being exists, it will continue to do so until destroyed
by a cause outside itself (III, 4). The power to continue one’s being requires no
divine intervention: it is inherent in the nature of being itself. Spinoza’s sub-
stance acts as a center of power, but the effect of that power remains within the
cause.∞ The notion that the substance is a center of power became one of the
leading ideas of the Enlightenment. We shall encounter it in many forms.

Mechanism: The Newtonian Revolution

British scientists remained to a great extent faithful to the principles
established by Francis Bacon, according to which science is essentially prac-
ticed by means of induction based on observation and ought to yield practical
results. Newton himself shared this practical orientation. Michael J. Petry has
called him ‘‘the most distinguished proponent of the idea that nature was to be
mastered in the practical interests of man through the application of the Ba-
conian inductive method.’’≤ Nor did Newton assume that the course of nature
necessarily and in all respects follows mathematical laws. His diffidence with
respect to an absolute mathematical a priori may be traced to the nominalist
belief that God’s absolute power overrules the normal, ‘‘ordained’’ exercise of
that power and may, at least in principle, interrupt it at any time. The con-
tingency of nature implies the possibility of exceptions in the normal order.
Indeed, for nominalist thinkers, though less for Newton, exceptions consti-
tuted an integral part of the normal.≥ Our experience that nature follows a
rational course does not allow us to consider that an a priori, necessary princi-
ple. Modesty as well as intellectual probity requires the mind to test its calcula-
tions by actual observation. If in the end Newton’s method in physics won out
20 A Different Cosmos

over Descartes’s, it was at least in part due to his refusal to take the mathemati-
cal nature of the universe for granted. Therein lies, I think, the primary mean-
ing of his famous declaration ‘‘Hypotheses non fingo.’’ He did in fact construe
hypotheses but avoided doing so independently of observation.
At the same time Newton’s investigations moved him in a direction that
eventually undermined the traditional idea that motion results from a con-
stantly infused divine power. Motion and rest have an equal status: a body
does not change from motion to rest or from rest to motion unless an external
force impels it to do so. Hence if we assume it to be originally moving, no
additional input of power is needed to keep it in motion, though motion may
decrease under the impact of external resistance. This principle of inertia
obviously contradicts the Scholastic theory, according to which motion had to
be constantly induced by a transcendent source. It rather corresponds to Spi-
noza’s axiom that a thing perseveres in being until a cause outside itself forces
it to change. The fourth definition of book I of Newton’s Principia mathe-
matica reads: ‘‘Perseverat enim corpus in statu omni novo per suam vim iner-
tiae’’ (A body maintains every new state it acquires by its force of inertia). So,
not motion was to be explained, but the change from one state to another.
No less significant was the fundamental change the new philosophy intro-
duced in the notion of causality. In classical and Scholastic philosophy the
term ‘‘cause’’ had referred to various modes of dependence of one being upon
another—one of which was that of extrinsic, efficient causality. More intimate
forms of causality had been the formal one whereby a being participates in
that on which it depends, and the final one that directs it toward a goal.
Descartes and all mechanistic philosophers who came after him had conceived
of nature as essentially static and affected only by the so-called efficient causal-
ity that induces motion from without. Mechanistic philosophers considered
any appeal to final causes pure speculation, an undesirable intrusion in a self-
contained structure. Newton himself avoided using teleological arguments,
not in the first place because they interfered with mathematical deduction, but
because they escaped observation.
Yet another change ought to be mentioned: The concept of matter, even as
that of nature, had received a meaning that differed from the one it had in
Aristotle and the Scholastics. For them, it had been a metaphysical principle.
Giordano Bruno had first described it as the very essence of physical nature and
its immanent center of power. Like Descartes, Newton defines matter as exten-
sion. Yet he adds other, empirically observed qualities to it: impenetrability,
hardness, and mobility (rather than motion).∂ In addition, he distinguishes
extension from space. Attraction, though a universal quality of our world
 A Different Cosmos 21

system, may not be an ‘‘essential’’ attribute of matter. Our knowledge of the

universe is insufficient to justify the claim that matter possesses this quality in
all possible universes. Most significant, Newton defined the qualities of matter
as vires (forces), a term that implies a dynamic quality. Even inertia, which,
according to the third definition of the Principia, ‘‘differs nothing from the
inactivity of mass’’ since it merely conserves the existing motion, is more than
passive extension: it actively resists any force pressing against it. ‘‘It is impulse,
insofar as the body, by not easily giving way to the impressed force of another,
endeavors to change the state of that other.’’∑ But there is more. If the mechan-
ical system contained only reactive forces, motion would soon become ex-
hausted. In the Opticks Newton states: ‘‘By this principle [the vis inertiae] alone
there never could have been any motion in the world. Some other principle was
necessary for putting bodies into motion, and now they are in motion, some
other principle is necessary for conserving the motion.’’∏ Motion decreases and
must be recharged from sources other than the reactive forces of matter.
Among the forces that actively cause change (rather than resist change), he
mentions (in the fifth definition) percussion, pressure, and centrifugal force.
Gravity belongs to this kind of force: in our universe it is the force that draws
all bodies ‘‘toward a point as to a center.’’ The passive forces of resistance and
preservation that, for the Cartesians, constituted the whole of mechanics,
cannot explain this force. One might even wonder whether the concept of
gravity is still compatible with the mechanical principles formulated by Des-
cartes since it operates in spaces empty of resisting matter where no direct
contact between bodies occurs. How could there be mechanical action at a
distance? How could a wholly active force be an essential quality of inert
matter?π Newton himself continued to hesitate about the place of gravity
within a mechanical system.∫
In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century all philosophers still as-
sumed that active power must come from God. So did Newton. But his method
forbade him to introduce metaphysical speculations about a transcendent
cause. Only at the end of the Principia, after his system of mechanics had been
proven, does he mention divine causality. At that point he even refers to a
‘‘spiritual’’ presence in matter. Immediately following his declaration in the
General Scholium that he was unable to derive the cause of gravity from the
phenomena themselves and yet unwilling to frame ‘‘hypotheses’’ (i.e., positions
not established by induction from observations), he asserts: ‘‘Now we might
add something concerning a certain more subtle spirit which pervades and lies
hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which spirit the particles of
bodies attract one another at near distances and cohere, if contiguous; and
22 A Different Cosmos

electric bodies operate to greater distances, as well repelling as attracting the

neighboring corpuscles.’’ This notion of a spiritual force, working at a distance
and immanent in matter without coinciding with it, suggests the influence of
alchemical and Neoplatonic sources. Newton, who had studied both with
considerable interest, accepted the idea of spirit residing within matter rather
than being exclusively above or outside it, as the Cartesians held.Ω Later the
idea of an active force immanent in matter contributed to the formation of a
concept of evolutionary, creative matter by Diderot, d’Holbach, and other
materialists.
Newton’s admission of active forces, such as gravity, enabled him to move
beyond the mechanistic conception of matter as being totally passive. In fact,
his notion of forces of resistance had already extended mechanical thought
beyond Cartesian limits. It supported the idea of self-preservation as an essen-
tial drive of all being—comparable to Spinoza’s conatus essendi. The presence
of an active force in matter had the potential to bridge the gap that separated
the totally passive nature of matter from the active nature of mind in the
Cartesian system. At the time of Newton’s writing Leibniz was laying the
groundwork for such a bridge by defining substance itself as a center of force,
thereby asserting the dynamic quality of all nature.
Newton’s concepts of absolute time and space also move beyond a narrowly
mechanistic theory. Absolute time and space are not derived from experience.
They are in fact metaphysical concepts. In the Scholium that follows the defini-
tions of book I, Newton justifies their admission as being necessary for the
idea of absolute motion, that is, motion not as measured by the distance from
one point in space to another but as related to space as such. Even a body at
rest moves with the earth on which it rests. The mathematical concept of ‘‘true
or absolute motion’’ presupposes an absolute space and an absolute time.
‘‘Entire and absolute motions can be no otherwise determined than by immov-
able places. . . . Now no other places are immovable but those that, from
infinity to infinity, do all retain the same given position one to another.’’∞≠ One
wonders, however, how an absolute space, which provides no points of refer-
ence whatever, can be truly helpful in the calculation of ‘‘true or absolute
motion.’’ Similarly, what could the concept of absolute time, that is, pure
duration unrelated to any actual motion, contribute to the understanding of
actual motion?∞∞ The concepts of absolute space and time would have been
less controversial if they had merely served as mathematical, ideal assump-
tions. But Newton insisted that they are real as well as ideal. On what grounds
did he base this claim, for they remain inaccessible to experience? Their reality
status appears to follow from the very argument that led him to introduce the
notions of absolute time and space in the first place. If motion presupposes
 A Different Cosmos 23

space, absolute motion requires the existence of absolute space. In the trans-
mission of motion from its source to any given object, this particular motion
presupposes a more comprehensive motion, which in turn presupposes a more
comprehensive space. They again presuppose a more comprehensive motion
and space, and so on to infinity. Kant, who criticizes this argument, agrees that
the idea of an absolute space that synthesizes all relative spaces within a single
unit may be essential to mathematical physics, yet he considers its reality both
unnecessary and unjustified.∞≤
The General Scholium at the end of book III conveys a theological meaning
to the metaphysical concepts of infinite time and space. In the preceding argu-
ment Newton had claimed to be incapable of justifying the cause of gravity
within a closed mechanical system. At the conclusion of his work he attributes
it to a source that lies outside the mechanical order. ‘‘This is certain, that it
must proceed from a cause that penetrates to the very centres of sun and
planets, without suffering the least diminution of its force’’ (General Schol-
ium, p. 446). He also concludes that other mechanically unexplainable facts,
such as the ‘‘diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times
and places,’’ could not result from ‘‘a blind metaphysical necessity which is
certainly the same always and everywhere’’ but must be the work of an in-
finite, perfect mind and will (ibid.). Yet the transition from an infinite Creator
to a finite universe requires a being that mediates between the infinite and the
finite. At the same time, Newton assumes that God is directly present to
creation: only a substantially present force can be causally effective in a mech-
anistic system. He attempts to overcome the apparent discrepancy by pos-
tulating that God’s primary expression must be infinite, as God himself is, yet
able to mediate with a finite creation. Only an absolute space and an absolute
time, he thinks, would make it possible for God to be present in all places at all
times. ‘‘He endures forever and is everywhere present; and by existing always
and everywhere, he constitutes duration and space’’ (p. 445). In Query 28 of
the Opticks Newton writes: ‘‘And these things rightly dispatched, does it not
appear from Phaenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent,
omnipresent, who in infinite Space, as it were in her Sensory, sees the things
themselves intimately, and perceives them and comprehends them wholly by
their immediate presence to himself.’’∞≥
The question of absolute space and time had a long history. Aristotle had
attacked the idea of a void existing beyond the cosmos: neither place nor void
could exist outside the heavens.∞∂ Nor did he believe the cosmos to be infinite
in space and time. Yet the Stoics held that an infinite void was needed to
include an infinite cosmos. Aquinas in this dispute sided with Aristotle. Nom-
inalist philosophers (specially Thomas Bradwardine), judging that a space
24 A Different Cosmos

restricted to the cosmos itself would unduly limit God’s creative power to this
universe (excluding a greater or a smaller one), had concluded that only an
infinite space would allow God’s omnipotence to create a universe of any size
He pleased.∞∑ This void, infinite as God himself, was a purely negative space
that shared none of the qualities of experienced space. One might possibly
interpret it as the emptiness within God, a precondition for the possibility of
creating otherness within the divine fullness.
Newton’s conception of absolute space and time appears to have been influ-
enced by some of these earlier discussions. Specifically the Cambridge theolo-
gian Henry More, whom Newton admired, may have inspired the concept of
an extended void-space. More had argued that extension itself could not exist
without the substratum of an infinite, incorporeal space. This spiritual space
constituted both the medium within which God creates and, for nature, the
condition of its being and operating. For Newton also, God had to be present
everywhere: within and outside creation. Was this outside ‘‘void’’ a real, three-
dimensional space as we normally conceive ours to be? Clarke appears to have
understood Newton as affirming that it was, if I read his assertion correctly:
‘‘By void space, we never mean space void of everything, but void of body
only.’’∞∏
One may find Newton’s argument very ‘‘hypothetical’’ indeed! But we
should remember that it appears in the concluding General Scholium of the
Principia, where, at last, he feels free to express his deeply held conviction
without being constrained by the self-imposed restrictions of mechanical
physics. His theological speculation merely provides additional support for
the idea of absolute space and time established by his physical theory. Bishop
Berkeley was to object: either that infinite time-space is God, or it must be a
reality beside God that nevertheless possesses divine attributes since it is eter-
nal, infinite, immutable, and uncreated.∞π But Newton’s absolute time and
space merely constitute an empty infinity within which God creates. They do
not ‘‘precede’’ God’s creative act yet accompany it. Newton calls it the divine
sensorium in analogy with the sensory apparatus in and through which a
remote object becomes present in perception. Theologians considered the
name not wholly appropriate, since, unlike sense perception, divine knowl-
edge does not depend on a pre-existing object. For God, knowing an object
consists of creating and sustaining it.
It appears, then, that serious tensions lurk at the heart of Newton’s theory.
One was between the nominalist and the Platonic elements of his theory. All
power comes from God. Yet in the nominalist version, divine power does not
become immanently present as it does in Neoplatonic thought but is imposed
from without. God’s causality is total yet remains external. Divine power,
 A Different Cosmos 25

rather than consisting in the divine presence within the world, becomes medi-
ated through the laws of nature. Mechanism functions as a closed system
impervious to any influence from outside, even though all that occurs within it
results from a transcendent source of motion. In the Neoplatonic version, the
effect participates in the divine cause. Moreover it is endowed with a divine
teleology that enables the higher spheres to communicate power to the lower
ones. Mechanical philosophy replaced the classical and medieval teleological
order by a nonhierarchical world of nature.∞∫
Newton’s philosophical adversaries objected to the absence of meaning or
purpose in a cosmos that had no higher end than remaining in motion. The
American theologian Jonathan Edwards uses the favorite mechanistic com-
parison of the world to a gigantic clockwork against him. If the only purpose
of the clock is to have parts that assist one another in their motions, the clock
itself is worthless. Similarly, if the world has no higher end than to allow its
parts to support one another, the world as a whole serves no purpose. ‘‘It is
nonsense to say of a machine whose highest end is to have one part move
another, for the whole is useless.’’∞Ω Neither does a consistent mechanical
theory have room for freedom—which Newton never questioned. Material-
ists attempted to rid the mechanical system of its inconsistencies by eliminat-
ing any extrinsic source of power and conceiving of it as an autodynamic, self-
generating system of reality.
Mechanism had begun as a scientific theory. It soon became a controlling
concept for the interpretation of all reality, including life and, with some, of
the mind itself. Thus it developed into a worldview, an ambitious attempt to
capture all reality within a comprehensive, undifferentiated system ruled by
identical laws. This worldview implied an all-encompassing determinism that
threatened the very possibility of freedom.≤≠ It assumed that the mind, being
the single source of meaning, is able to capture all reality within a single vision.
That assumption, as Heidegger has shown in an essay bearing the same name,
belongs exclusively to the modern age. Descartes and Newton, who had re-
stricted mechanism to a scientific interpretation of the physical universe, were,
of course, not determinists. But for materialists, nature was a single, homoge-
neous system that tolerated no exceptions. The naturalism underlying this
concept was to survive long after the mechanistic theory had been abandoned.
Romantic opponents of Enlightenment culture rejected the mechanist world-
view (none more vehemently than Blake). But many retained its subjacent
naturalism, including the idea that humanity becomes crushed by nature. Indi-
viduals may resist, but in the end nature smothers their futile efforts.
The introduction of mathematical physics drastically changed the knowl-
edge of nature. Instead of conforming the mind to a pre-existing reality, it
26 A Different Cosmos

defined the mind’s ideal relation to that reality. In Newton’s time mechanis-
tic thought had already begun to penetrate popular culture in England and
France. Poets hesitated whether they ought to welcome it. Some considered it
the ultimate key to the universe. In ‘‘A View of Death, or The Soul’s Departure
from the World,’’ the poet John Reynolds (1666–1727) looks forward to
death when the scientific mysteries of the universe will be fully revealed and
the mind will understand that Newton’s attraction is God’s love operating in
matter! Others distrusted the ambitious science. Thus Matthew Prior (1664–
1726), in his lengthy poem ‘‘Salomon,’’ wonders:
Can thought beyond the bounds of matter climb?
Or who shall tell me what is space or time?
In vain we lift up our presumptuous eyes
To what our Maker to their ken denies.≤∞

From Mechanism to Materialism

Two diverging theories claimed Newton’s authority. One used his mech-
anistic principles as foundation for a philosophical determinism. The other
developed the concept of active forces into an organic theory of nature. Even-
tually the two converged in a dynamic materialism. Newton’s definition of
inertia as the force that keeps a body in its present state, ‘‘whether it be of rest,
or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line’’ (Third Definition), dis-
posed of the traditional belief that rest is a body’s natural state while motion
must be externally induced. If one assumes that the universe never had a
beginning (a position which even Aquinas considered not refutable on rational
grounds) and has always been in a state of motion, no external cause is needed
to justify the beginning of motion. For eighteenth-century materialists, this
proved to be a sufficient ground for overturning the millennia old adage,
Quidquid movetur ab alio movetur (Whatever moves must be moved by an-
other), on which Scholastics had based one of their arguments for the exis-
tence of God. Combining a dynamic concept of matter with an organic con-
cept of nature, materialists attributed to matter a developmental power that
accounted for the emergence of plants, animals, and even humans. But even
those dynamic materialists never abandoned one of the basic principles of the
mechanistic system itself. They denied that even organic nature required the
kind of teleology which nonmaterialists like Buffon and Leibniz granted her.
To them, nature was a dynamic force, but a blind one, not directed toward any
particular goal.
All materialists, dynamic as well as mechanistic ones, agreed that reality
was homogeneous and to be explained through material forces alone. The
 A Different Cosmos 27

physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie in his two books, Histoire naturelle de

l’âme (1745) (which led to his banishment from France) and L’homme ma-
chine (1748) (which earned him a second exile, this time from Holland),
attempted to achieve a more consistent mechanism than either Descartes or
Newton had conceived. He reduced Descartes’s two kinds of substances, body
and mind, to one material substance and thus overcame the previously unex-
plainable cooperation of two heterogeneous functions that produced a single
effect. According to La Mettrie, nothing prevents matter from exercising the
functions commonly attributed to the mind. ‘‘Man is a machine and in the
whole universe there is but a simple substance variously modified.’’≤≤ In his
theory of the body, Descartes had already conceded half the mechanistic
thesis. Had he not declared animals to be no more than material substances?
But the distinction between humans and animals consisted merely in a higher
complexity of motion. Animals also feel and remember. They even possess
some primitive moral sense. The dog shows shame or remorse after having
broken rules it was trained to observe. It is sad when its master leaves and
happy when he returns. The lack of instincts made language a necessity for
humans, which their physiology allowed them to develop. Without speech
they would have remained below the level of apes. Psychic capacities depend
entirely on anatomical and physiological endowments. Thinking, willing, and
feeling consist of motions of the brain: ‘‘L’âme n’est qu’un principe de mouve-
ment ou une partie matérielle du cerveau.’’
La Mettrie astutely perceived that the deists’ concern was not with the
existence of God as such, but with their need of a transcendent support for
physics and morality. A consistently materialist theory rendered that support
superfluous. He grounded his materialism in a sensationalist theory of knowl-
edge. Knowledge originates in sensations that follow mechanistic principles.
Hobbes had earlier defined them as endeavors inward followed by endeavors
outward. ‘‘All mutation or alteration is motion or endeavour (and endeavour
also is motion) in the internal parts of the thing that is altered.’’≤≥ Thus the
sensation of seeing, for instance, is nothing but a motion first produced in the
eye, thence transmitted to the optic nerve, and from the nerve to the brain.≤∂
The higher functions of thinking, remembering, and judging are developed
from primitive forms of imagining—which itself is no more than structured
motion. ‘‘Pourquoi diviser le principe sensitif qui pense dans l’homme?’’ Why
indeed, if one regards all questions concerning the distinction between ‘‘sens-
ing’’ and ‘‘thinking’’ (which merely demands plus de génie) as meaningless.
Diderot’s more dynamic materialism succeeded far better in synthesizing
mechanism with organic being. To La Mettrie’s ‘‘dead’’ mechanism he op-
posed a concept of matter that possessed creative powers capable of exceeding
28 A Different Cosmos

the purely mechanical. He saw those forces at work in the generative process.
New life results from the union of sperm and ovum, neither one of which, he
thought, has a life of its own. In his early Philosophical Thoughts (1746) he
had still held that generative creativity was restricted to the species and that it
required a transcendent design. Later he interpreted the emergence of different
species as a result of matter’s evolutionary powers. He recognized essential
differences between the degrees of being but still traced them to a common
source, namely, a developing universe that attains order by chance and perfec-
tion by excluding defective forms.
Trembley’s stunning discovery of the minuscule hydra (chlorohydra vir-
idissima) that acted both as plant and as animal had suggested that the bound-
aries around species might not be as rigorous as had previously been assumed.
Different thinkers drew different conclusions from this discovery. Leibniz had
welcomed it as a resounding confirmation of his principle of perfection, ac-
cording to which nature had to be without gaps between species. For Diderot,
it meant that the restrictions philosophy had formerly imposed on the creative
forces of matter had completely broken down. The entire order of nature
might be no more than the random outcome of the powers of motion. Still,
there remained the question of the beginning. What started the process? Di-
derot gradually came to regard the very assumption of a beginning as a scien-
tifically unnecessary postulate derived from creationist theology. Why should
we postulate a beginning and extrapolate the source of nature’s creative power
outside nature? In his Letter on the Blind for Those Who See (1749) Diderot
showed how the need for a cause beyond nature ceases to be compelling when
we abstract from the overwhelming but deceptive impression of designed
order and beauty. That impression stems entirely from our own aesthetic
vision. If we suspend that subjective sense, the issue boils down to a logical
question: Does the order of nature indeed require a divine designer?
The Letter contains a pseudo-historical account of the death of a Cam-
bridge professor of mathematics, the blind Nicholas Saunderson. A minister
called to his bedside attempts to awaken the patient’s faith by evoking the
marvelous order in the universe. Saunderson admits the existence of order but
questions whether it conveys any insight about its origin. ‘‘I cannot see any-
thing. Yet I am admitting that there is a wonderful order in the universe,
though I hope that you will require no more of me. I am yielding to you on the
present state of the universe so that you will permit me, in return, to think as I
please about its former and first state, in regard to which you are no less blind
than I.’’≤∑ Not being confused by the multiplicity of sights, the blind, according
to Diderot’s Saunderson, are more capable of abstract thinking and less in-
clined to introduce an unnecessary cause. At the same time their own bodily
 A Different Cosmos 29

defect renders them more aware of nature’s imperfection and less given to
assume the need of a perfect designer. The order of the universe, he suggests,
may be the effect of a struggle among incompatible forces. Ill-formed creatures
were, for the most part, eliminated by their deficient ability to adjust to their
environment. Still some survive, as Saunderson’s blindness testifies. He com-
ments: ‘‘I conjecture that in the beginning, when fermenting matter was hatch-
ing out the universe, men such as myself were quite common. . . . And why
should I not assert what I believe about animals to be true of worlds also? How
many maimed and botched worlds have melted away, reformed themselves,
and are perhaps dispersing again at any given moment, far away in space.’’≤∏
To the paradox of a divine designer creating an imperfect world Diderot
opposes the hypothesis of the ancient atomists that in millions of years matter
has, by mere chance, organized itself into a more or less orderly cosmos, as
Lucretius had claimed:

Surely the atoms never began by forming

a conscious pact, a treaty with each other,
where they should stay apart, where come together.
More likely, being so many, in many ways
harassed and driven through the universe
from an infinity of time, by trying
all kinds of motion, every combination,
They came at last into such disposition
as now establishes the sum of things.≤π

Descartes himself had conceived of matter as moving, and Newton’s princi-

ple of inertia had abrogated the natural priority of rest over motion. If matter
had always existed and always moved, some elements would in time combine
with others, and these islands of order would be able to resist the destructive
forces of the original chaos. To Diderot, such a scenario appeared far more
probable than that of an all-wise, omnipotent God creating a chaos out of
which a never perfect universe was to develop. Diderot dearly paid for placing
his irreverent opinions in Saunderson’s pious mouth: he was imprisoned for a
while and permanently banned from membership in the Royal Society. But,
undeterred by censorship, he proceeded to answer the questions he had raised
in his aphoristic Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature.
This time the biologist Maupertuis served as mouthpiece for Diderot’s opin-
ions. Why, he wondered, do we fear to attribute to the material universe as a
whole the perceptive qualities we observe in all animals? If we overcome this
irrational aversion, we may find nature itself capable of introducing the modi-
fications we now ascribe to the Creator. Nothing prevents the sum of all
30 A Different Cosmos

molecules to be to some extent ‘‘endowed with the powers of thought and

feeling.’’≤∫ ‘‘If faith did not teach us that animals sprang from the hands of
their Creator just as we know them, . . . might the philosopher not suspect,
having given himself up entirely to his own conjectures, that the particular
elements needed to constitute animal life had existed from all eternity, scat-
tered and mixed with the whole mass of matter; that these elements happening
to come together, had combined because it was possible for them to do so?’’≤Ω
It had long been assumed that all organic beings were built in accordance
with a common form and function. The idea of a form that, in a variety of
ways, strives toward perfect expression prepared the acceptance of a natural
evolution from a single primitive one to a multiplicity of developed forms. The
prototypical form had to be conceived as a living force. ‘‘When we see the
successive metamorphoses of the prototype’s outward appearance, whatever
it may have been in the first place, bring one kingdom gradually and impercep-
tibly nearer to another kingdom and people the boundaries of those two
kingdoms . . . with uncertain, ambiguous beings stripped to a great degree of
the forms, the qualities, and the functions of the one and taking on the forms,
qualities, and functions of the other, is it not difficult to resist the belief that
there was never more than one first being, a prototype of all other beings?’’≥≠
The purpose of Diderot’s rudimentary hypothesis of a spontaneous evolution
of the species was inspired by philosophical reasons rather than derived from
scientific observations. He merely wanted to show that the creative power
might well reside within the universe—like a divine world soul—rather than
above it.
Still the origin of mental life posed special problems. In three dialogical
essays, ‘‘Conversation with d’Alembert,’’ ‘‘D’Alembert’s Dream,’’ and ‘‘Con-
clusion of the Conversation’’ (written in 1769 but not published during his
lifetime), Diderot moves from a theory of universal motion to one of universal
sensation. The difference between dead matter and sensitive matter is one of
degree, not of presence or absence. In nonorganic matter sensation remains an
inanimate force, but it becomes animated in plants and animals. That it can
pass from one state to another, Diderot presumed to be established by the
transformation of inanimate into living matter in metabolic and genetic pro-
cesses. ‘‘Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory,
every church or temple in the world. What is it, this egg, before the seed is
introduced into it? An insentient mass. And after the seed has been introduced
into it? What is it then? An insentient mass. For what is the seed itself other
than a crude and animate fluid? How is this mass to make the transition to a
different structure, to sentience, to life? Through heat. And what will produce
that heat in it? Motion.’’≥∞
 A Different Cosmos 31

To derive consciousness from this sensing matter Diderot had to overcome

the basic Cartesian distinction between res extensa and res cogitans. Crucial
for this transition was the role of memory—the power to hold on to a past
sensation. Diderot simply postulated it through an analogy of covibrating
chords that allow a sensing organism to retain past sounds and to recombine
them with present ones. At no point does this process move beyond matter.
Nor does it require any divine intervention for the creation of a ‘‘soul.’’ Di-
derot’s idea of a natural evolution was based on a hunch that acquired traits are
inheritable, which Lamarck soon afterward developed into a scientific theory.
‘‘Imagine a long succession of generations born without arms; imagine their
continued efforts and you will slowly see the two ends of this pair of pincers
grow longer, longer still, cross over at the back, grow forward again, perhaps
develop fingers at their ends, and create arms and hands once more.’’≥≤ With
this argument Diderot thinks he has accomplished his goal of uniting the
mechanistic theories of Descartes and Newton with a sensationalism derived
from Locke and thus of having eliminated the separation between material and
mental principles of reality.
Diderot’s friend and coeditor of the Encyclopédie, d’Alembert, resisted such
hazardous generalizations. Like Newton, he opposed metaphysical specula-
tion. He even refused to define the primary properties of matter; he was inter-
ested only in how they functioned. ‘‘The purpose of philosophy is not to
become lost in the universal properties of being and of substance, in useless
questions about abstract concepts, in arbitrary divisions and eternal nomen-
clatures: it is the science either of facts or of chimeras.’’≥≥ By means of defini-
tions philosophers merely generalize particular phenomena in order thereby to
make them appear universal and necessary. In fact, the complexity of nature de-
fies comprehensive description.≥∂ The creation of abstract universals obstructs
rather than favors the possibility of subsuming experience under mathematical
laws. D’Alembert, an eminent mathematician, abstained from construing gen-
eral philosophical theories on the basis of particular phenomena.
Observation never results in apodictic truth, but if duly repeated and formu-
lated into law, it asymptotically approaches mathematical certainty.≥∑ In the
end the very possibility of a universal science of ‘‘nature’’ can be no more than
a postulate. Cassirer confirms d’Alembert’s doubts: ‘‘Where is the guarantee,
the decisive proof, that at least this general system of phenomena is completely
self-contained, homogeneous, and uniform?’’≥∏ More orthodox mechanists
were not happy with d’Alembert’s methodic asceticism. In his funeral oration
for d’Alembert, Condorcet regretted that the great mathematician had pushed
the demands of mathematical rigor too far. ‘‘He may have imposed too narrow
limitations upon the human mind. Too accustomed to truths demonstrated
32 A Different Cosmos

and formed by simple, precisely defined ideas, he may have been insufficiently
aware of truths of a different order that have more complex ideas as their
object, for the discussion of which we may even need to articulate definitions
and, so to speak, new ideas, because the words employed in these sciences
taken from ordinary language and used in common parlance have only vague
and indeterminate meanings.’’≥π
Paul-Henri Dietrich d’Holbach’s Système de la nature (1771) stayed closer
to Diderot’s views, except for its peremptory dogmatism. In this work, pub-
lished anonymously, the German baron, who in Paris kept an open house for
scientists, philosophes, and radical thinkers, construed a coherent materialist
system of the universe and of all it contains. Matter is an all-comprehensive,
eternal substance that, with the sole support of motion, accounts for the entire
scale of the real—from mineral to mind. The author combines a naive reduc-
tionism and a simplistic determinism with an impressive erudition and an
occasionally incisive critique of established positions. He lacks any esprit de
finesse, but his passionate eloquence against ‘‘superstition’’ carries the weary
reader along through a dense brush of learning and bias. Single-mindedly
intent on proving the truth of atheistic naturalism, he borrows from any
source likely to provide ammunition for his unholy war. Empedocles, Epi-
curus, and Lucretius appear side by side with Descartes and Newton, whose
theories he thoroughly distorts. ‘‘Descartes asked but matter and motion:
diversity of matter sufficed for him; variety of motion was the consequence of
its existence, of its essence, of its properties.’’≥∫ As matter moves, it determines
bodies in different modes of being and they result in different modes of action.
D’Holbach claims to follow the ‘‘rules’’ of the Principia, but his own theory of
creative vital forces moves far beyond what Newton’s principles allow. In fact,
he superimposes Leibniz’s dynamic theory of substance upon Newton’s mech-
anism. He also appeals to Leibniz’s identity of indiscernibles—two individuals
even of the same species can never possess identical qualities—in order to
show the infinite fertility of a nature, which he defines as bound by rigorous,
mechanistic determinism (I, 9, 60).
Nature is ‘‘the great whole that results from the assemblage of motions
which the universe offers to our view’’ (I, 1, 15). Endowed with the attributes
of a transcendent principle, d’Holbach’s Nature is eternal, comprehensive,
organizing, and the sole source of motion. Typical of the baron’s breezy way of
marching through an argument are his far-reaching equations. Attraction and
repulsion are identified with Empedocles’ love and hatred (I, 4, 29–32). Physi-
cal motion rules the internal functions of willing and thinking. Intelligence
results from a particular combination of matter that produces unique modes
of action, called ‘‘reflection’’ and ‘‘decision.’’ Everything happens necessarily
 A Different Cosmos 33

and forms part of an uninterrupted chain of cause and effect. ‘‘Chance’’ and
‘‘freedom’’ merely describe series of events where we fail to perceive the causal
link. D’Holbach ascribes unlimited powers to nature. It suffices to consider
matter to be animated by motion, rather than dead and inert, to understand
the entire order of nature as self-produced (I, 5, 38).
A secret theology has wormed its way into his deterministic system. Nature
becomes personified, endowed with divine attributes, and invested with a
capacity to act in view of self-chosen ends. ‘‘It is part of her [Nature’s] plan,
that certain portions of the earth shall bring forth delicious fruits, whilst
others shall only furnish brambles and noxious vegetables: she has been will-
ing that some societies should produce wise men and great heroes, that others
should only give birth to contemptible men’’ (I, 12, 113). But Nature is indif-
ferent to human life, d’Holbach had asserted in a lyrical passage reminiscent of
that earlier rhapsodist of an all-inclusive nature, Giordano Bruno. ‘‘Suns en-
crust themselves and are extinguished; planets perish and disperse themselves
in the vast plains of air; other suns are kindled; new planets form themselves,
either to make revolutions round these suns, or to describe new routes; and
man, an infinitely small portion of the globe, which is itself but an impercepti-
ble point in the immensity of space, believes it is for himself this universe is
made’’ (I, 6, 46).≥Ω Despite the apparent indifference to human life of d’Hol-
bach’s matter, the emergence of forms of being follows a strict hierarchy from
the inert to the intelligent, as if mental life were its anticipated goal.
Is matter able to produce new species and to make old ones disappear?
D’Holbach does not doubt it. Only the shortness of human life prevents us
from seeing species emerging or vanishing. An organic nature constantly
transforms itself into ever more complex forms of life, in accordance with
climatic and geographical conditions (I, 6, 44). ‘‘Everything seems to autho-
rize the conjecture that the human species is a production peculiar to our
sphere, in the position in which it is found: that, when this position may
happen to change, the human species will, of consequence, either be changed,
or will be obliged to disappear’’ (I, 6, 45). This admission of a possible extinc-
tion of the human race is exceptional in d’Holbach’s system. Most of the time
his concept of nature was inspired by an eighteenth-century belief in progress
rather than by biological evidence. Not the struggle for survival nor ‘‘muta-
tional’’ accidents determine the process, but Nature’s teleological orientation
toward the highest form of life. Once civilization appears it becomes a power-
ful instrument for the preservation and improvement of the human species.
For all their learning and passion, d’Holbach’s tomes failed to impress his
fellow philosophes. In his Correspondance littéraire about cultural develop-
ments in France, the sarcastic Grimm writes: ‘‘I find no other danger in them
34 A Different Cosmos

than that of boredom: all of it becomes exceedingly repetitious. The earth

keeps on turning and the impact of the most daring opinions equals zero.’’
Grimm’s remark cautions us not to exaggerate the esteem d’Holbach enjoyed
even in the minds of his enlightened contemporaries. The baron’s goal was not
scientific but ideological: to justify materialism and theories of progress by
sweeping but unproven statements about physics and biology. D’Holbach’s
originality consisted in popularizing the scientific conclusions of arguments
presented by others and in transforming them, well beyond what their scien-
tific support warranted, into tools for a social program. His work may have
enjoyed little authority among scientists and even among philosophers, but it
effectively served a social project.
His materialism prematurely brought to completion what by its very nature
must remain an asymptotic process. The project of scientific research never
ends since the gap between thinking and reality never closes. The idea of
progress is inherent in the scientific enterprise itself.∂≠ Although we assume
that science comes ever closer to its ideal, it will never succeed in fully justify-
ing why the world continues to appear different from what our accumulated
knowledge proves it to be. The materialist resolves this permanent tension
between subject and object by simply assuming that subjectivity itself is a
mode of the known or knowable object. Once this thesis is accepted the pos-
sibility of an exhaustive knowledge is in principle attained. Further progress
then consists merely in filling in the details.

The Organic View of Nature

BUFFON

By the middle of the eighteenth century even such loyal apostles of

mechanism as d’Alembert, Diderot, and La Mettrie had begun to attribute
forces to nature that exceeded Descartes’s and Newton’s concepts of motion.
Buffon and Leibniz’s organic theories of nature broke away from mechanism
altogether. George-Louis Buffon, a noted mathematician and in his early years
an orthodox mechanist, attempted to apply Newton’s principles to the organic
world. But even the introductory Discours to the first volume of his enormous
Histoire Naturelle spells trouble for the theory. To reduce the order of living
organisms to a single homogeneous order, he writes, is an exercise that can
satisfy only ‘‘the mind of those who know nature poorly.’’ The Creator has
dispensed ‘‘an infinite number of harmonious and contrary combinations, as
well as perpetual destructions and renewals.’’∂∞ Buffon even objects to his
great contemporary Linné’s classification into genus, species, and subspecies.
 A Different Cosmos 35

In botany and zoology only empirical observation yields worthwhile results.

Amazingly, Buffon still believed that his battle was only with the Cartesian
deductive method, not with mechanism itself. Not until the majestic ‘‘Vue de la
Nature’’ that introduces volume XII did he become fully aware of his differ-
ences with the mechanistic interpretation of nature. Until then he continued to
describe zoological developments as the work of Newtonian forces, though he
considered them subordinate to the higher purpose of life. ‘‘Motion and life
are its scope.’’ Life still obeys the laws of attraction and repulsion, but it does
so in a manner that renders the force of gravity subservient to its own goal.
As he gradually became aware of the conflict between the mechanistic forces
of attraction and repulsion on one side, and the dynamic, teleological thrust of
organic life, on the other, Buffon began to separate the living forces from the
‘‘dead’’ ones. Attraction affects all bodies, yet in the organic ones repulsion
dominates. Finally, in the general ‘‘Vue de la Nature’’ Buffon abandoned the
notion of a homogeneous system of forces altogether. Nature as a self-moving,
animated, and animating power resists being constrained within a single sys-
tem. Although all bodies remain subject to physical laws, the effect of these
laws differs from one kind to another. Condillac and d’Alembert, the watch-
dogs of mechanistic orthodoxy, objected to such an ‘‘unscientific’’ teleology.
How could the order of nature be preserved with a number of uncoordinated
systems operating at once? Had the artist Buffon gotten the better of the
scientist?.∂≤
Buffon’s synthesis was indeed a work of the imagination. But that may have
been its greatest merit. For him, nature itself was a postulate of the imagina-
tion, a projected unity that included a constantly expanding and changing
content. By abandoning the belief in a homogeneous reality Buffon succeeded
in liberating nature from the prison house within which mechanism had
locked the endless variety of bodies living and dead. It was indeed an aesthetic
intuition that guided Buffon’s scientific observation. With his work the idea of
harmony, unity in diversity, that had long since made its way into art, poetry,
and philosophy entered science. Nature was an organic body composed of
different systems that held each other in balance.
A faith in a natural harmony inspires those exquisite reflections that, much
to the delight of the reader, Buffon has dispersed at regular (though seldom
predictable) intervals over his entire work. One of them, accompanying the
description of the ox, presents an opportunity to discuss the ecology of mutual
destruction among animals. To survive, animals must eat plants or other ani-
mals. But in order to keep the quantity of life constant, nature comme une
mère économe has fixed the limits of destruction and granted only few animals
carnivorous instincts, while outnumbering them with herbivores. Problems
36 A Different Cosmos

begin with the human species. They use their power to domesticate, over-
breed, and slaughter animals well beyond their needs. Humans hunt and fish
without restriction. ‘‘All of nature hardly seems to suffice for their intem-
perance and the inconstant variety of their appetites. By themselves humans
consume and swallow more meat than all animals together devour. They are
the great destroyers and move by abuse rather than by necessity.’’∂≥
Buffon frequently insists on the relative insignificance of the human person
in the whole of nature, yet in other passages he stresses his transforming
power—for good or ill. Without human care nature becomes ‘‘hideous and
moribund.’’ We alone can render it beautiful and wholesome—by draining
marshes and digging canals. ‘‘Let us put the torch at this superfluous growth,
at these old, half perished forests, and let us destroy with iron what fire did not
consume. Instead of rushes and water lilies from which the toad draws its
venom[!], we shall see buttercups, clover, sweet and salubrious herbs.’’∂∂ Thus
the pioneer naturalist returns home from his walk on the wild side to the
artificial French garden and its ideal of transforming nature into a work of art.
Enlightenment rationalism and emerging romanticism remain locked in an
undecided struggle in Buffon’s conception of nature.
Even his later study on the formation of the earth, Les époques de la nature
(1778), by many considered his best, remains ambiguous. After having been
separated from the sun, the planet stayed incandescent for 2,936 years(!).
Once it had cooled off, water constantly transformed it during the later ep-
ochs. The theory may appear fanciful in the light of modern geology, but its
significance lies in Buffon’s admission of change in an area of nature that even
he, in his earlier works, had considered subject only to immutable mechanical
laws. He now views the cosmos that mechanists from Galileo to Newton had
held to be static as passing through a succession of stages, each of which had
its own history in the total harmony of nature.
Surprisingly, Buffon considered presently living species as ancient as nature
itself. The geological foundations of nature and the living individuals in it are
subject to change, but not the species. Buffon had engaged the young Lamarck
(who had published a study on the flora of France) as a travel companion for
his son. Yet he would strongly have resisted the theory of evolution that
Lamarck later developed. Still, Buffon’s own theory called for change on every
level. ‘‘Nature has passed through different stages; the surface of the earth has
taken different forms; the heavens themselves have changed, and all things in
the physical universe are, even as those in the moral world, in a continuous
movement of successive variations.’’∂∑ In addition, the great botanist and zool-
ogist adduces the kind of evidence that was to lead later scientists to an evolu-
tionary theory of nature. He mentions seashells found on mountains, as well
 A Different Cosmos 37

as remnants of species that have ceased to exist. Some of those shells reappear
in continents now separated from each other. What we today would count as
clear signs of genetic mutations remained merely an intriguing phenomenon
for one who persisted in his belief that animal species are fixed. Even so, the
evidence Buffon produced was sufficient to alarm Newtonians as well as theo-
logians. Voltaire dismissed the seashells on the mountains as remnants of
travelers’ picnics or as relics of shell-bearing pilgrims crossing the Pyrenees or
Alps on their way to Compostella.
A crucial step in overcoming mechanism was the different conception of
form that emerged from the new life sciences—biology, botany, and zoology.
The issue first came up in a dispute about the nature of organic species. Are
natural forms continuous so that any classification, though useful for pur-
poses of investigation, must be artificial? Or are species distinct steps in the
hierarchy of nature, as Linné thought? Since Trembley’s discovery of the zoo-
phyte hydra, the issue of continuity ceased to divide the scientific community.
Henceforth it centered on the question of whether in a continuous system
forms might be classified as permanent. Ever since Newton’s theory of force
the idea of form as a dynamic, teleological principle had been working itself to
the surface. It definitively broke through in Leibniz’s philosophy.

LEIBNIZ
The scientific study of nature presupposes a trust that all the pieces of the
puzzle somehow fit together and that the various lines of investigation con-
verge at a center. Around this assumption of a universal harmony Leibniz built
an all-inclusive system of reality. But rather than reducing all things to a single
substance, as Spinoza had done, he started from an irreducible plurality of
substances. Each one, except the simple divine substance, contained a spiritual
core, a simple ‘‘monad’’ surrounded by a cluster of subordinate ‘‘monads’’ that
made the substance receptive to outside influences. This radical departure
from the mechanistic concept of reality remained a mere hypothesis until the
mechanistic thesis had, at least in principle, been falsified by the empirical
evidence on which it claimed to be based. Buffon and other naturalists of
Leibniz’s time had begun to show that animals and plants followed other laws
than the mechanistic one of action and reaction.
Leibniz’s thought, the most comprehensive and one of the most original of
the Enlightenment period, requires a more detailed analysis than appears in
this chapter. (More will be said about him in a later one.) Here I shall dis-
cuss only his remarkable alternative to mechanist philosophy. Crucial thereby
was the restoration of the notion of form, once the determining category
of Western thought. The philosophies of Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke all
38 A Different Cosmos

had replaced it by the concept of substance.∂∏ Substance soon became so all-

encompassing as to lose its distinct meaning. Descartes had identified the
entire physical nature with extended substance, and Spinoza, anxious to elimi-
nate the absolute dualism between extension and thought, equated substance
with the totality of the real. Hume subsequently showed how easily one could
dispense with such a broad category altogether.
In an article in the Journal des Savans (in June 1695) Leibniz justified his
reviving what had fallen into such a profound disrepute.
I realized that it is impossible to find the principles of a true unity in matter
alone, since everything in it is only a collection or mass of parts to infinity.
Now multitude can only get in reality from true unities which come from
elsewhere and are quite different from points (it is known that the continuum
cannot be composed of points). Therefore to find their real unities I was
compelled to have recourse to a formal atom, since a material being cannot be
both material and perfectly indivisible or endowed with true unity. It was
necessary, hence, to recall and, so to speak, rehabilitate the substantial forms
so decried today, but in a way which would make them intelligible and which
would separate the use we should make of them from the abuse that has been
made of them.∂π

By interpreting Newton’s notion of force in the sense of Aristotle’s goal-

directed form principle (the entelecheia), he hoped to reconcile the mechanis-
tic with the dynamic theories of matter while at the same time relinking the
new physics to the ancient metaphysics. ‘‘I grant that the consideration of
these [substantial] forms is of no service in the details of physics and ought not
to be employed in the explanation of particular phenomena.’’∂∫ But if Des-
cartes’s collapse of all material substances into one and Spinoza’s universal
monism were to be avoided, the notion of substance had to be defined in a
more specific manner than ‘‘that which is in itself and is conceived through
itself.’’ The universe contains a multiplicity of qualities, some of them conflict-
ing with others. They cannot be attributed to a single substance without logi-
cal contradiction. The differentiating note of form would prevent this.
By the same token Leibniz excluded Descartes’s equation of material sub-
stance with extension. If forces are an essential feature of the mechanic system,
material substances had to consist of more than extension, which is not even
an objective quality but a concept needed to describe continuity among mate-
rial substances.∂Ω The phenomenon of extension, far from defining the essence
of material substance, results from the mind’s tendency to equate what is
merely similar and continuous. Material entities do indeed share a common
passive quality. But, as Newton had shown, a mechanistic system also contains
active forces. They require the presence of the spiritual principle of form.
 A Different Cosmos 39

Leibniz disagreed with Newton’s theory of physics on one fundamental

issue. He rejected the notion of absolute space as an abstraction that freezes
into a single, static reality the dynamic relations that all coexisting things in the
universe entertain with one another. ‘‘I hold it [space] to be an order of coexis-
tences, as time is an order of successions. For space denotes, in terms of
possibility, an order of things which exist at the same time, considered as
existing together, without inquiring into their particular manner of exist-
ing.’’∑≠ Newton’s absolute space is independent of the objects in it and hence
indifferent with respect to the position of the objects. This means that objects
could occupy any other position than the one they actually occupy. But then
no reason could be given why things are where they actually are, a thesis that
directly conflicts with Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason. ‘‘The fiction of a
material finite universe, moving forward in an infinite empty space, cannot be
admitted. For, besides that there is no real space out of the material universe,
such an action would be without any design in it.’’∑∞ A spatial vacuum exists
neither outside the universe nor inside it. The concept of space refers to the
phenomenal order of coexistence in which objects are related to one another.
Leibniz excluded the very possibility of a void surrounding the universe by
assuming that it is infinite. (‘‘It does not appear reasonable that the material
universe should be finite.’’)∑≤
Time also refers to a relation, rather than to an independent being as it did
for Newton.∑≥ Since time is no more than the appearing order of succession,
Leibniz needs no idea of an absolute infinite time surrounding the duration of
the cosmos. A substance may last eternally but there is no such thing as an
eternal duration.∑∂ Nor could the world have been created ‘‘sooner’’ or ‘‘later’’:
time originates with the world, being nothing but the order in which existing
realities relate to one another. A time before the world would be ‘‘a thing
absolute, independent of God; whereas time must coexist with creatures, and
is only conceived by the order and quantity of their changes.’’∑∑ Moreover, the
idea that God would create the world at a particular segment of an absolute
time conflicts with the principle of sufficient reason: Why at this moment
rather than at another when in an infinite empty time no moment would have
an ontological priority over any other?
Surprisingly, Leibniz holds that duration, in contrast to extension, must
have a beginning. ‘‘If it is the nature of things in the whole, to grow uniformly
in perfection, the universe of creatures must have had a beginning. And there-
fore, there will be reasons to limit the duration of things, even though there
were none to limit their extension.’’∑∏ Yet the fact that time has a beginning
does not prevent it from stretching out indefinitely into the future. Leibniz’s
position may have been inspired by a theological concern that if the world had
40 A Different Cosmos

always existed, the divine act of creation would have been jeopardized. But
does creation imply more than an absolute dependence of all finite being upon
an absolute being? What then is time for Leibniz? An ideal concept resulting
not from a single perception but from ‘‘a train of perceptions [that] awakens in
us the idea of duration.’’∑π The synthetic concepts of time and space possess an
ideal truth, though not a real one: they condition our ability to perceive phe-
nomena in an orderly, connected series.
On one other critical issue Leibniz disagrees with Newton, namely, the need
for God’s occasional interventions to redress the small deviations from the
regular concentric orbits the planets describe. In the Opticks Newton had
written: ‘‘ ’Tis not possible it should have been caused by blind fate, that the
planets all move with one familiar direction in concentric orbs; excepting only
some very small irregularities, which may have arisen from the mutual actions
of the planets and comets one upon another; and which ’tis probable will in
length of time increase be anew put in order by its Author.’’∑∫ Leibniz objected
to such shoddy workmanship that required the Creator ‘‘to wind up his watch
from time to time.’’∑Ω If the order can be repaired, what prevented God from
making it perfect from the start? Does the principle of perfection not require
that everything made by a perfect Creator must be as perfect as it can possibly
be? This principle of perfection, as all Leibniz’s principles, follows from the
comprehensive rule of sufficient reason.
That principle most radically formulates the rationalist assumption that the
real must be rational in all respects. All that exists or occurs must be justified
by a reason for its particular existence or occurrence. That principle also
implies that substances must be continuous with one another. Gaps or abrupt
transitions in the line of being cannot be rationally justified. It further requires
that each substance qualitatively differ from all others, since the existence of a
substance that is in no way distinct from another would have no reason for
existing. It suffices not for a substance to occupy a quantitatively different
position, or to have a different ‘‘weight.’’ If simple substances were without
differentiating qualities, reality would be totally homogeneous.
The Monadology, Leibniz’s last major writing, may be read as his final
response to mechanistic philosophy. For Leibniz, as for all rationalists, the
ultimate condition of rationality is simplicity. Thought operates on the basis of
a small number of principles and this implies, according to them, that the real
itself may be broken down into simple elements.∏≠ Leibniz called simple sub-
stances monads rather than atoms, because physical atoms remain subject to
division.∏∞ ‘‘Physical points are indivisible only in appearance; mathematical
points are indivisible only in appearance; mathematical points are exact, but
they are only modalities; only metaphysical or substantial points (constituted
 A Different Cosmos 41

by forms or souls) are exact and real.’’∏≤ Each substance, then, even the com-
plex physical one is built around a simple spiritual core. Contrary to the
materialist notion of atoms, these spiritual monads are not moved by external
forces but exclusively by their own internal teleology.
Each monad expresses a unique perspective on the totality of the real. All
complement one another and, indirectly, influence each other by their greater
or smaller power of expression.∏≥ ‘‘Activity belongs to the essence of substance
in general.’’∏∂ In a letter to the Dutch philosopher De Volder, Leibniz writes: ‘‘I
believe that our thought of [material] substance is perfectly satisfied in the
conception of force and not in that of extension. Besides, there should be no
need to seek any other explanation for the conception of power or force than
that it is the attitude from which change follows and its subject is substance
itself.’’∏∑ In describing the material substance as an expressive force directed by
an inner teleology, Leibniz contradicts mechanism on the most fundamental
level. The dynamic qualities that mechanism had reserved to God and humans,
he predicated of all substances: ‘‘Substance is a being capable of action.’’∏∏
Leibniz even attributes perception, though not apperception (i.e., fully con-
scious perception) to all beings. The principle of perfection excludes a sudden
break between the organic and the inorganic, the mental and the corporeal.
Perception is an expressive act and because each substance, even the lowest in
the hierarchy of being, is a center of expressive power, each substance must be
perceptive. Each reflects in its own way the state of all others with which it is
united in a universal harmony.
In declaring power to be the essence of substance—not the kind of causally
induced power of mechanistic philosophy but spontaneous power that origi-
nates within the substance—Leibniz laid a new foundation for the harmony
between mind and body. All physical reality is ontologically linked to a spir-
itual core; in the case of humans, the mind is the spiritual core of the body.

Conclusion: Kant’s Internalization of Nature

In Kant’s thought empiricist and rationalist theories converged. From
the former he retained that only empirical knowledge can convey reliable
information about nature; from the latter, that knowledge to be scientific (and
hence universal) had to be rooted in a priori principles to become necessary. A
mere description of nature as the sum of empirical observations was inade-
quate for scientific as well as for philosophical purposes. In the Prolegomena
to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Kant replaces the traditional description
of nature as ‘‘the totality of all objects of experience’’ by ‘‘the existence of
things so far as it is determined according to universal laws.’’∏π These laws are
42 A Different Cosmos

more than generalized observations: they consist of the mind’s own rules of
experience. ‘‘We must not seek the universal laws of nature in nature by means
of experience, but conversely must seek nature, as to its universal conformity
to law, in the conditions of the possibility of experience, which lie in our
sensibility and in our understanding’’ (Gesammelte Schriften, IV, § 36, p. 319;
Ellington, p. 61). Kant distinguishes these pure and universal laws from the
empirical laws of nature known through particular observations. The ‘‘pure’’
laws, inherent in the knowing subject, prescribe the general conditions of
space and time within which the experience of nature occurs. Kant thereby
justified what had remained implicit in modern physical theories since Des-
cartes and Newton, namely, that our knowledge of the world clarifies our
relation to the world rather than defining the nature of the world.
His subjective interpretation of space and time laid this contested issue to
rest, at least for a while. In his Dissertation of 1770, he had rejected the earlier
theories of space and time, Newton’s as well as Leibniz’s. From Newton’s
concept of absolute space and time he nevertheless retained the idea that the
very possibility of conceiving nature depends on an a priori intuition of space
and time. But what Newton had called God’s sensorium Kant reinterpreted as
the subjective conditions that enable the mind to think the world. Leibniz’s
conception of space and time as a priori concepts of coexistence and succes-
sion would seem to come closer to Kant’s own idea. In fact, it became the main
target of his attack. Space and time, he objected, are not concepts: they are
intuitions of the senses and hence they are not universal as concepts are, but
singular. In his judgment Leibniz failed to distinguish the a priori of reason
from the a priori conditions of sense perception.∏∫
For Kant, the intuition of time, prior to any actual experience, establishes
the subjective requirements for coordinating all sense data. Similarly, space is
neither abstracted from external sensations nor constituted by the mind but an
a priori form of sensibility that, without any content of its own, links the
successive perceptions together. To perceive reality as a coherent whole re-
quires that things be situated within a single frame of space and time.
In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), Kant adds a
new element to his theory. He shows how a priori principles of judgment
determine the laws of mechanical physics. Obviously, the philosopher does
not ‘‘deduce’’ the laws of physics from metaphysical premises: they have to be
established by methodic observation. Yet reflecting on those laws the philoso-
pher understands how each of them presupposes definite a priori structures of
knowledge. The physicist need not know those structures, yet they form the
foundation of his science and give its laws their apodictic quality. ‘‘A rational
doctrine of nature, then, deserves the name natural science only when the
 A Different Cosmos 43

natural laws that underlie it are cognized a priori and are not mere laws of
experience.’’∏Ω In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786),
Kant reformulates the fundamental concept of matter. At the ground of it lies
the a priori intuition of space. Matter is pure or ‘‘absolute’’ space to the extent
that it forms the basis of motion (Gesammelte Schriften, IV, p. 480; Ellington,
p. 18).
Still the a priori intuition of space in no way grounds our understanding of
the dynamics of nature. The concept of force, on which the physical law of
action and reaction rests, requires a different philosophical justification. If
matter were wholly impenetrable, no motion would occur at all. On the other
side, if matter offered no resistance to external pressure, it would become
totally diffused—and, again, no motion would be possible. Matter, then, must
consist of forces that render it intrinsically active, that is, both penetrable and
resistant. This a priori quality of matter is, according to Kant, the foundation
of physical dynamics. One may question whether these allegedly a priori prin-
ciples philosophically justify the physical concept of force; indeed, whether
they add anything to a mere description.
Kant’s intention leaves no doubt. He is waging a battle with what he con-
siders to be the philosophical assumptions of Newton’s Principia, specifically
the notions of absolute space and absolute time. Those notions may be needed
as ideal hypotheses for rendering an ever-shifting relative motion measurable,
but they are unfit to serve as foundational concepts of physics. ‘‘Absolute
space is, then, necessary not as a concept of an actual object but as an idea that
is to serve as a rule for considering all motion therein only as relative’’ (Gesam-
melte Schriften, IV, p. 560; Ellington, p. 127). At this point the purpose of his
sharp critique of Newton’s assumptions becomes clear. If absolute space and
time were indeed the objective foundations of physical reality, Kant’s claim of
having accomplished a ‘‘Copernican revolution’’ in reversing the relation be-
tween the knowing subject and nature would become meaningless. In fact, his
victory over the objectivist philosophy of nature proved decisive at least in one
respect: no major thinker after him continued to speak or write of nature as of
a reality wholly independent of the perceiver. The process of knowing plays a
crucial role in constituting the object of that knowledge.
By the end of the eighteenth century the revolution begun by Copernicus
and Galileo was reaching completion. Not only was the universe larger—
infinitely so—than previous generations had thought, but it also had become
self-empowered. Nor did it appear to be there for our benefit: we and our
planet formed only one minuscule part of it, among billions of others. The
very notion that this planet might have a purpose had become questionable.
Nonetheless, as Pascal had stated, the mind infinitely surpasses a universe that
44 A Different Cosmos

does not know itself. Kant’s philosophy supported and strengthened this
awareness of the mind’s unique place in the order of reality. Not only does the
mind know the universe; its knowledge constitutes it as ideal entity.
The change in the cosmological outlook caused both a feeling of disorienta-
tion and a new sense of freedom. Many felt lost in a universe that had ceased to
provide a firm dwelling place. At the same time, others welcomed the libera-
tion from a prefixed order that restricted all thinking and acting by clearly
defined limits of space and time. Henceforth the mind itself was to determine
the coordinates of its position. For the first time people, no longer confined to
this earth, started speculating about a plurality of worlds. Other planets might
be inhabited. Eventually this new worldview was to affect all other aspects of
life—the person’s view of himself or herself, the nature of religion, ethics, and
aesthetics.
 3

A New Sense of Selfhood

The success of the physical and mathematical sciences inspired a demand

for a science of human nature. Not only would a systematic knowledge of the
person round out the circle of sciences, but, as Hume understood it, such a
knowledge would place all other sciences on a secure basis. ‘‘It is evident that
all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and that, how-
ever wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return by one passage
or another. Here then is the only expedient, from which we can hope for
success in our philosophical researches to leave the tedious lingering method,
which we have hitherto followed and instead of taking now and then a castle or
village on the frontier, to march directly up to the capital or center of those
sciences, to human nature itself; which being once masters of, we may every-
where else hope for an easy victory.’’∞
The science of the person was to provide the foundation for all others. Even
Kant, so scrupulous about separating the principles of knowledge from the
particulars of human nature, in a later writing declared the philosophical
understanding of man the key to all philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason
he had raised three questions: ‘‘What can I know? What ought I do? What may
I hope?’’≤ The three Critiques were to answer them. In the Logik he adds a
fourth question: Was ist der Mensch? (What is the human person?) His answer
states what had been one of the implicit assumptions of modern thought: ‘‘In

45
46 A New Sense of Selfhood

the end one might count all this [the content of the triple Critique] to be
anthropology, because the first three questions all relate to the last one.’’≥ Thus
philosophy rested on anthropology. But this knowledge of the self differed
from the one to which the oracle of Delphi had summoned Socrates, namely,
to understand his place in the whole of reality. For the moderns, the self defines
that reality, rather than being defined by it.

The Modern Predicament: The Self, Subject or Substance?

From the beginning a basic ambiguity had adhered to the science of the
self. The object of the investigation was at the same time the investigating sub-
ject. The self was both knowing subject and the substance to be known. The
terms ‘‘subject’’ and ‘‘substance’’ were both translations of the same Greek
term, hypokeimenon, the permanent base that supports the transient qualities
of a being. Descartes uses the term ‘‘subject’’ rarely and never in the pregnant
sense here described. The term ‘‘substance,’’ originally no more than the per-
manent core that supports (sub-stat) all qualities of a being, had gradually
come to refer to that being itself.∂ Early Scholasticism had referred to God, the
soul, and the world, as substances. Descartes continued to apply that term to
the conscious self (res cogitans), but because for him consciousness functions
as the source of meaning of all substances, that denomination created a major
problem. How can what constitutes meaning be, at the same time, a substance
endowed with a meaning content of its own? How can there be an objective
science of what is supposed to be the source of all objective meaning?∑
The problem continues to haunt contemporary thought. Michel Foucault
referred to it as the paradox of a ‘‘being such that knowledge will be attained
in him of what renders all knowledge possible.’’∏ Paul Ricoeur has rephrased
the two functions of the self while attempting to avoid the dualism involved in
the terminology of subject and substance. He distinguishes the two modes of
self-description by the Latin terms ipse (the meaning-giving function of the
self) and idem (the quality whereby a self remains the same substance).π The
self is both. Yet referring to it through either of those designations singularly is
inadequate. If the self is defined only through its sameness (idem), it becomes
quantitatively distinct from other objective entities, but nothing indicates its
qualitative uniqueness. Sameness defines the self through bodiliness, which
distinguishes it from any other substance but neglects its main quality, namely,
to be the source of meaning and acting. The problem is equally serious, how-
ever, if I describe the self as a pure ipse or subject, the unique and unshareable
center of consciousness. It allows no space for genuine otherness, beside that
 A New Sense of Selfhood 47

of its own bodiliness. Nor does such a disincarnated self-consciousness possess

a particular content to define its spiritual identity.
The problem of the self as subject and/or substance determined much of the
theoretical discussion of personhood during the Enlightenment. Rationalist
philosophers defined the self mainly as source of meaning, as Descartes had
done. But Descartes had described the person as consisting of two substances,
mind and body, and had thereby also occasioned a different, indeed an op-
posite trend. Materialists found in his philosophy some support for overcom-
ing the spiritual dualism inherent in his view of the person. Had he himself not
classified animal life as res extensa, that is, as part of a mechanistic universe?
Extending this view to all living beings, they converted the French philoso-
pher’s position into a materialist one, the one he had most strongly attempted
to avoid.
Kant brought this discussion to a head and resolved the ambiguity by distin-
guishing between the two aspects of the self: the transcendental subject or ego
that constitutes all objective knowledge and, on the other side, the self that is
aware of itself as an independent entity (a substance) but of which I have no
objective knowledge. ‘‘I do not know myself through being conscious of my-
self as thinking.’’ The I is not an object of thought, but a function of thinking.
‘‘In all our thought the I is the subject, in which thoughts inhere only as
determinations; and this I cannot be employed as the determination of another
thing. Everyone must, therefore, necessarily regard himself as substance, and
thought as [consisting] only [in] accidents of his being, determinations of his
state. But what use am I to make of this concept of a substance?’’∫ Even
introspection does not attain the core of selfhood. Our view of ourselves as
well as the words in which we express it depend on cultural presuppositions
transmitted through language. The child assumes this tradition when it learns
how to speak, before even knowing the meaning of the words. To Kant, the
issue was of crucial moral significance. As free beings humans are accountable
for their actions. Yet as parts of an objective system they are subject to deter-
minations over which they have no control (KRV, 448–49; B 476–77). How
can the self be free in such a system?
In my opinion, Leibniz came closest to resolving the dilemma of the self as
subject and the self as substance, though he did not directly discuss the issue.
For him, there were neither pure subjects nor pure substances. Each substan-
tial entity is a center of power that consists of a cluster of simple units (mo-
nads) acting together under the direction of one leading monad. In the case of
the human self, the soul fulfills this leading function. The subordinate monads
of the body stand in a subservient but not entirely passive position to the soul’s
48 A New Sense of Selfhood

active power. Without body, the mind would not be able to function; without
mind, the body would remain a random coalition of unorganized units. The
cooperation of mind and body, then, required a different causal relation than
that of the efficient causality that science had come to accept and which had
resulted in either dualism (as it did in Descartes) or in materialism (as in
d’Holbach). For Leibniz, their relation is determined by an inner teleology
whereby the mind functions as the body’s final cause. Mind and body operate
in unison as a single center of power. Leibniz accepts Spinoza’s principle that
‘‘the essence of the soul is to represent bodies,’’ but he adds that the soul is
more than the idea of the body. The body changes; the soul functions as the
active principle, the entelechy, that determines the body’s changes without
changing itself.
In British philosophy the search for a coherent theory of selfhood took a
very different form. Rather than speculating about what the self was in itself,
empiricist thinkers analyzed how and what it experiences. They shied away
from metaphysical concepts and instead attempted to describe, as accurately
as possible, the total array of experience, passions and emotions as well as
understanding. John Locke began by bracketing the question of the substan-
tial self (referring to it as a je ne sais quoi principle of unity), and David Hume
ended up denying its existence as an independent ‘‘thinking thing’’ distinct
from its thought content. In Hume’s words: ‘‘The mind is a kind of theatre
where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass,
glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There
is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different.’’Ω In addi-
tion, empiricist philosophers did not restrict introspection to a reflection on
the process of thinking, as rationalists had mainly done. With equal interest
they observed those emotional and sentimental states in which consciousness
appears to coincide with itself rather than being outwardly directed as in
intentional knowledge. I am what I feel myself to be.
Locke seldom ventured beyond the purely cognitive experience. His Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, as the title indicates, professes to be no
more than an inquiry concerning the modes of knowledge. But a full descrip-
tion of the ways of knowing ought to include all functions of consciousness.
The Essay is in this regard rather disappointing. Locke disposes of the passions
in one short chapter (Essay, II, 20). What prevented him from fully exploring
the perspectives he had opened was, in the first place, his narrow conception of
self-knowledge. If knowledge is a matter of sensation and reflection, the mind
is left little creative originality. Leslie Stephen’s unfriendly and ultimately un-
fair assessment of Locke’s work contains some truth in its final clause: ‘‘Locke
was a thoroughly modest, prosaic, tentative, and sometimes clumsy writer,
 A New Sense of Selfhood 49

who raises great questions without solving them or fully seeing the conse-
quences of his own position’’ (my emphasis).∞≠ In this case, he failed to grasp
the great possibilities his own method had released.
Because of the absence of any ontology of the mind, Locke’s theory of
experience proved acceptable to idealists like Berkeley as well as to French
materialists. Berkeley, faithful to the empirical method, equated mind with the
act of thinking. ‘‘Whoever shall go about to divide in his thought or abstract
the existence of a spirit from its cogitation will, I believe, find it no easy
task.’’∞∞ Yet in order to preserve the continuity of the self, the restriction of
selfhood to conscious experiences forced him to the paradoxical conclusion
that thinking is never interrupted: ‘‘The soul always thinks.’’∞≤ If reality con-
sists of a succession of experiences, however, why should we assume those
experiences to be linked by a permanent subject? In the end Berkeley’s theol-
ogy of the soul interfered with the empiricist principle he had adopted.∞≥
No such religious restraints obstructed Hume in carrying the empiricist
program to its ultimate conclusions. He most consistently applied the empiri-
cal method to the entire field of experience and thereby opened the road to
introspective psychology. In his Treatise of Human Nature he grants almost as
much space to a discussion of the passions (which, for him, include feelings as
well as emotions) as to that of the understanding. Gifted with a rich imagina-
tion and a refined perceptiveness, he described emotions, feelings, and pas-
sions with accomplished literary skill. Hume wrote marvelous essays on the
psychology of feelings and emotions, on aesthetics, and on the secret drives of
human conduct. In his History of England he put his understanding of the
‘‘passions’’ to the test in scrutinizing the hidden motives and irrational be-
havior of political figures.
Yet while thus opening untapped sources of experience, Hume’s radical
empiricism led him to deconstruct not only the substantiality but even the
identity of the self. He reduces the reality of the self to its various functions and
dismisses any idea of substance, subject, or any other ontological principle.
The fact that impressions follow a coherent order need not imply that they are
supported by a single sustaining subject. ‘‘The true idea of the human mind is
to consider it as a system of different perceptions of different existences which
are linked together by a relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce,
destroy, influence, and modify each other.’’∞∂ Yet Hume fails to account for the
continuity among these impressions. The continuous transition from one to
another presupposes a retention that enables one impression to endure while
the next is already occurring, as well as a memory capable of recalling past
impressions after a prolonged intermission of time. These are hard to conceive
independently of a permanent subject. Hume admits that the awareness of a
50 A New Sense of Selfhood

single continuous existence accompanies our perceptions, but he considers

that no sufficient reason for implying the actual existence of a substantial self,
of which we possess no separate impression (Treatise, I, 2, 6; also I, 4, 5).
Imperceptibly, Hume’s theory of knowledge has turned into a theory of
reality, a crypto-metaphysics. As one commentator observed: ‘‘The Treatise
can no longer be considered an epistemological work, but must be regarded as
a statement of ontology.’’∞∑ It is indeed ontological insofar as it deals with the
being of appearances, but burdened as it is with the problems of modern
epistemology, that being itself turns out to be no more than a mere phenome-
non. In one sense, Hume’s theory appears to mark the complete victory of the
self as subject over the self as substance, with which it had still entertained an
uneasy alliance in Descartes and even in Locke. Hume’s consistent phenome-
nalism deprives personhood of substantial consistency. Selfhood is no more
than an epiphenomenon of experience. Yet Hume was forced to continue
using the very terminology of the philosophy he was destroying. No other
language was available but the substantial one that he himself had under-
mined. Thus, he still spoke of ‘‘perceptions’’ even though there was no percip-
ient left. It has been said rightly that his rejection of the self amounts to ‘‘the
rejection of solipism through solipism.’’∞∏
Few accepted Hume’s position. Morality required someone who could be
held accountable, and Hume himself soon became aware that his solution left
no place for a responsible self. In an appendix to the separately published third
part of the Treatise on Human Nature he admitted that the description of a self
that is neither substantial nor necessarily continuous did not satisfy him. In-
deed, he declared himself incapable of explaining the inner sense of unity that
accompanies our perceptions except by reintroducing the very kind of sub-
stantial selfhood that his theory had concluded to be unprovable. Avoiding
Cartesian dualism between body and mind, Hume, with most other empiri-
cists, derived all ideas directly or indirectly from sensation as the single root of
experience. In fact, his theory severed the self as moral agent from the self as
epiphenomenon of experience. Not before the nineteenth century, and then
only in rare instances, did thinkers question the need for a substantial agent
responsible for his deeds.∞π Some postmodern writers who refer to the ‘‘per-
son’’ as a fiction of recent origin, in their own way confirm the loss of the self
implicit in Hume’s theory.
French materialists took the opposite position: they asserted the substan-
tiality of the self and reduced the self as subject to it. On the basis of Con-
dillac’s Traité des sensations (1754), they concluded that neither a subject nor
an immaterial substance was needed to explain all aspects of mental life. In his
book the French abbé had argued that sensation, from which all ideas were
 A New Sense of Selfhood 51

derived, was a purely physiological process. Dispensing with the qualifying

paraphrases of his predecessors, Baron d’Holbach bluntly declared: ‘‘Man is a
being purely physical. His visible actions as well as the invisible motion inte-
riorly excited by his will or his thoughts, are equally the natural effects, the
necessary consequences, of his peculiar mechanism, and the impulse he re-
ceives from those beings by whom he is surrounded.’’∞∫
The writers of the Encyclopédie, like Hume, intended to construe a science
of man. Yet the existing sciences were all of physical substances. Condillac’s
sensationalist epistemology enabled them to include the realm of conscious-
ness within the physical sciences and thereby to overcome the disturbing gap
between mind and matter. Humans are subject to the same laws as other
animals and, indeed, as the entire physical universe. Descartes himself had
described animals as part of the res extensa, the world of physical mechanism.
When the physiologist Robert Whytt in 1751 showed that movement in ani-
mals and humans could be generated by stimulating the spinal cord, many
materialists considered one of the final objections against the homogeneity of
the organic and the psychic removed.∞Ω All materialists recognized that me-
chanical laws assumed a more complex form in beings who consciously re-
acted to motion, but for most of them, the greater complexity did not basically
change the pattern of motion. Does not the mechanical system of a clock
produce intelligible results by motion alone, La Mettrie wondered. ‘‘The soul
is but a principle of motion or a material and sensible part of the brain which
may be regarded as the mainspring of the entire machine having a visible
influence on all its parts.’’≤≠
Diderot, though he himself had once compared the person to une horloge
ambulante (a walking clockwork), considered the sensationalist theory insuffi-
cient for explaining the birth of consciousness. Condillac had assumed that
memory was the essential link between sensations and consciousness. But how
did memory itself emerge from sensations? What causes them to be retained
after they have ceased to be actually present? Attempting to answer the ques-
tion on physiological grounds, Diderot, rather gratuitously, claimed that the
organs of perception continue to ‘‘vibrate’’ long after the stimulus has desisted.
They retain a past sensation while a new one is already entering the nervous
system. Even as the vibration of one string of a musical instrument makes all
others vibrate, the memory of an impression summons up a second, those two
a third, those three together a fourth, and so on.≤∞ The real question, however,
how the mind ‘‘stores’’ these impressions, remains unanswered. Diderot re-
mained faithful to the materialist creed. The laws that determine the physical
universe also govern the self. Passions may give us the impression that we
act autonomously when we are in fact motivated by them. The feeling of
52 A New Sense of Selfhood

self-determination rests on an illusion. There are no holes in the web of physi-

cal determinism. Desire of pleasure and aversion of pain unfailingly carry out
the dictates of the biological instinct for survival. In his Généalogie des pas-
sions Helvetius added to this instinct a drive for power: each living being
desires not only to be, but to be powerful and thereby to enhance its chances
for survival.
French materialists attempted to overcome Cartesian dualism by reducing
mind to the bodily substance. Others followed the opposite road. The French
zoologist Buffon held that the human body, contrived to serve as the mind’s
instrument, substantially differs from animal bodiliness. A famous description
in his Histoire Naturelle presents human anatomy as reflecting a higher, non-
material principle. ‘‘He stands erect, his attitude exudes command; his head
lifted up to heaven presents an august face imprinted with the mark of his
dignity; the soul’s image appears in his physiognomy; the excellence of his
nature penetrates his material organs and animates his traits with a divine fire;
his majestic posture, his firm and daring gait announce his nobility and rank;
the earth he only touches by his most remote extremities; he only views her
from afar seemingly holding her in low esteem; his arms are not given him as
pillars of support for the mass of his body.’’≤≤ Still, in that same work Buffon
describes animal bodies as purely mechanical, as Descartes thought them to
be. His theory overcomes materialist reductionism, but not Cartesian dualism.
That dualism excluded any possibility of human evolution from a lower
species. Buffon was familiar with a number of phenomena by which later
writers were to support the transformation of species. He acknowledged a
continuous ascending order among the animal species. But to him, the gap
between these species and human nature appeared so deep as to render a leap
from one to the other utterly impossible. ‘‘If the person belonged to the animal
order, there would in nature exist a number of beings less perfect than humans
yet more perfect than animals through which one would gradually, by almost
imperceptible shifts, descend from man to ape. But they do not exist. We pass
abruptly from the thinking being to the material one, from intellectual power
to mechanical force, from order and design to blind motion, from reflection to
appetite.’’ Buffon does not even see an analogy between animal and human
species. Humans are simply not in the same class as animals. He continues to
view the animals, which he so knowledgeably describes, as Descartes had seen
them—as automata.
In his later work Buffon yielded somewhat to the pressure of progress in the
zoological science to which he himself had much contributed. He ended up
admitting the existence of sensitivity, memory, and even dreams in animals. But
the line that divides them from humans remains as rigidly drawn as before.
 A New Sense of Selfhood 53

Herder, who started the hierarchy from animal to human from below rather
than from above (as Buffon had done), defended a teleological move toward
humanity. The ascending order of animals gradually prepared a finely tuned in-
strument for exercising mental functions. Yet neither Herder nor Leibniz, who
had formulated the principle of continuity, were ready to embrace any form of
biological evolution. Kant, in his review of books one to five of Herder’s Ideas
for a Philosophy of History, severely criticized even the alleged analogy be-
tween the organic structures of animals and those of humans.
This investigation of the ambiguity concerning the self as subject and/or as
substance may seem a rather arcane philosophical problem, distant from com-
mon human concerns. Writers of memoirs and autobiographies, poets, and
novelists focused their attention on the immediate states of consciousness that
convey a different, more intimate awareness of selfhood. Nonetheless, on a
more fundamental level, we detect a common concern. Both philosophy and
literature display an awakened subjectivity. However different his moral out-
look, La Rochefoucauld in his Maxims insists as much on pure intentions as
Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason; Abbé Prévost’s novels of irresistible
passions find a justification in Hume’s treatment of the same subject; Shaftes-
bury’s discussion of feelings and intuitions echoes Pascal’s knowledge of the
heart. We now turn to those more immediate forms of self-awareness.

Passions, Feelings, and Emotions

We still to refer to the eighteenth century as the Age of Reason, yet a
comparison of its views on reason, passions, and feelings with those current
in the preceding century shows that the epithet more properly applies to
the earlier period. Despite the persistence and development of rationalist
trends, the Enlightenment could more accurately be described as an age of self-
consciousness. The loss of the person’s central position in the post-Galilean
universe initiated a reflective mood. Lost in a planet of one of the innumerable
solar systems, humans could no longer reasonably assume that the universe
existed for their benefit or that they constituted its ultimate raison d’être. This
insight released two seemingly opposite but actually concurring reactions. The
first one was pointedly expressed in Hume’s statement quoted at the beginning
of this chapter in which he urges his contemporaries, now that admirable
inroads have been made in the domain of the natural sciences, to focus on the
human source of this knowledge. However minute a place the person may
occupy in the general scheme of things, the human mind has nonetheless
brought the entire universe into scientific subjugation. Hence the self pre-
sented a new, even more important field for scientific conquests. The other
54 A New Sense of Selfhood

reaction consisted in a withdrawal from the natural world in order to reflect

on the interior life where all that really mattered to the person remained
greatly unexplored. This inward move was supported by the spiritual trends of
the time.
The interest in self-knowledge that suddenly increased during the late seven-
teenth century would be hard to imagine without the practice of daily self-
examination such as that recommended in Catholic spirituality (that of the
Jesuits as well as of the Jansenists). Pietists and Puritans also felt the need to
scrutinize their inner attitude and to search for signs of election. This uninter-
mittent self-reflection has left its mark on spiritual as well as profane literature
in Great Britain and, even more, in New England.≤≥ I shall analyze some of the
sources of spiritual life in the Enlightenment in the final chapter, but here I
must at least mention such remarkable works of introspective piety as Féné-
lon’s letters of spiritual guidance, Jonathan Edwards’s treatise on Religious
Affections, and William Law’s The Spirit of Love. As a French historian of
ideas aptly put it: ‘‘Pietism is an intermediate phase in the process of a human
consciousness on its way toward emancipation. The God of Pietism is the God
who hides in the secret of the hearts.’’≤∂
Among the secular sources of the trend toward introspection, Shaftesbury
may well be the first name to mention. Convinced that there is more to self-
hood than Descartes’s and Locke’s ‘‘punctual’’ self-consciousness, he dis-
missed the central cogito ergo sum as being no more than an analytic state-
ment (there is thinking) that provides no information about the content of the
self whose existence it asserts. He anticipated Hume’s suspicion that one can-
not even derive the existence of a single thinking substance from the cogito.
Descartes’s substantial identity is no more than an unproven supposition.
Memory was supposed to link my experience of myself in the past to my
present self-consciousness. But Descartes himself had admitted that memory
may be deceptive. Indeed, Shaftesbury observed, the self I remember never
coincides with the self I really was and even less with the self I am now.
‘‘Consciousness may as well be false as real in respect to what is past.’’≤∑
Shaftesbury himself never explains what he considers to be the content of the
mind, but he emphatically denies that it consists in the capacity to generate
clear and distinct ideas. Instead he seeks that content at the deeper, more
obscure level of consciousness to which we refer as feeling. Self-knowledge,
for Shaftesbury, consists first and foremost in an awareness of one’s feelings.
Others followed him in this direction. Rousseau argued that not reason, but
the deeper, more diffuse self-awareness attained in feeling forms the core of
mind. At the beginning of the Confessions he raises the question, ‘‘Qui suis-
je?’’ and answers, ‘‘Je sens mon coeur.’’ A far cry from Cogito ergo sum! The
 A New Sense of Selfhood 55

popular playwright Nivelle de la Chaussée made the difference explicit in one

of his dramas: ‘‘Plus je sens vivement, plus je sens que je suis.’’ (The more
acutely I feel, the more I feel that I am.)≤∏
A third factor that affected the emotional climate of the eighteenth century
was the nature and sudden success of the novel. It began in France. Originally
a tale of adventure—either heroic or picaresque—the novel had in the seven-
teenth century taken an introspective turn. It became a reflection on the com-
plex interaction of feelings, passions, and emotions in love. Mme. de La Fay-
ette’s La princesse de Clèves (published in 1678) set the tone for much of the
subsequent narrative literature, not only in France but also in England. In this
psychological novel few events occur. The story follows its course from private
feeling to emotional struggle and moral victory. Having fallen in love with a
man who loves her, the princess remains faithful to her husband, even after his
death. Richardson’s novels Pamela and Clarissa were soon to refine, if not to
surpass, La Fayette’s exquisite analysis of feelings. Those romances explored a
more intimate layer of consciousness. Characteristic of the shifting interest
was a change in the meaning of such terms as sensibilité and sensibility. Orig-
inally sensible, in French as well as in English, had referred to intellectual
perceptiveness: the ability to sense or to reflect. By the eighteenth century it
had become a substantive and acquired a strongly emotional connotation. It
then came to mean, as the Oxford Dictionary explains, a power or faculty of
feeling and, more specifically, a capacity for refined emotions, as Jane Austen’s
distinction between sense and sensibility shows. Such terms as ‘‘sensitive’’ and
‘‘thoughtful’’ likewise broadened their original, purely cognitive meaning.≤π
Philosophy had paid little attention to the emotional side of the self. Of
course, Descartes’s Treatise on the Passions of the Soul (1649) as well as
Spinoza’s quite different treatment of the same subject had appeared in the
seventeenth century. But passions are not feelings. Moreover, with regard to
the passions a change in attitude was taking place at the end of the century.
Descartes had still unhesitatingly declared that no soul, however weak, is
incapable of gaining total control over its passions.≤∫ Such had essentially been
the Stoic position. Passions, though necessary, are to be subdued by reason.
Descartes had somewhat qualified the negative Stoic judgment. In his theory
passions fulfill a vital function; they assist the will in executing what reason
commands. Still, passions originate in the body and disturb mental life until
reason gains full control over them.≤Ω Spinoza also considered passions indis-
pensable, but they need to be converted into active powers.≥≠
Corneille’s dramas reflect both these positive and negative traits. In the
Examen that prefaces Le Cid Corneille writes: ‘‘The high virtue in a nature
sensitive to these passions, which she subjugates without weakening them,
56 A New Sense of Selfhood

and to which she leaves their full force in order to triumph over them even
more gloriously, has something more touching, more noble, and more attrac-
tive than the mediocre goodness, capable of weakness, indeed of crime, to
which our Ancients were constrained to limit even the most perfect character
of those kings and princes whom they made their heroes.’’≥∞ Passions, then,
were at once a challenge to moral excellence and a means to attain it. So
philosophers gradually started abandoning the negative, Stoic assessment of
the passions that had dominated ethical theories since the Renaissance. Typi-
cal for the changing attitude was the title of the first chapter of Jean-François
Senault’s treatise on the use of passions, Apologie pour les passions contre les
Stoiques (1672). Without passion humans possess no strong motive for acting:
some jolt of emotion needs to shake their indolence.
Few questioned that life had to be lived in accordance with reason, but the
assumption that this meant a life free of passion and emotion ceased to be part
of that rule. Emblematic for the new mentality was Addison’s play Cato
(1713), which, unlike Seneca’s stern tragedy, presents the Roman hero as torn
between feelings for his family and his patriotic duty.≥≤ Samuel Johnson (in
Rasselas, chap. 18) and Henry Fielding (in Joseph Andrews) criticized Stoic
indifference as unnatural and even perverse in the face of human suffering. In
his portrait of the man of virtue, ironically entitled ‘‘The Stoic,’’ David Hume
has scant praise for the ancient ideal that lacks ‘‘the charm of the social affec-
tions.’’ In fact Hume’s Stoic, who combines ‘‘the softest benevolence with the
most undaunted resolution,’’ stands closer to the early romantic sensitivity
than to ancient apatheia.≥≥
Gradually passions came to be regarded as the stronger and often the only
impulse to action. No one understood the independent and sometimes irresist-
ible power of passions better than the French novelist who went under the
name Abbé Prévost, one among several English and French writers whom
Shaftesbury directly or (as in this case) indirectly inspired. In his best-known
story, Manon Lescaut, he describes how a young man’s irrational passion for a
faithless woman drives him to his doom. Prévost passes no moral judgment on
his conduct. He simply presents emotions as more powerful drives of human
behavior than rational judgment or moral precept. The turbulences of emo-
tional life show how the self, far from being the serene kingdom of reason or
the undisturbed center of Stoic equanimity, is a snake pit of uncontrollable
passions jostling for supremacy. Still, despite their often disastrous effects,
Prévost has no doubt that emotions constitute the richness of inner life. ‘‘Most
people are aware only of the five or six passions within which their lives are
spent and to which all their affections are reduced. Take away love and hatred,
pleasure and pain, hope and fear, and nothing remains. But persons of noble
 A New Sense of Selfhood 57

character may be moved in a thousand different ways.’’≥∂ Nor were men and
women of the time bashful in expressing their emotions. In Mémoires et avan-
tures d’un homme de qualité, a multivolume roman fleuve, Prévost’s hero
exclaims: ‘‘If tears and sighs cannot carry the name of pleasures, it is neverthe-
less true that they contain an infinite sweetness for a mortally afflicted person.
All the moments I gave to my grief were so dear to me that, in order to prolong
them, I hardly took any sleep.’’≥∑ In fact, it took far less than ‘‘mortal afflic-
tion’’ to make the hero shed sweet tears. In the ‘‘age of reason,’’ weeping
belonged to the bon ton, for men as much as for women. Even hard-headed
cynics like Voltaire cried at the slightest occasion; no less than his notoriously
tearsome opponent, Rousseau, who proudly confesses: ‘‘Peu d’hommes ont
autant gémi que moi, peu ont autant versé de pleurs dans leur vie.’’≥∏
Herbert Richardson, Prévost’s model, discovered that no literary form was
more appropriate for the unrestrained expression and analysis of feelings and
emotions than the letter. The epistolary form of his novels allowed his effusive
heroines to express the whole gamut of feelings—love, aversion, ambiva-
lence—as they attempt to sort out their emotional confusion. Richardson
knew how to extend the chain of reflection indefinitely. Beside gushing their
own feelings out to parents and friends, Pamela and Clarissa report stories and
opinions imparted to them concerning the feelings of thrice removed acquain-
tances. These reports in turn invite searches for hidden intentions, new expec-
tations, and so on. Each event prismatically breaks open into a fan of feelings
and emotions. In fact, events merely provide occasions for feelings. Although
the young women (and perhaps their author as well) remain blissfully ignorant
of the measure to which their most private feelings reflect the moral and social
codes and prejudices of their time, the letters nevertheless remain marvelous
exercises in introspection. For Richardson, truth lies within ourselves, in our
feelings and emotions.
Yet such romantic explorations of the emotional content of selfhood, how-
ever favorably contrasting with the sterility of the rationalist analyses, suffer
from a poverty of their own. They detach feelings and emotions from the
complexity of the psychic life, secluding them within a separate ‘‘sphere’’ that
lacks structure and unity. The sentimental self is no more than a succession of
floating moods, barely united by loose associations. In the end the preroman-
tic novel of the eighteenth century may reveal less about the nature of person-
hood than such sturdier predecessors as Don Quixote and Gargantua. Where
the main content of consciousness consists of feelings, actions that give direc-
tion to life lose their supremacy.
Less self-conscious but often more revealing was the real correspondence
among members of the upper classes in France during the late seventeenth
58 A New Sense of Selfhood

century. Madame de Sévigné raised this naive form of introspection to classic

elegance in the almost daily warm and witty letters she exchanged with her
daughter. In gossipy, occasionally catty, yet always fascinating reflections on
the events around the Sun King’s Court, the marquise discloses as much about
her own feelings as about the objects of her ironical observation. Her elegantly
phrased sentences move with the flow of private thoughts, emotions, and
feelings rather than following the lines of logic and consistency. Other letter
writers reveal an unexpected side of themselves. Voltaire, the confident author
of sarcastic epigrams, cold dramas, and critical barbs against all people other
than himself, exhibits a quite different persona in his letters. In some of them,
we encounter a witty, warm-blooded yet vulnerable man, devoted to his Jesuit
masters, loving of his friends, and fearful of his enemies (especially Rousseau).
One may wonder, however, whether such epistolary self-disclosure may not be
an easy means to hide or idealize one’s true feelings. The suspicion is par-
ticularly strong in such a Protean figure as Voltaire. Dr. Johnson suspected that
the personal tone of the letter as well as the writer’s relation to his correspon-
dent may tempt the writer to express rarely felt affections as if they were
habitual ones. ‘‘There is indeed no transaction which offers stronger tempta-
tions to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse. In the eagerness
of conversation the first emotions of the mind often burst out before they are
considered; in the tumult of business interest and passion have their genuine
effect; but a friendly letter is a calm and deliberate performance in the cool of
leisure, in its stillness of solitude, and surely no man sits down to depreciate by
design his own character.’’≥π
The knowledge of human nature was pursued on the generic no less than on
the personal level. In France, a new literary genre of aphoristic observations on
the mostly negative, common traits of human nature gained instant popu-
larity. Among the numerous moralistes, as its authors were called, we remem-
ber mainly La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, and Vauvenargues. In his Max-
imes, the acidic Duke François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–80) dispenses
searing observations on human vice and virtue, love and hatred, glory and
envy, but even more on the petty motives that mostly inspire one as well as the
other. Not a word about himself, his contemporaries, or the social conditions
of his time. From the perspective of this seventeenth-century aristocrat’s ea-
gle’s eye, ‘‘humanity’’ appears to consist of exchangeable persons, timeless
types.
As the old nobility was slowly yielding its rule to the noblesse de robe,
reflections became more personal. In his Caractères (1645–96), La Bruyère
revived the psychological typology that Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor,
had written to complement his moral theory. But the French moraliste turned
 A New Sense of Selfhood 59

the Greek philosopher’s gallery of ethical ‘‘types’’ into a series of portraits. His
universal ‘‘characters’’ display individual features. They bear no names, but
behind the sharply drawn models one senses the presence of contemporary
faces. ‘‘The whole supremacy of La Bruyère’s art, Lytton Strachey writes,
consists in that absolute precision, that complete finish, that perfect propor-
tion, which gives his Characters the quality of a De Hoogh, and his aphorisms
the brilliant hardness of a Greek gem.’’≥∫ Indirectly, La Bruyère criticized the
social and political environment of his models. He foresaw the collapse of a
society in which peasants were living on ‘‘black bread, water, and roots.’’
‘‘Once the people start moving, one no longer knows how peace can return.’’
With the Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–47) the tone becomes moralistic,
occasionally sentimental, the language larded with such programmatic terms
as raison, liberté, nature. The young Vauvenargues, an unusually generous
person himself, introduced a note of suspicion that was to sound ever more
loudly in the later period of the Enlightenment. Whereas La Rochefoucauld
had explored the universal qualities (especially the bad ones) of human nature,
and La Bruyère its social conditionedness, Vauvenargues preromantically
focused on the disproportion between human aspirations and their chances of
being fulfilled. The moraliste reflections, though derived from introspection as
much as from observation, lacked the personal touch of memoirs and auto-
biographies. The quintessential portraitist of character was the duc de Saint-
Simon (1675–1755).
Opinionated in the extreme, incapable of doubting his own prejudices, fero-
cious in his hostility, and always on the barricades, he succeeded, despite his
vices, or possibly because of them, in capturing the irreducible singularity of
his subjects. For the jaundiced duke, no types exist, only individuals. In his
mind, he alone possesses the insight to perceive the hidden motives behind
people’s actions and the courage to confront them with his superior knowl-
edge. The expression, ‘‘I looked him straight in the eyes’’ constantly returns in
his Memoirs. He regards himself as the absolute witness, to whom nothing
escapes and who is endowed with an infallible judgment. Though himself
uninterruptedly implicated in intrigues, he reserves his sharpest barbs for
other intriguants. Watchdog of the old aristocratic order, he is merciless for
those who ascend the social ladder without having ancient ‘‘blood.’’ His re-
sentment goes in the first place to Madame de Maintenon, the king’s morgana-
tic wife, who, like an evil stepmother, has wormed herself into an undeserved
proximity to the king. Saint-Simon’s attitude to Louis XIV reflects the kind of
ambiguity a son feels for a father: he hates his autocratic authority, yet he feels
filial devotion and, above all, a protective hatred for all intruders into his
privileged intimacy. His portrait of Madame de Maintenon, as well as those
60 A New Sense of Selfhood

of General Vendōme, of finance minister Pontchartrain, and of the duc de

Noailles, are classics of vituperative literature. Yet he was hardly less severe for
other aristocrats whom he considered degenerate members of his own class. In
the first place, Monsieur, the king’s lascivious brother, and even more Mon-
sieur’s granddaughter, whose marriage the duke himself had helped to arrange
and who turned out to be ‘‘a fat, nasty, self-indulgent drunk.’’ His white-hot,
unmitigated hatred for those traitors of their class knows no limit. Some have
interpreted the scarcity of his loves and the multitude of the hatreds as project-
ing the ambivalence that marked the early relation with his parents.≥Ω
His rare admirations remain rarely unmixed. While praising his gentle father
figure, the duc de Beauvilliers, and his friend, the equally high-minded duc de
Chevreuse, both of whom Saint-Simon genuinely loved, he refers to the latter
as a naive optimist, more given to talk than action, and to the pious Beauvilliers
as being ‘‘narrow’’ in his principles. Nor does the spiteful duke relent after the
death of his victims. His necrology of one Madame d’Hendicourt begins with
the words: ‘‘The court was delivered from a familiar [i.e., an informer] by the
death of Mme. d’Hendicourt. . . . She had grown old and hideously ugly, but in
her time no one was more agreeable or better informed, more cheerful, witty,
and unaffectedly diverting. On the other hand, there was no one more gra-
tuitously, continually and intentionally malicious, and therefore more dan-
gerous, on account of her familiarity with the king and Mme. de Maintenon.
Thus everyone, favorites, nobles, officers of State, ministers, members of the
royal family, even the bastards, bent the knee to that old bitch, who enjoyed
doing harm and never had the faintest wish to oblige. With her passing [Mme.
de Maintenon] and the king lost a great source of amusement, but society at
whose expense this was provided was immensely relieved, for she was a heart-
less creature.’’∂≠
British character portraits (except for an occasional distychon by Pope)
rarely approach the vitriolic acidity of Saint-Simon’s portrayals. Addison’s
‘‘Observations’’ in The Spectator and Samuel Johnson’s sketches in The Ram-
bler and The Adventurer were kinder but less probing. Yet they resembled the
duke’s characters at least in the respect that they depicted concrete individuals,
not universal types, and also, particularly in Johnson’s case, that they resisted
any kind of social change. Carlyle has, not unfairly, called him the last English-
man who, with strong voice and wholly believing heart, preached the virtue of
standing still, tenaciously clinging to ‘‘decaying materials for want of anything
better.’’∂∞ Regarding human nature as unchanged and unchangeable, Johnson
attributed the problems of his time to a tampering with the eternal social and
religious foundations of human nature. His melancholy disposition gave the
doctor a keen eye for other people’s foibles. His sketches, intended as universal
 A New Sense of Selfhood 61

moral lessons, bear the signs of personal spleen and mostly lack psychological
depth. Only in his biographical explorations in the Lives of the Poets does he,
with one stroke, attain unscaled critical and psychological heights.
Biographies have been written since Greek antiquity. But over the centuries
their purposes have changed. Ancient ones, such as Plutarch’s Vitae or Taci-
tus’s Life of Germanicus, mostly pictured their subjects as models to imitate or
to avoid. Medieval hagiographies served an additional purpose, for next to
being exempla, they responded to the believers’ need for the mediation of
saints no less than to their obligation to imitate them. Even the best, such as
Gregory’s Life of Saint Benedict, follow universal models of heroic virtue.
Except for the ‘‘miracles,’’ they reveal so few personal traits as to be inter-
changeable. This pattern prevailed in the early modern lives of political he-
roes. Eighteenth-century biographers, however, by and large abandoned the
ideal of a model for imitation. Instead, they showed the historical or cultural
significance of their subject—good or bad. Such was certainly Samuel John-
son’s primary motive for writing his Lives of the Poets. His essays penetrat-
ingly explore the psychic makeup of his subjects in order to discover the
deeper meaning behind the poems, the hidden drives that attracted the author
to one topic rather than another as well as to a particular way of treating it.
Johnson introduced what later became a substantial part of literary criticism.
His Life of Pope ranks in this respect as a masterpiece. While admiring Pope’s
genius with words, he mercilessly exposes the deviousness, vanity, and morbid
sensitivity of his character, as well as the complexity of his relation with
others. ‘‘He [Pope] frequently professes contempt of the world. . . . These were
dispositions apparently counterfeited. How could he despise those whom he
lived by pleasing and on whose approbation his esteem of himself was super-
structured?—His scorn of Great is repeated too often to be real: no man
thinks much of that which he despises.—In the Letters both of Swift and Pope
there appears such narrowness of mind as makes them insensible of any excel-
lence that has not some affinity with their own.’’∂≤
Johnson’s own hagiographic biographer was right: the man possessed a
peculiar art of drawing characters ‘‘as rare as good portrait painting.’’∂≥ But
Boswell himself surpassed his model in scrutinizing its own particularities. The
slavish disciple obsessively wrote down every word, every deed, whether sig-
nificant or trivial. Then he worshipfully arranged his master’s logia in a loosely
chronological order, faithfully reporting the sparkles of Johnson’s vigorous
mind as well as his equally vigorous prejudices, all in the same respectful
monotone. In this relentless pursuit of a total portrait of an individual with
all his quirks and mannerisms lies, in spite of its author’s common intellect,
the lasting fascination of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. It soon surpassed the
62 A New Sense of Selfhood

popularity of its subject’s own writings. Carlyle was enthralled by it. ‘‘In worth
as a book we have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth century:
all J’s own writings, laborious and in their kind genuine above most, stand on a
quite inferior level to it; already, indeed, they are becoming obsolete for this
generation; and for some future generation may be valuable chiefly as pro-
legomena and expository scholia to this Johnsoniad of Boswell.’’∂∂ Macaulay,
another countryman of Boswell, writing forty years after the appearance of his
famous work when Romanticism had fully conquered the minds for the pri-
macy of the individual, attributed the quality of the Life to the average mind of
a biographer who, not knowing the difference between the significant and the
insignificant, left us a ‘‘complete’’ picture of its subject. ‘‘Many of the greatest
men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest
men that ever lived; and he has beaten them all. Others attained literary emi-
nence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weak-
ness. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer.’’∂∑
Boswell’s devotion to his subject did not produce a hagiography. Repeatedly
we hear him chiding his hero for not abiding by his own moral principles.
Boswell’s Johnson is not a universal model but a unique individual: a man of
slovenly appearance with a rolling gait, extremely industrious yet at times
immovably sluggish, a methodical scholar yet uncommonly irregular in his
habits, benevolent and generous yet a harsh critic of others—an irreducible
original. Boswell’s biography of the man who so solidly belongs to the Enlight-
enment announces the quest of the individual so single-mindedly pursued by
Rousseau and the Romantics. The eighteenth-century biographical portrait,
even when totally particular and no model of perfection, still invites the reader
to compare the subject with him or herself. Though the person whose story is
told may surpass the reader in some respects, he or she appears quite ordinary
in other respects. The relation between the self and the other has changed in
modern biography. One might say that the subject is there not to be admired
but to justify the reader’s own existence.
We notice an analogous but even more pronounced egocentric trend in the
autobiography. Earlier autobiographies had described the self in its relation to
others. Augustine’s had entirely consisted of a dialogue with God and Teresa
of Avila’s Life of her relations with superiors and fellow sisters. Yet during the
Enlightenment the relation with others ceased to be a dialogue and instead
displayed the controlling presence of the author. Modern autobiographies
became increasingly self-centered and self-conscious. The certainty of self-
consciousness that since Descartes had become the foundation of truth here
becomes the ground of the indubitable truth about oneself. As each person
possesses a strictly private, incommunicable awareness of him or herself, so
 A New Sense of Selfhood 63

each must find his or her own way to truth. Descartes had stressed the auto-
biographical nature of his search, describing it in the Discourse on Method as
‘‘a fable in which amongst certain things which may be imitated, there are
possibly others also which it would not be right to follow.’’ The truth based on
self-consciousness is universal, yet the road to it, the methodos, differs from
one person to another. Hence the personal, almost chatty tone of his story:
‘‘From my childhood I lived in a world of books. I had been in one of the most
celebrated schools in Europe. . . . I was in Germany, where I had gone because
of the wars which are still not ended. . . . I remained all day alone in a warm
room.’’∂∏
Most revealing of the link between personal and universal truth is The Life
of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself (1730). For Vico, the universal is not
merely the outcome of an autobiographical process. It permeates that process
itself. He considered truth to be intrinsically historical and the story of the self
to form an integral segment of that universal history. Yet, his notion of univer-
sality was not an abstract idea, but a concrete universal that incorporated the
particularity of his life. Vico tells his story from that historical perspective. The
solemn tone of the first paragraph—‘‘G.V. was born in Naples in the year
1670 of upright parents who left a good name after them’’∂π —in which he
reports on the characters of his parents and on the events of his early youth,
leaves no doubt that he regarded himself as a link in the chain of history
moving toward a providential destiny. Each event of his life takes its place
within an ideal totality.∂∫
Vico, a teacher of rhetoric himself, may have been inspired by the panegyric
exercises of Petrarch, Cardano, and other humanists. Yet his work sprung pri-
marily from a philosophical ambition to show, on the small scale of his own
life, the universal significance of even the most contingent events. He regarded
history (including his own) as a theodicy that justified the ways of Providence
in guiding the entire human race toward its natural destiny. His autobiography
forms part of this sweeping motion of history. Vico’s Life complements The
New Science (La scienza nuova, 1744) insofar as universal history proceeds
through personal decisions toward self-chosen ends. Giuseppe Mazzotta is
right: ‘‘The New Science [of history] is the real subject matter of the text: it is
at the same time, a symbolic event which, in retrospect, gives coherence,
direction, and intelligibility to the apparent roundness of Vico’s intellectual
quest.’’∂Ω
Public figures often feel urged to write an autobiography in order to set the
record straight by describing how they reached the decisions of which out-
siders only know the results. For Vico, the public effects form part of a prede-
termined, providential plan, yet the individual’s decisions make the execution
64 A New Sense of Selfhood

of that plan possible. These decisions, though free, were influenced by circum-
stances over which the person exercised no control. As a child Vico fell from a
ladder and nearly died. This incident caused him to grow up, he claims, ‘‘with
a melancholy and irritable temperament such as belongs to men of ingenuity
and depth.’’∑≠ This particular disposition enabled him freely to take decisions
that were to move history toward the fulfillment of the providential plan.
By writing an autobiography a person of some repute attempts to fill the gap
between the intentions of his deeds, known only to himself, and their actual
effects known to others. The writer thereby hopes to overcome the discrep-
ancy discussed at the beginning of this chapter, between the self as subject and
the self as substance. Such an effort never fully succeeds. The reader will
continue to distinguish the author’s words from his unrevealed intentions. The
author himself experiences an inevitable discrepancy. Even Augustine men-
tions the difficulty. He considered self-knowledge in this life impossible: we are
incapable of gaining definitive insight into ourselves as long as we have to do
so within the distention of time. Rousseau attributed the main obstacle to
authentic self-description not to the limits of introspection, but to the insur-
mountable misunderstanding by others. For him, the crucial distinction is no
longer the one between private intentions and public actions, but between the
subject of both intentions and actions on one side and, on the other, the
objective, universal norms by which others judge one. He regarded a perfect
self-identity not only possible but in his Confessions actually realized.∑∞
By portraying himself as faithfully as possible, with his qualities as well as
his defects, Rousseau attempts (without much hope of ultimate success) to
render himself as transparent to others as he is to himself. He wants to be seen
as an individual, distinct from any other individual and not to be judged by
objective standards. ‘‘I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I will even
venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better but
at least I am different.’’∑≤ He recognizes no predecessors and, he claims, will
have no imitators. He neither justifies nor excuses his obsessions and manias,
his irresponsible attitude, and his objectionable conduct. His uniqueness dis-
penses him from the need to justify his actions. With disarming openness
(though not always with full objectivity) he discloses his embarrassing traits:
his sexual obsessiveness, his habit of giving his children up for adoption as
soon as they are born. Far from feeling humbled by this baring of his question-
able behavior, he appears to think that his sincerity renders him immune to
criticism and he criticizes those whom he suspects of being less candid.∑≥
Contrary to earlier autobiographies, the Confessions were not intended to
justify its author but to exhibit his uniqueness. Such at least was his stated
intention. But it did not stop him, especially in the second part, from settling
 A New Sense of Selfhood 65

accounts with his enemies—Voltaire, Diderot, Grimm, d’Holbach, Hume, all

of whom feared his searing attacks.
Despite his moral duplicity, Rousseau displays an unprecedented insight
and honesty in reporting the hidden, often unflattering complexity of his mo-
tives. The account he gives of the theft of a silver ribbon that he had committed
and of which he accused a young fellow servant may serve as an example. In
scrutinizing the motives for a deed he considered ‘‘affreux’’ even at the time he
committed it, he concludes: ‘‘Never was deliberate wickedness further from
my intention than at that cruel moment. When I accused that poor girl, it is
strange but true that my friendship for her was the cause’’ (Confessions, bk. II,
O.C., I, 86; Cohen, p. 88). Indeed, he suggests that he stole the ribbon in order
to give it to her as a present. When the theft was detected, however, he accused
her, the person closest to him. She was promptly dismissed. In his last work,
the Rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire, he returns to this shameful episode, the
guilt of which continued to haunt him all his life.
Obviously the center of selfhood has been replaced! Not Descartes’s sub-
stantial res cogitans nor Hume’s loosely coherent stream of perceptions are the
subject of the Confessions. Rousseau regards all that as still objective. He aims
at reaching the subjective core of feeling from which all specific acts of con-
sciousness, ideas, passions, and emotions, emerge. His description owes more
to the sentimental novels of his time than to philosophy. The first paragraphs
remind us of the initial sentence of Abbé Prévost’s Mémoires d’un homme de
qualité (1728–31): ‘‘This story will be read if anyone finds it worth reading. I
have written down my misfortunes only for my own satisfaction. I shall be
content if as the fruit of my work I draw some tranquillity during the moments
I shall spend writing it.’’ Novels starting with this kind of confessional ex-
ordium had become common. The hero, reminiscing upon the events of his
life, confesses his errors and weaknesses, ‘‘mes désordres et mes plus honteuses
faiblesses’’ as the love-struck hero of Manon Lescaut puts it.∑∂ Rousseau had
read Prévost as well as Richardson and a great many less illustrious writers of
romances. He converted his autobiography into a romance of feelings.
In the Confessions Rousseau remembers expressions, gestures, and words
too elusive to be fully captured at the moment of their appearance: the look of
a stranger, the fleeting change in a familiar face, the unexpected move. Rous-
seau himself draws attention to the ‘‘secondary,’’ reflective bent of his mind. ‘‘I
can only see in retrospect ( Je ne vois bien que ce que je me rappelle). It is only
in my memories that my mind can work. I have neither feeling nor understand-
ing for anything that is said or done or that happens before my eyes. . . . But
afterwards it all comes back to me, I remember the place and the time, the tone
of voice and look, the gesture and vibration; nothing escapes me’’ (bk. III,
66 A New Sense of Selfhood

O.C., I, 114–15; Cohen, p. 114). Only when interiorized in memory do past

experiences disclose their significance. He may have been mistaken in their
interpretation, he admits, or he may inaccurately have recalled them. What
counts for him are the feelings connected with the facts as he remembers them.
‘‘I have only one faithful guide on which I can count; the succession of feelings
which have marked the development of my being, and thereby recall the events
that have acted upon it as cause or effect. . . . I may omit or transpose facts, or
make mistakes in dates; but I cannot go wrong about what I have felt, or what
my feelings led me to do; and these are the chief subjects of my story.’’ (Con-
fessions, bk. VII, O.C., I, 278; Cohen, p. 262). Of course, one may be very
wrong about the feelings one remembers: they are often no more than the ones
present at the time of writing. In reflecting on past feelings one never merely
recalls them. A feeling remembered may over time have increased or decreased
in intensity, or even have changed its quality altogether. To remember one’s
feelings, then, is more than a reproductive act: it consists essentially in produc-
ing new feelings on the basis of old memories and thereby recreating the
past.∑∑
If feelings constitute the core of selfhood, as Rousseau thinks, the self never
is, but continuously becomes and redefines itself. In remembering past feel-
ings, however inaccurately, we link the past more solidly to the present than in
recalling emotionally indifferent past events. We know that memory may dis-
tort or fully contradict the facts. Yet we do not distrust our past feelings
because we experience them as an uninterrupted bond with our past. In feel-
ings, the self appears, so to speak, as extended in time. To remember them is to
link the time of their original experience to an indefinite future. Feelings re-
membered carry with them an unmistakable sense of self-recognition: I cannot
doubt that I am the same person I was when I felt that way. In a masterly way
Rousseau evokes this sense of self-identity through the recollection of past
feelings.
A perceptive and knowledgeable student of his work, the Swiss psychiatrist
Jean Starobinski has shown how Rousseau’s autobiographical writing was
born out of a desire to become fully ‘‘transparent,’’ to others as well as to
himself.∑∏ In his final Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Starobinski argues,
the great writer at last recognized that the ultimate goal of his relentless intro-
spection proved unattainable: no one ever becomes fully transparent not even
to himself. In feeling one experiences oneself as continuous with oneself from
one time to another. But full transparency would require a coincidence with
one’s past.∑π A self distended in time, never reaches complete reunion with
itself, as Augustine had known. My past remains irretrievably separated from
my present. The possibility of becoming transparent to others remains even
 A New Sense of Selfhood 67

further out of reach. I may communicate my feelings to others. But such a

communication can never be more than indirect.
Rousseau hoped to awaken in his readers a desire to scrutinize their own
inner life and so to understand themselves.∑∫ To do so effectively required a
language of utmost precision and simplicity that would draw all attention to
the message, none to the expression. France’s foremost critic of the past cen-
tury, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, attributed most of Rousseau’s enormous
influence to his spare, lucid style. ‘‘The writer who brought about the greatest
single change in the French language since Pascal and who ushered in, lin-
guistically speaking, the nineteenth century, is Rousseau. . . . The day he bared
himself wholly to himself, the century recognized in him the writer most capa-
ble of giving expression to the unformed ideas which had been agitating it, the
writer best able to state them with originality, vigor, and impassioned logic.’’∑Ω
Jean Paul in Titan, Benjamin Constant in Adolphe, Goethe in Wilhelm Meister
and in Dichtung und Wahrheit, as well as countless romantic writers were to
follow Rousseau in their search for the soul.

New Perspectives on Language

The intense interest in language that emerged in the eighteenth century
shed new light on the problems of selfhood caused by the modern turn to the
subject and the subsequent search for its place in the objective order of things.
It proved impossible to give an adequate account of speech within the perime-
ters of a subject-object opposition. That speech was a given of human nature,
evolved from animal expressiveness as French sensationalists claimed, was the
first theory to be refuted. Yet the idealist position, according to which speech
was a necessary part of the mind’s expressive power independent of social
environment and physiological structures, proved equally untenable. Further
reflection on the nature of language showed how a dichotomous concept of
selfhood (such as we encountered in the first section of this chapter) proved to
be not only in principle but also in practice untenable. Language depends on
an intimate cooperation between the subjective and objective aspects of self-
hood, which excludes any description of it in terms of only one or the other. In
speech, human expressiveness shows its unique creativity. Still, even that cre-
ative power remains dependent on such elementary objective data as phys-
iological disposition, social conditions, and the existence of natural sounds—
such as the cries of animals, the songs of birds, and the rustling of wind and
rain.
As theories of human nature gradually changed from static to dynamic,
problems of expression assumed an increasing significance. Linguistic studies
68 A New Sense of Selfhood

thereby moved to the center of cultural interest. In less than a century the
Enlightenment succeeded in developing a complex theory of language. Locke
defined the critical question: How does language relate to meaning? The rela-
tion between word and reality had remained relatively stable until the late
Middle Ages. Augustine had described the word as simillimum rei notae (most
similar to the thing known). That this similarity did not mean a ‘‘copy’’ ap-
pears from the clause he adds: et imago eius (and its image).∏≠ The image
nature of language had theological roots. In the doctrine of the Trinity, the
Word (Logos, Verbum) was the image of the Father. Similarly, the human
mind is an image of the archetypal divine Word, and human words imitate
God’s expression. Yet only the verbum internum, that is, the mind, could be
called a true image of the Word; not the verbum externum, the actual word we
utter. Augustine thereby resumes a distinction, first made by Stoic philoso-
phers and taken over by Neoplatonists, between the logos endiathetos (the
inner word) and the logos prosforikos (the uttered word). In Augustine’s view,
only the revealed words of the Bible participate directly in the eternal Word.
Ordinary words merely function as arbitrary instruments of the mind’s ver-
bum internum. As such they are mere signs, not images.∏∞ Aquinas and the
many Scholastics who followed him conceived of the link between inner word
and verbal expression as being more intimate. Inner knowledge does not reach
completion until it is uttered in language. For Aquinas, truth requires verbal
expression.
Those speculations lost much of their power in the nominalist theory of
language at the end of the Middle Ages, which stressed the simple fact that
words, whether spoken or written, are arbitrary signs that present no guaran-
tee of truth but often lead the mind into error. They do so specifically in
suggesting the real or ideal existence of universals. Yet nominalism played a
significant role in the rise of modern theories of language by stressing its
creative power. At the beginning of the modern epoch, then, three different
conceptions of language competed with one another: the Neoplatonic tradi-
tion stressed the image quality of the spoken or written word; the nominalist
tradition wherein words serve as signs; and the Aristotelian tradition, con-
tinued by the Thomists, adopted an intermediate position.
The nominalist theory may have inspired Descartes’s idea of a mathesis
universalis, a system modeled after mathematics that would integrate all
knowledge within a universal system of signs. He assumed that as mathemati-
cal units are interrelated, so all segments of knowledge may be linked with one
another if we refer to them by mathematical signs. The creation of such a
comprehensive sign language presuppposes that we are able to break knowl-
edge down into simple elements. But neither science nor philosophy had suffi-
 A New Sense of Selfhood 69

ciently advanced to make a comprehensive analysis of knowledge possible.

Leibniz, who had worked on a similar project, concluded that this difficulty
was not prohibitive. If one started by attributing a characteristic number to
each segment of knowledge, the system did not have to wait until all essential
information on a given subject was available to complete the analysis. In fact,
combinations of existing numbers would lead to new discoveries. The univer-
sal language would serve as a grid that could be filled in as science progressed
and that would itself advance this progress.∏≤ Leibniz’s metaphysics supported
the possibility of such a universal language. As all things coming from the
hands of a perfect Creator must be compatible and continuous with one an-
other, a universal symbolism, a characteristica universalis had to be possible.
The search for an ideal language that would overcome the ambivalence and
confusion of common speech was yet another version of the age-old quest of
the original, Adamic language wherein words had exactly corresponded to
things.
Meanwhile, a less ambitious search for the common structure of ordinary
speech was being pursued in linguistic studies proper. In their Grammaire
générale et raisonnée (1660), grammarians of Port-Royal tried to compose a
grammatical structure that would fit all languages. Those efforts, however
flawed, nevertheless marked a significant step toward a symbolic conception
of language. In assuming that concepts (expressed in language) and things are
naturally related, the authors of the Grammaire do not imply that concepts
bear a similarity to things, but rather that they render things present. In the
Logique of Port-Royal that appeared two years later, they insisted that these
representations constitute reality as we know it. ‘‘We possess no knowledge of
what exists outside us, except through the intermediacy of the ideas that are in
us.’’∏≥ Yet ideas become manageable and effective only as they are translated
into words.
The preceding theories are all based on the assumption that thought pre-
cedes speech and that words bring preformed ideas to expression. They do not
account for the fact that those allegedly private thoughts themselves owe their
origin to verbal discourse. Not before Herder and Hamann in the second half
of the eighteenth century does the notion that language conditions thinking as
much as thinking conditions language make its appearance. Enlightenment
thinkers reached that insight after a number of discussions concerning the
relation between writing and speech, the symbolic nature of words, the rela-
tion between proposition and meaning, and, above all, the origin of language.
To these we now turn.
The story begins with Locke’s treatment of the relation between thought and
language in the third book of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding
70 A New Sense of Selfhood

(1690). There he raises the fundamental question: How do words mean? That
question has continued to engage philosophical thought ever since. Locke still
assumed that ideas, derived from primary impressions, originate indepen-
dently of language. Words come in at a later stage as signs of ideas that allow
the mind to order, arrange, and express them. Their role, though indispensable
to maintain thought, remains instrumental. People use words ‘‘either to record
their own thoughts for the assistance of their own memory; or, as it were, to
bring out their ideas, and lay them before the view of others’’ (Essay, III, 2, 2).
Yet words, being merely signs, rarely convey the full meaning of ideas, all the
less so since their common use inevitably lacks precision. This renders the
presumed correspondence between ideas and words increasingly problematic.
All the more so since one person’s understanding of a word’s meaning may vary
from another’s. Still, the private character of impressions and the imprecise use
of the terms do not imprison each speaker within a private language. Language
pre-exists my speaking of it. It already possesses a structure that a child learns
together with the ability to speak. This guarantees at least a practical agree-
ment on the meaning of words.
For Locke, a verbal sign refers to an idea as if the two followed a common
order of signification. In fact, the structure of language essentially differs from
that of ideas. Words do not signify directly as Locke assumes. Grammar,
syntax, and semantics vary from one language to another. Berkeley quite
appropriately criticized Locke’s theory of signification. When Locke writes:
‘‘Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas,’’ Berkeley
replies that a word becomes general by being made the sign ‘‘not of an abstract
general idea, but of several particular ideas.’’ He illustrates this by the function
of a line in a geometrical theorem. ‘‘As that particular line becomes general by
being made a sign, so the name ‘line,’ which taken absolutely is particular, by
being a sign is made general.’’∏∂ One may object to Berkeley’s nominalist thesis
that general ideas are no more than particular ideas with a general sign coeffi-
cient attached to them. But he is undoubtedly right in denying a direct relation
between language and ideas, as if one were a copy of the other. Locke’s and
Berkeley’s lasting credit in the modern study of language consists in having
established, albeit in an overly simplified way, the essential link between lan-
guage and ideas. Correct thinking is bound to linguistic conditions and errors
in thinking may be rooted in the improper use of language.∏∑
Locke’s onetime pupil, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftes-
bury, though not primarily concerned with the problems of language, none-
theless contributed a notion that proved to be of some consequence for the
future of linguistics, namely, that of dynamic form. All forms of expression, as
appears in the arts, rather than being mere means to retain or to record ideas
 A New Sense of Selfhood 71

derived from preverbal impressions, are themselves form-giving acts. Lan-

guage, the primary expression, ‘‘does not copy ideas: it structures them.’’∏∏
Shaftesbury’s nephew James Harris developed this insight into a comprehen-
sive linguistic theory. The title of his once famous Hermes or a Philosophical
Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (1751) may have been inspired by
the Grammaire Générale of Port-Royal, which assumes that the basic struc-
ture of grammar is universal.∏π But Harris’s theory of spiritual form, inspired
by his theory of art, moves well beyond the rationalist universalism of the
French.
Harris developed the first fully symbolic theory of language. Speech can
never imitate ideas, since it relies exclusively on sound. How could sound
imitate color? Moreover, the complexity of ideas excludes any one-to-one
correspondence between words and ideas.∏∫ Harris holds on to the theory that
words express pre-existing ideas, but he abandons the empiricist basis on
which Locke had established that theory. General ideas, for him, are not ab-
stracted from sense impressions. They are intelligible forms. This appears
obvious enough in the case of arts or crafts where the mind’s design precedes
any sensible realization. Nor do the words in which we express those ideal
forms imitate them; they symbolize them in independent intelligible structures
(p. 335). Harris incorporates his theory of ideal archetypes within Shaftes-
bury’s notion of the special genius proper to each individual or nation. The
way a nation conceives ideas determines its use of language. ‘‘These particular
Ideas become the Genius of their Language, since the Symbol must, of course,
correspond to its Archetype’’ (p. 407). The language of the Romans, who
excelled in politics and legislation, reflects juridical precision but lacks spec-
ulative genius. With the more philosophical Greeks, the opposite occurred.
About the English language, which combines French with German idioms,
Harris observes: ‘‘What we want in elegance, we gain in copiousness’’(p. 409).
In France the discussion of language took on an explicitly comparative
direction. How is speech related to other forms of expression? How does one
language differ from another? Diderot who rarely developed a comprehensive
theory on anything, but who sparked light on many things, developed a bril-
liant intuition concerning the nature of language in his Lettre sur les sourds
muets.∏Ω Different modes of expression, he argues, are irreducible to one an-
other. A common characteristic of all modes of them, whether in words or in
gestures, consists in their being discursive, that is, moving in time. Words are
spoken, written, or read in a certain order; gestures follow a different succes-
sion. The order of succession depends on the purpose and means by which we
express ourselves. The sign language of the deaf mute follows a wholly dif-
ferent sequence than the words of a speaker or of a writer. Even a person of
72 A New Sense of Selfhood

normal hearing uses gestures that are neither synchronic nor harmonious with
the words they accompany. Diderot discovered this through his strange habit
of stopping his ears in the theater while attending a play he knew well. He
observed that few actors succeed in bringing gesture and mime to the same
expressive pitch as the words they pronounce.
Nor does the sequence of verbal expression correspond to the logic of ideas,
as Abbé Batteux had maintained when defending the Latin syntax as the most
logical and hence the normative one. Diderot considers the logical order of
speaking and writing highly artificial. The natural sequence of words rarely
coincides with the logic of ideas. In sign language, the oldest form of com-
munication, the first gesture articulates the principal idea, while subsequent
gestures follow according to their relation to that primary one. In a logical
structure all parts are presented at once, as in a painting. Language, however,
has to break up into temporal segments what to the mind appears simulta-
neous. This may require an inversion of the logical order of words. Only the
‘‘natural’’ sequence effectively conveys ideas, emotions, and feelings in the
order in which they impress us. Even the most theoretical discourse requires
varying accents and degrees of intensity and rarely submits to any kind of a
priori definable order.
In an article originally written for the Encyclopédie and posthumously pub-
lished as a short book, Rousseau agrees with Diderot that originally humans
did not express their meanings in words but in gestures. Yet he considers the
impulse to speak wholly natural, as it is necessary to satisfy other human needs
than those of the body. ‘‘If the only needs we ever experienced were physical,
we should most likely never have been able to speak; we would fully express
our meanings by the language of gesture alone.’’π≠ What urges humans to
speak is the moral impulse to express strong emotions like love, fear, and
hatred. The most ancient words were emotional cries. Most important, Rous-
seau denied the assumed priority of ideas with respect to language, a priority
that all British writers, including James Harris, had steadfastly maintained. In
fact, we speak not to express previously conceived, articulated ideas: language
serves as the indispensable means for articulating ideas. Before they acquired
speech, humans had no ideas to express! In his early Discourse on the Origin
of Inequality Rousseau had argued, against the philosophes, that language
could not possibly owe its origin to human inventiveness. To invent requires
ideas, and ideas require language.
Still, though natural, speech is not an instinct, such as birds have for nesting
or ants and bees for communicating. Precisely the virtual absence of instincts
and the urge of a limitless perfectibilité forced humans to speak. The most
specifically human trait is the ability to speak, both in gestures and in words.
 A New Sense of Selfhood 73

With Rousseau, then, the problem of language shifts from one of origins and
communicative needs, to one of progress and culture. Primitive human expres-
sions consisted of vital cries, onomatopoeic more than articulate, sung rather
than spoken. As humanization progressed, those animal sounds became trans-
formed into fully articulate ones that enabled people to communicate beyond
the limits of their immediate families. This progression marks the beginning of
organized society. ‘‘The earth nourishes men; but when their initial needs have
dispersed them, other needs arise which reunite them, and it is only then that
they speak, and that they have an incentive to speak’’ (p. 39). In the pastoral
stage, especially in mild climates, passion and feeling, more than utility, stimu-
late the development of language. In harsher climates, where the need to work
is more urgent, linguistic development tends to follow a more utilitarian lead.
Hence, Rousseau notes, the languages of the north became more articulate
and those of the south more melodious.
Far less natural was the invention of writing. Practical needs alone were
responsible for it, especially the need to establish commercial relations with
distant partners. Writing removes language farthest from its original expres-
siveness. Letters substitute for the direct presence of the speaking person. Still,
the language of passion or of feeling, even when written, conveys some sense
of physical presence, as if speech had never totally yielded to writing. Poetry
also, in prosody and rhythm, has preserved some of the directness of sound.
Poems were meant to be sung or recited. One who only reads them loses much
of their musical impact: the prosody of written verse is only a poor substitute
for the more complex intonations of singing or reciting. What originally had
been different sounds, writing reduces to weaker or stronger emphasis. For
Rousseau, the transition from speech to writing indicates an increasing aliena-
tion from a natural state of being. Language itself, even the most primitive,
already causes a rupture in the original state of oneness with nature. To one
who speaks, life has left the immediate now. Discourse, as the term suggests,
extends consciousness across time: it presupposes foresight and remembrance.
Speech defers meaning to the very end of a phrase and often its full meaning
does not appear before the end of a discourse.
What feelings and emotions lose in directness by being spoken, they gain in
intensity. ‘‘As you watch the afflicted person, you are not likely to weep. But
give him time to tell you what he feels and soon you will burst into tears. It is
solely in this way that the scenes of a tragedy produce their effects’’ (p. 8). On
the negative side, the separation from immediacy renders language manipula-
tive. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Rousseau considers the
acquisition of language the principal cause of social corruption. The more it
becomes refined, the more means it acquires for being deceitful. Why, then,
74 A New Sense of Selfhood

one wonders, did Rousseau become a writer? In Jean Starobinski’s interpreta-

tion, writing for Rousseau was a means of last resort: the only way of com-
munication his alleged accusers left him to clear his name. He counted on
posterity to avenge him, and in order to reach later generations he had to
write. ‘‘The act of writing becomes a happy one for Rousseau only when he
ceases to address it to an outsider.’’π∞ Not before his final Rêveries d’un prom-
eneur solitaire did Rousseau at last write for himself. His message to others
had been delivered. His book to himself became his most honest one.
Inherited and enriched from one generation to another, language shapes the
identity of a people no less than that of an individual. This idea became central
to Herder’s theory. He may have read some allusions to it in Rousseau, though
probably not in the posthumously published essay. In Herder’s Essay on the
Origin of Language (1772), the various strands of Enlightenment linguistics
coalesced into a coherent whole. From the start he opposes the thesis that
language naturally develops from cry to speech: ‘‘While still an animal, man
already has language.’’π≤ Speech may have started as a cry of passion. But that
cry was from the beginning articulate, and its passion is still audible in the
rhetoric of even the most theoretical discourse. Like Rousseau, Herder re-
jected Condillac’s theory, popular among the philosophes, that language is the
outcome of an evolved animal instinct. But Rousseau had failed to draw the
conclusion that therefore it had to be invented. Necessity drove humans to
seek this essential means of survival. Animals need no more than the minimal
expressiveness required for communication among members of the same spe-
cies. Humans would be unable to survive without an extensive range of ex-
pressiveness present from the beginning. Nothing, then, would be more er-
roneous than to regard speech and reason as a ‘‘stepped-up potentiation of
animal forces’’ (p. 109).
Herder attempts to stay a middle course between Condillac’s evolutionary
naturalism, on one side, and Süssmilch’s theory (1766) that language is a divine
gift to humanity, on the other. ‘‘With our course set for [the truth], we perceive
to the right and the left why no animal can invent language, why no God need
invent language, and why man, as man, can and must invent language’’ (p.
127). A full development of the human ability to speak requires from the
beginning a different organization of all bodily powers, not just a particular
physiological disposition of throat and mouth. In addition it needs a human
environment: children that grow up wild do not learn how to speak. But that is
not to say, as Rousseau wrote in the Discourse on Inequality, that speech is
only potentially present. It belongs to the fundamental structure of being
human. Humans have to invent language and to learn how to speak, but that
ability to invent and to learn is ‘‘as natural to them as being human’’ (p. 112).
 A New Sense of Selfhood 75

The basic question is not: How do humans form sounds? They collected
their first vocabulary from the sounds of the world—the cry of animals, the
noise of thunder, the rustling of leaves in the wind. But: ‘‘Whence comes to
man the art of changing into sound what is not sound?’’ (p. 138). Primitive
human sounds articulate only undifferentiated feelings. In that archaic sensus
communis the awareness dawns that some things look the way others sound.
Herder all too briefly justifies the human ability to express an unlimited variety
of meanings through sound by arguing that all perceptions merge in feeling,
hence that all forms of perception are related, and that one may be used in lieu
of another. But the more fundamental question remains: What enables the
mind to transfer meaning to sound? How does a distinct meaning emerge from
an indistinct pool of meaningfulness? Despite this and other obscurities that
cloud his theory, Herder discovered what had escaped his predecessors (even
Rousseau), namely, that language, rather than bringing pre-existing meanings
to expression, creates meaning.
Herder’s friend, the cryptic Johann Georg Hamann, took Herder to task for
not having recognized that speech is not ‘‘natural,’’ as if humans had from the
beginning an aptitude for creating it. That aptitude requires that someone first
address them. This, according to Hamann, God did in revelation.π≥ Humans
are able to speak and to read in response to God’s revelation in nature and
Scripture and thus to decipher the mystery of reality (III, 301–3). With this far-
fetched thesis about the divine origin of language, Hamann attempted to jus-
tify the metaphorical capacity required for the creation of language, which
Herder had simply taken for granted. Moreover, the idea that all languages
came from the same source shows an awareness of the common structure that
underlies their irreducible diversity. Precisely this synthesis of universality and
diversity makes translation possible. George Steiner has rightly observed: ‘‘To
translate is to descend beneath the exterior disparities of two languages in
order to bring into vital play their analogous and, at the final depths, common
principles of being.’’π∂

Conclusion
Thinkers of the Enlightenment spent considerable, though mostly un-
successful, efforts on closing the gap between the self as subject of meaning
and the self as substantial reality, which the preceding period had opened.
Some did so by placing all the weight on the subject; not only empiricist
philosophers like Berkeley, but also preromantic writers like Rousseau and
some novelists. On the opposite side stood those who viewed the self as a
substance among other substances, though most endeavored to preserve its
76 A New Sense of Selfhood

spiritual identity. Both sides experienced major difficulty in giving that sub-
stance or subject a content of its own.
Both sides also found it hard to preserve genuine otherness. A self reduced
to a meaning-giving function—a mere subject—loses its personal identity
and, as a result, is no longer able to recognize the identity of the other. Ever
since Descartes, the problem of solipsism has haunted the subjective concep-
tion of the self. Where reality becomes a function of the subject, the real ceases
to be truly distinct from the self. Likewise, if the self is merely a substance,
albeit it a distinct one, it becomes absorbed within an objective totality that
admits no real otherness. For Descartes, any substance that was not a subject
became an undifferentiated part of a res extensa. The preceding analysis has
shown how difficult it was to preserve both aspects at once and even, for those
who succeeded in doing so, to adequately integrate them with each other.
My conclusion concerning the absence of fully recognized otherness may
appear to conflict with the well-known fact that the Enlightenment was a time
of unrestricted exploration of ethnic differences, varying customs, and alter-
native moral systems. Indeed, the experience of otherness was abundantly
present, but the ability to recognize and to justify it was missing. Cultural
differences came to be interpreted against the horizon of a universal reason
originating in the mind. As a dialectical tension with the other constitutes an
essential part of selfhood, a weakening of the sense of otherness creates a
major problem for self-understanding. The introspective literature of the time,
which resisted the trend to conceive of the self as either subject or substance,
gave the self a content that was more than functional and more than objective.
I have mentioned the fictional, the autobiographical, the aphoristic writings of
the moralistes. The practice of religious introspection also reasserted the self
as a spiritual center in its own right. Above all, the new theories of language
extricated selfhood from the narrow limits Descartes, Locke, and their fol-
lowers had set to it. Reflection on speech laid the ground for a new concept of
intersubjectivity that was to reach maturity in the next two centuries. Di-
alogue requires that in some way one abandons one’s own position to enter
into that of the other.π∑ The more I give myself to the other, the better I know
myself and the more I acquire a unique identity.
In the next chapter I shall consider concepts of art that paralleled the later
theories of language in resisting the sharp subject-object division characteristic
of modern philosophical anthropology. Ideas of beauty and harmony do not
allow themselves to be explained in either of those terms, even though aes-
thetic theories kept hesitating between the two, leaning at first more to the
objective and later to the subjective side. The division has continued to deter-
mine the modern idea of selfhood, resulting either in a naturalist or in an
 A New Sense of Selfhood 77

idealist conception of the person. The two tendencies were to remain locked in
combat all through the nineteenth century. The consequences of this internal
division have been severe. In chapter 5 we shall see how the moral crisis of the
Enlightenment was directly linked to it. In our own time some have started
speaking of ‘‘the death of man,’’ a forceful expression of the predicament that
persists in affecting not only anthropology but also the entire compass of
theoretical and practical thought.
 4

Toward a New Conception of Art

Artistically the Enlightenment may not compare favorably with the Re-
naissance or Baroque periods, but the aesthetic criticism of the eighteenth
century surpassed that of the two earlier periods and provided most of the
categories used in the two centuries that followed. One of its major achieve-
ments was to raise the idea of beauty to the level of truth. It accomplished this
in three stages: at the beginning the imitation theory prevailed, next the ex-
pressive theory, and at the end the symbolic theory made a tentative entrance.
Each of these movements made a definitive contribution to the modern con-
ception of art and literature. A first wave of poets and critics continued to
defend the ancient theory that art imitates nature. Originally artists, partic-
ularly early novelists, tended to interpret this rule quite literally. Others held
that artistic truth consisted in imitating the ideal rather than the reality of
nature. For many, particularly in France, that meant adhering to the formal
standards of harmony, unity, and proportion allegedly derived from ancient
models. Shaftesbury considered the observation of such formal rules necessary
but insufficient. For him, the imitation of nature consists in the first place in
following nature’s creativity rather than its accomplishments. Partly inspired
by Shaftesbury, such critics as Diderot and Lessing came to conceive of art as
being primarily expressive rather than imitative. They thereby gave the idea of
aesthetic truth a distinct, irreducible identity. Finally, with the notion of aes-

78
 Toward a New Conception of Art 79

thetic symbolism, Baumgarten and Kant raised the idea to the level of truth as
symbolic disclosure, which is where it remains today.

Art as Truth: From Boileau to Shaftesbury

At the beginning of the seventeenth century a concern for truthfulness
began to dominate aesthetics. Yet truth could be attained in different ways.
Plato had described art as an imitation of nature. But since nature itself was no
more than an imitation of the true, ideal reality, he considered it a lesser,
derivative mode of truth. Aware of his criticism, later Platonists, from Plotinus
to Michelangelo, concluded that art ought to imitate nature’s ideal form.
Hence art had to correct nature whenever it fell short of ideal perfection. The
truth of art, then, consisted less in resemblance than in ideal abstraction, not in
nature but in ‘‘nature beautified.’’
Boileau, the despotic arbiter of literary taste in France, decreed: ‘‘Rien n’est
beau que le vrai, le vrai seul est aimable. Il doit régner partout, et même dans la
fable’’ (L’art poétique). Literary truth, for him, consisted in verisimilitude of
content, harmony of form, and strict observation of the rules of style appropri-
ate to each genre. Pope, one of the few followers of the French rubric in
England, echoed, ‘‘Those rules of old discovered, not derived / Are Nature still,
but Nature methodiz’d’’ (Essay on Criticism, vv. 88–89). Classicist writers
and artists appealed to Greek aesthetics. Yet instead of pursuing the Greek
idea of perfection, as Renaissance artists had attempted to do, they were too
often satisfied with observing formal rules they claimed to draw from ancient
art and letters. Aesthetic truth thereby became restricted to what could be
justified by well-established principles. In France, these principles, conscien-
tiously followed and, in literature, enforced by the high authority of the royal
Académie, produced an orderly art of little originality but considerable polish.
Nor was this literature deprived of feeling. In fact, it became increasingly
sentimental. But feelings themselves were not allowed to stray into irratio-
nality or violence. They had their place in the harmoniously regulated universe
of art. Poets and artists constantly appealed to classical sources. But they
thoroughly domesticated the ancient models, gentrifying primitive Greek
myths and ascribing Stoic and Christian virtues to wild ancient heroes. A
rather instructive example of this appears in the libretto of Glück’s opera
Orphée. In the myth, Orpheus retrieves his beloved Euridice from the under-
world, violates the prohibition not to look back, and loses her forever. This
unhappy ending seemed unacceptable to the eighteenth-century sense of jus-
tice. So the artist has ‘‘Amour’’ restore the lovers to one another!
The question of truth assumed a crucial importance in biblical poems. In
80 Toward a New Conception of Art

Paradise Lost (1667) Milton attempted to preserve its veracity by maintaining

the division between celestial and terrestrial space of the ancient cosmology,
and by presenting the confrontation with the rebellious angels as a regular
modern war on a battlefield. In fact, however, his literalism jeopardized the
credibility of his poem. After Galileo, the division of the cosmos into a heaven
above and an earth below, which had so effectively supported Dante’s vision,
lost its meaning in a universe of which all parts obey the same mathematical
laws. Milton tries to save the image of two parallel realms by means of a
theological analogy: ‘‘measuring things in heaven by things on earth’’ (VI,
893). But in a modern cosmology such an analogy had to exclude literal
similarity. Milton’s insistent realism resulted in a succession of absurdities.
Even dim-witted terrestrials would know better than to wage an unwinnable
‘‘war’’ against the Almighty or to aim darts at immortal spirits. To render his
vision of fighting angels at least minimally credible, the poet endowed the
celestial rebels with bodies capable of physical pain. The faithful angels appear
exempt from this encumbrance. The description of a heavenly battle fought
with chariots, swords, and gunpowder has a comical rather than tragic effect.
Milton gains little by committing himself neither to a geocentric nor to a
heliocentric view. (‘‘Whether heaven move or earth imports not’’ [VIII, 70–
71]). The problem was not whether the sun or the earth was the ‘‘center’’ to the
world’’ (VIII, 122–23), but whether the universe could still be conceived as
consisting of two separate parts. The main difficulty stems from introducing a
literal understanding of the Bible into a modern epic at the time when the
biblical cosmology had simply ceased to exist. The nineteenth-century critic
Hyppolite Taine wondered: ‘‘What a heaven God runs! . . . We have orders of
the day, a hierarchy, exact submission, extra duties, disputes, regulated cere-
monials, prostrations, etiquette, furbished arms, arsenals, depots of chariots
and ammunition. Was it worthwhile leaving earth to find in heaven carriage-
works, buildings, artillery, a manual of tactics, the art of salutations, and the
Almanac of Gotha? Are these the things which ‘eye hath not seen, nor ear
heard, nor hath entered into the heart to conceive?’ ’’∞
Nor could the problems of literalism be solved by keeping the celestial
figures away from time and space, as Klopstock attempted to do in his Mes-
sias. His strategy merely resulted in a bloodless, abstract poem, far inferior to
Milton’s masterwork. An epic requires characters of flesh and blood in a con-
crete, identifiable setting. Apart from the incongruities I have mentioned, the
literalism of Paradise Lost also weakened the heroic quality indispensable in
an epic poem. Louis Martz appropriately calls it an ‘‘anti-heroic epic.’’≤ Rather
than imitating Homer’s grand style or even Virgil’s pathetic one, Milton, he
claims, displays a surprising affinity with Ovid’s ironic Metamorphoses.≥
 Toward a New Conception of Art 81

Milton may originally have been allured by the drama of the human race in its
battle with evil (as some of the most beautiful passages suggest), yet the Bible’s
report of a prehistorical lapse from a state of happy innocence to one of guilt
and pain induced him to move the action from earth to heaven. Thus the key
figure of the heavenly ‘‘preface’’ to the story, Lucifer, came to replace Adam as
central figure of the poem.
Paradise Lost illustrates the tension between realism and truth in the par-
ticular instance of the religious epic. Yet even when no biblical literalism was
involved, the question of truth assumed a new importance in the fictional
narrative to which the French referred as ‘‘roman’’ and the English as ‘‘ro-
mance.’’ The learned Pierre Daniel Huet, later to become bishop of Avranches,
in one of the earliest treatises on the subject, De l’Origine des Romans (1670),
distinguishes novels from historical accounts as ‘‘fictional stories of amorous
adventures, written in prose for the pleasure and instruction of the reader.’’
The term instruction alerts the reader that he regards the roman as more than
mere entertainment. Works of history, he clarifies, are for the most part true,
whereas romans are fictional, yet they contain some truth. Indeed, the term
‘‘roman’’ originally referring to the language of Romanized Gallia (as opposed
to Roman Latin), eventually became the name of historical reports written in
that Vulgar Latin. As they began to be put in poetic form (for instance, in the
chansons de geste surrounding Charlemagne’s battle with the Muslims), more
and more fictional elements entered the story until only a vague historical
frame remained. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, novels assumed
the fictional form Huet describes. In the process, however, they developed a
new kind of truth. Well-composed novels, Huet maintained, made their read-
ers aware of the richness and complexity of emotions and moral inclinations.
Thus their historical falsehood was in fact what Augustine called a ‘‘significant
falsehood,’’ a figure of truth, like the parables in the Gospel narratives.
English writers proved marvelously equipped for successfully practicing the
new literary genre. Instructed by French models, they no longer felt compelled
to weave their stories around historical events or ancient legends. Neither did
they, as French writers tended to do in the rationalist climate that had followed
Cartesian philosophy, feel obliged to express universal truths. Moll Flanders
and Robinson Crusoe, Pamela and Clarissa, Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews,
with their particular characters and individual personalities, stand at the op-
posite side of the universal types that filled the French tragedies and novels of
the classic century.∂ Individuals and events, not types and ideas, define British
narrative prose. Nowhere had the nominalist stress on the particular in con-
trast to classical universalism been more visible than in the eighteenth-century
English novel.
82 Toward a New Conception of Art

The search for veracity assumed several forms—Fielding differs both in

style and intent from Defoe and Richardson—but all of them firmly believed
that their stories had to reflect reality as it appears. Daniel Defoe came closest
to interpreting this demand of veracity in a literalist sense. He thereby re-
sponded to the expectation of ordinary readers of his time who, familiar only
with the Bible, had to assume that any report about a contemporary figure had
to be ‘‘true’’ if its author was an honest man. Otherwise, why would it be in
print?∑ Thus Defoe presented his famous Journal of the Plague Year (1722) as
an anonymous eyewitness’s account of the bubonic plague in 1665 (when the
author himself was only five years old). It was in fact a unique mixture of
journalistic reporting complete with casualty figures, medical observations,
investigations of the causes of the disease, and an imaginative reconstruction
of the total collapse of civilized life as a result of the plague. Robinson Crusoe
and Moll Flanders also appeared as autobiographical writings. Defoe’s success
in presenting his work as historically truthful backfired. Readers charged the
author with deceit when they learned that Robinson Crusoe had been a fig-
ment of the author’s imagination. He responded by showing how seriously
concerned he had been about the veracity of his imaginary reconstructions, as
he had already suggested in the preface to his early The Storm. Eventually he
seized upon the idea of moral truth, and in the preface to the third volume of
Robinson Crusoe, he compares the truth of his work to the allegorical one of
the popular Pilgrim’s Progress.
In his masterpiece Moll Flanders (1722) Defoe pursues a more fundamental
truth, namely, the difference between moral appearance and reality. In the
guise of an edifying tale of sin and repentance Defoe ironically contrasts Moll
Flanders’s moral posturing with her venal conduct. Repentance comes to her
only when one of her questionable enterprises fails, as when her partner in
adultery suddenly calls the affair off. The novelist doubles the irony by taking
his distance from the narrator as well as from the characters of the story,
thereby erasing whatever moral import it might have possessed. Some readers
still persisted in considering Moll Flanders a moral tale; others dismissed it as
an immoral book. Of course, it is neither, nowhere less so than in the preface
where Defoe expresses his ‘‘moral’’ intentions: ‘‘Throughout the infinite vari-
ety of this book, this fundamental [to expose vice] is most strictly adhered to;
there is not a wicked action in any part of it but is first or last rendered
unhappy and unfortunate; there is not a superlative villain brought upon the
stage but either he is brought to an unhappy end, or brought to be a penitent;
there is not an ill thing mentioned but it is condemned, even in the relation, nor
a virtuous, just thing but it carries its praise along with it.’’ In view of this noble
goal the author recommends his book, from every part of which ‘‘some just
 Toward a New Conception of Art 83

and religious inference is drawn by which the reader will have something of
instruction.’’ As Ian Watt wittily puts it: ‘‘The spiritual dimension is presented
as a series of somewhat inexplicable religious breakdowns in the psychic
mechanism, breakdowns, however, which do not permanently impair her
healthy immorality.’’∏
For Richardson, literary truth consisted in a faithful analysis of the feelings
and attitudes of his characters. His novels betray the influence of Marivaux’s
masterly analysis of feelings and emotions in La vie de Marianne. Richardson
improved the genre by writing his novels in epistolary form. This procedure
enabled him to present the same events from various perspectives, as they were
reflected in different minds. It allowed the reader to learn the characters’
dispositions toward each other. Richardson handled this new stylistic device
with such perfect competence that it became popular all over Europe. Yet
Fielding questioned the truth of the noble feelings Richardson’s heroines so
edifyingly expressed in their letters. In Joseph Andrews he lampoons the pru-
dish Pamela as a pioneer capitalist, a middle-class entrepreneur of virtue who
used her chastity ‘‘as a commodity to be vended for the purpose of getting
on.’’π Fielding himself was a moralist of a different kind. His target was hypoc-
risy and moral pretense. The picaresque Tom Jones parodies a code of sexual
conduct universally professed yet rarely practiced. Fielding considered his
works morally more truthful than Richardson’s because he exposed the un-
supported moral pretenses of his contemporaries. He even claimed ‘‘histor-
ical’’ truth for his stories. In Tom Jones (bk. IX, chap. 7) he insists that they
‘‘have sufficient title to the name of history,’’ contrary to the romances of
sentimental scribblers. His novels derive their historical authority not from
actual events but from a study of the ‘‘book of nature.’’ He claims to have
acquired his skills through a direct acquaintance with the kind of people he
writes about and through insight in their characters. This places Fielding’s
history more on the side of ‘‘natural history’’ than of that of chronicles of past
events.
In some eighteenth-century writers the irony with which they exposed the
hero’s false claims ended up undermining the novel’s own internal credibility.
In two experimental stories of the time the authors deconstruct the authority
of the narrator, the critical voice that gave the ironical novel a semblance of
truth. The author thereby abandons the role of moral critic to question the
validity of the novel itself. In Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760), the constant
digressions of this ‘‘autobiography’’ that ends at the narrator’s conception
destroy whatever coherent meaning was still holding the novel together. The
paradox that accounts for the enduring charm of this ‘‘autobiography’’ lies in
the role of a self that is always intruding yet nowhere to be found. In a more
84 Toward a New Conception of Art

studied, less spontaneous way, Diderot imitates Sterne’s irony in Jacques

le fataliste (1772 and 1778, published posthumously) while also borrowing
from Don Quixote and Le Sage’s picaresque novel Gil Blas. In this master-
piece of quick wit, sharp insight, and biting sarcasm, the secondary quality of
the story itself becomes yet a further subject of irony. By drawing attention to
the narrator’s ‘‘plagiarism’’ the author destroys the last feature of the novel
that had survived Sterne’s onslaught, namely, its originality. Only the author’s
persona remains: he no longer identifies with his work since he does not even
claim to be its creator.
This double irony proves to be a dubious weapon of moral criticism. In the
novel’s most remembered episode the hostess of the inn where Jacques and his
master have spent the night tells the story of one Madame La Pommeraye’s
revenge on a sleazy marquis who, after having seduced her, continues to ap-
peal to her for favors and financial support with no intention of marrying her.
She arranges for him to fall in love with a beautiful younger woman who,
however, insists on marriage as a condition for erotic intimacy. The marquis
reluctantly submits. On the day of the wedding the vindicated lady informs the
marquis that he has just espoused a prostitute. At that point the novelist, who
until then had been a silent companion, interrupts Jacques’s and his master’s
protest against what they consider an unwarranted cruelty, to proclaim that
any man who seduces and abandons an honest woman ought to be con-
demned ‘‘to the courtesans.’’ The author thereby breaks the spell of irony, yet
without benefit to the moral lesson he now wants to teach. The ironic tone,
sustained throughout a narrative, has deprived him of his moral authority. If
the novelist effectively wants to criticize the morals of his time, he ought to
keep his irony within the story, as Defoe and Fielding did, or otherwise tell his
story straight, as the realist novelists of the nineteenth century did or as the
sentimental novelists of the eighteenth century tried to do.
No writer of the Enlightenment grasped the full complexity of aesthetic
truth better than the German poet and novelist Christoph Martin Wieland
(1733–1813). He tackled it first in the original preface to Agathon (1766), the
Enlightenment novel par excellence. In the second edition (1772) he added an
essay, ‘‘The Historical in Agathon.’’ The question of truth keeps returning
throughout the long narrative and induces the author to make substantial
changes from the first to the third edition. It tells the story of the adventures
and moral trials of a young Athenian whose name appears among Plato’s
friends in the dialogue Protagoras. Attempting to justify the historical veracity
of his novel, Wieland claims that the hero of Euripides’ tragedy Ion (who, like
Agathon, grew up in the temple of Delphi), as well as Plato’s character in the
dialogue of the same name, stood model for his hero. In the novel the young
 Toward a New Conception of Art 85

Agathon, on his way to a promising political career in Athens, is captured by

pirates and sold to the sophist Hippias. In order to break the idealistic young
slave’s resistance to his own hedonist philosophy Hippias introduces him to
the beautiful hetaera Danae. Agathon becomes her lover, but he eventually
grows tired of his lascivious life with her and flees to Dionysus’s Court in
Syracuse, which he hopes to reform in accordance with philosophical rule.
With no more success than Plato himself, he barely escapes execution and
takes refuge with the philosophical ruler of Tarentum—Archytas. All the
names appearing in this story (except for Danae’s) belong to well-known
historical figures. This ‘‘probable’’ composition of an educated Athenian of
the fourth century prefigures what a gifted young man of the Enlightenment
age—such as Wieland himself—experienced in the process of growing up.
Presenting his entire story as Geschichte (a term that means ‘‘history’’ as well
as ‘‘story’’), the author, citing ancient sources, vouches for the accuracy of the
historical figures and their theories as they appear in his novel. (He devotes an
entire book to a careful analysis of Hippias’s philosophy.) He justifies his
romantic reconstruction by the fact that all historical reflection requires imagi-
nation no less than factual knowledge.∫ To be morally significant and to pos-
sess a universal meaning history needs to be reimagined. A mere chronicle of
facts carries no universal truth. Still, the imagination does not enjoy the same
liberty in a historical study that it enjoys in a historical novel where Wieland
allows it to add nonhistorical characters.
On the other hand, Wieland is particularly concerned to be psychologically
true. He constantly cautions the reader that, however credible his characters
appear, neither their words nor their thoughts about themselves ought to be
taken at face value. In addition, Agathon changes as he grows older and the
author is anxious to stress the distance between present and past in a develop-
ing person. Wieland concludes the final edition (1798) of his work with a
chapter on the wisdom of Archytas, who taught that the ultimate truth is
interior and cannot be adequately communicated. ‘‘It may well be that in the
visible world most of it is deceptive and all is merely appearance. But is there
not in our inner being an invisible world the limits of which no moral treatise
has explored?’’ (bk. XVI, chap. 3). Perhaps more explicitly than any other
work of the time Agathon raises the question: How can a narrative be fictional
and nevertheless be true? Wieland took the hardest case—a historical novel,
taking place in a distant past, that at the same time was meant to be modern,
autobiographical Bildungsroman. As a contemporary critic, Christian von
Blankenburg, noted, the author thereby conveyed yet another truth through
fiction, namely, that the customs and traditions of a particular society shape
the ideas of those who live in it.Ω
86 Toward a New Conception of Art

In the visual arts the concern with veracity led mostly to formalist conclu-
sions. The question of whether art, to be truthful, should represent objects as
they are or as they ideally ought to be was almost always answered in favor of
the ideal. The Greek and Roman statues discovered in the excavations of Pom-
pei (1748) and Herculaneum (1738), as well as Johann Joachim Winckel-
mann’s interpretations of Greek sculpture and architecture spread the notion
that ancient art favored idealized models of reality. Especially French classi-
cism imitated the simple lines, perfect proportions, and harmonious composi-
tions of the Greeks. But somehow its cold, well-drawn forms remained far re-
moved from the ancient models that inspired them. Even Jacques-Louis David,
who in his paintings applied the classicist principles with more genius than
others, always appears disengaged from his heroic subjects. Classicist art,
despite its formal perfection, appears to have replaced concrete flesh and blood
by universal rules of reason. Winckelmann himself had explicitly warned
against this way of interpreting and imitating the ancient models. Classical
motifs had, of course, been common since the Renaissance. But before the
eighteenth century their influence had been restricted to the presence of ancient
columns or temples in painting. The two great painters of the French seven-
teenth century, Nicholas Poussin (1594–1656) and Claude Lorrain (1600–
1682), had also found inspiration in ancient landscapes and classical myths.
But their bucolic Arcadias with Roman ruins had never degenerated into the
formalist ‘‘truthfulness’’ characteristic of the later classicist style.
Even some contemporaries of the classicists felt the artificiality of the ra-
tionalist canon and pursued a different kind of artistic veracity. Jean-Baptiste
Chardin (1699–1779), the loving observer of ordinary objects and domestic
intimacy, succeeds in directly conveying the touch of velvet, the shine of po-
lished brass, the smell of freshly baked bread instead of concerning himself
with geometrical compositions or ancient heroes. Antoine Watteau’s (1684–
1721) canvases evoke the secret hidden at the heart of what we thought we
knew. The enigmatic beauty of his Embarkment for Cythara—a classical
theme treated in a nonclassical way—approaches the viewer from a timeless
dreamland. It answers none of our questions. Why are the pilgrims, frozen in
the imperturbable peace of an immobile fête galante, on their way to Aphro-
dite’s sacred island? He sublimates everything into aesthetic mystery. His Pier-
rots stare at us from a distant world, very alive yet unresponsive to our scrutiny.
Neither does the term ‘‘classicist’’ apply to Giambattista Tiepolo’s exuber-
ant apotheoses. His radiating hues and rapturous motions defy the subdued
colors and static harmonies of the neoclassicists. The four panels of the en-
counter of Rinaldo, the hero of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, with the en-
chantress Armida, in their striking contrasts of bright and pale tints, assume
 Toward a New Conception of Art 87

the viewer into an unearthly sphere closer to the Baroque sources that inspired
it than to classicist patterns. In England Gainsborough’s and Reynolds’s ide-
alized portraits do indeed display a pure though by no means static classicism.
But next to them we find Hogarth’s satirical scenes and the many landscapes
inspired by Poussin, Claude, and the dramatic Salvator Rosa, far removed
from French classicism.
The art of the eighteenth century continued to maintain strong ties with the
Baroque. Not only is the Baroque not forgotten—indeed, it culminates in the
architecture and sculpture of southeastern Europe, and, even after having lost
its spiritual content, the Rococo style preserved much of its form. Yet the
history of art never parallels that of philosophy. What Arnold Hauser asserted
in general about periodization in art holds particularly true for the eighteenth
century: ‘‘One ought, really, never to speak of a uniform ‘style of the time’
dominating a whole period, since there are at any given moment as many
different styles as there are artistically productive social groups.’’∞≠ Indeed, the
term ‘‘classic’’ itself soon lost much of its reference to ancient art and litera-
ture. It began to be predicated of any work of art that by its power and formal
perfection set a model for later generations.∞∞
The distinction between art and ideas finds a strong confirmation in the
difference between theories about art and what poets and artists were actually
doing. For d’Alembert, a typical representative of Enlightenment rationalism,
art hardly differs from science, and even less from craft. In his ‘‘Preliminary
Discourse’’ to the Encyclopédie, he divided the ‘‘sciences’’ according to the
faculties most active in them: memory, reason, imagination. Imagination in-
cluded mechanical as well as fine arts. Both are practical ways of knowing, but
they rest on a system of ‘‘positive and invariable rules’’ as much as theoretical
sciences do. The sole merit of these rationalist speculations was that they
restored the element of truth in art. Seventeenth-century critics had fundamen-
tally distrusted the imagination, and Samuel Johnson still described it as ‘‘a
licentious and vagrant faculty, unsusceptible of limitations, and impatient of
restraint.’’∞≤ D’Alembert’s attribution, then, of some mode of truth to art was
not insignificant. Yet obviously art is not ‘‘science’’: the aesthetic symboliza-
tion entirely differs from the scientific one.∞≥ Indeed, if art is primarily imi-
tation, as d’Alembert still continued to hold, then its truth must consist ex-
clusively in a correspondence between an idea and a thing, and that may
reasonably evoke some comparison with science, as it did in Plato. But at no
time did its aesthetic quality primarily reside in the correctness of the represen-
tation. Rather does the artist aim at transforming an ordinary reality into a
symbol that discloses a previously unknown aspect of reality.
Rationalist critics recognized only two forms of truth: correspondence
88 Toward a New Conception of Art

between idea and reality, and coherence among the parts and the whole. They
never mention the most essential quality of aesthetic truth, namely, the dis-
closure of a new aspect of reality. This began to change with the writings of
Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, one of the most original and
influential writers of the early eighteenth century. His ideas, elegantly ex-
pressed in allusive rather than assertive phrases, paved the road toward a new
aesthetic theory. He had been inspired by Platonism, but also by Leibniz’s idea
of moral harmony and by his former tutor John Locke’s empiricism. The
latter’s influence accounts for the subjective perspective he imposed upon a
basically Platonic theory of beauty. The harmonious proportions of nature
become truly beautiful only when viewed as symbolic of the mind’s own inner
harmony. ‘‘Nothing affects the heart like that which is purely from itself, and
of its own nature; such as the beauty of sentiments, the grace of actions, the
turn of characters and the proportion and features of the human mind.’’∞∂
Only a subjective ‘‘sense of beauty,’’ analogous to the bodily senses, enables
us to perceive the proportion between physical and mental harmony. How
powerful a role this subjective element played in his aesthetics appears in the
following passage, in which he describes the male perception of female beauty:
‘‘We should find perhaps that what we most admired, even in the turn of
outward features, was only a mysterious expression, and a kind of shadow of
something inward in the temper; and that when we were struck with a majestic
air, a sprightly look, an Amazon bold grace, or a contrary soft and gentle one,
’twas chiefly the fancy of these characters or qualities which wrought on us:
our imagination being busied in forming beauteous shapes and images of this
rational kind, which entertained the mind and held it in admiration.’’∞∑
Applying this subjective factor to artistic creation, Shaftesbury warns the
artist against copying nature. ‘‘A painter, if he has any genius, understands the
truth and unity of design; and knows he is even then unnatural when he
follows Nature too closely and strictly copies life.’’∞∏ The work of art origi-
nates in an inner vision of harmony between mind and nature. The artist
becomes ‘‘a second Maker, a just Prometheus under Jove.’’∞π Only in the mind
does nature attain aesthetic truth. ‘‘All beauty is truth,’’ Shaftesbury writes.
Not the truth of faithful description, which is the lower kind based on obser-
vation of a given form, but the unique truth attained by the mind’s power to
create forms of spiritual harmony. ‘‘The beautifying, not the beautified, is the
really beautiful.’’∞∫ ‘‘The beautiful, the fair, the comely, were never in the
matter, but in the art and design; never in the body itself but in the form or
forming power.’’∞Ω The ability to create beauty requires the existence of moral
harmony in the artist’s mind. To be a great poet one must first be a good man.
Lack of moral sensitivity weakens the sense of beauty: aesthetic perception
 Toward a New Conception of Art 89

is directly conditioned by moral harmony. Shaftesbury united ethics to aes-

thetics. ‘‘Arts and virtues are ‘mutually friends’—and thus the science of vir-
tuous and that of virtue itself become, in a manner, one and the same.’’≤≠
Harmony and proportion, the foundations of art, form also the ground of
morals. Moral refinement, no less than aesthetic taste, requires education.
Shaftesbury’s ideas, however influential, did not survive in their original
form. His followers transformed his spiritual empiricism into a sensational
one. For Shaftesbury, the subjective experience merely discloses the spiritual
form in which beauty resides. For Francis Hutcheson, who claims to apply
Shaftesbury’s principles, beauty consists primarily in a subjective experience.≤∞
He does distinguish the ideas from the experience of pleasure they cause: ‘‘the
ideas of beauty and harmony, like other sensible ideas, are necessarily pleasant
to us’’ (I, 3). But in his empiricist epistemology, ideas themselves have a subjec-
tive origin: they are reflections of sensations. He admits that the perception of
beauty reveals qualities inherent in the thing perceived rather than mere sensa-
tions of the perceiving mind (I, 16). But the question remains whether it is the
perception that causes objects to be beautiful or the qualities of the perceived
object. Hutcheson compares the inner sense of beauty to the senses of hearing
and seeing, ‘‘because of its affinity to the other senses’’ (I, 13). He never in-
tended to identify beauty with pleasure. Indeed, he emphasizes the objective
qualities of the form required for inducing aesthetic pleasure, such as unifor-
mity in variety, proportionality, pictorial harmony. Yet those qualities merely
‘‘occasion’’ aesthetic pleasure. The theory of beauty is thereby bound to be-
come subjective. Hume, drawing the conclusion from these principles, col-
lapsed the idea of beauty with the pleasure it causes. ‘‘Pleasure and pain . . . are
not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their
very essence.’’≤≤
Still, Hutcheson was a perceptive observer who followed his observations
wherever they might lead. Thus he radically reinterpreted the mimetic theory
of art. Art ought to imitate nature, but unless the mind idealizes nature, the
artist will not be able to answer Plato’s critical question: Why should the artist
attempt to copy poorly what nature has done well? In Hutcheson’s view, the
artist ought to imitate a natural model in such a way that it becomes a symbol
of a spiritual ideal. As Shaftesbury had suggested, in the aesthetic intuition the
mind becomes aware of the affinity between its own inner life and the outer
world. There exists a concordance between the mind’s disposition and ‘‘natu-
ral, inanimate objects.’’ ‘‘Thus a tempest at sea is often an emblem of wrath; a
plant or tree drooping under the rain of a person in sorrow—in short, every-
thing in nature, by our strange inclination to resemblance, shall be brought
to represent other things, even the most remote, especially the passions and
90 Toward a New Conception of Art

circumstances of human nature in which we are more nearly concerned’’ (IV,

4). Despite his associationist terminology—‘‘inclination to resemblance’’—
Hutcheson is already preparing the turn from imitation to expression. For
him, the model the artist imitates needs not be beautiful. The deformities of an
aging face or the monotony of a barren landscape become ‘‘beautiful’’ once the
artist or the viewer shows their congruence with a mental state and thereby
evokes the harmony that unites the order of nature with that of the mind.
Indeed, that inner harmony becomes more apparent when the model is not
physically perfect because the feeling of tension awakens the mind to the
deeper harmony between inner and outer reality. Too facile a concordance
fails to alert the mind to its own part in the aesthetic creation.

The Extension of the Aesthetic Field:

From Imitation to Expression

DIDEROT

The conflicts among different views concerning the relation between

beauty and truth made the eighteenth-century discussion of ‘‘aesthetics’’ very
lively. Most instructive in this regard are the constant changes in Diderot’s
intellectual development. As a young man he published an essay on art that
later appeared in the first volume of the Encyclopédie. In it his position hardly
differs from d’Alembert’s. ‘‘If the object leads to action, we give the name of
‘art’ to the compendium of rules governing its use and to their technical order.
If the object is merely contemplated under different aspects, the compendium
and technical order of the observations concerning their object are called
science.’’≤≥ The description exposes the utilitarian outlook of the Encyclopédie
team. But by the second volume of the Encyclopédie, in an article later pub-
lished separately as Traité du beau, Diderot had abandoned this conglomera-
tion of arts with crafts. He understood that the prospect of uniting all the
mind’s activities within a single comprehensive system (the original purpose of
the Encyclopédie) had become impossible. Instead he now attempted to inte-
grate Augustine’s objective definition of beauty with Hutcheson’s subjective
one. He concluded that the subjective ‘‘sense of beauty’’ failed to account for
the qualities inherent in the beautiful object and that beauty was based on the
objective qualities of order, proportion, and relation in the object. ‘‘I term
‘beautiful,’ independently of my existence everything that contains the power
of awakening the notion of relation in my mind; and I term ‘beautiful’ in direct
relation to myself everything that does awaken that notion.’’≤∂ Diderot thus
appears to leave the subjective element of pleasure out of the description.
 Toward a New Conception of Art 91

But then he proceeds to qualify the objectivity of the beautiful so much as to

virtually undo it altogether. The ideas of proportion and of all other ‘‘objec-
tive’’ characteristics do not exist before we perceive them, he claims. In them-
selves they ‘‘are nothing but abstractions made by our minds’’ (Oeuvres, IV,
98; Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 52). Moreover, those ideas depend on cul-
tural conditions. What the French consider beautiful, others may not. Diderot
enumerates no less than twelve varying factors that influence aesthetic judg-
ments—some of them no more than local and national conventions. Still, he
concludes, ‘‘despite all these causes of diversity in our judgment, there is no
reason at all to think that real beauty, which consists in the perception of
relations, is a creation of fantasy’’ (Oeuvres, IV, 111–12; Diderot’s Selected
Writings, p. 59). Within a given culture educated persons agree on the fact that
some relations induce aesthetic pleasure while others do not. This claim falls
far short of the thesis of objective beauty Diderot claimed to advocate. He
uncomfortably moves between the traditional objective concept of beauty and
the newer, subjective one. Much of the inconsistency in the essay is due to his
ambivalent attitude toward Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, both of whom influ-
enced him more than he was willing to concede. He meant to show that
objective qualities and subjective sense together constitute the aesthetic expe-
rience, but he did not succeed in integrating the two.
In the simultaneously published Letter on the Deaf and Dumb (1751) he
approached the subject from a different angle and accomplished a veritable
breakthrough in aesthetic theory. This short essay was written as a letter
addressed to Abbé Charles Batteux, author of The Fine Arts Reduced to a
Single Principle (1746). According to Batteux, art imitates nature, though not
nature as we actually find it ‘‘but as it can be and as it may be conceived by the
mind.’’≤∑ The French critic attempted to maintain the principle of imitation
while at the same time avoiding Plato’s objection: How could there be any
merit in imitating what is imperfect in itself? Moreover, art being a work of the
mind ought to reflect the universality of the mind’s concepts, whereas the ob-
servation of nature yields no more than singular impressions. The relation be-
tween the universal and the particular in aesthetic perception had also preoc-
cupied Batteux’s contemporary Johann Joachim Winckelmann. For the great
German classicist, the surpassing quality of Greek art had consisted in its
power to express a universal truth in a particular representation. By idealizing
an aesthetic object the mind raises that particular, imperfect object to universal
perfection. Thus the late classical statue of Antinous, besides showing a resem-
blance to Emperor Hadrian’s friend, stands as a universal icon of male beauty,
such as nature never attains in any single individual. Even more, in the tran-
scendent beauty of Leochares’ Apollo Belvedere (in the Vatican collection),
92 Toward a New Conception of Art

Winckelmann perceived how much the artist might enable nature to surpass
itself and become divine. Hence, he concluded, the artist ought not to imitate
nature directly, but only the standards of artistic representation the Greeks
have left us. The Greeks discovered the forms (‘‘the correctness of the con-
tours’’ Winckelmann calls it) through which the human figure may attain
universal beauty.≤∏ Nature as we actually observe it never reaches perfection.
The often-cited two qualities by which the art historian described Greek art—
edle Einfalt und stille Grösze (noble simplicity and silent grandeur)—both
refer to the mind.
Batteux did not know Winckelmann’s essay that appeared nine years after
his own, but the classical ideal dominated the entire epoch and he pays homage
to it in his own notion of the belle nature. Unlike Winckelmann, however, he
proved incapable of properly integrating this universal ideal with the imitation
theory, as Diderot was to remind him again and again. Diderot ironically
requested that in the next edition of his study the abbé add a chapter on what
he means by ‘‘beautiful nature,’’ ‘‘for I know there are people who agree with
me that without [it] your treatise lacks a foundation’’ (Oeuvres, IV, 43; Di-
derot’s Selected Writings, pp. 38–39). Yet Diderot himself failed to bring the
imitation theory into accord with the ideal nature of art. Tzvetan Todorov has
shown the remarkable inconsistency of both Batteux and his critic. ‘‘If imita-
tion were the only law of art, it ought to bring about the disappearance of art:
the latter would differ in no way from ‘imitated’ nature. For art to endure, the
imitation must be imperfect.’’≤π Neither Batteux nor Diderot shows how an
imperfect imitation may be beautiful!
But more important for the future of aesthetics was the groundwork Di-
derot laid for a theory of symbolic expression. Whereas his Treatise on Beauty
had still remained within the ambit of the old dispute whether beauty lies in
the thing or in the eye of the beholder, he now approached the subject from a
different angle. An attentive reading of the Letter’s untidy jumble of lin-
guistics, rhetoric, and aesthetics shows those various elements linked by an
analogy of expression. Art is not primarily imitative but expressive and em-
blematic. In poetry, the immediate subject of the dispute with Batteux, both
qualities appear in the inversion of the logical construction of sentences typical
of rational discourse. The succession of words in ancient languages, such as
Greek and Hebrew, does not follow the logical syntax but the order in which
impressions affect the speaker’s mind. The poetic syntax symbolically suggests
the order of impression. The diachronic character of all speech forces us to
break language down into segments. Scientific and ordinary modern lan-
guages (certainly modern French) reorganize those segments into a logical
order. This order no longer reflects the original impact of the impressions.
 Toward a New Conception of Art 93

Poetry alone overcomes this discursive quality by symbolizing the mind’s im-
pressions in the order of the words. It represents things as soon as it says them,
and it presents them as symbolic expressions of the mind. This emblematic
character of poetic language appears not only in the order of the words but
also in their sounds and in the rhythm of their conjunction. A poem is ‘‘a fabric
of hieroglyphs,’’ ‘‘a forest of symbols’’ (Lettre sur les sourds muets, in Oeu-
vres, IV, 34).
Connected with this thesis on linguistic symbolization Diderot advances
another, even more fundamental one, on the analogy and irreducibility of all
modes of aesthetic expression. Visual images may be aesthetically as expres-
sive as poetry, yet, contrary to the title of Batteux’s treatise, they cannot be
reduced to ‘‘a single principle.’’ Each mode of expression is different. No mode
of aesthetic symbolization can be directly transposed into another. Virgil’s
graphic description of Neptune who, disturbed by the sudden storm at the
beginning of the Aeneid (I, 124–27), raises his head above the waters would
merely look ludicrous in a painting. Diderot’s thesis anticipates Lessing’s con-
cerning the irreducible contrast between Virgil’s poetic description of Laocoön
and the Belvedere’s Hellenistic sculpture, which we shall discuss later. Di-
derot’s argument has not been lost on contemporary psychologists who came
to oppose the method of teaching the deaf-mute a surrogate form of speech
(such as lip-reading) rather than educating them in the different, more appro-
priate visual sign language.
Despite these irreducible differences, a definite analogy unites the various
modes of aesthetic expression. The analogy consists not in a similarity of the
aesthetic objects but in a comparable pattern of symbolization. Diderot sup-
ports his view of functional analogy by referring to the newly invented light-
organ that projects beams of color corresponding to musical tones. A deaf-
mute, he claims, could come to understand indirectly what speech is like by
observing the organist’s finger movements as they become instantly translated
into light. Indeed, a person of normal hearing has occasion to observe a similar
analogy among different forms of expression. When walking through an art
gallery, Diderot writes, he feels like a deaf-mute: the paintings speak a silent
language; one that essentially differs from spoken language in that each canvas
displays the whole scene at once rather than unfolding it in temporal succes-
sion, as language does.≤∫
For all his objections to the imitation theory, Diderot continued to maintain
that in some way art imitates nature. Through a detailed study of actual
paintings in France, Holland, and Germany, as well as through his reading of
Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn’s Betrachtungen über die Malerei, Diderot
gradually acquired a new respect for realistic representation. Where nature
94 Toward a New Conception of Art

serves a symbolic function, its excesses and deformities may as much stand
model to the artist, as harmony and balance. The first sentence of the Essais
sur la peinture (1766), in which he synthesized this fresh experience, sounds
like a manifesto: ‘‘La nature ne fait rien d’incorrect. Toute forme, belle et laide,
a sa cause.’’ Diderot commends Chardin’s everyday realism as an imitation
très fidèle de la nature, ‘‘the very substance of the objects, the air and the light
you take at the point of your brush and apply to the canvas’’ (Salons [1763], in
Oeuvres, IV, 265). In the Essais he applies the same rule to the portrait: to
qualify as a work of art a portrait must present more than a flattering resem-
blance. It must dare to reveal what age or smallpox has done to a face. It must
reflect individuality rather than a universal type or a moral virtue. Artistic
conventions hold no authority against nature’s primeval power (Essais, in
Oeuvres, IV, 467–69). Passions and feelings, wild nature and monsters, de-
serve to be represented as well as rational harmony, among things. ‘‘The arts of
imitation need something savage, crude, striking, and enormous’’ (Essais, in
Oeuvres, IV, 498).
We are a long way from la belle nature! But have we returned to the literalist
theory of imitation? I think not, because what the artist imitates is not in the
first place the object as simply perceived but as perceived through an emo-
tional prism. The symbolic function of the model is ‘‘purely ideal and not
borrowed from any particular image of nature’’ (Salons [1767], in Oeuvres,
IV, 524). Art that focuses entirely on rendering an accurate perception of
nature leaves out most of nature’s spiritual meaning. Instead, the artist ought
to represent nature as reflected in les grands enthousiasmes de la vie. Diderot
developed this insight in a series of critical reviews, written for Grimm’s Corre-
spondance littéraire on the yearly art exhibitions at the Louvre and later pub-
lished as Salons (Oeuvres, IV, 193–1005). His theory of expression called for a
more radical transformation of the aesthetic object than the one art critics of
his time called la belle nature. He refers to La Tour’s portraits that seem ‘‘made
of flesh and blood,’’ not in the first place because they resemble the facial
features of their models, but because they capture their spiritual identity. He
‘‘idealizes’’ nature by internalizing natural forms. Nature remains the only
model available to the artist but he must present it as reflected in ideas, feel-
ings, and memories. Nature as imitated by the artist always symbolizes an
inner state of mind. Diderot accepted the empiricist principle that all knowl-
edge is derived from sense impressions, but for him, the imagination trans-
forms those impressions into symbols of inner life. This internalization of the
impressions justifies Arthur Wilson’s paradoxical interpretation of Diderot’s
aesthetics: ‘‘When Diderot used the word ‘imitation’ as he did frequently in all
his aesthetic writings, it was in the sense more readily conveyed to twentieth
 Toward a New Conception of Art 95

century students by the word ‘expression.’ The scrupulous imitation of nature

that he called for is accomplished by expressing her.’’≤Ω The ideal model is not
derived from nature: it resides in the artist’s soul. Herbert Dieckmann, another
perceptive interpreter of Diderot, arrived at a similar conclusion: ‘‘To the
question of imitation he substitutes that of expression or, more correctly, of
the relation between ‘thought’ or the artist’s internal state and his expression
in the work.’’≥≠
Still, Diderot’s position is not free of ambiguity. Yes, he constantly reminds
his readers that copying nature has no aesthetic merit. Yes, the inspiration for
painting or sculpturing a particular scene or a particular face must entirely
come from within and thus be expressive of an inner state. Yet his sensational-
ist theory of knowledge often stands in the way of his theory of expression.
The rules of painting described in the Essais sur la peinture all insist on a
realistic rendition of things as they appear. Feelings may be conveyed only
through the choice of the physical subject—not by a transformation of the
forms of appearance. Diderot even objects to disharmonious expressions of
passion. Regardless of the subject, the artist must observe the traditional con-
ventions of harmony. Obviously the French critic’s attempt to avoid subjectiv-
ism as well as naturalism did not always succeed.
The narrowness of his aesthetic ideal also imposes strict moral norms upon
artistic expression. The author of the lascivious Family Jewels as well as of
a number of risqué stories turns surprisingly moralistic in his art criticism.
Throughout the Essais sur la peinture he insists that the moral quality of a
work of art forms an essential part of its aesthetic merit. ‘‘To render virtue
lovable, vice odious, and to expose the ridiculous—that is the project of each
honest man who picks up the pen, the brush, or the chisel’’ (Essais, in Oeuvres,
IV, 501). Linking the beautiful to the good and the true, he adds to the ancient
definition of beauty as splendor veritatis, the splendor of goodness. ‘‘The true,
the good, and the beautiful stay close to each other. If we add to one of the two
former qualities a rare, brilliant condition, the true will be beautiful and the
good will be beautiful’’ (Essais, in Oeuvres, IV, 513). Diderot despises Boucher
for being ‘‘licentious’’ and neglects Watteau for being frivolous while he
praises the often-sentimental Greuze for the moral nobility of his work (Es-
sais, in Oeuvres, IV, 500). With Diderot, nothing is ever simple, however. His
moral high-mindedness was balanced by a sensuous temperament as well as
by an ingrained skepticism concerning all values, including the ones he so
zealously defended. His own descriptions of Boucher’s canvases are more
erotic than the works themselves!
His art criticism reveals as much, if not more, about his own feelings,
moral principles, and prejudices as about the paintings he discusses. Madame
96 Toward a New Conception of Art

Necker, charmed by his subjective approach, praised Diderot’s art reviews

because she ‘‘liked painting only in poetry.’’ Others, like Barbey d’Aurevilly,
could hardly contain their irritation about the critic’s continuous intrusions.
‘‘In his novels as in his other works, he never forgets himself, himself and his
sermonizing. . . . The painter breaks through the painting to stick his head out
of a hole in the canvas to make sure that everyone sees him well and always
understands him well.’’≥∞ The charge is all too true, yet vanity may not have
been the sole reason for Diderot’s pertinacious presence. He felt so driven by
the importance of his literary mission that, indeed, he rarely dropped the
preaching tone. Art, for him, formed part of a comprehensive project to im-
prove the condition of the human race.

LESSING
It is hard to find two men who occupied more similar positions in the
aesthetic life of the eighteenth century than Lessing and Diderot. As art critics
and playwrights, both strongly influenced the ideas of their time. Both ex-
pressed themselves in an easy, conversational style. Lessing admired Diderot’s
dramas and aesthetic theories and Diderot admired Lessing’s. Yet each one
succeeded in preserving his own literary identity. Diderot was light-hearted,
sensitive, and folksy with a touch of vulgarity; Lessing more focused, serious-
minded, capable of irony and sarcasm, but hardly ever indulging in levity. The
expressive theory intimated in Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf-Mute Lessing
elaborated into a full-fledged philosophy.
His views on aesthetics are spread out over his Hamburg theater reviews
(Hamburgische Dramaturgie) and a long essay in which he compares poetry
with the plastic arts (Laocoön). I shall discuss Lessing’s dramatic work in an
appendix to chapter 5. His essay Laocoön (1766) introduces a category that
brought the centuries-old debate about the comparative merit of poetry and of
the visual arts to a close.≥≤ Beauty, Lessing concludes, is the defining charac-
teristic of the visual arts, expressiveness that of poetry. Lessing illustrates the
distinction by comparing a passage from a literary work with a recently dis-
covered Hellenistic sculpture that represented the same subject. Virgil’s Aeneid
(II, 199–224) describes how the Trojan priest Laocoön, together with his
two sons, is killed by two gigantic serpents Minerva has summoned from the
sea. Johann Winckelmann had previously compared the two works of art
(Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture, 1755).
In his view, the statue bears the composed artistic expression of the classical
period, whereas Virgil’s poem displays the uninhibited emotion characteristic
of the later, Roman age. Lessing accepted Winckelmann’s surprising inter-
pretation of the sculpture as ‘‘composed’’ and of the poem as ‘‘emotional,’’ but
 Toward a New Conception of Art 97

he rejected Winckelmann’s explanation of the difference. In his judgment, the

emotional treatment of Virgil’s poem has nothing to do with its presumed later
age, but with the specific nature of literature. Even Greek poetry of the classi-
cal age had been capable of violent expression, as Sophocles’ Philoctetes
shows. But, he argued, neither Greek nor Roman taste tolerated emotional
distortion in statuary.
The comparison between the two artistic genres presented a unique occa-
sion for testing Horace’s oft-quoted and mostly misinterpreted ut pictura
poesis (a poem must be like a picture). Lessing conjectured that Virgil’s poem
had preceded the statue in time and hence ought not be read as a description of
an existing work of art.≥≥ On a more substantial level, he argued that, since
poetry develops in time while pictorial art remains fixed in space, the passing
emotional images of poetry have a slighter impact than a picture frozen in
immobility. In a statue emotional tension lastingly distorts the subject’s fea-
tures and thus conflicts with the aesthetic harmony required in a work of art.
Traditionally beauty has been considered the dominant category of visual art.
But if beauty were the principal quality of poetry (as the later interpretation of
ut pictura poesis suggested), then none but the pictorial passages of a poem
would possess aesthetic merit, while physically or morally disturbing scenes
and portraits would detract from its aesthetic value. Homer’s description of
the ugly Thersites (Iliad, II) as well as Shakespeare’s portrait of Richard III
proves that the opposite occurs. Restricting the aesthetic to the beautiful sub-
mits poetry to an inappropriate norm.
Lessing obviously overstates his thesis: a poem must also be beautiful, and
visual art may be strongly expressive, as the Laocoön statue, contrary to
Winckelmann’s and Lessing’s assessment of it, shows. In fact, Lessing himself
refers to contemporary theorists who argued that even in the plastic arts ex-
pressiveness had become the primary law. ‘‘Truth and expression (they claim)
are art’s first law and as nature herself is ever ready to sacrifice beauty for the
sake of higher aims, so must the artist subordinate it to his general purpose
and pursue it no further than truth and expression permit’’ (chap. III, p. 19).
Lessing suspended judgment on this opinion until, after having completed the
twenty-fifth chapter of his book, he read Winckelmann’s History of Ancient
Art (1768). It fully persuaded him that the visual arts also might be expressive.
By that time he already had reached the conclusion that poetry, besides being
expressive, can and must also be beautiful, though its means for being so
differed from those of the visual arts. Poetry moves in time and is able to
describe things in motion; visual arts are static. With this distinction Lessing
exposed a more subtle difference than the one between beauty and expressive-
ness. The purely spatial nature of painting and sculpture reveals all features at
98 Toward a New Conception of Art

once, while the dynamic, temporal one of poetry develops images in the order
in which they appear. He cites Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield in which
the poet focuses on the process of forging it, rather than on the finished prod-
uct. The principal merit of Lessing’s theory consists in having enlarged the
aesthetic canon with an essential category, that of expressiveness.

REYNOLDS
In his annual discourses to the Royal Academy in London, its founder,
Joshua Reynolds, recorded the successive phases and transitions of his and his
contemporaries’ assessments of the meaning and quality of painting in the
preceding two centuries. As the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Claude Lor-
rain, and Salvator Rosa passed his review from year to year, no study reflects
more accurately the changing taste of the eighteenth century, especially (but
not exclusively) in Britain, than the collected Discourses. Reynolds’s aesthetic
eclecticism as well as his constant experimentation with different styles pre-
disposed him to be receptive to any new current. His early concept of artistic
beauty may be traced back to Shaftesbury’s Platonic notion of an ideal nature.
‘‘Instead of endeavoring to amuse mankind with the minute neatness of his
imitations, he [the painter] must endeavor to improve them by the grandeur of
his ideas. . . . All the arts receive their perfection from an ideal beauty, superior
to what is to be found in individual nature.’’≥∂ Like Shaftesbury, Reynolds
links the beautiful to the good (IX, 142). Together they constitute the true. It is
in fact the search for truth that directs the search for beauty and goodness.
Moral virtue, he claims, serves as an indispensable condition for a proper
assessment of aesthetic quality. ‘‘It has been often observed that the good and
virtuous man alone can acquire this true and just relish even of works of art’’
(VII, 109). On the other side, any aesthetic imperfection, anything that is too
particular or deformed or deviating from the common form, falls short of a
true representation of nature and is therefore related to a moral mistake. The
sculpture of classical Greece, which captured this ideal form, ought to serve as
a model (III, 27). Shaftesbury himself might have written this.
Yet once Reynolds starts discussing actual paintings, his high moral ideal
often takes second place to the traditional, formalist norms of harmony, bal-
ance, and so on. According to idealist principles, Michelangelo ought tot be a
greater painter than Raphael: he takes ‘‘a firm hold and entire possession of
the mind as to make us desire nothing else’’ (V, 63). Nevertheless, Reynolds
concludes, Raphael deserves the palm. Why? Because his work burns with ‘‘a
more pure, regular, and chaste flame’’ (V, 63). Over the years the author
gradually shifted his preference and, in the conclusion of his final discourse,
completely reversed his position: ‘‘I should desire that the last words which I
 Toward a New Conception of Art 99

should pronounce in this Academy, and from this place, might be the name
of—Michael Angelo’’ (XV, 242). Through the preceding years, however, Rey-
nolds continuously wavered between Neoplatonic idealism, scholastic formal-
ism, and preromantic expressiveness. This explains why he looked down upon
the realist art of the Flemish and Dutch masters, who ‘‘depart from the great
purposes of painting, catching at applause by inferior qualities’’ (IV, 45).
Rubens’s work in particular, with its fleshy bodies, comes in for criticism. But a
year later he changes his judgment to one of admiration for the perfect har-
mony of Rubens’s composition and color (V, 66). In his early years he consid-
ered landscapes subject for a lesser genius, unless they serve as background to
a historical scene or at least allude to such a scene. Obviously Reynolds had
not yet discovered the sublime in nature, which he was to praise so highly in
his later discourses.≥∑
What must have puzzled even his contemporaries was Reynolds’s low opin-
ion of the great Venetians, especially Veronese and Tintoretto. Though they
perfectly accomplished what they attempted to achieve, their ideal, in his
opinion, was still too pedestrian to rank them with the ‘‘noble schools’’ (V, 45).
Their splendor of style, so pleasing ‘‘to the eye or sense,’’ their dramatic alter-
nation of light and shade, their brilliant colors dazzle more than they reflect
‘‘the ideal beauty of form’’ (IV, 49). Yet even while he was writing those
controversial judgments, some doubt began to invade Reynolds’s idealism,
and later, in the same fourth discourse, he praised the ‘‘senatorial dignity’’ of
the school. ‘‘The Venetian is indeed the most splendid of the schools of ele-
gance; and it is not without reason, that the best performances in this lower
school are valued higher than the second-rate performances of those above
them: for every picture has value when it has a decided character, and is
excellent in its kind’’ (IV, 50). Faint praise for great masters! But enough to
show how opposing principles were combating each other in Reynolds’s mind.
Particularly revealing in this respect is his assessment of Salvator Rosa, the
seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter of dark, dramatic landscapes and sea-
scapes. He had anticipated much of what Reynolds himself longed to paint but
what his own aesthetic formalism never allowed him to do. ‘‘He gives us a
peculiar cast of nature, which though void of all grace, elegance, and simplic-
ity, though it has nothing of that elevation and dignity which belongs to the
grand style, yet, has that sort of dignity which belongs to savage and unculti-
vated nature’’ (V, 65). Rosa and a few artists like him form the link between
the classical ideal of moral greatness and the preromantic one of emotional
expressiveness. The tension he felt in the great Baroque works of art led Rey-
nolds to reconceive the notion of genius that played such an important part in
late eighteenth-century aesthetics.
100 Toward a New Conception of Art

Although in the earlier discourses artistic genius had included formal har-
mony in color and composition as well as moral grandeur, in the later ones it
tends to move beyond harmony. (I write, ‘‘tends to’’ because nothing is ever
definitive for this versatile critic!) ‘‘Genius is supposed to be a power of pro-
ducing excellencies, which are out of the rules of art; a power which no pre-
cepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire’’ (VI, 74). ‘‘Genius,’’ then,
refers to the capacity to achieve a qualitative leap in aesthetic excellence that
cannot be justified by established rules or conventional ideals. It still follows
rules, both formal and moral, but they are rules of its own making (V, 76). As
such it surpasses both conventional moral ideals and classicist harmony. But it
reconciles them on a higher level. In this new conception of genius the expres-
sive concept of art definitively breaks through. The aesthetic weight shifts
altogether from the imitation of external nature to ‘‘the nature and internal
fabric and organization of the human mind and imagination’’ (VII, 99). Na-
ture remains the fountain of all forms, but she reveals her inner secret only to
the mind and hand of the artistic genius. ‘‘Thus the highest beauty of form
must be taken from nature; but it is an art of long deduction and great experi-
ence, to know how to find it’’ (VI, 80). Copying nature’s appearances is no art,
but merely ‘‘a scanty entertainment for the imagination’’ (VII, 102).
With his reinterpretation of the concept of taste Reynolds completes his
move toward an expressive theory of aesthetics. Taste, according to him,
consists not in sensitiveness to the formal qualities of a work of art (harmony,
composition, etc.), but in some of that ability to partake of nature’s creativity,
which characterizes the artist of genius. ‘‘Genius and taste, in their common
acceptation, appear to be very nearly related; the difference lies only in this,
that genius has super-added to it a habit of power of execution; or we may say,
that taste, when this power is added changes its name, and is called genius’’
(VII, 96). Still Reynolds never became an unbridled romantic. Even artistic
genius must obey certain established rules, without which nothing would be
left but ‘‘caprice and casualty’’ (VII, 99). But these rules differ from the guide-
lines of academic training. Unfortunately Sir Joshua remains exceedingly
vague in defining them. The principles of orderly composition, harmony of
light and shade, and a happy blending of colors are too general to function in
this capacity.
Reynolds’s theory suffers from a discrepancy between the sensationalist
theory of knowledge, to which he persistently turns for philosophical support,
and a concept of aesthetic truth that in fact has its base in the creative imagina-
tion. Thus, after having asserted that the criterion of beauty resides not in the
external form of things but in the mind and the imagination, he immediately
hastens back to Lockean orthodoxy in denying the imagination any creative
 Toward a New Conception of Art 101

power. ‘‘The imagination is incapable of producing any thing originally of

itself, and can only vary and combine those ideas with which it is furnished by
means of the senses’’ (VII, 107). Inconsistencies of this nature show the eclectic
as well as the transitional character of Reynolds’s work. Over the years he bor-
rowed from various aesthetic theories, without fully embracing any single one.
In the earlier discourses he increasingly stressed the subjective and ‘‘moral’’
factor. Not until he expressed his unambiguous preference of Michelangelo in
the final discourse did he definitively embrace the principles of a new era in
aesthetics. With Kant the expressive theory of art at last received its theoretical
justification.

On the Way to a Symbolic Theory of Art

THE CONCEPT OF TASTE AND THE BIRTH OF AESTHETICS:

FROM SHAFTESBURY TO BAUMGARTEN

The term ‘‘taste’’ current in the vocabulary of eighteenth-century aes-

thetics varied in meaning from one author to another. For Boileau and Fon-
tenelle, it had consisted in a capacity of judging art in accordance with right
reason, that is, with objective principles of harmony, verisimilitude, and in-
sight. A famous article (‘‘Goût’’) in the Encyclopédie, begun by Montesquieu
and completed by Voltaire with an appendix by d’Alembert, wavers between
an objective, rational, and a mildly subjective interpretation. Voltaire argued
that taste requires more than an acquaintance with the principles of harmony:
‘‘One must feel beauty and be moved by it.’’ But aesthetic sensitivity needs to
be educated. A genuine judgment of taste must be able to claim the consensus
of all educated persons. Voltaire still assumed that the foundation of beauty
lies in the things themselves.
For Montesquieu, however, taste had consisted in the pleasure one takes in
an object without regard to its use. ‘‘When we find pleasure in something that is
useful for us, we say that it is good; when we find pleasure in seeing it, without
discerning for the moment any utility in it, we call it beautiful.’’≥∏ Not a word
about the objective qualities of the beautiful here! ‘‘Perfection in the art consists
in presenting objects to us in such a way that they cause us as much pleasure as
possible’’ (‘‘Goût,’’ p. 343). Montesquieu admits that the work of art must
meet certain objective conditions, but he explains them as derived from pri-
mary sense impressions. Thus the pleasure we find in symmetry would derive
from the fact that symmetry is ‘‘useful to the soul and able to further its func-
tions’’ (‘‘Goût,’’ p. 349). This concept of taste, based mostly on beauty’s objec-
tive effects, opened up a space for perceptions, feelings, and emotions—those
102 Toward a New Conception of Art

subjective elements that Boileau’s theory of le vrai seul had not been able to
accommodate. But how could aesthetic pleasure preserve that universality
which art critics claimed for taste? In an appendix to the Encyclopédie article,
d’Alembert tried to resolve that problem, arguing that the ‘‘true philosopher’’
knows how to distinguish the universal element in taste from the conventional
one and thus to determine which pleasures are genuine and which are ‘‘illusory
pleasures’’ (‘‘Goût,’’ p. 366). The term ‘‘illusory’’ reveals the bad conscience of
the rationalist who, afraid of the anarchy of pleasure, withdraws by objective
qualification much of what he had granted to subjective feeling.
In Britain the concept of taste had similarly wavered between an objective
and a subjective meaning. Shaftesbury, who with Addison made the word
fashionable, used it in defense of objective norms that he felt were threatened
by the subjective relativism of Locke’s epistemology. Far from being at the
mercy of arbitrary feelings, taste for him consisted in the awareness of the ob-
jective harmony that unites the physical cosmos with human feelings and emo-
tions.≥π Shaftesbury vaguely intuited what was to become the fundamental
principle of Kant’s theory of the beautiful, namely, that the aesthetic expe-
rience originates in the primary awareness of harmony between the faculties
of the mind and the represented object. For the British critic also, the dis-
interested attitude necessary for aesthetic taste demands a detachment that
does not come naturally but must be learned. In addition, taste requires a sense
of moral grandeur and even a feeling of tension between the self and its sur-
roundings. Only the awareness of an unresolved contrast induces the mind
to search for that deeper harmony which causes the properly aesthetic plea-
sure. The contemplation of uncultivated nature may arouse or heighten that
tension. ‘‘Even the rude rocks, the mossy caverns, the irregular unwrought
grottos and broken falls of waters, with all the horrid graces of the wilderness
itself, as representing Nature more, will be the more engaging, and appear
with a magnificence beyond the formal mockery of princely gardens.’’≥∫
With Hume the pendulum swung in the opposite direction and the notion of
taste became wholly subjective. According to his early Treatise on Human
Nature (1738), the aesthetic experience depends on ‘‘such an order and con-
struction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by
custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul.’’≥Ω
In a later essay, ‘‘Of the Standard of Taste’’ (1757), he moderates that subjec-
tivism somewhat by referring to the ‘‘general rules of beauty.’’ But the rules
themselves are drawn from ‘‘the observation of what pleases or displeases.’’∂≠
To speak of ‘‘real’’ beauty is as fruitless as ‘‘to pretend to ascertain the real
sweet or real bitter.’’ Nonetheless, Hume considers the judgment of taste uni-
versal. But he ascribes this quality to the similarity of the subjective processes
 Toward a New Conception of Art 103

of thinking and feeling, which vary little from one person to another. Hence
the paradox that, though judgments of taste are in principle universal, only
few people are endowed with enough aesthetic sensitivity properly to evaluate
a work of art.
Neither French nor British critics had succeeded in satisfactorily incorporat-
ing their analyses of the aesthetic experience within a general theory of knowl-
edge. To do so was Kant’s project in The Critique of Judgment. He thereby
relied heavily on the work of Alexander Baumgarten, the philosopher who
had first used the term ‘‘aesthetics’’ for referring to the science of the beautiful.
In his Aesthetica (1750), the rationalist Baumgarten intended to complete
Wolff’s theory of knowledge that had included little about sense perception
and imagination, though both play an essential part in the epistemic process.
Together they constitute what Baumgarten calls the ‘‘aesthetic’’ knowledge,
the perfectio cognitionis sensitivae.∂∞ This knowledge lacks the objective qual-
ity of conceptual cognition, but in the intuition of harmony it grasps the unity
in the multiplicity of phenomena that, according to Wolff, was a distinctive
quality of truth. In contrast to reason, however, the aesthetic intuition never
moves beyond perceiving the harmony between the universal and the particu-
lar. It experiences this harmony but is incapable of rationally justifying it. The
aesthetic judgment, then, can claim no objectivity. Still the fact that most
educated people agree on the principles of art indicates that the aesthetic
experience occurs in accordance with certain rational norms.
On its own level art aims at attaining what constitutes the objective of
reason, namely, subsuming diversity under unity, particularity under univer-
sality. Though not rational in itself, the aesthetic judgment is nonetheless
analogous to the rational one (§ 42). Baumgarten grounds the analogy be-
tween logical truth and aesthetic perception on the rationalist assumption that
the actual world as perceived by senses and imagination must in all respects
correspond to the laws of the mind. Aesthetic perception, in an obscure yet
intuitive awareness of the logical harmony of the world, presents what ought
to be (in the rational order of things). Baumgarten’s Aesthetica overcomes
narrow rationalism and inconsistent subjectivism by granting aesthetics an
indispensable place in the realm of truth. In his earlier Reflections on Poetry
(1735), where the term ‘‘aesthetica’’ first appears, he had argued that a good
poem must be like the world: the whole ought to be harmonious and the parts
well ordered. Yet the poem need not refer to the real world: it constitutes a
virtual world of its own, independent of any external reality.
The problems inherent in such a comparison appeared soon enough. De-
spite his sympathy for Baumgarten’s aesthetic conception, Kant noted that a
work of art can never be entirely ‘‘pure’’ or self-sufficient. Aesthetic forms
104 Toward a New Conception of Art

always refer to a world beyond the work of art. This is particularly the case
with poetry. Words continue to bear the mark of their original destination: to
articulate our life world. A poem’s meaning, then, moves inevitably beyond
the virtual aesthetic reality that it construes. Still Baumgarten’s aestheticism
proved to possess a durable staying power. Even in the early part of the twen-
tieth century some art critics still restricted a poem’s significance to a self-
contained meaning. In isolating the poem from the ‘‘real’’ world the German
philosopher did away with the imitation theory, which, despite many modi-
fications and reinterpretations, had remained dominant among critics. But he
did so at the expense of art’s ontological significance.∂≤

THE KANTIAN REVOLUTION: INTUITION AND GENIUS

For Kant, as for Baumgarten, the judgment of taste belonged in the
realm of truth. Art and beauty present ideas that, because of their rich emo-
tional content, cannot be conceptualized. At the beginning of his ‘‘Analytic of
the Beautiful,’’ the first part of the Critique of Judgment,∂≥ Kant explains how
the aesthetic judgment differs from the objective, cognitive one ‘‘In order to
discern whether or not something is beautiful we do not relate the representa-
tion through reason to the object for knowledge. Rather, we relate it through
the imagination (perhaps in conjunction with reason) to the subject and its
feeling of pleasure or displeasure’’ (KUK, § 1; AB, pp. 3–4). In objective
knowledge the imagination serves a purely instrumental function: it unifies the
multiple data that enter consciousness through the senses into a single repre-
sentation. In the process of thinking the mind is hardly aware of this opera-
tion. But if the mind, instead of moving directly to full objectification, lingers
at this intermediate stage of the imagination a different, nonconceptual repre-
sentation emerges. This intermediate level, according to Kant, is the birthplace
of aesthetics. The representations constituted at this level hold the middle
between objective concepts and sense perceptions, but they also cause a plea-
surable feeling of harmony between the mind and its representations. With
respect to them the mind has not yet achieved that intellectual distance essen-
tial to objective cognition. They remain, so to speak, inherent in the mind
itself, in such a way that the mind can freely play with this product of its
creative imagination without being tied by the fixed rules of objective reality.
Kant insists that the concomitant feeling of pleasure does not constitute the
essence of the aesthetic experience. It merely follows the judgment of taste.
Analogous to the cognitive judgment and in contrast to feelings of pleasure,
the aesthetic judgment is universally valid, even though it lacks the irrefut-
ability of logical propositions or scientific conclusions. ‘‘There can be no ob-
jective rule of taste which determines by concepts whether an object is beauti-
 Toward a New Conception of Art 105

ful. For all judgments from this source [i.e., taste] are aesthetic, that is to say,
their determining ground is the subject’s feeling and not any concept of an
object. Any effort to search for a principle of taste that would furnish the
universal criterion of the beautiful in terms of definite concepts is bound to be
sterile, for what is sought is impossible and self-contradictory’’ (KUK, § 17;
AB, p. 39). Nonetheless, someone who judges with taste may assume his
feeling to be universally communicable without having to prove it by logical
arguments.
Kant’s theory is not subjectivist in the way Hume’s notion of aesthetic plea-
sure is. Yet the question remains: Which objective, universal criteria justify the
mind in considering an object beautiful, since the aesthetic experience consists
entirely in the mind’s subjective response to it? Without some such criteria it
becomes impossible to distinguish a genuine work of art from a flawed one or
even from an ordinary object. Kant therefore was forced to present certain
specific qualities that distinguish representations capable of inducing aesthetic
experiences from others. One of them was that of ideal form. This criterion
differs from the belle nature of the French and English writers, which had been
purely objective. For Kant, the aesthetic potential of an object depends on the
spiritual power the artist has been able to invest in it, not on pre-established
objective characteristics. A withered tree or a dying animal was not botani-
cally or zoologically ideal, but Ruysdael and Rembrandt repeatedly made
it into an ideal expression of a state of mind. Kant complicates matters by
adding the condition that the ideal form excludes serious deviations from a
general type. This criterion of a fixed ideal form appears to conflict with the
subjective nature of his aesthetics.
More consistent with his theory and far more important for the modern
theory of aesthetics was Kant’s insight that the aesthetic representation func-
tions as a symbol of the mind. In the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Kant had described symbols as representations that refer to ideas to which no
direct sensuous intuition corresponds, such as the idea of God. Those repre-
sentations then substitute for sense intuitions of the actual object. They do
so on the ground of ‘‘a similarity of relations between two quite different
things.’’∂∂ Aesthetic representations fulfill a similar function. They symbolize
ideas too rich in content and too indeterminate in form to be adequately
expressed in concepts. The mind thereby gains some insight in ideas it cannot
prove to be true or even conceptually articulate. The restrictions inherent in
Kant’s epistemology prevent him from calling them ‘‘true.’’ But when he intro-
duced the well-established notions of genius and of the sublime into his aes-
thetic theory he opened the door to a more fully symbolic understanding of
those ideas.
106 Toward a New Conception of Art

No term had become more popular in eighteenth-century criticism than that

of ‘‘genius.’’ Much of this popularity may be traced—again—to Shaftesbury
who used it sparingly but appears nevertheless most responsible for its modern
usage. The origins of the term go back to the Latin ingenium: what is innate or
belongs to a person’s nature or inborn talent (Herder applied the term to what
distinguishes one nation from another) and the related term genius (the pro-
tective spirit of a person or place). But, the ancients had no single term for the
concept of artistic genius. They somehow indirectly referred to it, as when
Plato in the Ion described it as a kind of divine madness that takes uncontrolla-
ble possession of the poet, or when Roman rhetoricians claimed that rules do
not make art (Poeta nascitur, orator fit). In the eighteenth century the term
often served as counterpart to the observation of rules in aesthetic creation.
Great artists are rarely aware of rules and often violate them. In Shaftesbury’s
Neoplatonic interpretation, genius consists primarily in the artistic power of
expression. The artistic genius re-creates the inner form of things and thereby
imitates nature in its spontaneous creativity.∂∑ Joseph Addison also stressed
the difference between the traditional concept of art as imitation of nature and
the modern one according to which it imitates nature’s creative power and
thereby adds to nature.∂∏
Ever since Shaftesbury, the concepts of genius and of taste had been related.
Taste consists in the ability to experience beauty, but genius alone creates
beauty. Still, taste must guide genius to the right project and assist in achieving
it. The article ‘‘Génie’’ in the Encyclopédie, attributed to Saint-Lambert but
thoroughly rewritten by Diderot, opposes genius to taste. Genius is all natural,
taste merely the result of ‘‘study and time.’’ Shakespeare may occasionally lack
taste, but he possesses genius. Similarly a thinker of genius may at times
neglect the rules of logic (the ‘‘taste’’ of reason), but he introduces new ideas.
‘‘There are few errors in Locke and too few truths in Lord Shaftesbury. Yet the
former is no more than a comprehensive, penetrating, and just mind, while the
latter is a genius of first order; Locke saw, Shaftesbury created, built, edi-
fied.’’∂π Pope also, in the preface to his translation of Homer’s Iliad, identified
genius with an extended comprehensiveness of the imagination.’’ But it was
the Scottish philosopher Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste (1759) followed
by his Essay on Genius (1774) that mostly influenced Kant’s notion of genius.
Gerard considered inventiveness the primary quality of the imagination.∂∫ The
artist invents associations rather than finding them: he ‘‘calls in from all quar-
ters the ideas that are necessary for executing his designs.’’∂Ω
In his Anthropology (1798) Kant praises Gerard for having perceived the
creative power of the productive imagination, which had played such an im-
portant part in The Third Critique. There he had described genius as ‘‘the
 Toward a New Conception of Art 107

innate mental disposition (ingenium) through which nature gives the rule to
art’’ (KUK, § 46; Bernard, p. 150). Yet Kant adds a surprising specification:
works of genius become models, ‘‘not to be copied but to be imitated’’ (KUK, §
47; Bernard, p. 152). Genius, then, though itself above the rules, sets up rules
for others to follow. This paradoxical conclusion (Does genius not exclude
imitation?) makes sense only if we remember that for Kant, even the artist of
genius must be directed by taste, even though he may take some liberties with
established rules. ‘‘Taste, like judgment in general, is the discipline (or train-
ing) of genius. It severely clips its wings, and makes it cultured and polished.
But, at the same time, it gives guidance, as to where and how far it may extend
itself if it is to remain purposive’’ (KUK, § 50; Bernard, p. 163). Kant’s notion
of genius creates the conditions for genuine aesthetic truth. The great artist
raises art beyond subjective experience to where it becomes symbolic of great
ideas. Kant here approaches a fully symbolic theory of art.∑≠ But in the end he
fails to overcome the subjective interpretation of aesthetics. When he describes
genius as ‘‘the innate mental disposition through which nature gives rule to
art,’’ one may wonder whether ‘‘nature’’ means more than the fundamental
structure of the mind itself.

THE SUBLIME AND THE BEAUTIFUL

The three most common categories of eighteenth-century aesthetics—
taste, genius, and the sublime—complement one another. A particularly close
relation links genius to the sublime. In the sublimity of nature and morality,
genius finds its inspiration. Many critics of the Enlightenment therefore re-
garded sublimity in a work of art the mark of genius. The term ‘‘sublime’’
entered aesthetic theory through the Latin translation of a Greek treatise on
‘‘high style’’ in rhetoric. Its third-century anonymous author (Longinus [?])
located the sources of the sublime style in the soul’s ‘‘invincible love for all that
is great and more divine than ourselves,’’ which induces it to cross ‘‘the bound-
aries of the surrounding world.’’∑∞ Rediscovered in the sixteenth century, the
tract was translated into Latin in 1572 and became popular through Boileau’s
French translation (1674). In the notes he added, Boileau extended the cate-
gory of the sublime beyond rhetoric and applied it to consciousness itself.
Great thinking was more sublime than great style. Moreover, the French critic
traced the origin of both meanings to an objective quality in nature itself:
the sublimity of nature evokes great thoughts, strong emotions, and noble
expressions.
In England the idea first received a more specifically aesthetic content. Ac-
cording to Samuel E. Monk’s classic treatise on the subject, ‘‘the sublime tended
to become the all-inclusive category for those objects and these emotions which
108 Toward a New Conception of Art

the strict neo-classic doctrine could not admit as beautiful, but which English-
men were traditionally and constitutionally [!] ready to accept as of aesthetic
value.’’∑≤ For Shaftesbury, as for Addison and Burke, the consciousness of the
sublime stems from the tension between the soul and the surrounding nature.
Thus, wild and savage nature arouses the soul to strong emotions and mag-
nanimous feelings. Joseph Addison argues (in twelve issues of The Spectator)
that the sight of vast expanses in nature makes the mind aware of its own
boundlessness. ‘‘A spacious horizon is an image of liberty, where the eye has
room to range abroad, to expatiate at large in the immensity of its views.’’∑≥ Yet
it was the young Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) (begun and virtually com-
pleted when he was still an undergraduate at Trinity College) who defined the
sublime’s distinct character by separating it from the beautiful. A representa-
tion that causes emotions of terror or of grandeur has little in common with the
beautiful, though it still falls within the aesthetic range.
Remembering Lessing’s discussion of the expressive character of literature
(in Laocoön), one would expect the sublime to be primarily a poetic category.
Poetry alone was fit to express strong emotions. Yet by the end of the eigh-
teenth century many felt that the grandeur and terror of nature could be more
forcefully presented in painting than in words. No poetic description would
equal a pictorial representation of the awe-inspiring power of nature. But to
achieve the full emotional effect of this power, painters ought not to be satis-
fied with a faithful representation of scenery; they had to intensify certain
aspects and exclude others until their picture of nature reflected the soul’s
inner landscape. Salvator Rosa was considered a master of this pictorial ex-
pressionism. British painters, influenced by him, amplified the power of nature
by the ‘‘architectural sublime’’ of solitary buildings, Gothic cathedrals, and,
above all, ruins of abbeys and castles. A landscape could hardly be sublime
without some reference to history: a dilapidated remnant of the past, an allu-
sion to an ancient battle or hero. In the end, it was not nature itself, but nature
as related to the soul that interested them. Such romantic canvases as Joseph
Turner’s Hannibal Crossing the Alps and John Martin’s Deluge triptych show
dwarflike humans struggling with the titanic powers of nature. The pursuit of
the sublime formed a natural transition between the art of the Enlightenment
and that of Romanticism.∑∂ The morally sublime came to consist in actions
undertaken with strong passion and carried through with extraordinary cour-
age, even if they conflicted with accepted moral norms. Great crimes may
require as much moral energy as deeds of heroic virtue.∑∑
Here also Kant provided the definitive expression. In his early Observations
on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763),∑∏ Kant had followed Burke
 Toward a New Conception of Art 109

in attributing the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime to different
mental states. But while Burke links the sublime primarily to emotions of
terror, Kant associates it mostly with moral feelings. For him, courage, hon-
esty, universal affection, and, in general, ‘‘true virtue,’’ more than ragged
mountain peaks, raging storms, and visions of Milton’s infernal kingdom,
evoke sublime feelings. In Kant’s moral writings, the Groundwork for the
Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), he
attributes the sublime to the moral will. It consists primarily in an attitude
rather than a feeling, though the moral attitude itself produces sublime feel-
ings.∑π In the lengthy and profound ‘‘Analytic of the Sublime’’ that appears in
the later Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant also refers to nature as sublime
but always in connection with the person’s unique dignity, which surpasses the
majesty of nature. There also he compares the beautiful with the sublime, as
Addison and Burke had done. But he traces the difference to his own distinc-
tion between understanding and reason. The beautiful symbolizes an indefi-
nite concept of the understanding; the sublime an indefinite idea of reason.
The former does so by means of finite forms; the latter through the absence of
form.
In beauty, imagination and intellect attain a state of balance. In the sublime,
the imagination strains this balance to a point where it threatens to disrupt the
aesthetic harmony altogether. This tension between idea and representation
produces the experience of the sublime. While the imagination enjoys free play
in the experience of the beautiful, in that of the sublime the idea does ‘‘violence
to the imagination’’ through a vision that both attracts and repels (KUK, § 23;
Bernard, pp. 82–84). No image, no aspect of nature is sublime in itself: it only
becomes so when the mind recognizes the disproportion between idea and
representation. In various ways artists and poets evoke this excess of mind
over nature, of idea over image. They may do so by giving their subject propor-
tions that exceed the capacity of the imagination and thereby suggest the idea
of the infinite (ibid., § 25–26), or by painting or describing scenes of over-
whelming power (threatening rocks, volcanoes, waterfalls) that oppress the
imagination yet make the mind aware of its superiority over nature (KUK,
§ 28; Bernard, pp. 99–101). Or they may depict desolate spaces that awaken
the soul to its own boundlessness. All such images drive the mind into itself.
For Kant, the sublime remains essentially a subjective experience.∑∫
The experience of the sublime conveys an awareness of the ‘‘unconditional’’
that lies at the root of the moral act. ‘‘In fact, a feeling of the sublime in nature
cannot well be thought without combining therewith a mental disposition
which is akin to the moral’’ (KUK, § 29; Bernard, p. 109). Still, the feeling of
the sublime intrinsically differs from the moral consciousness, which requires
110 Toward a New Conception of Art

a definite idea of the good: it merely establishes an analogy. Kant had drawn
attention to this analogy when he compared the sublimity of the starry sky
with that of the moral law. For him, strong affections remain merely ‘‘senti-
mental’’ as long as they lack a moral orientation (KUK, § 29; Bernard, p. 114).
Feelings and emotions remain, by their very nature, private and subjective. Yet
as they form part of an aesthetic judgment they command a universal assent.
According to Kant, they could not do so without being linked to some a priori
principle. In the case of the sublime that principle consists in their reference,
direct or indirect, to a moral absolute (KUK, § 29; Bernard, pp. 119–20).
Kant’s analogy between the moral and the aesthetic consciousness indicates
the extent to which by the end of the eighteenth century the idea of freedom
had come to dominate the entire spiritual life of the period.
Kant’s theory marks a major step forward in the direction of a symbolic
interpretation of aesthetics. In the Critique of Pure Reason he had defined a
symbol as an empirical intuition that assists the mind in representing an idea
that eludes the mind’s comprehension. In the Critique of Judgment he con-
siders all aesthetic representations to be symbolic. All present images of ideas
that cannot be articulated in concepts (KUK, § 59; Bernard, p. 197). In the
ordinary aesthetic representation the analogy between intuition and idea re-
mains vague. The symbolic character appears more directly in the sublime
where the ideal content dominates the entire representation. Still, even in the
case of the sublime, it falls short of being fully symbolic. Essential to a full
symbol is that the image participate in the truth to which it analogously refers.
This, in Kant’s judgment, the aesthetic feeling never achieves: it remains an
external illustration of the idea, albeit particularly in the case of the sublime, a
necessary one. A fully symbolic interpretation of art would require a more
intimate unity between image and idea than Kant’s aesthetics was able to
grant.
Where Kant failed, Goethe, largely on Kantian grounds, succeeded. A dis-
cussion of his aesthetic theory falls beyond the limits of this study, yet a short
reference to his work may suggest how thoroughly Kant’s thought had pre-
pared the terrain. The German poet united image and idea within the aesthetic
intuition. At first he saw this unity realized only in the human form. Echoing
Winckelmann’s rule, ‘‘The highest subject of art for the thoughtful person is
the human form,’’ the young Goethe wrote, ‘‘The highest purpose of art is to
show the human form, as sensuously significant as possible.’’∑Ω Later he ex-
tended the aesthetic synthesis from human nature to all of nature, thereby
uniting the two teleological models that Kant’s Critique of Judgment had still
kept separate: the teleology of nature and that of art. The work of art presents
a sensuous image with a spiritual meaning comparable to the immanent teleol-
 Toward a New Conception of Art 111

ogy of organic nature. Eventually Goethe came to consider art the expression
of nature itself. Reviewing his poetic development, he writes in Dichtung und
Wahrheit: ‘‘I had reached the point where I came to regard the poetic talent
that inhabits me entirely as the voice of nature.’’∏≠ Here the teleology of nature
and the harmony of art stem from a single source. ‘‘The highest works of art
are also the highest works of nature as articulated by the human [mind] in
accordance with true and natural laws.’’∏∞ In these words, written after con-
versations with the poet Karl-Philipp Moritz, Goethe appears to embrace a
Platonic ideal of beauty. Yet he steadfastly denied any separation between the
universal idea and the particular image. The image represents the entire uni-
versal type. ‘‘The particular is always subject to the universal; the universal
must always suit the particular.’’∏≤ Rendering the universal concrete, raising
the particular to universal significance, seeing the eternal in the transient—
that is for Goethe the goal of artistic genius. In that also consists the essence of
the aesthetic symbol. ‘‘Symbolism transforms appearance into idea, idea into
image, in such a manner that the idea remains infinitely active and yet unat-
tainable in the image.’’∏≥
I conclude. The eighteenth century raised beauty to an idea of truth. Starting
from an objectivist conception in which artistic truth consisted in an imitation
of reality, aesthetics soon adopted such subjective experiences as aesthetic
pleasure and taste as expressions of an inner truth. Concepts like genius and
sublime that had emerged like wild shoots initially resisted assimilation. Once
they became integrated with the traditional objective and subjective inter-
pretations, they played an essential part in moving aesthetic theory in a sym-
bolic direction. Kant who, in this domain also, brought together what an
entire century had collected, in the end proved incapable of tying all the ele-
ments together. The next generation with the symbolic philosophies of Goe-
the, Schelling, and Hegel completed what he had prepared.
 5

The Moral Crisis

In chapter 1, I expressed reservations about applying the term ‘‘crisis’’

with its modern negative meaning to eighteenth-century culture as a whole.
The questioning of the traditional foundations of morality, however, definitely
caused a crisis. In France, libertinism flourished among the rich and the edu-
cated. During the reign of Louis XIV much of the Court was thoroughly
corrupt—from the king’s own brother down. Corruption increased during the
regency period and the reign of Louis XV. England also passed through a
period of moral decline. The axiomatic beliefs that had supported traditional
moral principles had become dubious. In the wake of the scientific revolution,
philosophers started developing a theory of the person modeled after the sci-
ence of nature. David Hume, who did this most consistently, understood that
in a purely empirical science of the person the concept of obligation became
problematic. Science justifies what is. But it cannot make rules of what ought
to be.∞ The term ‘‘law’’ changed its meaning from being absolutely normative,
as it had been in moral discourse, to descriptive, referring to what always
occurs or what by a necessity inherent in the nature of things must occur.
Naturalists like La Mettrie and d’Holbach interpreted the general law of sur-
vival that governs the entire animal world as the supreme rule of human
conduct. Few embraced this extreme naturalism, but many accepted the un-
derlying principle that no moral absolutes exist.

112
 The Moral Crisis 113

The ensuing moral predicament was unprecedented. Socrates, Plato, and

Aristotle, as well as the Hebrew prophets and Christian theologians, had felt
the need to justify the rules by which they lived or ought to live. But they had
felt no need to question the foundations of those rules. Ethical principles had
changed little in more than a millennium. After Europeans ceased to agree on
the foundations of ethical life, however, a number of different systems sprang
up. Within the century that began with the publication of Spinoza’s Ethics
(1678) and concluded with that of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (1788),
ethical thought gave birth to most of the theories that continue to influence
our thinking today. In the following pages I shall consider the three major
schools: the rationalist one, the theory of moral sense and its slide into utilitar-
ianism, and the new interpretation of the moral law.

Rationalism and Its Deconstruction

SPINOZA AND MODERN RATIONALISM

Benedict Spinoza (1632–77), the greatest moral thinker in the rational-

ist tradition, accomplished the singular feat of construing an ethical theory
without admitting freedom of choice. According to the Dutch philosopher,
freedom and necessity coincide in the one substance of which all things form
part. Being all-inclusive this self-contained substance has no end beyond itself,
nor can it be compelled or attracted by anything outside itself. Everything in
the substance occurs necessarily. That necessity extends to the finite modes of
this one divine substance—body and mind. Spinoza wrote his Ethica as a
guide that would lead from the bondage of ignorance to the liberating insight
that all external causes are in fact modes of a divine self-determination. What
most people regard as evil is no less ‘‘necessary’’ than what they consider to be
good. In one case, they oppose forces that they fail to understand. In the other,
they accept forces that appear to support them but remain equally unintelligi-
ble. True freedom consists in the insight that both are necessary and in a full
understanding and acceptance of divine causality in oneself. Many never start
the arduous process to true freedom, and few ever complete it.
In contrast to other rationalist philosophies, in Spinoza’s ethics emotions
and pleasure play an essential role in the attainment of virtue and the ascent to
freedom. Since body and mind are united in the one substance, Spinoza firmly
rejects not only any contempt for the body but even any dualism of mind and
body as if they were two different substances. His ethical ideal includes the
well-being of the body: that of the mind depends as much on it as the body’s
well-being depends on the mind. Emotions thereby attain a crucial significance.
114 The Moral Crisis

They determine the body’s relation to the mind. ‘‘By emotion I mean the
modifications of the body whereby the active power of the body is increased or
diminished, aided or constrained, and also the ideas of such modifications.’’≤
Emotions belong to a still ‘‘confused’’ stage of consciousness. Yet some increase
the body’s power while others weaken it. ‘‘If we can be the adequate cause of
any of these modifications, I then call the emotion an activity, otherwise I call it
passion, or state wherein the mind is passive’’ (ibid.). All emotions, even the
active ones, remain in some way passive insofar as they do not originate in the
mind. The so-called passions are entirely induced by external causes and not, or
not adequately, controlled by the mind.≥
Although they belong to a lower level of mental life, emotions are indispens-
able. Only persons endowed with a rich emotional life reach moral greatness.
The potential for intellectual awareness (and hence for moral progress) de-
pends on the body’s ability to be emotionally affected. The emotions link the
body to the mind. Without understanding their role we are unable to guide
them and we remain entirely at the mercy of destructive passions, such as envy,
hatred, and strife (E, IV, 37N). Reflection alone allows us to integrate our
desires with each other and to direct them toward a universal well-being (E, V,
4N). Spinoza’s ambiguous claim that all actions determined by (passive) emo-
tions (provided they are not intrinsically evil) may also be determined by
reason without emotion (E, IV, 59), may appear to render emotions altogether
dispensable. Yet he is not denying the necessity of emotions; he is merely
asserting that what emotions induced by external causes accomplish may also
be accomplished by emotions induced by reason alone. The more morally
mature a person is, the more the mind controls the emotional power that, in
the immature one, the body passively undergoes. In understanding its emo-
tions the mind converts passions into actions. That conversion is not a purely
intellectual or voluntary process. It requires recognizing an emotion as emo-
tion and treating it as such. Moral insight alone ‘‘cannot check [i.e., restrain]
any emotion by virtue of being true, but only insofar as it is considered as an
emotion. One emotion can only be controlled or destroyed by another emo-
tion contrary thereto’’ (E, IV, 14). Knowledge itself must become ‘‘emotional’’
in order to be effective.
On the other side, those who fail to understand their emotions remain in the
state of bondage analyzed in the fourth book of Ethics. ‘‘Human infirmity in
moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for when a man is
prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune’’
(E, IV, preface). Spinoza recognizes the difficulty of the road to freedom.
Passions may never be so completely subdued as to leave the mind undis-
turbed. He therefore offers some rules for gaining gradual control over one’s
 The Moral Crisis 115

emotions. ‘‘The best we can do so long as we do not possess a perfect knowl-

edge of our emotions, is to frame a system of right conduct, or fixed practical
precepts, to convert it to memory, and to apply it forthwith to the particular
circumstances which now and again meet us in life, so that our imagination
may become fully imbued therewith, and that it may be always ready to our
hand’’ (E, V, 10, note). This advice, somewhat reminiscent of Ignatius of
Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, should prepare the moral novice for withstanding
the assault of uncontrollable passions, especially the more vehement ones of
love and hatred (E, IV, 45N; E, IV, 32, appendix).
For Spinoza, the essence of any being lies in its ability to preserve itself. ‘‘The
endeavor with which everything endeavors to persist in its own being, is
nothing but the actual essence of the thing in question’’ (E, III, 7). Pleasure
increases the body’s conatus essendi, its basic drive to be, and thereby pro-
motes the person’s well-being. ‘‘The greater the pleasure wherewith we are
affected, the greater the perfection whereto we pass; in other words, the more
must we necessarily partake of the divine nature.’’ (E, IV, 45) Yet if pleasure is
sought for its own sake, it stymies the mind’s active power and hinders its
capacity for action. Hence it benefits only when attained in conjunction with
reason. For Spinoza, asceticism is not a moral ideal, as it was for the Stoics. ‘‘It
is the part of a wise man, I say, both to refresh and to recreate himself in
moderation with sweet food and drink as also with scents and the amenity of
green plants with adornments, music, and the exertion of games, and with
other recreations of this sort such as anyone can do without any injury to
others’’ (E, IV, 45). Insofar as it promotes the body’s active power to be (E, III,
41), pleasure is good, but since it often derives from one part of the body
rather than from the whole, it is a poor guide toward the good life (E, IV, 60).
Only pleasure induced by the person’s total well-being may count as unquali-
fiedly good and is worth pursuing. The morally mature person, then, is both
desirous and suspicious of pleasure.
Finding the right balance requires what Spinoza calls virtue, understood in
the ancient Roman sense of virtus (power). ‘‘By virtue and power I mean the
same thing’’ (E, IV, def. 8), namely, the power to increase the active potential
of one’s entire nature and thereby also the pleasure that accompanies such an
increase. Virtue, then, is both an end in itself and a means to happiness ( felic-
itas) and fulfillment. The more a person endeavors to seek what is useful to
him, the more virtuous he becomes (E, IV, 20), because the more he ap-
proaches the maximal power of being. Yet ‘‘virtue is [also] to be desired for its
own sake’’ (E, IV, 18 scholium): through its practice humans participate in
blessedness itself, that is, in the knowledge of God (E, IV, 28). Here and
throughout book V, ‘‘Of Human Freedom,’’ Spinoza appears to shift the goal
116 The Moral Crisis

of ethics from the attainment of freedom through insight to the amor Dei
intellectualis, the intellectual love of God. Whereas the idea of freedom was
self-contained and included both pleasure and emotions, here he seems to
identify freedom with understanding. In fact, the two descriptions remain
coherent. The intellectual quality of Spinoza’s ethics, in the last book as well as
in the earlier ones, was never detached from bodily satisfaction and affective
fulfillment. A freedom that consists in total self-knowledge implies recogniz-
ing oneself as part of a totality and that totality is God. If the happy life is the
life stimulated by the highest emotions and yielding the highest pleasure, then
the one that pursues the most comprehensive knowledge and the most inclu-
sive love is the happiest. To know and to love God enables the mind to view
itself and all things sub specie aeternitatis (E, V, 36).
Spinoza has often been described as a rationalist thinker, and it is true that
he was influenced by Descartes’s thought, as were all rationalists. But his
ethical system shows none of the one-sidedness of rationalism. It features
hedonistic and even utilitarian qualities that distinguish it from rationalist
ethics. Indeed, his position displays a moral realism seldom encountered since
Aristotle. His method of overcoming the disruptive power of emotions by
insight, a central theme of his thought, anticipates a basic principle of mod-
ern psychotherapy. At the same time, his conception of the blessed life aims
higher than any other modern system of ethics. None surpassed and only Kant
equated the scope of Spinoza’s moral vision. Two factors contributed to its
enduring appeal. First, he never prescribed what he felt not capable of practic-
ing himself. Bertrand Russell once wrote that Spinoza was the one philosopher
who lived entirely by the rules of his own teaching. Second, his ethics, beyond
being a theory of human conduct, enabled humans to find meaning in their
lives by recognizing themselves as part of a meaningful totality.

THE DECONSTRUCTION OF RATIONALIST ETHICS

IN EMPIRICIST PHILOSOPHY
John Locke, the father of British empiricism, assumed a considerable
part of Descartes’s rationalism, but he consistently Descartes’s theory of innate
ideas. He did so with particular assertiveness when it came to moral ideas.
Locke admits that humans are born with a desire for happiness and an aver-
sion to misery.∂ But such a desire can hardly function as an adequate moral
principle. Indeed, inclinations to happiness are so far from being innate im-
pulses to virtue that ‘‘if they were left to their full swing, they would carry men
to the overturning of all morality’’ (Essay, II, 20, 2). Nonetheless, Locke suc-
ceeds in including that desire in his moral system by declaring happiness a
reward God attaches to the observation of the natural law. Insofar as true
 The Moral Crisis 117

happiness is inextricably linked to that law, the pursuit of happiness becomes a

moral principle. This divinely instituted link allows us to consider as good
what is apt to produce pleasure, but it fails to explain at which point the
inclination to happiness attains the ‘‘full swing’’ that would overturn all mo-
rality. He avoids a flat hedonism by restricting ‘‘true happiness’’ to those plea-
sures that are conducive to the perfection of one’s intellectual nature (II, 21,
51). Still, the law of nature so considered ultimately depends upon a statutory
divine decree. ‘‘He [God] has a right to do it (to promulgate law); we are his
creatures. He has goodness and wisdom to direct our actions to that which is
best; and He has power to enforce it by rewards and punishments, of infinite
weight and duration, in another life’’ (II, 28, 8). Thus what began as a theory
of experience ends in a voluntarist notion of divine law. With Locke, the battle
between a nominalist and a rationalist conception of morality enters a decisive
phase. He still attempts to combine the empiricist principle (the experience of
pleasure or pain) with the positive will of God. Later empiricists more consis-
tently replaced this a priori, authoritative principle by conclusions drawn from
experience alone. Their position led to two quite different ethical theories.
One based morality on the unique intuition of a moral sense. The other,
appealing to a less specific kind of experience responded to the practical ques-
tion: What kinds of actions contribute most to general well-being? It laid the
groundwork for a utilitarian ethics.
In France also, a radical shift away from the rationalist theories of
seventeenth-century ethics occurred. The idea of nature, which in the earlier
theories had functioned as the moral norm, ceased to be defined by reason
alone. For Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, living in accordance with nature
no longer meant having one’s life ruled by the law of reason. In several of his
stories, especially in L’ingénu, Voltaire suggested that moral standards vary
from place to place. He agreed with Locke that the ideas of good and evil were
not ‘‘innate.’’ Each individual has to discover them for himself. Yet all end up
with more or less similar conclusions. As he wrote to the future King Frederick
II of Prussia, ‘‘No one is born with the idea that it is necessary to be just, but
God has so formed the organs of man that all at a certain age agree to this
truth.’’∑ Customs and laws differ, but all peoples agree on some essential
principles of conduct.
According to Diderot, human nature and its basic needs stand at the origin
of the universally accepted distinction between good and evil. But from this
fact moralists have mistakenly concluded that the idea of nature contains
unchangeable, universal principles of moral law. Rather than adjusting the
principles of conduct to the demands of life at a particular place and time, they
have deduced ‘‘universal’’ principles from Western customs that may appear
118 The Moral Crisis

most unnatural to members of a different society. In his Supplément to the

French explorer Bougainville’s famous report of his journey to Tahiti, Diderot
compares what the West regards as universal principles of morality with the
very different moral ideas of ‘‘primitives.’’ Their lifestyle may seem less ‘‘ra-
tional’’ to us, but it certainly is more ‘‘natural’’ and often more generous.
Diderot graphically illustrates this point in his fictional additions to the official
report. In a ‘‘Conversation Between the Chaplain and Orou,’’ a Tahitian host
offers his wife and three daughters for the nightly comfort of the chaplain of
Bougainville’s shipwrecked boat. When the chaplain declines an offer so much
in conflict with the principles of his religion, Orou replies, ‘‘I do not know
what this thing is that you call religion, but I can think only ill of what prevents
tasting an innocent pleasure to which nature, our sovereign mistress, invites us
all, namely, to bring to existence a being similar to ourselves.’’∏
At first Orou appears to advocate little more than a hedonistic naturalism,
but the perspective changes when he informs his guest that the island is badly
underpopulated. In such circumstances sexual abstinence is harmful to so-
ciety, though it would be justified if overpopulation demanded a restrictive
policy. The indigenous custom, ruled by the demand of nature, issues a more
flexible imperative. Each member of a society ought to serve the common
good by all necessary means. Nor must the physical expression of love and
affection be restricted to the purpose of procreation.π Every society possesses
its own norms derived from what human nature requires in accordance with
the conditions of its physical and social environment.
How harmful it is to impose standards appropriate to one society upon
another appears in an old man’s farewell speech to the Frenchmen when they
finally leave the island. He accuses them of having corrupted the very people
who had so generously rescued and sheltered them. Orou’s story had con-
tained only half the message: ‘‘Let us imitate the chaplain: religious celibate
(moine) in France, savage in Tahiti.’’∫ The old man adds the other half. ‘‘We
are innocent, we are happy, and you can only destroy that happiness. We
follow the pure instinct of nature, and you have tried to erase its impress from
our souls. Here everything belongs to everyone, and you have preached us this
distinction you make between yours and mine.’’Ω It is the obsession with prop-
erty, according to Diderot, that lies at the root of sexual repression. Since men
came to regard their wives as legal property, they started claiming exclusive
sexual rights over them. This has resulted in unhappy marriages and, for
women who break the code, in social ostracism. The male, being the owner,
has never felt restricted by the monogamous marriage contract, and applying a
double standard of conduct, he has jeopardized the very institution that sexual
 The Moral Crisis 119

exclusiveness was intended to protect. Even those who abide by the rule suffer
from the indissolubility of marriage. Emotions are by nature inconstant: feel-
ings of love inevitably wither and die. Why, then, impose restrictions that so
obviously conflict with human inclinations? And why judge so severely a
person who follows the natural emotion of the moment when swearing eternal
love to someone, but whom the same nature later allows to fall in love with
others? Still, not even the primitive ‘‘state of nature’’ is free of crime, as the
narrator at the end of the Supplément concedes. Nor does Diderot seek to
return to a state of nature. He primarily wants to expose the duplicity of the
moral standards of his time and to advocate more flexible norms. Yet in the
process he radically changes the content of nature from what it had been in
the natural law tradition. How could nature be morally normative while func-
tioning as an empirical concept of infinitely stretchable norms?
The problem of freedom presented an even more serious objection to tradi-
tional moral principles. The difficulty is illustrated in the picaresque novel
Jacques le fataliste. Diderot’s real difficulty with free will, which he carefully
avoided confessing, stemmed from his materialist worldview. Only once, in a
letter to a contributor to the Encyclopédie, does he openly admit it. ‘‘Look at
the matter closely and you will see that the word ‘liberty’ is devoid of meaning.
There are not, and cannot be, free beings. We are merely what is consonant
with the general order, with our organization, education, and the whole chain
of events.’’∞≠ Few of Diderot’s contemporaries shared his radical views. Mon-
tesquieu and Voltaire certainly did not. Even Diderot’s friend and collaborator
on the Encyclopédie, d’Alembert, insisted that morality required observing the
universal law of reason, the demands of which are as exacting as those of a
divinely sanctioned code of morality.∞∞
In his final work on ethics, Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron
(1782), Diderot returned to a Stoic-rationalist position. Originally intended as
an introduction to a new translation of Seneca’s writings, the work had con-
tinued to grow into a shapeless mass of philosophical remarks on Seneca,
caustic observations on moral and political conditions of his time, and a settle-
ment of scores with former but still potentially dangerous adversaries. One
may wonder why Diderot in this rambling commentary wanted to return to a
Stoically inspired morality that he had so severely attacked in his annotated
translation of Shaftesbury’s Essay on Merit and Virtue. Particularly at a time
when the Stoic norm of reason had lost much of its moral appeal. He probably
wanted to protect the positions established by the philosophes (morality based
on reason alone) against those who had deserted the cause and whose critique
could hurt it. In particular, he feared that Rousseau’s expected assault on them
120 The Moral Crisis

in the forthcoming second part of the Confessions might further jeopardize a

secular morality that had already been discredited by La Mettrie’s immoralist
Anti-Sénèque.
On a more fundamental level, he regarded Seneca’s secular ‘‘Stoicism’’ use-
ful in his effort to emancipate ethics from religion. ‘‘Stoicism is nothing but a
treatise of freedom taken in its fullest sense. If this doctrine, which has so much
in common with religious cults, had spread as fast as the other superstitions,
the earth would long have been cleared of slaves and tyrants’’ (II, § 68). To
render his model effective Diderot first had to restore Seneca’s moral authority.
In his youth he had accused the Roman philosopher of cynical collaboration
with Nero. Now he argued that Seneca’s conniving attitude had in fact pro-
tected the city against some of the emperor’s worst excesses. This defense of
moral ‘‘flexibility’’ justified the philosophe’s own political compromises. Di-
derot never achieved a moral synthesis: his rejection of moral absolutes pre-
vented him from doing so. Yet at least Diderot kept searching! His friend,
Baron d’Holbach, never appears to have experienced any doubts about free-
dom or other moral issues. ‘‘Morals is the science of the relations that subsist
between the minds, the wills, and the actions of men, in the same manner that
geometry is the science of the relations that are found between bodies.’’∞≤
Motives of action that determine with the same inevitability as physical laws,
are, in fact, no more than physiological causes internalized through education.
‘‘Good’’ education fills the young with notions conducive to virtue, that is,
contributing to the welfare of society.

Moral Sense and Moral Feelings

SHAFTESBURY’S MORAL SENSE

While the debate around the universal norms of reason enlivened the
conversation in Parisian salons, a different, more intuitive approach to moral-
ity had begun to conquer parts of the thinking public in England. The third
earl of Shaftesbury initiated it. Shaftesbury has often been called a moral
relativist because, so the objection goes, he transferred the source of moral
judgment from reason to ‘‘natural affections.’’ In fact, he never abandoned the
rule of reason yet asserted that the mind discovers the norms of reason not by
deduction, but by moral intuition. An intuition of the ideally good and beauti-
ful, being a primary experience of reason itself, surpasses any intellectual
argument. He attacked Locke’s moral theory for its lack of a rational founda-
tion, accusing him of basing his moral norms on such problematic grounds as
‘‘mode and custom’’ or, at other moments, on the inscrutable will of God. The
 The Moral Crisis 121

critique was somewhat unfair. For Locke, the divine law was indeed supreme,
but that law had been ‘‘promulgated by the light of nature’’ and hence was by
no means arbitrary or lacking in intellectual foundation. As for ‘‘mode and
custom,’’ Locke had stated that opinion and reputation do act as some kind of
law by which most people abide, either because they fear to damage their
reputation or they hope to enhance it. But he had never claimed this criterion
to be adequate. He only asserted its currency ‘‘whether those rules were true or
false.’’∞≥
More important than the correctness of his critique, however, is Shaftes-
bury’s genuine concern for a foundation of moral norms on the rational order
of reality. The mind has a direct intuition of the universal harmony of all
things. Partaking itself in this harmony the mind naturally apprehends what is
morally good as well as what is aesthetically beautiful. The good and the
beautiful are but different aspects of the same harmony. We perceive both by
direct experience. That experience, unlike Locke’s, is not derived from sensa-
tions but from the mind’s connatural presence to an ideal reality. Even as for
the Stoics and for Spinoza, nature, the all-inclusive order that includes all
things and renders them interdependent, served for Shaftesbury as supreme
norm of ethics. Moral duties are defined by a person’s place within this orderly
universe. The mind’s moral sense, the ‘‘inward eye,’’ directly apprehends the
moral quality of any act. This apprehension does not require a comprehensive
understanding of nature (The Moralists, II, 4, in Characteristics, ed. M. Rob-
ertson, II, 60–84).
Shaftesbury’s principal objection against Locke was that he, for the lack of
aesthetic sensitivity, had been incapable of perceiving the universal harmony
that is the essence of moral virtue. ‘‘Had Mr. Locke been a virtuoso, he would
not have philosophized thus. For harmony is the beauty, the accord and prop-
osition of sounds; and harmony is harmony by nature, let particular errors be
ever so bad, or let men judge ever so ill of music. . . . The same is true in the case
of virtue and honesty; the honestum and the decorum in society, for which
you, my friend, can never lose your relish.’’∞∂ Shaftesbury attributed his de-
ceased mentor’s lack of sensitivity to an inadequate knowledge of classical
philosophy.∞∑ Shaftesbury refused to develop his moral thoughts into a system.
‘‘The most ingenious way of becoming foolish is by a system,’’ he wrote in
‘‘Advice to an Author’’ (pt. 3 in Characteristics, I, 189). His essays on morality,
An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699) and The Moralists (1709),
contain no methodical analysis of the moral act of the kind in which Kant was
to excel; they are inspired but rambling discussions on the human place within
a panentheistic universe.
Shaftesbury’s theory of moral intuition restored a facet of ancient ethics that
122 The Moral Crisis

had become lost in voluntarism (for which the moral norm is God’s will), as
well as in rationalism (which deduces its norms exclusively from reason). In
his interpretation, the ethics of Plato and Aristotle centered on ideas of har-
mony, order, and beauty. The ancient ideal consisted more in gaining the right
insight and then doing the right, or even the elegant thing than in obeying
some kind of higher command (though that became an important element in
the Stoa). Moral reason, immanent in the nature of things, included not only
what logic dictated, but also what convention and common sense suggested.
To a significant extent it was, as the term kalokagathon suggests, a matter of
taste, that is, of aesthetic discernment between the noble act and the vulgar or
villainous one.
‘‘Natural affections’’ link human beings to one another. They direct the
moral sense. The term ‘‘affections’’ apparently required no definition in
eighteenth-century British thought. But its vagueness has created numerous
problems of interpretation for us. Shaftesbury uses it to refer to an entire range
of desires, impulses, feelings, emotions, fundamental dispositions, and occa-
sionally even passions.∞∏ Natural affections guide the mind toward acts of
benevolence, the moral goal of life. Benevolence requires not that we sacrifice
our self-interest, for that also forms an essential segment of the well-being of
the whole. Yet contrary to what Mandeville and Adam Smith were later to
claim, the pursuit of self-interest alone will never result in a state of universal
harmony. Only social affections do so. Humans must actively seek the good by
deliberately following the course of their natural affections. In his early writ-
ings, Shaftesbury adopted an austere, Stoic attitude toward passions. ‘‘In a
higher relation, nothing can be more distant than this; nothing more inconsis-
tent with that true affection, which in a mind soundly rational is, as it were, in
the place of all.’’∞π Later he came to regard passions as indispensable for
converting moral affections into action.
With the theory of moral affections Shaftesbury opened what Charles Tay-
lor has called a new ethical space that allows the good to appear within human
subjectivity.∞∫ Without them morality turns negative, ‘‘confrontational’’ as Iris
Murdoch calls it, a constant struggle with one’s inclinations. Attaining an
inner harmony with all of nature neither needs nor tolerates obedience as
primary motive. Those who practice virtue because of a divine command he
calls ‘‘nominal moralists’’ (The Moralists, II, 2; Characteristics, II, 46–47). In
this battle against moral nominalism he followed the Cambridge Platonists.
These theologians, fellows of Calvinist Emmanuel College, considered moral
principles to be grounded in ‘‘immutable reason’’ rather than in the sovereign
will of God. Shaftesbury knew them well: he had published the sermons of
Benjamin Whichcote, one of the founders of the movement. According to
 The Moral Crisis 123

Ralph Cudworth (1617–87), the most learned of the group, ethical principles
inhere in the nature of things. ‘‘Though the will and power of God have an
absolute, infinite and unlimited command upon the existence of all created
things to make them to be or not to be at pleasure; yet when things exist, they
are what they are, this or that, absolutely or relatively, not by will or arbitrary
command, but by the necessity of their own nature.’’∞Ω No positive command
of God can render human acts good or evil. Cudworth takes position not only
against fellow Puritans, but also against Descartes who had claimed that all
order, law, and reason depended upon God.
Anticipating Kant, Shaftesbury places the entire moral weight on the inten-
tion. Moral goodness is not inherent in the objective deed, but in the deed as
intended by the agent. To be virtuous, then, an act must be so intended. Yet the
intention remains attached to the objective meaning of the act. The moral
intention therefore requires that we know the objective nature of the act. The
moral sense discovers its objective goodness; it does not ‘‘constitute’’ it. The
objective quality of Shaftesbury’s moral theory appears in the fact that a mis-
judgment, for which the agent bears only a slight responsibility, is nevertheless
a moral wrong. Even if our moral assessment is warped ‘‘through superstition
or ill custom . . . this is not, nor ever can be, virtue of any kind or in any sense,
but must remain still horrid depravity’’ (Virtue and Merit, bk. I, pt. 2, 3;
Characteristics, I, 255).
Still, Shaftesbury’s position remains elusive. The danger of subjectivism is
never remote, as the subsequent history of moral feelings confirms. Only the
strong Platonic strain in his thought prevented him from ever fully admitting
it. Nor were his efforts to expand his idea of moral harmony into a cosmic
theory altogether successful. He claims that the entire animal kingdom moves
beyond individual well-being: each species of animals contributes to the well-
being of some other (bk. I, Characteristics, I, 245). The benefit appears far
from mutual, however. The spider needs the fly, Shaftesbury argues. But does
the fly need the spider? Voltaire certainly saw no evidence that the ecological
balance resulted from altruistic feelings. ‘‘Flies are born to be devoured by
spiders, which are in turn devoured by swallows, and swallows by shrikes, and
shrikes by eagles, and eagles are born to be killed by men, who in turn live to
kill each other and to be consumed by worms, or by devils at least in thousand
cases to one.’’ The dependence of all creatures upon each other suggests indeed
a coherence of nature, yet not necessarily a peaceful one.≤≠
A theory of morality conceived as an attitude of universal benevolence may
easily lead to a utilitarian ethics. It actually did so, indeed, in Shaftesbury’s
most devoted yet least faithful follower, Francis Hutcheson. He equated uni-
versal benevolence with directing one’s actions toward the greatest possible
124 The Moral Crisis

benefit for the greatest number of people. For Shaftesbury, the good had been
intrinsically valuable, independently of the consequences. A deed is good to
the extent that the agent sincerely intends to further the harmonious integra-
tion of the whole, not to the extent that it actually benefits others, although
such benefits should normally follow from it. Nowhere did he consider the
utilitarian calculation of pleasures and pains, used as norm by Hutcheson and
later by Bentham, a sufficient or adequate ethical criterion.≤∞ In this respect
Shaftesbury stands closer to Kant than to Hutcheson or to any empiricist
philosopher. In shifting the moral emphasis from what we ought to do, be-
cause God or reason prescribes it, to what it is sensible and orderly to do,
Shaftesbury accomplished a revolution in ethical theory. He revived the ideal
of kalokagathia and restored the ancient link between morality and aesthetics.

ROUSSEAU’S MORAL SENTIMENTALISM

With Rousseau, feelings assumed an even more crucial role in moral life.
As he tells it in the Confessions, both his father’s lessons and his youthful
readings in Plutarch had taught him to subdue his passions and to lead a
simple life of self-sufficiency. The second part of that instruction Rousseau
never forgot. In his early, prize-winning Discourse on the Sciences and Arts
(1750), Rousseau still defended a Stoic conception of the moral law. But in his
second major essay, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), Rousseau
identified feelings as the root of morality. He takes issue with Hobbes’s posi-
tion that the state of nature is amoral, neither good nor evil, devoid of virtue as
well as of vice. Nor was it the drive of self-preservation that compelled hu-
mans to enter society, but rather a natural feeling of compassion that, prior to
reflection, moves them to care for the whole species and often that of other
species as well. Compassion naturally spawns those social virtues that Hobbes
denied. ‘‘What is generosity, clemency, or humanity, but compassion applied
to the weak, to the guilty, or to mankind in general? Even benevolence and
friendship are, if we judge rightly, only the effects of compassion.’’≤≤
To develop this affective source of all morality must be the primary purpose
of the child’s moral education. That education, described in book IV of Emile,
begins relatively late. The child must be given the time to develop its natural
faculties before it is able to be morally educated. But moral development, in
Rousseau’s theory, is a natural process. Guidance may be needed to protect the
child against ignorance, but force must never be used against allegedly evil
tendencies. Unless education deforms their natural inclinations, humans spon-
taneously develop into moral beings. Rousseau left no doubt about his pri-
mary assumption. The first sentence of Emile reads: ‘‘Tout est bien, sortant des
mains de l’Auteur des choses; tout dégénère dans les mains de l’homme’’ (All is
 The Moral Crisis 125

good as it leaves the hands of the Creator; all degenerates as it enters the hands
of man). He pointedly ruled out the concept of original sin: ‘‘Il n’y a point de
perversité originelle dans le coeur humain’’ (There is no original perversity in
the human heart). We know the vehement reaction this statement provoked.
The archbishop of Paris condemned the book; the Sorbonne ordered it to be
burned. Even in England it caused shock waves. It occasioned the famous
outburst of Dr. Johnson noted by Boswell: ‘‘Rousseau, Sir, is a very bad man. I
would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any felon who
has gone from the Old Bailey there many years. Yes, I would like to have him
work in the plantations.’’≤≥
It was not only the radical break with a Christian tradition distrustful of the
‘‘state of nature’’ that Archbishop Christophe de Beaumont and Dr. Johnson
feared, but, even more, the collapse of the entire social system that had been
built on it. In Rousseau’s view, if people can be good at all, they must be so
from the beginning. Goodness must be in the heart before it can be achieved by
the will. That natural goodness includes human passions, which serve as indis-
pensable means for self-preservation. They must be guided, not suppressed.
All originate in the healthy amour de soi, a drive to protect one’s existence.
Still, self-love easily degenerates into selfish love (amour propre), an unnatural
desire of superfluous possessions and of power over others. Once the child
enters adolescence it begins to compare its condition with that of others and
tries to subjugate their desires to its own. While natural self-love (amour de
soi) naturally grows into a love of others, selfish love excludes others. All
passions develop from these original, inclusive or exclusive attitudes: the kind
and affectionate passions from the former, the destructive ones from the latter.
To raise a child to virtue it suffices to preserve and develop its original self-love.
With Shaftesbury, Rousseau assumed the presence of a cosmic harmony
that gently guides inanimate as well as animate creatures toward their natural
goal. Unlike the English thinker, however, Rousseau concluded that living in
accordance with nature required a separation from a corrupt society, either by
returning to a pastoral lifestyle (as the lovers in Julie did) or by restoring
society to a state of integrity that would no longer be subject to property
relations and a state of virtual slavery (as Rousseau outlined in the Discourse
on Inequality and The Social Contract). In his novel Julie, ou la nouvelle
Héloïse, Rousseau shows how his moral ideals may be realized even before a
new society has been built. The two lovers, Julie and Saint-Preux, slowly and
painfully rise above a conventional morality of precepts and obligations to-
ward the natural ‘‘law of the heart.’’ In book III Julie, torn between the duty to
obey her father and her love for Saint-Preux, exclaims: ‘‘Nature, oh sweet
nature! Resume all your rights. I forswear the barbaric virtues that crush you.
126 The Moral Crisis

Are the inclinations you have given me less trustworthy than a reason that has
so often led me astray? . . . Duty, honor, virtue, all that means nothing any
more to me—I have made up my mind: I shall distress none of those I love.’’≤∂
With this she marries the man her father has chosen for her, not out of ‘‘duty’’
but out of filial piety, yet she informs her husband that she loves another man.
He responds with equal generosity by inviting Saint-Preux to share their
household.
Julie vows herself to a life of marital chastity. Unlike Diderot’s heroes, she
does not place her feelings above the rules of marriage. She, as well as her
husband and her lover, purify their love from the exclusiveness inherent in
erotic possession.≤∑ For them, morality consists in recapturing their aboriginal
innocence by listening to the voice of nature in their hearts. Shaftesbury’s
theory of moral sense may have influenced Rousseau. Yet for the British Plato-
nist, feelings point beyond themselves, toward an ideal of goodness. Rousseau
felt no sympathy for Platonic speculations on the good. In his optimistic con-
ception of human nature, private morality involved little more than total
authenticity. He considered universal moral norms always insufficient and
occasionally detrimental for leading a moral life. One cannot ignore the most
intimate part of one’s nature, revealed in one’s feelings, without being unfaith-
ful to oneself. Here began what in our time was to become an ethics of authen-
ticity.≤∏ In fact, feelings are not as deeply rooted in human nature, as Rousseau
believed them to be. They are too dependent on mood and occasion to serve as
reliable moral principles.
Rousseau encapsulated his subjective morality in the ideal of the beautiful
soul (la belle âme), popular during the Enlightenment. For some writers, such
as Christoph Martin Wieland, the term preserved some Platonic and Christian
connotations; for Rousseau it functioned as the secular counterpart of grace.≤π
Julie, who incarnates the ideal, declares that the only man she could ever love
would have to be a beautiful soul: a person uncommonly rich in feeling ( Julie,
bk. I, L60 and bk. II, L2). Comparing the beautiful soul to Kant’s moral ideal
of duty, Schiller was to write: ‘‘In the beautiful soul not the individual acts are
properly moral, but the entire disposition is.’’≤∫ Having reached a state of total
simplicity and of unrestricted communication with others, the beautiful soul
restores the pristine ‘‘transparence’’ of human nature.
The ideal of utter sincerity also inspired Rousseau’s controversial writings
against modern culture in general and against the theater in particular. The
theater, consummate product of an artificial civilization, conflicts with the
natural life of virtue. His caustic Lettre sur les spectacles (1758) unpleasantly
shocked the editors of the Encyclopédie with whom he had collaborated. It
was in fact a direct attack upon their work. Under the word ‘‘Genève,’’ d’Al-
 The Moral Crisis 127

embert had supported the building of a theater in the Calvinist city, contend-
ing that the pastors would not object because most of them were in fact
freethinking deists. Rousseau protested. The theater ought to be banned from
modern life altogether: it corrupts more than it instructs. If virtue requires
controlling one’s passions, how could a dramatic display of passions not be
harmful to public morality? To arouse the passions on the stage can only
increase moral turmoil. Nor does the theatrical presentation of virtue compen-
sate for this negative influence. Heroic virtue seen on the stage merely over-
whelms. It does not incite to imitation. Moved to tears by the display of high
virtue, the spectator applauds himself ‘‘de sa belle âme’’ but never intends to
follow the ideal examples displayed on the stage.
The problem with Rousseau’s code of authenticity is, of course, that it
contains no objective moral norms, as appears in Rousseau’s own conduct.
Questioned by an aristocratic lady about having abandoned his four children,
he laid the blame for whatever ‘‘objective’’ evil might have occurred at her own
doorstep: the rich were responsible for the ‘‘crimes’’ of the poor.≤Ω Similarly, in
the first book of the Confessions Rousseau justifies the constant larcenies of
his early years as a means to avoid the ‘‘dishonorable mediation’’ of money. He
feels that his confession in some way justifies his past. In ‘‘confessing’’ the
deeds as well as his often questionable motivations, he considers himself pu-
rified from the only genuine evil, namely, insincerity with oneself and with
others.
In a famous passage in the Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel criticizes ‘‘the
beautiful soul’’ as an immature stage in the development of conscience wherein,
after much doubt and insecurity, the romantic consciousness becomes certain
of itself, convinced that the ground of morality lies within itself.≥≠ This cer-
tainty, however, is no more than an enhanced sense of selfhood that lacks any
substance and, as Hegel was to put it, ‘‘dissolves as a shapeless vapor into thin
air.’’ The beautiful soul in fact refuses to assume moral responsibility for the
consequences of her actions, even while appealing to the ‘‘law of conscience.’’ If
protracted, this immature attitude undermines the very ground of morality.

THE MOVE TOWARD UTILITARIANISM:

HUTCHESON, MANDEVILLE, AND HUME
No one absorbed Shaftesbury’s ideas more devotedly than the Scottish
thinker Francis Hutcheson. Yet a spiritual gulf separates his Inquiry Concern-
ing Moral Good and Evil from the Characteristics. Shaftesbury, the aristo-
cratic virtuoso, had rarely been concerned about the coherence of his theory or
about its practical application. Hutcheson attempted to translate his vision
into a detailed, systematic treatise. The difference between the two authors
128 The Moral Crisis

goes beyond style: it affects the very essence of their thought. At times Hutch-
eson does little more than add much-needed clarifications to the Englishman’s
ambiguous ethics of intention. Thus he correctly specifies that actions inspired
by self-interest but ‘‘not wanting in benevolence’’ may still be virtuous.≥∞ But
more often Hutcheson writes from a different perspective. He lacks Shaftes-
bury’s magnanimous vision and reduces the ethics of benevolence to the out-
come of a moral computation. Measuring goodness by effectiveness, he takes
Shaftesbury’s ideals down to the bottom line of an account sheet.
To calculate virtue by a direct relation to the amount of good produced and
an inverse one to the agent’s ability to achieve it (in Hutcheson’s formula B =
M/A) (Inquiry, III, 11) turns Shaftesbury’s ethics into a simple consequential-
ism. To be sure, in any moral theory, the intention must take the foreseeable
consequences of the act into account. But Hutcheson’s assumption that we can
measure the goodness of an act by its material consequences introduces a
purely empirical factor that in fact deprives morality of any a priori norm, as
Hume was to point out. For Shaftesbury, goodness and happiness had been
intrinsic to virtue rather than dependent on its consequences. His moral theory
ruled out a definition of goodness through consequences, even though a more
precise definition of his principle of benevolence would have forced him to
take a more serious account of the implications of the benevolent attitude.
When Shaftesbury equated moral virtue with the benevolent intention, he
left the objective nature of the act inadequately determined. But he certainly
would not have measured virtue by its material consequences. For him, the
highest perfection was a virtuous life, and true benevolence consisted in cre-
ating adequate conditions for the practice of virtue, both for oneself and
for others. Hutcheson’s interpretation transformed Shaftesbury’s concept of
moral perfection through virtue into pursuing the advancement of material
well-being. Like Locke, Hutcheson wedged a divine ordinance between the
virtuous act and its favorable consequences. Virtue leads to happiness because
God so decided; it is not intrinsically conducive to it. On the other hand,
Hutcheson’s principle of universal benevolence demands that the virtuous
person create social conditions promoting actual public happiness. Since ef-
fective benevolence includes benevolence to oneself and hence also the need to
create conditions for one’s own material well-being, his position causes a
conflict between the pure intention of virtue and the self-interest involved in
the efforts to attain happiness for oneself as well as for others. In his mature
System of Moral Philosophy (1755), Hutcheson admits that whenever a con-
flict arises between one’s own interest and that of others, most people prefer
the former.≥≤
Bernard Mandeville, the sharpest critic of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, was
 The Moral Crisis 129

well aware of the difference between the two moral systems, both of which he
firmly rejected. In the first part of his Fable of the Bees he primarily attacks
Shaftesbury; in the second (published years later), Hutcheson. But tracing
Hutcheson’s errors back to their source he concludes that second part with the
following damning praise of the master: ‘‘[Shaftesbury] was a man of erudi-
tion and a very polite writer; he has displayed a copious imagination and a fine
turn of thinking, in courtly language and nervous expressions. But as, on the
one hand it must be confessed that his sentiments on liberty and harmony are
noble and sublime, so, on the other, it cannot be denied that the ideas he had
formed of the goodness and excelling of our nature, were as romantic and
chimerical as they are beautiful and amiable.’’≥≥ He peremptorily dismisses
Shaftesbury’s assumption that human beings are born with affection for each
other: ‘‘His notions, I confess, are generous and refined: they are a high com-
pliment to humankind. What a pity it is they are not true’’ (Fable, I, 323–24).
No one could ever meet Shaftesbury’s moral standards. That only altruistic
acts deserve to be called virtuous appears preposterous to Mandeville. What
would virtue require from a poor woman ready to put out her six-year-old son
as apprentice to a chimney sweep? Though she could never pay to have her
own chimney cleaned, her concern for the public good of having fewer chim-
ney fires and uncontaminated broth morally urges her to give up offspring and
estate in order to assist in preventing the damage caused by soot. ‘‘Free from
selfishness, [she] sacrifices her only son to the most wretched employment for
the public welfare’’ (Fable, II, 44).
Society could not survive with such perfect members! What would happen
to the economy without the vices of luxury and ostentation? ‘‘Superfluous
knickknacks and elaborate trifles invented to gratify either a needless curiosity
or else wantonness and folly’’ sustain the craftsman who produces them. In the
first part of the Fable Mandeville had, in a well-known satire, called private
vices, such as prostitution, public benefits. Did he merely want to show the
absurdity of unmitigated altruism? Or did he intend to expose the hypocritical
inconsistency between the eighteenth-century goals of national wealth and
power, ruthlessly pursued at home and abroad, and the universally professed
code of moral altruism. In Mandeville’s jaundiced view, altruistic virtue re-
quires a person, ‘‘contrary to the impulse of nature, to endeavour the benefit of
others’’ (Fable, I, 48–49). Of course, Mandeville misinterpreted Shaftesbury
as well as Hutcheson. The absence of altruistic motives does not necessarily
vitiate an act. A person may still be virtuous without acting with a purely
unselfish intention. Hutcheson himself had already obviated Mandeville’s cri-
tique when he distinguished ‘‘formal’’ from ‘‘material’’ goodness. A generally
benevolent intention renders any act morally good, as long as the nature of the
130 The Moral Crisis

act itself does not conflict with an altruistic attitude. A few spiritual writers,
including William Law, one of Mandeville’s most incisive critics, appear to
have held that any intrusion of self-interest jeopardizes the purity of the moral
intention.≥∂ This may have been a spiritual ideal, but it never was a moral
imperative.
According to Mandeville’s critique, self-love rooted in the instinct of self-
preservation excludes love of others. For Shaftesbury, one had implied the
other. In the second part of the Fable Mandeville specified that the instinct of
self-preservation always compels the individual to place his own interests
above those of others. Even social acts are inspired by our need of others: we
seek their approval or their future assistance for improving our own condi-
tion. Competitive and endowed with unlimited appetites, humans are pre-
pared to sacrifice private satisfaction to the good of the community only when
they realize that survival depends on social strength. Pride alone induces the
best ones to serve the community at the risk of life or personal possessions,
while shame restrains the less ambitious from blatantly acting against the
public good. Honor and shame, then, the more effective social virtues, are
mostly ‘‘counterfeited’’ passions (Fable, II, 100). Mandeville preceded Adam
Smith in assuming that the pursuit of private profits would benefit the com-
mon good. Yet far from running parallel with the practice of altruistic love,
this pursuit is in fact incompatible with it. Moral altruism and benevolent
intentions would not be conducive toward achieving the kind of prosperity
Hutcheson had expected from them. Economic success requires a different
code of behavior, one far removed from the Christian ideal of love and its deist
derivative of benevolence.
Thus Mandeville severed the artificial link that most British moralists of the
eighteenth century maintained between moral idealism and practical hedo-
nism. According to Locke, God’s will constituted that link; for Hutcheson and
implicitly for Shaftesbury, the essential harmony of nature united altruism
with self-love. Private and public happiness had been the end, and moral re-
straint the means. Mandeville fully accepted the end but cynically denounced
the means as hypocritical and ineffective.≥∑ He raised the fundamental ques-
tion about utilitarian ethics even before the theory had been adequately for-
mulated: How could traditional morality survive the conception of human
nature that lies at the ground of economic utilitarianism? The benevolent,
virtuous agent will in the end prove less ‘‘beneficial’’ than one who pursues
private interests even at the expense of others. Of course, the utilitarian princi-
ples of morality cannot so easily be disposed of as Mandeville thinks. No one
had ever seriously maintained that the norms of morality are the most effective
ways to attain economic prosperity. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson claimed only
 The Moral Crisis 131

that self-interest was not incompatible with altruism. To establish the limits of
their parallelism required a more comprehensive vision of society as well as a
firmer grasp of the implications of utilitarian theory than either of them had.
Bentham was the first to grasp the implications of both. I shall discuss his
theory in the next chapter.
Although David Hume possessed neither Spinoza’s nor Kant’s originality,
his influence on the development of ethical thought may have exceeded theirs.
His particular strength lay in the critical acumen with which he analyzed the
implications and deficiencies of the theories of his time. Besides, Hume was a
master of phenomenological description. The pages he wrote on sympathy, on
moral intention, and on justice remain a permanent part of our cultural pa-
trimony. His careful analyses as well as his elegant portrayals of moral atti-
tudes have made him a classic in literature as well as in philosophy. At the
outset of his discussion of ethics in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739) (bk.
III), he boldly declares that reason does not directly influence actions and
affections. Reason establishes relations between ideas, as it does in philosophy,
and between ideas and facts, as it does in historical and empirical sciences. Yet
the distinction between good and evil is neither a relation nor a matter of fact.
The moral ought does not belong to the domain of reason. The only ‘‘facts’’
morality knows are feelings of approbation or disapprobation. Here we might
wonder: Why only those feelings and not the awareness of a moral obligation
which appears to be a no less obvious fact than approval or disapproval? Did
Hume want to avoid any factor that might appear to render morality depen-
dent on a religious concept?≥∏ Kant considered the moral imperative a primary
fact, or as he called it, ‘‘the sole fact of pure reason,’’ even though his position
was no less secular than Hume’s.
All here depends on how Hume understands moral approbation or disap-
probation. In the Treatise he explains them as the arousal of pleasure that the
mind experiences in the presence of certain acts and of pain in the presence of
others. Those feelings belong to the calmer modes of love and hatred the mind
experiences with respect to the consequences that certain acts are likely to
entail. What evokes moral approbation or disapprobation stems from a natu-
ral sense of sympathy, the key concept of Hume’s theory. ‘‘It appears that
sympathy is a very powerful principle in human nature, that it has a great
influence on our taste of beauty, and that it produces our sentiment of morals
in all the artificial virtues. From thence we may presume, that it also gives rise
to many of the other virtues; and that qualities acquire our approbation,
because of their tendency to the good of mankind.’’≥π Much of Hume’s ethics
rests on this remarkable statement. He distinguishes artificial virtues from
natural ones, according to their origin in a natural or an artificial sense of
132 The Moral Crisis

morality. The former is direct and instinctive. The latter ‘‘arises from circum-
stances and necessity of mankind’’ (Treatise, II, 2, 1, p. 477).
Hume devotes the entire second part of the Treatise to the (artificial) virtue
of justice. The sense of justice is not a ‘‘natural’’ feeling, he claims, because it
depends on the particular structure of a society as well as on the education of
its members. Communities that have no developed institutions of private
property possess no sense of justice as we do. Ours is formed by a desire to live
in the kind of social structure that allows us to possess things not only com-
monly but also individually. The reasons usually invoked in support of a
natural sense of justice, such as regard for the public interest, universal benev-
olence, and so on, are inadequate. Hume explicitly denies the existence of an
inborn instinct of benevolence toward all human beings. But if the sense of
justice is artificially induced by education and convention (III, 2, 1, p. 483),
does it still deserve to be called a moral sense? Is it not the conclusion of an
argument rather than an immediate awareness? Not according to Hume. For
what excites universal benevolence is not reason, but a feeling of sympathy
evoked by an awareness of the similarity of human feelings of affection. Sym-
pathy arouses interest in the good of mankind as a whole (III, 3, 1, p. 584). Yet
sympathy is no virtue: it only enables us to feel what others feel (III, 3, 2,
p. 593).
In the Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1752), Hume spends
much effort in showing how the artificial virtue of justice extends to all an
attitude of benevolence that naturally embraces only the few whom we know.
Only after having been so universally extended can the moral sense of benev-
olence induce us to support the interests of the larger community, even in
instances where they conflict with our immediate natural feelings of benev-
olence. Such a generalization requires the intervention of reason. But the
moral determination itself is not derived from reason. ‘‘Though reason when
fully assisted and improved, be sufficient to interest us in the pernicious or
useful tendency of qualities and actions, it is not alone sufficient to produce
any moral blame or approbation.—It is requisite a sentiment should here
display itself in order to give a preference to the useful above the pernicious
tendencies.’’≥∫ A deed beneficial to our immediate acquaintances yields moral
pleasure. The feeling of sympathy extends that pleasure beyond that narrow
circle to humanity as a whole. That pleasure ‘‘is the sole source of that high
regard paid to justice, fidelity, honor, allegiance, and chastity’’ (Inquiry, V, 57).
Although the notion of utility occupies a central place in Hume’s moral
theory, he did not claim that utility is the only principle that determines the
morality of an act. In the Inquiry (VII), he declares such virtues as cheerful-
ness, dignity, and tranquility exempt from the rule of utility. Even benev-
 The Moral Crisis 133

olence, which lies at the root of all useful virtues, cannot always be measured
by social benefits. ‘‘As a certain proof that the whole merit of benevolence is
not derived from its usefulness, we may observe, that in a kind way of blame,
we say ‘a person is too good,’ when he exceeds his part in society and carries
his attention to others beyond the proper bounds’’ (Inquiry, VII, 81). Nor
is the ultimate end of ‘‘useful’’ virtues happiness, that is, a subjective state
of peace and pleasure, as later utilitarians maintained, but the more objec-
tive eudaemonia, which Hume tends to call humanity. For him, the theory
of moral sense balanced and qualified utilitarianism. For Jeremy Bentham
(1748–1832), the moral sense theory was the chief rival of utilitarianism. To
introduce feelings in a moral system that rests on calculating reason can only
confuse the issue. Bentham’s utilitarianism restores the primacy of reason,
which Hume had dislodged from morality. Reason alone can decide what are
the most effective principles for establishing a state of universal well-being.
The nature of utilitarian morality remains strictly hypothetical: If one de-
sires a particular kind of society, certain rules have proven to be effective in
obtaining it. Even a rational utilitarianism could not close Hume’s unbridge-
able chasm between is and ought. If the motive of action is no more than a
natural propensity, either immediate or artificially induced, the term ‘‘moral
obligation’’ appears to be out of place. Nonetheless, Hume himself continues
to speak of ‘‘a sense of obligation.’’ Without the higher authority of a moral
law or a divine order, the expression is hard to support.≥Ω As long as the
moralist refuses to set up an idea of goodness that requires more than what we
ordinarily do, he is unable to provide us with a moral ideal that we ought to
pursue. Charles Taylor, in the excellent pages he has devoted to the subject,
rightly argues that utilitarians are debarred by their ontology from formulat-
ing their own moral sources.∂≠

Kant’s Critical Theory of Morals

In Germany the ideals of the Enlightenment found their strongest sup-
porter in Kant. From the beginning of his philosophical life until the end, he
defended reason against arbitrary authority and intellectual obscurantism.
The nontechnical writings of his later period, from the 1784 essay ‘‘What Is
Enlightenment?’’ to the 1798 ‘‘Strife of the Faculties,’’ directly or indirectly
advocated the rule of freedom and the emancipation of the individual. Yet not
until his last great work, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1794),
did he disclose the assumptions implied by his concept of Enlightenment. In
contrast to Rousseau, Kant did not believe human nature to be intrinsically
good. We all enter the world with an inborn disposition toward evil, the
134 The Moral Crisis

‘‘radical innate evil in human nature’’ that invalidates the optimistic myth of
the noble savage.∂∞ Even the well-disposed person is inclined toward evil.
The Critique of Practical Reason combined with Foundations of the Meta-
physics of Morals contain a synthesis as well as a fundamental critique of all
ethical theories of the age. Regrettably we mostly remember the critique, for-
getting that it was probably the synthetic quality of Kant’s work that left the
strongest mark on moral philosophy. Kant so severely criticized the theories of
his time more because of the moral climate that had produced them than
because of their flaws. Those who equated the moral disposition with benev-
olence of feelings or a utilitarian calculus had, in his view, eroded the serious-
ness of the ethical demand. Goethe praised his great contemporary for having
brought ethics back ‘‘from the effeminacy in which we were wallowing.’’∂≤ In
his youth Kant had greeted the theory of moral feelings as a liberation from the
rationalism of his own philosophical education. In the early ‘‘Investigation
about the Evidence of Natural Theology and Morality’’ (1764), he praised the
theory that advocates experiencing (zu empfinden) the good, rather than
knowing it, and in his lectures of 1765–66 he still referred to the theory of
moral sense as ‘‘a beautiful discovery of our age.’’∂≥ Shaftesbury, Hutcheson,
and Smith had brought much-needed psychological insight to the study of
ethics, but they had left Hume’s question unanswered: What allowed the mind
to consider a psychic state or inclination morally imperative?

KANT’S CRITIQUE OF EARLIER THEORIES

The epistemic distinction between sense experience and rational knowl-
edge that Kant made in the Inaugural Dissertation (1770) also separated his
early from his critical theory of morality. No sensuous inclination could mor-
ally legitimate a human act. Conduct becomes ethical only to the extent that it
follows the dictates of reason. Kant’s rationalist teachers had made similar
claims. But what distinguished Kant’s principle was the exclusiveness of rea-
son’s authority: only norms that were totally universal could qualify as moral.
Shaftesbury and Rousseau, whom he had admired in the past, at once lost
their moral authority. He now lumped them together with Epicurus as sup-
porters of hedonism. The joy induced by moral feelings was, in Kant’s eyes,
hardly distinct from any other form of pleasure. Feelings as well as desires,
happiness no less than pleasure, all rely on the sensuous part of our nature and
are therefore declared unfit to serve as ethical criteria. Later he abandoned this
crude identification of moral feelings with sensuous pleasure. But he never
wavered in his resistance to admitting feelings as legitimate moral determi-
nants. In his mature Critique of Practical Reason (1788), he still attacks
the moral sense theory as ‘‘a desire for one’s own happiness.’’∂∂ Unfairly so.
 The Moral Crisis 135

Hutcheson had already pointed out that private pleasure plays no determining
role in feelings of benevolence. If it did, benevolence would cease to be un-
selfish. But to Kant, the distinction between genuinely altruistic and self-
oriented feelings remained insignificant in light of the more fundamental ques-
tion: Can feelings ever function as legitimate moral determinants? He ex-
cluded them one and all.
Even Aristotle’s concept of eudaemonia, rather than being a truly universal
idea, was in his esteem no more than an empirically generalized concept of
‘‘happiness.’’ Kant knew, of course, that happiness, particularly the ancient
eudaemonia, consists in a state of well-being rather than of well-feeling, the
outcome of a number of factors including insight, skills, prudential judgment,
even health and possessions. Yet in his view, even the noblest kind of happiness
was unfit to serve as moral ideal (C.Pr.R., 23; Ak, V, 24). In addition, all these
factors depend on external circumstances over which the will has no control.
What renders humans happy is highly contingent, differs from one time and
place to another, and varies from one individual to the next. Kant, of course,
does not deny that humans ought to promote the well-being of all. Yet happi-
ness, that of others no more than one’s own, ought not to serve as a motive for
doing so.
In this concept of morality as obedience to the command of reason, the idea
of the good loses the moral primacy it had enjoyed since Socrates and from
which even the notion of duty had been derived. For Kant, the process ran in
the opposite direction: the idea of the good does not serve as foundation of the
moral law, but the law defines what is good and evil (C.Pr.R., 65; Ak, V, 62–
63) To derive the moral law from the idea of the good subordinates what
ought to be a rational a priori to empirical concepts, whether they be happi-
ness, human perfection, moral feeling, or even the will of God. In all these
cases the source of morality lies outside the rational will. To deduce what is
primary from a previously ‘‘given’’ principle constitutes for Kant the essence of
moral heteronomy. Obviously, Kant does not question the moral nature of the
idea of the good—to do one’s duty is a good—but he denies that the idea of the
good is the primary moral category. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant still
had sought support for his position in Plato because the Greek philosopher
had grounded all moral rules in a priori ideas. ‘‘It is, however, in regard to the
principles of morality, legislation, and religion, where the experience, in this
case the good, is itself made possible only by the ideas . . . that Plato’s teaching
exhibits its quite peculiar merits.’’∂∑ In the Critique of Practical Reason he no
longer makes this claim.
The pursuit of human perfection remains, also for Kant, the essence of
virtue, but that perfection itself needs to be measured by a norm that surpasses
136 The Moral Crisis

experience. Reason alone defines moral perfection, and it does so by imposing

absolute obligations. Its categorical imperative directs us to ends that are
unqualifiedly good, that is, chosen by the rational will on the sole ground of
their conformity to reason. All other goods, the ancient ideal of eudaemonia as
well as the modern one of happiness, are conditional ends. Nothing but the
rational will is capable of converting conditional ends into unconditional
goods. Even the concept of virtue that had occupied such a prominent place in
Greek and Scholastic ethics must be subordinated to the pure law of reason. In
Kant’s view, the ancient ideal of virtue lost much of its moral dignity when
modern interpretations of it substituted empirical norms to the earlier a priori
idea. The primacy of the subject as source of meaning and value, characteristic
of modern thought, far from securing the rational a priori required by moral-
ity, presented in fact a formidable challenge to it. In all his writings Kant
attempted to disencumber the subjective principle of modern thought from its
subjectivist interpretations.
But Kant’s alternative presented problems of its own. A first one appears in
the very title of the Critique of Practical Reason. In what sense can reason be
‘‘practical’’? At the end of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains that
reason has two functions: to justify the order of actual appearances, but also,
beyond the actual phenomena, to establish what it requires for reality to be
rational and how to make the rational real. About the second task Kant writes:
‘‘Reason does not here follow the order of things as they present themselves in
appearance, but frames for itself with perfect spontaneity an order of its own
according to ideas to which it adapts the empirical conditions, and according
to which it declares actions to be necessary even though they have never taken
place and perhaps never will take place. And at the same time reason also
presupposes that it can have causality in regard to all these actions, since
otherwise no empirical effects could be expected from its ideas.’’∂∏
This remarkable passage implies that an inner necessity drives reason to
become practical and to dictate, as far as it lies within its power, the course
reality ought to follow. Freedom, then, the power to transform the contingent
into the rational order, is in Kant’s theory, the other side of reason. Nor is this
transformation left to the choice of rational beings. It is an obligation, an
ought. ‘‘Ought expresses a kind of necessity and of connection with grounds
which is found nowhere else in the whole of nature.’’∂π Self-determining rea-
son surpasses the given order of the physical universe. ‘‘Reason demands that
it determine itself in praxis and impose its own rationality upon the real’’
(C.Pr.R., 45; Ak, V, 43). In his later Religion Within the Limits of Reason
Alone (1794), Kant stresses that the potential to act rationally belongs to
human nature from the beginning, but to convert that potential into actuality
 The Moral Crisis 137

requires a deliberate effort. ‘‘From the fact that a being has reason it by no
means follows that this reason, by the mere representing of the fitness of its
maxims to be laid down as universal laws, is thereby rendered capable of
determining the will unconditionally, so as to be ‘practical’ of itself.’’∂∫
Once reason has become practical, it wields a causal power that competes
with, and is conditioned by, the causality of nature. In the first Critique Kant
had allowed for this possibility. Yet reason’s actual effectiveness could be
established only on the basis of a fact within the existing order. Kant discovers
that fact in the mind’s experience of the unconditional dictate of the moral law
itself. The categorical ‘‘Thou shalt’’ summons reason to move beyond the
given, causal order of nature. The imperative proves, according to Kant, that
the experience of freedom we all have is not an illusion. The unconditional
obligation to enact the law of reason in the physical world implies that rational
beings have the capacity to do so. Yet one may wonder whether reason can
ever issue an unconditional imperative. Reason may inform us about a moral
course of action. Thinking may even condition us against perpetrating evil, as
Socrates suggested when he identified virtue with knowledge. And it is cer-
tainly true that thinking alone enables the mind to reach a right judgment
about good and evil. A disposition toward absolute evil requires a willful
suspension of thinking, Hannah Arendt argued in Eichmann in Jerusalem. But
the formulation of the moral imperative has a transcendent quality, which
Kantian morality cannot justify on the basis of reason alone.
Not only the form of Kant’s imperative raises problems; its content does so
as well. ‘‘Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will
a universal law of nature’’ requires that any action be such that, when univer-
salized, it promotes the rational order. But does this principle provide an
adequate moral criterion? A moral system that uses such a purely formal
standard faces the dilemma: If given a determinate content, the rule can never
be fully universalized (each case has an unrepeatable uniqueness), but without
a concrete content it cannot be applied. In answer to this objection, Kantians
have argued that the moral principle refers to the act in its full complexity,
including its concrete content and foreseeable consequences. Only the actual
consequences fall entirely outside the moral domain. As John Silber put it:
‘‘Our calculation of duty is not to rest on empirical prognostication of the
consequences of our actions. But we are required to consider what are the
willed consequences of our action by projecting in imagination the sort of
world that would come into existence were the maxim of our act to become a
universal law of nature.’’∂Ω Moral reason demands not that the choice be made
in a vacuum, but that the decision be based on rational rather than empirical
considerations. This is undoubtedly true. The question is, however, whether
138 The Moral Crisis

the act when taken in its full complexity is still fit to be subjected to the
principle of generalization, as Kant understood it. It is by no means clear how
an act that is determined by particular and always unique circumstances could
ever be fully universalized.
Any action may be universalized, as long as the person who considers it
morally right is convinced that the same action would be right for others
acting in the same conditions The difficulty is, however, as Peter Winch in
Ethics and Action argues, that each person enters adulthood with at least the
outline of a moral code that he or she rarely has cause to question and that
code may lead him or her to universalize a particular choice in a manner that
differs from that of persons living by another moral code.∑≠ The formalist
nature of Kant’s rule appears in the fact that he excludes alternatives by the
law of contradiction. Going against the rule is logically inconsistent, he ar-
gues. But does a thief really ‘‘contradict’’ himself when he steals? Hegel, as
Hume had done before him, wondered whether any action ever contradicts
reason. Does a thief implicitly assert the existence of private ownership, while
explicitly denying it through his action? Does he do more than taking advan-
tage of the fact that others assert the validity of that law?∑∞ Property is not a
universal condition of rationality, but a practical rule for social living arranged
differently in different societies. Whoever breaks that arrangement may deny
its legitimacy. Or he may consider the prevailing laws of property unfair, as
Proudhon did when he declared, ‘‘La propriété c’est le vol.’’ Their denial, then,
implies no contradiction.
There are, however, alternative interpretations for understanding the term
‘‘contradiction.’’ According to the British Kant scholar H. J. Paton, a moral
contradiction occurs when an action goes against its natural purpose, that is,
when it disrupts the systemic harmony of purposes in human nature. Any such
action might be considered teleologically contradictory. But the person who so
acts may thereby express that he or she regards such a teleology as nonexistent
or as carrying no moral weight. A second alternative to the logical interpreta-
tion would be to regard it as a ‘‘practical contradiction’’: the immoral act, if
universalized, would turn the internal teleology of acting against itself.∑≤ It
may well be that this is what Kant had in mind. The sinner needs the very
system he or she violates in order to obtain the effects that the act intends. But
is it contradictory to deflect an act from its ordinary purpose toward one that
it does not normally pursue?

KANT’S SYNTHESIS OF EARLIER THEORIES

From the preceding it should appear how concerned Kant is to avoid
making the concepts of good and evil dependent on empirical elements. But
 The Moral Crisis 139

then, in the remarkable third chapter of the Critique of Practical Reason,

where he discusses the incentives of pure practical reason, his argument takes a
surprising turn. Even though the law of reason ought to be the only incentive
of moral action, the nature of the will is such that it operates through impulses
and inclinations. The unconditional acceptance of the moral law affects these
inclinations. Thus the moral incentive converts the ‘‘natural’’ inclination to
selfishness into one of rational self-love (C.Pr.R., 75; Ak, V, 73). By the same
token, the moral law, being an object of respect, excites a feeling of respect for
law (C.Pr.R., 76; Ak, V, 73). Kant regards this feeling, produced ‘‘solely by
reason’’ (C.Pr.R., 79; Ak, V, 76), indispensable for the efficacy of the moral
law.
We may remember the passage in which he links duty to the experience of
the sublime. ‘‘Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace noth-
ing charming or insinuating but requirest submission and yet seekest not to
move the will by threatening aught that would arouse natural aversion or
terror, but only holdest forth a law which of itself finds entrance into the mind
and yet gains reluctant reverence’’ (C.Pr.R., 89; Ak, V, 86). This rare lyrical
expectoration echoes Rousseau’s Vicaire Savoyard: ‘‘Conscience! Conscience!
Instinct divin, immortelle et céleste voix.’’∑≥ Kant here attributes to the moral
law the very quality which he, in the third Critique, associates with the infinite
vastness of the cosmos (C.Pr.R., 166; Ak, V, 162). The passage suggests that
feelings may act as emotional incentives for living by the principles of the
moral law. It also shows how the doctrine of the third Critique complements
that of the second: the rational motivation of freedom here assumes an aes-
thetic quality.∑∂ Freedom introduces a teleology that science cannot prove to
exist in the physical world, but which is symbolized in the aesthetic harmony
between the mind and the aesthetic object.
Nor was the moral significance of feelings a transient thought of Kant’s
middle period. In ‘‘The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue,’’ the principal part
of the late Metaphysics of Morals (1797), Kant assigns a critical role to the
development of feelings of sympathy for the natural world as well as for one’s
fellow humans. The pleasure derived from disinterested love for nature (rocks,
plants, animals), though not intrinsically moral in itself, does much ‘‘to pro-
mote a state of sensibility favorable to morals.’’∑∑ In the same vein, Kant
declares the propensity wantonly to destroy inanimate beings and, even more,
animate ones indicative of a deficient moral sensitivity. Empathy with others—
feeling pleasure in their joy, sadness in their pain—deserves to be fostered as
being conducive to an attitude of universal benevolence. Kant even claims that
without moral feeling a person is ‘‘morally dead.’’ Yet he stops short of declar-
ing ‘‘moral’’ feelings a duty: ‘‘There can be no duty to have a moral feeling or to
140 The Moral Crisis

acquire it’’ (Virtue, Intro., 58; Ak, VI, 399). But without feelings of benev-
olence the world would ‘‘lack a great moral ornament’’ (Virtue, § 35, 123; Ak,
VI, 458). Indeed, the third form of the categorical imperative as stated in the
‘‘Metaphysical Principles of Virtue’’ actually appears to equate feelings of
benevolence with respect for the moral law. ‘‘Respect for the law, which in its
subjective aspect is referred to as moral feeling, is one and the same with the
consciousness of one’s duty. Therefore, showing respect for man insofar as he is
a moral being . . . is also a duty which others have to him’’ (Virtue, § 35, 123;
Ak, VI, 458). At the very least, moral feelings appear indispensable for attain-
ing the moral ideal.
In the Critique of Judgment Kant laid the foundation for the link between
aesthetic feelings and moral sense. Here the argument follows the opposite
direction from the one it had hesitantly taken in the third part of the Critique
of Practical Reason and the one it was to take resolutely in ‘‘The Metaphysical
Principles of Virtue.’’ In both these writings, feelings formed a part (albeit a
nonessential one) of the moral ideal; here the moral ideal itself is declared
necessary for the development of aesthetic sensitivity. Kant regards the fos-
tering of moral feelings everywhere ‘‘the propaedeutic for the founding of
taste.’’∑∏ Thus he describes the experience of the sublime as consisting in the
mind’s awareness of its moral superiority when confronted with the immensity
or the horror of nature (C.J., § 28). The enormous power or solitude of nature
drives the mind back into itself forcing it to confront its own solitary greatness.
In evoking this feeling of transcendence the sublime symbolizes the moral
attitude. Indeed, for Kant the moral element, more than the stormy or gran-
diose landscape or seascape, constitutes the defining quality of the sublime. ‘‘A
feeling for the sublime in nature cannot well be thought without combining
therewith a mental disposition akin to the moral’’ (C.J., § 29). The powerful,
dialectical harmony between the two infinities—that of nature and of the
moral law—distinguishes Kant’s moral theory of art from the moralistic one
of Diderot and other French art critics.
The discussion of the teleology of nature in the Critique of Judgment estab-
lishes an even more fundamental link with morality. The teleological and the
aesthetic judgment share a common principle. Yet, while the aesthetic judg-
ment originates in a feeling of subjective purposiveness, specifically in an
awareness of the harmony between the appearing form and the subject’s per-
ceptive powers, the so-called teleological judgment stems from an undeniable
impression of objective purposiveness in nature: all phenomena appear to
form part of an integrated system. Without assuming that they do, science
would not be possible. Yet no scientific statement could ever define the pur-
 The Moral Crisis 141

pose of this teleological system itself. Even if science were to confirm the
existence of such a system, it still does not answer the question: What, if any, is
the purpose of the whole? Without an unconditioned end, present only in a
being that never serves as mere means, the decisive element needed to consider
creation meaningful as a whole would be missing. The moral theory provides
that missing part of the system by showing that the person as moral subject is
always an end in itself. He or she alone conveys a purpose to the whole of
nature and enables us to regard it as a hierarchical system of final causes (C.J.,
§ 86). Cosmic teleology, then, attains its end in the moral agent.
The moral consciousness in turn postulates the teleology of the physical
world. In discussing the ‘‘postulates’’ of practical reason, Kant shows that in
the end all things must support the moral agent. Here he reintroduces those
empirical elements that he had previously excluded as motivations for the
moral act. The very teleology of the empirical world order (required by sci-
ence) to remain consistent must, in one way or another, provide the empirical
benefits, which the moral agent may not claim for him or herself. On the basis
of this cosmic teleology Kant postulates empirical well-being as a necessary
complement to the theory of virtue. This allows him to add to the ‘‘highest’’
good (bonum supremum), which consists in the pursuit of virtue for its own
sake, the ‘‘perfect’’ good (bonum consummatum), in which virtue is rewarded
by actual happiness. Though happiness, if taken as a primary incentive, spoils
the moral purity of the virtuous act, for nature to withhold happiness from
those who practice virtue would ruin the universal harmony of which the
human person forms the center and purpose. ‘‘[Happiness] rests on the har-
mony of nature with [a rational being’s] entire end and with the essential
determining ground of his will’’ (C.Pr.R., 129; Ak, V, 124).
As we know, however, virtue does not necessarily yield happiness, nor is
happiness the privilege of the virtuous. All we may claim, then, is that the
order of reason (a teleological consideration) entitles virtue to happiness. Kant
first attempted to bridge the gap between virtue which makes me worthy of
happiness and actual happiness by means of a feeling of contentment that,
though not happiness itself, at least is an ‘‘analogue’’ of it (C.Pr.R., 123; Ak, V,
119). But then he realized that the austere satisfaction of having accomplished
one’s duty falls short of virtue’s rightful desert. Kant therefore attempts to
reunite virtue with happiness in a more substantial way by postulating an
omnipotent Creator, source of the moral as well as of the natural order, who is
able to rejoin what in this life must remain asunder (C.Pr.R., 129; Ak, V, 125).
In an afterlife at last the Creator will grant virtue the happiness it did not
obtain in the present life. One may question whether such a posthumous
142 The Moral Crisis

reward, when the cosmic order no longer exists, adequately shows the alleged
orientation of that order toward the human person.

PROSPECTS OF KANT’S ETHICAL THEORY:

THE IDEAL OF HUMANITY
One of the formulations of the categorical imperative that appears in the
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals goes as follows: ‘‘Act so that you
treat humanity in your own person as well as in that of another, always also as
an end and never as a means only’’ (Foundations, 54; Ak, IV, 429).∑π The
assumption underlying this imperative is that only a being ‘‘whose existence in
itself has absolute worth’’ could be an unconditional end and, as such, be the
object of a categorical imperative (Foundations, 52; Ak, IX, 428). Kant here
equates rationality, the determining principle of ethics, with humanity, thereby
giving the moral law a ‘‘material’’ content. I write this not to reopen the
question whether Kant indirectly smuggled an empirical content into his for-
mal law. We know that he did. But the particular nature of this content as here
formulated points in a different direction from the one he followed elsewhere
in his ethical theory. In the later writings he increasingly regarded the attain-
ment of true humanity the goal of all ethical endeavor.
Does the term ‘‘humanity’’ (Humanität) merely refer to any being endowed
with reason who therefore is entitled to be treated as an end? If so, practical
reason does no more than applying a conclusion of theoretical reason. Un-
doubtedly, this consideration must have been present to Kant’s mind, and it
may well have been the primary one. But Kant’s use of the term ‘‘person’’ in the
second form of the categorical imperative appears to support a richer inter-
pretation. To be a person implies more than belonging to a class of rational
beings: it suggests a being-with-other persons, an encounter of individuals.
Some find here at least the suggestion of a personalist ethics. In the Founda-
tions of the Metaphysics of Morals (Foundations, 66; Ak, IV, 401, 440) Kant
had argued that persons are entitled to respect (Achtung) and that respect
requires reciprocity. I must recognize the other as a self, if I am to respect him
or her. Yet in this earlier work Kant restricts this respect to a respect for the
law: ‘‘All respect for a person is only respect for the law . . . of which the person
provides an example.’’ The later concept of humanity is no longer tied to the
formal one of legality.
The work that inspired Kant to conceive of Humanität as a moral end was
Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784). We saw
that, according to the Critique of Judgment, nature’s ultimate purpose consists
in preparing the conditions for the possibility of a moral life. That purpose,
however, differs from nature’s more immediate goal: the satisfaction of natu-
 The Moral Crisis 143

ral desires and instincts. (Der erste Zweck der Natur würde die Glückseligkeit,
der Zweite die Kultur des Menschen sein [C.J., § 83].) The life of reason
frequently demands that we forego the satisfaction of natural desires. Ob-
viously, many humans do not pursue this higher goal of reason. They rarely
behave rationally, collectively no more than individually. The question, then,
how the human race might finally attain a mature humanity came to assume
an increasing significance in Kant’s thought. In his ‘‘Idea for a Universal His-
tory’’ (1784), he set up as the proper task of culture the raising of humans to
full Humanität.
With age Kant grew more pessimistic about the human race’s chances of
ever attaining that ideal. He increasingly stressed the fundamental flaw in the
human disposition with respect to its rational end. He also ceased to consider
the difference between the sensuous and the rational parts of our nature suffi-
cient for explaining the human inclination to evil. Evil appears as an unex-
plainable fact. That fact, however, renders the ascent from animality to moral-
ity and rationality an arduous, endless struggle of which the eventual success
remains far from assured. In ‘‘An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human
Race Constantly Progressing?’’ (the second part of ‘‘The Strife of the Fac-
ulties’’ [1798]), Kant still professes a belief in the possibility of reaching a
rational humanity, but he suggests that the adversaries of the humanitarian
ideal appear to have the stronger voice: ‘‘Bustling folly is the character of our
species: people hastily set off on the path of the good, but do not persevere
steadfastly upon it; indeed, in order to avoid being bound to a single goal, even
if only for the sake of variety, they reverse the plan of progress, build in order
to demolish, and impose upon themselves the hopeless effort of rolling the
stone of Sisyphus uphill in order to let it roll back down again.’’∑∫
The fundamental discrepancy between the call to humanity and our imper-
fect response to it leads Kant to raise the question again: Can we still con-
fidently assert that human beings in their actual behavior will ever achieve the
kind of rationality which alone renders them absolute ends? He modified the
claim from actual achievement to the capacity of choosing rational ends. Even
if a person behaves irrationally or is mentally deficient, we owe it to the human
race as a whole to honor that capacity. It may be impossible to recognize a
person who acts irrationally as an end, but respect for the capacity of reason,
in however minimal degree present, forbids us to treat him or her as a means.
Moreover, since humanity is a process as well as a state, morality demands
more than respect for humans in their present condition. It requires that we
actively pursue the ideal of a full humanity. As historical beings we must
assume the moral task of raising culture unto a process of humanization. We
are morally bound to promote progress in culture by creating conditions
144 The Moral Crisis

favorable to the attainment of a full humanity. Kant does not imply that the
state of culture ‘‘conditions’’ moral behavior. At best a morally more advanced
state of culture may facilitate ‘‘a disposition toward goodness,’’ but the actual
achievement of moral goodness remains each individual’s private respon-
sibility. Hence virtue consists not only in a person’s conformity to reason but
also in his or her contribution to the future moral condition of the human race.
This cultural ingredient in the categorical imperative inspired Fichte’s phi-
losophy of freedom as well as Hegel’s theory of culture. I do not believe,
however, that it quite overcame the one-sidedness of Kant’s system of ethics.
To do so, it would have had to satisfy the demands of human nature in its
entirety, including its desire for harmony and serenity. Kant’s theory seems in
this regard more restrictive than the theory of moral sense. Even during his
lifetime, Schiller (in On Grace and Dignity [Ueber Anmut und Würde, 1793])
had objected to a theory of the ‘‘good’’ life that praised the dignity of the moral
law at the expense of moral grace. Kant apparently saw the point. In a long
footnote in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone he answered: ‘‘I freely
grant that by very reason of the dignity of the idea of duty I am unable to
associate grace with it. For the idea of duty involves absolute necessity, to
which grace stands in direct contradiction. The majesty of the moral law . . .
awakens a sense of the sublimity of our own destiny which enraptures us more
than any beauty’’ (Religion, 19; Ak, VI, 23). Perhaps one might claim that
fulfilling one’s duty finds its perfection in ‘‘grace.’’ Yet the fact remains that,
after all due qualifications, Kant’s moral object is, as Bernard Williams de-
scribes it, ‘‘a rational agent and no more’’ and the self of the moral agency ‘‘a
noumenal self, outside time and causality’’ (Williams, p. 64).
An equally serious problem lies in the ambiguity of a morality of intention.
Even before Kant wrote his moral system, Abbé Prévost had exposed how
good intentions often hide selfish motives. In his Histoire d’une Grecque mod-
erne (1740), a French diplomat bitterly reminisces about his successful at-
tempt to liberate a young woman from a Turkish serail. He had educated her
and treated her like a daughter. Having fallen in love with his ward, he had
hoped that a long courtship and an uninterrupted stream of benefits would
induce her to return his love and to grant him freely the favors that the Pasha
had extorted from her by force. Instead, she used the very freedom he had
given her to refuse him. The moral interest of the novel lies in the narrator’s
gradual awakening to the ambivalence of his own motives. He at last discovers
the secret desire that had driven him to secure Théophé’s freedom. Prévost’s
work anticipated what Sartre later called la mauvaise foi (bad faith)—the very
attitude the narrator had most studiously attempted to avoid ( J’étais de si
bonne foi . . .). Théophé’s rescuer also understands that the ambivalence of his
 The Moral Crisis 145

virtuous intention had frustrated the end that he had secretly pursued. ‘‘Is it
not miserable that I, enslaved to the pleasures of the senses, have undertaken
to render a girl (kept in a serail) chaste and virtuous! Alas, I have been well
punished for it!’’
Both the narrowly deontological and the ambiguously intentional character
of Kantian ethics have their ground in its subjective character. In contrast to
the traditional priority of the good, for Kant, freedom, the rational will, deter-
mines the morality of the act. To be sure, this freedom, far from being a
subjective inclination, is reason itself in its practical aspect. Nonetheless,
Kant’s reason differs from Plato’s and Aristotle’s: it is not given but constituted
by the subject. Kant’s transcendental subject, of course, surpasses the scope of
the individual mind. Reason, for him, is not a psychological concept. But since
the principles of practical reason are to be applied by intellectually limited and
psychologically complex individuals, subject to passions and emotions that
inevitably obscure their judgment, the decisions made are rarely perfect. That
Kant himself was aware of those restrictions appears in the sharp distinctions
he drew between the intention of the agent and the nature of the act, as well as
between the internal order of morality and the external one of legality. As long
as the subject, even a transcendental subject, is solely responsible for the mean-
ing and content of the moral act, the danger of subjectivism can never be
exorcised.

Conclusion
Philosophers of the Enlightenment attempted to resolve the moral crisis
of their time by redefining the very notion of ethics. Yet they rarely succeeded
in combining the two conditions that render a moral theory both universally
normative and specifically concrete. Rationalists stressed universal norms
while neglecting either concrete application or particular fulfillment. Empiri-
cists focused on particular experiences, such as individual moral sense, private
satisfaction, or public benefit, but failed to link them to the universal element
of obligation. This discrepancy reflects the general disjunction between the
universal and the particular characteristic of Enlightenment thought. In the
ethics of Aristotle and medieval Scholastics, the universal had mostly, though
not exclusively, stressed the deontological moment. But that universality in-
cluded particular, personal satisfaction. Aristotle derived his entire ethics from
the teleology of nature. Later theories followed him in this respect but in-
creasingly formulated the synthesis in terms of the Stoic concept of natural
law, to which Jews, Christians, and Muslims added the idea of a transcendent
sanction. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, Scholastics so exclusively
146 The Moral Crisis

emphasized this transcendent element that the earlier synthesis collapsed.

Ethics came to consist primarily in obedience to a transcendently imposed law,
whereby human fulfillment became in fact a secondary, extrinsic end. For
Locke and some of his followers explicitly, for others (including Descartes)
implicitly, obedience to God’s law is ‘‘rewarded’’ by happiness. But obligation
and well-being had ceased to be intrinsically linked. The two appeared to
become reunited in modern thought when the subject, the source of meaning,
also became the source of value. But now a different problem arose. If the
ethical obligation rested on a rational a priori, it remained purely formal. On
the other side, if ethics was conceived on the basis of experience (as in the
moral sense theory or in utilitarianism) it could not function as an absolute
obligation.
Another problem with the modern principles of ethics follows from the fact
that the subject as only source of value allows no room for genuine otherness.
It reduces the other to an extension of itself. Contemporary authors have
drawn attention to the moral solipsism of the modern theory of the subject. In
it, according to Foucault, ‘‘man’s other must become the same in himself.’’∑Ω
Even Kant’s theory of obligation, so absolute in its demand to treat the person
never only as a means, deals with the other only as a universal, not as an
individual person with particular needs and a unique identity. Treated as mem-
ber of a universal class the individual naturally puts up what Emmanuel
Levinas has called an ‘‘ethical resistance.’’∏≠

Appendix: Moral Changes Reflected in Enlightenment Drama

By the end of the seventeenth century, the drama in France had shifted
from a conflict between moral ideals and passions (as it had been for Cor-
neille) to a conflict between opposing passions. Heroic virtue scores no victo-
ries in Racine’s moral crises. The destructive power of their passions pre-
destines his characters to moral failure and unredeemable misery. But in this
failure lies a moral lesson. Unaided human nature is defenseless against its
own destructive passions. Racine returns the drama to its religious origins.
Ancient fate now assumes the forbidding face of a Jansenist God. In his splen-
did study on Pascal and Racine, Le Dieu caché, Lucien Goldmann defined the
dramatic agon as taking place between religiously sustained virtue and a hos-
tile, secular world.∏∞ This interpretation still remains too much within Cor-
neille’s moral compass. In Racine’s plays the fundamental opposition is be-
tween a horizontal level of human striving and a vertical one of divine election
or rejection. The transcendent dimension of the conflict, caused by what
George Steiner has called ‘‘the intolerable burden of God’s presence,’’ conveys
 The Moral Crisis 147

to Racine’s plays an unprecedented dramatic tension.∏≤ Confrontations and

revelations occur against the background of this inscrutable presence, never
perceived but constantly felt.
At the end, the ruling passion moves the hero or heroine with inescapable
force toward destruction. Phèdre, Athalie, Néron are no longer able to resist
their fall: God has abandoned them to their passions. The significance of the
catastrophe surpasses the human motives that led to it. In that ultimate crisis,
Nero reveals the extent of his inborn corruptness, which previously had re-
mained hidden to all but his mother. At the decisive moment, Titus and Be-
renice finally decide to obey a destiny that had been decreed from all eternity:
he to be Roman emperor, she to abandon him, without their passion being
resolved. In the final act Phèdre openly surrenders to the destructive passion
for her stepson that has been consuming her. Reason and will are powerless
against the fate of strong passions: a higher power leads men and women to
their doom. Andromaque, at the end of the play that bears her name, under-
stands that a transcendent force has guided her tragic fate.

Yes, heaven, I praise thy high tenacity,

Upon my punishment relentless bent,
Thou’st made me drink the dregs of chastisement.∏≥

Eighteenth-century ‘‘classicists’’ resumed ancient plots—as Voltaire did in

Oedipe, Addison in Cato, Gottsched in Dying Cato—but their work lacked
the superhuman dimension that had given Greek tragedy its dramatic power.
Ancient drama had been rooted in the belief that human acts possess an
inherent, prereflective meaning. Born in ritual it stripped the elementary deed
bare to its primeval significance. The modern principle of subjectivity required
conscious motivations: meaning had to be given by the playwright. Thus the
drama became a moralistic projection rather than a ritual of ideal deeds. It dis-
pensed moral lessons, but the source of moral inspiration had dried up. The
theater rarely attained moral greatness. Plays had to end happily: virtue had to
be ‘‘rewarded.’’ Enlightenment plays lacked not only the depth of the Greek
classics, but also that of the early moderns, Shakespeare, Corneille, and Racine.
Playwrights pretended to continue the classical tradition; in fact, they eviscer-
ated the ancient drama. In The Lying Lover, Richard Steele resumed the theme
of Corneille’s Le menteur—itself harking back to Terence. The preface justifies
its different ending: the liar suddenly repents, ‘‘perhaps an injury to the rules of
comedy, but . . . a justice to those of morality.’’ In his dedication of The Tender
Husband, Steele discloses his intention to avoid ‘‘every thing that might look
ill-natured, immoral, or prejudicial to what the better part of mankind hold
sacred and honourable.’’ Leslie Stephen blamed the century’s complacent,
148 The Moral Crisis

passionless mode of living for this moralist mediocrity. ‘‘The society to which
Addison and his fellows belonged was a society of good, commonplace, sensi-
ble people, who were fighting each other by pamphlets instead of swords; who
played a game in which they staked not life and death, but a comfortable
competency . . . and who had a hearty contempt for romantic extravagance. A
society in which common sense is regarded as the cardinal intellectual virtue
does not naturally suggest the great tragic themes.’’∏∂
One of the few who, in my opinion, recaptured some of the existential depth
of the ancient tragedy and succeeded in reconciling it with a modern sensibility
was Vittorio Alfieri. As he resumed the classical themes in such dramas as
Polinice and Antigone, he preserved the full impact of superhuman forces
upon human freedom. Emotions and feelings are anchored within an ancient
sense of fate. His dramas, written with a romantic ardor for freedom and a
hatred of tyrants, do more than transfer modern aspirations to ancient plots:
they remain faithful to the spirit of the Greek tragedy. Antigone in caring for
her deceased brother displays modern feelings of sisterly love and moral inde-
pendence, yet her ultimate motive remains the eternal law of the family.
French tragedies of the time suffered from an even greater decline than the
British. Baron Grimm attributed the departure of moral greatness to an ex-
haustion of the traditional themes. ‘‘Tous les ressorts de notre système drama-
tique semblent usés après deux ou trois mille pièces jetées pour ainsi dire dans
le même moule.’’∏∑ In fact, the decline resulted less from repetition than from a
loss of heroic inspiration. The combination of preachy seriousness and senti-
mental happiness created a new genre that mixed the qualities of tragedy with
the happy ending of comedy. The derogatory name comédie larmoyante fully
captures the genre’s ambivalence, though not its underlying moralism.∏∏ Di-
derot, always anxious to improve human nature, considered it a most effective
means for propagating those moral principles that would assist the middle
class in its social rise. ‘‘How much it would benefit humanity if all the imitative
arts agreed on this common objective: to make people love virtue and hate
vice!’’∏π His two dramas, Le Fils Naturel and Le Père de Famille, have de-
servedly vanished from the repertoire. Nor do we readily understand how they
could ever have entertained a contemporary audience. Lessing had them per-
formed in his theater in Hamburg, though he himself wrote much better plays.
An unfriendly critic (Palissot) wrote about the less unsuccessful first one:
‘‘Ce qui est bon n’est pas nouveau; ce qui est nouveau n’est pas bon.’’ The
charge of a lack of originality hit Diderot at a particularly vulnerable spot
because he had borrowed the entire plot from Goldoni and was accused of
plagiarism. Diderot equates morality with the promotion of a more equitable
social order. ‘‘Virtue’’ had to serve as the great social equalizer. In Le père de
 The Moral Crisis 149

famille, a later, less-than-mediocre play, Diderot more directly but not less
cautiously criticizes the barrier between social classes. In it an aristocratic
young man wants to marry a poor commoner. The playwright considered such
a mésalliance still too shocking for his audience. So, at the end his poor hero-
ine turns out to be a long-lost noble relative. The compromise, as much as the
play itself, illustrates the total absence of moral scope in this moralistic theater.
Dialogues are trimmed to social lectures, uttered by cardboard models of
virtue and vice.
Why did Diderot, otherwise such a witty writer, want to spread his moral
gospel by means of such dull dramas? Some of his contemporaries must have
raised that question. To defend his idea of the theater, he wrote some En-
tretiens, the quality of which far exceeds that of the plays. In one of them we
read: ‘‘The theatrical scene is the only place where the tears of the virtuous
become mixed with those of the evil. Here the evil person allows himself to be
aroused against the injustices he himself has committed; here he feels pity for
unhappiness which he himself has occasioned; here he becomes angry with
men of his own kind.’’∏∫ These words at least recognize the existence of a
serious inner struggle—which his plays fail to display.
Moralizing theater may refine feelings, but it never plumbs the depths of
existence, as Greek or Shakespearean drama had done. Through fear and
compassion, ancient and early modern tragedies awakened the spectator to a
different state of moral awareness. The ideals of the bourgeois drama barely
grazed the surface of moral life: their models of benevolence and honesty were
weak attempts to reconcile moral ideals with questionable social conditions,
easy targets for parody.
Bourgeois drama fared better in Germany. Lessing, though an admirer of
Diderot’s aesthetic theory and director of his plays, was nevertheless conscious
of the Frenchman’s unfortunate tendency to display universal representatives
of virtues and vices rather than individual characters. Anxious to avoid Di-
derot’s abstraction, Lessing delivered his message in a far more dramatic form.
His Minna von Barnhelm takes place during the Seven Years’ War that had
just ended. The plot—a Prussian major falls in love with a Saxon girl, a
political enemy—contains a symbolic plea for reconciliation among Germans
and, beyond that, for a union of all German-speaking people. In other plays,
especially in his powerful Emilia Galotti (1772), Lessing attempted to arouse
his German contemporaries from their feudal slumber. Since the new bour-
geois class, whose spokesman he wanted to be, was barely emerging in Ger-
many, he placed his characters either in a society where customs were still
more feudal, as he did in Emilia Galotti ’s Italy, or in one that was more
advanced, as in Miss Sara Sampson’s England. Lessing was not inclined to
150 The Moral Crisis

please his audience with a happy ending. In Emilia Galotti, the prince, who
abducted Emilia on her wedding day and was responsible for the murder of
her spouse and her own death, remains unpunished. Such a harshly realistic
conclusion conveyed a far stronger message about the abuses of the ancien
régime than Diderot’s edifying comedies.
Still, Lessing’s tragedies (with the exception of Nathan der Weise) remained
moralistic, and the young Schiller castigated him for it in ‘‘The Theatre Stage
as a Moral Institution’’ (1784). In Schiller’s view, the playwright had to con-
front his audience with the fundamental dilemmas of human existence. He
ought to present models, not sermons. Dramatic heroes had to show how to
suffer, how to struggle with destiny, and how to choose between opposite
duties. Above all, they ought to assume full responsibility for their destiny.
Whether the behavior of the characters on the stage corresponds to conven-
tional moral norms matters not. Schiller did not expect that the tragic ending
of his robber hero, Karl Moor, would make the streets safer. But the aim of the
stage is not to achieve ‘‘moral improvements’’ but to fathom the human condi-
tion. Goethe’s and Schiller’s outlaws, Goetz von Berlichingen and Karl Moor,
rejected by society, incarnated a new ideal of freedom and authenticity to be
developed in the romantic theater.
Ironically, the Enlightenment comedy, so often censured for its frivolousness
, may have had a greater moral impact than the moralistic bourgeois drama,
particularly in Britain. The discrepancy between the moral standards by which
people pretended to rule their conduct and their actual behavior provided a
particularly appropriate target in a society where appearances had become
socially more important than reality. Comedies that punctured the balloon
filled with the hot air of moral respectability offered a welcome relief from
empty moral pretenses. No one had exposed the hypocrisy of late seventeenth-
century Parisian life with more wit than Molière. His lighthearted lampoons
of moral posturing probe social conflicts more deeply than the pseudo-heroic
theater of the eighteenth century. His comedy Le Misanthrope, a more serious
moral drama than most tragedies of the time, presents the sad fate of the
person who pursues perfection but merely succeeds in attracting ridicule. Mo-
lière expresses so much sympathy for his hapless anti-hero that his play could
have passed for a tragedy had he not presented Alceste as rigid as he was
virtuous. With bemused interest, but not without compassion, the spectator
watches a man in his effort to do ‘‘the right thing’’ stubbornly plot his own
undoing. Rousseau denounced Molière’s parody of virtue as immoral. But he
missed the play’s moral critique of the spiritual poverty of his age. Molière
denounces the falsity of Tartuffe’s self-serving piety, the false prudery of Les
précieuses ridicules, and the pretentious airs of Le bourgeois gentilhomme.
 The Moral Crisis 151

In the eighteenth century it is to England that we must turn to assess the

moral significance of the comedy. The development of the British comedy of
manners, so splendidly begun by Ben Johnson, was cut short by Cromwell’s
revolution. Restoration comedies, rather than resuming the Renaissance tradi-
tion, explosively released the pent-up aversion to Puritan moralism. Pretend-
ing to be critical of the licentious manners of a hypocritical society, they dis-
played more sympathy for the vices they decried than for the virtues they
praised. In William Wycherley’s lascivious The Country Wife (1675) and
William Congreve’s cynical The Way of the World (1700), the wicked do
indeed get punished in the end, but one can hardly claim that virtue triumphs.
Of their moral pretenses Macaulay wrote: ‘‘The heroes and heroines have a
moral code of their own, an exceedingly bad one.’’ After Jeremy Collier’s
indictment of the raunchy Restoration comedy in A Short View of the Immor-
ality and Profaneness of the English Stage, the theater became more ‘‘re-
spectable,’’ but the insipid ‘‘moral’’ plays that followed lowered dramatic
standards.
Two masters of plot and language, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan,
restored the vitality of the comedy of manners. In his Essay on the Theatre,
Goldsmith called the sentimental comedy that had come to dominate the
British stage ‘‘a false tragedy,’’ unworthy of the name ‘‘comedy.’’ But the mor-
alistic expectations were deeply ingrained in the critics, as appears in Horace
Walpole’s assessment of Goldsmith’s comical masterpiece She Stoops to Con-
quer: ‘‘the lowest of farces that tends to no moral, no edification at all.’’ Only
Sheridan’s School for Scandal, first performed at Drury Lane in 1777, per-
suaded everyone, including Walpole, that ‘‘a marvelous resurrection of the
stage’’ had begun. The British repertoire of the late eighteenth century still
parodied hypocrisy and duplicity, but with their characters serving as vehicles
for plot and witty dialogue, they were less comedies of manners than early
versions of a theater of the absurd.
I conclude these remarks on the moral import of eighteenth-century drama
with a note about satire. Since its ancient origins, satirical poetry has pretended
to serve a moral purpose. Particularly in the eighteenth century it claimed this
high moral ground for its attacks, even when they were only intended to settle
personal accounts. Edward Young cautiously concluded about the satire’s
moral effectiveness: ‘‘It is much to be feared, that misconduct will never be
chased out of the world, by satire; all therefore that is to be said for it, is that
misconduct will certainly never be chased out of the world by satire, if no
satires were written.’’∏Ω Satire measures its victims against established norms
either by absurdly inflating their qualities or by deflating their pretenses. Un-
like common irony, satire is, as Northrop Frye suggested, a ‘‘militant irony.’’π≠
152 The Moral Crisis

While common irony runs the risk of weakening the seriousness of its moral
criticism (as we saw in the case of the ironical novel), satire tends to overshoot
the moral goal and to be too critical to be morally constructive. In the eigh-
teenth century, personal attacks often became so harsh as to diminish both the
aesthetic and the moral quality of writing. In many of Pope’s epigrams, di-
rected at any person he happened to dislike, one looks in vain for a moral
purpose or, in many instances, for common decency.
No writer handled the powerful weapon of sarcasm more destructively than
Jonathan Swift. His moral indignation takes satire well beyond aesthetic mod-
eration. In his notorious ‘‘A Modest Proposal,’’ Swift takes his critique of the
British government’s exploitative attitude toward the Irish population to its
extreme conclusion. Why should the British table not take advantage of the
tender meat of newborn Irish children instead of letting their unnecessary
bodies go to waste in famine? No less sardonic are the final scenes of Gulliver’s
voyage to the Houyhnhnms, in which the merciless Dean Swift appears to
release an unadulterated hatred of the human race. Upon leaving the peaceful
kingdom of the horses, Gulliver exclaims: ‘‘By copulating with one of the
Yahoo species (the human race) I had become a parent of more.’’ The loving
embrace of his wife as well as the smell of his children repels him. A letter to
Pope (September 9, 1725) discloses that these feelings were more than literary
fiction: ‘‘I have ever hated all nations, professions and communities. . . . But
principally I hate that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter,
Thomas, and so forth.’’ Swift’s inner demons transform the targets of his
critique into objects of disgust. He himself describes satire as ‘‘a sort of Glass
wherein Beholders do generally discover everybody’s Face but their Own.’’ But
when satire is as ferociously administered as it was in some of Swift’s most
violent pieces, beholders are not likely to discover any face in it but the cruel
satirist’s own. Taken to an extreme, satire turns against itself and loses its
effectiveness as a moral weapon.
 6

The Origin of Modern Social Theories

The Enlightenment may have made its most lasting impact on the way
we live and think today through its social theory. Our institutions and laws,
our conception of the state, and our political sensitivity all stem from Enlight-
enment ideas. This, of course, is particularly true in the United States, where
the founding fathers transformed those ideas into an unsurpassed system of
balanced government. Remarkably enough, at the center of these ideas stands
the age-old concept of natural law. Much of the Enlightenment’s innovation in
political theory may be traced to a change in the interpretation of that concept.
Originally it had a descriptive as well as a prescriptive meaning: it referred to
the universal order of nature, to the way things are in their communality and
in their particularity. This comprehensive order had a normative quality as
well. Freedom ought to conform to nature as all other things do. Yet this ideal
aspect was never separated from the real one described in the theory of natural
law.
The voluntarist philosophies of the late Middle Ages shifted the emphasis
from the intrinsic rationality of natural law to the decision of the lawmaker.
The obligation of the law thereby gained ascendancy over its being an expres-
sion of a universal order of reason. By the eighteenth century, the prescriptive
element had become relatively independent from the descriptive one. This may
seem surprising. Was the rationalist conception of the natural law not a pure,

153
154 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

perhaps too pure, philosophical description of social reality? In fact, it is not

descriptive at all; its abstract universals take no account of particular historical
realities. In fact, many Enlightenment theorists attempted to disguise a radical
project of social reform under the appearance of an impartial speculation on
human nature. Ignoring all factual information about the origin, develop-
ment, and particular conditions of civil societies, such political thinkers as
Rousseau decreed what they ought to be. But others, such as Montesquieu,
avoided those speculative abstractions and instead investigated the origins and
development of civil law and social institutions. Montesquieu mentions natu-
ral laws, but he defines them as ‘‘the necessary relations arising from the nature
of things,’’ thus taking us back to the descriptive concept of law. All positive
laws, according to him, are but human attempts to adapt the law of nature to
the physical and moral conditions of a particular area and tradition. Practical
conclusions ought to be based on historical evidence, not on abstract specula-
tion. At the end of the century, the pioneers of the new science of economics
also broke with the prescriptive concept of natural law. For the early econo-
mists, specifically for the French Physiocrats and for Adam Smith, the laws of
economics were the empirical laws of nature, not a priori moral or political
dictates.

The Recasting of Natural Law and

the Origin of Natural Rights
That a universal law rules relations among nations as well among indi-
viduals was not a new idea. It was the founding principle of Stoic ethics and
had been suggested by Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle anticipated a crucial fea-
ture of the natural law when he distinguished a law that applies everywhere
from statutory laws that differ from one constitution to another. ‘‘By the two
kinds of law I mean particular law and universal law. Particular law is that
which each community lays down and applies to its own members: this is
partly written and partly unwritten. Universal law is the law of nature. For
there really is, as everyone to some extent divines, a natural justice and in-
justice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or
covenant with each other’’ (Rhetorica, 1373b). Elsewhere he adds that every
form of legislation requires deliberation, a function of practical reason (Eth.
Nic., 1141b–1142b), and that ‘‘there is but one [law] which is everywhere by
nature the best’’ (Eth. Nic., 1135a). Thus Aristotle relates law to reason and
reason to nature.∞ Still, the theory of natural law did not reach its definitive
form before Stoicism, because neither Plato nor Aristotle held that all humans
shared the same nature and were therefore entitled to equal rights. Free men
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 155

differed essentially from slaves, men from women, Greeks from barbarians.
The Stoics first clearly stated that all humans equally partake of a common
nature, and on the basis of that assumption they conceived of human nature as
a universal rule of conduct. Living well meant living convenienter naturae
(Cicero, De finibus, III, 73), and that, for humans, meant living in accordance
with reason. The same law of reason manifest in the human mind underlies the
order of nature. Reason converts nature’s order of rightness (ius naturale) into
a morally normative order (the lex naturae).≤
For the Romans, the lex naturae possessed no juridical authority except
when no civil law on the subject existed. Their jurisprudence accepted as
‘‘law’’ only a stipulated ordinance issued by a civil authority entitled to do so.
Neither did positive laws derive their juridical authority from the natural law.
As A. P. d’Entrèves pointed out in his classic text on natural law: ‘‘Nowhere, in
fact, do we find in the Corpus Juris an assertion of the superiority of natural to
positive law, in the sense that in a case of conflict, the one should overrule the
other. . . . We must indeed divest ourselves, in order to understand the Roman
conception of natural law, not only of the modern conception of natural
rights, but of the subordination of positive to natural law with which later ages
have made us familiar.’’≥
How, then, did natural law eventually acquire its sovereign authority over
civil law? The natural law had always had some moral authority insofar as
nature itself always possessed a somewhat sacred character, either because it
was divine or because it was derived from a transcendent source. Thus Cicero
writes: ‘‘True law is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal
application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its com-
mands, and deters from wrong-doing by its prohibitions; . . . one eternal and
unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will
be one master and one ruler, that is, God over us all, for He is the author of this
law, its promulgator and its enforcing judge.’’∂ Still, as I have noted, this high
moral authority did not give the natural law direct juridical power.
The Christian tradition adopted much of the Stoic doctrine. Natural law
reflects the rational order of the universe, an order that itself was grounded in
the lex aeterna of God’s government On the basis of this concept of eternal
law, Aquinas developed a comprehensive theory of law in the Summa The-
ologiae (arts. 90–96 of pt. I–II). ‘‘The world is ruled by divine providence—
the whole community of the universe is governed by the divine reason. There-
fore the very notion of the government of things residing in God as in the ruler
of the universe, has the nature of a law’’ (S. Th., I–II, q.91 a.1).∑ St. Thomas
traces the authority of all positive law to the natural law. ‘‘Every human law
has just so much of the nature of law as it is derived from the law of nature’’ (S.
156 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

Th. I–II, q.95 a.2). A statutory law is mostly a ‘‘determination’’ of the natural
law. For Aquinas, the primary concern of law (natural or positive) is not the
good of the individual, but the common good. The social order has a priority
over the individual and the first task of law is to secure peace on the basis of
distributive justice. (S. Th., I–II, q.90 a.2).
The guiding idea of the concept of natural law, namely, that all humans
share a common nature, lost much of its significance in late medieval nominal-
ist thought. Instead, the prescriptive element that had been present from the
beginning, the will of God, became prominent, and natural law derived its
authority from a divine decree. In fact, the legal character of any law (natural
as well as positive) resides exclusively in the decision of the lawgiver. Accord-
ing to the nominalist Marsilius of Padua (1340–96), God has restricted his
direct jurisdiction to the natural law, while entrusting positive legislation to
the human community. Still, no human law can contradict divine law without
losing its authority. Thomists and nominalists disagreed on the source of the
natural law. Did it originate in God’s wisdom or in God’s will? In the latter
case, favored by nominalists, the natural law attained a quasi-legal character.
Both parties continued to agree that reason was the source of our knowledge
of the natural law.
The Reformation strengthened the voluntarist interpretation, while the con-
cept of nature (tainted by sin) lost much of its former significance. For Calvin-
ists, not nature but the will of God became the determining factor of the moral
law. In reaction against this position, naturalist thinkers revived the original
Stoic conception of natural law. In fact, the ancient Stoic theory had not been
religiously neutral: a divine Logos filled all of nature and thus endowed na-
ture’s law with a divine authority. But this religious meaning, already weak in
the Renaissance interpretation of Stoic morality, had almost entirely vanished
by the eighteenth century.
It was John Locke who introduced the notion of natural law to the Enlight-
enment as a rational ground of moral and legal obligations as well as of
juridical rights. Yet unlike the Stoics, the Roman jurists, and most medieval
Scholastics, he stressed its juridical authority. The natural law, as he described
it in the Second Treatise of Civil Government, initiated in fact a theory that
neither Stoic philosophers nor Roman jurists nor medieval Schoolmen would
have recognized. Although for all of them, the natural law had been the law of
a rational world order inherent in nature, for Locke, it had been the conclu-
sion of a divine decision. Still, the English philosopher stressed the ‘‘natural’’
character of the law and even admitted an historical ‘‘state of nature’’ in which
that law would be the only norm. All the while he insisted firmly on this
natural law’s legally binding authority.∏ ‘‘The state of nature has a law of
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 157

nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law,
teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and indepen-
dent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.’’π
Some passages in the Second Treatise on Civil Government leave the im-
pression that natural law rules archaic society and that civil law belongs to a
later stage. ‘‘ ’Tis plain the world never was, nor never will be, without num-
bers of men in that state—I moreover affirm, that all men are naturally in that
state, and remain so, till by their own consents they make themselves members
of some politic society’’ (II, 14, 15). Locke here asserts (1) that the state of
nature is an actual, historical state in which some people still continue living
today; and (2) that the natural law ruling that state continues to be the su-
preme law, the norm of all positive laws in civil society. Other passages suggest
that the state of nature was the pristine condition of the human race before it
was corrupted by the fall. Since the fall occurred at the beginning, it appears to
be a theological assumption rather than an historical condition. John Dunn
describes it as that original state of innocence: ‘‘The state of nature is a topic
for theological reflection, not for anthropological research.’’∫
But more often Locke refers to this state of nature as if it were an enduring,
rather than a prehistorical or prelapsarian one. Every sovereign remains per-
manently in the state of nature with respect to every other sovereign. It is the
natural law itself that drives humans to leave the state of nature and to enter
civil society. The transition, though achieved through a free contract, is none-
theless dictated by and needed for, the full application of the natural law. For
that application requires the presence of social conditions that are not avail-
able in the state of nature.Ω The principles of natural law are insufficient to
settle even elementary disputes concerning ownership. The need for their in-
terpretation through civil laws excludes the permanence of a state without
public arbitration. When Locke, then, declares that some civilizations remain
in the state of nature today, as he does in the passage quoted above, he implies
that, though subject to the law of nature, they lack the benefit of a civil society
needed for fully observing that law. The claim that Locke simply juxtaposes
two states, one of which is natural (the state of nature) while the other results
from a ‘‘free’’ decision (civil society), misses the essential meaning of the state
of nature, which, for Locke, serves as a foundation for the political state.∞≠
Locke’s concept of a natural law as source of political authority opposes both
Filmer’s divine right of kings (the target of Locke’s first Treatise) and Hobbes’s
lawless state of nature.
One of the most significant changes in modern social theory concerns the
notion of natural rights. The notion of individual rights inherent in the person
did not exist before the twelfth century. What did exist was an objective order
158 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

of lawfulness ( jus) that allowed those who lived under the law to actively
pursue whatever did not conflict with the law. The idea of subjective rights,
that is, rights independent of that objective condition, was foreign to Roman
as well as to Christian legislators. It has long been assumed that the concept of
individual rights emerged in the fourteenth century dispute between Pope
John XXII and the Franciscans on the question of evangelical poverty. Could
the Franciscans legitimately claim to have the use of things necessary to life
without possessing them? The pope denied it: each person has an inalienable
natural right to possess. Many, including myself, used to interpret this episode
as the birth of the idea of natural rights. In his recent The Idea of Natural
Rights, the eminent historian of medieval law, Brian Tierney, has proven that
the notion of individual rights originated some two centuries earlier and had
originally nothing to do with the nominalist philosophy to which it has so
often been attributed. In fact, Ockham’s own formulation of it remained en-
tirely within the objective Thomist theory of natural law.∞∞
The twelfth-century commentators on Gratianus’s Decretum (c. 1140)—an
accumulation of the recovered Roman law and of various, not always consis-
tent canons of Church law—first conceived of right as a subjective power
inherent in humans. This subjective interpretation of rights survived into the
modern age, mostly, as Tierney shows, through the intermediary of the Span-
ish Scholastics of the sixteenth century. Ockham, long considered the father of
the idea of subjective rights, did in fact no more than repeat the earlier argu-
ments based upon the law of reason, which Aquinas and other Dominicans
had formulated well before him. For those Scholastics, jus had continued to
define, as it had for the Romans, the legal condition of the social state of
rightness (the sphere of the justum).∞≤ St. Thomas’s description of jus as ‘‘what
is fair’’ still remains in line with the idea of a legal order that makes right.∞≥
That order links the individual to a number of social bodies, such as guild,
principality, kingdom, or empire, through which rights and duties reached the
individual.
The nascent national state gradually absorbed most functions of the inter-
mediate multiple bodies, thereby equalizing all citizens in principle yet isolat-
ing them in practice. The states granted them political rights but severed the
links with the intermediate social entities that integrated the person within a
community of right. Princes legitimated their authority in a different way than
the vassals of the feudal society had done. The source of authority within the
states was neither the emperor nor the pope who represented a universal order,
but the particular will of the sovereign. By the same token the rights derived
from this particular source were restricted to a limited territory and to particu-
lar groups (e.g., Catholics or Protestants). Eventually members of groups that
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 159

did not share the rights other groups enjoyed within the state (especially re-
ligious rights) began to appeal to a doctrine of ‘‘universal human rights.’’ The
source of rights became thereby transferred from the community to the indi-
vidual. What began with particular claims made by religious dissenters in
sixteenth-century France and England resulted in the eighteenth-century dec-
laration of universal human rights. Alasdair MacIntyre describes the outcome
as follows: ‘‘The degree to which a particular individual identifies him or
herself with the life of the community in which he or she lives is always, on the
modern view, conditional. For it is only if, and insofar as, the community
satisfies the conditions prescribed by each particular individual’s view of
rights, that that individual has good reason so to identify.’’∞∂ Not the commu-
nity but an individualized conception of natural law grants each individual
equal rights.
The notion of the person as source of individual rights independently of the
social order to which he or she belongs was not entirely new. It had its roots in
the participation in a superior order that transcended the earthly community
and bestowed a unique dignity upon the individual as imago Dei. It granted
the person who belonged to it the right and duty to resist any power that
opposed that order. Conflicts between the Roman Empire and groups of Jews
and Christians had occurred all through the first three centuries of the com-
mon era. During the Reformation many appealed to those early precedents.
Yet there was a difference. At that earlier time rights had reached the individ-
ual via a sacred community. To some extent this was still the case with such
early religious dissenters as the Anabaptists and Calvin himself who always
stressed the priority of the sacred community even in dealing with the secular
state. But later dissenters (Protestants in France, Catholics and Calvinists in
England) usually appealed to individual rights grounded in the natural law. At
any rate, by the eighteenth century the supernatural notion of the person had
become totally secularized, and human rights were claimed on the basis of an
abstract theory of natural law. Those rights isolated persons from such con-
crete social structures as the community in which they lived, the trade or
profession they practiced, the religion to which they belonged. Indeed, they
‘‘universalized human solitude.’’∞∑
Two philosophers perceived the social danger of such unmediated appeals
to rights. They did not deny individual rights but showed how any effective
exercise of them required them to be mediated by the community. In Levia-
than, Hobbes defined natural right as ‘‘the liberty each man hath, to use his
own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to
say, of his own life.’’∞∏ In a prepolitical condition, if such a condition exists,
each person has indeed a right to everything. But as that right is constantly
160 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

threatened, no one possesses the power to enforce it. Hence real rights come
with laws passed and enforced by civil society. Spinoza’s theory in the Trac-
tatus Politicus (1670) resembles Hobbes’s. He defines the right of a nature as
coextensive with the power of that nature: ‘‘Each natural thing has by nature
as much right as it possesses power to exist and to operate—as this power of
each natural being is none other than God’s own power, which is absolutely
free.’’∞π An individual’s rights, then, are equivalent to his power to protect
them. In the state of nature, however, where even the weakest person can kill
the strongest, no single person is able to protect his rights.∞∫ Therefore, Spi-
noza concludes, no person in the state of nature possesses any real rights, but
only the illusion of rights.
Although both these theories reject the traditional concept of natural law,
their conclusions stand in fact closer to it than those of Locke and the
eighteenth-century theorists of rights. Independent of civil society no real nat-
ural rights exist. For Locke, on the contrary, the existence of individual rights
precedes that of the community, which previously had been considered the
concrete source of right. In the original, allegedly prepolitical state of nature,
the person already possesses all fundamental rights needed for the preserva-
tion and free development of human life. Locke follows Hobbes in describing
self-preservation as the fundamental natural right. Though he restricts that
right far more than Hobbes did, for whom it was a right to ‘‘everything,’’ he
nevertheless extends it well beyond mere self-preservation. For him, some
form of property is essential to the fullness of life, since property enables the
person to extend his power. ‘‘Every man has a property in his own person. . . .
The labor of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his’’
(V, § 27). But the institution of property is a historical concept that assumes
various forms in different societies. Marx who, like Locke, describes property
as ‘‘a human being’s relation to his natural conditions of production as belong-
ing to him . . . which only form, so to speak, his extended body’’ agrees with
the British theorist that the early forms of appropriation occurred as precondi-
tions of labor.∞Ω The point is important, for if the natural law attaches property
rights to labor, as Locke claims, rather than leaving them to the consensus of
society (as Grotius and Pufendorf still had claimed), the concept of natural
rights becomes not only detached from the community but also stretched to
indefinable limits.
If already the state of nature grants such extensive rights, the need to move
to a civil state becomes much weaker. For Hobbes, that move had been dic-
tated by the very need to survive. Locke, however, is forced to raise the ques-
tion: ‘‘If man in the state of nature be so free as has been said; if he be absolute
lord of his own person and possessions; equal to the greatest and subject to
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 161

nobody, why will he part with his freedom?’’ (IX, § 123). His answer that the
possibility of enjoying native rights is uncertain, because many are ‘‘no strict
observers of equity and justice,’’ exposes, once again, the tension between
Locke’s two different conceptions of the state of nature. Was it a nonhistorical,
permanent state or a primitive historical condition that in the end may not
differ too much from Hobbes’s pessimistic position? In either case the transi-
tion to the civic state occurs in order to preserve the original condition of
natural law: it insures that those who fail to respect the rights of others be
restrained. Civil society, then, protects existing rights; it does not establish
them. The Treatise puts it bluntly: ‘‘The great and chief end therefore of men’s
unity into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the
preservation of their property’’ (IX, § 124).
In the original state of nature, Locke assumed that its members cooperated
with one another. They even had a right to defend life, liberty, and property by
punishing trespassers (II, § 9). But how can there be a right to punish, defined
as ‘‘lawfully do harm to another,’’ prior to rules to apply it? That crime ought
to be punished, all agree; but it becomes a right only within a community that
has legally established the conditions for doing so. Comparing Locke’s posi-
tion to Kant’s, one commentator writes: ‘‘Locke’s claim is that we have a
natural right to punish and that we move to civil government in order to
punish more efficiently—Kant’s claim, on the other hand, is that we have a
natural need to punish but no natural right.’’≤≠
Far from considering the political community the source of rights, Locke
argues that to join it individuals must give up some of their natural rights in
order to hold the fundamental ones more safely. Individuals are fully endowed
with rights before the political community is established. The role of the civil
state becomes thereby reduced to what Otto Gierke calls ‘‘an insurance com-
pany’’ for the protection of property and liberty.≤∞ Ironically, to protect those
very interests other eighteenth-century liberals, Hume, Smith, and Bentham,
opposed a theory of natural rights. In their view, it might lead to social in-
stability and obstruct material progress.≤≤ Inspired by communitarian consid-
erations, Edmund Burke also rejected those abstract individual rights. He
denied the legitimacy of the French Revolution because, he claimed, it was
based on nothing but the ‘‘abstraction’’ of human rights, an unreal ‘‘meta-
physic’’ concocted by men of letters and philosophers.≤≥
The thesis of natural rights responded to economic and political conditions
that prevailed during the later seventeenth century. The concept of individual
human rights detached the person from the restrictive ties to the state and thus
benefited the economic expansion that had just begun. While Britain, having
introduced a constitutional government based on the theory of natural rights,
162 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

entered a prolonged period of prosperity that eventually made her the eco-
nomic ruler of the world, France stagnated socially and economically before
erupting in a series of violent political revolutions that were to last more than
half a century. At the same time we wonder whether the economic success of a
social system that one-sidedly favors the individual over the community justi-
fies the theory as it was formulated in the eighteenth century. How little pro-
tection it offered against the pauperization of large parts of the population
became obvious in the early stages of industrial capitalism. Since then, how-
ever, most Western societies have reincorporated the theory of rights within
some order of right, rather than linking it to a vague notion of human nature.
Nor is the artificial distinction between a state of nature ruled by natural rights
and a social or political state ruled by positive laws still needed to legitimate
the foundations of the just society. That distinction served a purpose during
the Enlightenment as it drew attention to the neglected place of the individual
in the absolutist structure of the national state. Today the concept of a state of
nature in which humans have rights independently of any communitarian
structure would only perpetuate the social abuses caused by an individualist
theory of society.

The Social Contract

The theory of social contract was less a scientific interpretation of politi-
cal facts than an ideology for change. As formulated in the late seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, it had little basis in history. Its meaning differed
substantially from a notion that bore the same name in the sixteenth century.
According to the earlier theory, human beings lived in structured societies
from the beginning and needed no contract to do so. The contract concerned
merely the particular form of government they wished to adopt. Thus accord-
ing to Francisco Suarez, the chief political theorist among sixteenth-century
Scholastics, humans constituted a unified group—corpus quoddam mysti-
cum—when they adopted or rejected a particular political system. Hugo
Grotius had projected the idea of a prepolitical condition as a working hy-
pothesis for the purpose of extending to international law the legal principles
valid within a nation. But he did not question the thesis that humans have
always lived in structured societies any more than the Scholastics did.
For Locke and his followers in Britain and later in France and Germany, the
idea of a social contract had to serve a different purpose, namely, to justify the
modern state. According to them, the natural law, conceived as a historical
process, drove humans from a prepolitical to a political state. They thereby
assumed (1) that the civil state constitutes an advanced ‘‘stage in the evolution
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 163

of natural law itself . . . added to [that of ] the pure natural law,’’≤∂ and (2) that
the human race consists of discrete individuals able to form a society only by
explicit consent. The social contract was the only legitimate means to move
from one state to another.≤∑ A free decision of individual wills thereby became
the only legitimate foundation of society. Nonetheless, contrary to Hobbes,
Locke regarded the state of nature as a genuinely social state. He rarely speaks
of a social ‘‘contract’’ but instead prefers the term ‘‘compact,’’ with its con-
notation of communitarian trust. Nor does he distinguish two stages in the
transition from the state of nature to that of civil society: first, a social contract
to introduce social cohesion among individuals and next a political contract to
constitute political sovereignty. Even as Hobbes before him and Rousseau
after him, Locke assumed that humans become social by their own free will.
The problematic thesis that humans transform themselves from sociable into
social beings follows from the modern principle that persons choose their own
way of being. If they live in society, it must be because they decided to do so.
The social contract seals that decision and converts the mass into a coherent
body.
Humans are by nature sociable. This induces them, Locke argues, by formal
agreement to enter into a politically structured society. Those who do so freely
submit ‘‘to the determination of the majority’’ (VIII, § 97) and convey a lim-
ited mandate to a governmental power that executes the decisions that their
legislating representatives have made into law. The genius of Locke’s theory
lay not so much in the division of powers as in the way he balanced them
against each other, nowhere more so than in the relation between the power of
the executive and the legislative. The executive convokes and supervises the
legislative but obeys its decisions and remains subordinate to it. Yet as circum-
stances change and no written law keeps pace with historical vicissitudes, the
legislative must leave some discretionary power to the executive—which
Locke calls the ‘‘prerogative’’ (XIV, § 159–60). It even allows the government
sometimes to act ‘‘against the direct letter of the law’’ (XIV, § 164).
Locke influenced all political philosophers in France during the eighteenth
century, yet not all accepted his version of a social contract. Montesquieu
rejected it. According to him, there could only be a political contract. In the
Lettres persanes he writes: ‘‘I have never heard people speaking of public right
without starting with a careful research about the origin of society—which I
consider ridiculous. In fact they are linked to each other from birth. A son is
born near his father, and he stays there. That is society and the cause of
society.’’≤∏ For Rousseau, on the contrary, the idea of a social contract forms
the centerpiece of his political philosophy: it makes a political contract super-
fluous. Yet he does not derive it from the theory of natural law as Locke had
164 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

done. His argument rests primarily on historical grounds. All rights and obli-
gations of modern society are to be initiated by an explicit agreement. In Julie,
Rousseau had presented a romantic model of a natural society. In his political
writings, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and The Social Contract,
he showed how modern society precludes the kind of natural community that
people once enjoyed in ‘‘the state of nature.’’ The current political system
needed drastically to be reformed. Yet whatever changes it required, they
would not aim at restoring the state of nature but at removing society as far
from its original state as possible.
In his early Discourse on Inequality (1755), Rousseau assumed that the
original condition of the human race was one of equality. Since no private
property divided people, their earliest state was not one of war, as Hobbes had
assumed. But neither was it fully social. Savages are neither social nor antiso-
cial. They are ‘‘sociables en puissance’’ as Rousseau was to describe them in
Emile. Still some social bond must have existed among them. Otherwise hu-
mans would never have learned how to speak. Yet in that primitive state
humans had no defined obligations to one another. They were ‘‘neither good
nor bad, virtuous or vicious.’’≤π Upon entering the pastoral stage humans
became more fully social. Still, they continued to live on a footing of equality
and their societies needed no formal contracts. With the invention of metal-
lurgy and agriculture, however, production began to exceed immediate needs
and private property emerged. With it came strife, social chaos, and the kind
of war that Hobbes had attributed to the entire state of nature.
The passage on private property that introduces the second part of Rous-
seau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality has become famous. ‘‘The first
man who having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This
is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder
of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murder, how many horrors
and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the
stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to
this imposter.’ ’’≤∫ Rousseau, then, regards as the source of all evil what Locke
had considered the beginning of the humanization process. The laws and
institutions of the existing political states legitimate this condition of social
injustice. As political powers grow stronger, inequality spreads from the eco-
nomic to all social levels until society becomes divided into a class of masters
and one of slaves. Such inequality prepares a radical social revolution.
In the Social Contract (1762) Rousseau shows that modern civil society
needs a contract to survive. Yet it fundamentally differs from Locke’s in two
respects.
1. The very possibility of a contract, for him, presupposes a state of equality,
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 165

a condition that does not exist wherever private property has already estab-
lished an unequal distribution of power. By recognizing property as a natural
right that precedes the contract, Locke’s contract legalized an existing inequal-
ity and thereby perpetuated it. No free person would ever sign a contract
whereby he loses everything and gains nothing! ‘‘Such an act of surrender is
illegitimate, null, and void by the mere fact that he who makes it is not in his
right mind.’’ Much less can one assume that a whole people have lost their
senses.≤Ω Rousseau derived his argument from L’esprit des lois. In bk. XV,
chap. 2, Montesquieu argues that a contract whereby one party loses its free-
dom is by its very nature invalid. Nor is it legally enforceable. No man can sell
himself or his children in slavery. Civil law cannot forbid a slave from fleeing
from his master, since slavery has deprived him or her of the equality of rights
on which civil society rests.≥≠ Locke himself presents some version of this
argument, though he supports it on different, religious grounds. ‘‘A man, not
having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact or his own consent,
enslave himself to anyone, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power
of another to take away his life when he pleases’’ (IV, § 23). Yet, Locke did not
consider an unequal distribution of property sufficient to invalidate a social
contract. Quite the contrary, the social contract’s main purpose is to protect
existing property rights. Indeed, it is hard to see what Rousseau himself under-
stands by contractual equality. He does not require that private property be
abolished: ‘‘I do not mean that power and wealth must be absolutely the same
for all, but only that power should need no sanction of violence but be ex-
ercised solely by virtue of rank and legality’’ (SC, II, 1). In his Discourse on
Political Economy he argues only for a rough equality of private holdings.
2. The transition to a legitimate civil society should not imply any sacrifice
of freedom. No one can by contract alienate even part of his freedom. To do so
would deprive the person of the full moral responsibility required for a legal
contract. Even if an individual were able to sacrifice part of his or her freedom,
such a contract would not be binding on his or her descendants. ‘‘They are
born free, their liberty belongs to them, and no one but themselves has a right
to dispose of it’’ (SC, I, 4). Nor does the original state of nature form an
adequate basis for social rights (as Locke believed), since rights require a
degree of reflection not yet present in a state ruled by instinct rather than by
reason. ‘‘Rousseau distinguishes the primitive natural right antecedent to rea-
son from the natural right established by reason.’’≥∞ Only if the natural law is
recognized as the law of reason, does it establish a ground for social rights.
People will not cross the chasm that divides the civil from the natural state
until ‘‘the obstacles to continuing in the state of Nature were stronger than the
forces which each individual could employ to the end of continuing it’’ (SC, I,
166 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

6). Once made, however, the social contract transforms the person ‘‘into part
of something greater than himself’’ (SC, II, 7). He receives new powers and
rights but must surrender all personal control over them. Is Rousseau not
contradicting the very condition he set up for a contract to be valid? How can
a person surrender what is by nature inalienable? On one side, he opposes
Hobbes’s thesis that in the state of nature might is right and that, upon enter-
ing civil society, a person surrenders his natural rights (SC, I, 3). On the other
side, he argues that once the social contract is in place, there occurs ‘‘a com-
plete alienation by each associate member of the community of all his rights’’
(SC, I, 6). Civil liberty becomes ‘‘curtailed by the general will’’ (SC, I, 8).
Rousseau justifies this apparent loss by claiming that the social contract does
not abolish natural rights, but transforms them and thereby secures a safer
possession of them. Here also lies the ground for Rousseau’s recognizing only
a social contract and not a second, political one, contrary to Samuel Pufen-
dorf, the weightiest German political thinker of that time, who held that a pact
of social equality, granting all members of society the same rights and obliga-
tions, must precede a political pact by which they transfer political power to
chosen leaders. Rousseau firmly rejects such a political contract: the institu-
tion of a government requires no contract at all, since the citizens release no
power. ‘‘To argue that the sovereign [that is, the citizens all made equal by
the social contract] can impose a superior upon himself is absurd and contra-
dictory’’ (SC, II, 16). Government remains a function of the people. Those
charged with executive powers are functionaries, not masters, who apply the
laws made by the people.
We now turn to what undoubtedly is the linchpin in Rousseau’s political
theory—the conception of the general will (la volonté générale). Marsilius of
Padua (1280–1343), writing centuries earlier, mentions the common will of
the citizens as the source of all secular authority. ‘‘Their minds are reciprocally
stimulated to consider that truth at which not one of them could arrive apart
or separately from the others.’’≥≤ Rousseau first used the term volonté générale
in an article, ‘‘Economie politique,’’ published in volume V of the Encyclo-
pédie (in 1755). In this essay, sometimes called the Third Discourse, he follows
Locke’s ideas and terminology. He even claims that the purpose of the social
compact is to secure the peaceful possession of property, thereby squarely
contradicting the central thesis of the Discourse on Inequality, published the
same year.≥≥ In spite of this individualistic tendency, he claims that the general
will overrules all particular pursuits of private interests. It is the source of
social virtue and constitutes the body politic as a moral being (A Discourrse in
Political Economy in the Social Contract and Discourses, pp. 253, 264). In
The Social Contract, the general will assumes an even more autocratic charac-
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 167

ter. It brooks no dissent. Since not all particular wills spontaneously agree with
the general will, the state must educate its citizens and, if necessary, compel
them ‘‘to be free’’ (SC, III, 15).
Rousseau optimistically hoped to prevent abuses by a strict political control
of education and religion. As early as the Discourse on Political Economy he
wrote: ‘‘If children are brought up in common in the bosom of equality; if they
are imbued with the laws of the state and the precepts of the general will . . . we
cannot doubt that they will nothing contrary to the will of society’’ (p. 269).
According to The Social Contract, this concept of public education was to
become law. It remained, of course, far removed from the precepts given in
Emile, Rousseau’s guide on education, published the same year. Yet the two
concepts were not wholly incompatible. Emile contains the rules for educating
a child in the imperfect society in which we now live, whereas the education to
citizenship presented in The Social Contract aims at the ideal state.≥∂
A constant subject of controversy has been Rousseau’s conception of the
state’s relation to religion. As a powerful body, the Church might easily stir up
resistance to political decisions. Rousseau therefore requires that the state
strictly control religion. In addition, all citizens must swear allegiance to a
‘‘civil religion’’ established for the sole purpose of fostering good citizenship.≥∑
‘‘Though it has no power to compel anyone to believe, it can banish from the
State all who fail to do so’’ (SC, IV, 8).≥∏
The social contract conveys all power to the body politic and deprives the
existing intermediate bodies of authority. Absolute sovereignty can be neither
delegated nor mediated: Rousseau replaces the entire hierarchy of economic,
cultural, and religious associations by a unitary state. As Hegel was to point
out in his Philosophy of Right (1820), this suppression of ‘‘civil society’’ (Bür-
gerliche Gesellschaft) abolished any possibility of mediating particular inter-
ests with the common good and thereby prepared major conflicts.≥π Rousseau
assumed that those semi-independent corporations increased social inequality.
Little did he foresee that allowing the state to absorb their role would weaken
its economic effectiveness while deepening economic disparity. He had no
notion of the dynamic potential of a free market economy. He conceived of
wealth as a constant factor, so that one person’s increase of it would entail
another’s equal decrease. Still, the principles of modern economy had been
clearly spelled out by the French economist Quesnay in the very volume of the
Encyclopédie in which his own Discours appeared.≥∫
Rousseau’s theory inspired the principles of the French Revolution as well
as those of every totalitarian regime in the West. Parties of the extreme right no
less than of the extreme left have found their dogmas in The Social Contract. It
influenced the fascist theory of the strong state as well as the communist
168 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

dogma that after a period of political dictatorship, society would no longer

need a political state. The surprising fact that both egalitarian and totalitarian
regimes have been inspired by Rousseau’s political doctrine is due to the fun-
damental ambiguity that lies at its root. A state based on a contract among all
members is in principle egalitarian. Yet since no principle of universal order
restricts its authority, that authority inevitably becomes totalitarian.≥Ω With
the hindsight of history one may find it hard to disagree with Ernest Barker’s
melancholy conclusion: ‘‘There is no comfort for the Center in all the shot
fabric of Rousseau’s book. That is why it is natural and even permissible to
prefer the hodden gray of Locke’s cloth to the brilliant but parti-colored silk of
Rousseau.’’∂≠

The Legal Foundations of Society:

Universal Principles and Historical Traditions
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, collaborated on the
Encyclopédie and strongly supported constitutional reform. Yet his historical
studies on the origin and development of legal institutions in France had
taught him the limits of change that a political tradition allowed. Although on
religious issues he was a rationalist, on political ones he often assumes an anti-
rationalist position. Compared to the political writings of Locke and Rous-
seau, Montesquieu’s monumental De l’esprit des lois (1748), despite its com-
prehensive title, appears far less ambitious. It contains no a priori principles of
legislation that may be universally applied. Nor do his conclusions present a
universal system of government. The author may have begun his historical
investigation with an eye on constitutional reform in France. Yet contrary to
his younger contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the president of the Acad-
emy of Bordeaux was no revolutionary. Aware that history and geography
impose severe limits on the possibility of change, he understood that no radi-
cally new society could replace the complex social fabric it had taken centuries
to weave. The origin as well as the development of the main political sys-
tems—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—depend in each instance on
specific historical and physical conditions. In the preface the author states: ‘‘I
write not to censure anything established in any country whatsoever. Every
nation will here find the reasons on which its maxims are founded; and this
will be the natural inference, that to propose alterations belongs only to those
who are so happy as to be born with a genius capable of penetrating the entire
constitution of a state.’’∂∞ Montesquieu’s declaration of neutrality is somewhat
disingenuous: he does want change, but no revolution.
The secret of a country’s past lies buried in customs, laws, and legal institu-
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 169

tions., and these also set limits to its future. (The Italian jurist Gravina had
already shown not only that laws determine the course of history, but that
history determines the development of the laws.)∂≤ Nor did the author of The
Spirit of Laws share the assumption of constant historical progress held by so
many of his contemporaries. No political system is perfect and all are bound to
decline. Neither do ascent and decline follow a uniform pattern, as they do in
Vico’s cyclical view of history. Montesquieu’s theory, less sweeping, stays
closer to empirically proven facts. A nation’s success or failure depends on his-
torical circumstances over which it has only limited control. In an early essay,
‘‘Observations on Nature’’ (1721), Montesquieu had praised Descartes’s sys-
tem for dispensing with any idea of divine intervention in nature beyond the
general movement of matter.∂≥ His own conception of history followed an
analogous principle. The course of history follows from inherent causes, some
of them physical and some moral. They alone determine the fate of a political
system: they raise it, preserve it, and destroy it. God has left the human world
as well as the natural one to its own inner dynamics.
Events, singularly considered, may seem contingent. But viewed in their
historical context they all have causes, albeit often remote ones. ‘‘If the fortune
of a battle, that is, a particular cause, has ruined a State, a general cause was
always responsible for the fact that this State had to be ruined by a single
battle.’’∂∂ Montesquieu stresses the historical uniqueness of each political so-
ciety. All undergo external influences, but each one absorbs them in its own
way. Visigothic and Lombardic societies both were subject to Germanic law
and both underwent the influence of Roman law, yet they assimilated that
influence in wholly different ways and thereby gave birth to distinct forms of
Frankish legislation (bk. XXXVIII).
Nothing is more instructive of Montesquieu’s method than the historical
monographs on Roman laws of succession (XXVII), on French civil law (XX-
VIII), and on Frankish feudal law (XXX, XXXI, XXXVIII) that appear in the
final part of The Spirit of Laws. Together with book XI on British and Roman
law, they constitute a remarkable contribution to legal history. Here especially
the great historian deserves the praise the French critic Sainte-Beuve, who
credited him with the gravity of Titus Livy, the expressiveness of Sallust, and
the imaginative power of Tacitus. The essay on the Roman laws of succession
(XXVII), a pioneering study of a development the sources of which lay hidden
in obscure antiquity, continues to rank among the classics on the development
of Roman law. It establishes the principles and limits of eminent domain in
republican Rome, where the common good took absolute priority over any
private claims. Later writers judged Montesquieu to have been insufficiently
critical of his sources. Perhaps, but at least he overcame the anachronistic
170 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

prejudices common to his contemporaries. In The Spirit of Laws he expresses

his constant concern ‘‘not to modernize all the ancient ages’’ (XXX, 14).
These historical essays possess great merit in their own right, though they
often fit but awkwardly within the whole. Several of them were written long
before the final composition of the book. Thus, the long sixth chapter of book
XI on the British constitution was written before 1743 (and most of it before
1738) in the form of a report on his 1731–34 visit to England. Another essay,
‘‘Considération sur les richesses de l’ Espagne,’’ written in the 1720s, appears
integrally as chapter 22 of book XXI. Two historical investigations in particu-
lar played a central role in the establishment of Montesquieu’s method. The
impact of Frankish legal institution on French law (bk. XXXVIII) proved to be
important for discovering the roots of the French civil tradition and hence for
defining the possibilities of reform. The other, a description of the British
political system, served as a realistic model for the distribution of political
powers.
The influence of Frankish feudal institutions on French law had long been a
controversial subject in France. Two opposite interpretations existed. In his
Histoire de l’ancien gouvernement de la France (posthumously published in
1727), Henri de Boulainvilliers had argued that French institutions plunged
their roots in Frankish feudal law that allowed the free men of the tribe to elect
or depose their chieftains. This ‘‘natural right’’ of the aristocracy had fallen
into desuetude when tribal leadership became hereditary. According to Bou-
lainvilliers, the development toward a monarchy had deflected French history
from its traditional course. Early Frankish power had rested with the nobility
and it ought to have stayed there. Another text disputed this claim of the
aristocracy. Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos, in his Histoire critique de l’établisse-
ment de la monarchie française dans les Gaules (1734), had defended the
thesis that the French state had a monarchic origin. The Franks, when entering
Gaul at the invitation of the Roman authorities, did, in fact, inherit the impe-
rial rights. Charlemagne’s consecration in 800 merely confirmed that inherited
sovereignty. Montesquieu adopted the former position, claiming that French
institutions were basically of Frankish origin, but he allowed for a strong
Roman influence in diverse regions of France. In The Spirit of Laws he re-
ported the results of these historical investigations and drew some general
conclusions from them concerning the founding principles of civil societies
and the means to preserve them.
Faithfulness to tradition is an indispensable condition for preserving a state
from major harm, but it is not sufficient to secure its survival. Tradition merely
sets the limits within which the state’s well-being must be sought. But its actual
well-being depends in the first place on the harmony among the functions
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 171

through which it exercises its powers: the powers to make laws, to execute
them, and to interpret them as well as to deal with those who break them.
These functions ought to be exercised by separate bodies, each one of which
needs to possess sufficient authority to keep the others in balance. In book XI,
Montesquieu describes a model of what he regards as the most successful
distribution of powers, namely, the British political system. England was a
monarchy, but a similar balance might be obtained in an aristocratic or a
democratic government. Nor did Montesquieu unqualifiedly admire the polit-
ical attitude of the English. His critique of them in book XIX, 27 is quite
harsh.∂∑ In his view, England achieved its exemplary balance as much by its
weaknesses as by its strengths. The peculiar defects of the English people
assisted them in restoring the balance of power which a monarchy tends to
disturb. A king tends to weaken or, as in France, to abolish the intermediary
bodies indispensable for a balance of powers (VIII, 6). Yet in a nation that
lacks the virtue needed for supporting a strong monarchical state, the crown is
too weak to encroach upon intermediary bodies. The strength of a monarchy
rests on a sense of honor among citizens who consider it the highest reward to
be honored by the king. Montesquieu claims about the English of his time that
they were too much concerned about their material interests to be bothered
about honor.
But this mundane attitude itself stems from the very liberty they had enjoyed
for a long time and indicates that political powers in England had somehow
always had been more in balance than they were in France. A free state allows
its citizens to pursue their own interests, and thus ‘‘this nation, which liberty
and the laws render easy, has become a trading people’’ (XIX, 27). Liberty,
however, is effect as well as cause. Precisely because the English, according to
Montesquieu, have an extreme passion for independence, they succeeded in
building a political system that guaranteed the highest political liberty. Inde-
pendence (the desire to do as one pleases) and liberty (the power to do what
one ought to do) are by no means identical: the former is a vice, the latter a
state of perfection (XI, 31). Yet the former has brought the English to such a
heightened ‘‘love of liberty’’ that they are willing to suffer any hardship, pay
any taxes, fight any war to preserve their liberty (XIX, 27).
How does Montesquieu, who repeatedly stresses the historical uniqueness
of each nation’s political institutions, succeed in formulating universal rules?
In fact, he does start from one general assumption. The primary laws, he
argues, are the laws of nature, ‘‘the necessary relations arising from the nature
of things’’ (I, 1). That these relations follow a rational order requires no proof,
he argues, since this world and its inhabitants have been created by an ob-
viously intelligent Being and must therefore be intrinsically rational. Through
172 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

positive laws humans attempt to adapt the laws of nature to the physical and
moral conditions of their geographical area and historical tradition (I, 3). As I
have pointed out, Montesquieu here returns to a descriptive concept of nature,
such as the physical sciences adopt when they refer to the laws of nature.
Nonetheless, he starts his investigation with the foundation of a universal, a
priori principle, namely, that intelligent beings in establishing their social in-
stitutions are guided, or at least ought to be guided, by reason (I, 1). The
natural law, then, demands of humans that they organize their political life in a
rational way. Institutions that conflict with reason ought to be changed or
abolished altogether. I suppose Montesquieu would justify this rule on the
ground that not doing so would eventually lead to their destruction. He de-
votes much of book XXVI to a discussion of laws invalidated by the fact that
they conflict with this basic rationality.
At the same time, he describes history as a continuous, causally determined
chain, in which past traditions continue to define present political needs. At
times the reformist and the historical strands in Montesquieu’s theory appear
to conflict with one another. The laws and institutions of a nation’s past form a
powerful counterweight to the moral force of the natural law. To bypass tradi-
tion, except when it directly conflicts with essential principles of natural law, is
ineffective as well as politically hazardous. Montesquieu illustrates this point
by the strange ways in which Czar Peter the Great attempted to modernize his
subjects, obliging them to cut off their beards and to shorten their clothes
(XIX, 14). From the successes and failures of Western societies in adapting
their laws to their ancient traditions he also draws some general conclusions.
But these are descriptive universals, not a priori precepts for any society.
The discussion of the moral attitudes required for the survival of political
systems often exceeds the descriptive method that Montesquieu usually fol-
lows. All legitimate constitutions need some form of political virtue to suc-
ceed. None more so than the democratic state. It demands devotion to the
republic, love of equality, and sobriety of living (V, 3). An aristocratic govern-
ment requires an attitude of moderation. Modesty and simplicity are called ‘‘la
vertu dans l’aristocracie’’ (V, 8). Similarly, honor, characteristic of the mon-
archy, must include a code of moral conduct as well as a hierarchical court
system. Only despotism requires no virtue to survive: fear suffices. Essential in
all systems is a general respect for the laws of the land.
Still, moral attitudes alone do not suffice for preserving a civil society. Legis-
lation must remain in tune with the specific demands of each form of govern-
ment. Inappropriate institutional changes will ruin any political system, no
matter how moral its leading class may be. An aristocratic government be-
comes corrupted once the nobles grow arrogant, but no less so when their
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 173

power becomes hereditary, for inherited power undermines the spirit of an

aristocratic constitution (VIII, 5). A monarchy violates its principles when it
sets out to conquer territories that lie beyond a nation’s natural boundaries. A
democracy can be preserved only as long as citizens actively participate in
political life. In addition, the balance among the classes must be maintained.
The demise of the Roman republic shows how a democracy disturbs this
balance by seeking indiscriminate equality (Le peuple pour établir la démo-
cratie choqua les principes mêmes de la démocratie [XI, 16]). Or when one
social class obtains privileges denied to other classes, as when the representa-
tives of the plebeians, the tribunes, were given the right to veto legislation or to
elicit plebiscites, while neither the senate nor the magistrates possessed the
power to overrule the people’s veto right (XI, 6). Similarly, when the populist
Gracchi succeeded in having judicial power transferred from the senatorial to
the mercantile, equestrian order, their action, rather than mediating between
patricians and plebeians, turned that power over to the most selfish class,
which used it for its own profit. ‘‘Attempting to protect the freedom of the
citizen [the plebeians] struck at that of the constitution; but the former per-
ished with the latter’’ (XI, 18).
In the second part of The Spirit of Laws (bks. XIV–XVIII), Montesquieu
abruptly changes the tenor of his argument by introducing the controversial
thesis that political systems, as well as the attitudes that support them, are
conditioned by climate, geography, air. At times his position comes close to
physical determinism, as when it links slavery and servile attitudes to indo-
lence induced by a hot climate. Where climate discourages labor, Montesquieu
claims, humans must be forced to work. He qualifies this statement, however,
by insisting that good laws are capable of overcoming all negative environ-
mental conditions, and that bad laws, more than a hot climate, induce indo-
lence. ‘‘Possibly there is not that climate upon earth where the most laborious
services might not with proper encouragement be performed by free men. Bad
laws having made lazy men, they have been reduced to slavery because of their
laziness’’ (XV, 8). The purpose of good laws is precisely to overcome the
negative impact of the climate.
Still, all other conditions being equal, inhabitants of hot regions, being less
motivated to cooperate actively toward establishing a political order, are more
likely to fall under the sway of a despotic authority. Thus Montesquieu at-
tributes the political geography of Asia to its continental climate. In Asia,
unlike in Europe, hot zones are directly adjacent to cold ones, he argues. As a
result the brave races of the cold regions could easily conquer their indolent
neighbors. This gave rise to the enormous empires of the East. In Europe, on
the contrary, the inhabitants of moderate climates live next to nations with
174 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

almost similar climates. Thus they keep each other in balance (XVII, 3–4). In
this, the shortest part of Montesquieu’s work, the careful analyses of Roman
and Germanic laws have made room for sweeping generalizations rarely sup-
ported by accurate information. The weight of The Spirit of Laws does not
rest on this crude sociologism, though unfortunately it is the part mostly
remembered today.
Later, Montesquieu strongly qualifies the geographic thesis. Physical causal-
ity is always mediated by ‘‘moral attitudes.’’ For instance, the nature of com-
merce depends on the geographical conditions in which trading nations find
themselves: they evidently differ in an island such as Great Britain from those
prevailing in the landlocked nations of Central Asia. While the former require
sea trade, the latter must follow caravan routes. Yet the decisive factor is how
effectively a nation knows how to exploit its physical conditions. Most impor-
tant, Montesquieu here establishes a link between the nature of laws and what
he calls the spirit of the nation. The very title of book XIX suggests a close
dependence of one on the other: ‘‘Of laws in relation to the principles which
form the general spirit, morals and customs of a nation’’ (my emphasis). Un-
fortunately, the lengthy argument through which the author intends to prove
his thesis may count as one of the most disorderly in a work notorious for the
looseness of its composition. He ominously announces at the beginning: ‘‘I
shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left that I may investigate and
discover the truth’’ (XIX, 1). After reading the many pages devoted to Chinese
customs, Spanish character, Russian beards, and Athenian wits, no reader will
doubt the truth of this prediction. The coherence of The Spirit of Laws also
suffers from Montesquieu’s mode of composing. He rarely completes an argu-
ment. The French literary historian Gustave Lanson aptly described it: ‘‘His
reflection is not a continuous act, but a series of isolated acts, each of which
begins and determines a separate effort between two pauses.’’∂∏
Nevertheless, three conclusions emerge with sufficient clarity. (1) Each na-
tion possesses a spirit of its own formed by climate, customs, religion, and
moral and legal tradition. (2) ‘‘The legislature must follow this spirit when it is
not contrary to the principles of government’’ (XIX, 5). (3) The legal princi-
ples, once established through the customs of a tribe or the foundational laws
of a republic, influence the character, customs, and spirit of the people. In this
same book XIX, Montesquieu ranks conditioning factors in a hierarchy that
begins with the physical ones. As the social factors grow stronger, mainly
under the impact of religion, morality, and law, the impact of the physical ones
grows weaker. Good laws build nations by bringing customs, traditions, cli-
matic and geographical conditions into harmonious coordination.
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 175

In his intellectual biography, Robert Shackleton describes how Montes-

quieu views the educational task of the legislator: ‘‘[He] must shift the em-
phasis, within the framework of the esprit général, from physical factors to
moral factors. He must rely less than his predecessors on climate, and more on
manners, morals, laws, religion, and the appeal to past usage.’’∂π The pos-
sibility of establishing good laws decreases when a nation attaches a dispro-
portionate weight to custom and tradition, as Montesquieu thought to be the
case in China, or when moral norms are inappropriate to custom and climate,
as they were in Sparta. Only a balanced combination of customs, morals, and
laws allows a nation to attain political maturity. Viewed from this perspective,
the chapters on climate and soil lose much of their significance.
Historians have objected to the abstractness of Montesquieu’s concept of
law and to the sweeping conclusions he draws from single instances. Rightly
so. But his insight that laws must be studied within the wider context of the
history of a nation and that the laws themselves play a determining role in
shaping that history has proven to be enduring. The discussion of the develop-
ment of civil law in the territory of France (bk. XXVIII) sets a model for a new
mode of history writing: laws and institutions are active agents of history as
well as reflections of the history of a nation.∂∫ Others had written histories of
legal institutions: Montesquieu had learned much from Jean Domat’s Les lois
civiles dans leur ordre naturel (1689) and from Gian Vincenzo Gravina’s Orig-
ines juris civilis (1717). Yet his own work surpassed these specialized studies in
assessing the relation between the laws and their historical context.
Montesquieu never fully clarified the relation between the universal princi-
ples of natural law that he assumed lay at the root of legislation and the
particularity of laws conditioned by the historically developed esprit d’une
nation. How seriously do legislators aspire to fulfill the natural law, which is
supposed to direct their work? Natural law and historical necessity stand side
by side. The idea of natural law, though conceived much more concretely by
Montesquieu than by the natural law philosophers, remains abstract in The
Spirit of Laws and history appears to have no part in it. Even this outstanding
historian of law had not entirely overcome the antihistorical bias of rationalist
thought. The discrepancy between the universal and the particular discloses,
once again, the dualism that, since its Cartesian beginnings, had inhered to ra-
tionalist thought. A comparison between Montesquieu’s esprit de la nation and
Herder’s Volksgeist reveals the dualistic character of the French concept. As we
shall see in the next chapter, for the German thinker, the spirit of a nation inte-
grates the historical uniqueness of a people with the destiny of other, equally
unique nations within the universality of a common humanity (Humanität).
176 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

Similarly, that universal humanity functioned as the all-inclusive, meaning-

giving idea of the particular national identities.

The Social-Economic versus the Political:

The Triumph of the Particular
In the Second Treatise on Civil Government John Locke described prop-
erty as an essential condition for preserving life and liberty (VIII, § 87). In that
same text appears the influential idea of labor as constituting the original title
to property. Work alone allows the individual to lay private claims to what by
nature belongs to all (V, § 27–28). In his theory a new social category comes to
existence: economic value. ‘‘ ’Tis labor indeed that puts the difference of value
on everything’’ (V, § 40). The rise of capitalism in the fifteenth century and
particularly the adoption of mercantilist policies by the governments of Spain
and France in the next two centuries had brought economics to the center of
social life. The governments of those countries had equated national wealth
with a favorable balance of trade. The inflation caused by Spain’s massive
import of gold from the American colonies had caused that country to go
bankrupt. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, France, more diversi-
fied in its trade yet impoverished by the wasteful policies of Louis XIV, came
close to the same fate. Faced with this impending disaster, a group of French
intellectuals led by the royal physician François Quesnay (1694–1774) and
finance minister Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–81), concluded that na-
tional wealth consisted not in hoarding gold or silver but in agricultural pro-
duction. In their view, agricultural labor alone brings more goods into the
world than it expends. The Physiocrats, as they were called, favored free
markets and capital accumulation. Attempting to convert the ideals of the
Enlightenment into attainable goals, they perceived their efforts as serving the
cause of freedom and progress. To succeed in this, however, the egalitarian
dreams expressed by writers on economics in the Encyclopédie (first of all,
Rousseau’s) had to be abandoned.
During a year spent in France, Adam Smith, the Scottish author of The
Theory of Moral Sentiments, acquainted himself with these new theories, to
which he never ceased to acknowledge his debt. But Locke’s universal theory
of labor convinced him that the Physiocrats’ theory erred in restricting eco-
nomic value to agricultural labor. All productive labor creates value. Locke
had identified labor as the original title to ownership. Smith declared labor the
source of value itself and thereby emancipated economic value from what
Marx was to call the ‘‘fetishism of commodities.’’ Economic value, which
earlier writers had regarded as a function of use, Smith declared to be a value
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 177

in its own right, essentially different from ‘‘use value.’’ The value of labor in a
capitalist economy is not to be determined by the use of its product. Economic
or exchange value must be computed according to the difference between
what the producer invests in labor and the instruments of labor on one side,
and the price received for the product on the other. From this difference Ri-
cardo, the most original of Smith’s followers, developed the concept of ‘‘sur-
plus value.’’ Marx took this a further step, attributing ‘‘surplus value’’ entirely
to ‘‘surplus labor,’’ that is, labor for which the worker has not been compen-
sated. His move was highly questionable but reveals an ambiguity in Smith’s
concept of value.
In 1776 appeared Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations, the founding treatise of classical political economy. It
detached economics from its earlier link with the state. Of course, by increas-
ing the wealth of individuals, economic exchange raises the nation’s cumula-
tive wealth. But free exchange cannot be restricted to one nation. Indeed, from
an economic perspective the state mainly serves as a means. Exchange takes
place among individuals or among particular groups. If, as Locke and Smith
assumed, the function of the political state consists primarily in the protection
of property and property relations, the political order becomes in fact reduced
to a social umbrella over interindividual relations. Where economic well-being
of its citizens becomes the principal aim of the state, the relation between
politics and economy becomes inverted from its original position. What for-
merly functioned as an indispensable support of political life now subordi-
nates the state to international economic activity. In Rousseau’s Social Con-
tract the state had absorbed all social spheres within itself, including the
economic one. In Smith’s Wealth of Nations the state became a particular
segment of civil society, namely, the one that legalized and protected property
relations.
Smith’s economic theory did not directly conflict with his earlier moral
ideal. Indeed, his economic argument owed a great deal to the moral principles
he had developed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Francis Hutcheson had
taught him that universal benevolence harmonized private with public inter-
ests. Nor need this benevolence be intentional. Those who merely seek their
own interests are often ‘‘led by an invisible hand . . . without knowing it,
without intending it, to advance the interest of society.’’ Still, the ‘‘invisible
hand’’ of The Wealth of Nations was no call to virtue, but rather an assump-
tion that the uninhibited pursuit of personal gain contributes most to the
common good. In economics, the need for benevolent intentions ceases to
exist altogether. Where public wealth is the goal and exchange the means, self-
interest is the only effective motive. We know the famous lines: ‘‘It is not from
178 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our
dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not
to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own
necessities but of their advantages.’’∂Ω To be economically credible the virtue of
benevolence demands an active pursuit of economic success. Smith had dimly
foreseen this conclusion in his Moral Sentiments: ‘‘In the middling and inferior
stations of life, the road to virtue and that to fortune . . . are happily in most
cases very nearly the same.’’∑≠ What had been a concession in Smith’s moral
philosophy became a law in his economic theory.
The moral justification of selfishness had been the sarcastic theme of Man-
deville’s The Fable of the Bees, a book universally censured yet commonly
believed. After having piously criticized it, Smith had to admit that the cynical
author had a point; ‘‘How destructive soever this system may appear, it could
never have imposed upon so great a number of persons, had it not in some
respects bordered on the truth.’’∑∞ Smith even appeared willing to accept the
darker consequences of Mandeville’s principle as inevitable. The author of
The Fable had predicted that the building up of capital required an amount
of labor that workers would be reluctant to perform except under the pressure
of survival. Employers should not take away that pressure. ‘‘It is wisdom to
relieve [poverty], but folly to cure.’’∑≤ The abolition of child labor and of
illiteracy ought not to be recommended, the cynic Mandeville declared, since it
would leave much needed tedious work undone. The kindly Adam Smith
never stated those brutal conclusions, but the premises of his argument left
little room for alternatives.∑≥
Unlike Mandeville, however, Smith felt a genuine concern for the fate of the
workers and anxiously stressed the moral importance of such virtues as hon-
esty in business transactions, prompt payment of wages, and a general attitude
of benevolence that went beyond minimally securing the worker’s survival.
That kind of benevolence was likely to be rewarded by more goodwill on their
part and a greater fitness for accomplishing their tasks. Still, the principles of
an unrestricted market economy could not but render their lot very harsh,
especially during the early period of industrial capitalism when accumulation
of capital was largely to be earned at their expense. Smith followed his teacher
Hutcheson in measuring moral benevolence by utilitarian principles, whereby
the most ‘‘useful’’ actions deserve to be ranked as the most benevolent. If an
undistracted pursuit of self-interest turns out to be profitable to the commu-
nity as a whole, no moral argument should prevent manufacturers from fol-
lowing what Smith considered an unavoidable law of economic activity.
Adam Smith’s economic theory emancipated the principle of utility from the
moral philosophy that had given birth to it, even though it seemed to extend its
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 179

application. Jeremy Bentham followed his mentor in the assumption that

moral laws and economic principles run parallel. Yet he did not believe, as
Smith did, that social harmony automatically resulted from a providentially
pre-established order. For him, such a harmony had to be established by a
deliberate effort of the legislator. Laws had to be drafted in a way that allowed
individuals as well as society to attain the purpose of moral and of political
life, namely, the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain. For this
purpose the economic principle of laissez-faire did not suffice. By means of a
system of punishments, the state had to force everyone to act in accordance
with the principle of public utility. Political legislation was to promote public
morality as well as economic progress. In fact, however, its subordination to
social-economic interests definitively detached politics from ethics of which,
according to the ancients, it had been the summit. In Jeremy Bentham’s Intro-
duction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, the moral principle of
utility could be consistently maintained only if defined by the material welfare
of the whole community.∑∂
Bentham himself never wavered in his conviction that the utilitarian princi-
ple could serve both as a moral rule for the individual and as a foundation of
public policy. He opposed his utilitarianism to two rival theories that had
dominated the moral discussion in Britain: the theory of natural law and the
ethics of ‘‘moral sense’’ presented by Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume. The
former lacks specific norms of action; the latter fails to justify why one’s
subjective feelings should be considered objectively valid principles. Still, for
achieving an identity of private and public interests, Bentham eventually saw
himself forced to reintroduce the need for a feeling of benevolence in human
beings. The satisfaction of this feeling proved indispensable for supporting his
axiom that most people would comply with the law even when their private
interests appeared to suffer by it. To be sure, penal laws were needed to compel
those who resisted the common good. But those laws would not suffice for
creating social harmony unless the conditions for such harmony already ex-
isted. How else could one expect most people to observe laws that conflicted
with their private interests, at times when they could reasonably anticipate to
suffer no ill consequences from not observing them? Bentham treats private
ethics as conditioned by general welfare, though he often derives the link
between the two from feelings of benevolence or sympathy.∑∑
This utilitarianism raises the question whether maximizing public happi-
ness and minimizing public pain suffices as a basis for social policy. Few earlier
theorists would have thought so. To the extent that politics is intrinsically
linked to ethics, it must be guided by an idea of perfection that always exceeds,
and often conflicts with, the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain.
180 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

Legislators must be educators, at least in this minimal sense that they ought to
promote the intellectual, spiritual, and artistic well-being of the citizens. Mak-
ing the means available for obtaining what the majority of people consider
‘‘happiness’’ could hardly serve as standard for public policy. To abolish all
restrictions and taxes on alcoholic beverages in a country where alcoholism is
rampant does little for the welfare of the citizens, though it may correspond to
the desires of most. Nor should the government put public treasures (works of
art or historical monuments) up for sale in a manner that depletes the cultural
patrimony, even if many might prefer this to paying taxes for their mainte-
nance. Bentham was not unacquainted with those objections. His main pur-
pose, however, was not to construe a comprehensive political theory, but
merely to establish a foundation for a theory of penal law that would prevent
individuals from obstructing the common good. Moreover, to attain at least
the general goal of his ethical system, a maximum of happiness and a mini-
mum of pain, Bentham regarded the building of a strong economic foundation
a necessary condition.
In the theories of Smith and Bentham it became obvious that the advent of
industrial capitalism had effected a shift in the hierarchy of social values.
Economic concerns came to dominate the entire social structure. Unques-
tionably, political economy creates the material conditions required for social
coexistence on a large scale. But in the late eighteenth century the means
tended to replace the end. In Greek and Roman antiquity economics had
remained subordinate to politics. Even in early capitalist societies where the
economic sector had assumed a crucial significance, as in the gold economy
of sixteenth-century Spain and the mercantilist one of seventeenth-century
France, the state had initiated, directed, and benefited from economic activity.
Eighteenth-century British theories inverted the relation between economics
and politics, rendering the latter subservient to the interests of the former.
When industrial capitalism put these principles into practice they caused a
social crisis that has continued until our own time. The domination of the
political by the economic marked a fundamental reversal in our political tradi-
tion. Hannah Arendt once observed that neither the Greeks nor the Romans
would have recognized the term ‘‘political economy,’’ since politics dealt with
the res publica and economy with the maintenance of one’s private estate
(oikos).
The writings of Edmund Burke (1729–97) appear to return to the older
tradition. For him, the state was neither a product of reason nor an instrument
for the promotion of economic interests but a partnership in virtue. Its con-
crete form and needs had been shaped by a history that, though it had not
followed logical lines of development, had nonetheless resulted in the benev-
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 181

olent social system. Burke strongly opposed Rousseau’s principles not because
he rejected the concepts of natural law or natural rights, but because he con-
sidered Rousseau’s rationalist formulation of rights abstract, arbitrary, and
dangerous. During his long career the Irish politician supported four revolu-
tions: the British of 1688 (in retrospect), the American (1776), that of the In-
dians against the East India Company (1788), and the one that led to the
emancipation of Catholics in Ireland (1797). But he thoroughly repudiated the
French Revolution and accurately predicted the horror of the Terreur. This
apparent inconsistency suggests that his critique was not inspired by a conser-
vative bent of mind but that a fundamental principle was at stake. He objected
to the assumption that a political system ought to follow a priori rationalist
norms identical in all places at all times. Not an abstract formulation of the
natural law, but the historically interpreted principles of natural law ought to
direct the order of society.∑∏ The natural law contains no blueprint for political
institutions. The communal wisdom of history has incorporated that law in
social customs, institutions, and civil laws.
Rousseau and most of the philosophes regarded it as their task to emanci-
pate the whole political system from its past tradition and to bring it in confor-
mity with reason. Montesquieu alone understood that institutions vary ac-
cording to a country’s historical development. But Montesquieu no more
approved of the current political condition than the other philosophes did.
Burke, on the contrary, regarded any radical interference with the historical
tradition with great suspicion. The unpredictable and often irrational course
of history realizes, in often unintelligible but nevertheless effective ways, a
universal and, indeed, sacred order. Not all that occurs in history is in har-
mony with that order. But the longstanding tradition of a peaceful nation
presents the only guidelines its citizens possess, at least until a major historical
upheaval leaves them no choice but to break with part of that tradition.
Burke supports his position by the very principle that had been the main
target of the Enlightenment’s attacks, namely, prejudice. ‘‘Instead of casting
away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree,
and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are preju-
dices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have pre-
vailed, the more we cherish them.’’∑π Burke’s prejudices are not personal
biases, nor are they irrational. They consist, in fact, in the unquestioning
acceptance of time-honored institutions by the citizens of an orderly nation.
The French revolutionaries intended to replace these assumptions by abstract,
untested theories. ‘‘[ Jacobinism] is the attempt . . . to eradicate prejudice out
of the minds of men, for the purpose of putting all power and authority into
the hands of persons capable of occasionally enlightening the minds of the
182 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

people.’’∑∫ Those who deduce the principles of society from abstract reason
start from a belief that humans are naturally reasonable and good. In fact, they
are neither. Civilized life follows not the rigid rule of abstract reason, but the
impulse of organic growth. Burke favorably compares what he regards as the
spontaneous development of the British Constitution with the simplistic polit-
ical philosophy of Rousseau and the revolutionaries.∑Ω
Even the idea of a common human nature appeared to Burke an inadequate
basis for a political theory. The alleged natural equality of all persons, which,
according to the philosophes, ought to serve as guiding principle of the politi-
cal constitution, is a ‘‘monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and
vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious
life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality, which it never
can remove’’ (Reflections, p. 49). Nor was there ever a ‘‘state of nature’’ in
which humans obeyed only the natural law. The so-called state of nature as
well as the subsequent social contract are no more than metaphors of the
human development toward more complex social structures. Not just once,
but several times, did those developments require a new ‘‘political contract’’ to
reformulate the basic principles of life in a community, especially after unpre-
dictable events like migrations, revolutions, and military invasions. Those
contracts remain in force only as long as citizens consider them appropriate to
their social needs.
For Rousseau, natural rights existed before the social contract. For Burke,
rights remain abstract principles until defined and granted by the established
political community. He does not dispute the legitimacy of attempts to estab-
lish an order of right. But such an order must remain an ineffective ideal until it
can be inserted into a nation’s historical tradition. Still, Burke admitted, above
the course of history stands the law of nature. This law overrules all existing
institutions that seriously violate it. Thus he considered the revolution of 1688
fully legitimate. In fact, he denied that it was a ‘‘revolution’’ in the sense of a
radical break with the nation’s political tradition. James II was expected to
impose a state religion that conflicted with the beliefs of the majority of the
British people. Such an act would go against what Burke considered the re-
spect a sovereign owed to the consciences of his subjects.
Here, however, a problem occurs. If natural rights are not a priori definable,
how do we know when the government seriously violates them? Burke’s an-
swer is vague: ‘‘The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of defini-
tion, but not impossible to be discerned’’ (Reflections, p. 75). The natural law
sets a process in motion that is not completed until it becomes politically
concrete in the course of which ‘‘potential’’ rights turn into real rights. Its
outcome is unpredictable. Not only do institutions and laws change: the prin-
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 183

ciples of right themselves develop. They do not become normative indepen-

dently of the concrete historical institutions to which we apply them.
Nor does a political contract abrogate the existing rights of associations
established for the attainment of religious, economic, or cultural ends. Most
significant, Burke restored the idea of civil society to its original comprehen-
sive meaning. For Rousseau, the state was to absorb all other social bodies. In
the opposite direction, some economists tended to lower the principal func-
tion of the state to the protection of property. Burke rejected both positions.
Against Rousseau he argued that it was the task of the state to integrate the
rights and functions of existing associations within a coherent social totality.
With equal determination he repudiated the social-economic version of the
social contract. ‘‘The State ought not to be considered as nothing better than a
partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or
some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest,
and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. . . . It is a partnership in all
science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfec-
tion’’ (Reflections, p. 110). For Burke, all social structures—the cultural, eco-
nomic, and religious as well as the political—form part of one comprehensive
civil society. They constitute a hierarchical order of which the parts are harmo-
niously integrated with one another and mediate one another within the en-
compassing synthesis of the state (Reflections, pp. 222, 100).
He dismisses as pure fiction any theory of a social contract conceived as a
free decision taken in a political vacuum. In reality, each social agreement
occurs within an already established social order as ‘‘a clause in the great
primeval contract of eternal society’’ (ibid.). It rarely requires a formal agree-
ment. Humans are essentially ‘‘civil’’ as soon as they live in groups, that is,
from the beginning. They may change their social arrangements. But at no
time did a historical gap separate a presocial from a social state or a precivil
from a civil one. Disaster threatens the state that refuses to recognize existing
social institutions and cultural distinctions. The French revolutionary govern-
ment, inspired by Rousseau’s principles, abolished regional and corporate
differences and concentrated all power in the central authority of the state. It
broke up naturally grown regional identities and replaced historical districts
by artificial ones (provinces, arrondissements, cantons). The revolutionary
bureaucracy treated France the way the Romans treated a colony. ‘‘It boasted
that the geometrical policy has been adopted, that all local ideas should be
sunk, and that the people should no longer be Gascons, Picards, Bretons,
Normans, but Frenchmen, with one country, one heart, and one assembly. But
instead of being all Frenchmen, the greater likelihood is, that the inhabitants
of that region will shortly have no country. No man was ever attached by a
184 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

sense of pride, partiality, or real affection to a description of square measure-

ment’’ (Reflections, p. 213).
Burke’s critique was not inspired by nostalgia of the past, but by a new,
organic-historical idea of the state that in many respects corresponded to the
one Herder was developing at the same time in Germany. Unlike Herder,
however, Burke failed to realize the historical necessity of a rupture with a past
protected by a tenacious power structure such as ruled eighteenth-century
France. He rejected the legitimacy of a revolution of which he only saw the
excesses while legitimating four others in the name of natural rights. Yet
without some a priori concept of human rights (which he rejects in his Reflec-
tions), no political revolution can ever be legitimated. Burke’s theory remains
ambiguous. At times he comes close to equating the law of nature with the
course of history. At other times he regards that law as the moving power of
history that stirs a people to revolution when fundamental principles of its
legitimate tradition are at risk, as was the case in 1688. It is hard to see by
which norm he distinguishes the English from the French revolution. Were the
anticipated abuses of the Stuart monarchy in 1688 worse than the actual ones
of the ancien régime in 1789 France?
Among Burke’s many critics we best remember Thomas Paine of Common
Sense (1776) fame. Paine lived in France through the revolution, was im-
prisoned during the Terreur, banished from England, and after his return to
America in 1802 ostracized as a freethinker. In 1791 he published The Rights
of Man, a direct attack on Burke’s thesis and an apologia of the French Revo-
lution. He immediately saw the weak spot in Burke’s argument. The 1688
Parliament that expelled James II changed the conditions of British govern-
ment for all posterity: no Catholic would ever be allowed to occupy the British
throne. Yet no law is eternal: it remains valid only until the sovereign authority
of the people repeals it. ‘‘When man ceases to be, his power and his wants
cease with him.’’∏≠ Soon Paine abandons the historical discussion and takes the
high ground of eternal principles ‘‘engraved in the heart of every citizen.’’ The
French Revolution, contrary to the British one, he claims, is all about those
principles. Human rights are grounded in a more ancient tradition than the
short political one to which Burke appeals. Indeed, historical tradition, an
untidy mixture of usurpation and legitimacy, establishes nothing by itself. ‘‘It
is authority against authority all the way, till we come to the divine origin of
the rights of man, at the Creation’’ (Rights, pt. I, p. 303). Civil rights are
legitimate only to the extent that they are derived from natural rights or are
needed to secure them.
Paine praises Adam Smith’s ‘‘political wisdom’’ for heeding what he regards
to be the primary task of government, the protection of property and property
 The Origin of Modern Social Theories 185

exchange. How decisive a role economic considerations played in Paine’s con-

ception of natural rights became fully evident in the second part of The Rights
of Man, written a few months later. Whereas in the first part the state had still
been the protector of natural rights, in the second one it served merely as an
instrument of economic utility. ‘‘Government is nothing more than a national
association; and the object of this association is the good of all, as well individ-
ually as collectively. Every man wishes to pursue his occupation, and enjoy the
fruit of his labors, and the produce of his property, in peace and safety, and
with the least possible expense. When these things are accomplished, all the
objects for which government ought to be established are answered’’ (Rights,
pt. II, p. 434). In this utilitarian concept of rights, the notion of natural law,
which in Locke’s Treatise still had functioned as the foundation of rights,
became an unnecessary addition. The defenders of natural rights gradually
abandoned grounding them on natural law and, instead, treated them as self-
evident and requiring no ulterior justification.

Conclusion
The eighteenth century decisively transformed political thought by grant-
ing the idea of individual freedom a primary position in its theories. In doing so
it restored the ancient bond between ethics and politics, which had been jeopar-
dized by such early modern writers as Machiavelli and Hobbes. Yet the reunion
remained precarious and by the end of the century was threatened from two
sides. Restricting the moral aspect of freedom to the internal moral intention,
Kant relegated politics to an external, legal order. On the opposite side, Smith
and his followers placed all the emphasis on the economic aspect of political
institutions and paid little attention to the ethics of public policy. Both legalism
and economism continued to affect politics all trough the nineteenth and the
twentieth centuries. One hears echoes of Kantian dualism in the commonly
used excuse for immoral conduct that no positive law was broken or that
crimes were actually performed in obedience to legitimate authorities. On the
other hand, the acceptance of economic interest as the supreme rule of politics
has resulted in social inequality or in violent reactions against it.
The social concept that underwent the most substantial changes in the eigh-
teenth century may well have been that of civil society. As we have seen, the
term ‘‘civil society’’ originally had a more comprehensive meaning than that of
politics in the narrow, modern sense. It included the entire public realm. Adam
Ferguson still preserved this meaning in his famous Essay on the History of
Civil Society (1767). Political institutions presented only one branch of civil
society. In the eighteenth century, however, politics (in the narrow sense) either
186 The Origin of Modern Social Theories

absorbed all other forms of the social order or became so heavily influenced by
particular interests that public policy functioned mainly as an organizational
structure for protecting those interests. In both cases the traditional distinc-
tion between politics and other social spheres vanished. The former presented,
of course, Rousseau’s position; the latter that of the British economists Smith
and Stewart, though already Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government
with its emphasis on the protection of private property leaned in that direc-
tion. Communitarian thinkers in our time are, once again stressing the impor-
tance of the intermediate groups as buffers between étatisme and laissez-faire
policy. Social relations on that intermediate level define our concrete social
identity. Without them political life remains abstract and may easily degener-
ate into some form of tyranny or totalitarianism. ‘‘We cannot regard ourselves
as independent in this way without great cost to those loyalties and convic-
tions whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is
inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are.’’∏∞
One cannot claim that the Enlightenment achieved a satisfactory synthesis
between the universal and the particular aspects of political life. Rational-
ist theories favored the universal; empirical theories, especially economic
ones, the particular. At the same time, eighteenth-century social universalism,
whether it be the a priori, philosophical version implied in the modern con-
cepts of natural law and human rights, or the empirical one assumed by inter-
national economic traffic, moved beyond the supremacy of the state as social
body and prepared the globalist thought of the late twentieth century.
 7

The New Science of History

The writing of history has always been inspired by the belief that the
knowledge of the past sheds light on the present. Yet the nature of this knowl-
edge has varied from one period to another. Ancient writers, both classical and
biblical, assumed that the essential patterns of life remained identical and
therefore that history provided lasting models for instruction and imitation.
Hence the search for historical prototypes of current customs and institutions.
Legendary founders of cities, ancestors of existing professions, prehistorical
legislators, and establishers of rituals were believed to grant them legitimacy.
This belief in tradition persisted among Christians, even though the coming of
Christ divided their time into two distinct periods. The basic relation between
past and present remained constant, except for the unique event of the Incar-
nation that had set a new beginning and a new end to history.∞
The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century undermined this stable
concept of time. The abrupt change it caused in the modern worldview sug-
gested that time was pregnant with novelty and directed toward the future
rather than repeating the past. The new orientation was supported by a philos-
ophy that viewed the person as the source of meaning and value and hence
capable of changing the course of history. The modern conception of history
resulted in two quite different attitudes toward the past. Some, beginning with
Descartes and all those primarily interested in the scientific achievements of

187
188 The New Science of History

their age, felt that the study of the past could contribute little to the scien-
tific enterprise. For others, however, a more accurate knowledge of the past
formed an integral part of that comprehensive renewal of knowledge intro-
duced by the scientific revolution. Thus, David Hume regarded the study of
history as essential to the study of human nature, the basis of all scientific
knowledge. Some historians, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Gibbon,
were convinced that a solid acquaintance with the past was to vindicate the
changes of the present.
Although the idea of change played a crucial role for all, it did not neces-
sarily imply that history followed a progressive line. None of the major histo-
rians assumed this. Those who did, such as Turgot and Condorcet, were phi-
losophers of history rather than historians. Vico proposed a cyclical theory of
history in which civilizations move from growth to decline, only to be fol-
lowed by others that go through a similar cycle. Still, even for Vico, each
new stage of a civilization preserves enough of the previous ones to raise its
achievements to a higher level and also to lower declines to greater depth. At
the end of the Enlightenment epoch, Herder formulated yet a new theory of
progress. Each nation, while following its own organic development, brings
the human race closer to its ultimate destiny—the fullness of humanity. This
organic view of history, however, implied no continuous progress from one
civilization to another. Each one must be judged on its own terms.
Meanwhile some earlier approaches continued to exist. The religious notion
of history as disposition of God’s Providence had survived through the seven-
teenth century: Bossuet gave it one of its final expressions. In his Discours sur
l’histoire universelle (1681), epochs follow each other as stages of a divine
plan, of which the earlier prepare the later. Ancient Rome had to fall in order
to make room for the spiritual realm it had helped to establish and of which
Rome remained the center. Since the nations beyond the traditional borders of
Western civilization fell outside Christendom, Bossuet gave them even less
attention than Augustine had done more than a millennium before him. The
American Puritan Jonathan Edwards pursued a comparable theological inter-
pretation in his History of the Work of Redemption (1774). For the New
England divine also, history remained entirely a supernatural drama, though
one moving in a direction opposite to that of Bossuet’s ecclesiastical trium-
phalism. It told the story of the anti-Christ who had been at work since Con-
stantine, allowing only for a short interstice of genuine Christianity during the
early Reformation.
Aside from Edwards’s odd exception and a few minor ones like him, the
view of history as a story of the magnalia Dei was clearly on the decline. Yet
one aspect of this providential concept of history deeply influenced secular
 The New Science of History 189

history, even though it ended up attacking the idea of providence. Enlighten-

ment historians continued to see regional history as part of a historia univer-
salis. The Göttingen professor Johann Christoph Gatterer wrote: ‘‘Properly
speaking there is only one history—the one that includes all peoples, and that
is the true and authentic universal history.’’≤ All human histories are inter-
twined and none is isolated. While for Gatterer, this had been an a priori
philosophical principle, for others, it became a battle cry against the narrowly
Western and Christian conception of history that had guided Bossuet’s work.
Voltaire in his Essai sur les moeurs (1756) (in English often referred to as Essay
on General History) concluded that the idea of a Providence that promoted
only Christian interests ignored the Chinese and Arabs.
But the Enlightenment notion of universal history suffered from similar
problems. All too often historians, especially those of the Göttingen School,
subjected or sacrificed concrete facts to an abstract, universal idea. Even Gib-
bon’s ‘‘causes,’’ Vico’s ‘‘cycles,’’ or Montesquieu’s laws were harnessed to such
universalizing theses.≥ Although those historians understood that the parts of
the story had to be interpreted through the whole, they often failed to observe
that the whole must be understood through the parts. A proper balance ap-
pears only at the end of the Enlightenment in Johann Gottfried Herder’s the-
ory of history.
The great historians of the Enlightenment, all magnificent writers, still fully
adhered to the narrative conception of history. Once they started telling their
tales, they felt little hampered by the general ideas that may have inspired them
in the first place. Nor did they much reflect on the critical questions that were
to become so important at a later period concerning the nature and validity of
the general principles on which causal deductions in history depend.∂

History as Truth: Giambattista Vico

Vico’s presence in this story requires some justification. He firmly be-
longs to what Isaiah Berlin has called the anti-Enlightenment. Working and
thinking within the older Italian rhetorical tradition, he appears to be more a
late humanist than an early Enlightenment thinker. He had so little in common
with the great historians of the eighteenth century that they would have found
it hard to understand his position had they read him. Few would have consid-
ered a theory of history based on legendary sources, literalist readings of the
biblical creation story, speculative interpretations of ancient myths, and fan-
tastic etymologies worth refuting. Even today a first encounter with The New
Science is disconcerting. Croce himself, who was greatly responsible for its
rediscovery in the past century, called it an alternation of light and darkness,
190 The New Science of History

truth and error.∑ Nonetheless, The New Science now ranks among the period’s
most lasting contributions to a philosophy of history.
Vico understood the significance of the issues raised by Enlightenment
thought and he shared Descartes’s epistemological concerns. Yet he saw the
unsatisfactory conclusions to which a rationalist philosophy would lead. He
accepted the modern axiom that truth originates in the mind. Yet he denied
that the mind operates exclusively by rational categories. For him, truth is not
primarily to be attained through a deduction process patterned on the model
of mathematical reasoning, but through reflection on what humans have actu-
ally done in history. Despite their erratic behavior, history follows a regular,
recurrent pattern. A true science of history, then, must be more than a chroni-
cle of facts and events. It must account for these returning movements and
include a justification of their implied universal cycles. Unlike the universals of
rationalist philosophy, however, the historical ones are based on observation.
In his cyclical theory of history Vico attempted to fill the gap that separated
universalist rationalism from historical empiricism. As we shall see, he lacked
the conceptual apparatus for succeeding in what he intended to do, but he
anticipated in many respects what Herder and Kant were to accomplish at the
end of the Enlightenment period.
Like Descartes, Vico links the question of truth to the subjective principle of
certainty. For Descartes, truth and certainty coincide in the self’s awareness of
itself, yet he had not succeeded in extending this coincidence beyond the point
where the mind is certain of its own existence. Vico claimed to have found a
more inclusive source of certainty in the mind’s awareness of what it has
made—the verum factum. He may have read in Hobbes’s Leviathan: ‘‘If one
wants to know something, he must constitute it himself.’’ Yet his support for it
came mainly from the humanist conception of rhetoric. The rhetorician’s truth
is not given: he must shape it himself. In this poiesis (the substantive of poiein,
to make), making and certainty are indissolubly united. To be sure, Descartes
also had relied on the certainty of mathematics, where the mind deals with its
own construction and hence cannot be wrong. Vico accepted the certainty of
mathematics and even pretended that his own science followed a geometrical
method.∏ Still, he considered mathematics of little use in establishing a true
knowledge of the real world. That, he claims, may be obtained only by imitat-
ing God’s mode of knowing, namely, by creating another reality.π Mathemat-
ics is but ‘‘an imaginary [universe] of lines and numbers that accomplishes in
abstraction what God accomplishes in reality in the universe.’’ Vico failed to
see the crucial function of mathematics for understanding the physical world:
for him, nature is too far removed from the mind to yield certain knowledge
of any kind. Rather than pursuing the abstract certainty of mathematics,
 The New Science of History 191

the mind should turn to the study of culture, its own creation through the
centuries.
The choice may seem puzzling. What guarantees the mind certainty in the
extremely vague and often inaccurate knowledge it has of human achieve-
ments in a prehistorical era? Lessing was to draw the opposite conclusion: no
knowledge is less certain than the historical one; between present and past
yawns an unbridgeable chasm. Historical facts are, by their very nature, ex-
cluded from the indubitable truths of reason. Vico, however, considers indu-
bitability too narrow a criterion for truth. Even for momentous decisions of
practical life we rely on certainties that no one would consider ‘‘indubitable.’’∫
Of many things we are certain on the authority of others. Our certainty may be
misplaced, and The New Science is meant to serve as a critique of beliefs too
readily accepted as certain. Nonetheless, the first step on the way to truth
consists not in doubting but in trusting our beliefs. Concretely this implies
accepting the principles one’s community considers self-evident.
The Roman concept of sensus communis, well known to Vico through his
studies of rhetoric and Roman law, justified the authority of those beliefs that
theory alone cannot prove but that are indispensable for practical life. Vico’s
rejection of the need for indubitable foundations places him, together with
Pascal, at the head of a line of critics of Descartes that stretches all the way to
the present. Modern epistemology, in his view, arbitrarily dismisses millennia
of conscious life as if they were no more than a prolonged state of error and
ignorance. Yet to those early, prerational ages the human race owes all that
made modern reflection possible: language, religion, and civilization. Still, as
Croce observed and others have confirmed, on the crucial issue, the turn to the
subject, Vico himself remains solidly within the modern tradition. ‘‘He also
entered the subjectivism of modern philosophy inaugurated by Descartes and,
in this very general sense, he himself may be called a Cartesian.’’Ω But Vico
fundamentally disagreed with Descartes’s formalist study of method indepen-
dently of content. For him, as later for Hegel, method can be defined only in
union with content.
On what ground, then, does Vico hope to gain truth from a turn to an
uncertain past? He appeals to the Ionian notion of physis, according to which
a thing’s nature lies in its origin. An echo of this axiom still appears in Aris-
totle’s assumption that the nature of an organic being resides in an initial
principle that determines its entire development.∞≠ Vico applies this to the
‘‘unfolding’’ of history. ‘‘The nature of things is nothing but their coming into
being at certain times and in certain guises. Whenever the time and guise are
thus and so, such and not otherwise are the things themselves’’ (147).∞∞ But
the authority of that ancient principle is of dubious value when applied to
192 The New Science of History

historical origins. Aristotle had referred to the nature of organic beings when
claiming that their beginning defines their further development. The Neapol-
itan thinker stretches the principle well beyond that organic meaning in equat-
ing truth with the development of mental life through the centuries. For him,
truth consists in the history of its development.
Aside from a theoretical problem, Vico here also confronts the practical
one—how we are to know the origin of a mental life that lies hidden in a
preliterary past. If the beginning of humanity remains veiled in darkness, how
can it serve as a source of truth? Vico himself compares the search to a ‘‘dense
night through a wild sea, surrounded by so many rocks of difficulties.’’∞≤
Nonetheless he believes that a philological study of ancient texts discloses not
merely the language and history of historical times, but that of the prehistori-
cal ones as well. Early poets, such as Homer, record not only the achievements
of the ‘‘age of the heroes,’’ but their writings also reflect even older preliterary
traditions. Combined with the most archaic legal texts, their poems contain
the story of the transition from an almost bestial to a human existence.
Although philology is needed for uncovering the past, it never yields the
definitive truth that philosophy requires. Historical information about past
beliefs and institutions contains by itself no philosophical truth at all. Yet
philosophy cannot attain its own truth without knowing the facta that philol-
ogy and history provide. To convert the historical certum into a permanent
verum, philosophy must critically reflect on what history, linguistics, literature
and law present. Only a critical reflection on the facts of history may validate
the verum factum principle.
In addition to philology, Christians possess the revealed story of the begin-
nings of the human race. Interpreting Genesis literally, he attempts to harmo-
nize the time after the expulsion from Eden with the primitive first age of
secular history. Cain is reported to have ‘‘wandered the earth’’ as a fugitive.
With him the corruption of the human race began. According to The New
Science, the story of Homer’s cyclopic giants corresponds to the biblical report
that the sons of God ‘‘married the daughters of men’’ and produced ‘‘the
heroes whose fame has come down to us from long ago’’ (Genesis 6:4). After
Noah, sacred history definitively separates from the ‘‘history of the nations.’’
Since a common Providence rules both, a new sacred history, more com-
prehensive than the biblical one, commences. From this point on, Vico only
writes about the latter.
Vico regards the primitive inhabitants of the earth far removed from the
bucolic idylls popular among his contemporaries. Rather than noble savages
they were speechless brutes, bestioni tutti stupore e ferocia, who lived not in
peace and harmony but in a state of violence and superstition. Vico calls their
 The New Science of History 193

epoch the age of the gods, not because of their piety but because, ignorant of
natural causality, they regarded all forces as divine. Their views of the tran-
scendent were entirely inspired by fear. The religion of the Gentiles (contrary
to revealed religion) was born from primitive terror for the unknown. Still
these superstitious beliefs restrained the primeval fierceness of the tribes and
instilled in them a respect for authority (916). All law was divine and all
government theocratic (922, 925). Even the first hieroglyphic script was held
to be sacred (929, 933). Through this archaic religion, especially through the
‘‘theological poets,’’ civilizing forces slowly conquered the chaotic ones. By
naming the divine forces active in nature and in social institutions—marriage,
death, family life—the primitive tribes acquired some control over them and
became capable of courting the gods’ favors. Indeed, the primitive religion of
fear was more fundamental to the development of the human race than the
establishment of ‘‘the true faith’’ in Israel.
Civilized life began when the ‘‘god-fearing giants’’ started burying their
dead rather than allowing them to decompose in the fields. Eventually males
and females came to stay with the same mate rather than having casual sex-
ual encounters. Thus they formed family groups and thereby decreased the
amount of violence in settling disputes. The civilized subjected or killed the
uncivilized, and the weak took refuge with the strong. Vico refers to this stage
as the age of the heroes. It featured the beginning of settled life, the establish-
ment of primitive law, and the creation of mythological poetry. It was the
period of the Trojan War, of the first Greek colonies, of the foundations of
Alba Longa and Rome.
As families expanded under authority of the fathers, a ‘‘barbaric aristoc-
racy’’ emerged. In an earlier work on Roman law, De universi iuris uno prin-
cipio et fine uno (1720), Vico had described the legal development of other
societies on the pattern of Rome. In The New Science he continues to do so.
The need to cope with the harsh conditions of a primitive society, he claims,
forced people to rediscover the natural law, preserved in the Law of Moses,
but in barbaric times lost among the gentes. During this entire period morality
was primitive, authority absolute, imagination the dominant mental faculty.
Even law was articulated in poetic form (170). During the next stage, the age
of the humans, the power of the imagination declines: thinking becomes ra-
tional and loses its mythical quality. Law, now grounded on rational princi-
ples, rules society.
The poets and legislators of the heroic age were the first makers of that
spiritual factum on which truth is based. Their metaphoric speech assumed
different objects under a single expression, thus preparing abstract universal
concepts. In his concept of ‘‘the imaginative universal’’ (universale fantastico
194 The New Science of History

or genus fantastico [809]) that preceded rational universals (460), Vico cap-
tured the essence of metaphorical thought that raises consciousness beyond
the singularity of sense perception. Vico’s imaginative universals may be
viewed as ‘‘ideal portraits’’ that point the way toward universality and, as
such, open the road to rational knowledge.∞≥ Since truth includes the road to
truth as well as its final conceptualization, he claims these metaphorical uni-
versals to be true in their own right.
In Vico’s theory all truth is historical. Even self-knowledge remains inacces-
sible to direct intuition; it can be obtained only through an autobiographical
narrative. This narrative character of truth has its first expression in the myth,
the extended metaphor. Originally the myth had a practical function: to en-
able primitive humans to cope with the primeval fear of the unknown. But it
also contains a lasting truth insofar as it complements the insufficiency of
rational discourse in dealing with those all-encompassing existential issues
that analytic reason is unable to handle. As the roots of words have remained
metaphorical, they preserve the memory of their mythical origins.
In his reflection on the ‘‘barbaric’’ stage of the mind’s odyssey toward truth,
Vico deliberately retains some of the mythical idiom in which primitive gener-
ations conducted their quest for truth. Thus in book II of The New Science he
describes the birth of morality in the imagery of Greek and Roman mythology.
‘‘The giants, enchained under the mountains by the frightful religion of the
thunderbolts, learned to check their bestial habit of wandering wild through
the great forest of the earth, and acquired the contrary custom of remaining
hidden and settled in their fields. Hence they later became the founders of the
nations and the lords of the first commonwealths’’ (504). This kind of meta-
phorical language, so far removed from that of eighteenth-century philosophy,
induced many to dismiss The New Science as being a remnant of an uncritical
past.
Yet, as Vico’s critical discussions of myth and legend (for instance, concern-
ing Aeneas’s coming to Italy [770–73]) indicate, he was by no means a ‘‘naive’’
thinker, but one fully aware of the difference between myth and science. He
knew Bacon’s Novum Organum to which the title of his own The New Science
alludes. He was also acquainted with the discoveries made by Copernicus,
Kepler, and Galileo, to which he refers in De nostri temporis studiorum ra-
tione. But, as Giuseppe Mazzotta has shown, he felt that another form of
knowledge about the natural world had been missing: the hermeneutical re-
trieval of ancient wisdom through the study of language and myth. As long as
we restrict the study of nature to the methods of Galilean and Cartesian
physics, we fail to see why and how the mind became intellectually involved
with nature in the first place.∞∂ This ‘‘poetic wisdom,’’ the knowledge of what
 The New Science of History 195

the mind has ‘‘made’’ over the centuries, stands at the origin of the scientific
study of nature.
Nor has science swept it aside (149–50). The truth of the myth is eternal: the
historian’s task consists in rescuing it from forgetfulness. The recovery relies
much on etymological analysis, as the roots of words still bear the traces of
ancient myths. Vico’s entire new science consists, in fact, of what he calls
Roman jurisprudence: ‘‘a science of interpretation’’ (999).
In the third book, ‘‘Discovery of the True Homer,’’ Vico demonstrates how
keenly he was aware of the difference between mythical thinking and critical
historiography. He raises what was later called the ‘‘Homeric question’’ con-
cerning the authorship as well as the historical quality of Iliad and Odyssey.
He rejects the historical character of both epics and even the existence of
Homer as a single person. Yet he argues that the poetic wisdom of the ancients
provides indispensable material to the science of history. The poets, he claims,
were ‘‘the first historians of the nations’’ (820). The events reported in the
ancient poems may not be historically reliable. But the philological study of
the language in which they were written, the institutions they describe, and the
links with contemporary monuments or texts enable the historian to establish
the nature of the culture they reflect. Philology itself forms part of history: in
disclosing the meaning of time-bound works, it ‘‘reveals the pastness of the
past.’’∞∑
Moreover, the narrative form of the myth preserved in the ancient poems
testifies to the early presence of a belief, essential to historiography, that events
constitute a coherent story. It affirmatively answers Hayden White’s funda-
mental question concerning the meaningfulness of history: ‘‘Does the world
really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories, with central
subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that permits
us to see ‘the end’ in every beginning?’’∞∏ When in The New Science Vico refers
to the myth as a ‘‘true narration,’’ he means more than that the narrative form
was once a necessary stage of the process of truth. That narrative form con-
tinues to be the only appropriate one for the writing of history. The truth
about historical beings can be told only as a story that unfolds and moves to an
end.
In the course of discussing his method Vico declares: ‘‘Our science . . . comes
to describe an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of every
nation in its rise, development, maturity, and fall’’ (349). That statement of
purpose returns several times in The New Science (e.g., 145, 245, 294, 393).
But a philosophy of history—for that is what Vico is after—requires more
than incorporating history within a general theory of truth. It needs a guiding
concept of the nature of history, justified by a philosophical argument and
196 The New Science of History

supported by empirical evidence. Has Vico provided that? His assumption

that history must move through cycles of ascent and decline is neither an a
priori principle of reason nor a conclusion based on empirical observation.
Even if Vico had analyzed a great number of civilizations (as Toynbee later
attempted to do) rather than only the development of Greek and Roman
institutions, he still would not have established a sufficient empirical support
for his claim that history always follows an identical pattern. In fact, Vico
merely subsumes particular events, laws, and cultural achievements under a
universal, ‘‘ideal’’ concept that he expects to transform their significance from
contingent to necessary. His insistence on the autonomous development of
each nation even seems to preclude a universal pattern. How could one draw a
meaningful general conclusion from the course of history when each and every
nation develops and declines in a unique way?
In fact, Vico’s method relies neither on logical principles alone nor on em-
pirical investigations, but, in the manner of the ancient myth, subsumes the
particular under the universal in the form of a idealized narrative. He does so
even in his Autobiography where he tells the story of his life in the light of an
ideal necessity.∞π In order to fit the pattern he did not just ‘‘make’’ the facts of
his life, he also in part ‘‘made them up’’ (e.g, the erroneous date of his birth)
and composed them into a self-made, ‘‘poetic’’ order. Historians remain justi-
fiably wary of such generalizations. Yet his theory deserves to be remembered
for other, more significant reasons. Surprisingly for a ‘‘cyclical’’ thinker, Vico
considered the course of each civilization relatively independent of that of any
other. The New Science thereby breaks with the ancient and medieval view of
history as magistra vitae, which assumes that the past does not essentially
differ from the present. For him, no two historical constellations are alike.
Certainly, earlier institutions may survive from one civilization to the next. All
through the early Middle Ages much of the Roman Empire survived and as
late as the fourteenth century France revived Roman law. But in these renewals
or revivals, ancient laws and institutions assume a different function in a new
context.
Vico spends considerable time and effort disproving the legend, commonly
accepted since Titus Livy, that the Roman Law of the Twelve Tables had been
‘‘imported’’ from Athens for the purpose of reconciling patricians and plebe-
ians. He shows that a delegation of Romans to Athens was at that time histor-
ically impossible. To him, the question was important. It proved that civiliza-
tions do not directly communicate in reaching vital decisions concerning their
institutions. The thesis is dubious, but later scholarship proved him right on
the facts. He also used the story against his own contemporaries who regarded
the Law of the Twelve Tables as the birth date of Roman democracy. He
 The New Science of History 197

considered it a mean-spirited document that ungenerously conceded as little to

the plebeian majority as the social tension of the moment allowed (109–10).
Those who convey democratic meanings to such terms as ‘‘liberty’’ and ‘‘peo-
ple’’ are mistaken: the Roman republic recognized only a small minority as full
citizens. Legislation was entirely inspired by patrician interests that conflicted
with those of other classes.∞∫
Since both the age of the gods and the barbaric age of the heroes prepare the
third, human age, in which people are ‘‘intelligent and hence modest, benign
and reasonable’’ (918), one might think that the movement of history follows
a progressive course. But with the human age also comes the decline of a
civilization. Reason loses contact with its own past and an abstract rational-
ism announces the return of a new barbaric age—the barbarie di reflessione.
The ‘‘barbarism of reflection’’ starts at the high point of the age of reason, a
time of unparalleled progress and enlightenment. A civilized nation begins to
decline when it falls ‘‘into the custom of each man thinking only of his own
private interests’’ (1106). Such a selfish attitude inevitably leads to cultural
disintegration. ‘‘As the popular states became corrupt, so also did the philoso-
phies. They descend to scepticism’’ (1102). To Vico, the political corruption of
his contemporaries, the loss of faith, and the philosophies of self-interest intro-
duced by Machiavelli and Hobbes displayed the same symptoms of cultural
decline that announced the end of earlier periods, specifically that of the Ro-
man Empire. The description of the barbarism of reflection bears a remarkable
similarity to some contemporary criticism of modern culture, specifically that
of the Frankfurt philosophers Horkheimer and Adorno.∞Ω In their Dialectic of
the Enlightenment they criticized modern thought for having lost the immedi-
ate contact with things. Our present functionalism, they claimed, has resulted
in a diminished sense of reality and a warped hierarchy of values.≤≠ Vico also
regarded abstract universalization as a means for gaining control over the
natural world: it reduced reason to functional universals more appropriate for
controlling reality than for understanding it.
The final part of The New Science deals with the return of the cycle—the
ricorso. Essential is that the ricorso initiates no mere repetition of the previous
cycle. Vico mentions only a ‘‘correspondence’’ between cycles (1048). He
never accepted the Stoic theory of an eternal return of the same. Thus the first
‘‘barbaric’’ age was a unique, never to be repeated, event. The barbarism of the
early Middle Ages that followed in the wake of the Germanic invasions was of
a wholly different nature. Roman civilization collapsed, but life did not return
to its original, primitive state. It retained the cultural acquisitions of the pre-
vious epoch: language, religious institutions, and ordinary rules of living. The
barbaric corruption of his own age repeated neither the first nor the second
198 The New Science of History

barbaric age of the West. An overall progressive movement, then, overdeter-

mines the cyclical theory and excludes predictions of the future. The cyclical
pattern remains constant, but both the rhythm of succession and the quality of
the periods differ from one to another.≤∞
Does Vico’s cyclical theory in the end not destroy itself? Decline continues
only as long as people remain ignorant of its causes and therefore fail to make
the necessary changes. Would the cycle not come to an end if Vico’s diagnosis
of the causes of decline came to be accepted and acted upon? Vico himself in
the so-called Pratica of The New Science (drafted for incorporation in the
third edition but never actually inserted) states that his work was an effort
‘‘toward delaying if not preventing the ruin of nations in decay’’ (1405). All a
civilization needs to overcome corruption are visionary leaders and effective
institutions capable of teaching and implementing principles such as the rule
of Providence, the moderation of passions, and the belief in immortality. If the
wise and strong, ‘‘the form and mind of this world of nations,’’ prevail, disas-
ter may be avoided (1410). Why did Vico not include the Pratica in the third
edition? Did he in the end despair of the efficacy of human intervention? Or
did he, more likely, feel that introducing the idea of an alternative would
require a substantial recasting of The New Science, a task he, having come to
the end of his life, felt no longer capable of undertaking? If humans, fore-
warned about the road to decline, would be able to avoid it, Vico’s theory
would become restricted to an interpretation of past history. Such an inter-
pretation would conflict with the concluding paragraph of book V, according
to which the cyclical theory is all-comprehensive and valid in all possible
worlds. ‘‘There will then be fully unfolded before us not the particular history
in time of the laws and deeds of the Romans or the Greeks but . . . the ideal
history of the eternal laws which are instanced by the deeds of all nations in
their rise, progress, maturity, decadence and dissolution [and which would be
so instanced] even if . . . there were infinite worlds being born from time to
time throughout eternity’’ (1096). Vico abhors physical determinism. Yet the
short conclusive section on Providence that follows the quoted text arouses
the suspicion that he may have held a theological determinism.
Disputes have raged about the significance of the idea of Providence in The
New Science since its rediscovery in the twentieth century. Some dismiss it as
an umbrella to shield Vico from censorship. Others understand it as referring
to the unchangeable course of history, indispensable for his theory, but regard
the religious term ‘‘Providence’’ misleading. Such was the view of the two great
scholars responsible for the Vico revival, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gen-
tile. Still others consider it part of the traditional Catholic view of history,
which Vico, a sincere believer, accepted without granting it a major role in the
 The New Science of History 199

development of his theory. None of these interpretations seems adequate.

Rightly or wrongly, Vico thought that without the idea of Providence his
theory would lack the ‘‘ideal, eternal’’ quality he intended to give it. In the first
book, he introduces Providence as one of the three principles on which the
new science is based (360). Vico distrusted mathematical-type deductions
from rational principles. Yet no more than Bacon did he consider an empirical
description of institutions and events sufficient for a universal theory of his-
tory.≤≤ The idea of Providence for him functioned as the indispensable link
between his universal thesis and the limited empirical evidence that supported
it. In addition, the idea of an all-encompassing guidance was needed to unite
the various autonomous cultures into a coherent totality if his theory of his-
tory was to be universal at all.
Indeed, the idea of Providence, much like Hegel’s Spirit, is so overarching
that no argument can prove it. It presented itself quite naturally to Vico as it
had been a standard part of Christian as well as of Stoic and Platonic philoso-
phies. The question remains, however, whether the idea retained its traditional
religious quality in the process of being transferred into a philosophy of his-
tory. In Vico’s account, Christianity, though dividing history into two parts
and initiating a new cycle, plays no major role in the development of the cycles
themselves: none in the ones that precede it and no obvious one in the succes-
sion of those that follow it. This in itself does not argue against a religious
interpretation of the idea. Vico’s conception of Providence may have been
‘‘deist,’’ not in the sense of excluding revelation, but in the sense that Christian
revelation should not occupy the centre in an account of history that started
long before the coming of Christ. In this universal, but not specifically Chris-
tian sense, The New Science may indeed be called ‘‘a rational civil theology of
divine providence’’ (342), that is, a comprehensive vision of God’s working in
the ‘‘world of nations in all the extent of its places, times, and varieties’’ (345).
The final sentence of The New Science confirms this religious intentionality:
‘‘This science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is
not pious cannot be truly wise’’ (1112).
But if there should be no question about Vico’s religious intention, there
remains considerable doubt whether a notion of Providence understood in a
religious sense is compatible with his conception of history. That conception
presupposes a total immanence of God in history. In and through human
decisions Providence realizes its designs, often against the purposes of human
agents. Beyond human acts and intentions, a higher power accomplishes a
grander design on the realization of which all peoples unwittingly cooperate.≤≥
Precisely this total immanence of God in history made Gentile conclude that
Vico’s Providence meant no more than the development of history toward
200 The New Science of History

increasing rationality.≤∂ In Vico’s mind, however, Providence aims at a goal

that exceeds human consciousness qualitatively, not merely in scope. In a
polemical passage Vico defends the religious nature of reason in history. He
appeals to the Roman jurisconsults and the common belief that the natural
law was instituted by God (633). How could all nations have agreed on moral
norms without transcendent guidance (145)? Yet in fact they do agree on basic
moral principles as soon as they become civilized, without having been influ-
enced by one another. Each nation follows the same order of development and
arrives at the same conclusions on the basis of the same principles (344).
Vico also detects the hand of Providence in accomplishments of the human
race, achieved without any awareness of the higher goal of civilized life yet
uniquely effective toward furthering it. Humans are too short-sighted to pur-
sue more than fragmentary, particular objectives, They fail to recognize that
they form part of a more comprehensive reality. If the cosmic order requires a
transcendent origin, as people generally assumed at the end of the seventeenth
century, the establishment of a civil order that renders limited, selfish en-
deavors subservient to the complex harmony of a social totality did so even
more. Vico concludes: ‘‘This axiom proves that there is divine providence and
further that it is a divine legislative mind’’ (133). But does it? Does the differ-
ence between the historical effects of human actions and the intentions that
inspired them require a divine Providence for these effects to be beneficial? Of
course, they do if one assumes that the eventual outcome is the best possible
and that none but a divine power could have made it so. But that is precisely
the question. Is it necessary to regard as teleologically directed, actions to
which there might have been alternatives, different but no less beneficial in
their effects? On what grounds do we consider the present ones the best? Vico
leaves all these questions unanswered.
It may well be, however, that he was attempting to establish a different,
more fundamental principle. At one point he attacks the ‘‘inexorable chain of
cause and effect’’ of Stoic philosophy (342). Vico’s qualm is not with causality
as such, but with the modern reduction of all causality to the efficient one. For
Plato and Aristotle, final and efficient causality had always been combined.
They regarded even natural processes as inherently teleological. The end of a
natural process was not merely its terminus, but also its goal. In modern
thought, teleology came to be the exclusive quality of conscious acts, while
efficient causality became the ruling category for interpreting the physical
world. This freed scientific investigation from earlier, anthropomorphic inter-
pretations of nature. Yet eventually it led to a tendency to apply it to all
processes—even historical ones.≤∑ Vico criticized Hobbes, Spinoza, and Ma-
chiavelli for their denial of final causes. He intended to avoid determinism as
 The New Science of History 201

well as chaos by assuming a divine guidance directing the human pursuit of

limited ideals. At the same time he considered human freedom, however lim-
ited and selfish, indispensable for realizing this divine teleology. Providence
does not determine human actions; it merely subordinates them to a more
comprehensive purpose.
What, then, is God’s providential plan of history, according to Vico? Ob-
viously not to realize the philosophes’ ideal of unlimited progress. Progress in
Vico’s view exists only in the limited sense that each decline results in a less
complete loss of civil life. Though that may result in cultural improvement, it
certainly does not raise moral standards. The barbarie di reflessione is morally
inferior to the primitive state of the barbaric ages. But what good could be
achieved by a succession of corsi and ricorsi in which all that rises is bound to
fall? Surprisingly, Vico sees in the endless repetition of cyclical patterns a
divine disposition. ‘‘Since these institutions have been established by divine
Providence, the course of the institutions of the nations had to be, must now
be, and will have to be such as our science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds
were born from time to time through eternity, which is certainly not the case’’
(348). Vico thereby grounds his historical pessimism on a theological founda-
tion. But the term Providence here loses its traditional meaning. The absence
of an ultimate, all-inclusive common destiny that defines the nature of history
through a transhistorical end of the human race distinguishes Vico’s notion of
Providence from the theological one. As the frontispiece of The New Science
suggests, only God’s light enables us to understand the course of history. He
describes the purpose of his work as being ‘‘a civil theology of divine provi-
dence’’ (2). But since he never justifies the designs of Providence in history, his
theory of Providence brings him close to a blind theological determinism that
sheds little light on the course of history.
Two tendencies compete in Vico’s work. On one side, he wants to establish a
new concept of truth by means of a historical, empirical method. On the other
side, he imposes his cyclical theory upon slim historical evidence. His discus-
sion of dubious documents concerning the prehistorical age is more inspired
by the demands of his theory than by hard evidence. With precocious insight
he observed that the Homeric writings, documents of Greece’s barbaric age,
reflected a culture that long preceded the time of their writing. But all too often
he fills the enormous gaps in our knowledge of that age by pure speculation.
Only in his discussions of Roman law and institutions does he attain the
methodical rigor of the slightly younger Montesquieu. Yet Vico attempted to
answer a different, more general question that he was one of the first to raise:
Is it possible to find a universal pattern in historical processes that by na-
ture are always particular and never identical? Ancient historians may have
202 The New Science of History

assumed that such a pattern existed, but if it did, it was restricted to the
civilized era. Christian apologists extended the historically ‘‘meaningful pe-
riod’’ to the beginning of the human race. But they restricted their perspective
to a narrowly conceived salvation history. Vico abandoned that Christian
universalism. The idea of Providence allowed him to integrate the particularity
of the nations within a fully comprehensive theory of history.

History as Progress: The Philosophes

The idea of historical progress, popular in the eighteenth century, im-
plied that history moves from a less perfect state to a more perfect one. Those
who supported it rarely defined in what precisely that greater perfection con-
sisted. They agreed that society was gradually becoming liberated from intol-
erance, superstition, political lawlessness, and juridical arbitrariness. Their
ideal also included the uninhibited development of science, as well as the
attainment of a maximum of personal liberty compatible with living in an
orderly society. Yet what was the immediate goal of this process of liberation?
Was the process finite or would it indefinitely expand? The philosophes sel-
dom raised and never answered those questions, preoccupied as they were
with the need for immediate improvement. Because of the unlimited ambition
of their project, their theories of progress have been called secularized es-
chatologies.≤∏ But, as Hans Blumenberg shows, a closer look reveals a funda-
mental difference: ‘‘An eschatology speaks of an event breaking into history,
an event that transcends and is heterogeneous to it, while the idea of progress
moves . . . toward a future that is immanent in history.’’≤π In the secular theory
the impulse toward progress comes entirely from within. The idea of Provi-
dence, central in the eschatological view of history, vanishes, even if the name
remains. The human race creates its own destiny.
Some notion of historical progress existed even in antiquity.≤∫ Hesiod,
Aeschylus, and Protagoras linked it to the myth of Prometheus who brought
practical knowledge to the human race. Yet all versions of the story caution
that practical knowledge without wisdom and virtue leads to disaster. More-
over, the ancient idea of progress applied only to the past without moving
beyond the present whereas that of the eighteenth century stretched toward an
indefinite future. The real predecessor of the modern theory of progress is
Francis Bacon. As he articulates it in the Instauratio Magna (1620), history
moves toward an unlimited expansion of science. One of his followers, Joseph
Glanvill, adopted the chancellor’s motto, plus ultra, in the title of a work that
fully anticipated the eighteenth century’s expectation of a glorious scientific
future.
 The New Science of History 203

Infinite progress was indeed inherent in the modern concept of science. It

required constant correction, but it also promised ever-expanding horizons of
knowledge. The ancient notion of truth, valid until the fourteenth century, had
held no such promises. It had a definitive, pre-established character. Each
thinker might be able to express it more adequately and would thereby give a
later generation some advantage over an earlier one. But truth itself did not
advance. The increase of empirical and practical knowledge of nature did not
add to truth in the strict sense. In the modern concept of science, truth became
an ongoing process. It never fully existed and its results had to be constantly
emended. Nor would that process ever come to an end. Though its general
objectives remained roughly the same, subject, method, and content had to be
newly discovered at each epoch. Truth, then, consisted in a relation to an ever
to be redefined object. As Hannah Arendt put it: ‘‘[Truth] was transformed or,
rather, broken down into a string of verities, each one in its time claiming
general validity even though the very continuity of the research implied some-
thing more provisional.’’≤Ω Though science, by its very nature, had to remain
provisional, it made the same kind of definitive claims that once had been
made for the unchanging idea of truth.
In France the early discussion of progress had a more literary character. It
sparked a revival of the famous quarrel of the ancients and the moderns.≥≠ But
the content of the Querelle had changed since the sixteenth century. The issue
was no longer the use of the vernacular language—that question had long
been decided—nor even the comparative merits of modern writers. At stake
was imitation versus innovation. The French critic Saint-Evremond put the
issue succinctly even before it became polemical: ‘‘If Homer had lived today,
he would have composed admirable poems in harmony with the century in
which he wrote. Our poets today compose bad ones imitating the Ancients
and led by rules that have become obsolete, on subjects that time has long
disposed of.’’≥∞
With Voltaire and Diderot, however, and mainly under English influence,
the discussion moved to the domain of science and later to that of morals and
politics. The Encyclopédie served as the main organ for spreading the gospel
of science and political reform, but also, according to d’Alembert, for record-
ing mankind’s difficult ascent to truth in the face of prejudice.≥≤ The idea of
progress in the Encyclopédie had a strongly utilitarian slant. Diderot wanted
to restore the ‘‘mechanical arts’’ to the place of honor they deserved as being
the most useful to the human race. Prejudice against them, he wrote, ‘‘has
filled the cities with useless spectators and with proud men engaged in idle
speculation, and the countryside with petty tyrants who are ignorant, lazy, and
disdainful.’’≥≥ The editors showed the seriousness of their practical interest in
204 The New Science of History

the magnificent engravings of technical instruments that accompanied the

text. In the course of time the Encyclopédie became itself a historical docu-
ment, especially in those parts that were least intended to be so, namely, the
articles on science, which Diderot assumed to contain definitive information.
Despite his optimistic expectations of science and technique for the future
benefit of the race, Diderot remained sensitive to the incurable moral defi-
ciency of the human race.≥∂
As some philosophes moved toward materialism, human history became
part of the biologically and chemically determined histoire naturelle. At times
this reductionism assumed comical proportions. D’Holbach attributes the
spread of Islam to Mahomet’s physiology. ‘‘What was the matter from the
combination of which resulted a crafty, ambitious, enthusiastic, and eloquent
man; in short, a personage competent to improve on his fellow creatures, and
competent of making them concur in his views? They were the insensible
particles of his blood, the imperceptible texture of his fibres, the salts, more or
less acrid, that stimulated his nerves, the proportion of igneous fluid that
circulated in his system.’’≥∑ Similar, though less picturesque passages could be
culled from the works of La Mettrie. Amazingly, those determinists stood in
the front line of the advocates of ‘‘progress,’’ convinced that their work would
advance it.
No more than Montesquieu or the British historians of the eighteenth cen-
tury did Voltaire believe that scientific progress or the overcoming of prejudice
alone would ever result in a reasonably moral or enlightened society. Calling
history a ‘‘ramas de crimes, de follies, et de malheurs,’’ he certainly harbored
no illusions about the chances of a definitive improvement of human nature.
His pessimism increased with the years. At age seventy-nine he called the
world a chaos of absurdity and horrors (letter to d’Alembert, July 6, 1773).
Nonetheless, he believed to the end that it was the philosopher’s task to con-
tinue working for the possibility of a more open society by fighting intol-
erance, war, and nationalism. Sages like himself could ‘‘lead’’ the educated: the
masses ‘‘are not worth instructing.’’≥∏ In this educational project, history was
to serve as a weapon against the enemies of progress. He used it most effec-
tively in his Essai sur les moeurs (1756; final edition 1769).≥π Prodded by his
hostess at Cirey, the Marquise de Châtelet, who found the Christian perspec-
tive of Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle too narrow, Voltaire went
to work on a more inclusive secular interpretation of history.
Humans, he argued, are subject to the laws of physical causality even as the
rest of nature.≥∫ But a different law determines the life of the spirit. Since the
mind retains what it has learned, it is capable of some improvement from one
generation to the next. Thus it may slowly overcome prejudice and irra-
 The New Science of History 205

tionality. Historiography should in the first place record that process. In the
‘‘Avant-propos’’ to the Essai, Voltaire states his intention to shift the emphasis
from a chronicle of battles and natural events to the history of ideas: how they
developed or what prevented them from doing so. ‘‘As much as we ought to
know the great deeds of sovereigns who made their peoples better and happier,
as much may we ignore the run of the mill kind of kings—they only burden
our memory’’ (Essai, Avant-Propos, p. 195). The principal subject of history,
then, must be the gradual enlightenment of the human race.
We know virtually nothing about the earliest period. We do know, however,
that by the time the Hebrews began to record their past, several ancient civili-
zations in the Near East had flourished: the Chaldean, Phoenician, Egyptian.
Voltaire commences his lengthy Discours préliminaire with their story. A com-
parison of these early civilizations puts both the morality and the reliability of
the biblical accounts severely to the test. With biting wit he exposes the incon-
sistencies and impossibilities of the Pentateuch, but, above all, the conquest of
Canaan. Why would God have chosen to establish his kingdom on earth
through a succession of murders, betrayals, and crimes? In his report on the
diaspora, Voltaire fully exposes his animus against Jews as well as Christians
who accepted them as their models. ‘‘If one simply follows the historical
thread of this small Jewish nation one sees that it could have no other ending.
She prides herself on having moved out of Egypt like a gang of thieves taking
along all that they had borrowed from the Egyptians. She boasts of the fact
that she has never spared old age, sex, or infancy in the villages and towns she
was able to conquer. Always superstitious, always desirous of other people’s
good, always barbaric, crawling in misery and insolent in prosperity: that is
what they were in the eyes of Greeks and Romans capable of reading their
books. But to Christians enlightened by faith, they were our forerunners, those
who prepared the way, the heralds of Providence’’ (Essai, sec. XVII, p. 151).
Next, Voltaire measures the morals of the Christian West by those of the
older Far Eastern cultures. In contrast to forever-warring Christians, Indians
consistently practice a universal charity toward all living beings. Christianity
was born among ignorants and developed amidst barbarians; China never
passed through a stage of barbarism and was from the beginning ruled by sages
rather than priests (Essai, chap. XI, p. 304). After having been persecuted for
undermining the Roman religion that supported the empire, Christians, having
gained political power, did the same to the pagans from whom they had
previously requested tolerance. They basely conformed their faith to the op-
portunist policies of thoroughly immoral ‘‘Christian’’ emperors or kings, such
as Constantine, Clovis, or Charlemagne—all of them murderers. Voltaire con-
cludes his survey: ‘‘The Church must surely be divine, since seventeen centuries
206 The New Science of History

of roguery and imbecility were not capable of destroying it’’ (Essai, chap. IX,
p. 295). The Essai inflated the ideological bias of the French Enlightenment to
epic proportions. History here serves the nonhistorical purpose of judging the
past by the present, the present by the past, and of criticizing both by the
prospects of the future. Later generations have not taken kindly to the ‘‘his-
tory’’ of the Essai. Yet in two other works Voltaire’s universalism played a
more constructive role.
In L’Histoire de Charles XII, Roi de Suède, Voltaire expanded the narrow
limits that had restricted French historiography within the western part of
Europe and confined its perspective on other nations to their relations with
France. Focusing on the northern and eastern borders of the subcontinent,
Voltaire extended the geographical precincts of European history.≥Ω In Charles
XII he tells the fascinating story of the young king of Sweden who, during
much of his short life, was engaged in a struggle with Czar Peter I for the
supremacy of northeastern Europe. The work owed its success as much to its
literary as to its historical qualities. The portraits of the two antagonists are
painted with psychological perceptiveness, and the dramatic description of the
final battle of Pultawa bears comparison with Tolstoy’s famous one of the
Russian disaster in Borodino.
In Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), his historical masterwork, Voltaire seeks a
different kind of universality by broadening the scope of the historical object
rather than by extending its geographical limits. To be truly universal, history
must report the story of a civilization rather than political and military ex-
ploits. In a letter to the president of the parliament of Paris (whose permission
he needed to publish his work) Voltaire wrote: ‘‘I have passed lightly over war
details which, in their own time, cause so much misery and draw so much
attention, while a century later they only bore us’’ (letter to Hénault, Janu-
ary 28, 1752). As early as 1738, Voltaire had started preparing this work,
which he described as an account of ‘‘the most glorious century of the human
spirit’’ (letter to Abbé Dubos, October 30, 1738). In it the author displays an
encompassing intellectual grasp as well as a rare aesthetic sensitivity. In Le
Siècle de Louis XIV, Voltaire succeeded in combining ideas and events, poetry
and politics, into a complex picture of seventeenth-century culture.
Two conflicting tendencies in the historiography of the French Enlighten-
ment appear together in Voltaire’s work. On one side, the idea of progress is
always, at least implicitly, present: a new age has dawned for the human race.
On the other side, the rationalism of the French Enlightenment assumed that
human nature remains basically unchanged and is therefore incapable of se-
rious progress. Philosophes who came after Voltaire appear to have aban-
 The New Science of History 207

doned the idea of an unchanging nature altogether. Turgot and Condorcet

stressed the infinite perfectibility of human nature.
At the incredible age of twenty-three the theology student Anne-Robert-
Jacques Turgot delivered the customary ‘‘Discours’’ at the opening and the
closing days of the academic season at the Sorbonne—July 3 and Decem-
ber 11, 1750. The first is a eulogy on the benefits the Christian faith has
brought to humanity; the second surveys the progress accomplished by the
human race since its beginning. During that same productive year Turgot also
wrote extensive précis for two related discourses on the idea of progress. The
young author displayed a respect for tradition and a modesty in his claims
most uncommon among the enlightened French. History, in Turgot’s view,
moves slowly toward greater perfection, though not in all respects. Knowl-
edge and technique advance steadily; arts and morality do not.
Turgot sensed that even this qualified idea of progress required some justifi-
cation. Compared to nature’s invariable rhythm, human history presents a
confused spectacle. Empires, raised on each other’s ruins, follow in rapid
succession. ‘‘Like ebb and tide, power moves from one nation to another, and,
in the same nation, from princes to masses and from masses to princes.’’∂≠ The
very remnants of our ancient civilization lie buried under the hooves of barbar-
ians invading from the north and Muslims from the east. The endless repeti-
tion of short ascents and long declines hardly suggests progress. Turgot won-
ders: ‘‘Do men rise only in order to fall?’’ (II Discourse, p. 606). Nonetheless,
he perceives modest signs of progress. After centuries of barbarism, Chris-
tianity succeeded in restoring some of the classical culture and in reestablish-
ing a common language. Eventually commerce was revived and the nations of
the West became reunited to one another.
In the extensive précis for a ‘‘Discours’’ on universal history, Turgot antici-
pates Comte’s three stages of progress. At first humans regarded all natural
phenomena as effects of supernatural causes. In the next, ‘‘philosophical’’
stage, they explain the world by means of abstract notions—‘‘essences,’’
‘‘faculties’’—thereby replacing the old mysteries by new ones. Finally, the
discovery of the mechanical interaction of bodies introduces the scientific
stage of truth. At this point the process of civilization gains so much strength
as to make its achievements irreversible. ‘‘Enfin toutes les ombres sont dis-
sipées. Quelle lumière brille de toutes parts! Quelle foule de grands hommes
dans tous les genres. Quelle perfection de la raison’’ (II Discourse, p. 160). But,
Turgot qualifies, scientific and technical progress does not necessarily improve
the human condition. Technical advances, for instance, have little to do with
refinement of aesthetic taste. To the contrary, people all too easily confuse the
208 The New Science of History

difficult with the beautiful (‘‘Discours sur l’histoire universelle,’’ p. 657).

Gothic buildings, ‘‘in the worst possible taste’’(!), require great technical skills
(ibid., p. 666). Nor does morality follow the ascending line of science: moral
perfection may precede the scientific age and decline may occur during it. Still,
scientific-technical progress establishes a cultural continuity without which
neither morality nor the arts could survive.
Not coincidentally Turgot’s planned ‘‘Discours sur l’histoire universelle’’
bore the same title as Bossuet’s famous work on the theology of history. It did,
in fact, undermine the bishop’s thesis without appearing to do so.∂∞ Turgot
also claims to detect the guidance of divine Providence in the course of history.
But whereas in Bossuet’s theory, evil had formed no part of a divine plan
(though God could convert it into an instrument of grace), in Turgot’s ‘‘Dis-
cours,’’ Providence, through human vice as well as through virtue, promotes
the goals of the Enlightenment. Thus ambition, indispensable for the building
of nations, has contributed ‘‘to the plan of Providence, the progress of Enlight-
enment, and the increase of human happiness’’ (‘‘Discours,’’ p. 632). Even
violent passions play an essential role in the providential design. As in Vico’s
New Science, Providence combines the various actions pursued for selfish ends
into a single power for progress. But in Vico’s cyclical theory, actions perpe-
trated for selfish purposes may cause a civilization’s decline and never directly
promote its good except after a divine ‘‘rearrangement.’’ For Turgot, the line
to progress is a direct one: selfish deeds are no obstacles but inevitably lead to
progress.
In spite of the eminent role he attributes to religion, Turgot’s theory in fact
prepares the secularist theories of progress that ran from Condorcet to Comte
and from Comte to Marx. They all assume that truth, happiness, and freedom
are to be realized only in the final period of history and that earlier generations
prepare the perfection of the later ones. In the original religious view of his-
tory, all generations are equal, earlier ones being no more ‘‘instrumental’’ to
the attainment of the end than later ones are identified with its fulfillment. As
we shall see, Herder’s theory of history remained closer to the original when he
attributed to all civilizations an equal part in the building of humanity but
rejected the idea that one civilization’s goal consisted in furthering the interests
of another. Turgot’s position remains ambiguous. In his first ‘‘Discours,’’ he
implied that religion conveys equal meaning to all human life, but in the précis,
religion itself serves as an instrument for achieving secular progress.
No such ambiguity clouds the Marquis de Condorcet’s Esquisse historique
des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795), an aggressively antireligious tract writ-
ten in support of the ideals of the French Revolution while its author was
hiding from the Terreur (1793–94). Condorcet had collaborated with Turgot
 The New Science of History 209

during Turgot’s tenure as finance minister to Louis XVI and had written a
hagiographic biography of his deceased friend. He fully adopted Turgot’s early
thesis: scientific and technical progress was inevitable and irreversible. The
marquis carefully purged the concept of historical progress of any religious
traces his master had left on it in his early ‘‘Discours.’’ Indeed, he hypostasized
progress itself into some kind of secular deity. Traditional religion, even re-
duced to a deist belief in God, had no other merit than that of having awak-
ened humans from their somnolent state through the superstitious terrors it
evoked. At last, with the French Revolution, the decisive epoch of freedom
had broken through. Like some of the accused in Stalinist trials, Condorcet
continued to sing the praises of a regime that was preparing to execute him.∂≤
He devoted the discussion of the final stage of history to a projection of in-
definite progress based on three conditions. Condorcet regards it as certain
that they will be met, even though they depend on future human decisions.
First, cultures must be homogenized (on the model of the French republic) and
a universal language ought to be created of simple and precise propositions.∂≥
A second condition requires that all citizens within the same nation have equal
rights. Science and technical innovation do little to advance society unless its
members are economically able to acquire the new inventions and are socially
prepared to use them.∂∂ Condorcet proposes that all protectionist policies
(such as France had known through most of the eighteenth century) be abol-
ished and that commerce and industry be allowed to follow their natural
course. In addition, Condorcet supported mandatory education. Where all en-
joy equal opportunities, social and economic inequality would soon disappear.
The third condition is not a condition at all but a wild leap into utopia. ‘‘The
perfectibility of the person is indefinite,’’ he claims (p. 371, also p. 260). The
progress of reason will transform human nature, not only intellectually but
also morally. For Condorcet, the Socratic principle that virtue is knowledge, is
axiomatic. It suffices that people understand human nature, its potential, and
its goals to become moral. Even arts and letters will improve from one genera-
tion to the next. Corneille had already surpassed the Greek tragedians and
Molière the ancient writers of comedy, while contemporary French painting,
in Condorcet’s questionable judgment, had much improved upon the unprece-
dented Italian art of the previous century (pp. 214, 305, 306). As diet, medi-
cine, working conditions improve, the human life span will become unlimited
(p. 374). Most promising of all: these marvelous physical, intellectual, and
moral qualities will be inherited by future generations. A remarkably sanguine
view for a man expecting execution!
Will these prophecies be fulfilled only if humanity chooses to follow the
rules, or will they be realized regardless of choice? Condorcet forecast that
210 The New Science of History

history itself would convert the forces opposed to social equality into sup-
portive ones. Progressive and obstructionist forces remain inextricably inter-
twined. History consists in a struggle of these two opposite principles.∂∑ Prog-
ress results from the struggle itself. Setbacks, delays, and reactions play an
indispensable role in the dialectic of progress. Nonetheless, the course of prog-
ress may be accelerated or slowed down by human choices. Yet with un-
daunted optimism Condorcet expected that an effective social organization
would eventually compel people to embrace principles that so obviously bene-
fited their future happiness.
Condorcet’s social-economic project brings to the surface what had re-
mained hidden in all preceding theories of progress, namely, that the ideal of
the good life had ceased to refer to what is good in itself. It now came to be
defined by what previously had belonged to the sphere of means, namely, an
increased access to material benefits and social services. Nor does the useful
merely serve as a substitute for an ideal of the good on the nature of which
members of a pluralist society have become unable to agree. For Condorcet,
the useful is the good. To the question, then, ‘‘What is the end of progress?’’ he
would have answered that it was progress itself. When suddenly the French
Revolution made the changes possible that had been most needed—religious
and political freedom—Condorcet made those intermediate goals into un-
qualified ends.∂∏ For Condorcet, the political and social emancipation would
convert human nature into what it had never been before. He set a precedent
for the twentieth-century gigantic projects of human engineering with their
devastating effects.

Gibbon: History as a Moral Saga

In his majestic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) Edward
Gibbon reunited historical narrative, conceived in accordance with the ancient
rhetorical tradition, with modern philological and archaeological research,
two strands that had been separated since the Renaissance. His recombination
of them enabled him to write a history richer in texture than that of any
modern historian of Roman antiquity. Gibbon possessed a, for his time, stun-
ning knowledge of the ancient sources and, aided by the French Jansenist
Lenain de Tillemont’s reputed Histoire des Empereurs (published posthu-
mously in 1732), knew how to assess their reliability. At the same time, an
uncanny ability to enter the emotional reality of the past enabled him to
convey what it felt like to be part of a decaying empire. It allowed him to
understand the minds of Rome’s enemies as well as those of the Romans.
Among the former he counted in the first place the Church, which, in his view,
 The New Science of History 211

hastened the empire’s decline. Gibbon took the theological disputes of the time
very seriously and spent more effort analyzing them than he did on most mili-
tary expeditions. Moreover, he understood that culture is never the achieve-
ment of a single nation, but that it results from an interaction among na-
tions.∂π All of these qualities enabled him to convey a uniquely dramatic power
to his history of an empire that, by the weight of inner as well as external
causes, moved to a tragic end.
Gibbon’s approach has been described as ‘‘empirical’’ and in his Autobiog-
raphy he reports that he had indeed been influenced by Locke’s philosophy.∂∫
Yet ‘‘conclusions’’ are more than the outcome of an empirical investigation.
Gibbon rejects any kind of historical determinism, whether theological (as
Vico did) or physical (as some French materialists did). Climate and geogra-
phy, so heavily emphasized in the second part of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of
Laws, play only a minor role in his work. For him, history remains essentially
a human process in which moral factors play the leading part. Only after the
publication of part 1 (chaps. 1–16) did the English historian fully realize
the importance of economics in a people’s ability to turn physical conditions
to political advantage. Later chapters betray the influence of Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations, which had appeared in the same year (1776) as the first
part of The Decline and Fall. Gibbon’s claim that as a society begins to pro-
duce more durable goods than the needs of the community requires, it in-
creases its wealth ‘‘by the division of labor and the facility of exchange’’ might
have been lifted out of Smith’s classic.
Still, the moving causes of history remain moral. Nowhere does this appear
more clearly than in the discussion of Christianity. In Gibbon’s assessment, the
rise of Christianity and the alleged changes it wrought in the moral attitude of
the Romans weighed more heavily than any institutional reforms at the end
of the republic. Unlike Vico and Montesquieu, he did not attribute the decline
of the empire to the democratization of an originally aristocratic constitution.
He admits that democracy opened the gates to demagogy and eventually led to
an absolute monarchy. But the struggles between plebeians and patricians
were not fatal to the life of the republic: they resulted in a ‘‘firm and equal
balance of the constitution’’ (chap. 38, ‘‘General Observations,’’ p. 630 [b]).
Nor was the rise of the principate in itself a source of decline. Gibbon esti-
mates that the second century was the happiest period in all of human history.
Many have read the controversial chapters 15–16 as basically repeating the
arguments of fourth- and fifth-century pagans who blamed the Church for the
disasters that were destroying their civilization. But this oversimplifies his
position. In Gibbon’s mind, the Church indeed bore major responsibility for
accelerating a fatal decline. But the polemical chapters about the rise of
212 The New Science of History

Christianity bear no direct relation to that decline, since it had been well on its
way before the Christian faith became a major power. The Church accelerated
it by draining much-needed energies away from the moral remnant of the
state. She bore responsibility not so much for what she did as for what she
failed to do, namely, to lend moral support to the state when it was sorely
needed. Instead of coming to the rescue of an empire struggling for survival,
the Church consumed whatever moral forces were left for furthering her own
sectarian goals. ‘‘The last remains of the military spirit were buried in the
cloister; . . . and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of
both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity’’ (chap.
38, p. 631 [b]). Gibbon repeats Rousseau’s argument that the Christian em-
phasis on such otherworldly virtues as humility, obedience, and resignation
weakened the moral fiber needed to resist the invasions of Goths, Vandals,
Huns, and Franks. The Church’s universalism failed to foster the patriotic
attitudes indispensable for national solidarity. Gibbon never claims that, with-
out the rise of Christianity, Rome could have survived. What he does assert is
that only the moral force of the Church might have restored the empire’s
strength and conceivably halted the decline. On the other side, he credits the
Church with civilizing the barbarians and thereby with having ‘‘cemented the
union of the Christian republic’’ with similar morals and a common jurispru-
dence (chap. 8, p. 601 [b]).∂Ω
How, then, did the empire start to decline? Gibbon postpones discussing
this question until the ‘‘General Observations’’ of chapter 38. He initiates his
argument with an axiom partially borrowed from Montesquieu: ‘‘Honor, as
well as virtue, was the principle of the republic’’ (chap. 38, p. 630 [a]). But its
meaning differs from that of The Spirit of Laws: not just virtue, essential to the
life of a republic, but also honor, Montesquieu’s principle of the monarchy, are
needed. While the transition from a democratic form of government to a
principate played no essential role, the absence of virtue and honor to sustain
it did. Contrary to Voltaire (Essai sur les moeurs) and an Encyclopédie article,
‘‘Empire Romain,’’ written by Louis de Jaucourt, Gibbon maintains that the
transfer of the seat of government to Constantinople was in itself no more
than an administrative division of powers, not an abandonment of the West to
the barbarians. It became disastrous only when competition and betrayal
made the administrative separation a moral division and a religious schism.
Once Rome began to expand its territories beyond the Italian peninsula, her
armies had to recruit soldiers who had never seen the city and were not at-
tached to the empire. Mercenaries are notoriously unreliable. They follow
their leaders but have no stake in preserving the state. Moreover, if political
oppositions, inevitable within a state, carry over to the armed forces, they are
 The New Science of History 213

likely to turn into civil wars, as the struggles between the armies of Marius and
Sulla, Pompeius and Caesar in the final years of the republic had shown.
Behind those particular causes stands the general one: the immense size of the
empire. ‘‘The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immod-
erate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of de-
struction multiplied with the extent of the conquest; and as soon as time or
accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to
the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious and
instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather
be surprised that it had existed so long’’ (chap. 38, p. 63 [a]).
When a state expands beyond its natural borders it becomes vulnerable
both to attacks from without and from within. Huge empires die from a loss of
patriotic motivation among its nationally diverse inhabitants. No strong sense
of citizenship is to be expected from those who lost their independence to a
superstate. Thus the empire becomes dependent on citizens it cannot trust. In
addition, the subjugation of many nations exposes its territory to threats that
can hardly be foreseen. How could the Romans suspect that the peace of Italy
was to be shaken by revolutions in distant China? Yet the Chinese annals may
well contain ‘‘the secret and remote causes of the fall of the Roman Empire’’
(chap. 30, p. 483 [b]). Fleeing the marauding armies of Kublai Khan in their
territory near the Caspian Sea, the Huns moved west toward Hungary and
pressured the Gothic tribes who occupied that area into crossing the limes of
the Danube. Even today Western empires ought not to feel confident that
barbarians will never threaten them again. The power of independent ‘‘bar-
barians’’ may appear to have contracted too much to be a cause for apprehen-
sion among civilized nations. ‘‘Yet,’’ Gibbon cautions, ‘‘this apparent security
should not tempt us to forget that new enemies and unknown dangers may
possibly arise from some obscure people, scarcely visible in the map of the
world. The Arabs or Saracens, who spread their conquests from India to
Spain, had languished in poverty and contempt till Mahomet breathed into
those savage bodies the soul of enthusiasm’’ (chap. 38, p. 632 [b]).
Gibbon’s ominous prediction that appears to have acquired a new proba-
bility in our own day returns the argument to his main thesis: the sources of
historical ascent and decline are moral. Yet the ‘‘morality’’ of Decline and Fall
differs from what we ordinarily consider ‘‘virtuous’’ behavior. It includes fear-
less courage, ruthless ambition, and political guile. Only nations endowed
with those primitive qualities, rejected as vices by the morally refined, will
conquer the earth. ‘‘The warlike states of Antiquity, Greece, Macedonia, and
Rome, educated a race of soldiers; exercised their bodies, disciplined their
courage, multiplied their forces by regular evolutions. . . . But this superiority
214 The New Science of History

insensibly declined with their laws and manners’’ (chap. 38, p. 633 [a]). Unless
the peaceful learn to resist the violent with their own weapons, the barbarians
will overrun them.
Despite this defense of Machiavellian virtù, Gibbon often appeals to a more
traditional morality when his conquerors exceed the limits of what conven-
tional standards of behavior tolerate. Indeed, it is by its moral vision, however
ambiguous, that The Decline and Fall continues to fascinate the modern
reader. We feel irresistibly drawn in by the epic conflict between the good and
the bad, the generous and the selfish, the refined and the barbaric. But even
more by the melancholy feeling of the transience of all human affairs, the very
experience that stood at the origin of Gibbon’s great work. In his memoirs he
recalls the occasion: ‘‘It was at Rome on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat
musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were sing-
ing Vespers in the Temple of Jupiter [then, as now, the church of Santa Maria
in Aracoeli] that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started
to my mind.’’ Gibbon views the past as irretrievably lost: heroism and coward-
ice, vice and virtue, in the end will leave nothing but ruins. This pervasive
feeling of permanent loss has always conveyed a romantic attraction to The
Decline and Fall.
In the concluding chapter 71, he once again contemplates the ruins, not in
propria persona, but through the eyes of the fifteenth-century humanist Pog-
gio. ‘‘The place and the object gave ample scope for moralizing on the vicissi-
tudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works,
which buries empires and cities in a common grave; and it was agreed that, in
proportion to her former greatness, the fall of Rome was the more awful and
deplorable’’ (chap. 71, p. 590). What for Poggio had been a reflection on the
eternal law of events, however, has in the British historian awakened a sorrow-
ful sense of never-to-return pastness. Nor does the story of the past contain
any providential design for future generations. The few times Gibbon men-
tions Providence, he does so in an ironic way, as when four thousand veterans
unexpectedly land in the port of Ravenna and liberate the weak and incompe-
tent emperor Honorius from an imminent invasion by the Goths. ‘‘But there is
a Providence (such at least was the opinion of the historian Procopius) that
watches over innocence and folly, and the pretensions of Honorius to its
peculiar care cannot reasonably be disputed’’ (chap. 31, p. 508 [a]). Or again,
when Augustine justifies the ways of Providence in the destruction of Rome by
citing the respect the invading Goths paid to the sacred vessels (chap. 31,
p. 509 [b]).
In contrast to ancient historians, Gibbon no longer turns to the past for
exemplars. Even for Machiavelli, history had still served as magistra for our
 The New Science of History 215

conduct in the present. The later historian paints his memorable characters,
men like Marcus Aurelius, Athanasius, Alaric, Attila, or women like The-
odora and Placidia in colors that make them appear very remote from our
time. Precisely thereby do they hold a deeper fascination for us than examples
of imitable virtue or avoidable vice might ever do. They present the more
sweeping moral story of the infinite, ever changing variety of human nature.
Like the aphorisms of the French moralistes, Decline and Fall gives insight
through the observation of a human nature that, for all its universality, re-
mains forever unpredictable.
The very title of Decline and Fall reveals Gibbon’s historical position. The
view of late antiquity as moving toward a ‘‘fall’’ was far from generally ac-
cepted before his work appeared and has become almost universally rejected
by historians of our own time. In a recent lecture at the American Academy
Professor Glen Bowersock pointed out how the obsession with ‘‘the fall of
Rome’’ dates mainly from the publication of Gibbon’s work. ‘‘This means that
the reflections of a Montesquieu or even a Vico . . . do not represent what we
have in mind when we speak of the fall. For Montesquieu, decadence and
decline were deduced from the study of ancient literary texts, as were the
shifting corsi and ricorsi of Giambattista Vico. For Gibbon, the primary in-
spiration was his own personal experience of ancient ruins in Italy, and espe-
cially in Rome. It was a very different experience from Poggio’s.’’∑≠
Did the empire ever actually ‘‘fall’’? Concerning the end of the Eastern
Empire there can be no doubt: in 1453 the Ottoman forces conquered Con-
stantinople and absorbed the Byzantine Empire within their own. But the
Western case appears far more complex. One might, indeed, claim with some
justification that in 476 the Western Empire expired, since the title of ‘‘em-
peror’’ was lost when the barbarian Odoacer pensioned the young emperor
Romulus Augustus off to Lucullus’s villa on Capo Miseno. But ought the
conquest by an unassimilated barbarian and the loss of the imperial title be
called ‘‘the fall of the empire?’’ Odoacer was not the first ‘‘barbarian’’ sov-
ereign of Rome, though he was the first who had no Roman citizenship. Nor
did any abrupt change of civilization or even of juridical administration occur.
Historians of the early Middle Ages feel less inclined to place the end of the
Western Empire in 476. Henri Pirenne argues that the end did not come until
the Islam definitively divided East from West. Peter Brown rejects the notion of
a ‘‘fall’’ altogether and prefers to speak of a cultural transformation.
Gibbon continues the history of the Western Empire beyond ‘‘the fall.’’ In
800 when the Eastern Empire still had a legitimate emperor with legal jurisdic-
tion over East and West (the Roman senate had returned the title of imperial
authority to Constantinople), Pope Leo III, acting as self-proclaimed heir of
216 The New Science of History

the entire empire, crowned Charlemagne as universal emperor. The legitimacy

of this act was anything but certain, as the later need for a forged donatio
Constantini proved. Yet when the Eastern Empire collapsed in 1453 the
crowning might appear to have received some posthumous legitimation from
the fact that no other title stood in its way. Assuming a minimal continuity of a
title that persisted all through Christian civilization, one might even claim that
the Holy Roman Empire continued until Napoleon formally abolished it.
Even after that, some sizable part of it was resurrected at the Council of
Vienna as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which survived until 1917.
If the Western Empire, then, never really ‘‘fell,’’ the Eastern one never se-
riously ‘‘declined’’ before its abrupt ending in 1453. The period of its greatest
weakness, under the successors of Theodosius, Arcadius, and Theodosius II,
preceded the very strong reign of Justinian and his powerful successors. Not
only did Constantinople not collapse under the barbarian assaults of the fifth
century, but its armies managed to reconquer Africa, and parts of Italy and
Spain. Admittedly, compared to the earlier republic or even the early empire,
the later empire may be said to have in some way ‘‘declined.’’ But few histo-
rians agree on the nature and causes of this downward slide. Was it moral,
social, political, economic decay, or all of these together, and if so, in which
order? What, then, do the terms ‘‘decline’’ and ‘‘fall’’ stand for? They served
Gibbon’s purpose of telling a moral tale. Without a definite conclusion pre-
pared by a preceding decline, the story would have lacked the coherence re-
quired by a moral saga. To meet this purpose, however, it needed not be
coherent in all its particulars. The chapters 30–40 on the Gothic invasions
show how loosely particular episodes of Decline and Fall were strung to-
gether. They are well-told stories, complete within their own right and in a
general way contributing to the ‘‘decline’’ of the whole. But they leave the
chronological order of events to the reader’s industry and imagination.
For Gibbon, as for many historians of ancient Rome, a decisive politi-
cal event occurred when the first Gothic tribes, pressed by migrating Huns,
crossed the Danube. The invasions led to an ever-growing ‘‘barbarization.’’
But would Rome have suffered any ill effects from it if the city had not ex-
panded into an empire? Or if it had not changed its political system from
aristocratic to democratic and then monarchic? Economic changes also played
a major role, especially after the third century, and caused the cities, the source
of a higher economy, to become deserted.∑∞ But what in this complex web of
factors was cause and what effect? It is hard to disagree with the conclusion of
resigned ignorance expressed by J. B. Bury, the excellent editor of Gibbon’s
work: ‘‘The gradual collapse of the Roman power in this section of the Empire
was the consequence of a series of contingent events. No general causes can be
 The New Science of History 217

assigned that made it inevitable.’’∑≤ Gibbon’s great work, then, is not merely
history; it is also rhetoric. Indeed, to a major extent it owes its popular success
as a work of history to its rhetorical qualities.
This should not surprise us. Throughout Greek and Roman antiquity the
writing of history had been an exercise in rhetoric. Composing the speeches of
political and military heroes formed an essential part of the historian’s craft,
and much of the quality of his work was judged by his ability for posthumous
speech writing. Gibbon, of course, endeavors to set himself apart from this
kind of rhetorical inventiveness. Yet he continues to abide by what Isocrates
called the ‘‘hegemony’’ of the logos, the rhetorical approach to his subject. A
work of history had to excel by literary qualities as well as by historical
exactitude. That Gibbon did succeed is attested even by such an unfriendly
witness as Samuel Coleridge who calls him ‘‘our most eloquent historian.’’∑≥
Above all, Gibbon was a master of the sweeping moral tale in which virtue and
vice, insight and insipience, become repaid in equal measure by success or
failure in the outcome of events. In The Decline and Fall narrative history
scores a total victory over the chronicle. The chronicle lacks a plot: it misses
the symbolization indispensable for transforming mere facts into carriers of a
human, spiritual meaning. Gibbon, like Hume in large parts of the History of
England and like Voltaire in Charles XII, gives the events an enduring signifi-
cance and their connection a literary composition. The grand scheme of the
eighteenth-century storytellers moves them toward a dramatic ending. His-
tory here appears as essentially a result of human designs, and historiography
as a product of the imagination as well as of knowledge and insight. Gibbon
achieves this effect by pursuing a single theme throughout his work, but also in
part by weaving events around a few major characters, such as Alaric, Gen-
seric, Theodoric, Justinian, or Julian, even if such a condensation requires
sacrificing the historical importance of others to the dramatic impact of the
whole.∑∂
Ever since its appearance, readers have praised the dignified style of Decline
and Fall, worthy of the grandeur of its subject. This acclaim has profited from
the fact that few have read the entire work. To those who have, the majestic
periods and the cascading adjectives tend to lose some of their initial im-
pressiveness once it appears that they are often unrelated to the nature of the
subject. It has been said that Gibbon imitates Cicero; if this is true, he appears
to have modeled his style only on Cicero’s perorations. As Gilbert Highet
wrote, The Decline and Fall is a perpetual peroration. Some find his prose
condescending and self-congratulatory. I disagree, but I can hardly deny that
occasionally Gibbon’s grand style serves as a screen behind which the author
hides a lack of precise information or even an inability to reach an adequate
218 The New Science of History

interpretation of the events. The solemn phrases inspire confidence that the
writer remains in full control of the subject and that whatever may be missing
is the subject’s own fault. At times the reader suspects that, for Gibbon, the
ultimate meaning of history lies in his writing it.
Yet another rhetorical quality distinguishes the writing of The Decline and
Fall, a quality that Plato critically referred to as the art of making the weaker
argument appear the stronger. Certainly, Gibbon never allowed rhetorical
sophistry to jeopardize his historical credibility. But he does have axes to grind
and grinds them with a vengeance. The famous diatribe on the rise of Chris-
tianity in chapters 15–16 fits but oddly in the general argument. Similarly, the
lengthy discussion of the Islam serves more than an exclusively historical
purpose: it does double duty as an object lesson in religious ‘‘fanaticism,’’ the
problem of Christianity writ large. Beyond these particular objectives lies the
general one of Gibbon’s story: to convince the reader of the central message of
the Enlightenment, sapere aude. He never loses sight of the fundamental func-
tion of his eloquent narrative: to persuade his contemporaries to cast an crit-
ical glance at a past that hitherto had remained clouded in prejudice and
‘‘superstition.’’ While uncovering the truth about late antiquity, Gibbon in-
tends to spread the modern message of the reign of reason and of the univer-
sality of the human race. Other eighteenth-century writers—Vico, Voltaire,
Turgot—had laid out the principles of a secular history of humankind. Gib-
bon actually showed in the one concrete instance of the Roman Empire how
the fate of all human beings is interrelated and codetermined in places and by
peoples far removed from the precincts of their own nation. Huge empires,
such as the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic ones and the Roman,
have played a role in making people aware of their solidarity with others.
Yet Gibbon did not present the global character of those empires as models
for the future. Political structures of this magnitude, especially when inhabited
by heterogeneous populations, are bound to collapse. Instead, he proposes the
model of a loose union of small, independent nations that entertain an uninter-
rupted cultural exchange with one another. Such was ancient Greece; such
were the socially advanced states of Europe at his time. ‘‘In all the pursuits of
active and speculative life, the emulation of states and individuals is the most
powerful spring of the efforts and improvements of mankind. The cities of
ancient Greece were cast in the happy mixture of union and independence,
which is repeated on a larger scale, but in a looser form, by the nations of
modern Europe: the union of language, religion, and manners, which renders
them the spectators and judges of each other’s merit: the independence of
government and interest, which asserts their separate freedom, and excites
 The New Science of History 219

them to strive for pre-eminence in the career of glory. The situation of the
Romans was less favorable’’ (chap. 53, p. 327 [b]).
This passage discloses the dual objective of Gibbon’s work: one, to promote
a cultural union through education and liberation from prejudice; the other, to
caution against enforced political and cultural uniformity. Gibbon did not
possess Montesquieu’s acute perceptiveness for the sense of historical identity
that a nation derives from its institutions and laws. Yet his study of Rome’s
expansion and decline had convinced him that oversized, politically cen-
tralized states end in ruin. At the same time, his lengthy exposure to what he
regards as a millennium of ‘‘decline’’ discouraged him from nurturing any but
the most cautious optimism for the future. Yes, he believed in the possibility of
moral and cultural progress, and he was convinced that the advances in sci-
ence and technology would prevent the West from relapsing into full barba-
rism. But his overall view of human behavior remained quite different from
that of most philosophes. Where they held great expectations about the future
of mankind, Gibbon remained skeptical to the end. A profound relativist, he
was one of the first ‘‘historicists’’ of the modern age.∑∑

Particular History, Universal Humanity: Herder and Kant

Herder presented the most serious challenge to the theories of the En-
lightenment. In all three his studies on history, Another Philosophy of History
Concerning the Development of Mankind (Auch eine Philosophie der Ge-
schichte zur Bildung der Menschheit [1774]), Reflections on the Philosophy of
the History of Mankind (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit
[1784–91]) (his only properly historical work), and Letters for the Advance-
ment of Humanity (Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität [1793–97]), he
attacks the philosophes, though in the later works less so than in the earlier
ones.∑∏ In the early Another Philosophy he rejects the Enlightenment idea of
historical progress altogether. In the Reflections he admits the possibility of
moral progress but denies that it coincides with the advance of ‘‘reason.’’ In
the Letters he hesitantly accepts the philosophes’ theories of freedom and
equality as he saw them realized in the French Revolution. Throughout these
shifts Herder’s position remained consistently anti-rationalist. The light of
reason does not warm the soul, he often repeats. ‘‘In our century we have, alas,
so much light’’ (In unserem Jahrhundert ist leider so viel Licht) (Another
Philosophy, in Werke, V, 524). ‘‘While light has been endlessly exalted, the
drive and passion to live have become disproportionately weakened. Ideas of
universal love for humanity, peoples, enemies, have increased, but warmth in
220 The New Science of History

the natural affections toward fathers, mothers, brothers, and friends has infi-
nitely decreased’’ (ibid., p. 538). The Enlightenment has replaced ancient
prejudice by the more harmful prejudice of reason. Great art and poetry would
not have existed without a commitment to ideas and values we now call
‘‘prejudices,’’ while the unprejudiced age of reason can claim few memorable
achievements. Richness of experience has yielded to poverty of abstraction
(Another Philosophy, in Werke, V, 543–544).
Yet far more significant than Herder’s critique of the Enlightenment was his
success in synthesizing its leading ideas and in overcoming their one-sidedness.
He balanced the universal ideal of humanity with the irreducible particularity
of each nation, the idea of organic growth with that of causal determinism, the
divine guidance of history with the uninhibited autonomy of human efforts.
Each culture forms an independent, organic entity and each people is ani-
mated by its own spirit—the Volksgeist—and ‘‘each functions as means and
end at once’’ (ibid., p. 527). Nor does the purpose of earlier civilizations
consist in preparing the later ones, as Turgot or Condorcet claimed. History
has known good and bad times, periods of beauty and of ugliness. But the
better ones are not necessarily the later ones, though later epochs profit from
the lessons of the past. The philosophes proclaim their own age the goal of all
previous history: ‘‘We are the healers, the saviors, the enlightened ones: the
times of the mad fever are gone’’ (ibid., p. 556). Herder insists: no individual
exists ‘‘for the sake of another or of posterity’’ (Ideen, bk. XV, chap. 5, in
Werke, XIV, 246; Reflections, p. 113). Each nation expresses a different
mode of living, based on different standards of perfection. Isaiah Berlin called
Herder the first cultural pluralist of the West. He was indeed the first major
thinker to maintain that the values of different cultures are irreducible to a
common denominator. Yet in the end the term ‘‘pluralism’’ fails to do justice to
Herder’s thought, since the irreducible cultural variety forms part of an all-
integrating unity.∑π
Neither ought the historian assume that a final causality determines the
succession of events. If the physical sciences have reaped no benefit from the
concept of final causes, how much less will history do so ‘‘with its endlessly
complicated machinery of causes that mutually act upon each other’’ (Ideen,
bk. XIV, chap. 6, in Werke, XIV, 202; Reflections, pp. 266–67). Human affairs
form only an infinitesimal link in the chain of nature. Seeing no more than our
own contribution to the whole, we imagine that we must be the centerpiece of
creation. Yet human history forms only a small part of natural history and
historians ought to follow the same empirical method that has proven so
successful in the natural sciences. Herder’s lengthy treatise on world history
begins with a startling sentence: Unsre Erde ist ein Stern unter Sternen (Our
 The New Science of History 221

earth is a star among stars), followed by a discussion of the earth’s geological

formation (Ideen, bk. I, chap. 1, in Werke, XIII, 13; Reflections, pp. 13–46).
Human history takes its place within this cosmic process. Still, despite his
opposition to teleological speculations, Herder remained unwavering in his
conviction that history follows a meaningful course. Its completion is both an
ideal and a reality in progress. Only when all civilizations have run their course
will the human race have completed its task of achieving a comprehensive
moral community. Meanwhile, the moral ideal of Humanität summons each
individual and each nation to follow his or her own vocation in the process of
history. Humanität, then, remains a very elusive concept. It is at once a norm
of action, an ideal of moral development, a construction of historical perspec-
tive, and a world-historical process.∑∫ Some individuals and even some nations
have left universal models of perfection. Such were the aesthetic ideal of hu-
manity realized in classical Greece and the moral one preached by Christ. Yet
all civilizations, however imperfect, have their place in a process that irresisti-
bly moves toward a universal, moral community.
Since this process is a necessary one, Herder feels justified in calling Human-
ität a reality, albeit one in progress. He supports the necessity of its realization
by a surprising principle: ‘‘Whatever can take place among mankind, within
the sphere of given circumstances of time, place, and nation, actually does take
place’’ (Ideen, bk. XIII, chap. 7, in Werke, XIV, 144; Reflections, p. 213). If
this means that over an endless stretch of time anything that can take place
must take place, the principle does not apply to history, because we have no
assurance that time extends into an infinite future, and even if it did, the
conditions of the process change from moment to moment in an irreversible
succession. But Herder appears to have had something else in mind. The
‘‘necessity’’ he writes about is a conditional one: given a certain situation and
the link that connects cause and effect in natural history, it follows that, if
history is indeed a natural process, certain events are bound to occur. ‘‘The
whole history of mankind is a pure natural history of human powers, actions,
and propensities, modified by time and place’’ (Ideen, bk. XIII, chap. 7, in
Werke, XIV, 145; Reflections, p. 214). One may, of course, question whether
the view that human affairs are no more than a link in the chain of nature is
compatible with the freedom he praises in his Letters for the Advancement of
Humanity as the main accomplishment of the modern age.
Matters become even more complicated when Herder attributes this deter-
minism to a providential disposition. His interpretation of Providence differs,
however, from Turgot’s. To conceive of history as a progressive development
guided by God’s hand (as the French thinker did) conflicts with the most
elementary observation of the crimes and disasters that terrorize the world.
222 The New Science of History

Such a ‘‘progressive’’ view of Providence stems from the same overblown

opinion of one’s own epoch that gave birth to the secular philosophies of
progress. Herder denies that God furthers the fortunes of one nation or of one
epoch at the expense of others. In his conception, humanity forms part of a
divine plan that includes all of nature and conveys meaning to all times. God
realizes his comprehensive design through the same natural appetites that
drive individuals and nations to irrational, violent behavior as well as to virtue
and culture. Even after they discover the wisdom of reason and order, humans
continue to oscillate between chaos and rule. The eternal law of nature points
toward balance, but human nature, torn by conflicting powers, ‘‘vibrates be-
tween extremes . . . till [it] reaches the temperate mean’’ (Ideen, bk. XV, chap.
5, in Werke, XIV, 246; Reflections, p. 114). Through the unhappy conse-
quences of mindless deeds, nations like individuals eventually learn to observe
the laws of reason. ‘‘To all these disorders Providence has applied no other
remedy than what she administers to individuals; namely, that each fault
should be followed by a corresponding evil, and every act of indolence, folly,
malice, rashness, and injustice by its own punishment’’ (Ideen, bk. XV, chap.
5, in Werke, XIV, 247–48; Reflections, p. 115). So, in the end, all enter into
God’s design. That design aims at the good of all nature and in humans, at the
fullest realization of their humanity.
Within this ‘‘natural’’ course of history, Herder admits only one direct di-
vine intervention. In the person of Jesus appears a moral ideal of perfection,
which the human race will not attain until its final stage. ‘‘The most genuine
humanity is contained in the few discourses of [ Jesus] that are preserved:
humanity he displayed in his life and confirmed by his death: and the favorite
name, by which he chose to distinguish himself was that of the son of man’’
(Ideen, bk. XVII, intro., in Werke, XIV, 290; Reflections, p. 269). That divine
model, however, lost much of its power in the very Church founded to keep it
alive. Nevertheless, the Church, in linking all peoples by a spiritual bond,
formed an inclusive European culture. ‘‘Christianity has knotted a tie among
the peoples as the conquests of Alexander, the Romans, and the Huns had
never succeeded in doing. It was intended to be a bond of peace, however often
it became a cause of strife and disputes. In the hands of Providence it also
became a bond of culture, of a common culture among the nations’’ (Letters,
Collection V, # 1, in Werke, XVII, 301). Even the papal ‘‘despotism’’ of the
Middle Ages, harshly criticized in Ideen, XIX, had an unintended beneficial
effect. ‘‘The pressure of the Romish hierarchy was perhaps a necessary yoke,
an indispensable bridle for the rude nations of the Middle Ages. Without it
Europe had probably been the prey of despots, a theatre of eternal discord, or
 The New Science of History 223

even a Mungal [Mongol] wilderness. Thus as a counterpoise it merits praise’’

(Ideen, bk. XX, chap. 6, in Werke, XIV, 492; Reflections, p. 397).
Herder never discusses how much any given civilization realized the ideal of
humanity. His critique of the Roman and the medieval Christian one appears
severe for one who believed that each civilization contributes an essential part
to the whole. In the Ideen, he thoroughly demolishes the neoclassical ideal of
the Roman republic as a moral model. The genius of the Romans, idealized in
European schoolbooks, was not humanitas (even though they invented the
term), he claims, but an extraordinary ability for military conquest. ‘‘By de-
grees Rome drained, enervated, and depopularized Italy,’’ so that barbarians
were needed to repopulate it again (Ideen, bk. XIV, chap. 3, in Werke, XIV,
171; Reflections, p. 238). Having first subjugated Italy Rome attacked Car-
thage, transforming a flourishing North African civilization into a cultural
desert. Roman civilization, undeniably, transmitted Greek culture to the West
and even produced a few original creations of its own. But were Virgil’s Aeneid
and Horace’s Epistles worth ‘‘the rivers of blood’’? (Ideen, bk. XIV, chap. 6, in
Werke, XIV, 201; Reflections, p. 265). Does Rome deserve credit even for
having ‘‘preserved’’ Greek culture? Its intent was to conquer and, having little
culture of its own, it took from others what it had been incapable of creating
itself. ‘‘The Romans were destroyers, and in their turn destroyed: but de-
stroyers are no preservers of the world. They irritated all nations, till at length
they became their prey; and Providence performed no miracle on their behalf’’
(ibid., p. 267). Nor ought Christians look at Roman expansionism as a provi-
dential means for spreading their faith. ‘‘It would be derogatory to divine
Providence to suppose that, for her noblest work, the propagation of truth and
virtue, she could employ no other instrument, than the tyrannical and bloody
hands of the Romans’’ (ibid., p. 266).
Nonetheless Herder himself considers the empire a step toward a global
community. Its very collapse made a fresh beginning possible. Vigorous Gothic
and Germanic tribes reoccupied the enormous territory and infused the ex-
hausted empire with new, vital forces. Earlier Herder had written: ‘‘Whoever
observes the condition of the Roman lands (they made up the entire civilized
world at the time!) in the final centuries will marvel and wonder at the ways of
Providence’s work in having prepared such a peculiar replacement of human
forces’’ (Another Philosophy, in Werke, V, 514). Rome’s fall negatively created
the conditions of moral renewal of which she herself was incapable. Moreover,
the city left the barbarian invaders a common language and political structures.
Herder’s discussion of medieval Christianity displays a similar ambiguity
toward a culture that fell short of its ideal vocation yet unwittingly moved
224 The New Science of History

history closer to its final ideal. Surprisingly, after his early defense of the
Middle Ages as a period of experience and dynamic vitality (Another Philoso-
phy, in Werke, V, 524–26), and the later one of Christian culture as indis-
pensable for the unification of Europe (bk. XIX of Ideen), he thoroughly
denounced the enslavement of the European nations by papal and ecclesiasti-
cal despotism. What had Christ’s humanitarian message accomplished, if it led
only to a moral condition inferior to that of pagan society? Here as in other
instances Herder distinguished the moral quality of a particular epoch from its
part in the realization of the universal goal of history. Medieval Christianity
failed in the former, yet it strongly contributed to the latter.
The discrepancy between the fundamental principles lying at the ground of
Christian culture and the highly imperfect history of that culture raises a more
comprehensive question about the role of religion in attaining the ideal of
Humanität. For Herder, religion forms the core of that universal ideal. Yet
religions have also been responsible for the divisions among nations and have
constituted the most serious obstacle to the formation of a universal human
community. Herder rejects Rousseau’s solution of the problem, namely, the
creation of a universal civil religion. The Lutheran minister knew too much
about the nature of faith to adopt such an artificial stratagem. Religion is by its
very nature specific and ought to be so, if it is to be practiced at all. He only
demanded that this practice not conflict with the universal ideal of humanitas.
Herder distinguishes particular doctrines from the universal principles that
support them. All ought to cultivate the principles and respect the doctrine.
This synthesis of religious particularity and universality does not imply that he
considers all doctrines equal. The fundamental principles of Christianity, for
him, incarnate the very ideal of Humanität, but he disdains the conflicting
interpretations the Christian Churches have given of Jesus’ message.
One might wonder how civilizations so basically opposed to one another in
their moral ideals as the Greek, the Roman, and the medieval, not to mention
the Far Eastern ones, could ever constitute a harmonious whole. His belief in a
final concordance of irreducibly diverse civilizations was, in fact, inspired by
an aesthetic notion of harmony, rather than by the moral one he proclaimed.
In art and poetry, oppositions, however strong, may complement one another
in a way they cannot do in a moral system. Influenced by Winckelmann and
Goethe, Herder increasingly came to use the harmonious form of Greek art
and poetry as a model for his cultural ideal of Humanität. Classical sculpture
and architecture presented the ‘‘epitome of all that is sensible on earth’’ (Let-
ters, in Werke, XVII, 343). The pages he devoted to Greek art and poetry and
to their role in the new German educational ideal substantially contributed to
 The New Science of History 225

a Greek renaissance in Germany, the romantic counterpart of the Enlighten-

ment’s Latin classicism in France.
The advent of the French Revolution, which he greeted as a major victory of
the human spirit, may have convinced Herder that his own theory implied a
more rectilinear idea of progress than he had previously admitted. He discon-
tinued work on the Ideen, for which he had planned five more books, and in
his next Letters for the Advancement of Humanity (1793–97), he changed his
assessment of the Enlightenment and its idea of progress. The breakthrough of
freedom in this one revolutionary event suddenly appeared to shorten the road
to the realization of his moral ideal in an irreversible move toward freedom.
The sympathy with which other nations had greeted the revolution suggested
that a morally united community of the peoples of Europe was about to be
born. Yet in a second collection of Letters (1793), written at the time of the
Terreur in Paris, Herder wondered whether his idea of a definitive moral
progress of the human race had been more than a utopian aspiration (Letters,
Collection II, # 24, in Werke, XVII, 113). He concludes this Letter on an
uncharacteristically skeptic note: ‘‘Allow me with Lessing to consider the en-
tire dream of the increasing perfection of our race to be a salutary deceit.
Humans have to aim at something higher, if they do not want to sink lower’’
(ibid., p. 114). At least the illusion of perfectibility preserves people from
morally degenerating.
Soon, however, Herder reasserts his belief in the possibility of a truly human
community. Yet more than before, he stresses that moral improvement ought
to accompany cultural progress in the complex combination of cultural refine-
ment and moral growth, to which he refers by the word Bildung. This defin-
ing term of Germany’s new humanism combined the pursuit of a cultural-
aesthetic ideal with the moral one of noble conduct. It included, next to a
schooling in the classical studia humaniora, a moral training in the virtues of
moderation, equanimity, and kindness, inspired by the Roman ideal of hu-
manitas and the Christian one of brotherly love. Herder considered such a
program necessary to avert the dangerously competitive drive that continued
to estrange peoples from one another. Having witnessed ever more nations
drawn into international conflicts, he darkly prophesied: ‘‘A conflict of all
nations of the earth might well be imagined. In fact, the ground for that has
already been established’’ (Letters, Collection II, # 16, in Werke, XVII, 118).
Despite those somber forebodings, Herder preserved his faith in the possibility
of achieving a universal peace. Humans enter the world with a predisposition
toward full humanity (Letters, Collection III, # 27, in Werke, XVII, 138).
Herder’s idea of the end of history remains purely hypothetical. Will the
226 The New Science of History

human race ever realize the moral ideal of Humanität? Even if rational beings
learn from their mistakes, as he claims, we may wonder whether they ever
learn enough to live up to that ideal. People tend to invent new vices even
as they develop new virtues. Despite the utopianism inherent in Herder’s
thought, the remarkable balance between universality and particularity in his
theory of history strongly influenced the views of the romantic era. The sweep-
ing conclusion of a recent commentator may not be exaggerated. ‘‘No one in
our tradition has thought more radically about the need to accomplish a medi-
ation between the particular and the universal, pluralism and monism, just as
no one else has produced such a startlingly ambitious attempt to do so.’’∑Ω
Herder saw his ideal incarnated in Kant, the ‘‘teacher of Humanität.’’ What
impressed the former disciple most in his master was that in his personal life
Kant abided by the strict moral code he advocated in his philosophy. After
much hesitation, Kant adopted his disciple’s moral ideal. He provided the
concept of Humanität with a more solid moral foundation in the second form
of the categorical imperative: Treat persons as ends, never merely as means.
Still Kant’s primarily moral meaning was more restricted than Herder’s, for
whom the idea of a fully humanitarian development consisted in an unin-
hibited, open communication among nations in which the cultural as well as
the moral potential of the human race would be fully realized.
Kant’s initial reaction to Ideas Toward a Philosophy of the History of the
Human Race (1784) had been quite critical. He had frowned upon Herder’s
analogy between the growth of an organic being and the cultural development
of human beings. ‘‘There is not the least resemblance between the gradient
progression in the same man who is ever ascending to a more perfect structure
in another life and the ladder which one may conceive among completely
different types and individuals in the realm of nature.’’∏≠ Nonetheless, shortly
thereafter Kant himself began to write of Humanität as the moral destination
of the human race. In his ‘‘Conjectural Beginning of Human History’’ (1786),
he traces the development of the human species from an animal state to one of
genuine humanity. The current condition of Europeans, compared to that of
primitives, warrants at least a ‘‘responsible conjecture’’ that humans have
made some progress since the beginning of the race (‘‘Conjectural Beginning’’
in Kant on History, p. 59; Schriften, VII, 114). But not all in the area where it
matters most. Earlier Kant had written: ‘‘To a degree we are, through art and
science, cultured. We are civilized—perhaps too much for our own good—in
all sorts of social graces and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having
reached morality—for that much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to
culture; its use for some simulacrum of morality in the love of honor and
 The New Science of History 227

outward decorum constitutes mere civilization’’ (‘‘Idea for a Universal His-

tory’’ in Kant on History, p. 21; Schriften, VII, 26).
In his famous essay on the Enlightenment, Kant admitted that culture had
taken the road toward irreversible progress. Once reason has become enlight-
ened and freedom emancipated, no political or religious authority is capable
of halting humanity on its course to full enlightenment.∏∞ Still, the removal of
the obstacles does not imply that we have actually become enlightened. We do
not yet live in an enlightened age, Kant insists, but we do live in age of enlight-
enment. Moral progress has not kept pace with the intellectual advances of the
modern age. Yet without moral improvement we have not moved closer to the
ideal of Humanität.
Finally, in one of his last writings, ‘‘An Old Question Raised Again: Is the
Human Race Constantly Progressing?’’ (1798), Kant conceded that we have
actually achieved moral progress. Yet he still refused to embrace the optimistic
thesis of the French philosophes that humanity constantly advances. Even if
we have progressed, what assures us that we shall continue to do so in the
future? At the same time, Kant dismisses the hypothesis that history moves
back and forth between good and evil. Though logically irrefutable, that posi-
tion must be rejected on moral grounds. A constant alternation of good and
evil, he argues, rules out what the moral imperative demands, namely, that
moral life follow an ascending line in the human species as well as in the
individual.
Kant never abandoned his position that a morality exclusively determined
by the intention cannot be objectively measured. But at least we are able to
ascertain whether prevailing conditions favor or obstruct the practice of mo-
rality. By that measure, changes that promote the attainment of a higher level
of freedom must be considered signs of moral progress. The French Revolu-
tion was, in this respect, an irreversible breakthrough toward freedom. The
disinterested sympathy that its contemporaries showed for it indicated that
it met with universal approval. Kant’s surprising opinion was by no means
shared in countries where the revolutionary armies had wrought havoc and
violated the sovereignty of the nation. Nonetheless, he confidently declared:
‘‘Now I claim to be able to predict to the human race even without prophetic
insight—according to the aspects and omens of our day, the attainment of this
goal.’’∏≤
At the conclusion of the war between the French Republic and the League of
European Monarchies, Kant had even expressed his belief that a universal
peace among European nations was possible and likely to be concluded. In his
early ‘‘Conjectural Beginning’’ he had considered war indispensable for the
228 The New Science of History

development of culture. At a time of conflict a nation rallies all its powers,

becomes inventive in its attempt to outwit the adversary, and produces at
maximum capacity. In the essay ‘‘Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical
Project’’ (1795), he argued that in an advanced civilization this brutal means
of self-assertion turns against itself.∏≥ The nation’s resources, instead of being
used for the benefit of the citizens, are squandered on the conduct of war.
Freedom becomes restricted and moral values jeopardized. Indeed, an ad-
vanced culture requires peace for its survival.
For the maintenance of peace Kant recommended establishing a court of
international law to enforce the observance of the moral law in international
relations. Kant’s theory of a purely internal morality has frequently been held
responsible for moral indifference with respect to public policy, as if in legal
matters obedience to the legal authority of one’s own nation were the only
moral requirement (a principle still invoked by a number of Nazi war crimi-
nals). The treatise on peace shows that, far from consenting to such a moral
duplicity, he vigorously strove to abolish it. As long as policy has not made
public life conformable to the moral law, the age of reason has not truly begun.
To be sure, Kant never ceased to stress that no political institutions can achieve
the moral end of history. The moral struggle begins with each person anew and
will not be concluded before the end of time. But part of each individual’s
moral obligation consists in improving the conditions favorable to the de-
velopment of humankind’s moral capacities.
 8

The Religious Crisis

The impact of the Enlightenment was undoubtedly felt most deeply in

the area of religion, either as loss or as liberation. It was particularly severe in
France and in England, where for a long time skeptical philosophies had
undermined the foundations of Christian beliefs. By the end of the eighteenth
century, the French masses, pressed by economic hardship, felt abandoned by
a Church closely linked to a political regime indifferent to their suffering. In
England, after two centuries of religious turmoil, the willingness of the Church
to adapt its doctrine to the will of the sovereign had drained common people
of any expectation of receiving teaching in the body that had traditionally
dispensed it. Still, much piety, even mystical fervor, remained. Yet when com-
pared to the Baroque, the last season of religious exuberance that preceded it,
the age looks bleak. Science was flourishing; philosophy was reaching one of
its greatest periods. But as life was losing its mystery, many, even among the
pioneers of the intellectual revolution, felt that it was losing its depth.
To define the causes of the transformation is both easy and difficult. Easy
because they appear so obvious. Difficult because after analyzing the ‘‘causes,’’
the strength of their impact upon Western consciousness continues to escape
us. What follows, then, is not so much an explanation as a description. In past
centuries religion had been the integrating factor of Western culture; in the
eighteenth century it was forced to the sidelines. Christianity had once formed

229
230 The Religious Crisis

the core of Western culture: the Church ruled intellectual life, directed the
universities, set the norms of moral conduct. For a long period she had also
controlled the political structures. But since the struggle between pope and
emperor and the rise of national states in the fourteenth century, political
power had gradually slipped from her hands. The loss of Christian unity
during the Reformation confronted political leaders with a new problem.
Should they accept the division among their subjects and embrace a policy of
religious toleration, or should they attempt to enforce religious homogeneity?
We know that at first they tried the harsher method, causing a general con-
flagration of Western Europe that lasted almost a century and concluded in the
shaky compromise of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. In the second half of the
seventeenth century, dissenting minorities, particularly in England and France,
insisted on their right to practice religion in accordance with their conscience.
To recognize that right required an unprecedented separation between Church
and state. This privatization of faith aroused protest from the established
Churches since it deprived them of the right to implement their principles
in public policy and to conform society to their theological norms. As the
Churches never reached an agreement on mutual recognition, the very princi-
ple of tolerance became a hotly contested issue. All of this led to a great deal of
confusion among the faithful.
A more immediate cause was undoubtedly a new image of the cosmos,
which was strongly at variance with the one presupposed by Christian theol-
ogy. The conflict first appeared in the interpretation of Scripture. The primary
problem was no longer the formal one it had been for Galileo and his contem-
poraries: How can we reconcile the letter of the Bible with the new scientific
theories? The text itself had become unintelligible. Its language suddenly ap-
peared utterly incongruous with the scientific worldview. Its symbols had lost
their transparency.∞ In the second half of the seventeenth century, Bible schol-
ars initiated a long overdue historical critique of the ancient text. Their conclu-
sions soon became a powerful argument against a Church that had built her
doctrines on what now seemed to be an untrustworthy foundation.
Not only the discrepancy between the new cosmology and the text of the
Bible, but the very notion of divine causality had become questionable. When
efficient causality, conceived on the model used in modern science, came to
define the relation between Creator and creature, the more intimate depen-
dence implied by the traditional doctrine, was lost. Creation so conceived
opened the door to a number of alternative interpretations. As Hume showed,
a purely efficient cause of nature need neither be divine nor personal. The three
factors, then, that most contributed to the religious crisis of the Enlightenment
 The Religious Crisis 231

among intellectuals were biblical criticism, scientific rationalism, and the un-
resolved division of the religious communities.

Biblical Criticism
Early humanists and reformers had launched a concerted effort to rescue
the literal meaning of Scripture from the figurative ones that had freely flour-
ished since Augustine. This new literalism had raised the expectation that the
narratives of the Bible were historically accurate. But further philological
study had evoked serious questions about this assumed accuracy. Allegedly
historical accounts, especially those of the first chapters of Genesis, came to
vary ever more widely from the historical, geological, and physical discoveries
modern science was making at an accelerated pace. By the middle of the
eighteenth century the entire sacred history began to look like one comprehen-
sive exception to all we know both of the physical world and of human history.
The six days of creation, the strange longevity of the patriarchs (Mathusela
lived a record 969 years—figures hard to contest as not literally ‘‘intended.’’
Why otherwise would they be so precise?), the Flood that covered the whole
earth, yet of which other nations knew nothing—these were all questions that
urgently required an answer.≤
The most drastic among the solutions proposed for saving the meaning of
the sacred text was the theory of a double historical truth, proposed by the
famous inventor of the Pre-Adamites, Isaac de la Peyrère. In his Theological
System upon the Presupposition That Men Were Before Adam (1656), he
postulated two creations: one of Adam at the beginning of Jewish history, and
an earlier one that gave birth to all other nations. Thus with one stroke he
reduced the whole history of the Bible to a local phenomenon. Amazingly,
even such scientists and scholars as Pascal and Arnauld continued to insist on a
literal interpretation. The exegetical problems created by philology touched
off a crisis when it appeared that no adequate answers compatible with tradi-
tional Christian doctrine were forthcoming. In his Tractatus Theologico-
Politicus (1670), Spinoza proposed a radically different method of interpret-
ing the Bible. Catholic and Protestant theologians unanimously rejected it,
though eventually many ended up applying it themselves. In the course of the
discussion it appeared that the questions raised by biblical hermeneutics re-
quired a more fundamental philosophical reflection on the status of a histor-
ical religion than either philology or history could provide.
Many exegetes had been conscious of a distinction between the meaning
and the accuracy of the biblical narratives. For centuries commentators had
232 The Religious Crisis

been questioning Moses’ alleged authorship of the entire Pentateuch (which

includes a description of his death). But it was Spinoza who drove a decisive
wedge between the meaning of biblical writings and their historical reliability.
Supported by a solid knowledge of the Hebrew language (he had published a
Hebrew grammar) and a lifelong study of Scripture, he proposed a new, sub-
jective principle of exegesis, namely, the intention of the author. This, of
course, had been virtually absent from the ancient belief that the author served
as a mere mouthpiece of divine communications. Spinoza’s method consisted
in interpreting Scripture by principles present in Scripture itself. A correct
understanding of the text will disclose what the author had in mind. To ac-
quire it, readers had to acquaint themselves with the particular idiom of the
Hebrew language and the historical circumstances of the time when a text was
written in order to establish the author’s intention. Only in this way would
they be able to establish the meaning of the text. ‘‘We are at work not on the
truth of passages, but solely on their meaning.’’≥
Traditionally, the historical events reported in the text had formed part of
the eternal truth of revelation and hence that report had to be free of factual
errors. To this tradition Spinoza opposed that the allegedly historical parts of
the Bible were narratives, told in various degrees of accuracy, by means of
which the ancient writers attempted to convey a timeless truth. These historical
reports possess neither the universality nor the certainty that true knowledge of
God requires. ‘‘The truth of a historical narrative, however assured, cannot
give us the knowledge nor consequently the love of God, for love of God
springs from knowledge of Him, and knowledge of Him should be derived
from general ideas, in themselves certain and known, so that the truth of a
historical narrative is very far from being requisite for our attaining our highest
good’’ (TTP, III, 61; Elwes, 61). Thus, Spinoza cut the Gordian knot that had
linked biblical realism to historical inerrancy. For him, the Bible moved on two
planes. On one, Mosaic Law and the Hebrew prophets prepared the still
primitive Hebrew tribes for their historical mission. On the other, they laid the
groundwork for a religion of universal truth that required neither historical
miracles nor legal institutions. Israel’s historical mission was completed, ac-
cording to Spinoza, when its religion ceased to be linked to its particular
history and became universal in the person of Jesus. ‘‘Christ was sent to teach
not only the Jews but the whole human race, and therefore it was not enough
that his mind should be accommodated to the opinions of the Jews alone,
but also to the opinion and fundamental teaching common to the whole hu-
man race—in other words, to ideas universal and true’’ (TTP, 64; Elwes, 64).
Though Christ enjoyed a direct insight in God’s nature, he nevertheless had to
express this to others through parables, miracles, and doctrines adapted to
 The Religious Crisis 233

‘‘the ignorance and obstinacy of the people’’ (ibid.). Whereas biblical realism
had formerly depended on a correct reporting of facts, in Spinoza’s interpreta-
tion it consisted in a correct conveyance of the writer’s intention in reporting
alleged facts.∂
The Tractatus Theologico-Politicus leaves many questions unanswered.
How does the historical role of the prophets and the coming of Christ relate to
the impersonal, unchangeable God of Spinoza’s Ethics? Some interpreters
have read the text as a cryptogram decipherable only to the learned but hiding
its pantheistic content under theological terminology.∑ Others (including my-
self) read the Tractatus as a philosophical reflection on a way of salvation that
runs parallel with that of philosophy without ever coinciding with it.∏ While
philosophy pursues truth in a purely theoretical way, revelation requires in the
first place obedience to practical precepts, though they are built on theoretical
‘‘foundations.’’ ‘‘Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith . . . looks for
nothing but obedience and piety. Again, philosophy is based on axioms which
must be sought from nature alone: faith is based on history and language and
must be sought for only in Scripture and revelation’’ (TTP, 179; Elwes, 189).
Philosophy and faith rest on a common foundation: the mind’s participation
in the nature of God (TTP, 15; Elwes, 14). Since this participation constitutes
the very essence of the mind, Spinoza considers all knowledge of God natural.
But reason alone is unable to justify the salvific character of obedience to
God. ‘‘The power of reason does not extend so far as to determine for us that
men may be blessed through simple obedience, without understanding’’ (TTP,
184; Elwes, 194). Revelation, therefore, must complement rational reflection.
Scripture itself, however, assumes some philosophical principles that are indis-
pensable for understanding its precepts. Among them: the existence of God as
one, omnipresent, all-powerful, benevolent to those who worship him in jus-
tice and charity, and forgiving the sins of those who repent (TTP, 103, 77–78;
Elwes, 104, 187). Genuine faith never conflicts with those philosophical pre-
suppositions, ‘‘the fundamental dogmas of the whole of Scripture’’ (TTP, 177;
Elwes, 186). Indeed, the ‘‘dogmas’’ of faith materially coincide with the funda-
mentals of speculative knowledge, though formally they differ from them, as
they have not been deduced by reason but passively accepted from revelation.
Theological faith is incapable of rationally justifying its own foundations. Yet
the practical attitude of faith carries its own authority, protected by the theo-
retical foundations of biblical religion.
True faith, then, remains free of ‘‘superstition,’’ that is, of any belief that
conflicts with the laws of nature established by reason. For Spinoza that
means that the ‘‘miracles’’ reported in the Bible must have been natural events.
Whether one considers them so or regards them as miraculous ‘‘signs’’ matters
234 The Religious Crisis

little, since faith is not about truth but about obedience. ‘‘Everyone is free to
think on the subject as he likes, according as he thinks it best for himself and
most likely to conduce to the worship of God and to single-hearted religion’’
(TTP, 96; Elwes, 97). Nor ought the discrepancies among various parts of the
Bible disturb the faithful. Given the fact that all sources of revelation are
‘‘natural’’ and, indeed, that ‘‘man himself is the main source of revelation,’’
errors are unavoidable. Such errors do not affect the principles that lie at the
ground of the practical goals of religion—justice and charity. In reading Scrip-
ture we must seek what is most universal and what the prophets unanimously
commend as most conducive to a good life. ‘‘Quod universalissimum . . . et
quod tanquam aeterna et omnibus mortalibus utilissima doctrina ab omnibus
Prophetis commendatur’’ (TTP, 102; Elwes, 104). Those principles parallel
the principles of reason. Both lead to the same religion, the amor Dei intellec-
tualis. But philosophy recognizes no authority but that of reason.
This clear picture becomes murkier if one attempts to incorporate the vari-
ous remarks that Spinoza occasionally inserts in his argument. At one point in
the Tractatus, the parallel lines of philosophy and revelation appear to meet,
namely, in the person of Christ.π Spinoza attributes to Christ an intuitive
knowledge of God that surpasses both rational cognition and faith (TTP, 21;
Elwes, 18). ‘‘Inasmuch as God revealed Himself to Christ’s mind immediately,
and not as to the prophets through words and symbols, we must needs sup-
pose that Christ perceived truly what was revealed, in other words, He under-
stood it, for a matter is understood when it is perceived simply by the mind
without words or symbols’’ (TTP, 64; Elwes, 64). The basic content of Christ’s
insight could be transmitted to his followers because of its extreme simplicity:
Love (one) God and love your neighbor (TTP, 156; Elwes, 162).
Once revealed this universal message required no external authority. Chris-
tian faith thereby ceased to be a ‘‘particular’’ religion, resting on one person’s
authority. Indeed, further theoretical or practical specification of it betray the
original message. All who adhere to the religious precept of love receive their
religion through Christ, though not necessarily through the Christian Church.
‘‘Paul concludes that since God is the God of all nations, that is, is equally
gracious to all, and since all men equally live under the law and under sin, so
also to all nations did God send this Christ, to free all men equally from the
bondage of the law’’ (TTP, 54; Elwes, 53). The message of Christ is intrin-
sically universal and all who honor God by practicing justice and charity
possess the spirit of Christ.∫
But Christ’s message must be distinguished from New Testament Scripture.
The apostles derived their insight from Christ, but being incapable of fully
assimilating it, their interpretation of the message was limited by their imper-
 The Religious Crisis 235

fect understanding of it. They tended to understand that message as a new

‘‘law,’’ and thus again reduced it to a particular revelation, albeit one ad-
dressed to all peoples. In defending the universal quality of the Christian faith,
Spinoza by no means intended to equate it with philosophy. Indeed, he crit-
icizes the early Christian writers’ attempt to express Christian doctrine in
philosophical arguments. In so doing they distorted what was essentially a
simple, moral religion and set off an endless succession of schisms and heresies
that turned the message of charity into an acrimonious debate. ‘‘I have often
wondered that persons who make a boast of professing the Christian religion,
namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel
with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such
bitter hatred, that this, rather than the virtues they claim, is the readiest crite-
rion of their faith’’ (TTP, 8; Elwes, 6).
Still, in the end a problem remains. If Christian doctrine is to fulfill more
than an educational heuristic function for the sole purpose of reaching practi-
cal conclusions that reason could have reached by itself, does revelation not
become superfluous once the mind attains the level of reason? Is the true
follower of Christ, then, not the one who abandons the exclusive claims of a
particular religious community, its specific rituals, and even the significance of
its founder? Spinoza neither draws this conclusion nor explains how he can
avoid it. He denies that the cognitive content of the Christian faith carries any
salvational meaning in itself. Yet the obedience required by faith does require
some cognitive content.Ω ‘‘Faith consists in a knowledge of God without which
obedience to Him would be impossible’’ (TTP, 175; Elwes, 184). For that
purpose religious doctrines need not be philosophically true: it suffices that
they introduce the believer to the truth that is written in the human heart (TTP,
158; Elwes, 165).
Richard Simon’s monumental Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (1678,
partial publication in Paris; 1685, full publication in Rotterdam) shows an
extensive, though unrecognized, debt to the Tractatus. This radical revision of
the study of the Old Testament by an Oratorian priest caused far fewer rever-
berations in France than Spinoza’s work had done in Holland. In a mostly
Catholic country, doctrinal authority remained exclusively with the Church
and a reinterpretation of the Old Testament seemed less alarming as long as
that final authority was recognized. In fact, Simon’s thesis that the entire Old
Testament was the outcome of a tradition and must be read in the light of that
tradition, displayed some affinity with the Catholic principle that tradition
was the ultimate authority in biblical interpretation. Yet Bishop Bossuet, who
had vainly attempted to draw the author into his own camp, perceived a
fundamental difference between the two positions: the tradition from which
236 The Religious Crisis

Scripture derives its authority according to Simon differed from the tradition
on which the Church grounded its own authority for defining the meaning of
Scripture. The Protestant philologist Ezechiel Spanheim put his finger on the
ambiguity: Which tradition was at stake? The one that gave rise to the sacred
texts? Or the one of the Church that sanctions them? Obviously, for Simon the
ultimate interpretive authority belonged to the tradition discovered by the
historical critique. It was a ‘‘tradition’’ that undermined the Protestant author-
ity of Scripture as well as the Catholic one of tradition.∞≠ The texts of the Old
Testament stem from an earlier, oral or written, tradition, he argued, which
alone must decide their meaning.
The impact of Spinoza’s Tractatus appears everywhere. Still Simon’s work
substantially differed from it. In his opinion, the Tractatus failed to address
one of the basic questions of historical criticism: What motivated an author to
write a particular text in given historical circumstances? Simon pays a great
deal of attention to the historical conditions that led to the sacred author’s
expression, but he neglects what later generations have come to regard as
essential in that expression. In his exegesis, the reception of a text and its later
interpretation play hardly any role. ‘‘Tradition,’’ for him, referred exclusively
to the historical formation of a text. Hermeneutics has no part in his method.
Yet to explain the Old Testament within a Christian context, as Simon at-
tempted to do, without taking account of the Church’s reading of it over the
centuries makes little sense. For Catholics, Orthodox, and Anglicans, as well
as for most Protestants, the spiritual interpretation of the Old Testament had
been essential for their own Christian self-understanding.
Simon’s historical reading of the Bible played right into the deist idea that
a revelation addressed to one particular people at one particular time that
claimed to contain the definitive truth concerning the human condition for all
times loses its credibility at a later period. Scripture crudely stated for one
people what enlightened reason was capable of formulating more accurately
for all. Either revelation is intrinsically universal or it lacks universal author-
ity. These ancient texts, written at different epochs, and referring to historical
events of their own time, could not be read as if they were pointing forward to
Jesus of Nazareth without granting a religious authority to their later interpre-
tation. To these textual problems eighteenth-century deists added the overrid-
ing objection that the miracles alleged to support the message were themselves
to be excluded a priori as conflicting with the natural laws of the universe. At
this point biblical interpretation turns into critique of the Bible.∞∞ In contrast
to the more radical British and French critics, the German ones alone con-
tinued to attribute a providential function to the historical form and context in
the transmission of an eternal message.∞≤ According to Lessing, the function of
 The Religious Crisis 237

these historical Scriptures was to educate the human race toward understand-
ing the universal truth of religion.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), mainly remembered for his aesthetic
theory and dramatic work, did not begin to publish theological writings until
his later years. Yet originally his studies had been in theology and at heart
he had remained a theologian. Shortly after he was appointed librarian of
the duke of Brunswick’s Wolfenbüttel library (1769), he started publishing
Beiträge from the duke’s collection. The first one set the tone for all the follow-
ing. It contained a typically ambiguous defense of Leibniz’s essay on the eter-
nal punishment of hell. Neither he nor Leibniz believed in those punishments,
but as he wrote to his freethinking brother Karl, who had been taken aback by
Gotthold’s apparent return to orthodoxy: ‘‘I only prefer the old orthodox
theology (at bottom, tolerant) to the new (at bottom, intolerant) because the
former is in manifest conflict with human reason, whereas the latter might
easily take one in. I make agreement with my obvious enemies in order to be
able to be better on guard against my secret adversaries.’’∞≥ Even before com-
ing to Wolfenbüttel, Lessing had become a deist. In an early fragment post-
humously published by his brother, he called the ‘‘positive’’ religion of revela-
tion a popularized version of natural religion. No particular faith enjoys an
absolute priority over others. ‘‘All positive and revealed religions are equally
true and equally false.’’ But the one that contains the fewest additions to
natural religion is, relatively speaking, the best.’’∞∂ That, he specifies in a later
annotation, is the Islam, because ‘‘almost all in Mahomet’s doctrine amounts
to natural religion.’’∞∑
With his publication of the so-called Reimarus fragments he engaged in a
series of exegetical discussions. Hermann Samuel Reimarus was an Orientalist
who at his death left a bulky manuscript (Apology for Rational Worshippers
of God) that, via his daughter, came into Lessing’s hands. Lessing published
six anonymous fragments in the Beiträge. As these philosophical and histor-
ical investigations of biblical issues appeared, they became increasingly critical
of the official Christian interpretation. Lessing accompanied them by his own
‘‘counterpropositions,’’ pretending to defend orthodoxy but in fact adding
fuel to Reimarus’s flames either by ill-directed criticism or by absurdly ortho-
dox refutations. When attacked, he justified his publication by declaring the
fragments harmless to ordinary Christians. Theologians may be confused, but
the believer ‘‘feels [the Christian faith] to be true and in it he feels blessed’’ (my
emphasis). Reimarus’s critique, he argued, concerned the Bible, not religion.
‘‘The letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion.’’ Religion existed
before the Bible, and Christianity before the Gospels. Even if the entire New
Testament were lost, Christian faith would survive. Moreover, ‘‘religion is not
238 The Religious Crisis

true because the evangelists and apostles taught it, but they taught it because it
is true.’’∞∏
Lessing carefully selected the fragments for the purpose of divulging his own
views on biblical revelation. The first one was an attack on the critique of
reason in the pulpit. It enabled Lessing to defend the idea that reason has the
final say concerning what is revealed and what is not. ‘‘Whether there can and
must be a revelation and which one among the many that claim to be so is
probably the true one, only reason can discern’’ (L-M, XII, 432). To Re-
imarus’s objection that a scriptural revelation would remain inaccessible to
most people, since they live at places and times different from those of the
historical revelation, Lessing responds that such a limitation is indeed inherent
in the nature of a historical revelation and concludes therefore that scriptural
revelation cannot be necessary to salvation. He distinguishes ‘‘revelation’’
from the ‘‘books of revelation.’’ The former is available to all through natural
reason. The latter are merely a means to awaken reason. The problem with
Reimarus, Lessing now ironically observes, is that he interprets the symbols of
the Bible as if they contained the true substance of Christianity, but neither the
doctrine of Christ nor that of the Church equates the letter with the spirit. We
recognize yet another version of the distinction between factual truth and
meaning.
What, then, is letter and what is spirit? The need for a distinction appears in
Reimarus’s argument that six hundred thousand Hebrews with women and
children could not have crossed the ‘‘sea’’ in one night, as Exodus reports.
Lessing ‘‘criticizes’’ Reimarus by driving the improbability up to absurdity. If
God could miraculously open the sea for the Hebrews, why could God not
miraculously accelerate the speed of those who passed through it? Does Ex-
odus 19:4 not teach that God carried Israel on ‘‘eagle’s wings’’? In a more
serious vein he argues that much in the Old Testament conflicts with essential
principles of Christian doctrine, such as the denial of life after death (in Kohe-
let and repeatedly in the Book of Psalms) or the admission that other gods
exist. Abandoning all irony, Lessing then outlines the principles of an evolu-
tionary theory of religion. The Bible describes the various stages through
which humans gradually attain a metaphysical notion of God. To regard the
primitive texts of the early stage as still authoritative for interpreting the later
ones excludes such a development, in addition to attributing to God all the
vices of jealousy, anger, and vindictiveness, which later ‘‘revealed’’ texts so
obviously deny.
Shortly after having written this Counterproposition Lessing developed it
into a now famous essay on religious evolution: ‘‘The Education of the Human
Race’’ (1780) (only the first part of it appeared in the Beiträge). Positive reli-
 The Religious Crisis 239

gions are stepping stones to a mature consciousness of God: ‘‘Why are we not
more willing to see in all positive religions simply the process by which alone
human understanding in every place can develop and must still further de-
velop, instead of either ridiculing or becoming angry with them?’’ (L-M, XIII,
415; Chadwick, p. 82). In principle, then, revelation may contain nothing that
humans could not have learned by themselves. But first they must be educated!
The Jewish people performed this educational task for the entire human race
(§ 18). That essential doctrines are absent from the Bible in no way diminishes
the religious significance of the biblical initiation process. The role of Christ
marked a wholly new stage in this process as he was the first reliable teacher of
life after death (§ 58). Lessing claims that the ancient teachers of immortal-
ity merely ‘‘speculated’’ on the subject without realizing its practical conse-
quences (§ 60) (a highly implausible interpretation of Plato).
The evolutionary notion of truth allowed Lessing to defend specifically
Christian doctrines, such as that of the Trinity, as being intrinsically rational.
God’s self-expression presupposes a divine self-reflection, the image of which
must itself be divine (§ 73).∞π But the significance of this Christian mystery as
of all others, he confirms, is instrumental: it serves to develop ‘‘revealed truths
into truths of reason’’ (§ 76). The ‘‘errors’’ of Scripture trouble him less than
Reimarus and his deist colleagues, who criticized Christianity for being a
corruption of the original natural religion, as Lessing himself had done in his
early ‘‘On the Origin of Revealed Religion.’’ The truth of religion, he now
asserts, does not lie in the past but in the future, and Christianity alone shows
the way to that future.
Lessing is fighting on two fronts. Against the orthodox he argues that re-
ligious truth is universal and independent of any historical revelation. Against
the rationalists he maintains that a historical revelation was indispensable for
discovering this truth. In both cases he opposes a dynamic, evolutionary con-
cept of religious truth to a static one. ‘‘Education gives man nothing which he
could not also get from within himself. In the same way, too, revelation gives
nothing to the human race which human reason could not arrive at on its own;
only it has given, and still gives to it, the most important of these things
sooner’’ (§ 4).
Lessing assumes a similar, intermediate position in his comments on the fifth
fragment that dealt with Christ’s resurrection. From the discrepancies in the
Gospel reports, Reimarus had concluded that the event never occurred. Less-
ing challenges this conclusion. He distinguishes the alleged witnesses of the
Resurrection from the evangelists who wrote about it. Both may have been
mistaken, which, of course, would have been more serious in the former case
than in the latter. Yet even conflicting reports given by eyewitnesses do not
240 The Religious Crisis

necessarily discredit their authority, as long as all agree on the event itself: their
perception of it may have been inaccurate or they may have remembered it
incorrectly. As for the writers, they can only report how they understood the
witnesses. In a later reply to an orthodox attack, Lessing adds that a descrip-
tion of the same event often varies from one historian to another, without
discrediting either. ‘‘Yet if we treat Livy and Dionysius and Polybius and
Tacitus generously enough not to place them on the rack for each syllable, why
then not also Matthew and Mark and Luke and John?’’ (L-M, XIII, 26.) Over
the years Lessing had spent much effort on a critical comparison of the four
Gospels, treating them as historical documents independently of their reli-
gious significance. He now uses his considerable biblical erudition first to
argue the ‘‘thesis’’ that contradictions do occur in the Resurrection reports
without necessarily jeopardizing the truth of the Resurrection story, and next
the ‘‘hypothesis’’ that there may actually not be any contradictions at all (ex-
cept in minor details). Through the proofs of his ‘‘hypothesis’’ Lessing hoped
to convince the orthodox of his good faith, but by accepting it, they would be
forced to admit his ‘‘thesis’’ that there might be errors in the Bible.
In fact, Lessing’s position is far more radical than his distinction between the
essential message of revelation and the accidental errors of Scripture suggests.
Once the mind attains the level of reason, historical reports are not only
useless; they positively conflict with the conclusions of reason. Or so he argued
in ‘‘On the Proof of the Spirit and the Power’’ (1777). This short essay has
become so well known that entire phrases in it have entered the vocabulary of
modern theology and even of common intellectual discourse. In it Lessing
presents two theses. First, the historian ought to be skeptical with regard to
past reports of miracles, if they are not confirmed by the occurrence of similar
events in our own time. ‘‘Miracles, which I see with my own eyes, and which I
have the opportunity to verify for myself, are one thing; miracles of which I
know only from history that others say that they have seen them and verified
them, are another’’ (L-M, XIII, 3; Chadwick, p. 51). Next, he moves to the
more general thesis that no historical report, however reliable, could ever
prove a metaphysical truth. Such a truth can be derived only from the un-
changeable rules of reason. ‘‘What does it mean to accept an historical propo-
sition as true? . . . Does it mean anything other than this: to accept that there is
no objection to be brought against it? . . . If on historical grounds I have no
objection to the statement that this Christ himself raised to life a dead man;
must I therefore accept it as true that God has a Son who is of the same essence
as himself?’’ (L-M, XIII, 6; Chadwick, pp. 53–54). As is not uncommon with
Lessing, his argument remains slippery, constantly shifting from one thesis to
 The Religious Crisis 241

another. At times he wonders why we should accept as true what is insuffi-

ciently established; at other times he questions how even historically reliable
narratives could result in existential conclusions. The second thesis follows
from Leibniz’s sharp division between truths of reason and truths of fact: the
former are universal and necessary, the latter particular and contingent. Less-
ing excludes the particular from the field of universal truth altogether: be-
tween the two yawns an ‘‘ugly, broad ditch.’’ With this conclusion he has in
fact invalidated the original distinction between accidental errors and essential
truth: even accurate historical reports are inadequate for the function they are
intended to fulfill in the Scripture, namely, to change the reader’s entire intel-
lectual orientation.
Not all detected Lessing’s strategy in publishing the Reimarus fragments
and his Counterpropositions. One who did, though, was the Hamburg Pastor,
Johann Melchior Goeze. He accused the polemicist of having no other inten-
tion but to undermine the orthodox Christian faith. Lessing answered Goeze’s
charge in ten axioms (‘‘Axioms, If There Are Any in Such Matters’’) (1778) (L-
M, XIII, 107–40).∞∫ His primary intention in the polemics with Goeze was to
show that the Christian religion, if studied in its original sources, might be
reduced to a religion of reason. The historical elements in the New Testament
(as in the entire Bible) form no part of the message; they were needed to
transmit its message to the uneducated readers of an earlier epoch. Lessing
restates his distinction between the essential and nonessential elements in
Scripture. Historical reports are not essential. While conceding that not every
word of Scripture is of equal moment, Goeze contends that the text cannot be
so neatly divided into essential and nonessential sections. The nonessential
forms an inseparable part of the biblical content. Modern generations may
regard as insignificant what to earlier ones appeared crucially important (e.g.,
whether the ‘‘miracles’’ in the Bible are of divine origin or must be attributed to
natural causes). Unless the whole Bible is divinely inspired, no particular parts
can be considered to be so.
Goeze possessed a keen sense for the literary continuity of a biblical text.
But he naively concluded that if all was inspired, nothing could be erroneous,
even though he himself had admitted that the critical quality of even the more
recent historical books of Scripture falls far short of modern norms. For him,
the question came down to: If God has revealed himself in Scripture, how
could the Bible be erroneous? Did Lessing imagine that the Christian religion
could exist if the Bible had long been lost or had never been written? In
his brief ‘‘Necessary Answer to a Very Unnecessary Question’’ (1778) (L-M,
XIII, 331–36; Chadwick, pp. 62–64), Lessing pointed out that the earliest
242 The Religious Crisis

confessions of faith preceded the New Testament writings. Were those be-
lievers who lived and died before the New Testament not Christians? Once
writings began to circulate, they selected into a canon those that seemed to
agree with a previously existing rule of faith. What Scripture contains in addi-
tion to this regula fidei was, according to the spirit of the first four centuries,
not necessary for salvation. In a First Sequel (Erste Folge) Lessing denies
Goeze’s claim that ‘‘all Christians’’ accept the Bible as sole doctrinal ground of
the Christian religion. For Catholics, the Bible is subject to the authority of the
Church.∞Ω Indeed, the first major heresy, Arianism, stemmed from an exclusive
reliance on the text of the Synoptic Gospels, read independently of the
Church’s later tradition.
While the anti-Goeze controversy was in full swing Lessing published one
more Reimarus fragment: the last, the longest, and the most radical, ‘‘On the
Intentions of Jesus and His Disciples.’’ In it, Reimarus maintained that Jesus
taught or believed none of the central dogmas concerning his own divinity, the
dogma of the Trinity, the abolition of Jewish law and ceremonial. Instead he
preached a ‘‘rational, practical religion’’ based on universal values and cer-
tainly not intended to be a new, particular religion. His version of the King-
dom of God included, however, an apocalyptic liberation of Israel from Ro-
man occupation. His disciples changed this message into one of redemptive
sacrifice, bodily resurrection, and divinization. The publication of this large
fragment and its Counterproposition made it evident to all readers that what
separated Lessing from Reimarus were details, with one major exception:
Lessing regarded Christianity not as a degeneration of natural or rational
religion, but as a necessary preparation of it. In the Axioms against Goeze
Lessing had persistently argued that scriptural traditions are to be interpreted
through an inner truth rather than the inner truth through Scripture.
Lessing here radicalizes a position implied in a principle of the Reformation:
the Holy Spirit conveys the inner truth at the occasion of the personal reading
and interpretation of Scripture. But Lessing moves far beyond Luther’s princi-
ple, detaching Christian faith from its scriptural moorings altogether. The
questions he raises exceed the fields of philology and history. Does religion
consist entirely of an inner attitude? If so, can it be subject to any external
authority? What is the significance of the historical elements that have played
such an important part in Judaism and Christianity? Those questions require
philosophical answers. The philosophy of religion of Lessing’s time, however,
dealt only with such metaphysical problems as the existence and attributes of
God, the justification of the created world, and the immortality of the soul.
The specific questions he raised had to wait for Kant and his successors.
 The Religious Crisis 243

Deism, the Substitute Religion

I doubt whether any factor has contributed more to the rise of deism
and, indeed, of atheism in the modern age than the exclusive use of a narrowly
defined concept of efficient causality for describing the relation between cre-
ation and Creator. This interpretation reduces the intimate union between the
divine Cause and its creation to the extrinsic one between two separate en-
tities. To be sure, some facet of what Aristotle calls an ‘‘efficient causality’’ had
always formed part of the Judeo-Christian idea of the relation between God
and creation. But in the past it had never been thought to constitute the entire
relation, nor had it been conceived in the narrow terms of the scientific con-
cept of causality. Seventeenth-century thinkers, following the systems of Des-
cartes and Newton, replaced traditional ways of symbolizing the relation be-
tween the finite and its transcendent source by a type of causality conceived on
a mechanistic model. God became, once again, a remote Prime Mover respon-
sible for the motion of the universe. Deism was the inevitable outcome of this
distant relation to God. Atheism was to follow as soon as the need for an
external source of mechanical motion ceased to exist.
In his Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God (1704–5),
Samuel Clarke distinguished four kinds of deists: (1) those who believe in the
existence of an eternal, intelligent being that created a certain quantity of
matter and motion without concerning itself with its development or govern-
ment; (2) those who believe in the Providence of God but not in divinely
sanctioned moral obligations; (3) those who believe in God’s moral commands
but not in immortality; (4) those who believe in Providence, moral obligations,
and immortality, but not in revelation. The last ones, he claims, are ‘‘the only
true deists.’’≤≠ Most eighteenth-century deists belonged in the fourth class.
They believed that the Creator of the universe, known by the light of reason,
rewards good and punishes evil in this life as well as in the next.
Originally, deism had not excluded revelation. Fausto Sozzini (1539–1604),
to whom friends and foes used to trace the deist lineage, accepted the truth of
biblical revelation, the divinity of Christ (though conceived in a functional
rather than a personal way), and the Resurrection. Even the more radical John
Toland (Christianity Not Mysterious [1696]) and Matthew Tindal (Chris-
tianity as Old as Creation [1730]) professed, albeit with dubious sincerity, a
belief in a revelation that their theories, however, showed to be superfluous.
Both of them drew their conclusions from Christian authors: Tindal from
Clarke who unambiguously accepted both the idea and the content of revela-
tion; Toland from Locke, who in On the Reasonableness of Christianity
244 The Religious Crisis

(1695) firmly declared that those who understood him to claim anything more
than that the content of the Christian revelation agrees with the laws of reason
and can be justified by it misunderstood him.≤∞
English deism drew heavily upon Stoic philosophy and more particularly
upon Roman writers who had developed that philosophy into a monotheist,
natural theology. Augustine had found in Cicero and Varrho an arsenal of
arguments against polytheism and atheism. Later writers mined Cicero’s De
natura deorum to establish what reason alone was able to ascertain about the
nature of God. Contrary to this earlier Christian use, seventeenth-century
writers had begun to use Stoic sources for the foundation of a natural theology
that took the place of revealed religion. Peter Gay describes the shift: ‘‘It seems
as though Stoicism was detaching itself from Christianity only to be reab-
sorbed into the great philosophical reappraisal of the seventeenth century. . . .
Whenever men are told to live according to nature, to acquire knowledge by
discovering universal truths and the natural laws by which the physical and
the moral world are governed—whenever we encounter such ideas, we are
witnessing Stoicism lending strategic support to the campaign for the indepen-
dence of philosophy.’’≤≤
Stoic support for the religious meaning of nature lost much of its credit after
Mandeville’s ironic assault upon its two principal qualities, the order of nature
and the providential subordination of all creatures to the good of the human
race. Mandeville anticipated Darwin’s thesis, that the apparent order of nature
might merely be the outcome of a destructive struggle in which only those fit
enough to survive a hostile environment had been able to attain a modus
vivendi with others. The idea of a providential guidance of nature for the
benefit of humans flies in the face of experience. The human species almost
succumbed in its early struggles with other animals. ‘‘To ascribe all this to
Providence, otherwise than that nothing is done without the divine permis-
sion, seems inconsistent with the ideas we have of a perfectly good and merci-
ful Being. It is possible that all poisonous animals may have something in them
that is beneficial to men. . . . But when I look upon the vast variety of ravenous
and blood-thirsty creatures, that are not only superior to us in strength, but
likewise visibly armed by nature, as it were on purpose for our destruction;
when, I say, I look upon those, I can find out no use for them, unless it be to
punish us.’’≤≥ To be sure, the outcome of the struggle with those animals may
still be favorable to the human race, and indeed to all of nature. Our species
would have overstocked the earth and ‘‘we could not have had that variety of
living creatures there is now’’ (Fable, II, p. 253). But balance and variety have
resulted from killing, not from kindness.
Eventually Stoic philosophy became a weapon in the battle for atheism, as it
 The Religious Crisis 245

did in Diderot’s moral writings. The development is not too surprising. When
nature serves as the only ground on which the idea of God rests, it may easily
turn into a substitute for God, or, as in Spinoza’s case, become equated with
God. But this development was by no means necessary. There had always
existed a more intrinsically religious view of nature as that through which God
becomes manifest to reason. The Cambridge Platonists continued to look at
nature from this perspective. For Nathaniel Culverwell, the light of reason,
‘‘the candle of the Lord’’ (Proverbs 20:27), is none other than the light of
nature itself as it dwells within the human mind.≤∂ Benjamin Whichcote devel-
oped this view of nature into a full-fledged natural theology that remained well
within the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy.
Eighteenth-century poetry reflects the impact deism was having on the intel-
lectual climate in England. John Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682), written against
an emerging deism, nonetheless expresses a need to come to terms with it.
Reason cannot serve as the foundation of faith; nevertheless faith must justify
itself in the face of reason. Dryden raises all the disquieting questions that
evoked the deist answer. ‘‘How can revealed religion alone be salvational
when most people never heard of it? Of all objections this indeed is chief to
startle reason, stagger frail belief’’ (Religio Laici, 184). Where is the meaning
to be found in the often corrupt and unintelligible text that has reached us?
Newton’s cosmology, originally received as a glorification of God’s immensity,
now began to stir up disturbing doubts. Where was Providence in this cosmic
clockwork? How could an unmoved and immovable Creator care for the
minute inhabitants of this tiny planet? The powerful religious inspiration of
the metaphysical poets had dried up. Pope adopted Voltaire as his model, ‘‘at
once a freethinker and a lover of quiet; no bigot but yet no heretic.’’≤∑ He
defended his own deist Essay on Man as an attack upon atheism, but the
underlying thesis appears to be that all religions are in their core identical.
Toward the end of his life, however, he appears to have abandoned all deist
sympathies. His final work, the Dunciad (1742–43), contains a firm rejection
of the deist idea of a God ‘‘wrapt up in self, a God without a thought, regard-
less of our merit or default’’ (bk. IV, vv. 485–86).≤π
Other poets of the period profess a more sentimental deism. James Thom-
son, author of the much-celebrated The Seasons, presents a prime example.
God, to him, appears only in the beauty of nature and in human happiness.
His smiling God has been called the last glimpse of the Cheshire cat, of which
all ‘‘has faded away except the cosmic grin.’’≤∫ Thomson and some of his
preromantic contemporaries appear to have been inspired by a sentimental
deism with vaguely pantheist connotations. But it is also possible to view their
religious feeling as rooted in the experience of the inner light that, according to
246 The Religious Crisis

Puritan doctrine, accompanies conversion.≤Ω In that case their position is more

closely related to Jonathan Edwards’s religious affections than to Shaftes-
bury’s Stoicism. It remains true, however, that the internalization of religion
played a part in the development toward deism (as we noticed in Lessing’s
controversy with Goeze). In that sense at least H. N. Fairchild’s judgment
about the sentimental religious poet stands: ‘‘His sense of a divinity within him
being far stronger than his sense of a divinity above and beyond him, he
emphasizes the immanence of God so much more strongly than His transcen-
dence that the distinctions between God and man are blurred. Nature then
becomes divine.’’≥≠
Turning now to the contemporary philosophical sources of modern deism,
the first point to mention is that the principles of modern epistemology had
made it hard to avoid the deist position altogether. If the mind is the only
source of meaning, how can it admit as true what is derived from a different
source? In the fourth book of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(beginning with chapter 14), Locke outlines the rules for dealing with this
question.≥∞ He admits that a responsible assent ought to be proportionate to
the degree of probability of its object and hence that the mind must ‘‘not
entertain any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built
upon will warrant’’ (Essay, IV, 19, § 1). The assent the believer gives to reli-
gious dogmas obviously surpasses the evidence needed to justify his acceptance
of them. Yet, Locke claims, the importance of the object of faith strengthens its
probability and thus supplies what it lacks in evidence.≥≤ The adequacy of this
argument, remindful of Pascal’s wager, may be doubted. Yet Locke wisely
avoids justifying the religious trust in revelation on purely rational grounds.
Rather than risking to add grist to the deist mill, he plays the powers of reason
down.≥≥
Revelation, then, serves as an indispensable complement to reason, not only
for assisting those who lack the time or mental capacity to follow complex
philosophical arguments, but also for enriching the meager religious content
of philosophical theology. The mind welcomes the assistance of revelation, but
reason does not abandon it right to be the ultimate norm. Revelation must be
reasonable. Miracles may confirm the credibility of the Christian message
(Reasonableness [# 227]), but its reasonableness primarily rests on internal
grounds. Not only does no part of the Gospel conflict with the laws of reason,
but also its inner coherence strongly suggests its overall conformity to reason.
Does Locke mean that no part of it directly conflicts with reason? Or does he
hold that the entire content of revelation is in principle accessible to reason
alone? The ambiguity of Locke’s expression is probably the main reason why
deists often supported their theories by appealing to his work.
 The Religious Crisis 247

When a Calvinist divine accused Locke of Socinianism,≥∂ Locke pointed out

that his position, contrary to Socinius’s, was entirely based on Scripture and
not on independent reason. Further controversy followed, and Locke in A
Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity explicitly and, I
think, sincerely declared that he wrote his treatise for the benefit of ‘‘those who
thought that there was no need of revelation at all’’ or of those who considered
the articles for salvation incompatible with their way of reasoning—the two
objections ‘‘which were with most assurance made by deists against Chris-
tianity but against Christianity misunderstood.’’≥∑ To the bishop of Worcester
he wrote: ‘‘The reason of believing any article of the Christian faith . . . to me
and upon my grounds, is its being a part of divine revelation’’ (Works, IV,
303). In light of those declarations it appears astonishing that Locke’s treatise
became a rallying text for early deists. John Toland in Christianity Not Myste-
rious, published a year after The Reasonableness, was the first to amplify what
he considered Locke’s unstated implications. If Christianity was indeed rea-
sonable and intelligible, it contained not only nothing contrary to reason but
neither anything above reason. Though Locke publicly expressed his disagree-
ment, deist interpretations of his work continued to appear.
Matthew Tindal in Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) started from
a principle similar to Locke’s. ‘‘In all cases where I am capable of understand-
ing a proposition, ’tis Reason must inform me, whether ’tis certain, probable,
or uncertain.’’≥∏ This statement may be understood as saying merely that the
test of truth lies entirely within reason and in that case it does not substantially
differ from Locke’s thesis. But it may also mean that the human mind cannot
admit any proposition as true that lies in part beyond the grasp of reason. This
is, in fact, how most of Tindal’s contemporaries did understand its meaning.≥π
Part of the confusion may have stemmed from the ambiguity inherent in the
modern use of the term ‘‘rationality.’’ The older interpretation had not ex-
cluded a reality that transcends reason, provided it did not conflict with rea-
son. The ancient or medieval philosopher encountered the idea of God as a
given at the root of the rationalization process itself, previous to any argu-
ment.≥∫ Aquinas, to take one illustrious example, held that all philosophy
leads to the necessary acceptance of a transcendent principle. But the specifica-
tion of this principle to what Christians, Jews, and Muslims recognized and
adored as God came from a ‘‘revelation’’ that might be justified by reason (as
being free of contradictions) but did not originate in reason.≥Ω
Modern rationalism restricted the rational to that of which the mind is the
sole ground and hence which it is able to prove. For the deists, this paradox-
ically included the content of the allegedly ‘‘transcendent.’’ They claimed to
derive God’s existence as well as his ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘moral’’ attributes from a
248 The Religious Crisis

religiously neutral idea of nature. Nowhere does the inversion of the argument
appear more clearly than in Hume’s Dialogue on Natural Religion. Cleanthes,
the advocate of a deist natural theology, argues that we must model the idea of
God on the basis of our conception of the world. Carl Becker notes the shift:
‘‘Cleanthes does not conclude that the world must be rational because God is
eternal reason; he concludes that God must be an engineer because nature is a
machine.’’∂≠ The idea of God thereby comes to depend directly on a particular
representation of the world. Despite these claims of pure rationality, the deist
idea of God itself displayed enough vestigial Christian traits to leave no doubt
about its origin. More than a deduction, as it pretended to be, it was a rational-
ist abstraction of a specifically Christian idea, an undocumented survivor of
the rejected revelation. ‘‘I know of no greater tribute ever paid to the God of
Christianity,’’ Etienne Gilson quipped, ‘‘than His survival in this idea, main-
tained against Christianity itself and on the strength of pure natural reason.’’∂∞
The fact that ethics, for the deists, constituted virtually the entire content of
religion, also contributed to the rationalist interpretation of Locke’s philoso-
phy. Had not Locke himself claimed that the mind might, at least in principle,
independently reach the ethical precepts taught by Scripture? For the deists,
God had scarcely any function left but that of sanctioning morality. As Vol-
taire had written with characteristic assurance: ‘‘I understand by natural reli-
gion the principles of morals common to the human race.’’∂≤ D’Alembert was
even more explicit: ‘‘One would do a great service to mankind if one could
make men forget the dogmas; if one would simply preach them a God who
rewards and punishes and who frowns on superstition, who detests intol-
erance and expects no other cult of man than mutual love and support.’’∂≥
Thus a religious ethos superseded altogether the religious pathos.∂∂
Deism stemmed from practical concerns as much as from theoretical discus-
sions. Its advocates hoped that if the idea of God were detached from the
various interpretations of a divine revelation, the religious conflicts that had
torn Europe apart would end. John Locke, illegitimately adopted by the deists
as father of their philosophy, acquired a more legitimate reputation as the first
major proponent of religious tolerance. He grew more tolerant over the years
but never went beyond the limits of Christian faith. In 1660–61 he still main-
tained that an edict of toleration would return England to the political turmoil
from which the Restoration had just rescued it. He supported the status quo
by arguing that the matters that divided Christians were not in the gospel and
hence might be regarded as indifferent. In ‘‘An Essay Concerning Toleration’’
(1667) Locke reversed his position. For the state to support the religious
supremacy of the Anglican Church seemed not only unfair in view of that
Church’s self-serving use of its power, but even more, because the things Locke
 The Religious Crisis 249

had previously called ‘‘indifferent’’ appeared by no means ‘‘indifferent’’ to

believers, some of whom were prepared to die for them. Hence toleration
seemed to be the only effective way to avoid future civil war, regardless of the
objective merit of each party’s claim to truth. Finally, in a definitive ‘‘Letter
Concerning Toleration’’ (1685), written during his exile in Holland, Locke
pleaded for an equal treatment of all Christian denominations as being the
only practical and conscientious solution.∂∑ Even if civil authorities succeeded
in pressing citizens into conformity, they would merely force them to violate
their conscience. Neither civil nor religious good could ever come from such a
policy. Locke’s argument rests on the sharply drawn distinction between a civil
jurisdiction that is not responsible for the ‘‘care of souls’’ and an ecclesiastical
one that wields religious authority over its voluntary members but has no right
to interfere in civic matters. The magistrate should neither impose nor forbid
any form of worship nor attempt to impose any article of faith. Locke desired
to make a clean break with the theocratic tradition that had ruled the West
after the civil functions of the collapsing Roman Empire had fallen to the
Church.∂∏
Shaftesbury converted Locke’s mainly practical principles of religious toler-
ance into theoretical ones: they became the cornerstone of his deist philoso-
phy.∂π Religious intolerance assumes that God reserves salvation to a single
religious body. But why should salvation depend on the place where one is
born? ‘‘He who is now an orthodox Christian would have been infallibly as
true a Mussulman, or as errant a heretic, had his birth happened in another
place?’’∂∫ All religions ought to be subjected to rational inquiry, which is possi-
ble only ‘‘where comparison is allowed, examination permitted and a sincere
toleration established.
What distinguishes Shaftesbury from most other deists is that, for him,
religion is more than a matter of reason. It draws its inspiration from affec-
tions that raise the soul to magnanimity, love, and spiritual greatness by elevat-
ing the mind to the source of all reality (Miscell., IV, 2, in Characteristics, II,
294). His concept of religious feeling avoids the dominant rationalist reduc-
tionism and anticipates Schleiermacher’s romantic theory of religion. British
deists had persistently avoided an open break with Christianity. The debate on
tolerance had originally remained separate from the theoretical discussion
that led to deism. Only in Shaftesbury did the two issues merge.
In France, the repressive religious policy of Louis XIV’s later years, sup-
ported by the bishops and the censorious Sorbonne faculty of theology, stifled
critical discussion of Catholic doctrine as well as of the political hegemony of
the Church. When the king revoked the Toleration Edict of Nantes in 1685,
thereby depriving French Huguenots of political rights, tolerance became a
250 The Religious Crisis

primary concern. It soon came to be the moving power of a sharply polemical

deism. During the early period Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), a Huguenot refugee
who had settled in Rotterdam, became its influential spokesman. His Diction-
naire historique et critique (1697), probably the most extravagant glossary
ever written, contains no entries on many topics of primary significance and a
great number on very obscure ones. Moreover, the titles of the ones included
rarely correspond to the content of the articles. The only thing that is predict-
able in this strange book is that on any given issue, the author will present
unpredictable views. In some entries, he questions the foundations of central
Christian dogmas, while in others he severely censures those who question
them (e.g., Spinoza) or defends the Catholic position against the Reformed
one. He remains a mysterious figure. Was he a Protestant Christian, as he
claimed to be and as his faithful attendance at the Calvinist Church seemed to
confirm? Or was he a Pyrrhonist skeptic sensible enough not to practice what
he preached? Or merely a critical historian, as Dr. Johnson thought? Whatever
the answer, Bayle had more than the religious controversies in France on his
mind. Repeatedly he appeals to an innate, moral law that unites all humans
beyond religious differences. In his article ‘‘Epicure’’ he attacks the deist equa-
tion of religion with morality, claiming that atheists may be as moral as be-
lievers. By the same token he deprived religion of the only content deists had
left it.
Montesquieu’s attitude is far more typical of the way religious tolerance was
linked to deism in France. He defended it by dismissing what he considered
nonessential differences in religion (which included most Christian dogmas) as
cultural differences. In his Lettres persanes (1721) he denies that religious
pluralism leads to intolerance. ‘‘I concede that history is filled with religious
wars. But note well: not the multiplicity of religions has caused these wars, but
the spirit of intolerance that animated the one that considered itself to be
dominant’’ (Letter 85). In support of this religious pluralism Montesquieu
refers to Cicero’s monotheist interpretation of Roman polytheism. Active in the
manifold works of nature and in a variety of cultures, God receives many
names. For the Romans, Venus represents his generative power, Minerva his
wisdom, Neptune the force of the ocean, and so on. ‘‘From this belief originated
the [Roman] spirit of tolerance and kindness that reigned in the pagan world.
People felt no need to persecute and attack each other: all religions, all the-
ologies were equally good. Heresies, religious wars, and disputes were un-
known.’’∂Ω From the point of view of this ‘‘natural’’ monotheism, all religions,
whether polytheist or ‘‘revealed,’’ must be regarded as no more than contingent
attempts to give a concrete form to what is in essence the religion of reason. Any
particular claims, then, must remain subordinate to this universal religion.
 The Religious Crisis 251

With Voltaire the scene changes. He introduced British deism into France.
He lived long, wrote much, and participated in virtually every controversy of
the eighteenth century. He meant different things to different people: a mortal
enemy of the French Church yet a lifelong friend of his Jesuit teachers, a major
star in the literature of the eighteenth century but also a popularizer of Newto-
nian physics, besides being France’s foremost historian. In almost all his works
he wrote about, and mostly against, the Christian religion, particularly in its
Catholic form. The subject obsessed him, yet his attitude toward Christianity
is far from unambiguous. It varies from venomous hostility to skeptical deism,
to polemical zeal against atheism, even to intermittent returns to the rites of
the Church (particularly when he felt his life to be in danger). His (a)religious
gospel lies spread out over all his writings, but most directly in the Lettres
philosophiques (1734), Traité de métaphysique (1734), Essai sur les moeurs
(1756), Traité sur la tolérance (1763), Dictionnaire philosophique (1764),
L’Ancien Testament: L’Examen important de Milord Bolingbroke (1767),
and, most aggressively, in hundreds of letters. The two earlier works, reflecting
impressions of his prolonged stay in England, are more philosophical than the
later ones that mostly deal with biblical and historical criticism. In the Lettres
philosophiques he compares the experience of living in pluralist England with
the intellectually restrictive conditions of life in France. The lesson he learned
from British tolerance is that the many sects keep each other in balance. ‘‘If
there were one religion in England, one might fear despotism; if there were
two, they would be at each other’s throats; but there are so many of them and
so they all live in peaceful happiness’’ (Lettres philosophiques, Letter 6).
Some time after his return from England, while he was living at Madame de
Châtelet’s ruinous castle in Cirey, Voltaire summarized the philosophy he had
gathered from his exposure to British ideas. The resulting Traité de méta-
physique remained locked in his hostess’s drawer for many years: she deemed
it far too dangerous for publication. It introduced a number of theses that
were to remain definitive in Voltaire’s thought. The existence of God he con-
sidered certain, not so much on logical grounds as because of the absurdity of
its denial. How could nature follow mathematical laws without a divine mind
to define and establish them? Though we ignore the nature of this divine
legislator, we must assume that God interferes neither with his own laws nor
with the course of history. Hence, miracles must be considered impossible and
any assumption of a special Providence beyond the act of creation is to be
ruled out. Two theses separate Voltaire’s position from that of other deists: the
immortality of the soul and the divine sanction of morality. In the thirteenth
Letter Voltaire had written that we could not possibly prove the immortality
of the soul, since we do not know what the soul really is. ‘‘[But] the common
252 The Religious Crisis

good demands that we believe the soul to be immortal and faith orders us to do
so. We need no more: the issue is decided’’ (Letter 13). In the Traité de méta-
physique he is less assertive. Since matter is not incompatible with conscious-
ness (as he had learned from Locke) and material beings are essentially cor-
ruptible, no philosophical necessity supports the existence of an immortal
soul—indeed, probability is against it. Nor does morality depend on it. Sanc-
tions in an afterlife have rarely restrained criminals. Still, God remains the
foundation of morality as the legislator who issues the principles of natural
law. Later Voltaire returned to the common deist thesis that God must reward
the good and punish the evil ones in a future life.
Deism, for Voltaire, meant more than the independence of natural religion
with respect to revealed faith: the former excludes the latter as a rival faith.
Biblical criticism and Church history were more congenial to his literary talent
than philosophy. They also proved to be more effective weapons against a
Church still bound by the principle of inerrancy and by a literal interpretation
of Scripture. Particularly in the first part of the Essai sur les moeurs and in a
critique of the Old Testament that he attributed to Bolingbroke, he aimed his
sarcasm at every vulnerable spot in the harness of traditional exegesis. One of
them was the originality of the biblical accounts, at the time considered to be
crucial to their revealed character. The Christian ‘‘fulfillments’’ of Hebrew
prophecies he dismissed as ridiculously farfetched. The canonic Gospels were
forged after the fall of Jerusalem in order to appear miraculously predicting
the destruction of the Temple, while they were in fact written after the temple
had been destroyed.∑≠
Like Lessing, Voltaire challenged the reliability of historical reports written
in a remote past. ‘‘That which regards history gives birth to a thousand dis-
putes.’’∑∞ But most problematic of all to him was the very notion of a particular
revelation addressed to some and denied to others. ‘‘If God had wished to
make his cult known to me, it would be because this cult was necessary to our
species. If it were necessary he would have bestowed it on all alike, just as He
has given everyone two eyes and a mouth. . . . The principles of universal
reason are common to all civilized peoples, all recognize a God; they can then
flatter themselves that such knowledge is truth. Yet each of them has a dif-
ferent religion.’’∑≤ The Essai sur les moeurs, from which this quotation is
taken, may well count as the most massive assault on the Church’s history ever
written. Combined with the historical fragments on the ancient Church found
in chapters 20–38 of An Important Study by Lord Bolingbroke, it covers the
entire history of Catholic Christianity.
However unreliable this biased and polemical work is, one cannot read it
without being impressed by the author’s stunning erudition, not only with
 The Religious Crisis 253

regard to the history of the Church but also to that of other religions. He
devotes much of the book-length ‘‘Introduction’’ of the Essai (which he had
published separately) to a comparison of Catholicism with other faiths. Not
surprisingly, in Voltaire’s report all turn out to be more tolerant and more
moral. Voltaire found his own idea of natural religion formulated in a docu-
ment allegedly issued by Zaleucus, a legendary legislator of the South Italian
(Greek) city of Locri. According to Zaleucus, every citizen must accept the
existence of God. No dogmas or ceremonies are needed, but all must please
God by virtuous conduct (Essai sur les moeurs, p. 95). Only some Asian
religions approach this rational ideal. China adores a Supreme Being, ‘‘with-
out superstition or fanaticism (p. 237). The Persian Zend-Vesta contains all
that is commendable in Christianity, though Jews and Christians fail to recog-
nize its originality (p. 248). Only one faith is, in Voltaire’s eyes, worse than the
Christian and greatly responsible for Christian vices and superstitions: the
exclusive, tribal religion of Israel. The biblical story of Joshua burning cities,
murdering women and children, and shamefully executing thirty-one ‘‘kings’’
in the conquest of Canaan provokes the following outburst: ‘‘Compared to the
children of Israel, the Hurons, the Canadians, and the Iroquois have been
humanitarian philosophers; and it is in favor of these monsters that the sun
and the moon were made to stand still at full noon (Joshua 10:11–13)! And
why? To give them time to pursue and massacre the poor Amorites already
crushed by a rain of stones that God threw upon them from on high’’ (Boling-
broke, chap. 7, p. 112).∑≥
In his old age, Voltaire tended to recycle his biased stories under the guise of
history. In the late Letters of Amabed (1769) he trots them out again.∑∂ What
disturbs him most in Christianity is the discrepancy between Jesus’ moral mes-
sage and the Church’s transformation of it into a concoction of false proph-
ecies, fantastic doctrines, and fraudulent miracles. Once that Church gained
control over the Roman Empire, she discarded the principles of tolerance she
had previously invoked on her own behalf and became engaged in a ruthless
drive for power. The Essai sur les moeurs is a Church history in reverse: an
ecclesiastic chronique scandaleuse, erudite but wholly untrustworthy.
But it is in Voltaire’s letters that the full complexity of his attitude toward
religion appears. Depending on the correspondent and also his own mood, he
writes about Christianity with some respect and even affection, or with white-
hot hatred. Letters addressed to d’Alembert were mostly conspiratorial and
vitriolic. Destroying the Church appears a Catonic obsession. ‘‘To my last
breath I shall repeat my caeterum censeo: Ecrasez l’infâme. It is a major battle,
a battle of all thinking beings against the non-thinking beings’’ (October 20,
1761; also January 1, 1764, and June 26, 1766). These letters reflect a pent-up
254 The Religious Crisis

rage that a few years later exploded in a general rebellion against the Church’s
dominance in France. Amazingly, Voltaire wrote these letters from his little
castle in Ferney where he had a chapel built for religious services and where his
friend, Père Adam, regularly came to say a Mass piously attended by his host.
In his later years he began to feel more concern about the progress of athe-
ism than about a Church that was obviously in retreat. In a story of that
period, L’histoire de Jenni (1775) (in English translated as The Sage and the
Atheist), Voltaire passionately defends the existence of a benevolent Deity.
God’s existence needs no metaphysical proof: it clearly appears in the order of
nature and the goodness of creation. Most surprisingly, in ‘‘The Sage and the
Atheist’’ Voltaire replaces reason by feeling as the primary ground for a belief
in God. His hard-nosed rationalism here appears to melt into the kind of
sentimentalism that he had so often ridiculed in Rousseau. But, in his defensive
attitude with regard to religion as well as in his offensive, Voltaire’s conception
of it is always one-dimensional and flat, forcefully suppressing any sense of
mystery.
Shaftesbury had already protested that religion is not, or is not primarily, a
matter of reason but of the heart. We experience it in feeling and we respond to
it through feelings (‘‘The Moralists,’’ II, 3, in Characteristics, II, 55). Yet the
advocate of the gospel of feeling we remember today is Rousseau. In the fourth
book of Emile, the famous vicaire savoyard initiates his young pupil into the
rudiments of natural religion. With the philosophes, the priest assumes that
true religion consists in obeying the moral law. But for Rousseau, the divine
law may be perceived only through feeling. Reason merely teaches that the
maker of the universe must be powerful, just, and good. In feeling, God reveals
himself directly to the heart. ‘‘All that I feel to be right is right; whatever I feel
to be wrong is wrong: conscience is the ablest of casuists, and it is only when
we are trafficking with her that we have recourse to the subtleties of logic.’’∑∑
For the education of Sophie, Emile’s female counterpart, Rousseau even more
firmly opposes a discussion of religious doctrines. ‘‘Forget those mysterious
dogmas which for us are words without ideas, all those bizarre doctrines the
idle study of which takes the place of virtue in those committed to them whom
they make insane rather than good. Children ought to be kept within the
narrow circle of dogmas related to morality’’ (Emile, bk. V, p. 729). Until they
reach the age of reason, children will accept whatever their elders tell them,
mostly by example. When the time comes when they are able to judge for
themselves, they are to be given an inflexible rule for separating truth from
prejudice: le sentiment intérieur (Emile, bk. V). In Julie, Rousseau’s idea of
religious feeling receives a somewhat more specific content. Approaching the
end of her life, Julie is overtaken by a strong longing for God. This longing, she
 The Religious Crisis 255

hopes, will be fulfilled in the union with God after death. In this book, where
Rousseau links ethical disposition to mystical aspirations, appears the famous
sentence, whose meaning Marx, and particularly Lenin, strongly distorted:
‘‘La dévotion est un opium pour l’âme.’’∑∏
How surprising, then, to find a man of such delicate religious sensitivity to
be the author of the chapter on ‘‘civil religion’’ that concludes The Social
Contract. This totally pragmatic theology serves a purely political goal: to
remedy the loss of spiritual unity in the state. Ancient religion coincided with
the life of tribe or nation. The problem began when Jesus severed the internal,
spiritual kingdom from the external realm of politics. It became acute when
Christians (especially Catholics) subordinated their political allegiance to
their obedience to a religious leader, thus dividing loyalties that should have
stayed united. Christianity created a further political problem by promoting
virtues opposed to the ones needed for building a strong state. ‘‘Christianity
preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny,
and the latter always draws its profits from that fact.’’∑π Rousseau’s critique of
the virtues of Christianity, anticipated in Bayle’s Pensées sur la comète and in
Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs, also became a dominant factor in Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. To counteract the nefarious influence
of a religion of meekness Rousseau suggests that the state impose a civil reli-
gion that inspires virtues needed for a strong republic. Its doctrine should not
exceed the fundamental articles of natural religion: an acceptance of God as
creator and governor of the universe, who rewards good and punishes evil
after death. The state ought not to interfere with the citizens’ private beliefs
but exact strict conformity to the official cult and adherence to its principles.
He refers to the Roman Empire as a model for his distinction between public
and private religion. But the example of China that had recently become
known through missionary letters and travelers’ reports may have influenced
him as well.∑∫
Even those who opposed Rousseau’s principles felt the need for some re-
ligious bond among the citizens. Edmund Burke attributed a comparable role
to the established Church of England. It had to function as a general religion of
the citizens without, however, excluding private beliefs.∑Ω The doctrinal con-
tent imposed by this established Church would amount to little more than
what Rousseau’s civil religion required. Yet Burke’s model differs in one signif-
icant respect: he assumed that the general principles of the Church of England
remained in basic agreement with the private beliefs of the citizens. The as-
sumption was questionable since that Church was in open conflict with the
‘‘dissidents’’ and was bound to discriminate against them. The founders of
the American republic, though strictly opposed to any form of established
256 The Religious Crisis

Church, likewise considered the profession of some religious principles neces-

sary for the spiritual unity of the new nation. The original Puritan Covenant
theology of the New Israel, tempered by the founders’ deist convictions, for a
long time forged a powerful bond among American citizens and even today
conveys some religious appearance to public life.∏≠ American civil religion,
however, is neither established nor imposed. Nor does it claim to be a com-
plete religion in its own right. It invites the kind of specific content that only a
more personal faith provides, without compelling the citizens to seek it or even
to accept its own vague principles. Contrary to Rousseau’s separate civil reli-
gion, the nondenominational creed of America relies for its concrete content
on the actual religious beliefs of its citizens. The experience of Gulf War II
shows, however, that at critical moments a conflict may arise between the two.
Although most of the mainstream Churches strongly declared against the war,
the majority of the people sided with the president’s crusade against ‘‘the
forces of evil,’’ and they did so with all the fervor of a religious patriotism.

Atheism
The term ‘‘atheism’’ has rarely preserved the same meaning for a long
time. Socrates was condemned for one kind of atheism and Epicurus was
accused of another. Both of them believed in gods and today we regard neither
as an atheist. Spinoza, that most religious thinker, was considered an atheist
because he changed the relation between divine immanence and transcen-
dence, though he continued to maintain a distinction between the two. In the
eighteenth century, critics became less inclined to brand as atheist anyone who
was not an orthodox Christian or Jew. Yet new candidates for the title ap-
peared. In the preface to his long poem, Creation . . . Demonstrating the
Existence and Providence of God (1702), Richard Blackmore states that two
sorts of men have rightly been called atheists: ‘‘those who frankly and in plain
terms have denied the being of a God; and those who though they asserted his
being, denied those attributes and perfections, which the idea of a God in-
cludes.’’ On those grounds, he ranks deists under the second head, because
their God is totally ‘‘unconcerned about the direction and government of the
world.’’ Now it may have been the case, as Addison suggests in The Spectator
(March 10, 1711), that some atheists ‘‘retired into deism’’ when their position
became socially hazardous. But most deists firmly believed in their distant
God.
Deism did indeed pave the road to atheism by undermining the traditional
basis of religious faith. Yet that road was long and far from straight. During
the eighteenth century few followed it to the end. (Diderot was one of those
 The Religious Crisis 257

few.)∏∞ Even disaffected deists rarely turned atheist: they mostly became agnos-
tics. Early mechanistic philosophy had concluded the existence of God on the
basis of the need for a first principle of motion. But the moment it appeared
doubtful that motion required a transcendent cause, the argument collapsed
and, with it, the logical necessity of the idea of God. The rationalist proofs on
which deists had built their case depended entirely on the concept of efficient
causality. Hume rightly wondered why a God should be needed for mundane
tasks that might be performed by physical causes. Or as Diderot put it: Why
should we attribute to an unknown power outside matter what a more dy-
namic concept of matter could do itself? Modern agnosticism and atheism
were always, directly or indirectly, linked to the idea that efficient causality
alone defines the relation between Creator and creation.
Descartes had considered God’s creative act indispensable for bringing the
physical mechanism of the world into being as well as for setting it in motion.
Nor did he restrict God’s creative impact to a one-time communication of
power, as is often claimed. He insisted that creation is a never-ending process
without which the cosmos would immediately return to nothingness. None-
theless, the fact that he identified the act of creation with one of efficient
causality, as that causality was understood in mechanical physics, made the
need for a Creator dependent on his theory of motion. When Newton’s princi-
ple of inertia abrogated the assumption that rest had a natural priority over
motion, a theory of creation conceived in terms of motion became extremely
vulnerable. It sufficed to abandon the unproven hypothesis that the universe
must have had a beginning for the need of a transcendent cause of motion to
disappear. The cosmos might have moved from all eternity. This argument
took Diderot from deism to atheism.
The reduction of creation to an act of efficient causality led to even greater
problems in the moral area. From Newton’s exclusion of ‘‘chance’’ in the
physical world, it was easy to conclude a universal determinism. This caused
serious problems for the deist conception of God in which the existence of a
moral law had remained deism’s chief defense against naturalism. Indeed,
deism had virtually identified religion with a transcendent promulgation and
sanction of moral rules. The conflict between human freedom and divine
foreknowledge, already a subject of intense controversy during the sixteenth-
and early seventeenth-century disputes on predestination, became even more
heated as creation became defined exclusively in terms of efficient causality.
Freedom understood as the power of self-determined action was incompatible
with a closed system of physical causality. Even Kant found no way out of that
dilemma. He merely placed freedom and physical determinism on two differ-
ent levels of meaning and excluded from the moral act any causal dependence
258 The Religious Crisis

on God. Two central ideas of modern thought, that of freedom as self-

constituting and that of causality as a closed system, though conflicting with
one another, conspired in creating a kind of religious predicament out of
which atheism was born.
Agnosticism has been called an atheism that ignores itself. The agnostic acts
as if God did not exist, though he may feel incapable of proving it or may not
find it worth his while to do so. About the ‘‘agnostic’’ David Hume, however,
one can hardly claim that he ignored where his arguments led. Still, being
consistently skeptical he did not believe that the absence of proofs for God’s
existence and the inadequacy of the foundations of revelation sufficed to jus-
tify an atheist conclusion. There always remained the remote possibility that
at some point a new, hitherto unknown argument might come up. To assess
Hume’s position requires that we consider all his writings on the subject: not
only the Dialogues on Natural Religion (basically completed in 1761, pub-
lished in 1779), but also sections X and XI of the Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding (1748) on miracles and on immortality, and the Natural His-
tory of Religion (1757). Taken separately, each one leaves room for some form
of religion. Together they preclude the justification of any religious faith.
In the Dialogues Hume criticizes the rational arguments for the existence of
a God conceived on the monotheist model: omnipotent, omniscient, and be-
nevolent. Philo, the skeptical character, claims to be satisfied by the evidence in
favor of some transcendent ‘‘Designer,’’ but the proofs for a wise and good
God leave him unconvinced. His critique may be read as primarily an attack
on deism. The idea of a Creator who cannot be proven to be benevolent is
inadequate for supporting the deist thesis that God rewards virtue—the main
support of morality. Faith, on the other side, requires no positive proof of this
goodness, as long as no proof excludes it. In his Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, however, Hume had already argued that the one support faith
claims to possess, namely, that of miracles, so totally conflicts with all laws of
empirical probability and even with the idea of a consistent divine lawgiver
that they deserve no credence whatever. The critique of immortality in section
XI of that same book (and repeated in an independent essay), though not
decisive, also went to the heart of the deist position. Hume’s claim, then, that
‘‘our most holy religion is founded on faith, not on reason’’ can only be under-
stood in an ironical sense.
After all rational arguments have been refuted, one might still claim that
religion is primarily a feeling or emotion, as Shaftesbury and Rousseau had
argued. Hume’s own theory of moral feelings might have seemed to favor that
approach, all the more so since religious feelings were generally thought to
have a positive influence on human behavior. The Natural History of Religion
 The Religious Crisis 259

closed that door. It presented religion as derived from fear, one of the most
primitive emotions, and one that has consistently had a nefarious impact on
human conduct. Despite this comprehensive critique of religious belief, Hume
never formally ruled out the logical possibility that a good God may indeed be
proven to exist and even that the Christian faith may be right. Nothing, how-
ever, justifies that belief and everything argues against it. Let us look at the
details.
In the Dialogues, Philo prefaces his attacks by stating that the existence of
an intelligent designer is not at issue. ‘‘The question can never be concerning
the being but only the nature of the Deity. The former truth, as you well
observe, is unquestionable and self-evident.’’∏≤ That this truth is, in fact, far
from self-evident appears in part VII where Philo questions whether order
requires indeed a designer. But for the time being, Hume is willing to grant the
existence of a transcendent cause and to listen to the empirical arguments,
popular at the time, in favor of a perfect, wise, and benevolent nature. Clean-
thes, who advocates empirical, rather than rational arguments, presents an
impressive analogy in support of divine causality. How could this world not be
the creation of a wise designer? If we heard a voice in the sky addressing us in
intelligible language could we escape concluding that it belonged to an intel-
ligent being? Could the books in the library have been written by any but
intelligent authors? ‘‘Could you possibly open one of them and doubt that its
cause bore the strongest analogy to mind and intelligence?’’ (III, 24). But, then,
nature does not show the coherence of a book nor does it contain such an
obvious sign of transcendence as a voice calling from the sky. That leaves open
a number of nontheistic candidates to account for the existence of an incom-
prehensible universe.
In the central dialogues (IV–V–VI) Philo proceeds to attack the foundations
of the argument from analogy. He questions (in part IV) how much insight can
be gained about the mysterious origin of this world by ascribing it to a source
beyond the sphere of reliable knowledge. Even if we admit the causal depen-
dence of this universe upon an unknown transcendent source, we are not
justified in attributing more qualities to this cause than are needed to achieve
the known effect. How, then, could we justifiably infer the existence of an
infinite, single, and perfect being from our knowledge of a finite, complex
world of doubtful perfection? Much here depends on how we conceive of the
universe as a whole. Is it a machine? How intelligent an engineer does it take to
construe it? Or is the world an animated being? Why should its cause, then, be
more than an impersonal animating principle, such as Plato’s world soul (VI)?
Nor can we exclude the possibility that the world had no beginning and
required no designer at all. Why would the chaos of formless but constantly
260 The Religious Crisis

agitated matter, after myriads of alterations, destructions, transpositions, not

reach a point of stability from which order spontaneously emerges? ‘‘The
universe may for many ages have followed a continued succession of chaos
and disorder. But is it not possible that it may settle at last, so that as not to lose
its motion and active force . . . , yet as to preserve a uniformity of appearance,
amidst the continual motion and fluctuation of its parts?’’ (VIII, 51).
This very hypothesis led Diderot and his follower d’Holbach straight to a
materialist worldview. We need not conceive of matter as inert and moved
only by external forces. What prevents it from being endowed with active
powers of its own? Today Ilya Prigogine’s theory of self-organizing matter,
according to which natural systems spontaneously develop coherent patterns,
renders Philo’s theory less far-fetched than it appeared to his partners in the
dialogue.∏≥ Hume does not deny that the presence of order requires an expla-
nation, but he questions whether we ought to seek that explanation outside,
rather than within, the universe. To postulate an outside coordinator before
considering the possibility of an order spontaneously emerging within the
universe is yet another form of a misplaced analogy between the universe and
a man-made object.∏∂
Since the popular arguments of analogy have all suffered shipwreck in the
course of being transferred from the finite to the infinite, Demea, the rational-
ist, at last invokes the traditional a priori argument: ‘‘Whatever exists must
have a cause or reason of its existence, it being absolutely impossible for
anything to produce itself or be the cause of its own existence’’ (IX, 54).
Cleanthes turns the full force of Hume’s empiricism against this thesis. Before
Kant, he detects an ontological fallacy underneath the age-old cosmological
argument. ‘‘There is an evident absurdity in pretending to demonstrate a mat-
ter of fact, or to prove it by any arguments a priori. Nothing that is distinctly
conceivable implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we
can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-
existence implies a contradiction’’ (IX, 55). Hence the concept of ‘‘necessary
existence’’ on which the argument depends turns out to be meaningless.
The brunt of the attack on natural theology (found in parts X and XI of the
Dialogues) is directed at the assumption that the transcendent cause of the
universe must be benevolent. That a transcendent cause exists, Philo had con-
ceded in the beginning (though his subsequent critique had weakened that
concession into extinction), but as long as we have not proven the first cause to
be benevolent to its creatures, the argument has not established the existence
of a Christian or even of a deist God. To succeed in this task, the argument
must reconcile the idea of a benevolent Creator with the existence of much
physical and moral evil in the world. Philo, again in the front line, does not
 The Religious Crisis 261

claim that evil excludes the existence of a benevolent Deity, but that the evi-
dence for proving that existence remains inadequate as long as the deist has
not shown the inevitability of evil in a finite world. At this point the principle
of analogy encounters its strongest challenge. When Cleanthes, its protago-
nist, tries to meet it by the arguments borrowed from a partly Stoic, partly
Leibnizian theodicy, Philo points out that showing the compatibility of a good
God with the presence of evil in creation is one thing; proving the existence of
such a God on the basis of the available evidence is another. Theodicy presup-
poses the existence of God and needs to prove only a possible compatibility,
while an argument for the existence of God possesses no probative force unless
it previously establishes that the two must be compatible. Philo finds both
positions, Demea’s rationalist one that insists on the inevitability of evil in a
finite universe, and Cleanthes’ empirical one that modifies the idea of God’s
omnipotence, unsatisfactory. The presence of so much apparently remediable
evil fatally weakens the case in favor of the goodness of an even less than
omnipotent Creator. A capacity for pain may be needed for survival in nature
as ruled by its existing laws. But why the pain caused by incurable diseases
or natural disasters? Freedom includes the potential to commit evil. But
why should that potential in some individuals be so slanted toward actually
committing evil, when a more harmonious psychic disposition would have
avoided much human misery.
The final dialogue seems to throw all the acquired positions into disarray.
Philo commences by professing his ‘‘deep sense of religion’’ and his ‘‘profound
adoration’’ of God (XII, 77), even defending the analogy of nature he had so
effectively attacked. ‘‘That the works of nature bear a great analogy to the
productions of art is evident; and according to all the rules of good reasoning,
we ought to infer, if we argue at all concerning them, that their causes have a
proportional analogy’’ (XII, 79). Yet in these few words of approval Philo has
shifted the ground of the discussion of analogy. Proportional differences
among the effects indicate that the causes also are proportionally different.
Surreptitiously Philo has transformed the direct analogy of proportion into
the much looser one of proportionality (a/b = c/d), thereby widening the
differential gap between the areas of comparison to a point where the argu-
ment loses its force. ‘‘No man can deny the analogies between the effects: to
restrain ourselves from inquiring concerning the causes is scarcely possible.
From this inquiry the legitimate conclusion is that the causes have also an
analogy: and if we are not contented with calling the first and supreme cause a
God or Deity, but desire to vary the expression, what can we call Him but
Mind and Thought, to which he is justly supposed to bear a considerable
resemblance?’’ (XII, 80). But nothing in the argument requires that we restrict
262 The Religious Crisis

this cause to a personal God: a pantheistic or materialist interpretation will

work just as well once the analogy directly ceases to refer to the same principal
analogate. To one who believes in God, such reasoning may be sufficient; to
one who intends to prove the existence of God, it is not conclusive.
Philo declares his strong support of ‘‘the philosophical and rational kind’’ of
religion (XII, 83) and his firm rejection of ‘‘vulgar superstitions’’ (XII, 82)—
which in fact includes any sort of positive faith. Where does this leave us? All
philosophical attempts, both a priori and a posteriori, to justify a rational
(deist) religion, have been refuted. Nonetheless Philo declares that rational
religion deserves to survive! The dialogue concludes with Philo’s pious profes-
sion that he accepts all the arguments he had previously refuted. Hume con-
firms the ambiguity of his conclusion in a footnote attributed to the author
himself (XII, 81–82) that refers to the differences among those positions as a
matter of ‘‘habit, caprice, or inclination.’’∏∑ In one final blast of irony, Philo,
the critic both of the arguments and of ‘‘superstitious religion’’ concludes: ‘‘A
person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will
fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity. . . . To be a philosophical skeptic
is, in a man of letters, the first and most essential step towards being a sound,
believing Christian’’ (XII, 89).
If Philo seems to leave room for a religion based on revelation (provided its
tenets do not run counter to reason), section X of the Enquiry had effectively
closed that avenue by rendering the miracles and prophecies, from which
revealed faith claims to draw its credibility, themselves incredible. For some-
one to believe in miracles requires itself a miracle.∏∏ The report of a miracle,
especially one that has reached us from a remote time, ought to be admitted
only if falsehood of the testimony on which it rests would be even more
miraculous than the fact itself. For Hume, this practically eliminates any
ground for belief in miracles. How then do we explain the persistent belief in
them? Hume, this time without irony, attributes it to a ‘‘passion of surprise
and wonder’’ which tends to cast aside the common rules of evidence, par-
ticularly if that passion is excited within a religious context. Wonders continue
to appear today ‘‘among ignorant and barbarous nations,’’ and they are re-
ported to have occurred before Christianity and outside the world of the Old
Testament. ‘‘What have we to oppose to such a cloud of witnesses, but the
absolute impossibility of the events which they relate?’’ (Enquiry, X, 100).
One might be surprised to see Hume become such an ardent advocate of the
immutability of the laws of nature, of which he had so effectively undermined
the a priori necessity in the same Enquiry. By the purely descriptive meaning
he has given of the ‘‘laws of nature’’ no event, however exceptional, could ever
be considered to conflict with these laws. Moreover, the ‘‘laws of nature’’
 The Religious Crisis 263

never formed an essential factor in the religious understanding of the miracle.

The New Testament merely refers to signs (semeia), abnormal events that
occur within a well-defined religious context and therefrom derive a specific
meaning. The text never claims that those signs violated ‘‘laws of nature.’’
More to the point is Hume’s assertion that ‘‘a miracle can never be proved so
as to be the foundation of a system of religion.’’ Indeed, miracles receive their
specific meaning within an already established religious setting. They may
confirm, but they do not prove. Outside that context they are merely unex-
plained events, possibly of psychic or psychosomatic origin. Miracles prove
nothing as long as the particular religion that they are supposed to support has
not clarified what to expect and what not to expect.∏π
The last refuge of faith, popular in England in Hume’s time, was that reli-
gion consisted of a distinct feeling that supports moral attitudes. In The Natu-
ral History of Religion (1757) Hume denies both that religious feelings are
distinct from other emotions and that they exercise a positive influence upon
morality. The very title of the work is revealing. Rather than being a feeling of
transcendent origin as deists like Rousseau considered it, Hume claimed that
the allegedly religious feeling was not even an original instinct, but one derived
from other emotions, primarily from fear. If religion had been a primary
impression it would have been universally present and not subject to basic
changes.∏∫ ‘‘Some nations have been discovered, who entertained no senti-
ments of religion, if travelers and historians may be credited; and no two
nations, and scarce any two men, have ever agreed precisely in the same
sentiments. It would appear, therefore, that this preconception springs not
from an original instinct or primary impression of nature.’’∏Ω
The ‘‘natural’’ quality of religion, then, carries no assurance of its truth or
moral rectitude. Indeed, the emotion of fear tends to distort one’s judgment by
phantoms of the imagination. ‘‘Agitated by hopes and fears—, especially the
latter, men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes
and examine the various and contrary events of human life’’ (II, 28). There
they claim to detect ‘‘the first obscure traces of divinity.’’ Hume also takes issue
with the assumption that religion began as a primitive monotheism: its origins
are radically polytheistic. Only later does some form of monotheism emerge,
and then not under the influence of increased insight but rather from equally
‘‘irrational and superstitious principles.’’ Because a particular nation wor-
shiped one god or goddess more than others, it gradually came to regard him
or her as wielding supreme authority over all others by being more powerful
(VI, 42). The idea of a single God creating the entire universe and supervising
all its operations could not have occurred to minds incapable of compre-
hending the cosmos as one coherent system subject to invariable laws. The
264 The Religious Crisis

monotheism of popular religion continues to remain unsettled: believers still

flock to innumerable sanctuaries, invoke various saints for various purposes,
and regard extraordinary events far more significant than the principles of
monotheist theology. Polytheism and popular theism, though resulting in dif-
ferent social structures, share a common irrationality.π≠
Nor do such superstitions, whether polytheist or theist, foster moral prog-
ress. At the most primitive stage gods or spirits are devoid of moral qualities.
Yet even when religion culturally matures, the object of worship does not
become more moral. ‘‘As men farther exalt their idea of their divinity, it is their
notion of the god’s power and knowledge, not of his goodness, which is im-
proved’’ (XIII, 67). Indeed, efforts to raise the level of moral obligations often
end up having the opposite effect: they become a religious substitute for mo-
rality. The faithful regard the attendance at sermons intended to inculcate a
moral attitude an easy means to acquit themselves of their moral obligations.
No bond joins virtuous conduct to religious belief. Quite the opposite, re-
ligious fanaticism has been responsible for the most heinous crimes. Any but
the ‘‘religion of reason’’ sets morality back.
Hume’s Natural History of Religion presented a more damaging attack on
religion than the Dialogues, whose publication he prudently postponed. That
the early work received no stronger negative critique was due to the fact that
he attacked only the religion of the masses while excepting that of the edu-
cated. Taken together with the Enquiry and the Dialogues, however, the moral
critique of the Natural History precluded a rational justification of any form
of religion: philosophical, revealed, and sentimental. In fact, Hume’s writings
on religion undermined the case of deism as much as that of religion proper.
Deism had attempted to rescue the ideas of creation, of immortality, and of the
transcendent source of the moral law from their irrational context in popular
religion. Hume intended to show that those ideas were as far from being
rational as the popular superstitions. The idea of a transcendent Creator was
justified neither by logic nor by experience; the idea of life after death conflicts
with all we know about human nature; faith, even rational faith, far from
being indispensable to morality obstructs moral progress. Deism ceased to be
a viable substitute for revealed religion. Still, Hume never professed himself to
be an atheist. Rather than ‘‘opposing one species of superstition to another,’’
he declared himself ‘‘to make [his] escape into the calm, though obscure re-
gions of philosophy.’’
Having closed off all ways to prove God’s existence, Hume claimed, albeit
with more irony than conviction, to leave open the way to faith. French mate-
rialists such as La Mettrie, Diderot, and d’Holbach, were explicitly and, in
d’Holbach’s case, aggressively atheistic. They replaced Descartes’s metaphys-
 The Religious Crisis 265

ical dualism of mind and body by a single material substance capable of both
mental and corporeal functions. Condillac’s sensationalist theory of percep-
tion provided the physiological support needed for this transformation. In
chapter 2 I have sketched Diderot’s philosophical development toward such a
dynamic materialism. His evolutionary concept of matter had rendered the
idea of God superfluous.π∞ D’Holbach wrote later and fully profited from
Diderot’s ideas on the subject. To him, atheism was a logical conclusion as well
as a practical imperative for the intellectual and moral liberation of the human
race.π≤ His Système de la Nature (1770) remained the most elaborate summa
of atheism until the Soviet encyclopedias of the twentieth century. The author
must have spent years collecting the information with which he packed his
pages. Did he write it all himself? Rumors persist that Diderot had a hand in it
(especially in the footnotes). They knew each other well, and it may have been
Diderot who converted d’Holbach to atheism. The German baron certainly
borrowed Diderot’s dynamic concept of matter. But his Système lacks Di-
derot’s sharp wit and irony. It is not a subtle book. Arthur M. Wilson in his
biography of Diderot aptly compares the two philosophes: ‘‘Diderot’s doctrine
is much more elusive, ambiguous, and therefore closer to life than d’Hol-
bach’s. Diderot’s philosophy, hard to be sure of, has a great deal of poetic
insight, and should properly be called godless rather than atheistic.’’π≥
The basic principle of d’Holbach’s philosophy was the dynamic, creative
nature of matter. If matter is dynamic and eternal, as he assumes it is, it requires
no explanation as to how the causal process got started or why external causes
must be ruled out. Motion and the heat it produces suffice to explain all changes
and modifications. Motion, the source of diversity, also functions as the bond of
unity: it relates the whole to the parts and the parts to the whole. Religious
believers look upon nature ‘‘as a heap of dead, inert, formless matter, which has
not within itself the power of producing any of the great effects from which
emanates . . . the order of the universe’’ (I, 5, p. 38). Nor does d’Holbach equate
his materialism with a ‘‘blind’’ physical determinism. The idea that letters
thrown down at random could ever produce the Iliad, he considered as absurd
as Voltaire did. Works of the mind cannot be explained directly through mate-
rial causes, but mind itself results from such causes.
Having established matter as the single source of reality, d’Holbach predi-
cates the traditional attributes of God to an all-inclusive, creative matter. True,
matter is not ‘‘intelligent’’ as God is alleged to be, but ‘‘intelligence’’ is merely
‘‘a personification of an abstract quality’’ of matter as a dynamic source of
power. By not attributing the creative process to a source beyond nature, he
avoided the contradictions he thought to be inherent in the idea of a wise and
good Creator. Nature, indifferent to what humans call good or evil, merely
266 The Religious Crisis

follows her necessary course. Evil becomes an insoluble problem only when a
personal God is considered responsible for all that occurs in the world.
How could a good God have created a world ‘‘groaning under such a multi-
tude of calamities’’ (II, 1, p. 193)? The more theologians attempt to extricate
themselves from this difficulty by assuming a balance of justice and mercy, the
more they expose the inconsistency of their concepts. Where is ‘‘mercy’’? On
what ground do they call ‘‘just’’ a Creator so cruel to the works of his hand?
The allegedly merciful and compassionate God condemns fragile beings to
endless torments ‘‘for transitory offenses, for false reasonings, for involuntary
errors, for necessary passions, which depend on the temperament this God has
given them’’ (II, 1, p. 197). If God owes nothing to his creatures and is not
bound by either justice or goodness, why should they owe God anything?
How can they worship a Deity so deprived of all respect for what humans
regard as the laws of nature and of reason? Even the idea of a historical
revelation conflicts with the notion of a good God because it leaves uncount-
able humans unacquainted with truths deemed essential to their salvation. All
believers and most deists postulate an afterlife to compensate for the evils the
good have suffered in this life. But why should a future state, of which we
know nothing, have to compensate for the happiness God has denied us in this
life? How does one reconcile such a painful and unnecessary detour with the
idea of an omnipotent, benevolent God? All these absurdities vanish, accord-
ing to the Système, if we stop projecting our own optimistic or jaundiced
moods onto the universe. Deists are no less superstitious than believers. Both
start from the contradictory principle that an immaterial God is able to create
a material world and yet cannot prevent evil from occurring in it. ‘‘As soon as
they suppose such a God, they can believe anything’’ (II, 5, p. 259).
D’Holbach also sketches a natural history of religion. Since the dawn of
consciousness humans have never ceased to acknowledge a causal principle
beyond the creative power of nature. Religious apologists consider the univer-
sality of this belief in God a proof of God’s existence (II, 4, p. 205). What all
humans believe, they argue, cannot be false. In fact, the universality of religion
is due to a tendency inherent in human nature to ‘‘anthropomorphize’’ its
projections. ‘‘Man has never been able to prevent himself from drawing to-
gether from his own particular nature the qualities he has assigned to the being
who governs the universe’’ (II, 1, p. 191).
Despite its flat-footed, question-begging materialism, The System of Nature
remains a disturbing book for believers. Obviously theology had not kept pace
with scientific revolutions in astronomy, geology, and biology. D’Holbach’s
often casually formulated objections hide serious questions concerning funda-
mental concepts in Western religion. At the heart of them lie the problematic
 The Religious Crisis 267

notion of a creation exclusively conceived in terms of efficient causality, of a

heavily anthropomorphic idea of God, and often of the absence of a genuine
autonomy of finite beings (and hence the inevitability of suffering and evil). The
assault on these inconsistencies by which theologians and philosophers have all
too often supported their religious beliefs retain much of their strength, even
after we have dismissed d’Holbach’s nonsequiturs and simplistic conclusions.
Surprisingly few readers of the Enlightenment surrendered to d’Holbach’s
logic. Unbelievers no less than believers felt that he left out an essential ele-
ment. He simply assumes that the real coincides with the objective, allowing
no mode of being other than a homogeneous naturalism. Eighteenth-century
attempts at closing the gap between subject and object, opened during the
previous century, often ended up reducing one to the other. No one did so
more radically than d’Holbach. In his system the source of meaning becomes
itself an objective entity. The ‘‘inner’’ becomes an integral part of the ‘‘outer.’’
As he states at the beginning of his book: ‘‘The distinction which has been so
often made between the physical and the moral man is evidently an abuse of
terms. Man is a being purely physical’’ (I, 1, p. 11). The System admits as truth
only what is accessible to the methods of the positive sciences. The objectivism
heralded by d’Holbach came to play a major part in the scientific philosophy
of the nineteenth century. Those who have read Edward Wilson’s Consilience
would hesitate to declare it extinct today.
Despite its unambiguous hostility to religion, eighteenth-century atheism
displays an affinity with its enemy that makes one suspect the presence of a
hidden dialectic between the two. That doctrinal atheism differs from today’s
secularism, which is less concerned with opposing religion than with filling the
cultural vacuum left by its disappearance. Pierre Bayle, the author of the
historical and critical Dictionnaire, intimates that atheism may not be as far
apart from religion as its defenders think. In a famous article titled ‘‘Pau-
liciens’’ (Remarque I), he makes the charge, surprising for a confessing mem-
ber of the French Reformed Church, that Calvin’s doctrine of predestination
entails consequences that would be fatal to the idea of God if consistently
thought through. But then follows the interesting conclusion: lack of logical
consistency alone does not determine the religious or nonreligious quality of a
theological doctrine.π∂ Indeed, all radical monotheism has an atheistic streak
in it: the fight against idols will never be complete as long as any positive
determination remains. On the other hand, all doctrinal atheism has a re-
ligious origina: it needs a God to deny.
In his Phenomenology of Spirit (VI, A), Hegel first drew attention to the
dialectical nature of the Enlightenment’s critique of religion. He explained it as
resulting from an opposition between the act of thinking and its content. In the
268 The Religious Crisis

crisis of the eighteenth century, the rationalist mind ended up disowning the
traditional representations of faith as being no more than idealized projections
of the present world unto an otherworldly realm of fantasy. In so criticizing
religion as an illusory mode of thought, however, the rationalist mind de-
prived thought of its most fundamental content. Threatened by the assault of
reason, faith withdrew into a sphere impervious to the control of reason. Thus
faith and reason, both indispensable to thought, became separated. One pre-
served the content of thought but lost the rigorous method of reason; the other
preserved the formal method of reasoning but lost the content. They continue
to communicate, however, in a dialectical opposition. The atheist critique
forces the believer to recognize that there is no transcendent ‘‘object.’’ On the
other side, faith shows the emptiness of content in purely critical thought.
Nineteenth-century atheists and agnostics still remained aware of the ties
that continued to link their thought to the religion they once had embraced.
Thus Ernest Renan wrote: ‘‘I feel that my life is governed by a faith that I no
longer possess. Faith has this peculiar quality that, after it has disappeared, it
continues to work.’’ A similar feeling inspired much of Leslie Stephen’s Agnos-
tic Apology. Long before his contemporaries, Nietzsche understood the depth
of the crisis caused by this rupture in the Western mind. He realized how the
death of God had changed the very nature of our culture.π∑
In our own time, when atheism has mostly turned into secularism, it has
loosened its ties with religion. Secular men and women have ceased to define
themselves in the antireligious terms that still imply a dialectical dependence
on faith. They no longer describe themselves as ‘‘atheists,’’ a name derived
from an attitude with which they have broken.π∏ With the change has disap-
peared much of the polemical attitude. But so has the former dialectical rela-
tion to religion. Today modes of ‘‘low’’ transcendence are often filling the place
previously occupied by the high transcendence of God. Primary among them
may well be the aesthetic experience. Like religion, that experience integrates
the various aspects of our world within a single coherent vision that radiates
with a glow of transcendence. The aesthetic transcendence, like the religious
one, opens a new, symbolic dimension in the real. Beauty, even as religion,
albeit only for a moment, justifies the world. ‘‘After one has abandoned a
belief in God,’’ Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘‘poetry is that essence which takes its
place as life’s redemption.’’ππ Whether that suffices for rendering existence
meaningful is a question I do not have to answer in this book.
 9

The Faith of the Philosophers

In this chapter I shall discuss the main philosophical responses to the

challenges to religion described in the preceding one. Some philosophers, such
as Leibniz and Clarke, responded from within the rationalist tradition. Oth-
ers, among them Malebranche, Berkeley, and Jacobi, considered philosophical
rationalism the very source of the religious crisis and repudiated it altogether.
The first group attempted to revive philosophical theology, a branch of meta-
physics that had existed since the early Stoics and that aimed at establishing
the existence and nature of God. The Arabs, in their commentaries on the
works of Aristotle, revived it as a rational foundation for revealed religion.
When Western theologians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries became
acquainted with these commentaries, they adopted some form of it as a prepa-
ration to the traditional course of studies in scriptural theology.∞ Thomas
Aquinas integrated this new discipline with the traditional one of theology.
The nominalist theologians of the fifteenth century did not favor this kind of
philosophical theology based on a priori principles. Yet they continued to
assert the need for some natural justification of faith. Some then started ex-
ploring the signs of God’s presence in nature. The Catalan theologian Ray-
mond of Sabunde called his Theologia naturalis (first printed edition in 1487),
an unsystematic collection of random observations and ideas remembered

269
270 The Faith of the Philosophers

only for Montaigne’s critique of it, the prima scientia.≤ We have seen in the
previous chapter how thoroughly Hume destroyed those efforts.

The Rationalists
With the concept of rationality introduced by Descartes the kind of
integration between reason and faith achieved by St. Thomas was no longer
possible. If reason was essentially a quality of mind, revelation from a tran-
scendent source as well as the faith based on it belonged to a different order.
The two might peacefully coexist and possibly support each other. But hence-
forth theology and philosophy ought to remain separate. Descartes and major
thinkers of the rationalist school, such as Leibniz, Clarke, and Wolff, tried to
show the convergence of reason with faith. A critical role thereby played the
so-called arguments for the existence of God. In exposing the weakness of
those arguments, Kant proved that even the alleged parallelism between rea-
son and revelation rested on questionable grounds. The arguments assumed a
pre-existing intellectual intuition of the idea of God. In fact, reason does not
possess such an intuition. It borrows the idea of God from sources different
from itself—revelation, attempts to explain experiences of unknown origin,
traditions based on either or both. All reason might do for religion is, after a
critical reflection on religious phenomena and sacred texs, discern their ra-
tionality and explore how religious doctrines could be interpreted in confor-
mity with the rules of reason as eighteenth-century philosophy understood
them. Its contribution consisted not so much in support as in understanding a
field that did not belong to its own domain. Religion was thereby removed to
the sidelines of philosophy, as object of a subordinate branch—the philosophy
of religion.
The deists broke with traditional theology. They either took no account of it
or they reinterpreted it as essentially coinciding with philosophical theology.
The philosophers presented in the first part of this chapter followed a middle
course. They accepted revelation though they did not allow it to interfere
with their philosophical speculation. At first sight they seem to have taken
their philosophical arguments from Scholastic sources. Yet the Scholastic five
‘‘ways’’ (viae) leading to the existence of God had not been purely rational
arguments. At the beginning of the Summa Theologiae (I, 8) Aquinas declares
that reason does not prove the principles of faith: those principles are derived
from revelation. Without revelation, philosophy would be incapable of prov-
ing the object of faith.≥ Contrary to that position, deists started their argument
from nature conceived as independent of God; next, they attempted to show
that this nature required the existence of God. Needless to say, such a doubtful
 The Faith of the Philosophers 271

project rarely met with success.∂ Leibniz and Clarke, the two thinkers here
considered, took a different approach. They considered revelation an indis-
pensable source of knowledge of God, complementary to philosophical in-
sight but not reducible to it. Their work, even as that of the deists, mainly
covered three subjects: the existence of God, the attributes of God, and the
justification of evil and suffering in a world created by God.

LEIBNIZ AND GOD’S JUSTIFICATION

Leibniz, the most systematic thinker of the Enlightenment, never com-
posed a system. He treated the weightiest philosophical questions in letters
and short essays. Though mostly remembered for his Théodicée (the only
book published during his lifetime), he packed more substance in his short
pieces on the existence and nature of God than in that lengthy, rambling essay.
Leibniz was a rationalist in the philosophical sense (not in the religious one).
This created considerable problems for his project in philosophical theology,
since strict rationalism demands that all multiplicity must be reducible to a
single principle. In fact, Leibniz himself compared his method to the attribu-
tion of many predicates to the single subject of a proposition. According to
Bertrand Russell, it was only by logical inconsistency that Leibniz escaped
Spinoza’s metaphysical monism.∑ However one judges this claim, the German
philosopher keenly perceived the threat of monism and assiduously tried to
avoid it.
Could the rationalist principle be reconciled with the kind of ontological
pluralism required by a theistic worldview? How do finite beings succeed in
remaining distinct and relatively independent substances despite their total
dependence on the principle in which they have their justification? Leibniz
attempted to preserve both the unity of the system and the plurality of finite
substances by conceiving of them as intrinsically linked to a single all-inclusive
principle exclusive of any extrinsic dependence upon other finite substances.
God, the one, absolute principle explicates itself in an infinity of substantial
units, each of which presents a particular, finite perspective of the absolute on
which it intrinsically depends. ‘‘God preserves [the creatures] and can produce
them continually by a kind of emanation just as we produce our thoughts.’’∏ In
and through this absolute principle each substance communicates with all
other substances. ‘‘A particular substance never acts upon another particular
substance nor is it acted upon’’ (Discourse on Metaphysics, # 14).
To maintain the substantial independence of finite beings, their causal de-
pendence on the Creator could not be restricted to one of efficient causality, as
was usually done in the eighteenth century. If finite things were linked to the
Creator as to an efficient cause only, the relation would remain purely external
272 The Faith of the Philosophers

and their existence would not be justified through an ultimate, absolute princi-
ple, as the rationalist method required. They then would owe their entire being
to the blind will of God and have no intrinsic reason for their existence.π
Leibniz therefore reintroduced what the mechanists of his time had most radi-
cally excluded from thought, namely, a final causality, as well as the kind of
immanent dependence on God asserted by Thomists and by most mystics,
whereby God constitutes the very being of his creatures. ‘‘I, for my part, hold
that far from excluding final causes from the consideration of physics, as
Descartes pretends, . . . it is rather by them that all should be determined, since
the efficient cause of things is intelligent, having a will and consequently tend-
ing toward the Good.’’∫ Unless all things were directed toward a single pur-
pose, we would no longer be able to account for harmonious ‘‘fitting’’ together
in one universe.Ω
God unites all substances in a meaningful totality, a universal harmony,
without suppressing their identities. Yet God can do so only because He is
actively present in each and all as the very source of their being. ‘‘It is God
alone (from whom all individuals emanate continually . . . ) who is the cause of
this correspondence in their phenomena.’’∞≠ Leibniz’s system is rooted in Neo-
platonic thought, which starts from above, from the first principle itself, rather
than from below. Leibniz often refers to Henry More, the Cambridge Plato-
nist, whose dynamic concept of reality driven and unified by a divine spirit
inspired his own thought. For that reason, Philip Clayton correctly points out,
Leibniz’s ‘‘arguments’’ for the existence of God serve a different purpose than
Descartes’s. They are valid only within that system.∞∞ The system itself is one
ontological argument. It needs no others.
This Platonism also explains why the (Platonic) idea of perfection domi-
nates all other divine attributes. The Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) begins
with the words: ‘‘The conception of God which is the most common and the
most full of meaning is expressed well enough in the words: God is an abso-
lutely perfect being.’’ God’s perfection is both ontological and logical. It in-
cludes the highest reality and, at the same time, the greatest possible intel-
ligibility. The Platonic view of perfection implies self-communication: bonum
est diffusivum sui (the good is self-communicating). For Leibniz, this implies
that creation, in which God expresses this perfection, must be both necessary
and perfect: it could not be other than it is and no other creation could contain
a greater amount of reality. ‘‘The primitive simple substance must contain in
itself eminently the perfections of all the substances which are its effects; thus it
will have perfect power, knowledge and will: that is, it will have supreme
omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness.’’∞≤
This ‘‘necessary perfection’’ appears to bring Leibniz’s theory close to Spi-
 The Faith of the Philosophers 273

noza’s. He himself admits that God creates ‘‘by a kind of emanation’’ (Dis-
course on Metaphysics, # 14). In his notes on Spinoza’s Ethics, book I, Leibniz
accepts definition 7 without objection: ‘‘A free thing is that which exists and is
determined to action by the necessity of its own nature’’ (I, 7). Nor does he
appear to have any problems with proposition I, 16. ‘‘From the necessity of the
divine nature must follow an infinite number of things in infinite ways.’’ Still,
Leibniz’s theory essentially differs from Spinoza’s on the issue of necessity and
contingency. In the margin of Spinoza’s definition of things produced by God:
‘‘their essence does not involve existence’’ (Ethics, I, 24), he writes: ‘‘From this
proposition it follows, contrary to Spinoza’s own interpretation, that things
are not necessary.’’ The term ‘‘necessary’’ applies to God’s creative act, but not
to the nature of the created universe, which, being totally dependent, is en-
tirely contingent.
Elsewhere he even concludes, somewhat inconsistently, from this absence of
intrinsic necessity that all things must have been created by divine choice:
‘‘Beings do not emanate from the divine essence: they do not emerge neces-
sarily from it’’ (‘‘Causa Dei,’’ # 10, in Schriften, VI, 440). A divine decision is
needed to bring contingent things to existence, since in themselves they might
exist or not exist. In the Theodicy (1710) he unqualifiedly rejects Spinoza’s
position: ‘‘He teaches that all things exist by the necessity of the Divine nature,
without God making any choice. We will not waste our time here refuting an
opinion so bad, and indeed so inexplicable.’’∞≥ An even more baffling declara-
tion appears in an until 1948 unpublished fragment: ‘‘And certainly he [God]
wills freely, because outside his will no other reason can be given than the
will.’’∞∂ To Samuel Clarke, who objected to the idea of a necessary creation,
Leibniz responded that God’s creation implied no logical necessity. A different
universe or none at all would involve no contradiction, since there is no neces-
sity on the side of creation.∞∑ It is not hard to find conflicting tendencies in
Leibniz’s work, some of which may have been inspired by less than purely
theoretical motives. Yet I do not believe that he ever wrote anything that
would inevitably result in Spinoza’s conclusions.∞∏ What preserved him from
doing so was the Neoplatonic idea of participation that implies a real plurality
and a true contingency on the side of creation.∞π
Real problems, however, surround the relation between human freedom
and divine foreknowledge. In his Theodicy Leibniz considers the two theologi-
cal positions on foreknowledge and free will current in the early seventeenth
century. Bañez asserted that God’s foreknowledge also includes God’s foreor-
dinance of all future free acts (including the evil ones). Molina held that God
foresees those acts as mere possibilities before he decrees their actual existence
(Theodicy, # 42). Perceiving the heavily anthropomorphic implications of the
274 The Faith of the Philosophers

before and after in both positions, Leibniz repudiated the disjunction of either
free will and imperfect divine foreknowledge or perfect divine foreknowledge
and no real freedom. Instead, he argued that the knowledge of all possible
worlds enabled God to know a priori, i.e., independently of actual creation all
that was to occur in each of these possible worlds. This comprehensive vision
included possible divine decrees as well as possible human actions. Thus he
bypassed Molina’s highly criticized ‘‘middle science’’ (scientia media), without
compromising human freedom, as Bañez had done.∞∫ But in discussing the
relation between God’s foreknowledge and God’s decision, Leibniz himself
admits an equally anthropomorphic distinction between God’s ‘‘will’’ and
God’s ‘‘intellect.’’∞Ω In the Theodicy Leibniz uncritically adopts the anthropo-
morphic terms of his questioners and adversaries. Thus he distinguishes God’s
primitive antecedent will from the mediate will and the final and decisive will
(Theodicy, # 119). The idea of a ratiocinating God, first deciding on the princi-
ples, next balancing the various possibilities against each other, and finally
reaching a wise decision, is so unworthy of a thinker of Leibniz’s stature that
one cannot but wonder whether he intended it as a popular representation of
his own, quite different conception of divine rationality. If so, it betrayed the
fundamental principles of his philosophy!
The interminable discussions of free will, divine foreknowledge, and pre-
destination in the early modern age all stemmed from the seventeenth-century
notion of God’s creative act conceived exclusively in terms of efficient causal-
ity. As we saw, Leibniz supported a more intimate form of creaturely depen-
dence. In the Discourse on Metaphysics (# 32) he writes: ‘‘It appears clearly
that all other substances depend on God just as our thoughts emanate from
our own substances; that God is all in all and that he is intimately united to all
created things, in proportion, however, to their perfection; that it is he alone
who determines them from without by his influence, and if to act is to deter-
mine directly, it may be said in metaphysical language that God alone acts
upon me and he alone causes me to do good or ill, other substances contribut-
ing only because of his determinations.’’≤≠ God here is conceived as an inner
presence, a conception closer to Augustine and Malebranche than to Des-
cartes. Unfortunately, Leibniz did not consistently adhere to this more inti-
mate relation between Creator and creation, and he became constricted in
the same kind of anthropomorphic distinctions that misguided so much of
seventeenth-century theology.
It particularly confused his attempt to justify the existence of evil in a world
created by a good God. If God knows that the world He actually chose to
create was to contain a great deal of evil, why did He create it? Why not
another or none at all? Leibniz answers that a ‘‘moral’’ necessity drives God to
 The Faith of the Philosophers 275

create a world that includes a maximum of reality and variety compatible with
a minimum of evil. Since moral perfection is an essential attribute of God’s
nature, no other than the most perfect (or least imperfect) world could have
been created. Yet Leibniz gives that principle an unexpected twist when plac-
ing it above the need to remove moral evil from the world. ‘‘There is no reason
to suppose that God, for the sake of some lessening of moral evil, would
reverse the whole order of nature. . . . It is certain that God sets greater store by
a man than by a lion; nevertheless it can hardly be said with certainty that God
prefers a single man in all respects to the whole of lion-kind’’ (Theodicy,
# 118). This rationalist rule of perfection, like the Greek Ananke, stands above
God. ‘‘The eternal verities, objects of his [God’s] wisdom, are more inviolable
than the Styx’’ (Theodicy, # 121). If Leibniz, instead of subjecting the cosmic
order to an ideal law of reason, had given due weight to the intrinsic con-
tingency inherent in the very notion of creation, he could have dispensed with
the flawed idea of a ‘‘best possible world’’ altogether. Contingency voids any
world, good or bad, of internal necessity. This affects not only its existence,
but also its perfection. The very doctrine of creation implies that it is gra-
tuitous, an ‘‘unmerited grace.’’≤∞ Whether a better world is possible, given
the constraining and complex conditions of finitude, seems a meaningless
question.
The extraordinary significance the Enlightenment attached to theodicy re-
veals its moralistic slant. The real must be justified: it must earn our moral
approval before being deemed worthy of a divine Creator. Such an anthropo-
morphic defense of the Creator threatens in fact the very life of religion.
‘‘Theodicy, in contrast to the radical critique of religion, regards itself as an
intellectual operation that is friendly to religion, Hermann Lübbe writes,
nonetheless it is, so to speak, an heretical attempt to dismiss as a mere illusion
the condition of what a truly religious attitude requires, namely, a contingency
of life that surpasses the meaning of action.’’≤≤ Goodness had always been
regarded as a primary divine attribute. But after the modern view reduced it to
the quality of what a thing is worth to us, considerations of moral rightness
came to overrule the intrinsic contingency of all that is finite.
All contingency implies imperfection. But, according to Leibniz, within that
restriction the world must still be ‘‘the best possible’’ to be worthy of a perfect
Creator. He thereby transforms existential contingency into rational necessity.
The real question, however, remains whether the existence of evil does not
jeopardize the idea of divine perfection. Hume posed it better than Leibniz:
Does the presence of so much suffering and evil not conflict with the idea of a
perfect Creator under any circumstances? How could the answer be other
than affirmative, if the ultimate criterion for justifying the real is taken from
276 The Faith of the Philosophers

the moral scale of values? The answer to the question lies not in Leibniz’s
Theodicy, but in his Neoplatonic idea of the Good as a self-communicating
Absolute. If he had remained faithful to this original intuition, the ‘‘justifica-
tion’’ of the cosmos would have assumed a quite different form—as it had in
the Cambridge Platonists Cudworth and More who in other respects influ-
enced him so strongly. Rather than becoming bogged down in divine delibera-
tions ‘‘before’’ the creation of the world, Leibniz then would have referred to
the participation of all contingent being in the self-communicating principle of
the Good.≤≥
Leibniz never accepted the narrowly rationalist position of the deists who
restricted the knowledge of God to the conclusions of reason. Revelation
extends the range of truth as well as it confirms reason. ‘‘The ancient philoso-
phers knew very little of these important truths.’’ (Discourse on Metaphysics,
# 37). The principle of rationality demands only that the possibility of a
revelation be supported by adequate ‘‘motives of credibility.’’ In the Systema
Theologicum, an unpublished text written around 1686, Leibniz defines the
relation between reason and revelation as follows: ‘‘As right reason is the
natural interpreter of God, it is necessary that, before any other interpreters of
God be recognized, reason should be able to pronounce upon their authority;
but when they have once, so to speak, established their legitimate character,
reason itself must henceforward submit to faith.’’≤∂ Obviously Leibniz rejected
Bayle’s strange thesis that the truths of revelation may conflict with the truths
of reason. Indeed, to refute that position was one of his main motives for
writing the Theodicy. The principle of perfection requires both harmony and
continuity between all strata of truth, even those that surpass human knowl-
edge. At the end of his late essay on ‘‘Principles of Nature and Grace’’ (1714)
he still repeats what he had already asserted in his early Discourse on Meta-
physics, namely, that the realms of nature and grace meet on the level of
spirit.≤∑ A spiritual nature, he argues, naturally calls for an intimate relation
with God, which the mind is, however, unable to establish itself. The guiding
idea of a self-expressive divine goodness that attracts all ‘‘spirits’’ to itself,
shows again the Platonic direction of Leibniz’s thought.≤∏

APOLOGETICS: CLARKE AND BUTLER

Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), Newton’s philosophical disciple, advo-
cated a methodically less rigorous parallelism between reason and revelation.
He mixes a mechanistic view of creation with teleological speculations that
move so far beyond it as to jeopardize the coherence of his theory, and no-
where more so than in his discussion of what determines the order of the
universe. Was it God’s ‘‘arbitrary will’’ as nominalist theologians claimed, or
 The Faith of the Philosophers 277

was it a rule of reason to which the Creator himself owed obedience? Clarke
never decided the issue and it led to overt contradictions in his thought. His
theory exercised an enormous influence upon his contemporaries. Later gener-
ations, having read too many arguments for the existence of God and heard
too much about the ‘‘rationality’’ of their faith, brought him in for a severe
reassessment. Leslie Stephen condescendingly but not wholly unjustly por-
trays him as ‘‘a man of sufficient intellectual vigour to justify a very high
reputation, and [whose] faults are those which are less obvious to the eyes of
contemporaries than of posterity, . . . with perspicuity enough to avoid some of
the extravagances of the school to which he belonged, but not enough to
detect its fundamental fallacies.’’≤π Stephen pairs Clarke with Tindall. Unques-
tionably, Clarke accepted much of the deist’s thesis that the content of revela-
tion coincides with the principles of reason. But he steadfastly asserted the
need for a revelation, though in the light of his theory such a need appears
dubious.≤∫
Clarke’s position on natural theology did not become fully clear until his
later epistolary exchange with Leibniz.≤Ω Like Leibniz, he accepted the princi-
ple of sufficient reason. Yet as early as his first letter he interpreted it in a
manner that Leibniz found quite puzzling. ‘‘This sufficient reason is often the
simple or mere will of God’’ (L, III, 7, p. 47). For Clarke, the will of God is the
ultima ratio. While defending the miracles reported in the Bible, the main
target of the deist critique, Clarke had argued that no intrinsic necessity guides
‘‘the course of nature,’’ since matter is totally inert. Only ‘‘the arbitrary will
and pleasure of God exerting itself and acting upon Matter continually’’ deter-
mines all events in nature (Discourse, Prop. XIV, 3, p. 223). God’s miraculous
interventions, though deviating from the regular method of Providence, do
not conflict with it.
For Leibniz, such a view meant nothing less than the end of philosophical
theology, since it reduced the principle of sufficient reason ‘‘to the simple and
mere will of God.’’ The notion of sufficient reason thereby loses all philosophi-
cal significance: anything is possible for the arbitrary will of God (L, III, 7,
p. 54, also III, 17, p. 87). Even Clarke’s expression ‘‘the mere will’’ conflicts
with the very definition of the will as the ability to act on rational grounds. On
his side, Clarke felt that Leibniz’s interpretation of the principle of sufficient
reason left no need for God at all. ‘‘The notion of the world’s being a great
machine, going on without the interposition of God, as a clock continues to go
without the assistance of the clock-maker, is the notion of materialism and
fate, and tends to . . . exclude Providence and God’s government in reality out
of the world’’ (L, I, 4., p. 31). To Clarke, Leibniz’s principles of reason stand
above God. To Leibniz, Clarke’s rationality rests entirely on a divine decision.
278 The Faith of the Philosophers

Clarke was convinced that he had adequately met the principle of sufficient
reason when, in the so-called Demonstration of 1704 (later published as the
first part of the Discourse), he had deduced the existence of God from the
rational order of the world. ‘‘Whatever exists, has a cause, a reason, a ground
of its existence . . . either in the necessity of its own nature, and then it must
have been of itself eternal, or in the will of some other being and then that
other being must, at least in the order of nature and causality, have existed
before it’’ (I, Prop. I, p. 3). Thus, he concludes, something must have existed
from all eternity that is not subject to generation and corruption. One may
wonder why Clarke postulates an absolute Being beyond the series before
having properly excluded the possibility that it lays within the series.≥≠
In the ‘‘synthetic’’ part of his argument Clarke identifies this independent,
necessary being with God. Contrary to rationalist custom, he begins by admit-
ting his total ignorance of divine nature. Yet he feels that at least some of the
attributes follow from the proof of God’s existence. Thus eternity must be a
quality of a Being whose existence does not depend on any external cause (I,
Prop. V, p. 39). Moreover, what does not depend on anything cannot be
limited by anything; hence it must be infinite in time as well as in space. ‘‘The
infinity of the self-existent being must be an infinity of fullness as well of
immensity’’ (I, Prop. VI, p. 42). Clarke appears to be somewhat aware of the
problems connected with an infinity defined in terms of space and time be-
cause he writes: ‘‘As to the particular manner of his being infinite or every-
where present, in opposition to the manner of created things being present in
such finite places, this is as impossible for our finite understandings to compre-
hend or explain as it is for us to form an adequate idea of infinity’’ (I, Prop. VI,
p. 43). But if it is incomprehensible, why attribute it to God?
With the deduction of those divine attributes that identify the self-existent
being as a personal God, the argument becomes predictably even more contro-
versial. From the existence of intelligent creatures as well as from the wise
design of the universe as a whole, Clarke concludes that the being on which
they depend must be intelligent itself. We know what Hume thought of this
argument. But then we come to the point where Clarke definitively parts
company with Leibniz. God’s perfection requires ‘‘to do always what is best in
the whole’’ (I, Prop. IX, p. 59). Yet, he adds, nothing should prevent God from
acting arbitrarily in matters of indifference. In the end, however, everything
appears to become a matter of indifference for God and Clarke’s rationalism
breaks down altogether. ‘‘The nature, indeed, and relations, the proportions
and disproportions, the fitnesses and unfitnesses of things is only upon sup-
position that the things exist and that they exist in such a manner as they at
 The Faith of the Philosophers 279

present do. Now that things exist in such a manner as they exist at all, depends
entirely upon the arbitrary will and pleasure of God’’ (II, Prop. II, p. 95).
In the second Discourse, which deals with morality and immortality, Clarke
expresses his intention to prove the need for revelation. In fact, he assumes
that with the principles of morality engraved in human nature one may won-
der why mankind still needs a revelation. Why would a revealed system of
morality be more necessary than an inspired system of mathematics? Clarke
answers that revelation was needed to restore the authority of the natural law
after that law had gone into decline (II, Prop. I, p. 90). In his argument for
immortality he follows the same line. In the ordinary course of events the
observation of the natural law would be enforced by rewards and punish-
ments. Since the order of nature has been perverted, however, rewards and
punishments no longer follow virtue or vice in this life. Revelation promises a
restoration of the natural order in a future life. Yet Clarke had already proven
by Plato’s argument of the immateriality of the soul that the existence of a life
after death was essential to spiritual beings. He himself proves it and sees it
confirmed by the belief of ‘‘the most learned and thinking part of mankind’’
(II, Prop. IV, pp. 14–15). Then, why revelation? Once again he blames human
corruption (carelessness, prejudices, passions) for failing to recognize what all
are supposed to know. Hence, he concludes, even the most noble ancient
thinkers themselves felt the need for a divine revelation. As Socrates confesses
in the (inauthentic) Platonic dialogue Alcibiades: ‘‘It is absolutely necessary
that we wait with patience till such time as we can learn certainly how we
ought to behave ourselves both towards God and towards men’’ (II, Prop. VII,
p. 157).
This alleged expectation of the ancients at last provides the British apologist
with a somewhat more solid ground for distinguishing his natural theology
from that of ‘‘modern’’ (as opposed to ancient) deists who claim that philoso-
phy needs no revelation. In fact, he claims, the principles of modern deism are
themselves derived from the revelation it rejects. This explains why it succeeds
in formulating moral positions more precisely than the wisest men of antiquity
did. ‘‘ ’Tis one thing to see that those rules of life, which are beforehand plainly
and particularly laid before us, are perfectly agreeable to reason; and another
thing to find out those rules merely by the light of reason, without their having
first been otherwise made known’’ (II, Prop. VII, pp. 162–63). The discomfort
he experiences about the similarity of his own moral position to that of the
modern deists induces Clarke to accuse them unfairly of lacking a serious
regard for morality and of being ‘‘atheists at heart.’’ In fact, Clarke has merely
set the deist story in a different key—not reason, but the will of God, justifies
280 The Faith of the Philosophers

the natural order. He has thus converted the entire natural order into a super-
natural event and undermined the very purpose of philosophical theology.
But the originality of Clarke’s work lies elsewhere. At the end of his second
series of lectures he compares the prophecies of the Old Testament with events
allegedly fulfilling them in the Gospels. The often far-fetched linkage between
the two had become a favorite target of deist attacks. By introducing a different
notion of ‘‘fulfillment,’’ Clarke breaks new ground in exegesis. He increases the
challenge by refusing to take this ‘‘fulfillment’’ in a ‘‘typical, mystical, allegori-
cal, or enigmatical’’ sense. He considers it a literal, though ‘‘amplified,’’ one (II,
Prop. XIV, p. 237). Revelation, he argues, occurred ‘‘in different degrees and
proportions,’’ starting with a few tribes that ‘‘steadfastly adhered to the wor-
ship of the God of nature, the one God of the universe’’ (ibid., p. 238). Since the
prophets predicted an everlasting reign of truth and virtue, Clarke feels justi-
fied to interpret their prophecies as including more than a political liberation
from Assyrians, Egyptians, and Babylonians. The Spirit of God directed them
‘‘to be uttered in such words, as may even more properly and more justly be
applied to the great event which Providence had in view than to the intermedi-
ate event which God designed as only a pledge or earnest of the other’’ (ibid.,
p. 254). Taken in their entirety, the prophecies receive their ultimate fulfillment
in Christ. He vindicated the ‘‘direct’’ ones by his miracles. To the ‘‘indirect’’
ones, the ‘‘types, and figures; and allegorical manners of speaking’’ (ibid.,
p. 260) he gave a new meaning. In no way do they prove the truth of Christian
doctrine, but they confirm its continuity with the biblical revelation. ‘‘The
correspondence of types and antitypes, though they are not themselves proper
proofs of the truth of a doctrine, [yet they] may be very reasonable confirma-
tions of the foreknowledge of God; of the uniform view of Providence under
different dispensations; of the analogy, harmony, and agreement between the
Old Testament and the New’’ (ibid., p. 263). With his method of amplifying the
prophetic meaning of the Old Testament, Clarke abandoned rationalist con-
cordism altogether and returned to theology proper. Here the quality of his
hermeneutics, though marred by the literalism of his reading, far exceeded that
of his ‘‘proofs’’ of the agreement of revealed religion with natural theology.
Unfortunately only the latter, in which Clarke so closely approached the deism
he set out to combat is mostly remembered today.
Here precisely lies the difference between Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–
1752), whom John Henry Newman once called ‘‘the greatest name in the
Anglican Church,’’≥∞ and Clarke, with whom he seems to have so much in
common. Butler’s Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed (1736) had an
enduring impact upon religious thought in England. Like Clarke’s Discourse,
the Analogy was directed against deists yet centered around the same princi-
 The Faith of the Philosophers 281

ples that served as foundation to most deist systems of rational religion: the
immortality of the soul, the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, the
moral government of the world. In his view, these principles also form the core
of revealed religion. Christianity ‘‘teaches natural religion in its genuine sim-
plicity.’’≥≤ Yet as ‘‘an additional dispensation of Providence’’ it adds some
truths inaccessible to natural religion.
But Butler differs from Clarke in his conviction that conclusive proofs in
religious matters are impossible. His confidence in reason hardly exceeds that
of the skeptical Hume, his younger contemporary. The mind possess no ex-
haustive knowledge of anything in a constantly changing world. How, then,
could it attain a certain knowledge of God? All through the Analogy one hears
a note of skepticism that is more than theoretical. Butler obviously is ac-
quainted with the intellectual conflicts and existential anxiety of modern life.
Like Pascal, he has acutely experienced the sad discords of the universe. Con-
trary to the deists, this odd apologist confesses that we ignore the nature of this
world and, even more, the source from which it emerged. Butler’s great work,
then, is not a philosophical theology, such as Clarke wrote.
Rather than ‘‘proving’’ the truth of natural or of revealed religion, he shows
a parallelism between our observations of nature and the teachings of religion.
‘‘If there be an analogy or likeness between that system of things and dispensa-
tion of Providence, which experience together with reason informs us of, i.e.,
the known course of Nature, this is a presumption that they have both the
same author and cause’’ (Intro., 6). As an apologetic argument, this transition
from the like to the likely is weak. But Butler, fully aware of the weakness of
the allegedly ‘‘strong’’ arguments of reason, decided not to move beyond expe-
rience and this, as David Hume was to show, never yields more than proba-
bility. He argues that probability may still result in practical certainty. He
agrees with Locke that in matters ‘‘of great consequence’’ a person ought to be
prepared to admit lower probabilities. The moral element he introduces to
justify the transition from probability to the certainty required by faith re-
minds us of Pascal’s waiver: when facing the most momentous consequences
one is morally bound to make the safest choice, even though the evidence
supporting it is slight.
Butler’s notion of analogy differs from that of late Scholastic philosophy,
which derived an indirect knowledge of God from a direct knowledge of
nature. Such an inference from the manifest to the unmanifest presupposes
that the transcendent cause of the universe must in some way be similar to its
creation. For Butler, the mind possesses no philosophical knowledge of that
cause at all. Nothing is properly like God: the one, simple yet infinite source of
reality cannot be compared to the multiple, finite creatures. But if no similarity
282 The Faith of the Philosophers

exists between God and nature, no philosophical analogy may be assumed.

Revelation alone provides an adequate basis for comparing the manifest with
the unmanifest. Butler’s analogy moves not from the creature to God, but from
God (known through revelation and spiritual experience) to the creature.
Only after the mind accepts God’s revelation will it be able to discern some
traces of God’s presence in nature. These are signs rather than images of God.
Precisely because of the dissimilarity between the two terms, the analogical
correspondence cannot be more than symbolic. Revelation and religious expe-
rience alone are capable of interpreting the world as a symbol of the infinite.
Butler’s Analogy, then, is more a symbolic theology than a treatise of apolo-
getics: it assumes the very principle that apologetics ought to prove, namely,
that nature obviously, that is, by clear proofs, refers to a transcendent source.
In the second part of the Analogy, Butler applies his theory on the relation
between sign and signified to the relation between the New Testament and the
Hebrew Bible. He denies that the Old Testament literally predicts the events of
Christ’s life. Instead he refers to them as ‘‘the completion of prophecy,’’ in the
sense that if a long series of prophetic sayings applies to later events, one may
consider them ‘‘intended’’ (II, 7, 23). Obviously the author of a prophetic text
did not intend its later Christian interpretation. But the meaning of a text may
be extended beyond the intention of its author—a principle we accept for all
significant literary works.
Butler’s strategy in his polemics with the deists consists not in attacking the
content of their natural theology, but the absence of a valid foundation. The
deist argument for a natural analogy between a ‘‘creator’’ and the natural
world presupposes what it ought to prove, namely, the nature of a transcen-
dent creator. According to Butler, one must already be a believer to see the
analogy. Only after the idea of God has been given and accepted (from divine
revelation) is the believer in a position to discern the relation between the two
terms. Both in his distrust of purely logical proofs and in his stress on the need
for a revelation Butler stands closer to Pascal than to Clarke. His Analogy rests
on a spiritual vision that unites revealed faith with natural insight.

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION: KANT

The birth of the philosophy of religion marked a new stage in the philo-
sophical theology of the Enlightenment. Philosophy of religion differed from
natural theology in that it studied the phenomenon of religion in itself, inde-
pendently of the truth of its content and claims. Hume had initiated it in his
Natural History of Religion, but as we saw in the previous chapter, mainly for
critical purposes. His treatment had remained on a general level. Only primi-
tive religion and Christianity had received some particular attention. Philo-
 The Faith of the Philosophers 283

sophical theologians like Leibniz and Clarke had been satisfied to test the
Christian faith against the standards of reason. Their religious basis appeared
insufficient after a Jewish thinker, Moses Mendelssohn, showed that a very
different relation between religion and philosophy was possible. Though Ju-
daism, no more than Christianity, could claim to have added any speculative
‘‘truth’’ to natural theology, Mendelssohn argued, it had accomplished a
unique task among religions in preserving the great moral truths of reason
throughout the centuries.≥≥ Mendelssohn’s thesis about the role of Judaism
drew attention to the philosophical significance of those specifics that dis-
tinguish one religion from another. But not before the romantics (especially
Schelling) were the differences among particular faiths sufficiently recognized
for a genuine science of religion to be possible. In his Religion Within the
Limits of Reason Alone (1793), Kant laid the groundwork for it, though he
knew little about other religions. But, unlike other deists, he at least analyzed
specific Christian doctrines in detail.
It may appear as if philosophy thereby granted religion a more significant
place among its formal objects. In fact, the study of religion as a separate
subject—and a marginal one at that—marked a major step in the progressive
secularization of Western thought. What previously had belonged to the very
core of metaphysics now became relegated to the boundaries of philosophy. In
his triple Critique, Kant removed philosophical theology from the center of his
investigation. The idea of God, though indispensable as a philosophical ideal,
remained beyond philosophical ‘‘knowledge.’’ Philosophy may justify the use
of the notion of causality in the sciences, but that notion cannot be legitimately
applied to a transcendent reality. Only a reflection on the moral act postulates
the existence of God.
Nonetheless, Kant’s interest in religion, rooted in a profound personal con-
cern, had always been intense, and his knowledge of theology exceeded that of
most writers of the Enlightenment. Contrary to French deists who dismissed
any historical faith, Kant, a deist himself, considered the Christian faith indis-
pensable for leading the human race to what he considered the core of religion,
namely, morality. Religion, for him, constitutes an essential stage of the moral
consciousness. Nor is Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone the inferior
product of an aging mind, as his critics have too often claimed. Indeed, it dis-
plays qualities absent from his great trilogy, specifically, a sustained analysis of
theological sources. To be sure, in this late work Kant remains no less convinced
than in the earlier ones that religion is essentially a moral ideal that grants no
rational certainty about the real existence of its content. But at least Kant dis-
plays an intimate acquaintance with the doctrinal sources and he makes a seri-
ous effort to show how in the case of Christianity doctrine parallels morality.
284 The Faith of the Philosophers

Both the merits of his analysis and the limits of his interpretation appear in
the first book, which is entirely devoted to the dogma of original sin. The
whole discussion labors under an unresolved tension. On one side, Kant con-
firms the Lutheran doctrine that all humans are born corrupt. On the other, he
defends a notion of freedom according to which moral evil can result only
from a person’s free decision. ‘‘The source of evil . . . can lie only in a rule made
by the will for the use of its freedom.’’≥∂ Their sensuous nature entices humans
to attitudes and deeds that conflict with their spiritual nature. They prefer ease
and prosperity to obedience to the moral law. Through that fundamental
option the propensity to evil becomes itself immoral and the source of all
subsequent immoral acts. One still wonders how a corruption that begins so
early in life can be a free and definitive choice. Kant’s puzzling answer does
little to solve the problem. He claims that the propensity to evil, though freely
acquired, ‘‘has not been acquired in time’’ (Ak, VI, 25; Religion, Intro., p. 20).
It is a choice that may not be observable even to the person himself (Ak, VI, 20;
Religion, Intro., p. 16). But how can a human choice not be anchored in time?
And why should all humans make the wrong choice, even though all possess
an inclination toward virtue?
Although Kant’s attempt to force his philosophy into the Lutheran theology
of sin rarely succeeded and satisfied theologians no more than believers, the
tone of the discussion refreshingly differs from that of the deist treatises of the
time. Kant harbors no illusions concerning the innocence of primitives, nor
concerning the moral superiority of his own age. The primitive state of nature,
often praised as morally pure by his contemporaries, exceeds the civilized one
in brutal inhumanity. As we become civilized we merely refine expression of
our vices. But Kant warns, that refinement does not entail moral improve-
ment. ‘‘If we incline to the opinion that human nature can better be known in
the civilized state . . . we must listen to a long melancholy litany of indictments
against humanity: of secret falsity even in the closest friendship, so that a limit
upon trust in the mutual confidences of even the best friends is reckoned a
universal maxim of prudence in intercourse; of a propensity to hate him to
whom one is indebted, for which a benefactor must always be prepared . . .
and of many other vices still concealed under the appearance of virtue, to say
nothing of the vices of those who do not conceal them, for we are content to
call him good who is bad in a way common to all’’ (Ak, VI, 33; Religion, I, 3,
pp. 28–29). This is not the voice of the Enlightenment, but of Paul’s Epistle to
the Romans: ‘‘They are all under sin, there is none righteous, no, not one’’
(Romans 3:9–10, quoted in Religion, I, 3, p. 34).
In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant had established the principle of
moral autonomy: reason alone must be the source of moral legislation. God
 The Faith of the Philosophers 285

merely sanctions morality by balancing, in a future life, the merit of virtue with
the happiness it deserves. Now he argues that religion does more! While the
idea of a consummate good essentially belongs to the moral consciousness, its
reality does not. The moral postulate that good be rewarded does not insure
that virtue will actually be rewarded by happiness. The existence of this ulti-
mate fulfillment of our moral endeavors cannot be deduced from the moral
obligation itself (which by its very nature must remain indifferent to practical
consequences), though that obligation is a necessary condition for its realiza-
tion (Ak, VI, 8; Religion, Preface, pp. 6–7). Only the religious love of God can
assure the believer of the actual realization of the happiness postulated by the
moral disposition. The religious promise of realizing what the moral act
merely postulates induces Kant to reverse the axiom of his moral philosophy,
that religion complements morality. He now claims: ‘‘Morality leads to reli-
gion’’ (Ak, VI, 8; Religion, Preface, p. 7). The certainty religion conveys about
the realization of the moral postulate may, of course, not be more than subjec-
tive, since the content of religion itself is a transcendent ideal that cannot be
proven to exist.
Kant’s exclusive stress on the moral side of religion reflects a Pietist upbring-
ing that favored good works over intellectual insight. It is at odds with ‘‘ortho-
dox’’ Lutheran theology. In a letter written in March 28, 1776, Kant had
expressed his impatience with the traditional need of religious worship. ‘‘The
idea that religion is nothing but a kind of ingratiation and fawning before the
Highest Being—is an illusion which, whether based on dogmas or freed from
them, makes all moral thinking uncertain and ambiguous.’’≥∑ Genuine religion
imposes no ritual obligations, no cult, no prayer, no beliefs beyond the accep-
tance of a Creator and preserver of this world who will reward good and
punish evil in an afterlife. It does not exclude revelation, yet neither does
revelation add any content to the religion of reason.
Kant describes revealed religion as the larger circle within which the smaller
one of the religion of reason appears. The metaphor is misleading, for the
inner circle contains not only that minimum of religion, which reason by its
natural power may attain: it constitutes the entire essence of it. What lies
beyond the small circle possesses no more than an educational value. To re-
quire a divine revelation, over and above the self-explanation of reason,
amounts to demanding a divine authority beyond the one revealed in the
moral obligation itself. Churches ought to teach only what reason could in
principle attain through its own insight. Christian doctrines, rightly under-
stood, are objectively natural. Only for subjective, educational reasons have
they been revealed (Ak, VI, 156; Religion, IV, 1, p. 144).
The historical accounts of redemption belong exclusively to what he calls
286 The Faith of the Philosophers

‘‘the ecclesiastical faith.’’ This faith may be justified to the extent that it pre-
disposes the mind ‘‘to the unity of the universal church’’ (Ak, VI, 124; Reli-
gion, III, 2, p. 115). Its inclusiveness, unrestricted by culture or race, pre-
destined the Christian faith to become a universal faith. Yet when attempting
to sever its link with the exclusive religious faith of Israel by means of new
rituals, different prescriptions, and historical reinterpretations, the Church
betrayed its universal message: she recast Jesus’ message into a particular faith
not essentially different from others, not even from the Jewish faith against
which it attempted to define itself. For Kant, no fundamental opposition exists
between natural and revealed religion, but only between a religion in which
revelation constitutes a necessary addition to its moral content and one in
which it does not. He rejects both the supernaturalist view that takes revela-
tion to be intrinsically necessary, and the naturalist one that excludes revela-
tion altogether (Ak, VI, 154–55; Religion, IV, 1, p. 143). Still, he considers
revelation practically indispensable for awakening the mind to a truth that
otherwise would remain dormant.
In the age of reason, Christian revelation serves no other purpose but to
transmit the universal message to later generations. Meanwhile the unedu-
cated continue to receive that message in symbolic form. At the center of that
symbolic system stands the person of Jesus. Kant limits the historical message
of the New Testament to Jesus’ preaching, suffering, and death. ‘‘With that the
public record of his life ends,’’ he concludes (Ak, VI, 128; Religion, III, 2,
p. 119). But does this truncated account of the Gospel story legitimate Kant’s
dressing his moral message in the language of a ‘‘Christology’’? The idea of
the Church receives a similar reinterpretation. In one sense Kant considers a
Church indispensable. The fight against evil and the promotion of good, the
principal objective of Kantian religion, requires the combined efforts of many
as well as the social support that only a community can provide. But such an
ethical-religious society, unlike a juridical one, possesses no legal authority
over its members. The bond among them must, by its very nature, remain
internal. Kant refers to the communion of those who share a stable moral
disposition as the Church invisible. Its members recognize no authority but
that of the One who imposes ethical duties as divine commands. Still, com-
munication among them demands that this Church also assume a visible form
in institutions and laws. Unfortunately, the visible Church, especially the
Catholic one, is constantly tempted to impose its statutory rules as if they were
the laws of the moral kingdom (Ak, VI, 135; Religion, III, 2, p. 126 note).
‘‘Mysterious’’ for Kant is the divine cooperation in the moral act: the act
postulates a transcendent support, whereas the agent experiences it as entirely
 The Faith of the Philosophers 287

his own. The mystery stems from the fact that freedom is created and hence
dependent, and yet it remains fully autonomous. Kant concludes that the
principle of divine assistance is a postulate of moral striving, but a hazardous
idea to guide one’s practical life by. The right attitude consists in not counting
on God’s grace and, even less, attempting to acquire it by prayer or sacra-
ments. The mysterious gap between moral autonomy and dependence on
God, essential in Christian doctrine, widens with the so-called vicarious satis-
faction. Human efforts alone cannot overcome the propensity to evil once it
has taken possession of the human will. ‘‘This evil is radical, . . . inextirpable
by human powers’’ (Ak, VI, 37; Religion, I, 3, p. 32). To purify the moral
intention of a corrupt nature, then, requires a moral cleansing that, according
to Kant, can be accomplished only through the vicarious satisfaction of one
untouched by corruption. But how could such a satisfaction ever be compat-
ible with moral autonomy? No one else can assume responsibility for a free
agent’s deeds. For Kant, the Redeemer merely symbolizes the good principle
that we all carry in ourselves. Conversion, then, means that the sinner assumes
his guilt and atones for it as his own redeemer. Such a radical reinterpretation
of Christian dogma into a moral precept, in this and in other instances, sug-
gests that at the end of his explanation Kant rejoins the deism he appeared to
have abandoned in the beginning. He uses Christian doctrine as a symbolic
starting point for philosophical reflection on the moral act.
But what distinguishes him from other deists is that in his theory religion
intrinsically sanctions morality. The two pillars of his moral system, respect
for the moral law and for human beings, possess by their very nature a tran-
scendent dimension. One even might read Religion Within the Limits of Rea-
son as a treatise on the moral aspect of religion. As a philosophical interpreta-
tion of religion itself, however, Kant’s treatise fails to capture the uniqueness
of the experience. A few years after the appearance of Religion a young Ger-
man theologian directly attacked the one-sidedness of Kant’s position. In his
Discourses on Religion (1799) Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that religion
consists neither in a moral nor in an intellectual act but, as some British poets
had suggested, in a feeling. His thesis was, of course, as one-sided as Kant’s
moral one, and Schleiermacher himself abandoned it in his later works. But it
was sufficient to expose the deficiency of Kant’s interpretation.
Kant never wrote a theodicy, as Leibniz and Clarke had done. In a short
essay, ‘‘On the Impossibility of a Philosophical Theodicy,’’ he explains why it
would conflict with the principles of his moral philosophy.≥∏ It assumes that a
transcendent God is not beholden to human rules of conduct. Kant curtly
dismisses this argument. ‘‘An apology in which the justification is worse than
288 The Faith of the Philosophers

the charge requires no refutation.’’ If the Deity shares no moral judgment with
us, any attempt at a moral justification of its acts becomes futile. Even the
claim that God produces good out of evil raises more questions than it an-
swers. Why would the road to good have to lead through the detour of evil?
How could moral evil be a means to good? Similarly, the argument that the
laws of nature render suffering unavoidable begs the question. Why should
those laws rule the world? The complex and ingenious structure of the cosmos
inspires us to admire the creative wisdom (Kunstweisheit) of its Maker, while
our practical reason leaves no doubt about God’s moral wisdom. But the two
often seem to clash. The evidence of what divine power accomplishes in cre-
ation may suggest what divine morality and wisdom ought to be, but instead
of experiencing this wisdom, we see creation subject to a divine will that
commands rather than explains. We may only hope that justice will be satis-
fied. But we do not understand how so much suffering of innocents will ever be
vindicated. With Job, Kant definitively closes the subject to philosophical
speculation. ‘‘Theodicy, as has been shown, presents not so much a task for
speculative knowledge as a matter of faith.’’≥π
These three thinkers—Leibniz, Clarke, and Kant—argued from a Cartesian
perspective on reason. Leibniz and especially Clarke did so in order to restore
rational credibility to a faith that had suffered from rationalist attacks. They
attempted to return the idea of God to the center of rationality. Yet they
weakened that argument by detaching reason from what they proclaimed to
be its source. Leibniz appears to place reason above God when presenting it as
ruling and restricting God’s choice. With Clarke, the opposite occurs. The
principle of rationality itself loses its authority as it becomes overruled by an
inscrutable divine will. Perceiving the weakness of those rationalist attempts
to justify the idea of God, Kant declared its content to lie entirely beyond the
bounds of reason—in the realm of faith. So he shifted the focus back to
religion proper, in a way that allowed him to show the moral significance of
Christian doctrine without committing philosophy to its claim of absolute
truth. Its parallelism with the rules of morality granted it at least a relative one.
But in the process Kant loses sight of all other facets of religion, in particular
of its mystical quality. In his critical philosophy Kant exposed the flaws of
rationalism. In the First Critique Kant had promised to make room for faith.
In his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone he reduced faith to a symbol
of the moral attitude. We are not mistaken, then, in regarding Kant, the great
slayer of rationalist philosophies, still a reductionist in his interpretation of
religion. In this he differed from the philosophers I shall consider in the next
section.
 The Faith of the Philosophers 289

The Search for a Religious Philosophy

Three influential thinkers of the Enlightenment period, each in his own

way, attempted to restore the idea of an intrinsically religious philosophy and
to place it on a new footing. Malebranche, Berkeley, and Jacobi regarded the
sharp division between so-called theological issues and philosophical prob-
lems proper as inevitably resulting in a nonreligious philosophy. Truth does
not allow itself to be so divided. For them, the finite mind had to participate in
some way in the divine mind. Malebranche achieved this by denying second-
ary causality altogether; Berkeley by arguing that the mind receives its ideas
directly from God; Jacobi, by absorbing reason into faith. All abandoned the
fundamental modern principle that the human mind is the primary source of
truth.

MALEBRANCHE’S INTUITIONISM
Historians of philosophy continue to agree that Nicolas Malebranche
(1638–1715) was indeed a philosopher, even though his system was inspired
by a religious vision and based on theological assumptions. The secular Léon
Brunschvicg has called him ‘‘the typical and essential representative of a Chris-
tian philosophy,’’ while for the religious Henry Gouhier, his work articulated
the Augustinian idea of religiously enlightened reason. The genius of Mal-
ebranche consists in having understood that modern philosophy could not
fulfill the same function for theology that medieval and early modern philoso-
phy had. The Oratorian admired Augustine who had integrated philosophy
and theology within a single intellectual synthesis. But that synthesis no longer
corresponded to the scientific interpretation of the world. In Descartes’s sys-
tem he thought he had found what he needed: a philosophy that had assimi-
lated the new science yet remained open to an Augustinian vision. Such an
interpretation may appear surprising, since Descartes had made it a strict rule
of his philosophy to keep it separate from theology, whereas Malebranche
considered it his main task to reintegrate the two.
His contemporaries, both in France and in England, respected him, but few
were swayed by his argument. Of course, Malebranche’s peculiar talent for
making intellectual enemies did little to further the acceptance of his doctrine.
The publication of the anti-Jansenist Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce sparked
Arnauld’s smoldering hostility into flames never to be extinguished. The Jesuits
had considered the brave Oratorian a fellow soldier in the battle against Port
Royal until he took a firmly adversarial stand against their position in the
controversy concerning the admissibility of ancestor worship for Christian
290 The Faith of the Philosophers

converts in China. A protracted debate concerning pure love took a similarly

bad turn. A Benedictine monk appealed to Malebranche’s support of Fénelon’s
thesis, which he thought the Oratorian’s theory implied. The appeal un-
chained four increasingly polemical writings. In the end, even the superior
general of the combative mystic’s order turned against him. By that time
Church authority had long expressed its disapproval by placing most of his
works on the Index of Forbidden Books. None of these critiques and contro-
versies seem to have disturbed the pious Oratorian’s serenity or deflected him
from his course—least of all the judgment of the Roman congregation, which
he referred to as an ‘‘Italian’’ problem. He kept on writing and republishing his
‘‘forbidden’’ books with a sacred indifference worthy of the Quietists he so
arduously fought.
Today even studies sympathetic to Malebranche’s work end on a note of
disappointment about what most consider an inappropriate intrusion of the-
ology into philosophy. He failed because he attempted to restore the unity of
philosophy and revelation by means of Cartesian principles, whereas precisely
those principles had ruptured that unity. Malebranche himself held the Aristo-
telianism of medieval Christian thinkers chiefly responsible for the secular
character of philosophy. Descartes’s Christian thought, on the contrary, had
provided a solid foundation for modern science as well as a profoundly re-
ligious insight. Had not Cardinal Bérulle himself, the founder of the Oratoire
to which Malebranche belonged, considered young Descartes the bright new
hope for returning philosophy to its original Augustinian piety? Bérulle’s ex-
pectations turned out to be misplaced, but Descartes’s thought did indeed
possess an Augustinian quality. Nowhere more so than in the idea, central in
the third Meditation, that the mind knows the finite only against the backdrop
of infinity and hence that an implicit knowledge of God precedes all knowl-
edge of creation. This idea attracted the young Oratorian, who had recently
completed his seminary journey through the desert of late Scholasticism, to
Cartesian philosophy. Henceforth he regarded it as his vocation to develop a
new religious philosophy on Cartesian foundations.
From the Augustinian idea that God is directly present to the mind he drew
the conclusion (present also in Descartes) that the soul is closer to God than to
its own body. The solemn declaration made at the beginning of his first and
greatest work, De la Recherche de la Vérité (The Search for Truth) sets the
tone and defines the content of the following one thousand pages. ‘‘The hu-
man mind is by its nature situated, as it were, between its Creator and cor-
poreal creatures, for, according to Saint Augustine, there is nothing but God
above it and nothing but bodies below it. But as the mind’s position above all
material things does not prevent it from being joined to them and even de-
 The Faith of the Philosophers 291

pending in a way on a part of matter, so does the infinite distance between the
sovereign Being and the mind of man not prevent it from being immediately
joined to it in a very intimate way.’’≥∫ The end of creation, Bérulle, Mal-
ebranche’s spiritual master, had always insisted, is the glory of God: ‘‘God can
have no other special end for His actions than Himself’’ (RV III/II, 16, O.C., I,
442; Phil. Sel., p. 43). God would have had no sufficient reason for creating the
world if the mind had not been capable of contemplating God in creation. The
human mind, then, accomplishes the deepest purpose of creation, namely, to
render God present to creation in order that it may be present to God.≥Ω
Theological speculations of this sort leave no doubt about the radically
theocentric direction of the system: the glory of God defines its departure as
well as its intended terminus. Philosophy itself forms an integral part of a more
comprehensive theory of contemplation. In the controversy with Arnauld,
Malebranche insisted that he wrote only for the contemplatively inclined. ‘‘I
pride myself in speaking only to the méditatifs. I want to consult only the
interior Master, the eternal Word, and I will happily bear to pass thereby for a
visionary, the most ridiculous person who ever lived.’’∂≠ Malebranche’s style of
writing reflects the meditative bent of his mind. He contemplates ideas with
reverence as if they were sacred symbols and articulates them in a clear, classic
language. No philosopher wrote more elegant French than he did. Victor
Delbos, a superior writer himself, described his style as ‘‘harmonious, lumi-
nous, and deployed with ease, though not incapable of succinctness and pithy
formulations.’’∂∞
Malebranche’s mystical inspiration does not make his thought anti-rational.
Indeed, he embraces a more thorough rationalism than Descartes, whose vol-
untarism he rejects. To him, God cannot arbitrarily decide that two times two
equals four. Truth is rooted in the necessity of God’s essence, not in a divine
decree (RV, ‘‘Eclaircissement’’ 10, O.C., III, 136; Phil. Sel., p. 66). He intends
to bridge the modern gap between reason and faith by treating faith itself as a
participation in God’s eternal reason. Science and faith are complementary
ways leading to the same divine intelligibility. In both cases the mind draws
its derived light—its lumière illuminée—entirely from God’s lumière illumi-
nante.∂≤ Malebranche interpreted Augustine’s word literally: animam hu-
manam non illuminari nisi ab ipsa substantia divina (the human soul receives
no light but from the very substance of God) (RV III/II, 6, O.C., I, 442; Phil.
Sel., p. 43). To know is to know ideas in God.∂≥ Contrary to the always shifting
human understanding, reason, infinite in content, immutable, and necessary,
coincides with God’s own substance, for the infinite and universal being coin-
cides with infinite and universal reason. (RV, ‘‘Eclaircissement’’ 10, O.C., III,
130; Phil. Sel., p. 62). Reason is God’s self-expression, to which Scripture
292 The Faith of the Philosophers

refers as God’s eternal Word. Human knowledge partakes in that divine reason
in a twofold way: through the act of knowing and through its divine object.
Malebranche excludes all secondary causality from the intellect as well as
from the will. Descartes had already deprived inert matter of inherent causal
power. Malebranche extends that incapacity to the mind. The mind is no more
capable of creating clear and distinct ideas than the body is of self-caused
motion. It experiences only shifting ‘‘modifications,’’ barely distinct from the
body’s sensations. (In fact, Malebranche occasionally uses one term for the
other.) Ideas, however, are eternal and unchangeable. They are to be infused
from a source beyond the mind. The intellect is incapable of forming them (RV
III/II, 7, O.C., I, 452; Phil. Sel., p. 47): it can only ‘‘feel’’ its own modifications,
even as the body can only ‘‘sense’’ what affects it, without being able to inter-
pret the meaning. The necessary, eternal, immutable quality of ideas distin-
guishes them from the process of thinking proper, which is subjective and
changing. Thus the idea of extension, for instance, which Malebranche identi-
fies with bodiliness, has an infinite and necessary quality that surpasses the
finite mind. Whatever perception of extended objects I may have is merely a
modification of my mind. The idea of extension remains independent of that
modification, whether perceived or not perceived.∂∂ Descartes had argued that
there must be at least as much reality in the cause of an idea as in the idea itself
and had therefore concluded that the idea of the infinite must come directly
from God. Malebranche extended this argument to all ideas. All exceed the
power of the mind and, a fortiori, of sense impressions.
Yet in the Entretiens sur la Métaphysique he distinguishes the idea of the
absolutely infinite (which he, like Descartes, equates with God) from the in-
finity of other ideas. Only the former contains infinite perfections and so far
exceeds the power of the mind that the mind possesses no clear and distinct
idea of it (Entretiens II, O.C., XII, 52; Phil. Sel., p. 161). Other ideas partici-
pate in the idea of the infinite, but the absolutely infinite has no archetype. God
does not participate in the infinite. God is the infinite. Clearly, then, Mal-
ebranche introduces a distinction in the idea of the infinite that is absent from
Descartes’s third Meditation. Also, the relation between ideas and reality dif-
fers from Descartes’s theory. Descartes had linked ideas to reality by the au-
thority of a veracious God. Malebranche needed no such extrinsic divine
support: his epistemology recognizes no transition from ideas to reality, since
ideas are the true reality. He did not deny the existence of physical reality, but,
like Plato, he held that ideas constitute the true intelligible nature of that
reality.
But if sense impressions cannot be causes of ideas, what is their function in
the process of knowledge? Do they possess no cognitive qualities? We see
 The Faith of the Philosophers 293

colors, we hear sounds—and though they may not have the stability of ideas,
their immediate presence is unmistakable. Malebranche does not deny it. But,
for him, the ‘‘confused’’ feeling (sentiment) of seeing colors is totally distinct
from the idea of extension that corresponds to them. He equates sense percep-
tions with affective states: they are fully conscious, but they owe their origin
neither to a causal impact of physical objects, nor even to one initiated by the
mind itself. They fulfill an intermediary function in the perception of ideas.
Serving as prompters in the process of awareness, they open the mind to the
intelligible fullness of ideas (RV, ‘‘Eclaircissement’’ 10, O.C., III, 147; Phil.
Sel., p. 71). God alone touches the mind immediately and is the sole cause of
these lower stages of consciousness as well as of the higher one through which
we perceive ideas proper (ibid., p. 69). Malebranche explicitly rejects even the
tenuous link of cooperation between body and soul that Descartes had pre-
sented in a succession of tentative hypotheses (animal spirits, pineal gland,
etc.) (cf. Méditations, I, 9; O.C., X, 13). Instead, he opts for a radical occasion-
alism: sensations and ideas reach us at the occasion of bodily motions. God
alone is the cause of both.
Arnauld, a Cartesian himself as well as a theological follower of St. Au-
gustine, protested that Malebranche’s theory had strayed far from the princi-
ples of their common master. Descartes had indeed held that the immediate
objects of the mind are ideas, but that through them the mind knows the real
world.∂∑ For Malebranche, truth consists not in a correspondence of ideas
with reality, but in the coherence of those ideal relations which, prior to the
mind’s perception, have existed from all eternity. The very basis of Cartesian
certainty—the mind’s awareness of its own thought (cogito)—is subjective
and inadequate to render it immune against doubt. Malebranche anticipated
Kant’s objection that the indubitable certainty of my existence fails to inform
me about the nature of the ‘‘I’’ that exists. The mind’s destiny is not to know
itself, but to know the truth that is not in the mind (Méditations, I, 27; O.C.,
X, 18). His lengthy response to Arnauld’s attack in Des Vraies et des Fausses
Idées contains an eloquent passage on the mind’s ignorance of the self: ‘‘I
know of it only what an interior and confused feeling, sensibly and not intel-
ligibly, discloses. I am convinced that I am only darkness to myself, that my
substance remains by itself unintelligible to me, and that I shall never know
who I am until it pleases God to reveal to me the archetype on which I have
been modeled.’’∂∏ Paradoxically, the mind possesses a far greater clarity about
extension, the essence of bodiliness, than it has about itself. Only mathematics
and the physical sciences yield certain knowledge. Contrary to Descartes’s
claim, the mind possesses no clear and distinct idea of itself, though it has an
undeniable certainty of its existence. Nor does it have such an idea of God,
294 The Faith of the Philosophers

because the infinite exceeds all ideas (RV III/II, 7, O.C., I, 448–55; Phil. Sel.,
pp. 46–49). To the Christian Spinozist Mairan he wrote: ‘‘Not even the soul
has any knowledge of itself; it has only an inward awareness of itself and its
modifications. Being finite, it is even less capable of knowing the attributes of
infinity.’’∂π
Malebranche’s solution was not without theological difficulties, as the ideas
appeared to introduce real distinctions within God. He attempted to avoid this
conclusion in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Bonaventure. In God’s eter-
nal Word all divine perfections became manifest. Without being really distinct,
the divine perfections nevertheless contain the ideal principles of distinct real-
ities. In knowing those ideal archetypes the mind contemplates the divine
essence, but only to the extent that this essence relates to the created world (RV
III/II, 6, O.C., I, 439; Phil. Sel., p. 41). Malebranche denies that God ‘‘creates’’
ideas, as Descartes had implied when claiming that even mathematical truths
depend on God’s free decision. Ideas coincide with God’s own nature as it
relates to creation: they are uncreated and immutable.∂∫ Later Malebranche
qualified his position, with questionable consistency, when admitting that fu-
ture events ‘‘and several other ideas depend on the will of God and even of the
human will, as they are not eternal truths’’ (Méditations, III, 16; O.C., X, 31).
Remarkably, Malebranche combines his religious rationalism with a nega-
tive theology that uncompromisingly denies the mind any knowledge of God.
We know in God, but we do not know God. ‘‘There is a difference between
seeing the essence of God and seeing the essence of things in God. For though
one sees immediately the substance of God when one sees the essence or the
ideas of things in God, one sees God exclusively as He relates to the creatures;
one sees God’s perfections merely insofar as they represent what is other than
God’’ (Conversations chrétiennes III, O.C., IV, 63). Again: ‘‘When we see,
directly and immediately, the ideas, we do not truly see God, the infinitely
perfect being, but the essence of the creatures’’ (ibid., pp. 79–80). Male-
branche resisted any kind of anthropomorphic conception of God. Even the
traditional reference to God as spirit (based in Scripture) may be inadequate,
except in the relative sense that spirit belongs to a higher class of being than
body. Who knows if there may not exist a more perfect form of being (RV
III/II, 9, O.C., I, 473)? As decisively as Spinoza, Malebranche rejected the
distinction between intellect and will in God. It would be wrong then to equate
Malebranche’s ontologism with an intuitive knowledge of God. The intuitive
vision of God remains reserved to the saints and to the blessed. God is indeed
immediately present to the mind, but the mind does not know God directly.
We know God only through revelation and the feeling of attraction that effica-
cious grace bestows on the elect. Through its natural powers the mind knows
 The Faith of the Philosophers 295

the infinite as the implicit presupposition of all finite knowledge. To explicate

this implicit presence constitutes ‘‘the loftiest and most beautiful proof of
God’s existence’’ (RV III/II, 6, O.C., I, 441; Phil. Sel., p. 42). Malebranche
had, of course, read this argument in Descartes’s third Meditation, but he
carried it further by positing that this infinity, as the universal good that fulfills
all desires, including the desire to know, also constitutes the mind’s ultimate
end. God is directly present to the mind as the unity that precedes all multi-
plicity and as the universal good that makes particular goods desirable.
At an early date some had detected a resemblance between Malebranche’s
ideas and those of that other unorthodox Cartesian, Spinoza. At the end of
his life, he still had to suffer the unwelcome admiration of one Dortous de
Mairan, who insisted that the Oratorian’s principles basically coincided with
those of the Dutch ‘‘pantheist.’’ How, Mairan wondered, could Malebranche
hope to escape Spinoza’s conclusions after having accepted his principles?
Specifically, for Malebranche as for Spinoza, all causal power remained within
a single substance. God alone is responsible for all physical motion and acts as
sole cause of every human feeling and action. But if there is only one cause,
there can be only one substance. Malebranche defended his position as well as
he could, considering the cards he had dealt himself. The assumption of multi-
ple causes, he claims, derives from an ancient philosophy tainted by polythe-
ism. When thinking of causes, ‘‘pagan’’ philosophers commonly assumed that
a divine power inhabits them. In fact, a consistent monotheism should have
abandoned this opinion long ago. ‘‘Il n’y qu’une vraie cause, parce qu’il n’y a
qu’un vrai Dieu . . . toutes les causes naturelles ne sont point de véritables
causes, mais seulement des causes occasionnelles’’ (RV VI/II, 3, O.C., II, 312).
Malebranche’s conception of God acting as sole cause undermines the very
notion of causality. If, as he asserts, a genuine cause is one of which the mind
perceives the effect as necessarily linked to a cause, only the dependence of the
creature on the Creator qualifies for it. Anticipating Hume, Malebranche
showed that the phenomenon of constant succession was insufficient to justify
this necessary link. ‘‘Because a ball does not have the power to move itself,
they should not judge that a ball in motion is the true and principal cause of
the movement of the ball it finds in its path. They can judge only that the
collision of the two balls is the occasion for the Author of all motion in matter
to carry out the decree of His will, which is the universal cause of all things’’
(RV III/II, 3, O.C., I, 428; Phil. Sel., p. 35; also RV VI/II, 3, O.C., II, 313; Phil.
Sel., p. 94). The first ball may indeed be called the ‘‘natural’’ cause of the
second one’s motion, but the natural is only an ‘‘occasional’’ cause. Mal-
ebranche thus initiated the deconstruction of causality that Hume was to bring
to completion.
296 The Faith of the Philosophers

Can freedom survive a theory of occasional causality? Malebranche firmly

believed it can. The will, no less than the intellect, becomes an effective agent
only as God directly moves it. God propels the will irresistibly toward the
good and He constitutes that universal good from which all particular goods
derive. But the will itself determines to which particular good the divine im-
pact will move it. ‘‘The will cannot arrest the [divine] impression, but it may
direct its impulse in any sense it pleases and thereby cause the entire disorder
we find in its inclinations and in all the miseries that are the necessary and
certain results of sin’’ (RV I/I, 1, § 2, O.C., I, 46; Phil. Sel., p. 11 [changed]; cf.
also ‘‘Eclaircissement’’ 15, O.C., III, 225; Phil. Sel., p. 111). Malebranche
distinguishes the will, the divinely induced, irresistible yet indeterminate in-
clination toward the good in general, from freedom, i.e., the mind’s capacity to
direct the divine impulse toward a particular good. To attain a particular
good, the mind must choose from a number of options, none of which is
absolutely compelling (TNG, III, 3, O.C., V, 118–19; Phil. Sel., p. 270).
The more comprehensive the choice, the greater the freedom. The totally
free person understands that God is the only true good (TNG, III, 8–9, O.C.,
V, 122; Phil. Sel., pp. 272–73). The more the desire of a particular good
excludes others, the less the will is free. Though no particular choice literally
compels the mind, passions may almost irresistibly diminish the agent’s free
choice. Appealing to Augustine’s notion of the Fall, Malebranche asserts that
no one is wholly free (RV II/I, 7, O.C., I, 248). But can we ever claim to be
free? If God causes all movements, not only the ones affecting the physical
world, but also the spiritual ones, how can the mind pretend to make free
choices? Malebranche never satisfactorily answered the question. Nonetheless
he regarded the certainty of freedom as immediate and no less infallible than
the mind’s awareness of its own existence. Yet no more than the cogito can
that awareness be translated into a clear and distinct idea. The process by
which we convert a motive into a determining choice remains a dark, confused
feeling of simultaneously acting and being acted upon. The necessity to pre-
serve the freedom of the will forces Malebranche to restrict his thesis that God
is the sole cause to the real changes in the world. Decisions are ours, but their
real effects depend on the general physical laws by which God rules the uni-
verse. The moral quality of an act comes thereby to depend entirely on the
intention, not on its effects.∂Ω Kant was to develop this intentional morality
into a coherent theory.
A theological dispute forced Malebranche to qualify his idea of freedom
even further. His lifelong antagonist Arnauld had accused him of abandoning
Augustine’s doctrine when he denied that any external motive or power, in-
cluding the impulse of God’s grace, could compel the soul and eliminate the
 The Faith of the Philosophers 297

freedom of choice. Malebranche’s position on predestination, in agreement

with his theory of free will, had been the opposite of Arnauld’s. God saves only
by general principles, not by personal election or private grace. Salvation must
occur in accordance with divine perfection, ‘‘par les voies les plus simples,’’
that is, by universal laws (TNG, III, p. 22, O.C., V, 133). Initially Male-
branche neither accepted a particular Providence nor did he consider God’s
prevenient grace irresistible, as Arnauld and other Jansenists did. If God’s
prevenient grace had forced Adam to pursue the true good, he would never
have sinned (TNG, III, 25, O.C., V, 135)! Nevertheless, stung by Arnauld’s
critique, he came to distinguish la grâce de lumière, the prevenient grace that
enables all humans to recognize their true good, from la grâce du sentiment,
the grace that attracts them to the godlike life.∑≠ The grace of light alone leaves
the will cold with respect to the good. The grace of feeling, granted to various
persons in varying degrees, moves it toward the good and thus directly affects
the will (TNG, III, p. 18, O.C., V, 131). Salvation then depends on the ‘‘saintly
concupiscence’’ that enables the soul to counteract the sinful concupiscence of
the Fall. Malebranche’s admission of degrees in the efficacy of grace con-
stituted a major concession to Arnauld and implied at least a partial accep-
tance of the idea of a particular Providence.∑∞ But the fact that Malebranche
allowed the philosophical question of freedom to be determined by a theologi-
cal controversy of his day shows the fragility of his synthesis of science, philos-
ophy, and theology. His conclusions satisfied neither philosophers nor theolo-
gians—whether orthodox, Jansenist, or Quietist.
The link Malebranche forged between creation and general Providence gen-
erated even more controversy. God might have created a more perfect world,
he claims, but to do so would have required abandoning the law of simplicity,
which the nature of divine perfection compels God to observe. The laws of
nature, in fact the mechanical laws of motion, thereby come to express the
immutable wisdom of God’s eternal Word (TNG, I, 13–14, O.C., V, 28–29;
Phil. Sel., p. 260). God has no choice but to follow his volontés génerales,
regardless of the particular consequences. Malebranche concedes that these
‘‘simple ways’’ have resulted in an enormous amount of disorder and suffering.
Yet from the perspective of the highest order, they proved inevitable. ‘‘If God
in equally simple ways could have created a more perfect world, He would not
have established laws resulting in so many monsters. But it would have been
unworthy of his wisdom to multiply his decisions [ses volontés], merely to
prevent particular disorders’’ (TNG, I, 22, O.C., V, 35; Phil. Sel., p. 263
[changed]). This narrows Leibniz’s idea of the most perfect world down to the
simplest possible one.
Malebranche is willing to carry his conception of divine simplicity to its
298 The Faith of the Philosophers

ultimate consequences. God loves all his works and He wants to save all
humans, yet, he claims, God allowed ‘‘an infinite number of people to perish
during the centuries of error [i.e., the time before Christ]’’ (‘‘Eclaircissement’’
15, O.C., III, 220; Phil. Sel., p. 108). From the fact that God acts through the
simplest ways and follows a universal order, our author concludes that God,
though granting grace to all, often gives insufficient grace to be effective,
which therefore remains useless for the conversion of its recipients (ibid.). The
universal order of nature dominates God’s creation as the highest law. To
avoid subordinating God to the order of nature Malebranche interpreted that
order as coinciding with ‘‘the relations of perfection among his attributes and
among the ideas enclosed in God’s substance’’ (Entretiens VIII, O.C., XII,
191). The restriction of divine activity to general laws precludes the possibility
of miracles, as Arnauld had been quick to point out. Malebranche attempted
to circumvent the problem by compromising. The universal order can be
maintained even while exceptions to the laws of nature occur. The admission
again forces Malebranche to reintroduce the idea of a particular Providence.
‘‘I have repeatedly claimed that God always acted by this sort of [particular]
will whenever the order required it and often even when the order permitted it,
because the immutable order is the inviolable law of the divine decisions
[volontés].’’ He had, indeed, asserted in the Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce
that only the general order of creation fully coincides with God’s divine Word
and bears no exceptions, while God occasionally dispenses with the laws of
nature when the higher order demands it (TNG, I, 20, O.C., V, 33; Phil. Sel.,
p. 262; also, the long ‘‘Eclaircissement’’ 15, later added to the Recherche de la
Vérité, O.C., III, 223; Phil. Sel., p. 110). By moving the immutability of order
to a level above nature, Malebranche may have answered his opponent, but at
the price of weakening the concept of les voies les plus simples to the point of
meaninglessness. The ‘‘universal order’’ now seems to consist of whatever
occurs. What does the term ‘‘universal law’’ mean when applied to an ‘‘order’’
which we fail to understand altogether? Moreover, the reference to the laws of
nature as lois arbitraires jeopardizes his overarching theory that the ideas of
general laws participate in God’s very nature.
Malebranche must have perceived the difficulty himself for in a later ‘‘final’’
Eclaircissement he interprets miracles as attuned to the general laws of nature.
They may be part of a system of laws more comprehensive (but still natural)
than the mechanistic laws of motion. Miracles, then, remain exceptional as
measured by ordinary events, but they no longer need to conflict with the
general laws of nature (known and unknown) as he had claimed before. This
meandering argument about the laws of nature has removed the voies de
simplicité from the area of reason altogether. As a Cartesian philosopher Mal-
 The Faith of the Philosophers 299

ebranche conceives of nature entirely in mechanistic concepts. As a religious

thinker he wanted to abide by the interpretation of Catholic theology. His
rationalism undermines his mysticism and his mysticism corrodes the ra-
tionality of his system. Malebranche writes his best pages when discussing
either science or mystical theology without mixing one with the other. He was
a respected scientist and an excellent spiritual writer.∑≤ But his attempt to
achieve a synthesis of modern philosophy with theology failed. His mechanis-
tic concept of causality proved wholly inadequate for expressing the relation
between Creator and creature: it reduced that relation to one of extrinsic
dependence. Malebranche, the mystical thinker, attempted to restore the inti-
mate divine presence excluded by a purely efficient causality by eliminating
secondary causality altogether. Finite ‘‘causes’’ were no more than occasions.
Yet to escape Spinoza’s pantheism, Malebranche had to grant finite substances
some independence and even some causal impetus. He did so by converting
the entire finite universe into a system of signals that, without any power of its
own, conditioned God’s exclusive action. He thought he thereby saved crea-
turely independence as well as divine presence. The discussion of free will has
shown that his solution never attained full consistency. The only way the single
cause theory could be maintained was by adopting Spinoza’s thesis of a single
substance. This he found unacceptable. So he adopted a compromise: God re-
mains ontologically distinct from creation but operationally coincides with it.

BERKELEY’S PLATONISM
In Britain the most significant trend in religious philosophy (as distinct
from philosophical theology) remained within the empirical tradition. Yet its
empiricism fundamentally differed from Locke’s. Not sensations lie at the
roots of consciousness, but the experience of states of mind. This ‘‘radical’’
empiricism had its remote ancestry in Plato’s theory of Ideas and its immediate
one in Calvin’s doctrine of self-knowledge as implying knowledge of God. A
group of Anglican divines, fellows of Cambridge’s Calvinist Emmanuel Col-
lege, developed those ideas into the fundamental principles of a new religious
philosophy. The fruitfulness of their insights is reflected in the variety of think-
ers they influenced. A continuous line stretches from the Cambridge Plato-
nists—Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith, Ralph Cudworth, and Henry More
(he of Christ’s College)—to bishops Berkeley and Butler and, via the latter, to
John Henry Newman. Berkeley followed their Neoplatonic empiricism de-
spite his linguistic nominalism; Butler often appears to walk in Clarke’s foot-
steps, but his basic inspiration is Platonic; Newman combined a Platonic intu-
itionism with a mild philosophical skepticism.
The Cambridge Platonists wrote against the ‘‘atheism’’ of their age, for
300 The Faith of the Philosophers

which they held Thomas Hobbes mainly responsible. Consciousness, they

claimed, did not start from sensations gradually developed into ideas, but
from an implicit intuition of God. Cudworth attempted to prove this by inves-
tigating the religious ideas of the ancient world. Their rampant polytheism
hid, in fact, a belief in one God with many attributes. Descartes’s and Hobbes’s
mechanistic notion of causality had severed modern thought from the richer
founts of experience. The original, more comprehensive notion of divine
causality had been formal—penetrating the very being of creatures—rather
than efficient. The mystically oriented Cambridge divines intended to restore
that more intimate causal relation between God and the soul. Berkeley devel-
oped this theological empiricism into an idealist philosophy.
A comparison with Malebranche seems inevitable. Both assume that ideas
have their origin in God. For Malebranche, they remain in God, even while
referring to real objects. For Berkeley, ideas, though immanent in God, receive
an independent existence within the human mind. Nor do they refer to extra-
mental objects: they themselves are the objects. Ideas, then, have an ectypal as
well as an archetypal existence in God. In the Philosophical Commentaries
(written 1707–8; published 1871), Berkeley sharply contrasts the indepen-
dence of the mind’s ideas and of the human will with what he takes to be
Malebranche’s position. ‘‘We move our legs ourselves. ’Tis we that will their
movement. Herein I differ from Malebranche.’’∑≥ They most fundamentally
differ, however, on Malebranche’s theory of universal, ‘‘abstract’’ ideas, which
the bishop contemptuously rejects as ‘‘enthusiasm.’’∑∂
As I mentioned, Berkeley, despite his Platonism, persistently held on to a
nominalist theory of language. Charles Peirce remarked on this odd combina-
tion of Platonic idealism with a theory that had mostly been linked to a sensa-
tionalist theory of knowledge: ‘‘Berkeley is an admirable illustration of this
national (British) character, as well as of that strange union of nominalism
with Platonism, which has repeatedly appeared in history, and has been a
stumbling block to the historians of philosophy.’’∑∑ Berkeley combines the two
by declaring words and universal concepts no more than signs of reality; while
reality itself is wholly ideal.∑∏
Everyone remembers Berkeley’s paradoxical principle, esse est percipi. If he
had limited it to the mere phenomena of cognition, it would be hard to quarrel
with. Kant put the same point more clearly but no less radically when he
declared things in themselves to be unknowable. Yet when Berkeley concluded
from the mental character of perception to the nonexistence of the physical, he
took, of course, a logical leap. Moreover, he steered the entire discussion in the
wrong direction by changing the issue from a distinction between the phe-
nomenal and the real to one between the material and the immaterial. I shall
 The Faith of the Philosophers 301

not enter into the epistemological questions discussed in the early Principles of
Human Knowledge (1710) and the Three Dialogues (1713) but restrict my
comments to Alciphron (1732) and Siris (1744), in which Berkeley deals di-
rectly with the religious issues that occupy us in this chapter. The elegantly
written dialogue Alciphron approaches the literary quality of Plato’s philo-
sophical dramatizations by presenting real-life persons with particular preju-
dices, emotions, and temperaments. An easy conversation in the leisurely set-
ting of an English country home drifts toward the problems confronting
religion. What in a rationalist, freethinking age could still critically justify a
faith in what lies beyond the boundaries of reason? When Alciphron, the
agnostic to whom Berkeley refers as the ‘‘minute philosopher,’’ claims that no
metaphysical argument has ever persuaded him, and that only a direct sensible
perception of God’s presence would do so (‘‘Nothing so much convinces me of
the existence of another person as his speaking to me’’), Euphranor, represent-
ing Berkeley’s position, agrees.∑π
Yet sense perceptions never represent reality. Even the perception of a divine
voice could not do so. In his early (1709) Theory of Vision Berkeley had shown
the insufficience of visual perceptions to convey the real distance or size of an
object seen. The eye, he claims, perceives nothing but light and colors. From
this questionably sensationalistic interpretation of vision he concludes that
our perceptions have no direct causal link with the ideas of distance, dimen-
sion, and figure. They function merely as signs of ideas, ‘‘not by similitude, nor
yet by inference of necessary connection.’’∑∫ The indirectness of all perceptions
with respect to the reality they signify justifies Euphranor’s conclusion that the
absence of any single perception (such as that of a voice from the sky) by no
means rules out the idea of what is usually signified by it. Yet with respect to
the knowledge of God, the subject of the dialogue, there is a further complica-
tion, since the human mind possesses no idea of God. Its ideas are only of the
physical world. What then justifies a belief in a reality of which we have
neither a perceptual sign nor an idea?
Berkeley answers that our perceptions may indirectly suggest the idea of a
transcendent power. Our perceptions of the world follow a steady pattern of
succession. Whenever water reaches a temperature of 100 centigrades, it boils.
The fact that it always does so makes it predictable, even though no sense
impression of causality links heat to boiling. Only ideas convert the succession
into a rule of causality.∑Ω The constancy and coherence of the world order
suggest that a single agent must direct this infinite variety of phenomena. ‘‘Will
it not then follow, Euphranor asks his freethinking friend, that this vastly
great, or infinite power and wisdom must be supposed in one and the same
Agent, Spirit, or Mind; and that we have at least as clear, full, and immediate
302 The Faith of the Philosophers

certainty of the being of this infinitely wise and powerful Spirit, as of anyone
human soul besides our own?’’ (Alciphron, IV, 5). The ‘‘minute’’ philosopher
demurs at this hasty conclusion. But, Euphranor insists, the same evidence
with which other signs suggest the existence of a never directly perceived
thinking principle, accompanies our idea of the order and harmony of the
universe.
Even if we concede this, what entitles us to call this coordinating agent
‘‘God’’? Once the mind on the basis of its ideas of the world has concluded to
the existence of an active agent, a further reflection on the order and harmony
of one’s ideas as well as of those of other agents induces the notion (not the
idea!) of a superagent endowed with intellectual powers and free of imperfec-
tions.∏≠ The notion of God, then, according to Berkeley, is the outcome of a
mental process that occurs in several stages. It starts with sensible appear-
ances. At the occasion of these appearances the mind receives ideas from a
philosophically unknown source, which converts the perceived phenomena
into signs of ideal objects. By means of another set of signs, different from the
natural signs of physical phenomena, words, ciphers, and other symbolic char-
acters, the mind establishes relations among these ideas.∏∞ It thus construes
these ideas into a coherent world picture. By a ‘‘skillful management of [those]
signs’’ (Alciphron, VII, 11), the mind surpasses both the realm of ideas and
concludes to the existence of a Being to which no ideas correspond. The notion
of God, then, is not deduced from a perception of a regular succession of
phenomena, but from the fact that the system of signs itself requires at every
moment a coordinating intelligent Agent.
In his last great work, Siris, all too often dismissed because of the large part
devoted to the cure-all qualities of tar-water, Berkeley describes the nature of
this final metaphysical stage of thought: ‘‘If proceeding still in his analysis and
inquiry, he [the ‘‘curious inquirer’’] ascends from the sensible into the intellec-
tual world, and beholds things in a new light and a new order, he will then
change his system, and perceive that what he took for [physical] substances
and causes are but fleeting shadows; that the mind contains all, and is to all
created beings the source of unity and identity, harmony and order, existence
and stability.’’∏≤ The term ‘‘mind,’’ in analogy with the Neoplatonic nous,
stands here for the transcendent Mind, source of the human mind and of all
reality. With the Rhineland and Flemish mystics, Berkeley interprets the Pla-
tonic principle that ‘‘the nous is the place of all forms’’ (Siris, # 328) to mean
that God, the ideal source of all things, is inmost present to them (# 275). ‘‘It is
the opinion of Plato and his followers that in the soul of man, prior and
superior to intellect, there is somewhat of a higher nature, by virtue of which
we are one; and that by means of our one or unit, we are most closely joined to
 The Faith of the Philosophers 303

the Deity. And as by our intellect we touch the divine Intellect, even so by our
to hen or unit, the very flower of our essence, as Proclus expresses it, we touch
the first One’’ (# 345). This is, indeed, the language of Proclus and of Eckhart,
not of Locke. Textbooks continue to rank Berkeley with empiricists such as
Locke and Hume because for him also all mental activity begins with sense
perception. But perception is never a cause of ideas—only an occasion. The
true reality, for him as for all Platonists, is ideal.
Even to classify Berkeley’s philosophy as a subjective idealism is inadequate.
For reality does not depend only on my perception. He clearly affirms that
objects continue to exist even when no one perceives them: God perceives
them. This reply has been called a betrayal of the principle esse est percipi that
restricts reality to sense perception. Yet for Berkeley, God’s ‘‘perception’’ of
things is, in fact, the real source of their being. The term ‘‘perception’’ as
applied to God may be clumsy, not to say faulty. Here it merely serves to
support the principle, common to religious Platonists, that all reality exists
ideally in God. Berkeley draws more radical conclusions from this principle
than earlier Christian Platonists had done. In his interpretation, finite reality
never leaves this ideal existence in God: it constitutes the very core of its
nature.∏≥ Reality exists only in God and God allows the human mind to ob-
serve this intradivine presence by granting it ‘‘ideas.’’ If the real were ever to
move out of its ideal inexistence in God, creation, according to Berkeley,
would become independent of the Creator.
Berkeley’s theory of the creature’s permanent inexistence in God evoked a
suspicion of pantheism. He appears to have foreseen the charge and insists
that his view of the divine mind as immanent in creation is no more pantheistic
than ancient Egyptian religion or Pythagorean or Neoplatonic thought were
(Siris, # 300). ‘‘Whether the nous be abstracted from the sensible world, and
considered by itself, as distinct from, and presiding on, the created system; or
whether the whole universe, including mind together with the mundane body,
is conceived to be God, and the creatures to be partial manifestations of the
divine essence; there is no atheism [meaning: pantheism] in either case, what-
ever misconceptions there may be, so long as mind or intellect is understood to
preside over, govern, and conduct, the whole frame of things’’ (Siris, # 326).
Above all, Berkeley wanted to avoid a naturalism he considered inevitable if
the creature’s dependence on God becomes reduced to the extrinsic link of
efficient causality. With Christian Platonists, especially Ralph Cudworth (to
whom he repeatedly refers), he holds that all things exist in God, which for
him means that they only exist as ideas. The bishop thereby reasserted what
for Plato and Aristotle had been ‘‘formal causality.’’ If philosophy was to
avoid skepticism and atheism, in his opinion, it had to admit a more intimate
304 The Faith of the Philosophers

relation between finite reality and its transcendent ground than efficient cau-
sality warranted. He attempted to do so by suppressing the concept of matter
that, for him, symbolized the separation between Creator and creature, and he
justified this radical move on the ground of the ideal nature of the cognitive
act. If knowledge was ideal, its object also had to be ideal.
Berkeley went further than other empiricists in claiming that the process of
knowledge points beyond the data of perception and even the ideas occa-
sioned by them, toward an ideal absolute. He therefrom illogically and, for his
thesis, needlessly, concluded that things possess no physical existence what-
ever. Instead of supporting his theological purpose this egocentric fallacy un-
dermined it. The real purposes of Berkeley’s idealism consisted in showing that
the ultimate reality of all things resides in an unknown God, not in an all-
comprehensive Spirit who could be grasped by the human mind. He remained
essentially a negative theologian in the Platonic-Christian tradition. No anal-
ogy, no image, no idea even, links human knowledge directly to God.

Jacobi’s Philosophical Faith

I doubt whether the eighteenth century knew a more elusive thinker than
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1762–1814). A central figure of the German En-
lightenment; personally acquainted with Lessing, Mendelssohn, Wieland, and
Kant; sympathetic to Spinoza’s and Hume’s philosophies, he nevertheless op-
posed most of what the Enlightenment stood for. Despite his life-long battle
against rationalism, he never shook himself free of it. Although constantly at
odds with the ideas of the Enlightenment, he did everything he could to play a
role in the movement. The impression of intellectual duplicity, created by his
ambiguous attitude toward Spinoza, Hume, and Kant, aroused suspicions
about his true motives. Jacobi presented himself as a knight of faith, yet Ha-
mann, his companion in arms in the battle against rationalism, kept reminding
him that he was a deist like the rest of them. He spent his entire life embroiled
in intellectual feuds and polemics and was deeply involved in the two major
controversies of his time: the Pantheismusstreit, which his report on the late
Lessing had stirred up, and the Atheismusstreit, in which he took the side of
Fichte—whose philosophy he nevertheless firmly rejected.
Jacobi enjoyed a certain literary reputation before he wrote his philosophi-
cal essays. Founder of the Teutscher Merkur (1773), to be edited by Wieland,
he was one of the initiators of the Sturm und Drang (‘‘Storm and Stress’’) move-
ment, in which the young Schiller and Goethe found their voice. A young busi-
nessman, mostly self-educated, he came to philosophy through the urgency of
his convictions, not because of any academic prospects. Lucien Lévy-Brühl in
 The Faith of the Philosophers 305

his insightful account of Jacobi’s thought put it well: ‘‘He was not a profes-
sional philosopher, but became one by vocation.’’∏∂ His two novels, Allwill
(1775–76) and Woldemar (1777), written in the epistolary tradition of Rich-
ardson and Rousseau, mainly served as vehicles for his ideas. (A malignant
critic claimed that Woldemar reads like a review of a novel, rather than a
novel.) Goethe saw in Woldemar a questioning of the truth of feeling and
emotion, the founding thesis of Sturm und Drang, and, literally, pilloried the
book to a tree. In the earlier novel Jacobi had already opposed the liberated
ethics of the ‘‘beautiful soul.’’∏∑
Today we look upon him as a transitional figure, but the impact he had on
his contemporaries may be compared to Kant’s. Whereas Kant completed the
Enlightenment, Jacobi paved the way to Romanticism. To be sure, he never
approached Kant’s intellectual stature. Jacobi was intuitive, brilliant in short
treatises, letters, and aphorisms, but incapable of elaborating his insights into
a coherent system. But his ideas strike us as fresh and original in a way Wolff’s
do not, though Wolff was a superior thinker. Jacobi reintroduced the meta-
physical question of being and nothingness at a period when it was submersed
by epistemological concerns. With him, the idea of God, once again, stands at
the center.
Always mindful of the dramatic gesture, Jacobi leaped onto the philosophi-
cal stage with a set of Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785), that imme-
diately captured the attention of Germany’s intellectual community. They con-
tained a revealing report on Lessing’s secret thought. Moses Mendelssohn, to
whom Jacobi addressed them, had always felt close to Lessing and had devel-
oped some of his friend’s fragmentary ideas into elegantly written, rationalist
treatises. Mendelssohn enjoyed an enormous respect in Germany because of
his clear mind and balanced judgment. When learning that he was preparing a
book on his deceased friend, Jacobi preceded him by publishing the remark-
able conversation he had with Lessing shortly before his death. Jacobi had
shown Lessing Goethe’s anonymous poem, ‘‘Prometheus’’—a scathing attack
upon the Judaeo-Christian God. Far from being shocked, as Jacobi had ex-
pected, Lessing found it excellent and proceeded to reveal his previously hid-
den thoughts on religion. ‘‘The orthodox concepts of the Divinity are no
longer for me; I cannot stomach them. Hen kai pan! (One and all). I know of
nothing else.’’ When Jacobi suggested that he then was likely to agree with
Spinoza, Lessing answered: ‘‘If I have to name myself after anyone, I know of
nobody else.’’∏∏
The letter accomplished two things: it deprived German deists, including
Mendelssohn, of the founding father of their philosophy, and it showed that
Jacobi knew Lessing’s intellectual position better than the man who claimed to
306 The Faith of the Philosophers

have been his intimate. Jacobi further argued that Spinoza’s philosophy was
incompatible with Mendelssohn’s deism, and that it was the only consistent
form of rationalism. He supported his argument by displaying such a thor-
ough acquaintance with Spinoza’s thought that the astonished Mendelssohn
wondered whether Jacobi himself might perhaps be a Spinozist. That was
exactly the effect Jacobi had intended. He wanted to show that a philosophical
theology independent of revelation left no alternative but Spinoza’s ‘‘panthe-
ism.’’ (Later he was to make a similar claim about Fichte’s thought.) In a later
letter to Mendelssohn, he gave the reasons why. A finite world could not have
come from an infinite Being. Hence the world must have existed from all
eternity as an integral segment of the infinite, not as the result of a free cre-
ation. Spinozism was plain and simple pantheism and that, Jacobi argued,
amounted to atheism. The protracted discussion developed into what is now
known as the Pantheismusstreit. For Jacobi, God had to be a personal individ-
ual, opposed to other individuals, a Thou confronting my I. Any other concep-
tion of God resulted in pantheism. Others, such as Herder (in a letter to Jacobi
of December 12, 1784) considered such a narrowly defined idea of God an-
thropomorphic. Behind Jacobi’s questionable reasoning, however, lies a legiti-
mate concern that too close an identification of the finite reality and God
excludes that otherness without which transcendence is not possible.∏π
When the deeply shocked Mendelssohn requested further explanations, Jac-
obi hastened to comply. While Jacobi had previously argued that rationalist
philosophy entailed pantheism and, indeed, atheism, he now added that it also
implied fatalism, as had been obvious in the case of Spinoza. Any attempt to
compress reality within a system of pure thought renders future events not
only in principle predictable but also predetermined in fact. That the theory is
false, is proven by the experience humans have of being able to manipulate
nature. They are capable of foresight and regret, of anticipating results, and of
feeling proud or ashamed of past decisions. Therefore, according to Jacobi, a
closed system of reason contradicts our awareness of freedom. Still, Jacobi
repeated, he preferred Spinoza’s straightforward admission of fatalism to the
subterfuges of other rationalists (‘‘Vorrede,’’ in Werke, II, 116–17; Main Phil.
Writings, 586–87).
In the course of their discussion Jacobi had invited Lessing to make a salto
mortale outside philosophy in order to cross what Lessing had called the
‘‘broad, ugly ditch’’ that separates particular and historical events from the
unchanging, permanent principles of metaphysics. In fact, Jacobi had claimed,
each system of thought would have to cross the ditch between the universal
and the historically particular if it was to be more than an empty abstraction.
Philosophy could do so only by moving outside philosophy into the area of
 The Faith of the Philosophers 307

faith. Kant reacted sharply against these unphilosophical acrobatics in an

essay entitled ‘‘What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thought?’’ (‘‘Was
heist sich im Denken orientieren?’’) (1786).∏∫ He did not object to the notion
of ‘‘faith’’ itself. Indeed, he claimed, the mind can orient itself concerning
supersensible objects only by means of a rational faith (Vernunftglaube). But
such a faith never becomes knowledge: it remains a subjective aspiration. Even
the idea of the highest object of faith, that of a supreme being, adds nothing to
knowledge if reason cannot demonstrate its rational necessity. To deny reason
the capacity to prove so means to reduce belief in God to superstition or
Schwärmerei. Jacobi’s faith was neither religious nor philosophical. In a letter
to Herder, Jacobi insisted that ‘‘any acceptance of a truth not inferred from
principles’’ with the same certainty as the conclusion of an argument was
faith.∏Ω
In David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism (1787), Jacobi took a
different approach than in his Spinoza Letters. Appealing to Hume’s notion of
‘‘belief’’ he reinterpreted his own concept of faith as referring to the kind of
immediate evidence that accompanies sense perception. The mind reaches
certainty not only through the conclusion of a rational argument, he argued,
but also, and primarily, through the immediate evidence of the senses. Ob-
viously, the evidence acquired by sense perception had nothing in common
with what Jacobi had called ‘‘faith’’ in his exchange with Lessing. There faith
and knowledge had been mutually exclusive; here they became complemen-
tary. Stung by Mendelssohn’s earlier remark that Christians, when short on
arguments, could always count on the escape door of faith, he now insisted
that he argued from philosophy to philosophy and remained on the level of a
natural belief, upon which he, even as Hume, assumed all knowledge to rest.
According to Hume, we always assert more than we know. From the primary
evidence of sense perception we rush to affirm that reality outside the mind
corresponds to our experience. It is in fact the imagination that links the
perceived appearances and synthesizes them into complex objects. We trust
this transition because we cannot command it at pleasure. But in the end it all
remains a matter of belief.
Jacobi accepts Hume’s comprehensive notion of belief, yet he rejects his skep-
ticism, which, he claims, stems from Hume’s subjective idealism. In the novel
Allwill this idealism is shown to result in epistemic and moral nihilism. From
the fact that we only see with our eyes, hear with our ears, one of the characters
concludes that ‘‘we see nothing but our own eyes, and hear nothing except our
own ears,’’ and hence that we see and hear nothing.π≠ But a philosophy that
ends up with nothing inevitably prohibits any moral commitment, an attitude
incarnated by Allwill, a prototype of the ‘‘aesthetic’’ man in Kierkegaard’s
308 The Faith of the Philosophers

Either/Or. Jacobi detected that same nothingness at the core of all purely
metaphysical reflection, he later wrote to Fichte.π∞ To this nihilist idealism he
opposed his own ‘‘philosophy of non-knowledge.’’π≤
Unable to prove that reality corresponds to our ideas, he appeals to immedi-
ate experience. The truth of experience allows no doubt. In ‘‘perception’’
(Empfindung) the mind cannot question the reality of what it perceives.π≥ For
Jacobi, this suffices as foundation for a realistic theory of knowledge. ‘‘The
object contributes just as much to the perception of consciousness as con-
sciousness does to the perception of the object. I experience that I am and that
there is something outside me, in one and the same indivisible moment.’’π∂ The
certainty that accompanies this encounter possesses an immediacy that neither
requires nor admits logical inference. The reality of the object becomes doubt-
ful only when the mind assumes that it is itself the sole source of its ideas.
Jacobi supported his realism with the theory of common sense of the Scottish
philosopher Thomas Reid. For Reid, as for other empiricist philosophers,
knowledge begins with sensation. But through sensation the mind directly
apprehends reality. In his Spinoza Letters Jacobi had conceived of philosophy
as a closed rationalist system and the awareness of reality as attainable only
through an exit from philosophy. In David Hume on Faith he attempted a
philosophical justification of this awareness through a theory of perception as
immediate certainty.
The influence of Kant’s philosophy, of which the first signs had appeared in
the Hume essay, became dominant in the ‘‘Appendix on Transcendental Ideal-
ism.’’ It introduced yet a new stage in Jacobi’s thinking about faith. What
impressed him in Kant’s thought was the principle that all reliable cognition
originates in sense perception. For Kant, however, that did not imply that we
thereby know the reality of the object. Jacobi now agreed with Kant that ‘‘any
assertion of the existence of a thing in itself, outside my representation, can
never . . . carry absolute certainty with it.’’ But he drew a quite different
conclusion from this theoretical uncertainty. Whereas for Kant, the thing in
itself is not only unprovable, but unknowable; for Jacobi, it is unprovable, and
in that limited sense an object of faith, but no less therefore an object of
immediate certainty.
Yet another distinction in Kant’s critique allowed Jacobi to bring the notion
of faith back into philosophy, namely, the one between Verstand (understand-
ing) and Vernunft (reason). Verstand consists of an ordering, synthesizing
reflection on the phenomena of sense perception. Vernunft opens the mind to
the ideas of God, immortality, and freedom, which lie beyond the grasp of the
understanding. Here also Jacobi’s interpretation deviates from Kant’s inten-
tion. Kant had denied that the reality of those ideas was accessible to theoret-
 The Faith of the Philosophers 309

ical confirmation, but he had admitted the existence of God, the immortality
of the soul, and the freedom of the will as postulates of the moral act. The
reality of those ideas ultimately remained an object of faith.
Kant’s use of the term ‘‘faith’’ alerted Jacobi to the problems inherent in his
own former usage of it. He adopts Kant’s concept but, again, moves beyond
and against its original meaning. Jacobi seeks to confirm the object of faith by
grounding it in a direct intuition (which Kant had explicitly ruled out). This
intuition is conveyed through feeling, the primary still undifferentiated root of
all mental activity.π∑ In this immediate mode of consciousness the mind, ac-
cording to Jacobi, becomes aware of itself as spirit. He refers to this early
mode of consciousness as ‘‘der in sich gewisse Geist’’ (the Spirit certain of
itself). Since spirit constitutes the very core of mindfulness, Jacobi places the
certainty of God’s presence at this most intimate layer of consciousness.
God is ‘‘more present to [the person] through his heart than nature is to him
through his external senses.’’ We become intuitively aware of this presence in
the ideas we have of the true, the good, and the beautiful, which constitute the
principal content of the idea of God. ‘‘We believe in God, because we see him;
though he cannot be seen with the eye of the body, he appears nevertheless to
us in every upright man.’’π∏ Although the appearance itself is not God, the
feeling it evokes unmistakably reveals Him. Either the mind possesses an im-
mediate awareness of God or none at all. That awareness ‘‘not only needs no
proof, but excludes all proofs absolutely, and is simply and solely the represen-
tation itself agreeing with the thing being represented.’’ππ
Combining Kant’s view concerning the ideas of reason with Hume’s notion
of belief as a necessary complement to perception, Jacobi concludes that our
entire knowledge of reality rests on an act of faith. Faith, then, was not the
salto mortale outside philosophy that Kant had so severely criticized in Jac-
obi’s writing on Spinoza. It was an essential part of philosophy itself, though
its immediate certainty could not be justified by a philosophical argument. In
the later ‘‘Vorrede’’ to his works Jacobi writes: ‘‘We took our stand on the
assumption of two different faculties of perception in man, one by means of
visible and tangible, hence corporeal, instruments; and the other by means of
an invisible organ that in no way manifests itself to the external sense, but
whose existence is made known to us through feelings alone. This organ, this
spiritual eye for spiritual objects, has been called ‘reason’ (Vernunft) by men
(practically by all).’’π∫
Central to Jacobi’s polemics with idealism and rationalism is the principle
that philosophy can only reflect upon what is first given to the mind—either
through sense experience or through reason’s experience of itself. In the lat-
ter experience, the mind becomes indirectly acquainted with its founding
310 The Faith of the Philosophers

principle in its manifestations (truth, goodness, and beauty). This immediate,

though indirect, experience of God is conditioned by a moral attitude. In his
Spinoza Letters Jacobi had already linked the quality of one’s thinking to one’s
moral disposition, as Fichte was to do a few years later. To improve the think-
ing of an age, he wrote, its mode of living needs to be corrected first.πΩ That
philosophers resented Jacobi’s frontal attack on their method and responded
in kind ought not to surprise us. Even those who shared his aversion of En-
lightenment rationalism reacted in a hostile way. Hegel wrote the most thor-
ough, but also the most severe, assessment of Jacobi’s theory in his early Faith
and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen, 1802). He agreed that the Enlighten-
ment’s exclusion of faith from philosophy restricted the content of philosophy
to the finite, while it reduced the infinite, essential to philosophical thought, to
an empty aspiration for ‘‘an unknowable God who remains beyond the limits
of reason.’’∫≠ But Jacobi restricted the consciousness of the infinite to feeling
and never properly integrated it with philosophy. He thereby left the problem
of the Enlightenment as he found it: faith and reason remained two opposite
functions of the mind that had not been reconciled.∫∞
Jacobi never solved the problems he addressed. His significance lies more in
his critique of rationalism and later of idealism than in his own philosophical
achievement. He expressed his aversion of idealism most forcefully in his
famous ‘‘Letter to Fichte’’ (March 3, 1799). A philosophy, whether rationalist
or romantic, that asserts the self-sufficiency of the human mind in the quest of
truth dissolves being into knowledge and reduces reality to an immanent state
‘‘where nothing is outside the I.’’∫≤ In this view, the I, whether it be called
transcendental ego, subject, or unity of apperception, is the sole source of
truth. For Jacobi as for Malebranche, truth pre-exists the knowledge that
partakes of it. The knowledge of God, which he considered the central issue in
philosophy, must return to Augustine’s position: ‘‘In order to seek God and
what is pleasing to God, one must already have Him and what is pleasing to
Him in one’s heart and spirit, for what is not in some way already known to us
we cannot seek, not search after.’’∫≥ As Jacobi saw it, only faith enables the
mind to maintain the necessary distance between itself and reality.
His simplistic view of the relation between faith and reason fully deserved
Kant’s and Hegel’s critique. One cannot simply juxtapose one to the other or
replace one by the other without destroying philosophy itself. Yet that is what
Jacobi proposed in various ways at each of the stages of his development. The
significance of his work is mainly negative. He effectively denounced the self-
enclosedness of modern thought. The absence of genuine otherness is indeed a
most problematic side of Enlightenment philosophy.∫∂ It is also the one that
 The Faith of the Philosophers 311

contemporary critics (in the first place, Emmanuel Levinas), have pounded
with their heaviest artillery.
The principle of subjectivity as formulated in modern thought, namely, as
sole source of meaning, obstructed the restoration of a genuinely religious
philosophy. The three thinkers discussed in this section were undoubtedly
right in their critique of it. Yet none of them, I think, succeeded in removing
the obstacle. Indeed, all three deprived the finite of its autonomy. Malebranche
did so by denying that the finite mind plays any active part in the constitution
of ideas; Berkeley by denying that the physical world exists in any but an ideal
way; and Jacobi by denying philosophy’s independent authority over thought.
But their failures drew attention to the core of the problem and thus stimu-
lated the new reflection on the idea of subjectivity in the nineteenth century
performed by Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard.
 10

Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

The ideas discussed in this chapter differ considerably from the ones we
have come to consider characteristic of the Enlightenment. Not only do they
fall outside the rationalist trends of the age, but they contrast just as much
with those that opposed that rationalism. Some of the most prominent and
influential thinkers of the time appear to have bypassed the dominant contro-
versies altogether. Unlike the so-called anti-Enlightenment thinkers, the ones
presented here do not seek, or do not seek in the first place, alternatives to the
prevailing ideologies. They mostly ignore them. Their ideas remain largely
continuous with those of a premodern past. That may not be immediately
apparent since they often phrase them in the language of their contemporaries
in whose company they seem to have felt quite at home. The controversial
Johann Georg Hamann, the only one who explicitly rejected the principles of
the Enlightenment, took pride in his friendship with such luminaries of the
movement as Kant, Herder, and Jacobi. It was through his translation that
Kant became acquainted with Hume. Bishop François de Salignac de La
Mothe-Fénelon was the tutor of Louis XIV’s grandson. Emanuel Swedenborg
was a famous Swedish metallurgist and a respected member of parliament.
But, whether apologists or spiritual writers, they reformulated age-old doc-
trines. They stirred up plenty of controversy: Fénelon was condemned for
Quietism; the Pietists Spener and Francke provoked the ire and contempt of

312
 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 313

the Lutheran Orthodox; Swedenborg was held by many to be a madman. Yet

the former three drew upon ancient Christian sources while Swedenborg, the
founder of a new sect within the Reformation, spread a spiritual message
rooted in much older theosophical traditions. Contrary to what, according to
Hans Blumenberg, had been typical of early modern writers, namely, that they
poured new wine in old skins, these men served very old wine in new skins.
What united these theologians and separated them from their contempo-
raries as well as from their predecessors is the symbolic nature of their thought.
In some way or other they all stressed that knowledge of God can be expressed
only in analogy with ordinary language: theological concepts and representa-
tions symbolize transcendence more than they define it. Butler consistently
speaks of analogies (of language); Swedenborg of concordances; Hamann
mostly uses the term symbols. But all three share a common approach, sanc-
tioned by ancient tradition.

The Search for a Symbolic Theology: Johann G. Hamann

A discussion of Johann Georg Hamann (1730–87) may seem inappro-
priate for introducing a chapter on spiritual trends. The paradoxical contro-
versialist definitely does not belong in the same class with Quietists, Pietists,
and Swedenborgians. Still his symbolic interpretation of the Bible and its
extension to the entire human history dominates the often acrid polemics in
which he was constantly involved. Hamann was essentially a spiritual man
who expressed his traditional religious thought in the language of his contem-
poraries. A native of Königsberg, he attended the same university and audited
some of the same lecturers (including Martin Knutzen) as his famous fellow
citizen Immanuel Kant. As a young man he enthusiastically embraced the
Enlightenment. But during a commercial mission to London, at the end of a
profound spiritual crisis, he converted to an orthodox form of Christianity. He
reread the Bible and wrote his observations down in Biblical Reflections (Bib-
lische Betrachtungen), which forms the major part of his Diary of a Christian
(Tagebuch eines Christen, 1758). During the following five years of leisure he
read voraciously. Surprisingly, he found Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natu-
ral Religion much to his taste and later translated them into German. Through
this unpublished translation Kant became acquainted with the work. What
attracted Hamann to Hume’s philosophy was the central place of belief in
existential judgments. For Hamann, as for Jacobi, not arguments but belief
provided a natural foundation for religious faith. The fideist Hamann pre-
ferred the agnostic Hume to the believing rationalist Christian Wolff.
In a letter to Herder, Hamann wrote: ‘‘Hume is the man for me, for he at
314 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

least honors the principle of belief, and includes it in his system, while our
countryman [i.e., Kant] keeps on chewing the cud of his causal whirligig,
without a thought for belief. I don’t call that honest.’’∞ This letter was written
before Hamann had read the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant himself
declared, quite possibly under Hamann’s influence: ‘‘I have found it necessary
to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith (Glaube)’’ Still, Hamann’s
later critique of Kant in his own Metakritik (1784), though more civil, is
hardly less severe. Indeed, as one commentator has noted, ‘‘It does to Kant’s
project the one thing it cannot tolerate: it relativizes the critical philosophy by
placing it within a more basic context of interpretation.’’≤ Hamann objected to
what he calls Kant’s ‘‘purism of reason, that is, a reason detached from belief
and tradition as well as from language’’ (Metakritik, p. 284; English, p. 155).
Kant’s separation of reason from experience, and of understanding from sen-
sibility, ‘‘as if they were two branches of human cognition growing out of a
common root’’ tears the concrete experience apart into mental abstractions
and blind data (Metakritik, p. 286; English, p. 157). Countering this dualism,
Hamann quotes Hume’s statement that one of the most valuable discoveries of
his time was Berkeley’s principle that universal abstract ideas are nothing
other than particular ones tied to universal names.≥ Without this insight Hume
would never have become the great philosopher he was.
Hamann, even as Butler, attempted to construe a new, symbolic theology on
the basis of analogy. He adopted Kant’s description of analogy in the Critique
of Pure Reason as his starting point. The philosopher had argued that in
philosophy, contrary to mathematics, from the proportion of two given terms
the mind may learn the relation of a third term to the fourth, but not the nature
of the fourth term itself. Philosophical analogy, he concluded, merely gives us
‘‘a rule for seeking the fourth member in experience and a mark whereby it can
be detected’’ (Critique of Pure Reason, A 179; Norman K. Smith, trans.). If the
unknown term lies beyond experience, as the nature of a transcendent Being
does, we may still refer to it by an analogy drawn form the actual experience of
persons, or nature, or events that, however imperfectly, evoke the thought of
such a Being. Such an ‘‘anthropomorphic’’ analogy, he had added elsewhere,
yields symbols of God’s nature but no real knowledge of it.∂ Hamann, though
critical of the Critique of Pure Reason, recognized this as an accurate descrip-
tion of that unique kind of analogy between God and creation, from which the
mind draws its religious symbols.
Yet in a short essay on the origin of language, Hamann showed how the
biblical revelation enables us to draw more from this anthropomorphic anal-
ogy than Kant had done. Revelation conveys a concrete meaning to the ob-
scure analogy between nature and history, on one side, and God’s nature, on
 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 315

the other.∑ In a short fragment added to the London Diary Hamann wrote:
‘‘All appearances of nature are dreams, visions, enigmas, that have a meaning,
a secret sense. The book of nature and of history consists of nothing but
ciphers, hidden tokens that require the key of Holy Scripture to explain it all,
which is the very purpose of its inspiration.’’ (Fragments [Brocken], in Werke,
I, 308). Obviously this reading comes close to Butler’s. Time and again Ha-
mann insists that ‘‘Scripture ought to be our dictionary and grammar’’ for
interpreting these ‘‘natural’’ revelations (Biblical Reflections, in Werke I, 243).
But how could texts written for the needs of one particular nation respond
to the needs and aspirations of all people at all times? Hamann responds that
God’s revelation originally was addressed to all mankind and only later came
to be interpreted as a particular one addressed to the Jews. The first chapters of
Genesis describe the beginning of the entire human race. Not until after the
confusion of tongues in Babel did the revelation become restricted to the
language spoken by one nation. A further restriction occurred when scribes
after Moses narrowed the content down to the founding and preserving of
Israel’s theocracy. God’s covenant with Israel had originated in the promise
made to Abraham. In the Pentateuch, Moses (its reputed author) had re-
stricted that divine promise to the laws, institutions, and rituals of a people
recently freed from slavery. The scribes subordinated the promise to the law,
thereby making the Bible into a Jewish document.
Through this far-fetched interpretation Hamann hoped to reconcile the idea
of a universal revelation with the notion of a document pertaining only to the
particular history of one people. Any revelation is by nature particular, even if
it is intended for all. In a polemical tract, Golgotha and Scheblimini (1784; in
Werke, III, 291–320), Hamann passionately argued this thesis against Moses
Mendelssohn’s rationalist Jerusalem (1783). Mendelssohn had claimed that
Judaism coincided with the religion of reason (Vernunftreligion) of the En-
lightenment and that the law revealed at Mount Sinai consisted merely of the
moral law with some ceremonial and dietary instructions added for practical,
hygienic, or political purposes. Hamann detected in this ahistorical interpreta-
tion of the Old Testament a direct threat to the obviously historical revelation
of Christ, which had to be continuous with the biblical revelation on which
it depended. Even Israel’s ‘‘illegitimate’’ shift from promise to law did not
change the fact that ‘‘salvation had to come from the Jews.’’ Jesus himself
remained within the Jewish tradition—in body and mind—when he restored
the original promise and widened the meaning of the Covenant. On that
ground, Paul and the writers of the four Gospels had interpreted events and
persons of the Old Testament as figuratively anticipating the message of the
New Testament.
316 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

In a number of elusive short writings that earned him his unique place in
German literature, Hamann extended the relation between biblical type and
Christian antitype to nonbiblical figures and events, especially to those that
preceded the Christian Scriptures. His favorite Gentile prophet was Socrates,
whom rationalists venerated as the patron saint of free investigation. In his So-
cratic Memorabilia (Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten, 1760)∏ (complemented
in Clouds: A Sequel to the Socratic Memorabilia [Wolken: Ein Nachspiel zu
Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten], 1761), and in the late Golgotha and Sche-
blimini: By a Preacher in the Wilderness (Golgotha und Scheblimini: Von
einem Prediger in der Wüste, 1784), Hamann reclaimed the Greek sage for the
Christian tradition. Had he not declared to owe his insight to divine sources:
the oracle of Delphi and his personal daemon? The paradox of the Delphic
god proclaiming Socrates wisest among men, while he himself felt that he
knew nothing, confirms the difference between autonomous human cognition
and knowledge derived from a transcendent source. Socrates expressed more
truth than he understood. Even as Peter or as Caiphas who prophesized and
proclaimed divine truths without understanding them, he occasionally served
as a mouthpiece of divine wisdom (Fragments [Brocken], § 3, in Werke, I,
304).
Hamann claims to find a biblical precedent for extending typology beyond
the biblical context. Paul repeatedly refers to extra-scriptural sources as hav-
ing prophetic significance (as in Acts 17:28 where he quotes the Greek poet
Aratos’s words as prophetic of the Gospel). The term Hamann uses for this
procedure, metaschematism, even appears in 2 Corinthians 4:6, where it
means transferring a secular meaning to a religious one on the ground of a
fundamental analogy between sacred and profane history. Still, the choice of
Socrates as a Christian ‘‘type’’ seems surprising in view of his later objections
(in Golgotha and Scheblimini) to ‘‘Atticism,’’ which, he claimed, had been the
source of eighteenth-century ‘‘atheism.’’ He considered the significance the
Enlightenment attached to Greek philosophy dangerous and unwarranted.
There were other thinkers of antiquity whom Hamann considered prophets
of Christ: ‘‘The pagans have been great prophets. I have concluded the old year
with the letters and philosophical writings of Cicero. An economy, a yeast runs
through all the aeons until their completion’’ (letter, January 13, 1773). Ha-
mann refers to them as ‘‘the subterranean truth that godly men did exist
among the heathen and that we should not despise the cloud of these wit-
nesses, that heaven has anointed them as its messengers and interpreters and
consecrated them to precisely that vocation among their people which the
prophets had among the Jews’’ (Memorabilia, p. 149; Werke, II, 64). Not only
representative figures of the past, but all of history had a prophetic meaning
 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 317

for Hamann. Even modern historiography, however secular, conceals a sym-

bolic design that appears to those who read it in the light of the spirit. ‘‘Perhaps
all history is more mythology than [Bolingbroke] thinks and is, like nature, a
book that is sealed, a hidden witness, a riddle which cannot be solved unless
we plow with another heifer than reason’’ (Memorabilia, p. 151; Werke, II,
65).
Hamann’s analogies often appear artificial and his reading of Scripture re-
mains narrowly literalist. Thus he claims that Socrates, whose spiritual beauty
was masked by a Silenic appearance, prefigured Christ whose divine reality
was likewise hidden in the form of a servant. His typological interpretation of
later historical figures appears even more far-fetched, as when he compares
Peter the Great working in the shipyards of Zaandam to Jesus, the carpenter of
Nazareth. But Hamann’s theological significance consists not in the appropri-
ateness of his analogies, nor in the correctness of his biblical exegesis, but in
his insight that all religious language is by its very nature symbolic. This was
the point that rationalist theology had missed altogether. To the believer, the
stories, prophecies, and proverbs of the Bible possess, next to their natural
meaning, a transcendent reference. Hamann extended this biblical symbolism
to all poetic expression.
Metaphoric language for him is by nature poetic. For what is poetry in
essence if not, as Goethe, an early admirer of Hamann, suggested, natural
words that symbolize a spiritual reality? From this insight Hamann concluded
that art and poetry possess a revelatory character and are potentially religious.
‘‘True poetry is a natural form of prophecy’’ (Bibl. Refl., in Werke, I, 229). In
his short tract on aesthetics, Aesthetica in nuce (Werke, II, 195–217), Hamann
highlights this religious quality of poetry. ‘‘Nature and Scripture are the mate-
rials of the beautiful, creative, and imitative spirit’’ (ibid., 210). But to the
religious mind, they also contain the substance of all poetry. Even the classical
poets understood this: they imitated nature and in their mythological inter-
pretations, endowed her with religious meaning. Modern poets have ceased to
follow their example. They no longer draw genuine inspiration from mythol-
ogy, Bible, or theology. As a result, poetry has lost its former depth, according
to Hamann.
In his critique of the Enlightenment, Hamann strikes out at so many trends
and thinkers that one cannot but wonder what his real target was. He attacks
rationalism but also fideism, naturalism but also supernaturalism, classicism
but also Biblicism. Nonetheless, a single, coherent vision inspires this scattered
critique. He consistently defended the autonomy of the particular against
universalizing ideologies of the age and attempted to restore a symbolic con-
cept of theology that modern thought had lost.
318 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

A Subdued Piety

As theology became increasingly rationalistic in the late seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, it lost its experiential ‘‘spiritual’’ character. Piety became
isolated from theology. The latter stressed doctrine, the former experience.
Thus in France the term ‘‘mystique,’’ previously an adjective referring to a
common quality of religious life, became a noun identifying a group of devout
believers favored with strong religious experiences. Religious men and women
attempted to compensate for the withdrawal of religion from public life and
even from theology by establishing spiritual conventicles of like-minded,
linked by a common vocabulary. As Michel de Certeau has shown in his
insightful La fable mystique, their esoteric language converted into necessary
principles what once had been random reports of actual experiences.π It came
to fulfill a ‘‘performative’’ function. Spiritual life was assumed to follow a
predictable order of stages with standard divisions and subdivisions. I know
no better example of this rigidified system than Dom Claude Martin’s hagiog-
raphy of his own mother, who had left him as a child in order to join the
Ursuline Congregation and sail to Quebec as a missionary. The faithful son
fitted each fragment of Marie de l’Incarnation’s spiritual diaries neatly into
pre-existing niches of purification, illumination, and union.
This isolation of spiritual life, perhaps needed for its survival in an in-
creasingly secular society, gave spiritual life a new intensity in small devotional
groups. They released an unprecedented flood of pious writings upon the
Christian world. Nor did their spiritual seclusion prevent the ‘‘devout’’ from
moving in the highest circles. In France several had infiltrated the Court. Mme.
de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s morganatic wife, was herself a dévote. Still, as
some of these spiritual movements maintained a certain secrecy and kept a
distance from the official Church, they sooner or later came under suspicion
either of the state or the Church, if not of both. This occurred with the Jan-
senists and Quietists in France, the spiritual dissenters in England and the
Netherlands, the early Pietists in Germany.
The spiritual movements of the Enlightenment never became part of the
main culture. Alienated by its increasing secularism, they constituted a sort of
spiritual counterculture. In this regard they differed from the religious human-
ism of the Baroque period, which had still succeeded in integrating traditional
religion with modern culture. The spiritual movements of the Enlightenment,
far from restoring the cultural synthesis of the past, widened the gap between
culture and faith. This trend continued and even intensified during the two
centuries following the Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century, the new
spiritual movements, however controversial, still considered their theories
 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 319

rooted in ancient Christian traditions. Later mystical movements tended to

become independent of institutional religion, if they did not openly collide
with it. I shall discuss three types of eighteenth-century spirituality: the Qui-
etism of Mme. Guyon and Fénelon; Lutheran Pietism as represented by An-
gelus Silesius, Spener, and Tersteegen; the theories of religious affection and
mystical symbolism proposed by Swedenborg and Jonathan Edwards.

Quietism and Fénelon

I doubt whether any other spiritual movement has suffered more from
misrepresentation and unfair polemics than the one that has come to be
known by the derogatory name ‘‘Quietism.’’ Historians commonly trace its
beginnings to a text by the Italian Jesuit Achille Gagliardi, written under the
inspiration of his spiritual daughter Isabella Bellinzaga. But much of the doc-
trine already appears in Teresa of Avila’s discussion of the ‘‘quiet’’ state of
contemplation. The theory did not become controversial until the strange
condemnation of Miguel de Molinos (1685). After enormous popular success
as a spiritual director in Rome (whose influence reached even the pope and
several cardinals), this Spanish priest was accused of immorality in his rela-
tions with penitents and of heterodoxy in his teachings. He was charged with
having taught that the person who has abandoned his will to God ought not
resist temptations. Next to this moral allegation was a theoretical one con-
cerning the question of whether passive contemplation can be acquired by
human effort (as he was alleged to have taught), or whether it is exclusively
infused by a special grace of God. Serious doubts remain about the validity of
both accusations. One of the theses surprisingly condemned in Molinos’s Spir-
itual Guide explicitly distinguished infused from acquired contemplation
‘‘wherein one must persist one’s entire life as long as God does not draw the
soul to infused contemplation’’ (Article 23 of the bulla of condemnation).
Molinos unambiguously states that passive contemplation can only be in-
fused. Barely escaping capital punishment, he was sentenced to lifelong incar-
ceration in Rome. True to Quietist principles, he denied none of the charges—
even those of which he was patently innocent—and spent the last nine years of
his life in prison, where he died with the reputation of a saint. Whatever secrets
this mysterious affair may hide remain buried in some twelve thousand letters
kept under seal in the Vatican.
That appeared to have settled matters—at least in Rome. But in the mean-
time a well-to-do young widow of an ancient French family, Jeanne-Marie
Guyon (1648–1717) (born Bouvières de la Mothe and distantly related to
François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, her future follower, as well as to
320 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

the Jansenist Arnaulds, her future enemies), began to spread theories that
in some respects came remarkably close to Molinos’s doctrine, though she
claimed not to have read him. Her Spiritual Torrents (1682), written in a single
stretch and not reread before publication, contains a rather traditional de-
scription of spiritual recollection. After an initial active stage, replete with
consolations, the spiritually initiated are supposed to pass through a condition
of spiritual death. During it, the soul is taught to be indifferent with regard to
her future state—whether she will be saved or rejected. If capable of accepting
this spiritual annihilation, she will enter a new life. ‘‘She only takes a new life
in order to lose it in God; or rather she only lives with the life of God.’’∫ Like
Molinos, Jeanne Guyon stressed the need for total passivity in spiritual life.
What ought the soul do? ‘‘Nothing, and less than nothing. It must simply
suffer itself to be possessed, acted upon, and moved without resistance . . .
letting itself go naturally into all things, without considering what would be
best or most plausible’’ (Spiritual Torrents, pp. 112–13). Once again, the
censors charged Jeanne Guyon with attributing to human effort what belongs
exclusively to divine grace. She claimed that some form of passive contempla-
tion could be acquired, as Saint Teresa had taught. Apparently the censors
based their judgments on the nominalist position that nature and the super-
natural are and must remain totally separated, in their cause as well as in their
effects. As the blind French mystic François Malaval wrote about his critics,
they denied that grace can operate through the ordinary ways of prayer and
they confused ordinary forms of contemplation with the extraordinary ‘‘in-
fused’’ ones.Ω
Instructive in this affair was that Jansenists and Jesuits, traditional adver-
saries, conspired in attacking Quietism. For the Jansenists and their sym-
pathizers (most prominently Bishop Bossuet), grace belongs entirely to the
‘‘supernatural’’ order and hence an ‘‘acquired’’ (i.e., natural) passivity in
prayer is a priori suspect. The Jesuits accused Guyon of the opposite error:
raising passivity in prayer to an ideal induces the person to neglect active
moral cooperation. Still, the positions of the hostile parties show at times a
remarkable similarity with the ones they opposed. The influence of François
de Sales upon many Jansenists (particularly upon the nuns of Port Royal)
softened their opposition to passive contemplation. The same holds true for
many Jesuits, whom a subtler reading of their own founder’s writings had
convinced that all prayer, indeed apostolic action itself, moves toward con-
templative prayer. Both the first ‘‘Quietist’’ text and the last famous treatise on
divine abandon were written by Jesuits: Gagliardi and de Caussade.
In her subsequent Short Method of Prayer (Moyen court de faire oraison,
1685), Jeanne Guyon completed her spiritual system with the concept of pure
 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 321

love. She may have found it described in François de Sales’s Treatise of the Love
of God as the degree of love that induces a person to care more about God
than about his or her own well-being. The idea had been implicit in Guyon’s
earlier work without attracting controversy. Yet in the wake of Molinos’s
condemnation, it became the spark that set off the anti-Quietist witch-hunt of
the years 1687–88. Mme. Guyon was confined to the Convent of the Visita-
tion in Paris, but after an investigation she received a clean bill of orthodoxy.
Even after her two books had been condemned in 1695, Bossuet himself, who
had initiated all the problems and was to become her worst adversary, granted
her a certificate of good conduct (that also had come under question!) and of
orthodoxy. During the years following her release from the convent, her theo-
ries encountered an enormous success within aristocratic circles. Mme. de
Maintenon introduced her to the teachers and pupils of Saint Cyr, the school
she had established for girls of the French nobility. It was probably there that
she met Fénelon, who had a hand in the direction of the school.
François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715) admired Jeanne
Guyon’s direct spiritual experience of which he, by his own testimony, re-
mained deprived. In the correspondence that followed their acquaintance, he
placed himself under her direction more than she under his. The most elegant
French writer of the eighteenth century, culturally refined and intellectually
brilliant, Fénelon had been charged with the education of the king’s grandson,
the duke of Burgundy, and was later consecrated archbishop of Cambrai.
Among the career ecclesiastics of the time he stood out by his humility, scrupu-
lous morality, and spiritual courage. These virtues became even more apparent
after he fell into disgrace at the Court. While still in his days of glory, he
performed one of the most courageous acts of the ancien régime. He, the
teacher of Louis XIV’s grandson, wrote a letter to the king criticizing his
disastrous foreign policy. By plunging France into twenty years of almost
unintermittent war he had brought its people to the verge of famine and made
the country a pariah among its neighbors. All of this for the sake of bringing
one of his descendants upon the throne of Spain, of extending his territory
beyond its ancient borders, and of pursuing the (mostly frustrated) vainglory
of winning battles. Since he was legally entitled to none of the places he had
conquered, Fénelon suggested that, as an act of elementary justice, Louis XIV
restore them to their rightful owners. The king had so thoroughly alienated his
subjects that a revolution appeared imminent.∞≠ Fénelon did not send the letter
directly to the king but, most likely, to Madame de Maintenon, whose full
confidence he enjoyed at the time. The gesture appears all the more remark-
able in that earlier in the same year, 1693, at the occasion of his reception at
the Académie Française, in the habitual eulogy of his predecessor, Fénelon
322 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

himself had indulged in the very flattery of the king’s grandeur he was to
denounce so shortly afterwards.∞∞
Unquestionably, the archbishop was a complex person and, at least until the
time of his disgrace, worldly and self-centered despite his genuine piety. Even
his early protestation of loyalty to his consecrating bishop Bossuet and the
humility with which he later submitted to Rome’s censorship seem overly self-
conscious.∞≤ Certainly Fénelon appears morally superior to the bishop of
Meaux who, with the full weight of his eloquence, his rival influence at the
Court, and the persistent efforts of a sleazy nephew whom he had sent to the
Papal Court for the purpose of having his brother bishop condemned, mightily
strove to crush ideas too subtle for his robust mind. Still, the Quietist attitude,
which Fénelon preached and usually practiced, did not prevent him from
accusing his adversary of bad faith, insincerity, and a malevolent intention to
harm his reputation. The archbishop’s ‘‘Réponse à la Relation sur le Qui-
étisme’’ permanently, though perhaps not undeservedly, damaged Bossuet’s
ecclesiastical standing. When learning that Bossuet was preparing a refutation
of his theory, Fénelon made every effort to head off the attack before it was
launched. His Explication sur les Maximes des Saints refuted in advance all the
errors he expected to be charged with. Bossuet felt angry at seeing the wind
thus taken out of his sails. In Ronald Knox’s witty assessment: ‘‘Bossuet had
saved the State—his favorite accomplishment, and the Maxims appeared to
insinuate that it had not needed saving’’ (p. 343). The theological antagonism
between the two bishops seems surprising. Both appealed to Augustine and re-
garded Francis de Sales as their spiritual master. Both opposed the widely held
belief that the virtuous Christian was entitled to eternal beatitude. Fénelon
even repeats Pascal’s statement, ‘‘God never owes us anything’’ (Maximes, X).
God’s grace entails no obligations on his part.
What, then, was at the heart of the dispute? The etherial issue was whether
the love of God, to be pure, ought to exclude all thought of personal happi-
ness, even to the point of rendering a person indifferent with respect to eternal
salvation. Today’s readers may find the question too subtle to be meaningful.
They are, of course, right and that subtlety discloses the fundamental weak-
ness in the spirituality of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: it was
extremely self-conscious, typical of a religious attitude that, having been ex-
iled from the culture at large, took refuge in the shelter of an introverted piety.
Quietists formed a small group of initiates, almost like a gnostic cenacle.
Father Lacombe, Jeanne Guyon’s early, controversial director and onetime
companion in her apostolic travels, referred to their followers as les enfants de
la petite Eglise, a statement paralleled by Spener’s reference to the early groups
 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 323

of Pietists as ecclesiolae in Ecclesia (‘‘little churches within the Church’’). For

all its qualities, Quietism was a movement of withdrawal after the Church had
lost center stage in the public arena.
In his Explication sur les Maximes des Saints (1697) Fénelon attempted to
steer a middle course between the Quietist movement threatened with censor-
ship and the position of his adversaries who defended a more hierarchical and
less mystical form of piety. He showed that pure love, abandon, and passive
contemplation were not new-fangled ideas but concepts solidly rooted in the
Church’s oldest tradition. The stated aim of the Maximes was to preserve the
movement from heterodox tendencies, but its more immediate one was to
blunt Bossuet’s anticipated attacks. Despite the spiritual perceptiveness of the
author, the Maximes is not Fénelon’s best work. This master of epistolary
exchange found it hard to condense a way of life into forty-four terse articles,
scholastically divided into vrai and faux. Even his beautifully phrased letters
and short tracts display a self-conscious quality that renders the disciple in-
ferior to the masters to whom he constantly appeals—Bernard of Clairvaux
and Francis de Sales. They lack the common sense of the latter as well as the
lyrical enthusiasm of the former. Instead of experience Fénelon offers discourse
honed to perfection. He himself, perceptive to an extreme, did not remain
unaware of his problem. Reflecting upon himself he wrote: ‘‘I do not find
myself in the multitude of my ideas and yet these ideas are all I find of myself.
They prevent me from seeing the one, the true who will liberate me from the
numbers, syntaxes, etc.’’ His insurmountable ambivalence renders even his
purest intentions suspect to himself. He confesses that he always wants to be
approved of, loved, honored, and that he is idolizing his reputation.
Others also felt the ambivalence. Nicolas Malebranche, himself a onetime
advocate of pure love, had no use for the archbishop’s doctrine. To him the
idea of pure love rested on a theological misconception, a désintéressement
imaginaire. In his short polemical treatise Traité de l’Amour de Dieu (1697),
he dismissed the pursuit of love without the desire of satisfaction as psycholog-
ically impossible. ‘‘If we pretend that we love God without his pleasing us,
without tasting his goodness, or at least without firm hope that one day we
shall possess God with pleasure, namely, through the lively and sweet percep-
tions his substance will produce in our soul, we pretend the impossible.’’∞≥
Would a total indifference with respect to the union with the beloved not mean
that one does not love at all? Certainly in such an attitude the desire of God
ceases to be desire.
But this argument does not entirely refute the pure love thesis. One may not
be able to love God without implicitly desiring one’s own fulfillment in this
324 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

love, but one may still be motivated more by the God one loves than by the
pleasure that love induces. To Malebranche’s rhetorical question: ‘‘Can one
ever love something by another principle than that of being happy?’’ the advo-
cates of pure love would reply that, even if we cannot love God without the
implied desire of finding fulfillment in that love, we must not love Him because
of it. Malebranche himself had written: ‘‘God is not loved purely when loved
only because of his pleasure’’ (Lettres I, O.C., XIV, 55). Moreover, Fénelon
leaves no doubt that pure love remains an ideal that can never be reached: we
remain attached to our private interest.
Was Quietism a child of the Enlightenment or was it a reaction against it?
On the surface it may appear to have been no more than an attempt to over-
come the secularism of the period by a return to spiritual doctrines of the
past. It undoubtedly was continuous with a premodern tradition. Fénelon
constantly refers to Augustine, Bernard, and François de Sales. But a closer
look at the movement also discloses the presence of decidedly modern ele-
ments that had already been at work in the Reformation and were becoming
fully manifest in Pietism. It made spiritual life accessible to all believers with-
out the mediating authority of clergy and magisterium. Instead of devotional
practices, sacraments, and communal prayers, it stressed an unmediated, inte-
rior piety. This, more than specific doctrines, aroused the Catholic Church’s
suspicion. Those who chose the way of perfection became members of a dis-
tinct group—les spirituels—less submissive to authority than to the inspira-
tion of the Spirit. In this respect at least, Quietism’s self-conscious piety was
fully in tune with those aspects of modernity that it doctrinally so strongly
opposed.
Fénelon lost the battle for his spiritual movement. He withdrew to his di-
ocese, seldom leaving it and observing a respectful silence. But his influence
continued to grow, not only among French Catholics but also among English,
German, and Dutch Protestants. Wesley included the Maxims in his Christian
Library. In The Spirit of Love, William Law (1686–1761), a saintly, nonjuring
Anglican clergyman, followed Fénelon’s ideal of spiritual life and withdrew to
solitude. Philipp Jacob Spener and August Herman Francke, the founders of
the Pietist movement in Germany, recommended Fénelon, and their own writ-
ings are suffused with Quietist piety. The Protestant Pierre Poiret republished
Fénelon. Thus after having been censored by Rome and exiled from Versailles,
the archbishop became a leading spiritual master of Western Christians, Prot-
estants and Catholics alike. Quietism ceased to be a Catholic sect: it became an
état d’âme that, besides Lutherans and Calvinists, affected even deists such as
Rousseau.∞∂
 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 325

German Pietism

By the middle of the seventeenth century, Lutheranism had ceased to be

a protest movement. It had settled down as an alternate Church with distinct
doctrines and rituals. Luther’s vision had become framed within an orthodox
scholasticism of which Melancthon’s Loci communes was the authoritative
text. Orthodoxy attempted to present Christian faith in a logically coherent
system. But that system itself was inconsistently built on Luther’s critique of
reason in matters of faith. Lessing was to attack this inconsistency in dogma as
well as in logic. Devout Lutherans, disaffected by this intellectualist theology,
wistfully remembered Luther’s stress on the experience of God in prayer and
good works. Their aversion of the doctrine of Orthodoxy led to the movement
that later came to be known as ‘‘Pietism,’’ a name no less derogatory than that
of ‘‘Quietism.’’ Its origins go back to the theologian Johann Arndt (1555–
1621), whose True Christianity (originally published as Vier Bücher vom
wahren Christentum [1606]—later two more books were added) was to
transform the face of Lutheranism in the second half of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Arndt intended to restore Lutheran piety through a revival of its original
mystical inspiration.∞∑ He republished Luther’s edition of the late medieval
Theologia Deutsch, as well as Johannes Tauler’s Sermons and The Imitation of
Christ, sources of Luther’s inspiration. Arndt’s own True Christianity was
deeply steeped in medieval piety. The third book consists entirely of a com-
mentary on Tauler’s theory of mystical union with virtually no ‘‘Protestant’’
reinterpretation at all.∞∏
Arndt had been an early forerunner. Pietism became a religious movement
only after Philipp Jacob Spener’s (1635–1705) republication of Arndt’s work
with a long introduction, later published separately under the title Pia de-
sideria (1676). In it Spener complains about the sterility of Orthodox theology
and advocates a mystical piety. In his commentary on the Epistle to the Ro-
mans, he writes: ‘‘Perfection in this life consists in being so united with God
that the entire soul with all her powers be directed at, drawn to, and absorbed
by God, so that she becomes one spirit with God, thinks of nothing but God,
experiences and comprehends nothing outside God. . . . The entire foundation
of such a great glory of the faithful lies in the inhabitation of, and communion
with the Lord Christ in them.’’∞π
Spener, though antagonistic to Orthodox theology, nevertheless attempted
to avoid causing a schism in the Church. He constantly insisted on the Lu-
theran origin of his ideas and missed no occasion for attacking ‘‘Papism,’’ even
while drawing upon Catholic sources. The dual strategy did not quite succeed.
326 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

His work stimulated spiritual aspirations that, despite his warnings, escaped
ecclesiastical control. He himself started small groups (ecclesiolae in Ecclesia)
that submitted only to the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. August Hermann
Francke (1663–1727), Spener’s favorite disciple, wrote: ‘‘To find Christ in
Scripture is precious, but to find Him in one’s heart is even more so. . . . One
might say that one will not find Christ in Scripture if one does not discover him
in one’s heart.’’∞∫ Despite official resistance, Spener’s views spread, particularly
after Francke was appointed at the newly founded university of Halle. The
enemies of Pietism proved to be right. The more the movement turned mysti-
cal, the more it deviated from Lutheran Orthodoxy. Radical Pietists such as
Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714) ceased to justify their theories by referring to
Orthodox sources. Instead they appealed to the Greek Fathers’ doctrine about
the inhabitation of God in the soul.
One cannot but notice the affinity with Quietism. Both Spener and Francke
recommended the reading of Fénelon. The mystical Gerhard Tersteegen
(1697–1769), raised in the Dutch Reformed tradition, stands closer to Mme.
Guyon, whose work he translated, than to Calvin. For him, as for the Qui-
etists, religion consisted entirely in a passive surrender to God’s will. His ideal
was ‘‘to live retired, be emptied of everything, to be alone with God in the
Spirit, and separated from the world, at rest and in silence, giving place to God
and things divine.’’∞Ω His followers included German Lutherans as well as
Dutch Calvinists (with whom he entertained an intense correspondence in
their own language).
Their enemies—as recent as Albrecht Ritschl in his learned History of Pi-
etism (3 vols., 1880–86)—accused Pietists of the same vices with which Qui-
etists had been charged: subjectivism, separatism, and a lack of serious con-
cern for doctrine. They did indeed have much in common. During the second
half of the eighteenth century, Pietism, no longer able to defend its weak
theology against rationalist attacks, gradually returned to Orthodoxy. Yet
even those who abandoned the movement persisted in a search for inner expe-
rience. The so-called Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) current in late
eighteenth-century German literature continued to be inspired by the spirit of
Pietism. Klopstock’s Messias retains some of the trappings of popular Pietist
hymns: angels everywhere, apostles in golden chairs, Jesus overseeing every-
thing, and Satan plotting and scheming against the human race. The imagery
of the epic appears contrived and much of its poetry maudlin. But Klopstock
introduced the grand religious themes that, in the pen of greater poets such as
Hölderlin, were to create a new poetic idiom. Indeed, Hölderlin himself wrote
some Pietist songs in his early youth.≤≠
Angelus Silesius’s Cherubinic Wanderer (1657) also deserves mention, even
 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 327

though its publication actually preceded the Pietist movement. Yet the first
two books of this work, which the author, Johann Scheffler, wrote before his
conversion to Catholicism, present a more radical form of Pietism than the
later one.≤∞ In them the soul’s union with God is grounded in the creature’s
eternal inexistence as an idea in God.
The rose which here on earth is now perceived by me,
Has blossomed thus in God from all eternity. (I, 108)≤≤

Once the creature begins its existence in time, its essential being continues in
God and hence, as Eckhart had written, it possesses no real being of its own.
‘‘All creatures have no being, for their being consists in the presence of God.’’≤≥
But if creatures possess no being except in God, God becomes ‘‘being’’ only in
and trough his creatures. If, as Angelus Silesius assumes, God must express
Himself in a finite creation, the Creator depends on creation for his very being.
Creation on its side, being nothing in itself, entirely depends on God.
Ich weiss, dass ohne mich Gott nicht ein Nu kann leben,
Werd ich zu nicht, er muss von Not den Geist aufgeben. (I, 8)
(I know that without me God cannot live a ‘‘now’’ [moment],
Were I reduced to naught, He also would expire.)

There are various ways of interpreting Silesius’s paradoxes. Undoubtedly,

some passages suggest that the soul actually loses its identity in God. But the
vision underlying the Wanderer is pan-entheistic rather than pantheistic. All
things exist in God, yet the creature’s finitude irreducibly distinguishes it from
God. To an all-inclusive infinite, nothing can be opposed as other. Otherness
consists entirely in the partial character of the finite’s expression of the infinite.
Hence the creature relates to God as the other relates to what Nicolas of Cusa
had called the ‘‘Non-other.’’ The dialectic between the Non-other and the other
in Silesius’s poem assumes a particular significance when compared with the
rationalist theology of the Enlightenment, which conceived the relation be-
tween God and creation as an extrinsic one between two ‘‘other’’ beings. For
Silesius (as for Spinoza), a juxtaposition of the infinite with the finite would
limit the infinite. Infinity leaves no metaphysical space beyond itself: all ‘‘other’’
reality must somehow exist within God.

Religious Affections in Edwards and in Swedenborg

As the quest for a more intimate, personal religion increased, the ancient
notion of religious affections became prominent once again. According to the
great New England divine Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), religious affections
328 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

belong to the essence of faith. ‘‘True religion, in great part, consists in holy
affections.’’≤∂ An affective awareness of God’s presence, for him as for Calvin,
was a sign of divine election. What did Edwards understand by the vague term
‘‘affection’’? Obviously more than feeling or emotion. Affections move the will
as well as the heart. They instigate the mind toward acting in a particular way.
Moreover, for Edwards, the term has a cognitive no less than an emotional
denotation. John E. Smith in his introduction to Edward’s Treatise concerning
Religious Affections describes them as ‘‘signposts indicating the direction of
the soul, whether it is toward God in love or away from God and toward the
world.’’≤∑ Edwards distinguishes religious affections from ordinary inclina-
tions by the strength of their impulses. They are the vigorous spring to action
that moves will, emotions, and understanding all toward the same goal.
Religious affections also possess an aesthetic quality. Though God’s nature
surpasses human perception, in some way the affective awareness of a divine
presence impresses the soul as beautiful. ‘‘God’s nature, or the divinity, is
infinitely excellent; yea ’tis infinite beauty, brightness, and glory itself’’ (242).
The concept of glory, central in Calvin’s theology, refers to a quality that
renders God both attractive and distant. Edwards describes it as ‘‘infinite
highness and infinite condescension.’’≤∏ The light of glory illuminates the mind
and arouses a selfless love that in some way corresponds to Jeanne Guyon’s
and Bishop Fénelon’s pure love. Yet for the Puritan divine, the infinite distance
between God and the created mind can never be bridged in union. The object
of love is near, yet never to be possessed. Edwards speaks of an infused cogni-
tive sense, not a new faculty, but an ability granted ‘‘the same faculty of
understanding’’ (206) that renders the mind capable of savoring God’s revela-
tion (273, 282) and apprehending its beauty.
What induced Edwards to call this an infused sense rather than an infused
understanding? Writing in Locke’s tradition he traced any source of new
knowledge to sensation. Reason, restricted to comparing and assessing ideas
received from the senses, possesses no affective qualities, as sensation does.
Hence any spiritual perception had to originate in some kind of sensation.≤π
Moreover, for the Cambridge Platonists, John Smith and Henry More, who
influenced Edwards, the empiricist term ‘‘spiritual sensation’’ disguised a Pla-
tonic intuition that had nothing in common with sensationalism. For them as
for Edwards, this ‘‘spiritual sensation’’ could convey a necessary and eternal
truth, rather than being a transient impression the truth of which was still to
be established by reason. Still, Edwards emphatically distinguishes spiritual
insight from notional understanding. His ‘‘sense of the heart,’’ unlike Pascal’s
knowledge of the heart, yields not the kind of knowledge by which a person
‘‘knows what a triangle is, and what a square is’’ (272). In fact, religious
 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 329

affections, though originating in a cognitive sense, do not primarily grant a

‘‘seeing’’ of truth, but a new tasting of divine life.
Edwards attributes this affective knowledge to the Spirit of God, who
dwells in the saints as in ‘‘his temple’’ and instills ‘‘a principle of new nature
and life’’ (200). Suggesting a participation in God’s life (392), Edwards strains
the principles of reformed Christianity to the limits. He also insists on the
necessity of active cooperation. Holy affections, he maintains, are rooted in
the practice of Christian virtues, and they lead to a more consistent practice. It
is sheer hypocrisy ‘‘to cry up faith in opposition to works’’ (318).≤∫ Even for
this Puritan firebrand, doctrinal Calvinist positions lose much of their signifi-
cance. For Edwards, as well as for Quietists and Pietists, the immanent pres-
ence of God forms the core of spiritual religion.
In the eighteenth century, the term ‘‘affection’’ had yet another meaning
than the one Edwards knew. It referred to the way people or things influence
(affect) one another, or, as Swedenborg wrote, ‘‘correspond’’ to one another.
That more objective meaning defines the structure of Emanuel Swedenborg’s
(1688–1772) thought. This son of the bishop of Skara grew up to be one of
Sweden’s most distinguished scientists. As a member of the Royal Mining
Commission, he wrote a much-respected study on metallurgy and made vari-
ous discoveries in the fields of physiology and astronomy. In his fifty-fourth
year he experienced a prolonged spiritual crisis in the course of which he
allegedly began to receive visions that continued trough the rest of his life.
They all related to the correspondence between physical, spiritual, and what
he calls ‘‘divine’’ reality. He spent most of the last thirty years of his life
discussing the connections and affinities between the three realms.
The twelve-volume Arcana Coelestia (1749–56), Swedenborg’s first and
most comprehensive work, consists of a Latin commentary on the two first
books of the Bible. Having completed this gigantic opus, Swedenborg under-
standably abandoned the project of writing a commentary on the remaining
books. Reading the Arcana (or part of it) is a unique experience that oscillates
between admiration and aversion. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz compares
the experience to wandering through a hall of mirrors that arouses a range of
conflicting emotions, where mockery abruptly turns to awe and curiosity to
boredom.≤Ω In thousands of pages the Swedish visionary describes a spiritual
universe that forms the inner core and immanent cause of the physical one we
know. Within it lies an even more inward, divine realm unknowable in itself
but manifest in its effects. The outer or lower realities symbolize the interior,
higher ones. ‘‘Whatever is seen anywhere in the universe is symbolic [others
translate: representative] of the Lord’s kingdom, to the point that nothing
whatever occurs in the atmosphere or in space, in the world and its three
330 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

kingdoms, that is not in its own way symbolic [or: representative]. . . . From
the divine came heavenly realities whose essence is the good. From the heav-
enly realities came spiritual ones whose essence is the true. And from those
two come natural realities.’’≥≠
The two concepts of correspondence and representation play a crucial part
in Swedenborg’s doctrine. ‘‘Correspondence . . . [exists] between the phe-
nomena of the inner or spiritual person and phenomena of the outer or natural
person. A representation occurs in things proper to the world’s light (that is,
something in the outer or natural person) that relates to phenomena proper to
heaven’s light (that is, that come from the inner or spiritual person)’’ (Arcana,
# 3225). Swedenborg’s concordances may be compared to Bishop Butler’s
theological analogies. Both symbolically link the natural universe to a spiritual
realm. In different ways they counter the naturalist ideologies of their time by
suggesting the existence of another dimension of the real than the one of the
natural sciences.
Swedenborg finds the key to this symbolism in the spiritual interpretation of
the Bible. Yet rather than superimposing a spiritual sense upon the literal, he
presents the spiritual as hidden within the literal. ‘‘The spiritual sense is not
apparent in the sense of the letter; it is within it as the soul is in the body’’ (The
True Christian Religion [1771], # 194). In this spiritual literalism ‘‘each and
every element is [intrinsically] symbolic of spiritual and heavenly matters’’
(Arcana, # 3472).≥∞ Beyond the spiritual meaning Swedenborg still admits a
celestial one to be grasped only indirectly ‘‘through the affection of the will’’
(Doctrine of Sacred Scripture [1764], # 19). Swedenborg justifies his symbolic
perspective on the natural world by means of an immanent divine presence
that moves nature from within rather than leaving it entirely to the blind force
of mechanical causality. ‘‘The natural [world] has its whole source in the
spiritual kingdom. Anything lacking a prior source is nothing, nothing occurs
that is not connected to a cause’’ (Arcana, # 2758). Reality depends on God
from within, not through the extrinsic causality of a product on its maker. For
him, God does not create ‘‘out of nothing.’’ The universe, the natural as well as
the spiritual, ‘‘could not have been created except in God and from God’’; God
himself ‘‘is, in fact, its actual reality’’ (Divine Love and Wisdom [1763], # 55).
Swedenborg aims his argument at Isaac Newton, according to whom God
needs an empty receptacle of infinite space and time—a physical ‘‘nothing-
ness’’—in which to create. Such a zone of emptiness contradicts the very idea
of God as infinite being. ‘‘The Divine fills all space of the universe without
being bound by space’’ (Divine Love and Wisdom, # 69). It must be said,
however, that the promises of this theory of concordance remain mostly un-
fulfilled. Many of Swedenborg’s ‘‘deeper’’ readings amount to little more than
 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 331

far-fetched allegories of a kind that had long been discredited. Instead of

disclosing the symbolic meaning of a text, they consist of line-by-line allegori-
cal interpretations that run parallel with the literal meaning without inti-
mately linking one to the other.
Although the basic structure of Swedenborg’s system is Neoplatonic, some
Gnostic elements appear in it. Where traditional Jewish and Christian theol-
ogy draws a decisive line in the structure of reality between Creator and
creation, the Swedish theosophist, following the Gnostic distinction between a
material, a psychic, and a spiritual level, distinguishes two divisions: one be-
tween the natural and the spiritual realm, the other between the spiritual and
the divine. Moreover, as in the Gnostic pleroma, the ‘‘heavenly’’ sphere houses
a plurality of divine beings. Most controversially, Swedenborg equates the
Creator with Gnosticism’s aboriginal Divine Man. The following passage ap-
pears in Heaven and Hell (1758), an early work that inspired William Blake:
‘‘The only form in which any angel in heaven can perceive the divine is the
human form; and remarkable as it may seem, in the higher heavens, they
cannot even think about the divine in any other way’’ (Heaven and Hell, # 79).
Since God can exist only as God-Man, major parts of the Arcana are devoted
to a detailed description of the concordance between human physiology and
the celestial kingdom.
Czeslaw Milosz has perceived the significance of this position in the ra-
tionalist atmosphere of the time. ‘‘The Christian faith, always strongly an-
thropocentric, searched for a new vision to compete with the new atheistic
idea of the Man-God who was to be his own redeemer. In the eighteenth
century an extraordinary concept makes its appearance, one possibly related
to the Adam Kadmon, the primordial, pre-cosmic man of the Cabala. For
Swedenborg, God in heaven has a human form; Christ’s humanity is thus a
perfect fulfillment of the Godhead.’’≥≤ Indeed, even the Incarnation is an in-
trinsically necessary event within God. ‘‘God came into the world . . . that He
might become visible’’ (True Christian Religion, # 786).
The idea of a Primal Man appears in several Gnostic myths. Yet they rarely
identify this precosmic perfect Adam with the Godhead. Swedenborg here
deviates from common Gnostic theory as well as from Christian orthodoxy.
He reinterprets the doctrine of the Trinity in a similar sense. The Trinity did
not exist before God became incarnate ‘‘in the Lord God, the Redeemer and
Savior, Jesus Christ’’ (ibid., # 170). God, then, became fully divine only in
Christ. The theosophist is convinced that Christianity is about to enter its final
phase and the prophecy of the New Jerusalem to be fulfilled. In fact, the Last
Judgment has already occurred in the spiritual world, yet the glorified Christ
remains invisible except to those whose spiritual sight has been opened (True
332 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

Christian Religion, # 777). He will become manifest in a new Church, of

which Swedenborg declares himself to be the divinely appointed minister. This
and a few similar visions have discredited Swedenborg’s mystical theology to
most Christian believers.
Before dismissing his theology, we ought to establish what role the ‘‘visions’’
play in the whole of his work. Over a period of nearly thirty years Swedenborg
alleges to have experienced visions. In them he moves easily between this
world and the spiritual realm, where he engages in conversations with spirits.
What renders these visions disconcerting is their ordinary, not to say pedes-
trian, character. They are neither awesome as those of Jeremiah or Ezechiel,
nor ecstatic as the ones of Julian of Norwich or Teresa of Avila. In his reports
of them Swedenborg casually chats with the spirits of the dead as with chance
encounters in the street. Was he a schizophrenic genius like Strindberg and Van
Gogh, as Karl Jaspers contends? The visionary message that equates Christ’s
Second Coming with Swedenborg’s new religion (True Christian Religion,
# 779) seems particularly strange.
Still, he impressed others as a stable person of mature judgment. Up to his
final years he continued to revise and publish scientific papers and to serve as a
respected member of the Swedish parliament. Some think that he may not
have had any visions at all and that the ‘‘reports’’ merely served to illustrate his
spiritual insight. Thus the French-Polish poet Oscar Milosz wonders: ‘‘Did the
memorabilia [the passages in which he reported his visionary encounters]
come before or after the system? Was the work born of a vision or an idea?
Because these ‘memorabilia’ have the look of inventions designed as an alle-
gorical proof.’’ Czeslaw Milosz, Oscar’s distant cousin, adds that eighteenth-
century literary conventions required such authenticating devices as a pseudo-
memoir or a pseudo-diary, or a manuscript found in a tree trunk.≥≥
It is hard to decide between the pathological and the ‘‘allegorical’’ hypoth-
esis. But a realistic interpretation of the visions seems excluded. What, for
instance, are we to make of Swedenborg’s report of his visit to the ‘‘frigid
zones’’ of the spiritual universe ‘‘where the northern spirits dwell’’ who have
their heads covered with lion skins, their bodies with leopard skins, and their
feet with bear skins as they ride in sledges to a Sunday service (True Christian
Religion, # 185)? The strange transference of the present world to a spiritual
universe appears almost intended to discourage the reader from taking the
vision literally. Fantasy complements prejudice in the Supplement to The True
Christian Religion, probably a late addition, where he passes in review the
founders and representatives of various Western religions as he encounters
them in the spiritual world. His description resembles Dante’s picture of hell
and purgatory. Luther is expected to move up to heaven after Swedenborg
 Spiritual Continuity and Renewal 333

converts him from his doctrine of justification by faith alone. Calvin meets a
worse fate as he persists in the ‘‘execrable doctrine of predestination’’ (True
Christian Religion, # 798). Among Christians the ‘‘Papists’’ are the lowest and
they remain unreformed.
In the end the nature of Swedenborg’s visions—whether inventions, delu-
sions, or illustrations—may not be decisive for the merit of his theology. They
sharply differ from the theory in content as well as in tone and discredit neither
the insight nor the religious sensitivity displayed in the theoretical parts. Swe-
denborg’s religious and cultural impact was profound and long lasting. In the
eighteenth century his doctrine influenced Goethe as well as the Würtenberg
Pietists.≥∂ Emerson gave him a place among his Representative Men; Balzac
admired him and so did Borges; he marked the education of William and
Henry James; Blake’s theosophical writings bear the stamp of Swedenborg on
every page; Baudelaire used the concordances as a literary device; symbolist
painters Odilon Redon and Pierre Bonnard learned from them to view physi-
cal appearance as transparent of spiritual reality. Swedenborg’s symbolic vi-
sion of the physical universe may be seen as an attempt to achieve a new
synthesis, if not between traditional religion and culture as a whole, at least
between religion and the scientific worldview of his time. A fantastic super-
naturalism compensating for a narrow literalism clouded his theological in-
sight and conflicted with the symbolic direction of his work.
 Conclusion

The ideas of the Enlightenment continue to influence our present cul-

ture. The ideal of human emancipation still occupies a central place among
them, though it has since passed through a number of changes. Marxism,
which until recently played a leading role in European life, may serve as an
example both of the continuity with and the transformation of the original
ideal. It derived its goal of social liberation from the eighteenth-century ideal
of emancipation. Yet the kind of social liberation Marx had in mind obviously
differs from the emancipation pursued by the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-
century thought had at least in principle continued to maintain the traditional
primacy of theoretical reason. Marx replaced this primacy with that of instru-
mental reason. Human emancipation was to result from changes in the social
process of production.
In the West, Marxism now appears to belong to a perfect past and most of
us consider ourselves more legitimate heirs of the Enlightenment legacy. Still,
the Enlightenment itself contained a less overt but no less consequential prag-
matism. The eighteenth-century notion of rationality included a universal pat-
tern of order to be imposed upon nature and society. The idea of an enforced
rationality inspired and motivated the French Revolution. Albrecht Wellmer
has described the dangers implied in this project: ‘‘Enlightenment became a
world-historical project of the human species, in which the species simulta-

334
 Conclusion 335

neously creates itself and threatens its own destruction; its ultimate aim is
social freedom, happiness, and the independence of the individual, but its
secret logic aims at the extinction of the self-liberating subjects and the self-
elevation of social bondage and constraint.’’∞
Jürgen Habermas has made a vigorous effort to disconnect at least the
Enlightenment’s idea of emancipation from a narrowly practical interpreta-
tion and to restore some of the metaphysical content that practical reason, at
least for its major thinkers, possessed. Deprived of all metaphysical and re-
ligious content, he claims, practical reason tends to degenerate to a utilitarian
calculus, ‘‘rationality in the service of self-preservation gone wild.’’≤ He seeks
to return to what he considers the original emancipatory project of the En-
lightenment. The modern concept of reason is indeed linked to emancipatory
action, as Kant had shown. But that call for action does not imply that theo-
retical reason must ever yield its primacy to practical intelligence. When sub-
ordinate to practice, theoretical reason forfeits the authority to raise critical
questions of legitimacy. Both Nazism and Communism have shown the cata-
strophic consequences to which this leads.
Other contemporary thinkers have recently criticized the Enlightenment for
the opposite reason. According to them, it intensified a one-sided intellectual-
ism that had been inherent in Western thought since its Greek beginnings. In
particular, they object to the typically modern concern with absolute founda-
tions. That concern, according to Richard Rorty, originated in the early seven-
teenth century.≥ Western thought did not always require the support of ulti-
mate foundations, even though it has always insisted on the necessity to justify
the real. Plato’s philosophy began with ‘‘nonfoundational’’ conversations. His
dialogues remain wide open to all viewpoints, as long as the speakers do not
contradict themselves. To make sense, an argument must remain consistent,
but nothing should or can prevent it from admitting unproven assumptions.
Premodern thinkers have never felt the need to prove all of the presuppositions
of their thought. Yet, as I understand them, the concerns of Rorty and some
other postmodern thinkers move beyond the intellectualism of the Enlighten-
ment. Their critique of modernity forms part of a more comprehensive attack
on a logocentrism that allegedly has obsessed Western thought from the be-
ginning. Modern rationalism, then, would be merely a distinct, more self-
conscious stage of that ancient rationalism.∂
In my opinion, that critique of the Enlightenment continues to rely on prin-
ciples inherent in the Enlightenment itself. Its summons to uninhibited critical
thinking—sapere aude—challenges any principles that stand in the way of
such a critique, including the Enlightenment’s own. Formerly few dared to
turn the power of their critique on the rule of reason itself. Today’s critics are
336 Conclusion

prepared to do so, though the source of the critical impulse lies in the very
movement they criticize. Michel Foucault’s thought presents an amazing ex-
ample of opposition to Enlightenment in the name of Enlightenment princi-
ples. In his view, the fact that the human subject imposes meaning transforms
the meaning-giving act itself into an exercise of power. Structures of meaning
that appear as determinations of reason express in fact an underlying will to
power.∑ So, he rejects the primacy of reason, essential to Enlightenment proj-
ect, altogether. Here also, however, it must be said that antecedents of this
critique may be found in the Enlightenment itself. Rousseau continuously
attacked the rationalism on which his political critique was based. In others,
such as Diderot, the inconsistency is less obvious. Yet their personal and fic-
tional writings substantially differ from the rationalist principles that lie at the
ground of their critique. It has been said with some justification that the so-
called Age of Reason was reason’s worst enemy.∏
In the course of this book I have repeatedly indicated that one of the main
problems of the Enlightenment stems from the assumption that the mind alone
is the source of meaning. This often led to an unwarranted intellectual confi-
dence. Many appeared insufficiently aware of the limitations of the histor-
ically conditioned individual mind and tended to identify it with the univer-
sal, transcendental reason. Kant, who coined the term ‘‘transcendental ego,’’
warned against equating it with the empirical self. Others did not adequately
distinguish them and ended up with an idea of reason that badly needed to be
desublimated. One effect of it was that they tended to overestimate the realis-
tic chances of their projects. Utopian treatises on perpetual peace, on a perma-
nent international brotherhood, on the unification of all sciences, and on the
future extinction of crime, bear the sign of a naive presumptuousness. For a
brief period many intellectuals, especially but not exclusively in France, ex-
pected that the French Revolution, the ultimate utopia, was about to realize all
the Enlightenment’s hopes.
Contrary to the religious utopias of earlier ages, those of the Enlightenment
appeared realistic because their supporters intended to realize them by scien-
tific means and methods. But, as Karl Mannheim remarks, that did not make
them any less utopian. ‘‘Nothing is more removed from actual events than the
closed rational system. Under certain circumstances, nothing contains more
irrational drive than a fully self-contained, intellectualistic world-view.’’π In
fact, religious utopias, believed to be long suppressed, continued to inspire the
allegedly scientific projects of the Enlightenment. Behind the rationalist out-
lines of the stages of world history we still detect traces of apocalyptic specula-
tions that began with Joachim of Fiore. Lessing’s essay on ‘‘The Education of
the Human Race,’’ directly influenced by Pietist sources, shows how easily a
 Conclusion 337

religious view of history could be transferred to a secular one. In France, the

young Turgot initiated a similar transition in his ‘‘Discours sur les progrès
successifs de l’esprit humain,’’ which his admirer Condorcet developed into a
fail-proof, scientific utopia. His certainty of the future as that of other uto-
pians rested entirely on an unrestricted trust in the compelling force of reason.
Having reached full intellectual maturity, humans, they assumed, would have
no choice but freely to obey the voice of reason and thereby to realize the ideal
state of humanity. Since then we have learned what Voltaire knew: how little
reason directs human conduct.
Finally, I return to the question raised at the beginning of this book concern-
ing the Enlightenment’s relation to early and late modernity. From the preced-
ing chapters it should appear that in the Enlightenment the original thesis of
modern thought, namely, that the mind plays a creative role in the constitution
of the real, found its strongest expression. That does not imply, however, that
the Enlightenment’s intellectual position can be derived from early modern
premises. In many respects it deviated from them. Early modern thought had
none of the abstract universalism characteristic of the later period. The En-
lightenment reinterpreted the humanist idea of human creativity. The charac-
teristic inclination of Enlightenment thought to universalize its concepts de-
prived the Renaissance notion of human creativity of the tragic limitations
restricting each individual’s potential to realize it, of which precisely the most
creative men of genius—Michelangelo, Galileo, Leonardo—had remained so
acutely conscious. We rarely perceive those limitations in the Enlightenment.
For the later thinkers, no meaning is given with reality itself. This belief con-
stitutes the basis of what we consider to be the Enlightenment’s rationalism
taken in the comprehensive sense that includes empiricist as well as philosoph-
ically ‘‘rationalist’’ thought.
Within that rationalism, the principle of universality, crucial in our intellec-
tual tradition since its Greek beginnings, turned into an abstract, logical prin-
ciple of reasoning. On a practical level, it became a tool of instrumental reason
that enabled the West to develop a technical superiority, which allowed it to
impose its views and politics on most of the world. Through colonization,
technical advances, and economic power, it has attempted and mostly suc-
ceeded in restructuring other societies on a Western pattern. These develop-
ments were not accidental: they were direct consequences of the new concept
of reason. That concept was isolated from the historical context in which it
had previously been embedded. In premodern thought reason was never taken
to be free of presuppositions. To overcome the skepticism created by the
nominalist crisis, however, Descartes considered it necessary for reason to be
its own foundation and not to rely on anything outside itself. That abstraction
338 Conclusion

by now has shown its limitations, both the theoretical and practical. With
many others, Alasdair MacIntyre has called for a return to a way of thinking
that recognizes its link to a particular tradition. ‘‘What Enlightenment made
us for the most part blind to and we now need to recover is . . . a conception
according to which the standards of rational justification themselves emerge
from and are part of a history.’’∫
Since the Enlightenment has now come under such a severe revision, many
have begun to wonder whether it was more than an unfortunate cultural
interlude, a deviation from the course of our intellectual development. Against
this position I have argued that the Enlightenment, though flawed and one-
sided, accomplished an indispensable task in the development of Western
thought. With admirable persistency it pursued the principle that has domi-
nated our intellectual tradition since its beginning, namely, that things ought
to be justified rather than blindly accepted from habit and custom. In its
single-minded attempt to make that principle into the guiding rule of thought,
the Enlightenment achieved a veritable breakthrough on the way toward con-
sistent rationality and even provided the tools for correcting its own one-
sidedness. Though the eighteenth century rarely made those corrections, its
intellectual achievement remains unsurpassed.
The Enlightenment has given us some of our most important ideas: an
expressive conception of art, a nonauthoritarian view of morality, political
theories that build freedom and democracy within the very structures of so-
ciety. These were rationally sound positions, even when the arguments that
supported them often rested on questionable grounds. A theory of human
rights conceived in a judicial vacuum may be hard to defend juridically, yet the
very concept of such rights expresses the profoundly rational insight that
human beings are by nature entitled to rights. The same applies to the doubtful
arguments by which political philosophers legitimated the idea of a social
contract. They were right in believing that political structures must serve peo-
ple’s needs rather than being self-justifying structures. If today we feel that the
undesirable conditions in which many humans have to live impose a universal
obligation on the conscience of the more fortunate ones, we may find it hard to
justify that insight, but we nevertheless know it to be true. Time and again the
rational insights of the Enlightenment surpass the arguments invoked to jus-
tify them.
Even in its attitude toward religion, which has most severely been criticized,
the Enlightenment deserves considerable credit. Religious tolerance; the sepa-
ration between cult and public life; the protection of the individual conscience
against religious compulsion, social pressure, or cultural prejudice—all of
these have become nonnegotiable positions to Western believers. The sad
 Conclusion 339

events mentioned at the beginning of this book show the evil a religion may do
when it refuses to accept those positions. The critique of the so-called argu-
ments for the existence of God, themselves a modern, rationalist invention,
forced theology at last to abandon a long surpassed pre-Copernican concep-
tion of the world. The idea of creation conceived as a divine imparting of
motion, held over from an Aristotelian cosmology, lost its meaning after New-
ton’s theory and Diderot’s attacks. The critique of religion proved painful,
particularly in the irreverent form in which it was often administered; yet it was
necessary and overdue. In the end religion benefited from it. It forced the
religious community to seek the proper domain of religion in symbols of
transcendence rather than in science, and compelled it to begin a search for the
kind of spiritual depth needed to live in accordance with this insight. Paradox-
ically, it was the critique of the Enlightenment, however one-sided and intol-
erant of alternative views, that opened the eyes of Western believers to the truth
and value of religions other than their own. Even deism, rationalism’s own
defective product, was capable of inspiring genuine piety as the example of the
deeply religious Moses Mendelssohn showed and as Lessing’s play based on
that example proved. However we assess the Enlightenment’s achievements,
we could commit no greater error than to deny or reject them. They have
become an essential part of what we are.
 Notes

Introduction
1. Quoted in Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi (1851–70), vol.
VII, p. 325.

Chapter 1. A Definition and a Provisional Justification

1. Franco Venturi, Italy and the Enlightenment, ed. Stuart Woolf, trans. Susan Corsi
(New York University Press, 1972), p. 33.
2. Henry Steele Commager, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and
America Realized the Enlightenment (New York: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 242–45.
3. Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1988), p. xv.
4. R. G. Collingwood, ‘‘The Historical Imagination,’’ in his The Idea of History
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 231.
5. Ernest Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944),
p. 222.
6. Louis Dumont, ‘‘Are Cultures Living Beings?’’ Man (1986): 587.
7. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 121.
8. Georg Simmel, The Condition of Modern Culture and Other Essays, trans. K. Peter
Etzkorn (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), pp. 27–28.

341
342 Notes to Pages 7–14

9. Louis Dupré, Metaphysics and Culture (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University

Press, 1994) and ‘‘Is the History of Philosophy Philosophy?’’ Review of Metaphysics 42
(March 1989): 463–82.
10. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 486.
11. Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Was ist Aufklärung,’’ in Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin:
Preussische Akademie, 1902–42), vol. VII; trans. as ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ by Lewis
White Beck in Kant on History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 3.
12. Denis Diderot, Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron in Oeuvres Complètes,
ed. H. Dieckmann and J. Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1986), vol. XXV.
13. Rüdiger Bittner, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ in What Is Enlightenment? ed. James
Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 345–58. We know how one-
sided specialists can be in their practical judgment. Why should that judgment overrule
common sense?
14. Moses Mendelssohn, ‘‘On the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’’ trans. James
Schmidt, in What Is Enlightenment? pp. 53–57. The selection, the quality of the transla-
tions, and the expert commentary make Schmidt’s collection of essays an invaluable
source of information on the German Enlightenment.
15. Destutt de Tracy, Eléments d’Idéologie. Première partie: Idéologie proprement
dite, ed. Henri Gouhier (Paris: Vrin, 1971). Cf. Emmet Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age
of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of ‘‘Ideology’’ (Philadelphia: American
Philosophical Society, 1978).
16. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books,
1969), pp. 231–32. See also Fernand Dumont, Les Idéologies (Paris: P.U.F., 1976), and
Louis Dupré, Marx’s Social Critique of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1983), chap. 5, ‘‘The Use of Ideology.’’
17. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1970; repr. New York:
Doubleday, 1973), p. 100.
18. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit and Methode, 2d ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1960), pp. 250–61.
19. Frederic Antal, Classicism and Romanticism (New York: Harper and Row, 1973),
p. 4.
20. Edmund Husserl, ‘‘Philosophy and the Crisis of Modern Man,’’ trans. Quentin
Lauer, in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row,
1965), pp. 149–92. The quoted text appears on p. 157.
21. Edmund Husserl, ‘‘Philosophy as a Rigorous Science’’ (1910–11), trans. Quentin
Lauer, in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, pp. 71–147.
22. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner, 1952); Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper,
1964), p. 457.
23. Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, trans. J. Lewis May as The
European Mind, 1680–1715 (New York: World, 1952).
24. Cf. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Random House,
1967); Michael J. Buckley, At the Origin of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1987).
 Notes to Pages 15–24 343

25. Cf. Pierre-Jean Labarrière, Le discours de l’altérité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1982), p. 49.
26. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947; repr. New York: Seabury Press, 1974),
pp. 14, 17.

Chapter 2. A Different Cosmos

1. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de l’expression (Paris: Editions de Minuit,
1968).
2. M. J. Petry, ‘‘Hegel’s Criticism of Newton’’ in Clio 13, no. 4 (1984): 334–35.
3. Hans Blumenberg, ‘‘Selbsterhaltung und Beharrung: Zur Konstitution der neu-
zeitlichen Rationalität,’’ in Subjektivität und Selbsterhaltung, ed. Hans Ebeling (Frank-
furt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1976), pp. 144–207, esp. p. 181.
4. Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, bk. III, rule 3
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1964), p. 324.
5. Mathematical Principles, bk. I (Third Definition), p. 13.
6. Isaac Newton, Opticks, 4th ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1952), Question
31, p. 397.
7. Cf. Newton’s two letters to Bentley written in 1693. On this confused issue and
Newton’s persisting hesitation, cf. Ernan McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity
(South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1978), esp. chaps. 1–2.
8. In answering a query by Cotes, the author of the preface to a later edition of
the Principia, he even refers to the third law of mechanics—the equality of action and
reaction—the very one of which he had elsewhere declared that it could not prevent the
decrease of motion in the universe. Cf. McMullin, Newton on Matter, pp. 52–54.
9. On the impact of alchemy on Newton’s thought, cf. R. W. Westfall, ‘‘Alchemy in
Newton’s Career’’ in M. Righini Bonelli and W. Shea, eds. Reason, Experiment, and
Mysticism in the Scientific Revolution (New York: 1975).
10. Mathematical Principles, bk.I, Scholium following Definitions, p. 20.
11. Mathematical Principles, bk.I, Scholium following Definition VIII, pp. 18–19.
12. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, in Kants
Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Preussische Akademie, 1902–42), vol. IV, p. 560; Meta-
physical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. James Ellington (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1970), p. 127. In a letter to Bentley of December 10, 1692, Newton argues that
without an infinite (real) space the force of gravity would pull all celestial bodies together
into a single mass. Only an immense space (but why infinite?) would make it possible for
them to remain separate bodies. Without it, a continuous divine intervention would be
needed to keep bodies from collapsing into one another. Cf. Michael Buckley, Motion
and Motion’s God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), chap. 17.
13. Newton, Opticks, p. 370.
14. Aristotle, De coelo, I, 9, 279a.
15. Thomas Bradwardine (1290–1349), De causa Dei contra Pelagium, ed. Henry
Savile (London, 1618) and the commentary of Edward Grant, ‘‘Medieval and Sev-
enteenth Century Conceptions of an Infinite Void Space beyond the Cosmos,’’ in Isis 60,
pt. 1, no. 201 (spring 1969): 39–60; Alexandre Koyré, ‘‘Le vide et l’espace infini
344 Notes to Pages 24–31

au XIVe siecle,’’ Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen-âge 24 (1949):

45–91.
16. Samuel Clarke in André Robinet, eds., Collection of Papers which passed between
the late Learned Mr. Leibniz and Dr. Clarke in the years 1715 and 1716, relating to the
Principles of Natural Philosophy and Religion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1957). Clarke’s fourth reply.
17. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in The Works of
George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (Edinburgh, 1948–
57), no. 117, p. 94.
18. Avihu Zakai, ‘‘Jonathan Edwards and the Language of Nature: The Re-
Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning,’’ Journal of Religious
History 26 (2002): 15–41, and Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 3. Cf. J. E. McGuire, ‘‘Boyle’s Conception of
Nature,’’ Journal of the History of Ideas 33 (1972): 533.
19. Jonathan Edwards, Miscellany, in Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. XIX (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 565–94.
20. Melvin Woody, Freedom’s Embrace (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity, 1998), p. 220.
21. Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, vol. I: 1700–1740 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 152–53 (Reynolds), p. 40 (Prior).
22. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, L’homme machine: Man a Machine (1912; La Salle,
Ill.: Open Court, 1993), p. 148.
23. Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore, IV, chap. 25, 2, in The Latin Works, vol. I, ed.
Molesworth (London, 1839).
24. Thomas Hobbes, Of Human Nature, chap. 2, in The English Works, vol. IV.
25. Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles, in Oeuvres, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Robert
Lafont, 1994), vol. VII, p. 167; trans. Derek Coltman in Diderot’s Selected Writings, ed.
Lester G. Crocker (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 21.
26. Diderot, Lettre, p. 169; Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 23.
27. Lucretius, De rerum natura, I, 10/6–10/24; The Way Things Are, trans. Rolfe
Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 49.
28. Diderot, Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (# 50), in Oeuvres, vol. I, p. 588;
Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 79. In a letter to Charles Pineau Duclos, dated Septem-
ber 10, 1765, Diderot stated quite openly: ‘‘Sensibility is a universal property of matter,
an inert property in inorganic or senseless bodies . . . , a property rendered active in the
same bodies by their assimilation into an animal substance, one that is living.’’ Quoted in
Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1987), p. 232.
29. Diderot, Pensées (# 58), in Oeuvres, vol. I, p. 597; Diderot’s Selected Writings,
p. 86.
30. Diderot, Pensées (# 12), in Oeuvres, vol. I, p. 565; Diderot’s Selected Writings,
p. 73.
31. Diderot, Le rêve de d’Alembert (1769, pub. 1830), in Oeuvres, vol. I, p. 618;
‘‘D’Alembert’s Dream,’’ in Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 188.
32. Diderot, Le rêve, p. 636; Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 199.
 Notes to Pages 31–38 345

33. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Essai sur les élémens de philosophie (1759) in Mélanges
de littérature, d’histoire et de philosophie (Amsterdam, 1763–70), vol. IV; repr. in
Corpus des Oeuvres de Philosophie en Langue Française (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1986),
p. 27.
34. Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem (1922; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Ver-
lag, 1971–73), vol. II, p. 411ff.
35. Eclaircissement (addition to the Elémens de philosophie) in Mélanges, vol. V,
p. 253.
36. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1968), p. 56.
37. Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas, Marquis de Condorcet, Eloge de d’Alembert, in
Oeuvres de d’Alembert (Paris: A. Belin, 1821), vol. I, p. xiv.
38. Paul-Henri, baron d’Holbach, Système de la Nature ou des loix du monde physique
et du monde moral (Amsterdam, 1770); trans. as The System of Nature, by H. D. Robin-
son (New York: G. W. and A. J. Matsell, 1835; repr. by Burt Franklin in 1868 and in
1970), I, 2, 22. I refer to the 1970 edition by book, chapter, and page.
39. Echoes also of Pascal’s ‘‘Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up
like a speck.’’ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Lafuma, # 194; trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Bal-
timore: Penguin Books, 1966), p. 87. Pascal was not alone in feeling lost. The skeptic
Fontenelle describes the reaction of the marquise whom he has just informed that all fixed
stars are centers of different solar systems, each one of which may be inhabited. ‘‘That
confuses, disturbs, frightens me.’’ Fontenelle answers: ‘‘Quite the contrary with me. I feel
liberated by this endless space.’’ Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la plu-
ralité des mondes (1686; Paris: Marcel Didier, 1968), p. 135.
40. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1985), pp. 136–37.
41. George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, ‘‘Discours,’’ in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris,
1778), vol. I, p. 11.
42. Georges Gusdorf, Dieu, la nature, l’homme au siècle des lumières (Paris: Payot,
1972), pp. 270–73. Gusdorf’s assessment of Buffon’s significance deserves to be read in
its entirety (pp. 251–81).
43. ‘‘Le boeuf,’’ in Histoire Naturelle, vol. IV.
44. ‘‘Première vue de la nature,’’ in Oeuvres Philosophiques de Buffon (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1954), p. 34.
45. Les Epoques de la Nature (1778). This work appears as vols. XIV–XXIV of the
Oeuvres Complètes. The introduction to it appears separately in Oeuvres Philosophiques
de Buffon, p. 118. (Henceforth Epoques.)
46. On the history of form, one may consult my Passage to Modernity (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993), chaps. 1 and 2.
47. ‘‘Système nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances,’’ orig. pub. in
Journal des Savans, June 27, 1695, in Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, ed.
C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin 1875–90) (henceforth Schriften), vol. IV, p. 478; ‘‘New System of Na-
ture,’’ trans. in Leibniz Selections, ed. Philip Wiener (New York: Scribner, 1951), pp. 107–8.
48. Discours de métaphysique, in Schriften, vol. IV, p. 434; Discourse on Metaphysics,
in Leibniz Selections, pp. 302–3.
346 Notes to Pages 38–41

49. In an article in the Journal des Savans (June 18, 1691), Leibniz shows how exten-
sion cannot possibly account for the resistance to motion (the natural inertia) of bodies:
‘‘If there were nothing more in bodies than extension or position, that is to say, what
geometers know about it, combined with the sole notion of change, this extension would
be entirely indifferent with respect to this change, and the results of the impact of the
bodies would be explained solely by the geometric composition of the motions. That is,
the body after the impact would continue with a motion composed of the impulsion it
had before the impact and the one it would receive from the colliding body in failing to
stop its motion; that is to say, in this case of collision, it would travel with the difference of
the velocities and in the resultant direction.’’ Schriften, vol. IV, pp. 464–65; Leibniz
Selections, p. 101.
50. ‘‘Third Letter to Clarke,’’ # 4, in Schriften, vol. VII, p. 363; Leibniz Selections,
p. 223.
51. ‘‘Fifth Letter to Clarke,’’ # 29, in Schriften, vol. VII, p. 395; Leibniz Selections,
p. 246.
52. Ibid., # 52, in Schriften, vol. VII, p. 403; Leibniz Selections, p. 256. Also: ‘‘Abso-
lutely speaking it appears that God can make the material universe finite in extension; but
the opposite appears more agreeable to his wisdom’’ (# 30).
53. Ibid., # 106, in Schriften, vol. VII, p. 415; Leibniz Selections, p. 273.
54. Ibid., # 49, in Schriften, vol. VII, p. 402; Leibniz Selections, p. 255.
55. Ibid., # 55 in Schriften, vol. VII, p. 405; Leibniz Selections, p. 258.
56. Ibid., # 74, in Schriften, vol. VII, p. 408; Leibniz Selections, p. 263.
57. Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement Humain, in Schriften, vol. V, pp. 138 and 116;
New Essays Concerning Human Understanding, trans. A. G. Langley (Lasalle: Open
Court, 1949).
58. Newton, Opticks, Question 31, p. 402.
59. Leibniz, ‘‘First Letter to Clarke,’’ in Schriften, vol. VII, p. 358; Leibniz Selections, p.
216.
60. In his Rules for the Direction of the Mind Descartes had argued that a rational
investigation requires that we break the data of knowledge down into simple elements. In
so doing the mind attains principles that are intuitively certain and from which reliable
propositions may immediately be deduced. This analysis enables the mind to know the
simple natures, the ultimate, ideal elements of the real. René Descartes, Regulae ad
directionem ingenii (Rules for the direction of the mind), in Oeuvres de Descartes, ed.
C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris, 1897–1913), vol. X, p. 370 (rule 3) and p. 418 (rule 12).
61. Monadologie, # 8, in Schriften, vol. VI, p. 608; Leibniz Selections, p. 534. The
notion of monad as Leibniz conceived of it may have come from the physiologist and
theosophist J. B. Van Helmont (Brussels, 1577–1644), who assumed the existence of a
neutral element in the cells that acted as a conductor of all the others.
62. ‘‘Système nouveau de la nature et de la communication des substances,’’ in
Schriften, vol. IV, p. 483; ‘‘New System of Nature,’’ Leibniz Selections, pp. 112–13.
63. Discours de Métaphysique, in Schriften, vol. IV, # XV, p. 440; Discourse on Meta-
physics, in Leibniz Selections, pp. 311–12.
64. Nouveaux Essais, preface, in Schriften, vol. V, p. 46; New Essays Concerning
Human Understanding, trans. A. G. Langley, in Leibniz Selections, p. 390. See also Letter
 Notes to Pages 41–47 347

to De Volder (January 21, 1704), in Schriften, vol. II, p. 262; and the clear assertion to
Bayle, ‘‘Without that force [of acting] it would not be a substance’’ (vol. III, p. 58; Leibniz
Selections, p. 181).
65. Letter to De Volder (March 24/April 3, 1699), in Schriften, vol. II, p. 169; Leibniz
Selections, p. 158.
66. ‘‘Principes de la nature et de la grâce,’’ # 1, in Schriften, vol. VI, p. 598; ‘‘Principles
of Nature and Grace,’’ in Philosophical Works of Leibniz (New Haven: Tuttle, More-
house, and Taylor, 1890), p. 209 (corrected).
67. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jedigen künftigen Metaphysik, in Kants Ge-
sammelte Schriften, vol. IV, §§ 14, 16, pp. 294–95; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphys-
ics, trans. Paul Carus, rev. by James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1976), pp. 38–39.
68. Immanuel Kant, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis, in Kants
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, § 22 Scholion.
69. Immanuel Kant, Die metaphysischen Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, in
Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV, p. 468; Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Sci-
ence, trans. James Ellington (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 4.

Chapter 3. A New Sense of Selfhood

1. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford Univer-
sity Press, [1896] 1951), p. 253.
2. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin:
Preussische Akademie, 1902–42), vol. IV, A 804–5/B 832–33; Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929; New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1965), p. 635.
3. Kant, Logik, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IX, p. 25.
4. On the complicated question of the terminology of subject and substance, cf.
Rudolf Boehm, Kritik der Grundlagen des Zeitalters (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1974), # 26. Also Edward Pols, Mind Regained (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998),
pp. 105–10.
5. How radically the term ‘‘subject’’ came to vary from ‘‘substance’’ in the course of
modern thought appears in Hegel’s famous statement in the preface to the Phenomenol-
ogy of Spirit: ‘‘That Substance is essentially Subject, is expressed in the representation of
the Absolute as Spirit, the most sublime Notion and the one which belongs to the modern
age and its religion.’’ G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner, 1952), p. 24.; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977), p. 14.
6. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), trans. as The
Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 14.
7. Paul Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1990); Oneself
as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
8. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV, A 349–50
(henceforth abridged in the text as KRV ); Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, pp. 333–
34. I have used this translation throughout my work; it refers to the pages in the German
edition, both the first (A) and the second (B). Cf. Carlo Frigerio, ‘‘Kant’s Metaphysics of
348 Notes to Pages 48–54

the Subject and Modern Society,’’ in South-African Journal of Philosophy 8 (November

1989): 176–81.
9. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 253.
10. Leslie Stephen, ‘‘English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century,’’ in
Selected Writings in British Intellectual History, ed. Noel Annan (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1979), p. 126.
11. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in
The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop (London: Nelson, 1948),
vol. II, p. 84.
12. Berkeley, Commonplace Book (notes published in 1871), G. A. Johnston edition
(London: Faber and Faber, 1930), # 660. See Risieri Frondizi, The Nature of the Self
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1953), pp. 55–77.
13. When the Puritan theologian Samuel Johnson asked him, How could there be
consciousness after death if perception ceases with death? Berkeley responded that the
soul could continue to perceive independently of the body. An odd answer for an empiri-
cist! Letter to Samuel Johnson of November 25, 1729 in Works of George Berkeley, vol.
II, p. 282.
14. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, bk. I, 4, 6.
15. P. Butcharov, ‘‘The Self and Perceptions: A Study of Humean Philosophy,’’ Phi-
losopical Quarterly 9 (1959): 97–115.
16. Ibid., p. 115.
17. In Marxist philosophy the priority of a socially determined praxis so far eclipsed
the individual moral agent that it all but eliminated the notion of moral subject. Cf. Louis
Dupré, Marx’s Social Critique of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), esp.
pp. 1–14.
18. Baron d’Holbach, Système de la nature (Amsterdam, 1770); The System of Nature:
With Notes by Diderot, trans. H. D. Robinson (New York: Burt Franklin, 1868; repr.
1970), p. 11.
19. Mechanism made further inroads upon anthropology as the physiology of the
brain progressed. A major step in that direction was Prochaska’s and Galvani’s theory of
the vis nervosa. Cf. Daniel Robinson, The Enlightened Machine (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), esp. pp. 13–17.
20. Julien Offray de la Mettrie, L’homme machine: Man a Machine. Original French
text of 1748 and trans. by Gertrude Bussey and M. W. Calkins (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court,
1993; orig. pub. 1912), p. 135.
21. Diderot, Le rêve de d’Alembert, in Oeuvres, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Robert
Lafont, 1994–66), vol. I, p. 617–18; Diderot’s Selected Writings, trans. Lester Crocker
(New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 186.
22. Buffon, Histoire Naturelle, bk. II (1749).
23. Cf. Leopold Damrosch, God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional
Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985). See also
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 75–
77.
24. Georges Gusdorf, Dieu, la nature, l’homme au siècle des lumières (Paris: Payot,
1972), p. 80.
 Notes to Pages 54–60 349

25. Shaftesbury, Miscellaneous, chap. 1, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opin-

ions, ed. John M. Robertson (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), vol. II, p. 275.
26. Nivelle de la Chaussée, Mélanide, I, 4.
27. Cf. Jean Mesnard, ‘‘Le classicisme français et l’expression de la sensibilité,’’ in
Expression, Communication, and Experience in Literature and Language, ed. Ronald G.
Popperwell (Modern Humanities Research Association, 1973), pp. 28–37. Also Rainer
Baasner, Der Begriff Sensibilité im 18. Jahrhundert: Aufsteig und Niedergang eines Ideals
(Heidelberg: C. Winters, 1988).
28. Descartes, Traité des passions (Article 50), in Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. C. Adam
and P. Tannery (Paris, 1897–1913) (henceforth abridged to AT), vol. XI; pp. 368–70;
The Passions of the Soul, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and G. R. T. Ross in The Philosophical
Works of Descartes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970; orig. pub. 1911), vol.
I, p. 348.
29. Descartes, Letter to Mesland, AT, vol. IV, p. 119; also Letter to Princess Elisabeth
(September 1, 1645), AT, 286–87. On the difference between Descartes’s theory of pas-
sions and the Stoic one, cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989), pp. 148–52.
30. Spinoza held that all passions could be converted into actions (Ethica, V, 3).
31. Pierre Corneille, Examen du Cid (1660), in Oeuvres Complètes de Corneille (Paris:
Macmillan, 1963), p. 219.
32. Ian Donaldson, ‘‘Cato in Tears: Social Guises of the Man of Feeling,’’ in Studies in
the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Canberra: Australian National University
Press, 1973), vol. II, pp. 377–95. See also R. S. Crane, ‘‘Suggestions Towards a Genealogy
of the Man of Feeling,’’ ELH: A Journal of English Literary History 1 (1934): 205–30.
33. David Hume, ‘‘The Stoic,’’ in Essays—Moral, Political, and Literary (1777; Indi-
anapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), p. 151.
34. Abbé Prévost, Manon Lescaut, in Oeuvres de Prévost (Paris: Boulland-Tardieu,
1823), vol. III, p. 335.
35. Prévost, Mémoires et avantures d’un homme de qualité, in Oeuvres de Prévost, vol.
I, p. 281. Cf. the chapter on emotions in Abraham Keller and Geoffrey Atkinson, Prelude
to the Enlightenment: French Literature, 1690–1740 (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1970), pp. 25–81.
36. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin
and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Ed. de la Pléiade), vol. I; trans. J. M. Cohen, p. 103.
37. Samuel Johnson, ‘‘The Life of Pope,’’ Lives of the Poets (1779–81), in The Works
of Samuel Johnson (London, 1787), vol. IV, p. 97. One of the enticements of the episto-
lary novel is that each statement made by the correspondent must remain open to the
reader’s probing.
38. Lytton Strachey, ‘‘Two Frenchmen,’’ originally published in Characters and Com-
mentaries (1933), republished in Literary Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, n.d.),
p. 104.
39. Alphonse De Waelhens, Le Duc de Saint-Simon (Brussels: Facultés Universitaires
Saint-Louis, 1981).
40. Duc de Saint-Simon, Historical Memoirs, ed. and trans. Lucy Norton, 2 vols. (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), vol. I (1691–1709), p. 410.
350 Notes to Pages 60–68

41. Thomas Carlyle, ‘‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson,’’ in Fraser’s Magazine (1820), re-
published in Carlyle’s Works (Boston: Dana Estes, 1895), vol. II, p. 408.
42. Johnson, ‘‘Life of Pope.’’
43. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (1791; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887),
vol. III, p. 332.
44. Carlyle, ‘‘Boswell’s Life of Johnson,’’ p. 415.
45. Thomas B. Macaulay, ‘‘Samuel Johnson,’’ Edinburgh Review, 1831, republished in
The Pocket University (New York: Doubleday, 1925), vol. II, pp. 30–34.
46. Discours de la Méthode, in AT, vol. VI, p. 4; The Philosophical Writings of Des-
cartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge
University Press, 1984), vol. I, p. 112.
47. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas
Goddard Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944), p. 111.
48. Donald Verene, Vico’s Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), chap. 5.
In this excellent study of Vico’s autobiography, Donald Verene compares the stages of
Vico’s life to the cycles of history in The New Science (La scienze nuova, 1744).
49. Giuseppe Mazzotta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giam-
battista Vico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 20–21.
50. Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, p. 111.
51. Andrea Battistini, Lo Specchio di Dedalo: Autobiografia e Biografia (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 1990), pp. 83–84.
52. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: Ed. de la
Pléiade, 1957), vol. V, p. 5; trans. J. M. Cohen (Baltimore: Penguin Books, n.d.), p. 17.
Henceforth abridged to O.C. and Cohen.
53. ‘‘I had always been amused at Montaigne’s false ingenuousness, and at his pretence
of confessing his faults while taking good care only to admit the likeable ones; whereas I,
who believe, and always have believed, that I am on the whole the best of men, felt that
there is no human heart, however pure, that does not conceal some odious vice.’’ Con-
fessions, bk. X, in O.C., I, 516; Cohen, p. 479.
54. Abbé Prévost, Manon Lescaut in Oeuvres de Prévost, vol. III, p. 480.
55. Jean Starobinski, Rousseau: La transparence et l’obstacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1971),
pp. 237–38.
56. Starobinski, Rousseau, esp. chap. 8, ‘‘Les problemes de l’autobiographie,’’ pp.
216–39.
57. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire, in O.C., I, 1024.
58. From another autobiographical fragment first published in Annales J. J. Rousseau
IV (1908), in O.C., I, 1149.
59. Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, ‘‘Les Confessions de Jean Jacques Rousseau,’’ in
Causeries du lundi (November 4, 1850) (Paris: Garnier, 1919), vol. III, pp. 78–79; Sainte-
Beuve Selected Essays, trans. Francis Steegmuller and Norbert Guterman (New York:
Doubleday, 1963), pp. 207–8.
60. Augustine, De Trinitate, 15, 12, 22.
61. Cf. Werner Beierwaltes, ‘‘Zu Augustins Metaphysik der Sprache’’ Augustinian
Studies 2 (1971): 181–82.
 Notes to Pages 69–80 351

62. Leibniz, ‘‘Towards a Universal Characteristic,’’ in Die philosophischen Schriften

von G. W. Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhardt (Berlin, 1875–90), vol. VII, pp. 184–89; Leibniz
Selections, ed. Philip Wiener (New York: Scribner, 1951), pp. 17–25. Cf. Ernst Cassirer,
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim ( New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1953), vol. I, Language, pp. 129–32.
63. Logique ou l’art de penser (1662), ed. L. Martin (Paris, 1970), p. 64.
64. George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in
Works of George Berkeley, vol. II, p. 32.
65. János Kelemen, ‘‘Locke’s Theory of Language and Semiotics,’’ Language Sciences
38 (April 1976): 16–24. The quoted text appears on p. 21.
66. Shaftesbury, ‘‘Soliloquy or Advice to an Author,’’ in Characteristics, ed. Robertson,
I, 135.
67. James Harris, Hermes, or a Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Uni-
versal Grammar (London, 1751), p. 335. Henceforth referred to by page numbers of this
edition.
68. Vico still maintains that humans originally expressed themselves through gestures
and hieroglyphs that were ‘‘naturally’’ (that is imitatively) related to the objects they
signified. Hieroglyphic script statically imitated what gestures dynamically suggested.
Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard
Bergin and Marx Harold Fish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), # 429.
69. Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, in Oeuvres, vol. IV, pp. 26–34.
70. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, intro. and notes by Cath-
erine Kintzler (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), p. 58; On the Origin of Languages, trans.
John H. Moran (Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1966) 1986), p. 9.
71. Starobinski, Rousseau, p. 171. See all of chap. 6 (pp. 149–215).
72. Johann Gottfried Herder, Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache (1770), in Herders
Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernard Suphan (Berlin, 1891), vol. V; trans. Alexander Gode as
Essay on the Origin of Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986; orig. pub.
1966), p. 87. Henceforth referred to by page numbers of the English translation.
73. Johann Georg Hamann, Golgotha und Scheblimini, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Joseph
Nadler (Vienna: Herder, 1949–57), vol. III, pp. 291–320. See also Brocken in Sämtliche
Werke, vol. III, p. 303, and Konxompas in Sämtliche Werke, vol. III, p. 227.
74. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1975; repr. 1981), p. 72. Steiner rightly refers to the ‘‘mystical’’
nature of Hamann’s method.
75. Mikhail Bakhtin, Esthétique et théorie du roman, trans. Daria Olivier (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1978).

Chapter 4. Toward a New Conception of Art

1. Hyppolite Taine, History of English Literature, trans. H. Van Laun (Edinburgh:
Edmonston and Douglas, 1873), vol. II, p. 307.
2. Louis Martz, Milton: Poet of Exile (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980),
chap. 12.
352 Notes to Pages 80–88

3. For the difference between Virgil’s ‘‘primary’’ epic and Milton’s secondary one, cf.
C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961),
chaps. 6 and 7.
4. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel; Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 13–16, 274–76. Watt distinguishes the
more universal (but not idealized!) traits of human nature, which Fielding emphasizes,
from the more strictly individualized ones described by Defoe and Richardson.
5. Cf. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1974), p. 148.
6. Watt, Rise of the Novel, p. 128.
7. Maynard Mack in his introduction to the Holt Rinehart and Winston edition of
Joseph Andrews.
8. Christoph Martin Wieland, Agathon, in Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Weidmann,
1909–54; after 1954, Akademie Verlag), vol. VI (1937). I learned much from Ellis Shook-
man, Noble Lies, Slant Truths, Necessary Angels: Aspects of Fictionality in the Novels of
C. M. Wieland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
9. Christian von Blanckenburg, Versuch uber den Roman (1774). Wieland did so
again in the satirical Geschichte der Abderiten where, however, the weight of the truth
question was much lighter and became absorbed within the comprehensive irony of the
work.
10. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman (New York:
Vintage Books, 1957), vol. II, p. 179.
11. Sainte-Beuve notes the distinction between the earlier definition of a classic in Le
Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1694): ‘‘auteur ancien fort approuvé et qui fait autorité dans
la matière qu’il traite,’’ from the one in the later (1835) edition: ‘‘ceux qui sont devenus
modèles dans une langue.’’ Causeries du Lundi, vol. III (Paris: Garnier, n.d.), p. 41. Some
literary works became instant ‘‘classics’’ without any link with the ancients. Today a
‘‘classic’’ refers to a work of lasting significance that resists a definitive interpretation and
discloses ever-new truth and value. Cf. David Tracy’s insightful discussion in The Analog-
ical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981), chap. 3.
12. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, # 125.
13. Of course, before the seventeenth century, plastic arts had not even been formally
distinct from crafts, even though everyone knew the difference between a great painter and
an ordinary craftsman. A similar union had existed between scientific literature written in
the vernacular and belles lettres. Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Huygens were fine writers
as well as great scientists. A number of scientific studies published during the period here
considered still reflect some of the former union with art. Buffon, Fontenelle, and Hume
belong as much to the history of science as of literature. They continued to write in a
literary language. Scientific studies for the most part avoided the dry style, the technical
jargon typical of specialized studies in our own time. The Encyclopédie constituted in
intent as well as in execution the final attempt to unify the various fields of consciousness.
14. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and
Humor (IV, 3), in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, ed. John M. Robertson
(Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), vol. I, p. 90. (Henceforth abridged to title, chap-
ter, section, and page in Robertson’s edition of Characteristics.)
 Notes to Pages 88–97 353

15. Ibid., IV, 3, p. 91.

16. Ibid., IV, 3, p. 94.
17. Shaftesbury, Advice to an Author, I, 3, in Characteristics, I, 136.
18. Shaftesbury, The Moralists, III, 2, in Characteristics, II, 131.
19. Shaftesbury, The Moralists, II, 2, in Characteristics, II, 132.
20. Shaftesbury, Advice to an Author, III, in Characteristics, I, 217.
21. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design. This
was the first of the two essays published under the title Inquiry into the Original of Our
Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725). I cite from the separate edition of the first
essay by Peter Kivy, in the Archives of the History of Ideas (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1973). I refer to it by section (roman numeral) and subsection (arabic number).
22. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1928; repr. 1955), p. 299.
23. ‘‘Art’’ in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des
Métiers, vol. I (Paris, 1751); trans. of this and some other articles in Encyclopedia Selec-
tions, ed. Nelly Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 4.
24. Denis Diderot, Traité du beau, in Oeuvres, ed. Laurent Versini (Paris: Robert
Lafont, 1996), IV, 99; Diderot’s Selected Writings, trans. Lester Crocker (New York:
Macmillan, 1966), p. 54.
25. Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts réduits a un meme principe (1746) (Paris, 1773),
p. 45. Diderot’s response: Lettre sur les sourds et muets, in Oeuvres, IV, 11–50; partial
translation in Diderot’s Selected Writings, pp. 31–39.
26. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen
Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Thoughts about the imitation of the Greek
works in painting and sculpture) (1755) in Winckelmanns Werke (Berlin-Weimar: Auf-
bau Verlag, 1982), pp. 1–46, esp. 11–14.
27. Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1977), p. 113. All of chaps. 4 and 5 is relevant.
28. Diderot weakens his thesis by an ill-directed attempt to translate a poetic composi-
tion into a musical one on the inadequate ground that language and music are both
temporal arts. Such a translation of one set of symbols into another is possible only in
vocal music or in music that accompanies moving images, such as Prokovief’s masterly
accompaniment to Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky (1938).
29. Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 530.
30. Herbert Dieckman, Cinq Leçons sur Diderot (Geneva: E. Droz, 1959), p. 116.
31. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Goethe et Diderot (Paris, 1880), p. 176.
32. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), trans. Edward
Allen McCormick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962).
33. Although the originality of Lessing with respect to Winckelmann is well estab-
lished, the relation to Diderot is more complex. In his Essais sur la peinture, published the
same year as Lessing’s Laocoön (1766), Diderot writes about the famous statue: ‘‘Le
Laocoon souffre, il ne grimace pas’’ (Oeuvres, IV, 489). A remark made a few pages later
suggests that the reason for avoiding intense expressions in painting may be closely
related to the one Lessing invoked. ‘‘The painter has only one moment. He can no more
cover two moments than two actions’’ (ibid., p. 496). Elsewhere he condemns La Mettrie
354 Notes to Pages 98–106

for having himself portrayed while laughing. A person who freezes his epression in a
permanent laughter lacks nobility and character, and often truth; hence it is absurd.
‘‘Laughter is always passing’’ (Essais, Oeuvres, IV, 507). In the Pensées détachées sur la
peinture (Oeuvres, IV, 1018), Diderot brings up the question of priority between Virgil
and the sculptor. Winckelmann had already raised this question. According to Paul Ver-
nière, at that time Diderot knew neither Winckelmann’s nor Lessing’s writings on the
subject (Diderot, Oeuvres Esthétiques [Paris: Garnier, 1968], pp. 744, 761).
34. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. and intro. Stephen O. Mitchell (Indi-
anapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964). Discourse, III, p. 27. Henceforth abridged to roman
numeral for the Discourse and arabic for the page number.
35. In fact, the presence of the sublime in land- and seascapes was not fully recognized
in England until the time of Cozens and Turner, even though such influential Dutch
painters as Ruysdael, Rembrandt, and Van Goyen had intimated it much earlier.
36. ‘‘Goût’’ (Taste), in Encyclopedia Selections, ed. Hoyt and Cassirer, p. 337. Hence-
forth ‘‘Goût.’’
37. Shaftesbury, Advice to an Author, III, 3, in Characteristics, I, 218.
38. Shaftesbury, The Moralists, III, 2, in Characteristics, II, 125.
39. Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, II, 95.
40. David Hume, ‘‘Of the Standard of Taste,’’ in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary
(Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), p. 235.
41. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag,
1970), § 14. This edition is a reproduction of the original one published in Frankfurt a/d.
Oder in 1750. I shall refer to the numbers of the sections, which appear in all editions.
42. This was, of course, the position against which Heidegger reacted. Karsten Harries
has discussed the opposition between aesthetic and ontological theories of art in a num-
ber of writings, among them The Meaning of Modern Art (Chicago: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1968), and ‘‘Metaphor and Transcendence,’’ in On Metaphor, ed. Seldon
Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 71–88.
43. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin:
Preussische Akademie, 1902–42), vol. V. I refer to it by KUK and section number. For the
first part of the Critique of Judgment (§§ 1–21), I quote from Walter Cerf’s translation,
Analytic of the Beautiful (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), referred to as AB, with
Kant’s paragraph number and Cerf’s page number. Later parts of the Critique are from
J. H. Bernard’s translation (1892; New York: Hafner Press, 1951).
44. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, § 58; in Kants Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. IV, p. 357.
45. The same idea is found in Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition
(1759).
46. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, # 421 (London: William Tegg, 1867), p. 485.
47. M. de Saint-Lambert and Diderot, ‘‘Génie,’’ in Encyclopédie, vol. VII, repr. in
Diderot, Oeuvres Esthétiques (Paris: Garnier, 1968), p. 14. This article does not appear
in the Versini edition I have used for Diderot.
48. Alexander Gerard repeated Pope’s description in his 1758 and 1759 lectures in
Aberdeen and in his Essay on Taste (1759)—both of which form the basis of his influen-
tial Essay on Genius (1774). Cf. Bernhard Fabian, ‘‘An Early Theory of Genius: Alex-
 Notes to Pages 106–14 355

ander Gerard’s Unpublished Aberdeen Lectures,’’ in Studies in the Eighteenth Century,

ed. R. F. Brissenden (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1973), vol. II, pp.
113–41.
49. Gerard, Aberdeen Lectures, as quoted by Fabian in ‘‘Early Theory of Genius,’’
p. 137.
50. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1965), pp. 46–52. See also Pierre Fruchon’s insightful commentary in L’herméneutique
de Gadamer: Platonisme et modernité (Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 1994), pp. 28–38 on taste, and
chap. 2 (pp. 39–53) on genius.
51. Longinus, On Great Writing (On the Sublime), trans. G. M. Grube (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1957).
52. Samuel Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth Century
England (1935; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960). On the literary history
of the idea of the sublime in England this remains the primary text.
53. The Spectator, # 412 (1712).
54. Cf. Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime (New Haven: British Museum Publica-
tions, Yale Center for British Art, 1981).
55. These ideas appear both in Diderot’s Pensées philosophiques and in his Salons of
1765. As he often did in writing on aesthetics, Diderot followed the British model but
added some perceptive analyses of his own.
56. This is the title of the translation of Betrachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen
und Erhabenen made by John T. Goldtwait (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1960).
57. Cf. Paul Crowther, The Kantian Sublime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 20–
21.
58. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1979), esp. chap. 7, and ‘‘Kant’s Distinction Between the Beautiful and the Sublime,’’
Review of Metaphysics 35, 4, # 140 (June 1982): 753–83.
59. Johann Winckelmann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. J. Eiselein (1825), vol. I, p. 207.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Schriften zur Kunst (Zurich: Artemis, 1949), vol. XIII,
p. 417. All texts are cited from the same Artemis edition.
60. Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, bk. IV, vol. X, p. 735.
61. Goethe, Italienische Reise (September 6, 1787), vol. XI, p. 436.
62. Goethe, Maximen und Reflectionen, vol. IX, # 199, p. 518.
63. Ibid., # 1113, p. 639.

Chapter 5. The Moral Crisis

1. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1985), pp. 148–49.
2. Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata, bk. III, def. 3, in Spinoza Opera, ed. Carl
Gebhart (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1925), vol. II, p. 146. Trans. R. H. M. Elwes in The
Works of Benedict de Spinoza (London, 1883; New York, 1951). Henceforth abridged to
E, followed by book and definition or proposition. All translations taken from Elwes.
3. On the emotions (affectus), one may consult Herman De Dijn, ‘‘Inleiding tot de
356 Notes to Pages 116–25

affectleer van Spinoza,’’ Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 39 (1977) and Michael Della Rocca’s
essay ‘‘Spinoza’s Metaphysical Psychology’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza,
ed. Don Garrett (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996) pp. 192–266. Also Errol
Harris, Spinoza’s Philosophy: An Outline (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press,
1992), chap. 9, pp. 399–408.
4. John Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1894), bk. I, chaps. 2, 3. I shall refer to it as Essay followed by
book, chapter, and section, which are identical in all editions.
5. Voltaire, Letter to Crown Prince Frederick, quoted in Ernst Cassirer, The Philoso-
phy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 244–45.
6. Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, in Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Laurent Versini
(Paris: Robert Lafont, 1994), II, 552; Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 231.
7. In the critical reflection that follows the stories (Suite du Dialogue), the question of
procreation is omitted altogether.
8. Denis Diderot, Supplément, in Oeuvres, II, 577; Diderot’s Selected Writings,
p. 250.
9. Diderot, Supplément, in Oeuvres, II, 547; Diderot’s Selected Writings, p. 227.
10. Diderot, Letter to Paul Landois, June 29, 1756, in Oeuvres, VIII, 8.
11. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Essai sur les Elémens de Philosophie (Paris: Fayard,
1986) p. 66.
12. Paul-Henri, Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature (1770), trans. H. D. Robin-
son (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), p. 98.
13. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. II, chap. 20.
14. Shaftesbury, Letter to General Stanhope (November 7, 1709), in The Life, Un-
published Letters and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Ben-
jamin Rand (London: Swan, Sonnenschein, 1900) p. 416.
15. Ibid.
16. Stanley Greane, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1967), p. 148.
17. Life, Unpublished Letters . . . of Shaftesbury, p. 158.
18. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)
p. 257.
19. Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality (An-
dover, Mass.: Gould and Newman, 1838), bk. I, chap. 2, p. 14.
20. In The Moralists, pt. I, 3, in Characteristics, II, 22, Shaftesbury reintroduces the
spider and fly and admits that only in humans a universal harmony requires disinterested
affection for others.
21. Cf. Georges Gusdorf, Naissance de la conscience romantique au Siècle des Lumi-
ères (Paris: Payot, 1976), pp. 227–28. The entire chapter on Shaftesbury (pp. 219–43) is
excellent.
22. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (1755), in Oeuvres
Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1964), vol. III; The Origin of Inequality, trans.
G. D. H. Cole, in The Social Contract and Discourses (London: J. M. Dent and Sons,
n.d.), p. 199.
23. Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887).
 Notes to Pages 126–31 357

24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, bk. III, letter 15, in Oeuvres
Complètes, vol. II, p. 335. Henceforth Julie, followed by the number of the letter (L).
25. Surprisingly, Rousseau uses this unconventional decision as an occasion for justify-
ing the very conventional custom of prearranged marriages. He dismisses the idea that a
good marriage requires passionate love as an illusion. In fact, erotic love is a constant
source of unrest, jealousy, and privation, all of which hardly agree with the joy and peace
that distinguishes a successful union ( Julie, bk. III, L20, in Oeuvres Complètes, II, 373).
26. Alessandro Ferrara, Modernity and Authenticity. A Study in the Social and Ethical
Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). Also ‘‘Authenticity: A
Moral Notion or a Philosophical Horizon?’’ in Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
Yearbook (Amsterdam: ASCA Press, 1999), pp. 49–68.
27. In an elegant and erudite study, The Beautiful Soul (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1955), Robert Norton compares Wieland’s use of the term die schöne Seele in
Agathon with Rousseau’s belle âme in Julie and shows how the German and the French
meanings merge in Romanticism. On Rousseau’s morality of the beautiful soul as a
substitute for grace, cf. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919; Austin: Uni-
versity of Texas Press, 1976), chap. 4 (esp. p. 113).
28. Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller, Ueber Anmut und Würde (On grace and dignity),
in Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe (Weimar: H. Böhlaus, 1943ff.), vol. XX, p. 287.
29. Rousseau, Letter to Madame de Francueil on April 20, 1751. Cf. Babbitt, Rousseau
and Romanticism, p. 129.
30. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag,
1955), pp. 461–70; Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (London: Macmillan,
1931; New York: Harper and Row, 1967), chap. 6, C, pp. 664–75 (the cited words
appear on p. 665).
31. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue
in Two Treaties: II Concerning Moral Good and Evil (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew
Foulis, 1772), II, 3, and III, 5. I refer to chapter and section.
32. Francis Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy (1755) (in two volumes), I, 4, 13
(book, chapter, section), in Collected Works (Hildesheim: Olms), vol. V, p. 78. Pleasure
taken as a motive can induce only self-interested actions. In the Essay on the Nature and
Conduct of the Passions and Affections with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728), I, 4,
1 (Collected Works, vol. V, p. 53), he insists that moral approbation does not coincide
with the experience of pleasure that accompanies it.
33. Bernard Mandeville, Fable of the Bees (London: J. Roberts, 1729); repr. with
commentary by F. B. Kaye (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pt. II, pp. 356–57.
34. William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), (New York: Paulist
Press, 1978), passim. See also his Remarks upon a Late Book, entitled, The Fable of the
Bees (1724), p. 23.
35. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977), p. 81.
36. Cf. Terence Penelhum, ‘‘Hume’s Moral Psychology,’’ in The Cambridge Compan-
ion to Hume, ed. David Fate Norton (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 136–37.
37. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1896), p. 478. Henceforth referred to by book, part, section, and page.
358 Notes to Pages 132–40

38. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. and intro.
Charles Hendel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), appendix I, p. 106.
39. Bernard Wand, ‘‘Hume’s Account of Obligation,’’ in Hume, A Collection of Crit-
ical Essays, ed. V. C. Chappell (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 308–36.
40. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 337–40.
41. Immanuel Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, in Kants
Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Preussische Akademie, 1902–42), vol. VI, p. 335. Religion
Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson
(New York: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 28.
42. Goethe to Chancellor von Müller, as quoted in Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and
Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 270.
43. Kant, Vorlesungen, 1765–66 in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. II, p. 311.
44. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. V,
p. 38; Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis W. Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1956), p. 40. Henceforth referred to as C.Pr.R. (English) and Ak (German).
45. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 318/B 375, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. III, p. 249; Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Mac-
millan, 1929), p. 313.
46. Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A 548/B 576; Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, p.
473.
47. Ibid. A 547/B 575, pp. 472–73.
48. Kant, Religion innerhalb, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VI, p. 26; Religion
Within the Limits, p. 21.
49. John R. Silber, ‘‘Procedural Formalism in Kant’s Ethics,’’ Review of Metaphysics
28, 2, # 110 (December 1974): 212.
50. Peter Winch, Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
51. G. W. F. Hegel, Ueber die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts, in
Schriften zur Politik und Rechtsphilosophie, Sämtliche Werke, ed. G. Lasson (Leipzig:
Felix Meiner, 1913), VII, 354–61.
52. Christine Korsgaard, ‘‘Kant’s Formula of Universal Law,’’ Kant-Studien 77, 2
(1986): 20.
53. Rousseau, Emile, bk. IV. A similar passage, possibly written under the influence of
Kant, appears in the second part of Novalis’s Heinrich von Oefterdingen: ‘‘Conscience
fills the place of God on earth and is thus the highest and the last. . . . It is the innermost
essence of the person in full clarity, the aboriginal, celestial man.’’
54. Cf. Paul Guyer’s brilliant Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aes-
thetics and Morality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 21–30.
55. Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Tugendlehre, in Kants Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. VI, p. 443; The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, trans. James Ellington
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), p. 106. Henceforth abridged as Virtue with number
and page of the English translation, followed by the Akademie edition volume and page
number.
56. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. V, p. 60; Critique
of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), § 60. Henceforth
referred to as C.J. followed by the paragraph number (identical in all editions and transla-
 Notes to Pages 142–54 359

tions). Today we have the more acccurate translations of Kant’s Critique by Paul Guyer
and Allen Wood. This text was completed before their appearances.
57. Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indi-
anapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).
58. Kant, ‘‘An Old Question Raised Again,’’ in Kant on History, ed. Lewis White Beck
(Indiapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 140; Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VIII, p. 82.
Here, as in other instances, we notice how strongly Kant’s later views on ethics were
influenced by his concept of history. His anthropology had, of course, marked his ethical
writings early and late. Cf. Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
59. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. of Les mots et les choses (New York:
Random House, 1973), p. 328.
60. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘‘Philosophy and the Idea of the Infinite,’’ trans. Alfonso
Lingis, in Levinas’s Collected Papers. Phaenomenologica, vol. C (Dordrecht: Nijhoff,
1987). See Adriaan Peperzak’s excellent commentary in To the Other: An Introduction to
the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press,
1993) pp. 94–95.
61. Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu caché: Etude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de
Pascal et dans le théâtre de Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).
62. George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London, 1961), p. 53.
63. Andromaque, V, 5, in The Complete Plays of Jean Racine, trans. Samuel Solomon
(New York: Random House, 1967), vol. I, p. 316.
64. Leslie Stephen, ‘‘English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century,’’ in
Selected Writings in British Intellectual History, ed. Noel Annan (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1979) pp. 146–47.
65. Friedrich Melchior, Baron de Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et
critique (Paris: Longchamps, 1812–13), 16 vols., vol. XII, p. 49.
66. Cf. Gustave Lanson, Nivelle de la Chaussée et la comédie larmoyante (Paris:
Hachette, 1887). Nivelle may count as the most successful but one of the least memorable
among many undistinguished practitioners of the genre.
67. Diderot, De la poésie dramatique, in Oeuvres, IV, 1283.
68. The passage is quoted in Herder’s Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität, # 72. I
have not succeeded in locating it in Diderot’s Oeuvres Complètes, but both the message
and the wording allow no doubt about its authenticity.
69. Edward Young, preface to Love of Fame, quoted in Thomas Maresca, Pope’s
Horatian Poems (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), p. 9. The first two
chapters of Maresca’s study sketch a useful development of satire.
70. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1957), p. 223.

Chapter 6. The Origin of Modern Social Theories

1. Terence Marshall, ‘‘Leo Strauss et la question des Anciens et des Modernes,’’ Ca-
hiers de Philosophie Politique et Juridique 23 (1993): 68–69. Cf. also Leo Strauss, Na-
tural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), esp. chaps. 3 and 4.
360 Notes to Pages 155–60

2. John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (New York: Oxford University Press,
1980), pp. 375–76.
3. A. P. d’Entrèves, Natural Law: An Historical Survey (1951; New York: Harper and
Row, 1965), pp. 30–31. Emphasis mine. See also James B. Murphy, ‘‘Nature, Custom, and
Stipulation in Law and Jurisprudence,’’ Review of Metaphysics 43 (June 1990): 751–90.
4. Marcus Tulius Cicero, De republica, III, 22.
5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Dominican Fathers of the English
Dominican Province (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1920). Multiple editions
with revisions.
6. Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800 (1913), trans.
and intro. Ernest Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934; repr. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1951), p. 97.
7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil
Government, II, § 6. I have used Sir Ernest Barker’s edition in Social Contract (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1960). Henceforth referred to by chapter (roman numeral) and
paragraph.
8. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1969), p. 97.
9. Jeremy Waldron, The Dignity of Legislation (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1997, chap. 5.
10. David Walsh, The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1997), pp. 128–29; I have followed Walsh’s and Dunn’s interpretation of the state
of nature.
11. Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law
and Church Law, 1150–1625. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997; Grand Rapids: Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 2001). On the significance of the dispute on poverty, see also Richard Tuck,
Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1979), pp. 18–23.
12. James B. Murphy, ‘‘Nature, Custom, and Stipulation,’’ Review of Metaphysics 43
(1990): 751–90. The same idea underlies much of his The Moral Economy of Labor:
Aristotelian Themes in Economic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
13. ‘‘What Is Fair’’ is John Finnis’s translation in Natural Law and Natural Rights,
p. 206. I do not think, however, as Finnis does, that Aquinas’s concept of jus corresponds
in all respects to the Roman interpretation of it.
14. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘‘Community Law, and the Idiom and Rhetoric of Rights,’’
Listening 26, no. 2 (spring 1991): 96–110 (quote on p. 105). Also After Virtue, chap. 6.
15. Frans De Wachter, ‘‘Ethiek en mensenrechten,’’ Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 49, no. 4
(1987): 586.
16. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651; Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968), chap. 14,
p. 189.
17. Benedict de Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, chap. 2, § 3, in Spinoza Opera, ed. Carl
Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1925), vol. III, pp. 276–77.
18. Spinoza, Tractatus, chap. 2, § 15, in Opera, p. 281.
19. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), pp. 391 and 384; trans. Mar-
tin Nicolaus (Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1973), pp. 491 and 485.
 Notes to Pages 161–67 361

20. Jeffrie Murphy, Kant: The Philosophy of Right (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 125.
21. Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, p. 113.
22. Bentham, who had supported the revolutions in America and France, criticized the
declarations of inalienable rights proclaimed in Virginia and Carolina as rendering penal
laws invalid since such ‘‘inalienable’’ rights would prevent them from executing or incar-
cerating criminals and even from depriving them of property. Elie Halévy, The Growth of
Political Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1972), p. 174.
23. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; New York:
Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1973), p. 72.
24. Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, p. 101.
25. Donald W. Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1970), p. 318.
26. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Lettres persanes, in Oeuvres
Complètes (Paris: La Pléiade, 1949), vol. I, p. 269.
27. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi
les hommes, in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: La Pléiade, 1964), vol. III, Ecrits Politiques,
p. 152; A Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men, trans. G. D. H. Cole
(London: J. M. Dent, n.d.), p. 195.
28. Rousseau, Discours, p. 164; Cole, p. 207. Rousseau’s view may have been influ-
enced by Montesquieu’s claim that as soon as humans enter society equality ceases and
the state of war sets in. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, L’esprit des
lois, bk. I, chap. 3 in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: La Pléiade, 1951), vol. II, p. 236. The link
between the beginning of social life and the origin of inequality was not universally
accepted. Helvetius rejected it.
29. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (I, 4), in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. III,
p. 356; Social Contract, trans. Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960),
p. 174. Henceforth abridged as SC followed by chapter and section; they are identical in
all editions.
30. Montesquieu, L’esprit des lois, in bk. XV, 2 and bk. VIII, 3, in Oeuvres Complètes
(Paris: NRF, La Pléiade, 1949), vol. II, pp. 491–92 and p. 352.
31. Robert Derathé, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique de son temps (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), p. 168.
32. Marsiglio of Padua, Defensor minor, 12, 5. In Writings on the Empire, ed. Cary
Nederman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
33. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’économie politique (1755), in Oeuvres
Complètes, vol. III, p. 277; ‘‘A Discourse on Political Economy,’’ in The Social Contract
and Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (London: J. M. Dent, n.d; New York: E. P.
Dutton), p. 278.
34. Robert Derathé, ‘‘Introduction to Contrat Social,’’ in Rousseau, Oeuvres Com-
plètes, vol. III, p. xcviii. It is worth noting how far Rousseau’s position stands from
modern liberalism, which he in other respects influenced. While the liberal idea implies
that the choice of values be left to the individuals, for Rousseau the primary task of
education is to instill values conducive to the state’s well-being.
35. Rousseau, Letter written to Johann Martin Usteri in 1763, as quoted in Lucio
Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 177.
362 Notes to Pages 167–75

36. Cf. Niklas Luhman, ‘‘Grundwerte als Zivilreligion,’’ in Heinz Kleger and Alois
Müller, eds., Religion der Bürger: Zivilreligion in Amerika und Europa (Munich: C. Kai-
ser, 1986), pp. 175–94. An excellent analysis of the relation between religion and civil
society is Inigo Bocken, ‘‘Bij gratie van de burger: Religie en burgerlijke maatschappij,’’ in
Jaap Grappelaar, ed., Burgers en hun bindingen (Budel: Damon, 2000), pp. 75–128.
37. On ‘‘civil society,’’ cf. Manfred Riedel, ‘‘Der Begriff der ‘Bürgerlichen Gesellschaft’
und das Problem seines geschichtlichen Ursprungs’’ in Studien in Hegels Rechtsphiloso-
phie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969).
38. Henri Denis, ‘‘Deux collaborateurs de l’Encyclopédie: Quesnay et Rousseau,’’ La
Pensée 38 (1951): 44–45.
39. Michael Halberstam, Liberalism, Totalitarianism, and the Aesthetic (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2000), p. 133. Also, Hannah Arendt, ‘‘On the Nature of To-
talitarianism,’’ in Essays in Understanding (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994), pp.
328ff.
40. Barker, Introduction to Social Contract, p. xxxix.
41. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois, in Oeuvres Complètes de Montesquieu, anno-
tated by Roger Caillois (Paris: La Pléiade, 1949 and 1951), 2 vols.; The Spirit of Laws,
trans. Thomas Nugent and rev. J. V. Prichard (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1873; repr.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). I shall use this translation throughout and
refer to passages by book (roman numeral) and chapter (arabic). Because of the many
editions of L’esprit des lois available in French and English, page numbers are neither
practical nor needed; most chapters are short and many do not exceed one paragraph.
42. Gian Vincenzo Gravina, Origines juris civilis (1717). This pioneering work influ-
enced both Vico and Montesquieu.
43. Montesquieu, ‘‘Essai d’observations sur l’histoire naturelle’’ (1719–21), in Oeu-
vres Complètes, vol. I, p. 39. In The Spirit of Laws he appears less certain. ‘‘Whether
brutes be governed by the general laws of motion, or by a particular movement I cannot
determine’’ (SL, I, 1).
44. Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur
décadence, chap. 18. Our remarks concern only secular history, because in chaps. 16 and
22 of the Considérations (1734) he appears to admit a direct providential intervention in
the establishment and maintenance of the Christian faith. But one may question the
sincerity of this distinction. Cf. Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 162–63.
45. Cf. Sharon Krause, ‘‘The Spirit of Separate Powers in Montesquieu,’’ Review of
Politics 62, no. 2 (spring 2000): 231–65.
46. Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française (Paris: Hachette, 1894; nu-
merous reprints), p. 706. See also Henri Auguste Barckhausen’s manful yet not al-
thogether successful attempt to show the presence of a consistent order in L’esprit des
lois, in the chapter entitled, ‘‘Le désordre de l’Esprit des Lois,’’ in Montesquieu, ses idées
et ses oevres (Paris 1907).
47. Shackleton, Montesquieu, p. 318.
48. How much significance Montesquieu attached to this chapter appears from the
effort he put into it. ‘‘For three months I thought I was going to kill myself in the writing
of a book on The Origins and Evolutions of Our Civil Laws. It will take three hours to
 Notes to Pages 178–89 363

read it, but I assure you that under the amount of work my hair has turned white’’ (Letter
to Msgr. Cerate, March 28, 1748).
49. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), bk. I, chap. 2, p. 7.
50. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1757), Aalen reprint, p. 101.
51. Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 555.
52. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), vol. I, p. 194.
53. Mandeville, Fable, vol. II, p. 352. On the relation between Mandeville and Smith,
cf. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1977).
54. Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780,
printed; 1789, published), ed. H. L. A. Hart (London: Methuen, 1978).
55. H. L. A. Hart, Introduction to Principles, p. li.
56. Peter Stanlis, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1958). Cf. also André Van de Putte, ‘‘De natuurwet bij Edmund Burke,’’
Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 54, no. 3 (September 1992): 393–423, esp. pp. 404–5.
57. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; New York: Dou-
bleday, 1973), p. 100. Abridged as Reflections.
58. Letter to William Smith in 1795, as quoted in Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke: A
Genius Reconsidered (Wilmington, Del.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1997), pp.
201–2.
59. Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796–97), in Select Works of Ed-
mund Burke (based on the Oxford: Clarendon Press edition of 1874–78), (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 1999), pp. 180ff.
60. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1781), bound with Burke, Reflections on the
Revolution in France (New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 278.
61. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1982), p. 179.

Chapter 7. The New Science of History

1. Hannah Arendt, ‘‘The Concept of History,’’ in Between Past and Future (1954;
New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 66–67.
2. Johann Christoph Gatterer, Vom historischen Plan . . . (1767), cf. Rudolf Vierhaus
in ‘‘Historisches Interesse im 18. Jahrhundert’’ in Aufklärung und Geschichte, ed. H. E.
Bödeker et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1986), p. 271. On Jonathan
Edwards’s comprehensive theology of history, cf. Aviha Zakai’s excellent Jonathan Ed-
wards’s Philosophy of History: The Reenchantment of the World in the Age of Enlighten-
ment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
3. On the difficult balance between the universal and the particular, cf. Albert Cook,
‘‘History Writing as a Separate Genre,’’ in Clio 15, no. 2 (1986): 171–89.
4. Cf. Carl Hempel, ‘‘The Function of General Laws in History,’’ Journal of Philoso-
phy 39 (1942), repr. in Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars, Readings in Philosophical
Analysis (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1949); and Alan Donagan, ‘‘Explanation
in History,’’ Mind 66, no. 262 (1957): 145–64.
364 Notes to Pages 190–98

5. Benedetto Croce, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico (1911; Bari: Laterza, 1973), p. 46.
6. Giambattista Vico, Vita di Giambattista Vico da lui stesso descritta, ed. Benedetto
Croce and Fausto Nicolini (Bari: Laterza, 1929); Autobiography, trans. Max Harold
Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944), p. 125.
7. A critique of Descartes’s principles appears in Giambattista Vico, Principi di Sci-
enza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni (3d ed., 1744), ed. Fausto Nicolini
(Bari: Laterza, 1928), § 1212; The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas
Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984; repr.
1994). (I refer to these editions by paragraph number and, unless otherwise indicated, I
have followed the Bergin-Fisch translation. Yet § 1212, part of an appendix taken from
the second edition (1730), does not appear in the Bergin-Fisch translation.)
8. In his early De nostri temporis studiorum ratione (1709) Vico questioned the norm
of indubitability as a criterion of truth, and even of certainty.
9. Croce, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, p. 33. David Lachterman, ‘‘Vico and
Marx: A Precursory Reading,’’ in Vico and Marx, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo (New York:
Humanities Press, 1983), pp. 38–61, and H. S. Harris, ‘‘Philosophy and Poetry: The War
Renewed’’ in Clio, 23, no. 4 (summer 1994): 395–408, esp. 404–6, have also argued the
presence of a strong Cartesian strand.
10. Aristotle, Physics, II, 8, 199.
11. I have corrected ‘‘institutions’’ to ‘‘things’’ (cose) and added emphasis to stress the
plural. ‘‘Natura di cose altro non è che nascimento di esse in certi tempi e con certe guise,
le quali sempre che sono tali, indi tali e non altre nascon le cose.’’ Bk. I, Degnità.
12. Vico, Scienza nuova prima (1752), in Opere, ed. A. Battistini (Milan: Mondadori,
1990), p. 88. My translation.
13. On the imaginative universal, cf. Donald Verene, Vico’s Science of the Imagination
(Ithaca: Cornell University, 1981), esp. chaps. 3 and 5.
14. Giuseppe Mazzotta, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giam-
battista Vico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 130.
15. Ibid., p. 148.
16. Hayden White, ‘‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,’’ Crit-
ical Inquiry 7 (1980): 9.
17. This point has been elegantly argued by Donald Verene in The New Art of Auto-
biography: An Essay on the Life of Giambattista Vico, Written by Himself (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991). Also Vico’s Science of the Imagination.
18. On Vico’s persistent exposure of this misconception, cf. Jeffrey Barnouw, ‘‘The
Critique of Classical Republicanism and the Understanding of Modern Forms of Polity in
Vico’s New Science,’’ Clio 9, no. 3 (spring 1980): 393–41.
19. Fred Dallmayr, ‘‘Natural History and Social Evolution: Reflections on Vico’s Corsi
e recorsi,’’ in Vico and Contemporary Thought, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Michael
Mooney, and Donald P. Verene (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), pt. 2,
pp. 199–215.
20. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 36.
21. Massimo Lollini, Le Muse, le maschere e il sublime: G. B. Vico e la poesia nel età
della ‘ragione spiegata’ (Naples: Guida, 1994), p. 126.
 Notes to Pages 199–204 365

22. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. R. L. Ellis in The of Works of Francis
Baco, ed. James Spelling et al. (London, 1858–74), vol. VIII, aphorism 64.
23. This total immanence of God in history was, of course, Hegel’s fundamental thesis
and before him that of Herder and Hölderlin.
24. Giovanni Gentile, in ‘‘Dal concetto della grazia a quello della Providenza’’ in Studi
Vichiani (Florence: Sansoni, 1969), pp. 145–61.
25. Cf. P. S., Dreyer, ‘‘Doel als geskiedkundige kategorie’’ (Purpose as historical cate-
gory), Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Wysbegeerte—South African Journal of Philosophy
8, nos. 3–4 (November 1989): 182–86 (double-columned). I have followed the basic
argument on teleology in ancient and modern Western thought presented in this article.
26. Cf. Karl Loewith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1949).
27. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert Wallace
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), p. 30.
28. Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1967). The myth of progress was balanced by one of decline.
29. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), p. 55.
The title of Joseph Glanvill’s work is Plus Ultra: The Progress and Advancement of
Knowledge Since the Days of Aristotle (1668). I have written on Bacon and the early
discussion in Passage to Modernity.
30. In his Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes, Fontenelle argued that the human
potential always remains identical: nature does not change. Yet endowed with memory,
individuals, even entire nations, retain what they have learned from one generation to
another. In arts and letters, however, memory is of little service: the creative process starts
ever anew. Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes (1688–96). Later Condorcet was to
defend progress on the basis of the opposite view of nature. Human nature, far from
being unchangeable, was endowed with an intrinsic capacity for growth.
31. British writers were less inclined to abandon the classical tradition. Boswell quotes
Dr. Johnson as saying long after the matter had been settled in France: ‘‘Modern writers
are the moon of literature; they shine with reflected light, with light borrowed from the
ancients.’’ Dryden and Pope continued to write well in classical forms.
32. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Essai sur les élémens de philosophie (Paris: Fayard,
Corpus des Oeuvres de Philosophie en Langue Française, 1986), p. 20. His ‘‘Preliminary
Discourse’’ to the Encyclopédie has been translated by R. Schwab (Indianapolis and New
York: Bobbs Merrill, Library of Liberal Arts, 1963).
33. ‘‘Art’’ in Diderot, d’Alembert, Encyclopedia Selections, trans. Nelly S. Hoyt and
Thomas Cassirer (Indianapolis, New York: Bobbs Merrill, Library of Liberal Arts, 1965),
p. 5. See also, the article ‘‘Encyclopédie.’’
34. Denis Diderot, Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron, in Oeuvres Complètes,
ed. H. Dieckmann and J. Varloot (Paris: Hermann, 1986), vol. XXV, pt. 2, p. 5.
35. Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature, trans. H. D. Robinson (New York: Burt
Franklin, 1868, 1970), p. 115.
36. Letter to Damilaville, March, 19, 1766 in Voltaire, Correspondance in Oeuvres
(Paris: La Pléiade), vol. VIII, § 9356, pp. 409–10.
37. Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756). This work went
366 Notes to Pages 204–11

through numerous variations and editions. Publication started with seven articles in
Mercure de France in 1745–46. A pirated edition was followed by Voltaire’s own in
1756. He added sixteen chapters to the 1761 editions and, to the ‘‘final’’ edition of 1769,
a long Discours préliminaire, previously published under the title Philosophie de l’histo-
ire (1765). After that date marginalia still kept appearing until 1778. I have used the
edition René Pomeau published in the Classiques Garnier (Paris, 1963), referring in
roman numerals to the sections of the Discours préliminaire and to the chapters of the
main text. The discussions of India and China appear in the Discours, sections XVII and
XVIII. The ones on the Islam, in the main text, chaps. VI and VII.
38. Cf. Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, s.v. Grégoire VII.
39. On the universalism of Voltaire’s history, cf. Georg G. Iggers, ‘‘The European
Context of German Enlightenment Historiography,’’ in Aufklärung und Geschichte, ed.
Hans E. Bödeker, Georg G. Iggers, Jonathan Knudsen, and Peter H. Reill (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1986), esp. pp. 230–32.
On the literary quality, cf. Hayden White, ‘‘The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,’’ in
The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert M.
Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 41–62.
Also, Robert Anchor, ‘‘Narrativity and the Transformation of Historical Consciousness,’’
Clio 16, no. 2 (1987): 121–37.
40. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, ‘‘Discours sur les progres successifs de l’esprit hu-
main,’’ in Oeuvres de Turgot, 2 vols., ed. Eugène Daire and Hyppolite Dussard (Paris,
1844), p. 599. All references are to vol. II. The numbers of the ‘‘Discourses’’ are in roman
numerals.
41. Du Pont de Nemours, Turgot’s admiring disciple, notes that Turgot did not want to
humiliate Bossuet. ‘‘Il préférait de recomposer ce livre, de lui donner l’étendue qu’il y
aurait désirée, et d’y consigner les principes que l’illustre évêque de Meaux avait passés
sous silence, n’avait peut-être pas conçus, n’aurait peut-être pas adoptés’’ (II Discourse,
p. 627 note).
42. He died, probably by his own hand, the night before the police came to arrest him.
43. Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau histo-
rique des progrès de l’esprit humain, in Oeuvres Complètes (Brunswick and Paris, 1804),
vol. VIII, p. 370.
44. The same idea was to play a central role in Marx’s theory concerning the social
conditions for the use of technology. Thus, the steam engine did not assume prac-
tical usefulness until society was economically enough evolved to use it. Capital I,
trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967),
p. 375.
45. Cf. Condorcet’s marginal notes ‘‘Fragments de l’histoire de la première époque’’
that appear in the 1847–49 edition. My attention was drawn to this by Frank Manuel’s
beautiful essay on Condorcet in The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1962; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), pp. 53–102.
46. On this issue, cf. Hiram Caton, The Politics of Progress: The Origins and Develop-
ment of the Commercial Republic, 1600–1835 (Gainesville: University Presses of Flor-
ida, 1988), esp. pp. 334–36.
47. Friedrich Meinecke, Die Enstehung des Historismus, 4th ed., in Friedrich Mein-
 Notes to Pages 211–26 367

ecke Werke, ed. H. Herzfeld, O. Hinrichs, and W. Hofer, vol. II (Munich: Oldenbourg
Verlag, 1765), p. 230.
48. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings (1796), ed. J. B. Bury (1935),
p. 160. For The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I have used the
most accessible edition published by the University of Chicago Press, 1952. I refer to it by
chapter, page, and column (a or b).
49. Cf. Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture (London:
Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1960).
50. Glen W. Bowersock, ‘‘The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome,’’ Bulletin. The
American Academy of Arts and Sciences 40, no. 8 (1996). On the many interpretations of
the ‘‘fall,’’ see Alexander Demandt, Der Fall Roms: Die Auflösung des römischen Reiches
im Urteil der Nachwelt (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1984).
51. Several historians have stressed the economic basis of the decline, among them
Michael Rostovtzeff, Eduard Meyer, W. L. Westermann, and A. E. R. Boak.
52. J. B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, 395–565 (London: Macmillan,
1923), vol. I, p. 311.
53. Samuel Coleridge, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion, ed. Lewis Patton and
Peter Mann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 182.
54. In other instances when there is no ‘‘story’’ to tell, the condensation of a develop-
ment protracted over centuries into a single chapter makes excellent sense, as in the
admirable survey of Roman jurisprudence over the centuries in chap. 44. On the impact
of the novel on the moral nature of Gibbon’s narrative history, see Leo Braudy, Narrative
Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding, Gibbon (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1970).
55. Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus.
56. I refer to Bernhard Suphan’s edition of Herder’s Sämtliche Werke (Berlin; Weid-
mannsche Buchhandlung, 1877–99). Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte is vol. V;
Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, vols. XIII and XIV; Briefe zur
Beförderung der Humanität, vols. XVII and XVIII. An English translation of the Ideen by
T. O. Churchill appeared in 1800 in London (to my knowledge still the only one) as
Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. It was reprinted in abridged
form by Frank Manuel in the series Classic European Historians, edited by Leonard
Krieger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Since this edition is by far the
easiest available I refer to it whenever possible. Other translations are my own. I refer to
the Reflections by book, chapter, and, whenever available, by page in Manuel’s edition; to
the Letters by collection, number, and page.
57. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (New York:
Vintage Books, 1992); also, ‘‘Herder and the Enlightenment,’’ in Vico and Herder (New
York: Viking Press, 1976). See the pertinent critique in Damon Linker, ‘‘The Reluctant
Pluralism of J. G. Herder,’’ Review of Politics 62, no. 2 (spring 2000): 267–94.
58. Wolfgang Förster, ‘‘Johann Gottfried Herder: Weltgeschichte und Humanität’’ in
Aufklärung und Geschichte, ed. Hans Bödeker et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht, 1986), pp. 363–87, particularly p. 371.
59. Linker, ‘‘Reluctant Pluralism of J. G. Herder,’’ p. 293.
60. Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie edition), vol. VII, p. 53; trans. as ‘‘Review
368 Notes to Pages 227–36

of Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind’’ by Robert E. Anchor in

Kant on History, ed. Lewis White Beck, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 37.
61. Kant, ‘‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’’ in Kants Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. VII, pp. 35–42; trans. as ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ by Lewis Beck White
in Kant on History, pp. 3–10.
62. ‘‘Eine alte Frage . . .’’ in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VII, p. 88; trans. as ‘‘An
Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’’ by Robert E.
Anchor in Kant on History, p. 147.
63. Kant, ‘‘Vom ewigen Frieden’’ in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VIII, pp. 343–
86; trans. as ‘‘Perpetual Peace’’ by Lewis Beck White in Kant on History, pp. 85–135.

Chapter 8. The Religious Crisis

1. Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. John Hallowell (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1975), pp. 18–23.
2. There are, of course, reports of ancient floods in various lands, including China.
Martin Martini, S.J., a missionary in China, attempted to find support in them for the
historical character of the biblical story. In his Sinicae Historiae (1658) he suggests that
the Chinese chronicles may have been inaccurate in dating the flood, or even that the
legendary emperor Yaüs was in fact Noah himself. David Wetsel, ‘‘ ‘Histoire de la Chine’:
Pascal and the Challenge to Biblical Time,’’ Journal of Religion 69, no. 2 (April 1989):
199–219.
3. Benedict de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in Spinoza Opera, ed. Carl
Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, Universitäts Buchhandlung, 1926), vol. III, pp. 28,
100; trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951), p. 101. (See also
p. 93.) Abridged as TTP and Elwes for the English translation.
4. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1973), pp. 151–56.
5. Such was the thesis of Leo Strauss’s Die Religionskritik Spinozas als Grundlage
seiner Bibelwissenschaft (1930). Much of that position is still accepted by Y. Yovel,
Spinoza and Other Heretics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Spinoza’s con-
temporary Lambert van Velthuysen had already accused him of such a devious strategy.
6. This appears to be Herman De Dijn’s position, expressed in a number of writings
but most clearly in ‘‘Spinoza and Revealed Religion’’ in Studia Spinozana 11 (1997).
7. In Vroomheid, vrede, vrijheid: Een interpretatie van Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-
Politicus (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1996), Angela Roothaan has drawn full attention to the
significance of this meeting.
8. Spinoza, Correspondence, Letter 43.
9. On the salvational power of a specific faith through the universal religion of Christ
in the Tractatus, cf. A. Matheron, Le Christ et le salut des ignorants (Paris, 1971).
Unfortunately this work is written from a rather narrowly Marxist point of view. More
balanced is Herman De Dijn, ‘‘Spinoza and Revealed Religion.’’
10. ‘‘By tradition Simon understands not a diadoche that, through the apostolic succes-
sion attests to the continuity of a chain that ends in Christ, the Word of God, even less a
paradosis that would guarantee an incorrupt transmission and preservation of the re-
 Notes to Pages 236–45 369

vealed text throughout the centuries.’’ F. Saverio Mirri, Richard Simon e il metodo
storico-critico di B. Spinoza (Florence: Le Monnier, 1972), p. 77.
11. This change in scriptural interpretation during the eighteenth century has been well
analyzed by Hans Frei in Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, chap. 3, pp. 51–65.
12. Frei, Eclipse, chap. 6, pp. 105–14.
13. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Letter of March 20, 1777, in Sämtliche Schriften, ed.
Karl Lachmann and Franz Muncker (Leipzig: Göschen, 1886–1924), 23 vols. (Hence-
forth abridged as L-M and volume.) This letter appears in vol. XVIII, p. 227, trans. Henry
Chadwick in Lessing’s Theological Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957),
p. 13. I take all translations from this work, wherever available.
14. ‘‘On the Origin of Revealed Religion,’’ thesis II, in L-M, XIV, 313; Chadwick,
p. 105.
15. ‘‘On the Toleration of Deists,’’ L-M, XII, 268–70.
16. L-M, XIII, 127; Chadwick, pp. 17–18.
17. In the early fragment ‘‘The Christianity of Reason’’ (1752–53), Lessing expresses
this idea and there explicitly defines the role of the Spirit as the harmony between Father
and Son (L-M, XIII, 43; Chadwick, p. 94).
18. There exists an early translation of Axiomata by H. H. Bernard in his Cambridge
Free Thoughts and Letters on Bibliolatry (London, 1862).
19. The ultimate authority of the Bible in Church doctrine had already been a major
source of controversy between Luther and the Catholic Church. Some of his followers
and most Calvinist churches stressed the uniqueness of this authority even more strongly
calling themselves ‘‘reformed in accordance with the word of God’’ to indicate that God’s
Spirit is entirely bound to the word. Cf. the chapter ‘‘The Word and the Will of God’’ in
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine,
vol. IV, chap. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 183–244.
20. Samuel Clarke, Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Natu-
ral Obligations of the Natural Religion, and Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revela-
tion (London, 1704–5), pt. II, pp. 12–23.
21. John Locke, A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity in The
Works of John Locke, 10 vols. (London 1823; reissued Aalen: Scientia, 1963), VII, 188.
22. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Random House,
1966), vol. I, pp. 303–4.
23. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (London, 1729; reissued by Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1924), vol. II, p. 243.
24. Nathaniel Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse on the Light of Nature,
ed. Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1931), p. 6. Both Culverwell and Whichcote, though influenced by Stoicism, were sincere
Christians and indeed Calvinists, albeit of slightly Arminian leanings. Culverwell de-
scribes as the purpose of his Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652)
‘‘to vindicate the use of reason in matters of religion,’’ yet at the same time ‘‘to chastise the
sauciness of Socinus and his followers.’’ Later members of the Cambridge School were to
ground their position in Neoplatonic philosophy, but in the seventeenth century it still
rested primarily on the Stoa and on Scholastic Aristotelianism.
25. From a letter to Bolingbroke.
370 Notes to Pages 245–48

26. Robert Shackleton, ‘‘Pope’s Essay on Man and the French Enlightenment,’’ in
Studies in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Canberra: Australian
National University Press, 1973), pp. 1–16. If the two French translators had not re-
tracted the ideas it expressed, the Sorbonne would have placed the Essay on its list of
condemned books.
27. Cf. Arthur Friedman, ‘‘Pope and Deism,’’ in Pope and His Contemporaries, ed.
James C. Clifford and Lewis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949) pp. 89–95.
28. Hoxie N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, vol. I: 1700–1740 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. 521.
29. Such was the interpretation of Herbert Schöffler in Protestantismus und Literatur:
Neue Wege zur Englischen Literatur des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1922).
30. Fairchild, Religious Trends, p. 553. The final two chapters of this now neglected
work are rich in insights on sentimental religion.
31. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Fraser edition (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1894). I refer to it by book, chapter, and section.
32. Cf. Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘‘The Assurance of Faith,’’ Faith and Philosophy 2, no. 4
(October 1990): 396–417.
33. John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), # 238. I refer to the
(standard) numbers of the sections.
34. John Edwards, Some Thoughts concerning the Several Causes and Occasions of
Atheism, especially in the Present Age, with some Brief Reflections on Socinianism and
on a Late Book entitled: ‘‘The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scrip-
tures’’ (London: J. Robinson and J. Wyat, 1695).
35. Locke, A Second Vindication of the Reasonableness of Christianity in Complete
Works of John Locke, vol. VIII, p. 188.
36. Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation (London, 1730), p. 199.
37. Others attacked the reasonableness of Locke’s scriptural argument. Thus Anthony
Collins in A Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724)
criticized the validity of the argument that Jesus had fulfilled the biblical prophecies as
being so vague that any religious teacher could have claimed the same. Thomas Woolston
completed this critique by denying the credibility of the miracles that were supposed to
support the fulfillment. Once the bond that had linked scriptural revelation to reason was
broken, the theory of rational religion entered into conflict with revelation (Discourses
on the Miracles of Our Saviour [1727–29]). On a more general level, Collins distin-
guished the reports of historical facts which, being empirical, carry no guarantee of
absolute certainty, from the universal and necessary truths of reason. On the development
of Lockean thought into deism, see Gay, Enlightenment, vol. I, pp. 374–80.
38. Henry Duméry, Le problème de Dieu (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1975), p. 15.
39. Cf. Louis Dupré, A Dubious Heritage: Philosophy of Religion after Kant (New
York: Paulist Press, 1977), pt. III, pp. 129–77.
40. Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1932), p. 56.
41. Etienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941),
p. 106.
 Notes to Pages 248–54 371

42. Voltaire, Elémens de philosophie de Newton (1738), in Oeuvres (1785), vol. LXIII,
pt. 1, chap. 6.
43. Jean le Rond d’Alembert, ‘‘Discours préliminaire,’’ Encyclopédie, ed. Picaret, p. xv.
44. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1968), p. 164.
45. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), ed. and intro. James H. Tully
(Indianapolis: Hacket, 1983). The introduction contains a useful survey of Locke’s posi-
tions over a thirty-year period.
46. This theocracy had culminated in Pope Boniface VIII’s bulla Unam Sanctam
(1302), in which he declared that both the spiritual and the temporal swords had been
divinely entrusted to the Roman Pontiff. Enchiridion Symbolorum, ed. Henricus De-
nzinger (Barcelona: Herder, 1948), # 469.
47. Cf. Stanley Greane, Shaftesbury’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics (Athens: Ohio
State University Press, 1967).
48. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, ‘‘Miscellaneous Reflections,’’
II, 3, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., ed. John Robertson, 2
vols. (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), II, 220.
49. He made this statement in an address to the Academy of Bordeaux delivered in
1716. ‘‘La politique des Romains dans la religion’’ anticipates what he was to write on the
subject in the later Grandeur et décadence des Romains (1734).
50. Voltaire, L’examen inportant de Milord Bolingbroke (1767), chaps. 13, 15, in
Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire (Paris: Hachette, 1859), vol. XXI; An Important Study by
Lord Bolingbroke, in Voltaire on Religion, trans. Kenneth Appelgate (New York: Freder-
ick Ungar, 1979), pp. 135–41 and 144–46.
51. Cited from the so-called Homilies, which Voltaire ironically credited himself with
having delivered in a London chapel in 1765. Trans. Kenneth W. Appelgate in Voltaire on
Religion, p. 80. Peter Gay’s important Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), though primarily focused on Voltaire’s multiple
political involvements, is also a richly documented source on the writer’s complex posi-
tion on religious issues.
52. Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire
depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII (1756; Paris: Editions Garnier, 1963), 2 vols.,
introduction, vol. I, p. 95.
53. Even Gustave Lanson, who admires Voltaire’s literary and historical talents, takes
exception at his allegedly historical critique of religion: ‘‘There is nothing dirtier, more
hateful and more undignified in Voltaire’s work than what he wrote about the Jews and
the origin of Christianity. Renan has pronounced the definitive condemnation of all that.
Neither science nor the taste of our time allows us to reverse this condemnation.’’ Gus-
tave Lanson, Voltaire (Paris: Hachette, 1906), p. 171.
54. Diderot called it ‘‘a rehash of all the old naughtiness the author has uttered against
Moses and Jesus Christ, the prophets and the apostles, the Church, the popes, the cardi-
nals, priests, and monks.’’
55. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1762), bk. IV, in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: La
Pléiade, 1969), vol. IV, p. 541.
372 Notes to Pages 255–63

56. Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Paris: La Pléiade, 1964), pt. VI, letter 8.
57. Rousseau, Du Contrat Social (1762) in Oeuvres Complètes (Paris: La Pléiade,
1964), vol. III, p. 467; The Social Contract, ed. Sir Ernest Barker, in Social Contract
(Oxford University Press (1947/1960) p. 304.
58. Christian Wolff had discussed it in his inaugural lecture as philosophy professor in
Halle, ‘‘Oratio de Sinarium Philosophia practica’’ (1721). Christian Wolff, Gesammelte
Werke (Hildesheim and New York, 1974), vol. XXXV, pp. 25–126. Cf. Hermann Lübbe,
Religion nach der Aufklärung (Graz: Styria, 1986), pp. 306–27.
59. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; New York:
Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1973), p. 106.
60. Robert N. Bellah, ‘‘Civil Religion in America,’’ Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967), repr. in
Beyond Belief (New York, Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 168–89. This essay touched off a
lively debate, some of which appeared in Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones, eds.
American Civil Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). See also Richard John
Neuhaus, Time Toward Home: The American Experiment as Revelation (New York:
Seabury, 1975), esp. chaps. 19, and 20, and John F. Wilson, ‘‘The Status of Civil Region in
America’’ in The Religion of the Republic, ed. Elwyn A. Smith (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1971).
61. As Michael Buckley, S.J., has shown in At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), deism does not imply atheism. See esp. pp. 37–38.
62. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Richard Popkin (Indi-
anapolis: Hacket, 1980), II, 14. I shall refer to this edition, the most easily available, by
section and page. Since the sections are short, the quoted passages may easily be found in
other editions.
63. For a popular presentation, cf. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of
Chaos, Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1986).
64. For an elaboration of this critique, see Louis Dupré, ‘‘The Teleological Argument,’’
in Dubious Heritage, pp. 152–65.
65. A great deal has been written on the question which one of the characters repre-
sents Hume’s own views. From the beginning most commentators have identified the
skeptical Philo as the one. Yet others, including Nicholas Wolterstorff, consider the di-
alogues an exchange between an empiricist skepticism (represented by Philo) and an
empiricist defense of religion (represented by Cleanthes) as both present in Hume’s mind.
The fact is that Hume himself in a letter to Gilbert Elliot (March 10, 1751) requests
Elliot’s assistance for making Cleanthes’s argument ‘‘formal and regular.’’ Apparently he
had a personal stake in Cleanthes’s position. For alternatives and for an excellent assess-
ment of Hume’s agnosticism, cf. James Noxon, ‘‘Hume’s Agnosticism,’’ in Hume: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. V. C. Chappell (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 360–
83.
66. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 2d ed., ed. L. A.
Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), X, 131.
67. Antony Flew, God and Philosophy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World,
1966), pp. 150–52. See also, his Hume’s Philosophy of Belief (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1961).
68. Cf. James Collins, The Emergence of the Philosophy of Religion (New Haven: Yale
 Notes to Pages 263–71 373

University Press, 1967), pp. 32–33. Phenomenologists of religion, such as Joachim Wach,
Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade, have strongly reacted against the tendency to derive
religion from other categories—be they concepts or emotions. They consider religion
a constitutive element in the mind’s structure, not a former stage in the history of
consciousness.
69. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. H. E. Root (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1957), introduction, p. 21. I refer to this work by section and page
number.
70. Cf. Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 177.
71. An excellent report on Diderot’s development toward atheism may be found in
Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, pp. 194–250.
72. Baron Paul d’Holbach, Système de la Nature (Amsterdam, 1770), bk. II, chap. 5;
trans. as The System of Nature by H. D. Robinson (New York: Burt Franklin, 1868; repr.
1970). I shall refer to this translation by book, chapter, and page.
73. Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 176.
74. Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, ed. A. J. Q. Beuchot, 16 vols.
(Paris, 1820–24). See also the articles ‘‘Caligula,’’ ‘‘Lucrèce,’’ ‘‘Hobbes.’’ On the basis of
Pensées diverses (CXIII and LXXI) and other texts, Gabriel Vahanian concludes that
Bayle is primarily an ‘‘iconoclast,’’ a destroyer of idols: ‘‘Par delà la Theodicée: L’héritage
de Pierre Bayle,’’ in Teodicea Oggi (Archivo di Filosofia 56 [1988]), pp. 29–36.
75. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York:
Random House, 1967), # 5, p. 52.
76. Unlike Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty refused to call himself an atheist because of
the religious connotation of the term. On the dialectical character of modern atheism, cf.
Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, chap. 6, and Louis Dupré, ‘‘On the Intellec-
tual Sources of Modern Atheism’’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 45
(1999): 1–11.
77. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 158.

Chapter 9. The Faith of the Philosophers

1. Cf. Yves M. J. Congar, O.P., A History of Theology, trans. Hunter Guthrie, S.J.
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), and esp. chap. 3.
2. Cf. Konrad Feiereis, Die Umprägung der natürlichen Theologie in Religions-
philosophie (Leipzig: St. Benno-Verlag, 1965). This study contains an excellent history of
natural theology.
3. Cf. Walter Van Herck, ‘‘De taak van de godsdienstfilosofie,’’ Bijdragen. Tijdschrift
voor filosofie en theologie 59 (1998): 428–52.
4. As I have tried to show in A Dubious Heritage: Philosophy of Religion after Kant
(New York: Paulist Press, 1977), pt. 3.
5. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schus-
ter, 1945), p. 595. For the complete argument, Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of
the Philosophy of Leibniz (London, 1937), pp. 59ff.
6. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discours de Métaphysique, # 14, in Die philosophischen
374 Notes to Pages 272–74

Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. I. Gerhard, 7 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann,
1875–90), vol. IV, p. 438 (henceforth abridged as Schriften); trans. George R. Mont-
gomery, rev. by Albert R. Chandler in The Rationalists (New York: Doubleday, n.d.),
p. 424.
7. ‘‘On the Philosophy of Descartes’’ (1679–1680), in Schriften, IV, 274, also 289;
The Philosophical Works of Leibnitz, trans. George Martin Duncan (New Haven, Conn.:
Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor, 1908), p. 1.
8. Philosophical Works of Leibnitz, trans. Duncan, p. 3.
9. ‘‘The Principles of Nature and Grace, Founded on Reason’’ (1714), # 11, in
Schriften, VI, 603, trans. in Leibniz, Theology and Philosophy, ed. C. R. Morris, trans.
R. Latta (New York: Doubleday, 1934).
10. Letter to Arnauld in The Leibniz-Arnauld Corespondence, trans. H. T. Mason
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), pp. 147–48.
11. Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought (Grand Rapids: Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 197–98. This important work draws attention to Leibniz’s casual
interest in mysticism and to the impact of Henry More’s work on Leibniz.
12. ‘‘The Principles of Nature and Grace’’ (1714), # 9, in Schriften, VI, 602.
13. Theodicy, # 173, in Schriften, VI, 217; trans. E. M. Huggard (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1951), my emphasis.
14. Leibniz: Textes inédits, ed. Gaston Grua (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1948), p. 302.
15. In a collection of letters and fragments published in 1931 the critical distinction
between indifference and freedom of choice appears: ‘‘It is not indifference of equi-
librium, so to speak that constitutes freedom, but the faculty of choosing among several
possibles, even though they are not all equally feasible or convenient for the one who
acts.’’ Paul Schrecker, Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz: Lettres et fragments inédits sur les
problèmes philosophiques, théologiques, politiques de la réconciliation des doctrines
protestantes (1669–1704) (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1931), p. 97. I owe this citation to Robert
Merrihew Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994), a careful analysis of the theories of contingency as well as of the notion of
Ens perfectissimum.
16. There is, however, the Spinozistic expression in an early text. ‘‘That all things are
distinguished not as substances, but as modes.’’ Yet, Leibniz here is concerned to show
that things are not isolated from each other as substances, but distinct through certain
qualities of their substantial being. If they were wholly different in their substantial being,
no universal harmony could exist.
17. Cf. Letter to Bourguet in Schriften, III, 575.
18. Robert Sleigh, ‘‘Leibniz on Divine Foreknowledge,’’ Faith and Philosophy 11, no. 4
(1994): 547–71.
19. This distinction had already been criticized by Spinoza: ‘‘The intellect of God,
insofar as it is conceived to constitute God’s essence, is, in reality, the cause of things, both
of their essence and of their existence’’ (Ethics, bk. I, prop. 17). Kolakowski shows why
the distinction does not hold. ‘‘In God Himself essence and existence converge and this
implies that His will is identical with His essence. God neither obeys rules which are valid
regardless of His will nor produces these rules according to His whims or as the result of
 Notes to Pages 274–80 375

deliberating various options; He is those rules.’’ Leszek Kolakowski, Religion (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 25.
20. Discours de Métaphysique, #32, in Schriften, IV, 456. The phrase ‘‘determines
them from without’’ is to be understood in a relative sense; God is the only ‘‘other’’ reality
that directly influences the creature. The expression says nothing about the nature of the
divine causality, whether it is intrinsic or extrinsic.
21. As Robert M. Adams calls it in ‘‘Must God Create the Best?’’ in The Virtue of Faith
and Other Essays in Philosophical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
For a theological development of this idea, cf. Kenneth L. Schmitz, The Gift: Creation
(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1982).
22. Hermann Lübbe, Religion nach der Aufklärung (Graz-Vienna: Verlag Styria,
1986), p. 195 (my translation). Cf. also Gabriel Marcel, Journal Métaphysique (Paris:
Gallimard, 1935), p. 65, and Jan Sperna Weiland, ‘‘La théodicée c’est l’athéisme’’ in
Teodicea Oggi, ed. Marco Olivetti (Padua: CEDAM, 1988), pp. 37–50.
23. I have discussed the terms of that problem in Religious Mystery and Rational
Reflection, chap. 4 (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 41–64.
24. Leibniz, A System of Theology, trans. Charles William Russell (London: Burns and
Lambert, 1850), p. 11. Robert M. Adams assumes that this text may not entirely reflect
Leibniz’s personal position, but perhaps the maximum he would be willing to subscribe
to, if it were acceptable to the Catholic Church. Robert Adams, ‘‘Leibniz’s Examination
of the Christian Religion, Faith and Philosophy 11, no. 4 (October 1994): 517–46.
25. ‘‘Principles of Nature and Grace, Founded on Reason’’ (1714), # 15–16, in
Schriften, VI, 609.
26. In a letter written toward the end of his life he admitted the Platonic inspiration of
his work: ‘‘I have ever since my youth been greatly satisfied with the ethics of Plato, and
also, in a way with his metaphysics.’’ Schriften, III, 637.
27. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876; New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), vol. I, p. 100.
28. Samuel Clarke, Discourse Concerning the Being and Attributes of God, the Natu-
ral Obligations of Natural Religion, and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revela-
tion. Henceforth abridged as Discourse. This work unites the Boyle lectures of 1704,
originally published as A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, with the
second series, delivered in 1705, and first published as A Discourse Concerning the
Unchangeable Obligations . . . . I have used the tenth, corrected edition of 1749 and refer
to it by volume (I or II), proposition, and page.
29. Samuel Clarke, A Collection of Papers which passed between the late Learned Mr.
Leibniz and Dr. Clarke in the years 1715 and 1716, relating to the Principles of Natural
Philosophy and Religion, ed. and intro. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 1957). Abridged as L, for Letters from I to V.
30. Clarke’s argument has been the subject of a number of contemporary studies,
among them William Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1975); Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 7; and Michael J. Buckley, S.J., At the Origins
of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), chap. 3.
31. John Henry Newman, in a letter to Edward Hawkins (December 5, 1852).
376 Notes to Pages 281–91

32. Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed ((1736), (London:
Macmillan, 1900), pt. II, chaps. 1 and 5. Because of numerous editions of this work, I
shall refer only to Butler’s own divisions: roman numeral for the part, arabic number for
the chapter, followed by the number of the section.
33. Jerusalem (1783), in Moses Mendelssohns gesammelte Schriften, ed. G. B. Men-
delssohn (Leipzig, 1843–45), vol. III.
34. Immanuel Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloszen Vernunft, in Kants
Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Preussische Akademie, 1902–42) (henceforth referred to
as Ak), vol. VI, p. 21; Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M.
Greene and Hoyt Hudson (LaSalle, Ind.: Open Court, 1934; reissued New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1960), bk. I, introduction, p. 17. I shall refer to this translation as Religion,
followed by book, section, and page.
35. Letter to Wolke in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. X, p. 178, trans. in Kant’s Life
and Thought by Ernst Cassirer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 19.
36. ‘‘Ueber das Miszlingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodicee’’ in Kants
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VIII, pp. 255–71.
37. Ibid., p. 267. On Kant’s critique of traditional theodicy, cf. Michael Stoeber, Evil
and the Mystics’ God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), chap. 5. For a posi-
tive view of Kant’s discussion of evil, cf. David McKenzie, ‘‘A Kantian Theodicy,’’ Faith
and Philosophy 1, no. 2 (April 1984): 236–47.
38. Nicolas Malebranche, De la Recherche de la Vérité (1674–75), in Oeuvres Com-
plètes de Malebranche, gen. ed. André Robinet (Paris: Vrin, 1958), vol. I, ed. by Gen-
evieve Rodis-Lewis, preface, p. 8. Future references to this work will be indicated as
follows: RV roman numeral for the book (and, if needed, for part of the book), arabic
number for the chapter; followed by the volume of this edition of the Oeuvres Complètes
(hereafter O.C.) (bks. I–III in vol. I; bks. IV–VI in vol. II). I shall cite from the translation
of Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscam, The Search after Truth (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 1980), and from other translations that appear in Malebranche
Philosophical Selections, ed. Steven Nadler (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1992), whenever
available. The present text appears on p. 3.
39. Cf. Malebranche, Conversations chrétiennes (1677), II, O.C., II, 50–52. Henri
Gouhier, La philosophie de Malebranche et son expérience religieuse (Paris: Bloud et
Gay, 1926), p. 27. Gouhier, who edited some of Malebranche’s works, may well be his
most perceptive interpreter.
40. Malebranche, Première lettre touchant la défense de M. Arnauld (1685), ed. André
Robinet in O.C., VI, 194. The voice of Augustine’s De magistro is heard here as through-
out the Recherche de la Vérité.
41. Victor Delbos, Etude de la philosophie de Malebranche (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1924),
p. 22.
42. Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques (1683), IV, 1, ed. Henri Gouhier and
André Robinet, O.C., X (1959), 36. Abridged as Méditations. Cf. also Armand Cuvillier,
Essai sur la mystique de Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1954), pp. 38–41.
43. Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce (1680), ed. by Ginette Dreyfus, O.C., V, 36
(henceforth abridged as TNG).
 Notes to Pages 292–300 377

44. Entretiens sur la Métaphysique et sur la Religion (1688), ed. André Robinet, O.C.,
XII, 29–48; Phil. Sel., pp. 147–58.
45. Antoine Arnauld, Des vraies et des fausses idées (1684) in Oeuvres de Messire
Arnauld (Lausanne: d’Arnay, 1780), vol. XXXVIII, pp. 204–5.
46. Malebranche, Réponse au livre des Vraies et Fausses Idées (1684), ed. André
Robinet, O.C., VI (1966), chap. 22, p. 153. (Some modern Cartesians have agreed with
Malebranche, including that crypto-Cartesian, Jean-Paul Sartre.)
47. Victor Cousin, Fragments philosophiques cartésiens, p. 345.
48. The Fragments published by Victor Cousin contain an anonymous report accord-
ing to which Malebranche explicitly denied the Cartesian thesis that truth is constituted
by divine fiat. ‘‘I asked him [Malebranche] if it was conceivable that God could see that
2 + 2 = 4 before having willed it to be so. He answered yes, because this truth is
God himself.’’ Victor Cousin, Fragments philosophiques (1866), vol. III, p. 139. Henri
Gouhier hereby refers to a statement made by Malebranche himself in one of the nu-
merous ‘‘Eclaircissements’’ he kept adding to his text: ‘‘God who makes everything did
not make it [truth], though He engenders it permanently through the necessity of His
being’’ (RV, ‘‘Eclairissement’’ 8; granted in Gouhier, La philosophie de Malebranche,
p. 41).
49. Traité de morale (1683), ed. Michel Adam, O.C., XI, chap. 2.
50. God grants the grâce de sentiment in accordance with the thoughts and desires
through which Christ foresaw and preordained the destiny of all future generations.
Arnauld dismissed this hypothesis as absurd. How could the fate of billions depend on the
knowledge or ignorance of one human, and hence finite, consciousness! Fénelon, for once
in agreement with his antagonist, reacted sharply and to the point. ‘‘In this little book
[Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce] Malebranche justifies the inefficacy of God’s will with
respect to the salvation of all men entirely by an impotence derived from the simplicity of
God’s ways and from the limits of Jesus Christ’s brain. This is new in the Church, remote
from any theology, and unworthy of God.’’ At the instigation of Bossuet (then still his
friend), Fénelon also wrote a Réfutation du Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce (1687)
which, however, remained unprinted until 1820. Fénelon, Lettres sur la grâce et la pre-
destination, in Oeuvres Choisies de Fénelon (Paris: Hachette, 1862), vol. III, p. 181.
51. Malebranche, Réponse a une Dissertation de Mr. Arnauld contre un Eclaircisse-
ment du Traité de la Nature et de la Grâce (1685), ed. André Robinet, O.C., VII, 485.
52. The eminent historian of science Pierre Duhem praises both his insights and his
command of scientific methods in La Loi du Choc des Corps d’après Malebranche (Paris:
Vrin, 1924) and La Physique des successeurs de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1934).
53. Berkeley, Philosophical Commentaries, ed. A. A. Luce (London: T. Nelson and
Sons, 1944), p. 548.
54. Berkeley, Dialogues, II, in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed.
A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessup, 9 vols. (London: T. Nelson, 1948), vol. II, p. 214.
55. Charles Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cam-
bridge: Belknap Press, 1931–58), vol. VIII, p. 10.
56. Douglas Anderson and Peter S. Groff, ‘‘Peirce on Berkeley’s Nominalistic Plato-
nism,’’ American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72, no. 2 (spring 1998): 165–78.
378 Notes to Pages 301–10

57. For Berkeley, there are no universal ideas but particular ones may constitute a
universal meaning in and through their relations to other ideas. Berkeley, A Treatise
Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in Works of George Berkeley, vol. II,
# 15, p. 32.
58. Berkeley, Alciphron, IV, 10, in Works of George Berkeley, vol. III, p. 154. Roman
numeral refers to the dialogue, number to the section.
59. George Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, ## 30–32, in Works of George
Berkeley, vol. II, pp. 53–54.
60. Berkeley, Three Dialogues, in Works of George Berkeley, vol. II, p. 232
61. Berkeley, Principles, introduction, ## 20–21, in Works of George Berkeley, vol. II,
pp. 37–38.
62. Berkeley, Siris, # 225, in Works of George Berkeley, vol. V, p. 107. Henceforth
indicated by number.
63. Cf. Nicholas Everitt, ‘‘Quasi-Berkeleyan Idealism as Perspicuous Theism,’’ Faith
and Philosophy 14, no. 3 (July 1997): 353–77.
64. Lucien Lévy-Brühl, La philosophie de Jacobi (Paris, 1894), p. 23.
65. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Werke, ed. Friedrich Roth and Friedrich Köppen (Leip-
zig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1815; reproduced by Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darm-
stadt, 1980), 6 vols. Henceforth abridged to Werke and volume. Trans. with introduction
by George di Giovanni as Edward Allwill’s Collection of Letters in Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill (Montreal: McGill Uni-
versity Press, 1994), pp. 468, 476.
66. Jacobi, Main Phil. Writings, p. 187.
67. Jacobi, ‘‘Vorrede’’ (preface) in Werke, II, 50; Main Phil. Writings, pp. 558–59.
68. Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VIII, pp. 133–47.
69. George di Giovanni, Introduction to Main Phil. Writings, p. 85. This introduction
is, in fact, the best monograph on Jacobi available in English.
70. Jacobi, Allwill, in Main Phil. Writings, p. 437.
71. Jacobi, Werke, III, 44; Main Phil. Writings, p. 519.
72. Jacobi, Werke, III, 44; Main Phil. Writings, p. 513. Cf. also di Giovanni, Introduc-
tion, pp. 114–15.
73. David Hume, in Werke, II, 27; Main Phil. Writings, p. 266.
74. David Hume, in Werke, II, vi; Main Phil. Writings, p. 256.
75. Feeling, the undifferentiated ground of consciousness, is not specified to any par-
ticular object. In it consciousness still remains in a state of pure immanence. How much
all mental activity proceeds from it was brilliantly argued in Suzanne Langer’s psycholog-
ical study, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, vol. I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1967), and more recently in the neurophysiological study of Antonio Damasio, The
Feeling of What Happens (New York: Harcourt, 1999).
76. Jacobi, ‘‘Vorrede,’’ in Werke, II, 119–20; Main Phil. Writings, p. 588.
77. Jacobi, ‘‘Beylage’’ to Spinoza Letters, in Werke, IV/1, 210; Main Phil. Writings,
p. 230.
78. Jacobi, ‘‘Vorrede,’’ in Werke, II, 74; Main Phil. Writings, p. 56
79. Jacobi, Werke, IV/1, 237–28.
 Notes to Pages 310–24 379

80. Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel, Glauben und Wissen, in Werke, Jubiläumaus-
gabe, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart, 1927–39), vol. I, p. 286.
81. This point has been well argued by Peter Jonkers in ‘‘God or Nothing,’’ in Hegel-
Jahrbuch 2002, pp. 272–78.
82. Jacobi, Werke, III, 23; Main Phil. Writings, p. 509.
83. Jacobi, Werke, III, 48; Main Phil. Writings, p. 522.
84. Jacobi, Werke, III, 43; Main Phil. Writings, p. 519.

Chapter 10. Spiritual Continuity and Renewal

1. Letter of May 10, 1781, in J. G. Hamanns Briefwechsel, ed. W. Ziesemer (Wies-
baden: Insel Verlag, 1952).
2. Johann Georg Hamann, ‘‘Metakritik,’’ in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Nadler in 6 vols.
(Vienna, 1949–57), vol. III, pp. 281–89; ‘‘Metakritik on the Purism of Reason,’’ trans.
Kenneth Haynes in What Is Enlightenment? ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), pp. 154–67. In that collection appears also Garrett Green’s essay,
‘‘Modern Culture Comes of Age: Hamann versus Kant on the Root Metaphor of Enlight-
enment,’’ pp. 291–305, The quote appears on p. 299.
3. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, bk. I, sec. 7.
4. The justification of symbols of the divine does not appear in the Critique of Pure
Reason but in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783) published two years
later. Cf. Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Akademie, 1902–1942), vol. IV, p. 358;
trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1977), p. 98. In the Critique of Judg-
ment Kant defined a symbol as an indirect presentation of a concept by means of an
analogy between a sensible intuition and an object known intellectually. Thus he justified
the link between analogy and symbol, which Butler and Hamann grasped intuitively.
5. Ritter von Rosenkreuz letzte Willensmeinung über göttlichen und menschlichen
Ursprung der Sprache (1772), in Werke, III, 27.
6. Hamann, Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten, in Werke, II, 57–82; trans. James C.
O’Flaherty, Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1967).
7. Michel de Certeau, La fable mystique (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).
8. Jeanne Guyon, Spiritual Torrents, in A Short Method of Prayer and Spiritual
Torrents, trans. A. W. Marston (Sampson Low, 1875), chap. 9.
9. In a letter quoted by Jean-Robert Armogathe, Le Quiétisme (Paris: Presses Univer-
sitaires de France, 1973), p. 31.
10. François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon, ‘‘Lettre à Louis XIV,’’ in Oeuvres
(Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1983), vol. I, p. 544.
11. Cf. his ‘‘Discours à l’Académie Française,’’ in Oeuvres, I, p. 537.
12. Ronald Knox calls them ‘‘almost hysterical.’’ Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chap-
ter in the History of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 340.
13. Nicolas Malebranche, Traité de l’Amour de Dieu et Lettres au P. Lamy (1697), ed.
André Robinet, O.C., XIV (1963), 23.
14. Cf. P. M. Masson, La religion de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. II, La ‘‘Profession de
380 Notes to Pages 325–29

foi de Jean-Jacques’’ (Paris: Hachette, 1916); Max Wieser, Der sentimentale Mensch
gesehen aus der Welt holländischer und deutscher Mystiker im 18en Jahrhundert (Gotha-
Stuttgart: F. A. Perthes, 1924); Emilienne Naert, Leibniz et la querelle du Pur Amour
(Paris: Vrin, 1959).
15. Heiko Oberman, preface, in Johann Arndt, True Christianity, trans. and intro. by
Peter Erb (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), p. xi.
16. Cf. Wilhelm Koepp, Johann Arndt: Eine Untersuchung über die Mystik im Luther-
tum (Berlin, 1912). Peter Erb’s introduction to his translation of True Christianity is
excellent. Unfortunately that edition contains only bk. I and summaries of the other,
more mystical ones.
17. Philipp Jacob Spener, Die Heilige Schrift: Altes und Neues Testament, vol. VI
(Romerbrief ), p. 155. On the inhabitation of Christ in Pietist theology, cf. Hans-Jürgen
Schrader, ‘‘Le Christ dans le coeur de ses fidèles,’’ in Le Christ entre Orthodoxie et
Lumières, ed. Maria-Cristina Pitassi (Geneva: Droz, 1994).
18. August Hermann Francke, Christus der Kern der Heiligen Schrift (Halle, 1702),
p. 428.
19. Life and Character of Gerhard Tersteegen, trans. Samuel Jackson (London: Black,
Young and Young, 1834), entry November 4, 1742.
20. On the religious sources of Hölderlin’s poetry, cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herr-
lichkeit, vol. III/1, Im Raum der Metaphysik (Ensiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1965) pp.
644–89; The Glory of the Lord, vol. V, trans. Oliver Davies, Andrew Louth et al. (San
Franscisco: Ignatius Press, 1991) pp. 298–338.
21. I omit books III and IV written after his conversion to Catholicism in the style of the
Counter-Reformation. In book V, added in later editions, Silesius resumes his earlier
views. Had he written it earlier or did he consider his radical views compatible with
Catholic doctrine? Cf. Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans Eglise, chap. 9, pp. 567–639.
22. Wherever available I have used Maria Shrady’s elegant partial translation of Angelus
Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer (New York: Paulist Press, 1986). In other cases I give my
own prose translation or that of Maria Böhm, Angelus Silesius’ Cherubinischer Wanders-
mann: A Modern Reading with Selected Translations (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).
23. Meister Eckhart, Die deutschen Werke, ed. Joseph Quint et al. (Stuttgart: Kohl-
hammer, 1938ff.), vol. I, pp. 69–70; Meister Eckhart, Sermons and Treatises, trans.
M. O’C. Walshe (London: Watkins, 1979), vol. I, p. 284.
24. Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith,
vol. 2 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959),
p. 95.
25. John E. Smith, Introduction to Religious Affections, in Works of Jonathan Ed-
wards, vol. II, p. 12.
26. Jonathan Edwards, ‘‘The Excellency of Christ,’’ in Works of Jonathan Edwards,
vol. XIX, Sermons and Discources (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
27. On this epistemological issue I follow William Wainwright’s essay, ‘‘Jonathan Ed-
wards and the Sense of the Heart,’’ Faith and Philosophy 7, no. 1 (January 1990): 43–62.
28. Smith, Introduction to Religious Affections, p. 42.
29. Czeslaw Milosz, The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne (New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 1984), p. 139.
 Notes to Pages 330–38 381

30. Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia (# 3483), in 12 vols. (1749–56). All works
have been translated (from Latin) into English. Two selections taken from the Arcana
have recently been retranslated by George F. Dole, under the titles Emanuel Swedenborg,
The Universal Human and Soul-Body Interaction (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), and
A Thoughtful Soul: Reflections from Swedenborg (Westchester, Pa.: Chrysalis Books,
1995). The latter contains texts, topically arranged and selected from various works. I
have followed Dole’s modern translation wherever it was available and have preserved
the standard numbering of the sections.
31. Signe Toksvig in her intellectual biography of Swedenborg traces the method of this
spiritual exegesis to the sixteenth-century Calvinist Sebastian Castillio. Castillio writes:
‘‘Only the person who has in himself the illumination of the same spirit that gave the
original revelation can see through the garment of the letter to the external message, the
ever-living word hidden within.’’ Signe Toksvig, Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist and
Mystic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), p. 151.
32. Milosz, Land of Ulro, p. 139.
33. Ibid., p. 53.
34. Even Kant who parodied Swedenborg’s visions in his Dreams of a Ghost-Seeer had
three years earlier expressed his respect for the visionary’s clairvoyant powers, which he
did not question.

Conclusion
1. Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society (New York: Seabury Press, 1974),
p. 132.
2. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1987), p. 112.
3. Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), p. 171.
4. Rorty, Essays on Heidegger, p. 174. Cf. my essays, ‘‘Alternatives to the Cogito,’’
Review of Metaphysics 40 (June 1987): 687–716, and ‘‘Postmodernity or Late Moder-
nity? Ambiguities in Richard Rorty’s Thought,’’ Review of Metaphysics 47 (December
1993): 277–95.
5. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. M. Sheridan Smith (New
York: Harper and Row, 1976).
6. Emmet Kennedy, ‘‘Anticipations of Postmodernist Enlightenment Epistemology,’’
in The Postmodernist Critique of the Project of Enlightenment, ed. Sven-Eric Liedman, in
Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, vol. LVIII (1997),
pp. 105–21. Peter Gay wrote that the Enlightenment was not an Age of Reason but a
revolt against rationalism. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Random
House, 1967), vol. I, p. 141.
7. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1936), trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1955), p. 219.
8. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (South Bend, Ind.: Notre
Dame University Press, 1988), p. 7.
 Index

Adams, Robert M., 374n15, 375n21, Anderson, Douglas, 377n56

375n24 Angelus Silesius (Johann Scheffler), 319,
Addison, Joseph, 56, 60, 102, 106, 108– 326–27
9, 147–48, 256 Antal, Frederic, 342n19
Adorno, Theodor W., 197 Aquinas, Thomas, 23, 26, 68, 155–56,
Aeneid, 93, 96, 223 158, 247, 269–70
Aeschylus, 202 Arendt, Hannah, 137, 180, 203, 362n39
Affections: natural, 120, 122, 129, 220; Arguments (proofs) for existence of God,
moral, 249; religious, 245, 319, 327– 259–61, 270; critique, 258–61, 281,
29 339
Agnostic(ism), 257–64, 301 Aristotle, 2, 3, 18, 20, 23, 38, 58, 68,
Alembert, Jean le Rond d’. See D’Alem- 113, 116, 122, 145, 154, 191–92, 200,
bert, Jean le Rond 243, 269, 290
Alfieri, Vittorio, 148 Arnauld, Antoine, 231, 289, 291, 293, 320
Althusser, Louis, 10 Arndt, Johann, 325
Altruism, 129–31, 135 Arnold, Gottfried, 326
American colonies, 5, 176 Atheism, 14, 243–45, 250–51, 254,
Amor Dei intellectualis, 364 256–58, 264–68, 279, 303, 306, 316
Analogy (religious or philosophical): 52, Atkinson, Geoffrey, 349n35
80, 93, 110, 261, 281–82, 313–14, Augustine, 62, 64, 66, 68, 81, 90, 188,
317, 330 214, 244, 274, 289–91, 293, 296, 322,
Anchor, Robert, 366n39 324

383
384 Index

Baasner, Rainer, 349n27 Bonaventure, 294

Babbitt, Irving, 357n27, 357n29 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 188–89, 204,
Bach, Johann Sebastian, xii 208, 235, 320–23
Bacon, Francis, 19, 194, 199, 202, Boswell, James, 61–62, 125
352n13 Boucher, François, 95
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 351n75 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 118
Balthasar, Hans-Urs von, 380n20 Boulainvilliers, Henri de, 170
Banez, Dominicus, 273–74 Bourgeois drama, 149–50
Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules-Amédée, 96 Bowersock, Glenn, 215
Barckhausen, Auguste, 362n46 Bradwardine, Thomas, 23
Barker, Ernest, 168, 362n40 Braudy, Leo, 367n54
Barnouw, Jeffrey, 364n18 Brown, Peter, 215
Baroque, xii, 5, 11, 78, 87, 99, 220, 318 Bruno, Giordano, 20, 33
Batteux, Abbé, 91, 92, 220, 318 Brunschvicg, Léon, 289
Battistini, Andrea, 350n51 Buckley, Michael, 14, 342n24, 343n12,
Baumgarten, Alexander, 79, 103–4 372n61, 373n71, 373n76, 375n30
Bayle, Pierre, 250, 255, 276 Buffon, Georges-Louis, comte de, 26,
Beaumont, Christophe de, 125 34–37, 52, 352n13
Beautiful soul (belle âme), 126–27 Burckhardt, Jacob, xi
Beauty, the beautiful, 88–92, 95–98, Burke, Edmund, 4, 10, 108–9, 161, 180–
100–101, 103–5, 109, 111, 120–22, 84, 255
126 Bury, J. B., 216
Becker, Carl, 248 Butcharov, Panayot, 348nn15–16
Beierwaltes, Werner, 350n61 Butler, Joseph, 280–82, 299, 315
Bellah, Robert, 372n60
Belle nature, 92, 94, 105 Calvin, Jean, 159, 267, 299, 326, 328,
Bellinzaga, Isabella, 319 333
Bentham, Jeremy, 124, 131, 133, 161, Calvinism, Calvinists, 156, 250, 324, 329
179–80, 361n22 Cambridge Platonists, 24, 122, 245, 272,
Berkeley, George, 9, 49, 70, 75, 269, 289, 276, 299, 328
299–304, 311, 314 Capitalism, 176–78, 180
Berlin, Isaiah, 4, 189, 220 Cardano, Gerolamo, 63
Bernard of Clairvaux, 323–24 Carlyle, Thomas, 60, 62
Bérulle, Pierre, 290, 291 Casanova, Giovanni Giacomo, 9
Bildung, 8, 85, 225 Cassirer, Ernst, xiii, 6, 31, 341n5,
Bittner, Rudiger, 342n13 345n34, 371n44
Blake, William, 25, 331 Caton, Hiram, 366n46
Blankenburg, Christian von, 85 Causality: divine or transcendent, 230,
Blumenberg, Hans, 202, 313, 343n3 243, 257, 259–60, 281; efficient or
Bocken, Inigo, 362n36 physical, 174, 200, 204, 230, 243,
Boehm, Rudolf, 347n4 257, 265, 267, 271–72, 274, 283; fi-
Boileau, Nicolas, 79, 101, 107 nal, 200, 220, 272; formal, 300, 303;
Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, occasional, 295, 303; secondary, 292,
252 299
 Index 385

Certeau, Michel de, 318 Constantine, Emperor, 188, 205, 216

Characteristica universalis, 69 Cooper, Anthony Ashley. See Shaftesb-
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, xii, 86, ury, third earl of
94 Copernicus, Nicholas, 43, 194
Charlemagne, 81, 170, 205, 216 Corneille, Pierre, 55, 146–47
Charles XII, 321 Correspondences. See Concordances
Christian faith. See Religion: Christian; Cosmology, 2, 80, 230, 245, 339
Church Cosmos, cosmic processes, 2, 14, 80,
Christian theology. See Theology: Chris- 221, 230, 263, 288
tian Counter-Enlightenment, 4, 13
Church: and culture, 222, 229–30; of En- Cousin, Victor, 377n48
gland, 248, 255; established, 255–56; Cozens, John Robert, 354n35
and mysticism, 323, 325–26; and Ro- Crane, R. S., 349n32
man Empire, 210–12, 249; and Scrip- Creation, Creator, 230, 257–58, 260,
ture, 234–36, 238, 242, 252; and 265–66, 271–76, 281, 295, 299–300,
tolerance, 230, 248–51; Voltaire’s at- 303–4, 327, 339
tacks upon, 252–54 Croce, Benedetto, 189, 191, 198
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 155, 217, 244, Crowther, Paul, 355n57
250, 316 Cudworth, Ralph, 123, 276, 299–300,
Civil society or state, 154, 157, 160–67, 303
170, 177, 183, 185 Culverwell, Nathaniel, 245
Clarke, Samuel, 24, 243, 269–70, 276– Cuvillier, Armand, 376n42
81, 287–88 Cyclical theory of history, 188, 190, 198,
Classicism, classicists, xii, 79, 86–87, 201
100, 147, 225, 317
Clayton, Philip, 272 D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 30–31, 34–
Coleridge, Samuel, 217 35, 87, 90, 101–2, 119, 126, 203, 248,
Colletti, Lucio, 361n35 253
Collingwood, Robin George, 5, 341n4 Dallmayr, Fred, 346n19
Collins, Anthony, 370n37 Damrosch, Leopold, 348n23
Collins, James, 372n68 Darwin, Charles, 244
Commager, Henry Steele, 341n2 David, Jacques-Louis, 11, 86
Common good, 118, 130, 156, 167, 169, Dawson, Christopher, 367n49
177, 179–80 De Dijn, Herman, 355n3, 368n6, 368n9
Comte, Auguste, 207–8 De Hoogh, Pieter, 355n3, 368n6, 368n9
Concordances, 313, 330, 333 De Wachter, Frans, 360n15
Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, 35, 50–51, De Waelhens, Alphonse, 349n39
74, 265 Decretum Gratiani, 158
Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine Nicolas Defoe, Daniel, 82–84
de Caritat, marquis de, 4, 31, 188, Deism, Deists, 14, 27, 199, 209, 236–37,
207–10, 337 243–52, 256–57, 264, 277, 279, 287
Congar, Yves, 373n1 Delbos, Victor, 291
Congreve, William, 151 Deleuze, Gilles, 343n1
Constant, Benjamin, 67 Della Rocca, Michael, 355n3
386 Index

Demandt, Alexander, 367n50 Drama, bourgeois, 149–50

Denis, Henri, 362n38 Dreyer, P. S., 365n25
D’Entrèves, A. P., 155 Dryden, John, 245, 365n31
Derathé, Robert, 361n31, 361n64 Du Pont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel,
Descartes, René: and certainty crite- 366n41
rion of truth, 62; deductive method Dubos, Jean-Baptiste, 170
and mathesis universalis, 35, 68; and Duhem, Pierre, 377n52
dualism of body and mind, 27, 31, 46– Duméry, Henry, 370n38
48, 50–52, 293; on form replaced by Dumont, Louis, 341n6, 357n35, 363n53,
substance, 37–38; and impact on the- 372n64
ology of creation, 243; materialist in- Dunn, John, 157
terpretation, 51–52; mechanism, 20– Dupré, Louis, 342n9, 342n16, 345n46,
21; Malebranche’s rejection of his vol- 348n17, 370n39, 373n76, 373n4,
untarism, 291, 294; and nominalist el- 381n4
ements, 18–19; on passions, 55; and
rationalism, 3, 7, 16, 116; and re- Eckhart, Johannes, 303, 327
stricted selfhood, 76; on separation of Edelstein, Ludwig, 365n28
reason and revelation, 270; on tran- Edwards, John, 370n34
scendent foundation of truth, morality Edwards, Jonathan, 25, 54, 188, 246,
and causality, 9, 123, 146; on unity of 327–29
self, 50, 54 Emancipation, social or political, 11,
Destutt de Tracy, Antoine-Louis-Claude, 210, 227
comte, 19 Emotions, 53, 55–58, 65, 113–16, 119,
Determinism: physical, 32–33, 173, 198, 122, 145, 148, 263, 328–29
204, 212, 220, 257; theological, 198– Empiricism, Empiricists, 7, 41, 48–50,
201, 211, 221; historical, 200, 211 75, 88–89, 94, 116–17, 124, 145, 190,
Di Giovanni, George, 378n65, 378n69 303–4, 328, 399
Diderot, Denis; on role of philosophe, 8; Encyclopédie, 8–9, 31, 51, 72, 87, 90,
on creative and dynamic matter, 22, 101–2, 106, 119, 126, 166–68, 176,
27–32, 34, 265; sensationalism re- 203–4, 352
fined, 51–52; criticized by Rousseau, Epistemology, 89, 106, 190–91
65; theory of expression, 27–32, 34, Erb, Peter, 380n16
71–72, 265; Jacques le Fataliste, 84; Eudaemonia, 131, 135–36
aesthetic theory, 78, 90–96, 106; Euripides, 84
moral relativism, 117–20; as moralis- Evil, physical or moral, 260–61, 274–76,
tic, 148–49; utilitarian idea of prog- 284
ress, 203; on Stoicism as weapon of Extension, 21, 38–39, 293
secular morality, 244–45; atheism,
256–57; materialism, 260; rationalism Fabian, Bernhard, 354n48
and antirationalism, 336 Fairchild, Hoxie, 246, 370n28
Dieckman, Herbert, 95 Faith (religious), 233–35; in Butler, 281;
Division of labor, 211 in Hume, 237, 245, 258, 264; in Kant,
Donagan, Alan, 363n4 288; in Leibniz, 276; in Malebranche,
Donaldson, Ian, 349n32 291
 Index 387

Feiereis, Konrad, 373n2 Gibbon, Edward, xii, 4, 188–89, 210–19

Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Gierke, Otto, 161, 360n6, 361n24
Mothe, xii, 13, 54, 290, 319, 321–24, Gilson, Etienne, 248
328, 377n50 Glanvill, Joseph, 202, 365n29
Ferguson, Adam, 185 Glück, Christoph Willibald von, 79
Ferrara, Alessandro, 357n26 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 67, 110–
Feudal law, 169–70 11, 134, 150, 224, 305, 317, 333
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 144, 304, 306, Goeze, Melchior, 241–42
308, 310 Goldmann, Lucien, 146
Fielding, Henry, xii, 56, 82–84 Goldsmith, Oliver, 151
Filmer, Sir Robert, 157 Gospels, 240, 252, 315
Finnis, John, 360n13 Gothic architecture, 108, 208
Flew, Antony, 372n67 Goths, Gothic tribes, 212–14, 216
Foerster, Wolfgang, 367n58 Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 147
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier, sieur de, Gouhier, Henry, 289, 376n37, 377n48
101, 345n39, 352n13, 365n30 Grace: efficacious, 294, 297; moral, 144;
Foreknowledge, 273–74, 280 prevenient, 297; with respect to na-
Formalism, 98–99 ture, 126, 276, 287; sufficient, 298
Foucault, Michel, 46, 146, 336 Grammar or grammaire, 69–70
Franciscans, 158 Grant, Edward, 343n15
Francke, August-Hermann, 324–26 Gravina, Gian Vincenzo, 165, 175
François de Sales, 320–24 Greane, Stanley, 356n16, 371n47
Frederick II, 117 Green, Garrett, 379n2
Frei, Hans, 368n4, 369n11 Gregory, St., 61
French Revolution, xiii, 4, 10, 12, 15, Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, iv, 95
161, 167, 181, 184, 208–10, 219, 225, Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, baron, xii,
227, 336 33–34, 65, 94, 148
Freud, Sigmund, 13 Groff, Peter, 349n35
Friedman, Arthur, 370n27 Grotius, Hugo, 160, 162
Fruchon, Pierre, 355n50 Gusdorf, Georges, 345n42, 348n24,
Frye, Northrop, 151 356n21
Guyer, Paul, 355n58, 358n54, 359n56
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, xiii, 10 Guyon, Jeanne-Marie, 318–22, 326
Gagliardi, Achille, 319–20
Gainsborough, Thomas, xii, 87 Habermas, Jürgen, 10, 16, 335
Gale, Richard, 375n30 Halberstam, Michael, 362n39
Galileo, 36, 43, 53, 80, 194, 230 Halévy, Elie, 361n22
Gatterer, Johann Christoph, 189 Hamann, Johann Georg, 304, 312–17
Gay, Peter, 14, 380, 341n3, 370n37, Hanson, Donald W., 361n25
381n6 Harries, Karsten, 354n42
General will, 166–67 Harris, Errol, 355–56n3
Genius, 99–100, 106–7, 111 Harris, Henry S., 364n9
Gentile, Giovanni, 198–99 Harris, James, 71–72
Gerard, Alexander, 106 Hart, H. L. A., 363n55
388 Index

Hauser, Arnold, 87 219; criticizes idea of moral obligation,

Hazard, Paul, 14 112, 128, 133; criticizes religion, 248,
Hedonism, 117–18, 130, 134 258–64, 278, 275; criticizes substan-
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 12–13, tial self, 38, 48, 65; emphasizes role of
16, 111, 127, 138, 144, 167, 191, 199, passions and emotions, 48, 53, 56; on
267–68, 347n5, 365n23 essential role of moral sense and sym-
Heidegger, Martin, 7, 25 pathy in ethics, 131–33, 179; on
Helvetius, Claude-Adrien, 52, 361n28 Hamann, 313–14; on history as essen-
Hempel, Carl, 363n4 tial to knowledge of human nature,
Herder, Johann Gottfried von: critic of 188; influence on Jacobi, 307–9; as no
Jacobi, 306–7; on genius, 106; on simple utilitarian, 132; opposes theory
God’s immanence in history, 365n23; of human rights, 161; on science of
on history, 188, 219–26; on human- man as basis of all others, 45, 53
itas, 106; more traditionalist, antira- Huns, 212, 216, 222
tionalist, 4, 13; theory of language, 53, Husserl, Edmund, 5, 12
69, 74–75 Hutcheson, Francis, 89–91, 123–24,
Hermeneutics, 194–95, 231, 236, 251 127–30, 134, 177–79
Hesiod, 315
Highet, Gilbert, 217 Ideology, 9–10, 34, 162, 312, 317
Historical criticism, 23, 231, 236, 251 Iggers, Georg G., 366n39
History, cyclical theory of, 188, 190, Iliad, 106, 195, 265
198, 201 Immortality, 198, 239, 242–43, 251–52,
Hobbes, Thomas, 27, 37, 124, 157, 159– 258, 264, 281, 308
61, 163–64, 166, 185, 190, 197, 200, Intuitionism, 289, 299
300 Islam, 204, 215, 218, 237
Hogarth, William, 87 Isocrates, 217
Holbach, Paul-Henri, baron d’, 9, 22, Israel, 193, 232, 242, 253, 286, 315
32–34, 48, 51, 65, 112, 120, 204,
264–67 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich: accepts
Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, Hume’s thesis that certainty rests on
326, 365n23 belief, 307; on the basis of religious
Homer, 80, 97–98, 106, 192, 195, 201, philosophy being the principle that
203 truth pre-exists knowledge, 310–11;
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 97, concludes with Kant that belief must
223 be part of philosophy, 309; on philoso-
Horkheimer, Max, 17, 197 phy becoming faith, 307; on rational-
Huet, Pierre Daniël, 81 ism as source of religious crisis, 269;
Huguenots, 249–50 on reason being absorbed into faith,
Humanism, humanists, 63, 190, 225, 289, 304–11; relations with Goethe,
231, 318, 337 305; relations with Mendelssohn, 306;
Humanity (Humanität) as moral ideal: in on Spinoza’s philosophy as the only
Herder, 142–44, 175, 220–26; in consistently rationalist one, 306; stirs
Kant, 226–27 up Pantheismusstreit and Athe-
Hume, David: compared with Gibbon, ismusstreit, 304–5
 Index 389

Jansenism, Jansenists, 54, 146, 297, 318, Keller, Abraham, 349n35

320 Kennedy, Emmet, 342n15, 381n6
Jaucourt, Louis de, 212 Kepler, Johannes, 194
Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Rich- Kierkegaard, Søren, 307, 311
ter), 67 Kirk, Russell, 363n58
Jesuits, 54, 58, 289, 320 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 80, 326
Jesus Christ, 221–22, 224, 232, 234–40, Knox, Ronald, 322, 379n12
242–43, 253, 255, 280, 286, 315, 317, Koepp, Wilhelm, 380n16
331–32 Kolakowski, Leszek, 374n19, 380n21
Joachim of Fiore, 336 Korsgaard, Christine, 358n52
John XXII, Pope, 158 Koyré, Alexandre, 343n15
Johnson, Ben, 151 Kublai Khan, 213
Johnson, Samuel, xii, 56, 58, 60–62, 87, Krause, Sharon, 362n45
125, 250, 365n31
Jonkers, Peter, 379n81 La Bruyère, Jean de, 55, 59
Judaism, 283, 315 La Chaussée, Pierre-Claude Nivelle de,
Justice, 131–32, 154 55
Justinian, Emperor, 337, 339 La Fayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la
Vergne, comtesse de, 55
Kant, Immanuel: on the aesthetic experi- La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de, 9, 27, 34,
ence, 104–10; on anthropology, 45– 51, 112, 120, 204, 264
47; comparisons with Berkeley, 300; La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de, 53,
comparisons with Hamann, 313–14; 58–59
comparisons with Jacobi, 307–9; de- La Tour, Maurice Quentin, xii, 94
fines the Enlightenment, 1, 7–9, 11, Labarrière, Pierre-Jean, 343n25
227; ethical significance of, 113, 116; Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine,
on genius, 106–7; philosophy of na- chevalier de, 31, 36
ture, 41–44; theories of space and time Langer, Susan, 378n75
differ from Newton’s and Leibniz’s, 23, Lanson, Gustave, 174, 359n66, 371n53
42–43; theory of morality, 133–45; on Laocoön, 93, 96–97, 108
historical progress, 253–56; ideal of Law: civil or statutory, 154–57, 165,
humanitas, 142–44, 226; on moral op- 169, 175; divine, 121, 146, 193, 254,
timism, moral feeling, 134; on natural 264, 315; eternal, 148, 155, 198, 222;
symbols of morality, 39–40; postulates of the heart, 125; international, 162;
empirical well-being, 141; on priority moral, 113, 117, 124, 135, 137, 139,
of moral law vis-à-vis idea of the good, 144, 156, 228, 250, 264, 315; Mosaic,
135; problems of formalism, 137–38; 232, 234, 315; natural (prescriptive),
on reason as principle of emancipa- 74, 112, 116, 119, 145, 153–63, 165,
tion, 335; on religion, 282–88; trans- 172, 175, 179, 181–82, 185–86, 193,
forms concept of reason, 17; on the sub- 199, 279; of nature or natural (descrip-
lime, 108–10; on taste and symbolism, tive), 112, 117, 154–55, 157, 171–72,
104–5; on transcendent quality of moral 184, 222, 233, 256, 262, 288, 296–98;
law, 137; on virtue, 136, 139–40 of reason, 119, 137, 139, 222, 244,
Kelemen, János, 351n65 275
390 Index

Law, William, 54, 130, 324 57, 160–63; on social contract, 162–
Le Sage, Alain-René, 84 63; theory of language, 69–71; on tol-
Legislature, 163, 174 erance, 248–49; on voluntaristically
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: criticized by conceived divine law mediating plea-
Kant, 42, 287–88; criticizes Descartes sure with virtue, 117, 128, 130, 146
and Newton, 38–40; dynamic theory Loewith, Karl, 365n26
of nature, 37–41; monads, 37, 40, 41, Lollini, Massimo, 364n21
47–48; philosophical rationalism with Longinus, 107
transcendent ground of reason, 7, 9, Lorrain, Claude, 86–87, 98
269–71; philosophical theology, 269– Louis XIV, 59, 112, 176, 249, 318, 321
78; influences Lessing, 237, 241; influ- Lübbe, Hermann, 275, 372n58
ences Malebranche, 297; influences Lucretius, 29, 32
Shaftesbury, 88; opposes mechanism Luhman, Niklas, 362n36
by organicism, 34; on substance, cen- Luther, 242, 325, 332
ter of force, 22, 38; on teleology in na- Lutheran(ism), 284–85, 324–26
ture, 26; on true ideas including
existence of their object, 15 Macaulay, Thomas, 62
Lenain de Tillemont, 210 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 185, 197, 200,
Leo III, Pope, 215 214–15
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: on aes- MacIntyre, Alasdair, 159, 338
thetics, 78, 96–98, 108, 148–50; bibli- Mahomet, 204, 213, 237
cal criticism, 236–42 Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné, mar-
Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 146, 311 quise de, 59–60, 318, 321
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 304–5 Mairan, Dortous de, 294–95
Lewis, C. S., 352n3 Malebranche, Nicolas, 288–99; claim
Linker, Damon, 367n57 that God must create the simplest
Linné, Carl von, 34, 37 world, 297; on faith as participation in
Literalism (biblical), 80–81, 189, 231, divine nature, 291; negative theology,
280, 317, 333 294; occasionalism, 293; on morality
Locke, John: Butler follows him on suffi- lying entirely in the intention, 296;
ciency of probable grounds for faith, pure love controversy, 323–24; sim-
281; critique by Shaftesbury, 120–21; ilarity with Spinoza, 295
economic theory, 176; on faith and Mandeville, Bernard de, 122, 128–30,
reason, 246; form yields to substance 178, 244
in his philosophy, 37–38; his empiri- Mannheim, Karl, 336
cism extended by Cambridge Plato- Manuel, Frank, 366n45, 373n70
nists, Berkeley, and Jonathan Edwards, Marcel, Gabriel, 375n22
299, 303, 328; on identity and self- Marcus Aurelius, 215
consciousness, 48–50, 76; influence on Maresca, Thomas, 359n69
Reynolds’s aesthetics, 100; influence Marie de l’Incarnation, 318
on Rousseau’s Third Discourse, 166; Marivaux, Pierre, 83
influence on Shaftesbury’s aesthetics, Marshall, Terence, 359n1
88, 102; on innate moral ideas, 116; on Marsilius of Padua, 156, 166
natural law and natural rights, 156– Martin, John, 108
 Index 391

Martini, Martin, 368n2 ethics, 119; on history, 188–89, 201,

Marx, Karl, 10, 25, 160, 176–77, 255, 204, 211, 215, 219; on politics, 154,
334, 366n44 163, 165, 168–75, 181, 212; on toler-
Marz, Louis, 80 ance, 250
Masson, P. M., 379n14 Moralism, 95, 147–51, 275
Materialism, 25–27, 32–34, 47–52, 119, Moral sense (feeling), 6, 113, 117, 120–21,
204, 260, 262, 266 123, 126, 133–34, 140, 144, 146, 179
Matheron, A., 368n9 Moraliste(s), 58, 76, 215
Mathesis universalis, 69 More, Henry, 24, 272, 299, 328
Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de, 29 Moritz, Karl-Philipp, 111
Mauvaise foi, 144 Murdoch, Iris, 122
Mazzotta, Giuseppe, 303, 350n49 Murphy, James Bernard, 360n3
McGuire, J. E., 344n18 Murphy, Jeffrey G., 361n20
McKenzie, David, 376n37 Mysticism, 291, 318, 332
McMullin, Ernan, 343nn7–8 Mythological, mythology, 193, 317
Mechanistic, mechanism, 25–26, 31–32,
34–38, 40–41, 257, 276 Naert, Emilienne, 380n14
Meinecke, Friedrich, 366n47, 367n55 Napoleon, 9, 12, 216
Mendelssohn, Moses, 8, 283, 304–7, Naturalism, 25, 76, 112, 118, 156, 257,
315, 339 267, 286, 317
Mercantilism, mercantilists, 176, 180 Natural theology. See Theology: philo-
Mesnard, Jean, 349n27 sophical or natural
Metaphor, 193–94, 317 Necker, Suzanne, 96
Metaphysics, 6, 48, 50, 69, 238, 240, Neoplatonism, 22, 24, 68, 99, 106, 272–
242, 254, 265, 283, 301–2, 305–6, 73, 276
308, 335 Nero, Claudius Caesar, 120, 147
Michelangelo, 79, 98, 101 Neuhaus, Richard John, 372n60
Middle Ages, 18, 68, 153, 196–97, 215, New Testament, 241–42, 263, 280, 286,
222–24 315
Milosz, Czeslaw, 329, 331–32 Newman, John Henry, 280, 299
Milosz, Oscar, 332 Newton, Isaac: his cosmology, 19–26; on
Milton, John, 80–81, 109 Clarke’s theory, 276; critique by Buf-
Miracles: in Clarke, 282; in Hume, 258, fon, 34–36; critique by Kant, 42–43;
262–63; in Lessing, 240; in Locke, critique by Leibniz, 38–40; critique by
246; in Malebranche, 298; in Spinoza, Swedenborg, 330; impact on theology
232–33, 236; in Voltaire, 251–53 of creation, 243, 245, 257; influence
Mirri, Saverio, 368–69n10 on materialists, 31–32
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 150–51 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 268
Molinos, Miguel de, 319–20 Nihilism, 307
Monad, 37, 40–41 Nivelle de la Chaussée, 55
Monk, Samuel, 107 Noblesse de robe, 58
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 270, 350 Nominalism, nominalists, 2–3, 18–19,
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Sec- 23–24, 68, 70, 81, 122, 156, 158, 269,
ondat, baron de: on aesthetics, 101; on 276, 299
392 Index

Norton, Robert, 357n27 Physis, 10, 191

Noxon, James, 372n66 Pietism, pietists, 13, 54, 318–19, 324–
27, 333, 336; influence of, 336
Oberman, Heiko, 380n15 Pirenne, Henry, 215
Objectivism, 43, 267 Plato: on aesthetics, 79, 84, 88–89, 106;
Occasionalism, 293 Berkeley as follower of, 301; on
Ockham, William of, 158 causality, 200; on eternal law, 154; on
O’Flaherty, James C., 379n6 ethics, 113, 122, 135, 145; theory of
Old Testament, 235–36, 238, 252, 262, Ideas, 299; Ion, 84, 106; and nonfoun-
280 dational truth, 335; Parmenides, 2;
Ontological, ontology, 49–50, 133, 272 Phaedo, 279, 292; Protagoras, 84; So-
Ontologism, 294 phist, 30; Timaeus, 2
Original sin, 125, 283–84 Platonism, Platonists, 24, 79, 88, 98,
Orthodoxy (Lutheran), 237, 285, 325 111, 123, 126, 199, 272, 299. See also
Otto, Rudolf, 372–73n68 Cambridge Platonists
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 80 Plotinus, 79
Pluralism: ontological, 271; religious,
Paine, Thomas, 184–85 250
Pantheism, 233, 245, 262, 303–4, 306, Plutarch, 61, 124
327 Poggio Bracciolini, Gian Francesco, 214–
Parmenides, 7, 15 15
Participation in divine nature, 233, 273, Polytheism, 244, 250, 263–64, 295
276, 289, 291–92 Pope, Alexander, 61, 79, 106, 152, 245,
Pascal, Blaise, 43, 53, 67, 231, 246, 281, 365n31
345n39 Popperwell, Ronald, 349n27
Passion(s), 55–56, 58, 65, 73, 94, 108, Poussin, Nicolas, 86–87
114, 122, 125, 127, 130, 145–47, 208, Pre-Adamites, 231
279 Predestination, 257, 267, 273–74
Paton, H. J., 138 Prejudice: favorable, 220; unfavorable,
Paul, St., 234, 284, 315–16 181, 204, 218, 254, 279, 332
Peirce, Charles, 300 Preromantic, 75, 99, 245
Pelikan, Jaroslav, 369n19 Prévost, Antoine-François, Abbé, 53, 56–
Penelhum, Terrence, 357n36 57, 65, 144
Peperzak, Adrian, 359n60 Prigogine, Ilya, 260
Peter the Great, 172, 206, 317 Prior, Matthew, 26
Petry, Michael, 19 Proclus, 303
Phenomenalism, 50 Progress: in Herder, 188, 221–22, 225;
Philology, 192, 195, 210, 231, 242 as ideology, 33–34, 73, 169, 176; in
Philosophes, 18, 181–82, 201–3, 206, Kant, 226–27; in the philosophes,
219–20, 254 201–4, 207–10; in Vico, 197–98
Philosophical or natural theology. See Property, 138, 160–61, 164, 166, 176–
Theology: philosophical or natural 77, 183–85
Philosophy of religion, 270, 282 Protagoras, 202
Physiocrats, 154, 176 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 138
 Index 393

Providence: in Butler, 281; in Clarke, Religion: Christian, 235, 237, 241–42,

277, 280; in deist philosophy, 243–45; 259, 283, 325; civil, 167, 199, 201,
in Gibbon, 214; in Herder, 221–23; in 224, 255–56; natural, 158, 237, 239,
Malebranche, 297; in Turgot, 208; in 242, 248, 252–53, 255; rational, 241–
Vico, 188–89, 192, 198–202; in Vol- 42, 250, 264, 285, 315; revealed, 193,
taire, 205 237, 245, 250, 264, 269, 281, 285. See
Pufendorf, Samuel, 160, 166 also Church
Pure love (amour pur), 290, 320–24, 328 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, 105,
Puritan(ism), 14, 54, 123, 151, 246, 256, 354n35
328–29 Renaissance, xi, xii, 11, 16, 78–79, 86,
151, 156
Quesnay, François, 167, 176 Renan, Erneste, 268
Quietism, Quietists, 13, 290, 297, 318– Restoration comedy, 151
24 Revelation, 75, 232–40, 243, 246, 247–
48, 252, 269–70, 276–77, 279–80,
Racine, Jean, 146–47 285, 294, 306, 314–15, 328
Raphael, 98 Reynolds, John, 26
Rationalism: in Buffon, 36; general char- Reynolds, Joshua, xii, 87, 98–101
acteristics, 2–4, 7, 10, 13, 15, 17; im- Ricardo, David, 177
plications of religious rationalism, Richardson, Samuel, 55, 57, 65, 82–83
147–48; in Leibniz, 40–41; Lessing’s Ricoeur, Paul, 6, 46
religious rationalism, 239; Locke dis- Rights: civil (or political), 184, 209, 249;
tinguishes rationalism from empiri- divine, 157; individual, 158–61, 338;
cism, 116–17; in Montesquieu, 168, natural (or human), 54–55, 157, 159–
175; narrow concept of artistic truth, 61, 165–66, 181–82, 184–86, 230;
87, 102–3; nature as unchangeable, order of lawfulness (jus), 155, 158,
206; omission of emotional life, 53, 57; 162, 182
and rationality, 335–37; Rousseau’s Ritschl, Albrecht, 326
theory of right, 181; self as primarily Robinson, Daniel, 348n19
source of meaning, 47–48; Spinoza in- Rococo, 87
corporates emotions and passions, Roman Empire, 159, 196–97, 210–19,
113; Stoic tendencies of, in ethics, 119; 249, 253, 255
universalistic, 71, 145; Vico’s rejection Roman law, 169, 191–93, 196, 201
of, 190; Voltaire’s, 254 Roman Republic, 173, 197, 223
Rationalism, religious, responses to, 269; Romanticism, 11–12, 17, 25, 36, 62,
by Clarke, 278; by Hamann, 317; by 100, 108, 127, 148, 150, 225–26, 249,
Jacobi, 304, 306, 308–10; by Kant, 283, 305
288; by Leibniz, 275; by Malebranche, Romulus Augustus, 215
294, 299 Roothaan, Angela, 368n7
Reformation, 156, 159, 188, 230–31, Rorty, Richard, 335, 381n4
242, 324 Rosa, Salvator, 87, 98–99, 108
Reid, Thomas, 308 Rostovtzeff, Michael, 367n51
Reimarus fragments, 237–41 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: abstract theory
Relativism, 102, 120 of natural right, 181–83; on the beau-
394 Index

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (continued) 17–20, 26, 46, 68, 136, 145, 156, 158,
tiful soul, 125–26; Confessions as a 162, 281, 290, 325
search for transparency, 62, 64–67; Schräder, Hans-Jürgen, 380n17
criticized by Burke, 181–83; criticized Scientific revolution, 187–88
by Hegel, 127; criticized by Kant, 134; Scripture, 231–34, 236–38, 240–42,
impact of Montesquieu and Locke on, 247–48, 315
165–66; not consistently antirational- Secularism, 267, 283, 318, 324
ist, 9, 13–14, 119–20, 336; opposition Senault, Jean-François, 56
to theater, 126–27, 150; on personal Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 119–20
religion consisting of feeling and moral Sensationalism, sensationalist(s), 95, 100
conduct, 254–55, 258; political cri- Sensibility, 55, 139
tique of Christian virtues, 212, 255; Sensus communis, 75, 191
preromantic, 54, 57; on public wor- Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, mar-
ship in civil religion, 255–56; rejection quise de, 58
of intermediate social bodies leading to Shackleton, Robert, 175, 362n44,
totalitarianism, 167–68, 177, 186; on 370n26
the social contract, 163–66, 277; on Shaftesbury, third earl of (Antony Ashley
the state of nature, 164; theory of lan- Cooper): on aesthetic taste, 89, 102;
guage, 72–75 critique by Mandeville, 128–30; de-
Rowe,William, 375n30 ism, 249; on genius, 106; Hutcheson’s
Rubens, Peter-Paul, 99 interpretation of, 123–27; influence on
Russell, Bertrand, 116, 271 Diderot, 91; influence on Rousseau,
Ruysdael, Jacob, 105, 354n35 125–26; Kant’s relation to, 134; on
moral sense, 120–22; on Platonic the-
Sabunde, Ramon de, 269 ory of beauty, 78, 88–89, 91, 98; re-
Sade, marquis de, 9 jects utilitarianism, 123–24; on
Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 67, 169, religion of the heart, 254; on self-
352n11 knowledge through feelings, 54–55; on
Saint-Evremond, Charles de Marguetel, the sublime, 108
marquis de, 203 Shakespeare, William, 97, 106, 147, 149
Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de, Sheridan, Richard, 151
9, 59–60 Shookman, Ellis, 352n8
Sandel, Michael, 363n61 Silber, John, 137
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 144, 373n76, 377n46 Simmel, Georg, 7
Satire, 151–52 Simon, Richard, 235–36
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 11, Sleigh, Robert, 374n18
283 Smith, Adam, 122, 130, 134, 154, 161,
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich, 176–78, 180, 184, 186, 211
126, 144, 150 Smith, John, 299, 328
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 249, 287 Smith, John E., 328, 380n25
Schmidt, James, 342n14 Social contract, 162–68, 182–83, 338
Schmitz, Kenneth, 375n21 Socrates, 46, 113, 135, 137, 256, 279,
Schoeffler, Herbert, 370n29 316–17
Scholasticism, scholastics, or Schoolmen, Solipsism, 146
 Index 395

Sophocles, 97 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 74, 329–33

Sozzini, Fausto, 243, 247 Swift, Jonathan, 61, 152
Spanheim, Ezechiel, 236 Symbol, symbolism: poetic imagination
Spectator, The, 108 converts impressions into symbols, 16,
Spener, Philipp Jacob, 322, 324–26 87–88, 94, 217; Leibniz’s calculator,
Sperna Weiland, Jan, 375n22 69; Harris’s theory of language, 71;
Spinoza, Benedict: biblical exegesis in Lessing’s theater, 149; biblical symbol-
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 231– ism, according to Reimarus, 238;
36; considers that all of nature is driven Butler on symbols of transcendence,
by conatus essendi, 19–20, 22, 115; 282, 339; Kant on the Christian doc-
considers that true universals include trine symbolizing the moral law, 287;
particulars, 15; contrast with Leibniz, Berkeley on religious symbols, 302;
37–38, 272–73; denial of final causality, Hamann’s symbolic theology, 313–14,
200; ethical theory, 113–16, 121; mo- 317; Swedenborg’s symbolic theology,
nism, 245; philosophical rationalism, 7; 329–31
reception by Jacobi, 304–6; on role of Symbols, Kant’s theory of: general, 105,
passions, 55, 114–15, 349n30; on soul- 109–10; aesthetic, 105, 107, 110; ethi-
body relation, 38, 48; on state of nature cal, 139–40; religious, 286–87
in political theory, 160 Sympathy, 208–10, 281
Stanlis, Peter, 363n56
Starobinski, Jean, 66, 74, 350n55 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, 61, 169, 240
State of nature, 119, 124, 156–57, 162, Taine, Hyppolite, 80
164, 165, 182, 284 Taste, 89, 97, 100–107, 122, 207
Steele, Richard, 147 Taylor, Charles, 122, 133, 349n29
Steiner, George, 75, 146 Teleology, 33, 35, 41, 48, 110, 138–41,
Stephen, Leslie, 48, 147, 268, 277 145, 200–201, 221, 276
Sterne, Laurence, 83–84 Ter Steegen, Gerhard, 319, 326
Stevens, Wallace, 268 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer), 147
Stewart, Dugald, 186 Teresa of Avila, 62, 319–20, 332
Stoeber, Michael, 376n37 Theocracy, 193, 249
Stoic(ism), 23, 55–56, 68, 79, 115, 119– Theodicy, 63, 261, 275, 287
22, 124, 145, 155–56, 197, 199–200, Theology: Christian, 230, 235, 238–39,
244, 261, 269 249, 283; negative, 294, 304; philo-
Strachey, Lytton, 59, 277 sophical or natural, 245–46, 260,
Strauss, Leo, 368n5 269–70, 277, 279–80, 282–83; sym-
Sturm und Drang, 304, 326 bolic, 282, 287, 313–14
Suarez, Francisco, 162 Theophrastus, 58
Subjectivism, subjectivists, 102–3, 105, Thomism, Thomists, 68, 156, 158, 272
123, 136, 145, 191, 326 Thomson, James, 245
Sublime, 99, 105–11, 139, 144 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista, xii, 86
Sufficient reason, principle of, 40, 277– Tierney, Brian, 158
78, 291 Tindal, Matthew, 243, 247, 277
Superstition, 120, 123, 192–93, 202, Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), 99
205, 209, 218, 233, 248, 253, 263–64 Titus Livy, 169, 196, 240
396 Index

Todorov, Tzvetlan, 92 universal history, 218; and philology

Toksvig, Signe, 381n31 and jurisprudence, 195–96; and Ro-
Toland, John, 243, 247 man law, 191, 193, 196; on signifi-
Tolerance (religious), 204–5, 230, 249– cance of myth, 193–96
53 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 80, 93,
Totalitarianism, 168, 186 96–97
Toynbee, Arnold, 196 Virtue (virtus), 115, 121, 123–28, 136,
Tracy, David, 352n11 139–41, 144, 146–49, 166, 172, 177–
Transcendence, 155, 193, 200, 246–47, 78, 180, 212–14, 225, 254, 264, 284,
259, 268, 301–2, 339 329
Trembley, Abraham, 28, 37 Voegelin, Eric, 368n1
Tuck, Richard, 360n11 Volksgeist, 175, 220
Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 176, 188, Voltaire: as anti-atheist, 14; criticizes
207–9, 218, 337 Bossuet’s interpretation of Providence,
Turner, Joseph, 108, 354n35 188–89, 204; disagrees with Diderot
on freedom, 117; as historian, 203–6,
Universal history (historia universalis), 218; influences Gibbon, 255; knows
189 that humans rarely follow reason, 337;
Universale fantastico (imaginative uni- on moral law as universal yet variable,
versal), 194 117; objective theory of beauty, 101;
Universalism, 71, 81, 186, 202, 206, 212, often more sentimental than rational,
337 57–58; opposes Shaftesbury’s univer-
Utilitarianism, 113, 117, 123, 127, 130– sal harmony, 123; polemics with the
33, 146, 178–79, 185, 335 Church, 251–54; questions immor-
Utopianism, 209, 225–26, 336–37 tality, 251–52; ridicules possibility of
evolution, 37; says that natural religion
Vahanian, Gabriel, 373n74 is no more than morality, 248
Value (economic), 176–77 Voluntarism, voluntarists, 117, 122, 153,
Van de Putte, André, 363n56 156
Van Herck, Walter, 373n3
Varrho, 244 Wainwright, William, 380n27
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, marquis Waldron, Jeremy, 360n9
de, 58–59 Walpole, Horace, 151
Venturi, Franco, 341n1 Walsh, David, 360n10
Verene, Donald, 350n48, 364n13, Wand, Bernard, 358n39
364n17 Watt, Ian, 83
Vico, Giambattista: autobiography as Watteau, (Jean) Antoine, xii, 86, 95
part of history, 63; and causes of Weber, Max, xi
Rome’s decline, 211, 215; comparison Wellmer, Albrecht, 334
with Descartes, 190–91; in Counter- Westfall, R. W., 343n9
Enlightenment or not? 4; cyclical law Wetsel, David, 368n2
of history, 169, 188–89, 197; and his- Whichcote, Benjamin, 122, 245, 299
tory and providence, 198–202, 208; White, Hayden, 195, 366n39
on history as truth, 189–202; initiates Whytt, Robert, 51
 Index 397

Wieland, Christoph Martin, 84–85, 126 Wolterstorff, Nicolas, 370n32, 372n65

Wieser, Max, 380n14 Wood, Alan, 359n56, 359n58
Williams, Bernard, 144, 345n40, 355n1 World soul, 259
Wilson, Arthur, 94, 265 Wycherly, William, 151, 354n45
Wilson, John F., 372n60
Wilton, Andrew, 355n54 Young, Edward
Winch, Peter, 138 Yovel, Y., 368n5
Winckelmann, Johann, 86, 91–92, 96–
97, 110, 224 Zakai, Avihu, 344n18, 363n2
Wolff, Christian, 7, 103, 305, 313,
372n58