A heavenly poise: radical religion and the making of the Enlightenment

ABSTRACT

Scholarship continues to identify the Enlightenment with secularization, despite the theological tenor of much of the movement's canonical literature. This article proposes an explanation for such a dissonance, before addressing the matter more directly through the work of Baruch Spinoza and Pierre Bayle. The claim is that scholars have been unduly dependent upon theological commentary in reaching the fixed verdict of secularization, inferring ‘atheism’ and disenchantment from the polemical utterances of a privileged orthodoxy rather than the primary sources themselves. Seen apart from such controlling anathemas, icons of the radical Enlightenment such as Spinoza and Bayle emerge as deeply spiritual thinkers, challenging the theocratic assumptions of their age with theological certainties of their own, interrogating orthodoxy with a resolutely biblical rationality. The final section suggests the continuity of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment of Voltaire, Kant and Mary Wollstonecraft with the spiritual rationalism of the seventeenth century. If so many of the Enlightenment's landmark thinkers were inspired by religious ideas, the concept of a secular modernity must be open to revision.     

Interpreting the Enlightenment

This article addresses a number of issues relevant to the interpretation of the Enlightenment raised by Jonathan Israel in his recent book, Enlightenment Contested. After a brief summary of the main points of the book it considers whether, as Israel claims, the core of the Enlightenment is a materialist monist metaphysic first fully articulated by Spinoza, and whether it is convincing to make materialism and atheism the main criteria of Enlightenment thought. The argument that Spinoza and Pierre Bayle should be seen as co-founders of the Enlightenment is also examined. The article further questions the cogency of the sharp distinction drawn between the moderate and radical wings of the movement, and seeks to determine whether the model of radicalism used by Israel has the consistency ascribed to it, whether it was as widely disseminated as claimed, and whether thinkers described as radical argued and wrote as Israel's model of radicalism would lead us to expect.     

The Poison and the Spider's Web: Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Epicureanism

This article argues that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in the moral and political thought of the eighteenth century. Concentrating on the reception of Epicureanism in France, it shows that some critics focused on Epicurus’ hedonistic moral psychology and labelled Epicurean those thinkers who denied natural sociability; for others, who instead focused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker an Epicurean was to label them an atheist. This polyvalence is presented as a salutary caution against essentialising claims about the content of eighteenth-century Epicureanism per se. Despite this sceptical stance, however, the article goes on to argue that it is nevertheless fruitful to investigate the engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers or in particular texts. Indeed, a comparative reading of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in Johan Jakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used his discussion of Epicureanism to intervene directly in contemporary theological controversies over the immortal soul and a providential god.     

Intersections between philosophy and art: expressions of immanence in the seventeenth century — Spinoza and Vermeer*

ABSTRACT

Spinoza's philosophy of immanence represents a turning point that radically changed our conception of human agency and its relation to infinity. Hans Blumenberg rightly called the principle of immanence “a general hypothesis of the epoch”, a principle that applies to philosophy no less than to the sciences and arts in the seventeenth century. This article looks at Dutch paintings by drawing parallels between Spinoza's philosophy and Vermeer's work. Spinoza and Vermeer both deny a dualistic conception of the world and a hierarchical structure between inner and outer spheres. With the example of Vermeer's painting the Milkmaid, this article shows how an analysis of light and colour, time and space, reveal a vision of immanent infinity, with the human agent at its centre.     

The Reception of ‘That Bigoted Silly Fellow’ James Beattie's Essay on Truth in Britain 1770–1830

This article examines the Scottish philosopher James Beattie's (1735–1803) controversial work of moral philosophy An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770), noted for its pugnacious attack on the sceptical philosophy of David Hume. Usually treated only as an ephemeral success in the early 1770s, the Essay actually had two distinct periods of enormous popularity that account for its contemporary significance in the period between 1770 and 1830. The prominence of the Essay is demonstrated by its widespread positive reception, evinced in both published and private responses, in both England and Scotland, by the high estimation in which it was held within pedagogical circles as an anti-sceptical philosophical primer, and by its continual use as a textbook in both university and dissenting academy logic and moral philosophy classes. In these senses, Beattie's Essay was arguably the most significant work of the Common Sense School of Scottish philosophy.     

Stewart,Kant, and the Reworking of Common Sense

Summary

Dugald Stewart was the first metaphysician of any significance in Britain who attempted to take account of Kantian philosophy, although his analysis appears generally dismissive. Traditionally this has been imputed to Stewart's poor understanding of Kant and to his efforts to defend the orthodoxy of common sense. This paper argues that, notwithstanding Stewart's reading, Kant's philosophy helped him in a reconsideration and reassessment of common sense philosophy. In his mature works—the Philosophical Essays (1810), the second volume of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1814), and the second part of his historical ‘Dissertation? (1815–1821)—Stewart's analysis of Kantian philosophy is far from being uniform. In the first two works, he takes a cautious approach to transcendentalism, showing some interest in the challenge it might represent for common sense; in the last, he turns to rash criticism. This change may appear confusing and inconsistent unless considered in the light of a precise ‘nationalistic’ strategy. In fact, once Stewart had taken from Kantian philosophy what he deemed useful for his own aims, he eventually dismissed it in order to show that his reworked version of common sense was the most original and most consistent outcome of the whole Anglo-Scottish philosophical tradition.     

La république des « humeurs » : Les querelles dans le dictionnaire de Bayle

Quarrelling is a ‘routine’ activity of the Republic of Letters. This article demonstrates that quarrels played a key role in the field of historical criticism. The contention of this article is twofold. First, it explores the epistemological issues raised by Bayle while reporting the quarrels of the Republic of Letters, and demonstrates their creative potential, thus applying to historiography conclusions drawn by recent research on scientific controversies. It offers a new understanding of scholarly quarrels, here understood as a socially and intellectually structuring activity. Second, this article takes issue with the debate over Bayle’s historical pyrrhonism. As will be shown, the quarrels constitute a key element within a method of writing history that is both conscious of its limits and confident of its investigative powers     

Spinoza’s genealogical critique of his contemporaries’ axiology

Among Spinoza’s principal projects in the Ethics is his effort to “remove” certain metaethical prejudices from the minds of his readers, to “expose” them, as he has similar misconceptions about other matters, by submitting them to the “scrutiny of reason”. In this article, I consider the argumentative strategy Spinoza uses here – and its intellectual history – in depth. I argue that Spinoza’s method is best characterised as a genealogical analysis. As I recount, by Spinoza’s time of writing, these kinds of arguments already had a long and illustrious history. However, I also argue that, in his adoption of such strategies, we have good reason to think Spinoza’s primary influence was Gersonides. Elucidating this aspect of Spinoza’s critique of his contemporaries’ axiologies brings a number of explicatory and historical boons. However, regrettably, it also comes at a cost, revealing a significant flaw in Spinoza’s reasoning. Towards the end of this article, I consider the nature of this flaw, whether Spinoza can avoid it and its ramifications for Spinoza’s wider philosophical project.     

Rilke's Orpheus: A myth revived

This article argues that debates about the theoretical relations between Critical Theory and Existential philosophy have to date been excessively focused on the connections between Martin Heidegger and Theodor W. Adorno, and should now extend their analysis to consider points of dialogue between Adorno and Karl Jaspers. Examining the cognitive, ethical and political implications of their works, the article claims that Jaspers and Adorno have much in common and contribute in related ways to our understanding of certain important issues. This is the case in their views on idealism and on the politics of humanism, but it is most evident in their reflections on the role of metaphysics in modern philosophy: both seek to salvage the contents of metaphysical thinking, and they denounce the tendency towards purely immanent or autonomist accounts of human reality in the theoretical traditions to which they belong. Their views on metaphysics are especially apparent in their interpretations of Kant, in their critiques of neo-Kantianism, and in their shared hostility to Heidegger's reaction to Kantian philosophy.     

Spinoza's counter-aesthetics

ABSTRACT

Spinoza says very little about art or literature in his work; a fact which partly explains the absence of references to him by the German initiators of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, including Baumgarten, Kant and Hegel. Spinoza's resolute opposition to teleology, however, provides an even more compelling reason for his absence, given the teleological conception of literary and artistic form common to the notion of aesthetics at the time of its emergence. Is it possible to fashion a counter-aesthetics from the materials provided by Spinoza's philosophy? I argue that his reading of the great Spanish Baroque writers, especially Luis de Góngora and Baltasar Gracián (whose works were found in his library), provided him with an alternative conception of literary form based on a rejection of formal coherence and closure in favor of constitutive incompleteness and an opening to the infinite.     

The Will to Exist: Reflections on Desire and the Good in Western Culture

In my essay I argue that the critical distinction that Spinoza makes between two concepts of desire, as also between two concepts of the good, captures the distinction that Tertullian makes in posing the question: What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? In identifying the good with desire—desire with the good—and in denying that desire is dependent on the good in itself (e.g., Plato’s form of the good), Spinoza shows us that philosophy, as ethics, belongs to Jerusalem, to the Bible, and not to Athens (ancient Greek philosophy). We see, then, that the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem is not the distinction between philosophy and the Bible, between reason and faith, between the secular and the religious.     

Confucianism,Secularism, and Atheism in Bayle and Montesquieu

It should be hardly surprising to discover that eighteenth-century European perspectives of other cultures were shaped to a large extent by concerns internal to European political life. Objective or unprejudiced accounts of non-European cultures are rarely found among travellers, missionaries, and philosophers of the time. While the insights of Enlightenment political thinkers on the non-European world may shed little light on the cultures being commented upon, they are useful for assessing the nature of the Enlightenment's engagement with cultural traditions external to Europe. In particular, Enlightenment conceptions of China were extremely varied and reflective of the debates between Enlightenment thinkers, especially on the proper relation between religion and politics. I shall argue that Montesquieu's account of Confucianism in The Spirit of the Laws (De l’esprit des lois, first published in 1748) was in part influenced by his critique of Bayle's position on the role of religion in society as expounded in his Various Thoughts on the Comet (Pensées diverses sur la comète, published in 1682). While Montesquieu's account and assessment of Chinese thought and culture are “Eurocentric,” his evaluation of Confucianism nevertheless arises from a considered philosophical position on religion and politics.     

Plain lives in a golden age. Popular culture,religion and society in 17th-century Holland

Though it has rarely been the subject of academic criticism, there is a philosophy of truth that animates Jean-Jacques Rousseau's broader philosophical system. This philosophy of truth was unique for its time—in the same way as the whole of Rousseau's thought—in its emphasis on feeling over reason, the heart over the mind, the simple over the sophisticated, the useful over the demonstrable, the personal over the systematic. Rousseau's philosophy of truth might be more accurately called a ‘philosophy of truthseeking’ or an ‘ethics of truthseeking’, because its focus is on the pursuit and acquisition of truth rather than on the nature of truth itself. What was needed, Rousseau believed, was a guide back to the simple truths of human happiness—truths that were immediately apparent to us in our natural state but have become opaque in society. This article describes Rousseau's normative philosophy of truthseeking, of what human beings must do if they hope to (re)discover the truths of human happiness. This philosophy can be summarised as utility, autonomy, immediacy and simplicity in pursuit of what Rousseau called the ‘truths that pertain to the happiness of mankind’.     

Unsocial Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment: Ferguson and Kames on War,Sociability and the Foundations of Patriotism

Summary

This article reconstructs a significant historical alternative to the theories of ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘liberal’ patriotism often associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. Instead of focusing on the work of Andrew Fletcher, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume or Adam Smith, this study concentrates on the theories of sociability, patriotism and international rivalry elaborated by Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) and Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782). Centrally, the article reconstructs both thinkers' shared perspective on what I have called ‘unsociable’ or ‘agonistic’ patriotism, an eighteenth-century idiom which saw international rivalship, antagonism, and even war as crucial in generating political cohesion and sustaining moral virtue. Placing their thinking in the context of wider eighteenth-century debates about sociability and state formation, the article's broader purpose is to highlight the centrality of controversies about human sociability to eighteenth-century debates about the nature of international relations.     

The Interest of Reason Is to Go Without God. Jacobi's Polemic Against Philosophical Theology

Jacobi's polemics against philosophical theology is meant to show that neither Spinoza, nor Kant, nor Fichte nor Schelling have been able to think God as a person, that is as a free, intelligent being. In order to elucidate Jacobi's position I focus on two less well‐known texts of his, viz., A Few Comments Concerning Pious Fraud (1788) and Of Divine Things and Their Revelation (1811). In the second section I situate two key philosophical theological concepts — deism and theism — against the broader context of modern philosophy. The third section analyses Jacobi's polemic against deism, followed by an examination of his positive attitude towards theism and an explanation of the reasons why he, at the end of his life, came to identify theism with deism and extended the negative meaning of the latter term to the former. In the final section, I give an outline of Jacobi's alternative idea of philosophical theology.     

Writers and politics in West Germany

This article argues that Archibald Campbell's Necessity of Revelation (1739) can be viewed as the first application of the ‘science of human nature’, a characteristic branch of the Scottish Enlightenment, to the study of religious belief. Adopting Baconian and Newtonian methodological principles, Campbell set hypotheses, collected historical data, and inferred conclusions about the capabilities of human nature to come to fundamental religious ideas without the aid of revelation. He did so not only to reject the ‘deist’ position on the powers of unassisted human reason, associated with Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), but also to refute Campbell's conservative critics within the Church of Scotland who had earlier tried him for heresy. Campbell's example is that of a university professor using the experimental study of religion to defeat both radical freethinking and Calvinist orthodoxy. His work is another instance of the complicated relationship between science and religion within eighteenth-century Scotland.     

Henry VIII et le schisme anglais

For the philosopher of Rotterdam, religious coercion has two essential sources of illegitimacy: the linking of religious and ecclesiastical belief and the use of politics for religious purposes. Bayle responds to it, with his doctrine of freedom of conscience, on one hand and by means of the essential distinction between voluntary religious affiliation and political obligation, on the other hand. From my perspective, his doctrine of tolerance does not involve an atheist state, nor does it mean the rejection of the presence of religion in the public space or its displacement to the intimate sphere of the conscience. This paper proposes a reading of Baylean tolerance as a political doctrine that allows the articulation between freedom of conscience (individual), minority confessions (private associations), and official religion (established church). Thus, the Baylean theoretical model could be considered a proposal to provide a normative form to the practice of toleration present in the seventeenth -century Netherlands.     

Why Dominican Feminism Moved to the Right: Class,Colour and Women's Activism in the Dominican Republic, 1880s–1940s

This article analyses feminism in the Dominican Republic, and the rightward shift of the women's movement in the 1930s and 1940s, by examining the historical development of female activism in the Dominican Republic from the 1880s until the first decade of General Rafael Trujillo's regime in the 1940s. The article argues that elite female activists, most of whom were white or light‐skinned, allied themselves with the right‐wing politics of General Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship because his vision of elite women's activism complemented the class and colour interests of a select group of female reformers. Dominican feminism's rightward shift also resulted from the monopolisation of political power under the Dominican Party; the veneration of elite, bourgeois womanhood in official state iconography; the elaboration of Hispanidad nationalism; and the rejection of feminism's early roots in the political philosophy of Eugenio María de Hostos. As a result, Dominican feminism's origins in left‐leaning, potentially radical politics were ignored and erased by leading activists.     

Kypros,Tourkia kai ellinismos

Gianrinaldo Carli was a central figure in the origin of the Milanese Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century. Carli's political career as well as his works connected him both to the mid-century reforms by Pompeo Neri and to the times of Beccaria and the Verri brothers—the heyday of Lombard intellectual life in Europe. Not originally from Lombardy, but from the Venetian periphery, Carli became an erudite scholar of witchcraft and magic and an influential functionary of the Habsburg administration in Milan. He remains most famous for his works on money and his contributions to the journal Il Caffè. Most of his later political writings, which were widely circulated in Italy following the American Revolution, originated in debates with Pietro Verri over the nature of Natural Law, of the Social Contract, and the relationship between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. They illustrate key aspects of Lombard political culture of the 1780s: a culture that was critical of Rousseau, trustful of the reformist experience and supportive of Enlightened Absolutism. Within this context, Carli's works have traditionally been difficult to place.