The Ark

The 17th & 18th century Enlightenment philosophers have been criticised for being anti-religious. But just how opposed to God were they?

Transcript

Rachael Kohn: 'Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest'. So said the philosopher of the French Enlightenment, Denis Diderot.

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and this is The Ark on ABC Radio National.

That anti-clerical statement has been taken as typical of the 18th century Enlightenment philosophers, who ranged across England, France and Germany. Critics of the Enlightenment have said that its anti-religious sentiments begat the secular age, and destroyed religion. But Wayne Hudson, Professor of Philosophy at Griffith University, says critics misunderstand the philosophers who were not as anti-religious as all that.

Wayne, why did you feel that it was time to revise the record on the Enlightenment critique of religion?

Wayne Hudson: Because all over the world people are trying to react to September 11 and to the rise of Islam, and they're doing it, in my view, using a radically wrong model because they haven't understood the Enlightenment critique of religion which I argue is substantially correct, but which is a more positive critique than scholars have suggested.

Rachael Kohn: But hold on a minute, wasn't it the philosopher Thomas Hobbes who in the 17th century pretty much said that religion was a superstition based on fear?

Wayne Hudson: Scholars have never been able to agree what Hobbes thought about religion or God, and I think the general consensus probably among the better scholars is that he may have been some kind of Deist and maybe some kind of Calvinist. It's not clear, but he seems to think that there is a God but that God is corporeal. And of course his views change at different times, but they're difficult.

Rachael Kohn: Well he was certainly a philosopher and I get the feeling that he thought religion was in some ways unnatural, but philosophy could be considered natural.

Wayne Hudson: I think that's a very valid point. I don't think he thinks religion's unnatural, but I think he thinks it's bound up with the passions, and that the passions are a form of nature, and that they're intrinsically very dangerous to social and political life. I think his primary interest is how to control the danger of religion.

Rachael Kohn: Right, and when you say the danger, and when you say the passions, of course they subvert reason. So was he thinking that belief wasn't reasonable?

Wayne Hudson: I think he thought that it had to be made subject to rational criticism and rational control. He wasn't an 18th century person, he didn't think that reason itself would do it all. He believed in a role for the State and for institutions. And he wasn't I think, hostile to having the church as one of the controlling parts of the State, if you want to think of it like that. But he was certainly concerned with unreason as a major threat which could come in a religious form.

Rachael Kohn: Were philosophers impressed in any way by religion's ability to convey some very high truths rather effectively, even if it was through stories?

Wayne Hudson: Well this of course is Spinoza. Again you've taken another very difficult one, because no-one agrees what Spinoza finally meant.

But I think myself that it's fairly clear that Spinoza is in fact a Deist of a complex kind, and I think he's also essentially a Hebrew thinker, and I don't think he's a sort of Voltaire hiding in the Netherlands. I think he thinks that revelation is a reality, but what is revealed is imagination. It's imagination. You can use the word 'fantasy' if you like, but with the implication that this fantasy can be used to morally direct people's lives.

So again it's a question of rational control trying to limit the damage, trying to control the danger. Spinoza is very conscious that the universe is infinitely many modes and he's not trying to eliminate reverence for the universe. He thinks that in a certain way, the universe is mysterious, but its mysteriousness is rational.

Rachael Kohn: Is that what the Deists, the English Deists were doing as well? I mean I do get a sense of reverence for God, but perhaps also tied in with a desire to lose the miraculous.

Wayne Hudson: The case of the Deists is very complicated, and I've just written a book about that, which will come out I hope next year. And essentially you have to take them one by one.

They're not Deists in the popular sense, they don't think that there's a God outside the world who controls it like a clock, they are closer to Pantheists many of them. And they're not hostile to religion on the whole at all. They're hostile to irrational beliefs, to faith in the sense of mysteries imposed by clergy on the common people.

They're arguing again that in a contemporary modern sort of society, you have to have cognitive norms for developing strong cultures, you have to have rational reasons for adopting particular points of view. And they do very much see the universe as a kind of mystery. Toland, one of the most famous of them, certainly thinks that in a certain way the universe manifests God, something like that.

People say that some of them were Atheists, and all I can say about that is that these people had multiple identities, unlike ourselves. they were, if you like Anglicans at lunchtime, they were Atheists at night, in the middle of the day they might be something else. Lots of them were very critical of the supernatural, but they weren't critical of the supernatural in the sense of wanting to say there was nothing anti-mundane in reality. They believed that the anti-mundane was really, really there.

They were critical of the supernatural because it didn't conform to the law of the nature of things.

Rachael Kohn: Wayne, I'm also thinking about the 17th century when so much of this thought was burgeoning, and that was a time when Europe was beset by religious wars and sectarian conflict. Were these philosophers who were critiquing religion, trying to see past its more dangerous and destructive elements, and save something which could be used in a, I suppose, in a more rational, reasonable way to keep society and people together?

Wayne Hudson: Lots of them are reacting to the religious wars, as you know. But they're also concerned how you govern a population under modern conditions.

Most of them don't think that you should close the churches, or kill all the priests, because then there's no-one to provide imaginary truth for the common people, and remember reading and writing are not developed skills at this time. So they see a great need for this. Even Gibbon, who's often portrayed as a sort of latent sceptic, in fact is an admirer of good church ritual. So they all think as Roman philosophers did, that even if religions are totally false, they have a crucial social role in maintaining virtue in a population. But that means you need to have a civil religion that inculcates virtue, and not a twisted religion in which hatred and fear is put into people's hearts.

Rachael Kohn: Well when you said they don't want to kill the priests I think Diderot would probably have wanted to kill all the priests, yes?

Wayne Hudson: Yes, France is different. In England there are maybe one or two people of this kind, but many of the Deists were clergy - of course, they didn't want to kill themselves.

In the case of France, there is a real issue of this kind, but it's about French Catholicism, it's about political power. And in person after person, even including Diderot, there was a kind of mystical streak. It's very strong in Rousseau obviously, and in France the issue was controlling the church, limiting the church, and driving out superstitious and horrendous practices.

Rachael Kohn: Well let's quickly hop over into Germany with Emmanuel Kant, the great idealist, the great philosopher. Now he seems to be wanting to push religion out of the mysterious realm and into the moral one.

Wayne Hudson: I don't know whether it's that easy. You should ask Ian Hunter that question because he's written a great book on the subject. But it's certainly the case that Kant wants again to limit the damage. But I think he's fundamentally a Lutheran, and I think his position is a Christian position, and I think he's trying to make room for faith, by his very complicated philosophical architecture.

But of course the faith that you have in Kant in the end is, as you point out, moral, and it's a matter of postulates that will have to be adopted in order to act intelligently and benevolently in the actual world. Kant is a sort of philosopher I think of the moral world, where that moral world is a world of action, and like Dewey, for him in a sense, the religious realities are disclosed in action.

Rachael Kohn: Well Wayne, you've managed to convince me that Emmanuel Kant was a Christian, but you couldn't really say the same so easily about Karl Marx, although his father was a convert to Christianity, and of course he was from a Jewish background. His own belief was certainly one that had a great deal of disdain I think for religion - after all it was 'the opiate of the people'.

Wayne Hudson: The translation of that is also disputed, because of course he's referring to the opiate in the sense of a 19th century sense of something he would use to reduce your pain. He means the emphasis in that sentence is on the control of suffering rather than on the totally illusory.

Marx I think is the most interesting religious thinker in some ways of the 19th century. He's certainly anti-religious in all kinds of ways, but when you look in detail at what he says, he's really saying something that I think offers a positive reconstruction of religion, because Marx is saying fundamentally that while it's true that religious content projects illusory entities into the sky, Marx says in the sky is where the truth and the treasure are to be found.

So the Marxian project if you like, is to convert into the real world what only appears first in the illusional contents in the sky.

Rachael Kohn: So are you saying that he'd recognise that religious consolations were real but that they had to be realised in material forms on earth?

Wayne Hudson: Yes, it's stronger than that. He regards the real possibility of humanity, and he's influenced by Feuerbach here, as manifesting first in the religious content, and that's an idea that's also in another way in Hegel. So in these Germans who we read, we don't read them in their complexity.

What they're sort of saying is of course popular religion is problematic, and of course you can't believe in religious systems in the sort of sense that you might believe in a natural sign. But they're also wanting to say that in the religious material the human race, in a sense, begins to know itself as spirit for the first time, and in a form that is able to be made rational.

In Marx, the emphasis isn't on a theological rationalism, but on transforming the world so that the treasures that appear first in religion can be made actual in people's real lives.

Rachael Kohn: Do you think that the people who try to carry out Karl Marx's vision got it very wrong, simply didn't understand him?

Wayne Hudson: Yes, absolutely. With the partial exception of Ernst Bloch on which as you know I've written a big book. Bloch I think did understand it, because Marx was influenced by Schelling, and the other great religious thinker we don't read in Australia is Schelling, and if we read Schelling and Hegel and Marx, we'd have a whole new philosophy of religion. And I think myself that it's better than the recent work in France by Derrida or Marion, I think this German stuff is worth another run.

Rachael Kohn: How do you think finally contemporary religion is in any way a reflection of the Enlightenment?

Wayne Hudson: Well I think contemporary religion is suffering from having taken the Enlightenment on board but in a half-hearted way. They've only taken the shell of the Enlightenment, they haven't taken the moral struggle.

Enlightenment people were adults trying to improve the world through grasping its complexities. The religious world has taken on some of the critique but they haven't taken on the anthropological depth of the Enlightenment. If they do that, then of course they also I think have an immediate connection back to their own heritage particularly in the Patristic writers, because what religious people in Christian countries particularly need is a deep anthropology.

At the moment their anthropology is childish, and it tends to make the religion they're giving people childish.

Rachael Kohn: Time for clerics to go back to the philosophers. Wayne Hudson of Griffith University is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Arts, Media and Culture. Wayne mentioned that his colleague, Ian Hunter, was the real expert on Kant, so here is Ian on Kant's religion.

Ian Hunter: One of the moves you have to make I think in understanding the relation between the rational and the theological in Kant is you need to take on board that his conception of reason has a strongly theological dimension in itself.

The conception of reason that he uses is a sort of standard one from the metaphysical tradition, and it's the notion that the rational being is one who creates the essences of things by thinking them, and who can conform their own conduct through pure thought.

Now the original custodian of this view of course is God himself, God is the bearer of that said about tributes in traditional metaphysics. What Kant does is say that man is the bearer of that set of attributes, of that capacity of quasi-divine reason, even though there are certain limits imposed on it by man's sensible or sensuous nature. These limits should be overcome as far as possible, Kant argues. So Kant's conception of reason itself is highly metaphysical.

So when one talks about him as a rationalist, one needs to take that on board. For that reason there's not such a gap, if I can put it like that, between the rational Kant and the theological Kant because the theological Kant is working on the problem of how to actualise this very, very transcendantal conception of reason in ordinary life.

Rachael Kohn: Well how does the ordinary person live a moral life? Is it responding to a sense of duty, and if it is, where does that duty come from?

Ian Hunter: Well Kant famously differentiates his kind of morality and his conception of the moral life, from some rival ones that were around at the time by this notion of the sense of duty and the goodwill or the pure will that underlies it. And it's well known that his main point here is that what makes a piece of conduct moral is not any outcomes that it might have, in terms of one's civil, familial or whatever existence, but purely the spirit in which one conceives the act itself. That is, purely in terms of the purity of one's own will.

Rachael Kohn: I guess that's one reason why Kant was called an idealist.

Queensland University's Ian Hunter has written Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany.

Next week on the program the sacred sits of Islamic popular religion in Indonesia, going back to the 16th century. That's The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

THEME

Guests

Professor Wayne Hudson
teaches within the School of Arts, Media and Culture at the Nathan Campus of Griffith University in Brisbane.

Professor Ian Hunter
is Assistant Director of The Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

Further Information

Wayne Hudson - Griffith University

The Enlightenment Critique of Religion
A paper by Wayne Hudson from the Australian EJournal of Theology. August 2005, Issue 5.

Professor Ian Hunter - University of Queensland