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Humans, Spinoza argued, designed a God who had made the universe especially for mankind, and reasoned in circular fashion that God had crafted a human purpose.
The best way to do this, according to Spinoza, is through a Stoic passivity—seeking knowledge of the universe and acknowledging that we are not at the center of it.
While Hobbes’s new morality led him to the foot of an all-encompassing state, Spinoza recommended the opposite: a minimal state designed merely to prevent insurrection from those whose rights are violated.
Freedom of religion and speech, in this view, aren’t rights so much as spheres of privacy the state ought to avoid if it knows what’s good for it. This is a libertarianism based on practicality, not on principle per se: we don’t know what is right or good or virtuo...
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David Hume (1711–1776). Like Hobbes and Spinoza before him, Hume discounted the possibility of miracles—he said that the laws of nature speak to us more frequently than any human testimony, and therefore the evidence for miracles was annihilated.
Hume discounted the possibility of miracles—he said that the laws of nature speak to us more frequently than any human testimony, and therefore the evidence for miracles was annihilated.
Most of all, Hume rejected the idea of a just God because of the presence of evil in the universe.
Hume rejected the idea of a just God because of the presence of evil in the universe.
Discoverable purpose disappeared in Hume’s philosophy.
Having dethroned God as an active moral arbiter for human behavior and instead redefined God as the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover alone, man was free to search for a moral system using reason alone.
New moral systems, therefore, had to be constructed from scratch. Human beings, these Enlightenment thinkers proposed, could construct systems to maximize human happiness.
But the remnant vapors were responsible for some of humanity’s most fascinating and complex attempts at creating a God-free objective morality.
Leading the way was Voltaire (1694–1778). Voltaire was a deist—he famously stated, “It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme and intelligent being.
Like an eighteenth-century Bill Maher, Voltaire delighted in ridiculing the most facially ridiculous statements of the Bible and declaring the Bible’s morality abhorrent on its face.
Leibniz argued that since God was good, and since God had created but one world, the world He had created was by necessity the best possible world. Voltaire mercilessly skewered that perspective in Candide:
So where did Voltaire find purpose and morality? Like Francis Bacon, one of his intellectual heroes, he found it in the betterment of the human condition materially.
Voltaire’s morality tends toward the fully libertarian, then—freedom from control, liberty in behavior. But such a system, absent the virtue of a citizenry, quickly collapses.
By removing the supposed shackles of virtue, Voltaire also removed the constraints preventing chaos and tyranny. When Voltaire’s version of freedom was mixed with the passion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), the result was the guillotine.
Kant thought that the search for virtue could be found not through reason applied to the universe, but through investigation of the moral instinct. We all have an instinct for morality, Kant believed. Reason was limited, as human perception was limited; Kant remained skeptical of the human capacity to know the world.
Kant looked instead to the human heart. The human heart, he said, had embedded within it a moral logic.
Those categorical imperatives included injunctions never to use other human beings as means, but rather to treat them as ends. Actions are good in and of themselves, not because they have good effects.
“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”19
the idea that every law must be generalizable—provides a nice guidepost for human activity, and one that seems to mirror the Golden Rule. But Kant’s categorical imperative does not answer more complex moral calculations. Is it really correct that we do a wrong whenever we lie, even to hide a Jew when the Nazi is at the door, for example, as Kant seems to suggest?
Bentham believed, along the lines of Hobbes, that no rights preexisted the state, and called natural rights “nonsense upon stilts.”
Voltaire, Kant, Bentham—all assumed that reason could construct morality from scratch. But their moralities did not coincide. Practically speaking, their morality lifted elements, even if unconsciously, from the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek telos they suggested they had exploded.
All of this left an unanswered question: If reason could not construct objective systems of morality, what could? What if faith in reason was misplaced—and something darker actually motivated human beings?
By throwing God out of the kingdom of man, the Enlightenment also reduced man to a creature of flesh and blood, with no transcendent reason to guide the way.
Hobbes, who was deeply devoted to tearing down Greek teleology, attacked not only the idea that the universe had discoverable purpose, but that human beings were capable of exercising reason more broadly. “The Passions of men,” Hobbes writes, “are commonly more potent than their Reason.”
Reason cannot bring happiness, nor can it be used as the goal of a philosophical life. There is no happiness. There is only striving and security and passion. Reason cannot save us from the war of all against all; only the Leviathan, the power of the state, can.21
Through reason, human beings are capable of better understanding their plight, and this grants them some limited measure of freedom—but their freedom of action is heavily circumscribed.
“Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,” Hume famously wrote, taking to its logical extreme the thought of his predecessors. “[Reason] cannot be the source of moral good or evil, which are found to have that influence.”
This move away from reason and toward passion—the rejection of Judeo-Christian values and Greek teleology—may have been popular among philosophers, but it remained a rather fringy perspective. All that changed, however, with the rise of Darwinism. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) provided the first scientific grounding to the notion of a world without God, and a world beyond the
There was no telos to the universe—there was merely nature, and man was part of it. Man was an animal. God was unnecessary. Reason itself disappeared into higher brain function designed for better environmental adaption.
Objective truth itself became an article of faith, since the human mind was designed not for its discovery, but for finding the nuts and berries necessary to ward off death and pain.
Darwinism was seen by the intelligentsia of the time as a final permission to break with the ways of the ancients.
Dostoyevsky suggested the cure for hunger would be the dictator—the man who satiates hunger will be worshipped as a deity. Human beings, Dostoyevsky suspected, were too frightened to use God-given freedom of will to seek God Himself; instead, they would retreat into infantilism, happy to follow leaders who will relieve them of their need for bread and provide them the comfort of conformity, promising them that their sins mean nothing: “We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of
The dark side of the Enlightenment was no secret to Dostoyevsky, who saw the rumblings of a coming cataclysm looming through the mists of the future. He knew that reason alone, unmoored from God, could not hold back the tide; in fact, reason itself would provide the impetus for evil, he argued.
No, Dostoyevsky stated, man would rebel against such logic. Human beings were not made for it: “What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.
The search for meaning, untrammeled by Judeo-Christian values and Greek telos, freed from moral responsibility by scientific determinism, would burst forth in a conflagration that will set the whole world on fire, Dostoyevsky predicted. The result would be blood and suffering, a maelstrom of horror, followed by an epoch of emptiness. God’s death, Dostoyevsky thought, was man’s death as
Nietzsche suggested that we stop brooding over the “moral worth of our actions.” Instead, he said, let us “seek to become what we are,—the new, the unique, the incomparable, making laws for ourselves and creating ourselves!”
What, exactly, is the will to power? It is the will to self-perfection.
He properly understood that all other systems of morality, from utilitarianism to Kantian categorical imperatives, are based at root on the moral discoveries of the Judeo-Christian tradition—and he said that man can only be freed by destroying that moral vestigial structure. That structure, he believed, had held man back; it was “slave-morality,” which sacrificed strength for weakness, which celebrated poverty and powerlessness.
That morality will no longer be based on human happiness—it would not be based on how to “maintain himself best, longest, most pleasantly.”
Philosophy spent two centuries killing Judeo-Christian values and Greek teleology—or at least discarding them in favor of brave new utopias filled with perfectible human beings, or crystal palaces ruled by men of reason, or worlds of determinism filled with avoidance of pain and maximization of pleasure.
Either man would rule supreme, or he would destroy all in his path. Which would it be? The world would soon find out the answer to that question.
The Enlightenment straddled two sides of a thin line. On the one side was the American Enlightenment, based on the consummation of a long history of thought stretching back to Athens and Jerusalem, down through Great Britain and the Glorious Revolution, and to the New World; on the other was the European Enlightenment, which rejected Athens and Jerusalem in order to build new worlds beyond discoverable purpose and divine revelation.
The most obvious chains were those imposed by religion itself, which the French philosophes saw not as the bulwark for Western morality and rationality, but as the chief obstacle to them.
French historian Robert Mauzi writes that Diderot believed that “to be happy is to be oneself; that is, to preserve the truth which is peculiar to our being, and which may choose to express itself through a passion incompatible with virtue.”
The answer is obvious. In the French Declaration, rights do not spring from God or preexist government: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.” All rights come from the state. All rights therefore belong to the state.
Where, exactly, did the French Revolution—born with dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity—go so wrong? It went wrong because the Enlightenment of the French Revolution rejected the lessons of the past; it saw in the history of the West mere repression and brutality, and longed for a tomorrow full of visions and dreams based on vague notions of human goodness.
