Descartes' Bones (12 page)

Even among the first generation of Cartesians the idea had arisen that, strictly based on reason, there was no justification for social rules subordinating women. Particularly in Paris, women began taking an active part in salons and advancing philosophical discussions. As if to confirm the worst fears of those who criticized such attempts to level society based on sex, erotic literature—novels as well as instruction manuals—began to appear. The thinking behind them, according to one of the most enthusiastic promoters of the new sexual freedom, was that society had denied women the right to understand and express their sexual pleasure as a way to keep them under control. The writer, Dutchman Adriaan Beverland, altruistically devoted himself—both in his personal life and in his work—to freeing women of their sexual inhibitions.

This sexual enlightenment mirrored the path of the wider Enlightenment, with a small number of books in the late 1600s gradually growing into a full literature, of which the marquis de Sade's works—in which sex is a vehicle for exploring notions of radical individual freedom—are the ultimate expression. Indeed, just as much as Jefferson or Rousseau, de Sade was a figure of the High Enlightenment; you might think of him as the Thomas Jefferson of sex. The connection to the new philosophy was also right on the page. Much of the literature of sexual freedom that came out of the post-Cartesian decades had a frankly philosophical cast, with authors undergirding their scenes of women masturbating and cloistered nuns in coital embrace with references to Descartes, Spinoza, Ovid, and Petronius.

As transformative as the threatened sexual revolution promised to be, it was minor compared to the impact of the new philosophy on religious institutions and the religious beliefs of individuals. Before Descartes, religion was the language in which the most basic ideas about life and the world were discussed. Philosophical debates were religious debates: they took place between Catholics and Lutherans, or Lutherans and Calvinists, or Catholicism and Protestantism, or they were doctrinal disputes among members of a particular sect. Beginning around the time of the reburial of Descartes' remains in Paris, the emphasis shifted. Reason applied outside the boundaries of theology—“free thinking”—caught fire and swept across the Continent with a speed and force that bewildered churchmen. As far as the radical philosophers were concerned, Christianity sat on one side of the scale and secular thinking on the other. An English philosopher named Anthony Collins sounded the trumpet of the new thinkers, stating in his best-selling (but anonymous) 1713 treatise,
A Discourse of Free Thinking:
“By Free-Thinking then I mean,
The Use of the Understanding, in endeavouring to find out the Meaning of any Proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the Evidence for or against it, and in judging of it according to the Seeming Force or Weakness of the Evidence.”
And he declared expansively that “if I vindicate Man's
Right
to
think freely
in the full extent of my
Definition,
I not only
apologize
for my self, who profess to
think freely
every day
de quolibet ente,
but for all the
Free-Thinkers
who ever were, or ever shall be.”

Philosophers held real sway in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They wrote in newspapers, manned presses and printed their own tracts, thundered in parliaments and councils, debated church leaders, and otherwise molded popular opinion. As a result, the new secularism began to make inroads among ordinary people, and quite soon after the time of the first Cartesians. In the early 1700s, travelers to the Low Countries noted that, as a people, the Dutch seemed to have lost the popular belief in witches and demons; Anthony Collins reported that “the Devil is intirely banish'd [in] the United Provinces, where
Free-Thinking
is in the greatest perfection.” The modern French scholar Michel Vovelle studied eighteenth-century archives in southern France and found that starting right around the time of the first Cartesians French people began giving less money to religious organizations and the use of pious language began to drop off in wills and other official writings. Where wills were once replete with pleas to the Virgin Mary and local saints to look after the soul of the departed, by 1750 as many as 80 percent contained no religious references. Of course, Europe remained Christian, but secularism was now a force in society. Gysbert Voetius—who had so vigorously opposed Descartes in Utrecht, saying that his philosophy would lead to atheism and wanton individualism—was right.

In the early 1700s, writers in every European country made names for themselves by advancing the argument that magical thinking—believing in the powers of amulets, in warding off evil, in Satan himself—was nonsense. Some veered toward the forbidden territory of atheism, though almost no one actually espoused it, since professing that God didn't exist was a crime throughout Europe. What arose instead was either deism—belief in God based on reason rather than religious tenets—or “materialistic pantheism,” which holds that God and the world, meaning all the physical forces in the universe, are one. Radicati outlined such a view in 1732: “By the
Universe,
I comprehend the infinite Space which contains the immense
Matter. . . .
This
Matter,
modified by
Motion
into an infinite Number of various forms, is what I call NATURE. Of this the Qualities and Attributes are,
Power,
Wisdom,
and
Perfection,
all of which she possesses in the highest Degree.”

Power, wisdom, and perfection are, of course, attributes that were formerly assigned to God, and playing fast and loose with definitions in this way did not fool churchmen who were on the lookout for attempts to circumvent their worldview and their authority. In 1708 a German theologian created a guide to enable his colleagues to thwart the kind of thinking that “calls God Nature,” which he characterized as “the most systematically philosophical form of atheism.”

Most radical Enlightenment figures—Collins, Radicati, Van den Enden, and others—don't have the same star power as moderate Enlightenment players. But not all have sunk into obscurity. Jonathan Israel makes a case that the main force behind the radical wing, its intellectual godfather (and one of the most influential philosophers in history), was Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza used many of Descartes' categories and applied them more ruthlessly—to religion, among other things. Like Descartes, he “proved” that God exists, but he also “proved” that God cannot have human properties and does not perform miracles or otherwise intervene in human affairs. The Bible contains much wisdom, Spinoza wrote, but shouldn't be trusted when it comes to tales of seas parting or water being turned into wine. He ridiculed popular belief in supernatural beings, reacting to a debate about whether spirits can be female or male by saying, “Those who have seen naked spirits should not have cast their eyes on the genital parts.”

The three-way debate among the radical and moderate secularists and the theologians ranged over nearly every conceivable issue, but it was centered on the notion of God. The charge of atheism was seemingly constantly in the air in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and not because its targets professed not to believe in God but because they defined God in ways that did not require a church as mediator. A conception of God that did not rest on scripture was considered a danger to church and state. Far from seeing himself as an atheist, Spinoza believed that God
must
exist, for he defined God as infinite substance and reasoned that “a substance consisting of infinite attributes . . . necessarily exists.” In his view God was synonymous with nature, meaning not merely the natural world but the totality of all things. He went so far as to upend the medieval notion of substances by defining God as the one and only substance existing in the universe: everything else was some subpart of God.

Spinoza insisted that there is such a thing as religious truth, but he also insisted that religious institutions were largely concerned with protecting their own position. At times Spinoza's thinking about superstition and the manipulation of it sounds not only modern but ultramodern; streamline the language of his
Theologico-Political Treatise
and it could appear in a twenty-first-century antireligion best seller: “The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt. . . . Anything which excites their astonishment [people] believe to be a portent signifying the anger of the gods or of the Supreme Being, and, mistaking superstition for religion, account it impious not to avert the evil with prayer and sacrifice. Signs and wonders of this sort they conjure up perpetually, till one might think Nature as made as themselves, they interpret her so fantastically.” Religious institutions, Spinoza held, in a passage that has set many people in the centuries since nodding in agreement, prey on this collection of insecurities: “Immense pains have therefore been taken to . . . [invest] religion, whether true or false, with such pomp and ceremony, that it may rise superior to every shock, and be always observed with studious reverence by the whole people.”

Spinoza's form of pantheism was reviled by Christians and Jews of his time and later (he was expelled from his Amsterdam Jewish community at the age of twenty-three), but it has fit well in the modern era. Einstein, when challenged to state his own religious beliefs, famously aligned himself with Spinoza, saying, “I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

Genuine atheism—a belief that there is no deity involved in the universe or its creation, that we are alone—would, of course, be a major outcome of the modern turn that occurred in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But it would be wrong to imagine that the Enlightenment was antireligion. Its mainstream thinkers, as well as many if not most of the radicals, were antichurch, not antifaith. Their problem with religion was that it kept individual humans from exercising their own minds and applying their innate reason to understanding the world and their place in it. This criticism applied not only to Catholicism but also to Protestant theology. It's true that Protestantism was a movement on behalf of the individual. It came into being in large part because its leaders felt that individual Christians needed to have their own relationship with God, unmediated by the church. Luther reviled the Catholic Church for making people slaves to the clergy. But at the same time he wrote
On the Enslaved Will,
which argued that individuals must prostrate their intellect and will to the God of scripture. As the marquis de Condorcet, a leader of the French Enlightenment, said of such Reformation figures as Luther, “The spirit that animated the reformers did not lead to true freedom of thought. Each religion allowed, in the country where it dominated, certain opinions only.” The Protestant churches were no more willing to accept the God-equals-nature argument than was the Vatican.

The Enlightenment figures wanted people to be utterly free to use their minds, to apply the light of reason. This included applying reason to faith: evaluating and valuing the underlying substance of life—the universe, God, nature—with clear eyes, and without necessarily employing the tools of organized faith. You might say, in fact, that the whole thrust of the Enlightenment was not an attempt to diminish God at all but, on the contrary, an insistence on expanding God, broadening the scope of the word to include all that the new forms of learning encompassed. The enemies, in this view, were two: authority—any power or organization that dictated how and what to believe—and fuzzy thinking.

All of this went directly back to Descartes, whose turn to philosophy began when, after his studies, he found himself “saddled with so many doubts and errors that I seemed to have gained nothing in trying to educate myself unless it was to discover more and more fully how ignorant I was.” “Clear and distinct ideas” would be the goal—of Descartes, and of the thinkers of the next century. Thus Spinoza lashing out at superstition. In the 1740s, Denis Diderot, the force behind the famous
Encyclopédie
and one of the intellectual fathers of the French Revolution, put the zeal for clarity in the form of a maxim: “Superstition is more harmful than atheism.”

H
ISTORICAL PERIODS DON'T USUALLY
name themselves. People walking around circa 1300 did not greet each other with “It's a lovely morning here in the Late Middle Ages.” The Enlightenment—whose leaders were nothing if not self-conscious—was an exception.
Aufklärung, les lumières, ilustración, illuminismo, verlichting
: across Europe, in whatever language, there was an awareness on the part of individuals of somehow having different minds from earlier generations, and everywhere they expressed the idea with the metaphor of light invading what had been darkness. One of the clearest expressions of it came from the tiny, introverted German philosopher Immanuel Kant, part of whose grand project was to identify the “transcendental” foundation of religion—to ground faith not in a church or a holy book but in the human mind, the world, and the relationship between the two. Kant was a mousy, homebody sort who never strayed farther than one hundred miles from his Prussian hometown, and his writings are as dense as any philosopher's, but he could on occasion rise to the soaring plane of the propagandist. “Enlightenment,” he declared when asked to define the force that he and his contemporaries were caught up in, “is man's exodus from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is the inability to use one's understanding without the guidance of another person. . . . ‘Dare to know' (
sapere aude
)! Have the courage to use your own understanding; this is the motto of the Enlightenment.”

The “motto” was put into practice politically in two dramatic and very different ways in the eighteenth century. In the 1770s, there came a metaphorical lull in the frenzy of invention and scientific activity as everyone paused to witness the birth of a whole new arena of modernity. Across the ocean, the inhabitants of the former British colonies in North America decided to throw off their mother country and give a real-world test to the ideas about representative government that had been nurtured over the century in the theories of men like John Locke. Americans are used to thinking of their country's revolution as the climax toward which the century of European intellectual ferment was building. As the great American scholar Henry Steele Commager wrote in 1977, “The Old World imagined, invented, and formulated the Enlightenment, the New World—certainly the Anglo-American part of it—realized and fulfilled it.” Europeans see it differently. To them, the American Revolution was a sideshow, while the French Revolution, in all its gore and glory and tragedy, its titanic upending of church and state, was the ultimate expression of the Enlightenment and of the long process of transformation that began with Descartes' cogito.