FIRE FROM HEAVEN
Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus: “In one word, I hate all the gods,” is its very own confession, its own sentence against all heavenly and earthly gods who refuse to recognize human self-consciousness as the supreme divinity—by the side of which none other shall be held.
—Marx, Dissertation
He may be the first Enlightenment hero. Alfonso X became king of Castile in 1252, and his reign was full of trouble from the start. He repudiated his wife, on the ground that she was barren, then sent to Denmark for another. By the time the princess of Denmark arrived in Spain, the queen was pregnant with the first of nine children she would bring into the world. Neither woman ever forgave Alfonso, though his brother, archbishop of Seville, gave up his seat to marry the Danish princess. The learning and eloquence that gave Alfonso a splendid reputation in other countries did not impress his Castilian contemporaries, who seemed to resent him. Though he was the first king of Castile who caused public acts to be written in the Spanish tongue, and commissioned a Spanish translation of the Bible, it didn’t lead to the flowering of local culture that translations into the vernacular produced in neighboring France. Rather, many later historians held the works he sponsored to be responsible for the ignorance and barbarity that they claimed spread over Spain. The children he had longed for turned out to be ingrates. One of them, Sancho, tired of waiting to inherit the throne and conspired with the king of Granada to overthrow his father. Alfonso’s death in 1284 put an end to the ensuing civil war but not to his misfortune, for his will was entirely ignored: the rebel Sancho remained on the throne, and his own heart, which he had ordered buried on Mount Calvary, was left to molder with his other remains in Seville.
Medieval and early modern thinkers viewed this saga as a confirmation of Providence. All Alfonso’s troubles were punishment for one nearly unspeakable sin, and hence were confirmation of God’s presence, justice, and even capacity for irony. For Sancho’s rebellion, in particular, was the fitting response to the rebellion his own father instigated against the Heavenly Father Himself. Alfonso’s revolt began as an act of scholarship. He sent to Toledo for learned Jews to instruct him in astronomy and commissioned one Rabbi Isaac Hazan to draw up astronomical tables, known thereafter as Tablas Alfonsinas, at considerable expense. After several years of intensive study, Alfonso remarked, “If I had been of God’s counsel at the Creation, many things would have been ordered better.”1
This little sentence, or some variation of it, expressed the essence of blasphemy for close to half a millennium. Bayle said no one was ignorant of Alfonso’s astronomical studies and their consequences, and was scrupulous in footnoting numerous variants of the story. In several of them, even the rebellion of his son wasn’t considered sufficient punishment. One who presumed to judge the heavens should be answered more directly, so a number of commentators had Alfonso or his family hit by lightning. A certain Rodericus Sanctius wrote that an angel appeared in a dream to convey a message from the celestial council warning Alfonso to repent.
But Alphonsus laughed, and repeated his blasphemy…. The Night following there were such horrible storms, accompanied with Thunder and Lightning, as if Heaven was falling. The Fire from Heaven burned, in Alphonsus’ chamber, the King and Queen’s Cloaths; then the Prince in Distress sent for the Hermit, confessed his Sins to him, cried, humbled himself, and retracted his Blasphemy. The more he wept, the more the Storm diminished, and at last quite ceased. (Bayle 2, 380)2
Bayle contested this account and other versions involving lightning. Such a wonderful accident, he argued, would be confirmed by more sources, particularly if it took place in Spain, whose inhabitants were always delighted to find evidence of miracles. Bayle wished to naturalize the story and may thereby be Alfonso’s first defender. The king, in Bayle’s account, committed prosaic sins: he neglected domestic political interests in favor of astronomical learning, preferring to “make a Noise” in foreign countries by cultivating his knowledge rather than attending to relations with his family and other subjects. Here we see ordinary, not criminal, narcissism. Though the former might render his subsequent downfall more comprehensible, Bayle still did not think he deserved it. On the contrary. Bayle devoted several footnotes to the infamous sentence and gave it a modern and more charitable reading. Alfonso’s belief that the heavens look remarkably disordered may be a comment not on God’s workmanship but on the defects of Ptolemaic astronomy, which were all too apparent by 1697. It all depends where the emphasis falls. Had Alfonso asserted “If I had been of God’s counsel at Creation …,” it would indeed sound like scandalous conceit. But, Bayle proposes, the claim could be read as follows: “If I had been of God’s counsel at Creation….” In that case the object of derision is not the Creator but the sorry medieval astronomers, whose ridiculous system did no honor to Him.
Whether or not we sympathize with such nascent deconstruction, we are likely to support Bayle, and to go several steps further. Alfonso’s remark will strike modern readers as so harmless that the wrath it provoked for centuries, much less the possible judgment of heaven, will be hard to understand. Even those who take patience and humility to be primary virtues can view Alfonso as manifesting them. He might, after all, have left the cosmic order to divine jurisdiction and devoted his attention to the business of earthly kings, like falconry and wenching. It would have been simpler, and brought simpler rewards: all Alfonso got for the years spent learning to calculate epicycles was the dubious blessing of posthumous notoriety. Since it wasn’t even good science, not even a glimpse of the truth crowned his efforts. His life, by all counts, looks a model of failure. Yet apart from the vanity that might afflict anyone, his motives were perfectly good ones. Alfonso sought to learn the secrets of the science that was viewed as the very highest so as better to understand and revere the Creation. And in uttering the remark that made him famous, there was no wish to blaspheme, just to point out the truth: an ordinary, hardworking Spanish king could design a better world than the one received wisdom ascribed to an omnipotent Creator.
His fate, therefore, will seem hardly more just than Job’s, whose story of endless suffering was also paradigmatic for writers concerned with the problem of evil. It is important to note that, like Alfonso’s misfortunes, Job’s were not viewed as unfair until a very late date. Sometime during the Enlightenment, commentators stopped looking for ways in which Job’s torments could be justified. According to Kant, who wrote a wonderful essay on the subject, they had previously done so in the hope that God would be eavesdropping. Having lost that hope, they had less motivation to try out variations on possible theodicies, which showed either that Job was secretly guilty of something after all, so that loss of all he had was justified punishment, or that he was being tried today to be rewarded the more surely tomorrow. Earlier writers identified with Job’s friends, the theodicy-makers who found justification. Later ones identified with Job, who found none. Tracing this development might be an interesting way of spending a lifetime, which wouldn’t be long enough to examine the vast literature the Book of Job inspired. But let us return to Alfonso, whose remark hardly reached the presumption of his biblical predecessor. Job did not go so far as to follow his wife’s suggestion that he curse God and die, but he did curse the day he was born, close enough to cursing Creation itself. Alfonso only suggested that it could be improved.
I will argue that Alfonso was less harmless than we think. Medieval observers were not entirely mistaken in reading his wish to advise God as the first step in a process that led to something they could not have imagined: not only the nineteenth century’s wish to displace God but Nietzsche’s announcement that the deed had been done and was no longer even shocking. Let’s begin by considering the functions Alfonso performed in the Enlightenment.
GOD’S ADVOCATES: LEIBNIZ AND POPE
Leibniz wrote that everyone condemns Alfonso’s opinion that the world could be better.3 He joined in the general condemnation and wondered why, despite it, the world of philosophers and theologians contained so many latter-day Alfonsos. For anyone who thinks God could have made the world better and chose not to do so thinks that God is not as good as He could be. Leibniz put the point gently. His Theodicy is one long response to the work of Bayle, who minced fewer words. History, said Bayle, is the history of the crimes and misfortunes of the human race. A God who could have created a world that contained fewer crimes and misfortunes, and chose not to do so, seems nothing but a giant criminal Himself.
Leibniz invented the word theodicy to describe the defense of God in categories taken from legal discourse. Before we examine his defense, let us look at the attack that provoked it. Bayle’s work will be examined on its own terms in chapter 2. Here I wish simply to mark what was exceptional in the charges he laid at God’s door. God had been on trial since the Book of Job, at the latest, and if the framers of that text pressed any point with clarity, it’s that He had it coming. For we, the readers, can see that things are even worse than Job suspects. He begs for understanding. Suppose he had known that the death of his ten children was the result of a bet God made with Satan, like two thuggish schoolboys contesting for power? One who undertakes to try the righteous in such ways will be called to account sooner or later Himself. Job, who cannot read the prologue to his story, might be satisfied by God’s mere appearance as a witness, but later ages would demand more in the way of defense. As the crimes He was charged with looked graver and graver, and He seemed unwilling even to appear to address the accusations, modern writers felt bound to condemn him, in absentia, to something like death.
Bayle argued that Christianity made the problem worse. Before Bayle it was easier to view Christianity as a sensible solution to the problem of evil. As one believer put it, “Job is the question, and Jesus is the answer.” The details of the solution are as various as the differences in Christian doctrine, but the statement marks the belief in messianic redemption, and the hope for eternal life, at the core of any Christian view. God Himself, in those views, took on as cruel a set of punishments as any human ever suffered. Indeed, they were made all the crueler by the fact of his utter innocence. His miraculous resurrection, which would make the agony on the cross seem a fleeting nightmare, is a prototype of that open to anyone who chooses to believe in the miracle.
Belief in miracles, for Bayle, was not a problem. He regarded the world as generally mysterious. One more break in a rather incomprehensible natural order would pose no great difficulty (Bayle 1, 194). The problem lies, rather, in the internal structure of the Christian solution itself. The torments of the damned, even without the doctrine of predestination, are the block on which reason stumbles. For however bad a sin may be, it has to be finite. An infinite amount of hellfire is therefore simply unjust.4 To imagine a God who judges many of the forms of life He created to be sinful, then tortures us eternally for our brief participation in them, is hardly to imagine a solution to the problem of evil. Positing a God who may permit infinite and eternal suffering is of little help in stilling doubt about a God who clearly permits finite and temporal suffering.
Matters were far worse for those who accept the doctrine of predestination. Though neither Bayle nor Leibniz did so, both took it very seriously. Manichaean heresies viewed the world as ruled by good and evil principles forever engaged in conflict. Bayle thought Manichaeism would be far more prevalent had it developed in an age that took predestination as seriously as did his own. Anyone who believes that our worldviews have become less heartening over time should recall the basic elements of that doctrine. According to Calvinism, the number of those who will be eternally damned is much larger than the number of those who will be eventually saved. Who shall be redeemed is decided by God at, or before, the moment of birth. Any action you perform may reflect your prospects of burning forever, but nothing you can do will affect them. Sade himself made an effort, but was unable to invent something worse, and no modern tyrant even tried. Death is a mercy here entirely lacking. Torture without limit falls on unbaptized babies, noble princes, and brutal gangsters alike—and its author is the Creator we are bound to revere.
The doctrine is the logic of omnipotence gone mad. Is the Creator all-powerful? But of course. Then He can do what He wants? Just the meaning of power. Can He break all the laws? Well, He made them. Laws of reason? We should judge Him? Laws of justice? Ditto, likewise. Any justice? If He chooses. Every step is unexceptionable, till we are led to a system choked with evil so inscrutable that we turn to modern worldviews for relief. Sheer randomness will be a respite.
It is just the randomness of guilt and punishment, along with the presence of good as well as evil, that creates philosophical problems. For even Bayle knew that life contains something besides vice and pain. The fact that we sometimes meet up with virtue and happiness is just what’s confusing. If all of humankind were wicked and miserable, we could conclude it to be the creation of a wicked and miserable deity, who created in his own image and for his own perverse pleasure. If the justice of such a world weren’t obviously apparent, it would be hard to find anyone who might care. But this is not the world we live in. Bayle says it’s the mixture of happiness and suffering, wickedness and virtue, that leads us to reflection and makes Manichaeism seem the most reasonable of views. The picture of a world ruled by good and evil principles locked in perpetual struggle preserves belief in God’s benevolence. Far from being the Author of sin and misery, God is always attempting to prevent it. He is simply hindered by the strength of His opponent. If this view makes God into a large and long-living parent, well-meaning but bounded, it does less violence to our intuitions than do other options. It may be hard to acknowledge God’s limits, but it’s less frightening than denying His goodwill. Manichaeism may not explain experience, but it certainly seems to reflect it, by underlining the bewildering alternation between good and evil that structures human life. Alfonso would have been unlikely to mutter if the natural world presented nothing but flawed machinery. It is just the presence of some matchless order, along with the existence of other parts without rhyme and reason, that caused his complaint. Some experience of understanding creates expectations of more. To be sure, the belief in such order long preceded modern science. Kant thought it was manifest in the change of the seasons. The fact that delicate flowers are preserved through winter storms should suffice to convince any skeptic that the world was designed by an awesome Creator. And if the coming of spring may seem more of a miracle in East Prussia than in the south of Spain, it’s an event that can evoke wonder anywhere.
Ordinary wonder at the world’s bits of order makes ordinary experience fractured. Discontinuity between understanding and blind groping, decency and horror, frames the texture of our lives. Thus, Bayle concludes, Manichaeism is the most reasonable response to experience. Let us take his conclusion at face value. Reason’s response to experience is a demand for Manichaeism. Faith’s response is affirmation of Christianity. In 1697, even in the progressive Holland where Bayle was writing, it is not hard to guess which of the two will be condemned.
No wonder Bayle was happy to take up Alfonso’s defense. For the king’s mild-mannered suggestion put a foot in the door. Alfonso stood for any claim that human reason contains in itself more sense and order than the world it faces. Bayle’s belief in the general incomprehensibility of all things used Alfonso as champion. Leibniz had to rebut him in the effort to show the world to be in principle transparent. So he took up Alfonso thirteen years later. Bayle had argued that reason, and all the evidence of experience, leave God condemned. Any attempt to retain faith will not only lack rational foundation; it must positively defy it.
The Theodicy thus set out to prove the conformity of faith with reason, though for later readers like Voltaire it served to prove the absurdity of faith in reason. Leibniz undertook to defend a Creator accused of unparalleled crime. His defense rests on two points. The first is that the accused could not have done otherwise. Like any other agent, He was constrained by the possibilities available to Him. The other line of defense invokes the claim that all the Creator’s actions in fact happen for the best. One part of the defense is an inquiry into the grounds of the accused’s actions, while the other concerns the true nature of their consequences in the world. It is there that Leibniz’s claims look not only prior to experience but positively immune to it. For he makes quite clear that any fact, however awful, is compatible with the claim that this world is the best of all possible ones. Leibniz’s assertion is no claim about the goodness of this world; it simply tells us that any other world would have been worse. Those who want to reject it will be told that they don’t know enough to do so, and this is surely true. The statement is just as impossible to disprove as it is to confirm. Take Leibniz’s attempt to speculate about how the balance of good and evil might cohere. It’s possible, he says, that all crimes and misfortunes are concentrated on this planet. In that case, it would be the lot of human beings to bear the burden of the universe, while inhabitants of other planets are much more blessed and happy than we are. This is possible, of course, but it’s no less possible that the denizens of other galaxies exceed us in wickedness and misery. That didn’t deter Leibniz from trying the same sort of speculation on the hardest of theological claims for his account, the claim that the number of the damned is greater than the number of the saved. Perhaps, he considers, there is incomparably more good in the glory of all the saved, few as they are in number, than there is evil in the misery of the damned.—Perhaps there is. On the face of it, one possibility is just as likely as any other. In the latter case, it is hard to know how to state the alternatives coherently. In the realm of sheer possibility, not much is excluded.
Leibniz’s defense of God’s justice depends on his division of all our misery into metaphysical, natural, and moral evil. It’s this division, together with his assumption of a causal link between them, that will strike us as sorely in need of defense. For Leibniz, metaphysical evil is the degeneration inherent in the limits of the substance(s) of which the world is made. Natural evil is the pain and suffering we experience in it. Moral evil is the crime for which natural evil is the certain and inevitable punishment. The assumption that moral and natural evils are causally linked is an assumption Leibniz never subjected to scrutiny. Modern readers may turn every page of the Theodicy with the hope that its author will address the point most in need of argument, but Leibniz held the connection between moral and natural evils to be too self-evident to warrant serious question. The complexity of his accounts of freedom does not make up for the simplicity of his account of the relations between sin and suffering. That account rests on an understanding of the Fall considered, most generally, as an explanation of why life is not what it should be. Long ago, it was. The earth was a garden in which everything was good. Hunger was stilled without effort; children were born without pain. We knew neither death nor shame nor confusion. If you had to design a world, wouldn’t you design it like that?
If this is the way things ought to be, something must explain the way they are. The idea that the problem was caused by our ancestors’ sins does not depend on what they did. To complain that a taste of the wrong kind of fruit shouldn’t be enough to bring a death sentence on the heads of all their descendants is to miss the philosophical point, and Christian attempts to make the deed look worse than it was are wasted effort. Something trivial is precisely appropriate. What counts in the first instance is not the justice of the connection between what they did and what they suffered, but that there be a connection at all. Why do bad things happen? Because bad things were done. Better to have some causal explanation than to remain in the dark. To connect sin and suffering is to separate the world into moral and natural evils, and to create thereby a framework for understanding human misery.
For contemporary readers, the distinction between suffering and sin is so fundamental that eighteenth-century discussion will seem simply confused. The fact that one word evil was able to designate both testifies to the closeness of the link conceived between them. For rationalists, the link was straightforwardly causal. Natural evils could be nothing but punishment; to leave room for a neutral conception of suffering, and ask about its relation to moral evil, was to ask more than faith could bear. Note that the connection between natural and moral evils could be made without reason by any voluntarist: this would be just to say that God makes no concessions to our understanding but sends what He chooses according to His will. If the rationalist tends to collapse the distinction by making all evils moral ones, the voluntarist’s rejection of a comprehensible notion of God’s morality tends to make all evils natural. Sin and suffering both come from the Creator, who relates them as He will. For Leibniz, such a view makes God a worse tyrant than the emperor Caligula, who had his laws written in so small a print, and posted in so high a place, that no one could read them. A Creator who gives us no clear directions about the links between sin and suffering is nothing but a monster; more monstrous still would be a Creator who didn’t link them at all.
All this is traditional enough, though remembering its context makes Leibniz’s efforts on God’s behalf more poignant. In a world where Bayle evoked the nightmares suggested by Calvinism, Manichaeism was a real possibility. Descartes’s evil demon was not science fiction but theology. Leibniz’s God may not be a hero, but other options were infinitely worse. What is modern in Leibniz’s account is the conviction that the causal links between sin and suffering will become clearer with time, as will the ways in which, despite appearances to the contrary, God has ordered all those links for the best. Leibniz puts his trust in explanation still to come. We have no evidence that good will come from evil, and quite a lot of reason to doubt it. What makes Leibniz’s faith in the future something better than Panglossian?
Few thinkers in history were more persuaded of the scope and possibilities created by the early scientific revolutions, and the Theodicy is happy to use them as part of its argument for acknowledging Providence. One thing they have taught is a matter of size. Leibniz says ancient beliefs that the universe was “puny” prevented Augustine from giving an adequate explanation of evil. As long as only one planet was thought to be inhabited, the apparent prevalence of evils over goods could not be explained. Now that we know that the universe is vast, Leibniz argued, we can better place our own troubles in perspective. Today the thought of an infinite number of galaxies may give us pause, but only for a moment. For the charge that the problem of evil arises from shortsighted egotism doesn’t need modern science for support. It can be found even in the Bible, where the Voice from the Whirlwind accuses Job of selfishly focusing on his own case. God has ostriches and antelopes to care for, as well as human beings; how can Job demand all His attention? Discoveries about the size of the universe cannot support an argument either way, for we were told all along that God’s Creation was not confined to human being. Either, as the author of Job would thunder, God’s hands were quite full with the variety of forms of life on this planet, without looking for creatures on others. Alternatively, the skeptic can reply that, unlike an overworked parent, the unspoken metaphor that carries the burden of this argument, God was supposed to be omnipotent.
Thus the discovery that the universe is larger than supposed cannot be among the discoveries of science that will prove much help with the problem of evil. Among the other sources of his confidence is Leibniz’s invention of the calculus, which made him not only one of the greatest admirers of the early scientific revolutions but also an agent of them. But the leap Leibniz imagined, from the calculus he and Newton simultaneously invented to the universal calculus that would be the basis of the science of the future, seems almost as vast today as the universe that then impressed him. Indeed, what’s hard to understand is the tenacity of Leibniz’s belief in the discovery of a method that would solve every problem. His most famous vision of the future is one in which two people warring over politics or religion would exchange their swords for pencils. With a cheerful “Come, let us calculate,” they would solve every disagreement as easily as we solve equations. The universal calculus would not only resolve old problems but would function as a logic of discovery. It would work so well that even a scientist who wished to go astray would fail to do so: his hand, said Leibniz, would refuse to write an error. For the calculus would reveal the rational order in language as ordinary language does not. Sometimes Leibniz thought of it as the language spoken by Adam before the tower of Babel; elsewhere he holds it to have a form only mathematics can capture. Once he tried to work it out in hieroglyphics. Though none of these attempts came close to fruition, he was so convinced that the next would be successful that he bade his readers give thought to the greatest problem future science would face: gratifying vanity. For once the universal calculus was discovered, all the sciences, from metaphysics to history, would be completed so effortlessly and automatically that any fool could do it. What challenge would be left for ambitious young talent?
Leibniz did not expect all his readers to share his own confidence in the inevitability of scientific triumph. The distinctions between early rationalists and empiricists were less fixed than post-Kantian polemics often suggest. Still, Leibniz’s exchanges with leading empiricists like Locke, Clarke, and Bayle taught him to expect the charge that he placed too much trust in reason. Here Alfonso could help, for he signified all the follies of empiricism. The appeal to experience is, in the end, always appeal to experience limited by particular place and time. Poring over Ptolemaic tables by torchlight, Alfonso concluded that the universe was deficient. Within the boundaries of his own experience, his conclusion made sense. Recall that it was not only Ptolemaic astronomy but also ordinary experience and common sense that put the earth in the center of the universe. Which of our senses tells us that the earth moves? Had Alfonso but lived to see the discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler, he would have marveled at the system and harmony with which the universe is run. The fault lay not in the universe but in the poverty of Alfonso’s experience, and this should give us pause. It’s a mark of the modern that Leibniz no longer found the king appalling but subjected him to ridicule, in a message that was perfectly clear. Anyone inclined to challenge the fact that Leibniz’s defense of God was utterly a priori should consider the alternative. In another few centuries understanding of the universe, and God’s purposes in it, should progress unimaginably. Today’s scoffers will look as silly as a Spanish king shaking his head over antiquated astronomy and complaining that the world makes no sense. Alfonso makes the appeal to experience itself look ridiculous, while Leibniz buys time for science to prove this world to be best.
If we hold the same opinion as King Alfonso, we shall, I say, receive this answer: You have known the world only since the day before yesterday, you see scarce farther than your nose, and you carp at the world. Wait until you know more of the world … and you will find there a contrivance and a beauty transcending all imagination. Let us thence draw conclusions as to the wisdom and goodness of the author of things, even in the things that we know not. (Leibniz 248)
In passages such as this, and other parts of the Theodicy, Leibniz offered himself as a defender of the faith, in contrast to those “ridiculous critics of God’s works” who use the awfulness of experience to claim that God might have done better. His defense of God argued that God could not have done any better than He did. But every lawyer has his price. In the process of defending God, Leibniz disempowered Him. More exactly, Leibniz went so far in meeting our needs for understanding the Creator in terms with which we make sense that he gave us a God created in our image. Hegel compared him to a vendor in an open market: Leibniz’s God can offer only what’s available. We should not grumble if the produce isn’t perfect but should be content when we know it’s the best that can be had (Hegel 5, 3:341). Hegel’s metaphor may seem unfair. Neoplatonists could explain evil by defects in the nature of matter. As a Christian, Leibniz was bound by the view that God is also Creator of matter itself. His God is no greengrocer but the Maker of seeds and weather, markets and buyers alike.
How then to explain the defects in all of them? Leibniz’s solution was to move all problems back. God created matter but not form. The truth of everything, including the essence of every possible object, is contained in the eternal forms, which function in ways similar to a simple reading of Plato’s. Before God decided which of all possible worlds He should choose to make real, He looked at all the forms, calculated which ones would fit together, and chose the best of all possible combinations. The forms are just the rules of reason. Imagining God to want to be free of them is to imagine a God who is mad. Yet in defending God against voluntarism, Leibniz did just that of which rationalism is traditionally accused: he put reason above God Himself. Reading Leibniz together with Hegel, one begins to think in pictures: God comparing essences in a ghostly supermarket. If reason itself is more powerful than God, since it prescribes laws that presume to limit Him, it is no wonder that God could come to seem superfluous. The late idealist choice to ignore the middleman and enthrone reason itself might seem just a matter of good sense dictated by Ockham’s razor as well as burgeoning market economics. Thus the orthodox charge against every form of rationalism could come to seem comprehensible. To demand or give reasons for God’s behavior is to demand to judge Him. Even if the judgment comes out in His favor, it involves an element of presumption that religious views will find unacceptable. In vain will the rationalist protest that reason too is God’s creation, and we shouldn’t despise His gifts. The traditionalist must answer: did He give it because He thought He would require our help?
The process by which the wish to defend God with reasons would become the wish to displace God with reason was a long one. If the wisdom of hindsight lets us understand traditional fears, the early Enlightenment did not. All to the contrary. Much has been made of the ways in which the scientific revolutions led to skepticism about religious tradition by challenging accepted worldviews. Far less has been said about the ways in which, at the time, they seemed to support faith. Eventually, it may be true that faith in science replaced faith in God; for a very long time, it only strengthened it. The idea goes back to the Renaissance and reached its peak in the middle of the eighteenth century. Pope’s couplet, cut as the great man’s epitaph, likened the birth of Newton to a second Creation:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in Night
God said: Let Newton be! And all was Light.
But it wasn’t only Newton. Every new discovery seemed to prove the argument from design. Indeed, for the eighteenth century the argument from design was less an argument than a piece of hard data. Its central claim was just this: the evidence for God’s existence is nothing less than the whole of Creation. For the latter is so shot through with order and design that it could not have originated by accident. We needn’t point to something as grand or distant as the heavens; the structure of our own hands or eyes will do as well. Designs of that intricacy require a Designer. As Newton’s expositor Samuel Clarke summarized:
Yet the notices that God has been pleased to give us of himself are so many and so obvious in the constitution, order, beauty and harmony of the several parts of the world, in the form and structure of our own bodies and the wonderful powers and faculties of our souls, in the unavoidable apprehensions of our own minds and the common consent of all other men, in everything within us and everything without us, that no man of the meanest capacity and greatest disadvantages whatsoever, with the slightest and most superficial observation of the works of God and the lowest and most obvious attendance to the reason of things, can be ignorant of Him; but he must be utterly without excuse. (Clarke, 91)
Science was viewed not as rival but as servant of faith, since every new discovery was a discovery of law. Any advance of science was proof of more order in the universe. Even further, our ability to make discoveries was evidence of our own powers, and of the fit between those powers and the natural world. Wonder upon wonder, God had created human minds and a natural world that were exactly and perfectly balanced to respond to each other. Each new discovery could confirm the glory of each. In his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, written at the close of the eighteenth century, Kant wrote that King David could never have adored the Creator as we can, for he knew too little of the wonders of Creation. Thus his psalms must pass as empty sound, for the emotion we feel on contemplating the work of God’s hand, now manifest in modern science, is too great to express. Such views were as present in literature as in philosophy, in French as in German. The eighteenth-century best-seller L’An 2440 was a utopian tract depicting Enlightenment fantasies of a future without the injustice and misery of the old regime. Despite all his radicalism, its Rousseau-inspired author imagined religious education that required future generations to look through the telescope and microscope in order to reveal God’s presence and glory through this “communion of two infinities. If, by some aberration, an atheist were to appear among them, the Parisians would bring him around with an assiduous course of experimental physics” (quoted in Darnton, 130).
Contemplating such texts makes it is easier to understand Leibniz’s confidence that, somehow or other, science would find the hidden connections between happiness and virtue that current experience fails to show. Bayle, says Leibniz, asks “a little too much: he wishes for a detailed explanation of how evil is connected with the best possible scheme for the universe. That would be a complete explanation of the phenomena” (Leibniz, 214). A complete explanation is an unreasonable demand—particularly in an era exploding with excitement over partial ones. The example of Alfonso was hope and warning at once: not itself a discovery, or a method for making one, but the sort of thing that could keep one going in the absence of either. Didn’t the world get more intelligible all the time?
An unhappy traveler, uncertain of reaching his goal, draws comfort from looking backward to recall how far he’s come. The early Enlightenment took Alfonso as consolation. He made clear how great was our progress in grasping the world. Inexplicable death and pain, of course, did not diminish in the wake of eighteenth-century science’s discoveries, but neither did expectations of coming to understand them. For hopes were high to behold—or preferably to be—the Newton of the mind. The nearly universal confidence that there would be one may seem amusing for those used to deep conflict between science and the soul—through religion or the categories of ordinary psychology. But we should not read our own distinctions between what the eighteenth century called natural and moral sciences into earlier eras any more than we should our distinctions between natural and moral evils. For an age that had yet to distinguish between hard and soft sciences, the expectation that someone would do for mind what Newton had done for matter was almost trivial. Each was just a piece of universe waiting to be explained. Much less obvious was the kind of explanation that was expected. To wish to be the Newton of the mind was not to wish to explain mental experience in physical terms. The search for naturalistic explanation was not yet, or not universally, a search for mechanistic explanation. Natural was opposed to supernatural, and meant something like “lawlike,” but the type of law that would turn out to be explanatory was hardly fixed.
Two things that the eighteenth century expected of a second Newton will surprise contemporary readers, but they are clear from the most important text we have on the subject, an early note Kant left unpublished. The Newton of the mind, it indicates, would answer King Alfonso’s objection that God’s design is flawed. It is for this reason that Leibniz had promised that the causal connections between moral and physical evils now hidden would be made manifest with the progress of science. Suffering that seems entirely random, hence liable to make us doubt God’s goodness, would be shown to be the effect of some sin we had secretly committed. Moreover, suffering would be shown to be itself the cause of some greater good, so that the network of causality now partly traceable throughout the physical universe would be seamlessly extended to the moral one. If this seems far-fetched, imagine how implausible a connection between the phases of the moon and the motion of the tides must have seemed. After these had been placed in causal relation, what other kinds of connection might not be soon to come?
The second service expected of the coming Newton follows from the first one. A Newton of the mind would not remove God’s presence from the universe (by reducing spirit to soulless mechanism, as is often suggested) but would eloquently testify to it. Newton viewed his work as testimony to the glory of God, and no eighteenth-century admirer would have disagreed. Alfonso’s doubts about the cosmos had been laid to rest forever by the English scientist, who was rewarded for his labor in defense of the Creator by the repeated epithet “immortal” along with the earthly title “Sir Isaac.” While most of early science was viewed as a series of proofs for the argument from design, Newton’s was paradigmatic. Not only had he seen connections where others saw chaos, found the most elegant and far-reaching formulas, joined heaven and earth by relating their movements. Even more precisely, Newton had shown that given a description of the initial conditions and properties of all its parts, one could derive the state of the system of the universe at any given time. Once the system is set in motion, it runs more or less on its own. Later it would seem clear that a God whose only task was to create a perfect world might be in danger of disappearing from it, but at the time Newton’s vision was a vision of God’s greatness. For most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers, God’s presence was such a given that consequences which now seem obvious will not have occurred to them. People feared an incompetent God, like Alfonso’s, or a malevolent God, like Descartes’s. As the following chapter will argue, the Enlightenment offered possibilities that seem more frightening than any we now imagine; but an entirely absent God was rarely among them.
The Theodicy is often credited with inspiring Pope’s Essay on Man. Published in 1734, the Essay was probably the eighteenth century’s favorite poem. Kant was wont to quote Pope in university lectures, Voltaire was happy to translate him, and when Hume addressed the question whether politics can be scientific, his starting point wasn’t Montesquieu but the English poet. The meaning of Pope’s views was debated from one end of Europe to the other. Part of such debate was a contest sponsored by the Prussian Academy. The questions proposed by the Academy tell us much about the framework of eighteenth-century intellectual culture:
The Academy requests an investigation into the Popean system which contains the sentence “everything is good”. In particular, each contestant should (first) determine what the true sense of this sentence is, according to its author; (second) exactly compare it to the system of optimism, or choice of the best; (thirdly) state the reasons for or against accepting the Popean system.
The exactness of analysis of the questions at issue is only apparent, as the most famous entry to the contest was at pains to show. “Pope a Metaphysician!” is its title, and Lessing and Mendelssohn clearly enjoyed coauthoring it. It’s hard to imagine another motive for writing, since the scorn they heaped on the Academy for posing the question virtually ensured that the prize would go to someone else. Their discussion is occasionally funny, but more often reminiscent of the pedantic swagger with which some philosophers discuss literary texts in private. Their main point, argued at greater length than it need be, is that Pope is a poet concerned to clothe philosophical ideas in attractive dress, but unable to develop them with any depth or consistency. Hence, they conclude, he’s unworthy of serious philosophical engagement. For this reason alone he differs from Leibniz. Perhaps they share certain moral claims, but their principles are entirely different. Lessing and Mendelssohn were right to stress Pope’s distance from Leibniz. Pope may seem to simply mold the well-meant orthodoxies that Leibniz defended, but in fact he undermines them, as many of his contemporaries recognized. In so doing, he takes crucial steps toward the world we will see in Rousseau. That world is not apparent from many of the Essay’s most famous verses:
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And in spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.
(Pope, 289–95)
This certainly sounds like Leibniz—except that it is written as a poem and not a legal brief, thus making enjoyable a message in which modern readers will find little else to enjoy. Pope seems to assert the unbroken goodness of Creation as it stands; the existence of an order behind appearances which assures that unbroken goodness; and the presumption and ignorance of anyone who dares to suggest the world could be improved. Pope’s very art may seem to lend fervor to his defense of the established order that makes it even more alien than Leibniz’s. (“All this dread ORDER break—for whom? For thee? / Vile worm! Oh madness! Pride! Impiety!” (Pope, 257–8). But Pope knew that his contemporaries would regard the Essay differently, and he took care to publish anonymously. For even this seemingly conservative claim could be read as seditious. As Voltaire pointed out, if whatever is, is right, there is no room for original sin—or Providence itself. Progressive intellectuals may have loved it, but traditional readers described it as a nursery of heretical opinions, and the chief cause of vice among Christians. One critic compared Pope to Eve seducing Adam in the Garden of Eden; for like her he pandered to his readers’ lower faculties with the beauty of his verse, and befuddled their minds by overheating their bodies.
The quarrel between philosophy and poetry is an old one, as is the philosopher’s suspicion of good writing as merely seductive. Relatively generous critics like Lessing and Mendelssohn saw the work as simply confused, but hostile critics called it intentionally confusing. They charged that Pope manipulated readers with sensual pleasure to mask corrupt, impious views. Pope cannot have been unaware of the tension between the genres when he decided to write philosophical poetry. Presumably he chose it because neither medium alone was fit to express what he wanted. Poetry itself never seeks the kinds of judgments of meaning and morals that Pope often intended. But philosophy alone is too straightforward, too unambiguous to do justice to the complexity Pope saw in the human condition. Poetry has a wider range of responses than those open to philosophy, mixing tones, changing mood and mode, shifting from the somber to the ironic without looking for grounds. The unclarity of which Pope was accused is, I believe, entirely intentional; he sought to reflect, not to resolve, the complexity of the questions at issue.
The Essay has been called an exercise in which a very troubled writer struggled to convince himself of a system of ideas he could not wholly accept. This is probably true. Poetry can record that struggle without settling it, and this alone may give it an advantage over philosophy, which seeks conclusive solution. Pope’s Essay records the struggle between hope and despair that can take place daily in anyone who thinks about the questions he raised. By using poetry, he could use resources of irony, metaphor, and paradox to hold that struggle in tension without seeking to resolve it. For resolving it would require him to reduce the very many perspectives one can take on the matter into one final and decisive one. Since the poem itself is about the multiplicity of perspective, such finality would be false to the reality of human experience.
One of Pope’s first critics complained, “Have poets so extensive a Privilege that they may boldly assert the wildest Paradoxes, provided they utter them in sounding Language?” The question is meant to be rhetorical, but the answer, I think, is: yes, they do. Part of the work of poetry is just to express paradox without absurdity, to give form to contradiction without stilling it, to give voice to tension without dissolving it. Poets can leave things open that philosophers cannot.5 Pope uses question almost as often as he uses assertion, makes hypothetical as often as categorical statements. In so doing, he not only states our ignorance of the great metaphysical questions he seeks to resolve—one major theme of the Essay—but shows it in the very form of the text. If Pope loved to remind us of how little we understand, the paradoxes and shifts in the poem allow us to feel it. When we cannot even determine Pope’s position on the problem of evil, how can we hope to find a solution to the problem itself?
To emphasize the skepticism eighteenth-century readers felt in the poem, rather than the affirmation of order now apparent to us, seems to put Pope closer to Bayle than to Leibniz. Like Bayle, Pope denied that we can understand the order of the universe, and thought it foolish and arrogant to try. This amounts to the claim that only faith can resolve the problem of evil with which Leibniz and other metaphysicians had wrestled. But unlike Bayle, who was content to regard most things as beyond our understanding, Pope’s poem began to suggest that there is some problem of evil that might be within our reach. With this he unlocked a door to the modern that Rousseau would open. For the Essay that began and ended with a defense of Providence is, after all, the Essay on Man.
Modern readers may be surprised by how little interest Leibniz showed in the human. The Theodicy devoted a great deal more attention to divine than to human freedom, and makes reference to human choice and passion more by way of example than anything else. Eighteenth-century readers analyzed fine differences between Pope’s “Whatever is, is right” and Leibniz’s “Everything happens for the best,” but perhaps the greatest difference is that it is impossible to imagine Leibniz’s claim followed by the great couplet with which Pope followed his.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of mankind is Man.
(Pope, 1–2)
Traditional readers lambasted the poem for focusing on “man” rather than “immortal man”—the latter being the only object thought proper for pious and serious contemplation. With his very title, Pope signaled a shift of focus from God’s nature and responsibilities to our own. In so doing, he began to push the problem of evil out of the realm of metaphysics and theology into the world of ethics and psychology, and therewith to a set of questions we can recognize as our own. Pope directs us to understand ourselves, our passions, and our possibilities, for only these have bearing on any problem of evil we may hope to affect.
The absence of a notion of original sin, and the cheerful description of the initial state of nature, foreshadowed Rousseau’s. So did the moral psychology Pope drew from them. His attempt to give a naturalistic account of the passions was not as deep or complex as Rousseau’s. Nor was his claim that ordinary self-love can be cultivated to aim at the general good. Still they point in the same direction, and the consequences were plain. For those committed to belief in original sin, salvation could come only by grace (or, depending on how much freedom one ascribed to individuals, by repeated threats of eternal damnation). But if, as Pope thought, our own self-love is inherently social, then acting virtuously is natural. It may even be pleasant. If that’s the case, what’s needed to eradicate most evils is not prayers and threats, but self-knowledge and social arrangements. This is anything but the Cosmic Toryism of which Pope was later accused.
A poet with Pope’s eye for irony would have been amused to learn that the naturalist impulse which was born in service of religion came to seem antithetical to it. But the original intention is evident not only in Pope’s claim that God’s wise design links self-love and sociability, but in his far-reaching attack on the appeal to final causes. The rejection of final causes was not undertaken simply in service of mechanical ones. Rather, Pope believed that thinking in terms of final causes leads to rebellion and despair. Assuming the world is made to suit our purposes, we are outraged and miserable when it doesn’t. To recognize that the universe is not created for our needs is not to assert that it’s indifferent to them. The line between patience and resignation is one Pope wished to preserve. His insistence that the final causes of things cannot be known, and should therefore drop out of view, is meant to keep the balance. His examples can be chilling: a man who thinks that all the world exists for his benefit is no better than a pampered goose who believes that the farmer who fattens him exists for his. Removing teleology from the world began as an attempt to preserve significance, not to destroy it. The ultimate meaning of Creation may be forever out of our reach. But this, for Pope, was no ground for despair. We need not fear that its resistance to our purposes means it has none at all.
NEWTON OF THE MIND: JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Suggestions are not science, however well expressed. As much as Kant loved to quote Pope, he never called him a second Newton. That was an honor he reserved for Rousseau. This choice is anything but obvious. In an age when it was common to work in multiple genres, Rousseau was extravagant: he wrote opera and literature as well as tracts declaiming against them, moved from political theory to theology with ease and erudition, and in the Emile and the Confessions, invented genres of his own. The one thing he did not engage in, unlike most of his contemporaries, was anything they would have classified as science—with the exception of a small treatise on botany that he wrote toward the end of his life. Yet Kant believed that only Rousseau was comparable to Newton. This meant, he wrote, that Rousseau had justified God and proved Pope’s thesis true. We must assume that the thesis of Pope which Kant has in mind is the one the eighteenth century quoted most often: whatever is, is right. Rousseau will have proved it if he has refuted the objections of Alfonso and the Manichaeans. But why did Kant write that, before Rousseau, those objections were valid? Leibniz used Alfonso to counsel patience. As rhetoric, it was probably more effective than the maledictions preferred by others. Instead of calling those who complain about the quality of Creation “vile worms,” Leibniz made them targets of ridicule. After being a fool, how did Alfonso become again a threat?
How does a straw become the last one? The metaphor underscores just the thinness of causal explanation. Burdens grow until the beast collapses under the accumulated weight of contradiction, disappointment, and exhaustion. The eighteenth-century faith in scientific discoveries that would reinforce traditional faith in Providence was not destroyed by any single event. Lisbon focused the problem, but it didn’t invent it. For one thing, natural disaster was part of the literature. Pope had no trouble mentioning plagues, earthquakes, and volcanoes. All these were events that no serious thinker took to undermine belief in the greatness of Creation. Significantly, he attacks those who hold moral evils to be a greater threat than natural ones.
If plagues or earthquakes break not Heaven’s design,
Why then a Borgia, or a Catiline?
(Pope, 32)
At least two reasons were offered for the suggestion that moral evils threaten faith in Providence more surely than do natural ones. The first was that natural evils display something sublime, even beautiful, that cannot be found in moral ones. No decent Enlightenment thinker regarded moral evils as anything but vile. Even more important was the persistent assumption that natural evils exist as punishment for moral ones. The former therefore required no justification. Far from breaking Heaven’s design, they were a crucial part of it, for they were evidence of a moral order in which every sin had consequences. More puzzling was a world whose Creator allowed crimes that would require such punishment. This was a Leibnizian problem, the reason he devoted the bulk of the Theodicy to developing a notion of divine freedom that could function in the limits of necessity. Pope clearly found it less troubling. This was partly because he was beginning to develop notions of moral psychology that would allow for explanations of moral evil. But more important, he held any other, more traditional problem of evil to be inexplicable. Earthquakes, like other catastrophes, could be incorporated into natural law—depending on how interested one was in geology. They could also be worked into a system in which sin and suffering were self-evidently connected—depending on how sanguine one was about our ability to discover such connections. Pope himself was not. He mentions that “several of the ancients, and many of the Orientals” regard those who are struck by lightning as special favorites of Heaven. Pope sees such views as more reason to be skeptical about ever understanding the ways of Providence rather than as a clue to them. If there are signs, we cannot read them.
Thus enlightened theists like Leibniz and Pope had standard ways of coping with catastrophe. They argued that a world which works according to general natural law is far better than a world requiring God’s intervention in special cases. The latter would be ad hoc and chaotic, unbefitting the dignity of a majestic and omnicompetent sovereign. Physical accidents that sometimes occur are the unfortunate side effects of those general laws which give the world order and allow us to orient ourselves in it. To rail against their Author because of occasional negative consequences would be as stupid, and ungrateful, as to rail against a monarch whose great system of law contains an occasional weakness. For it’s far better to have sporadic injustice in a society governed by law than to live in a state of permanent anarchy.
These claims may show where analogies between divine and earthly rulers break down, and turn us into democrats on both fronts. Not the least among problems with this sort of argument was Leibniz’s choice of example to illustrate it. We can’t expect the weather system to change its nature, he wrote, because the rain that produces a harvest in one field prevents a picnic in another. It did not take all the resources of French pathos available to Voltaire to point out that the Lisbon earthquake was hardly a spoiled outing. Initially, however, the century’s deepest thinkers tried to treat it with the traditional resources available for discussing disaster. Both Kant’s and Rousseau’s initial reactions to Lisbon were highly unimpressive, revealing them as nothing more than good students of Leibniz and Pope. Kant argued with more conviction than consistency both that earthquakes sometimes have beneficial consequences, and that they are in any case only natural events. Rousseau attacked Voltaire for depriving him of hope for a better world, and the citizens of Lisbon for living in cities, where earthquakes do maximum damage.
It was a curious phenomenon. Here Rousseau began to demarcate a sphere of natural accident that is neutral: disaster has no moral worth whatsoever and need have no negative effects. The latter were the result solely of human failure. On the one hand, this was the beginning of a modern distinction between natural and moral evil. It is crucial to such a distinction that natural evils have no inherent significance. They are neither punishment nor sign but part of an order that is, literally, meaningless. On the other hand, the distinction was fed by archaic appeals to guilt that end in making even those evils caused by natural disaster somehow or other our fault—and hence having meaning after all. The traditional assumption that there must be a connection between sin and suffering was thereby both canceled and preserved. It should come as no surprise that Rousseau’s characteristic focus on human contributions to our own suffering appeared in orthodox religious contexts. Hence his remarks about Lisbon remained more traditional than Voltaire’s. While Rousseau underlined the modern separation between natural and moral evil, he did so in a way that seemed to blame us for both. And the only positive suggestion he offered for alleviating either form of evil was a return to a society with more primitive architecture.
Traditional features of Rousseau’s discussion of evil were even more evident in the one explicit reference he made to Alfonso himself. It occurred in a reply to objections made to his own first publication. The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences argued that the study of philosophy leads to little but vanity. There Rousseau considered the difference between the philosopher and the farmer. The philosopher imagines he can understand God’s ways and has the right to judge them. By contrast, the farmer
does not censure God’s works, and does not attack his master to show off his own adequacy. The blasphemous statement of Alfonse X will never enter the mind of the common man. (Rousseau 1, 36)
Though Rousseau claimed to admire Leibniz’s optimism, the difference between them was profound. Leibniz was optimistic not only about God’s goodness but about our capacities for understanding it. Unlike Leibniz, Rousseau never suggested that Alfonso would have done better to study modern science. On the contrary: he would have done better not to study at all.
Rousseau’s most sustained discussion of Providence occurred in the “Creed of the Savoyard Vicar,” that part of Emile which managed to offend almost everyone. This section caused the book to be collected and burned by the public executioner in Paris. Its author was spared a similar fate, but he was saved from imprisonment only by a warning from the prince de Conti, who urged him to leave France at dawn before the warrant for his arrest could be served. The authorities read the book as a severe attack on religion, since Rousseau denied both original sin and the need for religious instruction, and preached an unacceptable degree of religious tolerance. While the book was banned by the establishment for undermining religion, it was loathed by the philosophes for the opposite offense. For though the “Creed” argued against traditional forms of religious authority, it clearly defended traditional faith in Providence. Rousseau’s grounds for that faith were unembellished: there must be reward and punishment in another world, or the miseries of this one would be too much to bear. The straightforward pathos with which the “Creed” voiced Rousseau’s declaration of faith can seem so traditional that contemporary readers may find it insipid. They will surely miss, on first reading, what was once experienced as critical.
No wonder Rousseau’s Parisian patrons held him to have returned to views of which educated people should be ashamed—and no wonder Kant’s description of Rousseau as a second Newton is usually ignored.6 And yet, I will argue, Kant did not exaggerate. Despite its initial appearance, Rousseau’s discussion is so new and profound that it radically changed our construction of the problem of evil. Although the eighteenth century was dominated by discussions of the question, it’s fair to say that Rousseau was the first to treat the problem of evil as a philosophical problem—as well as to offer the first thing approaching a solution to it.
Before Rousseau, thinkers were forced into one of two positions. To claim that this world is the best is to view all evils as ultimately apparent: anything we take to be evil is in fact a necessary part of a greater plan. Leibniz thought we would someday understand it, and Pope thought we wouldn’t. They agreed, however, that there is an order in which everything that looks like evil leads to the good of the larger whole. The result is that no particular evil is genuine. Everything we experience as evil works more or less like radical medical treatment by a competent doctor: as awful as it seems to the patient, all the alternatives are worse. This was called the doctrine of optimism, and many felt it gave optimists a bad name. For it seems to amount to straightforward denial. So Rousseau viewed it in answering a Leibnizian named Charles Bonnet:
To deny the existence of evil is a most convenient way of excusing the author of that evil; the Stoics formerly made themselves a laughing-stock for less. (Rousseau 1, 233–34)
Rousseau also pointed out that such doctrines lead to quietism. If evils are merely apparent, and everything is the best that it could be, there’s no need to do anything about them. Indeed, any action might count as impious—as many authorities used traditional theodicy to argue. Optimism could preclude not only practical action but theoretical undertaking as well. All that’s left is the orthodox theory that dissolves certain questions by fiat. If there is no genuine evil, how could there be a problem of it?
As we will see in the following chapter, critics of optimism were forced into the opposite role. Those who acknowledged that evils are genuine found that they literally defy explanation. Not only do all the resources of reasoning fail to explain them; the persistence of evil makes us doubt all the resources of reasoning itself. Taking evil seriously seemed to demand that we deny philosophy: it is hopeless to analyze evil, and probably wrong to try. The most we can do is describe it. Denying philosophy, for some, amounted to denying God as well. Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse contains one character representing the voice of good common sense. He is noble, and virtuous, but committed to atheism. For
Wolmar contented himself with observing that we must recognize that, little or great, evil indeed exists, and from this existence alone he inferred the absence of power, intelligence or goodness in the First Cause. (Rousseau 2, 352)
Whether or not Wolmar is actually modeled on Hume, with whom Rousseau eventually quarreled, he expresses the view that Hume voiced best: admitting the reality of evil precludes providing an account of it. Occasionally thinkers countered by proposing Manichaeism as the most reasonable response to the problem of evil. But even Bayle was aware that this was less a solution to the problem than a reflection of it: There are two forces in the universe, one of good, one of evil.—This is just the world we see, not an explanation of it. No wonder Bayle thought faith to be the deeper response. Before Rousseau, in short, there were just two options: either there is no problem of evil, or there is no answer to it.
Tradition seemed to offer another, and just as he was partly influenced by Seneca, Rousseau built on Augustine’s account. For Augustine, the connection between moral and natural evil was clear: infinite punishment for infinite guilt. He thus had no need to deny the reality of either sort of evil; in fact, he insisted on it, at considerable length. The original sin of ungrateful disobedience was just as bad as the punishment that followed it: expulsion from Eden, and the loss of the eternal life we could have had there. But neither of these horrors can be laid at God’s door. God’s benevolence wasn’t called into question by the presence of evil, for we are its authors. God loved us enough to make us in His image, and allowed us a share in Creation by giving us free will. Our abuse of that gift was so thorough that only a miracle, the Passion of Jesus, can save us.
This sketch should reveal all the distance between Rousseau and traditional solutions before him. Like Augustine, Rousseau held human freedom to be God’s greatest gift; like Augustine, he was tireless in describing the ways we abuse it. Unlike Augustine, Rousseau held the Fall, and any possible redemption from it, to be explicable in terms that are completely natural. Here natural meant scientific, as opposed to religious. Rousseau replaced theology with history, grace with educational psychology. In so doing, he took the responsibility for evil out of God’s hands and put it squarely in ours. Augustine is sometimes said to have given humankind responsibility for evil. It seems more accurate to say he gave humankind the blame for evil, but this is not the same. On Augustine’s account, perhaps Adam and Eve, but only Adam and Eve, could have done otherwise. Without massive supernatural intervention, we surely cannot. Augustine’s discussion of free will left him open to Bayle’s charge: generous donors don’t offer gifts that will destroy their recipients.
Rousseau’s account vindicated God all the more surely as it did so without damning humankind. Evil is our own doing, but we are not inherently perverse. The entire catalog of crimes and misfortunes can be seen as not fully intentional but mistaken. Thus knowledge, not penance, is needed. Once we have it, we are free to undo the damage any time. Rousseau’s notion of freedom left metaphysics aside. The little discussion he devoted to traditional questions of free will was fairly conventional. New in his account was the recognition that freedom has real conditions. If we care about freedom, we must care about history and politics, education and psychology. Metaphysics is as little required for redemption as is grace and will just as surely be taken care of—or not—without our intervention.
For Rousseau, both the problem of evil and its solution depend on the idea that evil developed over time. This assumes, in turn, that human beings develop over time, both as species and individual beings. Human nature has been altered. Thus begins the second Discourse, and its force becomes clear only when we recall how earlier thinkers saw human nature as much the same through time and space. Classical Greek thought viewed the cosmos as eternal, and the relation of human beings within it as eternally fixed. In arguing that God, or apocalypse, could turn the course of the cosmos, Jewish and Christian thought broke with static conceptions that prevailed before them. But the doctrine of original sin depends on the idea that human nature could change at most once: at the time of the Fall. And many Enlightenment thinkers used the new discoveries provided by commerce and travel to argue not for the variety of human nature but for its depressing unity.7 If human nature is fixed, any evils we cause or suffer will be fixed within it. The one is as immutable as the other. This leads to a view as comfortable as it is depressing. If human nature was corrupted through one wrong choice in Eden, our particular choices can make little difference. For Rousseau, by contrast, human nature itself has a history. Our choices affect it.
History is the right kind of category to introduce because it enables us to understand the world and gives us hope for changing it. History leaves space between necessity and accident, making actions intelligible without being determined. If the introduction of evil was necessary, we can be saved only by a miracle. If it was an accident, then the world, where it matters, makes no sense. History, by contrast, is dynamic. If evil was introduced into the world, then it might also be eradicated—as long as its development is not fundamentally mysterious. After Rousseau, we need not deny the reality of evil. We can, rather, incorporate it into a world whose intelligibility is expanding. Exploring evil as historical phenomenon becomes part of our efforts to make the world more comprehensible in theory, and more acceptable in practice.
Kant saw Rousseau’s view as revolutionary as much because it allowed us to state the problem of evil as because it offered solutions. The task was to determine a relation between moral and natural evils, or risk acknowledging that the world has no justice or meaning. Rousseau was the first to assert a relation without calling it punishment, hence the first to see a solution that doesn’t depend on miracle. He thus could avoid bad faith—a notion he more or less invented—and still affirm the glory of God. Rousseau never denied the depth of evil, and he enraged most of his contemporaries by showing that they were both more corrupt and more miserable than they’d noticed. Yet his claim that such misery was a result of clear historical processes, and could be undone by others, made his work one long witness to Providence.
If the particular details of his solution to the problem of evil are unimportant, the fact that there are details is not. It was crucial that there be some. Details were evidence that Leibniz’s promises were not empty. Would-be optimists waited decades for someone to make evil intelligible, to show that, all murky appearances to the contrary, the world was the best it could be. Rousseau’s account was designed to do that: revealing a world that was good at the core, awaiting only human action to make it better. His account is found in the second Discourse and the Emile, books related to each other as diagnosis and prescription. The second Discourse offered an alternative to the story of the Fall. It explained how the noble savage, though free of evil and suffering in the state of nature, came to spawn the wretched creatures who pass for civilized humanity. Rousseau’s alternative incorporated elements of the new science. Like Newton, Rousseau began from a minimalist description of the bodies to be explained and showed how the present state of affairs followed naturally from a few initial properties. All the vices that currently plague us could be explained through a few developmental principles. A little vanity, and the alienation from our own natures that accompanies it, can take us all the way to the systems of artifice and injustice now organizing our world. Rousseau’s account of evil was naturalistic because it required no reference to supernatural forces or sin. Not only divine but human intention began to disappear from view in the very moment evil emerged. Evil arose as collective process, not as act of individual will. This was no appeal to necessity: his emphasis on history was meant to show that evil arose through a process that was thoroughly understandable but contingent. We became wicked without willing it, through a series of particular events. There are tendencies to weakness within human nature, but their course is not inevitable. The second Discourse showed how certain processes, once begun, gain compelling momentum. But momentum is not inevitability: the world could, at each point, have been otherwise.
The story doesn’t matter. (But neither, I suggested, does the story Rousseau wished to replace. You can eat all the fruit in the garden but that one. Why not?) Rousseau stressed the unimportance of the content of his story in the outrageous statement that opens the book: “Let us begin by setting aside the facts, for they do not affect the matter at hand” (Rousseau 1, 139). This is the realm of myth, not quite history, but any other narrative of origins will be mythic too. Rousseau described one particular descent from primeval innocence to civilized misery, but we might have gone down in a number of ways. Evil came into the world through a long slow development during which human beings alienated themselves from their own true nature. Evil is thus external, not intrinsic to who we are, and it involves precisely a focus on the external rather than the essential. The noble savage knows who he is and what he needs without considering the views and needs of others. Civilized people never even see themselves when they’re not reflected in others’ eyes.
Downfall wasn’t present in the social process itself. History began in isolation. Savages gathered food, met occasionally to copulate, and scattered again without emotion other than the capacity for pity, which takes the place of active benevolence. Pity ensured that mothers cared for their infants until the age of two, when they could disappear into the forest to fend for themselves. The radical isolation Rousseau imagined was broken by one natural accident or another. A harsh winter, a dry summer forced these solitary nomads to band together into tribes, sharing labor and land. While they lived in simple villages, property was held in common, and division of labor was kept to a minimum. As in the biblical Fall, the original dissonance in this paradise was erotic. The moment people gathered in groups, the human shape of sexuality was formed. Desire for the other’s body is easy to feel, and not hard to gratify; desire for the other’s desire is complex. As soon as it’s present, public esteem acquires value. Each wants to appear better than the others to arouse the attention of the opposite sex. This initial regard for the way we appear, and the competition in which it puts us with others, is a part of our nature that is perfectly neutral. From it can develop that alienation from our nature which is the source of evil.
So long as confined to donning paint and feathers, trying to excel in song or dance around a fire before a hut, alienation needn’t be fatal. What’s the decisive point in the catastrophe that became civilization? Readers of the second Discourse can easily feel bewildered. At several points in his retelling of history, Rousseau interrupts his narrative to assert that a particular event was the key to humankind’s downfall. Each event is introduced with authority and passion—until he discovers the next one. After human sexuality he named the discoveries of iron and wheat, the division of labor, and private ownership of land, with increasingly emphatic rhetoric each time. Possibly, Rousseau was confused, or didn’t notice the contradictions. I think it more likely that he held no one moment for decisive. No point was the turning point in civilization, and it’s a mistake to try to seek one. He intended, rather, to show that once certain processes begin, the move to the next stage of civilization—and misery—is almost, but not quite, inevitable. At several points in time, we might have turned the course of history. Since we didn’t, the process by which we passed from self-sufficient decency to the web of dependence and betrayal that makes up the social world is a process we must understand.
Rousseau was the first to propose a natural connection between sin and suffering. Our misery isn’t groundless but results from our sins. The relation between the two is all the more direct for the fact that it requires no intervention from God. We suffer because of our actions, but not through direct divine punishment. Every sin contains its own penalty as a natural consequence, every virtue its own reward. We are the authors of our own suffering and could be the source of our happiness—not because God is keeping score and meting out justice, but because He has so arranged the world that such justice is part of a natural order.
Evil brings its own misery in big things and small. Rousseau discussed how to punish children, should they need it, in book 2 of Emile. He insisted that punishment should follow intrinsically from wrongdoing and should not be experienced as a product of the authority’s will. For children, he argues, accept natural evils as necessary. What they reject are attempts by other human beings to impose things on them. These will always be experienced as arbitrary, hence resented as evils—even if carried out for the child’s own good. The child who cheerfully accepts the statement that the sweets are all gone will rebel against the statement that she can’t have any before dinner. So a child who breaks a window should suffer a night in the cold; a child who tells a lie should experience a world in which no one believes him. Rousseau wanted education to mirror the natural world, in which misdeed and misery are internally related.
This conviction could be the source of what sounds like sympathy. More than other radical thinkers, particularly those born at the bottom of the social world, Rousseau noticed rich people’s pain. Indeed, he insisted on it. This may be partly an attempt at seduction, but Rousseau was more likely to confront than persuade. When he repeatedly argued that aristocracy suffers from its own false needs, it’s doubtful that he was trying to tempt them. It wasn’t his style, and he was too shrewd to expect many converts. His point was systematic. Like other evils, gathering wealth has immediate costs. The rich man must deny others’ claims to his riches, isolating himself in boredom and fear. The luxuries he enjoys are more painful to lose than they are pleasurable to discover. Each object creates new sources of discontent faster than it satisfies old ones. Rousseau’s analysis of false needs and consumerism is very prescient, but his point is as theological as it is political. Understood rightly, evil is not even tempting, for the universe is so constructed that suffering follows evil as the night the day.
The opposite, of course, is just as true: most of the time, virtue leads straight to happiness. This is entirely different from the Stoic claim that virtue is the same thing as happiness. Rousseau scorned Stoics as simple deniers. Contemplating your own virtue may be good advice in a Roman prison, where there’s nothing else to console you, but calling this the highest form of pleasure is sheer self-deception. If this is all the consolation philosophy can offer, no wonder most people prefer faith. Rousseau’s claim was another entirely: those actions which are good are also the most pleasant and have the most pleasant consequences—not in moral, but in sensual terms. Toward the end of Emile, he slipped into reverie, imagining life as a man of vast wealth. Rousseau was sure that if he had it, he’d continue to live much the same simple life he enjoyed without it. Rousseau may have been tortured, but he was no ascetic. The Confessions reveals that he understood pleasure, if he seldom knew quite what to do with it. His fantasy was not about heavenly but about earthly rewards: “I would be temperate out of sensuality” (Rousseau 3, 345). Rustic cottages are more cheerful; simple dress is more comfortable; country dinners taste better than sumptuous Parisian fare. One need not share his taste to understand his meaning: virtue and happiness are causally connected.
With this in mind, we can understand features of Rousseau’s writing that look simply odd. For readers of the view sketched thus far should find it overly cheerful. Just to grant a great deal for the sake of argument, suppose that moral evils do lead to natural ones in the social and political realm. What about death and disease, which are out of our hands? Rousseau’s remarks about both should be seen systematically. He often asserted that death itself is not an evil. The noble savage doesn’t fear it; the Spartan mother doesn’t mourn it (Rousseau 3, 40). Healthy people, he argued, find loss of freedom a greater horror than loss of life. Health itself is also part of nature, and civilization brings diseases for which it has no cure. Rousseau’s oft-repeated insistence on the illnesses caused by the medical profession and practices of his day are partly the complaints of a chronically ill man in the hands of eighteenth-century quacks. They were no less an expression of philosophical conviction: most of the evils called natural are part of a world we have ruined, and could come to control. Emile’s first sentence could sum up all of Rousseau’s thought:
Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of nature; everything degenerates in the hands of men.
This must apply to bodies as well as minds. Hence the discussion, in Emile and elsewhere, of diet and posture, exercise and sleep. Rousseau’s treatment of them was always part prescription, part theodicy. If we follow nature’s instructions, we can see how well she works. Death itself is a part of nature. The fact that we do not live forever is no more of an evil than the fact that we do not have wings or live on air. Only a humanity estranged from its own nature, hence unable to accept natural necessity, will view death itself as an evil.
Thus everything in Rousseau’s world testified to Creation. Whatever God made was good. But ruin, once begun, occurs with great speed. Disaster in Genesis seems a matter of minutes. Though centuries elapsed between the eating of forbidden fruit and sins so great that they provoked the Flood, their description takes a couple of pages. In Rousseau’s Fall too, the debacle is swift, the damage possibly irreparable. The second Discourse was perceived as unremittingly dark. Voltaire called it Rousseau’s “new work against mankind,” while others demanded a prescription for the illness called civilization that Rousseau had diagnosed. His answer was bleak: you don’t call the doctor once the patient is dead. When he wrote the diagnosis, he couldn’t see a cure. Though his work displayed clear nostalgia for the state of nature, he saw a return to it as no more likely than a return to Eden. Lost innocence cannot be found. But by 1762, Rousseau saw a chance for salvation. In the Emile, the isolated savage of the second Discourse was given another chance. This time, Rousseau took care that he wouldn’t be left on his own. He designed an education meant to undo the processes the Discourse had described. Raised as nature intended, the child would not be vulnerable to the evils of civilization, and could play a role in constructing a better one.
Rousseau called Emile his brightest work, and reading it was the one event, besides the French Revolution, that ever broke Kant’s routine. We should now be able to understand why. Providence was no longer an extraordinary occurrence but a matter of natural law. Emile argued that the same natural processes which caused moral evil could be used to cure it. It’s important to note that the goal was not to return us to the state of nature but to produce something better. Emile should be raised in the country, with so little formal education that civilized society will find him savage. But at eighteen, the age of reason, he will not only be a young man whose freedom and self-respect are second to none; he will also have become a philosopher (Rousseau 3, 315, 458). Emile is the proof that any ordinary boy can realize the Enlightenment dream. Freedom, reason, and sexuality were the source of the errors that brought evil into Creation. Properly managed, just those capacities can be molded to form human beings far more noble than anything possible in the state of nature.
Especially important was the idea that redemption would take place through the very processes that led us to ruin. For a God who allowed our natural faculties to lead us to catastrophe that only a miracle can get us out of isn’t as good as one who gave us the means to repair our own damage. Indeed, Rousseau went one step further. He wished to prove the goodness of Creation by proving the goodness of its toughest cases. What Christianity had blamed for disaster—desires for sex and knowledge—could be used to overcome it. Thus God is not to be blamed but all the more to be praised for giving us tools that can overcome corruption just as naturally as they can cause it. They thereby lead to firmer and deeper virtue than we would have without them.
Only self-knowledge can save us, but it’s just as hard to get as it is crucial. This may be the single clearest statement running through Rousseau’s work. Self-knowledge is rare because we’re masters of self-deception; it’s crucial because viewing ourselves through others’ opinions perpetuates alienation and vanity. Knowledge of humankind as a species teaches us to distinguish what’s essential to human nature from what’s been altered. Knowledge of ourselves as individuals teaches us to distinguish our own true needs from the false ones that cloud all our efforts at virtue. Rousseau didn’t aim to counter the Enlightenment but to give it solid foundation. As Kant saw, Rousseau’s goal was to produce not a modern savage but a man who can think for himself. Most education proceeds by creating desires to display one’s accomplishments or meet others’ expectations. But the knowledge that will lead to self-knowledge must come from true needs the child gradually develops. Emile should not read until his twelfth year. His slow introduction to culture was based in part on Rousseau’s observation of child development. At least as important as empirical observation was the theory of humankind’s evolution as a species laid out in the second Discourse. Culture and sexuality were born at the same moment, and each draws much of its power from the other. Human beings invest bodies with souls, biology with ideas, which creates the potential for redemption as well as danger. From the moment we invented song and dance to attract other savages’ attention, culture and sexuality combined to create cycles of vanity and alienation from which we have yet to recover. By handling both of them carefully, the educator can turn a natural drive into a search for the ideal erotic object. This creates a love for the ideal itself—the source of any human striving we may value.
Rousseau went even further. If properly managed, sexual desire could be the link between self-interest and morality that other thinkers sought in vain. What links members of civil society? Hobbes’s instrumentalist social contract provided too little; Enlightenment claims that we’re naturally social presume too much. We are neither so brutish nor so benevolent as each would imagine. There is one act, however, in which your own interest is identical with the interest of the other. This is erotic love. If done as it should be, conflict between human desires is dissolved just then.
Thus love between men and women is the cornerstone on which Rousseau would found a society to overcome all the evils civilization produced. In seeking that love, Emile must learn all the arts and sciences can teach us about the human heart and soul. In finding that love, all the destructive force of art and science is overcome. These themes are introduced just after the “Creed of the Savoyard Vicar,” which denied that the church is needed to save us. Instead of grace, Emile is offered love, and not just any love at that: he finds salvation in the love of Sophia, and he will not settle for less. In case you might have missed it, Rousseau drew attention to the fact that the name of Emile’s beloved was not accidental. Small wonder church authorities took exception.8
There may be a moment of kitsch in every vision of salvation. What saves Rousseau’s from being overwhelmed by it are the elements Kant saw as Newtonian. Emile conflated genres, for it isn’t only a novel. It’s also a manual of instruction. It offered directions for the right use of our faculties, as well as description of a long, controlled experiment. (When we consider that eighteenth-century chemistry relied on what it called rational analysis rather than experiments in laboratories, the fact that Emile was a thought experiment appears less important.) Rousseau insisted that Emile be an average boy, with nothing but ordinary intelligence and talent. He may be an invention, but he’s not an invention of anything special. Whatever works in this case will work, mutatis mutandis, in others. Without the Emile, the Fall in the second Discourse would be just as mythic, and just as irrevocable, as that in Genesis. With the Emile, we enter the world of organization. Conditions for redemption may be hard to arrange, but they’re entirely prosaic. The overcoming of evil is almost banal.
Another feature of the work that must have seemed Newtonian was its causal relation of processes hitherto kept separate. As Newton united apparently diverse phenomena into one single order, Rousseau linked behaviors no one had connected. The child who must listen to his nurse’s senseless prattle is prepared to swallow all the nonsense with which tyrants fool their peoples. The fables she reads him form his soul to be flattered, guaranteeing his future manipulation. Two centuries of social psychology ensure that we’re no longer surprised by this kind of connection, and we may dispute any of the ones Rousseau drew. In its time, Emile was without precedent. The relations drawn there between details of child raising and political life-worlds were no less surprising than Newton’s discovery that earthly and celestial motion could be explained by the same laws.
Here’s the 1765 note that contains Kant’s analogy:
Newton was the first to see order and regularity combined with great simplicity, where disorder and ill-matched variety had reigned before. Since then comets have been moving in geometric orbits. Rousseau was the first to discover in the variety of shapes that men assume the deeply concealed nature of man and to observe the hidden law that justifies Providence. Before them, the objections of Alfonso and the Manichaeans were valid. After Newton and Rousseau, God is justified, and Pope’s thesis is henceforth true. (Kant 2, 58.12)
How did Rousseau’s account answer the objections of Alfonso? Early in the century Leibniz used Alfonso to counsel patience, but patience was wearing thin. Newton had showed the natural order to be the best, but what about the moral one? When Leibniz wrote the Theodicy, the two seemed so clearly connected that evidence of progress in the one could sustain hope of progress in the other. Science had provided causal connections medieval learning could not dream. This gave strong reason to hope it would come to explain the relations between moral and natural evil. By midcentury, people felt need for more evidence. It no longer sufficed just to say that the moral order was in principle as intelligible as the physical one. Somebody had to show it, in no little detail. Rousseau defended Providence by showing that it works. Evil arose in a good world through a series of natural, comprehensible, but avoidable (thus free) processes. By adapting the same natural, comprehensible, but avoidable (thus free) processes, evil could be overcome.
Rousseau’s psychology appeared to Kant a gift from heaven. For since the great scientific revolutions, progressive thinkers increasingly abandoned classical conceptions of particular Providence, which required God’s frequent intervention in human affairs. Most turned to a conception which praised the wonder of a universe so governed by law and order that it required no interference from the power that created it. General Providence was viewed as more appropriate to notions of God’s majesty and more consistent with increasing revelations of science. As a program, it was commonly accepted, but Rousseau proposed an account of how general Providence might actually work. His moral psychology did not abolish distinctions between moral and natural evils but wrote them into nature. Where every sin carries its own punishment naturally, punishment may be viewed not as an evil but as a warning. Thus Rousseau could view his account as an advance upon Leibniz’s rather than an alternative to it. In Rousseau’s system too, the evil in natural evil virtually disappears, since its benefits are as clear as they’re just. Cold air teaches wild boys not to break windows without submitting them to human coercion. Indigestion shows Parisian decadents the folly of their banquets without subjecting them to sermons. Pain is as providential as any earlier theodicy could wish. Indeed, it may be more so. Rousseau’s account asserts suffering to be part of a natural order finer and vaster than earlier theologians had dreamed.
It’s a striking moment in the history of philosophy. What would come to seem two completely different problems of evil were bound together. The question of why free rational beings make immoral choices still occupies ethics and moral psychology today, devoid of all connection to the question it was developed to solve. Rousseau needed a solution to the question left open by Augustine: how can free will lead to the moral evil that causes natural suffering? Without some such answer, the appeal to human freedom on which theodicy is based must falter. Rousseau’s answer inaugurated work in several directions, theoretical and practical, and spawned lines of development in ethics and political theory, pedagogy and psychology. Progress in philosophy took place through elements of a very old tradition. It’s less clear that Rousseau’s account answered the questions with which it began.
While there were hints in similar directions before him, Rousseau’s work created the modern shape of the problem of evil. In focusing attention on the question of moral evil, and its historical and psychological causes, it offered little to those concerned with the traditional problem. It had virtually nothing to say about earthquakes. Rousseau’s discussion of Lisbon is almost feeble. His explicit discussions of Providence let us draw two messages: we should worry about the evils for which we’re responsible, and God will take care of the rest. The first half of the message is modern. Rousseau made it more so by increasing the number of evils for which we’re responsible. In so doing, he would make traditional theists uneasy. For his Creation is so perfect that its Creator is liable to become superfluous. God is benevolent, but we do not need Him. Here too Rousseau was close to Newton. Both wanted to demonstrate God’s greatness by showing the flawlessness of His order. Both ended by describing an order so flawless it could almost run on its own.
Voltaire, as we’ll see, was still angry at God. This creates more connection to Him than Rousseau seemed to have. The noble savage has as little need of the Lord as does Emile. Both need, instead, the perfect tutor—whom Emile’s author, with pardonable confusion, often confounds with Jean-Jacques. The tutor’s function is not to teach Emile about the world but to control it for him. As pedagogy, Emile is sometimes attacked on moral grounds. The child should be raised naturally, but his environment is entirely artificial. He should be educated for freedom, but his tutor manipulates his every experience. Such attacks miss the point of the unnatural elements of Emile’s environment. Rousseau cannot be faulted on grounds of bad faith. Emile is not Summerhill. Emile’s world is not controlled for the reasons of safety or comfort that give liberal educators scruples. There Rousseau is remarkably blithe. His concern is to create not a world that will never harm the child, but one that will always make sense to him. In it, the connections between action and reward, moral evil and its natural consequences, are always manifest. The tutor must manipulate the world so that all constraints have the appearance of natural necessity. Bad consequences will never be missing, nor will they appear as arbitrary punishment. They are simply as they should be—the natural effects of ordinary causes.
The tutor’s job is to correct the oversights of Providence. Emile should always learn from experience. He studies geometry not by proving theorems but by calculating at what angle the ladder must be placed to reach cherries on the tree. He learns astronomy not by hearing lectures but by getting lost in the forest and finding his way home by the stars. The most important lesson he must learn is that virtue and happiness are intrinsically connected. Some such lessons are easy. Rousseau will give the child no speeches about the corruption of luxury. It’s enough, he thinks, to appeal to his senses: any healthy child will like country food better than a cramped Paris banquet. What to do when the connections are murkier; where the link between happiness and virtue, suffering and wickedness seems out of reach? There the tutor steps in—not with words, but with actions. His job is not to describe those connections, just to underscore the operations of Providence. And if necessary, he can always make a contribution to them. Like Newton’s God, he need not intervene very often. But nature is never designed well enough to do without him entirely.
Rousseau is often accused of incoherence, and the number of conflicting interpretations of his work can seem to support the accusation. Some readers, from Voltaire to Judith Shklar, have emphasized the dark and somber tone found in many of his works instead of the hopeful notes emphasized here. Rousseau’s moods about whether his solutions were viable surely wavered. Even a more steadfast person could be torn in two directions when faced with the problems he saw so clearly, and Rousseau may have been the most tormented soul in the history of philosophy. But his texts make available the more hopeful line that readers like Kant and Cassirer drew. The idea that the problem of evil might be formulated in a way that gives a key to its solution is not only supported by the relationships between species and individual development sketched above. It is also underlined by Rousseau’s tireless search for political solutions. These ranged from the general theory of the Social Contract to the particular attempts to help Poland and Corsica formulate new political orders. Through education and politics, Rousseau thought we could reshape most things that now look natural. The true nature thereby exposed mostly works as it should. Surely the need for an occasional pedagogically guiding hand isn’t enough to threaten your faith in it?
DIVIDED WISDOM: IMMANUEL KANT
All the elements for explosion were assembled. Did Kant try to prevent it, or did he provide the match? To see how his work fuels both impulses, we must elaborate its background. Leibniz used Alfonso to defuse a danger, transforming him from a threat against faith in God’s perfection to a rash if good-natured fool. In Kant’s hands he once again became a challenge. All science aimed at making the world intelligible. Philosophy, insofar as it was separate from other sciences, perhaps even the queen of them, had to safeguard the possibility of intelligibility itself. Rousseau tried to do it, but the costs were significant.
We’ve already seen the first: God’s role in the world decreases. God wasn’t entirely absent in Rousseau’s version of Providence, but He was more of a shadow than anything else. The more responsibility for evil accrues to the human, the less belongs to the divine. Empowering humanity was precisely Rousseau’s intention. Even more than Leibniz’s, Rousseau’s success was greater than he’d planned. Leibniz vindicated God by restricting His choices through eternal forms. The result, as Hegel put it, was too much of a fairy tale to really disturb anyone (Hegel 7, 3:340). Rousseau vindicated God by shifting our focus to moral evil and arguing that He’d given us resources to control it. Once the most rational response to Alfonso became the vision of a world for which God is not responsible, Alfonso himself receded from view. His questions were too modest, his challenge to God too polite. The icon of the late Enlightenment is another figure entirely.
Prometheus didn’t ask the gods to hear his advice. He defied them completely, stole their fire, and brought light to humankind. They weren’t about to offer it, and he wasn’t about to wait for them. The discussion of Prometheus in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought in Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth is so good that I will not try to add to it, except to draw one conclusion implicit in his work. Goethe’s poem “Prometheus” ignited the Pantheism Controversy, the eighteenth-century debate that invented the word nihilism.9 These are the crucial lines:
When I was a child,
Not knowing my way
I turned my erring eyes
Sunward, as if above there were
An ear to hear my lamentation,
A heart like mine
To care for the distressed.
Who helped me
Against the Titans’ wanton insolence
Who rescued me from death, from slavery?
Have you not done all this yourself,
Holy glowing heart?
And young and good, you glowed
Betrayed, with thanks for rescue
To him who slept above?
I honor you? For what?
Have you ever eased the suffering
Of the oppressed?
Have you ever stilled the tears of the frightened?
Was I not wielded to manhood
By almighty Time
And eternal fate,
My masters and yours?
Did you fancy perchance
That I should hate life
And fly to the desert
Because not all
My blossom dreams ripened?
Here I sit, forming men
In my own image
A race to be like me
To suffer, to weep
To delight and to rejoice
And to defy you,
As I do.
(Goethe, in Kaufmann)
The Pantheismusstreit began when Lessing heard the poem and avowed that it fit his own Spinozistic views. But Spinoza was a pantheist, not a pagan. What in this poem could be common to both views? It must be the denial of Providence. In the worlds of Spinoza and Prometheus, God’s intentions are not hidden from us; as far as we’re concerned, there are none. For Blumenberg, who stressed Goethe’s impact on the course of German philosophy, his “fundamental idea is that God would have had to arrange the world differently if he had been concerned about man” (Blumenberg 3, 556).
Rousseau, of course, had argued otherwise. But the extent of the tutor’s role in Emile displayed the flaw in his system that would prove to undo it. If the natural world routinely connected happiness and virtue, we just might overlook an occasional earthquake. But if the natural education that is supposed to reveal the goodness of human nature requires constant intervention, how good can the connections be? Rousseau could protest that in the original state of nature, connections were more direct. The tutor must engage in myriad forms of manipulation because we live in a world that’s been spoiled. Emile’s isolation from it can never be total. He was born into a society which destroyed the natural order that the tutor must work to rebuild. But if the work is as extensive as all that, the hopes for redemption of even one child look precarious, and all the old questions return in new form. Perhaps God did create a world whose moral order is transparent, and the world’s defects are our own making. But why is the order so fragile? Either we or the world should have been made less vulnerable: we to moral corruption, or the world to being damaged by it. Arranged as they are, human beings and the natural world hardly seem to have been made for each other.
It’s easy to conclude that they’re not. Purpose then drops out of Creation entirely, to become located in human beings. The universe is not only indifferent to human purposes, but positively resistant to them. One can try to be a Spinozist and do without purpose altogether. Spinozism was resisted, however, not only because it was anathema to orthodoxy, but because Prometheus better captures the intuitions of ordinary experience. We seek light and warmth and everything that follows from them. To get them, we’re compelled to work by stratagem or force, and we pay, often dearly, for every advance we’re lucky enough to succeed in wresting from the natural world. If few of us find our lives reflected in Spinoza’s vision of a world in which our own purposes are merely apparent, even fewer will resort to real paganism. So modern dualism becomes compelling. The resistance of nature that we experience daily, in matters great and small, is not the work of angry anthropomorphic deities but simply part of the arbitrary stuff of the universe. Natural evils are neither just punishment for something despicable nor unjust punishment for something heroic, but framework of the human condition. That condition is structured by mortality and, even more generally, by finitude. Being limited is being who we are. If finitude isn’t punishment, it’s no evidence of sin. It isn’t exactly a lack; it may not even be a property. We have purposes; the world does not. Both of these constitute something essential to the nature of each, and neither has any meaning at all.
Thus the problem of evil became structurally irresolvable. These are assumptions worked out clearly by Kant. As he described it, the problem of evil presupposes a systematic connection between happiness and virtue, or, conversely, between natural and moral evil. But the world seems to show no such connection at all. Virtue is the domain of human reason, which Kant defined as the faculty of purposes. Happiness depends on events in the natural world. The difference between reason and nature is, for Kant, the difference on which the world turns. The one is a matter of what ought to be; the other is a matter of what is. Each makes its own claims, and nothing is more important than learning to distinguish them. Recognizing reality and demanding to change it are fundamentally different activities. Both wisdom and virtue depend on keeping them separate, but all our hopes are directed to joining them. Whether we’re trying to make sense of the world by understanding or by altering it, we are guided by an idea of the Unconditioned—a world that would be, as a whole, transparent to human reason. If it were transparent, it would be as it should be. If it were as it should be, we would have no more demands, theoretical or practical. The world, made for our purposes, would be the best of all possible ones. We could not even formulate a question about it.
For Kant this set of assumptions was neither foolish nor trivial. Nor does it express a psychological need of our species that might have been different. It embodies what he called a need of reason that is presupposed in any attempt to make sense of the world. And yet it’s a need that can never be met: the gap between is and ought is not accidental but systematic. It’s a gap that will leave us permanently torn.
Immanuel Kant has already appeared in this book, and will accompany it to the end. Any narrative of the history of modern philosophy will assign him a central place. Mine must begin by showing, first, that he was concerned with the problem of evil at all. For it seems paradigmatic of those questions which may indeed, as he wrote, be prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, but which transcend all reason’s powers to answer. Kant’s enthusiastic notes about Rousseau and his essays on earthquakes belong to his early, pre-Critical work. His intellectual life began with the Leibnizian views his mature, Critical work undermined. Traces of his early views inhabit the later texts. Those with an open eye can find them in surprising places. The example of the relation of ground to consequent that he gives in the “Metaphysical Deduction”—hardly a soft spot in the Critical Philosophy—comes straight from classic discussions of the problem of evil. If there is perfect justice, the obstinately wicked are punished (A73/B99). This is the example used to illustrate the principle that became, in Kant’s system, the principle of sufficient reason. But Kant’s examples are often problematic; scholars could view this as a relic of early obsessions that the later work condemned to irrelevance. For such hints notwithstanding, Kant’s most central discovery was the discovery that we are, necessarily, ignorant. Questions about God and His purposes, the nature and sense of Creation, thus the materials for thinking about the problem of evil, are all out of bounds. The wish to answer them is the wish to transcend the limits of human reason. And the wish to transcend those limits is uncomfortably close to the wish to be God.
Appearances are seldom completely deceptive. The warning not to seek to displace God is exactly one-half of the message of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. His thought about these questions developed, of course, from the enthusiastic note of 1765 to the virtual despair of his last essay in 1800. Tracing that development could be the task of one long book. Here I will attempt something much more schematic. I begin by sketching that line of Kant’s thought which condemns the wish to be God. I conclude by sketching the line that suggests it’s a wish we can never extinguish. In trying to resolve that conflict, thinkers like Schelling and Hegel took the road to Absolute Idealism. Kant himself remained simply torn.
Dissatisfaction comes from the wish to be God. If any one claim is the message of Kant’s epistemology, it is this. Traditional metaphysics could not solve the questions it posed because those questions transcend the limits of human knowledge. To answer them, we would need access to the absolute reality of the world as a whole. Kant’s questions are so deep that once they are posed, they virtually answer themselves. Everyone else simply failed to ask them. Can we know things as they are in themselves, independent of whatever conditions we need to know them? The fact that we cannot is nearly tautological. Does human knowledge have conditions? Doubtless. What might they be? This requires work, and the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to it. Do we create what we perceive, or are objects of perception given to us? Of course they are given—to anyone but God. What structures must exist to create the possibilities in which they can be given? Frameworks of space, time, and very general concepts lie ready to structure the unordered data of perception. Can’t we get beyond them? Beyond space? Beyond time? I don’t want to be God. Of course not. Just to know things as they really are. Without the conditions that make it possible for human beings to know things? Without any mediation that is external to things in themselves.
If by the complaints—that we have no insight whatsoever into the inner nature of things—it be meant that we cannot conceive by pure understanding what the things which appear to us may be in themselves, they are entirely illegitimate and unreasonable. For what is demanded is that we should be able to know things, and therefore intuit them, without senses, and therefore that we should have a faculty of knowledge altogether different from the human, and this not only in degree but as regards intuition likewise in kind—in other words, that we should be not men but beings of whom we are unable to say whether they are even possible, much less how they are constituted. (A277/B333)
To know objects independently of the conditions under which they can be given to us would be to know them through what Kant calls intellectual intution—a capacity that would allow us to perceive in and through the moment of creation. Don’t bother trying to understand this; Kant’s point is that you can’t. The concept of intellectual intuition isn’t an attempt to describe a different kind of intuition, but to make us wonder about our own. God, presumably, perceives through the act of creation—a perception not even to be compared with our mediated perception of things like soup or books or tables, which we create from material that is given to us. Our wish to perceive things differently is a wish that makes no sense. We cannot even express it.10
Nevertheless it’s the wish that underlies all the epistemology and metaphysics that took place before Kant’s Copernican Revolution. Some philosophers were explicit in viewing the search for knowledge as imitatio Dei. Plato was so certain that approaching wisdom entails despising the sensual conditions which limit human knowledge that his Socrates is happy to die in order to transcend them. Leibniz views God’s knowledge to be less finite than ours only because He lives longer than we do. This gives Him time to unfold all the truths contained in complete concepts, hence to know why what seemed contingent was actually necessary. Had we the same amount of time at our disposal, we too could know the same. Empiricists, who stressed the sensual component of knowledge, thought there were principled differences between God’s knowledge and our own. Locke, for example, believed that only God knows essences, while we know accidents. But even those empiricists for whom God disappears entirely tacitly relied on a model of knowledge that would be appropriate to Him alone. Hume’s ontology contains neither God nor soul, nor even causes or objects in ordinary senses. But despite the radical skepticism of his metaphysics, he neglected to pose the question put by Kant. In failing to ask whether there are conditions on perception of those bundles of impressions that do make up his world, Hume failed to note the fundamental fact about human knowledge: whatever the stuff we perceive turns out to be, it is not created by us. The Scottish atheist underestimated the magnitude of the fact that we aren’t God.
Kant called his own view transcendental idealism, and juxtaposed it with transcendental realism. However they sought it, he held that earlier philosophers sought a route straight to the heart of reality, shunning any form of mediation as a restriction on knowledge. They all thereby presupposed a model of unmediated knowledge that made everything else look deficient. Kant thought every attempt to overcome those deficiencies was an attempt to overcome the limits imposed by the nature of the human. Such attempts are senseless railing against what is so far beyond possibility that we cannot even imagine it. So essential are the limitations on our knowledge that we should not perceive them as failings. For even to imagine another way of knowing that would be successful must surpass all our powers of thought. Earlier philosophy viewed the finitude of human knowledge as a problem; Kant viewed it as a fact. More precisely, it is the fact about knowledge, defining every epistemological relation we have to the world. Kant had no tendencies toward quietism. His awareness of our limits, and the threats of contingency, never led him to give up in the face of them; this was the man who introduced the first lightning rods to the city of Königsberg. Nor did he urge us to be content with our lot. As was clear when he discussed Job, he found plenty of grounds for complaint about the human condition. The finitude of knowledge was just not among them. This may be the biggest difference between Kant and Leibniz. Since, for Leibniz, human knowledge was like God’s knowledge, but smaller, a grievance about its limits is built into the structure of his epistemology. Without his high hopes for overcoming those limits by some form of progress in science, Leibniz’s view would succumb to the pessimism enshrined in its structure. The philosopher renowned for the claim that this world is the best of all possible ones built dissatisfaction into his theory of knowledge—while being content to leave the world as it is.
Kant recognized the power of the wish to be God, and offered the deepest of epistemological reasons for letting it go. If it’s the nature of human knowledge to be limited in ways he described, many traditional questions of metaphysics must be out of bounds. Whether the world as a whole is intelligible is a question without sense. But as deep as are the epistemological grounds for rejecting it, Kant offered even deeper, moral ones in the second Critique.
A child was killed through violence or neglect. A criminal betrayed his way into power he enjoys without penalty or regret. Fill in examples as you choose. What do you mean when you say: that should not have happened? Kant says you mean that happiness and virtue should be systematically connected, and the connection should be causal. Those who are righteous for the sake of righteousness itself should be blessed because of it. They deserve all the goods nature can bestow on humanity—not merely satisfaction with their own righteousness. Those who are wicked ought to suffer—not merely through the pains of tormented conscience, which they show little evidence of feeling anyway, but through something imposed by the world itself. Innocent people should not be harmed. (Our intuitions about those who are neither righteous nor wicked are more complex. On the one hand, harming them is paradigmatic of evil action. On the other, they do not quite fit into the reward-and-punishment thinking that affects this problem.) The assumption that happiness and virtue should be systematically connected is so deep that it is seldom even stated, but Kant holds it to be at the bottom of every moral critique. Every moment of despair in the face of others’ suffering, every expression of outrage at the sight of others’ cruelty, is based on conviction that the world should work on principle. The use of the adjective innocent to modify the noun suffering testifies to the automatic way in which the principle is accepted. Before you dismiss it as a relic of naive wishful thinking, ask yourself whether the principle can be coherently negated. Happiness and virtue should not be systematically connected. Can normative claims contain contradiction? Try thinking a consequence that could follow from this one. Those who help others should be slowly tortured. You can say words like these, but they make as much sense as saying A is not A. But a world in which happiness and virtue were systematically disconnected would express more order than is evident in the world. What about sheer random relation, something like the disorder we often seem to experience? Generosity should sometimes be noticed, sometimes disregarded. People who show it should be met with blank indifference. You can imagine such a world, but can you imagine wanting it? Here the random may be still bleaker than the willfully perverse.
Chapter 4 will discuss Kant’s reasons for thinking that the idea of this world as the best one is not a childish wish. It is rather, he believes, a requirement of human reason. Here the question is not why it’s reasonable to have such a wish, but why we ought never to know whether that wish is fulfilled. Kant thought all moral action has one goal: to realize a world in which happiness and virtue are systematically connected. Every time we act rightly, we are acting to bring the world closer to this ideal. The knowledge that we often fail, and that the world fails to work with us, may lead to despair only faith can heal. In Kant’s view we must believe that all our efforts to be virtuous will be completed by a Being who controls the natural world in ways we do not. We have no evidence that such a Being exists. But only such a Being could provide the systematic links between happiness and virtue that reason demands. Reason needs such belief in order to maintain its commitments: to waking up ever again, through half-success and failure, to continue the struggle to create another world. Kant argued for this kind of faith throughout his work. He was sure that without some such faith, we would succumb to resignation at best, and cynicism at worst. How else can we face a life that increasingly shows us how rarely the world reveals the connections between happiness and virtue that reason demands?
The crucial difference between this view and the traditional one is Kant’s conviction that we should not know those connections. Leibniz hoped the progress of science would make all connections between natural and moral evils manifest. Once we could see them, we would know in detail what we now know merely as a general principle: this world is the best of all possible ones. Others doubted we would ever succeed in knowing those connections, but no one ever doubted that we should. For it seemed unquestionable that knowledge of the connections between happiness and virtue would strengthen both of them. We’d be less liable to despair, and less prone to decadence, were we certain the world works as it should.
Kant was nowhere more stunning than when denying all that. He argued just the opposite. Knowledge of the connections between happiness and virtue is not only metaphysically impossible but morally disastrous. Consider your relations with people in power. You may want to compliment without meaning to flatter. You may try to smile from sheer graciousness, try to give just from fullness of heart. Perhaps you enjoy and respect them, and seek ways to express it. How often can you forget the hope of goods they can bestow? Jobs or money? On occasion. What about that vaguer advancement which results from general esteem? For how long? Where the connections between good behavior and its reward are obvious, only saints can act without instrumentalizing. The rest of us will calculate, in terms of varying subtlety.
Now imagine a world where you knew what God knows: how every right action will be rewarded, every wrong one avenged. Could you engage in moral action? Act out of pure goodwill? Kant says that you could not, at least not consistently. Your relationship to God would be that which you have toward your employer, writ very, very large. If you are lucky, he has all the virtues, and you may want to please him for the sake of being pleasant. But while he controls the means to your existence, you can never know that you will meet him without instrumental considerations in the background. The analogy is imperfect only because the constellations are so different in size. In the world we’re imagining, we’re imagining a relation between a Being whose power is so absolute that He can right any wrong and reward any right—and everybody else. This is the fantasy that’s expressed in many a standard prayer. Were it to be realized, we would be undone. A morally transparent world would preclude the possibility of morality.
The best of all possible worlds is not a world we could live in, for the very notion of human freedom depends on limitation. To act freely is to act without enough knowledge or power—that is, without omniscience or omnipotence. Not knowing whether our good intentions will be rewarded is essential to our having them. If we knew the world was the world that we long for, human nature would change beyond recognition. Kant thinks our behavior would improve. Who would dare commit a crime if he were certain that the cosmic order actually worked? Some version of eternal damnation would suffice to deter almost anyone from almost anything. But good behavior is not the same as moral behavior, and the struggle to achieve the latter, which makes up human decency, would simply disappear. Like puppets pulled by a master, we would do nothing but move for carrots and sticks.
“Our faith is not scientific knowledge, and thank Heaven it is not!” (Kant 11, 2.2). This claim is central to Kant’s thought as a whole. It was widely and early criticized. Heinrich Heine found it cheap, and the rest of the nineteenth century couldn’t stand it. Yet thanking Heaven for remaining inscrutable can make perfect sense. Providence itself requires that we cannot know it. Our very uncertainty about whether Providence works as it should is one more testimony to the awesome wisdom that orders Creation. For, Kant continued,
suppose we could attain to scientific knowledge of God’s existence … all our morality would break down. In his every action, man would represent God to himself as rewarder or avenger. This image would force itself on his soul, and his hope for reward and fear of punishment would take the place of moral motives. (Kant 11, 2.2)
This is deeper than the charge that theodicy leads to quietism posed in the question: If you know God will always take care of the world, why should you bother to do so yourself? Kant was also concerned with that problem. It led him to insist that faith in a world which coordinates happiness and virtue can’t be faith in another world to come but in a transformation of the world that we live in. Temporal suffering is not advance payment for eternal bliss. But the problem of quietism could be handled by traditional means: if the systematic connections between virtue and happiness are causal ones, we first have to act well in order to see them. The more radical point is another. Solving the problem of evil is not only impossible but immoral. For knowing the connections between moral and natural evils would undermine the possibility of morality.
If this weren’t enough, Kant’s last works add more dramatic reproaches. Theodicy is not merely impossible and immoral; it also tends toward blasphemy. Here Kant was less concerned with logical than with psychological relations. His analysis of the motives that led thinkers to create theodicies is brilliant. Traditional metaphysicians expatiated on the glory and justice of God in the hope that He would be listening and would reward them accordingly. This is very wishful thinking. What else could drive them to deny the brute force of pain? Kant thought they could not possibly believe in the connections between natural and moral evils they asserted without evidence. The claim that all suffering is just payment for some crime or another is belied by ordinary experience every day. To repeat it to Job as he cries on the ash-heap is to sin against the friend whose righteousness his friends should know and whose pain they should acknowledge. It is also to sin against truth itself, as only a scoundrel could do.
So Kant denounced the standard position one might call the theodicy of ignorance. God’s standpoint is not our standpoint; His wisdom is incomparable; what may seem to be against our interests may be in fact the best means of realizing them; unlike God, we cannot judge what is best for the whole. It’s a view one might think Kant would find congenial, but he attacked it with vehemence, calling it an apology that requires no refutation but the abomination of anyone with the least feeling for morality (Kant 8, A202). What’s wrong with saying that God has ways we cannot understand?
For Kant, even this much knowledge is too much knowledge. To say that God has purposes, though we don’t know them, is to say that God has purposes. That’s precisely what was in doubt. To assert it a priori is to trade recognition of the reality of suffering for a consolation so abstract it cannot really comfort. It must be meant to work like a charm: if I assert God’s justice and wisdom often enough and loudly enough, perhaps He’ll bestow it on me. It’s an infantile form of Pascal’s wager. This way, at least, I run no risks. (Think of the trouble Alfonso got into for simply questioning.)
Superstition may strike you as silly but harmless. For Kant it is blasphemy. The problem with superstition is less what it does to us—turning what should be autonomous adults into self-made, foolish children—than what it does to God. Every superstition is an act of idolatry, the attempt to appease or flatter a powerful being in the hope that he’ll reward us, on earth or elsewhere. Kant’s God hates sacrifices in every form. Kant saw little difference between burning an entrail, doing a rain-dance, or saying a prayer for eternal salvation, except that the latter is likely to contain more hypocrisy. This theme runs throughout Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, the book that was banned by the Prussian censor. It fueled his conviction in the impiety of theodicy. To defend God by insisting a priori that He always rewards happiness with virtue is to fly so directly in the face of experience that one who does it can only have one of two base motives. If he isn’t hoping that God is eavesdropping and will reward his flattery—a hope that debases the Creator no less than the created—he must be out to convert or console. But to win friends for God by pointing out the fruits of His friendship is to give instrumental reasons for being holy—a clear contradiction, and a vile one at that. No wonder Kant held the biblical prohibition on God’s image to be central and sublime. To break our tendency toward idolatry, our idea of God must be so exalted that we cannot even represent it.
Kant’s discussion of idolatry occurred in his discussion of the moral law. Rewards should never be dangled to make us moral, any more than images of God’s likeness should ever be offered to make us pious. Rather than encouraging morality or holiness with incentives, such processes dilute and debase them. Goodness is genuine only if done for goodness’ sake. Attempts to give extrinsic reasons for virtue do not merely weaken virtue; they destroy its very essence. To illustrate, Kant began with examples on which all will agree. There is a fundamental difference between the shopkeeper who never cheats because cheating is wrong, and one who never cheats because a reputation for honesty will bring him more customers. Their behavior may never be different, but one is moral and the other is not. This is the root intuition that led Kant to the position others would call deontological: action is moral action only if done from regard for the moral law itself, regardless of consequences. Kant’s insistence on this view acknowledges the depth to which thinking about Providence lies behind our thought about ethics and action, as it attempts to undo that thinking. For maintaining this view, he was accused of everything from a masochism that demands we get no pleasure from good actions, to a mad passion for justice which, like that of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, lays waste to every other good in its path. Yet Kant’s ethical writings, if read as a whole, make clear that he neither scorned happiness nor despised human desire for the goods of the world. Over and over, he insisted on them. He also insisted on what he took to be simple honesty: virtue is one thing, and happiness another.
This is a claim that ought to be trivial. But its implications are so difficult that we’d prefer to deny it, in any one of a number of ways. If we acknowledge the gap between virtue and happiness, we seem bound to acknowledge that though virtue may lie in our hands, happiness most certainly does not. Kant was even more merciless than Rousseau in attacking those Stoics who tried to collapse happiness into virtue. They thereby wished to give us an illusion of power. For any but gods, this is simply bad faith. Consciousness of one’s own virtue may be the noblest source of happiness, but it’s very far from being the only one. In Job’s case it was a particular source of bitterness, when he lost all other conditions required for happiness: knowing he’d done nothing to deserve his fate made his fate all the harder to bear. Should a righteous man be comforted by the thought that his suffering is not merely suffering, but evidence that the world as a whole is unjust?
But look at the choices. We cannot be virtuous in order to be happy, for virtue as means is not really virtue. The shopkeeper who knows that fraudulent scales prevent potential customers from sending small children or blind aunts to his store cares not about honesty but about investment. Virtuous actions undertaken in the service of happiness may not be evil, but they are not examples of virtue. It’s this idea that led Schiller and others to think Kant held only unhappy people to be good ones. Yet Kant insisted that the desire for happiness is a desire of human reason, which the Stoics were dishonest to deny. If we should neither be virtuous in order to be happy nor persuade ourselves that being virtuous is all we need to be happy, how should we view their relation?
Kant said we should be virtuous for the sake of virtue alone. But doing our duty makes us worthy to be happy—which is not the same thing as making us happy. The relation we’re imagining is not quite a causal one. It means going through the world like Orpheus through hell. If we do not turn, eyes focused straight toward what’s right, we may hope to have it all: virtue and reward. If we falter for a moment, the object is gone. To look for reward is to lose the virtue that is its rightful condition. Yet Kant would be the last to say to Orpheus that his songs should be enough.
Heine attacked Kant for several forms of bad faith, but the attitude Kant demanded is anything but dishonest. It is certainly tortured—more bluntly, hellish. He knew it demanded extraordinary faith in a world that gives us few grounds for trust. In a universe of earthquakes, can you count on contingency to work in your favor? Why should Hades keep a promise?
Rousseau gave the young Kant something like grounds. The Emile can be read much as Newton’s Principia can be: both were background texts Kant used in describing general laws that structure our world. The argument he gave for rational faith is faith in a world that works roughly as those works described. Emile depicted a natural order in which virtue is the cause of happiness—not because God intervenes to reward us, nor because people raised virtuously are good at calculating, but because the natural order is so good that this is roughly how things work. As Kant grew older, the order seems less certain to him. For the problem is worse than it initially seemed. It may be right to separate the rightness of an action from the goodness of its consequences, but both clearly matter. And like everything else in the natural world, the consequences are not up to us. Perhaps you can give up your own claims to happiness and are willing to settle for virtue. You will want all the more to know that your right actions had the consequences you intended, that your virtue itself was successful. This knowledge too is fundamentally out of reach.
Kant’s last essay addressed this subject, but most readers dismiss it entirely. “On the Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives” considers the following case. Your innocent friend took refuge in your cellar from a murderer pursuing him. When the murderer arrives at your doorstep demanding to know his whereabouts, should you tell a lie? Kant says you should not, and his reason will puzzle. It is possible that if you lie and tell the murderer your friend is elsewhere, he will leave the house to continue his pursuit, thereby running straight into your friend, who just managed to slip out the basement window to what he thought was safety. This argument has seemed so awful that it’s been used to maintain that the elderly Kant suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. Kant’s attackers have been delighted with what they view as an instance of rigorism that ends in absurdity. If other passages in Kant seem blindly rule-bound and formalistic, none seems to give better reason for rejecting his moral philosophy than one suggesting that betraying your friend to a murderer is preferable to telling a lie. Most Kantians agree this is the thrust of the essay. But arguing that it’s the wrong consequence to draw from Kant’s ethics as a whole, they opt to save the latter by dismissing this short work.
At first glance, the essay does seem ridiculous: its central argument looks less appropriate to philosophy than to slapstick. The vision of murderer and victim crashing into one another is enough to raise guffaws or eyebrows—if it weren’t also a vision of the tragic. For just as surely as comedy, tragedy lives on wrong identifications, opportunities missed and grabbed in the split of a second, paths crossed at the least expected moments, intentions that hit marks their agents never aimed at. It is, in short, about the power of the contingent, and the importance of the fact that we don’t control the natural world. Kant’s discussion of the murderer underlined all that. His point was not that it’s better to betray your friend than to lie about his whereabouts, still less that telling lies is a fate worse than death. Though many readers overlook it, Kant was willing to consider lying to protect the fragile ego of an author. This shows a healthy skepticism about truth telling that belies his reputation and suggests he might allow lying—if successful—to protect other things as well.11 His point was, rather, one we have no wish to hear: our power over the consequences of our actions is really very small. What lies in our hands is good intention itself.
It’s easier to dismiss Kant than to dismiss the implications of his essay, once taken seriously. The absurdity in this example underscores both the depth and the scope of contingency. Maturity is a theme and a goal of all Kant’s philosophy; accepting one’s limits is always a part of it, as well as of commoner demands for growing up. The last essay hints that not even maturity is an option, for there seem to be no limits to the limits of our power. We can give up dreams of revolution, settle down to plant a garden with our friends. What’s to stop a mad assassin from breaking into it? What ensures safe access to the escape route devised to avoid him? As there is no limit to our lack of power, so there is no limit to the number of things that can go wrong. Meditating on them can be a recipe for comedy, or for paralyzing sorts of neurosis, but they are no less numerous for the fact that living successfully requires us to forget them.
Successful lives, like maturity, seemed to depend on moderation. This was urged by Greek thinkers, like Socrates, whom Nietzsche blamed for the death of tragedy and the birth of a world that eschews both tragedy and fairy tale. It’s a world where Oedipus and Jocasta turn out to be first cousins once removed, and are free to grow fat and bored together. Instead of the plague that ravished Thebes, their reign heralds nothing worse than a rise in unemployment and a decline in the GNP. The point is not that such a world is unimaginable. Nothing could be easier to imagine. The problem is that even should Oedipus choose to seek it, its realization is not in his hands. Small dreams are no surer to come true than great ones, and either can become nightmare in the blink of an eye. Recognizing one’s limits seems a form of fair trade: if we withdraw some of our claims on the world, surely those remaining will be met. Yet the wish to determine the world can’t be coherently limited, for you cannot know which event will turn out to be not just another event, but one that will change your life. Romance is one exposition of this fact, tragedy another.
Tragedy is about the ways that virtue and happiness fail to rhyme, for the want, or the excess, of some inconsiderable piece of the world which happens to be the only thing that mattered. Kant’s work was written in increasing awareness of it. If the older Nietzsche made the sage of Königsberg a figure of fun, the younger Nietzsche paid his work the compliment of calling it tragic. The tragedy is real. Kant’s understanding of the ways that the wish to be God fuels most of our mistakes is as deep as his understanding of the ways that only being God would really help. The wish to be God isn’t simply pathological; its alternative is blind trust in the world to work as it should. What leads you to it?
Nothing shows the dilemma so clearly as Kant’s attacks on Stoic thought. Stoics sought to secure satisfaction in exchange for renouncing happiness. Perhaps you are tempted to follow them. Suppose you don’t care about happiness, but only about the realization of that virtue for which you’ve renounced everything else. Kant wouldn’t believe you, but let that be his problem. Yours is another. Being satisfied that you’ve acted rightly is just as little in your control as any other kind of reward. You may keep heart and soul trained on the Highest Good before you, let no sideways glance distract your way. Still the question is not whether Eurydice will follow, but whether anything will. You may opt for sainthood, and it’s still up for grabs. Your friend in the cellar could slip out the door.
The gap between our purposes and a nature that is indifferent to them leaves the world with an almost unacceptable structure. For it’s easy to resign oneself to finitude—as long as it stays within limits. If we cannot even guarantee our own effective virtue, we may incline to a rage no Stoicism can still. Of the many distinctions Kant took wisdom and sanity to depend upon drawing, none was deeper than the difference between God and all the rest of us. Kant reminds us as often as possible of all that God can do and we cannot. Nobody in the history of philosophy was more aware of the number of ways we can forget it. He was equally conscious of the temptation to idolatry, the alternative route to confusing God with other beings. Kant’s relentless determination to trace the ways we forget our finitude was matched only by his awareness that such forgetting is natural. Here forgetting is prescribed by the nature of reason and virtue themselves. If the desire to reject human finitude is the desire to control the world just enough to achieve our rightly chosen ends, it’s a desire that morality itself should make sense. What desire could be more worthy?
The legitimacy of the wish to overcome human limit shapes the expression of the categorical imperative: Act as though the principle of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature. In the original German of his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the words “universal law of nature” are printed in boldface. The formulation begs for explanation, and much has been written about it. One aspect has not been sufficiently emphasized. Universal laws can be imagined by anyone; universal laws of nature are given by one Being alone. In giving us this formula, Kant gave us a chance to pretend to be God. Every time we face a moral dilemma, we are to imagine reenacting the Creation. What choices would we make if given a chance to create the best of all possible worlds?
Kant’s examples move from logic to preference: some kinds of world would break down entirely; others would just not be the best they could be. So he sometimes discusses cases that lead to worlds we cannot coherently imagine, and sometimes those that lead to worlds we cannot really want. Consider his first example of moral dilemma. The Groundwork introduces a man who, “reduced to despair by a series of evils, feels a weariness with life but is still in possession of his reason sufficiently to ask whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life” (Kant 5, 422). How is he to decide the question? Kant suggested he formulate the principle he would act on if he killed himself, then challenged him to imagine a world where that principle worked as smoothly and effortlessly as the law of gravity. Here is his principle: “For love of myself, I make it my principle to shorten my life when by a longer duration it threatens more evil than satisfaction” (ibid.). Could we imagine the world running according to such a law? In such a world, every threat that life would bring more evil than satisfaction would lead, inevitably, to suicide. Kant thinks this a world we cannot imagine.
Note that when we use this fantasy to test our own principles, we are meant to use all we know about how the world works. It’s often been noted that the fact that people have memories, and record acts of deception, is crucial for the Groundwork’s more famous example of lying: deception would have little consequence if we forgot when we were deceived. For Kant, it seemed clear that life’s evils outweigh its satisfactions. Indeed, he held that on hedonistic grounds, no rational being would continue to be alive. This wasn’t an unusual opinion, as we’ll see in chapter 3. Current conceptions of eighteenth-century optimism notwithstanding, the belief that human life contains less good than evil seemed sheer common sense. Kant presupposed it in arguing that a world in which everyone shortened a life that threatened more evil than goodness would simply self-destruct. As a competent God, you could not allow such a law to be enacted. If it worked as well as your other laws of nature, your creatures would shortly disappear.
It’s an interesting offer. The perspective Kant provided was both challenge and consolation. The categorical imperative can be viewed as a constraint on our self-interested and sensual drives, but it’s also a chance to escape our own limits anytime we feel brought low by them. If the blows of bad fortune have left you in despair, you can leave them, for a moment, as lawgiving sovereign. If sharp or petty needs make meanness seem tempting, there’s a device to create nobility of character that is second to none. The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals states that everyone should regard himself as lawgiver of the world at all times (Kant 5, 438). Imitatio Dei was proscribed as a principle for guiding acts of knowledge, but it was all the more present in everything else.
While rejecting every comparison between ourselves and God in the theoretical realm, Kant was determined to shape us in each other’s image in the practical one. He was explicit in repeating that God’s will, like ours, must be determined by criteria of pure practical reason. Nothing about being God makes His decisions authoritative—except the fact, which is almost accidental, that His decisions always turn out to be right ones. God operates according to the same moral laws as we do; He just never neglects to obey them. And if God is a more perfect version of an ordinary human agent, for practical reason we are just a less perfect version of God. When following the categorical imperative, human agents are to imagine themselves writ large. Like Leibniz’s God examining the essences of all things and deciding which combination to actualize, we should test our maxims according to the laws of nature we know. Like Leibniz’s God, when we’re not creating according to the law of noncontradiction, we are to create according to the principle of the best. Some laws would not actually lead to sheer breakdown, but are they the best a good legislator could devise? Kant considered a world made to run on the principle that nobody should ever help another. Such a world is not impossible, unlike that of Hobbes: were humankind really inclined to perpetual war as a universal law of nature, its demise would be swift and assured. By contrast, a world ruled by mutual indifference would be able to function. Yet it’s hardly the best one a creative God could discover. Far better to produce one where generous sympathy had the status of law.
Kant’s emphasis that moral laws must be universal ones has been ascribed to everything from particularly Prussian rigidity to general Enlightenment Eurocentrism. It is not my present interest to defend him from such reproaches. I wish only to underline that part of Kant’s universalism which stems from concerns about consequence and control. Kant asked us to consider our actions from the perspective of universal lawmaking not only because doing so expressed the core of any demand for fairness. As Kant himself knew, the categorical imperative also expresses folk wisdom and religious precept. Putting yourself in the other fellow’s shoes, or refusing to do to him what you don’t want done to you, is not a new suggestion.
The demand that we consider moral principles as universal laws formulates a fantasy of power as well as a sense of justice. If moral laws were universal laws of nature, they would actually work. Lying continues to work because not everybody does it—at least not all the time. People can live indifferent to the welfare of others because they can regularly depend on finding someone who cares about their own. Universal laws have no exceptions. Knowing this, you couldn’t hope to get away with the things you hope others will refrain from trying. Were moral laws transformed into laws of nature, they would always have consequences as predictable and reliable as physics itself. As things now stand, any particular moral action may have any consequence whatsoever. This makes the finitude we can accept in the realm of knowledge hardly endurable in the realm of action. If we were God, we could change moral principles into sovereign law. Were God Himself to enact such a law, moral principles would lose all connection with freedom. The problem is one of the worth of morality, and each alternative seems unacceptable. Good intentions without consequence are empty; lawlike behavior without intention blind.
It is one of the extraordinary moments in the Critical Philosophy. We do not actually want God to create the world we long for, but we want to be able to imagine it often. The only autonomous way to imagine it is to imagine ourselves as creators. By 1784, you need not be a monarch to challenge Creation. Kant wanted each of us to engage in fantasies that Alfonso dared not dream. Rather than sitting at God’s elbow offering suggestions, you can redesign Creation every time you decide something significant. This time, there’s no fear of getting punished; quite the contrary. The fantasy of replacing God is the test by which morality itself is decided.
Two things fill the mind with awe and wonder the more often and more steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not merely conjecture them and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me, and I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence…. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature, which must give back to the planet (a mere speck in the universe) the matter from which it came, the matter which is for a little time provided with vital force, we know not how. The latter, on the contrary, infinitely raises my worth as that of an intelligence by my personality, in which the moral law reveals a life independent of all animality and even of the whole world of sense—at least so far as it may be inferred from the purposive existence assigned to my existence by this law, a destination which is not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life but reaches into the infinite. (Kant 6, 162)
This may be the most quoted passage in Kant’s entire work, for it expresses the tension that animates his thought as a whole. Kant offered a metaphysic of permanent rupture. The gap between nature and freedom, is and ought, conditions all human existence. For Walter Benjamin, it was this gap that made Kant’s work so modern: later philosophy, he wrote, was an eleventh-hour flight from the honesty of Kant’s dualism (Benjamin 1, 2:32). Integrity requires affirming the dissonance and conflict at the heart of experience. It means recognizing that we are never, metaphysically, at home in the world. This affirmation requires us to live with the mixture of longing and outrage that few will want to bear. Kant never let us forget either the extent of our limits or the legitimacy of our wish to transcend them. Neither is less important than the other, though one way to distinguish analytic from continental readings of Kant’s work is through the ways each tried to forget. Analytic philosophy emphasized Kant’s recognition of the senselessness of our desire for transcendence; continental philosophy, Kant’s recognition of our longing for it. The difference is easy to state: is our urge to move beyond experience a piece of obsolete psychology, or of the logic of the human condition? Kant thought it was the latter, for in fact he was perfectly split. The desire to surpass our limits is as essential to the structure of the human as the recognition that we cannot. Hence it’s no surprise that he was the last figure both traditions took in common.
The stance he recommended is not one either tradition—nor perhaps any other—could maintain over time. Along with the constant reminder that we are not God, Kant gives us permission to pretend that we are. A very cheerful reader could view this as a way of having his cake and eating it too, but not for very long. Kant’s later work, the Critique of Judgment, suggested that not even he could stand so much tension, or tragedy. Why else devote a book to showing that we and the world were made for each other, and that all art and science combine to prove it? Again the problem is not finitude but futility. We may be able to accept the former, but it’s positively wrong to accept the latter. Where it’s only a matter of knowledge, the fact that what affects us is not created by us causes little problem. It would be easy to acknowledge that not controlling the natural world is part of being human, were it not for the fact that things go wrong. The thought that the rift between reason and nature is neither error nor punishment but the fault line along which the universe is structured can be a source of perfect terror.
In the Critique of Judgment Kant viewed that rift as a source of wonder. Both knowledge and ignorance combined to make room for faith. Kant called our attention to a miracle: reason and nature were made for each other; the world is a place where we feel at home. Consider the fact of induction. From the infinite number of possible connections between objects and events in the world, human beings regularly pick out some that turn out to be laws of nature. In the vast array of data and possible explanations of data that the given world offers our senses, the frequency with which we get it right is utterly fortuitous. The pleasure that scientists and small children feel at discovery is tinged with surprise: what a marvel that the world and my cognitive powers fit together! Cassirer said the average person doesn’t see this problem of induction and thus overlooks the pleasure he feels at its solution. One might add that the average person doesn’t make the problem quite as hard as Kant did by emphasizing continually the sheer and basic difference between mind and world. If his transcendental self feels pleasure on discovering itself reflected in nature, it’s against a background of fear that it will be found nowhere at all.
That was, in the end, the vision of Hume, whose world without self or transcendence seemed to Kant a nightmare. Reading Hume, Kant wrote, awoke him from the dogmatic slumber into which he’d been rocked by Leibnizian metaphysics. For Hume, induction was a myth. Since we cannot know whether the causal connections we pick out are genuine, our decision to call some of them laws is a matter of convenience and habit. (Perhaps deep convenience, and good habits, but no more than that.) What for Hume was a myth was for Kant a miracle, and a key to understanding the world as a whole. In insisting on the split between reason and nature, Kant began by denying that purpose was a feature of nature. Purpose was, rather, the feature that defined reason. Both in science and in morality, reason’s task is to propose ends that are not present in experience but direct us to something beyond experience. Kant inherited the classical definition of the human as the rational animal. But reason, for him, was a matter not of knowledge but of creating and pursuing purposes.12 By the time we’ve finished reading his first two critiques, we should be persuaded that purposiveness is the fundamental feature of the human.
The third Critique surprises readers by claiming that purposiveness is a fundamental feature of nature too—or rather, of the way we must approach nature. Its two halves describe how beauty and knowledge bear witness to purpose. Beauty, for Kant, is sheer purposiveness alone, the experience of perfect line and balance, harmony and form—the experience, in short, of design. Where we find purposiveness existing for its own sake, we feel aesthetic pleasure. Purposiveness without purpose gives us pleasure by showing our own defining quality reflected in the world itself. Science requires the assumption that the world was built not just for some purposes but for our purposes. Nothing else could explain the wonder that it’s a place we come to know.
The Critique of Judgment gives a definition of purposiveness: the lawfulness of contingency. If the miracle of fit between our faculties of knowledge and all the laws of nature is explained by the fact that both share the category of purposiveness, there is law instead of chaos. Nature must be viewed as a work of art. This means we must view it as the product of a conscious Creator who is just as free as we are. Art itself is the emblem of freedom, in nature and outside of it. Thus we not only trade dissonance for harmony; we seem to get a foolproof version of the argument from design. Though he had argued that it was invalid, Kant couldn’t refrain from calling it the only proof of God’s existence that impresses the man on the street as well as the scholar, and it’s clear he was always drawn to it. A world that constantly evokes pleasure at the discovery of design within it, that can be understood only by our assuming our own essential feature running through its heart—such a world could only be the product of a benevolent Designer. For He gave us a world where metaphysical conflict is minimal, since its pieces so perfectly mirror each other.
Kant was at pains to deny that these are claims to knowledge of all that his earlier work had argued can never be known. Rather, he repeated, they are claims about our own capacities. They reveal nothing about the structure of the world as it is. Whether investigating its laws in the course of doing science, or enjoying its properties as art, we cannot help viewing the world to be purposive—but this may be just a statement about human inadequacy. The world itself remains unknown. Kant repeated such lines often enough to be boring, and his repetition suggests a guilty conscience. Though no one worked harder to show that the question of whether the world is made for us cannot even be properly formulated, no one seems more tempted to give it a positive answer.
To undercut his own temptation, Kant introduced a counterpart to miracle: certain forms of disaster. Nature gives us the beautiful but also the sublime, and the latter is shot through with violence. In an instant of lightning, or a volcano’s explosion, we experience something close to beauty—but for its revelation that the world is not made for us after all. To judge nature to be beautiful is to feel satisfaction: if I had made the world, I would have done it just like that. To judge nature to be sublime is to be aware of something surpassing any capacities I ever dreamed: however much greater I imagine my creative powers, they would never suffice to do that. The sublime is not merely chaotic; it is overwhelming. Primitive peoples experience it in horror and fear. The awe that accompanies the sublime comes not just from the feeling that I could not have created something as crazy as lightning, but from the thought that on balance, I would not have done so. Practical reason cannot forget that the sublime is always dangerous—a threat to our purposes—however glorious it may sometimes appear. The best of all possible worlds is not only a world without earthquakes; it doesn’t contain as much as a storm.
Kant’s notion of the sublime, and its function as a sign of contrapurposiveness, is deep and important. Its difference from Romantic notions, which saw the sublime as a heightened form of the beautiful, deserves far more exploration than is possible here. Yet Kant’s reminder that the world sometimes runs counter to our purposes is relatively brief; the sublime takes up twenty-six pages of his attention. The rest of the Critique of Judgment is a meditation on harmony. That the harmony is not part of the world, but part of our ability to approach it, is a point Kant repeated endlessly. But his oscillation between expressions of wonder at the design radiating through the world’s features, and expressions of bad conscience at his own wonder, is too constant and swift. In the course of it Kant takes back with one hand what he gives with the other so often that one cannot blame Romantics for getting dizzy. And while Kant’s titanic vision of the human would strike them as appealing, “unhappy consciousness” barely begins to describe someone who could steal fire in one moment, and construct his own punishment in the next. It’s a talent that could come to wear thin.—God creates as we do, and we create as He (said in a whisper, and said very fast). The world was made for our purposes, and we for the world’s.—But we can’t ever know this. We also can’t ever know anything without assuming it. (Some cultures avoid positive forms of assertion to avoid the evil eye. Is Kant’s hesitation merely the result of theoretical worries?) The world is my world, and then of course it isn’t. In the face of all this torment, why not quit and call it home?
REAL AND RATIONAL: HEGEL AND MARX
Hegel never said that he was God. He left that to Kojeve, and even the latter admitted it was madness (Kojeve, 120). But long before Nietzsche, Hegel said that God was dead. And the logic of the process that led him to the claim seems to force the conclusion that someone must replace the Creator. If logic did compel such a claim, most people would be tempted to reject logic and philosophy itself. Hegel took himself to have completed them. Kierkegaard thought that anyone who overlooks the infinite difference between God and man must be crazy, or committed to blasphemy (Kierkegaard, 207). I want to show why Hegel was neither. It may remain hard to grasp exactly what it means to identify self, God, and world without madness or sacrilege. But the process that led Hegel to try it makes sense.
First we must acknowledge that he really does identify them. Neither the difficulty of his language nor the demands of common sense should let us overlook it.13 In Hegel’s philosophy, the knowing self becomes God. His Phenomenology of Spirit, usually considered his central work, has been described as the autobiography of God (Tucker, 45). Even atheists are often wary of this much sacrilege. But two considerations should prevent us from rejecting his identification of self and God out of hand. The first is that how much space exists between human and divine nature is an open question. Kant, and most forms of Judaism, held the space to be infinite, and much twentieth-century theology followed them. But the answer isn’t self-evident, and both paganism and Christianity leave it open. Centuries of Christian attempts to articulate the Incarnation make this clear. Christianity itself can be viewed as a meditation on the relation between man and God, an attempt to understand the possibilities and perils of each becoming the other. Hegel wrote that Christianity betrayed its Jewish origins by separating divine and human nature too radically.14 His work can be seen as continuing Christian tradition rather than rejecting it—not despite its identification of the self with God but because of it.15 Hegel’s work explored better ways for human nature to become divine and for God’s presence to be realized in the being He created. Not for nothing did He create in His own image. Hegel’s explorations in these directions may lead to heresy. But it’s heresy similar to Pelagianism or Albigensianism: doctrines a church may decide to condemn, but not because they are entirely foreign intrusions.
Nor does the heretical impulse usually begin as an impulse to blasphemy. Far from expressing a wish to attack God, it’s usually moved by a wish to defend Him.16 Hegel’s wish to take God’s place developed naturally from Rousseau’s desire to vindicate God by taking evil on ourselves. God’s subsequent disappearance could be predicted from the Emile, which is why authorities were quick to burn it. But the more seriously we take responsibility for evil, the larger we must become. What ended as a way of displacing God began as a means of unburdening Him. If the outcome looks like madness, there is nothing in it but method.
Hegel’s identification of self and God is thus neither as foreign to Western tradition nor as blasphemous as it may appear. But isn’t it at least anachronistic? Taking his claims about God, or the World Spirit, seriously is hard because they seem completely obsolete. Kant offered metaphysical, moral, and religious grounds for driving God out of philosophy altogether. Those grounds were convincing enough to lead Moses Mendelssohn, Germany’s greatest Leibnizian, to complain that Kant had dashed everything to pieces. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the permanent separation of philosophy and theology as the most important consequence of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. If any theological questions remained to be treated philosophically, they were to be treated with a sense of embarrassment. Yet Hegel would write that
God plays a far greater role in modern philosophy than in the ancient, because the comprehension of the absolute opposition of thought and being is now the main demand. (Hegel 7, 3:347)
Hegel was hardly unaware of the conclusions others drew from Kant’s reflections. He understood them superbly. If Hegel could nevertheless reject Kantian proscriptions and return God to philosophical discourse, it’s because, paradoxically, he was the first to give a secular formulation of the problem of evil. What’s at stake in the problem of evil, as Hegel reformulated it, is the absolute opposition of thought and being, rational and real. Kant came close to Hegel’s formulation in describing the need for systematic connection between happiness and virtue, but his language was still directly theological. Hegel circumvented Kantian prohibitions on philosophical theology by recasting the problem of evil in metaphysical terms.
His claim that his philosophy is theodicy is often ignored out of embarrassment. For what shall we do with self-conscious anachronism? The Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History is unabashed.
Our investigation can be seen as a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God (such as Leibniz attempted in his own metaphysical manner, but using categories which were as yet abstract and indeterminate). It should enable us to comprehend all the ills of the world, including the existence of evil, so that the thinking spirit may yet be reconciled with the negative aspects of existence; and it is in world history that we encounter the sum total of evil … we must first of all know what the ultimate design of the world really is, and secondly, we must see that this design has been realized and that evil has not been able to maintain a position of equality beside it. (Hegel 5, 43)
A few pages later, Hegel makes clear that he is not only prepared to return to Leibniz but anxious to outdo him. The task of philosophy is to make us understand that the real world is as it ought to be, and to show that nothing can thwart God’s purposes. Philosophy reveals
that God’s will must always prevail in the end, and that world history is nothing more than the plan of providence. The world is governed by God, and world history is the content of his government and the execution of his plans. To comprehend this is the task of the philosophy of world history, and its initial assumption is that the ideal is fulfilled and that only that which corresponds to the ideal possesses reality … the aim of philosophy is to defend reality against its detractors. (Hegel 5, 67; my emphasis)
Students of Kant will find Hegel’s return to Leibniz breathtakingly blithe. His claim that the actual world is as it should be equals the claim that this world is the best. Heine called Hegel the German Pangloss. But not even Pangloss claimed that only the ideal possesses reality. If empirical evidence provided by events like Lisbon didn’t dispatch such claims, Kant’s metaphysics should have finished them off.
But Hegel’s return to obsolescence is based on an idea of the modern. Kant viewed the world as structurally flawed, built along a gap between the is and the ought that admits but the shakiest of bridges. He accused earlier philosophers of bad faith in denying the gap, and insisted on giving each side equal weight. For Kant, the claims of reason are no less legitimate than those of nature. There is no reason to suppose that they will coincide, and evidence enough to show how often they don’t. For Hegel, Kant’s insistence on a principled infinite distance between is and ought is just as unnecessary as the distance between human and God. Neither distinction is in the nature of things; each one is created. The gap is not metaphysical but a product of history. Kant’s misery was self-imposed, for the dualism he located in the structure of reality could be overcome. Hegel thought Kant expressed modern alienation. The dualism between self and nature that Kant emphasized reflects one between individual and community, which in turn reflects the split between virtue and happiness itself. All these divisions are indeed part of our present experience of the world, but they’re not written into it. For Hegel these disjunctions presented problems to be overcome, not reasons for accepting Kant’s unhappy solutions. In his readiness to accept as final what was the result of historical process, Hegel believed Kant was giving up too soon.
The eighteenth century saw the birth of modern consciousness of alienation. Hegel opened the nineteenth by locating alienation in modernity itself. Kant and Hegel differed over whether the alienation itself was new, or only the consciousness of it. If Hegel was right, alienation is a modern product. The unhappiness it produces is self-imposed. Thus the remaining question is which modern tool can overcome it. For Hegel, the answer is history—both as diagnosis and cure. His idea that history is both cause and redemption of our suffering owes much to Rousseau. After Hegel, modern inventions from economics to biology were proposed to overcome the misery Kant thought was produced by irrevocable metaphysical split. Nineteenth-century thinkers inherited Hegel’s absolute confidence that the alienation which cuts through our lives was a product of modern culture and could therefore be overcome by it. Their confidence can give the nineteenth century an air of smug self-satisfaction. Against them, Nietzsche spoke of a metaphysical wound that can never be healed. When he wrote, in Schopenhauer as Educator, that anyone who thinks political events are enough to provide remedies deserves to become a professor of philosophy at a German university, he was probably thinking of Hegel. Nietzsche thought his contemporaries’ confidence in progress unbearably vulgar. But it’s easy to reply that his talk of metaphysical wounds just projects private growing pains—which threatens to be self-indulgent, even decadent, if nourished past a certain age. Why should the heart of the world be irreparably broken?
For Hegel, the flaw Kant thought to be structural was an expression of Kant’s own weakness, a failure of the courage to think independently that Kant saw as the key to Enlightenment. Hadn’t Kant divided the world into reason and nature, then given reason sovereignty? Hadn’t Kant told us that reason is the faculty we share with God? We should have the courage to draw consequences. “There cannot be two kinds of reason and two kinds of spirit, a divine reason and a human one that were completely different. Human reason, the consciousness of its Being is reason, the divine in humankind” (Hegel 6, 40). Hegel’s logic dictated conclusions that Kant’s provincial Pietist nerves could not quite face. If reason rules the world, let reason rule the world. This should not remain a matter of wishful thinking, or hopeful imperatives, but of determining force. Kant’s refusal to overcome the gap between reason and nature was worse than a refusal to think to the end. For what’s outside us, it meant renouncing hopes of affecting the world. The ought is utterly ineffective. It remains a pathetic expression of empty desire that only marks a guilty conscience. For what’s inside us, it exists as reproach. Since the split between reason and nature runs inside the soul as outside it, the ought becomes merely a means of self-punishment. Kant defined freedom as obedience to laws one gives to oneself. For Hegel, this substitutes self-imposed bonds for external ones. What slave glorified his own chains with more conviction? No wonder Kant could not do without the hope of heaven.
Hegel wished to bring it back to earth. “The sole aim of philosophical inquiry is to eliminate the contingent” (Hegel 5, 28; the original is printed in bold). For Kant, whether the contingent was reasonable is a matter of faith. This leaves us utterly dependent on divine goodwill. The third Critique recalled the miracle that contingency works as it ought to, but Kant’s last essay recalls how often it does not. He had celebrated the success of induction by reminding us of the serendipity of science. How lucky that from all the wild array of data we so often pick out what coalesces to confirm laws of nature! But Kant knew how many accidents are less happy. Insisting that moral action depends on determining your will, not the world, even if this entails telling truth to assassins, he insisted on how many consequences of our actions are determined by chance. Hegel’s demand to eliminate contingency was moved by the horror of cases like these. Necessity may be bleak, but contingency is tragic. What Hegel described as “mental torture” is entirely impersonal. It arises for the spectator of history as well as its agent.
Without rhetorical exaggeration, we need only compile an accurate account of the misfortunes which have overtaken the finest manifestations of national and political life, and of personal virtues or innocence, to see a most terrifying picture take shape before our eyes. Its effect is to intensify our feelings to an extreme pitch of hopeless sorrow with no redeeming circumstances, to counterbalance it. We can only harden ourselves against it or escape from it by telling ourselves that it was ordained by fate and could not have been otherwise. (Hegel 5, 68)
Why does Hegel think that showing suffering to be necessary is a way to escape it? To tell an individual that an awful event could not have been different offers consolation’s barest bones. At most, it spares her the anguish of self-torment about what she might have changed. Perhaps removing some anguish is better than removing none at all. Hegel captures our sense that tragic events are most tragic when they could have been prevented by trivial changes. (After all his efforts to circumvent the prophecy, how could Oedipus have arrived at just that crossroads? At just that moment?) But Hegel is notoriously less concerned with individual misery than with what he called disinterested sorrow. Such sorrow arises through awareness of our finitude (Hegel 3, 1:143). In fact it isn’t finitude itself but the futility which results from it that causes the pain. Recall the unhappiness that arose from contemplating your choices when you meet an assassin. For Kant you are entirely free: to lie or meander, to strike him, block the door. You run through any number of options, make a quick decision, and act upon it. This is the commonsense assertion of self-determination. But common sense, and Kant himself, quickly find that this is not enough. What you wanted was to determine not yourself but the world; to preserve your friend’s life, not your good conscience. Kant’s appeal to the latter was an appeal from despair. So Hegel saw the categorical imperative—on charitable days. He wanted to be happy, not merely free.
Those who find Hegel’s notion of necessity problematic should return to Kant’s notion of freedom. For Hegel reached it in the attempt to avoid problems that Kant’s system could not avoid. The examples Kant chose to illustrate our freedom reveal, among other things, his own sense of desolation. He thought a proof of human freedom to be impossible; instead he offered a thought experiment. The Critique of Practical Reason considers a man who claims that his desire is uncontrollable whenever he passes a brothel. Kant begs to differ: were the man to be shown the gallows on which he would be hanged the moment after gratifying his desire, he would find himself quite able to resist. We’re then asked to consider the same man, the same gallows, another occasion. Our hero (for so he has potentially become) must decide whether to refuse not the charms of a woman of easy virtue, but the threats of an unjust sovereign who orders him to write a letter condemning an innocent man to death. Kant held that though none of us knows what we would do in such a moment, each of us knows what’s possible: to refuse to cause another’s death even at the price of our own. In ordinary cases, all other desire is second to desire for life itself. When we’re faced with moral choices of this sort, the desire to be decent may overcome even that.
Kant thought such examples immensely important. As he put it, even businessmen, women, and ten-year-old boys can understand their message: our mastery over our own goodwill is so absolute that it matches the power of the most absolute sovereign. Kant thought this showed the reality of freedom. For a Hegelian, it just as surely shows its limits. What we want, of course, is not that the sovereign should send us to our death, but that he should not send an innocent man to his. The fact that we can choose not to aid the sovereign is little comfort. For the alternative is not the determination of the self but the annihilation of it. If your self can affect nothing in the world but its own disappearance, its freedom is empty indeed. Kant’s attachment to cases that pit life against death demonstrates the depth of our freedom while underscoring its limit. The momentary feeling of power that accompanies the realization that life and death are in your hands must yield to despair at the realization that, very often, nothing else is. If these are the fruits of freedom, no wonder Hegel has so little fear of necessity.
The problems of our relative helplessness in the face of contingency arise whether we’re thinking of moral evils or natural ones. For the former are also an instance of the latter: we are one of the things that go wrong in the world. Freedom, if it’s universal freedom, must allow for the failure of others. Later philosophers often forget that the greatest enemies of human freedom were not metaphysical but political. Even the Enlightenment’s greatest metaphysician was more concerned with removing unjust sovereigns than with providing proofs about substance. But for Hegel, political self-determination could never be enough. This is not a matter of his particular political views but of his estimation of the power of contingency. Here he was gripped by the sort of case Kant’s assassin reveals. The murderer at your doorstep has you just as surely in his power as does the unjust sovereign, and it’s hard to imagine which political action could change that. Call him mad, and view outbreaks of madness as natural events. You are back in the realm of earthquakes. Carry out fantasies of controlling crime or madness through some yet-to-be-discovered science of human behavior, and you will have eliminated freedom.
There’s no particular reason to retain Kant’s example; the reader may choose another. But we should not forget that its very improbability is completely modern. The randomness of life and death is the feature most emphasized in accounts of survival in totalitarian regimes. Survival depended on events so accidental that they undercut rational behavior itself. Contingency blurs the lines between moral and natural evil the eighteenth century tried to draw, for it is both microscopic and all-pervasive. Chance can turn our best efforts to be moral into quixotic last stands. The will to be effectively moral is therefore the will to remove it. Contingency must be eliminated entirely. This can be done with a logic that doesn’t stop at guaranteeing that contingent events are simply necessary. Rather, it should show that what’s essential is morally necessary. Every is and every ought must be identical.
Hegel was one of philosophy’s most acute readers of its own history, with a wonderful eye. He was right to see himself as Leibniz’s heir. Recall that Leibniz insisted on three sorts of evil: natural and moral evil were distinct from metaphysical evil, which he saw as the ultimate source of the others. The eighteenth century abandoned the notion of metaphysical evil and called it finitude. Rousseau viewed it as a natural necessity we find easy to accept. We are born and we die, and in between our powers to control nature are severely limited. These are aspects of any condition we could call human. Distinguishing them from those features which are changeable is what wisdom is, presumably, about. By the mid–eighteenth century, discussion was largely confined to the possibility of eliminating natural evils (suffering), moral evils (sin), and the uneven connection between them. Medicine and technology were to combat the first, pedagogy and better economic relations the second, and political justice would address the third. These Enlightenment hopes set agendas well into the nineteenth century. With so much to do that was useful, why should Hegel resurrect a premodern notion of metaphysical evil?
Leibniz defined metaphysical evil as the imperfection of all created things, intelligent or not, solely in virtue of their being created. The fact that they are created gives them boundaries. Only God is infinite, hence perfect and complete. For Leibniz, this poses a problem of necessary evil. Post-Kantians can find it hard to understand without the problem of contingency. We have seen the contingent wreak havoc upon any of reason’s demands. What better task can reason have than to overcome it? Because the contingent is infinite, and all-pervasive, our own finitude is not just a fact that good sense should accept. It’s rather a source of sorrow that reason itself must reject.
Reason’s task in combating contingency is daunting on two scores. One is the scope of contingency. Necessity is necessary not because failure is so great. Rather, contingency is unbearable because of the number of accidents that can destroy the best efforts of reason. The second ground on which metaphysical evil is unacceptable comes from the logic of explanation alone. To accept imperfection is to accept a world that is not as it ought to be. Why should this world exist if another were better? This question is embedded in structures of thought that reason cannot escape. For Hegel as for Leibniz, eliminating contingency means showing this world to be necessary after all. It means showing that the world as a whole, and everything within it, is purposive. Purposiveness was defined as the lawfulness of the contingent. To open any door of the world to contingency is to open the whole to chaos; if law isn’t universal, it isn’t really law. To accept that the world we inhabit is not the best is to accept essential unintelligibility that leaves understanding in the dark.
Hegel’s rejection of finitude returns us to the problem of metaphysical evil. His refusal to accept finitude and contingency as framing the human condition was led by logic, but not confined to it. Now we cannot in fact be infinite, any more than we can be immortal, but we can be part of something that is both. So Hegel completed the appeal to history that began in Rousseau. Rousseau introduced the idea that the very history which condemns us might be the only thing which redeems us. His idea that humankind isn’t fixed but subject to development was also the idea that an answer to the problem of evil is possible within history. Hegel wished to show that the possible is actual.
Even Kant knew that mere possibility could not keep us going forever. He had appealed to a concrete historical event—disinterested spectators’ admiration for the French Revolution—as the sign we need that progress actually takes place. Hegel wanted more than signs. The idea of real history, and as much observation as was needed to give content to it, was his key to finding categories less abstract than those of Leibniz. If history is a history of progress, it would contain its own cure. The (not-quite-yet) given became the standing negation of the given. This overthrows appearances without appealing to something transcendent. The overcoming of present evils is slow, but it’s immanent. For we need not appeal to another reality in order to do it. Overcoming evils is part of the process evident in history itself.
Here the reader should balk. What’s evident in the claim that history makes progress that proves the goodness of the world? We do not need the events of the twentieth century, or any of their observers, to give us pause. Bayle and Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant show that doubts about progress in history presented themselves the moment anyone began to wonder about it. Put more strongly: it is history itself that presents the problem. Hegel’s certainty that it presents the solution must leave us bewildered.
His initial discussion seems so sunny that it may only provoke further astonishment.
If we admit that providence reveals itself in (nature) why should we not do the same in world history? Is it because history seems too vast a subject? … It is the same in plants and insects as in the destinies of entire nations and empires, and we must not imagine that God is not powerful enough to apply His wisdom to things of great moment…. Besides, nature is a theater of secondary importance compared with that of world history. Nature is a field in which the divine Idea operates in a non-conceptual medium; the spiritual sphere is its proper province, and it is here above all that it ought to be visible. Armed with the concept of reason, we need not fear coming to grips with any subject whatsoever. (Hegel 5, 38)
Where did Hegel get his confidence in the power of the reason he recommended as weapon? In this passage he appeals to the argument from design, but it was precisely the inadequacy of the argument from design that called reason into doubt. The early eighteenth century used discoveries of modern science as evidence that the argument from design was true. Alfonso’s willingness to doubt it could be cast for a time as the result of medieval ignorance. By midcentury he seemed a harbinger of modern fear. For Voltaire, the Lisbon earthquake was proof that even in nature, the world’s design required improvement, and other skeptics would add conceptual battering to the attacks provided by reality. But disaster, however appalling, and speculation, however brilliant, were less threatening to the argument from design than the evidence of history. Human history always served as a standing reproach. Nature’s wonders may testify to God’s wisdom and goodness; the creature He designed in His image did not. Contemplating humankind’s miserable record in history left God’s wisdom and goodness thus doubly open to question. Rousseau was the best the Enlightenment offered by way of hope. But his ambivalent attempts to sketch ways in which the human is intrinsically good, and might become better, were at best grounds for the most cautious confidence.
Enter Hegel with the claim that if the wonders of nature reveal the workings of reason, how much more so the glories of human action! The Lectures on the History of Philosophy even quoted gospel to recall that Jesus disdained the fowls of the air, preferring the “divine superiority” of the human. The idea that history has meaning, one way or another, came to serve the nineteenth century much as the notion that nature has order served the eighteenth. The first will seem significantly less plausible than the second, but Hegel has several reasons for confidence in the very claim that required defense. The bright assurance that made Prometheus the nineteenth century’s emblem was reflected in everything from the French Revolution to the final thought of Kant’s critiques, which saw human freedom as the purpose of the universe. (Schelling’s memorial address for Kant called these expressions of a single spirit.) The denial of original sin that made Rousseau’s work shocking was soon taken for granted. The nineteenth century opened with an optimism the eighteenth never had.
Hegel thus had reason to be cheerful, but he wasn’t, for all that, blind. It’s he who described history as a slaughterbank. Using history to reveal the effects of reason in the world, and not its utter failure, required finding sense inside evil itself. This is why the struggle between slave and master in his Phenomenology of Spirit is a paradigm of the process he saw in history as a whole. His later speculations about the development of the World Spirit, and the role great men and their sufferings played within it, are contained in this one. The master/slave dialectic doesn’t merely stand at the beginning of history; it shapes the structure of historical explanation. It asserts that Bayle’s description of history as a record of crimes and misfortunes was just superficial. Bayle hadn’t looked closely. Where he saw bloodshed, Hegel saw sense.
His description of the first historical event is as grand as it is eerie. There is so little description that it remains in memory like the starkness of a desert. Two men meet, and as men do, they begin to fight. For thinkers like Hobbes, such battle is expression of brute striving for power, without goal, end, or purpose. It can be suppressed but not understood, for there’s nothing deep to understand. For Hegel it’s the beginning of understanding itself. Each wants to realize not force but spirit. Through a willingness to give up life, each man expresses contempt for the matter of body and the contingency of death. Through a desire to force the other to yield to him, each man expresses his desire to be seen as a person, not a thing. The other’s recognition is essential to one’s own self-consciousness. Where Rousseau saw vanity, and resulting alienation, Hegel saw the necessary condition of identity. Our need for the other’s recognition is so crucial to our sense of being that we are willing to risk our lives to attain it.
Someone blinks. The one who decided that the other’s acknowledgment was not quite worth forfeiting his life will be enslaved by the one who was noble enough to disdain death for a trifle from the realm of spirit. That is, after all, what aristocrats do. But now the cunning of history begins in earnest. If battle was necessary for self-realization, defeat was even more so. The master is unhappy. Having fulfilled his only function, he has nothing left to do. All his life as agent was exhausted in one moment of prefeudal glory. Even worse, it seems to be a perfect failure, for the recognition he risked his life to attain has value only if it’s recognition from an equal. By admitting defeat, the slave will avoid it, for as subordinate being, he cannot give the master what the master craved. The slave can rest easy, for this isn’t disobedience but dialectic. His triumph will take place a little later, and be a little subtler: that’s just what civilization means. The slave is forced to work. In so doing, he uses consciousness to give form to mere matter—the spitting image of God Himself. The master’s idleness leaves him not merely bored, but obsolete as those gods whose thunder was stolen. What moves the world is something else.
Good theodicy makes everyone feel that his troubles were justified. The master has his fifteen minutes in the limelight, then consoles himself with the knowledge that his subsequent eclipse results not from a failure of his performance but from the structure of recognition itself. The slave can take pride, and revenge if he wants it, in the knowledge that he drives world history. Since increasingly refined work is a higher form of activity than battle, he is closer to the spirit and power that reflect the Creator than the master who subdued him. The World Spirit can be conscious that the design He created was the best means for pushing history forward with the right combination of freedom and necessity. And contemplating such designs, all the rest of us can feel at home in the world. What looked like two brutes on the rampage turned out to be the beginning of self-consciousness. Hegel found both sense and necessity where there seemed to be none. If there at the dawn of history, why not anywhere else?
The Phenomenology describes the development of human consciousness as a natural process of development. This structure was influenced by the Emile as well as the bildungsroman, the literary discovery of Hegel’s youth. But the bildungsroman itself is a way to structure the experience of folk wisdom: through one set of trials or another, you learn the truth about yourself and the world. As an educational tool, pain has value nothing else can replace. Unlike later thinkers who viewed life as a narrative, Hegel still cared about the moral of the story—a locution we have virtually discarded. For Hegel it was clear that history must have an end. He found it in the progressive unfolding of human freedom. It may seem ironic that progress toward freedom should be absolutely necessary. But it’s no more paradoxical than any other feature of the attempt to think through the combination of contingency and necessity that occupied Hegel throughout his work.
The idea that the development of humankind mirrors the development of individuals was available in Rousseau (who was very aware that in the species or the individual, education can go badly wrong). Lessing elaborated on the connections between education and progress. Kant took them so thoroughly for granted that his work is full of references to the child’s growth to maturity as a paradigm of human development as a whole. His metaphors are often as clumsy as the falling toddler who forms the most famous of those references in “What Is Enlightenment?”17 Hegel’s account is much more nuanced. But he too builds on the idea implicit in the very notion of Enlightenment itself that most pain is principally growing pain, and that maturity is, finally, worth it. These are two separate claims. You may want to retain maturity as your goal while denying that pain is needed to achieve it. But unless you’re especially self-deceptive or unlucky, growing up does bring progress in both awareness and freedom. Individual development is a natural metaphor for the development of humankind as a whole.
At least as surely as any theological metaphor, it’s the source of the idea that the future will be better than the past. It is what we tell our children in their trouble. (You will understand how the world works, be more able to act when it doesn’t.) It’s an idea at least as old as the idea of the Fall—which both Hegel and Kant held necessary for the birth of humanity itself. Benjamin might have called this weakly messianic, but it’s not the result of any particular form of messianism. Messianism itself is, rather, an attempt to give particular form to hope.
For Hegel, the idea of progress was heir to the idea of Providence. The relations between them have been much debated. I will return to that debate in chapter 4. One clear similarity is that both were invented not merely to explain appearances but to defy them. Both posit an order counter to the mess that experience presents. Experience offers crimes and misfortunes. Progress and Providence try to go behind (and before, and after) them. Appearances themselves are never decisive—in faith or philosophy. Both progress and Providence are read into evidence that seems to refute them. Evidence against them is not at issue, for nothing is easier to offer.
Knowing this cannot prevent some kinds of evidence from stopping us short. Even the very historical event that the late Enlightenment found redemptive (the French Revolution, for Kant, or its extension in the Battle of Jena, for Hegel) provides material for doubt. When asked whether the French Revolution signaled progress, many will second Chou En-lai: it’s too soon to tell. And even should we decide that the revolution was worth it, every other decisive event looks a great deal worse. Some recent interpretations hold this objection to depend on naive readings of Hegel. His claim that modern Western history led to collective aspirations for freedom is not yet the claim that we’ve realized them, much less reached a state without oppression or evil.18 One can find Hegelian indications of progress in subsequent Western history itself. The abolition of slavery, which he didn’t live to see, and the demand for gender equality, which he didn’t begin to imagine, can both be read as confirmation of Hegel’s claims about freedom. So can many un-Hegelian attacks on Eurocentrism. And the abolition of public torture represents progress not belied by all the horrors of twentieth-century history. Foucault claimed that modern substitutes for torture are subtler forms of domination. But the fact that we can barely stand to read descriptions of things we would have brought our children to watch a few centuries earlier marks an advance in human consciousness that seems hard to reverse.
A resolute Hegelian can find signs of progress in the Hegelian system itself. The idea that modernity creates its own source of unhappiness but can also provide its own cure is new and progressive. So is the idea that self-conscious awareness is a good in itself. Both ideas can be traced to Rousseau. But Rousseau’s deep ambivalence toward the very idea of modernity makes his work a prelude to the modern. Rousseau could never decide whether or not to be nostalgic. Hegel was clear. The ability to valorize the modern is itself modern, progressive, and beneficial—since turning back is not an option.
There are thus more signs to sustain claims of progress than appear at first glance. Depending on your political sympathies you will emphasize different features of modern life to support (or deny) them. But whatever you use will remain just a sign. The impulse to assert that history makes progress is not quite a form of whistling in the dark. But like claims about Providence, it arises less from belief than from doubt. Appearances suggest not God’s presence in human affairs but His inexplicable absence; not progress in history but what looks like decline—or endless pointless cycles at the very best. To see this, you don’t need the modern. It’s been argued that the idea of Providence itself was invented in order to contend with the first great catastrophe in Jewish history. Faced with exile, the prophets sought an account that would leave intact their people’s claim to be chosen.19 This seems too specific, for the impulse is so natural that it is found throughout the Bible, beginning in much earlier books. Job’s friends, for example, were faced with evidence so overwhelming that they knew no defense but to deny it, arguing that apparent injustice is a sign of God’s wisdom. Turning evidence on its head is a bold move, but not a naive one.
Taking the very thing that seemed to be the problem as proof of its ultimate solution is not, therefore, a new idea. Proving it would lead to Hegel’s goal for knowledge:
The aim of knowledge is to divest the objective world that stands opposed to us of its strangeness, and as the phrase is, to find ourselves at home in it. (Hegel 3, 335)
Finding ourselves at home in the world seems so unexceptionable an aim that it’s almost innocuous. The only problem is one of price: what claims on the world do you have to renounce in order to feel at home in it? The problem is not determined by Hegel’s choice of means; it’s implicit in his end itself. “Philosophy should help us to understand that the actual world is as it ought to be” (Hegel 5, 66; my emphasis). If you set out to justify suffering, you may find in the end that you’ve justified suffering. And then you are left with consequences that Hegel was willing to draw.
We cannot fail to notice how all that is finest and noblest in the history of the world is immolated upon its altar. Reason cannot stop to consider the injuries sustained by single individuals, for particular ends are submerged in the universal end. (Hegel 5, 43)
The debate about Hegel’s identification of reason and reality cannot be treated adequately here, but I hope to have offered grounds for understanding why he insisted on it. The claim that the real is rational is not, in particular, a willful confusion of the is and the ought; it is a demand. For Hegel, Kant’s separation of them was timid, naive, and ultimately empty. Hegel’s intention was not to idealize existing reality but to realize what Kant had left merely ideal. However complex was his discussion of real and rational, the alternatives open are few. One commentator summarizes:
Hegel’s famous dictum [the real = the rational] does not … scandalously deify naked power: ‘the actual’ is not any and all existing fact (which must include the irrational, contingent and evil) but, rather, existing fact only insofar as it manifests rationality. But is Hegel’s dictum not then rescued from scandalousness only at the price of being reduced to innocuous tautology? It is in the end because it can see no third alternative that Rudolf Haym’s influential Hegel und seine Zeit chooses the first alternative and accuses Hegel of sanctifying the existing order. (Fackenheim, 208)
History seemed a vehicle not for equating real and rational but for overcoming the distinction entirely. If history is progressive, it is thereby a constant negation of given reality—not through something transcendent, but through the occurrence of more reality. To claim that history reveals its own meaning is, of course, to deny that history is just one thing after another. In practice, present reality will be negated by whatever comes next. The options for reading these facts do seem quite limited. If calling whatever is, right doesn’t amount to glorifying it, then calling it right becomes empty.
There is another option, though few would wish to take it. This would be to declare that Hegel’s philosophy entails the end of the human itself. Kojeve was ready to swallow this consequence with something like relish (159). The annihilation of the human is one way to stay within the demands of Hegel’s logic. For many view the refusal to accept the given as given—the capacity to make demands on reality—as constitutive of being human. This gives Kant’s work its distinctively tormented quality. Being human means to strive to realize a world so perfect that its realization would undo us. The best of all possible worlds is one we could never inhabit. To show the gap between ought and is slowly closing through historical process is to envision a world in which the characteristics we take to be most human become superfluous and disappear with other anachronisms.
Hegel is more commonly accused of glorifying existing power relations. If this alternative produces a more palatable interpretation of Hegel, few will find it a preferable political position. Hegel said the equation of rational and actual was the conviction on which the plain man and the philosopher simply had to take a stand (Hegel 4, 10). Arendt succinctly described the alternative they face when they take such stands:
Since Hegel and Marx, these questions have been treated in the perspective of history and on the assumption that there is such a thing as progress of the human race. Finally we shall be left with the only alternative there is in these matters—we can either say with Hegel: Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, leaving the ultimate judgement to success, or we can maintain with Kant the autonomy of the minds of men and their possible independence of things as they are or have come into being. (Arendt 4, 216)
Arendt’s statement expressed her lifelong anti-Hegelian conviction that Hegel’s alternative resigns us to the triumph of things as they are. She never took seriously Hegel’s argument that Kant’s alternative seems to resign us to simple failure. By opting for transcendence, Kant began by abandoning hope that ideas can be fulfilled. Is Hegel resigned to reality, or Kant to the mere critique of it? We can imagine the argument: Your transcendence is empty.—Your immanence blind. Only an intellectual intuition could directly realize the merely ideal. But such intuition cannot even be conceived, much less used by us. In the end, it hardly matters, for the question of whether World Spirit or self is the actor has disappeared in the squabble. There’s very little acting going on. We are left with a debate over who was more in need of consolation: Hegel for the failures of given reality or Kant for the impotence of protest. Even without Marx, each was turning the other upside down. If this isn’t antinomy, it’s hard to see a way out of it.
Stating something both short and sensible about Marx is no less daunting than trying to do the same for any other major philosopher, not least because the scholarly debates are no less voluminous for him than for others. But Marx made it easier by leaving the best summary of his own approach to the problem of evil. “Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.” Hegel was aware that his system was a refined form of theodicy. Marx made us aware that this could be a reason to reject it. All the heady debates of Hegel’s heirs were just opiate of the salon: justifications that lulled intellectuals into accepting given reality rather than forming a plan to change it.
It’s common enough to describe Marxism as a religion, or to attack it as the god that failed. Like most vulgarizations, this contains a piece of truth. But to acknowledge religious elements in Marx’s view is not to oppose it to philosophy. It’s often suggested that Marxism was born of disappointment with religion’s failure to satisfy human longing for redemption. Philosophy, by contrast, is said to seek truth for truth’s sake alone. It’s further claimed that Marxism is maintained with the tenacity and disregard for evidence that marks religious faith, while philosophy is measured, rational, and responsible to evidence. Some hold that Marx’s territory is close to that of religion, which explains its refusal to cover what philosophy should discuss. In particular, it’s often noted that though Marx’s tone conveys constant moral indignation, he has no moral philosophy in any standard sense—no definitions of right or justice, no attempts to establish moral foundations in general or to argue for the rightness of any action in particular. Thus his fervor is that of the prophet or preacher, not of the moral philosopher.20
All these charges take on a different cast if we place Marx where he placed himself, in the thick of attempts to explain evil. Calling it philosophical theology is acceptable as long as you remember that Marx himself was aware that philosophical theology was supposed to be passé. To describe Marxism as the god that failed can be a way of suppressing Marx’s simplest insight, for it implies that Marx’s readiness to substitute human for divine agency was not self-conscious. Then his willingness to assume positions that should be hazarded, at most, within theology, would be a mixture of bravado and oversight. But—to risk the rhetorical inversion of which he was so fond—Marxism can’t be described as the god that failed without first acknowledging Marx’s point: God’s own failure is the starting point for the history of philosophy.
Cataloging that failure is an empirical business which will occupy the next chapter. Marx belongs in the theodical tradition of this chapter, despite his merciless attacks on theodicy, because God’s failure was merely his starting point. Like other rationalists, he offered both an explanation of that failure and a proposal for preventing it. More exactly, he thought that earlier philosophy was double expression of failure. After creating idols to take responsibility for human misery, it spent itself creating excuses for them. Even the most radical of young Hegelians arguing about the relations between human and God thereby forgot the point. Marx’s resolve to devote himself to solving the problem rather than explaining it should not obscure his very clear view of its structure and origin, which now seems so simple it is easy to ignore. If his rejection of philosophy was simple, his reading of it was deep. Marx understood what he was abandoning.
More than anyone other than Nietzsche, Marx perceived the web binding philosophy and theology. Kantian criticisms cannot shatter it as long as those criticisms remain intellectual exercises. Mere arguments can’t address the needs that found expression in theodicy. The God Kant forbade us to mention stands all the more surely behind the scenes. For transcendental idealism never transformed the reality that made us long to transcend it. Perhaps Kant’s prohibitions only made problems worse: the more hopelessly elusive the object, the more longing for it grows. Hegel tried to strip the veil that Kant had provided, and demanded that philosophy face the relation between human and God. Marx argued that his boldness was only in thought. So he wrote that criticism of religion is the first premise of all criticism.
Religion, for Marx, includes a great deal:
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedia, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and the general ground for the consummation and justification of this world…. Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people. (Marx, 115)
This is a lot to be said in praise of opium. Religion appears as neither trick nor narcotic but head, heart, and spirit. It is applied philosophy, the live and popular expression of a single human need. He believed it to be the consciousness of transcendence that arises from real necessity. Meaningless suffering is unacceptable, so both philosophy and religion go to work to give it meaning.
Some descriptions of this process sound conspiratorial. Since unexplained suffering threatens to explode established order, those interested in maintaining the order had better find explanations fast. “A theodicy justifies the happiness of the powerful and the suffering of the powerless” (Gunneman, 43). Theodicy thereby preserves each group in the place it’s accustomed to occupy. But it’s important to note that Marx held this process to work so naturally it didn’t even require intention. One version of the process is both crude and complex: suffering people take refuge in religion, who turn to philosophy when religion begins to look illegitimate. It’s a picture we’ll find captured by Walter Benjamin’s hunchback: behind Marxist philosophy of history lies an old religious phantom that can’t be admitted to plain view. This picture assumes more discontinuity between philosophy and theology than we have been able to define. A cloudier and simpler picture does more justice to the facts. Both religion and philosophy can give meaning to suffering by distinguishing natural from moral evils and dividing responsibility accordingly. From the sigh of the oppressed to the system of Hegel there’s an increase in abstraction, but each obscures our real needs. Both religion and philosophy conceal our real task: to take responsibility for the world rather than to explain it, to transform rather than to endure. The continuity in the tasks of religion and philosophy seemed so self-evident that Engels could write:
Hitherto the question has always stood: what is God?—and German philosophy has resolved it as follows: God is man. Having grasped this truth, man must now arrange the world in a truly human way, according to the demands of his nature—and then the riddle of our time will be resolved by him. (Quoted in Tucker, 73)
Engels expressed what most left Hegelians believed. God Himself could not play the role of Redeemer He was created to fulfill. Even worse, He took up all the power and space available, so that nobody else could redeem us either. Humankind cannot be free until it takes back the power it gave to God.
Note that we have moved with extraordinary speed. If modern philosophy began by taking power from God in order to lighten His share of responsibility for evil, it soon reached the idea that all power was ours to allocate in the first place. Marx and Engels could move so quickly because they knew the discussion that consumed Hegel’s heirs. Hegel had demanded mergers: philosophy should become theodicy; man should become God. Since this was the agenda, arguments could quickly turn to the question of how much was left to complete.
Debates about whether Marx was a moral philosopher should be seen against this background. Many readers are disturbed by the contrast between the tone in which Marx denounces instances of injustice and the means by which he asserts they will be overcome. While the first reflects moral indignation, often outrage, the second insists that the process of change is a matter not of moral demand but of natural law. Thus many take the late Marx, in particular, at face value. He claimed he was not a philosopher but an economist, and said his claims were not even intended to be normative, just statements of fact. The tension between the tone and the content of Marx’s claims is lessened in light of the debate about natural law discussed above. For the question of which evils should be considered natural and which moral is central to that discussion.
Tension pulls in two directions. The more things are designated as moral evils, the greater our responsibility for them grows. This seems a natural process of accepting the privileges and demands of maturity—the process of Enlightenment—until we reflect that our responsibility has little relation to our power. If we don’t control the natural world, we can take all the responsibility we like in thought, but it will remain without force. The price of absolute freedom becomes so high that the impulse to designate more evils as part of nature returns. Even Kant, whose insistence on separating freedom and nature was second to none, responded to this state of affairs with the categorical imperative. Directing us to act as if our moral principles were universal laws of nature is a way to imagine moral principles as efficacious. Marx was impatient with imagination.
He believed the time had come when human beings could do more than pretend to replace God as a moral hypothesis. Changes the industrial revolution had wrought in the world itself brought double fruit. Technological advances let us abolish most sources of misery. This, of course, is good in itself. But these advances themselves can create a deeper sense of liberation. The realization that progress is the product of our own creative activity should finally show that suffering and redemption are in our hands alone. Neither need be left to the grace of a Being we ourselves invented, or to the mercies of the theoretical resources of a group of philosophers. Concrete advances in material conditions allow us to control nature in ways only gods could have imagined. The industrial revolution makes further theoretical revolutions superfluous. The distinction between natural and moral evil began as a debate about how much of the world’s misery was God’s fault, how much of it ours. Once God was overcome as a human projection, the distinction itself must be overturned.
Engels wrote that communism was the unavoidable conclusion of German philosophy (3:448). Here three points seem to confirm him. Hegel had suggested that God was dead, along with the idea that the human should replace Him and be responsible for more of the world than we’d hitherto imagined. Similarly, the claim that ideas which remain transcendent remain mere pious wishes is found in Hegel’s critique of Kant—now applied to Hegel himself. In Marx as in Hegel, the morality and nature that Kant tried to keep separate fuse. Finally, Marx was influenced by the Phenomenology’s suggestion that the slave and his work are the forces that transform the world.21 In all these ideas, Marx’s intention remains the same: to reproduce in the material world the movement Hegel made in thought. For Hegel represents but Prometheus manqué: he made it to the heavens, but forgot to take the fire.
In one mood, Marx’s rejection of philosophy looks as simple as Dr. Johnson’s. The English doctor dismissed skeptical arguments that material objects are unreal by kicking a stone, saying, “I refute Berkeley thus.” This is not a part of philosophical argument but a rejection of it altogether—which itself can be part of philosophy. Marx’s rejection of philosophy is accompanied by a profound narrative of its history. To claim we’ve forgotten that the point was not to interpret the world but to change it is to make a philosophical point. For it rests on the understanding of past philosophy as theodicy. By understanding this with an accuracy missing in others, Marx eliminated philosophy with an assurance others lacked, for he proposed to eliminate the needs from which it arises. Kant proclaimed the end of metaphysics but insisted on perpetuating the questions that produce it. Those questions, he thought, can never be answered by reason. Marx would only agree. The questions that drive philosophy are fundamental to human existence. Just because they are real questions, they demand real, not rational, solutions.
These solutions should incorporate whatever is productive in the structure of philosophical theodicies while removing the need for theodicy. Rousseau gave us the idea that historical processes made us authors of our own suffering who could become the authors of our own happiness. The idea was vastly refined in Hegel, whose view of the slave’s work as the beginning of history was the basis of Marx’s. Labor distinguishes us from animals, making us the creative beings we projected onto the heavens. While some animals can make particular products at random, only humans produce their own means of production. This is the source of our ability to replace the God we invented. Producing those means ensures our status as creators, for it makes us self-conscious and self-sufficient—just those qualities we projected onto God. Those who produce the means of production can foresee the future, and demand a share in it.
The alienation of labor enslaved the means of production—precisely that feature of human existence which should make us free and divine. Thus it is the basis of all the other ways human beings create their own chains and call them natural necessity. Every philosophical theodicy addresses the question of which evils are natural and which ones are moral. Marx was no exception, and his answer redrew boundaries that seemed fixed. What looked as immutable as an earthquake turned out to be merely property relations. The understanding we acquired, and technology we created, could rearrange something that seemed as objective and independent of us as the institution of private property. If we could do all that, who would set limits to the changes we could impose on the world? Like other theodicies, Marx’s justified suffering in the present by showing how it was necessary to overcome suffering in the future. Marx’s praises of capitalism are thus neither ironic nor paradoxical. They are part of a tradition whose goal is to make sense of suffering. Giving meaning to the past and hope to the future is the task of any ground on which religion and philosophy meet. Marx stood as firmly on such ground as anyone. In one respect, however, he broke with every preceding form of theodicy. What others left implicit, half-thought or half-dared, was for Marx as serene as an axiom. Theodicies had hitherto defended God; the point was to replace Him.
Marx’s attraction to Prometheus is easy to understand, for it wasn’t just anything that the Titan stole. The nineteenth century found no better dream of bringing heaven down to earth. Lightning symbolized all the majesty and terror of Providence. To transform the unpredictable force that strikes at random from above into a perfectly prosaic form of power was to put fate itself in human hands.
IN CONCLUSION
The demands of reason led to consequences that explode them. We began with Alfonso, whose fantasy looked close to common sense. Alfonso’s wish to advise God quickly led to Leibniz’s wish to be his advocate, a more complex form of displacement. Rousseau’s wish to defend Him was a step toward making Him obsolete. Kant was the first to name the wish to be God as driving force behind much of metaphysics. His first Critique unmasked it, his second made it the testing ground of morality, and his third simultaneously validated it and showed it up for the hopeless piece of blasphemy that it is. No wonder his legacy was hard to decipher. We saw Hegel announce God’s death and his own willingness to replace Him, and Marx demand that the replacement become real.
The same story could be told in more measured tones. In the foregoing I have tried to show how the demands to make sense of the world threaten the limits of sense itself. The attempt to stay within reason is doomed here to failure, and forms of expression are anything but accidental. I have made little attempt to trace causal connections in the history of ideas, though I have drawn on histories of others. Rather, I have tried to show something about the logic implicit in the very ordinary wish to change a piece of the world.
Here there’s more than one slope to slip down. Feuerbach provided cold links for a chain of argument. Providence, he argued, concerns God’s relation to humans. General Providence, the claim that God’s wisdom is manifest in the very existence of unchanging laws of nature, was a claim he found too weak. Rather, he took the notion of personal Providence seriously. God may intervene daily, as He sees fit. Every hair on your head is numbered. If God is willing to interrupt the laws of nature for your sake, you have infinite worth in His eyes. Well, then, here’s nothing less than His word for it: you have infinite worth.
Consequently, the belief in God is nothing but the belief in human dignity, the belief in the absolute reality and significance of human nature. (Feuerbach, 103)
Feuerbach concluded his discussion of Providence with a word to those Christians who might damn such views as expressions of pride. Is it more humble to imagine God becoming human for the sake of saving humankind? Feuerbach saw himself as merely leaving out the middleman. Since Leibniz gave Him little to do but pick out combinations already determined by necessary essences, God had become little but a middleman anyway.
If one axis on which reason falters is the increasing impotence of God, the other is the power of contingency. Rousseau’s tutor was needed to eliminate it, but it was a lifelong, full-time job. The later Kant knew that accident makes short work of small changes; or, rather, that there is no way to know which changes will be small ones. So Hegel called philosophy’s task the elimination of contingency—and the philosopher’s goal a knowledge as absolute as that once ascribed to God. Between these two axes there is no logical space for humility. Wherever one moves, one is caught. The demand to change the world cannot remain a moral imperative. It will quickly move from Kant’s proposal to imagine we are creating laws of nature to Marx’s demand that we go ahead and change nature itself. But exchanging the demand to change the world for the insistence on being reconciled with it brings little relief. Hegel’s announcement of the death of God, and of redemption through the future, would soon give way to Nietzsche’s announcement of the murder of God, and the need to seek redemption through the past. Those who talk most about the owl of Minerva long most to replace the goddess of wisdom herself.
This is all the more remarkable when we recall where philosophy began. Its founding hero’s claim to fame was a claim of absolute humility: only Socrates knows that he knows nothing. Socrates’ uncertain shuffle between diffidence and swagger is itself a matter for study. It cannot be accidental. For even thoroughly modest characters like Kant knew that this confusion belongs to the discipline, whose goal is always to close the gap between ought and is—from one side or another. Kant’s vision of metaphysics as unending rests on his view that the gap is permanent. Thus he described his relation to the subject as that of an unsatisfied yet unwavering lover (A850/B878). But tolerance for tormented love is varied; Kant’s seemed to be higher than most. Hegel would at once proclaim the end of philosophy and of the gap between real and rational. Marx attacked endings that remained endings in thought; once the gap really closed, there would be no more to discuss.
The presumption involved in the wish to replace God may lead to dangers that refuse to stay in the realm of theology. This would become clearer in the following century. The wish would be condemned not as blasphemy but as pathology—the latter now considered the greater problem. So it has been argued that Nietzsche’s misappropriation by fascism wasn’t merely bad luck. The search for the wrong sort of power creates confusion between human and divine prerogative that must end in something damned.
All this is good reason to back down before the problems start, and to resist the fantasy of outdoing the Creator by improving on Creation before it gets out of hand. The next chapter will examine a different sort of reservation. Some thinkers rejected the wish to replace God not because it was absurd or impious, but because they thought it beneath them. On their views, the world we were given is so outrageous that no reasonable being would want credit as its Author. Giving accounts that show how the world is, or can be made, rational is a way of being accountable for it. This is responsibility they would not accept.