A Revolution of the Mind by Jonathan Israel

Author:Jonathan Israel [Israel, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-10-26T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER V

Two Kinds of Moral Philosophy in Conflict

Despite the great variety of the world’s religions, affirms Diderot, all peoples have felt, more or less along the same lines, that it is necessary to be just. All nations have honored such virtues as goodness, friendship, loyalty, sincerity, and gratitude. Consequently, we should not look to any particular event or revelation for the source of what is so general and unalterable.1 True morality, argues Diderot, is essentially reverence for, and obedience to, just laws and good institutions, so that societies have good or bad customs and morals depending on whether they have good or bad laws; and the happiness of the people is determined by whether the laws are good or bad.2 For Radical Enlightenment in the tradition of Spinoza, Bayle, Fontenelle, Meslier, Du Marsais, Diderot, Helvétius, and d’Holbach, but also numerous writers in other countries besides Holland and France, morality is a universal, purely secular system based on a conception of justice wholly separate from, indeed best cultivated without, the influence of any particular religion. This was a view Rousseau in later life claimed to have shared with his former friend, Diderot, during the late 1740s and early 1750s, but later firmly rejected from the period of his Letter to d’Alembert (1758) onward.3

Ministers of religion disagree, suggested Diderot, only because “through their systems they became the masters of regulating all men’s actions, and of disposing all that men owned and wanted. In the name of heaven they endorsed arbitrary government on earth.”4 In the religious camp, those that could align with this conception of morality were, once again, the philosophical Unitarians and quasi-Socinians, such as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, figures influential in Holland and America as well as Britain, who were virtual materialists themselves. For these insisted on uncoupling church-based theology from morality and social policy, and church authority from the civil power, thus leaving human inquiry free and unfettered. Society, Price admonished, must ensure “an open field for discussion, by excluding from it the interposition of civil power, [. . .] by separating religion from civil policy, and emancipating the human mind from the chains of church-authority and church-establishments.”5

Admittedly, the Unitarians and their friends believed in some sort of Heaven, whereas the radical philosophes, Paineites, and Benthamites did not. But what chiefly mattered for forging the new radical revolutionary consciousness in moral and social theory, no less than in politics, was that Unitarians and atheistic materialists both placed great emphasis on the universality, separateness, and primacy of a reason-based moral order and a predominantly secular conception of the “common good” against church doctrine, tradition, and belief. Priestley entirely concurred that

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