Tag Archives: The Enlightenment

The Allure of Pantheism

Posted on by Bill Ryan

There is certainly no shortage of homes for spiritual seekers to choose among in this multifaceted world of ours. Conventionally speaking they seem to range from large institutional religions with historically deep traditional roots to contemporary charismatic spiritual movements with leadership who guide their aspiring flocks. In nearly every case, subscribing to a pious preference involves at least two inherent features—a community of like-minded disciples and a systematized doctrine exhibiting a path toward some conception of salvation. To many of the world’s spiritually inclined, these generalized qualities appear to be readily acceptable.

I contend, however, that there are a number of spiritual searchers who prefer a solo quest, the contours of which they construct individually, intentionally, and perhaps idiosyncratically. For them, the journey is every bit as stimulating and motivating as is endorsing any finalized faith or settled belief. It is to this type of explorer, this uncertain but committed pathfinder, that I dedicate the following words. I too desire a fidelity to a conviction of the universe, to a conceivable reality, and to all-there-is which feels at least plausible and hopefully authentic. By taking some time now to assess where I am currently in this effort may add some color to the perspective of others as they contemplate the big questions of God and nature and the metaphysical roles they play.

A significant shift in my spiritual contemplations occurred when I encountered Baruch Spinoza. And no, I am not going in the direction of branding Spinoza as some type of philosophical guru. Instead, I will say that what initially struck me as remarkable about this Portuguese/Dutch Jew from the seventeenth century was his enlightened and novel approach to perceiving God. He endured profound ostracism in order to present us with an idea that God was not a transcendent and distant all-powerful entity manipulating the universe from afar, but rather a living and animating force that pervades and is present in all things always. The suggestion that God is in us and in all things universally, most strikingly in Nature, instantly connected with me.

It is difficult for us humans to not think in terms of all-we-know in spatial and temporal terminology. The metaphysical implications of space and time provide plenty of grist for philosophers to mill, which is as it should be. Given the lack of consensus of the phenomenal vs noumenal role played by space and time ontologically, I accept that my perception of everything, including God, will be for now influenced by my consideration of the positioning and everlastingness of this divine potency. So, Spinoza’s claim becomes more coherent when he locates God universally as opposed to transcendentally. God becomes an inherent and elemental force in all of creation in contrast to a distant overseer of creation for all time. This spatial imagery especially resonates. It makes sense and feels right.

Speaking of imagery, another subjective benefit of this all-pervasive view of God is that the anthropomorphism commonly associated with conventional explanations of a transcendent being does not transfer at all well to an acceptance of God as the inherent essence of all-there-is. I have long been annoyed with the symbolism of God as a Zeus-like figure perched on high dispensing avowals of one sort or another down on His hapless figures scurrying about on the world He created. I have always imagined that this metaphorical style was considered more accessible to an unsophisticated populace. Perhaps, but now the notion of a supreme commanding figure appears to be a monarchical device meant to keep everyone in a holy line. This father God story may work for many as an adequate religious trope, but it does not work for me.

Spinoza’s identifying of a unified, immanent, and monistic reality is known as pantheism. This was not a term coined by Spinoza or by any of his forebearers. The descriptor begins to appear twenty years after Spinoza’s death in 1677. However, the conviction of a universal divine presence expressed in all things has a history that undoubtedly influenced Spinoza in his crafting of a systemized monistic metaphysic. There is evidence that the presocratics, in particular Heraclitus, spoke of the world as infused with an active Logos or natural order manifest in Nature itself. In time, the Stoics continued the sentiment of Logos as the force structuring all of creation. They promoted a view of a universal soul that merged God and Nature. Plotinus of Neoplatonism fame also pointed to a basic monistic power that defines all beings. The Irish philosopher and theologian John Scotus in the ninth century merged Neoplatonism with Christianity such that God was embodied in and of the world blurring a sharp distinction between creator and creation.

During the Renaissance of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries a natural philosophy began to be developed which involved revisiting ancient philosophical texts, challenging medieval church orthodoxy, and refining views of the natural world. Two names from this period stand out in a discussion of pantheism. Giordano Bruno constructed a system that embraced the growing outlook of an expansive universe populated by numerous worlds that were all expressions of an immeasurable God. He spoke of a world soul that energized a natural universe, and which was not dissociated from God. Tommaso Campanella described nature as a living organism evinced by an all-encompassing awareness directed by God. The notion of an internal and omnipresent Soul or Logos combining God and the natural world became more established during this period.

How directly these western influences impacted Spinoza’s formulation of pantheism is unclear. We do know that his intellectual investigations were rooted in three source domains: Jewish scripture presented rabbinically, the Latin humanist and philosophical canon of his time, and the Jewish-Islamic-Aristotelian philosophical hybrid constructed by the twelfth century Jewish intellectual Maimonides. As a Sephardic Jew living in the Netherlands, he benefited intellectually from availability of a rich Jewish and Latin body of thought with the freedom to scrutinize texts and doctrine while in the context of a liberal and tolerant Dutch scholarly environment. Indeed, it is ironic that it was his fellow Jewish exiles from the Spanish Inquisition who were the ones imposing an excommunication on Baruch Spinoza over the very issue of his pantheistic declaration.

Orthodoxies strikingly similar to pantheism were to be found in other parts of the globe over the past two millennia or so, although transmission of these principles were largely unlikely to have been made aware to Spinoza. Let us take a quick look at some disparate examples. One includes classical Hindu nondualism known as Advaita Vedānta which claims that Brahman is the supreme divine reality. A separate world of appearances, or Maya, is chimerical or deceptive, since in truth it is merely a manifestation of the one Brahman. The parallels of Dao with pantheism is another instance of note. Both spiritual approaches share a belief in the ultimate reality being a living whole, a diffuse harmony here in the world before us, not elsewhere in a distant realm. Both reject a creator-creation dualism, but both embrace following nature as a virtuous path. There can also be identified a kinship between pantheism and Native American spiritual beliefs. The sacred is immanent throughout all existence within many Indigenous cultures, not unlike pantheism’s divinity of Nature. There is no differentiation between being in relationship with Nature and with great spirits or God. The land, rivers, and air are vivacious, alive, hallowed, and in harmony with people. Many other such correlations between pantheism and other spiritual/philosophical customs around the world can be revealed.

One heritage that likely impacted Spinoza’s development of a pantheistic paradigm came from his own education as a Jewish youth in seventeenth century Amsterdam in the form of the Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah. It is entirely plausible that Spinoza was exposed to Kabbalistic writings, notions, and teachers. Primarily he would have gained from them the observance and liturgical practices associated with an unorthodox monism. This was expressed in Kabbalah as consisting of an infinite God being in communion with its creation of a finite existence. In this mystical view infinite possibilities are imaginable within this relationship of the infinite and the finite. A divine conscious presence is shared between God and God’s creation making all-there-is dependent manifestations of God with nothing existing beyond it. The universe is to be understood as revealing of the sacred reality.

As was Spinoza’s inclination, he did not accept wholesale the Kabbalistic interpretation of theism. He found it too oriented toward a personal God with an imposition of commandments and covenants on the finite world. Spinoza would have found this flavor of theism closer to what today we call panentheism, a pantheistic and transcendence hybrid. Rather Spinoza wanted his pantheism to have a highly rational and mathematical precision, a mechanistic and determinist outlook regarding God and Nature. As influential as Kabbalah mysticism presumably was on Spinoza, the rupture between his highly rational description of the relationship between God and the world and the more deferential Kabbalistic teachings of the faith’s elders led to Spinoza’s banishment from Amsterdam’s Jewish community. Regardless, pantheism now had an established presence in western philosophy and theology.

Spinozian pantheism was not initially well received. Indeed, it was harshly attacked. In general, ideas that disrupt the conventional wisdom, especially if there is institutional calcification defending a prominent position, meet with fierce resistance and obstruction. Many movements succumb to the onslaught. Pantheism did not. To be sure, Spinoza himself was cast out of Amsterdam and the Jewish community by the Jewish upper crust. He retreated to the Dutch city of Leyden where he spent the remainder of his short life working out his highly rational and deterministic philosophical system. In many decades following his death, pantheism and Spinozism were widely seen among the European intellectual elite as terms of derision. Charges of fatalism, moral degradation, and atheism accompanied the memory of Baruch Spinoza. The “civilized” western world was not yet ready to consider a philosophical or theological challenge to the idea of a personal or transcendent deity and the merger of Nature and God.

At this point I will admit to feeling one great hesitancy with Spinoza’s philosophy, which I see as tangential to his pantheism, although I accept that many others may see it as more integral. My reluctance pertains to the immoderation of his rationalism which led to a deterministic and mechanized view of the universe, and by extension to the divine. Therein lies a big problem. If the universe is so pre-programmed as to unfold in an exact and predictable manner, then where does spontaneity, variability and even chaos fit in? Foregone destiny seems too regulated. Free will could not exist within such a highly reasoned and algorithmic paradigm. Nullifying human self-determination is to rob people of an essential feature of their character.

Spinoza’s short life briefly overlapped with the later years of Rene Descartes, the philosopher most credited with the onset of modern philosophy and with the western devotion to rationalism and science. Clearly, Descartes influenced Baruch Spinoza. The excitement to elevate human potential through rational thought and mathematical precision while emerging from the stilted palsy of medieval scholasticism is understandable. That it inspired Spinoza and led to a lasting mark on western philosophy is evident. However, as we have seen, not everyone took readily to pantheism. Many did not easily embrace determinism either. Indeed, over time and due to its ardent rejection by the seventeenth and eighteenth century elites of Europe, pantheism shaped a debate that altered the course of western philosophy.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was an influential and well known eighteenth century philosopher, playwright, promoter, and art critic who is today recognized as having significantly impacted German literature. So, it came as a great surprise in the philosophical and literary world when in 1785 the German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi disclosed that in his last conversation with Lessing his colleague revealed, “There is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza.” This revelation incited what is known as the Enlightenment’s “Pantheism Controversy” within what was to be German Idealism. The intellectual world in Europe had not forgiven Spinoza for his blasphemy. His works were still widely banned. Therefore, the sentiment of Lessing was a shock to the refined minds of the elite. What ensued was a vigorous debate that in many ways defined the German Idealism movement.

In my judgment, the resurrection of pantheism in the midst of Enlightenment-era rationality added a greater degree of validity and panache to the notion of God and Nature being one even as the conception underwent intense investigation and criticism. History appears to bear this out. Pantheism’s reemergence generated disputes that remain unresolved to this day. In particular there are the dual conflicts of reason vs. faith and freedom vs. determinism. Jacobi, mentioned above, contended that absolute reason inevitably led to a deterministic universe devoid of freedom, individuality, and a personal and providential God. Faith must have precedence over reason he argued. Pure reason looks upon God-Nature existence as axioms from which deductively arrived upon proven statements are derived. It is difficult to see where human moral responsibility fits into such a universe.

A redefinition of pantheism eventually surfaced which included variations of an acceptance of a vital, spirited, and divine Nature with human agency as a core shaping element of God-Nature. I see this notably in the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), one of the principals of German Idealism. As with other German idealists, Schelling attempted to reconcile Spinoza’s divinity of Nature with the unacceptable predestinarianism of Spinoza’s rationalism. Schelling devoted his life and philosophical inquires to refining Spinozian pantheism. The depth and richness of his work is far beyond the scope of this essay, but I will summarize his crucial contribution this way.

Schelling elaborates the sacredness of Nature magnificently in his Naturphilosophie (Nature of Philosophy). He described Nature as infused with and expressive of spirit such that it is ever energetic and changing; always inventive and autonomous; and consistently self-becoming, self-regulating, and self-generating. Nature in Schelling’s world is not inert and listless or the product of a remote God, but rather forever developing organically toward cultivation and improvement. Schelling gives devout texture and definition to the qualities of sanctified Nature. This description clearly aligns with Spinoza’s God and Nature oneness.

With regards to human agency, I am struck by Schelling’s conflating of the ceaseless unfolding of God-Nature with the continual emergence inherent within the human condition. Schelling proposed a radical idea that the one true reality was not, nor ever has been, a finished product but rather an unending process of expansion, evolution, and progress. Fixed laws of nature did not arise from a starting point of time unchanged and left hanging like a framed painting hanging in a gallery. And since we humans are a direct expression of the One, as is all of Nature, we too live our existences in a state of growth and potential with freedom to choose life’s path. Schelling makes clear that the divine condition is a struggle between a chaotic darkness and a liberating light. It is within this cosmic churn that we each craft our lives. Yes, God and Nature are one, and a crucial feature of this unity is how we each flower, how we each flourish, or not. The process of becoming is fundamental to all of existence, including to ourselves.

Pantheism had traversed from chastisement and damning from the time of Spinoza through to the reform attempts during the period of German Idealism. In the years since the early nineteenth century pantheism has refused to expire. Indeed, it lives on as an influence in a number of philosophical and literary approaches. Romanticism writers, artists, and philosophers had an effect of adorning the heavily rationalist approach of Spinoza’s pantheism with odes, poems, hymns, landscapes, and a reverence for Nature as sacred. In their reaction to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason the Romantics chose instead to smooth the differences between Nature, God, rational metaphysics, and the self. True reality was expressed in terms of emotions, imagery, and yes, the unity of Nature and the holy. Ordinary people were encouraged to be awe-inspired by Nature, ecstatic before the vastness and intricacies of the natural world, and comforted by the embrace of the world-spirit whose presence was all around them.

In time, pantheism retained varying degrees of relevancy in the philosophical trends of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was less meaningful in the context of the English speaking world’s immersion into logical analysis with its concentration of language and logic. However, continental philosophy and its tradition of phenomenology turns out to be a more welcoming environment for the monism of pantheism. Theologians unsurprisingly have struggled with any alternative to their theistic model of a transcendent God, but even among the world’s great religions there are those who are less threatened with the divine immanence quality of pantheism. To some it makes sense and it feels right even if the concept is not preached from on high. Today, pantheism lives on in debates about God, Nature, ontology, and reason. Encouragingly, pantheism appears to be more widely accepted and endorsed nowadays than at any other time in modern history.

Speaking of my own spiritual journey, pantheism at my late stage of life is highly relevant and worthy of my continued consideration. As one who has not fit well into dogmatic traditions and their institutions, the view of a God and Nature harmony resonates plainly and warmly. It is not difficult for me to assign faith, that trust inspired conviction which we all settle on in our own very personal ways, to pantheism. May my heart and mind change fundamentally concerning this topic in the future? Possibly it will. However, I do not see this happening soon. Rather, I am content to see my faith in pantheism as rooted in three themes that form the structure of my personal metaphysics.

Call it the One, the Logos, the Word, the Collective Soul, All-There-Is, the Divine, or God the common throughline is the monism of reality. All of what is known to us, from matter and energy detected by us through our five senses to the most rudimentary a priori intuition and cognitive capacities we are born with reveals reality and fundamental truth as springing forth from a single all-powerful and all-inclusive wellspring.

Divinity is not restricted to an external and transcendent deity, but is instead infused throughout all of reality. Separating the divine from the commonplace implies naturally higher and lower orders. This does not feel right. Humans, because of our fallibilities, assume we are unwholesome in a fundamental way. Yet, the whole package of the evil and the sublime throughout the universe are features of the immanent divine.

Nature, including humankind, is not a produced entity manipulated and managed from afar, but is the basic, if not exclusive manifestation of the divine one. The genesis of reality is centered on God’s impulse of self-awareness. Not unlike how consciousness is our way of seeing and knowing ourselves, the divine too expresses itself to itself. Nature is the self-identification of God, inextricably bound and related.

To the seeker, the curious, the wanderer, and the explorer I encourage an examination of pantheism. A faith-based construction comprising the three themes mentioned above provide a starting point for the searcher who is not afraid to step out of the conventional religious models in their quest for a meaningful and subjective spiritual home. May we all find life enhancing revelation and light on our journeys.

 

Hume’s Valiant Challenge to Christianity’s Dominance

Posted on by Bill Ryan

I have long had a fraught relationship with Christianity. Raised as a Roman Catholic in a Massachusetts family with Irish roots I was taught to revere the institution, which I did until I did not. Indeed, throughout much of my life I became a Catholic rebel or eschewer more content with finding fault with the Church than looking for the virtues, which to be honest I have always known were hidden there among the layers of hypocrisy, intolerance, and self-righteousness.

What follows is the kind of Christian story that still appeals to me. It is a kind of David and Goliath tale of an individual standing up to a far superior power. The commanding strength of the Church pitted against a single wily and crafty intellect. To set the stage let us review how Christian supremacy came to reign across Europe and the western world.

Christianity has long played a paramount and highly influential role in the life and history of the European continent since the fall of the Roman Empire. The collapse of Roman rule in the western part of Europe is generally dated to the year 476 CE, the date the Germanic chieftain Odoacer ousted the last Roman emperor who controlled the western part of Europe, Romulus Augustulus. (Of note, the eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire, lasted for another thousand years. The Great Schism of 1054 permanently separated Roman Catholicism in the west from the Orthodox Church in the east.)

The theological underpinnings of Christianity had been codified just prior to the fall of the empire in the form of the teachings of Saint Augustine. These stringent, uncompromising, yet to many revered dictates on topics such as the meaning of original sin, the necessity of salvation, the reach of God’s omnipotence, and the rigorous dedication required for each individual to pursue a spiritual journey set the stage for influencing western European religion and culture for many centuries to come.

With Augustine’s theological structure in place the Roman Catholic Church became one of the only significant institutions remaining from the empire that represented social steadfastness and constancy in western Europe. As the seceding centuries transpired a blend of the growing power of popes, the expansion of monasteries, missionary zeal, conversions to Christianity among royal lines, political marriages, military partnerships, and cultural intermingling led to the establishment of Christian kingdoms and religious unification across much of the continent.

It is difficult to overstate the authoritarian importance of Christianity across western Europe. As the faith became more entrenched across the continent the very identity of Europeans became defined by their adherence to Christian doctrine. Culture, social order, education, the arts, and personal conduct were decreed from the papacy in Rome as the Church replaced the empire in its universality. Indeed, state control in the form of feudal systems collaborated companionably with the Church to sustain and defend Christian orthodoxy.

Over time, however, cracks began to appear in papal control of western Europe. An eventual establishment in and slow rise of nationalism led to challenges of papal sovereignty. This was clearly evident during the Avignon Papacy of the fourteenth century when for seven decades seven consecutive popes left Rome to govern the Church from Avignon, France. Disputes with French royalty and instability among Italian states resulted in Rome being temporally abandoned by the Church creating an impression that popes were not as invincible as previously thought.

Of course, the most significant confrontation to Roman Catholic control of European religious life was the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Northern European religious reformers beginning with Martin Luther and John Calvin and nation state rulers such as King Henry VIII of England among others dared the papal preeminence on matters of theology, liturgy, and jurisdictional reach. By the end of the seventeenth century religious wars, internal corruption, political transformations, and theological disagreements permanently ended the Roman Catholic Church’s hegemony over the religious life of western Europe.

Nevertheless, western Europe remained under the ecclesiastical sway of Christianity, albeit within the two churchly provinces of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. To challenge the core of Christian canon with an alternative doctrinal conception was close to unheard of across the continent. To be sure, spiritual variants existed in medieval Europe although they were always limited in their reach. Folk and pagan traditions, heretical factions, mystical and charismatic visionaries, Jewish and Muslim communities, and general doubters and skeptics were evident, but restrained in their capacity to seriously narrow the scope of Christianity.

Rather, a dogged defiance of Christian creed that could not be easily ignored came from an Enlightenment-era philosopher, in the person of David Hume. Born in Edinburgh in 1711 and raised in the Scottish Lowlands close to the English border Hume became one of the deepest thinkers and greatest intellects of the eighteenth century. When I first began studying western philosophy my initial impression of Hume was that he was a radical empiricist. Nothing I have learned about him since has dissuaded me from that original notion.

David Hume presented a much more extensive body of philosophical thought than merely religious critique. His explorations involving epistemology, skepticism, ethics, and early psychology were sweeping, but it was Hume’s radical empiricism that prompted him to confront the frailties he found apparent in religious thinking—with Christianity, the prominent religion in his culture acutely in his sights.

Hume’s entire philosophical project rested on core assumptions chief among them that human beings are simply too restricted in their ability to perceive anything beyond what sensory experience reveals. A grand metaphysical structure, whether it be divine or solely physical, is an abstraction outside of our capacity to comprehend. All we can know about the world begins with our sensory impressions; those vibrant connections we make with the world external to our minds. These impressions convert to ideas which are the thoughts and conceptions we mentally construct as we reflect on our sensory experiences.

By rejecting metaphysics as a credible invention due to the lack of a direct tangible sensorial connection between humans and any alleged existential actuality, Hume concedes that we humans can never know the true nature of ultimate reality. Because of our epistemological limitations, which are confined to our senses, we cannot prove the existence of any transcendental realms or realities. This would include the existence of God, which most Christians of the eighteenth century (and indeed today) still view as a transcendent being. If God cannot be proven to exist, then by extension all the works and effects believers claim are the result of God’s actions are also called into question.

At the time of Hume Newtonian science was in full development. What science was exposing was that the universe had order—from the movement of heavenly bodies to the flow of blood within our own bodies. Surely, many contended, a grand design was evident in the makings of the universe, which deists and theists claimed was the handiwork of God. However, Hume was having none of it. How do we know God designed the universe? And if God did design the universe why did he design one with so many faults in it?

Hume intentionally engaged with conventional Christian thought assailing key tenets by consistently basing his commentary on his premise of the prominence of sensory experience. Take the causality of the universe, a fundamental discourse in the eighteenth century that goes as far back as the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides. Most agreed that whatever exists must have a cause for its existence. Afterall, nothing can come from nothing. Furthermore, no cause can manifest perfection unless the cause itself is perfect. God, an immaterial, intelligent, and perfect being must be the preeminent cause of the universe.

Not necessarily so said Hume. To begin with the typical claim of cause and effect in general is faulty. Because we observe repeated sequences does not establish causation. These common and everyday repetitions we notice in our lives only highlight typical courses of action, not causal relationships. Could we therefore not also be incorrect about claiming God as the cause of the universe? What sensory experience can we attribute to God creating the universe? Such a declaration exceeds human awareness.

Hume’s skepticism extends to religious conceptions of souls, miracles, and the idea of future states of being in heaven and hell. Humans are driven by emotions and passions and not by reason according to Hume. We want to share as social creatures in the glorification of common convictions, moral judgments, and belief in God. Custom and habit motivate our behavior. Our ideas about religion are based more on feelings, imaginations, and what we think works best. Abstract reasoning and identifying divine purpose are not our strong suits. Religion will not solve the ultimate mysteries of existence, but it feels good for many to enlist in spiritual community and to practice traditional rituals. David Hume is content to leave religion to that.

Hume is not an atheist in the way we typically think of a non-believer. To me this is revealed in his approach to the age old problem of evil in religion. Most atheists I hear say that because evil clearly exists in the world, then that is proof God does not exist. Hume’s method of relying on sensory experience can no more disprove God than to prove God’s existence. So, he states the obvious. God may or may not exist. We can never know for sure. But what is evident is that pretenses to God’s infinite goodness are suspect in a world where evil abounds. Hume calls into question what kind of God is it that permits evil? And on that point Hume is not alone.

We also do not find Hume rejecting morality. Rather he devises a secular set of ethics that rests on human nature and conduct which promotes happiness and reduces suffering. Religion is not required to live a life of integrity and goodness. I think Hume would have agreed with the future Abraham Lincoln who said, “When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.”

It is difficult with a twenty-first century perspective to fully appreciate how socially and politically thorny it was for David Hume to confront the established Christian thinking of eighteenth century Britain. He showed awareness of knowing he needed to temper the presentation of his convictions when for example he expounded his critique cloaked in the guise of a fictional character’s dialogue. He was known also to conduct self-censorship. What is unmistakable is that he exposed himself to a hefty dose of inconvenience and distress.

Hume had very much wanted to be appointed to ethics and philosophy teaching positions at both the University of Edinburgh and Glasgow University. However, religious authorities consistently discouraged such appointments due to their claims of Hume’s heresy and atheism. The Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum or List of Prohibited Books included all of Hume’s books in 1761. Although never completely followed through, The Church of Scotland also began an action to try Hume for infidelity.

His personal life fared no better than his professional one. Throughout his life his critics referred to him as The Great Infidel and as an atheist. He was shunned by many of the professional class, although not by all intellectuals. In short, he existed as a controversial figure for presenting alternative views to the ideological norm. The time in which Hume lived is now referred to as The Enlightenment, but plainly that did not mean the period was fully illuminated.

As David Hume faced death during the summer of 1776 there was a public captivation across Britain with whether or not The Great Infidel would renounce his irreverent skepticism. Another great Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and friend of Hume’s, Adam Smith described Hume’s final days as buoyant and calm with no reservations of his beliefs evident. Another philosopher friend, the pious James Boswell, was beside Hume’s deathbed and gave his friend an opportunity to experience a last-minute conversion. But it was not to be. David Hume died as he had lived—content with his philosophical skepticism and steadfast in his convictions.

 

 

 

Classical Liberalism in the Modern Era

Posted on by Bill Ryan

In essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity. — attributed to St. Augustine

There are times in modern history when the Hegelian dialectic forms the basis for social and political change. The thesis represents the status quo; the antithesis introduces deviation; and the synthesis emerges as the new normal — at least for a time.

One such metamorphosis occurred during the initial rise of industry from 1760 until 1840 with another iteration evident from 1870 until 1914. Broadly speaking the Industrial Revolution marked a formidable displacement away from reliance on hand craftmanship to machine manufacturing as the primary means of production. Mechanical power was harnessed to vastly expand product output and in the process the world was transformed.

The Industrial Revolution did not spontaneously combust. It became conceivable because a philosophical foundation was set to make it possible. A school of thought developed characterized by reason, empiricism, pragmatism, and a systemization of knowledge gain. In the west, social confinement finally began to shift away from the combined dominance of Church teachings and monarchial/aristocratic decrees as the sole roots of incontrovertible truths and guidance for all humankind.

The period known as The Enlightenment began in the mid-seventeenth century with Descartes and Newton and lasted until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The rational and scientific upheaval of this age of reason made possible the Industrial Revolution. Of significance was the synthesis of the many cultural, political, economic, and technical outgrowths spawned by development of industry.

We not only live at present with the technological and economic features of industrial capitalism, but also with its principal social and political theory known as classical liberalism. From the churn of new philosophical and scientific thought emerged a transfigured social order. A novel conception of what it meant to be human surfaced emphasizing the worth of the individual person. A looming fatigue and disdain for playing the role of chattel manifested. The human condition had had enough of subjugation and exploitation.

Classical liberalism began with a revisitation and reformulation of the concepts of the state of nature and natural law. Though interpretive consensus was lacking there nevertheless existed a prevalent and rising belief in an a priori substructure to the human condition. One that stated inconclusively that we are all born with common qualities, most importantly with universal rights. If there is a clear-cut and explicit focal point to the birth of classical liberalism it is with this crystallization of human rights.

In our hearts we never strayed from Aristotle’s claim that to be fully human means to flourish. Philosophy of the seventeenth century sparked a renewed reverence for what it meant to thrive, to try finally to live a life of wonderment, prosperity, and joy. However, recognition of our sacred solitariness alone was not enough to sustain it. We shared the world with others. We all had the right to flourish. We all wanted the same thing and therein lies the challenge of the collective for the individual.

Classical liberalism was a social contract. A systemized way of honoring individualism within the context of society. John Locke contributed much to articulating how this social contract was to be perfected. Locke perceived the budding natural law ethic of individual rights as consistent with his view of the human as free and equal in the state of nature. And revolutionary for his time, Locke saw the rights of the individual as superseding the authority of monarchs.

The macro movement of limiting the power of monarchs inspired Locke and led to his social contract theory, which became an elegant construction, the influence of which lives on to this day. A key hallmark of the social contract prescribed that government, a concept that Locke admits did not come from natural law, but which was a necessary creation of humans nevertheless, should be constituted and exercised by the governed, by the people. Its key purpose was to achieve social harmony by ensuring all could prosper.

To execute the social contract Locke composed a political theory that centered on four central functional elements for government to follow:

  • Individual Rights to protect the freedoms of each person
  • A Rule of Law that is applied to all equally
  • Limited Government to safeguard against tyranny
  • Economic Freedom as the means of achieving abundance

The job of bringing the classical liberal social contract to fruition fell to the early post-church and post-monarch nation states during the eighteenth century, primarily Britain, France, and the young United States. Despite their respective fits and starts and idiosyncrasies what eventually materialized were the liberal democracies, a movement that in time became globally pervasive due to its civilized capacity to merge individual rights with shared decision making. Consensus grew that liberal democracy best secured and expressed the values of classical liberalism.

Adherence to classical liberalism exerted within the context of representative democracy constitutes a humane and effective means of ensuring opportunities for flourishing of all people within a given society. One is hard put to see a system that is better. All other methods of command and control demonstrate an imbalanced concentration of power of one sort or another. Over-convergence of power, whether it be in the form of government, religion, corporations, monarchies, oligarchies, aristocracies, or media, eventually leads to hierarchy, domination, oppression, and a diminishment of individual rights and checks on power.

Retaining classical liberalism is not easy to do, despite its popular appeal. There are muscular forces in most societies which feel constrained and checked by broad and equal disbursement of rights. Classical liberalism promotes sharing of power and wealth among a citizenry. Those with a tendency toward hoarding power and wealth do not want to contend with these fundamental and vexing aspects of liberalism. Rather, they pine for a more traditional and antiquated arrangement in which some people, as in their kind of people, are better than others and more deserving of power and wealth.

Today we see such a regressive social and political movement in the form of illiberalism. This emerging ideology directly challenges classical liberalism. The traditional but menacing leadership practices associated with autocracy, dictatorship, all-powerful monarchs, and a privileged well-heeled class are always at hand. There is a rich history reaching back millennia of groups and individuals who believe in their hearts and minds that an entitlement class is necessary to ensure that a society or national state retains its cultural conventions and to prevent social descent into chaos and debauchery. They alone possess the means and abilities to best steer the populace.

The latest iteration of this authoritarian heritage is illiberalism. This perspective views classical liberalism as anathema to their mission. Illiberalism prides itself on advancing national sovereignty and what is known as national essentialism, an interpretation of a historic national core comprised of a founding people with valued originalist traditions and practices in need of preservation. It promotes a political culture that rejects change and attempts at progress in favor of customary rituals.

To further the illiberalism project, adherents renounce individual freedoms among those not included among the chosen people. Multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and extensions of rights to minorities are shunned, if not forcibly curtailed. Limited government is also abandoned as power is concentrated into an all-powerful executive. To accomplish executive consolidation parliamentary and judicial systems are diminished and enfeebled.

Economically, illiberal supporters do not trust free trade and tend to be highly protectionist despite the many examples of economic decline wrought by protectionism such as high consumer prices, trade wars, inefficiency, supply chain disruptions, and reduced market access. Indeed, illiberalism is ambivalent about free enterprise in general. Its controlling nature can lead to cronyism and state intervention into economic decision making, not unlike communist practices.

Not surprisingly, illiberalism lacks enthusiasm for foreign policy that engages too much with the world and instead favors isolationism. Multilateral treaties and multinational institutions are seen as inconsistent with sovereignty and so are spurned. In the case of the United States, which has played a unipolar role internationally since the end of the Cold War, continued influencing of advancing democratic principles globally is also in conflict with illiberal thought. The conviction remains that a nation state can and should conduct its own affairs in its own interests with as little contact with others, as necessary.

Illiberal political parties are proliferating around the world. Their presence is now found in Hungary, Poland, Türkiye, Brazil, El Salvador, Venezuela, India, Philippines, Russia, Israel, Tunisia, and Egypt — and now here in the United States. The Republican Party has abandoned conservatism for illiberalism, and we have a president, who along with the majorities in Congress, practice it.

The Hegelian Dialectic acknowledges that social change happens. Political inertia is not to be expected. However, it is the quality of the antithesis and the resulting synthesis that most matters. The great challenge for our time in America and around the world is to see if the ideals of classical liberalism, which remain a revolutionary enhancement in governance, can survive and thrive in the face of a world disrupted by contemporary technologies and a globalized economy. Illiberalism represents a regression to times and methods ill-suited to address modern problems and opportunities. Rather, illiberalism is based on fear and insecurity and deserves to be soundly repudiated.