Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise vicomte de Bonald - Philosophical researches on the premier objects of moral cognitions (1818)

I’ve already discussed de Bonald’s ideas about the proper form of state - to summarise, he was a conservative thinker, who preferred hereditary monarchy over democracy, because the former provided a unifying element required for stabilising society and keeping it running according to necessary laws. I am now about to discuss his opinions on the more theoretical side of philosophy and particularly his work Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaissances morales.

De Bonald begins his discussion with a summarised account of the history of philosophy, starting with Thales and ending with Kant and his school. While his account is at first quite diverse, he is finally quite willing to divide all philosophy into two rough classes, according to the question of the source of our ideas - those de Bonald calls Platonists, who believed in the possibility of innate ideas, and those he calls Aristotelians, who upheld that all ideas are ultimately derived from sensations. This is strikingly similar to the ideas of Saint-Simon, which makes one suspect that both thinkers relied on some common tradition in French historygraphy of philosophy.

It is no wonder that de Bonald, with his conservative take on philosophy, prefers the platonistic side of the dispute. This can be seen especially in his attitude toward the question of the origin of language. On the one side of the question, de Bonald sees linguistic atheists, who deny any peculiar origin of language and regard human speech as a mere haphazard accident that has arisen through happy circumstances. At the other side, then, are linguistic theists, who insist that skill language has been created together with the creation of human beings, just like the biblical story of Adam naming animals reveals. Finally, there is also the deistic middle stance, which supposes that human language has arisen gradually over time, from a state of complete silence, but also that humans have had a natural tendency for speech, not to be found with other animals.

De Bonald insists that the proper answer to the question is the theistic one, simply because language is something that could not have been invented - invention would have already required thinking, but human beings simply cannot think without the aid of words. A particular target of his criticism is Condorcet’s notion of the development of human culture, which undoubtedly was highly speculative account. Of course, nowadays we would quickly discount de Bonald’s explanation by saying that it is equally speculative, based on mere unverified myths, while the seemingly separate realms of silent animality and linguistic rationality seem in our eyes to be more like two points on an unbroken continuum.

De Bonald goes even further and suggests that even writing is something humans cannot have invented by themselves, pretty much for the same reason as language couldn’t have been invented - to distinguish sounds within words, one must already have letters to indicate them. What might have been invented was hieroglyphical writing, in which all words were indicated by one picture, but like other thinkers of the time had said, such a manner of writing expressed a stagnation of human development. The truly innovative alphabetical writing, de Bonald insists, must have been of divine making. Indeed, its very purpose was to counteract the all too human habit of forgetting such important things as divine law.

On basis of these considerations, it is no wonder that de Bonald is against any materialistic theories of human constitution. He notes as a physiological fact that human brain plays a crucial role in the formation of human consciousness, because all the nerves clearly transmit sensations to it. Yet, he notes, this does not necessarily mean that brain is the source of thoughts, because it might as well be just the means by which the proper source of thinking - intelligence - receives sensations and transmits commands to various parts of the body. Indeed, de Bonald says, the latter theory bears striking resemblance to the proper form of state, in which a monarchic ruler uses noble ministers to guide the body of state.

De Bonald finds three different aspects in the intelligence: imagination, or the faculty of making mental representations corresponding to sense objects, understanding, or the faculty of conceiving ideas of non-sensuous, intellectual objects, and finally, sensibility, or the faculty of sensing pleasure and pain. Now, all of these aspects have their own form of language, de Bonald continues: imagination makes gestures and pictures, understanding creates articulated speech, while sensibility is shown in involuntary movements and cries.

What de Bonald tries to achieve by distinguishing these three faculties is, firstly, to argue against the Condillacian theory that all thoughts are just modifications of sensations. Especially he wants to say that ideas - say, like of justice or goodness - are not mere sensuous images. Of course, we have learned through senses the linguistic expressions, which refer to these ideas, but the ideas themselves must be innate in us, at leas as innate capacities to think such things, de Bonald concludes.

The second reason for this trivision of mental faculties, lies in de Bonald’s wish to undermine the materialistic philosophy of mind presented by Cabanis. While Cabanis had suggested as significant evidence for materialism that such things like age, gender or climate affect one’s mental constitution, de Bonald suggests that such matters affect only things like taste in foods, which belongs more to sensibility, but not ideas, which should be universal. Indeed, de Bonald states, seeming counterexamples of cultures having different moral norms are not dependent on material influences, like climate, but simply on the moral state of the culture in question.

From the rather clear that fact that a person can wish for one’s own death, de Bonald draws the rather strong conclusion that human soul must be immortal. De Bonald’s reasoning is based on the assumption that soul or human personality can never really hope for its own destruction. Indeed, when one desires death, one desires merely separation of soul from the shackles of body, de Bonald says. Of course, one can quite well suspect such a statement, because we might well assume some suicidal people would really want to destroy their very consciousness.

De Bonald also notes the universal recognition of the existence of God. Indeed, he notes this on each of the three aspects of human cognition: different cultures have had images of divinity, they have talked about gods and they have surely had sentiments of the creator. De Bonald suggests this universal recognition as a premiss in a Cartesian proof of God’s existence - if humans have had cognitive stances about God, God must be possible, which means that he must also exist. Yet, as he himself appears to understand, the most convincing argument he could use is more emotional - the universality of belief in God seems hard to explain, unless God really existed. Indeed, de Bonald notes, even hardline materialists cannot but fail to speak of such matters as the order of the world, thus implicitly already assuming the existence of someone to order matter.

It is no wonder that as a conservative thinker de Bonald doesn’t try to introduce any novelties in his philosophy, but defends a tried worldview. Thus, it is to be accepted that after bringing God into the equation, de Bonald notes that he has organised the world teleologically for the sake of human beings. In another analogy with state, de Bonald calls humans ministers of the divine monarch, leading all the other living beings. This does not mean that humans could despotically rule over animals, because they should be more like guardians to animals. Still, de Bonald sees humans as clearly above animals, because animals are, de Bonald says, perfect and cannot become any better, while humans are perfectible.

Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais: Essay on indifference in matters of religion, volume IV; Defence of the essay on indifference in matters of religion

The rest of Lamennais argument for the divine nature of Christianity concerns mostly what could be called its emotional impact. For instance, Lamennais notes that miracles reveal to us the power of divinity, which surpasses the comprehension of human mind, and thus bolster the dogmatic side of divine revelation. I am not really interested of the question whether miracles actually have occurred, but a more interesting consideration is whether miracles are even possible. A deistic argument against their possibility, which Lamennais recounts, notes that miracles are contradictions, because they should break supposedly unbreakable laws of nature - that is, nothing could be a miracle, because if something broke what we thought was a law of nature, then the supposed law wouldn’t have been a true law in the first place.

Now, making miracles into a logical absurdity seems a sophism of the worst sort and makes one just wonder, if there is something wrong in the suggested definition of miracle, because one can surely imagine what it would be like if some divinely powered entity would break the regular course of nature. Of course, it also depends on what do we mean by a law of nature. If one means by it just a regularity, miracles could be defined as highly improbable events, on the condition that these regularities usually hold. Then again, if a law of nature means something more necessary, we could either think of all these laws as having an implicit caveat, like “unless God decrees otherwise” - and a miracle would then be just an instantiation of such a caveat - or we might think that miracles mean temporary replacement of our world and its laws with another world having different laws of nature. For Lamennais, this sophistical argument is just a proof that deists, who deny all powers from divinity, are a step away from becoming atheists, who, by the way, cannot even show that natural world has any unbreakable laws.

The very crux of the emotional argument for the sanctity of Christianity lies undoubtedly with the person of Jesus and his supposed role in the divine plan. Word of God - whatever that means, but it surely sounds like a mighty person - takes on a rather powerless position and dies just for the sake of giving humans a chance to redeem themselves. As the popularity of Christianity shows, this is a rather powerful story - who wouldn’t like it, if some person of authority sacrificed himself for others? Indeed, one might suggest that this emotional component was an essential aspect at the stage when Christianity spread over the Roman empire. Lamennais, on the other hand, takes this spread as a further proof for the divine origin of Christianity, which seems a bit too quick conclusion, since Christianity surely hasn’t been the only ideology that has gathered followers despite its meager beginnings.

Lamennais still tries to back the sanctity of Christianity by showing that Christianity has been beneficial to the development of society. I have already discussed a similar argument and noted that it is rather doubtful. What is more interesting is Lamennais’ later written defense of his work, attached at least in the edition I've been reading to the final volume. Here Lamennais returns especially to the themes of the second volume and to his account of various philosophical schools, like empiricism and idealism. In the defense, Lamennais is especially interested of what he called dogmatic school of philosophy, the major proponents of which were supposedly Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, Leibniz, and rather interestingly, Francis Bacon, whom otherwise one might have included with the empiricists. The defining characteristic of this “school” Lamennais finds in reliance on individual human reason. It doesn’t take Lamennais long to find some clear difficulties e.g. in Cartesian reliance on human reason - as Descartes himself attests, the very criterion he suggests, or clarity and distinction of ideas, works as a criterion only if he already supposes the existence of a benevolent divinity, who can guarantee the connection between clarity/distinction and truth. Lamennais thinks that even the famous I think therefore I am falls because of this mistake, since it can at most now show that we must believe in our own existence, not that we have any basis for this belief.

While Cartesian fundamentalism does break at obvious places, Lamennais regards as its worst offence the culture of individual reason it has propagated - after Descartes, everyone believes she can find the truth by following her own opinions. Lamennais explicates his own chosen criterion by saying that instead of individual reason he advocates for common sense or reason, that is, the authority of generations and generations of Church doctrine. He does note some of the more obvious criticisms against his position, especially on the question whether we can truly say that Catholic Christianity is the best authority to rely upon. Unfortunately, he really does not have any better basis for this assumption, except to point to his four criteria of unity, universality, perseverance and sanctity, all of which we have found wanting.