Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 - Will behind the phenomena

While the first section of Schopenhauer’s book was nominally Kantian, but in reality something else, the second section is a clear move beyond limits set by Kant. One of the most central thesis in Kant’s philosophy is that we do not have any access to things as they are in themselves. Schopenhauer flatly denies this and states that we indeed have such an access. If we were mere disembodied subjects, such an access wouldn’t exist, but we are not. In fact, we are very much embodied persons. Now, we can regard our bodies from an external viewpoint, as a mere object. Still, we also have access to what our bodies are, not as objects, but as things in themselves - through our will. For instance, we feel an urge to do something, and at once we can see this urge fulfilled in the movement of out body.

Superficially taken, Schopenhauer’s attempt to go beyond Kant’s limits for cognition resembles Fichte’s philosophy in the sense that both philosophers base their attempts on a practically understood self-consciousness. Yet, there are clear differences. While Schopenhauer’s justification is quite crude and seemingly based on nothing more than mere self-feeling, Fichte’s assumption is based on an interesting transcendental deduction: whole experience would not be possible without being set up by a practically understood self-consciousness.

Now, Schopenhauer distinguishes his primal will in itself from all motives seemingly guiding our actions. Such motives are mere phenomenal circumstances, which at most explain why we act at this moment and in this situation as we do. Primal will, on the other hand, is equal to action itself and is, according to Schopenhauer, ultimately explicable, because all explanations occur on the level of representations. In fact, no phenomenal restrictions apply to the primal will. Thus, on the level of will, Schopenhauer concludes, there are no separate individuals, but each and everyone of us is as well a representation of the primal will.

In fact, Schopenhauer goes even further and insists that animals, plants and even bare material objects are all just embodiment of will. At first sight, saying that e.g. gravity is a form of will is just replacing one difficult word (force) with another (will). Yet, it contains at least one description of such a force - it is somehow similar to the urge that we feel in our actions. While forces as such are just closed from us, will we know intimately well, and it is just a matter of extending this familiarity to, first, motiveless urges of animals and plants, and finally, to strivings of all material objects.

Although Schopenhauer then in a sense upholds an ontological monism - all is will - he does not endorse any monistic explanations in the level of science. On the contrary, science works at the level of appearance or representation, so there is no guarantee, he says, that e.g. organic phenomena could be reduced to chemical terms. In fact, Schopenhauer appears to suggest that no reduction of any kind can happen between different sciences. And indeed, if any type of reduction is to be effected, this should happen to a direction completely opposite from the usual attempts of reduction. In other words, inorganic phenomena, like gravity and magnetism, should be understood through an analogy to our own volitional efforts. In fact, Schopenhauer suggests that phenomena could be arranged in a hierarchy according to the level of resemblance they have with human volition. Such levels would then show different levels in the process of becoming apparent of the primordial will - mere material phenomena would show their origin in will least clearly, while human volition would show it most clearly.

We have already remarked about the resemblance of Schopenhauer’s notion of will with Fichte’s practical self-consciousness. Even clearer affinities Schopenhauer’s theory has with the romantic notion of phenomenal world as an appearance of forces of life. Like romantics, Schopenhauer notes that individuality is mere delusion, that everything originates from a unified source and that this source is embodied in a hierarchy of levels, where humanity holds the highest place. Even Schopenhauer’s insistence that at the level of phenomena different embodiments of primordial will strive against one another is not unlike e.g. Hegelian insistence that basic forces contradict one another and even cancel themselves in some circumstances. Furthermore, Schopenhauer’s statement that will can never completely fulfill its strivings, but is always driven to do more and more, is quite on line at least with the ideas of some romantics - although others imagined that at some level (perhaps with humans) such a primal need could be balanced by harmonious reason.

Arthur Schopenhauer: World as Will and Representation 1 (1819)

Although in the preface of the first edition of his main work, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Schopenhauer is quite insistent that no one should read his work, before reading first Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his own work on the principle of sufficient reason, when I first read the work, I understood it quite well without these aids and even by beginning from the second, supplementary book published later. This is mostly a testament to Schopenhauer’s skills as a writer. Compared to some of his contemporaries, Schopenhauer’s prose is even dull in its simplicity.

The first edition of the work divides into five sections, two dealing with world as representation and two with world as will, while the fifth is a detailed criticism of Kant’s philosophy. I shall follow Schopenhauer’s division in this regard and divide my account of the book into five consecutive posts.

Although I shall thus consider Schopenhauer’s relation to Kant in more detail in a later post, we can already note that in the first section of his book, Schopenhauer offers a quite simplified and even caricaturised version of Kantianism. Schopenhauer’s basis for his form of Kantianism is the conceptual pair of subject and object. Subject is that which is conscious of an object and neither can exist without the other, Schopenhauer says - there could be no consciousness without nothing to be conscious of, but also nothing to be conscious of without any consciousness. While object is spatio-temporal, subject is not. Still, space and time can also be seen as forms of being conscious of, in the sense that subject sees everything spatially and temporally. Same goes for causality - object follows causal laws and subject regards everything as following causal laws. Thus, without any subject, there would be no object, no space, no time and no causality. This quite straightforward idealism Schopenhauer takes as the essence of Kant’s philosophy - and essentially also as the kernel of Berkeley’s philosophy. All of this would quite confuse most Kantians, who would be quick to distinguish between Kant and Berkeley.

We have already seen Schopenhauer develop the basic structure of this first part in his book on the principle of sufficient reason, and what he adds in this work is mostly just the subjective correlates for the objective elements. We have already seen that Schopenhauer follows Kant in regarding space and time as forms of cognition - following Kant, he calls them objects of pure sensibility. Space and time alone would allow no change - space as such is not processual, while time as such has nothing abiding that could change. It is only their combination that makes it possible to experience something as changing, Schopenhauer says. This combination of the two happens through what Schopenhauer, again following Kant, calls understanding. But unlike with Kant, Schopenhauerian understanding does nothing else, but implicitly regards everything in space and time as causal. Causality binds space and time together through the notion of matter, which is just an abiding substrate for all causal changes. Schopenhauer takes this notion of understanding in a quite robust manner: there literally is a module in our brain that combines our individual perceptions into neat causal chains.

Even more adamantly than Kant does Schopenhauer insist that causality cannot be applied outside experience. In fact, Schopenhauer insists that objects do not causally affect subject. Neither does subject create objects, but both appear on the playing field at the same time.

Beyond sensibility and understanding Schopenhauer places reason, which for him, more clearly than for Kant, is a common name for our conceptual abilities. Indeed, it is our conceptual ability reason is all about, since it is the only essentially human cognitive faculty. Schopenhauer thinks that reason by itself cannot really do anything, but is always dependent on the content given by sensibility and understanding, because concepts are just abstract generalisations from perceptions. Still, for practical purposes moving to this level of abstractions is of necessity - for instance, we couldn’t communicate things to others, if we couldn’t use concepts for them. Even so, Schopenhauer emphasises the use of perceptual and intuitive examples even in case of scientific study, which is the place where conceptual side of cognition is at most in play - the certainty of even mathematical principles is essentially based on perceptions and intuitions. The most remarkable thing about this account is how unremarkable it is - even Wolffians could have accepted everything Schopenhauer had to say about reason.

Indeed, in a sense Schopenhauerian notion of reason is closer to Wolffian than Kantian philosophy. When it comes to the practical use of reason, Schopenhauer denies that reason could have any absolute moral principles, which would be based on nothing external. Thus, the only way reason could be used in action would be as a faculty for guiding us to as happy life as possible. Hence, the most perfect system of practical reason for Schopenhauer is Stoicism, which aims at human happiness and notes that it can be achieved only through perfect self-control.

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.

Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais: Essay on indifference in matters of religion, volume III

Lamennais’ argument for taking Christianity as the true religion was based on four characteristics the true religion should have: unity, universality, perpetuity and sanctity. I talked about Lamennais’ case for the unity of (Catholic) Christianity, which meant essentially just that Christianity did not tolerate any other religions. Even if we accepted such intolerance as a characteristic of the supposed one true religion, the problem is that many other religions share the same characteristic.

Lamennais’ case for the universality of Christianity is based on an almost opposite justification, namely, on the supposed similarity of aspects of other religions with some dogmas of Christianity. Lamennais goes to great lengths in quoting authorities on other religions to show that e.g. belief in one divine creator and an idea about an upcoming savior are accepted throughout the world. Lamennais wants to say that other religions are mere modifications of Christianity and its dogmas. The obvious problem with this line of attack is that one might think Christianity itself is just a modification of the true religion, which might be one of the other religions having these supposedly universal characteristics. This problem is augmented by the fact that some distinctly Christian dogmas, such as trinity or incarnation, are not as universally accepted.

If by universality Lamennais tried to emphasise that Christian dogmas could be found all around the globe, by persistence he meant to say that Christianity, in one of its forms, could be found at all times. This characteristic tied in with Lamennais’ insistence on a chain of authority running through the Catholic tradition, all the way to the supposed creation of humankind. In fact, Lamennais even stated that such a chain could be found in other traditions and noted that many religious thinkers and philosophers emphasised the ancient religious customs as the purest and most suitable for worship of divine. In case of these other traditions, this chain just had at some point broken, by idolatry and materialistic philosophy.

Lamennais’ case for the perseverance of Christianity is, of course, based strongly on the assumption that Bible is a reliable history. We obviously cannot expect that Lamennais would have had any idea of the future findings of archaeology, which make it rather clear that many Bible stories cannot be literally true - e.g. there probably was no great migration of Hebrew nation from Egypt. Even so, many of his arguments for the reliability of Bible are quite full of holes. For instance, Lamennais finds it unconvincing that Jewish nation would have suddenly forgotten its history, when it had been handed from parents to children in an unbroken succession. The obvious problem here is that even if this line would be unbroken, the message might well change, like in a game of Chinese whispers. Indeed, Lamennais notes this possibility in case of e.g. Indian traditions, which shows a clear double standard on his part.

Just as unconvincing as Lamennais’ defence of the reliability of Bible is his defense of Biblical prophecies, especially of those that have concerned events which are now past - because these prophecies came to be true, Lamennais thinks that we can trust that the other prophecies will also. The clear problem is that Lamennais takes it as granted that these prophecies derive from the era of the supposed author of the texts, for instance, that the prophecies of Daniel concerning the rise and fall of ancient kingdoms were reported at a period before these risings and falling had occurred. Yet, one might well make the assumption that such prophecies were actually written after the events mentioned, and in fact, in case of Daniel’s prophecies, it seems clear that their author knows much more about this future history than about the time when Daniel was supposed to live.

The unreliability of Bible in general and prophecies in particular affects also Lamennais’ case for the fourth characteristic of the true religion or sanctity - that is, if Bible and prophecies are full of falsities, it makes it questionable that they and Christianity as a whole would be divinely inspired. We shall return in more detail to the case of the sanctity of Christianity in the next and final post on Lamennais’ work.

Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais: Essay on indifference in matters of religion, volume II

With the second volume of his essay, De Lamennais enters the region of epistemology. It is especially the question of the foundation of all certainty that interests him. He considers three possible answers to the question, all of which he finds wanting. First of these answers is the classical empiricism, in which certainty is based on sensations - Lamennais calls this possibility materialism. His criticism is predictable: sensations give us no certainty on anything, because we do not know how or even whether they are connected to a thing existing independently of sensation.

The second answer Lamennais considers is idealism, which he says to be exemplified by Berkeley and Kant. This pairing might raise some eyebrows and even more suspect is Lamennais’ suggestion that such an idealism based certainty on sentiment. Lamennais does not offer a serious justification of this characterisation, but one might suspect that it is especially the post-Kantian idea of intellectual intuition as the method of philosophy, which lies behind his suggestion. In any case, Lamennais can quickly note just that sentiment is no better a foundation than sensation, because different people have diverse sentiments of same topics.

The final answer is Cartesian dogmatics, which in Lamennais’ opinion bases everything on reasoning. Although Lamennais regards dogmatics most favourably of the three answers, he is quick to point out that all reasoning must have some starting point or use some axiom which is not based on further reasoning. Thus, even reason is no final answer to the question of certainty and Descartes must accept the bane of Pyrrhonian skepticism.

Having denied the validity of these three answers, Lamennais introduces his own solution. Certainty, he says, cannot be based on thoughts of a single individual, but this does not mean that it couldn’t be based on a group of individuals. Indeed, Lamennais insists, whenever we are arguing and come to a standstill, we ask the opinion of other people. In other words, it is the intersubjective criterion of authority, which Lamennais takes as the foundation of certainty. There is certain feasibility in this ideas, since e.g. when discussing a difficult scientific theory, we are more likely to accept the opinion of an expert than that of a layman with a clear feeling about the correct solution, because the expert is more of an authority than the layman. Still, what we could consider an acceptable authority and what Lamennais considers it to be are two different things.

It is then no wonder that when Lamennais starts to consider the existence of God that he uses the common opinion of all humanity as a proof of this existence. He does mention more meatier proofs, notably what Kant called an ontological proof - surely God must exist, since he is just “that who is” or the epitome of all existence, which must exist, never mind what else there is. So convinced Lamennais is of his authorial justification that he puts all the other proofs he uses in a footnote.

The existence of God is not just some very theoretical statement, which doesn’t concern human life, Lamennais thought. Instead, a number of important truths follow from the existence of God, he said. Notably, humans, created by God, must have some laws governing their nature, just like all things, and furthermore, they must follow these laws of their nature, if they are to find true happiness. For instance, Lamennais noted, human beings need to know the truth, but as he supposedly showed, all truth is based on authority and ultimately on authority of God himself, who is supposed to know all the truth.

The purpose of Lamennais’ argument is then clearly to show that human beings need a relation to God, in order to satisfy their own yearning for truth. The relation of human being to God, then, is obviously meant to be the defining moment in religion. Yet, not just any relation to God satisfies Lamennais, but he insists that there is only one proper religion, since the natures of human being and God are not variable - they are like two puzzle pieces that can be combined in only one manner. This means that all the other supposed religions are then just falsifications of the one true religion.

The next question is obviously then what criteria we should use for discerning this true religion and distinguishing it from all false religions. Lamennais considers again the possibility to use sentiment or reasoning as a criterion - apparently sensation just has nothing to do with religion in Lamennais’ eyes. Both possibilities are easily shown to be unfeasible. Sentiment cannot be the basis of one religion, since different cultures have had different feelings about the true religion, while reason is again incapable of fending off doubts even about the simplest truths.

The only possible option left, Lamennais insists, is authority, this time of the society. God has created human being as an essentially social entity, who has to find his certainty through education given by others. Since this flow of education cannot be infinite, it must end at a stage where human beings were directly educated by God himself - hence, the need for revelation.

It is to be expected that the true revealed religion Lamennais has in mind is Christianity in its Catholic form. In the next post I shall enter into more details of the justification Lamennais gives for this thesis, but we can already note the emphasis on the unity on religion - a clear statement against any tolerance of opinions. Indeed, Lamennais is quick to dismiss all pagan religions because of such a tolerance of different viewpoints, which appears to be the worst form of idolatry. Furthermore, he regards almost all non-Christian religions as such an idolatry. The only exceptions are Judaism, which Lamennais thinks was just a temporary phase in the development of true religion and is now just a lifeless husk, and Islam, which he considers to be just another heretical form of Christianity.

Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais: Essay on indifference in matters of religion, volume I (1817)

1782-1854

It is always interesting to find thinkers who in their later life completely reverse or at least significantly modify their thoughts in some manner. Catholic priest de Lamennais is an example of such a thinker. While he was originally quite conservative in his opinions, disparaging French Revolution as a destroyer of traditional social and religious values, later on he would become a devout democrat, who would attempt to combine Christianity with a more liberal attitude toward affairs of state.

De Lamennais’ four-volume work, Essai sur l'indifference en matière de religion belongs still to the conservative period of his thinking. He is evidently inspired at least by de Bonald, whom he quotes approvingly several times in the first volume. But while de Bonald emphasised more the role of society, de Lamennais focuses on religion and especially the battle of philosophy against it.

Just like Chateaubriand earlier, at least in the first volume of his work de Lamennais does not even try to give a theoretical argument for the truth of religion in general and Catholic Christianity in particular, but he merely emphasises the practical need for religion. All humans strive for happiness, de Lamennais begins his apology. Yet, any being can be happy only if it satisfies laws of its own nature. A presupposition of this step in de Lamennais’ argument is that it must be possible that a human being can live without satisfying those laws - thus, fatalism must be simply false, de Lamennais says, because in a fatalist world we would all follow the laws of our nature and be happy, which is clearly not the case. Of course, one would easily make this argument collapse by choosing a completely different criterion for human happiness, such as pleasure and pain. Still, if we follow de Lamennais a step forward, we notice that to become truly happy we must know our place in the world, as designed by God, which is the job of religion.

Although individual human happiness is then one thing that de Lamennais uses in his defence of religion, it is especially the social benefits of religion - and particularly of Christianity - which he takes as his primary justification. All societies have been based on religion, and the longer the mores of a society have been in touch with the original religious consciousness, the longer it has lasted. Especially noteworthy in de Lamennais’ eyes is Christianity, which has stabilised and civilised Europe since the fall of Rome - and like Chateaubriand, de Lamennais is quick to compare the havoc caused by French Revolution with the education of Paraguay by Catholic priests.

From modern perspective one might note that Christianity has also been one of the forces stifling the development of society, but for de Lamennais this objection would not be valid, because he is still quite enthused about the conservative ideal of society, in which people are bound in a clear hierarchy, with different obligations and authorities assigned for different classes and genders. The philosophical counterpoint - the story of a pact made to form a society - is not favoured by de Lamennais, because it essentially confuses authority given by divine power with the force of majority to make others follow the laws dictated by them (of course, one might ask, what is meant to be the basis of divine authority, if not the supposed infinite force behind it).

One common enemy of Christianity and liberal politics de Lamennais find in slavery, which cannot really be tolerated. Yet, even here de Lamennais finds the policy of Catholic Church much more reasonable than the attempts of philosophical reformists - while latter try to change the state of African slaves in one enormous upheaval, Church tries to educate men to stop taking people as slaves. One might think that while such slow reform can often be pragmatically best option, it is quite peculiar that Church as the supposed mouth of God in the material world still renounces its own principles and advocates for a pragmatic solution.

The opponents of the Church de Lamennais divides into three categories, all of which are in some measure indifferent to the importance of religion. The first and clearest of these are atheists, who turn their back completely to God. While atheists would nowadays just deny the worth of religion, the supposed atheists of French Enlightenment might have been of different opinion and they could have admitted that religion is a useful tool for upholding society. Or at least de Lamennais says they have admitted this, mentioning at least Voltaire’s quip that he wouldn’t accept atheists as servants (we can ignore for now that Voltaire most likely wasn’t an outright atheist). De Lamennais finds in this attitude a sort of inconsistency, but upholding publicly what one deems as false is not a real contradiction, just a lie - and perhaps such an atheist could say that lies might be necessary and hence acceptable in the matters of society.

A further problem de Lamennais finds in the assumption that religion has been expressly invented as a deceit when creating the first society - such an invention would already require a society, for which it should have been basis. Yet, one need not either take religion as a conscious invention or suppose its divine origin. Instead, we might suppose that religions have grown accidentally from pre-social experiences and interactions of human beings and thus can fail to be true descriptions of the relation between humans and the supposed divinity, while still having an important role in the growth of civilization.

The second category of opponents includes deists, the foremost example of which for de Lamennais is Rousseau, as expressed by the speech of the Savoyard priest in the book Emile. Deists accept the existence of God, but they deny the need for any specific revelation, embodied expressly in the figure of divine mediator or Jesus. De Lamennais follows the official Biblical announcement that Jesus is the only true way toward knowing God and thus easily concludes that deists can really know nothing about God. Their only supposed source for the knowledge of God is human reason, but that is in de Lamennais’ eyes a fickle thing and something prone for errors, as shown by the fact that no two philosophers can agree on the nature of divinity. De Lamennais even uses Hume to show that reason can really say nothing about the existence of God, thus suggesting that deism just paves the way for straight atheism. The only content left for religion in deism is ethics, but this is especially something that cannot be decided by reason, de Lamennais insists, as shown by different customs of different nations. De Lamennais’ work reeks of an attitude where deism is not taken seriously, but is regarded as a mere lightweight substitute for religion - an attitude that doesn’t understand that religiousness can be embodied also in uncertain searching for something divine and not just in a faith founded on strong foundations.

Considering the Catholicism of de Lamennais, it is no wonder that the third opponent of true religion for him is protestantism in its various forms. If atheism tried to severe humans from God and deism from Jesus, protestantism attacks the relation between individual and church. One might think that this is a too severe judgement, because the protestants do have churches also, but it is more the unity of church de Lamennais is talking about. While Luther or Calvin might just have wanted to reform the original church, what they managed to bring about was a number of petty congregations, squabbling with one another. The problem in the whole reformist attitude, according to de Lamennais, is practically same as with deism - it tries to replace Catholic tradition with individual reason and conscience. What de Lamennais criticizes is the multiplicity of possible individual opinions on faith and God, while it is just this tolerance of individual opinions we might cherish as the true benefit derived from Reformation.