3.4—Kant, Diderot, & Voltaire (18 min video)

Transcript

_{The following transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors in spelling and/or grammar. It is provided for assistance in note-taking and review.}

Well, welcome back. We’re going to take a look at three more Enlightenment-era thinkers. This actually is kind of the high point of the Enlightenment when it’s looked at historically. Descartes is kind of a precursor, usually timeline-wise. But the three we’re going to look at today are Emmanuel Kant, Denis Diderot, and François Voltaire. We’ll start with Emmanuel Kant. His dates are 1724 to 1804. He lived in what is known as East Prussia, in the city of Königsberg. It’s interesting, it’s said that he, a little bit of trivia here for you, it’s said that he never traveled more than 100 miles from his home in his entire lifetime. So he stayed very local to his birthplace and where he also died as well It’s also interesting just because it comments both partly on him and also partly on the the time period We’re looking at it was said that the locals there in Konigsberg set their watches to his daily 430 p.m. Walk that’s how precise he was in his habits and in the things he did in a day-by-day basis Just a little interesting bit of information for you Like many of the other Enlightenment thinkers, he loved the advanced work of Isaac Newton.

We’ll talk about Newton in a later lecture. And studied astronomy heavily. Loved that science as well, like Newton did also. It’s also curious that Kant was raised by a very firm group of German Christians. They’re often called pietists. Very focused upon living a very simple and holy life. And he also was heavily influenced by the thinkers of the Enlightenment and especially by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who we’ll talk about in the next lecture. This is curious because Kant wanted to hold on to the ideas of the Enlightenment and hold on to reason together. So he’s really this interesting figure that brings the two different worlds together in very unique ways. So he uses both faith and reason in much of his thinking and in many of his ideas. What he often said, or what he often pointed out, akin to Descartes and many other thinkers we’ve looked at, is that we find truth through evidence, through experience, through inductive thinking, where you kind of look around at the data around you and you make a conclusion based upon it, kind of like a good detective does when he’s solving a mystery. But he also was concerned that he argued that science and human reason can’t ultimately account for who God is. That’s kind of one of the most important things about Kant. He recognized, if any way, the limitations placed upon human reason. His most famous work is the Critique of Pure Reason, which was published in 1781. And true to his title, he critiqued that idea. He really talked about knowledge, like some of the other guys that we’ve looked at discuss. He said that knowledge begins with our experiences. That does not sound any different than the other guys we’ve talked about. But he said that we have minds that are pre-programmed. We have minds that have certain categories that are already put in them that use these categories to actually view knowledge in different ways. So that made him very different from, say, John Locke, who said we begin as a blank slate. He ultimately argued there were two realms that all things exist in. There was the phenomenal realm and there was the noumenal realm. The phenomenal realm, he argued, is everything that’s manifest, everything that is seen, everything that we can experience through the senses. And he said that all of our actual knowledge, all of the application of reason that we have is applied to that phenomenal realm. It’s limited to it. And we can only look at the phenomenal realm and make categories of thought. Like we can make a category of that’s a plant, that’s an animal, that’s a mineral, that’s of food. We can make those kind of categories, for example. The noumenal realm is a little bit different in Kant’s thinking. He argued the noumenal realm is what he called the “ding in sic,” which means the “thing in itself.” This includes our actual selves. He actually made this whole point that we are ourselves as individuals even though we have knowledge of each other in the phenomenal realm, there’s a true self that’s out there in this noumenal realm that no knowledge can ever know. He also said that God of course is in that noumenal realm and so therefore we can never actually know God from our own senses, from our own experiences, from our own knowledge.

Now if you stop there you could then maybe make the argument that you need revelation to actually know God. The thing is is that revelation specifically in the book of Romans, specifically in Romans chapter 1, will tell you that God has clearly made his attributes known through what he has made.

And so we can of course know God and know him best through the scriptures, but we can also know God through general revelation, what he has made, and our own consciousness, for example, that actually have a sense of what is right from what is wrong.

So as R.C. Sproul has pointed out, either Paul who wrote Romans is wrong or Immanuel Kant is wrong when he says that we can never know God from anything that we actually experience.

What’s curious about this is that even though Immanuel Kant has a great respect for the scriptures and knew them well, what’s curious about it is that because our knowledge of this world, something that you could actually unpack in philosophy, because he can only deal with things in this world, he still made it a very big deal and he tended to separate revelation of the Scriptures from reason.

Whereas the previous Christian thinkers of the area of Christendom, especially somebody like Thomas Aquinas, they saw no separation needed. They saw no conflict between human reason and revelation. After all, they argued, God is a reasonable God who has made a reasonable people. If there is a fault anywhere to be found, it’s to be found in us because our reason is fallen. Anyway, he did still make several different arguments for God’s existence, often beginning with his own experiences. So, for example, I’ll give you kind of a breakdown of his moral argument for the fact that God exists. He argued that we have ethics. We have this idea of right from wrong and that means if we have ethics, a right from a wrong, there must be justice. There must actually be a punishment of wrongdoing and a reward for those who do good. And he then argued that if you have justice, then that presupposes or says that there must be a just world that’s out there somewhere or is in the future far off. But if you have justice, you must have a place where it’s actually possible. And if you have a just future world, he said that presupposes that you must have a just judge. And if you have a just judge, that presupposes or says that there must be an omniscient and omnipotent God. It’s kind of an interesting argument and it does have its own merits. What’s often pointed out is he kind of begins with this very scanty experience and he tries to take that to explain the existence of God.

So what he’s arguing is he’s using reason, he’s using his own ideas to define who God is ultimately and what justice is. So that means, think about this for a moment, that our ideas of who God is and what justice are are based entirely upon our own ideas, our own opinions of who God is and what justice is.

So it’s a very internal idea, it’s what the Enlightenment was all about, that essentially you find the light from within, from your own reasons specifically, to determine what is actually true from what is not.

The next philosopher we’ll take a look at is Denis Diderot. He lived from 1713 to 1784. He was a French philosopher, he was an art critic, he was a writer. In fact, his most famous work was a 17 volume encyclopedia that he spent some 21 years writing. It was designed specifically to codify, to gather in major categories all the knowledge and human understanding that had been gathered by mankind, specifically in the Enlightenment period and from an Enlightenment worldview.

It was actually specifically designed to be a work against, say, the Encyclopedia of Cominius, or the encyclopedias or the gathering of knowledge that have been done by monks and different orders such as the Franciscan order throughout time.

He actually has some very pointed things to say about his view of Christianity. He said, “I believe in God, although I live very happily with atheism. It is very important not to mistake hemlock,” something that poisons you, “for parsley. But it’s not at all so to believe or not in God.” In other words, all that matters is this current world. You need to be able to figure out if you’re going to eat hemlock or parsley. If they look alike, you need to know which one is poisonous and which one is a garnish. But whether or not you believe in God, that just doesn’t matter. He said that happiest are the people who give most happiness to others. That itself could probably go on a t-shirt and look nice all by itself and could be even a nice sentiment, that the people who are happiest are those who make other people happy.

That itself, though, in many ways, even though it’s a good sentiment, that’s kind of the essence of humanism. When you get rid of the whole concept of who God is, it’s just about making other folks happy. It’s not really about true love at this point or about sacrifice. Those don’t actually come into it. It’s about simply enjoying life, but it’s enjoying life in a very temporary sort of way. He goes on, and in his letter to the blind, he says this. He says, “What is this world? It’s a complex whole. It’s subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions, they show a continual tendency to destruction. They show a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish.” In other words, we all die. “It’s a fleeting asymmetry. It’s the order of a moment. I reproach you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity, “And I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days. You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an ephemeral insect might judge of yours. The world is eternal for you.” He’s talking to God here. “As you are eternal to the being that lives but for one instant, yet the insect is the more reasonable of the two. For what a prodigious succession of ephemeral generations attests your eternity! What an immeasurable tradition! Yet shall we all pass away without the possibility of assigning either the real extension that we filled in space or the precise time that we shall have endured?

Time, matter, space, all it may be, are no more than a point. In other words, what is this world except the passing of time and the experience of death? And you can actually see as he addresses this work to God ultimately, who he wonders if he even exists, there’s a certain amount of bitterness. What’s the whole point of it all? You, God, he says, live for all eternity and we are merely like insects to you. But of course, if you actually uncover the gospel, you see that the amazing thing is that God actually chooses, God who is beyond all space and time, chooses to become one of us.

That’s the beauty of it all. Something that Diderot unfortunately did not understand. The next character we’ll take a look at is another Frenchman by the name of François Voltaire. He lived from 1694 to 1778. Came from a comfortable French middle class family. Was known at birth as François Eroët, but took on the name Voltaire as a pen name. He was known for his brilliant and witty writing. He was known for his sarcasm that he used often in his works. He actually wrote some 70 different works of criticism, of history, of incredible dramas, and amazing novels. He was also known as the “gentleman of the bedchamber,” meaning that he had lots of affairs with wives who were not his own. He admired, in many ways, the religious and the civil liberties that he saw experienced over in England and wanted to see similar liberties in his native France.

But he saw the ultimate enemy not as any kind of form of dictatorship, which could be argued that time in France under the reign of the Louis, but he saw the enemy as the church.

He actually referred to the church in the Christianity simply as the infamous thing. Calling the church the infamous thing, he argued that if God did not exist, it would necessary to invent him. In other words, he made the argument that powerful people have invented the whole idea of God or the whole notion of religion or the whole notion of powerful supernatural beings or forces merely to control the masses by having them fear offending that God and therefore keep them obedient.

That’s how he viewed the gospel. That’s how he viewed Christianity. It was all just one massive lie designed for control. The sad truth is that people often use the fear of God as a way to control people. That’s not how it should actually work. Anyway, he wrote his own version of world history that really viewed the entire history of the world from an atheistic perspective. It began with China as the very first civilization instead of the creation of the world. That was a unique thing for the time. time. Of course now if you pick up a history of the world you’re going to begin with some foray into evolution usually. That kind of thinking at least in the modern era began with Voltaire. He ultimately said that Christianity was simply kind of a blip on the radar and it really was not much of much importance at all.

Really had done very little to actually change the world. He also argued, curiously enough, that what the world needed most were not leaders who had any association with religion because they seemed to use that for their own power, at least in his day and age, and that makes sense.

He did after all live in a country not too long after the Roman Catholic Cardinal Cardinal Richelieu was around and on the scene. But he did argue that what the world needed wasn’t needed an enlightened group of elites. It needed a group of philosopher kings like Plato had once argued in his Republic. It’s part of the reason why Voltaire was good friends with Frederick the Great of Prussia, whom he saw as one of these enlightened despots.

Ultimately on his deathbed he refused to renounce Satan. That was kind of the thing you did back then was you renounced Satan and renounced your life of sin and accepted Christ and he said he didn’t want to give up Satan because he didn’t want to to make a new enemy when he was dying. He said this, he said, “The safest course “is to do nothing against one’s conscience. “With this secret, we can enjoy life “and have no fear from death.” In other words, do whatever you think is right. If you think that it is okay, then just go ahead and do it. He said, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, “but certainty is absurd.” In other words, the whole idea of absolutes, The whole idea of having a standard that you begin from, it’s absurd. It’s just seen as arrogant by Voltaire. He said, “It is forbidden to kill. “Therefore, all murderers are punished “unless they kill in large numbers “into the sound of trumpets.” That was his jab against the leaders, especially of France at the time. He said, “God is always on the side of the big battalions.” That’s another kind of attack there on the church and on the conspiracy he supposedly saw between the church and the governments, which, by the way, did sometimes exist.

He said that essentially whoever wins says, oh, God was the one who caused our victory. While it is true that God is sovereign over all things, that doesn’t mean that all things that happen in history are by any means right. He said, “God is a comedian, playing to an audience, “too afraid to laugh.” That last quote that I’ll leave you with for understanding Voltaire is perhaps the most poignant the things he said and the most, probably the best one to understand his ultimate worldview by and of course also one of the most depressing is the fact that God is just somehow laughing at us.

It’s like we are just his toys. But of course the entire testimony of the Gospels, the entire experience of Christ, and of course the entire love that God shows throughout the entirety of the Scriptures, beginning with what happens right after the fall when he does not kill man but provides for man, the very first sacrifice, tells a very different story indeed.

But we’ll stop there. We’ll pick up with Rousseau in our next lecture.