June Meeting

Greetings!

The Socrates Cafe group hosted by Professor Brian McNally meets the third Wednesday of the Month at 7 pm. For June, the group is exploringthe connection between Philosophy and Poetry. Bring in your own or your favorite classical poetry to share with the group. To help you get started exploring philosophic poetry visit the

websitehttp://www.authorsden.com/categories/poetry.asp?alpha=a&catid=32.

Below I have posted some recent works in progress - Please review and comment.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics

Brian McNally

The Question of The Episteme Sought In
Aristotle’s Metaphysics & Physics

This essay is an examination of the issues of contention surrounding the examination of which science (episteme) Aristotle pursued in the work of The Metaphysics and its relation to the project of The Physics. A great deal of scholarship has been committed to clarifying this point as it relates to the question about the unity of the work of The Metaphysics as a whole. The issues are examined by many modern scholars, but for the purposes of this essay, I have focused my examination on two strong theses on the issue by Werner Jaeger and Giovanni Reale. Werner Jaeger holds that Aristotle’s work has two clearly contradictory inquiries into the appropriate episteme for the first principle (proton arche) of Being. According to Jaeger, The first line of reasoning at work in The Metaphysics is to be understood as an episteme for the proton arche as in terms of theology (qua immoveable ousia), and the second is the episteme for the proton arche in terms of ontology similar in terms of The Physics (qua moveable ousia). He holds that these two differing lines of development are in conflict within The Metaphysics simultaneously and leaves the work on the whole in confusion. How Jaeger approaches these two tracks of development shall be explored in this essay with the goal of discerning the differences and inconsistencies of Jaeger’s thesis. His work concludes with the thesis that the text we know as The Metaphysics is not the work of Aristotle but rather an assemblage of concepts threaded together by later editors and interpreters through the history of the life of the manuscript.
The second position that disagrees with Jaeger is represented by Giovanni Reale who holds that the works are united and the position of Aristotle in the same text is actually whole and consistent[1]. Reale is quick to point out that besides a literary or philological unity, one must especially consider the conceptual unity that belies any issues that may be at discord in the work as a whole.
Werner Jaeger argues that Aristotle’s works have undergone extensive editing in the version of the text of The Metaphysics that we see today[2]. In two works, the first in 1921, he forwarded his theory on the development of The Metaphysics and later in 1923, culminated his work into Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development. In this book he defined the position further to claim that there is a fundamental error in the way readers have understood Aristotle since the Neo-Platonists and most notably, since the medievals. From the introduction of his work, Jaeger sets out an explanation of his thesis:
“This book, being at once treatise and monograph, demands a brief word of explanation. It does not seek to give a systematic account, but to analyze Aristotle's writings so as to discover in them the half obliterated traces of his mental progress. Its biographical framework is intended merely to make more palpable the fact that his previously undifferentiated mass of compositions falls into three distinct periods of evolution. Owing to the meagerness of the material the picture that we thus obtain is of course fragmentary; yet its outlines constitute a distinctly clearer view of Aristotle's intellectual nature and of the forces that inspired his thinking. Primarily, this is a gain to the history of philosophical problems and origins. The author's intention is, however, not to make a contribution to systematic philosophy, but to throw light on the portion of the history of the Greek mind that is designated by the name of Aristotle.” (Jaeger, Introduction p. ii)
Jaeger’s book is set to question if The Metaphysics was a unified work by Aristotle at a single phase of his development or if what we have been handed down by history is an edited work from a later era follower that assembled two metaphysical treatises. The first possible work Jaeger theorizes is an earlier Platonic-influenced theory and the other is a more empirically founded theory concerned with the ontological investigation of moveable ousia in phusis (nature). In this, Jaeger sees the third and fifth identifications in the text as contradictory.
In his examination, Jaeger makes an extensive analysis of the linguistic and conceptual breakdown of the books of The Metaphysics and places two competing and conflicting lines of development within the one text. Jaeger starts his examination by a textual identification that he claims discloses that there are two conflicting episteme which Aristotle states he is seeking for use in reaching an understanding of the proton arche of Being (Jaeger, 198-203 ). The first development Jaeger identifies is an earlier Platonic notion, according to which divine entities or separated substances are the subject matter of a different episteme as theology. The second line of reasoning from a later period of work conflicts with this and Jaeger claims he announces a dual result with the result of the episteme for Being qua Being (on! h on!). On the first view, Jaeger says Aristotle is examining an episteme that does not take any notion that it is not coterminous with the set/ genus of all ousia. Thus, metaphysics is ontology. The latter empirical reading is one that also is more in line with the position presented in the work of The Physics VII (Ibid, 203).
What is Jaeger’s examination leading to? Is the textual confusion Jaeger argues for between the examinations of episteme appropriate for either or both moveable and immoveable ousia enough to cast doubt on the whole of Aristotle’s Proton Philosophia? Jaeger seems to think that the confusion is enough to reveal a literary disunity in Aristotle’s thinking about the proton arche for ousia that has roots equally in both The Physics and The Metaphysics. The problem for the modern reader is to wonder what was originally intended by Aristotle to be the correct episteme in order to comprehend the proton arche of Being given these two positions?
To explain the origin of the confusion and how the work was edited into this state, Jaeger has woven together what he calls the “genetic interpretation” of Aristotle’s body of work. In this he divides Aristotle’s work into three distinct periods which are defined as an early, middle and late period. The early phase is primarily characterized during his twenty years at Plato’s Academy which defined his influence. Jaeger reports that Aristotle developed a series of Platonic style dialogues from this period of his development that have been cited by authors of antiquity but are now lost to us. Jaeger claims editors may have used sections of these early dialogues in later works, most notably from the lost work On Philosophy in The Metaphysics, book I (Ibid, 125-166). The second period is a transitional time (aka. The Assos period) in Macedonia when Aristotle left The Academy following Plato’s death. The late period is defined by Aristotle’s full development into the unique philosophic position of proto-scientist. Jaeger argues that in this period Aristotle is largely concerned almost exclusively with the general sciences and origins of phusis. This latest period shows the Aristotle that has fully broken away from his teachings at the Academy and has developed his own voice and philosophy according to Jaeger’s theory.
Jaeger makes out the case that The Metaphysics reveals work from the first and last periods and the two orientations have been confusingly interwoven within the treatises themselves. Because of this, there are sections of The Metaphysics that are “Platonic” (early) and “Aristotelian” (later) sections at conflict within the one work. It is not always the case that there are some books that are earlier-period and other books wholly later-period, but rather that the two have been edited together so closely he says that only a lifetime of painstaking philological scholarship will ever separate them[3] (Ibid, 167-292). His work is only the “red flag” that requires deeper study in his analysis of the work. Jaeger interprets Aristotle wavering between these two positions in The Metaphysics and does not offer any way for the two of them to be consolable. If we accept only the later more empirical reading we end up with Aristotle’s Proton Philosophia as a episteme of ousia in terms of ontology. If we accept the earlier view the text is a special noble epsiteme bearing on a unique ousia that is set apart from all others as immoveable, pure eidos, pure energia, the highest entelechy, the highest good, the unmoved mover; Theon as separate ousia.
Jaeger is careful to point out that Aristotle was not necessarily more sympathetic earlier in his development to theology and later was seeking a more empirical ontology. Rather, it is the case that Aristotle himself was at odds throughout his whole career over the two sciences, and the tension and conflicting positions were never fully resolved. Jaeger points this out in a central passage that he thinks shows the conflict between the earlier and later positions when Aristotle allows for three different episteme to inquire into Being.
But if there is something which is eternal and immoveable and separable, clearly the knowledge of it belongs to a theoretical science -- not, however, to physics (for physics deals with certain movable things) nor to mathematics, but to a science prior to both. For physics deals with things which exist separately but are not immovable, and some parts of mathematics deal with things which are immovable but presumably do not exist separately, but as embodied in matter; while the first science deals with things which both exist separately and are unmovable. [The Metaphysics, 1037a10][4]
Jaeger argues that this passage lends itself to reveal that Aristotle is at odds for what the science is his inquiry seeks. He allows for different investigations of being through the three episteme simultaneously to phusis, mathematics and Proton Philosophia. The Physics inquiry and method of episteme is concerned with inseparable and changeable ousia; mathematics episteme with unchangeable but inseparable ousia; and first philosophy episteme inquires to separate and changeless ousia. Jaeger argues also that he reads Aristotle to say that if theos exists anywhere it will be comprehended in episteme of Proton Philosophia which will result in a theoria of theology. Also, he says that the episteme of Proton Philosophia would be then of the more honorable because its inquiry is into more honorable things and thus the most honorable of the theoretical sciences. According to Jaeger he continues to support this tension between the multiple episteme further when he also says…
For one might raise the question whether first philosophy is universal, or deals with one genus, i.e. some one kind of being; for not even the mathematical sciences are all alike in this respect -- geometry and astronomy deal with a certain particular kind of being, while universal mathematics applies alike to all. We answer that if there is no substance other than those which are formed by nature, natural science will be the first science; but if there is an immovable substance, the science of this must be prior and must be first philosophy, and universal in this way, because it is first. And it will belong to it to consider being qua being -- both what it is and the attributes which belong to it qua being. [The Metaphysics, 1026a22 ff]
Jaeger’s analysis ultimately concludes that Aristotle’s seeming solution is no more than a gloss over of the issue of which episteme he is seeking, so he announces that it can be both and makes the issue that the proper episteme of Proton Philosophia even more obvious (Ibid, 218). He goes on to say that this is further evidence of his position that this mediation shows that Aristotle himself did not develop this at one stage or even in the same reflection, but rather again this was condensed together by later successive editors over time.
The proof of this condensing lies in the passage which shows Jaeger argues that Aristotle indeed had an inconsistency or a tension between holding that Proton Philosophia, the culminating telos of philosophy, as a general episteme i.e. ontology qua physics or as a particular episteme that is notable from other particular episteme (i.e. theology). Jaeger makes the case that if it is a general science, it will be impossible for Aristotle to distinguish it from natural philosophy (Physics). It will be an episteme of the theoria of a high level of generality of physical objects (changeable ousia) in the supra-lunar sphere. This would connect the episteme of investigation between mathematicals and phusis together more closely (Jaeger p. 219). Aristotle, according to Jaeger would be tempted at this, as a later period, more epistemologically grounded thinker, but it would mean the full end of the earlier Platonic project that runs parallel in the text.
Jaeger holds that the fact that Aristotle announces in the passage of 1026a22 (above) that first philosophy can be both, i.e. first philosophy can be a general science, thus it cannot have a particular subject (separate immoveable ousia), but it can also be the science of the separate and immobile (the supersensible) ousia: theos. Jaeger holds that the later era editors make Aristotle contradictory when this happens. Jaeger moreover claims then that this represents the noble failure of The Metaphysics, and the end of the Platonic influence on the project and of the earlier period genetic reading. This is the crux of his work on why The Metaphysics cannot be read as a whole and a position must be taken to select a reading of the work as we have done in the class this term.
The problem I personally question about Jaeger’s project is that through all his work he never explicitly considers which Aristotle (early, middle or late) is “the real” Aristotle? This may seem like a sophomoric question, influenced the struggle I have to suppress my inner-pragmatist. I want to know where he stands as an interpreter. Is the historian or classicist one who risks his objective examination if he risks an opinion about the work and not just focuses the historical context and philological tools he uses to make his analysis? The closest we get to his opinion is his comparison of Aristotle’s work to some of Aristotle’s later-era followers that show his influence to establish the work of the later Aristotle as the most influential upon them. Jaeger gives such an examination in his work on Diocles of Carystus (Ibid, 405-425). In this he shows how Aristotle’s work as the proto-scientist is evident in the work of this biologist, medical doctor and philosopher of the post-Aristotelian Lyceum.
Another problem I have in reading Jaeger is that he never adequately defines what the correct explicit metaphysical orientation is to understand the content of the work. In other words, does Aristotle at anytime in his work not think that Being is the one? Being is necessary? Being is eternal? Being is not the sum of beings, but more? etc…(i.e. the Advanced Philosophic Orientation). I cannot find any reflection on this in Jaeger. Perhaps this is beyond the scope of his historical investigation. But as a philosopher, I again must ask which Aristotle is the one I ought to be reading. Jaeger systematically says on one hand it could be the earlier pro-Platonic period, or, on the other hand, it could be the later more empirical founded. However, amidst all this hand washing Jaeger never spells out what he thinks the correct metaphysical orientation is or if there is a developmental theory between the two that weds them together. Of course, it goes to say that the central point of Jaeger’s thesis is that there is an expressed tension in Aristotle’s works of The Metaphysics that reflect the differing periods of Aristotle’s development and show a phasing change in the orientation. I am not oblivious to his project. But he claims in the immediate post-Platonic Assos period, when Aristotle still considered himself a Platonist, is when also started his transition to his empirically founded method[5]. But is it really fair for Jaeger to claim that this middle period “Aristotle” is more “Aristotle” than the time when he was close to Plato? This seems biased to me to think that only the scientist Aristotle is the “true” Aristotle. Why is developing uniqueness as a scientist that who broke from his Platonic education and developed his own thoughts and now intellectually liberated following his 20 years in the Academy. It seems implicit that Jaeger seems to clearly favor the later Aristotle as the proto scientist, which I think taints his ultimate thesis[6].
I am still interested in the question of whether Aristotle’s work can be read as a unified work with a solid metaphysical foundation throughout the entirety of the work. Reale takes up this point in broad opposition to Jaeger and offers a different account of the corpus’ historical development arguing that Aristotle is developmental but consistent through his works never reaching the extreme position of the proto empirical scientist that Jaeger argues for. Both of these positions take on enormous philosophical and philological arguments which are well beyond the limited scope of this essay to fully refute, however the goal of this essay is to rally the position offered by Reale and defend Aristotle as a consistent point of view. Reale’s position however will be expanded upon with consideration of an additional explanation of the metaphysical orientation unconsidered in his largely correct reading and the metaphysical position as offered by the lectures and writing of Dr. Daniel Guerriere. I believe the combined thought of Guerriere and Reale together make a fully comprehensive understanding of Aristotle that considers both the Platonic heritage of Aristotle and likewise shows the unique development of the Stagrite’s work which offers insight and resolution to the problems presented by the work of Jaeger.
Giovanni Reale argues that the proper method of understanding the unity of The Metaphysics is though the content unity of the work, as opposed to the questions of philological, historical, or linguistic analyses that Jaeger examines. Reale says is it characteristic of Aristotle to vigorously debate the two opposing sides of argumentation. Reale feels that current critics isolate the issues that Aristotle examines and does this to such a degree that misleads their line of criticism, loosing sight of the proverbial forest because of all the troublesome trees in the way. Reale summarizes his point when he explains that the critic fails when he analyzes the thesis and the antithesis of the debate on their own merits rather than as part of the larger debate that Aristotle presents on the whole. He loses the sight of the synthesis that the debate is working toward (Reale, 36).
To me as a philosopher, the debate is not whether or not there is a literary or linguistic unity, but if there is an ideological or metaphysical unity that Aristotle reveals that makes the work as a whole consistent? For Reale, the answer is emphatically yes. Reale does an excellent job of constructing a foundation to understanding an approach to Aristotle that allows the reader to approach the work as a conceptual unity. The brief form of this essay does not allow for the space to outline the foundation, but the reader is referred to Chapters 2 to 4 of the work of Reale from the bibliography. There he lays out an explicit list of the aprorias (first principles) and episteme sought for The Metaphysics and how one can approach the work as a content unity[7].
It seems further that Jaeger places the primary leading or founding element of Aristotle’s entire philosophic opera to be the logical treatise rather than a metaphysical orientation. He reports, “Aristotle’s huge achievement in logical inquiry shall be touched on here, as it characterizes the whole spirit of his philosophy” (Jaeger, 369). He continues to elaborate that Aristotle does not allow one to speak of a metaphysical logic, in this he holds that Aristotle had broken down the old ontological thoughts of his predecessors into the elements of word (logos) and being (on1) (Ibid, 370). This, to me, is the wrong idea, for Aristotle tells us that metaphysical arche are not known by merely logic, but epigoge and nous.
In epigoge, one comes to know the universal though anyone particular thing. The term epigoge typically is thought of as insight, or intuition but this does not convey the notion fully. Martin Heidegger offer some thoughts on epigoge in a way he calls it “Forehaben” a pre-conceptual or attunement (Stimmung) to the universals in Being that any one being conveys in the process of Being as the whole. The character of epigoge gives us the ability to have immediate contact with universals. Aristotle sites one of the characteristics of being human as the ability to conceive and identify universals. The epigoge (pre-conceptualization) that comes to one is the same for all inquiry into all ousia be it either mathematics, phusis or first philosophy because all of them as a whole are of one Being. A confusion seems to seems to occur Jaeger, that I could be wrong about, but it seems to me that he almost seems to hold that there is an Being (on1) as objects of math, an Being (on1) as phusis, another Being (on1) as Theon, but they are each mutually exclusive and not co-terminus or participating in Being as beings. This lack of a proper orientation is the deepest problem that I find in Jaeger’s reading. Aristotle is very clear to me that there is only one Being. When Jaeger reads Aristotle in such a way there must seem to him that there is a logical epistemic system for each Being (on1) worthy of inquiry (math, phusis, Theon) and thus, when Jaeger comes to the analysis of changeable ousia and immoveable ousia he thinks Aristotle is contradicting himself. Jaeger explicitly shows this confusion between the ousia of natural science, logic, mathematics and Theon in his analysis of the scholar Bonitz’s commentary (Ibid, 221).
Another source of confusion could stem from the fact that Jaeger isolates The Metaphysics 1 as an editorial insertion and not by the hand of Aristotle (Ibid, 177). In fact, Jaeger’s analysis holds that Book 1 is an excerpt likely repeated from Aristotle’s missing dialogue “On Philosophy” written during his time at the Academy.
The objection against this is made by Reale when he reconstructs The Metaphysics of Theophrastus. Much of the editorial work that has been confused is the editorial work of Theophrastus according to Jaeger. The problem is that if this were so, then the work of Theophrastus ought to show the later influence of his master and not the earlier work the pro-Platonic period. It would seem that if the thesis of Jaeger is to hold, then the later work of Aristotle is the more empirically founded aspect of the work would be dominate in the mind of his successor and editor. Reale shows this is not the case, such that when analyzed, The Metaphysics of Theophrastus shows a close unity with The Metaphysics I & XII (theology). Reale asks, if Theophrastus was as loyal and true to the work of his master, why would he revert to an earlier (theological) position held and abandoned as Jaeger has proposed? Reale spells this out rather well (Reale, xxiii and 365) and makes the point again that Jaeger has lost sight of the conceptual unity in his analysis of the literary and philological aspects. Much more needs be said, but shall have to be explored in a longer form essay with greater charting of the text of Aristotle compared with that of Theophrastus.
In conclusion, much more needs to be explored on this topic but in this essay I have attempted to layout a criticism against the thesis of Jaeger that the work of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is not a unity. Rather, that given the proper metaphysical orientation toward the project of the text as a whole allows a conceptual unity to arise. Also, given Reale’s analysis of The Metaphysics of Theophrastus the historical claims against of Aristotle’s by Jaeger may also be in question. Bibliography

Jaeger, Werner Wilhelm. Aristotle. Fundamentals of the History of his Development. [1923], trans Richard Robinson. New York: Oxford University Press 1948.

Owens, Joseph. The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian “Metaphysics”, 3rd rev. ed Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978.

Reale, Giovanni. The Concept of First Philosophy and the Unity of the Metaphysics of Aristotle. [1967] trans. John A Catan. Albany: SUNY Press 1980
[1] Also allied largely with this position is Joseph Owens, who holds a less controversial position on the work of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and sides with Reale that the work is a whole consistent unity. A detailed examination of Owens, along with Reale and Jaeger, is beyond the space limitation allotted to this work but will be forthcoming for personal research.
[2] Jaeger makes great mention of how scrolls were collected in series and not books in the modern sense. This allows him to cast a shadow of doubt about the editing and reproduction of the body of work since antiquity.
[3] I would love to spell out the details of which sections are early and later, but it is beyond the confines of this introductory essay and general assessment of the single question about episteme.
[4] The provided translation is Jaeger’s own (Ibid, 199) in our text, The Ross translation reads as such “Whether there is, apart from the matter of such substances, another kind of matter, and one should look for some substance other than these, e.g. numbers or something of the sort, must be considered later. For it is for the sake of this that we are trying to determine the nature of perceptible substances is the work of physics, i.e. of the second philosophy; for the physicist must come to know not only about the matter but also about the substance expressed in the formula, and even more than about the other.”
[5] The driving force of this change to empirical sciences was the practical application of the realpolitik that Aristotle was to call upon in his dealing with the Macedonia court. Aristotle stopped teaching the concepts of Plato’s Republic and was urged by circumstance to think in a utility based political ways in the very ambitious court of Phillip, prompting his opportunity to be a tutor to Phillip’s son. Aristotle became well known enough during Phillip’s reign but not yet the intellectual leader of Greece (Ibid, 120).
[6] Professor, in a class lecture you once questioned if Aristotle understood Plato correctly. Could it be possible that this favored reading of Aristotle as proto scientist is what has left us historically with the idea that Aristotle misunderstood Plato? This is very large speculation and a much larger speculative topic for later investigation.
[7] Interestingly the orientation of the listed aprorias is very similar to your lecture and writing on The Advanced Philosophic Orientation by Dr. Daniel Guerriere. When one takes the proper orientation to what must be admitted about the process of “to-be” then much of Aristotle’s work comes into focus, without the derivations in the text that is such a concern to Jaeger.

Work in Progress - Deism

Brian McNally
Thesis
CSULB 2007 Spring

The Failure of the Project of Deism in Natural Philosophy


Deism, as a philosophic and religious inquiry, has all but disappeared from the intellectual landscape of the present academic world. My present aim is to examine the historical causes of why this has come to pass by following the sixteenth century development, seventeenth century rise and the eighteenth century broad influence of deism through its peak in the Enlightenment to its popular demise in the late nineteenth century. The philosophical and theological development of the concept of deism came to fruition in the exchange between the English and French intellectual communities that crossed paths in Eighteenth Century Amsterdam.
The failure of deism is understood in four ways, from the perspective of theology, metaphysics, politically theocratic and as the foundation of natural philosophy.
Attention on the influence of the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper the third Earl of Shaftsbury with the French intellectual community of the philosophes Denis Diderot, Voltaire, d’Holbach, and Rousseau. Shaftesbury’s ideas inspired and clarified the French intellectual fervor and left as part of its legacy the basis of inspiration for the Revolution. At issue is the influence at many levels of intellectual life within the literary world, the growing scientific community as well as the political sphere that was not yet ready to shed Christianity at the cost of full scale social disorder.

Deism Defined

To begin it is important to be clear about how Deism has been defined in different ways by different proponents of the position. There are distinct types of deism that had arisen by the Enlightenment. The common thread between all versions of deism is an effort to make reconciliation between faith with reason.
The primary thesis of deism is that God is the prime mover of creation. The created may be understood by reliable empirically confirmed laws through science, such as physics, chemistry and biology. Deism has been called by other names in its development such as natural theology, natural religion as well as religious naturalism but all hold the central thesis with some noted exceptions[1]. The variations in deism are in regards to the question about the actions of God in creation, free-will and determinism. One variety of deism holds that once creation was set into motion that God no longer interacts with creation. In this, questions arise that ask if the world is given freewill or if there is a divine plan. In either case, the world but must operate within the physical laws of matter in motion it has become known commonly as the clockmaker God.
With the success of the products of science, as shown in the advances in medicine, engineering and chemistry, the social acceptance of scientific explanation as a path to truth over religious dogmatic became rapidly accepted. Deism’s success was because it bridged the gap between the historic traditions of theology and a desire to make sense of the ancient ecclesiastical regime with the intellectual, empirical and logical aspirations of the new sciences. The great centers of learning we must recall were still largely church funded however and as such were not fully ready to abandon a thousand years of traditional scholasticism. The reconciliation of the past with the present is a driving force behind the efforts of the deists.

The Origin of Deism as “Natural Religion”
The term deism was originally interchangeable with theism until the Sixteenth Century[2]. Theism can be traced through the Greek term theon (god/deity) or theos (divinity), thus a theist is one who believes in the deity or divinity. Likewise, deism was similarly translated with the Latin term deus (god/ deity) to be one who believed in the God. There is little scholarly agreement in etymology about the first historic use of the word "Deism" to represent uniquely the concept of a prime-mover or clockwork God[3]. However, there is an epistle from 1563 that makes use of the term "Deist" to describe an advocate of the new unorthodox religion was noted by the Swiss Reformed theologian Pierre Viret. He wrote:
There are many who confess that while they believe like the Turks and the Jews that there is some sort of God and some sort of deity, yet with regard to Jesus Christ and to all that to which the doctrine of the Evangelists and the Apostles testify, they take all that to be fables and dreams. . . . There is much more difficulty with these than there is even with the Turks, or at least as much. For they hold opinions with regard to religion that are just as or more strange than the Turks and all other miscreants. I have heard that there are of this band those who call themselves Deists (déiste), an entirely new word, which they want to oppose to Atheist. For in that atheist signifies a person who is without God, they want to make it understood that they are not at all without God, since they certainly believe there is some sort of God, whom they even recognize as creator of heaven and earth, as do the Turks; but as for Jesus Christ, they only know that he is and hold nothing concerning him nor his doctrine[4].
In this century, the earliest published works of deism are to be found in the writings of the Englishman Herbert of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Lord Herbert sought to develop a natural history of religion that mended the fences between faith and reason which were always at issue through the Scholasticism of the Middle-Ages. His work was the first to openly express the concept of Deism as a solution to this age-old problem. Herbert’s major work De Veritate[5] was devoted to investigations into psychology, metaphysics and culminated into an epistemology as the basis for a new approach to what he termed “natural religion”. Nowhere in his corpus does Lord Herbert use the term deism as such. He develops the term “natural religion” to express his views and he contrasts his position against the religion of revelation as understood in orthodoxy in the Abrahamic tradition. Uniquely, he for the first time openly argues that the world, as created by God, can be comprehended in full by reason alone with an appriciation of the whole creation by the created being of mankind. The concept of his natural philosophy was given a clearer definition in his work De religione gentilium[6] (DRG) where he examines heathen religions in a sort of comparative theology with Christian ideals. In the work he develops the common marks by which religious truth is recognized. They are
1. An inherent belief in the existence of the Deity
2. The rational obligation to reverence of such a power
3. The identification of worship with practical morality
4. The obligation to repent of sin
5. A divine justice in this world and the next
Over time these are come to be known as the "five articles" of the English Deism as noted by Tolland and Shaftesbury as well as David Hume. Cherbury argues that these principles constitute the nucleus of all religions including Christianity in its primitive, uncorrupted form. He also held that the practice of Christianity during his time facing the new divisions and conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism make apparent its corruption to the political aims of mankind over the divine revelations of the Deity. This concern possibly influenced Cherbury in his argument that the creator was not engaged in the affairs of creation. Rather God was a prime-mover who in the divine act of creation set the world forth as a mechanism. Cherbury has become famous and widely regarded as the father of English Deism.
Given the religious freedom of the time, following the reign of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I and the current rule of her successor King James I, academic inquiries into more liberal theologies sprouted which provided the opportunity for progressive work free from the watchful eye of the Catholic Church. Given this new information Lord Herbert was arguably aware of the thoughts of Aristotle’s Metaphysics[7] (Carrigan p.12). He did not adapt Aristotle in whole but took the idea of the unmoved mover to develop deism as an independent concept in a different direction with his own 5 principles for governing natural religion (IEP p.7). In essence he reversed a central idea of Aristotle’s metaphysics that hold that all action (praxis) and essence (entelechia) aim toward some good (agathon). The highest of all goods is the God (theon) which we understand as the unmoved mover. Cherbury along with the intellectual vogue of the times wrongly associated the works of Aristotle as being in line with Christian thinking through the efforts of St. Thomas Aquinas. It was not until the 19th Century that Aristotle was read without the Christian filter so long imposed upon scholars.
Cherbury’s work was an attractive proposition for the intellectuals of his time. Cherbury’s ethical philosophy was favorable to the new theorists of deism. It offered a mid-way metaphysical solution for philosophers and scientists alike to attest to their belief in God yet trudge onward with the new tools offered by both the approved and revolutionary science of the day. While his work has not been assimilated into the current doxography of Philosophy of our times, Cherbury’s explorations had been known and felt well into the Enlightenment most notably to Anthony Ashley Cooper the third Earl of Shaftesbury who then influenced the French Deistic movement.

Anthony Ashley Cooper the Earl of Shaftesbury
While he has not become part of the mainstream doxography of philosophy today, Anthony Ashley Cooper the Earl Shaftesbury’s major work The Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Characteristics) was very well received by the intellectual communities of his homeland England in 1711. The work was so popular it came to have the demand enough for five printings[8]. His work enjoyed a popular second life in France thirty years later with Denis Diderot’s 1745 translation of his first ethical treatise An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (ICMV). Diderot’s liberal framing of his work inspired the philosophes of his day to promote Shaftesbury’s ideas across the intellectual landscape of the day across Western Europe, with copies ending up across the Atlantic Ocean in the library of Jefferson’s Monticello. His success and academic importance lasted well into the Romantic era but following the failure of deism in the academic world, currently you would be hard pressed to find a graduate student of philosophy who has heard his name or much less has read his work.
To understand Shaftesbury it is interesting to note that he was connected through out his life with the founder of British Empiricism, John Locke. It was Locke who started his career with service to the Ashley family in many capacities including medical doctor, political attaché and domestic advisor. He even assisted with Anthony’s birthing and for many years in his education during which Locke wrote Thoughts Concerning Education. The work chronicled his thoughts on the education of children while bringing up Anthony. Locke placed great emphasis on an awareness of the Greek and Roman classics equally along with the sciences. So, as a result the young Shaftesbury was literate in both Latin and Classical Attic Greek by the early age of 11 which he read equally on par with his native English, French and German. This explains his vast reference and knowledge of the classics and ancient Greek Philosophy in his work. Shaftesbury could arguably be seen as Locke’s ideal man of letters. Much more could be said of this relationship, but the work he produced speaks for itself. His work realized a great deal of acceptance and indeed interest with his contemporaries. Consider that Leibniz indeed praised Shaftesbury as “the living Plato of the age.” Shaftesbury’s work developed a vast array of philosophic and theological topics but for purposes of this essay our present concern shall primarily examine his work on Enthusiasm, Wit and his deep concerns about the value of divine revelation.
To start an understanding of Shaftesbury’s work we must understand that he was a teleological thinker. His early education in ancient Greek led him to detailed understanding of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and his work reflects a sharp acceptance of the world explained by the stagrite’s famous proton arche (first principles) and its treatment of the four causes. Of course, Aristotle’s work was long accepted as Christian teachings through the efforts of St. Thomas Aquinas. The teleological world presents the idea that “being-as-a-whole” is a connected. All individual parts exist always in relation to one another in a series of cause and effect relationships. By Shaftesbury’s time this came to be called “The Great Chain of Being”. Scientists, philosophers and theologians can all be evidenced to be allied toward similar veins of thinking including Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Paley and many more[9]. The argument at this time period position holds that there is a metaphysical hierarchy and connectives that makes the world sensible to pure reason. Shaftesbury interpreted this argument to be understood as the rational evidence of the craftsmanship of the God of the Abrahamic tradition. The importance to stress here is that the world, to this group of thinkers, is a rational relationship of the one and many that can be understood by a reliable set of scientific laws and principles. While this is nothing new, what is at issue is the relationship of divine revelation and interaction with the rational functioning “world machine” or “clockwork reality” of the creator.
Shaftesbury asks the question, if one accepts that the world is a well functioning machine, then why would miracles, revelations and divine messages be needed? Why would religion demand faith over reason and logic? If the world was ordered truly could it not be fully understood by reason? The problem is most religions have historically been founded and justified on the belief in revelation, miracles or divine dispensations[10]. These have been defined historically as those events which defy reason and affirm faith, in essence supernatural. Shaftesbury takes issue that the creator is such that his creation is functioning well enough to not need to break with the natural logical functioning of nature and introduce the supernatural. For these reasons, The Encyclopedists categorized religion subordinate to reason in the same sub-category next to magic, the occult and witchcraft all of which are subordinate to reason.
The primacy that Shaftesbury places on reason leads into the primary thesis that requires anyone who affirms belief in a true, just and benevolent deity must then have some standard of judgment independent of the deity in whom that agent can decide that God is in fact true, just and benevolent[11]. He argues that agents who are not free of God’s influence, would not be able to be said to have a free will for their destiny would be under the auspice or influence of the divine all powerful will and divine foresight. Only an agent who was truly independent of the deity could have moral agency and thus come freely to that deity as a moral personage and not a slave or automaton[12]. Shaftesbury thus adopts the theological position of a deist for the purpose to account for human morality in which a free will must be independent of God.
Shaftesbury further attacks the notion that there would ever be any divine interference or other seeming phenomena that disrupt or otherwise mettle with the rational, natural order to the seemingly enlightened. This is what he called the dangers of religious enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm in Shaftesbury usage is rooted in the Greek term enthousiasmos which means a unique inspiration or possession by a divine affection, emotion from or by the presence of O Theon (The God)[13]. Another indication for the period is Dr. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) which gives further evidence of this as he defines enthusiasm as "a vain belief of private revelation; a vain confidence of divine favour or communication." Today we use the term very differently to simply convey a sense of heightened emotion but without any reference to divinity. If one wants a correct understanding of Shaftesbury’s thesis then we need to keep in mind his use of the term from his period forward.
Thus, one can understand Shaftesbury’s cautionary critique about religious enthusiasm representing a leaning away of a religion of reason and toward a religion based on superstition or supernaturalism. He holds that if enthusiasm is one’s primary path to God, then it must be false because since scientific law can prove its claims as verifiable as a key to comprehending the logical operation of the world. Thus, in judgment about endeavors that deny this must fall back onto enthusiasm. Such endeavors ought to be very careful about trying to explain the world in any other than purely rational principles. The idea that divine miracles, revelation or other appearances of divine figures such as angels, etc… seem to defy reason would be a direct indication of their falsehood if the world is rational. The primacy of reason thus demands that the world must be explained purely logically. Skepticism and railings would be the only option toward enthusiastic revelation, miracle or other mysterious disclosure. Shaftesbury argues that if a claim to a supernatural event cannot be evidenced, rationalized or otherwise logically accounted for then it would represent a failure of the physical laws of the world that the all-powerful God set into motion. He writes on revelations,
If I mistake not our author’s meaning, be professes to believe, as far as is possible for anyone who himself had never experienced any divine communication, whether by dream, vision, apparition, or other supernatural operation; nor was ever present as eye-witness of any sign, prodigy, or miracle whatsoever”.[14]
In essence he claims that nothing short of direct experience would account for the acceptance of any supernatural phenomenon. Further, even with experience, one should doubt such things in the absence of a rational explanation as to why such phenomenal effect would occur without due consideration of the responsible cause to the operation of the rational world.
The interesting thing is his approach reminds one of the irony and satire of Voltaire’s earlier writing. Shaftesbury takes a rather gentle approach to questioning his opposition’s positions rather than a full scale attack. Shaftesbury takes this tone because he holds that miracles and the supernatural offer no logical proof of the existence of God. We must already believe in God before we can determine whether any alleged miracle is of such divine origin. His thoughts later echo in the work of John Stuart Mill’s position that claims that any supernatural phenomenon only would reveal the will of God rather than the fact of God.[15]
To clearly express the problems he is concerned about Shaftesbury writes about The Camisard Rebellion of 1702 in France. This rebellion is reported to be inspired by prohetic visions and divine messages that incited the common people to rebel against King Louis XIV. As a result of this public show of religious enthusiasm, King Louis repealled The Edict of Nantes which once again made any open Protestant worship illegal. To enforce this he sent miliatry troops that came to be called ‘Dragonades’ (Missionaries in boots) who charge was to violently converted the pesants back to Catholicism at the end of a musket[16]. Shaftesbury while not in agreement with forced Catholicism, was equally disgusted at the seeming ease in which the pesants were led to the gross violence from the ‘prohets’ who led many to their death in rebellion.
The moderate tone of his work reflects his thoughts on the use of wit as a stronger tool than outright attack. One of the most interesting aspects to Shaftesbury’s style is that he believes that “wit and railing” has the potential to play a role in the disclosure of the truth against falsehood. He argues that if something can withstand satire, railing or other forms of mockery or assailment of wit, then it is usually true. This holds this especially for moral claims but also equally so for truth claims. He can make this bridge between truth and morality because the truth of morality would be objective to the logic in a fully realized rational world of law. Thus, if one can withstand the slings and arrows of ridicule with modest honor, then one’s view must be true and good. It is often the case he tells us that many historical institutions have only persisted when they have been in power positions in the society to demand respect. His concept is that respect for social, moral traditions should never be demanded, but rather earned by being subject to rational examination and expose. Thus, reverence for social institutions ought to be abandoned, if they rationally do not hold up to scrutiny for the public good logically. In the later portion of this essay we will examine how this alone has made Shaftesbury popular with the libertine radical intellectuals behind the revolutionary movement in France. His work influenced Rousseau and Voltaire who publicly voiced that any public institutions of the ancient regime that no longer benefited the public good ought to be done away with.
Shaftesbury himself maintained that the church establishment was at service to the public good and as such is noted as a regular church attendant[17]. He felt that in particular the Anglican Church of England needed no serious alteration following its firm establishment by the time of the Restoration. He notes further the Church lent support to civil order and its moderate temperament did not unduly interfere with the liberty of speculation. To this point, contemporary authors such as Theodor Adorno argue that given his high social position one could question the ethical authenticity of Shaftesbury’s self-interest over the economic interest gained in maintaining social order to benefit his lineage and noble title[18].
In summary, revelation and claims to the supernatural was the real target for Shaftesbury theological concerns. On a close reading, Shaftesbury’s work on these topics clearly defines his position on natural religion which led and inspired both the French and English Deists. Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau all can be shown to have adopted and cited his work in their own as the basis for their initial position of a self claimed radical libertine Deism that eventually slides into an indifferent atheism stands apart from the gentler position of Shaftesbury[19].
The Influence of Shaftsbury on Diderot, Voltaire and the Philosophes
The exiled French intellectuals living in Amsterdam, Holland were exposed to the writings of Shaftesbury as early as 1686 when he visited his exiled old teacher John Locke. The young earl lived there during political turmoil in England for at least four years to most accounts. During this stay, Earl Anthony was exposed to many of the leading liberal scholars of the day, as the city was a refuge for people whose work was against the conservative grain politically. His first publication An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (ICMV) was in its first rough drafts and reports claim that his thesis was accepted with a great enthusiasm in public readings and the salon intellectuals circles he frequented[20]. By the time he published Characteristics later in 1711, it was being spread rapidly for the time and technology. In England alone five editions were printed within 20 years and the French of Amsterdam were reading Pierre Des Maizeaux’s commentaries on Shaftesbury by 1720. While Shaftesbury himself was influenced intellectually, his work returned the favor. The intellectuals of the time were unsure of the way to reconcile the new science and the ancient regime of the church. Shaftesbury’s works were amongst the first to introduce the early thoughts of Herbert of Cherbury and the English Deists to this circle. I argue that his form of natural theology as well as that from his fellow English deists spoke the liberal philosophes of the time and started a brush fire of thought that spread through the low-lands all the way to Paris that set the French interest in Deism in motion[21].
To support this claim consider that Denis Diderot’s second paid scholarly job was to translate Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit into French. There was a market recognized by the owners of the printing business in Amsterdam and a growing academic request for Shaftesbury’s work to be accessible to a wider French intellectual market within 5 years of its fourth English publication. By today’s standards, this may seem slow, but given the time and technology it is very fast. The influence of this settled deep for a number of years into the Encyclopedists. Historians can even trace how each in their own way adopted various aspects of Shaftesbury and promoted the work in various ways[22].
Notably, Voltaire took to heart not only Shaftesbury’s deism but also his essay in Characteristics on wit. Voltaire comments that he was especially moved by the idea of wit as a means to revelation of truth. Shaftesbury held that wit was a sort of test of the truth[23]. If a proposition, institution, or tradition could withstand ridicule, railings, or humiliation, then it was sound. Shaftesbury felt that many of the practices of the ancient regimes existed only because of “historical advantage” or “politics of force”. Historical advantage means that once upon a time the way that an idea was widely socially accepted was not for their intrinsic value but for the coercion of force upon its adherents. For example, the inquisition was not of merit logically however, if you did not adhere to the strict edicts then you risk being tortured or killed in the name of God by the church. Wit and ridicule in a democratic and tyrannical society can be used to undue popular support amongst the people and then the truth will be realized. Shaftesbury felt that theatre, music and all aspects of performance was a good way to disseminate this idea and practice. While admittedly this is a very optimistic idea Shaftesbury has been shown to be correct in the use of political theatre and satire could be seen as its reality expressed. Voltaire himself admitted that this idea helped him in a transition from is early acerbic nature to change to a satirically wit oriented approach to issues in his literature[24].
Further evidence of influence can be seen in how Diderot remains faithful to Shaftesbury’s deism through his Pensées Philosophiques in 1746. This work can be read as a continuation directly of The Earl’s work but now being re-addressed to the issues France approximately 50 years after its publication. Diderot’s second printing of his French translation of Shaftesbury ICMV contains many outright editorial changes and original work of his own influenced by his later own thoughts from the Pensées. In this edition, he takes a great deal of authorial liberty with Shaftesbury’s work but clearly grounds his own work clearer in the moral and theological issues[25].
While historians and ethicists may question Diderot’s right or wrong in his outright alteration of the text, one can understand why he did it and forgive him[26]. Diderot obviously felt strongly that the central thesis of Shaftesbury’s work spoke to the issues facing the French in his time. This thesis sat remained with Diderot for many years and a shadow was cast long over the project of the Encyclopedists which set the tone as well as the agenda for Denis Diderot’s management of the project. Historians agree that if not for Diderot’s leadership, tireless devotion and amazing scholarly ability it is unlikely that the project would have been done within the time frame that it was. He devoted himself to the project for twenty four years from 1748-1772. While by modern standards it may seem like a very long time, given the technology, manual plate setting and printing of the work. Twenty-four years for the impressive agenda of The Encyclopedia set itself to be the most comprehensive living taxonomy of human knowledge. Enough cannot be said about the scope, depth and courage of such a work to be attempted and better completed.
Following Shaftesburys similar division in Characteristics, The Encyclopedia divides human knowledge into three main branches of inquiry[27];
1. Memory / History
2. Reason /Philosophy
3. Imagination/Poetry
It is interesting to reflect on their decision that theology is correctly cataloged under the section of “Reason/ Philosophy'. This speaks a great deal to the thinking of Diderot at the time about his thoughts of religion. On this, Robert Darnton notes that this categorization of religion as being subject to human reason, and not a source of knowledge in and of itself, was a significant factor in the controversy surrounding the work[28].
Additionally notice that 'Knowledge of God' is only a few nodes away from 'Divination' and 'Black Magic'[29]. This decision evidences that the project’s ideology was not attempting to justify existing traditional political structures, but rather face the project of knowledge in the new humanistic light of the reason that shone forth from the Enlightenment as a whole. In 1759, publishing of The Encyclopedia was formally banned in France. The work however continued in Amsterdam and the publishing pre-sales grew from 2000 to over 4000 subscribers. The project clearly shows support of the ideas behind deism. The world is logical and ready to be understood removing the mystery behind the operating procedures of the world’s cultures, crafts and facts of the mechanical science. Ultimately, it was the light of knowledge brought to the masses to better understand the physical reality and dispell the mystical elements as well as those held closely for economic gains long controlled by the guilds and ruling class. The bookseller however, had secretly unknown to Diderot, struck out from the first official printing some very controversial religious passages fearing retribution from the French government. Nevertheless, the Encylopedia has stood the test of time and has shown that the project obviously met and far succeeded its goals.
The influence of Shaftesbury amongst the Philosophes is undeniable however the consequences realized was unique in that many of them progressed or fell to atheism[30]. The social value of the church as an element for social order always kept Shaftesbury a deist, however this was not the case for the philosophers as a case study let us consider the case of Diderot’s transition to atheism. His story is like so many others it stands as a good example of the new intellectual classes’ disillusionment with the benefits of social stability and ancient orders. Diderot is of course exceptional, but stands as a new “man of letters” whos education exceeds his social class a mere generation prior to his formative years. The conservative view of education for the new successful middle classes was still traditionally religious in nature yet the desires of the newly educated was often at odds with the ends of relgion and I will make the case the Diderot stands as such a case.
Deism to Atheism: The Case of Denis Diderot

It is unambiguously in vast agreement amongst scholars that by the end of the project of The Encyclopedia Diderot was a steady atheistic materialist. In his earliest days, he was a student of theology and devotedly religious. In his early professional years as a man of letters and translator he adopted Shaftesbury’s deism. What were the steps in the gradual change toward atheism? There could be many answers made of this, and many authors examine different events all worthy of examination. In this section I will explore the specific points to compare Diderot and Shaftesbury with the temperament between the political, economics between England and France during the half century between the two. I will also argue that the change in the social climate and the economics of both are influential factors.
To begin and understand the early formation and experiences that shape Diderot, we need to explore what he himself writes of about his own life. Diderot was a constant letter writer and many of his letters have been preserved and pieced together in a series of volumes that give a good insight in to his life. We can first begin to trace his disillusionment with the teachings of religion at an early age. Diderot’s correspondence records that he started his education in theology at the urging of his father at the Paris Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand[31]. Quickly he found it did not suite his inquisitive nature. He completed his studies only after he changed colleges and ended up in The University of Paris. By 1732 he earned a Master’s degree in the field to philosophy and rhetoric. This change in study resulted in him being alienated from his father who initially funded his education but it was discovered that he left theological studies as his father desired he was cut-off monetarily and socially from his family for a number of years. For this reason, Diderot never completed his doctorate studies though it is noted that he had intended to do so when funding would allow.
It is interesting to note that Denis’ failure to meet his father’s wishes gave both his younger brother Didier-Pierre, and his sister Angelique and chance at education. Both would follow their fathers wishes to the ecclesiastical path, the former becoming a priest and the latter a nun[32]. Dider Diderot, Denis’ father, is noted to have wanted the social and political gains of a family connection to the clergy and would not be denied this at any cost. The Diderot family had developed a very successful cutler and tanning business and wanted to advance the family’s social standing. The well known classical path for this was through the promotion of family members within the church. Obviously, Denis thought otherwise and chose to remain alienated from his father till the birth of his daughter almost 10 years later according to his letters[33].
For the first time in his life, he was presented with the challenge to earn a living. He arranged to be apprenticed with a lawyer and found that the vocation was much more to his liking. After three years of working with the lawyer, he adopted the life of a man of letters and made a meager living as a tutor and clerk. His first big break was in 1745, when he was paid to translate Temple Stanyan’s three volume work Grecian History to French. With this success he was hired again to translate Shaftesbury’s ICMV to French. In this project he found his own voice and his philosophic footing in the works of the relatively unknown English deist. At this early point in his career Diderot’s work reflects that his position was inline with Shaftesbury as a professed (moderately congenial) natural theologian committed to deism. It would be fair to say that following his translation of ICMV that he was the largest adherent and promoter of Shaftesbury’s work in his intellectual circles within Paris.
It is interesting to note that the dedication of French edition of ICMV is to his brother Pierre who is a canon in the church and is now referred to as “the bigoted Abbé” by Denis. The falling out from his family was now complete, with the only exception being his sister Angelique living as an avowed nun in a Parisian convent who he communicated with infrequently. Most nuns did not and were not encouraged or allowed permission to have outside communication with their families. At best, it is recorded that he wrote once a year when he was able to somehow exchange letters with her through private channels that remain undisclosed in his letters[34]. Perhaps this alienation from his sister was one of the underlying influences that prompted his railings in The Nun about the unnatural state that the cloisters provide.
In his first original philosophic work, Pensées Philosophiques in 1746 he reflects upon a series of public riots in Paris from the year he completed studies in 1732. The riots raised a general concern in him about fanaticism (or religious enthusiasm in Shaftesbury terminology) that had the potential to quickly rally people to violence in the name of God. The riots were centered on The Church of Saint Médard which had become a place of pilgrimage since the burial of François de Páris, a theologian who supported the Jansenist sect within Catholicism. While not a fully Protestant faith, for it acknowledged the Roman Papal authority it was very radical. Following his death and burial at Saint Médard alleged miracles and visions started to be claimed among the pesants. The “peasant prophets” lead large scale public disruptions and periodic violence. Historians argue that the violence was part of a long standing protest against the revocation of The Edicit of Nantes which prohibited Protestant worhsip in France. Jansenists sects were allowed to continue operating after this revocation, but this line of action ended that. To silence the matter, King Louis XIV ordered the church closed in 1732 after the death of 100’s in the streets of Paris to the violence. Diderot, like Shaftesbury before him[35], was disgusted how easily claims of religious enthusiasm in the form of visions incited the masses to violence. Pensées Philosophiques stands as the start of a series of writings that increase Diderot’s skepticism toward the church as well as the state.
His later writings only amplify his atheistic skepticism. In La Promenade du sceptique (The Skeptic’s Walk) written in 1747 clearly show increasing doubts about religion. The printing of the work was a problem from the start. The printer became nervous upon reading the work while typesetting and sent a copy to the authorities for review. The manuscript was seized before publication and censured deemed too radical for public consumption. Diderot was not arrested for this but it started the police to begin to pay attention to Diderot closely. Next, he produced a ribald and bawdy satire on Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, Les Bijoux Indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels), in 1748 which further antagonized the authorities. Finally his Lettre sur les aveugles (An Essay on Blindness) in 1749 questioned the basic belief in God and made the Deistic argument that cosmic order argues for God's absence from creation. For this work, he was finally arrested and sentenced to solitary confinement for three months in the fortress of Vincennes. Diderot's imprisonment shook him deeply leaving him with a strong distaste for Parisian authority and the king’s censorship policies[36].
Following his served time he moved to Amsterdam which led him into the focus of his most famous work. The transition was not an obvious one. Again he was contracted prior to being arrested to do translation and editorial work on the Chambers' Cyclopoedia of The Medical Arts. Upon arriving in Amsterdam, Diderot discovered a large and very liberal intellectual community. The exchange with the new thinkers inspired him to grow his Chamber’s project into a much larger work. With so many other intellectuals and men of letters Diderot’s resources for learned authors grew. So, he inspired his publishers and they decided to expand the project to covering not only the medical arts but also the mechanical arts. Later, this went even further to include the human sciences and this finally allowed the work to become further blossoming into The Encyclopedia: A Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences.
The work on The Encyclopedia and the events outlined above led Diderot to adopt a more materialistic view. We can sum this up to say that he did not support the church as an aid to social order like Shaftesbury did. Diderot rather came to view the church as an impediment to social progress of the individual as the cost of the stability of order. Thus, without enjoying the benefit of social order, the shift ideologically to atheism is understandable. Diderot never abandoned deism intellectually directly in a text. However, given that he viewed the church as an impediment to advancement then why retain the last vestige of it in deism?
Diderot starts to promote within The Philosophes the idea that the only way for the individual to advance was to topple the ancient regime’s social order. He believed that The Encyclopedia had the potential to do just that by freeing knowledge and encouraging more individual advancement and competition of ideas. Individuals would no longer be chained to church sponsored universities, royal chartered colleges or ancient craft guilds to become educated. The liberation of knowledge was the beginning of the path to the liberation of the citizen from the oppression of the ancient regime.
Another factor rarely considered in the evolution of Diderot’s philosophy was the life and premature death of his sister Angelique. According to his letters, as mentioned above, following the pressure from his father Dider, Angelique and her brother Dider-Pierre both took theological education culminating in vows to the ecclesiastical life. She had been living in a Parisian convent as a nun since 1734, until her death in 1758. Not much is noted historically personally about Angelique’s life directly. However, we know that she was the only family he had a continuous relationship with, even if only in correspondence. He followed the family tradition by naming his first daughter Angelique, which was also Denis’ mother’s name. To me this denotes, at minimum, some terms of endearment between the two. In 1758, Angelique dies while sequestered away in her convent. There are different reports of her death, some claim that she died of fevered illness, others of a religiously inspired fit of ecstasy. Others claim the death was due to reported exhaustion from her labor while at work for her convent[37]. Since she died on Church grounds there was no formal investigation and the matter was never settled to the best of my readings to date in his letters.
I find it interesting to note that the death occurs only two years prior to his intense work on his novel The Nun during the summer of 1760[38]. He later consented to it being published 1780 to a small circle in The Correspondence Literaire. While it is commonly known that work of The Nun was the practical joke upon M. de Croismare, the death of his sister is not commonly discussed and I believe it is hard not to attribute her death as some measure of inspiration for the work and his increasing anger directed at religion eventually escalating to a fully materialistic atheism. To the best of my research there is nothing in his correspondence to provide evidence to this fact other than the coincidence of dates. If time allows, perhaps future research into his letters of the time will disclose more.

The End of Deism and The Social Acceptance of Atheism
Diderot’s later period atheism is his final departure from Shaftesbury’s deism that he promoted for so long. To understand this final step of Diderot’s position we must consider the individual economic factors involved with both in a simplified manner of the Frankfurt School. To start, I believe one can make a case of that the vast gap between the differences of social class and economic freedom between Shaftesbury and Diderot reflect eventual differences on their stand on theology and specifically deism.
I will argue, as I have before, that Diderot serves as a single representative of the larger whole of the new class of the men of letters. This is a new unique social class of educated men do not have the deep roots in the dealings of the ancient regimes. They are the middle class educated men who come from the trade families. They may admire the aristocratic rich, but their wealth is city and trade based not land based. Thus they like Diderot share the ability to social change that a land holding nobleman does not. This freedom to be in the public sphere of the city the new society form actually opens a door for the new social acceptances such as atheism. Many changes were afoot following the social upheavals in American and France in the later part of The Enlightenment. The forthcoming Romantic era only exasperates this change and people start to look to nature for answers rather than the church.
To begin, consider the core of the differences lies on the economic social order proper to each. On one hand, we must consider Shaftesbury who, as a literal English Earl, sat as a member in the House of Lords. I argue that this political clout makes him not only benefit from social order he was society order embodied. His position afforded and burdened him with landholdings as a great deal of wealth in an annual pension in excess of 28,000₤ annually by some historical accounts[39]. A single person could sustain themselves in a modest middle-class life with an annual income of 200₤ with some creature comforts.
On the other hand, Diderot who was born to a well to do merchant family that has recorded linage back to the middle-ages in the city of Langres. The family was respected as honorable craftsmen over the years as cutlers, tanners and even artisans. He was by no means marginalized in French society but when Diderot finished college and was cut-off of economic support by his father upon the discovery of abandoning his study to be a clergyman was in effect penniless. He was forced to take work as a legal clerk and he scratched out a living in his spare hours as a tutor.
In these early years, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Diderot were close friends. Rousseau and Diderot first met in Paris in the early 1740s. They had a lot in common and made fast friends. They both were bachelors, tutoring the children of the rich while they both struggled as writers. They tried to work their way into upper-class society and hoped to gain patronage in financial backing of well-to-do, progressive bourgeois or aristocrat to let them pursue writing full time. They both achieved some connection to high Parisian society with varying degrees of success. They both wanted to be men of letters in the newly recognized professional intellectual class. Rousseau himself admits that he did not match the seeming limitless energy level and physical health of Diderot, nor his commitment to Parisian social life[40].
Following Diderot’s An Essay on Blindness in 1749 and the imprisonment that followed, their friendship was so strong that Rousseau visited him at the Vincennes prison where he was held. Rousseau visited frequently and wrote to many people to secure his release. He even wrote on his behalf to Madame de Pompadour, The King’s famous consort, arguing that she had a moral obligation to request Diderot's release. However, due to scandal and censorship surrounding Diderot’s book The Indiscrete Jewels about her and King Louis from three years prior this did not go over very well. Rousseau in typical fashion even went so far as to request that if she fails to gain his release, then she should request that he be imprisoned with Diderot[41]. The publishers of The Encyclopedia were also worried about Diderot's imprisonment for the simple fact it slowed down progress on their project which they had already invested considerable money[42]. Diderot was deeply affected by his imprisonment and treaded more carefully after this unfortunate period of his life. Rousseau also considered this period of his own life as unfortunate, but for different reasons[43]. Eventually, his publishers secured his release with some undisclosed form of payment of bail for his release. The project left Paris for Amsterdam following his release and the rest has been mentioned.
Rousseau writes that on one of his journeys to the prison by foot on a hot summer day that he had his revelation to describe the detrimental effects of the arts and sciences on civilization. Diderot encouraged him to pursue his idea[44]. Within weeks Rousseau wrote an essay critiquing the role of the arts and sciences, which won him fame through a prize conferred by the Academy of Dijon. This later became the basis for his work The Social Contract and most of his later work.
Rousseau writes of his own life that after this visit to Diderot in prison and his prize-winning essay, he held it to be the beginning of the misfortunes that followed him for the rest of his life. Indeed, it was from this time on that the literate public became aware of Rousseau's radical criticism of urban high society and of its self-serving promotion. Diderot never shared the absolute radicalism of his friend. Over the following years and by the end The Encyclopedia project the distance between them began to increase. However, while Diderot was never as radical as Rousseau, his distaste for the church never wavered. The madness and death of his sister, his views on the unnatural state of life in the cloisters as described, examined and evidenced in The Nun all sum up a strong obvious discontent. It is the experience of these events that is reflected to this writer as Diderot’s pathway to adopt atheism. Without the benefit of social order there was no reason left to keep allegiance with Shaftesbury or deism.
Atheism was marginally socially acceptable following the French Revolution. Diderot had died five years prior to the start of the revolution. Rousseau working with Robespierre in 1792, had realized that their program of social disorder was going too far. Statues of a new goddess of Liberty had started springing up all over Paris but to people this represented absolute freedom and a libertine spirit. It is recorded that people wantonly killed their fellow citizens without remorse or fear of retribution from neither an earthly or divine providence. The project of atheism had gone too far, and now the possibility of real social collapse was a reality. Robespierre and Rousseau planned public festivals to inaugurate a new religion of Patriotism calling upon the spirits of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. On July 8, 1794 a festival to re-dedicate Notre Dame Cathedral to this new Religion of reason was held. The festival was to put the torch to atheism, vice and folly each in the form of an impish wooden statue. The festival was to reach an apex when these three statues would be burned being beaten down by the image of reason as truth and order. The problem was the wood for the statues of atheism and folly were newly carved of green wood that would not burn. The statue of reason was charred with smoke and the crowd was riotous with disgust. The festival was a fiasco and the idea of altering Notre Dame Cathedral was too much for the Parisians. A month later, Robespierre was guillotined[45].
In closing, I think another support to this point can be supported indirectly in a reading of Jacques the Fatalist and His Master. Diderot creates a milieu of narrative of two men telling each other stories of seduction and conflict through their journey to dispense self defined justice. The story flows like a river that rises and sinks but the story floats along with no real satisfying end. There is no grand moment, there is no ultimate climax. Even after the murder, the story continues. I am left with the thought that the story is meditation on a way to think of life. The point of the story is that is that there is no answer to the ultimate questions, no life affirming or denying turning point epiphany. All that remains is the memory of the experience, all that remains is the conversation. Life is what we make of it in the never ending engagement in rational argument and exchange with other people. We may opt to adhere to “what is written above” but it is our choice to recognize or deny it.
For Diderot, atheism is the final stand for him philosophically. There is no real point to life, only free exchange of ideas, value and the flux of life. For Diderot, like in Jacques, meaning is found in life and action not metaphysics. Teleological purposes are mute to plugged ears and blind to closed eyes. The baggage of deism was simply too pay with the power and confusion about the role of the church in such a world. The benefit of the abandonment of social order puts the reasonability to bequeath meaning in life for us and by us and no one or anyone else. We are left alone without a God and on our own to define the meaning we come into life and leave life with. This ideal would not be realized for almost 170 years until another fellow countryman Jean-Paul Sartre published Being and Nothingness and starts promotion the ideals of Existentialism in post-WWII Europe.

Bibliography

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 1 & 2. Jonathan Barnes, Editor. Bollingen, 1995

Carrigan. Cky J. The Rise and Fall of English Deism 1995,
URL =

Clarke, Randolph, "Incompatibilist (Nondeterministic) Theories of Free Will", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Fowler, Thomas. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson London : Sampson Low, Marston. Searle & Rivington, 1882
Guéhenno, J. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Vols. 1-2) (J. & D. Weightman, Trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1966
IEP - “Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648)” by Anonymous. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005. URL=

Kushner, Harold S. When Bad Things Happen to Good People, New York: Schoken Books, 1989 ed.

Torrey, Norman L. Voltaire and The English Deists Yale Romantic Studies, Vol I New Haven, Yale University Press, 1930

Langner, Karol. Wikipedia Free Online Encylopedia Topic Free Will. 2006, URL =

Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, 2 volumes, (London, Parker, 1843) revised, 1846, 1 volume
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Les confessions [Confessions] (Vols. 1-3). Paris: Garnier Frères. 1926 ed.
Schlegel. Dorothy B. Shaftesbury and The French Deists New York, Johnson Reprint Corp. [1969, c1956]

Swinburne, Richard. The Coherence of Theism Revised Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993

Walters jr., Gordon B. The Signifigance of Diderot’s Essai Sur Le Merite et la Vertu. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press [1971]

Wiles, Maurice F. God’s Action in the World, London: SCM Press, 1986
Attachment I
Attachment II


[1] Insert details from thesis here.
[2] John Orr, English Deism: Its Roots and Its Fruits (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1934), p.13 Theism holds a very different thesis about the nature of God in the claim to His nature as the perfection of goodness, omnipotence, and omniscience.
[3] Webster's Dictionary. Ninth Edition, p.335 (1682).
[4] Déiste (fr) Original text is French. Translation by William Lane Craig, The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus During the Deist Controversy (Lewiston, England: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985), p.73. Viret, Pierre. L'instruction chretienne.
[5] De veritate, prout distinguitur a revelatione, a verisimili, a possibili, et a falso (On Truth, as it is Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False) First published in Paris in 1624. See bibliography for full reference and details.
[6] The text was completed by 1645 four years prior to his death. However, it was first published in Amsterdam in 1663 and later translated into English by W Lewis, London, 1705. Amsterdam was a hotbed of liberal intellectual life when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 which once again declared Protestantism illegal and returned Catholicism to being the official state religion.
[7] This is significant historically, according to Carrigan for non-clergy were generally not allowed direct access to the libraries under Church doctrine or Church held foundational texts (for example - Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Abelard and others). If not for the opening and capture of Church lands (and possessions) by King Henry VIII in the English reformation. Carrigan argues that most of the works and revision of classical thought may still be locked away under church ownership till this time. The seizure of lands and property (i.e. libraries, scriptoriums) by the king opened scholarship to secular readings and latter interpretations. An example of this is within 30 years we see popular writers like Phillip Marlow and William Shakespeare, neither well known as strictly academics, but whose work shows a good deal of familiarity with Greek mythology and classical thought which was not seen is previous era’s poets, Comedia Del Arte, masks nor plays. For the work of classical Greek thought in philosophy, art and myth to make its way down to the arts, the works of the church were fairly wide spread and open to any who were of a primary education (our equivalent to high school).

[8] Each printing represented approximately 500-700 completed textbooks. While not enormous by contemporary standards, it was considerable. Locke’s 1690 work Two Treatises of Government was printed twice with about 1000 texts in total and is now a revered philosophical and political work.
[9] References here would be too vast to cite. A wonderful, although pedestrian, treatment may be had in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener. It has been recently argued that Isaac Newton actually sought to explain the world in terms of a series of “mechanical laws” that in the current day have been re-interpreted to eliminate the teleology. However, this contemporary reading is not the argument of this essay.
[10] For example, Jesus and the walking on water, laying on of hands, speaking in tongues, and divine ascension. In Islam, consider Mohammed’s splitting of the moon, voice of the east wind, and the ascension to heaven. In Judaism, the parting of The Red Sea, the burning bush that spoke to Moses, etc…
[11] Shaftesbury’s words “true, just and benevolent” may be equated equally with the modern standard for theism’s claims to the characteristics of God as all knowing, all powerful and all good.
[12] Automaton (plural: automata) is a self-operating machine. The word is sometimes used to describe a robot, more specifically an autonomous robot. Used colloquially, it refers to a mindless follower. (Dictionary.com)
[13] Little & Scott Greek Dictionary – we may distinquish: theon - deityd; theos – divine; O Theon – The God (monotheism)
[14] Characteristics, Miscellaneous Reflections, Misc. 2, Ch 2.
[15] John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Book III, Chapter 25.
[16] See attachment II for a period cartoon commentary of the period.
[17] Fowler, Thomas. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. pp. 125
[18] See Fowler pp. 190. I personally believe that this alone is not a strong critique of Shaftesbury, for his interest in the perpetuation of his title seems of passing importance for he married only at the strong urgings of his friends well into his 40’s to bear only a single child and lived abroad apart from his wife and family most of his days in France, Holland and finally to die in Italy in seeking warmer climates than England due to his chronic asthma and poor health.
[19] Schlegel. Dorothy B. Shaftesbury and The French Deists.
[20] See Schlegel pp. 7.
[21] See Schlegel – many pages to cite on this but primarily the chapter 1 and 4 both as a whole.
[22] Walters jr., Gordon B. The Signifigance of Diderot’s Essai Sur Le Merite et la Vertu.
[23] Voltaire and The English Deists Torrey. Norman L. P. 33
[24] See Schlegel – Ch. 2 The Dilemma of Voltaire
[25] The only problem with his translation is that ICMV is no longer Shaftesbury’s own thoughts or words but the work holds a great deal of import to the issues and problems of the publishing time. There is a great deal of detail to address this and I recommend Gordon Walters who wonderfully chronicles the translation issues and liberal authorial changes Diderot makes in the second edition of the ICMV.
[26] Jacques Derrida argues in Of Grammatology that in literature that there is not an author and perhaps all there really is to meaning is “the text”. While this issue is beyond the scope of the present concern perhaps a case could be made of his point in Diderot’s translation of ICMV in this.
[27] I argue that the categorization as mentioned is a influence by Shaftesbury. I would be happy to make more of this claim and further investigate the textual evidence, but space in this limited venue does not allow for it.
[28] Darnton, Robert., The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France W. W. Norton & Company (April 1996)
[29] See Attachment at the end of this essay for the chart.
[30] It seems either metaphor is telling as a raising or lowering but I am honestly not sure if it is a raising or lowering.
[31] Correspondence, IV (Fevrier 1762-Decembre 1764). by Denis Diderot, Georges Roth, trans.

[32] Diderot’s life is also chronicled very nicely by Furbank, P. N. Diderot: A Critical Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
[33] Correspondence, IV p. 123
[34] Correspondence, IV (Fevrier 1762-Decembre 1764) pp. 89
[35] Recall from above Shaftesbury’s concerns about the violence from the Camisard Rebellion of 1702
[36] Much more could be said to make this case, but the best biography I have enjoyed is by Furbank, P. N. Diderot: A Critical Biography. Pp. 125

[37] Furbank pp. 125. Fonteney (p. 27) claims that his sister Angelique died of madness in her convent. It is hard to believe that this event did not inspire or effect Diderot’s work The Nun. Yet the introduction to the Penguin Edition by Leonard Tancock makes no mention of this event.
[38] Tancock, Leonard. Introduction to The Nun, Penguin Classics.1973 ed. pp. 10
[39] Fowler, pp. 145
[40] See Rousseau’s Confessions. The whole story is in Vol. I
[41] Ibid. Vol II, pp 124
[42] At this point, the project is still the Medical Encyclopedia, but money was still invested in Diderot’s unique ability to work and organize this project. Prior to him, three previous editors had failed or quit. So , he was valuaBrian McNally
Thesis
CSULB 2007 Spring

The Failure of the Project of Deism in Natural Philosophy


Deism, as a philosophic and religious inquiry, has all but disappeared from the intellectual landscape of the present academic world. My present aim is to examine the historical causes of why this has come to pass by following the sixteenth century development, seventeenth century rise and the eighteenth century broad influence of deism through its peak in the Enlightenment to its popular demise in the late nineteenth century. The philosophical and theological development of the concept of deism came to fruition in the exchange between the English and French intellectual communities that crossed paths in Eighteenth Century Amsterdam.
The failure of deism is understood in four ways, from the perspective of theology, metaphysics, politically theocratic and as the foundation of natural philosophy.
Attention on the influence of the writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper the third Earl of Shaftsbury with the French intellectual community of the philosophes Denis Diderot, Voltaire, d’Holbach, and Rousseau. Shaftesbury’s ideas inspired and clarified the French intellectual fervor and left as part of its legacy the basis of inspiration for the Revolution. At issue is the influence at many levels of intellectual life within the literary world, the growing scientific community as well as the political sphere that was not yet ready to shed Christianity at the cost of full scale social disorder.

Deism Defined

To begin it is important to be clear about how Deism has been defined in different ways by different proponents of the position. There are distinct types of deism that had arisen by the Enlightenment. The common thread between all versions of deism is an effort to make reconciliation between faith with reason.
The primary thesis of deism is that God is the prime mover of creation. The created may be understood by reliable empirically confirmed laws through science, such as physics, chemistry and biology. Deism has been called by other names in its development such as natural theology, natural religion as well as religious naturalism but all hold the central thesis with some noted exceptions[1]. The variations in deism are in regards to the question about the actions of God in creation, free-will and determinism. One variety of deism holds that once creation was set into motion that God no longer interacts with creation. In this, questions arise that ask if the world is given freewill or if there is a divine plan. In either case, the world but must operate within the physical laws of matter in motion it has become known commonly as the clockmaker God.
With the success of the products of science, as shown in the advances in medicine, engineering and chemistry, the social acceptance of scientific explanation as a path to truth over religious dogmatic became rapidly accepted. Deism’s success was because it bridged the gap between the historic traditions of theology and a desire to make sense of the ancient ecclesiastical regime with the intellectual, empirical and logical aspirations of the new sciences. The great centers of learning we must recall were still largely church funded however and as such were not fully ready to abandon a thousand years of traditional scholasticism. The reconciliation of the past with the present is a driving force behind the efforts of the deists.

The Origin of Deism as “Natural Religion”
The term deism was originally interchangeable with theism until the Sixteenth Century[2]. Theism can be traced through the Greek term theon (god/deity) or theos (divinity), thus a theist is one who believes in the deity or divinity. Likewise, deism was similarly translated with the Latin term deus (god/ deity) to be one who believed in the God. There is little scholarly agreement in etymology about the first historic use of the word "Deism" to represent uniquely the concept of a prime-mover or clockwork God[3]. However, there is an epistle from 1563 that makes use of the term "Deist" to describe an advocate of the new unorthodox religion was noted by the Swiss Reformed theologian Pierre Viret. He wrote:
There are many who confess that while they believe like the Turks and the Jews that there is some sort of God and some sort of deity, yet with regard to Jesus Christ and to all that to which the doctrine of the Evangelists and the Apostles testify, they take all that to be fables and dreams. . . . There is much more difficulty with these than there is even with the Turks, or at least as much. For they hold opinions with regard to religion that are just as or more strange than the Turks and all other miscreants. I have heard that there are of this band those who call themselves Deists (déiste), an entirely new word, which they want to oppose to Atheist. For in that atheist signifies a person who is without God, they want to make it understood that they are not at all without God, since they certainly believe there is some sort of God, whom they even recognize as creator of heaven and earth, as do the Turks; but as for Jesus Christ, they only know that he is and hold nothing concerning him nor his doctrine[4].
In this century, the earliest published works of deism are to be found in the writings of the Englishman Herbert of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Lord Herbert sought to develop a natural history of religion that mended the fences between faith and reason which were always at issue through the Scholasticism of the Middle-Ages. His work was the first to openly express the concept of Deism as a solution to this age-old problem. Herbert’s major work De Veritate[5] was devoted to investigations into psychology, metaphysics and culminated into an epistemology as the basis for a new approach to what he termed “natural religion”. Nowhere in his corpus does Lord Herbert use the term deism as such. He develops the term “natural religion” to express his views and he contrasts his position against the religion of revelation as understood in orthodoxy in the Abrahamic tradition. Uniquely, he for the first time openly argues that the world, as created by God, can be comprehended in full by reason alone with an appriciation of the whole creation by the created being of mankind. The concept of his natural philosophy was given a clearer definition in his work De religione gentilium[6] (DRG) where he examines heathen religions in a sort of comparative theology with Christian ideals. In the work he develops the common marks by which religious truth is recognized. They are
1. An inherent belief in the existence of the Deity
2. The rational obligation to reverence of such a power
3. The identification of worship with practical morality
4. The obligation to repent of sin
5. A divine justice in this world and the next
Over time these are come to be known as the "five articles" of the English Deism as noted by Tolland and Shaftesbury as well as David Hume. Cherbury argues that these principles constitute the nucleus of all religions including Christianity in its primitive, uncorrupted form. He also held that the practice of Christianity during his time facing the new divisions and conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism make apparent its corruption to the political aims of mankind over the divine revelations of the Deity. This concern possibly influenced Cherbury in his argument that the creator was not engaged in the affairs of creation. Rather God was a prime-mover who in the divine act of creation set the world forth as a mechanism. Cherbury has become famous and widely regarded as the father of English Deism.
Given the religious freedom of the time, following the reign of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I and the current rule of her successor King James I, academic inquiries into more liberal theologies sprouted which provided the opportunity for progressive work free from the watchful eye of the Catholic Church. Given this new information Lord Herbert was arguably aware of the thoughts of Aristotle’s Metaphysics[7] (Carrigan p.12). He did not adapt Aristotle in whole but took the idea of the unmoved mover to develop deism as an independent concept in a different direction with his own 5 principles for governing natural religion (IEP p.7). In essence he reversed a central idea of Aristotle’s metaphysics that hold that all action (praxis) and essence (entelechia) aim toward some good (agathon). The highest of all goods is the God (theon) which we understand as the unmoved mover. Cherbury along with the intellectual vogue of the times wrongly associated the works of Aristotle as being in line with Christian thinking through the efforts of St. Thomas Aquinas. It was not until the 19th Century that Aristotle was read without the Christian filter so long imposed upon scholars.
Cherbury’s work was an attractive proposition for the intellectuals of his time. Cherbury’s ethical philosophy was favorable to the new theorists of deism. It offered a mid-way metaphysical solution for philosophers and scientists alike to attest to their belief in God yet trudge onward with the new tools offered by both the approved and revolutionary science of the day. While his work has not been assimilated into the current doxography of Philosophy of our times, Cherbury’s explorations had been known and felt well into the Enlightenment most notably to Anthony Ashley Cooper the third Earl of Shaftesbury who then influenced the French Deistic movement.

Anthony Ashley Cooper the Earl of Shaftesbury
While he has not become part of the mainstream doxography of philosophy today, Anthony Ashley Cooper the Earl Shaftesbury’s major work The Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Characteristics) was very well received by the intellectual communities of his homeland England in 1711. The work was so popular it came to have the demand enough for five printings[8]. His work enjoyed a popular second life in France thirty years later with Denis Diderot’s 1745 translation of his first ethical treatise An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (ICMV). Diderot’s liberal framing of his work inspired the philosophes of his day to promote Shaftesbury’s ideas across the intellectual landscape of the day across Western Europe, with copies ending up across the Atlantic Ocean in the library of Jefferson’s Monticello. His success and academic importance lasted well into the Romantic era but following the failure of deism in the academic world, currently you would be hard pressed to find a graduate student of philosophy who has heard his name or much less has read his work.
To understand Shaftesbury it is interesting to note that he was connected through out his life with the founder of British Empiricism, John Locke. It was Locke who started his career with service to the Ashley family in many capacities including medical doctor, political attaché and domestic advisor. He even assisted with Anthony’s birthing and for many years in his education during which Locke wrote Thoughts Concerning Education. The work chronicled his thoughts on the education of children while bringing up Anthony. Locke placed great emphasis on an awareness of the Greek and Roman classics equally along with the sciences. So, as a result the young Shaftesbury was literate in both Latin and Classical Attic Greek by the early age of 11 which he read equally on par with his native English, French and German. This explains his vast reference and knowledge of the classics and ancient Greek Philosophy in his work. Shaftesbury could arguably be seen as Locke’s ideal man of letters. Much more could be said of this relationship, but the work he produced speaks for itself. His work realized a great deal of acceptance and indeed interest with his contemporaries. Consider that Leibniz indeed praised Shaftesbury as “the living Plato of the age.” Shaftesbury’s work developed a vast array of philosophic and theological topics but for purposes of this essay our present concern shall primarily examine his work on Enthusiasm, Wit and his deep concerns about the value of divine revelation.
To start an understanding of Shaftesbury’s work we must understand that he was a teleological thinker. His early education in ancient Greek led him to detailed understanding of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and his work reflects a sharp acceptance of the world explained by the stagrite’s famous proton arche (first principles) and its treatment of the four causes. Of course, Aristotle’s work was long accepted as Christian teachings through the efforts of St. Thomas Aquinas. The teleological world presents the idea that “being-as-a-whole” is a connected. All individual parts exist always in relation to one another in a series of cause and effect relationships. By Shaftesbury’s time this came to be called “The Great Chain of Being”. Scientists, philosophers and theologians can all be evidenced to be allied toward similar veins of thinking including Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Paley and many more[9]. The argument at this time period position holds that there is a metaphysical hierarchy and connectives that makes the world sensible to pure reason. Shaftesbury interpreted this argument to be understood as the rational evidence of the craftsmanship of the God of the Abrahamic tradition. The importance to stress here is that the world, to this group of thinkers, is a rational relationship of the one and many that can be understood by a reliable set of scientific laws and principles. While this is nothing new, what is at issue is the relationship of divine revelation and interaction with the rational functioning “world machine” or “clockwork reality” of the creator.
Shaftesbury asks the question, if one accepts that the world is a well functioning machine, then why would miracles, revelations and divine messages be needed? Why would religion demand faith over reason and logic? If the world was ordered truly could it not be fully understood by reason? The problem is most religions have historically been founded and justified on the belief in revelation, miracles or divine dispensations[10]. These have been defined historically as those events which defy reason and affirm faith, in essence supernatural. Shaftesbury takes issue that the creator is such that his creation is functioning well enough to not need to break with the natural logical functioning of nature and introduce the supernatural. For these reasons, The Encyclopedists categorized religion subordinate to reason in the same sub-category next to magic, the occult and witchcraft all of which are subordinate to reason.
The primacy that Shaftesbury places on reason leads into the primary thesis that requires anyone who affirms belief in a true, just and benevolent deity must then have some standard of judgment independent of the deity in whom that agent can decide that God is in fact true, just and benevolent[11]. He argues that agents who are not free of God’s influence, would not be able to be said to have a free will for their destiny would be under the auspice or influence of the divine all powerful will and divine foresight. Only an agent who was truly independent of the deity could have moral agency and thus come freely to that deity as a moral personage and not a slave or automaton[12]. Shaftesbury thus adopts the theological position of a deist for the purpose to account for human morality in which a free will must be independent of God.
Shaftesbury further attacks the notion that there would ever be any divine interference or other seeming phenomena that disrupt or otherwise mettle with the rational, natural order to the seemingly enlightened. This is what he called the dangers of religious enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm in Shaftesbury usage is rooted in the Greek term enthousiasmos which means a unique inspiration or possession by a divine affection, emotion from or by the presence of O Theon (The God)[13]. Another indication for the period is Dr. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) which gives further evidence of this as he defines enthusiasm as "a vain belief of private revelation; a vain confidence of divine favour or communication." Today we use the term very differently to simply convey a sense of heightened emotion but without any reference to divinity. If one wants a correct understanding of Shaftesbury’s thesis then we need to keep in mind his use of the term from his period forward.
Thus, one can understand Shaftesbury’s cautionary critique about religious enthusiasm representing a leaning away of a religion of reason and toward a religion based on superstition or supernaturalism. He holds that if enthusiasm is one’s primary path to God, then it must be false because since scientific law can prove its claims as verifiable as a key to comprehending the logical operation of the world. Thus, in judgment about endeavors that deny this must fall back onto enthusiasm. Such endeavors ought to be very careful about trying to explain the world in any other than purely rational principles. The idea that divine miracles, revelation or other appearances of divine figures such as angels, etc… seem to defy reason would be a direct indication of their falsehood if the world is rational. The primacy of reason thus demands that the world must be explained purely logically. Skepticism and railings would be the only option toward enthusiastic revelation, miracle or other mysterious disclosure. Shaftesbury argues that if a claim to a supernatural event cannot be evidenced, rationalized or otherwise logically accounted for then it would represent a failure of the physical laws of the world that the all-powerful God set into motion. He writes on revelations,
If I mistake not our author’s meaning, be professes to believe, as far as is possible for anyone who himself had never experienced any divine communication, whether by dream, vision, apparition, or other supernatural operation; nor was ever present as eye-witness of any sign, prodigy, or miracle whatsoever”.[14]
In essence he claims that nothing short of direct experience would account for the acceptance of any supernatural phenomenon. Further, even with experience, one should doubt such things in the absence of a rational explanation as to why such phenomenal effect would occur without due consideration of the responsible cause to the operation of the rational world.
The interesting thing is his approach reminds one of the irony and satire of Voltaire’s earlier writing. Shaftesbury takes a rather gentle approach to questioning his opposition’s positions rather than a full scale attack. Shaftesbury takes this tone because he holds that miracles and the supernatural offer no logical proof of the existence of God. We must already believe in God before we can determine whether any alleged miracle is of such divine origin. His thoughts later echo in the work of John Stuart Mill’s position that claims that any supernatural phenomenon only would reveal the will of God rather than the fact of God.[15]
To clearly express the problems he is concerned about Shaftesbury writes about The Camisard Rebellion of 1702 in France. This rebellion is reported to be inspired by prohetic visions and divine messages that incited the common people to rebel against King Louis XIV. As a result of this public show of religious enthusiasm, King Louis repealled The Edict of Nantes which once again made any open Protestant worship illegal. To enforce this he sent miliatry troops that came to be called ‘Dragonades’ (Missionaries in boots) who charge was to violently converted the pesants back to Catholicism at the end of a musket[16]. Shaftesbury while not in agreement with forced Catholicism, was equally disgusted at the seeming ease in which the pesants were led to the gross violence from the ‘prohets’ who led many to their death in rebellion.
The moderate tone of his work reflects his thoughts on the use of wit as a stronger tool than outright attack. One of the most interesting aspects to Shaftesbury’s style is that he believes that “wit and railing” has the potential to play a role in the disclosure of the truth against falsehood. He argues that if something can withstand satire, railing or other forms of mockery or assailment of wit, then it is usually true. This holds this especially for moral claims but also equally so for truth claims. He can make this bridge between truth and morality because the truth of morality would be objective to the logic in a fully realized rational world of law. Thus, if one can withstand the slings and arrows of ridicule with modest honor, then one’s view must be true and good. It is often the case he tells us that many historical institutions have only persisted when they have been in power positions in the society to demand respect. His concept is that respect for social, moral traditions should never be demanded, but rather earned by being subject to rational examination and expose. Thus, reverence for social institutions ought to be abandoned, if they rationally do not hold up to scrutiny for the public good logically. In the later portion of this essay we will examine how this alone has made Shaftesbury popular with the libertine radical intellectuals behind the revolutionary movement in France. His work influenced Rousseau and Voltaire who publicly voiced that any public institutions of the ancient regime that no longer benefited the public good ought to be done away with.
Shaftesbury himself maintained that the church establishment was at service to the public good and as such is noted as a regular church attendant[17]. He felt that in particular the Anglican Church of England needed no serious alteration following its firm establishment by the time of the Restoration. He notes further the Church lent support to civil order and its moderate temperament did not unduly interfere with the liberty of speculation. To this point, contemporary authors such as Theodor Adorno argue that given his high social position one could question the ethical authenticity of Shaftesbury’s self-interest over the economic interest gained in maintaining social order to benefit his lineage and noble title[18].
In summary, revelation and claims to the supernatural was the real target for Shaftesbury theological concerns. On a close reading, Shaftesbury’s work on these topics clearly defines his position on natural religion which led and inspired both the French and English Deists. Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau all can be shown to have adopted and cited his work in their own as the basis for their initial position of a self claimed radical libertine Deism that eventually slides into an indifferent atheism stands apart from the gentler position of Shaftesbury[19].
The Influence of Shaftsbury on Diderot, Voltaire and the Philosophes
The exiled French intellectuals living in Amsterdam, Holland were exposed to the writings of Shaftesbury as early as 1686 when he visited his exiled old teacher John Locke. The young earl lived there during political turmoil in England for at least four years to most accounts. During this stay, Earl Anthony was exposed to many of the leading liberal scholars of the day, as the city was a refuge for people whose work was against the conservative grain politically. His first publication An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit (ICMV) was in its first rough drafts and reports claim that his thesis was accepted with a great enthusiasm in public readings and the salon intellectuals circles he frequented[20]. By the time he published Characteristics later in 1711, it was being spread rapidly for the time and technology. In England alone five editions were printed within 20 years and the French of Amsterdam were reading Pierre Des Maizeaux’s commentaries on Shaftesbury by 1720. While Shaftesbury himself was influenced intellectually, his work returned the favor. The intellectuals of the time were unsure of the way to reconcile the new science and the ancient regime of the church. Shaftesbury’s works were amongst the first to introduce the early thoughts of Herbert of Cherbury and the English Deists to this circle. I argue that his form of natural theology as well as that from his fellow English deists spoke the liberal philosophes of the time and started a brush fire of thought that spread through the low-lands all the way to Paris that set the French interest in Deism in motion[21].
To support this claim consider that Denis Diderot’s second paid scholarly job was to translate Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit into French. There was a market recognized by the owners of the printing business in Amsterdam and a growing academic request for Shaftesbury’s work to be accessible to a wider French intellectual market within 5 years of its fourth English publication. By today’s standards, this may seem slow, but given the time and technology it is very fast. The influence of this settled deep for a number of years into the Encyclopedists. Historians can even trace how each in their own way adopted various aspects of Shaftesbury and promoted the work in various ways[22].
Notably, Voltaire took to heart not only Shaftesbury’s deism but also his essay in Characteristics on wit. Voltaire comments that he was especially moved by the idea of wit as a means to revelation of truth. Shaftesbury held that wit was a sort of test of the truth[23]. If a proposition, institution, or tradition could withstand ridicule, railings, or humiliation, then it was sound. Shaftesbury felt that many of the practices of the ancient regimes existed only because of “historical advantage” or “politics of force”. Historical advantage means that once upon a time the way that an idea was widely socially accepted was not for their intrinsic value but for the coercion of force upon its adherents. For example, the inquisition was not of merit logically however, if you did not adhere to the strict edicts then you risk being tortured or killed in the name of God by the church. Wit and ridicule in a democratic and tyrannical society can be used to undue popular support amongst the people and then the truth will be realized. Shaftesbury felt that theatre, music and all aspects of performance was a good way to disseminate this idea and practice. While admittedly this is a very optimistic idea Shaftesbury has been shown to be correct in the use of political theatre and satire could be seen as its reality expressed. Voltaire himself admitted that this idea helped him in a transition from is early acerbic nature to change to a satirically wit oriented approach to issues in his literature[24].
Further evidence of influence can be seen in how Diderot remains faithful to Shaftesbury’s deism through his Pensées Philosophiques in 1746. This work can be read as a continuation directly of The Earl’s work but now being re-addressed to the issues France approximately 50 years after its publication. Diderot’s second printing of his French translation of Shaftesbury ICMV contains many outright editorial changes and original work of his own influenced by his later own thoughts from the Pensées. In this edition, he takes a great deal of authorial liberty with Shaftesbury’s work but clearly grounds his own work clearer in the moral and theological issues[25].
While historians and ethicists may question Diderot’s right or wrong in his outright alteration of the text, one can understand why he did it and forgive him[26]. Diderot obviously felt strongly that the central thesis of Shaftesbury’s work spoke to the issues facing the French in his time. This thesis sat remained with Diderot for many years and a shadow was cast long over the project of the Encyclopedists which set the tone as well as the agenda for Denis Diderot’s management of the project. Historians agree that if not for Diderot’s leadership, tireless devotion and amazing scholarly ability it is unlikely that the project would have been done within the time frame that it was. He devoted himself to the project for twenty four years from 1748-1772. While by modern standards it may seem like a very long time, given the technology, manual plate setting and printing of the work. Twenty-four years for the impressive agenda of The Encyclopedia set itself to be the most comprehensive living taxonomy of human knowledge. Enough cannot be said about the scope, depth and courage of such a work to be attempted and better completed.
Following Shaftesburys similar division in Characteristics, The Encyclopedia divides human knowledge into three main branches of inquiry[27];
1. Memory / History
2. Reason /Philosophy
3. Imagination/Poetry
It is interesting to reflect on their decision that theology is correctly cataloged under the section of “Reason/ Philosophy'. This speaks a great deal to the thinking of Diderot at the time about his thoughts of religion. On this, Robert Darnton notes that this categorization of religion as being subject to human reason, and not a source of knowledge in and of itself, was a significant factor in the controversy surrounding the work[28].
Additionally notice that 'Knowledge of God' is only a few nodes away from 'Divination' and 'Black Magic'[29]. This decision evidences that the project’s ideology was not attempting to justify existing traditional political structures, but rather face the project of knowledge in the new humanistic light of the reason that shone forth from the Enlightenment as a whole. In 1759, publishing of The Encyclopedia was formally banned in France. The work however continued in Amsterdam and the publishing pre-sales grew from 2000 to over 4000 subscribers. The project clearly shows support of the ideas behind deism. The world is logical and ready to be understood removing the mystery behind the operating procedures of the world’s cultures, crafts and facts of the mechanical science. Ultimately, it was the light of knowledge brought to the masses to better understand the physical reality and dispell the mystical elements as well as those held closely for economic gains long controlled by the guilds and ruling class. The bookseller however, had secretly unknown to Diderot, struck out from the first official printing some very controversial religious passages fearing retribution from the French government. Nevertheless, the Encylopedia has stood the test of time and has shown that the project obviously met and far succeeded its goals.
The influence of Shaftesbury amongst the Philosophes is undeniable however the consequences realized was unique in that many of them progressed or fell to atheism[30]. The social value of the church as an element for social order always kept Shaftesbury a deist, however this was not the case for the philosophers as a case study let us consider the case of Diderot’s transition to atheism. His story is like so many others it stands as a good example of the new intellectual classes’ disillusionment with the benefits of social stability and ancient orders. Diderot is of course exceptional, but stands as a new “man of letters” whos education exceeds his social class a mere generation prior to his formative years. The conservative view of education for the new successful middle classes was still traditionally religious in nature yet the desires of the newly educated was often at odds with the ends of relgion and I will make the case the Diderot stands as such a case.
Deism to Atheism: The Case of Denis Diderot

It is unambiguously in vast agreement amongst scholars that by the end of the project of The Encyclopedia Diderot was a steady atheistic materialist. In his earliest days, he was a student of theology and devotedly religious. In his early professional years as a man of letters and translator he adopted Shaftesbury’s deism. What were the steps in the gradual change toward atheism? There could be many answers made of this, and many authors examine different events all worthy of examination. In this section I will explore the specific points to compare Diderot and Shaftesbury with the temperament between the political, economics between England and France during the half century between the two. I will also argue that the change in the social climate and the economics of both are influential factors.
To begin and understand the early formation and experiences that shape Diderot, we need to explore what he himself writes of about his own life. Diderot was a constant letter writer and many of his letters have been preserved and pieced together in a series of volumes that give a good insight in to his life. We can first begin to trace his disillusionment with the teachings of religion at an early age. Diderot’s correspondence records that he started his education in theology at the urging of his father at the Paris Jesuit College of Louis-le-Grand[31]. Quickly he found it did not suite his inquisitive nature. He completed his studies only after he changed colleges and ended up in The University of Paris. By 1732 he earned a Master’s degree in the field to philosophy and rhetoric. This change in study resulted in him being alienated from his father who initially funded his education but it was discovered that he left theological studies as his father desired he was cut-off monetarily and socially from his family for a number of years. For this reason, Diderot never completed his doctorate studies though it is noted that he had intended to do so when funding would allow.
It is interesting to note that Denis’ failure to meet his father’s wishes gave both his younger brother Didier-Pierre, and his sister Angelique and chance at education. Both would follow their fathers wishes to the ecclesiastical path, the former becoming a priest and the latter a nun[32]. Dider Diderot, Denis’ father, is noted to have wanted the social and political gains of a family connection to the clergy and would not be denied this at any cost. The Diderot family had developed a very successful cutler and tanning business and wanted to advance the family’s social standing. The well known classical path for this was through the promotion of family members within the church. Obviously, Denis thought otherwise and chose to remain alienated from his father till the birth of his daughter almost 10 years later according to his letters[33].
For the first time in his life, he was presented with the challenge to earn a living. He arranged to be apprenticed with a lawyer and found that the vocation was much more to his liking. After three years of working with the lawyer, he adopted the life of a man of letters and made a meager living as a tutor and clerk. His first big break was in 1745, when he was paid to translate Temple Stanyan’s three volume work Grecian History to French. With this success he was hired again to translate Shaftesbury’s ICMV to French. In this project he found his own voice and his philosophic footing in the works of the relatively unknown English deist. At this early point in his career Diderot’s work reflects that his position was inline with Shaftesbury as a professed (moderately congenial) natural theologian committed to deism. It would be fair to say that following his translation of ICMV that he was the largest adherent and promoter of Shaftesbury’s work in his intellectual circles within Paris.
It is interesting to note that the dedication of French edition of ICMV is to his brother Pierre who is a canon in the church and is now referred to as “the bigoted Abbé” by Denis. The falling out from his family was now complete, with the only exception being his sister Angelique living as an avowed nun in a Parisian convent who he communicated with infrequently. Most nuns did not and were not encouraged or allowed permission to have outside communication with their families. At best, it is recorded that he wrote once a year when he was able to somehow exchange letters with her through private channels that remain undisclosed in his letters[34]. Perhaps this alienation from his sister was one of the underlying influences that prompted his railings in The Nun about the unnatural state that the cloisters provide.
In his first original philosophic work, Pensées Philosophiques in 1746 he reflects upon a series of public riots in Paris from the year he completed studies in 1732. The riots raised a general concern in him about fanaticism (or religious enthusiasm in Shaftesbury terminology) that had the potential to quickly rally people to violence in the name of God. The riots were centered on The Church of Saint Médard which had become a place of pilgrimage since the burial of François de Páris, a theologian who supported the Jansenist sect within Catholicism. While not a fully Protestant faith, for it acknowledged the Roman Papal authority it was very radical. Following his death and burial at Saint Médard alleged miracles and visions started to be claimed among the pesants. The “peasant prophets” lead large scale public disruptions and periodic violence. Historians argue that the violence was part of a long standing protest against the revocation of The Edicit of Nantes which prohibited Protestant worhsip in France. Jansenists sects were allowed to continue operating after this revocation, but this line of action ended that. To silence the matter, King Louis XIV ordered the church closed in 1732 after the death of 100’s in the streets of Paris to the violence. Diderot, like Shaftesbury before him[35], was disgusted how easily claims of religious enthusiasm in the form of visions incited the masses to violence. Pensées Philosophiques stands as the start of a series of writings that increase Diderot’s skepticism toward the church as well as the state.
His later writings only amplify his atheistic skepticism. In La Promenade du sceptique (The Skeptic’s Walk) written in 1747 clearly show increasing doubts about religion. The printing of the work was a problem from the start. The printer became nervous upon reading the work while typesetting and sent a copy to the authorities for review. The manuscript was seized before publication and censured deemed too radical for public consumption. Diderot was not arrested for this but it started the police to begin to pay attention to Diderot closely. Next, he produced a ribald and bawdy satire on Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, Les Bijoux Indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels), in 1748 which further antagonized the authorities. Finally his Lettre sur les aveugles (An Essay on Blindness) in 1749 questioned the basic belief in God and made the Deistic argument that cosmic order argues for God's absence from creation. For this work, he was finally arrested and sentenced to solitary confinement for three months in the fortress of Vincennes. Diderot's imprisonment shook him deeply leaving him with a strong distaste for Parisian authority and the king’s censorship policies[36].
Following his served time he moved to Amsterdam which led him into the focus of his most famous work. The transition was not an obvious one. Again he was contracted prior to being arrested to do translation and editorial work on the Chambers' Cyclopoedia of The Medical Arts. Upon arriving in Amsterdam, Diderot discovered a large and very liberal intellectual community. The exchange with the new thinkers inspired him to grow his Chamber’s project into a much larger work. With so many other intellectuals and men of letters Diderot’s resources for learned authors grew. So, he inspired his publishers and they decided to expand the project to covering not only the medical arts but also the mechanical arts. Later, this went even further to include the human sciences and this finally allowed the work to become further blossoming into The Encyclopedia: A Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences.
The work on The Encyclopedia and the events outlined above led Diderot to adopt a more materialistic view. We can sum this up to say that he did not support the church as an aid to social order like Shaftesbury did. Diderot rather came to view the church as an impediment to social progress of the individual as the cost of the stability of order. Thus, without enjoying the benefit of social order, the shift ideologically to atheism is understandable. Diderot never abandoned deism intellectually directly in a text. However, given that he viewed the church as an impediment to advancement then why retain the last vestige of it in deism?
Diderot starts to promote within The Philosophes the idea that the only way for the individual to advance was to topple the ancient regime’s social order. He believed that The Encyclopedia had the potential to do just that by freeing knowledge and encouraging more individual advancement and competition of ideas. Individuals would no longer be chained to church sponsored universities, royal chartered colleges or ancient craft guilds to become educated. The liberation of knowledge was the beginning of the path to the liberation of the citizen from the oppression of the ancient regime.
Another factor rarely considered in the evolution of Diderot’s philosophy was the life and premature death of his sister Angelique. According to his letters, as mentioned above, following the pressure from his father Dider, Angelique and her brother Dider-Pierre both took theological education culminating in vows to the ecclesiastical life. She had been living in a Parisian convent as a nun since 1734, until her death in 1758. Not much is noted historically personally about Angelique’s life directly. However, we know that she was the only family he had a continuous relationship with, even if only in correspondence. He followed the family tradition by naming his first daughter Angelique, which was also Denis’ mother’s name. To me this denotes, at minimum, some terms of endearment between the two. In 1758, Angelique dies while sequestered away in her convent. There are different reports of her death, some claim that she died of fevered illness, others of a religiously inspired fit of ecstasy. Others claim the death was due to reported exhaustion from her labor while at work for her convent[37]. Since she died on Church grounds there was no formal investigation and the matter was never settled to the best of my readings to date in his letters.
I find it interesting to note that the death occurs only two years prior to his intense work on his novel The Nun during the summer of 1760[38]. He later consented to it being published 1780 to a small circle in The Correspondence Literaire. While it is commonly known that work of The Nun was the practical joke upon M. de Croismare, the death of his sister is not commonly discussed and I believe it is hard not to attribute her death as some measure of inspiration for the work and his increasing anger directed at religion eventually escalating to a fully materialistic atheism. To the best of my research there is nothing in his correspondence to provide evidence to this fact other than the coincidence of dates. If time allows, perhaps future research into his letters of the time will disclose more.

The End of Deism and The Social Acceptance of Atheism
Diderot’s later period atheism is his final departure from Shaftesbury’s deism that he promoted for so long. To understand this final step of Diderot’s position we must consider the individual economic factors involved with both in a simplified manner of the Frankfurt School. To start, I believe one can make a case of that the vast gap between the differences of social class and economic freedom between Shaftesbury and Diderot reflect eventual differences on their stand on theology and specifically deism.
I will argue, as I have before, that Diderot serves as a single representative of the larger whole of the new class of the men of letters. This is a new unique social class of educated men do not have the deep roots in the dealings of the ancient regimes. They are the middle class educated men who come from the trade families. They may admire the aristocratic rich, but their wealth is city and trade based not land based. Thus they like Diderot share the ability to social change that a land holding nobleman does not. This freedom to be in the public sphere of the city the new society form actually opens a door for the new social acceptances such as atheism. Many changes were afoot following the social upheavals in American and France in the later part of The Enlightenment. The forthcoming Romantic era only exasperates this change and people start to look to nature for answers rather than the church.
To begin, consider the core of the differences lies on the economic social order proper to each. On one hand, we must consider Shaftesbury who, as a literal English Earl, sat as a member in the House of Lords. I argue that this political clout makes him not only benefit from social order he was society order embodied. His position afforded and burdened him with landholdings as a great deal of wealth in an annual pension in excess of 28,000₤ annually by some historical accounts[39]. A single person could sustain themselves in a modest middle-class life with an annual income of 200₤ with some creature comforts.
On the other hand, Diderot who was born to a well to do merchant family that has recorded linage back to the middle-ages in the city of Langres. The family was respected as honorable craftsmen over the years as cutlers, tanners and even artisans. He was by no means marginalized in French society but when Diderot finished college and was cut-off of economic support by his father upon the discovery of abandoning his study to be a clergyman was in effect penniless. He was forced to take work as a legal clerk and he scratched out a living in his spare hours as a tutor.
In these early years, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Diderot were close friends. Rousseau and Diderot first met in Paris in the early 1740s. They had a lot in common and made fast friends. They both were bachelors, tutoring the children of the rich while they both struggled as writers. They tried to work their way into upper-class society and hoped to gain patronage in financial backing of well-to-do, progressive bourgeois or aristocrat to let them pursue writing full time. They both achieved some connection to high Parisian society with varying degrees of success. They both wanted to be men of letters in the newly recognized professional intellectual class. Rousseau himself admits that he did not match the seeming limitless energy level and physical health of Diderot, nor his commitment to Parisian social life[40].
Following Diderot’s An Essay on Blindness in 1749 and the imprisonment that followed, their friendship was so strong that Rousseau visited him at the Vincennes prison where he was held. Rousseau visited frequently and wrote to many people to secure his release. He even wrote on his behalf to Madame de Pompadour, The King’s famous consort, arguing that she had a moral obligation to request Diderot's release. However, due to scandal and censorship surrounding Diderot’s book The Indiscrete Jewels about her and King Louis from three years prior this did not go over very well. Rousseau in typical fashion even went so far as to request that if she fails to gain his release, then she should request that he be imprisoned with Diderot[41]. The publishers of The Encyclopedia were also worried about Diderot's imprisonment for the simple fact it slowed down progress on their project which they had already invested considerable money[42]. Diderot was deeply affected by his imprisonment and treaded more carefully after this unfortunate period of his life. Rousseau also considered this period of his own life as unfortunate, but for different reasons[43]. Eventually, his publishers secured his release with some undisclosed form of payment of bail for his release. The project left Paris for Amsterdam following his release and the rest has been mentioned.
Rousseau writes that on one of his journeys to the prison by foot on a hot summer day that he had his revelation to describe the detrimental effects of the arts and sciences on civilization. Diderot encouraged him to pursue his idea[44]. Within weeks Rousseau wrote an essay critiquing the role of the arts and sciences, which won him fame through a prize conferred by the Academy of Dijon. This later became the basis for his work The Social Contract and most of his later work.
Rousseau writes of his own life that after this visit to Diderot in prison and his prize-winning essay, he held it to be the beginning of the misfortunes that followed him for the rest of his life. Indeed, it was from this time on that the literate public became aware of Rousseau's radical criticism of urban high society and of its self-serving promotion. Diderot never shared the absolute radicalism of his friend. Over the following years and by the end The Encyclopedia project the distance between them began to increase. However, while Diderot was never as radical as Rousseau, his distaste for the church never wavered. The madness and death of his sister, his views on the unnatural state of life in the cloisters as described, examined and evidenced in The Nun all sum up a strong obvious discontent. It is the experience of these events that is reflected to this writer as Diderot’s pathway to adopt atheism. Without the benefit of social order there was no reason left to keep allegiance with Shaftesbury or deism.
Atheism was marginally socially acceptable following the French Revolution. Diderot had died five years prior to the start of the revolution. Rousseau working with Robespierre in 1792, had realized that their program of social disorder was going too far. Statues of a new goddess of Liberty had started springing up all over Paris but to people this represented absolute freedom and a libertine spirit. It is recorded that people wantonly killed their fellow citizens without remorse or fear of retribution from neither an earthly or divine providence. The project of atheism had gone too far, and now the possibility of real social collapse was a reality. Robespierre and Rousseau planned public festivals to inaugurate a new religion of Patriotism calling upon the spirits of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. On July 8, 1794 a festival to re-dedicate Notre Dame Cathedral to this new Religion of reason was held. The festival was to put the torch to atheism, vice and folly each in the form of an impish wooden statue. The festival was to reach an apex when these three statues would be burned being beaten down by the image of reason as truth and order. The problem was the wood for the statues of atheism and folly were newly carved of green wood that would not burn. The statue of reason was charred with smoke and the crowd was riotous with disgust. The festival was a fiasco and the idea of altering Notre Dame Cathedral was too much for the Parisians. A month later, Robespierre was guillotined[45].
In closing, I think another support to this point can be supported indirectly in a reading of Jacques the Fatalist and His Master. Diderot creates a milieu of narrative of two men telling each other stories of seduction and conflict through their journey to dispense self defined justice. The story flows like a river that rises and sinks but the story floats along with no real satisfying end. There is no grand moment, there is no ultimate climax. Even after the murder, the story continues. I am left with the thought that the story is meditation on a way to think of life. The point of the story is that is that there is no answer to the ultimate questions, no life affirming or denying turning point epiphany. All that remains is the memory of the experience, all that remains is the conversation. Life is what we make of it in the never ending engagement in rational argument and exchange with other people. We may opt to adhere to “what is written above” but it is our choice to recognize or deny it.
For Diderot, atheism is the final stand for him philosophically. There is no real point to life, only free exchange of ideas, value and the flux of life. For Diderot, like in Jacques, meaning is found in life and action not metaphysics. Teleological purposes are mute to plugged ears and blind to closed eyes. The baggage of deism was simply too pay with the power and confusion about the role of the church in such a world. The benefit of the abandonment of social order puts the reasonability to bequeath meaning in life for us and by us and no one or anyone else. We are left alone without a God and on our own to define the meaning we come into life and leave life with. This ideal would not be realized for almost 170 years until another fellow countryman Jean-Paul Sartre published Being and Nothingness and starts promotion the ideals of Existentialism in post-WWII Europe.

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Attachment I
Attachment II


[1] Insert details from thesis here.
[2] John Orr, English Deism: Its Roots and Its Fruits (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1934), p.13 Theism holds a very different thesis about the nature of God in the claim to His nature as the perfection of goodness, omnipotence, and omniscience.
[3] Webster's Dictionary. Ninth Edition, p.335 (1682).
[4] Déiste (fr) Original text is French. Translation by William Lane Craig, The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus During the Deist Controversy (Lewiston, England: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985), p.73. Viret, Pierre. L'instruction chretienne.
[5] De veritate, prout distinguitur a revelatione, a verisimili, a possibili, et a falso (On Truth, as it is Distinguished from Revelation, the Probable, the Possible, and the False) First published in Paris in 1624. See bibliography for full reference and details.
[6] The text was completed by 1645 four years prior to his death. However, it was first published in Amsterdam in 1663 and later translated into English by W Lewis, London, 1705. Amsterdam was a hotbed of liberal intellectual life when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 which once again declared Protestantism illegal and returned Catholicism to being the official state religion.
[7] This is significant historically, according to Carrigan for non-clergy were generally not allowed direct access to the libraries under Church doctrine or Church held foundational texts (for example - Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Abelard and others). If not for the opening and capture of Church lands (and possessions) by King Henry VIII in the English reformation. Carrigan argues that most of the works and revision of classical thought may still be locked away under church ownership till this time. The seizure of lands and property (i.e. libraries, scriptoriums) by the king opened scholarship to secular readings and latter interpretations. An example of this is within 30 years we see popular writers like Phillip Marlow and William Shakespeare, neither well known as strictly academics, but whose work shows a good deal of familiarity with Greek mythology and classical thought which was not seen is previous era’s poets, Comedia Del Arte, masks nor plays. For the work of classical Greek thought in philosophy, art and myth to make its way down to the arts, the works of the church were fairly wide spread and open to any who were of a primary education (our equivalent to high school).

[8] Each printing represented approximately 500-700 completed textbooks. While not enormous by contemporary standards, it was considerable. Locke’s 1690 work Two Treatises of Government was printed twice with about 1000 texts in total and is now a revered philosophical and political work.
[9] References here would be too vast to cite. A wonderful, although pedestrian, treatment may be had in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, edited by Philip P. Wiener. It has been recently argued that Isaac Newton actually sought to explain the world in terms of a series of “mechanical laws” that in the current day have been re-interpreted to eliminate the teleology. However, this contemporary reading is not the argument of this essay.
[10] For example, Jesus and the walking on water, laying on of hands, speaking in tongues, and divine ascension. In Islam, consider Mohammed’s splitting of the moon, voice of the east wind, and the ascension to heaven. In Judaism, the parting of The Red Sea, the burning bush that spoke to Moses, etc…
[11] Shaftesbury’s words “true, just and benevolent” may be equated equally with the modern standard for theism’s claims to the characteristics of God as all knowing, all powerful and all good.
[12] Automaton (plural: automata) is a self-operating machine. The word is sometimes used to describe a robot, more specifically an autonomous robot. Used colloquially, it refers to a mindless follower. (Dictionary.com)
[13] Little & Scott Greek Dictionary – we may distinquish: theon - deityd; theos – divine; O Theon – The God (monotheism)
[14] Characteristics, Miscellaneous Reflections, Misc. 2, Ch 2.
[15] John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Book III, Chapter 25.
[16] See attachment II for a period cartoon commentary of the period.
[17] Fowler, Thomas. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. pp. 125
[18] See Fowler pp. 190. I personally believe that this alone is not a strong critique of Shaftesbury, for his interest in the perpetuation of his title seems of passing importance for he married only at the strong urgings of his friends well into his 40’s to bear only a single child and lived abroad apart from his wife and family most of his days in France, Holland and finally to die in Italy in seeking warmer climates than England due to his chronic asthma and poor health.
[19] Schlegel. Dorothy B. Shaftesbury and The French Deists.
[20] See Schlegel pp. 7.
[21] See Schlegel – many pages to cite on this but primarily the chapter 1 and 4 both as a whole.
[22] Walters jr., Gordon B. The Signifigance of Diderot’s Essai Sur Le Merite et la Vertu.
[23] Voltaire and The English Deists Torrey. Norman L. P. 33
[24] See Schlegel – Ch. 2 The Dilemma of Voltaire
[25] The only problem with his translation is that ICMV is no longer Shaftesbury’s own thoughts or words but the work holds a great deal of import to the issues and problems of the publishing time. There is a great deal of detail to address this and I recommend Gordon Walters who wonderfully chronicles the translation issues and liberal authorial changes Diderot makes in the second edition of the ICMV.
[26] Jacques Derrida argues in Of Grammatology that in literature that there is not an author and perhaps all there really is to meaning is “the text”. While this issue is beyond the scope of the present concern perhaps a case could be made of his point in Diderot’s translation of ICMV in this.
[27] I argue that the categorization as mentioned is a influence by Shaftesbury. I would be happy to make more of this claim and further investigate the textual evidence, but space in this limited venue does not allow for it.
[28] Darnton, Robert., The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France W. W. Norton & Company (April 1996)
[29] See Attachment at the end of this essay for the chart.
[30] It seems either metaphor is telling as a raising or lowering but I am honestly not sure if it is a raising or lowering.
[31] Correspondence, IV (Fevrier 1762-Decembre 1764). by Denis Diderot, Georges Roth, trans.

[32] Diderot’s life is also chronicled very nicely by Furbank, P. N. Diderot: A Critical Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
[33] Correspondence, IV p. 123
[34] Correspondence, IV (Fevrier 1762-Decembre 1764) pp. 89
[35] Recall from above Shaftesbury’s concerns about the violence from the Camisard Rebellion of 1702
[36] Much more could be said to make this case, but the best biography I have enjoyed is by Furbank, P. N. Diderot: A Critical Biography. Pp. 125

[37] Furbank pp. 125. Fonteney (p. 27) claims that his sister Angelique died of madness in her convent. It is hard to believe that this event did not inspire or effect Diderot’s work The Nun. Yet the introduction to the Penguin Edition by Leonard Tancock makes no mention of this event.
[38] Tancock, Leonard. Introduction to The Nun, Penguin Classics.1973 ed. pp. 10
[39] Fowler, pp. 145
[40] See Rousseau’s Confessions. The whole story is in Vol. I
[41] Ibid. Vol II, pp 124
[42] At this point, the project is still the Medical Encyclopedia, but money was still invested in Diderot’s unique ability to work and organize this project. Prior to him, three previous editors had failed or quit. So , he was valuable to their business and worth the money to secure his freedom.
[43] Ibid vol I. pp.
[44] Ibid pp. 80
[45] This story is recounted in the climax of Schlegel’s text on p 130-133. Please make additional notes of her citation of her research on the events. ble to their business and worth the money to secure his freedom.
[43] Ibid vol I. pp.
[44] Ibid pp. 80
[45] This story is recounted in the climax of Schlegel’s text on p 130-133. Please make additional notes of her citation of her research on the events.