Notes on the Enlightenment critics
RS 200 Fall 2007
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): As Kant put it in his essay of 1784, “What is
Enlightenment?”: “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another.
This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in
lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare
to know] ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’--that is the motto of
enlightenment.”
Karl Marx (1818-1883): Religion is the opium of the people. I.e., religion keeps people
(as a group) oppressed by numbing their suffering, and keeping them from acting on their
own behalf. He thinks that it would be better to throw off religion because it is “illusory”
happiness, and to demand real happiness, which requires the overturning of unjust
economic systems.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): God is dead, and we have killed him. If God is dead
(or doesn’t exist) then we are free to be a do anything we desire. This is because God is
our sun (according to the madman) who give our lives their bearings. Without God, there
is no up or down (right or wrong) except that which we make.
He is critical of Christians who ascribe to a “slave morality”, but also to
lukewarm atheists who claim that there is no God, but who do not live in the freedom that
such a claim entails.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939): “The Future of an Illusion”
Definition of religion: “religion consists of certain dogmas, assertions about facts and conditions
of external (or internal) reality, which tell one something that one has not oneself discovered and
which claim that one should give credence” (p. 72).
Ordinarily, dogmas (truth claims) are founded on observation which can be personally confirmed.
Not so with religious dogmas.
What are religious dogmas based on? (p. 73)
Religious people claim that religious dogmas deserve to be believed because:
1) our primal ancestors believed them;
2) we have proofs handed down from antiquity;
3) it is forbidden to raise questions about their authenticity.
Freud’s reply to these arguments:
1) our ancestors were far more ignorant than we are on many things. Why should
we believe them on this?
2) the writings of antiquity (the Scriptures) “bear every trace of being
untrustworthy. They are full of contradictions, revision and interpolations”
(p.74).
3) (which Freud deals with first on p. 73), this reason evokes suspicion that society
knows that there are not good bases of religious doctrine, or such bases would be
put forward.
Nonetheless, Freud thinks that religious doctrines are further defended through the argument
A. from absurdity (Credo quia absurdum). Religious doctrines stand above (are
superior to reason and its capacities).
B. from “As if”. We act “as if” we believed these absurdities.
“But” in spite of the fact that religious dogmas have not bases in evidence, and they rely on
absurdity, people continue to believe them (p. 75). WHY???
Look, says Freud, to the psychical origin of religious ideas….
“These [religious ideas] which profess to be dogmas, are not the residue of experience or
the final result of reflection; they are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most
insistent wishes of mankind; the secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes” (75).
This illusion is based in our infantile helplessness leading to the need for protection provided by
our fathers. Since we never get over the need for a protective father, we have a super-strong wish
for a super-Father to protect us: we call this super-Father God.
Definition of Illusion: an illusion is not the same as error (it is not necessarily an error)… “It is
characteristic of the illusion that is derived from men’s wishes” (p. 76). An example would be
Christopher Columbus’ wish to find a sea-route to India, or a peasant girl’s wish for a prince to
rescue her. Religious illusions border on the delusional.
“No reasonable man will behave so frivolously in other matters or rest content with such feeble
grounds for his opinions or for the attitude he adopts; it is only in the highest and holiest things he
allows this” (77).