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Enlightenment thinkers often presented themselves as having a higher opinion of human nature than did the thinkers of earlier epochs. A classic expression of this can be found in Voltaire's attack on the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). In the last of his Lettres philosophiques (Philosophical Letters, 1734), Voltaire, responding to Pascal's picture of humankind as mired in the consequences of original sin, asserted that Pascal had written "against human nature." Against Pascal's insistence that "we are born unjust, since everyone cares about himself," Voltaire replied that love of ourselves helps us to love others because our mutual needs make us useful to the human race.
Voltaire's condemnation of Pascal epitomizes at least one strain of the Enlightenment's distinctive new attitude toward human nature. Pascal's doctrine of original sin represented an Augustinian or "hyper-Augustinian" strain of Christian dogma that saw humanity as depraved and incapable (without divine intervention in the form of Grace) of moral goodness. In this view, human depravity is an innate essence shared by all mankind since the Fall and not amenable to improvement except by supernatural means. It expresses itself in selfish desires and selfish actions that reflect the sin of pride. The Enlightenment is generally seen to have wished to supplant this pessimistic Christian view of human nature with a more optimistic and secular approach. Voltaire's condemnation of Pascal, however, did not challenge Pascal's claim that humans are motivated by self-love (amour-propre); rather, it disagreed with Pascal largely on the issue of whether this fact betokens depravity.
The Enlightenment Context
Some conspicuous Enlightenment authors insisted that human behavior is motivated by benevolence rather than self-interest, but Voltaire was not alone in claiming both that human beings are motivated primarily by selfish impulses and that human nature deserves to be held in higher esteem than Pascal's pessimism would allow. The Enlightenment shift in attitude toward human nature is sometimes less a shift in psychological description than a shift in context that allows for a positive valuation of traits previously deplored.
For Pascal, self-love represented a radical alienation from God and an incapacity to achieve the more spiritual plane of the love of God and a divinely inspired love of one's fellow creatures. The Enlightenment rejected original sin; more important, it placed great value on human happiness and the social benefits that resulted from human actions. Thus, some Enlightenment writers cared less about whether humans loved their fellow creatures than whether they brought them happiness.
This higher opinion of selfish appetites and desires developed gradually, beginning with Christian moralists such as Pierre Nicole (1625–1695) and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), who professed Augustinian theological dogma but nonetheless observed that selfish motives could be conducive to an orderly or prosperous society. Judging selfishness to be the mark of moral depravity, they nonetheless could attribute benign worldly consequences to such sinful impulses. A more dramatic version of this paradox was offered by Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) in his Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714). Mandeville argued that a prosperous society depends precisely on "private vices," those sins that Christianity had traditionally decried as symptoms of human depravity.
Later writers who valued a happy and prosperous society but discarded the notion that those who selfishly produce such benefits are morally blamable are often associated with the so-called radical Enlightenment. These writers, including Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771), Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach (1723–1789), and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), were radical to the degree that they rejected transcendent principles in favor of a wholly natural morality. As in the less radical Voltaire, however, the radicalness of those thinkers resides not in their discarding Pascal's description of human nature but in their placing it in a new context.
Thus far, human nature has been treated largely in terms of innate moral capacity and disposition toward specific appetites or behaviors. However, a crucial element in the shift that resulted in Enlightenment conceptions of human nature involves the relationship between moral capacity and moral knowledge. Many of the permutations in the relationship between these two elements derived from the influence of, and reaction against, Pascal's older contemporary, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).
Hobbes and His Influence
Hobbes's celebrated political views are intimately connected to his profoundly influential view of human nature. As much as Voltaire and other French philosophes looked on Pascal as their antithesis, it was Hobbes who may have had the deeper impact—especially on those who claimed to disown him.
Hobbes's view of human moral capacity is not very different from that of Pascal and other Christian contemporaries. Hobbes too saw human beings as dominated by selfish passions, incapable of transcending self-interest. In Hobbes's philosophy, the dark view of human moral capacity did not result from the taint of original sin, but from the kind of machine that humans happen to be, and the ways in which this machine responds to stimuli. However, the similarity between Hobbes and Pascal regarding human nature leaps across the metaphysical gulf between Hobbes's materialism and Pascal's Augustinianism. Where Hobbes differed from his Christian contemporaries, however, was in his conception of moral cognition. For most, though not all, of Christian thought, it is hard or impossible for a human to be good, but it is not hard to know what it means to be good. In the Christian tradition, however, moral rules are prescribed by God through revelation. Thus, even if human reason is weak or corrupt, Christians have a clear knowledge of their moral duty, which they defy to their own horror and shame.
By the time Hobbes was writing, however, England had been plunged into the chaos of revolution and civil war by, as Hobbes saw it, religious fanatics who sought to justify their sedition on the ground that the overthrow of sovereign authority had been mandated by God as a condition of salvation. The revolutionaries, Hobbes believed, claimed knowledge of "private revelation," a special, inspired insight into God's will. Hobbes's political theory is grounded on precisely a rejection of the claim that there are any higher moral principles—either in any religion or independent of any religion—than the obligation to submit to the authority of the political sovereign. Claims of "higher" moral knowledge merely project the claimants' selfish appetites and desires, confusing what is actually "good" relative to themselves with some alleged absolute good. Whereas traditional Christianity treated moral capacity as corrupted by original sin but moral knowledge as more or less unproblematic, Hobbes saw all claims to moral knowledge that conflicted with the constant obligation to submit to sovereign political authority as self-serving projections rather than objective truths.
Hobbes did not deny that obeying God's will was necessary for salvation; he was a moral voluntarist. At the level of political obligation, however, he insisted that no "higher laws" took precedence over the laws promulgated by the sovereign; in this, he was a legal positivist. Hobbes insisted that there was no conflict between these views, and that, on the contrary, the arbitrary will of the sovereign gained authority from its resemblance to the arbitrary will of God.
Enlightenment thinkers, however much they might otherwise disagree with Hobbes, generally accepted his insistence that justifying political behavior on purported privileged knowledge of God's will would have catastrophic consequences and must be avoided at all costs. Instead of accepting Hobbes's legal positivism, however, they tended to believe that the benign alternative to religious fanaticism was to demonstrate the existence of higher principles that transcended all religious differences. Thus, to preserve Hobbes's goal of avoiding disruptions of the political and social order, but to do so without granting despotic, absolute authority to the political sovereign, the Enlightenment needed to explain how human beings could have moral knowledge independently of religion. Thus, Enlightenment authors had to explain the mechanisms or procedures of moral cognition. In taking on this secular project—the apprehension of universal moral truths independently of revelation—their project may be seen as a reaction to Hobbes.
To understand how Hobbes's secularization of moral cognition and his separation of moral cognition from moral capacity led to the Enlightenment's recontextualization of selfishness, it is useful to turn to another work of political theory, John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689). Locke (1632–1704) sought to repudiate Hobbes, but, with respect to human nature, he did so only in a limited way. He thereby helped to effect the transition from Hobbes's view of human nature to that of the Enlightenment.
By way of precluding a right to appeal to higher moral authority that might justify revolution, Hobbes had argued that there was no morality in the state of nature, but that right and wrong came into existence only with the founding of a commonwealth. Locke, writing to justify a second seventeenth-century English revolution, that of 1688–1689—which forced the reigning monarch, James II, into exile and gave Parliament the right to determine the royal succession—needed to argue that there was a natural law from which moral knowledge could be derived in a state of nature, and that this moral knowledge, being prior to and independent of the will of the sovereign, could in certain circumstances justify dethroning an anointed king. Locke therefore insisted, contra Hobbes, that justice could exist where there was no commonwealth, and that it could be administered by private individuals where there was no magistrate.
Locke was careful to avoid the risk of implying that there was no need for government at all by separating moral cognition from moral action. It was essential for his theory of revolution to reject Hobbes's views about moral cognition in the state of nature, but it was no less essential to embrace Hobbes's views about the mechanisms of passion and self-interest, which, if unrestrained, could have terrible consequences. Accordingly, immediately after Locke established the existence and knowability of moral laws in the state of nature, he conceded that the self-love and partisan passions of private individuals could not be counted on to execute these laws fairly. Locke concluded: "Therefore God hath certainly appointed government to restrain the partiality and violence of men."
Locke's importance in the development of Enlightenment conceptions of human nature is usually understood in terms of his insistence, contra Descartes and others, that there are no innate ideas, and that all knowledge derives from data obtained through the senses. Locke himself, however, in the Second Treatise, was more concerned with arguing for the existence of moral knowledge independently of sovereign and religious authority than with specifying the epistemological basis for that knowledge. Although later Enlightenment thinkers were divided on the question of whether moral knowledge comes through experience or through the innate capacities of human reason, what matters at the broadest level is that they gave moral cognition an independent status and found an interplay between moral cognition and moral capacity in the ultimate production of an orderly and prosperous society.
Just as Locke himself, when writing as a political theorist, seems to have had no inclination to insist on his own empiricist principles in his account of moral cognition in the state of nature, later figures who admired Locke and embraced his empiricist principles often found no need to be strictly empiricist in their accounts of human nature. Voltaire, for example—though a key figure in the transmission of British empiricism to the French reading public—based his rejection of Pascal less on the philosophical appeal to experience and observation than on the metaphysical doctrines speculative philosophy of the English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744).
In itself, the shift away from biblical revelation as a source of moral knowledge did not entail a radical shift in the understanding of moral obligation or moral capacity. Even when the Enlightenment began to view secular avenues to moral cognition not merely as a confirmation of Christian revelation but as an alternative to it, the new truths often seemed to echo the older ones by placing Christian charity in a new guise. As human nature came increasingly to be viewed in a more broadly secular context, however, the gulf between Christian and Enlightenment views began to widen. For example, the emphasis on overarching social and natural systems that were seen as orderly and benign—an emphasis that in some measure reflected the influence of Newton's orderly picture of the universe and that conferred value on the natural tendency of humans to contribute to the success of the system—had several implications regarding human nature and morality. Pope's Essay on Man (1734) epitomizes the attempt to retain the trappings of Christian belief without acknowledging that fundamental doctrines have been abandoned. Pope based his view of human nature on metaphysical principles regarding the necessary orderliness of the universe. With regard to human moral capacity, Pope's view was not distinctly different from that of Locke, or indeed of Hobbes. Humans are motivated by self-love, and although reason serves to "restrain" the selfish impulses, this so-called restraint is really a kind of deferral of immediate gratification for the sake of pursuing one's long-term interests. In the Christian tradition, such restraint would have come under the heading of sinful pride, but for Pope, the two complementary principles of self-love and reason are not tainted with sin, and neither deserves to be called evil. They are necessary parts of the overarching and benign system of the universe. Each, moreover, is understood, as it had been by Locke and Hobbes, in primal, naturalistic terms, as grounded in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The traditional category of pride does not disappear from Pope's view of human nature; however, pride manifests itself not in the pursuit of selfish desires but in the failure to accept the system by wishing to rise above one's place in God's design. Pope's attempts to preserve vestiges of orthodoxy, however, fail to conceal his significant departure from Christian doctrine.
The Benevolist Tradition
Among those who retained Hobbes's appetitive conception of the springs of human behavior, but who nonetheless saw themselves as presenting a nobler conception of human nature, the notion of a larger, divinely ordained system clearly conferred value on its human components, which might in themselves seem ignoble. An opposing tradition saw human moral capacity as dominated by benevolent tendencies rather than by self-interest, allowing humans to be good in themselves rather than only by virtue of their place in a prosperous society or an ultimately rational universe. This "benevolist" tradition, in some of its most conspicuous manifestations, required not only that humans be good in themselves, but also that moral principles be good in themselves; this, in turn, depended on a benign universal system.
The Enlightenment reaction to Hobbes tended to have as its common denominator a requirement for moral truths accessible to all, independently of the dictates of competing religions. Although this universal accessibility did not require the rejection of Hobbes's voluntarism, his most thoroughgoing critics, using an approach derived from Platonic philosophy, argued that God's will in itself cannot produce the principles of morality. As Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) argued, if moral laws were the product of God's will, then they would be arbitrary and subject to revision without notice. Moreover, if the products of God's will did not conform to a principle accessible to human reason, then humans would remain dependent on revelation for moral knowledge, and therefore remain subject to the social chaos resulting from clashing interpretations of what are purportedly divine commandments. On the other hand, if moral principles are accessible to human reason and exist independently of God's will—and Cudworth insists that they are indeed eternal and immutable truths—then they are stable and unaffected by the whims of any creature or any despotic power, human or divine.
It is useful to compare Cudworth's position with that of Locke. Locke's natural-law tradition allows for knowledge of God's dictates through natural rather than supernatural means. Notions of right and wrong are available in the state of nature, but these moral laws still come from God. In Cudworth's view, by contrast, moral knowledge is not a knowledge of commands or decrees, since that which is good is good in itself, independently of any will. Goodness is not relative and not dependent on the divine will, but its existence is nonetheless connected to the rational order of the universe. For Pope, Voltaire, and their ilk, man contributed to the functioning of this system even as he pursued his selfish interests; for Cudworth and his followers, however, man is a microcosm of the system and reflects its goodness in his own behavior. In this view, rather than having a disjunction between moral cognition and moral capacity, there is an intimate link between the two. The knowledge of the system impels the possessor of moral truth to act in accordance with that truth, and hence in accord with the rational order of the universe.
The thinker who most influentially developed the implications of Cudworth's thought was Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury attributed to mankind a natural disposition toward benevolence, which would seem to complete the shift in views of human nature from moral depravity to natural goodness. Yet what Shaftesbury himself considered to be distinctive and valuable in human nature was not a natural inclination to perform benevolent actions, but rather a capacity to recognize the merit of such actions. For Shaftesbury, instinctual behaviors, including those motivated by self-interest and those performed by lower animals, may contribute to the successful functioning of the overall system of the universe. To this degree, he agrees with Pope. However, such instinctual actions are at best morally neutral, while the sorts of actions that deserve the designation of virtue, or merit, and that raise human nature to its place of honor, are those associated with a kind of reflection that focuses on the action and approves of it. A virtuous action is one that is performed self-consciously, with some kind of awareness or appreciation of its being in accord with the harmonious structure of the universe. This approbation cannot be based on the fact that the action will have favorable consequences or on the fact that it is pleasurable.
Something about the perch on which Shaftesbury placed humankind struck subsequent Enlightenment writers on human nature as precarious. In describing the reflection on moral actions that renders the agent virtuous, he vacillated between treating it as a kind of rational contemplation and treating it as an immediate reaction, a passive, perceptual, virtually aesthetic response. In fact, each of these two models, in its own way, threatens to undermine Shaftesbury's insistence that virtue depends on a recognition that an action is good in itself and not good relative to anything else.
The model of rational contemplation risks the implication that the choice of virtue includes an element of prudent calculation; but if such calculation were the basis of our behavior, then it would be reducible to self-interest and cease to be virtuous. The aesthetic model, in contrast, treats the system as something that we approve in itself, immediately, without having time to calculate any benefits. The good action, rather than being understood in terms of its consequences, is understood as a microcosm of the system—as something beautiful to which we respond in the same way that we respond to harmonious, well-proportioned things that present themselves to the senses. The problem, however, is that the aesthetic was commonly understood to be pleasurable, and an aesthetic model of morality therefore risked reverting to the Hobbesian claim that morality was reducible to self-interest.
One of Shaftesbury's most influential followers in the benevolist tradition, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), attempted to resolve the problem by equating moral cognition with moral sensation. According to Hutcheson, there is a moral sense that responds in moral situations in a way analogous to the way the other senses respond to sensory impressions, immediately and without reflection. In this "moral-sense" model, it is essential that the response be immediate, in order to avoid the imputation that moral choices could be based on self-interested calculation. Beyond this, by insisting that human morality be understood in terms of sensory mechanisms, Hutcheson was harnessing the prestige of Locke's empiricist epistemology to conclusions that Locke had never imagined.
Following Shaftesbury, Hutcheson wished to associate morality with aesthetic beauty because beauty could provide a bridge between sensation and a notion of morality that was more complex than mere sensation. Hutcheson's link between the apprehension of beauty and the apprehension of goodness had a somewhat tenuous relationship with Locke's empiricism. For Locke, sensations are of simple rather than complex entities, and the immediate apprehension of beauty occurs only when we perceive a simple sense datum, such as an agreeable color. Moreover, for Locke, moral psychology has more to do with the avoidance of pain than with the perception of beauty. What Hutcheson wished to do, however, was to follow Shaftesbury in treating beauty and morality as a harmonious set of relations, a fitness or order, while at the same time obeying the Lockean dictum that knowledge is obtained through the senses. Hutcheson claimed not merely that moral virtue can be immediately apprehended through a moral sense, but, further, that this sense is not limited to normal powers of senses as defined by Locke: it can discern complex relations that had previously been considered to belong to the province of the intellect.
Human Nature and the Defense of the Social Order
Hutcheson's project did not sit well with writers who placed themselves more squarely in the tradition of Lockean sensationalism. They put more stress on feelings and sentiments as the basis for sociability and happiness, which posed new problems for the understanding of human nature. Shaftesbury's model, in addition to smacking of philosophical aloofness, also required a kind of personal cultivation that was beyond the reach of ordinary men and women. To many he sounded like an ethereal aristocrat speaking to and for an unrepentant elite.
The tension in Shaftesbury between a secular morality that democratized human nature by universalizing the capacity to know what is good and to practice the best kind of behavior and, on the other hand, his insistence on the superiority of a political and cultural elite reflected a larger tension that permeated Enlightenment thinking about human nature. The need to universalize moral cognition so as to remove religious justifications for fanaticism or persecution often ran up against the deeply held conviction that a social hierarchy marked by subordination and deference was natural and necessary. As views of moral psychology put more stress on sensory mechanisms, or feelings or sentiments, it became harder to fend off the implication that natural morality was in everyone's grasp, as long as everyone was allowed to be natural. This understanding raised profound problems for the belief in the superiority of the elite, and ultimately for the belief in the rightness of the social order.
For those who faced up to the task of reconciling social hierarchy with moral self-governance, the undertaking was to some degree facilitated by the fact that authority was increasingly understood not in despotic terms—that is, not as the regulation of behavior through the exercise of power—but rather in terms of deference, a natural disposition of those lower in the social order to recognize and defer to the superiority of those above them. Thus, it was possible to adapt the idea of the moral sense so as to see moral capacity less as a response to goodness than as deference of one part of one's psyche to another part recognized as a higher authority. This is precisely what one finds in the view of human nature developed by Joseph Butler (1692–1752). Just as the idea of a civil constitution implies in it, wrote Butler, "united strength, various subordinations, under one direction, that of the supreme authority," just so are the several passions of the human agent naturally subordinate to the one superior principle of reflection or conscience, a superior principle whose authority is naturally recognized and to which one naturally defers. Although this might seem a persuasive way to understand moral psychology if one already has the unshakable conviction that recognition of and deference to higher authority is part of the natural order of things, it leaves unanswered the question of why one human being who has the kind of moral capacity that Butler attributes to mankind in general ought to defer at all to another human being whose goodness does not exceed his own.
It is possible, of course, to treat social hierarchy as the sine qua non of social order, and not to be concerned with the question of whether those at the top of the hierarchy are indeed better than those below them. Indeed, Edmund Burke's famous attack on the French Revolution acknowledged that the deference owed to one's social superiors is based on "pleasing illusions," but he nonetheless justified such deference. Burke, however, was an enemy of Enlightenment rationalism and had long suspected that the new secular approaches to human nature posed a threat to the established social order. Although he shared with Enlightenment authors an interest in the psychology of assent and of obedience, Burke was perhaps more willing than they to content himself with a justification of social subordination that sidesteps notions that ordinary people are naturally good and renounces claims to the actual superiority of the elite.
Among those British thinkers who wrote about human nature after Butler, and who grappled with the tension between the new moral status of ordinary people and the traditional social status of elites, two Scots—David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790)—devised notable strategies. Both implicitly justified social hierarchy by broadening the definition of human nature to include, and to place high value on, qualities that go beyond the universally shared capacity for moral goodness. In Hume's view, our approbation of qualities that we perceive in others is a sentiment that results from our finding these qualities immediately agreeable. The basis for this sentiment of approbation is either that the qualities in question are useful to the person possessing them (with whom we feel a natural sympathy), or that they are useful to the persons perceiving them. Some of these qualities inspire love, others awe or respect, but in either case, the mechanism of approbation is the same and does not distinguish in any fundamental way between what is conventionally deemed moral virtue and what is traditionally deemed natural ability or strength of character. In wishing to apply the term virtue in this broader sense, Hume hearkens back to the etymological origins of the term, designating male qualities deemed estimable in pagan Rome. This not only broadens our definition of virtue, and hence of human nature, but also rejects Christian values in favor of pagan ones. For example, Hume argued that well-regulated pride—understood as quiet self-esteem appropriate to one's abilities and one's social rank—far from being a fault, "is essential to the character of a man of honour" and is naturally esteemed by mankind.
Smith went further. Rather than broadening the conception of virtue, he narrowed it to exclude moral attributes that are found among ordinary people. Smith made clear that ordinary moral goodness, by dint of its ordinariness, is less estimable than qualities that are more exclusive and more indicative of an elite. Indeed, he reserved the term virtue for a level of "sensibility and self-command" that is "much beyond what is possessed by the rude vulgar of mankind." Virtue is analogous to taste and good judgment; it is a rare quality in the exclusive hands of a cultural elite.
Whereas Hume pointedly rejected Christian values of humility and otherworldliness and gave pride a prominent and positive place in the human makeup, Smith emphasized another pagan virtue, self-command, and in some measure embraced classical Stoicism. As Enlightenment thinkers asserted the natural goodness of the passions or sentiments, they tended to reject the Stoic model of rational control of the passions. Smith, however, saw Stoic self-mastery, by dint of the very fact that it refuses to solicit sympathy, as a supremely effective mechanism for eliciting it. Thus, Smith managed to combine the up-to-date empiricist view of sympathy as the basis for unselfish feelings with the Stoic valorization of self-command, shifting the new appreciation of human nature from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
The vision of human nature that we find in Hume and Smith acknowledges the moral capacities of ordinary people, but it nonetheless considers these capacities to fall below the virtues of the elite. A more common way of trying to reconcile social hierarchy with the egalitarian implications of the new views of human nature was not to raise elite virtue above ordinary virtue, but instead to isolate intellectual defects that, among the lower orders of society, counteract natural moral capacities. For the Enlightenment, the most conspicuous of these countervailing factors were ignorance and superstition.
At first glance, the notion that only ignorance and superstition impede natural goodness makes the impediment seem external to human nature and thus easily corrigible. For much of the Enlightenment, however, superstition and ignorance were synonymous with religion itself; and religion is not simply imposed on passive victims. Instead, human passions and human ignorance motivate the embrace of beliefs that undermine our moral capacity. In a word, what prevents human nature from living up to its capacity is human nature itself.
Thus, when Shaftesbury condemned religions that teach men "either treachery, ingratitude, or cruelty, by divine warrant; or under colour and pretence of any present or future good to mankind," he was not exculpating the men who are brought up to believe such religions. Rather, he insisted that "worth and virtue depend on a knowledge of right and wrong, and on a use of reason." A virtuous human being must be able to reject teachings that are contrary to reason. Hence, an innate disposition toward moral goodness is useless unless it is supported by rational judgment.
Butler, likewise—despite his claim that an agent will defer to the authority of his conscience—indicated that the conscience can be perverted in its judgment of the good by the effects of superstition and self-interest. Hume, in the Natural History of Religion (1757), characterized religious beliefs as the natural outgrowth of the attempts of the "ignorant multitude" to make sense of the apparently fortuitous accidents that govern their lives. Thus it is not surprising, according to Hume, that polytheism, with its limited and competing gods, emerges among barbaric peoples who are striving to explain the vicissitudes of everyday life. Even in Christian Europe, he claimed, so profound was the "ignorance and stupidity of the people" that they maintained their "incurable prejudices in favor of their particular superstitions."
Accordingly, to the extent that religion gives rise to intolerance and persecution, counteracting the natural goodness stipulated by the benign view of human nature that Hume shared with other Enlightenment thinkers, the superstitions that thwart human nature need to be seen as the natural outgrowth of human nature itself. Among ordinary people who lack education and judgment, natural benevolence is thus checked by natural ignorance and stupidity. As long as the moral capacity of the lower orders is undermined by factors that are themselves deemed part of human nature, the threat to social hierarchy is held at bay.
Rousseau, Kant, and the Anti-Voluntarist Attack on the Social Order
Given the various ways in which writers tried to reconcile views about mankind's capacity for moral goodness with a deep commitment to the socio-political status quo, it is easy to understand why a more radical approach would have a powerful impact on European thought. The rupture would result from tipping the balance toward the goodness of human nature and away from the valorization of the social order—a paradoxical development, given that the elevation of human nature had originated as an attempt to protect the social order. This radical rejection of the Enlightenment view of the relationship between human nature and the social order was carried out most conspicuously by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Rousseau's rejection of civilization applied to material culture, to polished manners, and to intellectual polish as well as to the political status quo, and it often expressed itself as the rejection of sophistication and the valorization of natural simplicity. Although earlier conceptions of human nature had valorized the natural, Rousseau's particular understanding of what counts as natural would seem to shift the balance away from elites and toward ordinary people.
Even though Rousseau was not committed to justifying the status of the social and cultural elite, this fact did not result in the wholesale redemption of human nature. For Rousseau, civilization is not simply an external force imposed on hapless victims; rather, civilization evolves out of the weaknesses of human nature. Despite a certain nostalgia for an earlier, simpler, stage in the development of human society, Rousseau did not sentimentalize the pre-social state of nature. For him, there was no virtue in the state of nature. Man in the state of nature felt compassion for others, but this compassion does not deserve to be called virtue because it was automatic rather than self-conscious. Unlike Shaftesbury, Rousseau argued that the historical (and prehistorical) development of habits of reflection, rather than approving or giving moral weight to this automatic response, had the effect of vitiating it. Reflection, far from approving of compassionate behavior, replaced sympathy with a calculating selfishness that was incompatible with social virtues. Likewise, when our ancestors declined to deceive one another, it was not because they were morally superior to us, but because they lacked the sophistication that we have developed to hide our true natures and desires. The development of civilization, with its increasingly sophisticated tastes and needs—rooted, in Rousseau's view, in the institution of private property—has been inimical to natural goodness: the more civilized we have become, the more our original human nature has degenerated.
Insofar as Rousseau rejected the values that Hume, Smith, and others had used to insist on the superiority of the social elite, but did not offer an entirely concomitant elevation of the ordinary man, his view reflected an attitude that had been set forth in the early work of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755). In Montesquieu's novel Lettres persanes (Persian Letters, 1721), the tale of the Troglodytes includes the transition from a republic (in which the citizens are actively virtuous) to a monarchy (in which they depend for their security on external laws); the abandonment of moral and political self-governance is not blamed on tyrants but on human weakness. However much Rousseau may differ from Montesquieu, he would seem to agree with this paragon of the early French Enlightenment in blaming the decline in human nature on human nature itself.
Nonetheless, Rousseau's nostalgia for human nature at a simpler stage of social development fueled a search for ways in which the moral status of ordinary human beings could be redeemed. Rousseau called not for a return to an earlier stage of humanity, but for a transformation of human nature. Mankind's renewal or rehabilitation is attainable either through moral education or through the establishment of a society in which the moral impulses of the citizenry are brought into conformity with a benevolent general will. For Rousseau, the human heart still speaks the language of morality, but we are deaf to it—either because of prejudice and fanaticism that overwhelm our moral capacity, or because of the corruption associated with civilized sophistication. When individuals accept a social contract that entails their submission to the benevolent general will, they activate their moral potential, and they will be able to hear and obey the divine voice that is enshrined in their conscience.
Leaving aside the frequently raised question of whether uniformity of will is really compatible with individual conscience, even the most benign and liberating interpretation of Rousseau's doctrine still sees the corrective to moral failings to lie beyond the reach of the individual. This state of affairs would seem to arise from Rousseau's assumption that the morality that resides in one's conscience comes from on high, and that the impediments to the recognition of this morality come from defective beliefs that the individual cannot easily correct. In crucial ways, this impotence reinscribes an interesting feature of the Enlightenment elevation of human nature that we have been examining: the doctrine that moral goodness is repeatedly thwarted by intellectual error. Moreover, the tendency to retain the belief in the necessity of social subordination had been premised, as we have seen, on the notion that the intellectual error was willful and hence blameworthy. Thus, the moral potential that signals human goodness is based on principles that have their basis beyond the individual, but the intellectual failure to live up to these principles is to be laid at the individual's doorstep. Since the larger social order does not transcend the failings of the corrupt individuals that compose it, there is no overarching harmony that militates toward the preservation of the status quo.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) radically disrupted earlier ways of understanding the relationship among morality, knowledge, and will. He discarded both the notion that there is an intellectual or moral weakness in the general population that requires relegating them to a subordinate role in a social hierarchy, and the notion that some prior agreement or contract obliges us to submit. Obligations are not inherited, just as they are not handed down from on high. Obligations are freely chosen: we impose them on ourselves. They are not, however, emanations of our appetites or desires, nor are they arbitrary. They arise from our nature as rational beings, which requires us to choose moral imperatives that are universally applicable. This fundamental principle affects both the way we are to understand human nature and morality, and the way we are to understand the relationship between the individual and the social order.
Hobbes, in effect, had set up the alternative between subordinating oneself to the authority of the state or subordinating oneself to the authority of God, and he had expressed an unqualified preference for that of the state. Enlightenment notions of human nature and politics had made morality something more dignified than blind obedience to divine dictates, and they had made social subordination more palatable than submission to royal dictates. To the degree that various Enlightenment writers had accepted the voluntarist assumptions underlying Hobbes's thought, however, Enlightenment thought had stayed within the Hobbesian framework.
The Hobbesian framework, however, had been discarded by the tradition of anti-voluntarist rationalism represented by such figures as Cudworth and Shaftesbury. By rejecting moral voluntarism, these thinkers had given moral truths a status independent of God's will; hence, they had dared to suggest that God and mankind submit to the same eternal moral laws. It might seem that this approach would have been sufficient to liberate ordinary moral agents from their subordinate positions in the social hierarchy. Indeed, in the hands of Richard Price (1723–1791), such a view of morality could, by appeal to transcendent principles, justify precisely what the mid-seventeenth-century radicals had justified by an appeal to the divine will: the political upheaval that Hobbes had feared as the dire consequence of any recourse to higher moral principles. There is, in fact, a direct line between Cudworth's appeal to eternal and immutable truths as an antidote to Hobbes and Price's embrace of the French Revolution.
Given the fact that Price's moral rationalism could applaud the French Revolution as the realization of eternal moral principles that compel assent by God and man alike, it might be asked in what sense Kant's view of morality and human nature can be said to go further. In what sense can Kant (who, like Price, was sympathetic to the Revolution) be said to go beyond Price's conception of man's dignity as a moral agent?
Kant, to be sure, would consider the free will that he associates with moral autonomy to greatly enhance human dignity; but further, and more in keeping with essential Enlightenment concerns, Kant assumed not only that the common intellectual shortcomings used to justify social hierarchy are corrigible, but also that the very moral laws that rational beings impose on themselves impose on them the obligation of enlightening others.
Insofar as the Enlightenment associated intellectual errors such as superstition with the corruption or degradation of human nature, it tended to reinscribe, in more secular terms, the Christian myth of the Fall. When Rousseau characterized natural goodness as the goodness that was experienced during mankind's childhood and depicted adulthood as having brought with it an accretion of beliefs or habits that have caused us to lose touch with our better selves, his Counter-Enlightenment attitude was not terribly far removed from the attitude of the high Enlightenment. For Kant, by contrast, ignorance is not willful or corrupt or incorrigible; it betokens a lack of full maturity. When Kant characterized the lack of intellectual enlightenment as a kind of immaturity imposed on the majority of mankind, the metaphorical shift from corrupt adulthood to innocent childhood acquired large implications. Moral equality was now seen not only to justify political equality but also to imply a kind of intellectual equality that is attainable and needs only to be actualized. The tension between universal moral capacity and the intellectual incapacity that had been used by others to justify social inequality was now resolved, not by attributing to ordinary people an intellectual sophistication that they lack or by ignoring their lack of sophistication, but by viewing their limitations as a barrier to full maturity and as something unjustly imposed on them. Meanwhile, human moral autonomy allows us to formulate a universal moral imperative: that to deprive the masses of enlightenment would be to commit what Kant termed a crime against human nature.
Oscar Kenshur
Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Translated by Fritz C. A. Koelin, and James P. Pettegrove. Princeton, N.J., 1951. English translation of Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, first published in 1931. A classic study whose chapter on religion is especially relevant to the understanding of human nature during the Enlightenment.
Dunn, John. The Political Theory of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the "Two Treatises of Government." Cambridge, 1969.
Ehrard, Jean. L'idée de la nature en France dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle. Paris, 1963. A magisterial study that ranges from human nature to the nature of the universe.
Ellison, Julie. Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion. Chicago, 1999. A provocative study of the interplay between Stoicism and sentiment.
Hundert, E. J. The Enlightenment's Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society. Cambridge, 1994.
Klein, Lawrence. Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge, 1994.
Passmore, J. A. Ralph Cudworth: An Interpretation. Cambridge, 1951.
Schneewind, J. B. The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, 1998. While undertaking to explain the intellectual heritage from which Kant's moral philosophy emerged, this book manages to provide one of the most detailed and perceptive overviews of Enlightenment ideas about human nature.
Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Transparency and Obstruction. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago, 1988. English translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La transparence et l'obstacle, first published in 1957. A brilliantly integrated interpretation of Rousseau's oeuvre.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass., 1989. A wide-ranging study that traces ideas of the self from archaic Greece to modernist poetry, and has much to say about early modern conceptions of human nature.
Tulloch, John. Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century. 2d ed. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1874.
Van Kley, Dale. Pierre Nicole, Jansenism, and the Morality of Enlightened Self-Interest. In Anticipations of the Enlightenment, edited by Alan C. Kors and Paul Korshin, pp. pp.69–85. Philadelphia, 1987.
Viner, Jacob. The Role of Providence in the Social Order: An Essay in Intellectual History. Philadelphia, 1972.
From Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
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