I recently discovered that a question which had obsessed me during my entire life, and which I had never been able to put into words, is actually being studied by a philosophy professor. I’m currently reading his paper, “Against egalitarianism” (no socioeconomic implications intended; it’s about theory of consciousness).
Reading Nature’s God, by Matthew Stewart. Stewart argues that many of the American Revolutionary figures held a particular world view at odds with what we would consider orthodox Christianity, with roots going back to Epicurus, and transmitted to them via Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Locke and other figures from the rationalist period leading up to what we call the Enlightenment. Stewart studied many of the original writings from the period, and he says he found references to what he calls”space aliens” everywhere, even in the freethought book published by the relatively unlettered Vermont hillbilly Ethan Allen. The Revolutionary figures who wrote down their thoughts on the matter took the Epicurean doctrine of the infinite universe and the plurality of worlds seriously, and they postulated that these other worlds must have rational species similar to humans living on them, even if they had no way to observe them.
I don’t see how this differs from the Christian belief in the unobservable, populated realms of heaven and hell; yet the advocates of this extraterrestrial belief apparently considered it “rational” by the standards of the time. These speculations might have influenced Joseph Smith a couple generations later when he came up with the Kolob doctrine in Mormonism. Despite the Enlightenment culture of the Revolutionary generation, Americans became more conventionally religious in the early 19th Century.
Reading Stewart’s book made me wonder why more of the Enlightenment figures with resources didn’t try to secure their gains. They managed to lock in their political ideas to some extent in the U.S. Constitution, of course. Thomas Jefferson worked to establish the University of Virginia to teach Enlightenment values. And the French immigrant banker and trader Stephen Girard, who also read Enlightenment books and named his merchant ships Voltaire and Rousseau, left his fortune in trust to establish a secular school for orphans. But other Enlightenment figures with money, like Voltaire himself and the Baron d’Holbach, didn’t think of doing this to improve the odds of making the Enlightenment sustainable. If they couldn’t have done this in France for political reasons, they certainly had the ability to send money to other countries, and even to the early United States, with instructions to carry on the Enlightenment project.
History of Ideas
I recently discovered that a question which had obsessed me during my entire life, and which I had never been able to put into words, is actually being studied by a philosophy professor. I’m currently reading his paper, “Against egalitarianism” (no socioeconomic implications intended; it’s about theory of consciousness).
Reading Nature’s God, by Matthew Stewart. Stewart argues that many of the American Revolutionary figures held a particular world view at odds with what we would consider orthodox Christianity, with roots going back to Epicurus, and transmitted to them via Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Locke and other figures from the rationalist period leading up to what we call the Enlightenment. Stewart studied many of the original writings from the period, and he says he found references to what he calls”space aliens” everywhere, even in the freethought book published by the relatively unlettered Vermont hillbilly Ethan Allen. The Revolutionary figures who wrote down their thoughts on the matter took the Epicurean doctrine of the infinite universe and the plurality of worlds seriously, and they postulated that these other worlds must have rational species similar to humans living on them, even if they had no way to observe them.
I don’t see how this differs from the Christian belief in the unobservable, populated realms of heaven and hell; yet the advocates of this extraterrestrial belief apparently considered it “rational” by the standards of the time. These speculations might have influenced Joseph Smith a couple generations later when he came up with the Kolob doctrine in Mormonism. Despite the Enlightenment culture of the Revolutionary generation, Americans became more conventionally religious in the early 19th Century.
Reading Stewart’s book made me wonder why more of the Enlightenment figures with resources didn’t try to secure their gains. They managed to lock in their political ideas to some extent in the U.S. Constitution, of course. Thomas Jefferson worked to establish the University of Virginia to teach Enlightenment values. And the French immigrant banker and trader Stephen Girard, who also read Enlightenment books and named his merchant ships Voltaire and Rousseau, left his fortune in trust to establish a secular school for orphans. But other Enlightenment figures with money, like Voltaire himself and the Baron d’Holbach, didn’t think of doing this to improve the odds of making the Enlightenment sustainable. If they couldn’t have done this in France for political reasons, they certainly had the ability to send money to other countries, and even to the early United States, with instructions to carry on the Enlightenment project.