Evil philosophers
Evil Philosophers: A Salon in Paris and the Forgotten Legacy of the Enlightenment is a non-fiction book published in 2011 by the German historian Philipp Blom .
content
At the beginning, the author Philipp Blom goes in search of the place where Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach and Denis Diderot met regularly with other philosophers and high-ranking scholars of Europe in the second half of the 18th century to discuss various radical theories the education exchange and politics. In doing so, Blom makes it clear that their ideas were directed against the entire foundation of the Western world at that time and were significantly more radical than those of the representatives of the French Revolution .
He describes the conditions of the feudalist - clerical society at that time, the censorship of critical literature / philosophy , the draconian punishments for non-compliance from banishment to execution and the need for private salons . There, the pioneers of the Enlightenment were able to exchange ideas freely and work on their works. For example, the Encyclopédie , whose employees were mostly visitors to the Holbach salon, was not only a means of collecting knowledge from the world, but also of circumventing strict censorship and publishing new ideas.
Blom sheds light on both the childhood and youth of Diderot and Holbach, highlighting the material differences and showing how the two found each other and how a close friendship developed. Jean-Jacques Rousseau also belonged to this friendship . However, this broke up over time, due to the different world views and his increasing paranoia . Rousseau actually represented a deeply pessimistic view of man and with his philosophy laid the foundations of a repressive and brutal social order. He just adopted the Christian view of man and the world and packed it into a new philosophy. From this are u. a. the Great Terror under Robespierre and the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century emerged. Both philosophies are described in detail by Blom. Criticism is also made of Voltaire , since after Blom he was much more interested in his own prosperity and wanted to serve as a figurehead for the Enlightenment. That is why he did not turn against the church, but against parts of the radical enlightenment.
This old Christian worldview of Rousseau, which is only packaged in a new form, determines our thinking to this day. So we would still linger in categories like “ salvation ” and “ damnation ” and fear seemingly unsolvable problems like climate change , nuclear wars or destructive asteroids . This is another reason why we are so susceptible to ideas like socialism , the perfect market or science fiction , since these act as a kind of substitute heaven. This understanding is reflected u. a. in sexual morality , advertising , the health and youth cult, the film industry and in the rejection of radical science such as stem cell research and genetic engineering .
Diderot and Holbach, on the other hand, are described as radical atheists and critics of religion and the church who shared the ideas of naturalism , materialism , sensualism , pragmatism , relativism and every form of equality and feminism . They were pioneers of the theory of evolution , had already theoretical knowledge about DNA , the nature of atoms , psychological explanatory models and much more, which was scientifically proven only centuries later. They did not believe in any meaning in life other than survival, relief from pain, and promoting enjoyment. They developed a moral of freedom and passion, the sole principle of which is; everything is good that is good for people in the long term and vice versa. This should lead to a society that is based on mutual respect.
The reasons for the far-reaching failure of the philosophy of the radical Enlightenmentists and their ignorance towards philosophers such as Voltaire, Kant or Rousseau was that both initially the representatives of the French Revolution and later the European monarchs, especially as a result of imperialism, had much more of their own power and were interested in the exploitation of the colonies and their inhabitants through slavery . An equality of all people and cultures, as represented by Diderot and Holbach, would have removed the legitimacy of imperialism.
Blom concludes that our clinging to the supposed meaning of life is nothing more than narcissism . The philosophers around Holbach and Diderot had reversed this principle: Ethics only emerged from senselessness . And from this insight emerges what Epicurus already demanded: the constant attempt to refine and direct one's passions instead of slandering them, to find one's own happiness in this world, to harm one's own environment as little as possible and to create as much good as possible.
Reviews
“With his captivating philosophical panorama, with his portrayal of the world of the intellectuals in the second half of the eighteenth century, Philipp Blom has opened a door to a new approach to them. Only when you draw the circle as far as it does, do cultural-historical contexts come into view that are not captured by today's monographic representations. "
“Philipp Blom rehabilitates the 'evil philosophers' of the Enlightenment. [...] A book that is as learned as it is amusing. [...] The philosophical questions that were fought over at that time, Blom spreads out before us with a light hand. Plentifully interspersed anecdotes ensure that we do not lose patience even in the theory-heavy passages. "
“Philipp Blom followed the paths of the bourgeois Enlightenment in the middle of the 18th century and precisely located an intellectual center of gravity of the time. [...] The 'evil philosophers' declare that enlightenment is not something that falls into the lap of intellectuals without risk and is then embodied in people who stand on a pedestal. "
“Blom may not be the first author to devote himself to radical Enlightenment […], but his story of the Holbach'schen Salon is the first to appear in German. It remains to be seen whether Blom - as he suggests in the introduction - has made a contribution to unmasking the Christian rudiments in current discourses on scientific ethics, such as in the debate about pre-implantation diagnostics. The positivist stance that he propagated as a panacea against theological remnants of current thinking seems somewhat naive. With this book, however, he calls to mind how little self-evident a worldview that is independent of religious dogmas is even today: After reading it, one does not want to hear a battle term such as the currently popular 'Enlightenment fundamentalism'. "
“It is certainly worthwhile to think carefully about the views of the radical Enlightenmentists. Blom's easy-to-read and anecdotal book, through which many famous names from the history of Western ideas are buzzing - Baruch Spinoza, René Descartes, Kant, Isaac Newton, David Hume and many others - encourages us to take a closer look at their ethics of empathy and solidarity . But should and do we really want, as Blom suggests, to throw overboard Kant's poetic sentence, 'the starry sky above me, the moral law in me' and religious ideas that have become dear to him with it? Should we only stick to the concrete and graphic and not dare to think of the ' thing in itself ' with Kant too? The reader should decide for himself. "
Award
In 2011 Blom was awarded the Gleim Literature Prize for the book .
expenditure
- Philipp Blom: Evil Philosophers: A Salon in Paris and the Forgotten Legacy of the Enlightenment . Carl Hanser Verlag , Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-446-23648-6 .
See also
- Hedonism , Enlightenment , naturalism , materialism , sensualism , pragmatism , relativism
Web links
- Evil Philosophers ( Memento from August 31, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), originally on the Carl Hanser Verlag website
- Review notes on "Evil Philosophers" at Perlentaucher
Individual evidence
- ↑ FAZ: "The Lord Baron had a secret", from March 10, 2011
- ↑ Die Welt: “How do you feel about religion? The historian Philipp Blom rehabilitates the “evil philosophers” of the Enlightenment ”, from March 12, 2011
- ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau: "Enlightened and Radical", April 2, 2011
- ^ The daily newspaper: "The legacy of the atheists", March 17, 2011
- ↑ literaturkritik.de “The best minds in Europe”, June 6, 2011