Daisy’s Reviews > The Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries > Status Update

Rousseau is a fervent deist, but even there he strikes a dissonant chord…. In Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1749), he argues from history and reason that progress in the arts and sciences has led us away from virtue, lessening rather than increasing it…. Reason also shows the linkage between cultural progress and moral decadence. The arts and sciences create and then satisfy artificial vices and human pride, serving luxury and vanity, not our natural needs….. In his Second Discourse, On the Origins of Inequality (1755), Rousseau asks whether inequality is natural. …Arbitrary power creates and maintains social injustices that we regard as natural, but that are wholly a creation of culture. The attempt to satisfy artificial needs stifles conscience and natural compassion and breeds selfishness…Rousseau’s Emile seeks to create the greatest amount of natural learning and inoculation against social depravity. The goal is direct education by nature, not by men or things.

Unlike Beccaria’s model, Rousseau’s social contract insists that all individual freedom is given to the state, such that one’s own happiness is one’s share of the happiness of the society. When one’s self-interest can only be pursued by pursuing the well-being of all others, society becomes a means to overcome selfishness and permit moral beings to exist in civilized society.

In the 18" century there is the growing practice of naturalistic, mechanistic, and materialistic explanations of the world in which we find ourselves. There are, whether one is a Christian, a deist, an unbeliever, extraordinary strides being made in the physics of moving bodies and what one can explain in terms of physics, in the physiology of living things, and in our knowledge of the human body, of animals, and of plants…. Diderot offers proto-evolutionary speculations on the transformation of the species over time, the survival of the best adapted, the scientific need to abandon the limitations of Scriptural time, and the cells as carriers of the information of each organism. Human thought is a scientific, not a theological, mystery.
Diderot squarely faces the ethical implications of atheistic naturalism. Ethics as behavior is partly inherited, partly learned. The goal of ethics is survival and better interaction with nature and ourselves. The only ethical criteria are pleasure and utility. For Diderot, atheism is proper humility. Atheism is the ultimate humanism.