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The Crisis of Reason: What Happened to European Christianity?
Written Spring 2005
A “crisis of reason” occurred in Europe beginning with the period of the Enlightenment. For it was this so-called “Century of Light” that brought about a ‘revolutionary’ form of thinking by philosophes and scientists whom challenged orthodoxy and introduced the “process,” which led to the “dethroning” of rationality and reason.[1] It cannot be refuted the fact that Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky were just as much ‘products’ of the Enlightenment as they were its ‘destroyers.’ I will now discuss how each of these five individuals contributed to the downfall of Enlightened thinking by “dethroning” the idea of human rationality. I will begin by discussing Darwin.
Charles Darwin wrote and published On the Origin of Species, which inadvertently served as one of the most significant bodies of thought to challenge the existence of God.[2] It wasn’t until much later, after the scientific community had largely accepted Darwin’s theory of natural selection as “fact” that he dared publish The Descent of Man, which essentially argued that humans had evolved from a species of ape along with his facial expressions, thoughts, and morality. These were all just results of evolution by natural selection, not a ‘divine’ plan. Darwin had crossed the line and “Creationism” emerged viciously denouncing his theories dubbing him “the son of a monkey.”[3]
Darwin had asserted, with scientific evidence, that humans had no more “consciousness” than dogs. He claimed that just as humans have emotions, dream, think, remember, and respond to stimuli, so too do animals.[4] Darwin had put forth the idea that humans were just like every other species on earth and were not ‘special.’ This theory helped “dethrone rationality” because people began to question whether or not they really were rational when Darwin had just told them that they were no different than animals in the natural world, and may have even evolved from animals. This had a devastating effect on religious faith and the purpose of life for a huge number of Europeans.[5] Many of Darwin’s own Christian friends, like fellow biologist Asa Gray, began the struggle to consolidate these discoveries with their faith.[6] I will now move on to Freud.
Sigmund Freud, like Darwin, believed that “God was man’s creation,” not the other way around.[7] His ‘reality principle’ proposed the idea that conflicting “wills” within the individual suppressed the “unconscious will,” which he coined the “Id.”[8] He believed that he could help people reveal their Id by analyzing their dreams, the manifestations of the Id, which individuals subconsciously suppressed.[9] Freud’s psychoanalytical theories served to define people as powerless to their unconscious desires. He thought humans were enslaved by their contesting wills and he felt that one way he could help them was by probing their unconscious. The power of the unconscious overrode all other powers individuals might have rendering them the irrational slaves of their own Id. This psychoanalytical approach subsequently left little room for reason and rationality. His ideology certainly challenged Kant’s belief in self-reliance on one’s own understanding. Another thinker who challenged accepted Enlightened notions was Einstein.
Albert Einstein established the Theory of Relativity, which essentially broke the ‘reality’ of the universe down into subjective points of observation. He shattered the belief many Europeans held that the universe could be observed objectively, that it was the same from every ‘vantage point.’[10] Einstein proved the theories of Newtonian physics to be inadequate explanations of the entire universe. He helped Europeans call into question what other theories and ‘accepted truths’ might not be adequate.[11] What they had believed to be rational during the Enlightenment, theories of the First Scientific Revolution, were now revealed to be as irrational as Christ’s miracles.[12] I will now discuss the philosophers who helped “dethrone rationality.”
Friedrich Nietzsche denounced Christianity as an “agent of the cultural sickness of European civilization.”[13] He called upon the “German Youth” to get back in touch with their true sense of self, not offered by Christianity or the “sterilizing academicism” of German culture, which he believed inhibited self-knowledge through “self-delusion.” He advocated that the “self” could be found through action and he believed this to be an individual, not a social, task, which could only be discovered through isolation and a limitation of knowledge.
Nietzsche’s ideas challenged the ‘social’ aspects of the Enlightenment, by deeming the individual his own god, and calling for a limit to academic knowledge for the sake of one’s true development. Otherwise, the individual would again fall victim to self-delusion and run astray.[14] Nietzsche’s ideas also sharply denounced the self-evident ‘truths’ upon which Enlightened thinkers built their ‘systems.’ For Nietzsche, everything was arbitrary, nothing self-evident. Systematic thinking, like that of Kant, Hegel, and Descartes, had to be rejected.[15] I would now like to finish my discussion with the ideas of Dostoevsky.
Nietzsche described Dostoevsky as a victim of the “conscience-vivisection and self-crucifixion of two thousand years” of Christianity. In his book Notes from Underground, the ‘Underground Man’ contemplates human nature and the utopian ‘lie’ of the rationalists in his solitude. He comes to the conclusion that man is an irrational, incomprehensible creature whose intellect has not been given the possibility of understanding or explaining his own essence.[16] Subsequently, man’s reliance on reason and all rational sciences were equally incapable of revealing the truth about man. My analysis of what the book seems to argue is that man can only come to self-understanding through the realm of religion.
The world of the ‘Underground Man’ was, in essence, a world without God, in other words hell. This is a rejection of the Enlightened ideal that humans can rely on their own will and rationality. With the inclusion of the “intended second part” to his book, it could be concluded that what Dostoevsky argued was that “human freedom without God is raw will grounded in nothing, a bottomless abyss of self-consciousness.”[17] This would mean that Dostoevsky’s philosophy was a complete rejection of the Enlightened notion that humans could act of their own ‘good’ will, with rationality, and didn’t need God to achieve progress, truth, and understanding.
All five of these ‘modern’ thinkers helped bring about the “crisis of reason” by denouncing, either blatantly or inadvertently, the philosophies ‘born’ of the Enlightenment. They were the product, and rejection, of Enlightened thinking.
[1] Dorinda Outram, New Approaches to European History: The Enlightenment, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1.
[2] Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002), 60.
[3] Ibid., 304-05, 325, and 329-30.
[4] Ibid., 340-41.
[5] Ibid., 380-81, and 391.
[6] Ibid., 155-56.
[7] J.W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 7.
[8] Ibid., 66.
[9] Ibid., 164-65.
[10] Albert Einstein, “Relativity Part II: The General Theory of Relativity,” http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/einstein/works/1910s/relative/ch18.htm.
[11] Burrow, Crisis, 59.
[12] Ibid., 199.
[13] Ibid., 186.
[14] Ibid., 188.
[15] Steven Kreis, “Lecture II: Nietzsche, Freud, and the Thrust Toward Modernism,” The History Guide, http://www.historyguide.org/europe/lecture2.html.
[16] Burrow, Crisis, 149.
[17] Ibid., 150.
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