In The Name of Atheism. A Critical Response to Philipp Blom’s Book ‘A Wicked Company’

Abstract

ly theorizing about its sterile conditions and forgetting to live it. Indeed, Blom overlooks some crucial elements at work in his fascinating account. Fear is the important concept in this problem. In this story – a history where we should not neglect the specific context determining specific reactions – fear has three different dimensions. Unfortunately Blom mixes them up. The first is the fear he ignores: the fear that has driven the radicals, as he describes and praises them, into the godless world of materialism. It is the fear for the empty space or blind spot in any system of (scientific) knowledge, that is, the void that anyone who is religious or has beliefs (be it in God or anything else that cannot be known, defined or understood) willingly embraces. It is a dimension of fear we actually should not fear but admit. Atheists are in fact most frightened of all, since they are scared of fear. They replace it by their belief in a religion of science. Nevertheless, they do not believe they too actually believe. A vast belief in the advance and certainty of science erases the blind, absurd, unfathomable, surprising, incalculable, indefinable, unsayable or obscure from human experience. It are these things Blom or any radicals in search for clarity and light cannot face, defending a world dictated by predictable laws. The poetry of an unpredictable God has no place in their positivist view. There is another dimension of fear Blom touches upon, one that has more right to be erased or replaced than the previous. This is the fear the church woke in its disciples, fear used as an instrument to attain power and oppression. Considered from Holbach’s historical context, defined by hierarchic domination and the patronizing of knowledge, it becomes clear why the church and all religious associations to instruments of power and fear like the ‘wrath of God’ or the ‘deadly sins’ had to be attacked in those days. It also makes clear why figures like Diderot defended such a radically political, atheist position towards the existence of a God, especially in the difficult climate of France. It nevertheless does not explain why keeping an opening towards IN THE NAME OF ATHEISM 131 something beyond the facts of science and the material laws of nature should be considered as weak or sentimental, as Blom suggests. Because it should not. The tendency to ask for more than can be understood or predicted is very human and all attempts to create space for what cannot be subsumed under a natural law, in short, to create meaning in life, usually witness of the beauty of human creativity and of the power of imagination. Blom actually admits this in his account of Diderot’s letters and literary works, writings expressing inventiveness, drama and playfulness but also fear, regret and sadness for the loss of magic in life, for the problem morality poses and for the dead end Diderot’s radical, philosophical thoughts were leading to. This relates to a third aspect of fear: fear for the loss of meaning in a purely materialistic world, in an empty whirl of atoms and molecules. God or other ‘sentimental’ practices are meant to compensate for this loss. But Blom seems to be revolted by all attempts that allow for religious’ feelings’, in fact, for feelings and emotions tout court. This becomes most clear in his view on Rousseau. For Blom nothing Rousseau ever did was right, good or valuable. He blames Rousseau’s philosophy to be way too much biography, soaked in emotions and sentimental reactions against his enemy-friends. He makes the reader believe that all Rousseau ever wrote or created was the effect of his frustrations, of fear, jealousy, masochistic desires, misanthropy, pessimism, paranoia, megalomania and good PR. For Blom Rousseau equals secularized self-hatred, a soft form of Christian dogmatism that cannot free itself of the yoke of guilt. Rousseau’s originality and relevant contribution to the ‘colored shadows’ the Enlightenment had cast over Europe are therefore invalidated or even made ridiculous. The stressing of Rousseau’s unstable emotional nature creates a one-sided perspective on a figure who played an interesting part in the development of our cultural history. It is a reductionist perspective merely used to generate false oppositions and simple categories from where Blom convincingly writes his own program.