Joppe van Driel, until recently a student at Utrecht University, worked for no less than a year on his graduation thesis 'Enlightening the matter of science. The anti-materialistic enlightenment philosophy of Jean de Castillon (1709-1791)'. The result is impressive:A one hundred and fifty-page research report in which he does not hesitate to make short work of the ideas of renowned historians. He won the IISH/Volkskrant Thesis Prize for History with it.
British historian Johnathan Israel argued in 2001 that there were two camps during the Enlightenment. On the one hand, there were the conservative Enlighteners who cautiously tried out new scientific methods but always kept room for belief in God.
In contrast, Israel opposed the radical Enlightenment. Representatives of this movement aimed to explain the world solely in terms of matter and motion. There was no room for a God in this view. It would have been a select group of scientists who single-handedly defied the religious dogmas of the church.
Although Israel in his study Radical Enlightenment:Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (2001) explicitly tackled the Dutch Enlightenment, his distinction between radical and conservative has become a successful model for the European Enlightenment as a whole.
This is partly due to additional studies by authors such as Philip Blom, who in A Wicked Company:The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment (2010) designates French philosophers such as Baron d'Holbach and the encyclopedist Denis Diderot as lone champions of atheism. The complete rejection of God would be the only logical conclusion from the new thinking about nature.
However, this idea does not do justice to the enormous wealth of ideas of the Enlightenment, argues Van Driel on the basis of his research into the Italian Enlightenment thinker Jean de Castillon (1709-1791). Castillon had a broad intellectual background and also followed an international career path. He also thought a lot about the meaning of science and materialism. All this makes it very suitable as a case study, says Van Driel.
Rare Atheists
On the one hand, Castillon corresponded to the ideal of a radical illuminator. He strove to find one scientific method. On the other hand, he kept all the room for faith and divine revelation. Precisely these apparently contradictory views were characteristic of the Enlightenment. Castillon strongly criticized materialistic thinking. And it is precisely this criticism that played an important role in the Enlightenment, according to Van Driel.
Many Enlightenment thinkers tried to use scientific methods to answer theological questions. "True atheists like d'Holbach were rather a rarity in the Enlightenment," says Van Driel. It was much more a kind of intellectual primordial soup, full of ideas about people and science that partly overlapped each other.'
When asked how he came to this subject, Van Driel is clear:'In the history of science I wanted to look for critics of reductionism, the idea that all kinds of questions can be explained by one fundamental principle. A bit like Dick Swaab does now in his bestseller We are our brain .'
He knows what to do with the sum of 1500 euros associated with the IISH/Volkskrant Thesis Prize. ’ Nowadays I travel a lot between Amsterdam, Utrecht and Enschede. I am currently working as a PhD student in Enschede. So an iPad or new laptop with which I can work on the train seems very useful.