Ivan Sviták on Baron D'Holbach et al

New on my website:

Sviták, Ivan. Baron d’Holbach, Philosopher of Common Sense, translated by Jarmila Veltrusky. Chico: California State University, 1976. 76 pp. (Translated from Filosof zdravého rozumu, Holbach.)

In April I found this monograph on Holbach written by the dissident Czech Marxist philosopher Ivan Sviták (1925-1994) apparently just prior to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. I've now read it, following up on Philipp Blom's A Wicked Company, and here it is. This is an excellent analysis of both Holbach's historically innovative perspective and his limitations as a bourgeois revolutionary thinker. Svitak takes up where Blom leaves off conceptually. Note also that Sviták has a sophisticated historical perspective on religion.

Sviták, Ivan. The Dialectic of Common Sense: The Master Thinkers. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979. ii, 217 pp. (Front matter only.)

This volume includes studies of Montaigne, Voltaire, and Holbach. The Holbach study is the same as the aforementioned monograph on Holbach.

Both publications include information on the persecution of Sviták at the hands of the Stalinist Czech government. Sviták found refuge at California State University, Chico.

See also:

• The Perspectives of Philosophy (1956) by Ivan Sviták
• “The Sources of Socialist Humanism” (1963) by Ivan Sviták
• "Anthropological Conditions of Modern Culture" (1964): Conclusion by Ivan Sviták

Marx Wartofsky on Diderot

I wrote the following on 1 June 1015; only a few words have been changed here. I fortuitously stumbled on this today, coincidentally after reading two other works about Holbach and his circle:

Diderot has long been beloved by Marxists. Here is an interesting essay about Diderot in ...

Wartofsky, Marx W. "Diderot and the Development of Materialist Monism" (1953), in Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding (Dordrecht, Holland; Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), pp. 297-337. (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science; v. 48. Synthese Library; v. 129.)

We see the influences of Spinoza, Maupertuis, Leibniz, La Mettrie, d'Holbach, and how Diderot transcended the limitations of idealism and mechanical materialism.

Note:

This change from inorganic to organic matter is, for Diderot, a change in the qualitative level of the organization of matter. These qualitative differentiations within the monistic chain of being characterize his monistic materialism. The aggregates that he speaks of are not merely quantitative combinations, but are qualitative levels of the organization of matter. Thus continuity and discontinuity, the unity of particularity and universality, of quantity and quality, are maintained by Diderot as characteristics of matter in motion. This is not a simple metaphysical unity, not an absolute subsuming of opposites such as we find in the celestial realm of scholasticism, or in Leibniz's monad where there is a metaphysical unity of opposites, or in the metaphysical dialectic of Schelling, but it has the characteristics of such a unity of opposites where the opposition is not merely negated or ignored, but where the very condition of the unity itself is opposition. The pre-Hegelian dialectical element is based on the essential role of process, dynamism, development. The levels are the product of a process in matter, are not preordained, are not prototypes. The flux in Diderot's universe is not a flux-in-itself, it is a flux grounded in matter, in the mode of the existence of matter: motion. Although he never systematizes this process in philosophic terms, it is an essential element in his transformism.

Wicked Company: Holbach's salon, Diderot, & friends (4)

This is the final installment of my review of A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment by Philipp Blom.

As chapter 18 ends, we find Diderot and Holbach fortunate to die before the onslaught of the French Revolution for which their writings helped pave the way.

Both Diderot and the baron were interred in the ossuarium, a cryptlike room underneath the same altar, together with other famous Frenchmen, such as their friend Claude-Adrien Helvétius, the grand salon hostess Marie-Thérèse de Geoffrin, the great landscape artist André le Nôtre, and the dramatist Pierre Corneille.

During the Revolution, the burial place was ransacked, and the remains were torn from their resting places and scattered across the room. The rebels of the 1871 Paris Commune repeated this blasphemous ritual, and while the bones are still lying in the ossuarium, it was judged impossible to determine the parts of the individual skeletons.

After this chapter comes the "Epilogue: A Stolen Revolution." While Jonathan Israel has advanced the notion of the Radical Enlightenment in a series of scholarly works, Blom has told the story in a popular format. His Epilogue makes his intervention even more radical. This book should be put into as many hands as possible, but it also provides food for thought for more erudite readers.

I lack a detailed knowledge of the French Revolution beyond scattered facts, so Blom provides for me at least quite a revelation and quite an important one. Maximilien Robespierre is unequivocally condemned as a betrayer of the Radical Enlightenment. Considering the complex political mess of the revolutionary period, I won't comment on Robespierre's role in the dictatorship and Terror. Of interest in Blom's account is the emphasis that the most ruthless and violent acts, including those against the Catholic establishment, were not carried out by atheists, and that atheists themselves were executed for being such. Catholicism was supplanted not by atheism but by deism, Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being. In the process Robespierre practically deified Rousseau. Robespierre established elaborate festivals in honor of the Goddess of Reason. These details are most revealing:

With an immense flair for classicist bombast and ideological kitsch, the painter Jacques-Louis David, the chief decorator of the Revolution, designed huge, papier-mâché statues of Virtue, Liberty, and Nature—the latter endowed with multiple breasts that dispersed refreshing water, which was drunk out of a common chalice by eighty-six old men symbolizing the departments of France. On 20 Prairial Year II of the new calendar (June 8, 1794, to the uninitiated), Robespierre held a public ceremony for the Supreme Being in the Tuileries gardens. Attended by a crowd of thousands, it included not only a lengthy sermon by Robespierre but also the ritual burning of a statue of Atheism, the charred debris of which revealed an effigy of Truth—unfortunately blackened by smoke.

Implementing his new religion, Robespierre brooked no opposition, even from the dead. On December 5, 1792, the very day on which he was to give his famous speech demanding the execution of King Louis XVI, he had ordered the removal and smashing of a bust of Helvétius, which had been standing in the Jacobin Club next to an effigy of Rousseau. Helvétius had been celebrated by some Revolutionaries as a proponent of reasonable, republican government.

Note also:

After Robespierre’s fall and execution in 1794, the fortunes of Holbach, Helvétius, and Diderot were revived very briefly by the left-leaning Gracchus Babeuf, whose political thinking would today be described as egalitarianism, perhaps even Socialism. But Babeuf’s attempt to gain control of the reeling ship of state, the “Conspiracy of Equals,” was betrayed, and so was he. During his trial in 1797, he frequently cited Diderot as an inspiration, to no other effect than that Denis was regarded posthumously as a dangerous enemy of the people.

Diderot's posthumous reputation was subject either to neglect or calumny. Adulterated versions of his work were published. Uncorrupted versions of his texts saw light in the latter part of the 19th century. Other unpublished manuscripts remained hidden until well into the 20th century. Aside from the fragmentary publication of Diderot's works, the conditions under which he worked also fostered fragmentation.

His work remained eclectic, partly because he was as much an author of fiction and a talker as he was a systematic writer. Both of these factors conspired against Diderot’s recognition as an important thinker. The nineteenth century was the period of great systematic works, of Kant’s Critiques, Hegel’s grand expositions, Marx and his Capital. Diderot simply did not fit the mold: His best thoughts are to be found in his letters, his fiction, his writings on art, and his essays on other works.

Diderot published no great work of systematic philosophy that could have established his reputation in a climate obsessed with all-embracing answers. In addition to the heterogeneity of his writings, his constant, teasing ambivalence makes it impossible to read the philosophe as a dogmatic author. His work sparkles and often provokes—ultimately leaving the reader alone to make up her own mind. As a result, even historians and philosophers who should be his natural allies have too often overlooked him. The French writer Michel Onfray, for instance, has created a publishing sensation with his Contre-histoire de la philosophie, which concentrates on materialist and atheist authors. In his book Les ultras de lumières (The “Ultras” of the Enlightenment) he devotes entire chapters to personal heroes such as La Mettrie, Meslier, Helvétius, and Holbach—but not Diderot.

Holbach's work was systematic, but having appeared under various pseudonyms under the threat of repression, the establishment of authorship did not come quickly or easily. Holbach's unremitting atheism and materialism kept him out of the philosophical canon. He remained generally obscure, though he had his admirers such as Marx.

The Soviet Union pulled the radical Enlighteners—Holbach, Diderot, and Helvétius—out of the shadows and made them prominent figures of honor. Blom sees the Soviet social order as having had more in common with Rousseau than with the Radical Enlightenment.The fall of the Soviet bloc on top of the rise of postmodernism again relegated Holbach to obscurity. Blom reiterates that philosophical historiography initiated in the 19th century followed that century as the age of German idealism—Kant and Hegel. The Radical Enlightenment continues to be sidelined.

Here Blom interjects his most radical thesis:

The Enlightenment applauded and required by the capitalist and imperialist nineteenth century was a moderate version represented by Voltaire, who had always known on which side his bread was buttered, and by the exponents of Idealism, particularly Immanuel Kant. The question at issue here was skepticism. The Enlightenment radicals had argued that there is no grand, metaphysical Truth and that consequently the only valuable knowledge is based on evidence: Do what is useful; avoid what is harmful to yourself or others.

While this moral teaching had the advantage of being simple and easily understood, it was a thorn in the side of Europe’s and America’s burgeoning capitalist societies and their colonial empires. Implacably opposed to the “conspiracy of the priests and magistrates,” to national claims of superiority, to the exploitation of the poor and the oppression of peoples on foreign shores, the radicals stood against the intellectual tide of the century.

The nineteenth century needed a philosophical tradition that justified the colonial enterprise as well as the industrial exploitation of cheap labor, and it turned to the moderate, rationalist Enlightenment to provide it by giving a philosophical justification of religious faith. Meslier, Diderot, and Holbach had pointed out how organized religion leads to an unholy union of priests and magistrates, and the great bourgeois societies of the nineteenth century drew their authority and their social hierarchy out of precisely this union. Historians of philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic therefore emphasized an ultimately deist, religious eighteenth century, with Kant and Voltaire as its greatest exponents.

In this model of history, Immanuel Kant fulfilled a similar function for the eighteenth century as René Descartes had for the seventeenth: His grand metaphysical investigation left open a door through which God could be introduced back into philosophy. Kant argued that our senses determine how the world appears to us and that we may never be able to perceive things as they really are, the “things in themselves.” But instead of accepting that we cannot know anything beyond our perception and that it makes no sense to talk about what we cannot know, he conjectured a purely essential, spiritual reality that is inaccessible to human understanding, a reality in which we might imagine a deity beyond the grasp of the senses. One can read Kant safely without compromising one’s religious beliefs, which can always be safely tucked away among the “things in themselves.” Voltaire, the wit and critical commentator opposed to religious excess, fitted equally well into the designs of a civilization that saw itself as scientific and rationalist, without being antireligious or unpatriotic.

It is worth understanding this idea of rationalism, of scientific reason in harmony with the possibility of religious faith, which still dominates our understanding of the Enlightenment. Kant’s idea of pure reason not only was a field of philosophical research but also represented a cultural ideal: If only we could rationalize the world in its entirety, if only we could rid ourselves of animal instinct and unreasoning impulse, the world would be a better place.

Wow! In this scenario, the Radical Enlightenment has been virtually wiped out of historical memory. Blom sees the Moderate Enlightenment (and deism with it) as an idealized rationalism akin to theology, while the Radical Enlightenment not only strips teleology from the universe but expresses severe skepticism about the ultimate rationality of human beings.

The soft Enlightenment of Voltaire and Kant was highly commensurate with bourgeois values. Reason was celebrated but confined to science, where it did not threaten to violate the sacred grove of religion. Ideally, the human mind was seen as abstract and pure. Merged with faith, it formed the heavy trap door under which the continual guilt of desire and passion was shut away once again in a distasteful souterrain of human nature.

And there's more:

After all, the goal of industrialization was to rationalize society as far as possible; to optimize manufacturing processes, such as division of labor and the assembly line; and to achieve the increasingly efficient planning and control of everything from transport and leisure to sex, punishment, and entertainment. The era that built the greatest railway stations and factories also erected the largest prisons, all according to the same organizing principles of tightly managed production and supply. When the twentieth-century Marxist scholars Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno published their Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1947, they had witnessed (and escaped) the most monstrous travesty of this logic: the fully industrialized murder of human beings in Nazi extermination camps.

Wow and wow! I will comment on this forthwith, but one final quote on the Radical Enlightenment, from the sixth final paragraph of the Epilogue:

The radical humanism emanating from their works was read and understood by a small band of exceptional minds, among them not only the poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who loved Diderot but detested Holbach), Heinrich Heine, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, but also Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.

Stephen Eric Bronner, I, and others have had problems with Dialectic of Enlightenment. As Bronner has argued, the work supplants concrete historical analysis with an abstract, metaphysical historical perspective which also does injustice to the Enlightenment, which Bronner has defended most notably in his book Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement. Amazingly, Blom leaves the thesis of Horkheimer and Adorno untouched, but lays the blame on the Moderate Enlightenment! This is quite a radical statement, cutting through the prevailing ideological climate of our time.

It is possible, as critics of Jonathan Israel have asserted, that the political alignments and cleavage between the Radical and Moderate Enlightenment are too neatly schematized. Yet the emphasis on the social values of the Radical Enlightenment cannot be underestimated, given the attacks on the Enlightenment not only by the theocratic fascists of the right, but by the left bourgeois ideologues of the identity politics of our neoliberal era.

I should note nonetheless that the assimilation of Holbach, Diderot, and company into our awareness within the strict area of the discipline of philosophy bears certain limitations. The various dimensions—the scientific ideas and orientation as well as the progressive social values—of the Radical Enlightenment have been so thoroughly absorbed into the progressive tendencies of our time, that the only reason to read Holbach for example (Diderot on the other hand remains relevant from a literary standpoint) would be the same as the reason to read Newton—out of historical rather than current interest. Science has long moved on. The Radical Enlightenment is light on epistemology, which is of central interest to philosophy even when one removes skepticism and foundationalism as a focus of concern.  Still, reading the Radical Enlightenment back into the general historiography of philosophy can alter our historical perspective on its biases, contours, and development.

Here are some additional links. On my website:

• Diderot, Interpreter of Nature: Selected Writings, translated by Jean Stewart and Jonathan Kemp
• Denis Diderot by Tamara Dlugach, translated by Catherine Judelson
• Intellectual Life in Society: Bibliography: The Enlightenment
• Theodor W. Adorno & Critical Theory Study Guide

On other sites:

• Denis Diderot Archive at Marxists Internet Archive
• Critical Battle Against French Materialism, in The Holy Family by Friedrich Engels & Karl Marx
• "Dialectics at a Standstill: A Methodological Inquiry Into the Philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno" by Stephen Bronner

Wicked Company: Holbach's salon, Diderot, & friends (2)

I am past the halfway mark through the incredibly detailed, highly readable volume A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment by Philipp Blom. There are a number of interesting characters in it, and the contrast of characters, styles, philosophies, and behaviors is most interesting. There is the cooperation as well as temperamental and stylistic differences between the heroes of the book, Holbach and Diderot, at the center of the Radical Enlightenment. I also take note of the different perspectives and social roles of Rousseau, Voltaire, and David Hume.

All of the Frenchmen had their shortcomings when it comes to applying their principles to their wives and/or mistresses. Diderot is portrayed as more passionate, more bold in his rejection of traditional morality, and livelier in his writing style than his friend Holbach. (He edited much of the lead out of Holbach's prose.) Both are the heroes of the book, but Diderot comes off as more well-rounded and vital, though Holbach's literary output was prodigious as was his table. Both sought to re-ground morality casting aside not only the repressive morality of Catholicism but all theistically based notions. Nature is the basis of their rational world view and the fulfillment of pleasure combined with cooperation the basis of their morality. Diderot nevertheless was totally unrestrained in his advocacy of sexuality, casting aside whatever inhibitions (Stoical tendencies) that might still be found in Holbach's perspective. (Note though Diderot's disdain for La Mettrie.)

Rousseau was a piece of work. A product of malformed sexuality and upbringing, his paranoia and persecution complex poisoned all of his relationships with his friends, some of whom he also attacked in his writings. While a product of the same Enlightenment intellectual heritage as the Radical Enlightenment, he gave all of these ideas a reactionary spin once he opposed the atheism and sensualism of Holbach and Diderot, whom he grew to detest. He was a proto-Romantic, rebelling against Enlightenment rationalism, attacking the notion of civilizational progress, and equating the uncorrupted state of nature with godliness (though human nature is judged as corrupted by desire), essentially duplicating in modern form the Christian morality the Radical Enlightenment rejected. Despite Rousseau's critique of inequality, his social world view, including his conception of the general will and his views of education, censorship, religion, and political rule, is seeded with authoritarianism. His ideal society has all the features of a police state. Hence Rousseau effectively erases his incipient dialectical notion that man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Blom effectively relates Rousseau's ultimately regressive social vision and his spiteful philosophical betrayal of his former friends to his personal history and pathology.

Voltaire is presented largely as an opportunist, pursuing his own wealth, status, and reputation, and despite his problems with clerical and aristocratic despotism, attacked the Radical Enlightenment for his own ends. (As a deist he attacked atheism.)

David Hume was received as a superstar in France. Feted there, he had the time of his life, but philosophically he was quite at a distance from his hosts despite their enthusiasm for him. Hume was a skeptic rather than an atheist and he lacked that sharp polemical opposition to the social order exhibited by the Radical Enlightenment. Of note in this account is that the French materialists bypassed the epistemological preoccupation with certainty, skepticism, and justification that would drive so much of modern philosophy. For Holbach, who contributed mightily to the development of a scientific world view, science, based on empirical engagement with the world, provided the source for knowledge. No other justification was needed. Hume's philosophical preoccupation was quite foreign to him. And Holbach was quite prescient in his scientific ideas. I think that this was the main way forward at this point, though the epistemology behind it was not finely developed from what I can tell--the nature of concept and theory formation, etc. Hume was innovative in bringing to light fundamental issues that would devastate traditional a priori metaphysics, and it was too early at that point to see clearly what a dead end skepticism as the dogmatic inverse of dogmatism would become.

Generalizing the narrative so far, Blom insists that the Radical Enlightenment has been gravely misrepresented. "Passion is crucial to the radical Enlightenment." (Their moral theory on the positivity of sensual enjoyment, empathy, etc., is detailed, in contradistinction to both Christian morality and nihilism.) But also the Radical Enlightenment's view of Reason is the polar opposite both of Rousseau's repressive world view and technocratic rationalization.

So much of the Enlightenment was or was represented as a cult of “pure reason” (in Immanuel Kant’s key phrase) that it is still common in our day to think of this great philosophical paradigm shift as being concerned merely with making life more rational, more efficient, and less superstitiously medieval. This may be partly true for moderate, often deist thinkers such as Leibniz, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Kant, and even for Diderot’s friend Helvétius, but it was never true of the radical Enlightenment around Diderot and Holbach.

To the Enlightenment radicals, reason is merely a technical faculty of analysis, part of our material constitution. But while moderate thinkers wanted to create a life governed less by the passions and more by rational behavior, a life purified of physical desire and instinctive acts, Holbach and particularly Diderot wanted to create a society in which individuals could live as far as possible in harmony with their desires and fulfill them. Reason was simply a tool for a life that was essentially passionate and governed by vital drives, by pleasure and pain.

Now whether or not this world view is sufficiently well articulated in hindsight is less important than the facile assumptions indiscriminately attributed to the Enlightenment. My first thought is to refer here to Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and Adorno, which I have always disliked. As it happens, at book's end Blom does refer to it, and he lays all the blame for instrumental reason critiqued therein on the moderate Enlightenment!

There is no mention of William Blake in the book, but while Blake's aversion to much of the Enlightenment (though he had engaged it earlier in life, e.g. via Wollstonecraft and Paine), links the imperial capitalist order Blake opposed to empiricism proximately and materialism somewhat more remotely--specifically the figures of moderate English/Scottish and French Enlightenment, the Frenchmen targeted being Voltaire and Rousseau. Blake could never have been congenial to the materialism of the Radical Enlightenment, but perhaps earlier in life he could have accommodated aspects of it as he accommodated Thomas Paine.

Gods, UFOs, Zen, epistemology, autonomy

"Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another."

-- Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?"

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"Seeing and Believing" by Jerry A. Coyne
The New Republic, Wednesday, February 04,2009

The Edge commentaries are all over the place.

As for the original article, it effectively establishes the incompatibility between faith and science, and more generally between religion and science. From a cursory reading, I'd say it gets a little weird in sections III & IV. For example, the proposals as to what would constitute a test of religious beliefs are not convincing to me and require a deeper logical analysis. Curiously, I last thought about this about 30 years ago, when I read a most unusual book by UFOlogist Jacques Vallee.

Some of Coyne's concluding statements are most interesting:

So the most important conflict--the one ignored by Giberson and Miller--is not between religion and science. It is between religion and secular reason. Secular reason includes science, but also embraces moral and political philosophy, mathematics, logic, history, journalism, and social science--every area that requires us to have good reasons for what we believe. Now I am not claiming that all faith is incompatible with science and secular reason--only those faiths whose claims about the nature of the universe flatly contradict scientific observations. Pantheism and some forms of Buddhism seem to pass the test. But the vast majority of the faithful--those 90 percent of Americans who believe in a personal God, most Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, and adherents to hundreds of other faiths--fall into the "incompatible" category.

Unfortunately, some theologians with a deistic bent seem to think that they speak for all the faithful. These were the critics who denounced Dawkins and his colleagues for not grappling with every subtle theological argument for the existence of God, for not steeping themselves in the complex history of theology. Dawkins in particular was attacked for writing The God Delusion as a "middlebrow"book. But that misses the point. He did indeed produce a middlebrow book, but precisely because he was discussing religion as it is lived and practiced by real people. The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.

I have my doubts about Buddhism, which I doubt could pass the compatibility test. Coyne proceeds, in an abbreviated fashion, down the same path as Victor Stenger, who has written one of the best recent books I've seen on the incompatibility of science and theism. That is, they proceed by examining all the incompatibilities and then see what is left. For Stenger, some vague, toothless deism survives his tests; for Coyne, pantheism. I'll add that there are some lesser known variations on this theme, such as panentheism (I think you will find this and other variations in Wikipedia). But discounting these variations, we basically have pantheism and deism to deal with. Pantheism I would imagine to be more popular, but this could be my experiences of the counterculture in the '70s talking.

The question would then be, do what extent are these positions intelligible? If God is not immanent in the universe--which I think is the implication of deism (somebody correct me)--then what practical sense could be made out of the concept? As for pantheism, there are a couple ways of approaching the subject. What sense does it make to say that the universe is divine or transcendental? What specific qualities are posited other than a psychological or ideational disposition on our part? Does this mean that the universe as a whole possesses intelligence, or at least sentience, or functions as some sort of organism? If so, what is the evidence, and how does this notion concretely make sense? Perhaps the universe possesses a vital impulse or life-property without being divine per se, such as in the vitalism of Henri Bergson, George Bernard Shaw, or Hans Driesch? In my view, little would survive intensive conceptual investigation and our current knowledge of the universe except for some psychological / ideational disposition on our part regarding sacredness.

Coyne mentions the spineless position of the National Academy of Science on the compatibility of religion and science. The AAAS is just as bad if not worse. Coyne lets the cat out of the bag suggesting that scientists want to avoid losing funding and institutional support. Yet I think their cowardice goes too far. These organizations need not declare an official position against religion or theism, but it is entirely intellectually illegitimate and anti-scientific for them to declare officially a non-incompatibility between religion and science. If organized science can claim a compartmentalized mission in the totality of social life, then it should defend a compartmentalized role and refuse to take any position outside of defending the integrity of scientific research, publication, and education. Paradoxically, these organizations overreach their own sphere of competence by declaring the conceptual compatibility of religion and science rather than simply asking for a modus vivendi in social life.

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Jacques Vallée is a strange man. I think I may have seen him in person once discussing information science & technology. But I first heard of him as a UFOlogist as a child. Here's the basic poop:

Jacques Vallée - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Well, about 30 years ago I read one or both of these books, most likely the latter:

Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1969.

Another edition came out a quarter century later. An excerpt can be found on amazon.com:

Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993.

The Invisible College: What a Group of Scientists Has Discovered About UFO Influences on the Human Race. New York: Dutton, 1975.

Vallee had a novel hypothesis, linking UFO sightings to accounts of alien, supernatural, or divine visitations throughout human history in diverse cultures. I never took seriously any theory he had about all of this, but at the time I found his approach epistemologically fascinating, with a possible ethical implication I will attempt to clarify below.

I was reminded of this while reading the Coyne article, which cited the criteria offered by Bertrand Russell and/or others for accepting the existence of God, Christ, etc., criteria which I never found compelling. Yeah. I'd be freaked out if a burning bush started talking to me, or if the clouds opened up and Mother Mary cried out to her Jewish Son of God, "How come you never call?", but in the final analysis, what does this change? The human impulse to bow down and submit is precisely the ethical problem. But more on that later. The epistemological issue is interesting, because a phenomenon has not only to be experienced, but interpreted. One cannot simply assume that some vision or visitation is congruent with one's religious mythology or supposition about origins in outer space; rather, sensory experience is one link in a chain of investigative evidence to yield a plausible and fully generalized explanation. Vallee's book interested me at the time because his bizarro hypothesis revealed, perhaps unwittingly, what is epistemologically at stake.

---

Now back to the ethical dimension. Around the same time I was reading another book; it may have been D.T. Suzuki's contribution to Erich Fromm's Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. Suzuki was the original and foremost propagator of Zen in the western world. I didn't know his actual history back then, or how dishonest and irresponsible New Age panderers are in erasing history, in this case, how Suzuki was really positioned among the Japanese intelligentsia and Zen's link with Japanese nationalism, militarism, and fascism. Nevertheless, I'm guessing I was reading Suzuki at the time. Whoever it was, I was impressed by this characterization: Zen makes you confront who you are; it's not ultimately about what you believe and what you've committed yourself to, but who is the one who is believing, thinking, acting? In other words, there's an irreducible personal responsibility involved, which is foregrounded while religious justifications are relegated to secondary status.

Now I think Suzuki was lying, because Zen Buddhist practice is as institutionalized, ritualized, and historico-culturally specific as all get-out. As I say, New-Agers are historically ignorant or liars or both. Nevertheless, this concept impressed me at the time, and I'm pretty sure I made a connection with Vallee's book(s).

We love to submit to overwhelming power, to bow, scrape, and genuflect, in hopes we will get something out of our self-abasement. From totemism to American Idol, some things never change. "I was only following orders"--the mantra of Adolph Eichmann and Jerry Falwell. It's even worse when the issuer of those orders is entirely fictitious. But guess what, since the Nuremburg Trials that excuse doesn't fly anymore. The proper response is: fuck you, buddy, you're responsible, and you're going to hang for this.

It must be Shelley

. . . 'cause Blake don't shake like that.

For many a decade, I've been aware of Percy Bysshe Shelley's essay on atheism that got him kicked out of university—The Necessity of Atheism. Oddly, I don't remember reading the essay itself. Nor was I aware of Shelley's other essays on religious topics. (His essays are collected in separate volumes from his poetry, at least the ones I have.) His key essays reflecting his heterodoxy are available online:

Selected Prose Works of Shelley,
including, inter alia:
The Necessity of Atheism
A Refutation of Deism
On Life
On a Future State
Essay on Christianity

I discovered this in my search for "A Refutation of Deism" (1814).

Prometheus Books has collected these five essays in a book:

The Necessity of Atheism, and Other Essays (1993).

This collection of essays is available via Project Gutenberg:

A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

Essays:
On Love
On Life in a Future State
On the Punishment of Death
Speculations on Metaphysics
Speculations on Morals
On the Literature, the Arts and the Manners of the Athenians
On the Symposium, Or Preface to the Banquet of Plato
A Defence of Poetry

Only the essay "On Life" is one of the key anti-religious tracts listed previously.

Offline the most comprehensive compilation of Shelley's prose is:

Shelley's Prose, edited by David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954).

Contents:
Introduction:
The Growth of Shelley's Mind 3
Essays:
The Necessity of Atheism 37
An Address to the Irish People 39
Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists 60
A Declaration of Rights 70
A Letter to Lord Ellenborough 72
A Vindication of Natural Diet 81
Essay on the Vegetable System of Diet 91
"There Is No God" 97
" I Will Beget a Son" 103
"Necessity! Thou Mother of the World!" 109
"And Statesmen Boast of Wealth" 113
"Even Love Is Sold" 115
A Refutation of Deism 118
A Fragment of "A Refutation of Deism" 138
Refutation of the Christian Religion 141
A Fragment on Miracles 143
The Assassins 144
Essay on the Punishment of Death 154
A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote Throughout the Kingdom 158
An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte 162
Essay on Love 169
Essay on Life 171
Essay on a Future State 175
Essay on the Revival of Literature 179
A Treatise on Morals 181
The Elysian Fields: A Lucianic Fragment 194
Essay on Christianity 196
Essay on Marriage 215
A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love 216
The Colosseum 224
A Philosophical View of Reform 229
Two Fragments on Reform 261
A System of Government by Juries 262
Essay on the Devil and Devils 264
A Defence of Poetry 275
Una Favola 298
Appendixes:
A. Literary Criticism 303
B. Prefaces to Poems 314
C. Fragments and Minor Pieces 337
D. Translations of Longer Foreign Language Passages 354
Bibliography:
Selected Bibliography 365
Index 371

This book contains some relevant items I've not found online. I put this fragment on my web site and perhaps will add some more material:

On Polytheism (1819?)

Of course, Shelley's poetry is not to be neglected, and all of it can be found online:

The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Other online texts by Shelley can be also be referenced via Project Gutenberg:

Shelley, Percy Bysshe - Project Gutenberg

Scholarly materials abound. These are the best web sites on English Romanticism:

Romantic Circles
Romanticism On the Net