Pierre Bayle

Bayle, Pierre (1647–1706)

Bayle was one of the most profound sceptical thinkers of all time. He was also a champion of religious toleration, and an important moral philosopher. The fundamental aim of his scepticism was to curb the pretensions of reason in order to make room for faith. Human reason, he believed, suffers from two fundamental weaknesses: it has a limited capacity to motivate our actions, and it is more a negative than a positive faculty, better at uncovering the defects of various philosophical positions than at justifying any one of them. This conception of reason led Bayle to see, with an uncommon clarity, that the nature of the sceptic’s arguments must be to proceed by internal demolition, showing how claims to knowledge undermine themselves in their own terms.

Bayle’s moral thought is to be found essentially in his critique of attempts (such as that of Malebranche) to show how God, all-powerful and good, could have created a world in which there is evil. Such theodicies, he argued, rely on unacceptable models of moral rationality. Bayle’s arguments reveal a view of moral reasoning that is of considerable interest in its own right. Like Malebranche (and contrary to Leibniz, who attacked Bayle’s critique of theodicy), he believed that there are duties superior to that of bringing about the most good overall. But unlike Malebranche, Bayle saw these duties as lying not in what the rational agent owes himself but in what he owes to the inviolable individuality of others. This outlook had its psychological roots, no doubt, in Bayle’s own experience as a Huguenot victim of religious persecution.

1 Scepticism

Pierre Bayle was one of the most important sceptical thinkers of all time, as well as a notable moral philosopher and advocate of religious toleration. The fundamental motivation of his scepticism was religious: his aim was to curb the pretensions of reason in order to make room for faith. Born into a Calvinist family in Carla in southern France, he became a professor of philosophy in the Protestant academy at Sedan. After its abolition (1681) and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), which ended Protestant toleration in France, Bayle fled to Holland and spent the rest of his life in Rotterdam. His Calvinist conviction that God is rationally inscrutable spurred his wide-ranging attack on the power of reason to shape our conduct and to make sense of the world. As he wrote in the article on ‘Paulicians’ in his most important work, the Dictionnaire historique et critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary) (1696: Paulicians, note E), ‘The ways of God are not our ways… [We must accept] the elevation of faith and the abasement of reason’.

Bayle believed that human reason suffers from two fundamental weaknesses. The first is that reason is quite limited in its capacity to motivate our actions. Human beings act more often in virtue of their dominant passions than on the basis of their professed principles. In his first important work, Pensées diverses sur la comète (Miscellaneous reflections on the comet) (1682), Bayle made use of this observation to argue that, contrary to the accepted opinion of his time, atheists would be able to live together peacefully in society. Were they to follow through on all the consequences of God’s non-existence, they would indeed plunge into a life of vice without remorse. For though convinced that we can know the principles of morality without relying upon belief in God, Bayle thought that without such a belief we would have no reason to subordinate our self-interest to them. Still, the atheist would be unlikely to take up the life of crime, Bayle insisted, because the rational calculation of advantage is a less powerful motive than the concern for honour. The vanity of wishing to be well regarded by others, combined with an interest in using moral principles to blame or approve their actions (if not one’s own), would steer the atheist toward mutual cooperation with others.

For Bayle, this argument was not merely a philosophical curiosity. It formed part of his continuing campaign in favour of a society based on religious toleration. The expression of heterodox opinion need not by itself imperil social order. The motivational weakness of reason played a further role in the central argument of Bayle’s principal treatise on religious toleration, Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jésus-Christ, ‘Contrains-les d’entrer’ (Philosophical Commentary on the Following Words of Jesus Christ, ‘Compel Them to Enter’) (1686). Just as our actions stem less from our reason than from our passions and feelings, so belief itself, Bayle argues here, is not directly under our rational control, but arises involuntarily from inner conviction. As a result, the use of force to impose religious belief must be a futile enterprise. Individual conscience ought to be respected, since sincere belief can have no other source.

The second fundamental weakness of human reason for Bayle was that it is more a negative than a positive faculty. It lends itself better to the refutation of opposing views than to the justification of one’s own position. As he wrote in Réponse aux questions d’un provincial (Reply to the Questions of a Provincial) (1703–7: II.137), reason ‘is better able to demolish than to build, it knows better what things are not than what they are’. When reason is instead put to the use of defending some particular position, it tends naturally to undermine itself. Reason is essentially destructive because it excels in uncovering the self-contradiction into which its positive employment inevitably falls.

This diagnosis underlies two other significant features of Bayle’s thought. It allowed him, first of all, to see clearly how sceptical argumentation must proceed in general. The sceptic may not appeal to principles that are not admitted by the position under attack, since such an argument would be irrelevant to the partisans of that position and contrary to the sceptic’s own professed lack of knowledge. Instead, Bayle observed, the sceptic must show how the position undermines itself, involving views which are mutually inconsistent or conflicting with opinions every reasonable person holds. The sceptic must work by internal demolition, attacking his adversaries ‘on their very own dungheap’, as he wrote in the preface to his Pensées diverses (see also the ‘Second Clarification’ in ‘Spinoza’, Dictionnaire historique et critique).

The idea that in its positive employment reason is ultimately self-destructive also shaped Bayle’s attitude towards the fundamental conflicts between reason and faith which he doggedly uncovered (see §3). ‘If reason were in agreement with itself’, he wrote (1703–7: II.137), ‘we should be more worried that it agrees so poorly with some of our articles of religion’. Many of Bayle’s Enlightenment readers (such as Diderot, in the article ‘Pyrrhonian or Sceptic’ of the Encyclopédie) claimed him for one of their own. But they were wrong to suppose that his attack on rational theology was aimed at the rejection of religious dogma. On the contrary, Bayle’s scepticism took the form of a fideism, intended to confirm his Calvinist belief in the radical disparity between God’s ways and our own. Indeed, so far was Bayle from being a founding father of the Enlightenment that he was one of the first to express concern about what in the twentieth century has come to be called ‘the dialectic of the Enlightenment’. If we follow reason alone, proportioning all our beliefs to the available evidence, we will end up by doing away, he once wrote, not only with superstition and barbarism, but eventually with every sort of conviction: ‘Man’s fate is so bad that the knowledge that delivers him from one evil throws him into another’ (1696: ‘Takiddin’ Note A).

2 Epistemology and metaphysics

In arguing against the capacity of human reason to acquire knowledge of the world, Bayle focused chiefly on foundational matters. We cannot demonstrate the real existence of the external world, he maintained, nor grasp its fundamental principles. But he appears to have had no serious doubt that straightforwardly empirical questions admit of rational solutions. Indeed, Bayle frequently urged, against the authority of Descartes, that philosophy should recognize the validity and importance of historical knowledge, and his own scholarship in the history of philosophy and theology was significant. Bayle’s scepticism was therefore restricted to speculative questions of principle. In his Dictionnaire article on Pyrrho, he described Pyrrhonism simply as the view that we have no knowledge of the underlying nature of things (see Pyrrhonism).

Such an outlook would seem to place Bayle within the important seventeenth-century current of thought generally called ‘mitigated scepticism’, the most important exemplars of which were Gassendi and Locke. Like them he believed that, unlike our beliefs about the observable features of the world, ultimate physical explanations can be at most probable, never certain (1696: ‘Pyrrho’ Note B), and that such explanations refer to what we cannot fully understand. For example, he endorsed Locke’s view that we know too little about the nature of matter to rule out the possibility that God might have ‘superadded’ to it the power of thought (1696: ‘Dicaearchus’ Note M) (see Locke, J. §5).

None the less, Bayle’s scepticism ran deeper than that of Gassendi and Locke, for he also believed that ultimate physical principles turn out, upon reflection, to be self-contradictory. This was, for instance, the verdict of his famous discussion of space in the Dictionnaire article on Zeno of Elea (1696: ‘Zeno’ Note G). The idea of space, he argued, is incoherent on any of the interpretations one might give of it. Space cannot consist ultimately of mathematical points since the addition of extensionless entities to one another cannot produce extension. Nor can it consist of extended but indivisible physical points, since anything extended is divisible. Nor can it be infinitely divisible, since this would preclude the immediate contiguity of its parts, or would permit the interpenetration of any two contiguous bodies, and in any case would succumb to the well-known paradoxes of the infinite. Here we find a perfect specimen of Bayle’s theme that reason tends inevitably to undermine itself. His discussion of space had an important influence on Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–41).

3 Theodicy and ethics: Bayle versus Malebranche

Bayle’s moral thought is best approached by way of his critique of philosophical theodicy. That critique is important, if for no other reason than the fact that Leibniz took it as his main target in his 1710 Essais de théodicée (Theodicy). But it also embodies a view of morality that is of genuine interest in its own right.

A theodicy aims to justify the ways of God to humans, showing how God, all-powerful and good, could have created a world in which there is evil. It must therefore make use of a model of moral rationality that lays out the principles according to which one should choose among actions, where each action may involve bad consequences. In this light, theodicies retain a philosophical value even for those who today may find very foreign the idea of justifying the ways of God. Theodicies give vivid expression to models of moral rationality. Accordingly, in seeing why Bayle thought the two leading theodicies of his day were morally unacceptable, we bring into focus his own very interesting conception of moral rationality.

The first of these theodicies was presented by Malebranche in his 1680 Traité de la nature et de la grâce (Treatise on Nature and Grace). Malebranche’s guiding principle was that God, in creating the world, had to show his wisdom and goodness not only in the result he achieved but also in the means he used. Consequently, God could act to maximize the resulting good in the world only to the extent that at the same time he employed a ‘simplicity’ of means – that is, a system of universal and immutable laws. As he could foresee, these laws would sometimes result in evil that could have been avoided, had he set about single-mindedly to bring about the greatest good possible. God knew, for example, of the evil that men would do because of the freedom he had given them, when they made use of the laws he set up. This evil, though foreseeable, was not intended, however, since God aimed only to respect his own nature as wise and good. The model of moral rationality that Malebranche assigned to God is therefore one we would call ‘deontological’: right conduct is that which respects certain principles independently of the bad consequences that the action can foreseeably produce (see Malebranche, N. §6).

In his first writings, Bayle presented himself as an adherent of Malebranche’s theodicy. Thus, in the Pensées diverses, he sought to show that sensational phenomena such as comets and monsters, and even sin, represent neither a failure of providence nor God’s particular will, but are instead the unintended result of the simple laws by which God rules the world (1682: §§208, 230, 231, 234). It is important to note that, like Malebranche, Bayle did not draw this model of moral rationality from revelation or scripture. We must judge God’s rationality, he wrote, by reference to our own (1682: §223). He was convinced that the first principles of morals are open to our reason even ‘without knowledge of God’ (1682: §178).

This ‘autonomy of morality’ with respect to religion forms one of the constants of Bayle’s thought. It is the principal basis on which later (beginning with the Dictionnaire in 1696) he rejected Malebranche’s theodicy. He had come to believe that Malebranche’s underlying model of moral rationality is incompatible with what we can see to be the first principles of morality. It is in precisely these terms that, in one of his last writings, he explained his change of mind (1703–7: II.91, 155). Bayle’s fideism was therefore not the result of any wholesale scepticism about the possibility of knowledge in general. Indeed, as noted in §2 above, Bayle regularly limited his scepticism to speculative questions – he did not question our ability to acquire knowledge of more straightforward matters. And so, in the case of theodicy, he denied that we can ever justify the ways of God because, continuing to consider Malebranche’s theory the best conception possible, he found that it conflicted with moral truths we know already.

What exactly did Bayle find morally unacceptable in Malebranche’s theodicy? To Bayle it was evident that ‘those who permit an evil which it is easy for them to prevent are culpable’ and that ‘those who let perish a person that they could easily save are guilty of his death’. How, then, could God have let the whole human race fall into crime and misery? He could easily have prevented the disobedience of Adam and Eve or at least have stopped the consequences of their fall. Malebranche’s own response, of course, was that God let these things happen because the pursuit of the good must yield to respect for certain general principles. Bayle was not opposed to the idea that there exist duties superior to maximizing the good. But he insisted that such duties consist in securing an urgent good for the agent or someone other, or in saving them from a disastrous evil. These are not, however, considerations which could have moved God in the present case. No other parties but himself and humanity were involved and since, being perfect, he himself had need of nothing, nothing could therefore weigh more heavily than his benevolence toward humanity, his creation (1703–7: II.91, 150, 155).

It could be said that underlying this difference between Malebranche and Bayle were not only two models of moral rationality but also two opposing conceptions of love. On the one hand, there is the idea of love as merited, according to which if one is perfect, one must love oneself above all; on the other hand, there is the idea of love as a gift, which implies that the more perfect one is, the fewer obstacles there must be to the love one bears others. Thus, just as Malebranche wrote that ‘one cannot love anything except in proportion to how much one believes it lovable’ (Malebranche [1715] 1974 XVI: 96), so Bayle affirmed that ‘nothing fits better with true grandeur and supreme perfection than to put one’s power and knowledge in the service of others’ happiness’ ([1707] 1964–8 IV: 63).

In response to Bayle’s objection one could imagine Malebranche, like many deontologists, invoking the classic principle of ‘double effect’, according to which actions are to be judged morally by their intended effects, not by all their foreseeable effects. Is it not true that Adam and Eve were themselves free to prevent the evil, that the responsibility for it was their own, and that it was a paramount duty to respect their freedom of action, even at the price of not doing what one knew would produce the greatest good? Indeed, in a letter of 11 December 1706 to the Père André, Malebranche formally embraced the principle of double effect. But Bayle anticipated this reply, claiming that it is an evident principle that one ought not to give someone a good (such as freedom of action) that one knows the person will abuse (1703–7: II.81).

In the Dictionnaire Bayle presents a remarkable example to illustrate this point (1696: ‘Paulicians’ Remark E). A mother who sent her daughters to a ball knowing that they would succumb to temptation, but being content simply to encourage them to be virtuous and to threaten to disown them if they did not return home virgins, would not count, he observed, as loving either her daughters or chastity. Bayle did recognize duties of ‘strict obligation’, involving respect for the freedom of others which ordinarily take precedence over the maximization of the good. But he believed that such duties must be suspended in emergency cases, where a catastrophic evil is to be avoided (1696: ‘Paulicians’ Remark M). There, we must choose the lesser evil (See Malebranche, N. §§4–5).

4 Bayle and Leibniz

Bayle’s critique of Malebranche might suggest that he held a ‘consequentialist’ conception of moral rationality, according to which we should always seek the greatest net good overall, even at the price of using means that in themselves are bad. This conception underlies, in fact, the theodicy which Leibniz laid out in the Essais de théodicée. There he argued that God reasons according to the ‘règle du meilleur’ (‘the rule of the better’), so that what is evil in itself should be chosen if it forms the indispensable means to bringing about the greatest good overall (Leibniz 1710: §§22, 209). The general and immutable laws according to which God created the world constitute not limits (as Malebranche believed) but, rather, means to the maximization of the good.

Leibniz directed the Essais primarily against Bayle himself and his claim that theodicy is impossible. In his view, Bayle had sold theodicy short by failing to consider a version which makes rigorous use of ‘la règle du meilleur’. Leibniz’s position seems to look all the stronger if Bayle’s arguments against Malebranche are themselves consequentialist in spirit. However, the argumentative situation is more complex. Bayle’s conception of morality was not really consequentialist. And though Bayle died four years before the publication of Leibniz’s book, he was familiar with a theodicy of that form and rejected it as morally unacceptable (see Leibniz, G.W. §3).

The consequentialist theodicy with which Bayle was acquainted was one outlined by Isaac Jaquelot in his 1705 book, La conformité de la raison et de la foi (The Conformity of Reason and Faith). Jaquelot himself rather closely followed the Malebranchian position. But he claimed that Bayle’s objections to Malebranche relied on the principle that one ought always to do that action which will bring about the most good overall. Suppose, he wrote (treating the question of theodicy once again through the story about the mother and her daughters), the mother was sending her daughters to the ball so that, in virtue of all the foreseeable consequences of that decision, a ‘great, noble, and comprehensive plan’ for the reformation of the kingdom would be realized. If Bayle required that the welfare of the daughters should count for more than the duty of respecting their freedom, he ought also to admit, so Jaquelot argued, that the still greater good of accomplishing that plan should outweigh their welfare. They ought to be sent to the ball. God’s decision not to prevent Adam and Eve’s disobedience would thus be justified on the same basis – namely, by the greater good which his overall plan of eventual redemption would bring about.

Bayle took up Jaquelot’s challenge in his Réponse aux questions d’un provincial (1703–7: II.153). Such a mother, he replied, would be even more wicked than the one first imagined. Agreeing that, taken absolutely, the good of the kingdom is greater than the good of the daughters, Bayle maintained that there are some things we should never do to another person, even at the cost of foregoing a tremendous good. This rejoinder to Jaquelot was, no doubt, the objection Bayle would have made to Leibniz had he lived to see Leibniz’s Essais de théodicée. Once again we find him rejecting a theodicy on the basis of moral principles which he claims we know to be true.

An important question, however, is whether Bayle’s moral thought, taken as a whole, is coherent. How can we harmonize his criticism of Malebranche, according to which the prevention of a significant evil must weigh more than the duties of strict obligation, with his objection to Jaquelot (and by anticipation to Leibniz) that the maximization of the good must yield to certain prohibitions on the treatment of others? How, we might say, can Bayle apparently reject both deontological and consequentialist conceptions of moral reasoning? In fact, Bayle was perfectly consistent. In his rejection of Malebranche, the operative principle was that we may suspend a strict duty with regard to an individual if we wish to avoid a very great evil to this same individual. Such a principle is clearly compatible with the principle Bayle invoked in his response to Jaquelot, namely that we must never cause a great evil to an individual in order to procure a great good for others.

Bayle was no doubt a deontological thinker, since he believed that there are duties superior to that of bringing about the most good overall. The fundamental coherence of Bayle’s thought emerges once we recognize that a deontological ethic can take two different forms. Malebranche’s version limits the maximization of the good by the demands of what a rational agent owes himself. Bayle’s version limits it by the demands of what one owes to the inviolable individuality of others. The core conviction of Bayle’s ethics was the refusal to sacrifice individuals to a greater whole. No doubt, it had its psychological roots in his own experience as a Huguenot refugee from religious persecution. Bayle’s skill in giving it philosophical articulation shows him to be, despite his scepticism, one of the great moral thinkers.