Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of enlightenment 263
within this naturalistic horizon. As we have seen, Descartes sees human
beings as corporeal (res extensa) and thus as comparable to all other natural
beings, but he also sees humans as incorporeal (res cogitans) and thus
as comparable to God. Hobbes, by contrast, argues that human beings are
no diff erent than the rest of nature, mere bodies in motion that can no
more act like God than create something out of nothing. Descartes is thus
able to retain a space for human freedom, while Hobbes concludes that
everything happens as the result of necessity. In this way, the disagreement
that tore the premodern world to pieces reappears as the disagreement
about the nature of human freedom and natural necessity. And as we shall
see, it is this deep disagreement at the beginning of modern thought that
reemerges in the end in and as Kant’s antinomy. Th erefore, the antinomy
that is taken to mark the end of the Enlightenment and thus the end of
modernity is only the recognition of the fundamental contradictions that
were always hidden in the heart of the modern project.
While they disagreed about the nature and relation of man and God,
Descartes and Hobbes otherwise followed remarkably similar paths. Both
were acutely aware of the dangers of religious fanaticism. Th ey were also
both opponents of dogmatism, particularly in its scholastic form, and
similarly believed that that the idea of individual revelation was extraordinarily
dangerous. 17 Th ey also shared similar epistemological views. Both
agreed that the senses do not give us immediate knowledge of the external
world but only stimulate our sensory apparatus to form images in us.
Knowledge of the truth then cannot be attained by relying on the senses
and observation. Instead it is necessary to free reason from the snares of
the senses and open up a space for the reconstruction or representation of
the world hidden behind the veil of perception. In this way, epistemology
for both became the prelude to any metaphysics. In seeking this new path
to truth both drew on Bacon’s notion of science, but they recognized that
his method was inadequate to establish such a science. In their opinion,
his inductive empiricism would never produce the science he imagined
and desired. Science required a better method, and this they hoped to establish
by applying Galileo’s mathematical analysis of motion to broader
problems.
Descartes and Hobbes thus agreed about the dangers of religion, the
diffi culties that confronted understanding, the priority of epistemology,
the need for science, and the importance of a mathematical method at the
basis of such a science. However, as we have seen, they disagreed about the
nature of the world hidden behind the veil of perception, about the capacity
of science to comprehend it, and most importantly about the nature