![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The paper focuses on Priestley’s complex views on the essence of God in connection with his materialism, elaborated in the Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777/ 1782). This issue is crucial if one wishes to get a clear idea of what Priestley’s materialism amounts to; whether it is mainly a thesis about the material grounds of the human mind (“psychological materialism”), or a more far-reaching one about what kind of substances exist in the world (a version of “ontological materialism”). The claim that God may be material allows for the most radical version of ontological materialism according to which everything in the world is material, without altogether denying that God exists. In fact, Priestley considers and partially defends at least three different views on the potential materiality of God: (1) an agnostic stance that is his official view, (2) materialism about God based on his own theory of matter, and (3) “gross” materialism about God. The aim of the paper is to analyze these three views, in particular concerning what kind of materialism they support and whether they can contribute to the consistent Christian materialism Priestley envisaged.
Notes on contributor
Falk Wunderlich teaches philosophy at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. He is the author of Kant und die Bewußtseinstheorien des 18. Jahrhunderts (2005) and has recently edited the special issue Varieties of Early Modern Materialism of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy (vol. 24.5, 2016, with Patricia Springborg) and Kant and his German Contemporaries (2018, with Corey W. Dyck).
Notes
1 I would like to thank audiences at the British Society for the History of Philosophy annual conference at Sheffield, at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, in particular Charles T. Wolfe and John Walsh, as well as an anonymous reviewer, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
2 Thomson, Bodies of Thought, (espec. 135–74) has shown at length how British materialism especially is not necessarily atheist; cf. also Wolfe, Materialism; Wunderlich, “Materialism in Late Enlightenment Germany”; Wunderlich, “Empirismus und Materialismus an der Göttinger Georgia Augusta” for the Christian character of German materialism. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 13, in fact argues that Priestley’s Christian materialism is not altogether coherent; on Priestley and Radical Enlightenment, see also Sakkas, “Joseph Priestley on Metaphysics and Politics.”
3 Priestley, Disquisitions, 103.
4 To the best of my knowledge, there has been no analysis of Priestley’s view of the essence of God in the literature so far.
5 Aspects of Priestley’s materialism in general have been discussed by Hiebert, “The Integration of Revealed Religion and Scientific Materialism”; Schofield, “Joseph Priestley”; Yolton, Thinking Matter, 107–26; Dybikowski, “Joseph Priestley, Metaphysician and Philosopher of Religion”; Mills, Joseph Priestley and the Intellectual Culture, 113–26.
6 Priestley, Disquisitions, 56.
7 Priestley, Disquisitions, 176.
8 For instance, he argues with regard to divine immateriality that “in the common sense of it, as signifying a being that has properties and powers, not only infinitly superior to, but most essentially different from, every thing that we call matter, it had been seen that I do not object to it”; Priestley, Disquisitions, 134.
9 Priestley, Hartley's Theory, xx.
10 The best-known example of the view that motion and thought are fundamentally incompatible is Leibniz’s mill argument.
11 Priestley, Hartley's Theory, 26f.
12 Locke, Essay, 295–317.
13 For example, Priestley argues: “Metaphysicians, however, affirm that we have a clear idea of spirit, as we have of matter, each being equally the unknown support of known properties, matter of extension and solidity, and spirit of sensation and thought. But still since the substance is confessedly unknown to us, it must also be unknown to us what properties it is capable of supporting; and, therefore, unless there be a real inconsistency in the properties themselves, those which have hitherto been ascribed to both substances may belong to either of them”; Priestley, Disquisitions, 72.
14 Priestley, Hartley's Theory, 27.
15 Priestley, Disquisitions, 27.
16 Priestley, A Free Discussion, 256. Compare with a similar statement in Priestley, Disquisitions, 26:
the powers of sensation or perception, and thought, as belonging to man, have never been found but in conjunction, with a certain organized system of matter; and therefore, that those powers necessarily exist in, and depend upon, such a system.
17 “As to the manner in which the power of perception results from organization and life, I own I have no idea at all; but the fact of this connection does not appear to be, on that account, the less certain”; Priestley, A Free Discussion, 257.
18 Even though Priestley does sound Humean here, he does not endorse Hume’s theory of causality, primarily but not exclusively because it undermines the argument from design Priestley supports (see, e.g., Priestley, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, 196–201). It would require another paper to examine whether Priestley’s rejection of Hume’s theory of causality is consistent with his own view of the connection between brain and mind; for a brief discussion, cf. Mudroch, “Joseph Priestley’s Eclectic Epistemology,” 59–64.
19 For Priestley’s theory of matter, cf. Heimann and McGuire, “Newtonian Forces,” 268–81; Schofield, “Joseph Priestley, the Theory of Oxidation, and the Nature of Matter.” Cf. also Tapper, “Reid and Priestley on Method and the Mind.”
20 Priestley, Disquisitions, 11–23.
21 For Priestley’s discussion of how the theory of matter bears on his materialism, cf. Priestley, Disquisitions, 11–23, and for the theory of matter as such, Priestley, History and Present State, 383–94.
22 Cf. Duncan, “Materialism and the Activity of Matter,” for a recent discussion of this problem in early modern materialism.
23 Priestley, Disquisitions, 16.
24 Priestley, Disquisitions, 24f.
25 In his Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (162), Priestley sides with d’Holbach, the then-unknown author of the Système de la Nature, that matter cannot exist without powers, and that, without powers, “all the properties of matter, and the substance itself vanishes from our idea.” But they differ in how these powers are spelled out. Whereas Priestley stipulates the two fundamental forces, d’Holbach relies on the (Epicurean) idea that matter is in motion since eternity, which Priestley criticizes because it leaves no significant role for God as prime mover.
26 Priestley, Disquisitions, xxxviii.
27 Priestley, Disquisitions, 111f.
28 Priestley, Disquisitions, 18.
29 Priestley, Disquisitions, 107.
30 Priestley, Disquisitions, 112f.
31 Priestley, Disquisitions, 113.
32 Priestley, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, 62.
33 It is also important that the spatial omnipresence of God follows from his more fundamental attributes of infinite power and knowledge. In turn, we can be assured that God is infinitely powerful and knowledgeable based on his role as a necessary first cause, i.e. from the argument from design (cf. Priestley, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, 59). The fundamental role of God as a first cause within the argument is also stated in Priestley, Institutes, 18: “That God is immaterial, eternal, and immutable, follows necessarily, as we have seen, from his being uncaused”; on Priestley’s claim here that God is immaterial, see Section 4.
34 Priestley, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, 62. For a similar yet different discussion of divine omnipresence, cf. Hartley, Observations on Man, vol. 2, 34f. Hartley here argues that, by God’s omnipresence, “we must be understood to mean, that his Power and Knowledge extend to all Places.” At the same time, he states that, because our ordinary notion of space only concerns material objects and God is, for Hartley, immaterial, we cannot understand how exactly God’s power extends to all places but only acknowledge it.
35 Priestley, Disquisitions, 54.
36 Priestley, Disquisitions, 54.
37 Descartes, Œuvres de Descartes 5, 269–70. Cf. Schmaltz, Descartes on Causation, 164–9, for a more detailed analysis of this problem in Descartes, Aquinas, and More.
38 Priestley, Disquisitions, 55.
39 Schofield, The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley, 172, emphasizes the educational character of the work as “a summary of a half-century of the writing of liberal theologians on a number of issues and as to become a standard exposition of beliefs for generations of Unitarians.”
40 Priestley, Institutes, 8f.
41 Priestley, Institutes, 10f.
42 Priestley, Institutes, 15.
43 Priestley’s first discussion of Boscovich’s dynamical theory of matter is in Priestley, History and Present State, 383–94.
44 The literature on Locke on superaddition is vast and controversial, cf. recently Stuart, Locke’s Metaphysics, 264–280; Jolley, Locke's Touchy Subjects.
45 Priestley, Institutes, 16 (my emphasis).
46 “If by the term immaterial we simply mean to denote a substance that has properties and powers essentially different from those of created matter, it is plain that I have no objection to the term” (Priestley, Disquisitions, 108; cf. Priestley, Disquisitions, 152, 222). It would be a valuable enterprise to compare Priestley’s theology laid out in the Institutes, which was written for the general public and had a formative role in the history of Unitarianism, with his theological views developed in the Disqusitions.
47 For an overview of the debate, cf. McCann, “Locke on Substance.”
48 Priestley, Disquisitions, 103.
49 There are plenty of other passages along these lines. For instance, he states that “we have no proper idea of any essence whatever” and gives as example the essence of matter: “Our ascribing impenetrability to matter might make us imagine that we had some kind of idea of its substance,” and he concludes that, besides knowing the powers of attraction and repulsion, “it will hardly be pretended, that we have any proper idea of the substance even of matter, considered as divested of all its properties” (Priestley, Disquisitions, 104). If we cannot meaningfully argue about the essence of matter, however, we should also refrain from speculating about the essence of God:
If then our ideas concerning matter do not go beyond the powers of which it is possessed, much less can our ideas go beyond powers, properties or attributes, with respect to the Divine Being; and if we confine our definition of God to these, it is not possible that we can make any mistake, or suffer by our misconceptions. (Priestley, Disquisitions, 105).Cf. Priestley, Disquisitions, 109 f., 138f., 147, 152.
50 Cf. Priestley, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, 192: “we know nothing of any thing but its properties.” According to Priestley, Disquisitions, 134, the Scriptures tell a lot about the unity of God, but nothing determinate with respect to the divine essence.
51 Priestley, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, 195.
52 Priestley, Disquisitions, 146.
53 Priestley, Disquisitions, 109.
54 Priestley, Disquisitions, 109. Cf. Priestley, Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, 173, in which Priestley argues that it is the power, not the substance, that we revere.
55 Priestley, Disquisitions, 147.
56 Priestley, Disquisitions, 150.
57 Priestley, Disquisitions, 105f.
58 Priestley, Disquisitions, 106. In line with his theory of matter, Priestley argues that to produce or create something is to communicate powers to a substance, and to annihilate is to take a substance’s powers away (Priestley, Disquisitions, 106).
59 Priestley, Disquisitions, 109f.
60 On some occasions, Hobbes at least hints at the possibility of a material God, for instance in Hobbes, Elements of Law, 65f. Cf. Springborg, “Hobbes’s Challenge.”
61 Priestley, Disquisitions, 107.
62 Priestley, Disquisitions, 108f.
63 Priestley, Disquisitions, 109.
64 Priestley, Disquisitions, 112.
65 Priestley, Disquisitions, 112.
66 Priestley, Disquisitions, 52.
67 Cf. Wunderlich, “Varieties of Early Modern Materialism.”
68 Gen 4,14; Gen 11, 5; Priestley, Disquisitions, 135.
69 Exod. 3,4; Priestley, Disquisitions, 136.
70 Priestley, Disquisitions, 113; In Priestley, History of Early Opinions, vol. 4, 322–4, on the contrary, Priestley seems more critical of the view that God might have appeared in a material form. Had the Church Fathers known, so Priestley holds, the nature of light, they would not have used the efflux metaphor as an explanation of how things emerge from God (i.e. in analogy to light as an efflux from the sun).
71 D’Holbach is an example of thoroughgoing ontological materialism that at the same time denies the existence of God, whereas Margaret Cavendish exempts God from her ontological materialism; cf. Wunderlich, “Varieties of Early Modern Materialism,” on the taxonomy of forms of materialism.
72 Priestley, Disquisitions, 147.