Abstract
Having critiqued Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion as the nearest thing to an Anglophone manifesto for atheists, I now turn to Michel Onfray’s French equivalent, the highly popular Traité d’athéologie (2005), to critique it in a comparable manner. Whereas Dawkins, in the tradition of Darwinian evolutionism, extols a virtually hypostatized Natural Selection as a surrogate for God, Onfray wants to take the French Enlightenment and the French revolutionary impetus to their logical conclusions and makes a supreme virtue out of good sense, rationality and intelligence. Onfray is an advocate not only of atheism, but his own form of hedonism, anarchism and aesthetic cynicism. As usual, I will maintain that any atheistic position must fall back on the ‘ultimacy’ of its protagonists’ own arguments, and once again it can be established that in Onfray’s case his platform statement is full of inaccuracies and misunderstandings, logical slides and internal inconsistencies, and injections of angry irony and personal emotion that weaken his case. As usual, I simply concentrate as a scholar of religious questions on the argumentative backing and relative weight of Onfray’s case against religion (especially the three major monotheisms), and as an historian of ideas I will attempt to explain Onfray’s manifesto against the background of the Frenchman’s whole philosophical opus, especially his ongoing work Contre-histoire de la philosophie (2004–).
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Notes
- 1.
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In my view, however, Freud is capable of being reread as a special Kabbalist.
- 4.
While being cautious about Onfray’s Abrégé hédoniste (2012), it surprising how much it legitimates what already pertains in common enough Western mores.
- 5.
Going back to Julian the Apostate on the clergy’s ‘unprincipled attempts to alarm the people’ (about the consequences of going back to the old gods) ‘… Men should be taught and won over by reason’ (Epist. 52).
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In Antiquity this is for Onfray the time of Cynics and the Epicurean great Lucretius.
- 7.
The criticism can be extended to other schemas, including a new sociological one, that have entered a ‘post-secular age’ (see Beckford 2012).
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Important and learned works on the subject are completely without attention by Onfray, e.g., May (2003).
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A ‘tradition’ which receives some leniency in Onfray’s treatment compared to others.
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Contrast with the great Joseph Needham’s (1931) wiser title: The Great Amphibium: Four Lectures on the Position of Religion in a World Dominated by Science.
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Whereas Dawkins accuses the religious mind of not passing beyond blind adherence to absolutes to accept the greyness of reality in the light of day (2011), the problem is that relativism without also allowing for clear-sighted, transcendent vision usually indicates that a reflector’s thinking has not been refined and tested enough, and has ‘discontinued in the struggle’ for deeper or higher insights (‘above the level of ordinary science,’ one might say) informed by absolute (or absolute-looking) ideals.
- 14.
Hence ex-Communist atheist N. Gudskov’s significant comment on the Manifesto’s trans. into Esperanto that Onfray’s ateismo was ‘subkektiva limigta kay katolika,’ (yes, ‘Catholic’) and thus ‘an intellectually inadequate popular work of a fledgling’; discussed by Dumain (2011).
- 15.
Onfray (2007a, 89) mentions Nicolas d’Autrecourt, who was condemned more for his skeptical tendencies than atomism itself .
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Though not in every case, it seems, for liberation theologians are agreeable to him (Onfray 2007a, 53–54).
- 17.
The last two quotations are from D. Cupitt’s appreciation on the back cover.
- 18.
The parallel to Pandora’s box is also forcefully and too glibly and unthinkingly applied, especially in the case of the Qur’an.
- 19.
It is surely not necessary to list the plethora of relevant Internet sites.
- 20.
He is better on the later emperor Theodosius I (2007a, 147).
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Trompf, G.W. (2017). Onfray’s Popular Atheological Manifesto: A Philosophical Estimate. In: Cotter, C., Quadrio, P., Tuckett, J. (eds) New Atheism: Critical Perspectives and Contemporary Debates. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54964-4_8
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