The alternating currents of Benjamin Franklin’s thought on science and faith

Abstract

Benjamin Franklin, throughout his life, demonstrated an ambiguous attitude toward the interaction between religion and science, as evidenced directly in his celebrated Autobiography, as well as indirectly in lesser-known writings such as his technical papers on the nature of the electrical charge. This paper argues, based on the poststructuralist work Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, that Franklin’s view of science and faith can be explained by assuming that both the religious devotion of his clerical peers and his own scientific enterprise were the consequence of “desire-production”. In other words, the objections of organised religion to science that were still a part of Franklin’s world in the mid-18^th-century may have been little more than the power-brokering that is so central to the human enterprise. This intrinsic drive to dominance is epitomised by Deleuze and Guattari as the Oedipal imposition on human individuality that is so characteristic of modern psychoanalysis, when in actuality it is a tool of capitalist society. If Franklin managed to circumvent these powerful factors, then he also sidestepped the traditional dichotomy between the natural world and culture, thereby avoiding the blatant contradictions between the will to scientific knowledge and technological prowess, on the one hand, and the will to submit society to divine punishment, on the other.