The Enlightenment

A Beginner's Guide

Kieron O'Hara

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781780741536
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Blamed for the bloody disasters of the 20th century: Auschwitz, the Gulags, globalisation, Islamic terrorism; heralded as the harbinger of reason, equality, and the end of arbitrary rule, the Enlightenment has been nothing if not divisive. To this day historians disagree over when it was, where it was, and what it was (and sometimes, still is). Kieron O'Hara deftly traverses these conflicts, presenting the history, politics, science, religion, arts, and social life of the Enlightenment not as a simple set of easily enumerated ideas, but an evolving conglomerate that spawned a very diverse set of thinkers, from the radical Rousseau to the conservative Burke.

1

Introduction: aspects of Enlightenment

For a definition of Enlightenment, we do have a handy starting point. At the pinnacle of the age, 1784, one of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, wrote a short piece entitled ‘What is Enlightenment?’ That piece is a splendidly concise summary of much of the preceding epoch, but nevertheless hints at some of the difficulties of definition.

Kant is commendably direct: his first sentence defines Enlightenment as ‘man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage’. The goal is intellectual freedom; people need to be liberated from authority. Kant’s motto for the age is ‘sapere aude’, often translated as ‘dare to know!’ So the search for intellectual freedom is a moral one, and failure to embark on it is owing to ‘laziness and cowardice’. One should argue with authority, because one should claim ‘the freedom to make public use of one’s reason at every point’. That is not to say that we should be wrangling perpetually. We play various roles in life which quite properly restrict our freedom, but we have an individual core at the centre of our being which should dare to know, argue and find out. Kant gives the example of a clergyman who is obligated to the church to give orthodox sermons to his flock, but as a scholar, it is his duty to test such orthodoxy against his reason, to question and argue.

The Enlightened man challenges orthodoxy, argues against authority when his reason is compromised, and understands the limits to his reason dictated by the roles he plays in society. That is an important goal, but picking it apart exposes many of the tensions of the Enlightenment. For instance, the reader will no doubt have noticed its gendered language. Enlightened thinkers (of both sexes – even the important feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft) usually referred to man or mankind meaning all people, men and women, and it is certainly futile and anachronistic to condemn writers of a quarter of a millennium ago for lacking sensitivities we now possess. But their assumptions were indeed often sexist, and so the gendered language can also betray an unmotivated privileging of men’s experience over women’s. Kant, for example, asserts that the attempt to use one’s own reason ‘is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind (and by the entire fair sex).’ In this book, I shall generally use the gendered language used by the people on whom I am commentating, because to do otherwise would risk misstating key positions, and will leave the very difficult question of evaluating sexism to the reader, together with the additional question, if sexism be shown, of identifying whether it crucially undermines the arguments of the texts it appears in.

Kant is also unashamedly elitist. ‘New prejudices will serve as well as old ones to harness the great unthinking masses.’ He is very nervous of the idea that letting all individuals think for themselves is the best way to promote Enlightened values; he much prefers the idea that a radical prince (he is thinking of Frederick the Great of Prussia) should shepherd his people ‘out of barbarity’. Only an Enlightened despot with a numerous and well-disciplined army, he thinks, can let his people argue. ‘A republic could not dare say such a thing. … A greater degree of civil freedom appears advantageous to the freedom of mind of the people, and yet it places inescapable limitations upon it; a lower degree of civil freedom, on the contrary, provides the mind with room for each man to extend himself to his full capacity.’

Indeed, Kant denied that he lived in an ‘enlightened age’ at all (though ‘we do live in an “age of enlightenment”’). The Enlightenment, even for the foremost philosopher of the age, had not produced Enlightenment for the mass of people even by 1784. How, then, should a beginner’s guide proceed?

The Enlightenment has very blurry borders, and no-one quite agrees on the fine detail, but there is a core that can be described. My hope in this book will be to guide the beginner around that core, so that she – or he! – can get to know the rough territory, and start to make her own judgements about the age.

In the following sections I will sketch out some representative Enlightenment positions, with the firm caveats that thinkers of other eras have had similar ideas, and that Enlightened thinkers could sometimes hold very uncharacteristic opinions. But, if one does not mind generalising enormously, one can provide a not inaccurate view of the key aspects of the processes and products of Enlightened thought.

Aspect 1: new sources of authority, particularly grounded in human capacities

Any kind of belief, be it scientific, religious, philosophical, political or common sense, has a justification, a reason why it is believed. In the Enlightenment, there was a broad and general shift in the accepted justifications of belief away from authorities and toward the individual, who was expected to take more responsibility for the beliefs he held. This attitude was at least partly due to the social changes brought about by increased literacy, and was not unnaturally concentrated in the towns – the social mix allowed more people access to a larger number of opinions jostling to be heard.

Older sources of authority such as the king, God, the Bible, or tradition lost their hold, and newer ones, such as experimental observation, reason and logic became more respectable. The past has no claim on the future. As Kant put it, ‘An age cannot bind itself and ordain to put the succeeding one into such a condition that it cannot extend its (at best very occasional) knowledge, purify itself of errors, and progress its general enlightenment’¹ (seemingly neutral between a moral and a practical claim). Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s take was that genuine philosophes ‘respect that which they ought to, and prize that which they can. This is their real crime’ – i.e. the real reason for their notoriety. The opinion of ‘the people’ also became important, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theories about ‘the general will’ were adapted by Robespierre and the French Revolutionaries.

To make all that clearer, let’s take three examples. Many used to believe that the legitimacy of a ruler that made it obligatory for his subjects to obey him derived directly from God (the divine right of kings). In the Enlightenment the idea of a social contract emerged whereby subjects obeyed the king only in return for various services that the king was contractually obliged to perform, such as providing law and order, protection from want or outside invasion (see chapter six for more on this). So although royalism declined during the Enlightenment, it didn’t disappear, while a royalist like Voltaire would rest his arguments on a strongly-argued rational case, not on the realities of tradition or power.

A second example is religious belief. Whereas in the seventeenth century one was expected to conform to the religion of one’s country, and one could easily find oneself executed for holding the wrong beliefs, there was much argument in the eighteenth century that toleration of all religions was important, because God was less appreciative of someone getting it right, than of them making a genuine attempt to understand religious truth, even if they got it wrong.

Thirdly, science arose as authority, particularly religious authority or the authority of the great classical thinkers such as Aristotle or Galen, declined (see chapter seven). Truth about the world was found not in the library or the Bible, but via investigation of the phenomena in the world, with experiment and observation. If observations went against authority, so much the worse for authority.

There were three important corollaries of this new attitude. First, the power of tradition was markedly reduced, and old habits and attitudes were almost automatically questioned. The eighteenth century was a period of self-conscious modernisation. Secondly, there was a general increase in toleration; people with opposing views should be able, it was felt, to live peacefully alongside each other, as long as those views did not affect other people materially. Pierre Bayle argued that people cannot be forced to believe, pointing out that each of us generally strives to obey God as best we can in good faith even though we diverge, and this is generally unproblematic. On the other hand, we can recognise when people are doing evil, and can deal with them accordingly.² A stronger argument, honed by John Locke in his ‘Letter concerning toleration’, was that the religious and secular spheres are and should be kept separate; the policing of conscience is simply beyond the competence and authority of the magistrate.

The third corollary of the new attitude was that the individual became more important as a political entity, correspondingly more time was devoted to studying and theorising the psychology of the individual, and individual liberty was increasingly seen as an important political goal. The work of Isaiah Berlin and others³ reminds us that ‘liberty’ can be interpreted in many different ways, in the Enlightenment as much as in any era, but, however broadly construed, it was the watchword for many an Enlightenment thinker.

Mystery, in particular the mysteries of religion and folk-magic, became unfashionable. Alchemy and magic declined, and in the arts clarity began to reign. The dense, metaphorical poetry of the seventeenth century, represented in England by Donne and Vaughan, was replaced by the civilised, straight-speaking work of John Dryden (1631–1700) and Alexander Pope, and the acme of poetical achievement was when one’s lines were ‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’. The complex polyphonic music of Byrd or Palestrina from the sixteenth century was followed by the beautiful, joyous works of Bach and Händel.

The mysteries of religion were replaced by the assumption that God was basically rational and reasonable. The mysteries were really a way for the church to prevent ordinary people discovering inconvenient facts, and to obscure sensible ways of governing lives and nations. In Voltaire’s short novel, The Ingenu, a noble and naïve Huron Indian transported to eighteenth century Paris notes that where matters are clear, there is no conflict – there are no sects in geometry. But then why would God make the truths of geometry clear and the truths of morality obscure? ‘It is an absurdity, an outrage against the human race, an attack on the Infinite and Supreme Being, to say: “There is one truth essential to man, and God has hidden it.” ’

Aspect 2: confidence and optimism

This change in attitude towards authority coincided, not unnaturally, with another shift towards greater confidence about human powers of control. The example in particular of Newton’s mechanics showed that exact theories of even very complex phenomena could be developed that not only explained but allowed one to intervene and alter the environment. Newton’s advances were echoed in the world of politics by Locke, whose theories showed how a government could be tolerant while retaining power and legitimacy, and the example of the English government after 1688 proved it was possible. The constraints of nature could be tamed by commerce, new transport and communications systems, agriculture, gardening and so on. The vast wilderness of America presented a big, but not insuperable challenge. This confidence often displayed itself as optimism about the future of mankind, in marked contrast to previous generations who tended to look back nostalgically to the glories of Greece and Rome whose remains were so visible, or to the Biblical world where man was closer to God.

Optimism developed into the idea of providence, that the world couldn’t be any better than it was because God would surely not make an imperfect world. This view is generally associated with the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, but was certainly not unique to him. Pope’s Essay on Man gave the philosophy its most concise formulation.

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good:

And, spite of pride in erring reason’s spite,

One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

Confidence about progress became optimism about ability. One could have total knowledge of a state of affairs so that all variables were explained. Precision became important, and tools, instruments and measurements became increasingly accurate. The irreducibility of complexity was not seen as an issue. Abstraction and, thanks largely to Newton, mathematics were important tools. Expertise and expert opinion were admired. Scientist Joseph Priestley made the connection between totalising and optimism explicit:

[A]ll knowledge will be subdivided and extended; and knowledge, as Lord Bacon observes, being power, the human powers will, in fact, be increased; nature, including both its materials, and its laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it, and will grow daily more happy, each in himself, and more able (and, I believe, more disposed) to communicate happiness to others. Thus, whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal, beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.⁴

Aspect 3: scepticism

The balance of scepticism and confidence could never reach equilibrium. Scepticism about the old authorities very quickly turned on newer ones; Bayle was unimpressed even with Newton, while Voltaire’s Candide, Or Optimism (1759) parodied the optimism of the age as the philosophy of Dr Pangloss, the metaphyisico-theologico-cosmologist (spoofing Leibniz) who suffers terrible depredations (he catches syphilis that makes his nose drop off, is hanged, dissected, enslaved and whipped, in that order) while constantly intoning his view that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’.

One could be as sceptical of the fashionable nostrums of the Enlightenment as of the unfashionable mysteries and rituals of the Church – and many thinkers of the period were, but it did not have to lead to crippling inaction: James Boswell reports Dr Johnson arguing ‘take the case of a man who is ill. I call two physicians: they differ in opinion. I am not to lie down, and die between them: I must do something.’⁵

One effect of the clash between scepticism and confidence was a split between, broadly, Anglophone thinking and Continental thinking that persists to the present. The American revolutionaries veered toward the sceptical and conservative in politics, while the French revolutionaries were characterised by confidence. As a direct result of their respective political histories, Americans even now instinctively want government kept out of affairs, while the French expect top-down solutions to social problems. Scions of the two political cultures have tended to detest each other, and still do to the present day.⁶ Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, which appears to be a factual description of the state in which he lived, was in part a riposte to the celebrated French naturalist Buffon, who had argued (not on the basis of first hand experience) that nature in the New World was inferior to that in the Old World, and that Americans were less virile than Europeans because of the dense forests and marshes in which they lived.

There was a warm but impermanent rapprochement after French support had helped America defeat Britain in the Revolutionary War. Jefferson was strongly committed to the ideals of the French Revolution, and is an important figure for those who stress the continuity of the American and French Revolutions. Nevertheless, the radicalism and single-minded confidence of the French Revolutionaries worried many Anglophone thinkers; even initially sympathetic figures like Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine ultimately became troubled. In each case, their confidence in political and historical theory was shaken by real events. Historian Jonathan Israel argues that while scepticism and moderation towards theory may have been appropriate in the short term, it was the highly theoretical, confident radical theorists, not the sceptics, who furnished us with the treasured liberties of the modern age.⁷

Aspect 4: universal reason

The move away from authority meant that the individual needed the ability to find things out, and come to the right conclusions about the world. Scepticism about authority was fine, but it had no point unless something better could be found. The ‘something better’ was re...