The Enlightenment

Prof Mark Knights

Two lectures

• 1: What was the Enlightenment? What did it think it was challenging? What was its scope? What aspects of life did it want to shape or influence? So, how the Enlightenment saw itself.

• 2: Why is it important for modernists to understand the Enlightenment? What was its legacy and why is that legacy a controversial one? Is the Enlightenment a useful term, does it have a coherence, a common set of values? So, how the Enlightenment has been seen by others.

The terms of Enlightenment

• Enlightenment: it was contemporary: 1784 Prussian essay competition ‘was ist Aufklärung?’ More common was use of the verb enlightening: shedding light on. Description of a ‘process’ rather than an ‘event’ or period (the term ‘Age of Reason’, which is also used, does suggest a period). The image of light.

• But mainly C19th term used to describe an intellectual and cultural movement in the ‘long eighteenth century’ (c.1650 or 1680 to 1815).‘Early Enlightenment’ (late C17th-early C18th, esp in Holland and England) and ‘late’ or ‘high’ Enlightenment (late C18th, which pushed ideas outlined earlier further and with a new confidence)

• Philosophes – philosophers, public intellectuals• Where? That’s a point of debate to which we

must return. Traditionally Europe, especially northwestern Europe, though increasingly also seen as a phenomenon affecting the Atlantic world and governing Europe’s interaction with global expansion

The Enlightenment as an attack on the ‘ancien régime’

• ‘ancien régime’: a term invented at the French Revolution of 1789 to describe the ‘old rule’, ‘old order’, or ‘former regime’ that the revolutionaries were trying to sweep away

• The Revolutionaries of 1789 saw themselves as carrying out many of the ideas formulated by the philosophes and idolised some of them

1794 Allegory of the

Revolution by Nicolas Henry

Jeaurat de Bertry,

showing Jean-Jacques

Rousseau

Interring Voltaire in the Panthéon 1791

The Enlightenment caricature of the ‘ancien régime’

• Governed by outdated notions of authority and order, based on Scripture and custom

• Two key institutions: monarchy/state and church, buttressed by hierarchical view of society and inequalities of wealth and gender.

• Monarchy: divine right, absolute, sacred and paternal power, excluding people from power, no right to resist. Bishop Bossuet, Politics Drawn from Holy Scripture (1707)Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha (1680)

The ancien régime church• Bible as source of wisdom for human affairs• Powerful local and national institution governing

people’s lives and beliefs• Man as essentially corrupt and evil• Concerned with life after death rather than life on

earth• Intolerant of other beliefs• Opposed to progress (eg Galileo)• The Protestant reformation had ‘lifted the veil’

(Voltaire) but not removed it• The church harboured ‘priestcraft’, ‘superstition’ and

‘ignorance’

Social orders

• Great chain of being• Society hierarchically arranged and fixed,

reflecting the divine order• Equality was an impossibility since it

contravened that notion of hierarchy• Liberty contravened notion of order• Subjects not citizens• Rural rather than urban society

What positive ideals did the Enlightenment seek instead?

Two over-arching objectives:1) Reason and experiment

Immanuel Kant, 1784 ‘dare to know’, free oneself from being slaves to others, think for yourself, use reason. Deification of reason

Experimental philosophy – don’t go on assumptions but start from direct observation, and that will clear you from the ignorance of the past

William Blake’s depiction of Isaac Newton as the personification of reason , 1805

2) progress towards the good life• Optimistic belief in what man could achieve through learning and

observation of himself and nature. • Belief in progress. Marquis de Condorcet, ‘Sketch for a Historical

Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind’ (c.1794): advances in reason, knowledge and harnessing science lead to progress; through medical science ‘the perfectibility of man is unlimited’. Vision of universal education; greater leisure; better provision to feed the population and produce enjoyable goods; reason itself will progress and advance; the sexes will become equal; prejudices will be eradicated. ‘Men will know then that if they have obligations to beings who do not yet exist, these obligations do not consist in giving life, but in giving happiness. Their object is the general welfare of the human species’.

• Man as good and as a social animal• Human happiness and the good life as the purpose of society. • There were of course occasions when these convictions were

shaken eg 1755 Lisbon earthquake; French Revolution’s excesses.

But can we identify areas where the Enlightenment appears distinctive?

• 1) Religion. Relationship between man and God; between Church and State; the nature of revealed religion; the superiority of Christianity; and the nature of any Church. Hostility to superstition and to intolerance (écraser l’infâme). Some adopted a more rational form of religion, deism (Voltaire, Thomas Paine) and even atheism (Baron d’Holbach). But ironically many clerics were part of the Enlightenment e.g. Abbé Sièyes on the ‘third estate’.

2) Political Authority• New ways of thinking

about the powers of the people and their rulers.

• Ideas of contract and natural rights (John Locke; Rousseau).

• Justification of revolution (Britain 1689, America 1776, France 1789)

• Desacralisation of monarchy; admiration of republics (strong influence of antiquity)

3) The public• The public as a force• Proliferation of print and

case for press freedom• New institutions where

the public met and debated: coffee houses, cafés, salons.

4) Knowledge• The organisation and

collection of knowledge and artefacts (Carl Linnaeus 1707-1778; the Encyclopédie 1751-1772) – D’Alembert and Diderot

• New energy to understand the natural world, the body, and scientific processes (inoculation, analysis of air, the microscope, dissection and medicine)

5) Wealth and luxury

• Changing notions about the creation of wealth – a move away from consumption as sinful and from protectionist economics – Adam Smith 1776

• Debate about luxury

6) Exploration of the world

• Scientific and economic drivers

• Encounters with non-western civilisations – relativism and questioning how far Europe was superior (Diderot, Tahiti)

• Fascination with the exotic

Variety within the Enlightenment• How these ideals were

thought about varied. Pro and anti-Church/Christianity; pro and anti monarchy; different ways of thinking about sociability or what was the good life.

• And less novel than it liked to claim? There had been earlier thinkers and movements on which the Enlightenment built

The good life? A satire, by Gillray, of the prince of Wales (future George IV), 1792