Enlightenment review lecture

in 1784 Immanual Kant published his famous essay "What is Enlightenment" where he defined enlightenment as "man's emergence from self-imposed tutelage." The motto of the enlightenment was "Dare to know".

It believed in the autonomy of man to shape his own destiny, It believed in the right of unfettered criticism. A new phrase emerges in the period, freedom of thought. It was opposed to all forms of stupidity and dependence.

Like the period of renaissance humanism, the enlightenment had an ill-defined program. The program was not a course of study, as with studia humanitatis, nor was it modeled upon the writings of the ancients. In fact, some historians have just described it as an attitude of mind. But I prefer to see it, first of all as a new sense of responsibility of intellectuals towards a public of readers. This was not, to be sure, a mass public. Most of the important enlightenment texts sold under 15,000 copies and moreover they were fabulously expensive, especially since many were banned. But one can detect in the works a new sense that there is a "public" out there - a body of common readers who are interested in philosophical, scientific and political matters. Enlightenment writers, regardless of their particular beliefs, thought that it was their task to raise this public out of ignorance, superstition and tradition, and to show the people the way to true knowledge based on reason.

At it's most basic level, the enlightenment began with the substitution of information for an oral tradition of folk-memory, superstition and blind habit. It's greatest project was the Encyclopedia, begun by Denis Diderot in 1752, which purported to contain nothing less than the sum of the world's knowledge. The world of man and nature could be categorized, indexed, and organized according to rational participles, it could be opened to reason and to light. Thus following the great 17th century thinkers most of us looked at last semester, Hobbes Descartes and Locke, enlightenment thinkers believed that society could be constructed along the lines of natural law, that a form of society could be justified and sanctioned, not by God of by the customs of the past, but by nature.

But unlike the 17th century types who believed that the natural passions of man had to held in check, such as Hobbes' belief that a ruler had to be the supreme figure who kept the rest of us in awe, the enlightenment was optimistic about man's innate capacity.

Hobbes and Descartes thought that human passions had to be controlled. We had to give up our desires for the sake of the general well being of all.

For the enlightenment passions and interests only had to be set free, and then modified by the capacities of the individual for self-knowledge and all would be well. Cartesian philosophy was based on a distrust of the senses. Most enlightenment philosophy suggested that we could cultivate the senses and certainly trust them in matters of scientific investigation. The loser here, if one may phrase it in such a crude way, was Descartes, the winner was Locke, Newton and British empiricism in general

Here's Voltaire: "Descartes especially, after making a pretense of doubt, speaks so categorically about what he does not understand that I suspect everything he tells me about the soul when he has misled me so badly about the body."

The enlightenment was not a solid block of fixed belief, but it possessed certain widely shared assumptions, or key words, that allow us to treat it as a whole, the resonant words were nature, science, reason, progress, and tolerance.

Progress:

Now the notion of progress is one that has to be carefully examined. It is customary to claim that belief in progress is one of distinguishing features of Western civ, indeed the very success of the West in achieving world domination during the nineteenth century is sometimes attributed to a confidence in its own destiny.

Where did this progress come from? If we look back at what we covered last semester it is hard to see in most Christian theology - Protestant or catholic - a belief in secular improvement. Progress is a progress of the soul after death, it does not apply to man's mortal state.

And even if we look at authors who began to edge to the sidelines, like Machiavelli, we see there an understanding that history is cyclical rather than linear. We are all bound to the wheel of fortune. Statesmanship is a kind of roulette in which the skill of the players could at best delay the inevitable process of secular corruption.

But by the mid eighteenth century there a general feeling that the moderns, namely the philosophes had beaten the ancients at least on some points.

Science and philosophy proposed a new model for man, unburdened with innate ideas, thanks to Locke we are permitted self-conscious development. Through the use of reason our minds might improve and so might our characters. Through the growth of academies of art and sciences perhaps even knowledge might be cumulative. Bacon's phrase "the advancement of science and art" is tagged onto the names of all kinds of suspicious projects.

Well one figure that you should be reading this week (but won't) Condorcet extends these earlier modest notions of progress and makes them into almost a millerianian religion, a belief that perfection is coming around the corner. He is not a giant thinker but his new enthusiasm for material advancement and the systematic erasure of ignorance will make him almost a saint for many 19th century thinkers. He is as the mathematicians among you will know one of the great developers of probability theory.

Progress is still primarily a political or moral concept, few thinkers before 1800 believed that economies, especially industrial economies would support ever greater populations in reasonable health, indeed cities were still viewed as homes of pestilence for most of their populations. Yet Condorcet did think that technology, especially gunpowder and the printing press and the metric system had put an end to centuries of baronial oppression and ecclesiastical superstition.

Even when he was hiding from Robespeirre's forces during the French revolution he could still write that progress may be more or less rapid but their will never be any retrogression. Progress then is irreversible in quite a new way.

Condorcet: nature had endowed men with "rigorous and pure principles of justice.... habitual promptings of an active and enlightened benevolence, a delicate and generous sensibility." We have seen the development millineunism in christians terms but in providential development. He saw clearer than most that the future was likely to bring further social leveling and unlike most he believed that progress also involved an equality of the sexes and races.

But perhaps what is striking about this "high" or late enlightenment is that Condorcet might have been convinced that individual promptings were leading to some kind of collective utopia, others were far less certain.

Indeed after 1760 we can detect a return of skepticism among many thinkers, especially on the issue of man's innate powers for self-improvement.

Hume insisted that man was much more a creature of habit than the senses. The mind was not rational in the way it interpreted the senses, much more like a jumble of ideas that we collect, with little guarantees about their truth. Hume used this understanding of the personal, uncertain nature of belief not only to attack established religions, but also to demolish the new appreciation of natural religion. Primitive man, he said, did not have a natural relationship to the world at all. He didn't see the fundamental beauty of God's design. He was simply a creature of habit, only seeking supernatural explanations for things he did not understand. Religion was an insurance policy against acts of God. So primitive folk had a God of fire to explain fire, a god of rain to explain storms etc. Our belief in one God, he said, was not a move in the direction of truth, but simply an attempt to flatter one particular god at the expense of the rest, and eventually this led to one God being credited with the creation of the world.

Hume then suggested that experience and habit rather than reason should be the cornerstone of philosophy and others went much further in pleading for centrality of sentiment and passion, and in denying the existence of a benevolent order in the natural world or the dictates of reason. A critique of pure reason, the title of Kant's 1788 book, developed within the enlightenment itself.

Naturalism

After 1760 we see the development of naturalism, the idea that society itself corrupts. Skepticism, like Hume, could lead to notion that the social world operated by the law of the jungle, not by divine providence.

This is where J.J. Rousseau fits in, and doesn't fit in easily. He was a very difficult person who constantly either cut himself off or abused his friends. He was also not a systematic or consistent thinker and therefore he has been claimed as the founder of many opposing bodies of belief.

He is often touted as the father of romanticism, because of hisworship of nature and imagination.

But he has also been seen as the originator of egalitarian democracy, the first person to suggest that the state should step in to insure a degree of social equality. And last, but certainly not least, he has been claimed as the inventor of modern totalitarianism; he has been blamed for the worst excesses of the French revolution during the reign of terror, when in the name of public virtue many people were executed.

All this led Ernst Cassiser to say that one only studies the "question of Jean Jacques rousseau.

One way into Rousseau, a way that certainly makes him somethingof a romantic is to see his work as dedicated to the education of

the self in the liberation of passions from the false constraints of society.

Rousseau said that we all attempt to cope with a fall from nature, a loss of transparency, and to live in a constructed world of property, institutions and language. Institutions keep the social world together, but they drive souls apart. The history of western civilization is therefore something of a psychic trap. The more we invest in the refinement and advancement of science and art, the more we lose touch with the core of our own being. He seems at times a very modern thinker in that he supposes a dangerous compact between the ego and language. We have perfectly natural desires and instincts but we box them in with concepts, words, stories about ourselves.

Much of his work was therefore about the education of the self - Education was not to be a forcing of knowledge on an uncouth child, but rather a drawing out of what was already their, a self-education, a fostering of what was already native and natural.

But Rousseau did not stop simply with a critique of the artificial nature of society. He also proposed ways to bring government, social law, more into line with natural law. And these ways had to be more radical than Montesquieu for instance, because the gap between society and nature was so large.Consider the first lines of his famous work on The Social Contract published in 1762.

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a man believes himself to be the master of others, who is, no less than

they, a slave."

How then could one bring a measure of this original freedom into society which tended towards hierarchy and brutality. Note how he has effectively reversed Hobbes at this point. Hobbes according to Rousseau wrongly attributed to man in nature the attributes of man in society: warfare, greed and egoism. Hobbes' theory leaves out the capacity of man for compassion,something that society eradicates. Inequality, wealth power are all unnatural for Rousseau, while egalitarianism and mutualism characterize nature. We have innate principles of justice and virtue, we have inner voices of truth that are equally available to the peasant or the philosopher.

Well Rousseau hopes that the social contract will produce social freedom. Natural liberty is superseded by social liberty, that is, social freedom will appear when all people give their consent to be governed. Each member of the community, who is born free, grants their natural rights to a new super self composed of the citizens and the state. This not just a vote, but almost a sacrament as tight as marriage. Sovereignty doesnot lie with a monarch, but in the unity of wills that make up the state. We collectively alienate our rights to the community as a whole. The community therefore becomes the source not only of law but also of morality as well.

This general will can never err, never be wrong. Individual people and interest groups may be corrupted and deceived but not the general will. The general will is therefore not just the sums of the individual wills in the community, it is the universal good, which will

always be above private interest.

Now how this happens is not I think very clear. Rousseau never really says how the general will can be so absolutely virtuous. But in any case the idea of both popular sovereignty, that the people rule and the idea that the state can legislate morality can be traced in Rousseau.

It is unclear whether Rousseau believes in a basically egalitarian society run by the will of the populace, or in a state which somehow expresses the will of the populace without actually consulting it. Is he a egalitarian democrat or the kind of totalitarian thinker who believes that public virtue has to be forced upon self-interested citizens, or more exactly that we have to be forced to listen to our own inner virtue. I think part of the problem with Rousseau is that he usually had in mind a very small city state like his own Geneva, which he liked to equate with the old Greek city states of ancient fame. The general will, the civic virtue, could perhaps in a small city be imposed through collective belief and values rather than through draconian state controls. Only in small republics, under circumstances quite different from the sprawling hereditary monarchies of the 18th century (or indeed the united states) could a political body be created in which men were first of all citizens and patriots. I'm not sure, but even here there are costs to freedom because a sinister patriotism arises. He summed this up with brutal clarity at the beginning of Emile

"Every restricted society, when it is small and closely unified, alienates itself from the greater whole. Every patriot is severe

with strangers: they are merely men, they are nothing in his eyes. Abroad, the Spartan was ambitious, avaricious and unjust;

but disinterestedness, equity and peace reigned within his own walls. Beware of those cosmopolitans who go on distant bookish

quests for the duties which they disdain to fulfill in their own Surroundings."

Rousseau himself realized that his work could be appropriated in differing ways. He said "pardon my paradoxes.. I would rather be

a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices." It was largely thanks to Rousseau that the theory of the social and political equality of man as sovereign moral agents entered into European thought.

The limits of rationality and of organized society are of course themes that will be taken up by the Romantics...and the criticism of enlightenment principles will grow. untamed, wild nature, the nature of mountains and storms they will glory in the imagination of children, in any figures who seem marginal to polite society,, beggars and the mad.

Romantics will also rehabilitate the virtues of the middle ages, delighting in gothic castles, in words like faith, chivalry.

One could end at this point, with the limits of the enlightenment. Only a few years ago, it was very fashionable to criticize the enlightenment for its failure to include all those who did not fit into its ideal of a rational man: non-europeans, non-adults, non-males, non sane,....the list is potentially inexhaustible. An exercise in power not knowledge, homogenizing any cultural difference. Moreover then we consider just how many of our aspects of human experience and knowledge the enlightenment concept of reason and nature ignore, necessary to extend our versions of truth and practice But even if we acknowledge that reason might be a meaningless abstraction, surely enlightenment notions of tolerance are not.

At a time when we see a rebirth of religious narrow-mindedness, and glorifications of cultural narrowness it is time to recapture the ways that enlightenment philosophers talked in novel ways about freedom, how they developed a flexible sense of morality and a much more relaxed attitude toward expression of any kind of thought.