Age of Enlightenment

I

Introduction

Age of Enlightenment, term for the trends in 18th-century thought and letters in Europe and the American colonies before the French Revolution. The phrase was often used by writers of the period, convinced that they were emerging from centuries of darkness and ignorance into a new age enlightened by reason, science, and respect for humanity.

II

Early Influences

The precursors of the Enlightenment can be traced to the 17th century and earlier. They include the philosophical rationalists René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Baruch Spinoza, the political philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and sceptical thinkers in France such as Pierre Bayle. Equally important was the self-confidence engendered by new discoveries in science—by Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo, for example—as well as the cultural relativism encouraged by the exploration of the non-European world.

A fundamental and widely shared belief of the period was the unshakeable faith in the power of human reason. Thinkers of the age were enormously impressed by the discovery of universal gravitation by Isaac Newton. This is summed up by the Alexander Pope quote: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night, / God said, ‘Let Newton be’, and all was light.” The laws governing the rest of nature, the human mind, and society could, it seemed, soon be discovered by applying Newton’s method. If the centuries-old medieval view of the physical world had been so decisively overthrown by reason, the antiquity of an idea, or indeed of a law, a privilege, or a form of government, could no longer be seen as a guarantee of its worth. People came to assume that by judicious use of reason, an unending progress would be possible—progress in knowledge, technology, prosperity, and even in moral values.

III

Development of Enlightenment Thought

Under the influence of Pierre Maupertuis and Voltaire, 18th-century intellectuals abandoned Descartes’s belief in innate ideas (implanted in human beings by God) and his deductive, non-experimentalist approach to nature, in favour of the empiricism of Newton and Locke. Truth was to be discovered by the observation of nature, not by deduction from self-evident premises, and still less from venerable authorities such as Aristotle and the Bible. With proper education, humanity itself could be altered, its nature changed for the better. Although they saw the Church—especially the Roman Catholic Church—as the principal force that had enslaved the human mind in the past, most thinkers of the Enlightenment did not renounce religion altogether. They opted rather for a form of deism, accepting the existence of God and of a hereafter, but rejecting the intricacies of Christian theology, especially the dogma of original sin, with its implication that human advancement depends on divine grace. Human aspirations, they believed, should not be centred on the next life, but rather on improving this life. Worldly happiness was placed before religious salvation. Nothing was attacked with more intensity and ferocity than the Church, with all its wealth, political power, and suppression of the free exercise of reason.

More than a set of fixed ideas, the Enlightenment was an attitude, a method of thought. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed as the motto of the Enlightenment “dare to know!”. A desire arose to re-examine and question all received ideas and values, to explore new ideas in many different directions—hence the great diversity, and often inconsistency, of 18th-century thinkers. Many proponents of the Enlightenment were not philosophers in the strict sense; they were popularizers engaged in a self-conscious effort to win converts. They liked to refer to themselves as the “party of humanity”, and in an attempt to mould public opinion in their favour, they made full use of pamphlets, anonymous tracts, and the new journals and newspapers being created. Because they were journalists and propagandists as much as true philosophers, historians often refer to them by the French word philosophes.

The homeland of the philosophes as a self-conscious movement was France. It was there that the political philosopher and jurist Charles de Montesquieu published satirical attacks on existing institutions, such as his Persian Letters (1721; trans. 1961), as well as his monumental study of political institutions, The Spirit of Laws (1748; trans. 1750). In this pioneering work he showed the interconnections between religion, education, geography, and forms of government, and argued that despotism is to be avoided by a “separation of powers”, assigning the executive, legislative, and juridical functions of the state to distinct institutions. It was in Paris that Denis Diderot, the author of numerous philosophical tracts, began the publication of the Encyclopédie (1751-1776). This work, on which numerous philosophes collaborated, was intended both as a compendium of all knowledge and as a polemical weapon, presenting the positions of the Enlightenment and attacking its opponents. The most influential of the French writers was Voltaire. Once the most popular playwright of the day, he is now best known for his prolific pamphlets, essays, satires, and novels, in which he popularized the science and philosophy of his age, and for his correspondence with writers and monarchs throughout Europe. He wrote a series of historical works, notably the Essay on General History and on the Customs and Character of Nations (1756; trans. 1759), in which he attempted to trace the unfolding of human reason in every area of culture from the time of Charlemagne to the present. Many other historians of the period—the Marquis de Condorcet, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, for example—took Voltaire as their model. Even more original was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Social Contract (1762; trans. 1797), Émile (1762; trans. 1763), and Confessions (1782; trans. 1783) stressed the social nature of a person, in opposition to the dominant individualism of the age. He also made emotion as fashionable as reason, thus serving—along with Hume and Étienne Condillac, who saw passion as the mainspring of the human mind—to refute the charge that the Enlightenment exalted bloodless reason at the expense of emotion. Rousseau had a profound influence on later political and educational theory, on Kant, and on Romanticism.

The Enlightenment was a profoundly cosmopolitan movement with representatives throughout Europe and the American colonies: David Hume in Scotland; in Italy, Cesare Beccaria (a determined opponent of torture and capital punishment); and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in the American colonies. In Germany, Enlightenment thought was championed by Christian Wolff and Gotthold Lessing, as well as by Kant, who is considered to be the greatest philosopher of modern times. While British and French thinkers tended to regard the human mind as a passive receptacle for external stimuli, German philosophers were more inclined to attribute to it an autonomous imaginative creativity. Hence the Germans made important contributions to aesthetics: Alexander Baumgarten coined the term “aesthetics” and founded systematic aesthetics. German philosophes also took religion more seriously than the French, and their historical criticism of the Bible gave an enormous impetus to historical research as well as theology. The Enlightenment affected every sphere of culture, not simply philosophy: the Mozart opera The Magic Flute (1791), a tribute to freemasonry and to German unity, is imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment, as is the Beethoven work Fidelio (1814). French comic opera, too, especially after the French Revolution, acquired a more serious, ethical flavour.

During the first half of the 18th century, the philosophes waged an uphill struggle against imprisonment, censorship, and attacks by the Church. Later in the century they began to triumph. By the 1770s, the second-generation philosophes were receiving government pensions and taking control of intellectual academies. The proliferation of newspapers and books ensured a wide diffusion of their ideas. Scientific experiments and philosophy became widely fashionable, even among members of the nobility and the clergy. Many European monarchs became champions of the Enlightenment. Voltaire and other philosophes admired the so-called enlightened despots, notably Frederick II of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia, and Joseph II of Austria, and were welcomed at their courts. Philosophes, especially in central Europe with its smaller reading public, depended on state patronage for their livelihood. Many ideas of the Enlightenment were useful to rulers: educational and judicial reform, a trained bureaucracy, the ending of noble and clerical exemption from taxation, tolerance of (often talented and industrious) religious dissidents, and the abolition or amelioration of serfdom, enabling peasants to pay more taxes. However, enlightened despots were more than simple opportunists. Their legislation was marked by Enlightenment influence, even if they often sacrificed Enlightenment to raison d’état. The philosophes, for their part, were united in support of tolerance, the rule of law, social welfare, secular education, and hostility to privilege. They were not, however, opposed to the state as such: it was a crucial instrument for the realization of their ideals, as long as the ruler respected reason and natural law. Especially in central Europe and Italy, they were more concerned to strengthen the state so that it could do its job properly than to limit its power. The main targets of their hatred were the Church and the nobility. Few philosophes shared Montesquieu’s belief in the need for representative authorities intermediary between the state and the individual. While they mostly followed Locke in viewing the state as the result of a “social contract”, they did not invariably draw democratic or even very liberal conclusions from this. They believed in the need to educate the often deluded and backward masses, and this was not always easy to reconcile with their devotion to tolerance.

Nevertheless, the philosophes welcomed the American War of Independence, and the Declaration of Independence, seeing them as the beginning of the realization of their dreams. The Marquis de Condorcet, a moderate revolutionary who died in prison in 1794, argued in his Sketch of the Intellectual Progress of Mankind (1795) that the purpose of knowledge of human society can only be to guarantee the basic rights of men and, in his view, women: these are personal security, free enjoyment of property, equality before the law, and the participation of every citizen in government. The American states, he believed, were the first to convert these ideas into action.

IV

End of the Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment may be said to have ended in 1789 with the French Revolution, which it helped to bring about. The Revolution embodied many of the ideals of the philosophes, but its more violent phase, between 1792 and 1794, discredited these ideals temporarily in the eyes of many contemporaries, such as Edmund Burke. While conservatives found the Enlightenment too radical, Romantics found it soulless, neglecting individual differences and cultural diversity. Yet the Enlightenment left a lasting heritage. It marked a key stage in the decline of the Church and the growth of modern secularism. It served as the model for political and economic liberalism and for humanitarian reform throughout the 19th-century Western world. Karl Marx was influenced by the Enlightenment: if people become rationally aware of the workings of their society, he argued, then they will be able to control their own destiny and free themselves from the blind, irrational forces that have so far governed their lives. So too was Sigmund Freud: he held that people can free themselves of the irrational forces that dominate their psychological lives once they become rationally aware of them. The major ideologies of the 20th century in the West—liberalism and socialism—stemmed from the Enlightenment and share its belief that reason, with freedom as its inevitable accompaniment, will eventually prevail. Science as an undiluted good, popular education, democracy, progress—all these ideals of the Enlightenment retained their appeal in the 20th century.

Enlightenment ideals, however, were severely tested in the 20th century, with wars and revolutions as well as technological progress beyond the dreams of the philosophes. The rise of totalitarian regimes—in the former Soviet Union under the banner of Enlightenment ideals, and in Germany, seemingly a model of Enlightenment civilization—led Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to conclude, in the Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1944; trans. 1972), that the Enlightenment had turned against itself, perverting its own ideals in the very process of realizing them. Pollution of the environment and, in much of the world, unrestricted population growth—a danger indicated by an Enlightenment thinker Thomas Malthus—might also suggest that Enlightenment ideals are self-defeating. If the philosophes perhaps underrated human irrationality, and the importance of tradition and authority in keeping human beings on the right track, and if Enlightenment reason now has few wholehearted adherents, it is, in its broad outlines, irrevocable and indispensable. For to detect the faults of Enlightenment thought, in the hope of finding solutions for them, it is necessary to invoke enlightened reason.