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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 oblig- ated 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
Introduction: aspects
of Enlightenment
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 anachro- nistic 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 gener- ally use the gendered language used by the people on whom I am commentating, because to do otherwise would risk misstat- ing 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
2 The Enlightenment: A Beginner’s Guide
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 seven- teenth 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
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Aristotle or Galen, declined (see chapter seven). Truth about the world was found not in the library or the Bible, but via investi- gation 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 modernisa- tion. 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 gener- ally 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 individ- ual became more important as a political entity, correspondingly more time was devoted to studying and theorising the psychol- ogy of the individual, and individual liberty was increasingly seen as an important political goal. The work of Isaiah Berlin and others 3 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
Introduction: aspects of Enlightenment 5
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 totalis- ing and optimism explicit:
[A]ll knowledge will be subdivided and extended; and knowl- edge , as Lord Bacon observes, being power , the human powers will, in fact, be increased; nature, including both its materials,
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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 glori- ous 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
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The ‘something better’ was reason, the ability to discover implicit truths from explicit evidence. A wealth of psychological theorising took place in the Enlightenment to show how people were able to deploy reason, and that in turn was an important factor in the confidence that was also characteristic of the era. Some argued that reason was a type of perception, analogous to eyesight. Because reason was the driver, truth was a central value, and regarded as sovereign. One should not defer to authority until one had established to one’s own satisfaction that the authority was indeed speaking truth. One should not avoid uttering or publicising truths even if they were inconvenient or dangerous. As d’Alembert put it, ‘truth can hardly be too modest’ and he went on to argue that the community of radical French philoso- phers and writers which grew up during the Enlightenment, les philosophes , formed a newly rational literary community. It was also argued that reason was the same faculty in each person, which meant that the Enlightenment must be universal and global in scope. Indeed, for many thinkers, God, the Supreme Being, must be the ultimate deployer of reason precisely because reason was the supreme mode of thought. God’s behaviour could therefore be at least partially understood even by an imperfect human, because the human could follow at least some of His reasoning. The cult of reason, both human and divine, contributed to Enlightenment optimism; many questioned or rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin, arguing that mankind was indefinitely improvable, or even perfectible, by deploying its reason effectively. Admiration of reason was a threat to religion, especially Catholicism. The Protestant emphasis on the individual conscience could be squared with much of the more moderate Enlightenment thought, but traditional Catholic societies found their most treasured nostrums under attack. Gibbon is a good representative of the new advanced thinking, identifying
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the Romans’ Christianity as a major factor in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Aspect 5: self-interest, happiness
and human nature
The rise of individualism led to a new favourable attitude towards purely personal good. The American Declaration of Independence , passed by Congress on 4 July 1776 and based heavily on the philosophy of Locke, enshrined in its second paragraph the ‘self-evident’ truth that individuals had inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The philos- ophy of utilitarianism, whose major theorist was Jeremy Bentham, featured the promotion of happiness. Pleasure was no longer a vulgar pursuit, a rather lowly sort of good. It became something that people were expected to wish for, and which it was no-one’s business to impede. Cultural differences still manifested themselves; a number of American thinkers visiting Paris found themselves appalled at the loose morals of the French philosophes.^8 Self-interest, as long as it was Enlightened, was not seen as necessarily destructive of social harmony; rather, it balanced the restraint of reason. As Pope argued,
Two principles in human nature reign: Self-love, to urge, and reason, to restrain.
Philosopher David Hume went further, claiming that ‘reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them’, while Rousseau painted a nuanced picture of a deeply interconnected mind:
Whatever moralists may hold, the human understanding is greatly indebted to the passions which, it is universally allowed,
Introduction: aspects of Enlightenment 11
Aspect 6: attitudes of an
educated minority
The noble savage, however, did not get it all his own way. For instance, although the philosopher and mathematician Condorcet pointed out that ‘our trade monopolies, our treach- ery, our murderous contempt for men of another colour or creed, the insolence of our usurpations, the intrigues … of our priests, have destroyed the respect and goodwill that the superi- ority of our knowledge and the benefits of our commerce at first won for us in the eyes of the inhabitants,’ he still hoped that ‘the European population in [New World] colonies [will] either civilise or peacefully remove the savage nations who still inhabit … its land.’ Gibbon, like many Enlightened thinkers, disapproved and despaired of unorganised, charismatic religion, opining that ‘the monastic saints, who excite only the contempt and pity of a philosopher, were respected and almost adored by the prince and people’. The ‘extravagant’ tales of miracles displayed ‘the fiction, without the genius of poetry [and] seriously affected the reason, the faith and the morals of the Christians’. 11 These views of Condorcet and Gibbon are symptomatic; the Enlightenment was a very top down movement. It was an attitude, by and large, of a highly educated minority, often wealthy and with position in society, who felt the liberating force of Enlightenment, but were also conscious (and sometimes nervous) of the ‘great unthinking masses’ kept in darkness, through lack of education, money or manners, or perhaps merely through not being exposed to Enlightened views. It may be, as has been argued in the case of America, that Enlightenment ideas were simply too remote from the concerns of the agrarian majority – ‘on the whole, various forms of Protestant Christianity served the emotional needs of most Americans better’^12 – and the same may be true in Europe.
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Enlightened thinkers did not expect their own views to triumph without a struggle, and were keen to provide the conditions where they could flourish. Hence many thinkers developed theories of education. Sometimes, paradoxically, tolerant elitism became a lack of toleration of the unenlightened. The great thinkers of the time were noticeably impatient of those who failed to ‘get it’, and often remarked on the inferiority (remediable or otherwise) of the working poor, or women, or non-white colonised peoples. As Leonard Krieger put it, they ‘were in the anomalous position of writing on behalf of the whole society and at the same time castigating large sections of it for chronic abuses – governments for their inequities, aristocracies for their gratuitous privileges, and the masses for their servility.’^13 Having said that, the Enlightenment was a very social movement, premised on more or less good-natured conversa- tion, argument, discussion and the voicing of opinions. In England, the disputants tended to be the bourgeois and merchant classes discussing public affairs in the coffee houses of London (one of which, famously, evolved into the insurer Lloyd’s of London), or in clubs which included the Lunar Society, a dining club of industrialists and intellectuals that met in Birmingham between 1765 and 1813, including Matthew Boulton (1728–1809), Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Joseph Priestley, James Watt (1736–1819), Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) and William Withering (1741–99), 14 and which was visited by Richard Arkwright and Benjamin Franklin no less. In Edinburgh, intellectuals would often get together in clubs such as the Select Society, which included Adam Smith and David Hume, or the Poker Club. In France, however, the philosophes congregated in the houses, or salons , of well- connected Parisian ladies such as Madame d’Épinay (1726–83), Sophie de Condorcet (1764–1822, wife of Condorcet), Julie de Lespinasse (1732–76) or Madame Roland (1754–93).
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on the political radar even though they were often nominally powerless, and this gave immediacy to the debates on government legitimacy which carried on throughout the Enlightenment (see chapter six). Furthermore, since the public in this sense was relatively wealthy and educated, there could be no objection that ‘the mob’ was being brought into politics. It took many decades before the majority of people could take their place as part of public opinion – the development of the public sphere was an important step towards democracy, but it was only one step, and the direction of influence was still mainly top down. This top down aspect also meant that Enlightened thinkers were often self-consciously one or two steps ahead of reactionary governments and princes, and consequently were rarely secure, especially in dictatorships. They developed circumlocutions for their more radical thoughts, and relied heavily on irony , often saying the precise opposite of what they really intended to say. Voltaire was the master of this, but see also Gibbon’s apparent criticism of the heretical Bishop Demophilus (Damophilus) of Constantinople, which conveys only admiration. 17
The social context
One final point to be made particularly with respect to the sixth aspect of the Enlightenment (though it is relevant to any discus- sion of the Enlightenment couched as the process of transmis- sion of a set of ideas) is that ideas have contexts which are often more explanatory of their spread or otherwise than their intellectual force. The history of ideas can look like a list of great men, women and books, and indeed in this Beginner’s Guide it is appropriate to focus on the names, ideas and works with which the reader will hope to become familiar. However,
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it does not follow from this that the great do their work in a vacuum, that ideas are transmitted by sheer intellectual force alone, or that other more humble processes do not have a part to play. American historian Robert Darnton has been at the forefront of the movement to uncover the unconventional and irredeemably social aspects of intellectual history, aiming to incorporate the spread of not only books but ‘unofficial’ communications ranging from rumours and jokes to pamphlets and wills, as well as the actual working practices of contempo- rary publishers. The result is an understanding of the wider culture of communication within which the intellectual debates discussed in introductory books like this one take place. This work has been extremely important and influential, and is one reason why the aspects of Enlightenment discussed above are not entirely philosophical, but also incorporate more gener- ally diffused attitudes (e.g. scepticism) or social structures (e.g. the Enlightenment as a ‘top down’ phenomenon). Nevertheless, when we are looking at ideas, it is important to focus on their content as much as their context, and also to remember that context includes the disputes and controversies that help define and refine ideas. These are what the philosophes actually believed were important, of course. Furthermore, whereas the clash of ideas in open debate is at least visible and traceable, the undercurrents of the wider communication culture – though clearly relevant – are dogged with uncertainty and even invisibility. Hence in this book, there will be a concentration on ideas and intellectual debate, but it should not be forgotten that there are powerful, if not fully understood, social undercurrents. Accordingly, I will end this chapter with a brief discussion of one publishing project as much social as intellectual, whose influence was as much to do with the philosophy behind it as the philosophy and ideas contained within it.
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completion of eighteenth century encyclopaedias – which implicitly supported Francis Bacon’s view of science as an open- ended activity, rejecting the idea of the mere preservation and curation of a pre-existing ‘complete’ body of knowledge. There were many great examples of Encyclopaedic writing, by individuals and by collaborating groups. Ephraim Chambers (c1680–1740) created his ‘universal dictionary’ or Cyclopaedia in 1728 (two volumes), which wrestled with hypertextual problems by ordering the articles alphabetically while pioneer- ing the use of cross-reference and showing how all knowledge could be classified into a hierarchy of forty-seven disciplines. The oldest English-language encyclopaedia currently in print, the Encyclopædia Britannica (1768–71, three volumes) appeared at this time, edited in Edinburgh by William Smellie (1740–95). More specialised publications followed. Buffon became a revered celebrity with his Natural History of Animals, Vegetables and Minerals (1749–78, thirty-six volumes), which classified the biological world minutely, with an eye to geographical influ- ences, while Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) was not superseded until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary over a century later. For some encyclopaedists, ideology counted for more than the spread of knowledge, and the movement was used as a kind of Trojan horse to smuggle in articles with more political spice. Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697) looked at ideas and their originators, and deliberately cultivated a measured evalua- tion to show the value of tolerance. Almost the whole work was sceptical of its subject matter, but Bayle was able to use the encyclopaedia format to hide subversive thoughts away in footnotes. Meanwhile, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary (1764) remains an essential and entertaining read. Organised largely around religious and philosophical concepts, it is basically a series of short discursions on toleration and justice. Its title should certainly not be taken literally – for instance, the section
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on ‘Chinese catechism’ is an essay in dialogue form about the relationship between ethics and religion, and mentions Chinese catechism precisely zero times. For Voltaire, the encyclopaedic form was heaven-sent – he was able to publish a number of his shorter pieces (the various editions of his Dictionary differ substantially in content) without having to relate them to any kind of central narrative, anonymously and safely. He also used the survey form as a vehicle for his brilliant irony; for instance, the article on ‘Abraham’ begins by enumerating a number of mythical Asian and Arabian figures, including Abraham himself, before disingenuously reporting that fortunately, the Bible ‘having manifestly been written by the holy ghost himself’, we need not doubt Abraham’s existence (which would have been an extremely shocking thing to do). Voltaire, without expressly stating that Abraham was a mythical character, was able to hint not so subtly that ‘if we followed the methods of our modern history books it would be quite hard to believe’ in the Biblical Abraham. Of all the encyclopaedic works of the period, the most celebrated was L’Encyclopédie. This appeared in Paris between 1751 and 1772, and originally had the modest intention of being a translation of Chambers’ Cyclopaedia. But under the editorship of prominent philosophes Denis Diderot and d’Alembert, its scope widened. With Diderot taking the lead, twenty-eight volumes (eleven consisting entirely of illustrations) were published, followed by five supplementary volumes edited by other hands, and a two-volume index. In all over 70,000 articles were included, many by Diderot and other Enlightenment luminaries, including Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau. It fell to Diderot himself to summarise the project in the Encyclopédie article on ‘Encyclopédie’. Such an undertaking, he claimed, could only take place in a philosophical age ‘because [it] constantly demands more intellectual daring than is commonly found’. The aim of setting out the total state of
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