Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment refers to the 18th century in European philosophy, and is often thought of as part of a period which includes the Age of Reason. The term also more specifically refers to a historical intellectual movement, The Enlightenment. This movement advocated rationality as a means to establish an authoritative system of aesthetics, ethics, and logic. The intellectual leaders of this movement regarded themselves as a courageous elite, and regarded their purpose as one of leading the world toward progress and out of a long period of doubtful tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny, which they believed began during a historical period they called the Dark Ages. This movement also provided a framework for the American and French Revolutions, the Latin American independence movement, and the Polish Constitution of May 3, and also led to the rise of liberalism and the birth of socialism and communism. It is matched by the high baroque and classical eras in music, and the neo-classical period in the arts, and receives contemporary application in the unity of science movement which includes logical positivism.

History of Enlightenment philosophy

Another important movement in 18th century philosophy, which was closely related to it, was characterized by a focus on belief and piety. Some of its proponents attempted to use rationalism to demonstrate the existence of a supreme being. In this period, piety and belief were integral parts in the exploration of natural philosophy and ethics in addition to political theories of the age. However, prominent Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and State.

The 18th century also saw a continued rise of empirical philosophical ideas, and their application to political economy, government and sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology.

According to scholarly opinion , the Enlightenment was preceded by the Age of Reason (if thought of as a short period) or by the Renaissance and the Reformation (if thought of as a long period). It was followed by Romanticism.

The boundaries of the Enlightenment cover much of the 17th century as well, though others term the previous era "The Age of Reason." For the present purposes, these two eras are split; however, it is equally acceptable to think of them conjoined as one long period.

Europe was ravaged by religious wars. When the political situation stabilized after the Peace of Westphalia and at the end of the English Civil War, there was an upheaval which overturned the notions of mysticism and faith in individual revelation as the primary source of knowledge and wisdom—perceived to have been a driving force for instability. Instead, (according to those that split the two periods), the Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and absolutism as the foundations for knowledge and stability. Epistemology, in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes, was based on extreme skepticism, and inquiry into the nature of "knowledge." This goal in the Age of Reason, which was built on self-evident axioms, reached its height with Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza's Ethics, which expounded a pantheistic view of the universe where God and Nature were one. This idea became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson. The Enlightenment was, in many ways, influenced by the ideas of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo and other philosophers of the previous period. For instance, E. Cassirer has asserted that Leibniz’s treatise On Wisdom ". . . identified the central concept of the Enlightenment and sketched its theoretical program" (Cassirer 1979: 121–123). There was a wave of change across European thinking at this time, which is also exemplified by the natural philosophy of Sir Isaac Newton. The ideas of Newton, which combined the mathematics of axiomatic proof with the mechanics of physical observation, resulted in a coherent system of verifiable predictions and set the tone for much of what would follow in the century after the publication of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

Key conflicts within Enlightenment-period philosophy

As with most periods, the individuals present within the Enlightenment were more aware of their differences than their similarities; within the period there were schools of thought, which saw themselves as widely divergent, even as later perspective has come to consider them similar.

One key conflict is on the role of theology - during the previous period, there had been the splintering of the Catholic Church, not, as with previous schisms, largely along political control of the papacy, but along doctrinal lines between Roman Catholic and Protestant theologies. Consequently, theology itself became a source of partisan debate, with different schools attempting to create rationales for their viewpoints, which then, in turn, became generally used. Thus philosophers such as Spinoza searched for a metaphysics of ethics. This trend would influence pietism and eventually transcendental searches such as those by Immanuel Kant.

Religion was linked to another feature which produced a great deal of Enlightenment thought, namely the rise of the Nation-state. In medieval and Renaissance periods, the state was restricted by the need to work through a host of intermediaries. This system existed because of poor communication, where localism thrived in return for loyalty to some central organization. With the improvements in transportation, organization, navigation and finally the influx of gold and silver from trade and conquest, the state began to assume more and more authority and power. The response against this was a series of theories on the purpose of, and limits of state power. The Enlightenment saw both the cementing of absolutism and counter-reaction of limitation advocated by a string of philosophers from John Locke forward, who influenced both Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Enlightenment ideas influenced organisations seeking to affect state and social development, such as the Freemasons and Illuminati. And they ultimately had a profound effect on the actions of politically active individuals worldwide.

Within the period of the Enlightenment, these issues began to be explored in the question of what constituted the proper relationship of the citizen to the monarch or the state. The idea that society is a contract between individual and some larger entity, whether society or state, continued to grow throughout this period. A series of philosophers, including Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hume and ultimately Jefferson advocated this idea. Furthermore, thinkers of this age advocated the idea that nationality had a basis beyond mere preference. Philosophers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder reasserted the idea from Greek antiquity that language had a decisive influence on cognition and thought, and that the meaning of a particular book or text was open to deeper exploration based on deeper connections, an idea now called hermeneutics. The original focus of his scholarship was to delve into the meaning in the Bible and in order to gain a deeper understanding of it. These two concepts - of the contractual nature between the state and the citizen, and the reality of the nation beyond that contract, had a decisive influence in the development of liberalism, democracy and constitutional government which followed.

At the same time, the integration of algebraic thinking, acquired from the Islamic world over the previous two centuries, and geometric thinking which had dominated Western mathematics and philosophy since at least Eudoxus, precipitated a scientific and mathematical revolution. Sir Isaac Newton's greatest claim to prominence came from a systematic application of algebra to geometry, and synthesizing a workable calculus which was applicable to scientific problems. The Enlightenment was a time when the solar system was truly discovered: with the accurate calculation of orbits, such as Halley's comet, the discovery of the first planet since antiquity, Uranus by William Herschel, and the calculation of the mass of the Sun using Newton's theory of universal gravitation. The effect that this series of discoveries had on both pragmatic commerce and philosophy was momentous. The excitement of creating a new and orderly vision of the world, as well as the need for a philosophy of science which could encompass the new discoveries would show its fundamental influence in both religious and secular ideas. If Newton could order the cosmos with natural philosophy, so, many argued, could political philosophy order the body politic.

Within the Enlightenment there were two main theories contending to be the basis of that ordering: divine right and natural law."It might seem that divine right would yield absolutist ideas, and that natural law would lead to theories of liberty. The writing of Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627-1704) set the paradigm for the divine right: that the universe was ordered by a reasonable God, and therefore his representative on earth had the powers of that God. The orderliness of the cosmos was seen as proof of God; therefore it was a proof of the power of monarchy. Natural law, began, not as a reaction against divinity, but instead, as an abstraction: God did not rule arbitrarily, but through natural laws that he enacted on earth. Thomas Hobbes, though an absolutist in government, drew this argument in Leviathan. Once the concept of natural law was invoked, however, it took on a life of its own. If natural law could be used to bolster the position of the monarchy, it could also be used to assert the rights of subjects of that monarch, that if there were natural laws, then there were natural rights associated with them, just as there are rights under man-made laws.

What both theories had in common, however, was the need for an orderly and comprehensible function of government. The "Enlightened Despotism" of, for example, Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia (a state within The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation), is not based on mystical appeals to authority, but on the pragmatic invocation of state power as necessary to hold back chaotic and anarchic warfare and rebellion. Frederick the Great was raised by his French governess, importing the Enlightenment to "Germany." Regularization and standardization were seen as good things because they allowed the state to reach its power outwards over the entirety of its domain and because they liberated people from being entangled in endless local custom. Additionally, they expanded the sphere of economic and social activity.

Thus rationalization, standardization and the search for fundamental unities occupied much of the Enlightenment and its arguments over proper methodology and nature of understanding. The culminating efforts of the Enlightenment: for example the economics of Adam Smith, the physical chemistry of Antoine Lavoisier, the idea of evolution pursued by Goethe, the declaration by Jefferson of inalienable rights, in the end overshadowed the idea of divine right and direct alteration of the world by the hand of God. It was also the basis for overthrowing the idea of a completely rational and comprehensible universe, and led, in turn, to the metaphysics of Hegel and the search for the emotional truth of Romanticism.

Role of the Enlightenment in later philosophy

The Enlightenment occupies a central role in the justification for the movement known as modernism. The neo-classicizing trend in modernism came to see itself as being a period of rationality which was overturning foolishly established traditions, and therefore analogized itself to the Encyclopediasts and other philosophes. A variety of 20th century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism traced their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment, and away from the purported emotionalism of the 19th century. Geometric order, rigor and reductionism were seen as virtues of the Enlightenment. The modern movement points to reductionism and rationality as crucial aspects of Enlightenment thinking of which it is the inheritor, as opposed to irrationality and emotionalism. In this view, the Enlightenment represents the basis for modern ideas of liberalism against superstition and intolerance. Influential philosophers who have held this view are Jürgen Habermas and Isaiah Berlin.

This view asserts that the Enlightenment was the point where Europe broke through what historian Peter Gay calls "the sacred circle," where previous dogma circumscribed thinking. The Enlightenment is held, in this view, to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as being the primary values of a society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious and racial tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered to be the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas.

With the end of the Second World War and the rise of post-modernity, these same features came to be regarded as liabilities - excessive specialization, failure to heed traditional wisdom or provide for unintended consequences, and the romanticization of Enlightenment figures - such as the Founding Fathers of the United States, prompted a backlash against both Science and Enlightenment based dogma in general. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault are often understood as arguing that the age of reason had to construct a vision of unreason as being demonic and subhuman, and therefore evil and befouling, whence by analogy to argue that rationalism in the modern period is, likewise, a construction. In their book, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote a penetrating critique of what they perceived as the contradictions of Enlightenment thought: Enlightenment was seen as being at once liberatory and, through the domination of instrumental rationality tending towards totalitarianism.

Alternatively, the Enlightenment was used as a powerful symbol to argue for the supremacy of rationalism and rationalization, and therefore any attack on it is connected to despotism and madness, for example in the writings of Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Precursors of the Enlightenment

Important figures of the Enlightenment era

French Encyclopédistes | Voltaire | Leibniz | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Condorcet | Helvétius | Fontenelle | Olympe de Gouges | Ignacy Krasicki | Francois Quesney | Benedict Spinoza | Cesare Beccaria | Adam Smith | Isaac Newton | John Wilkes | Antoine Lavoisier | G.L. Buffon | Mikhail Lomonosov | Mikhailo Shcherbatov | Ekaterina Dashkova | Montesquieu |
Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) French. Mathematician and physicist, one of the editors of Encyclopédie
Thomas Abbt (1738-1766) German. Promoted what would later be called Nationalism in Vom Tode für's Vaterland (On dying for one's nation).
Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) French. Literary critic known for Nouvelles de la république des lettres and Dictionnaire historique et critique.
James Burnett Lord Monboddo Scottish. Philosopher, jurist and contributor to linguistic evolution.
James Boswell (1740-1795) Scottish. Biographer of Samuel Johnson, helped established the norms for writing Biography in general.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797) Irish. Parliamentarian and political philosopher, best known for pragmatism, considered important to both liberal and conservative thinking.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784) French. Founder of the Encyclopédie, speculated on free will and attachment to material objects, contributed to the theory of literature.
Ignacy Krasicki (1735-1801) Polish. Outstanding poet of the Polish Enlightenment, hailed by contemporaries as "the Prince of Poets." After the election of Stanisław August Poniatowski as king of Poland in 1764, Krasicki became the new King's confidant and chaplain. He participated in the King's famous "Thursday dinners" and co-founded the Monitor, the preeminent periodical of the Polish Enlightenment, sponsored by the King. Consecrated Bishop of Warmia in 1766, Krasicki thereby also became an ex-officio Senator of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) American. Statesman, scientist, political philosopher, pragmatic deist, author. As a philosopher known for his writings on nationality, economic matters, aphorisms published in Poor Richard's Alamanac and polemics in favor of American Independence. Involved with writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787.
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) English. Historian best known for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Johann Gottfried von Herder German. Theologian and Linguist. Proposed that language determines thought, introduced concepts of ethnic study and nationalism, influential on later Romantic thinkers. Early supporter of democracy and republican self rule.
David Hume Scottish. Historian, philosopher and economist. Best known for his empiricism and skepticism, advanced doctrines of naturalism and material causes. Influenced Kant and Adam Smith.
Immanuel Kant German. Philosopher and physicist. Established critical philosophy on a systematic basis, proposed a material theory for the origin of the solar system, wrote on ethics and morals. Influenced by Hume and Isaac Newton. Important figure in German Idealism, and important to the work of Fichte and Hegel.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) American Statesman, political philosopher, educator. As a philosopher best known for the Declaration of Independence and his interpretation of the Constitution which he pursued as president. Argued for natural rights as the basis of all states, argued that violation of these rights negates the contract which bind a people to their rulers and that therefore there is an inherent "Right to Revolution."
Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830) German who founded the Order of the Illuminati.
Hugo Kołłątaj (1750-1812) Polish. He was active in the Commission for National Education and the Society for Elementary Textbooks, and reformed the Kraków Academy, of which he was rector in 1783-1786. An organizer of the townspeople's movement, in 1789 he edited a memorial from the cities. He co-authored the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, and founded the Assembly of Friends of the Government Constitution to assist in the document's implementation. In 1791-1792 he served as Crown Vice Chancellor. In 1794 he took part in the Kościuszko Uprising, co-authoring its Uprising Act (March 24, 1794) and Proclamation of Połaniec (May 7, 1794), heading the Supreme National Council's Treasury Department, and backing the Uprising's left, Jacobin wing.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) German Dramatist, critic, political philosopher. Created theatre in the German language, began reappraisal of Shakespeare to being a central figure, and the importance of classical dramatic norms as being crucial to good dramatic writing, theorized that the center of political and cultural life is the middle class.
John Locke (1632-1704) English Philosopher. Important empricist who expanded and extended the work of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Seminal thinker in the realm of the relationship between the state and the individual, the contractual basis of the state and the rule of law. Argued for personal liberty with respect to property
Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760-1828) Spanish. Dramatist and translator, support of republicanism and free thinking. Transitional figure to Romanticism.
Montesquieu (1689-1755) Frenchpolitical thinker. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions all over the world.
Nikolay Novikov (1744-1818) Russian. Philanthropist and journalist who sought to raise the culture of Russian readers and publicly argued with the Empress.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) English. Pamphleteer, Deist, and polemicist, most famous for Common Sense attacking England's domination of the colonies in America.
Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Main figure of the Spanish Enlightment. Preminent stateman.

External links

References

Jonathan Hill, Faith in the Age of Reason, Lion/Intervarsity Press 2004
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Princeton University Press 1979
Mark Hulluing Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes 1994
Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996
Redkop, Benjamin, The Enlightenment and Community, 1999
Melamed, Yitzhak Y, Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 42, Issue 1
Porter, Roy The Enlightenment 1999
Jacob, Margaret Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents 2000
Thomas Munck Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721-1794
Arthur Herman How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of how Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It 2001
Stuart Brown ed., British Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment 2002
Alan Charles Kors, ed. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. 4 volumes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003
Buchan, James Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind 2003
Louis Dupre The Enlightenment & the Intellctural Foundations of Modern Culture 2004
Himmelfarb, Gertrude The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, 2004
Stephen Eric Bronner Interpreting the Enlightenment: Metaphysics, Critique, and Politics, 2004
Stephen Eric Bronner The Great Divide: The Enlightenment and its Critics
Henry F. May The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)