The Enlightenment

Sapere Aude!Dare to know!

- Immanuel Kant (1784)

One day, BossuetThe next, Voltaire

• Bishop Bossuet, Politics drawn from Holy Scripture (late 17th c.)– The grounds of authority: God, Bible, King– These ordered society, gender and social relations,

attitudes to nature, wealth, non-Christian cultures, science

• Hierarchical, paternal, sacred power• Monarchy as the best form of government

Bossuet

• ‘How I hate these philosophers who, making their own intelligence the measure of God’s purposes, would regard Him merely as the creator of a certain general order which He, then, left to develop as best it might. As if God’s aims were vague and confused generalities.’

Bossuet

• ‘I see… preparations for a great onslaught on the Church in the name of Cartesian philosophy. From the womb of that philosophy, from its principles, to my mind imperfectly understood, I foresee the birth of more than one heresy .’

Voltaire (1694-1778)

– Rule of law

– Commercial prosperity

– Religious Toleration

– Arts and Sciences

– Civil liberties

The Old Regime:An enchanted, hierarchical world

• Witches, the devil

• Intercession of saints

• Preparing for death and the afterlife

• The great chain of being

• Hierarchy and privilege

What was the Enlightenment?

• A new way of thinking, a profound epistemological shift

• Climate of opinion, the ‘public sphere’

• Campaign to transform state and society

Galileo’s telescope

• De-centered the earth

• De-stabilised humans’ self-conception

• Challenged religious authorities’ monopoly on knowledge

Descartes

• Skepticism, radical doubt

• Individual reason – hierarchies set aside

• Rationalism – truth found through reason

Spinoza - Bayle

• Freedom of conscience

• Religious toleration (they were from religious minorities)

• Secular foundations for political authority

• Rational foundations for society rather than tradition or superstition

• God and nature are one. The quest to understand Nature’s laws is to become close to God.

Locke, Newton, Montesquieu

• Repudiation of metaphysical ‘systems’

• Knowledge through the senses – empiricism

• Locke’s blank-slate

• Newton’s laws of nature – induction, not deduction

• Montesquieu’s laws of society found in history

• Newtonian thinking was – open-ended… could change with the introduction

of more facts– focused on relations and patterns, not inherent

essences

• Implications: authorities could not claim to master eternal truths.

The problem of ‘Evil’

• With the ‘devil’ removed from the cosmic scheme, how does one account for ‘evil’ in the world?

– Best of all possible worlds (Leibniz, 17th c.)

– Historical, universal progress (18th)– Stoicism and utility: ‘we must

cultivate our gardens’ (Voltaire, Candide, 1759)

Lisbon Earthquake, 1755

• How could ‘nature’ prove to be so evil, including ‘human nature’?– 40-50K killed– 80-90% of the buildings destroyed

• What are we to learn from it?– Voltaire: cultivate one’s garden– Rousseau: cities are bad, providence good

The Encyclopédie

• French, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, 17 vols.

• Published over 20 years in mid 18th c.– Most famous philosophers of the age

• Aim: to spread practical knowledge in society

• With amusing ‘digs’ at authorities from time to time (e.g.: ‘knowledge of God’ and ‘black magic’ are treated together on the tree of knowledge)

Rousseau: the dissenting voice

• First Discourse on the Sciences and Arts• Second Discourse on the Origins of Inequality

– Civilisation is corrupting– The ‘arts and sciences’, consumption and urban

living alienate the individual from his/herself

Rise of Critical Public Sphere

• Jürgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere (1962)

– New ideology of family• from necessity and coercion to morality and sentiment

– This notion of the family was projected on ‘society’ through public institutions

Public Sphere

• Print: a reading revolution

– Literacy rates rise dramatically in 18th c.

– Shift from devotional literature to novels

– Shift of intensive, reverential reading to extensive critical reading

– Seditious literature – libels, pornography• draw on Enlightenment epistemology to ridicule church and state

Public Sphere

• Salons– Increasing independence from the Court

• Theatres– Official and market-driven ones– Who determines playbills? Public asserts itself

• Pubs, cafés– owners subscribed to newspapers

• Freemasonry

Tribunal of Public Opinion

• The authority of ‘public opinion’

• Authorities unwittingly contribute to its rise– By policing– Through propaganda– By invoking the concept

The ‘public’ vs. the ‘people'

• Rise of popular agitation in late 18th century– peasant revolts– urban rebellions

• Fear of the masses intensifies

• Solution: transform the people into a public– How? More enlightenment!

Enlightenmentas

‘modern’

• The ‘Ancients vs. Moderns’ debate– The printing press, firearms and compass– Debate within the official French Academy– Enlightenment: a ‘narrative’ about progress

• Universal history– Kant’s Perpetual Peace– Marx’s theory of history

The mission to modernise

• Imperialism– Civilizing missions of the 19th century

• Universal education– Only way out of class disorder: education (and

discipline) the masses

Modernity:Good or Bad?

Charles-Louis RichardExposition of the doctrine of the modern philosophers (1785)

• The results of modern philosophy

– The corruption of faith and morals– The destruction of religion and every idea of duty, of

obligation, of law, of conscience, of justice and injustice

– “What a picture! What goals! What effects!”

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789

Guillotine

Modernity:Progress or Pathology?

• WWI and WWII: Is Europe Civilised? Is ‘Civilisation’ healthy?

• Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents (1929)• Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of

Enlightenment (1947)• Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis:

Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (1959)

Is the Enlightenment a myth?

• Too all embracing as a concept?

• Is it helpful to thinking of the Enlightenment as at the origins of ‘modernity’?

• Is modernity a useful concept?

• What Enlightenment is is still open to debate.