Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment refers to the age of the intellectual movement The Enlightenment, which covers the period of about a century and a half in Europe from around the time of the publication of Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620) to that of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781). From the perspective of socio-political phenomena, the period is considered to have begun with the close of the Thirty Years War (1648) and ended with the French Revolution (1789). Attempting to be freed from what Bacon referred to as four kinds of idols or intellectual fallacies: "idols of the Tribe" (idola tribus), "idols of the Den" (idola specus), "idols of the Marketplace" (idola fori), and "idols of the Theatre" (idola theatri), the Enlightenment advocated reason as a means to establishing an authoritative system of aesthetics, ethics, government, and even religion, which was supposed to allow human beings to obtain objective truth about the whole of reality. It is sometimes called the "Age of Reason." Emboldened by the revolution in physics commenced by Newtonian kinematics, Enlightenment thinkers argued that the same kind of systematic thinking could apply to all forms of human activity. Also, the wide availability of knowledge was made possible through the production of encyclopedias, serving the Enlightenment cause of educating the human race.

The Enlightenment was a reaction to what is usually called "Protestant scholasticism," which was established around the end of the sixteenth century and continued in the seventeenth century amongst Lutheran and Calvinist leaders, who claimed the supreme dogmatic and ecclesiastical authority of the Protestant Reformation. According to some historians, Protestant scholasticism was even more authoritarian than Medieval scholasticism of the Catholic Church. While Pietism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a more religious and pious reaction to Protestant schoalsticism, the Enlightenment was a more humanistic reaction. The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment regarded themselves as a courageous elite who would lead the world into progress from a long period of doubtful tradition and tyranny, which they imputed to the “Dark Ages” and which they also believed expressed itself through Protestant scholasticism. They now reduced religion to those essentials which could only be "rationally" defended, i.e., certain basic moral principles and a few universally held beliefs about God. Even atheism resulted from the Enlightenment, and religion was largely banished from the public square, becoming a private, domestic option. The church also increasingly withdrew from the public square.

The Enlightenment, especially with respect to its new political thought developed by people such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704), helped create the intellectual framework for the American Revolutionary War, French Revolution, the Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, and the series of Latin American revolutions around the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, and led to the rise of democracy, liberalism and capitalism.

The age of Enlightenment is considered to have ended with the French Revolution, whose more violent aspect was discredited by many. Also, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who referred to Sapere aude! (Dare to know!) as the motto of the Enlightenment, ended up criticizing the Enlightenment confidence on the power of reason. Romanticism with its emphasis upon imagination, spontaneity, and passion, emerged also as a reaction against the dry intellectualism of rationalists.

Nevertheless, the Enlightenment left a lasting heritage for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The general decline of the church, the growth of secular humanism and political and economic liberalism, the belief in progress, and the development of science have all resulted from this. Even today many of the conservative and evangelical Christians see the Enlightenment tradition still as a very serious challenge to their faith. Already being aware of the tension between the faith tradition of Pietism and the humanism of the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century, philosophers of religion such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) attempted to synthesize them. But, still the tension continues to exist today. It seems to have been appropriate, then, that in the twentieth century Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) called for "a new synthesis" of both traditions and Paul Tillich (1886-1965) for a new way of "mediation." The modernism of the Enlightenment tradition received a radical criticism from the non-religious postmodern deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) in the late twentieth century, but again some suggestions have been made thereafter that it be reintegrated with the depth of spirituality.

History of Enlightenment Thought

Europe had been ravaged by religious wars; when peace in the political situation had been restored, after the Peace of Westphalia and the English Civil War, an intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted belief that mysticism and revelation are the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom—which was blamed for fomenting political instability. Instead, (according to those that split the two periods), the Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and absolutism as 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." The goal of a philosophy based 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 then became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson.

The ideas of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo and other philosophers of the previous period also contributed to and greatly influenced the Enlightenment; for instance, according to E. Cassirer, Leibniz’s treatise On Wisdom identified the central concept of the Enlightenment and sketched its theoretical programme" (Cassirer 1979, 121-123). There was a wave of change across European thinking, exemplified by Newton's natural philosophy, which combined mathematics of axiomatic proof with mechanics of physical observation, a coherent system of verifiable predictions, which set the tone for what followed Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in the century after.

The Age of Enlightenment is also prominent in the history of Judaism, perhaps because of its conjunction with the political and social emancipation of many of Western Europe's Jews.

Key conflicts within Enlightenment-period philosophy

As theology became a source of partisan debate, different schools attempted to develop rationales for their viewpoints. Thus, philosophers such as Spinoza searched for the metaphysics of ethics. This trend later influenced pietism and eventually transcendental searches such as those by Immanuel Kant.

Religion was linked to another concept which inspired a great amount 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 the influx of gold and silver from trade and conquest, however, the state assumed more and more authority and power. Intellectuals responded with a series of theories on the purpose of, and limits of state power. Therefore, during the Enlightenment, absolutism was cemented and a string of philosophers reacted by advocating limitation, from John Locke forward, who influenced both Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Enlightenment ideas influenced organizations seeking to effect 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 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. These series of discoveries had a momentous effect on both pragmatic commerce and philosophy. The excitement engendered by 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, greatly influenced 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, two main theories contended 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 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, so that by analogy to argue that rationalism in the modern period is, likewise, a construction. In their book, 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. Foucault critiques the post-Enlightenment tendency to explain eveything according to a dominant mega-theory, so that eveything must fit the master-narrative. Truth, he says, is more subjective and all disciplines are created by elites who control the academy, who determine, often based on self-interests, the standards of normality. Once one method has been selected over others, alternatives become deviant. What does not conform is heresy. History, for example, is written by winners not losers, usually by men not women, by the elite not the workers. We need to unearth the hidden assumptions within texts; meaning may not be so much discovered within the text as supplied to, or read into, the narrative.

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.

The Scottish Enlightenment

Scotand benefitted economically from the expansion of trade and commerce of the British Empire in the seventeenth through to the twentieth centuries. Many Scots served overseas in the colonial service as well as engaging in commerce. Traditionally close ties to France from the pre-Union with England period helped to forge intellectual links with French thought. Scotland's Universities were less subject to ecclesiastical control than Oxford and Cambridge were and a type of humanism flourished in the Scottish academy. Several writers, such Herman (2001) and Buchan (2003) point to the high level of Scotish contributions to Enlightenment thought, represented by such thinkers as Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), David Hume (1711-1776) and Adam Smith (1723-1790). The concept of 'free trade', the mainstay of globalization as well as much of what came to be known as 'scientific method' developed within the Scottish Enlightenment. Herman explores how Scotland's 1707 union with England transformed the country from one of the poorest in Europe to an affluent and highly educated society, giving birth to the Scottish Enlightenment.

Muslim Critique

S H Nasr (1994) expresses Muslim criticism of the Enlightenment as separating knowledge from value. Western science and technology, he says, is immoral because there is no concern with the consequences of progress only with progress itself. Science no longer serves humanity but its own quest for yet more knowledge. His basic critique is that reason became detached from 'revelation', and thus also from values. Other Muslims argue that while Western science, post-Enlightenment, places trust in reason alone, Islamic science places its trust in God's revelation; Western science values science for its own sake, Islamic science regards itself as a type of worship; Western science claims impartiality, Islamic science claims a partiality towards what is true and beneficial for humanity; Western science reduces the world to what can be empirically verifeid, Islamic science admits the reality of the spiritual dimension (see Bennett: 120). Of course, such a contrast sets up a caricature of Western science over and against a very ideal view of Islamic science but it does represent a reasoned critique of post-Enlightenment assumptions. Nasr castigates contemporary Islamic fundamentalists for claiming that when they borrow Western technology that are retreiving what Islam have Europe through Spain since, says Nasr, they condemn as heretics the very philosophers from whom the West borrowed while Western science also stands on a foundation which they reject, that is, the primary of reason over revelation. There are also Christians who likewise have criticized the Enlightenment.

External links

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: The Enlightenment
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: The Counter-Enlightenment
• Introduction to the Enlightenment
• The greatest works of Enlightenment Literature
• 'L'esprit des Lumières a encore beaucoup à faire dans le monde d'aujourd'hui' by Tzvetan Todorov Le Monde March 4, 2006 url=http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3246,36-747585@51-696669,0.html

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bennett, Clinton Muslims and Modernity, NY & London: Continuum, 2005 ISBN 082645481X
• Newbigin, Lesslie Foolishness to the Greeks, Grand Rapids, MI: Eeerdmans, 1986 ISBN 0802801765
• Nasr, S. H. Traditional Islam in the Modern World, London: Routledge, 1990 ISBN 0710303327
• Hill, Jonathan Faith in the Age of Reason, Downers Grove, IL: Lion/Intervarsity Press, 2004 ISBN 0830823603
• Cassirer, Ernst et al The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979 ISBN 0691019630
• Hulluing, Mark Autocritique of Enlightenment: Rousseau and the Philosophes Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994 ISBN 0674054253
• Gay, Peter The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996 ISBN 0704500175
• Melamed, Yitzhak Y, 'Salomon Maimon and the Rise of Spinozism in German Idealism', Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 42, Issue 1
• Jacob, Margaret Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000 ISBN 0312237014
• Munck, Thomas Enlightenment: A Comparative Social History, 1721-1794 London: Arnold; NY: Oxford University Press ISBN 034066326X
• Herman, Arthur How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of how Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It NY: Crown, 2001 ISBN 0609606352
• Brown, Stuart ed., British Philosophy in the Age of Enlightenment London: Routledge, 2002 ISBN ISBN
• Kors, Alan Charles, ed. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. 4 volumes. NY: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 ISBN
• Buchan, James Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind NY: HarperCollins Publishers2003 ISBN 0060558881
• Louis Dupre, Louis The Enlightenment & the Intellctural Foundations of Modern Culture New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004 0300100329 ISBN
• Himmelfarb, Gertrude The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, NY: Knopf: Distributed by Random House,2004 ISBN 1400042364
• Bronner, Stephen Eric Reclaiming the Enlightenment, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004 ISBN 0231126085
• May, Henry F The Enlightenment in America NY: Oxford University Press, 1976 ISBN 0195023676

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