The World of the Enlightenment

The people who lived during the Middle Ages had no idea
that they were living in the Middle Ages, but the
philosophers of the Enlightenment self-consciously named
their era. The period between the death of Louis XIV,
around 1715, and the beginning of the French Revolution in
1789 was known in Italy as the Secolo degl' Illuminati, in
France as the Siècle des Lumières, in Germany as the
Aufklärung, and in England as the Enlightenment.
Towards its end, in fact, the great philosopher Immanuel
Kant was asked to write a magazine article in which he
would spell out what its principles were. The article was
entitled "What Is Enlightenment?" and here is its first
paragraph:

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed

nonage [childhood]. Nonage is the inability to use one's
understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is
self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding
but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's mind
without another's guidance. Sapere Aude! Dare to Know!
Have the courage to use your own understanding is
therefore the motto of the Enlightenment.

Let me unpack two implications of Kant's definition. First,

enlightenment is not an achieved state of being like
Nirvana. It is rather the process of learning to think for
oneself, and no process of that sort can ever be complete.
As Kant said later on in his essay, he and his readers do not
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 2

live in an enlightened age but in an age of enlightenment.

And second, enlightenment cannot be a system of beliefs,
but a mode of critique by which we can free ourselves from
systems imposed by others.

What particular system of beliefs were the thinkers of the

Enlightenment were trying to free themselves from? Let
me briefly characterize it as the Renaissance World Picture.
The world is organized as a Great Chain of Being leading
from God down through his creation to primordial
unformed matter. Man is made in God's image, and just as
God rules by majesty the heavenly host, so kings are
divinely appointed to rule over their subjects, so masters
are to rule over their servants, so fathers are to rule over
their families, so men over women. This hierarchical order
of society is eternally fixed: to argue that all human beings
are created equal would advocate chaos, would challenge
the order imposed by God. I could find these ideas in
Shakespeare, Milton, or Dryden, but let me quote
Alexander Pope's Essay on Man (1735):

Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes;

Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell,
Aspiring to be angels, men rebel,
And who but wishes to invert the laws
Of order, sins against the Eternal Cause!

Pope's "Essay on Man" is the last great re-statement of the

Renaissance World-Picture, a credo written in an age when
belief in that creed was rapidly crumbling. It is what the
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 3

world of the Enlightenment was learning to do without.

Pope's "Essay" is also one of the great statements of
Optimism, which is the subtitle of Voltaire's novel,
Candide.

Optimism did not mean merely looking on the bright side,

as it does today. The dark question that provoked the
Optimists was like the one asked in the Book of Job: If God
is omnipotent, omniscient, and universally beneficent, then
why does evil exist? Milton had asked that question in
Paradise Lost, and answered it according to his own
interpretation of the Bible: that the fall of mankind was
owing to Lucifer's pride and the prideful sin of Adam and
Eve, but that it was ultimately a fortunate fall, in that it
brought Christ's redemption to the world. But a century
later people were not interested in this sort of answer.

The answer that appears in Pope’s Essay on Man (derived

from the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz) is that
God's universe is a universe not of special providences but
of general laws. Despite what the hymn says, God's eye is
not on the sparrow. The sparrow falls, not because God
knocked it out of the sky but because God made the law of
gravitation. Pope argues that earthquakes and floods--and
blizzards--all natural disasters happen because of physical
laws that are the best ones that could have been devised.
And we would not want those laws repealed. I may
stumble and skin my knee because of the law of
gravitation, and that is painful. But if there were no law of
gravitation the rivers would cease to flow, and the
atmosphere itself would disperse into space.
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 4

Pope explains moral evil in the exactly same way as

physical evil, as a byproduct of the operation of general
laws. Man was created with two principles within the
mind, Passion and Reason. With Reason alone we could
accomplish nothing: we require Passion to direct Reason to
any goal. Passion may lead to crime and violence, to
conquerors like Alexander and traitors like Catiline. But
without Passions we would have no love, no families, no
societies---and no virtues. Pope's conclusion is that, since
God's order is the wisest order that could exist, that this
world is the best, and indeed the only possible world. And
therefore, Pope concluded:

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 in spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite,
One truth is clear: WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT!

When it appeared in 1735, Pope’s “Essay on Man” was

hailed as a magnificent truth, but only a few years later it
seemed a clever ad for a product that had become hard to
sell. Although Pope’s vision was emancipated from the
God of biblical revelation, Pope's picture depended upon
that metaphysical theory of the world as a Great Chain of
Being, beginning with God and ending in nothingness, with
Man as the middle link of the creation, fixed in his place,
his capacities and duties eternally the same. And already
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 5

the Enlightenment had begun to subject all such

metaphysical theories to critique.

Some Enlightenment writers argued against the logic of

Leibniz and Pope. Samuel Johnson teased out the hidden
premises of the Great Chain of Being idea and showed why
they were improbable, even incoherent, so that no one was
obliged to accept them. But his contemporary Voltaire did
not bother to refute Optimism: instead he exploded it.

The spokesman for Optimism in Candide is Doctor

Pangloss, professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmo-
nigology:

"It is proved, he used to say, that things cannot be other

than they are, for since everything was made for a purpose,
it follows that everything is made for the best purpose.
Observe: our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we
have spectacles. Legs were clearly intended for breeches,
and we wear them.... And since pigs were made to be eaten,
we eat pork all the year round. It follows that those who
maintain that all is right talk nonsense: they ought to say
that all is for the best."

Voltaire got started on Candide after listening to people

trying to justify, on the basis of Optimism, the 1755
earthquake at Lisbon, in which fifty thousand people had
lost their lives. He was outraged at this justification of
natural evil--but it was not physical evil that really bothered
Voltaire. It was rather the moral evil produced by
institutions and by the defects of human nature. Voltaire
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 6

dares the reader of Candide to say that "all is for the best"
after we witness brutal crimes like rape, murder, and
mutilation; the butchery of war itself and of military
tribunals; the merciless cruelty of religious bigotry; theft by
force and by fraud, by judges and moneylenders, gamblers
and whores; the horrors of servitude as chattel slave in the
Americas and as domestic servant in Europe. No
profession is exempt from Voltaire's mockery: doctors,
lawyers, merchants, and priests are corrupt, while the
peasants are merely revolting. Candide does meet a few
virtuous and noble souls in his travels, like Jacques the
Anabaptist, but they are the likeliest to die young.

In his youth Voltaire had believed in a Divine Watchmaker

who made the world according to perfect general laws, but
in Candide the philosopher Martin holds that God has
abandoned this world to the Devil. But even this theory
leaves mankind the central concern of some supernatural
being. The dervish of Constantinople has an even more
outrageous idea. When Candide asks why there is evil
throughout the world, the dervish replies with his own
question: “When the Sultan sends a ship to Egypt, does he
trouble his head about the comfort of the rats in the
vessel?” Voltaire asks us to imagine ourselves, finally, as
philosophical vermin debating our place in a universe
whose purpose we cannot understand but which certainly
has nothing to do with us.

At this point I want to back up from the particular texts you

are reading to talk a bit about the place of the
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 7

Enlightenment in history, as something that emerged out of

the wars and instabilities of the seventeenth century.

I expect you have been studying the Renaissance and the

Reformation, and about the humanism that was born at the
end of the Middle Ages. An enormous enthusiasm for
classical learning and secular culture broke out in every
European court, and we can see in seventeenth-century
writers like Bacon and Descartes, Newton and Locke, the
beginnings of modern scientific thought.

But given the social structures inherited from the Middle

Ages, this learning and culture penetrated an inch deep, if
that. The established churches were deeply suspicious of
the new science, and guarded jealously their monopoly on
learning. Every government censored publications: there
was no such thing as a free press. Even in England printers
could lose their ears for publishing a seditious pamphlet.
While the Royal Society was being established in London
as the great sponsor of experimental science, people were
being accused of trafficking with the devil, and burned at
Smithfield or hanged over here at Salem. In Catholic
countries like France, Protestants could be massacred,
while even in relatively liberal England you could go to jail
for attending the wrong church, or even for not attending
any.

Meanwhile every country in Europe with a merchant navy

was organizing to exploit the new wealth of the Americas,
purchasing millions of Africans as slaves and shipping
them across the Atlantic to work in the mines of Peru or the
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 8

sugar cane fields of Jamaica or Barbados. These slaves

were treated as expendable machinery with a limited useful
life: they were slowly worked to death, while those who
rebelled were executed in picturesque ways to discourage
the others.

The lot of the agricultural worker in England or France or

Germany was better, but not by much. The price of bread
was artificially manipulated to enrich landowners, so that
workers starved during times of plenty as well as during
famines. Common land where the poor had grown
vegetables or raised a few pigs were fenced off by the
wealthy, and those who were thrown out of work wandered
the countryside looking for work, stealing when they could
and being hanged when they were caught.

Jonathan Swift knew his own country, Ireland, was

exploited by landlords who squeezed high rents from tenant
farmers but spent the money on luxuries in London. And
his "Modest Proposal" (1729) was that poor farmers should
sell their babies at a year old to be slaughtered like suckling
pigs, to be roasted simply or turned into a fancy ragout.
Those who disagree with this beneficial scheme, Swift said,
should "first ask the Parents..., whether they would not, at
this Day, think it a great Happiness to have been sold for
Food at a Year old, in the Manner I prescribe; and thereby
have avoided such a perpetual Scene of Misfortunes, as
they have since gone through; by the Oppression of
Landlords, the Impossibility of paying Rent, without
Money or Trade; the Want of common Sustenance, with
neither House nor Cloaths, to cover them from the
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 9

Inclemencies of the Weather; and the most inevitable

Prospect of intailing the like, or greater Miseries upon their
Breed for ever."

Swift's satire was a searchlight of critique on colonialism as

it afflicted Ireland, and you can see how he links up with
Voltaire through his wicked sense of humor. But please
don’t confuse Swift's ideas with those of the philosophes.
Swift was by profession an Anglican clergyman---the dean
of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin---and his vision of life
was deeply Christian and conservative.

When you read Gulliver's Travels you will see how he

laughs at the enlightenment hope for a future of secular
progress. For Swift experimental science was not the key
to the future, it was a grotesque waste of time that he
thought would never make two blades of grass grow where
one had grown before. Man, Swift felt, would always be
like the fallen Adam and Eve, expelled from the Garden,
and searching for divine grace. The best we could hope
would be to control our monstrous pride, especially pride in
our supposed rationality, and the technical improvements
like gunpowder that have only made our conflicts more
bloody. His rebarbative image of humanity is sharpest in
the final book of Gulliver, when the hero meets the Yahoos,
bestial creatures with nauseating vices, and realizes that he
is one of them.

As a Christian, Swift viewed evil as an intrinsic part of

human nature after the Fall, a nature that could never
change. But the philosophes viewed evil as a challenge to
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 10

be overcome. Those evils included, as I have mentioned, a

semi-feudal economy, a division of the population into
orders and estates, religious intolerance, enthusiasm,
fanaticism and superstition, royal absolutism and
government corruption. Reform of all that was one tall
order. But if they were often depressed about the prospect
of meaningful change happening in their own lifetimes,
they were more often optimistic in the twentieth-century
sense, feeling that progress was inevitable and that history
was on their side.

How can we characterize Enlightenment thought? What

was involved in its culture of critique? I would argue that
characteristically Enlightenment thinkers try to cast away
old prejudices and presuppositions in order to see what
really lies at the bottom of our institutions. While most
philosophers from Plato to Descartes had assumed that
people had to be born with innate ideas of truth in their
heads, John Locke, in the Treatise on Human
Understanding (1690), took the opposite tack. He asked us
to suppose that the mind at birth is nothing but a blank slate
upon which experience writes. And he discovered that,
given a capacious memory and a few simple "programs"---
like the ability to compare one memory with another, and
the ability to reflect on its own operations---he could derive
all our complex ideas from experience.

Locke's ideas about society and law, in his Second Treatise

on Government (1690), made the same sort of move, by
working from a social version of the "blank slate." Instead
of assuming that kings and private property were ordained
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 11

by God, he speculated about what the world would be like

in a state of nature, before any governments existed. And
he argued that we have natural rights to our lives and to any
possessions we acquire by our own labor. But we are
insecure in those rights, since we can be killed or robbed by
brute force or sneak attack. This insecurity leads us to join
together into a society, forming a government to which
each person gives up rights, like the right to avenge
ourselves on those who attack us, so that public justice
replaces private vengeance. But if a government goes
beyond its just powers and usurps more power that it was
given, if it tyrannically takes people's lives and property,
then the social contract is broken, the government is
dissolved. The society returns to the state of nature and can
start all over again, forming a new and hopefully a better
government. In his political treatise, The Social Contract,
Rousseau took a similar stance, and these ideas are most
familiar to Americans through Thomas Jefferson’s version
of them in the Declaration of Independence.

Other Enlightenment thinkers built what we call today the

social sciences on Locke's foundation. They jettisoned the
received ideas of the past, as they were defended by the
intellectual clergy, and sought a new secular foundation for
the study of the human mind, ethical behavior, social
institutions, education, and history. Travelers had brought
back descriptions of civilized societies in Africa, Asia, and
the Pacific Islands, from which it was clear that morality
did not depend upon Christianity, which those societies had
never encountered. The society of Tahiti, which had been
visited by the explorers Cook and Bougainville, was
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 12

envisioned not just as a utopia of pleasure, but as a world

without crime and without criminal laws.

Many of the philosophes were atheists, like David Hume.

Most of the others believed, at most, in a creating God who
had made a world that obeyed natural laws. And most of
them agreed with Hume and with Jean-Jacques Rousseau
that the source of virtue was not to be found only in the
divine commandments, that there must be such a thing as a
natural morality based in the human heart, a natural
propensity to wish our fellow creatures well.

Many of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment wrote

history as well as philosophy, and there was a good reason
for this. History was no longer seen the way Renaissance
minds like Philip Sidney had seen it, as a way of teaching
ethics by example. Montesquiou, as early as his "Causes of
the Greatness and Decline of the Romans," (1734) had
argued that history is not just a parade of events, moral or
otherwise: it is a process of change governed by large-scale
environmental, social, and cultural forces, and a
philosopher ought to be able to predict such changes with
the same precision with which a scientist can predict the
action of natural laws. And those changes, as the
philosophes saw them, were not directionless: they were
leading to greater and greater human freedom and
happiness. It was not a historian but an economist, the
Frenchman Jacques Turgot, who put it this way:

"We see societies establishing themselves, nations forming

themselves, which in turn dominate over other nations or
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 13

become subject to them. Empires rise and fall; laws, forms

of government, one succeeding another; the arts, the
sciences, are discovered and are cultivated; sometimes
retarded and sometimes accelerated in their progress, they
pass from one region to another. Self-interest, ambition,
vainglory, perpetually change the scene of the world,
inundate the earth with blood. Yet in the midst of their
ravages manners are gradually softened, the human mind
takes enlightenment, separate nations draw nearer to each
other, commerce and policy connect at last all parts of the
globe, and the total mass of the human race, by the
alternations of calm and agitation, of good conditions and
of bad, marches always, although slowly, towards still
higher perfection...."

Not every historian was as optimistic as Turgot---David

Hume called history the narrative of the progress of human
stupidity. But what we hear in Turgot is something new in
the eighteenth century---the discourse of modernity. His
generation was the first to reject the static world of the
Great Chain of Being, the first to feel that the past had led
up to the present moment, had caused it to be what it was,
and that the future was going to be something new,
produced by the choices of those now alive. And the
wisdom of those choices would depend on the expansion of
knowledge and the dispersion of freedom of thought.

If there was a single major project that stood at the center

of the Enlightenment it was the Encyclopedia. We take for
granted today that our libraries, at school and even at home,
will have massive multivolume works written in a neutral
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 14

mildly boring style that will tell us at least a little bit about
anything we might conceivably be curious about, the
history of China, the invention of the saxophone, the
population of Tanzania. But its origin was in two
overworked, brilliant polymaths named Jean le Rond
d'Alembert and Denis Diderot. D'Alembert and Diderot
were curious about simply everything, wrote voluminously
on all sorts of subjects, and farmed out the articles they
couldn't write themselves to equally brilliant friends like
Voltaire and Rousseau. The Encyclopedia, which came out
at intervals between 1751 and 1766, was a revolutionary
project, as revolutionary as the Fall of the Bastille, because
its message was "Knowledge is for everyone, uncensored
by the Church or by the State. You shall know the truth
and the truth will set you free." In the Encyclopedia Diderot
defined the philosophe as one who:

"trampling on prejudice, tradition, universal consent,

authority, in a word all that enslaves most minds, dares to
think for himself, to go back and search for the clearest
general principles, to admit nothing except on the
testimony of his experience and his reason."

Sapere aude: dare to know.

Today scholars who study the eighteenth century are often

defensive about the Enlightenment. It is not just the
religious right, which finds the secular humanism of the
Enlightenment a denial of the revealed word of God. It is
also criticized from the left by Marxists who point out that
it promoted the ideas and the power of the bourgeoisie
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 15

classes at the expense of the working classes. Post-colonial

critics are rightly offended at the way its thinkers
propounded specifically European notions as universal
truths, or argued, as David Hume did, that those countries
that made slower progress toward modernity must be
populated by inferior races. Feminists are right to
complain that the Enlightenment set up its public sphere of
critique exclusively for men, while turning women into
"angels in the house." And there is an important
philosophical school running from Nietzsche to Derrida
that rejects the very basis of the Enlightenment: the idea
that we can determine values through rational thought.

Each of these contemporary attacks on the Enlightenment is

valid. But all of them arise out of the spirit of critique that
was the essence of the Enlightenment. So the more we
complain about the Enlightenment and its limitations, the
more we endorse its deepest values.

Those values seem particularly worth studying in the light

of what we have learned through recent history. For most
of the last half of the twentieth century, the adversary of
Western Europe and the United States was the Soviet
Union, which argued that the capitalist system was a
historical relic and that it was the socialist state that
represented the next stage of human progress, the truly
rational society the Enlightenment was seeking. Those
specious claims unraveled in the late 1980s, of course, but
it is interesting that, even in their worst tyrannies, dictators
bowed to the Enlightenment ideal of self-determination by
claiming to be acting on behalf of the will of the people.
David Richter: The World of the Enlightenment, Townsend Harris, 3.6.2002, page 16

Since September 11th, however, we find ourselves at war

with a different sort of enemy, an adversary that despises
not merely the culture but the very idea of modernity, an
adversary that wishes to return to a steady-state universe
run by religious teachers according to the revealed word of
God. Those of us who are aware, in our own social
critique, that the western world has never adequately
realized the vision of liberty, equality, and brotherhood that
inspired Montesquiou and Voltaire, now find ourselves
opposed by a culture, inhabited perhaps by a billion people,
that utterly rejects that vision. As we have become aware
through the war in Afghanistan, our technology gives us the
power to bomb our opponents into smithereens, but by
itself it does not give us the power to change one human
mind. An idea can be fought only with another idea, and a
vision of heroic martyrdom inculcated by religious teachers
can be fought only by another more attractive vision: a
vision of adults with the courage not just to die, which we
all must do, but to think for ourselves.

Sapere aude: dare to know.

Thank you.