As defined by Jonathan Israel, the Enlightenment principles are
as such:
Democracy;
racial and sexual equality;
individual liberty of lifestyle;
full freedom of thought, expression, and the press;
eradication of religious authority from the legislative
and education;
and full separation of church and state…
and we can see by actions, not wild fanatical bullshit of those like UR…
and who in America is actively engaged in ending freedom of speech,
and press, who is engaged in putting church over the state,
who is against individual liberty of lifestyle?
It is clear it is the right… for example, who has, even today, tried to pass laws
making homosexual activities illegal? who has tried to turn America into
a full theocracy? who has actively engaged in disenfranchising voters all over
America? Who wants to put religion back into schools? Who is actively working
to prevent LGBTQIA people from having legal and social rights? Who is
trying to take away women’s right over their own bodies? Hint: it ain’t the left…
the right wing actively tries to limit or take away human rights from
human beings… hence its hatred of the Enlightenment and what it stands
for…but the question arises, why does the right so hate people having
rights, freedoms, and liberties?
I think it, in part, stems from the operating principles that the right wing
begin with…
the right wing has certain principles that form the basis of their beliefs…
that the universe has an hierarchy… that there is a top to bottom flow
of the universe… and on top is god with man right below god…
that the universe is a set, formed universe… which explains why
the right so hates Darwin and evolution/science… the right clearly hates
the principle of evolution because of its changeable nature…
the right wing is fixated upon the past and its apparent fixed nature…
the right-wing hates movement, change, adaptation, process, progress
and evolution… for a conservative, change is never good, they hold onto
tradition no matter what… look at who fought against the American revolution,
the conservatives… and after America won, many thousands of conservatives moved
to either Canada or back to England…this is a historical fact…
the next thing about conservatives and you can see this today, in UR
and gLOOM for example, that the universe must fit into their own
conception of the universe… they don’t adapt their beliefs for the
universe, they try to force the universe facts to fit into their
perspective or understanding of the universe… and if it doesn’t fit
into their preconceived notion of the universe, it become “fake news”…
they can’t accept anything that doesn’t fit into their already fixed
and preconceived notions of the universe… which is why millions of them
still can’t accept the notion that Biden won the election… because
it flies in the face of their preconceived understanding of the universe…
that IQ45 is the messiah who can walk on water… and thus it becomes
impossible for them to conceive how anyone could possibly vote against him…
he is the messiah… how can you vote against the messiah?
everything about the conservative flows from their starting point or
fixed preconceived notion of the universe…their starting point
determines their path or their beliefs…
the next point is the idea that fear drives the conservative…
this is quite evident looking at them… they
clearly fear, well everything…the list of things they don’t fear
is much smaller than the things they do fear…
and by no means is this a comprehensive list of fears the conservative has:
Thinking, Terrorism, communism, homosexuality, women, socialism,
atheists, the U.S constitution, change, muslims, peace, renewable energy,
Hugo Chavez, the United Nations, blacks, democracy, love, fun, Obama,
Clinton (either one)…literacy, books, other religions like Hinduism,
or Buddhism, native Americans…
how many times has UR for example attacked one or more of these?
for example he has attacked literacy in one of his recent threads…
a typical reaction from the right… leave the “peasants” unable to read
or think for themselves because look at what “might” happen…
such dangers as democracy or freedom of expression…
the battle of the Enlightenment still continues on, even to this day…
the battle to treat human beings as human beings continues to this day…
personally, I find this trend to demolish the enlightenment ideal’s
as disturbing… unlike conservatives, I hold that people should have
the freedom to act and believe in what they want to believe in…
thus I do hold that burning the American flag is a question of
the freedom of speech, and should be allowed… I hold that women
can and do know what is best for them and thus they should have
the right to abortion on demand as they wish… (as for the conservative bogus
idea of the sanctity of life, fails the true test of real-world actions because
they approve of the death penalty and other useful deaths for example,
policemen who kill to protect their lives… if life has the sanctity of life,
then any, ANY attempt to end it, must be punished including for the safety of
country… thus IQ45 drone strike that killed Soleimani, is considered to be wrong
because if life is sacred, it must be sacred in ALL cases, not just in some)
so to continue the mission of the enlightenment, we must reengage in
the ideals of the enlightenment… to remove false, damaging
belief in the fixed nature of the universe… the world moves,
physically, mentally, emotionally, politically and socially
and philosophically… the conservative attempts to fix the world
into comfortable and safe patterns must be rejected… we must
become comfortable with change and movement…
or as Nietzsche might have said, we must become comfortable with
dancing on thin ice… yes, we might break the ice and drown, but that is the cost
of doing business in the real world… freedom over safety and security…
we can’t any longer afford to put safety/security ahead of freedom and
equality… this is just another way of saying, without risk, there cannot
be any rewards… the greater the risk taken, the greater the reward…
it is as simple as that…
so let us take one concept of the enlightenment and work on that…
why should we hold to equality instead of inequality?
the rightwing holds to an hierarchy, a top to bottom flow
to the universe… for example, the rightwing hold that
the “superior” human being is the super wealthy human being…
thus bill gates and Bezo’s are “superior” human being by virtue of
their wealth… wealth becomes a measure of one’s superiority
over the “Masses” and the long-time Protestant idea that wealth
becomes a measure of one’s superiority still stands true even today…
wealth becomes a measure of how “hard” working one is,
and one of the measuring sticks of the right, is how
hard one works and is rewarded by wealth…
(a fact that is disproven in the real world where the working poor
and the plain poor must work much harder than the upper class…
I know many people, working class people who must have two or
even three jobs to make enough to survive… or must have
EBT cards to survive, another example, it is a proven fact that the
ones who go into work first are not the managers or the upper class, but those
who are the workers… for example, I get to work at 5:00 Am,
whereas the managers don’t arrive until 7:00 am… this is a very
common theme in business and has been for a hundred years…
studies were done in the 1920’s that brought this fact to light)
we use wealth as a measuring stick for one’s “value” but we should
use one’s values or character as a measuring stick for the “valuable”
human beings…the rightwing uses other measuring sticks for
valuing a human being, like wealth or status or titles…
when we should be using such values as justice/equality,
freedom, those who promote peace instead of violence,
what makes a human being valuable? I would say that it is
one who engages with the values of love, peace, justice/equality,
charity, hope… we should value those like Gandhi or MLK over
those like IQ45 and Hitler…
the journey is something the rightwing doesn’t take into account…
we don’t see the right-wing praise the process, the journey, adaptability,
evolution, movement… but these are the things that make us human…
we aren’t not a fixed, set beings, we are ever moving changing, adapting,
engaged in process and movement… that is where we must move our
focus to… not to engage in safety or stability or any type of
fixed or set actions or behavior… we must become process
and movement and making that journey from animal to human…
that is the engagement human beings must engage with, not
as a set being, but a forever moving and evolving living beings…
I have changed my political stances changed three times now…
Once I was a moderate Democrat ( until I was 20 which is par for the course
as one simply adapts one’s family notions and beliefs as the standard to follow)
my next step was an reevaluation of values brought on by Rayguns election,
whereas I became an anarchist, and my third political stance was around 1993-95…
where after another revaluation of values, I left anarchism and turned
to a very liberal democratic position…
as I aged and changed, my views and understanding of the world changed
and adapt… views that made sense at age 20 or 40 or even 50,
no longer makes sense at 62, soon to be 63… as my life and values change,
I must change my understanding of what it means to be human…
one who cannot change their understanding of the world because of
fixed and set positions, which can be political, social, economic,
psychological or aesthetics, and/or all of the above, they cannot
change to adapt to an ever-changing world… they are in a very real
sense, dinosaurs and will die being unable to adapt and change to
an ever changing world…the key to being human and surviving
is to be able to change and adapt as needed to the world…
our laws, behavior, needs, values must change and adapt to the
ever changing world…we must be ready to change what it means
to be human in the face of our world changing…
the next boundary of change in being human lies in the coming revolution
of technology in human beings… I am part of that change as I must wear
a hearing aid to hear and soon, I will be deaf to the point of a hearing aid
no longer working so I must get a cochlear implant, which is technology
implanted into my head to allow me to hear… this is the future,
whether we want it or not… and we must adapt and change our thoughts
and actions to adapt to this changing environment…
just as we must change and adapt our laws, our behaviors, our understanding
of what it means to be human in the face of a changing environment…
we must change to face the future, not the conservative
way which is to label anything that forces us to change as
“fake news”…
can we hold to the principles of democracy if we hold
to the economic tyranny of the massive income inequality
that exists today?
the democratic principle is that everyone is equal before the law
and as such, has equal ability to vote… if we engage, as the right wing
has engaged in voter suppression, then we deny the practice of
democracy to potential voters… if we don’t allow voting to people,
for whatever reason, we deny democracy to people… it is that simple…
if we allow income inequality to exists, then we deny the process of
equality to all… for equality is not just a political term but is also
an economic term…it is not just about preventing equality to people
by the law, but it denies equality to people economically…
if we accept the phrase, “all men are created equal” then we must
hold to our society being equal in all aspects, politically, socially,
economically and philosophically…
if we believe in the phrase “all men are created equal”
then how can we engage in a process that makes people
unequal, either politically or socially or economically?
what would you say if I propose a new law, that people whose net worth
is over a million dollars, cannot, cannot vote in a election…
the screams would be heard all over eternity… how could I act with
such bigotry and hatred toward the wealthy… they have rights and
one of those rights is to vote… and yet, these exact same people will
defend denying the right to vote by the poor using the exact same arguments
they used to defend the right of the wealthy to vote…
if we accept, as we must, that “all people are created equal”
then we must actually act as if that is true… our laws, our vision of
America, our precepts must include all people in all matters, hence
we must change our educational system to be fancy trade schools
that teach people some trade to gain an income… in other words, education
right now, is focused on creating workers, producers, consumers…
be it high end workers like doctors or lawyers or low-end workers
like garbage workers or grocery clerks… what education should be focused on
is the creation of human beings, what is our possibilities of being, both
individually and collectively?
we must change our political system, our educational system, our
very understanding of what it means to be a human being, not just
being an American…
I would make the argument that by preventing people from voting
who have a million dollars of worth, (which by the way, precludes me
from voting) cannot vote because they are so engaged in the gaining
and maintaining their wealth as to forget that our political system is
engaged to help all people, not just the wealthy… the wealthy would use
their votes to improve their wealth instead of improving society as they should…
and we should ban anyone worth over a million dollars from voting…
just as many reasons can be cooked up to prevent the wealthy from
voting as is used to prevent the poor or minorities from voting,
that the GOP and the conservative use today to prevent millions from
voting.
the goal of society is to seek out justice and equality, instead of
seeking out the trinkets of existence, wealth, titles, fame, material goods…
what is the goal or point of existence or the point of one’s existence?
to seek out the possibilities that exists in our lives…
and that should be the engagement of a state or society…
to make it easier for one individually and collectively,
to seek out what is possible for us…
As a student of history I found that the Enlightenment tends to be what you want it to be and the counter enlightnement is that part of the enlightenment that you like less…
The term was not invented until the 1932 when Cassirer wrote his book. Cassirer. The Philosphy of the Enlightenment. (F. C. Petergrove, Trans.1968) Boston: Beacon Press.
The “members” of the Enlightenment, had no clue they were part of such a movement, and like David Hume, now seen as a leading light of the “Scottish Enlightenment” did not once ever use the word.
In the last few decades, especially since Mr Isreal decided to elevate Spinoza to the status of Enlightenment Guru, there has been a spluerg of Enlightnments such as the French Enlightenment, the Jewish Enlightenment, the American Enlightenment, Scottish Enlightenment, and even (Urghhfghh!!), The Christian Enlightenment.
The 18thC has proven to be too mean to hold the bullshit included in the Enlightenment, and so they have extended it both sides and calling it the “Long 18thC!”
In reality culture has been enlightening since 1450 ish and it has not really stopped.
one might ask, correctly, why hasn’t government engaged in
some sort of massive redistribution of wealth, not as in the recent
redistribution of wealth going from the middle class and poor to the already
wealthy, but of the wealth transfer going from the wealthy to the middle class
and poor?
because of the simple rule of engagement in a war that all parties follow
in warfare… keep the opposing side, in this case, the poor and middle class,
in conflict and in opposition to the ruling class… in other words, keep
your opponents from forming an alliance…
government can rule in more safety if there is constant class warfare in
America… if the lower classes from the working poor to those in poverty
to the middle class ever unite together, they are a threat to the government…
the way the government keeps its power is by not allowing different classes
to unite and become one together…so by forcing millions to remain in
poverty and working themselves to death, as is the situation right now,
this gives the government free reign to do whatever it wants…
but if the various classes of society/the state unite, then we can put
the government under our control, to do our bidding instead of
the corporations which does control the government.
the United States government is simple a division of ExxonMobil…
and that is wrong… in so many different ways… but the defender of
tradition will not engage in such a manner because he/she is told
that to disagree with the state, with tradition is to be in
revolt or rebellion to the established order…
the possibility of revolution can bring about chaos and anarchy,
and what does the conservative/right wing fear more than anything else is
anything that threatens the conservative hierarchy which is safety/security
above all else… nothing in a conservative’s world is worse than a
challenge to safety/security… and they will fight anything that threatens
their safety/security and income equality is a threat to their safety/security,
so they will fight it to the death…they must, to maintain
their illusion of safety/security, hold to the massive income inequality that
exists today because the alternative is possible chaos, and a challenge to
their safety/security…they can only see the possibility of the threat to their
safety/security… see UR for that… the only thing that matters to him
and to all conservatives is a threat to their safety/security…
the goals of the French Revolution were correct, they just failed
in their execution
K: your statements are factual not true… for example, Kant wrote in 1784:
“Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufkarung?”
and in English:
“Answering the question: What is enlightenment?”
and Kant was really late to the scene…
the enlightenment really did have a set of principles, as I have listed…
and the majority of Enlightenment writers engaged in those set of principles,
of course, some were engaged in different aspects of the Enlightenment,
but most held the course as set out…
now the question arises, is your other statement correct,
" In reality, culture has been enlightening since 1450 ish, and it has not
really stopped"
The problem with that statement comes down to how one defines this
“enlightening” does it means science, or historically or culturally,
or philosophically? how do we define this understanding of
“enlightening?”
Kant was taking about Aufkarung, which means enlightenment. NOT “The Enlightenment”. He was not refering to movement but he wrote an obsure essay on obeying your Lord. - Not a very Enlightenment Value at all.
And the only reason you know about that obscure essay was thar Carrirer made it his springboard in 1932. If he had not wrotten that book the essay would have reamined covered in dust.
For Kant there was no such concept; “The Enlightenment”.
It was not a movement.
It had no principles or key values because there was no such thing.
I’ve read this essay years ago, it is a toadying letter to his patron.
The Enlightenment is a poc hoc phantasm.
Essay: What is Enlightenment?
This essay is not about the Enlightenment. It is an investigation as to how the idea, ‘Enlightenment’[ The capitalisation of the term is rendered necessary as the length of this piece of work will not bear the weight of the addition of a lower case enlightenment.] has been adopted, and is used. It is closer to a genealogy of Enlightenment than an assessment of the actions of historical actors of the eighteenth century who have been enlisted to characterise the term. Due consideration of the ideas of the Enlightenment is only addressed in the light of this investigation. First the essay examines the reception of the Enlightenment into English, as a word to signify aspects of the eighteenth century. Then it looks at the evidence for the concept, as it existed in the eighteenth century. The essay will then investigate some of the historiographical issues that are complicit in the application of the term and some of the difficulties and arguments that have arisen from the consequence of the widening of the boundaries to which the term as been put, in contrast to the actuality of eighteenth century thinking.
It would appear that no English-speaking historian used the word Enlightenment to describe the eighteenth century, until the twentieth century. An investigation into several encyclopaedias of the Victorian period reveals not a single mention. This may reflect a nineteenth century attitude that ‘patronised’ the eighteenth century as being rather shallow.[ Albee, E. (1910). The Philosophy of the Enlightenement by John Grier Hibben. The Philosophical Review , 19 (5), 538-541.] Indeed a late Victorian OED definition associated Enlightenment with a French “shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for tradition and authority.”[ Schmidt, J. (2003). Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jabobins, British Hegelians, and the OED. Journal of the History of Ideas , 64 (3), 421-443.] A perusal of the British Library catalogue reveals not a single title containing the word “Enlightenment” until 1910.[ catalogue.bl.uk] But despite this negative evidence, it is not to say that nineteenth century historians did not concern themselves with the eighteenth century. Leslie Stephen, for one, devoted much consideration to the eighteenth century but did not make ‘Enlightenment’ the object of his approach.[ Stephen, L. (1979). Selected Writing in British Intellectual History. (N. Annan, Ed.) Chicago: University of Chicago.] Next from the study of the BL catalogue, we have to wait for 1942 when The Age of Enlightenment, an Anthology of 18th Century French Literature[ Eds Otis E Fellows & Norman L. Torrey, NY Crofts.] becomes available. But it is not until 1951 that the word Enlightenment becomes used to describe a unity of historical thought on the eighteenth century, in a book translated from the 1932 German version from the posthumous Cassirer.[ Cassirer. (1955). The Philosphy of the Enlightenment. (F. C. Petergrove, Trans.) Boston: Beacon Press.] The next book of significance is offered from Isaiah Berlin in 1956, The Age of Enlightenment.[ Berlin, I. (1956). The Age of Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.] The 1960s provides a further handful of books, notably from Gay, Manuel, and Fellows. But even after Enlightenment’s adoption into English, Bronowski’s and Mazlish’s The Western Intellectual Tradition[ Bronowski, J., & Mazlish, B. (1960, p xiii). The Western Intellectual Tradition. London: Hutchinson.] mention it only in passing, and then only dismissively; “To us, the Age of Enlightenment… is not a restful abstraction. It is a complex of people and groups with conflicting ideas…” Then, when dealing with France during this period they are again somewhat dismissive of the term: “usually labelled the French Enlightenment.”[ Bronowski, J., & Mazlish, B. (1960, p 246).] This demonstrates that the link between Enlightenment with the eighteenth century is not a necessary one and perhaps novel in some respects to twentieth century thinking. The 1960s is rather an interesting period for the career of this particular signifier as there was also a growing interest in Buddhism and so this decade also marks the appearance of another literary kind of “enlightenment”. It seems the word was attracting a certain kudos. During the first half of the 1970s both Buddhist enlightenment and the historical “Enlightenment” start to flourish. There were around 35 further history books on the eighteenth century containing the word in their titles. The rest of the decade sees an explosion of titles of around 100 British Library entries culminating in a cookbook of the Enlightenment. Presumably if you can eat it, it must be real? From that time to the present, Enlightenment studies has now become a massive historical industry. In the early twenty-first century, Enlightenment has become a historical category driven both by consensus and argument, and has undergone a massive proliferation of versions: French, German, Dutch, Scottish, Scientific, Radical, Counter-Enlightenment and even Christian and Jewish. Not to be left out we now also have a book about English Enlightenment[ Porter, R. (2000). Enlightenment. London: Penguin. ] from Roy Porter.
There is a claim that ‘Enlightenment’ is one of the few words to describe an historical period for whom the historical participants are responsible for its coining. Indeed there is a significant amount of evidence for this claim and a certain amount of justification. However the evidence for this claim is somewhat limited considering the widened scope that the Enlightenment now enjoys. It is true that many of the historical actors now associated with it would not have recognised themselves as part of the Enlightenment per se, (at least not as currently characterised) nor would wish to be associated with many of the other historical actors also associated with it. This becomes especially evident if we were to confront say La Mettrie, author of L’Homme Machine, with a leading light of the so-called Christian Enlightenment. It seems, that as Intellectual Historians, we should be in the business of avoiding anachronisms and false attributions such that it would seem unfair to attribute to people in the past such descriptions that they would not have employed of themselves. This essay is a brief investigation of this problem.
The evidence for the attribution of the word “Enlightenment” to be applied to the eighteenth century comes from two key areas, and a third rather less satisfying one. First, it may be accurate to say that the philosophe grouping in France during the eighteenth century were explicitly and openly were conscious of a distinct movement, initiated by Voltaire, in which the metaphor of revealing a light was used textually and iconographically – this can be seen clearly in the preface and frontispiece, respectively, to the Encyclopaédie of D’Alembert and Diderot. But it is not clear to what degree their movement attracted a signifier that approximates “Enlightenment” at the time, though the English translation uses the ‘enlightenment’ throughout the entire work. In particular, the use to which this word was put, by D’Alembert was a recognition that the philosophes were reflecting a previous age in ancient times in which the search for truth was less restrictive than their present. D’Alembert in writing his encyclopaedia was uncovering 1200 years of darkness stating, “The masterpieces that the ancients left us in almost all genres were forgotten for twelve centuries.”[ Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot D’Alembert, D. &. (2009, Dec). quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/] This somewhat retrospective viewpoint stands in some distinction to which various practitioners of intellectual history have applied the term “Enlightenment”, as we shall see. What does come near is the use of the term of Diderot’s, siècle philosophe, which he applied to the eighteenth century, whereas the term siècles de lumiére referred, not to the eighteenth century, but to pre-Christian, ancient times.[ Schmidt, J. (2003, p 431)] But it is this siècles de lumiére that has been recruited, and used to form the Enlightenment. This “French Enlightenment” seems to be the seed from which most other Enlightenments have borne their own contradictory progeny.
The second main area of evidence comes from the much quoted and perhaps over stated connection to Enlightenment that is the result of the famous question “was ist Aufklärung?” presented as a competition in a Berlin journal in 1783. It is often Kant’s answer that receives the most attention. This position was that Aufklärung was a maturing of mankind in its ability to be able to think for itself. Although the subsequent debate “raged”[ Schmidt (1996) (ed.)] for the rest of the decade, it is evident from Schmidt’s study of the Mittwochsgesellschaft[ Schmidt (1989)] that the Aufklärung was a limited phenomenon: limited to a small group of thinkers who under the license “you can think as much as you like as long as you obey”, were asking the questions: why had the public received so little Enlightenment, and even so, was it really a good idea to let them have any more? The restrictions proposed for this limitation were class based and considered application to the public and private. Even though these thinkers considered that they were enjoying many liberties, in being able to conduct this discourse, nonetheless this was conducted to a degree in secret, and this ‘liberty’ was peculiar to the benign despotism of the reign of Frederick the Great. What little liberty the Prussians enjoyed was soon to be reversed by the succession of Frederick William II when a Censorship Commission was there to “stamp out the Enlightenment”.[ Kant, I. (1798 (1979, p vii)). The Conflict of the Faculties. (M. J. Gregor, Trans.) New York: Abaris.] This Aufklärung has fed the imagination of Enlightenment studies as is exemplified by Foucault asking the same question in 1984.[ Foucault (1984). Rabinow ed.] He was not imune to the irony that Kant’s view is the very antithesis of a position of social responsibility, and was a position not likely to have a major impact on a wide swath of the public. It might be concluded that Kant’s view is paradoxical in allowing ‘public’[ But as a scholar he has complete freedom, indeed even the calling, to impart to the public all of his carefully considered and well-intentioned thoughts; Kant] freedom to a ‘scholar’, but to demand obedience to all those in a ‘private’ role[ What he teaches in consequence of his office as a servant of the church he sets out as something with regard to which he has no discretion to teach in accord with his own lights; Kant]: is not a scholar also holding an office? One has to ask if some great irony has been lost from the context, but also how much of an influence did Aufklärung actually have at the time in the brief reign of Frederick the Great? If this influence was so limited; why call the eighteenth century the Enlightenment? For Moses Mendelssohn, answering the same question as Kant, associates Aufklärung, with Bildung and Kulture. He stated that though these words may have been newcomers to the language, this did not prove that they are new things. “The Greek had both culture and enlightenment.”[ Schmidt, J. (1996, p54)] With this we might reflect how Enlightenment is become so heavily associated with the eighteenth century; or why be concerned to translate Aufklärung as Enlightenment?
The third justification for the attribution of ‘Enlightenment’ to the eighteenth century is that contemporary authors used the term of their own age. Burke, is sometimes quoted. But his reflections on the abandonment of old prejudices were somewhat ironic.[ Schmidt, J. (1996, p17)] The word was also used contemporaneously in a general way to describe a sense of growing modernity. An example of this is from Porter, quoting Revd Richard Price, “our first concern, as lovers of our country, must be to enlighten it.”[ Porter, R. (2000). Enlightenment. London: Penguin. xvii, Fn 2, p 485] Although Porter also calls the Enlightenment anachronistic he still feels the need to title his book thus. Other examples range from; “an enlightened age… of age of enlightenment – [but] the designation ‘the Enlightenment’ is nowhere to be found.”[ Schmidt, J. (2003, p430)] However, there is an important sense in which a long historical process that challenged the power of theology to dominate thinking had gathered pace. The question is whether such a complex process can be signified with a single word. However, it seems that the Aufklärung was the result of a thinly spread new outlook from philosophers across Europe, reaching the German speaking world who were making achievements in political thought, science and knowledge against traditional beliefs; that the philosophes and other intellectuals across Europe approximated a community connected by travel; a republic of letters and printed academic works. Significant evidence of cross fertilisation of ideas amongst European intellectuals – is, then, the basis upon which the eighteenth century has been characterised as the Enlightenment. As this concept has been conceived in the twentieth century, it has been appropriated by various interests in the academic community and has attracted a large range of supporters and detractors too numerous to even summarise in a small work such as this. What is clear is that “Enlightenment” has been used as a post hoc attribution to characterise an explicit philosophical movement, which departed from religion and faith, and has been characterised by a spectrum of philosophies, which included atheism, deism, pantheism and a mechanistic and materialistic approach to explain the natural world. This is to say nothing of a growing challenge to traditional political power relations, which is characterised by the struggle for liberty by the revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition Enlightenment as well as being coterminous with the eighteenth century is now also indistinguishable from the birth of modernity. This has led to the Enlightenment having its critics. This criticism does not only addresses what might be called the essential issues of that philosophical movement, but has also encompassed many other areas of eighteenth century history as the boundaries of the Enlightenment have been exceeded. Now we seem to have a position in historical discourse that has seen a proliferation and appropriation of the ‘Enlightenment’ which seems now to reside in a range of versions, as listed (p3) above.
As the “Enlightenment” has grown its various branches a critical response has emerged from James Schmidt and others. Some ground has been gained by his critique. In support of Schmidt, Delacapagne (2001) stated; “There is probably not a single philosophical position around which we could end up finding all the main representatives of the Enlightenment family gathered as if at a birthday party… except (perhaps) the anti-religious position.” [ Delacampagne, C. (2001). The Enlightenment Project: A Reply to Schmidt. Political Theory , 29 (1), 80 - 85.] Today, not even that is true, as the “Christian Enlightenment” has tried to gatecrash that party. Though most of the French philosophes never publicly declared full atheism, (presenting themselves as deists), it seems fair to say that this concern with unpacking of religious dogma so central to early twentieth century characterisations of the period has set the bar for Enlightenment studies. Collingwood described the Enlightenment thus: ”it was a revolt not only against the power of institutional religion but against religion as such.”[ Collingwood, R. G. (1946). The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p76] This view was also shared by Paul Hazard who suggested that the aim of the Enlightenment was to put Christianity on trial, and by Peter Gay who described it as a “war on Christianity.”[ Rosenblatt, H. (2006). The Christian Enlightnement. In The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol VII, Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660-1815 (pp. 283-301). Cambridge: Cambridge University press.] This position is now somewhat emasculated by a growing Christian Enlightenment which relies on what Rosenblatt, calls a ‘pluralizing’ rejection of a ‘single Enlightenment’. She suggests, “we now know … that the relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment was more complicated and interesting.”[ Ibid, 283] But is this we now know better position fair? Is it not simply a consequence of the ‘pluralization’ or more aptly a ‘colonisation’ of the word ‘Enlightenment’ by theological history? Is it not simply an artefact of a false attribution, which has extended the word beyond all reasonable limits? The result of this is that what was once considered, as the definitive Enlightenment, is now relegated to “French Enlightenment”, subsumed to allow for the growth of further branches. This simply begs the question: what is Enlightenment that a static past can be so seemingly transformed in just 60 years of scholarship? Were Collingwood et al so wrong? Within this new discourse the accompanying adjective is now pruned so that, for example, Professor Stewart Brown is now able to characterise Hugh Blair’s sermons, which specifically denounce Deism, Atheism, Materialism and the American and French revolutions, as “… the greatest influential achievements of the Enlightenment.”[9 Brown, P. S. (2009). Hugh Blair, the Sentiments and Preaching the Enlightenment in Scotland. In K. Haakonssen (Ed.), Religion and Enlightenment: Comparitive Studies of Scotland and Geneva. Brighton: University of Sussex.] This usage renders “The Enlightenment” as nothing other than equivalent to “the eighteenth century”, devoid of a core meaning. If the most significant core value of the Enlightenment can be so easily swept aside, this means that the Enlightenment of Collingwood has become stretched to its maximal extent: an extent that is as wide as the time period is describes. It now seems to have been robbed of its anti-superstition, anti-religion characteristics of the French philosophes, and the ‘thinking for one’s self’ aspect characteristic of Kant’s essay. The emergence of a Christian Enlightenment is in some ways the most extreme example of the extension of the boundaries of the Enlightenment. However, the various critiques of Enlightenment studies has more subtle and far less easy targets for this essay to pursue. And despite the difficulties with a definitively identifiable Enlightenment, Enlightenment studies have attracted a compelling and attractive scholarship that has asked questions which lie at the very heart of the nature and practice of Modernity.
In addition to the acquisition of the term and its promotion by sectional interests within academia, Enlightenment has also been acquired for a range of critiques. Schmidt[ Schmidt, J. (1996). What is Enlightenment? Berkeley: Universoty of Los Angeles Press.] notes that the Enlightenment has been blamed for a long list of crimes from the French revolution, totalitarianism, absolute values, imperialism, aggressive capitalism, the destruction of a sense of community by individualism and many more. Ironically enough many of the earliest attacks from the nineteenth century were made on the basis of the apparent opposition to faith and religion[ Garrard, G. (2006). Counter-Enlightenments. London: Routledge. P 122] to those identified as atheistic philosophes and deistic Aufklärer and by those that might now be welcomed paradoxically into the Christian Enlightenment. The attacks have continued in many forms to the present. But as the temporal distance has grown and the boundaries of Enlightenment have extended, the attacks become inconsistent as the object of the attack changes, so much so that any attack made against it could, with some little effort, be engineered in support of it. For example, Political scientist J. Q. Wilson attributes modern day problems with rights, as a legacy of the Enlightenment.[ Schmidt, J. (2000, p 734 – 5)] Haakonssen’s objection to Wilson correctly drives a distinction between the Enlightenment’s hierarchical social ethics and a rights-based liberalism of modernity. However, this begs the question, what is Enlightenment, and although Haakonssen’s objection is accurate using a precisely defined Enlightenment, it may simply be too late for such an objection to fit. The Enlightenment and its legacy, it seems have moved on: it is now indistinguishable from Modernity itself.
Garrard sets out a range of “Counter-Enlightenments”[ Garrard, G (2006)] from the eighteenth century to the present. Some of the contemporary ones share features with those set out by Schmidt. Schmidt (2000)[ Schmidt, J. (2000). What Enlightenment Project? Political Theory , 28 (6), 734 - 757.] explains some of the abuses to which the term Enlightenment has been put. He characterizes such critiques as falling into categories of jeopardy, futility and perversity. He shows how the critics of the Enlightenment project, use ‘a projection’ of the writers own choice and runs with this to knock down what might be called a straw man argument. “Critiques of the Enlightenment project thus rest on an act of projection in which the unpleasant features of our own time are explained as the consequences of certain general principles whose ultimate origins are located in a particular eighteenth century thinker or group of thinkers who are stipulated as representative of the Enlightenment.”[ Schmidt (2000, p741).] Though he hints later on, he does not make quite so much of the same evident tendency in the supporters and defenders of the Enlightenment to do the same thing. Are the Enlightenment’s defenders not also projecting their own concerns? Surely this too is a feature of Enlightenment studies. When Berlin, Lively and Manuel made choices as to those particular philosophers who were to be included in their own works, they were inevitably projecting their own concerns by allowing a selection of eighteenth century philosophers to speak for ‘themselves’, by speaking for the ‘Enlightenment’. But by making those choices they were inevitably creating and defining the boundaries and essential qualities of their personal conception of the Enlightenment.
Whilst Schmidt points to Birken and Lang, Garrard points to Crocker and Macintyre as critics of Enlightenment, all implicitly or explicitly implicate the Enlightenment in the horrors of WWII and totalitarianism. Is this justification any more convincing than laying the blame of racism and Nazism at the door of Darwin or Pol Pot at the door of Marx? Arguments against Birken’s and Lang’s notion that the Enlightenment is to blame for the horrors of Nazism[ Schmidt (2000, pp. 738,739)] is discarded and replaced by the more reasonable suggestion that the mysticism of Hegel; the Irrationalism of the Romantic and Nationalist nineteenth century, and the misappropriation of Nietzsche, are far more responsible for the rise of Nazism, and the concentration camps. It was not the rejection of faith and superstition, so characteristic of the philosophy at the time of the Enlightenment that can be held responsible for these horrors. But it is the use of science as a socially constructed tool, by political forces motivated by the irrational superstition that is Nationalism and Racism. Forces that justified evil deeds on scientific grounds, by using science as a rationale for an anti-Semitism that predated the eighteenth century by 100s of years. Anti-Semitic forces needed no encouragement from a thing that could have been called Enlightenment. Such an aberration seems able to justify itself within any historical context and was at the heat of Martin Luther’s personal ideology. Could this inversion be laid at the door of the anti-clerical forces of thought contained in eighteenth century philosophy; and the rise of nineteenth century Nationalism that seemed to have taken the place of the binding force of religion? It is clear from this, that if Enlightenment thinking can be blamed for this, it is due to omission rather than commission. Is it that Enlightenment thinking was unable to account for, or replace with reason, the human need to be bound to a systematized human group in distinction to the other, as it is this tendency that lies at the heart of Nazism and is a continuing problem to the present that seems always to plague our species. If it is the Age of Reason that is to blame, perhaps the detractors of Enlightenment thinking would like to suggest how unreason might have faired in the intervening 2-300 years? In Dialectic of Enlightenment[ Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment. (J. Cumming, Trans.) New York: Herder and Herder.], Adorno and Horkheimer tend to identify the problems of the twentieth century by posing the question: why has value neutral instrumental reason failed to enlighten humanity, which has continued to sink into barbarism. There seem to be two things that the Enlightenment could be criticized for in the reception of modernity and what that has involved for the world at large. One, is a critique of the thoughts and values contained within the historical period. And two, the valorization of the Enlightenment in terms of the historiographical process which has maintained it, writes about it, and feeds a kind of mythologisation of modernity. In this, Intellectual History would seem to be complicit with this activity. But are Adorno and Horkheimer criticizing one or the other, or both? It seems that they dissolve this distinction. Thus Enlightenment is all that characterizes the project of modernity from the eighteenth century to the present. The Dialektik der Aufklärung is less about the historically defined ‘Enlightenment’, but a general attack on the way elements of modern thought from Homer to the present that ought to have produced a better world have lost their way. If one were to hold to a definitive Enlightenment their critique is more about the failure of Modernity than its subordinate; the Enlightenment. Despite this compelling and thoughtful approach their own critics have caricatured their approach. It has been suggested, by Jan Gollinski, that Adorno and Horkeimer level a criticism at the Enlightenment for the ‘enlightened rationality responsible for the rise of totalitarianism itself… and ultimately to the extermination of human beings.”[ Gollinski, J. The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. (J. G. William Clark, Ed.) London: University of Chicago Press.] But the book is written in a mode of ironic puzzlement in which rationality has failed to penetrate deeper levels of human horror. Thus the debate seems to be rather confused if we look at what they actually said. They demonstrate that there is nothing new in Anti-Semitism. It has been transformed by a new rationale, and is “all that has been retained of religion by German Christians.”[ Adorno & Horkheimer(1972). ]
The result of this widening of its boundaries, then, has led to a diminution of its meaning and its value as a tool in understanding the history of ideas. Outram suggests that the Enlightenment is “obscure or even meaningless” due to history studying ideas, “not as autonomous discrete objects, but as deeply embedded in society.”[ Outram,(1995; 12)] This would be correct if the Enlightenment could be identified exactly with a series of autonomous ideas: it cannot. There never was any agreement as to what the Enlightenment was or whether it was possible to make it conform to a clear set of ideas. But is it clear that the seeds of that obscurity can be found not in the late twentieth century but in the middle of the twentieth century, between the works of Cassirer on the one hand and the likes of Manuel and Berlin[ Berlin’s The Age of Enlightenment (1956), and Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1955)] on the other, at the very moment that ‘Enlightenment’ is introduced. These distinct approaches lie at opposite ends of a conceptual spectrum: in the very use of the term which is used as if the Enlightenment were a causal agent by Cassirer, but only as a label for a period of philosophical history by Berlin and Manuel. Cassirer, far from applying ideas as autonomous objects he imposes a Geist – a process or form of thought not simply the sum total of the leading thinkers of the time, but he rather chooses to characterise the work of those thinkers as a “manifestation” of the essential Enlightenment. This is the very epitome of ‘embedded ideas’. But this was fraught with problems from the start, as Price[ K B Price, Ernst Cassirer and the Enlightenment, Journal of the history of Ideas, Jun 1957] pointed out: Cassirer fails to establish the Enlightenment as an “event”, but effectively produces a work of fiction by attributing to it a gentle process of historical development, devoid of the conflicts inherent in the period.[ Price, K. B. (1957). Ernst Cassirer and the Enlightenment. Journal of the History of Ideas , 18 (1), 101-112..] Berlin suggested that Cassirer “offers a conciliatory view at the expense of the critical faculty”, by characterising the Enlightenment without the “conflicts and crises … [in this] serenely innocent book”, showing the need for a more “business-like approach.” [ Berlin, I. (1953). Review: The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Cassirer. The English Historical Review , 68 (269), 617-619.] Cassirer is not without further critique: Boas in 1952 asked whether such an approach was at all possible; “neither times nor movements have Minds in any intelligible sense of the word.”[ Boas, G. (1952). The Philosophy of the Enlightenment by Ernst Cassirer. Journal of Philosophy, Inc , 49 (7), 244-247.] Oddly, Cassirer, by promoting this type of thinking, it seems, is flying against the aims of eighteenth century materialist philosophy by ironically promoting a romantic view of history and reflecting Hegelian counter-Enlightenment interests of the nineteenth century. The echo of this Geist appears throughout Enlightenment studies. Both the critics and promoters of “the Enlightenment” rely on a modified conceptualisation of the Geist of the eighteenth century. It is this unity of concept, and idealist notion of ‘culture’ this single mind that relies, not on eighteenth century self-critical thinking, but on the sort of nineteenth century mysticism of Hegelian Geistgesische. It is then of the deepest irony that Cassirer uses this to promote the Enlightenment. At the other end of the conceptual spectrum, Berlin et al cleverly allow the philosophers of the eighteenth century to speak for themselves with books that are selections of their writings with commentary. For example, Berlin with Locke and Voltaire but reveals his own peculiar interests by devoting a third of his book the writings of Hume. This sort of approach, which is common to Enlightenment studies, is a means by which the editors[ also Issac Kramnick 1995] create their own toolkit of connotations and piece together an Enlightenment of their own imagination.
Concluding Remarks
In 1876, Leslie Stephen observed; “in some minds the desire for unity of system in the more strongly developed; in others the desire for the conformity to facts.”[ Stephen, L. (1979, p6, orig 1876)] In the case of Enlightenment studies both attributes stand out in clear contrast. Those that love facts would seek conformity to a narrowly definitive Enlightenment; those that love a system can, like a magpie, attribute whatsoever they desire to find a systemic truth. Those wishing to hold hard to the facts have more chance to agree, whilst the systematisers can only hope to adopt a relativism to co-exist with other participants in Enlightenment studies. Outram has suggested a way forward. She prefers to look at the Enlightenment as a “capsule containing sets of debates, stresses and concerns, which however differently formulated or responded to, do appear to be characteristic of the way in which ideas, opinions and social and political structures interacted and changed in the eighteenth century.”[ Outram (1995)] Her idea is a viable and pragmatic approach to tackle some of the key issues that were discussed in the eighteenth century, though the notion that the selection of such issues will also tend to pre-configure the Enlightenment, there will also be those practitioners that see a spirit or system emerge out of their chosen arguments. Perhaps this is an unavoidable tendency that leads towards the Enlightenment becoming a thing with its own volition; a simple consequence of what to choose to place inside the capsule? There is a sense in which Outram is trying to salvage the Enlightenment. Her idea seems to be workable, but makes one ask, why not jettison the term entirely and continue to talk about what actually happened in the eighteenth century without colouring it with an inappropriate term, a term that carries the baggage of so much connotation and textual accretion? Perhaps the attractiveness of the word preserves its usage? Schmidt noted; “Historians searching for a felicitous way of capturing the spirit of the age have cited it, philosophers hoping to incite a renewed devotion to the ideal of Enlightenment have appealed to it, and present-day social critics-apparently in need of a bit of historical legitimacy have sometimes wrapped themselves in its mantle.”[ Schmidt (1989)] So why has the term attracted so much interest, or should it be asked, what has encouraged its acquisition by a range of interests? Such a word has a great positive feeling to a degree that anyone would wish to be associated with it. And when using it as an object of critique or ridicule, the effect is so much more enhanced being such a positive sounding word. But the Enlightenment by being vague such critiques are easier to pursue than, say, an attack on “the Age of Reason”. After all who would attack Reason? The Enlightenment connotes accomplishment, knowledge acquisition, attainments, illumination, awakening, civilisation, debunking, broad mindedness, sophistication, de-mythologisation. It is no surprise given the set of connotations that theological studies would wish to cover themselves in its mantle or is it just seeking a bit of historical legitimacy? These connotations stand against confusion, darkness and ignorance, notions that no one would wish to be associated with. What it has come to denote is far more complex and indefinable: the period terminating in the eighteenth century; a philosophical movement; a philosophical process; a philosophical project; a mental and social attitude; a set of philosophical and political argumental vignettes; and it is conflated with a wider category: Modernity itself.
Bibliography
Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment. (J. Cumming, Trans.) New York: Herder and Herder.
Albee, E. (1910). The Philosophy of the Enlightenement by John Grier Hibben. The Philosophical Review , 19 (5), 538-541.
Berlin, I. (1953). Review: The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Cassirer. The English Historical Review , 68 (269), 617-619.
Berlin, I. (1956). The Age of Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boas, G. (1952). The Philosophy of the Enlightenment by Ernst Cassirer. Journal of Philosophy, Inc , 49 (7), 244-247.
Bronowski, J. &. (1960). The Western Intellectual Tradition. London: Hutchinson.
Brown, P. S. (2009). Hugh Blair, the Sentiments and Preaching the Enlightenment in Scotland. In K. Haakonssen (Ed.), Religion and Enlightenment: Comparitive Studies of Scotland and Geneva. Brighton: University of Sussex.
Brumfitt, J. (1972). The French Enlightenment. London: Macmillan.
Cassirer. (1955). The Philosphy of the Enlightenment. (F. C. Petergrove, Trans.) Boston: Beacon Press.
Clark, W. G. (1999). The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. Chicago: Universoty of Chicago Press.
Collingwood, R. G. (1946). The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford Universoty Press.
D’Alembert, D. &. (2009 йил Dec). quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/
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Foucault, M. (1984). What is Enlighenment? In P. (. Rabinow, The Foucault Reader (pp. 32-50). New York: Pantheon Books.
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Gollinski, J. The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. (J. G. William Clark, Ed.) London: University of Chicago Press.
Integrated Catalogue. (2010). From British Library Integrated Catalogue: catalogue.bl.uk
Jacob, M. C. (2006). The Enlightenement critique of Christianity. In S. a. Brown, The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol VII, Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660-1815 (pp. 265 - 282). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, I. (1798 (1979)). The Conflict of the Faculties. (M. J. Gregor, Trans.) New York: Abaris.
Lively, J. (1966). The Enlightenment. London: Longman’s.
Outram, D. (1995). The Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Porter, R. (2000). Enlightenment. London: Penguin.
Price, K. B. (1957). Ernst Cassirer and the Enlightenment. Journal of the History of Ideas , 18 (1), 101-112.
Rosenblatt, H. (2006). The Christian Enlightnement. In The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol VII, Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660-1815 (pp. 283-301). Cambridge: Cambridge University press.
Schmidt, J. (2003). Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jabobins, British Hegelians, and the OED. Journal of the History of Ideas , 64 (3), 421-443.
Schmidt, J. (2000). What Enlightenment Project? Political Theory , 28 (6), 734 - 757.
Schmidt, J. (1996). What is Enlightenment? Berkeley: Universoty of Los Angeles Press.
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PS
of the six things you list Kant whom you claim to have represented The Enlightnment, would not have supported any more than one or two.
Kant could be argued to be against:
Democracy;
racial and sexual equality;
individual liberty of lifestyle;
ANd would have been ambivalent about
eradication of religious authority from the legislative
and education;
and full separation of church and state…
Read the essay you cited and come back an defend his as an “enlightenment” man!
Kant was taking about Aufkarung, which means enlightenment. NOT “The Enlightenment”. He was not refering to movement but he wrote an obsure essay on obeying your Lord. - Not a very Enlightenment Value at all.
And the only reason you know about that obscure essay was thar Carrirer made it his springboard in 1932. If he had not wrotten that book the essay would have reamined covered in dust.
For Kant there was no such concept; “The Enlightenment”.
It was not a movement.
It had no principles or key values because there was no such thing.
I’ve read this essay years ago, it is a toadying letter to his patron.
The Enlightenment is a poc hoc phantasm.
Essay: What is Enlightenment?
This essay is not about the Enlightenment. It is an investigation as to how the idea, ‘Enlightenment’[ The capitalisation of the term is rendered necessary as the length of this piece of work will not bear the weight of the addition of a lower case enlightenment.] has been adopted, and is used. It is closer to a genealogy of Enlightenment than an assessment of the actions of historical actors of the eighteenth century who have been enlisted to characterise the term. Due consideration of the ideas of the Enlightenment is only addressed in the light of this investigation. First the essay examines the reception of the Enlightenment into English, as a word to signify aspects of the eighteenth century. Then it looks at the evidence for the concept, as it existed in the eighteenth century. The essay will then investigate some of the historiographical issues that are complicit in the application of the term and some of the difficulties and arguments that have arisen from the consequence of the widening of the boundaries to which the term as been put, in contrast to the actuality of eighteenth century thinking.
It would appear that no English-speaking historian used the word Enlightenment to describe the eighteenth century, until the twentieth century. An investigation into several encyclopaedias of the Victorian period reveals not a single mention. This may reflect a nineteenth century attitude that ‘patronised’ the eighteenth century as being rather shallow.[ Albee, E. (1910). The Philosophy of the Enlightenement by John Grier Hibben. The Philosophical Review , 19 (5), 538-541.] Indeed a late Victorian OED definition associated Enlightenment with a French “shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for tradition and authority.”[ Schmidt, J. (2003). Inventing the Enlightenment: Anti-Jabobins, British Hegelians, and the OED. Journal of the History of Ideas , 64 (3), 421-443.] A perusal of the British Library catalogue reveals not a single title containing the word “Enlightenment” until 1910.[ catalogue.bl.uk] But despite this negative evidence, it is not to say that nineteenth century historians did not concern themselves with the eighteenth century. Leslie Stephen, for one, devoted much consideration to the eighteenth century but did not make ‘Enlightenment’ the object of his approach.[ Stephen, L. (1979). Selected Writing in British Intellectual History. (N. Annan, Ed.) Chicago: University of Chicago.] Next from the study of the BL catalogue, we have to wait for 1942 when The Age of Enlightenment, an Anthology of 18th Century French Literature[ Eds Otis E Fellows & Norman L. Torrey, NY Crofts.] becomes available. But it is not until 1951 that the word Enlightenment becomes used to describe a unity of historical thought on the eighteenth century, in a book translated from the 1932 German version from the posthumous Cassirer.[ Cassirer. (1955). The Philosphy of the Enlightenment. (F. C. Petergrove, Trans.) Boston: Beacon Press.] The next book of significance is offered from Isaiah Berlin in 1956, The Age of Enlightenment.[ Berlin, I. (1956). The Age of Enlightenment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.] The 1960s provides a further handful of books, notably from Gay, Manuel, and Fellows. But even after Enlightenment’s adoption into English, Bronowski’s and Mazlish’s The Western Intellectual Tradition[ Bronowski, J., & Mazlish, B. (1960, p xiii). The Western Intellectual Tradition. London: Hutchinson.] mention it only in passing, and then only dismissively; “To us, the Age of Enlightenment… is not a restful abstraction. It is a complex of people and groups with conflicting ideas…” Then, when dealing with France during this period they are again somewhat dismissive of the term: “usually labelled the French Enlightenment.”[ Bronowski, J., & Mazlish, B. (1960, p 246).] This demonstrates that the link between Enlightenment with the eighteenth century is not a necessary one and perhaps novel in some respects to twentieth century thinking. The 1960s is rather an interesting period for the career of this particular signifier as there was also a growing interest in Buddhism and so this decade also marks the appearance of another literary kind of “enlightenment”. It seems the word was attracting a certain kudos. During the first half of the 1970s both Buddhist enlightenment and the historical “Enlightenment” start to flourish. There were around 35 further history books on the eighteenth century containing the word in their titles. The rest of the decade sees an explosion of titles of around 100 British Library entries culminating in a cookbook of the Enlightenment. Presumably if you can eat it, it must be real? From that time to the present, Enlightenment studies has now become a massive historical industry. In the early twenty-first century, Enlightenment has become a historical category driven both by consensus and argument, and has undergone a massive proliferation of versions: French, German, Dutch, Scottish, Scientific, Radical, Counter-Enlightenment and even Christian and Jewish. Not to be left out we now also have a book about English Enlightenment[ Porter, R. (2000). Enlightenment. London: Penguin. ] from Roy Porter.
There is a claim that ‘Enlightenment’ is one of the few words to describe an historical period for whom the historical participants are responsible for its coining. Indeed there is a significant amount of evidence for this claim and a certain amount of justification. However the evidence for this claim is somewhat limited considering the widened scope that the Enlightenment now enjoys. It is true that many of the historical actors now associated with it would not have recognised themselves as part of the Enlightenment per se, (at least not as currently characterised) nor would wish to be associated with many of the other historical actors also associated with it. This becomes especially evident if we were to confront say La Mettrie, author of L’Homme Machine, with a leading light of the so-called Christian Enlightenment. It seems, that as Intellectual Historians, we should be in the business of avoiding anachronisms and false attributions such that it would seem unfair to attribute to people in the past such descriptions that they would not have employed of themselves. This essay is a brief investigation of this problem.
The evidence for the attribution of the word “Enlightenment” to be applied to the eighteenth century comes from two key areas, and a third rather less satisfying one. First, it may be accurate to say that the philosophe grouping in France during the eighteenth century were explicitly and openly were conscious of a distinct movement, initiated by Voltaire, in which the metaphor of revealing a light was used textually and iconographically – this can be seen clearly in the preface and frontispiece, respectively, to the Encyclopaédie of D’Alembert and Diderot. But it is not clear to what degree their movement attracted a signifier that approximates “Enlightenment” at the time, though the English translation uses the ‘enlightenment’ throughout the entire work. In particular, the use to which this word was put, by D’Alembert was a recognition that the philosophes were reflecting a previous age in ancient times in which the search for truth was less restrictive than their present. D’Alembert in writing his encyclopaedia was uncovering 1200 years of darkness stating, “The masterpieces that the ancients left us in almost all genres were forgotten for twelve centuries.”[ Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot D’Alembert, D. &. (2009, Dec). quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/] This somewhat retrospective viewpoint stands in some distinction to which various practitioners of intellectual history have applied the term “Enlightenment”, as we shall see. What does come near is the use of the term of Diderot’s, siècle philosophe, which he applied to the eighteenth century, whereas the term siècles de lumiére referred, not to the eighteenth century, but to pre-Christian, ancient times.[ Schmidt, J. (2003, p 431)] But it is this siècles de lumiére that has been recruited, and used to form the Enlightenment. This “French Enlightenment” seems to be the seed from which most other Enlightenments have borne their own contradictory progeny.
The second main area of evidence comes from the much quoted and perhaps over stated connection to Enlightenment that is the result of the famous question “was ist Aufklärung?” presented as a competition in a Berlin journal in 1783. It is often Kant’s answer that receives the most attention. This position was that Aufklärung was a maturing of mankind in its ability to be able to think for itself. Although the subsequent debate “raged”[ Schmidt (1996) (ed.)] for the rest of the decade, it is evident from Schmidt’s study of the Mittwochsgesellschaft[ Schmidt (1989)] that the Aufklärung was a limited phenomenon: limited to a small group of thinkers who under the license “you can think as much as you like as long as you obey”, were asking the questions: why had the public received so little Enlightenment, and even so, was it really a good idea to let them have any more? The restrictions proposed for this limitation were class based and considered application to the public and private. Even though these thinkers considered that they were enjoying many liberties, in being able to conduct this discourse, nonetheless this was conducted to a degree in secret, and this ‘liberty’ was peculiar to the benign despotism of the reign of Frederick the Great. What little liberty the Prussians enjoyed was soon to be reversed by the succession of Frederick William II when a Censorship Commission was there to “stamp out the Enlightenment”.[ Kant, I. (1798 (1979, p vii)). The Conflict of the Faculties. (M. J. Gregor, Trans.) New York: Abaris.] This Aufklärung has fed the imagination of Enlightenment studies as is exemplified by Foucault asking the same question in 1984.[ Foucault (1984). Rabinow ed.] He was not imune to the irony that Kant’s view is the very antithesis of a position of social responsibility, and was a position not likely to have a major impact on a wide swath of the public. It might be concluded that Kant’s view is paradoxical in allowing ‘public’[ But as a scholar he has complete freedom, indeed even the calling, to impart to the public all of his carefully considered and well-intentioned thoughts; Kant] freedom to a ‘scholar’, but to demand obedience to all those in a ‘private’ role[ What he teaches in consequence of his office as a servant of the church he sets out as something with regard to which he has no discretion to teach in accord with his own lights; Kant]: is not a scholar also holding an office? One has to ask if some great irony has been lost from the context, but also how much of an influence did Aufklärung actually have at the time in the brief reign of Frederick the Great? If this influence was so limited; why call the eighteenth century the Enlightenment? For Moses Mendelssohn, answering the same question as Kant, associates Aufklärung, with Bildung and Kulture. He stated that though these words may have been newcomers to the language, this did not prove that they are new things. “The Greek had both culture and enlightenment.”[ Schmidt, J. (1996, p54)] With this we might reflect how Enlightenment is become so heavily associated with the eighteenth century; or why be concerned to translate Aufklärung as Enlightenment?
The third justification for the attribution of ‘Enlightenment’ to the eighteenth century is that contemporary authors used the term of their own age. Burke, is sometimes quoted. But his reflections on the abandonment of old prejudices were somewhat ironic.[ Schmidt, J. (1996, p17)] The word was also used contemporaneously in a general way to describe a sense of growing modernity. An example of this is from Porter, quoting Revd Richard Price, “our first concern, as lovers of our country, must be to enlighten it.”[ Porter, R. (2000). Enlightenment. London: Penguin. xvii, Fn 2, p 485] Although Porter also calls the Enlightenment anachronistic he still feels the need to title his book thus. Other examples range from; “an enlightened age… of age of enlightenment – [but] the designation ‘the Enlightenment’ is nowhere to be found.”[ Schmidt, J. (2003, p430)] However, there is an important sense in which a long historical process that challenged the power of theology to dominate thinking had gathered pace. The question is whether such a complex process can be signified with a single word. However, it seems that the Aufklärung was the result of a thinly spread new outlook from philosophers across Europe, reaching the German speaking world who were making achievements in political thought, science and knowledge against traditional beliefs; that the philosophes and other intellectuals across Europe approximated a community connected by travel; a republic of letters and printed academic works. Significant evidence of cross fertilisation of ideas amongst European intellectuals – is, then, the basis upon which the eighteenth century has been characterised as the Enlightenment. As this concept has been conceived in the twentieth century, it has been appropriated by various interests in the academic community and has attracted a large range of supporters and detractors too numerous to even summarise in a small work such as this. What is clear is that “Enlightenment” has been used as a post hoc attribution to characterise an explicit philosophical movement, which departed from religion and faith, and has been characterised by a spectrum of philosophies, which included atheism, deism, pantheism and a mechanistic and materialistic approach to explain the natural world. This is to say nothing of a growing challenge to traditional political power relations, which is characterised by the struggle for liberty by the revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition Enlightenment as well as being coterminous with the eighteenth century is now also indistinguishable from the birth of modernity. This has led to the Enlightenment having its critics. This criticism does not only addresses what might be called the essential issues of that philosophical movement, but has also encompassed many other areas of eighteenth century history as the boundaries of the Enlightenment have been exceeded. Now we seem to have a position in historical discourse that has seen a proliferation and appropriation of the ‘Enlightenment’ which seems now to reside in a range of versions, as listed (p3) above.
As the “Enlightenment” has grown its various branches a critical response has emerged from James Schmidt and others. Some ground has been gained by his critique. In support of Schmidt, Delacapagne (2001) stated; “There is probably not a single philosophical position around which we could end up finding all the main representatives of the Enlightenment family gathered as if at a birthday party… except (perhaps) the anti-religious position.” [ Delacampagne, C. (2001). The Enlightenment Project: A Reply to Schmidt. Political Theory , 29 (1), 80 - 85.] Today, not even that is true, as the “Christian Enlightenment” has tried to gatecrash that party. Though most of the French philosophes never publicly declared full atheism, (presenting themselves as deists), it seems fair to say that this concern with unpacking of religious dogma so central to early twentieth century characterisations of the period has set the bar for Enlightenment studies. Collingwood described the Enlightenment thus: ”it was a revolt not only against the power of institutional religion but against religion as such.”[ Collingwood, R. G. (1946). The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p76] This view was also shared by Paul Hazard who suggested that the aim of the Enlightenment was to put Christianity on trial, and by Peter Gay who described it as a “war on Christianity.”[ Rosenblatt, H. (2006). The Christian Enlightnement. In The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol VII, Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660-1815 (pp. 283-301). Cambridge: Cambridge University press.] This position is now somewhat emasculated by a growing Christian Enlightenment which relies on what Rosenblatt, calls a ‘pluralizing’ rejection of a ‘single Enlightenment’. She suggests, “we now know … that the relationship between Christianity and the Enlightenment was more complicated and interesting.”[ Ibid, 283] But is this we now know better position fair? Is it not simply a consequence of the ‘pluralization’ or more aptly a ‘colonisation’ of the word ‘Enlightenment’ by theological history? Is it not simply an artefact of a false attribution, which has extended the word beyond all reasonable limits? The result of this is that what was once considered, as the definitive Enlightenment, is now relegated to “French Enlightenment”, subsumed to allow for the growth of further branches. This simply begs the question: what is Enlightenment that a static past can be so seemingly transformed in just 60 years of scholarship? Were Collingwood et al so wrong? Within this new discourse the accompanying adjective is now pruned so that, for example, Professor Stewart Brown is now able to characterise Hugh Blair’s sermons, which specifically denounce Deism, Atheism, Materialism and the American and French revolutions, as “… the greatest influential achievements of the Enlightenment.”[9 Brown, P. S. (2009). Hugh Blair, the Sentiments and Preaching the Enlightenment in Scotland. In K. Haakonssen (Ed.), Religion and Enlightenment: Comparitive Studies of Scotland and Geneva. Brighton: University of Sussex.] This usage renders “The Enlightenment” as nothing other than equivalent to “the eighteenth century”, devoid of a core meaning. If the most significant core value of the Enlightenment can be so easily swept aside, this means that the Enlightenment of Collingwood has become stretched to its maximal extent: an extent that is as wide as the time period is describes. It now seems to have been robbed of its anti-superstition, anti-religion characteristics of the French philosophes, and the ‘thinking for one’s self’ aspect characteristic of Kant’s essay. The emergence of a Christian Enlightenment is in some ways the most extreme example of the extension of the boundaries of the Enlightenment. However, the various critiques of Enlightenment studies has more subtle and far less easy targets for this essay to pursue. And despite the difficulties with a definitively identifiable Enlightenment, Enlightenment studies have attracted a compelling and attractive scholarship that has asked questions which lie at the very heart of the nature and practice of Modernity.
In addition to the acquisition of the term and its promotion by sectional interests within academia, Enlightenment has also been acquired for a range of critiques. Schmidt[ Schmidt, J. (1996). What is Enlightenment? Berkeley: Universoty of Los Angeles Press.] notes that the Enlightenment has been blamed for a long list of crimes from the French revolution, totalitarianism, absolute values, imperialism, aggressive capitalism, the destruction of a sense of community by individualism and many more. Ironically enough many of the earliest attacks from the nineteenth century were made on the basis of the apparent opposition to faith and religion[ Garrard, G. (2006). Counter-Enlightenments. London: Routledge. P 122] to those identified as atheistic philosophes and deistic Aufklärer and by those that might now be welcomed paradoxically into the Christian Enlightenment. The attacks have continued in many forms to the present. But as the temporal distance has grown and the boundaries of Enlightenment have extended, the attacks become inconsistent as the object of the attack changes, so much so that any attack made against it could, with some little effort, be engineered in support of it. For example, Political scientist J. Q. Wilson attributes modern day problems with rights, as a legacy of the Enlightenment.[ Schmidt, J. (2000, p 734 – 5)] Haakonssen’s objection to Wilson correctly drives a distinction between the Enlightenment’s hierarchical social ethics and a rights-based liberalism of modernity. However, this begs the question, what is Enlightenment, and although Haakonssen’s objection is accurate using a precisely defined Enlightenment, it may simply be too late for such an objection to fit. The Enlightenment and its legacy, it seems have moved on: it is now indistinguishable from Modernity itself.
Garrard sets out a range of “Counter-Enlightenments”[ Garrard, G (2006)] from the eighteenth century to the present. Some of the contemporary ones share features with those set out by Schmidt. Schmidt (2000)[ Schmidt, J. (2000). What Enlightenment Project? Political Theory , 28 (6), 734 - 757.] explains some of the abuses to which the term Enlightenment has been put. He characterizes such critiques as falling into categories of jeopardy, futility and perversity. He shows how the critics of the Enlightenment project, use ‘a projection’ of the writers own choice and runs with this to knock down what might be called a straw man argument. “Critiques of the Enlightenment project thus rest on an act of projection in which the unpleasant features of our own time are explained as the consequences of certain general principles whose ultimate origins are located in a particular eighteenth century thinker or group of thinkers who are stipulated as representative of the Enlightenment.”[ Schmidt (2000, p741).] Though he hints later on, he does not make quite so much of the same evident tendency in the supporters and defenders of the Enlightenment to do the same thing. Are the Enlightenment’s defenders not also projecting their own concerns? Surely this too is a feature of Enlightenment studies. When Berlin, Lively and Manuel made choices as to those particular philosophers who were to be included in their own works, they were inevitably projecting their own concerns by allowing a selection of eighteenth century philosophers to speak for ‘themselves’, by speaking for the ‘Enlightenment’. But by making those choices they were inevitably creating and defining the boundaries and essential qualities of their personal conception of the Enlightenment.
Whilst Schmidt points to Birken and Lang, Garrard points to Crocker and Macintyre as critics of Enlightenment, all implicitly or explicitly implicate the Enlightenment in the horrors of WWII and totalitarianism. Is this justification any more convincing than laying the blame of racism and Nazism at the door of Darwin or Pol Pot at the door of Marx? Arguments against Birken’s and Lang’s notion that the Enlightenment is to blame for the horrors of Nazism[ Schmidt (2000, pp. 738,739)] is discarded and replaced by the more reasonable suggestion that the mysticism of Hegel; the Irrationalism of the Romantic and Nationalist nineteenth century, and the misappropriation of Nietzsche, are far more responsible for the rise of Nazism, and the concentration camps. It was not the rejection of faith and superstition, so characteristic of the philosophy at the time of the Enlightenment that can be held responsible for these horrors. But it is the use of science as a socially constructed tool, by political forces motivated by the irrational superstition that is Nationalism and Racism. Forces that justified evil deeds on scientific grounds, by using science as a rationale for an anti-Semitism that predated the eighteenth century by 100s of years. Anti-Semitic forces needed no encouragement from a thing that could have been called Enlightenment. Such an aberration seems able to justify itself within any historical context and was at the heat of Martin Luther’s personal ideology. Could this inversion be laid at the door of the anti-clerical forces of thought contained in eighteenth century philosophy; and the rise of nineteenth century Nationalism that seemed to have taken the place of the binding force of religion? It is clear from this, that if Enlightenment thinking can be blamed for this, it is due to omission rather than commission. Is it that Enlightenment thinking was unable to account for, or replace with reason, the human need to be bound to a systematized human group in distinction to the other, as it is this tendency that lies at the heart of Nazism and is a continuing problem to the present that seems always to plague our species. If it is the Age of Reason that is to blame, perhaps the detractors of Enlightenment thinking would like to suggest how unreason might have faired in the intervening 2-300 years? In Dialectic of Enlightenment[ Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (1972). Dialectic of Enlightenment. (J. Cumming, Trans.) New York: Herder and Herder.], Adorno and Horkheimer tend to identify the problems of the twentieth century by posing the question: why has value neutral instrumental reason failed to enlighten humanity, which has continued to sink into barbarism. There seem to be two things that the Enlightenment could be criticized for in the reception of modernity and what that has involved for the world at large. One, is a critique of the thoughts and values contained within the historical period. And two, the valorization of the Enlightenment in terms of the historiographical process which has maintained it, writes about it, and feeds a kind of mythologisation of modernity. In this, Intellectual History would seem to be complicit with this activity. But are Adorno and Horkheimer criticizing one or the other, or both? It seems that they dissolve this distinction. Thus Enlightenment is all that characterizes the project of modernity from the eighteenth century to the present. The Dialektik der Aufklärung is less about the historically defined ‘Enlightenment’, but a general attack on the way elements of modern thought from Homer to the present that ought to have produced a better world have lost their way. If one were to hold to a definitive Enlightenment their critique is more about the failure of Modernity than its subordinate; the Enlightenment. Despite this compelling and thoughtful approach their own critics have caricatured their approach. It has been suggested, by Jan Gollinski, that Adorno and Horkeimer level a criticism at the Enlightenment for the ‘enlightened rationality responsible for the rise of totalitarianism itself… and ultimately to the extermination of human beings.”[ Gollinski, J. The Sciences in Enlightened Europe. (J. G. William Clark, Ed.) London: University of Chicago Press.] But the book is written in a mode of ironic puzzlement in which rationality has failed to penetrate deeper levels of human horror. Thus the debate seems to be rather confused if we look at what they actually said. They demonstrate that there is nothing new in Anti-Semitism. It has been transformed by a new rationale, and is “all that has been retained of religion by German Christians.”[ Adorno & Horkheimer(1972). ]
The result of this widening of its boundaries, then, has led to a diminution of its meaning and its value as a tool in understanding the history of ideas. Outram suggests that the Enlightenment is “obscure or even meaningless” due to history studying ideas, “not as autonomous discrete objects, but as deeply embedded in society.”[ Outram,(1995; 12)] This would be correct if the Enlightenment could be identified exactly with a series of autonomous ideas: it cannot. There never was any agreement as to what the Enlightenment was or whether it was possible to make it conform to a clear set of ideas. But is it clear that the seeds of that obscurity can be found not in the late twentieth century but in the middle of the twentieth century, between the works of Cassirer on the one hand and the likes of Manuel and Berlin[ Berlin’s The Age of Enlightenment (1956), and Cassirer’s The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1955)] on the other, at the very moment that ‘Enlightenment’ is introduced. These distinct approaches lie at opposite ends of a conceptual spectrum: in the very use of the term which is used as if the Enlightenment were a causal agent by Cassirer, but only as a label for a period of philosophical history by Berlin and Manuel. Cassirer, far from applying ideas as autonomous objects he imposes a Geist – a process or form of thought not simply the sum total of the leading thinkers of the time, but he rather chooses to characterise the work of those thinkers as a “manifestation” of the essential Enlightenment. This is the very epitome of ‘embedded ideas’. But this was fraught with problems from the start, as Price[ K B Price, Ernst Cassirer and the Enlightenment, Journal of the history of Ideas, Jun 1957] pointed out: Cassirer fails to establish the Enlightenment as an “event”, but effectively produces a work of fiction by attributing to it a gentle process of historical development, devoid of the conflicts inherent in the period.[ Price, K. B. (1957). Ernst Cassirer and the Enlightenment. Journal of the History of Ideas , 18 (1), 101-112..] Berlin suggested that Cassirer “offers a conciliatory view at the expense of the critical faculty”, by characterising the Enlightenment without the “conflicts and crises … [in this] serenely innocent book”, showing the need for a more “business-like approach.” [ Berlin, I. (1953). Review: The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Cassirer. The English Historical Review , 68 (269), 617-619.] Cassirer is not without further critique: Boas in 1952 asked whether such an approach was at all possible; “neither times nor movements have Minds in any intelligible sense of the word.”[ Boas, G. (1952). The Philosophy of the Enlightenment by Ernst Cassirer. Journal of Philosophy, Inc , 49 (7), 244-247.] Oddly, Cassirer, by promoting this type of thinking, it seems, is flying against the aims of eighteenth century materialist philosophy by ironically promoting a romantic view of history and reflecting Hegelian counter-Enlightenment interests of the nineteenth century. The echo of this Geist appears throughout Enlightenment studies. Both the critics and promoters of “the Enlightenment” rely on a modified conceptualisation of the Geist of the eighteenth century. It is this unity of concept, and idealist notion of ‘culture’ this single mind that relies, not on eighteenth century self-critical thinking, but on the sort of nineteenth century mysticism of Hegelian Geistgesische. It is then of the deepest irony that Cassirer uses this to promote the Enlightenment. At the other end of the conceptual spectrum, Berlin et al cleverly allow the philosophers of the eighteenth century to speak for themselves with books that are selections of their writings with commentary. For example, Berlin with Locke and Voltaire but reveals his own peculiar interests by devoting a third of his book the writings of Hume. This sort of approach, which is common to Enlightenment studies, is a means by which the editors[ also Issac Kramnick 1995] create their own toolkit of connotations and piece together an Enlightenment of their own imagination.
Concluding Remarks
In 1876, Leslie Stephen observed; “in some minds the desire for unity of system in the more strongly developed; in others the desire for the conformity to facts.”[ Stephen, L. (1979, p6, orig 1876)] In the case of Enlightenment studies both attributes stand out in clear contrast. Those that love facts would seek conformity to a narrowly definitive Enlightenment; those that love a system can, like a magpie, attribute whatsoever they desire to find a systemic truth. Those wishing to hold hard to the facts have more chance to agree, whilst the systematisers can only hope to adopt a relativism to co-exist with other participants in Enlightenment studies. Outram has suggested a way forward. She prefers to look at the Enlightenment as a “capsule containing sets of debates, stresses and concerns, which however differently formulated or responded to, do appear to be characteristic of the way in which ideas, opinions and social and political structures interacted and changed in the eighteenth century.”[ Outram (1995)] Her idea is a viable and pragmatic approach to tackle some of the key issues that were discussed in the eighteenth century, though the notion that the selection of such issues will also tend to pre-configure the Enlightenment, there will also be those practitioners that see a spirit or system emerge out of their chosen arguments. Perhaps this is an unavoidable tendency that leads towards the Enlightenment becoming a thing with its own volition; a simple consequence of what to choose to place inside the capsule? There is a sense in which Outram is trying to salvage the Enlightenment. Her idea seems to be workable, but makes one ask, why not jettison the term entirely and continue to talk about what actually happened in the eighteenth century without colouring it with an inappropriate term, a term that carries the baggage of so much connotation and textual accretion? Perhaps the attractiveness of the word preserves its usage? Schmidt noted; “Historians searching for a felicitous way of capturing the spirit of the age have cited it, philosophers hoping to incite a renewed devotion to the ideal of Enlightenment have appealed to it, and present-day social critics-apparently in need of a bit of historical legitimacy have sometimes wrapped themselves in its mantle.”[ Schmidt (1989)] So why has the term attracted so much interest, or should it be asked, what has encouraged its acquisition by a range of interests? Such a word has a great positive feeling to a degree that anyone would wish to be associated with it. And when using it as an object of critique or ridicule, the effect is so much more enhanced being such a positive sounding word. But the Enlightenment by being vague such critiques are easier to pursue than, say, an attack on “the Age of Reason”. After all who would attack Reason? The Enlightenment connotes accomplishment, knowledge acquisition, attainments, illumination, awakening, civilisation, debunking, broad mindedness, sophistication, de-mythologisation. It is no surprise given the set of connotations that theological studies would wish to cover themselves in its mantle or is it just seeking a bit of historical legitimacy? These connotations stand against confusion, darkness and ignorance, notions that no one would wish to be associated with. What it has come to denote is far more complex and indefinable: the period terminating in the eighteenth century; a philosophical movement; a philosophical process; a philosophical project; a mental and social attitude; a set of philosophical and political argumental vignettes; and it is conflated with a wider category: Modernity itself.
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[/quote]
K: I am a little unclear as to who wrote this essay?
Me.
Apologies for formating - footnotes were scrambled in the text.
Whilst on the subject of the glorious Enlightement of teh 18thC…
Many would offer as evidence the great French and American revolutions.
Yet the French led to tyrrany and the autocratic rulership of Napoleon, which decended into pan european war and the restoration of the manarchy.
Whilst in the US most of Congress were slave owners.
Perhaps you would like to guess just how many Congressmen owned slaves until they were banned 60 years after the glorious 18thC?
Democracy was not doing too well either, less than 5% of Americans had the vote up to the time of Lincoln decades after the glorious 18thC.
now, don’t take this the wrong way, but providing evidence based upon
something you yourself wrote, doesn’t really seem to be,… well,
Kosher. You offer up a statement then back that statement with
an essay written by… you… doesn’t really seem to be, well
right…
and you wouldn’t believe me if I offer up a statement and then back up
that evidence with an essay written by me…
and in further reading your essay, it skips a very important
aspect, which is that it is English focused. But you have to
further explore this understanding of the “Enlightenment”
by further studies into the French and/or Dutch writings…
As the Enlightenment is also a French/ Dutch/German
engagement too, you cannot just focus on English writings,
like Toland or Tindal, you need to stretch your thinking to
include Bayle for example or even to such Dutch thinkers
as Tschirnhaus or Van Gent or De Volder…
I believe your results to be too focused on English sources and not
the continental sources. I would be interested in what grade you got on
this paper and for what class it was written for?
I read the first post fully.
I did not read any of the other posts yet.
Walls of text.
I guess I don’t have a lot of endurance when it comes to reading.
Does not make the slightest difference, since there was no “Enlightenment” movement anywhere.
Obviously the work of the french philosophes, with the likes of L’Mettrie, Diderot, Rousseau in Switzland ad nauseam, but there is nothing distinctive about what they were doing that cannot also be applied to any other century from 1450 to the present.
Peter Kropotkin: and in further reading your essay, it skips a very important
aspect, which is that it is English focused. But you have to
further explore this understanding of the “Enlightenment”
by further studies into the French and/or Dutch writings…
As the Enlightenment is also a French/ Dutch/German
engagement too, you cannot just focus on English writings,
like Toland or Tindal, you need to stretch your thinking to
include Bayle for example or even to such Dutch thinkers
as Tschirnhaus or Van Gent or De Volder…
I believe your results to be too focused on English sources and not
the continental sources. I would be interested in what grade you got on
this paper and for what class it was written for?"
Sc: “Does not make the slightest difference, since there was no “Enlightenment” movement anywhere.
Obviously the work of the french philosophes, with the likes of L’Mettrie, Diderot, Rousseau in Switzland ad nauseam, but there is nothing distinctive about what they were doing that cannot also be applied to any other century from 1450 to the present.”
K: as you seem to be very certain, and certainty is antithetical to philosophy.
for certainty is the relm of theology and religion, and I hope you are engaging
in philosophy in which doubt is the driving force…
as for your base contention, I disagree… it is quite clear that there was a movement
called the Enlightenment and that those engaged in it, were aware of it and their
presence within that movement…there were a family as it were, a large, fractious,
contentious family, but a family nevertheless… and thus the disappointment of
the family engaged in the “Enlightenment movement” to the loss of Rousseau
to the “family”… when he went off and did his own thing…
an example of the “Enlightenment” movement was in Diderot’s “Encyclopedie”
where most of the Enlightenment writers contributed articles to it…
but in the end, Diderot himself wrote most of the articles…
K: I don’t mind a wall of text as long as it seems to be going somewhere with it…
random wall of text that don’t seem to have a point, annoy me… and I stop reading…
plus, it helps to be a masochist in reading a long wall of text…
Doubt isn’t as great as you think.
Moderns sometimes have a doubt based on their incapacities.
They are less than average in philosophy.
They want people to explain everything,
instead of already understanding it,
as it is common knowledge.
Demanding proof is different than finding proof on your own.
Nope.
You list these things as key to enlightenement views: Democracy;
racial and sexual equality;
individual liberty of lifestyle;
full freedom of thought, expression, and the press;
eradication of religious authority from the legislative
and education;
and full separation of church and state…
The trouble is the they are not present in what is laughingly called a “movement”
Where in Dutch, French, English, Scotish writings do you find these values?
The E is nothing more than a POST HOC artifact of historiography.
