Enlightenment (The Age of Reason)

1680-1790

The Enlightenment was an international movement that included French, English,

American, German, Italian Spanish and even Russian schools. Voltaire, Montesquieu visited
England and wrote extensively about its institutions. Franklin and Jefferson visited England
and France and were well connected with writers of in both countries. The intellectual ferment
was transnational. Dating an intellectual movement like the Enlightenment is never precise,
but a rough guide would emphasize the hundred-plus year from the 1680s to the 1790s. The
beginnings are marked by the Glorious Revolution in 1688, which provided a constitutional
arrangement repudiating Stuart autocracy and ushering in religious toleration, as well as by
the writings of Locke and the publication of 1687 of Newton’s Principia.

Enlightenment is a period where the study of the problems related to Nature, Man and
Society were at the core of unprecedented philosophical debates. Like the Renaissance, the
enlightenment falls into the same predicament. It is abundantly clear that the 18th century gave
itself a name: Italian –illuminati; French – lumière; German – Aufklarung; and in English
Enlightenment. In 1784, the 60 year old Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) published an essay
entitled Was is Aufklarung? Beginning as follows:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is

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

For Kant, enlightenment signified knowledge, specifically self-knowledge. Knowledge

implied an understanding of human nature as well as the uses to which that knowledge can be
put. The 18th century witnessed an outpouring of human knowledge in almost every field of
human endeavor. Knowledge would, it was hoped, conquer fear, superstition, enthusiasm and
in the case of Benjamin Franklin death itself. Thus what was needed was criticism and what
was criticized was the whole social and political system of the West – collectively, the ancient
regime. The old order was characterized by semi-feudal economy, a division of the population

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into orders and estates, religious intolerance, fanaticism, superstition, royal absolutism and
government corruption.

Consequently, the thinkers of the Enlightenment can be said to have had a common
goal: social reform. Their plans for social reform were a reflection of the world of abundance
in which they lived. Western Europe was advancing away from an agrarian economy; trade
and commerce were growing especially among the British, French and Dutch and the
Industrial Revolution seemed imminent. With wealth, thinkers began to turn from a Europe of
want, depravity and need to a Europe characterized by abundance – and with abundance, new
possibilities were about to become reality. More time was devoted to the pleasures of life.

What was the message of Enlightenment intellectuals? What were their ideals? They
believed that unassisted human reason, not faith or tradition, was the principal guide to human
conduct. Everything, including political and religious authority, must be subject to a critique
of reason if it were to command itself to the respect of humanity. Particularly suspect was
religious faith and superstition. Humanity was not innately corrupt as Catholicism taught, nor
was the good life only in a beatific otherworldly salvation. Pleasure and happiness were
worthy ends of life and realizable in this world. The universe was ruled by rational scientific
laws, which were accessible to human beings through scientific method of experiment and
empirical observation. Science and technology were the engines of progress enabling modern
men and women to force nature to serve their well-being and further their happiness. Science
and the conquest of superstition and ignorance provided the prospects for endless
improvements.

Central to the Enlightenment agenda was the assault on religious superstition and its
replacement by a rational religion in which God became no more than the supreme
intelligence or craftsman who had set the machine that was the world to run according to its
own natural and scientifically predictable laws. This deism, so reminiscent of the cosmic
outlook was inherently and deeply suspicious of religious fanaticism and persecution. More
than anyone else, Voltaire and his motto Ecrassez l’infâme symbolized the war against
torture and persecution bred by religious fanaticism. But virtually all the Enlightenment
theorists followed the lead of John Locke in demanding religious toleration. Religion
removed from public life and public authority would be reserved for the private sphere
of individual preference and individual practice.

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 If religion was the principal villain of the Enlightenment, then science was its hero.
The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment opened a path for independent thought, and
the fields of mathematics, astronomy, physics, politics, economics, philosophy, and medicine
were drastically updated and expanded. The amount of new knowledge that emerged was
staggering. Just as important was the enthusiasm with which people approached the
Enlightenment: intellectual salons popped up in France, philosophical discussions were held,
and the increasingly literate population read books and passed them around feverishly. The
Enlightenment and all of the new knowledge thus permeated nearly every facet of civilized
life. Not everyone participated, as many uneducated, rural citizens were unable to share in the
Enlightenment during its course. But even their time would come, as the Enlightenment also
prompted the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, which provided rural dwellers with jobs
and new cities in which to live.

By the eighteenth century, it was clear that the entire history of western thought was
obsessed with metaphysical questions. The Enlightenment did not really find metaphysics
meaningless, but it often degenerated into endless and somewhat mindless disputes. In
addition, metaphysics transcends the phenomena of nature and therefore cannot be verified by
observation. The thinkers of the eighteenth century discarded this approach to interpret th
outer world and it is the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) who was most
responsible for providing an alternative view – the empirical point of view. Together with his
fellow countrymen Isaac Newton, it was Locke who provided the epistemological bible for
his contemporaries. For Locke, the human mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which
experience records itself as human knowledge. The effects of such a pronouncement were as
revolutionary as were the discoveries of Newton. It is Locke and Newton who graced the
eighteenth century with its epistemological foundations.

Nevertheless, the first major Enlightenment figure in England was Thomas Hobbes,
who caused great controversy with the release of his provocative treatise Leviathan (1651).
Taking a sociological perspective, Hobbes felt that by nature, people were self-serving and
preoccupied with the gathering of a limited number of resources. To keep balance, Hobbes
continued, it was essential to have a single intimidating ruler. A half century later, John
Locke came into the picture, promoting the opposite type of government—a representative
government—in his Two Treatises of Government (1690).

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 Although Hobbes would be more influential among his contemporaries, it was clear
that Locke’s message was closer to the English people’s hearts and minds. Just before the turn
of the century, in 1688, English Protestants helped overthrow the Catholic king James II and
installed the Protestant monarchs William and Mary. In the aftermath of this Glorious
Revolution, the English government ratified a new Bill of Rights that granted more personal
freedoms.
Many of the major French Enlightenment thinkers, or philosophes, were born in the
years after the Glorious Revolution, so France’s Enlightenment came a bit later, in the mid-
1700s. The philosophes, though varying in style and area of particular concern, generally
emphasized the power of reason and sought to discover the natural laws governing human
society. The Baron de Montesquieu tackled politics by elaborating upon Locke's work,
solidifying concepts such as the separation of power by means of divisions in
government. Voltaire took a more caustic approach, choosing to incite social and political
change by means of satire and criticism. Although Voltaire’s satires arguably sparked little in
the way of concrete change, Voltaire nevertheless was adept at exposing injustices and
appealed to a wide range of readers. His short novel Candide is regarded as one of the seminal
works in history. Denis Diderot, unlike Montesquieu and Voltaire, had no revolutionary
aspirations; he was interested merely in collecting as much knowledge as possible for his
mammoth Encyclopédie. The Encyclopédie, which ultimately weighed in at thirty-five
volumes, would go on to spread Enlightenment knowledge to other countries around the
world.

The Enlightenment developed through a snowball effect: small advances triggered

larger ones, and before Europe and the world knew it, almost two centuries of philosophizing
and innovation had ensued. Whether considered from an intellectual, political, or social
standpoint, the advancements of the Enlightenment transformed the Western world into an
intelligent and self-aware civilization. Moreover, it directly inspired the creation of the
world’s first great democracy, the United States of America.