Saturday, July 11, 2015

Dare to Know

“Dare to Know”
            The medieval man considered religion above all else, with life composed and ordered by God. His duty was to accept the Word, live accordingly, and reach salvation. As the seventeenth century matured, man’s ideas and theories began to mature and change. Certain men, “philosophes,” began to confront the medieval man’s way of thinking. Instead of relying on societal tradition, philosophes such as Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Denis Diderot, and Immanuel Kant challenged their contemporaries to use reason in their individual lives and religion to go beyond what had normally been accepted as fact. This Age of Enlightenment lasted throughout the eighteenth-century, but the facts of and the debate about this monumental shift in public thought continues to be studied today. 
Many modern historians claim different interpretations of the Enlightenment, its actors, and its components. Writing from the perspective of the twentieth-century, Carl L. Becker ably describes the intellectual scene leading up to the Enlightenment in his book, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. “Intelligence was essential, since God had endowed men with it. But the function of intelligence was strictly limited.” Man did not question his origin or what would happen upon his death. Intelligence was needed to demonstrate the truth of revealed knowledge.[1]
Becker importantly asserts that the philosophes of the Enlightenment relied upon Christian assumptions. “The philosophes were nearer the Middle Ages, less emancipated from the preconceptions of medieval Christian thought, than they quite realized or we have commonly supposed.”[2] Becker also goes on to argue that before the seventeenth century, there existed a rational climate of opinion, but the Age of Enlightenment brought with it a factual climate of opinion. Becker’s title points to two things: the medieval man’s engrained notions of Heaven and the salvation needed to get there, and eighteenth-century thought patterns that helped to enlighten Europeans, who would reconstruct a Heavenly City of different materials.
Paul Hazard, in his The European Mind, builds upon Becker to provide a brief social and cultural historical foundation of Europe leading up to the Enlightenment. This generally influential history looks into the rise of the modern European mind, as the title points to. Detailing the past and providing for the future, Hazard describes the ways in which new thoughts on science, art, and philosophy began to undermine the classical world. Tradition gave way to reason.  
Beginning with travel and travel literature, Hazard contends that “minds and consciences were deeply stirred by” the startling inflow of new ideas as the Enlightenment dawned.[3] Next, “the Moderns” arrived on the scene and with archeological backing changed cultural awareness and opened up religion. Hazard concludes with England assuming the lead in Enlightenment from the French.
Peter Gay, describes what he calls “modern paganism” in his first volume on the Enlightenment, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Gay’s paganism is not synonymous with the standard definition of pagan: heathen, infidel, and idolater. He calls paganism instead, “the affinity of the Enlightenment to classical thought.”[4] Gay describes seventeenth-century Europe as living in an enlightened atmosphere and citizens as half-prepared to listen. His enlightenment is a cultural style and an invasion of theology by rationalism. He charges that religion was on the defensive throughout the Age of Enlightenment, due in part to the decay of clerical morale, the estrangement of tradition, and the widespread loss of religious fervor. Gay takes a narrower stance on the time frame of the Enlightenment by including only the years 1689-1789. This limited stance leaves out philosophers such as Rene Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, while including those such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Denis Diderot, David Hume, Isaac Newton, and Francis Bacon.
As a modern-day historian, Jonathan Israel offers a fresh perspective on the Enlightenment in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity. He argues that society can only remain stable while details of that particular society direct enough societal popularity and acceptance to maintain a majority. What Israel is alluding to in his thesis, is the breakdown of tradition leading up to the Age of Enlightenment. He points to an erosion of “trust in and acceptance of social hierarchy and kings, bishops, and aristocracy” that began to invade general thought. Following this erosion of tradition, the advent of republican and democratic political ideologies rose to prominence.[5]
Along the same lines of Peter Gay, Israel defends a single century as the time-frame of the Enlightenment. “In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as earlier, long-accepted and deep-rooted criteria legal, dynastic, and theological fixed the measure of just and unjust, legitimate and illegitimate, and of what reforms could rightfully be implemented.” Israel claims that this means that no real revolution could have taken place during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.[6] One glaring difference with Gay is Israel’s claim that there were two enlightenments and not one as Gay asserts. Israel breaks Enlightenment down into a radical enlightenment and the more popular, conservative or moderate mainstream enlightenment.
            Immanuel Kant wrote his piece, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” as the Age of Enlightenment was coming to an end. He offers a mature, developed, and contemporary view about what some enlighteners understood about what they were doing and what they had accomplished. Kant begins with the immaturity and laziness of man. In words that ring true even today, Kant describes man’s reluctance to do for himself what he can pay for others to do. In democratic language, Kant argues that in order for society to be enlightened, it only needs freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters. He underscores this freedom with the assertion that affairs which would affect the interests of all need a certain mechanism to control misuse. Kant describes the freedom of society, beginning with officials of the law, citizens, scholars, and clerics.
            Kant’s awareness of Enlightenment is striking in his statement, “If it is now asked whether we at present live in an enlightened age, the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.”[7] Kant realized that Enlightenment was more than a passing fad or a generational trend. He was essentially giving Enlightenment freedom to continue. Kant also argued for a controlled degree of civil freedom so that intellectual freedom would be free to expand to its fullest extent.
            Enabled by the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment became the near exact opposite of the Middle Ages. Enlightenment took many by surprise as the Middle Ages were marked by unwavering religious devotion. This revolutionary time period in European history cleared the path for individualistic thought and brought an increase in self-awareness.

1.     Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), pp. 1-31.
2.     Paul Hazard, The European Mind [1680-1715] (orig. 1935), pp. xv-xx, 3-79.
3.     Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism (1996), pp. 3-27, 322-57.
4.     Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of modernity 1650-1750 (2001), pp. 3-22.
5.     Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784).



[1] Becker, page 9.
[2] Becker, page 29.
[3] Hazard, page 9.
[4] Gay, page 9.
[5] Israel, pages 9-10.
[6] Israel, page 4.
[7] Kant. 

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