“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).
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