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Enlightenment Challenges Society

Religion

Church = Freedom Limiting Institution ● Most philosophes anticlerical (against influence of a hierarchical,

institutional Church organization)● Not necessarily against the general concept of religion

Natural ReligionEx: Deism

Revealed Religion Ex: Christianity

Empiricism (logic and observation) Teaching (divine revelation)

Man is ignorant Man is fallen

Needs enlightenment Needs redemption

Reason Faith

Evidence Authority (Bible and/or Church)

IsmsDeism

● Deism is example of natural religion ● Followers: Voltaire, Hume, Diderot,

Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson ● Deists believe in a distant,

non-interventionist God; God existed just not way Christians believe

Other Isms

● Skepticism: nothing can be fully known, doubt everything

● Atheism: belief in no God

Diderot on Skepticism:“All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.”

Religious Toleration ● Rational analysis of religious practices led to demand for religious toleration ● By 1800, most governments in western and central Europe extended

toleration to Christian minorities and in some states civil equality to Jews

Race

RaceArgument:

● Natural sciences, literature, and popular culture increasingly exposed Europeans to peoples outside Europe

● In line with scientific categorization of plants and animals (taxonomies), Europeans began to classify humans into hierarchical ordered “races” (biological, physical distinct groups of humans)

○ New categorization because before people grouped according to national, political, or cultural affiliations

● Popularized by Enlightenment thinkers like Kant, On the Different Races of Man (1775)

Counter Argument:

● Racism did not go unchallenged○ Ex: Diderot’s Supplement to

Bougainville’s Voyage criticize European racism via dialogue between Tahitian villagers and Europeans

○ Olaudah Equiano publish memoir testifying to horrors of slavery making an economic argument against it

Women

Women and the Enlightenment “Woman’s question”: debate about the nature and value of women

Argument: women deserve equal rights

1. Mary Wollstonecraft: Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), women would be better daughters/sisters/wives/mothers if they had “rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience” to men and society

2. Marquis de Condorcet: attributed women's limitations not to their sex but to their inferior education and circumstances

Counter Argument: nah (continued exclusion of women from political life)

● Rousseau Emile (1762): natural biological differences between men and women that made women mothers rather than intellectuals

Literature

Literacy ● 80% of men; 60% of women● Books were expensive

○ Many readers for each book (20 : 1)

● Genres: novels, plays, journals, memoirs,philosophy, history, theology.newspapers, political pamphlets

Voltaire (1694-1778) ● French Enlightened thinker ● Influenced by John Locke, Shakespeare,

and Isaac Newton ○ What he knew about science taught

to him by girlfriend, Emilie du Chatelet who was a fellow French philosophe

● Spent a lot of time in England so became great admirer of English constitutionalism

● Deist who was proponent religious tolerance ○ Candide was set during 16th French

wars of religion; hero was Henry IV○ Heavily criticized absolutism of Louis

XIV and XV

Epitome of Enlightenment Voltaire’s Candide (Optimism) 1759

Reason Both Rousseau and Kant question exclusive reliance on reason and emphasized role of emotions in moral improvement of self and society

Rousseau

Question: Does progress in the arts and sciences correspond with progress in morality?

● As civilizations progress, they move away from morality.

● Science and art raised artificial barriers between people and their natural state.

● Therefore, the revival of science and the arts corrupts social morals, not improves them

“Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.”

● Virtue exists in the state of nature but lost in society○ Concept of the noble savage

The Social Contract:

● Liberty could be achieved only by subjecting one’s individual interests to the general will○ Did this by entering into a

social contract not with their rulers, but with each other

Important Works: A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, Emile (gender), The Social Contract (politics)

Kant Transcendentalism

● Some things are known by methods other than empirically, belief in a non-rational way to understand things that transcended sensory experience.

○ Ex: faith, pre-existence, life after death

Thoughts on Enlightenment

● In 1784, Kant posed the philosophical question, “Are we now living in an enlightened age”?

● He then answered his own question by saying no “but we live in an age of enlightenment”.

● Diderot reflects Kant’s idea: “We will speak against senseless laws until they are reformed; and, while we wait, we will abide by them.”

ArtBaroque → Rococo → Romanticism

Baroque and Rococo ● 18th century art and literature

increasingly reflected the outlook and values of commercial and bourgeois society ○ “Bad” because increasingly non

religious subjects (secular)○ “Boujee” because growing

consumerism (fashion, gold everything, self portraits, non essential objects) by upper class called bourgeois

Baroque 1. Catholic Church: Started during the Catholic Reformation as a means of

answering the iconoclasm of the Protestants.

2. Absolute rulers: by 18th century had evolved into a tool of absolute rulers

Charles I of England Flemish artist Van Dyck was court painter to King Charles I

Charles I at the Hunt

Philip IV of Spain Velazquez court painter of King Philip

Las Meninas

Louis XIV of France

Hyacinthe Rigaud

3. Dutch: alternate use of art to glorify middle class, everyday life rather than the Church or the monarch

RembrandtGreatest European painter of 17th century. Famous for his self portraits of which he painted almost 100 at different stages of his life

Vermeer Scenes of everyday life

Girl with the Pearl Earring The Milkmaid

Rococo Start in Paris under Louis XV (1723-74)

By 1760, considered outdated in France but still the style until 1800 in Central Europe and Eastern Europe

Themes

Playfulness of the Nobility - attempted to celebrate the fun of aristocracy and show aristocrats at play or in times of leisure

Beauty - demonstrate beauty of women

Mythology - like the Renaissance, Rococo artists used mythological images

Light and Airy - pastel colors, softer than Baroque

Rococo Architecture Maria Theresa’s Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna

Frederick the Great’s Sans Souci Palace at Potsdam

French RococoFragonard was a popular court painter of portraits and landscapes The Swing

English Rococo ● Sir Joshua Reynolds who created over 2,000 historical paintings and portraits. ● In 1768, he became first president of the Royal Academy