The Enlightenment’s LegacyProf Mark Knights

Key questions

• Why is it important for modernists to understand the Enlightenment?

• What was its legacy and why is that legacy a controversial one?

• Isms: liberalism, socialism, conservatism, romanticism, fascism, colonialism, racism,sexism

• Is the Enlightenment a useful term, does it have a coherence, a common set of values?

The Enlightenment Legacy for the Modern World

1) Liberalism: toleration of opinion and of religions; separation of church and state; consensual government; free speech; free market (social progress through the market; consumerism; capitalism); natural rights (right to resist tyranny in self-defence, natural equality and liberty, sexual liberty). 1859, John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

2) Socialism• Natural equality• Brotherhood and sociability• Rousseau’s Social Contract and A

Discourse on Inequality (1754) for its critique of self-love.

• Utilitarianism – the greatest happiness of the greatest number

• The French revolution (declaration of the rights of man 1792 permeated by Enlightenment ideals) and social revolution

• Henri Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), founder of French socialism, influence on Karl Marx – eradicating the hand of greed; planned society

• Charles Fourier (1772-1837), another Utopian socialists thinker – decent minimum wage to eradicate poverty and communal approach to society

Fourier’s Phalanstère (1834)

"Liberty Leading the People", (Eugene Delacroix, 1830).

3) Scientific and medical mentalities

• Confidence in scientific approach

• Public health, hospitals• Scientific societies

(Lunar Society)• Museums and

collections• Science and industry• Scientific truth

4) International community

• C18th era of warfare – large-scale wars on a frequent basis between Britain, France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Russia. 7 Years War 1756-1763: war on a global scale. Wars against France 1792-1815

• Enlightenment critique of war based on emergence of international law – right of states to defend themselves but also benefit of peaceful co-existence

• Saint-Pierre, Project for Settling an Everlasting Peace (1712); Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant both wrote schemes for ‘perpetual peace’ via international communities

• League of Nations 1919-45, United Nations (1945), European community

Rejecting or questioning the Enlightenment

Important to recognise that ‘enlightening’ was a contested process in the eighteenth century. Strong adherence amongst some to the ‘ancien régime’, including at the popular level.

A satire of Joseph Priestley and Tom Paine, supping with the devil and depicted as dangerous

1) Conservatism• Particularly in response

to the French revolution• Edmund Burke,

Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), rejected natural rights in favour of what was tried and tested eg monarchy and church

• Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) stressed hierarchy, order, church (catholic)

• Regimes of 1849-1918

Burke’s Reflections bearing down on Dr Price

2) Romanticism• Edmund Burke's Philosophical

Inquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

• Influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the Enlightenment critiquing itself): reaction against the excessive stress on reason, instead emphasising emotion and feeling, including rapture of nature. The Confessions (completed 1770, pub. 1781) – self-conscious autobiography. ‘I must have mountain torrents, steep rrocks, firs, dark forests, mountains,oads to climb or descend, precipices at my side to frighten me’.

• Brothers Grimm’s folk tales (1812-1814)

• Romantic movement of 1790-1840s• Irrationalism 1880-1920s• psychology

3) Colonialism

Global empires, c.1750. The Enlightenment was strongest in colonising nations

4) Racism: ambiguities• On the one hand a drive against

intellectual slavery• On the other, the C18th witnessed

the enslavement of many (6 million Africans transported by Britain, France, Spain, Holland)

• Categorisation of exotic peoples – notions of primitive, savage. Enlightenment could lead to a sense of alienation over the people or things that were dominated. Cultural superiority?

• Rousseau and Denis Diderot attempted to praise ‘noble savage’; and Voltaire attacked the fact that the price of sugar consumption was slavery; but more done against the slave trade by evangelicals?

A Maori chief as drawn by Sydney Parkinson, Thomas Cook’s artist (1769)

5) Sexism: ambiguities• Some traditional ways of thinking: Rousseau in

Emile (1762) ‘Sophie should be a woman as Emile is a man. That is to say, she should have everything that suits the constitution of her species and of her sex so as to take her place in the physical and moral order. … woman is specially made to please man’.

• Attacked by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) : But the private or public virtue of woman is very problematical, for Rousseau, and a numerous list of male writers, insist that she should all her life be subjected to a severe restraint, that of propriety. Why subject her to propriety--blind propriety--if she be capable of acting from a nobler spring, if she be an heir of immortality? Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalise them, when principles would be a surer guard, only to sweeten the cup of man? Is not this indirectly to deny woman reason? for a gift is a mockery, if it be unfit for use

• Marquis de Sade, Juliette (1797), sexual freedom – what were the limits?

6) Fascism and absolutism• Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s

Social Contract (1762): the force of the general will, forcing to be free

• Enlightened absolutism: harnessing enlightened ideals to enhance the power of the state, particularly in eastern Europe (Prussia, Russia, Austria). Bureaucratic domination. All subjects become instrumental to the state. Theology displaced by a form of rationality.

 Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of

Reason Produces Monsters, Etching and aquatint (Caprichos no. 43: El sueño de la razon produce monstruos.), 1796-1797

The critique of Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944,

1947]“In the enigmatic readiness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the sway of any despotism, in its self-destructive affinity to popular

paranoia, and in all uncomprehending absurdity, the weakness of the modern theoretical faculty is apparent. … The flood of detailed

information and candy-floss entertainment simultaneously instructs and stultifies mankind; progress becomes regression…. Enlightenment is as

totalitarian as any system”"In the most general sense of progressive thought, the

Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates

disaster triumphant”‘Mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into

a new kind of barbarism’‘We are wholly convinced that social freedom is inseparable from

enlightened thought. Nevertheless, the notion of this very way of thinking already contains the seed of the reversal universally apparent today’

Irresponsible, fantastical utopianism

• Thinkers as dreamers, enthusiasts whose cult of reason was irrational. Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘Pure reason became unreason’.

• Belief in human perfectibility and progress is naïve and dangerous• Progress defeats itself. ‘Progress has a tendency to destroy the

very ideas it is supposed to realise and unfold. Endangered by the process of technical civilisation is the ability of independent thinking itself. Reason today seems to suffer from a kind of disease. This is true in the life of the individual as well as of society. The individual pays for the tremendous achievements of modern industry, for his increased technical sill and access to goods and services, with a deepening impotence against the concentrated power of the society which he is supposed to control’.

7) The postmodern challenge• Critical of the Enlightenment’s

notion of ‘truth’; post-modernism stresses relativismnotions of class, gender and racemeta-narrative of progress of Western civilisation and claim to be the ‘origins’ of modernityconfidence in human agency – rather post-modernism stresses the way in which cultures shape individualsits sense of domination – intellectual, cultural, colonial, environmental (has a scientific way of thinking about crop production been a good thing?)

Useful term?

• Is the Enlightenment a useful term, does it have a coherence, a common set of values? It has evolved to mean many different things.

• ‘the’? • Enlightenments – according to time and place?

According to status, gender, race• Do the ideas of the Enlightenment still have any use

for us in the C21st? Is it the cause of all ills? Is its approach wrong-headed? Do we have confidence in progress and reason?

Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. This tutelage is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own reason! That is the motto of the Enlightenment