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 clear; it is
believed to have started from around 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 John Locke
and the publication of 1687 of Isaac 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 eighteenth
century gave itself the name of illuminati in Italian; lumière in French; Aufklarung in
German; and Enlightenment in English. In 1784, the 60-year-old Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
published an essay entitled Was is Aufklarung? where he explains this new notion of
Enlightenment. He begins 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. Immanuel Kant urged his contemporaries to awaken from their profound slumber and to
detach themselves from the chains of dependency with regard to what they have to think;
thinking must be an independent act, an act of courage. However, it was clear that the entire
history of western thought was obsessed with metaphysical questions. The Enlightenment did

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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 the 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. In his groundbreaking
book Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), he negated the prevailing philosophy
in the seventeenth century about innate 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.

Gradually and before Europe and the world knew it, almost two centuries of
philosophy had collapsed. Studies generally began in the fields of earth science and
astronomy, as notables such as Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei took the old, beloved
“truths” of Aristotle and disproved them. Thinkers such as René Descartes and Francis
Bacon revised the scientific method, setting the stage for Isaac Newton and his landmark
discoveries in physics. From these discoveries emerged a system for observing the world and
making testable hypotheses based on those observations. At the same time, however,
scientists faced ever-increasing scorn and skepticism from people in the religious community,
who felt threatened by science and its attempts to explain matters of faith. Nevertheless, the
progressive, rebellious spirit of these scientists would inspire a century’s worth of thinkers.

The eighteenth 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 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. By the eighteenth
century, man believed himself to be the master of the Nature, no longer its victim, and the
first question to be asked was: what is man? Man was not a sinful creature who could only be
saved by self-denial while patiently awaiting death and ultimately salvation. In this sense, the

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first major Enlightenment figure in England, Thomas Hobbes, has caused a great controversy
on this issue with the release of his provocative treatise Leviathan (1651). Hobbes felt that by
nature, people were evil and characterized by selfishness, and to keep balance, Hobbes
continued, it was essential to have a single intimidating ruler. Hence, kings had a divine right
to rule over these sinful people and were considered as absolute monarchs; no one had the
power to interfere in the way they governed.

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).
Locke stated that Hobbes’ limiting ideas about man were not to be taken for granted, and he
sustained that man is rather born with three natural rights: life, liberty, and property.
According to Locke, the government should protect the natural rights of people. 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.

Montesquieu, another eminent thinker of the Enlightenment period, also claimed in

his book The Spirit of Laws (1748), that if the government was to protect and preserve
people’s rights effectively, it has to be divided into three instances: the legislative power, the
executive power, and the judiciary power, all three balancing the authority of the government.
The elaboration of this new configuration of government secured the natural rights of man
and prevented their violation by a despotic unique ruler. Jen Jacques Rousseau enforced this
philosophy by ingraining the idea of the moral pact between the government and its people in
his famous work The Social Contract (1762). For Rousseau an ideal state would be one
where the general will of people can be expressed for the common good; individuals’ will is
achieved once they become conscious of their interests as citizens and that of the republic as a
whole. Hence, the legitimacy of a government is determined by the popular sovereignty.

These major thinkers of the eighteenth century had paved the way for a Europe that
was about to emerge from the darkness of the despotic rule of the monarchs towards a more
sensible and fair government, but this could not have been achieved without attacking another

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sturdy institution that kept Europeans under the threat of damnation and hell for centuries. In
this respect, the philosophers advocated 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 and
promoted the rise of secularism. More than anyone else, Voltaire and his motto Ecrassez
l’infâme symbolized the war against torture and persecution bred by religious fanaticism.
European philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Montesquieu, David
Hume, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed various forms of separation of
church and state, 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.

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

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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.

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 soon the profound changes altered irremediably the political, social, religious,
and cultural life in Europe. In this period, the Philosophes were interested in all forms of
knowledge; they were quite anti-clerical and regarded knowledge based on experience as
the best form of understanding. The best example is surely what the thinker David Hume
(1711-1776), advocated in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748); he
considered that knowledge should not be taken for granted and doubt should always
remain. As his contemporaries and even more than Locke, he opposed metaphysics.
Whether considered from an intellectual, political, or social standpoint, the advancements
of the Enlightenment transformed the Western world into an intelligent and self-aware

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civilization. Moreover, it directly inspired the creation of the world’s first great democracy,
the United States of America.