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Age of Enlightenment

Published on Monday, June 9th 2008

Part of “School of Athens” by Raphael (Raffaelo Sanzio, 1483-1520)

History of
Western philosophy

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See also

Eastern philosophy
(Babylonian Indian Iranian
Chinese * Korean)

Religious philosophy
(Christian Islamic Jewish)

The Age of Enlightenment is a term used to describe a phase in Western philosophy and cultural life centered upon the eighteenth century. The term came into use in English during the mid-nineteenth century, with particular reference to French philosophy, as the equivalent of a term then in use by German writers, Zeitalter der Aufklarung, signifying generally the philosophical outlook of the eighteenth century. It does not represent a single movement or school of thought, for these philosophies were often mutually contradictory or divergent.

“Age of Enlightenment” and “The Enlightenment” refer particularly to the intellectual and philosophical developments of that age (and their impact in moral and social reform), in which Reason was advocated as the primary source and basis of authority. Developing in Germany, France and Britain, the movement spread through much of Europe, including Russia and Scandinavia. The signatories of the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were motivated by “Enlightenment” principles (although the English Bill of Rights predates the era). The era is marked by political aspiration towards governmental consolidation, nation-creation and greater rights for common people, attempting to supplant the arbitrary authority of aristocracy and established churches.

The eighteenth century was an age of optimism, tempered by the realistic recognition of the sad state of the human condition and the need for major reforms. The Enlightenment was less a set of ideas than it was a set of attitudes. At its core was a critical questioning of traditional institutions, customs, and morals. Some classifications of this period also include the late 17th century, which is typically known as the Age of Reason or Age of Rationalism.

There is no consensus on when to date the start of the age of Enlightenment, and some scholars simply use the beginning of the eighteenth century or the middle of the seventeenth century as a default date. Other scholars use the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804-15) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment. Still others describe the Enlightenment beginning in Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 and ending in the French Revolution of 1789. However others also claim the Enlightenment ended with the death of Voltaire in 1778.

Origins of the Enlightenment

Following the revolution of knowledge commenced by Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton, and in a climate of increasing disaffection with repressive rule, Enlightenment thinkers believed that systematic thinking might be applied to all areas of human activity, and carried into the governmental sphere, in their explorations of the individual, society and the state. Its leaders believed they could lead their states to progress after a long period of tradition, irrationality, superstition, and tyranny which they imputed to the Middle Ages. The movement helped create the intellectual framework for the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, Poland’s Constitution of May 3, 1791, Russia’s 1825 Decembrist Revolt, the Latin American independence movement, and the Greek national independence movement. In addition, Enlightenment ideals were influential in the Balkan independence movements against the Ottoman Empire, and many historians and philosophers credit the Enlightenment with the later rise of classical liberalism, socialism, democracy, and modern capitalism.

The Age of Enlightenment receives modern attention as a central model for many movements in the modern period. Another important movement in 18th century philosophy, closely related to it, focused on belief and piety. Some of its proponents, such as George Berkeley, attempted to demonstrate rationally the existence of a supreme being. Piety and belief in this period were integral to the exploration of natural philosophy and ethics, in addition to political theories of the age. However, prominent Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume questioned and attacked the existing institutions of both Church and State. The 19th century also saw a continued rise of empiricist ideas and their application to political economy, government and sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology.

The continent of Europe had been ravaged by religious wars in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. When political stability had been restored, notably after the Peace of Westphalia and the English Civil War, an intellectual upheaval overturned the accepted belief that mysticism and revelation are the primary sources of knowledge and wisdom. Instead (according to scholars who split the two periods), the Age of Reason sought to establish axiomatic philosophy and absolutism as foundations for knowledge and stability. Epistemology, in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and Rene Descartes, was based on extreme skepticism and inquiry into the nature of “knowledge.” The goal of a philosophy based on self-evident axioms reached its height with Baruch (Benedictus de) Spinoza’s Ethics, which expounded a pantheistic view of the universe where God and Nature were one. This idea then became central to the Enlightenment from Newton through to Jefferson. The ideas of Pascal, Leibniz, Galileo and other natural philosophers of the previous period also contributed to and greatly influenced the Enlightenment. Cassirer argued that Leibniz’s Treatise On Wisdom “identified the central concept of the Enlightenment and sketched its theoretical programme.”. There was a wave of change across European thinking, exemplified by Newton’s natural philosophy, which combined mathematics of axiomatic proof with mechanics of physical observation, a coherent system of verifiable predictions, which set the tone for what followed Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in the century after.

The Age of Enlightenment is also prominent in the history of Judaism, perhaps because of its conjunction with increased social acceptance of Jews in some western European states, especially those who were not orthodox or who converted to the officially sanctioned version of Christianity. Antisemitism, however, continued to remain a visible phenomenon throughout much of Europe during the Enlightenment, and a number of major Enlightenment figures were noted antisemites. The period is known as Haskalah in Jewish historiography, and the term carries the same connotations of “enlightenment” in Hebrew.

Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were also influenced by Enlightenment-era ideas, especially the views of John Locke on the duties and role of government for the people.

Recent research has also shown that women played an important, if somewhat limited, role in the Enlightenment, producing an unprecedented volume of published works.

Influence

Social democracy

Precursors

♦ The Age of Enlightenment***

♦ Utopian socialism

♦ Trade Unionism

♦ The Revolutions of 1848

♦ Orthodox Marxism

Development

♦ Revisionism/Reformism

♦ Third way

Policies

♦ Representative democracy

♦ Labour rights

♦ Civil liberties

♦ Welfare state

♦ Mixed economy

♦ Secularism

♦ Fair trade

♦ Environmental protection

Organizations

♦ Social democratic parties

♦ Socialist International

♦ Party of European Socialists

♦ ITUC

Important figures

♦ Eduard Bernstein

♦ Hjalmar Branting

♦ Friedrich Ebert

♦ Jean Jaures

♦ Leon Blum

♦ Karl Kautsky

♦ Ramsay MacDonald

♦ Clement Attlee

♦ Tommy Douglas

The Enlightenment occupies a central role in the justification for the movement known as modernism. The neo-classicizing trend in modernism came to see itself as a period of rationality which overturned established traditions, analogously to the Encyclopaediasts and other Enlightenment philosophers. A variety of 20th century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, traced their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment, and away from the purported emotionalism of the 19th century. Geometric order, rigor and reductionism were seen as Enlightenment virtues. The modern movement points to reductionism and rationality as crucial aspects of Enlightenment thinking, of which it is the heir, as opposed to irrationality and emotionalism. In this view, the Enlightenment represents the basis for modern ideas of liberalism against superstition and intolerance. Influential philosophers who have held this view include Jurgen Habermas and Isaiah Berlin.

This view asserts that the Enlightenment was the point when Europe broke through what historian Peter Gay calls “the sacred circle,” whose dogma had circumscribed thinking. The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as primary values of society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas.

With the end of the Second World War and the rise of post-modernity, these same features came to be regarded as liabilities – excessive specialization, failure to heed traditional wisdom or provide for unintended consequences, and the romanticization of Enlightenment figures – such as the Founding Fathers of the United States, prompted a backlash against both Science and Enlightenment based dogma in general. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault are often understood as arguing that the Age of Reason had to construct a vision of unreason as being demonic and subhuman, and therefore evil and befouling, whence by analogy to argue that rationalism in the modern period is, likewise, a construction. In their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote a critique of what they perceived as the contradictions of Enlightenment thought: Enlightenment was seen as being at once liberatory and (through the domination of instrumental rationality) tending towards totalitarianism.

Yet other leading intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky, see a natural evolution, using the term loosely, from early Enlightenment thinking to other forms of social analysis, specifically from The Enlightenment to liberalism, anarchism and socialism. The relationship between these different schools of thought, Chomsky and others point out, can be seen in the works of von Humboldt, Kropotkin, Bakunin and Marx, among others. No brief summary can do justice to the diversity of enlightened thought in eighteenth-century Europe. Because it was an attitude rather than a set of shared beliefs, there are many contradictory trains to follow. In his famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1784), Immanuel Kant described it simply as freedom to use one’s own intelligence.

Important figures

Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment”



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