Enlightenment, The

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ENLIGHTENMENT, THE

ENLIGHTENMENT, THE . The eighteenth-century European intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment was affiliated with the rise of the bourgeoisie and the influence of modern science; it promoted the values of intellectual and material progress, toleration, and critical reason as opposed to authority and tradition in matters of politics and religion. The eighteenth century itself is sometimes referred to as "the Enlightenment," but this appellation is highly misleading. For despite the patronage of a few powerful individuals (Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia, Josef II of Austria, and Pope Boniface XIV), the Enlightenment was always a critical and often a subversive movement in relation to the established political and religious order. Its values may have dominated certain intellectual circles in the eighteenth century, especially in France, but they did not dominate the political structures or the religious life of eighteenth-century people generally; and though many political goals of the Enlightenment were largely achieved in the nineteenth century, few of them were achieved in the eighteenth. In the eighteenth century, moreover, there were other powerful movements, particularly religious ones, that diverged from and were sometimes decidedly hostile to the Enlightenment (among them, Pietism, Jansenism, and Methodism). It is also a mistake to suggest that the ideas and values of the Enlightenment were limited to eighteenth-century thinkers, for these values have had a prominent place in European thought down to the present day.

The Enlightenment has always been regarded as predominantly a French movement, but its influence was certainly felt elsewhere, chiefly in Germany, England, and the American colonies. The terms éclaircissement and Aufklärung were generally used by its proponents, but the English term enlightenment does not appear to have been widely used until the nineteenth century, when it had largely derogatory connotations associated with the continent. In Germany too, the movement's opponents frequently played on anti-French sentiments.

The way was paved for the French Enlightenment by the wide influence of Cartesian philosophy and science in the latter half of the seventeenth century. But it also took stimulus from philosophical and scientific advances elsewhere, particularly in England. Within France, the principal forerunner of the Enlightenment was Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), whose Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697) combined sharp wit, copious historical learning, and dialectical skill with a skeptical temper and a deep commitment to the values of intellectual openness and toleration, especially in religious matters. In the sciences, the Enlightenment owed much to the publicist Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757), whose long and active career brought the ideas of scientific philosophers, especially Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton, into currency in France. But the chief philosophical inspiration for the French Enlightenment was provided by John Locke (1632–1704), whose epistemology, political theory, and conception of the relation of reason to religion became models for French Enlightenment thinkers.

We may distinguish two generations of French Enlightenment thinkers, with the transition occurring around 1750. The principal representatives of the first generation were Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) and the Baron de Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat, 1689–1755). Montesquieu's chief writings were in social theory, political theory, and history. His Persian Letters (1721) and The Spirit of the Laws (1748) give the lie to the common charge that the Enlightenment perspective on society and history was shallow, naive, reductionistic, and ethnocentric. Voltaire's massive oeuvre includes poetry, plays, and novels, as well as philosophical treatises and innumerable essays on the most varied subjects. His interests were exceptionally broad, but perhaps his chief concern was with religion. Voltaire's famous motto Écrasez l'infâme! ("Crush the infamous thing!") accurately portrays his hostility toward the Roman Catholic Church and toward clericalism in all forms. His writings contain many eloquent pleas for religious toleration and numberless irreverent satires on the narrowness, irrationality, and superstition of traditional Christianity. Voltaire was characteristic of Enlightenment thinkers in that he was uncompromisingly anticlerical, but it would be wholly incorrect to describe him as an atheist and inaccurate to call him an irreligious man. His writings bear witness to a lifelong struggle to achieve a rational piety that might sustain a person of moral disposition in a world full of monstrous human crimes and terrible human sufferings.

The younger generation of French Enlightenment thinkers (or philosophes ) represents a considerable variety of viewpoints, some of them far more radical politically and more antireligious than those of Voltaire and Montesquieu. The leading French philosopher of this generation was Denis Diderot (1713–1784), a versatile and gifted writer, and the principal editor of the massive Encyclopedia, unquestionably the greatest scholarly and literary achievement of the French Enlightenment. Diderot left no finished philosophical system, but rather a variety of writings that expressed an ever-changing point of view and covered many subjects—metaphysics, natural science, psychology, aesthetics, criticism, society, politics, morality, and religion. In religion, Diderot began as a Deist, but later abandoned this position as an unworthy compromise with religious superstition. Yet even as an atheist, he retained great sympathy for many aspects of religion, especially for the religious predicament of the conscientious individual moral agent. His atheism has sometimes been accurately (if anachronistically) described as existentialist in character. In his later years, he occasionally flirted with some form of theism, especially with a sort of naturalistic pantheism. Like Voltaire, he was adamantly opposed to the simpler and more direct atheism of materialists such as d'Holbach.

The first volume of Diderot's Encyclopedia was published in 1751, prefaced by the famous "Preliminary Discourse" by the scientist Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783). Seven volumes were published by 1759, when the work was suppressed by royal decree as causing "irreparable damage to morality and religion." In the same year, Pope Clement XIII threatened those who read it or possessed copies of it with excommunication. Six years later, with tacit permission of the government, Diderot managed to publish the remaining ten volumes. The Encyclopedia contained articles by many distinguished French intellectuals: Voltaire and Montesquieu, Rousseau and Condorcet, Quesnay and Turgot. Some of the articles are anonymous, perhaps written by Diderot himself, or taken by him from other sources. (The article "Reason," for instance, is a close paraphrase of Coste's translation of Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding [4.18.10–11], an eloquent part of Locke's treatment of the relation of reason to faith.) The Encyclopedia by no means disseminated a single "party line" on moral, political, or religious questions. Many of the articles on theological subjects, for instance, were by Abbé Claude Yvon (1714–1791), who, in his article "Atheists," attacks Bayle's view that atheism should be tolerated and that the morals of atheists are as high as those of believers. The real ideology behind the encyclopedia is its confidence that moral, political, and religious progress can be achieved in society by the simple means of "raising the level of debate" on these matters. It was precisely this, and not immoralist or antireligious propaganda, that aroused the fear of Louis XV and Pope Clement XIII.

The most important epistemologist and psychologist of the second-generation philosophes was Étienne Bonnot, abbé de Condillac (1715–1780), whose Treatise on Systems (1749) and Treatise on Sensations (1754) developed a theory of human knowledge grounded wholly on sense experience. It is probably in Condillac, in fact, together with David Hume (1711–1776), that we find the true beginnings of modern empiricism.

The philosophes also included some infamous philosophical radicals, particularly Julien Offroy de La Mettrie (1709–1751), Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771), and Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d'Holbach (1723–1789). La Mettrie expounded an openly materialist theory of the soul in Man a Machine (1748) and a blatantly hedonist ethics in Discourse on Happiness (1750). Helvétius's On the Mind (published posthumously, 1772) presents a thoroughgoing determinist and environmentalist psychology, together with a utilitarian ethical theory. D'Holbach's attack on religion was begun in his Christianisme dévoilé (1761; the title is cleverly ambiguous: "revealed Christianity" or "Christianity exposed"); it was continued in his materialistic, deterministic, and atheistic System of Nature (1770).

Elsewhere in Europe, the Enlightenment took more moderate forms. In Germany, the alleged religious unorthodoxy of the Aufklärung 's representatives often made them objects of controversy, sometimes victims of persecution. But in fact there was nothing more radical among them than a rather conservative form of Deism. The founder of the German Enlightenment was Christian Wolff (1679–1754). He was possessed of an unoriginal but encyclopedic mind suited to the task of exercising a dominant influence on German academic philosophy. And this he did during the whole of the eighteenth century, at least until its last two decades. Although Wolff's theology was orthodox to the point of scholasticism, his rationalistic approach to theology brought upon him the wrath of the German Pietists, who had him dismissed from his professorship at Halle in 1723. (He was reinstated by Frederick the Great, however, on the latter's accession in 1740.) Among the influential exponents of Wolffianism in the Aufklärung were the metaphysician and aesthetician Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), the first to describe philosophy of art as "aesthetics"; the "neologist" theologian Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791); and the controversial early biblical critic Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768).

The Aufklärung flourished during the reign of Frederick the Great (r. 1740–1786). Himself a Deist and an admirer of the philosophes, Frederick refounded the Berlin Academy in 1744 and brought the distinguished French scientist Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759) to Berlin as its head, along with Voltaire, La Mettrie, and d'Alembert. The academy's nonresident members included Wolff, Baumgarten, Fontenelle, Helvétius, and d'Holbach. Beyond (or beneath) the patronage of Frederick, there were also the so-called popular Enlightenment thinkers, such as Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) and Christian Garve (1742–1798). By far their most distinguished representative, however, was the Jewish Deist Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), a gifted German prose stylist, an early advocate of the disestablishment of religion, and the grandfather of composer Felix Mendelssohn.

One of the most independent and influential voices of the German Enlightenment was that of Mendelssohn's close friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), a dramatist, critic, theologian, and admirer of Spinoza and Leibniz. Lessing's theological writings are powerful but enigmatic in content, perhaps because his aim was simultaneously to criticize the arid rationalism of Wolffian theology and to reject the irrationalism and bibliolatry of Pietism. (The term bibliolatry as an epithet of opprobrium was coined by him.)

In the second half of the eighteenth century, there arose several empiricist critics of Wolffianism in Germany, notably Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) and Johannes Nikolaus Tetens (1736–1807). But towering over them, and indeed over all other philosophers of the German Enlightenment, is the foremost critic of Wolffian philosophy, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). It is often said that Kant's ethics displays signs of his Pietist upbringing. In fact, however, Kant's specific references to Pietist forms of religiosity (emphasis on devotional reading of the Bible and on prayer as means of raising oneself to an actual experience of grace and justification) harshly criticize them as fanaticism (Schwärmerei ) subversive of moral autonomy. Kant's theology was always a form of Wolffian rationalism, his moral religion a form of Enlightenment Deism. Kant's famous avowal that he "limits knowledge in order to make room for faith" makes reference not to a voluntarist or irrationalist "leap," still less to a biblical faith. Kantian moral faith is a form of rational belief, justified by a subtle (and usually underrated) philosophical argument. Throughout his maturity, and even during his term as rector of the University of Königsberg, Kant refused on principle to participate in religious services (which he condemned as "superstitious pseudo-service" [Afterdienst] of God). His uncompromising anticlericalism and deep suspicion of popular religion ("vulgar superstition") are characteristic French Enlightenment attitudes. Kant's 1784 essay "What Is Enlightenment?" expressed wholehearted support for the movement and for the policies of academic openness, religious toleration, and anticlericalism pursued by Frederick the Great.

The Enlightenment in Britain is represented in theology by the tradition of British Deism (the position of such men as John Toland and Matthew Tindal) and in politics by Whig liberalism. Representative of both trends was the philosopher, scientist, and Presbyterian (and Unitarian) cleric Joseph Priestley (1733–1804). Other Britons displaying the impact of the Enlightenment included the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the economist and moral theorist Adam Smith (1723–1790), the historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), and the radical political thinker William Godwin (1756–1836). Hume is often regarded as an opponent, even a great subverter, of the Enlightenment, partly because of his political conservatism, but chiefly because of his skeptical attack on the pretensions of human reason. Hume was, however, personally on good terms with many of the philosophes and at one with their views on religious matters. To see Hume's attack on reason as anti-Enlightenment is to ignore the fact that it is carried on in the name of the other important Enlightenment ideal, nature. Along with Condillac and the philosophes, Hume views our cognitive powers as part of our natural equipment as living organisms and urges us to view our use of them as bound up with our practical needs. His skeptical attack on reason is an attack not on the faculty praised by the Enlightenment, but rather on that appealed to by vain scholastic metaphysicians and crafty sophists hoping to provide "shelter to popular superstitions" by "raising entangling brambles to cover their weakness." Far from being a critic of the Enlightenment, Hume is one of its most characteristic and articulate voices.

The founding fathers of the United States included prominent Enlightenment figures: Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. The Federalist suspicion of centralized state power and the hostility to clericalism motivating the complete separation of church and state in the new republic both reflect the influence of Enlightenment ideas.

Even today we still tend to view the Enlightenment through the distorting lens of nineteenth-century romanticism and its reactionary preconceptions. Enlightenment thought is still accused of being ahistorical and ethnocentric, when (as Ernst Cassirer has shown) the conceptual tools used by post-Enlightenment historians and anthropologists were all forged by the Enlightenment itself. Enlightenment thought is charged with naive optimism, despite the fact that some of the most characteristic Enlightenment thinkers (Voltaire, Mendelssohn) were historical pessimists. It is said that the Enlightenment had too much confidence in human reason, despite its preoccupation with the limits of human cognitive powers. Moreover, many of the Enlightenment thinkers who were most hopeful of salutary social change because of the progress of reason also expressed profound doubts about this (witness Diderot's posthumously published masterpiece Rameau's Nephew ).

On the subject of religion, the common twentieth-century view—inherited from nineteenth-century romanticism—was that Enlightenment thinkers were shallow and arrogant, showing an irreverence and contempt for tradition and authority. Of course, any movement that (like the Enlightenment) sets out to deflate the pretensions of pseudo-profundity will naturally be accused of shallowness by those it makes its targets. It is equally natural that people who are outraged by crimes and hypocrisy carried on under the protection of an attitude of reverence for tradition and authority should choose irreverent wit and satire as appropriate vehicles for their criticism. In fact, the Enlightenment attack on religious authority and tradition was motivated by a profound concern for what it conceived to be the most essential values of the human spirit, the foundations of any true religion.

Kant defines "enlightenment" as "the human being's release from self-imposed tutelage"; by "tutelage," he means the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another, the state of a child whose spiritual life is still held in benevolent bondage by his parents. Tutelage is self-imposed when it results not from immaturity or inability to think for oneself, but rather from a lack of courage to do so. Thus enlightenment is the process by which human individuals receive the courage to think for themselves about morality, religion, and politics, instead of having their opinions dictated to them by political, ecclesiastical, or scriptural authorities.

The battle cry of the Enlightenment in religious matters was toleration. The cry now sounds faint and irrelevant to us, partly because we flatter ourselves that we long ago achieved what it demands, and partly because toleration itself appears to be a value that is bloodless and without specific content. But on both counts we seriously misconceive the meaning the Enlightenment attached to toleration. Toleration is the beginning of enlightenment as Europe in the eighteenth century conceived it because it is the necessary social condition for people to use their own intellects to decide what they will believe. The Enlightenment's demand for toleration is thus the demand that people be given the opportunity to fulfill their deepest spiritual vocation: that of using their intellects to determine the faith they will live by. People miss this vocation whenever "faith" for them ceases to be a belief founded on their own evaluation of the evidence before them and becomes the submission of their intellect to some unquestioned authority. The Enlightenment's judgment on such a spiritually crippling, unenlightened "faith" was pronounced most eloquently by the father of Enlightenment thought, John Locke.

There is a use of the word Reason, wherein it is opposed to Faith.… Only … Faith is nothing but a firm Assent of the Mind: which if it be regulated as is our Duty, cannot be afforded to any thing, but upon good Reason.… He that believes, without having any reason for believing … neither seeks Truth as he ought, nor pays the Obedience due to his Maker, who would have him use those discerning Faculties he has given him. (Essay concerning Human Understanding 4.17.24)

Enlightenment is release from tutelage. It is not surprising that a person who subjects himself to the authority of church or scripture or to his own fancies should be intolerant of others' beliefs and should attempt to impose his own upon them. "For," asks Locke, "how almost can it be otherwise, but that he should be ready to impose on others Belief, who has already imposed on his own?"

Kant, writing in 1784, did not claim to be living in an enlightened age, an age in which people had come to intellectual maturity and governed their own beliefs through reason; but he did claim to be living in an age of enlightenment, an age in which people were gaining the courage to free themselves from the spiritual oppression of tradition and authority. Before we dismiss Enlightenment thought as shallow or as irrelevant to our time, we should ask ourselves whether we can say even as much for our age as Kant was willing to say for his.

Bibliography

The best general study of Enlightenment thought is Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of Enlightenment (Boston, 1951). Also valuable are Paul Hazard's European Thought in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1954) and Frederick C. Copleston's A History of Philosophy, vol. 6, Wolff to Kant (Westminster, Md., 1963), parts 1 and 2. Carl Becker's The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932) is a famous and paradoxical defense of the continuity between Enlightenment thinkers and the Christian tradition they criticized. The best known of many replies to it is Peter Gay's The Enlightenment, 2 vols. (New York, 1966), especially volume 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism.

On the French Enlightenment, see Frank E. Manuel's The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge, Mass., 1962); on England, see John Plamenatz's The English Utilitarians, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1958). An excellent treatment of the German Enlightenment can be found in chapters 10–17 of Lewis White Beck's Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). Studies emphasizing the religious thought of the four most important Enlightenment thinkers are Norman L. Torrey's Voltaire and the English Deists (1930; reprint, Hamden, Conn., 1967); Aram Vartanian's Diderot and Descartes (Princeton, 1953); Hume on Religion (New York, 1963), edited by Richard Wollheim; and my book Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca, N. Y., 1970).