Jane OGrady - Enlightenment Philosophy in a Nutshell

Thank you to my meticulous, intelligent, long-suffering editor at Arcturus, John Turing, and to the wise Vanessa Daubney; to Richard Baron, Andrew Bowie, Bob Clarke, Tony Curzon Price, Alexander Douglas, Mark Fielding, Sacha Golob, John Heyderman, Simon May, Philip Pilkington, Georgia Scoones and Philippa Scoones for giving me (what certainly seemed) excellent advice; to Anna Curzon Price for helping me with the diagrams; Lucy Lethbridge, Prudence Cave, Sibby Curzon Price, Selina OGrady, Jeremy OGrady and Carolyn Law for putting up with my kvetching; and all the students that I have taught, or am currently teaching, for their enthusiasm, tolerance and inspiration.

What is Enlightenment? In 1784, Immanuel Kant wrote an essay answering that question, but it is still being heatedly asked more than two centuries later. Enlightenment from what? From dogma, authority, hierarchy, superstition, religious control and religious intolerance, granted, but was the Enlightenment essentially godless, and how enlightening in fact was it? Who were the enlighteners? Can enlightened despots such as Prussias Frederick II or Catherine the Great of Russia count as being among them? Was the Enlightenment an integrated, homogeneous movement, or were there as many Enlightenments as there were European countries? Or, as historian Jonathan Israel has recently argued, was it one movement but with two conflicting strands Radical (anti-traditional) and Moderate (more conservative)? Should the Counter-Enlightenment be considered separate to the Enlightenment, or essential to it, a sign of its complexity and fruitful contradictoriness?

Because when it began is disputed, there isnt even agreement about which European country was its source. Was it with Descartes doubt in the early 17th century? Around 1648 at the end of the 30 Years War? With Spinoza in tolerant Holland, or Newton and Locke in 17th-century England? At the beginning of the 18th century when the French became inspired with Anglo-mania? And when did it end with the French Revolution in 1789, Kants death in 1804 or the beginning or end of the Napoleonic Wars? Even given the earliest and latest temporal boundaries, the Enlightenment overflows them back into the Renaissance and forward into Romanticism. It produced a cornucopia of scientific discovery, literature, music, art and architecture as well as philosophy, but it would take several volumes to cover Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, heliocentrism, the invention of the steam engine, the economics of Beccaria and Adam Smith, the exuberant divinity of Bach, Handel, Haydn and Mozart, the light/dark antithesis, the nudes and portraiture of Rembrandt, Rubens, Vermeer and Velasquez, the ornate emotionality of Baroque churches, the rise of the novel with Defoe and Richardson, and satire from the likes of Jonathan Swift and Voltaire. So how can it be crammed into a nutshell?

The Enlightenment reached the highest echelons of society, as shown in this image of Louis XIV visiting the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris.

It cant, of course, but compression is sometimes handy for communicating the sense of a subject and inspiring further investigation. Only a handful of Enlightenment thinkers can be included, but I hope to show how Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Berkeley, Hume, Rousseau and Kant respond to, develop, re-form and contradict the ideas of their predecessors and peers such as Hobbes, Leibniz, Hutcheson, Voltaire and Diderot, and in doing so to convey the extraordinary courage and innovativeness of the Enlightenment as a whole.

What is Enlightenment?

The question What is Enlightenment? appeared in an exasperated footnote to an article defending marriage and lamenting moralitys decline, written in 1783 by a Prussian clergyman, Johann Friedrich Zollner. This question, which is nearly as important as What is truth? (he wrote) should be answered before one starts to enlighten. Many intellectuals besides Kant, including Moses Mendelssohn, took up the challenge.

Each chapter begins with a brief summary of what makes the philosopher it discusses lasting, and ends with a bullet-point summary of the chapters key ideas. It also gives some details of the philosophers life, because, as Nietzsche famously said, whereas a scientist or philologist is distinct from their work, philosophy is a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir of its creator, brewed out of that philosophers temperament and very essence; the life illustrates and illuminates the philosophy, perhaps especially where the individuals practice conflicts with their theory.

When outlining the ideas of each Enlightenment thinker, I use the present tense, not intending it as a historic present but as an immortal-thought present. Occasionally, where historical context is important, I use the past tense for a philosophers work, for instance when there needs to be a contrast between what that philosopher used to say, and what he ends up saying, or where I am referring to an earlier thinker whose work he is responding to.

The Enlightenment ranged from Jonathan Swifts satire (such as Gullivers Travels , pictured above) to Immanuel Kants earnest moral philosophy.

Philosophers of the Enlightenment

Ren Descartes (15961650)

John Locke (16321704)

Baruch Spinoza (16321677)

George Berkeley (16851753)

David Hume (17111776)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778)

Immanuel Kant (17241804)

In about 600 bce , the Greek citizen Thales asked: What is the One underlying the Many? Until then, human ingenuity had tended to manipulate the world piecemeal in maths and technology and to try to explain it as a whole only in terms of myth. Thales question sprang from the (then) odd and original idea that there must be a single principle (arch) informing and animating the gallimaufry of things in the world, and it made the key distinction that spurs all philosophical and scientific enquiry the distinction between what things merely seem and how they actually are .

Soon those who practised what they called philos sophia (love of wisdom) began to turn the spotlight on themselves. They realized that what they investigated was investigated by them through the medium of their thought, and of human eyes, skin, ears and other specific sense organs. Philosophy, like science, has always wanted to know what everything is, irrespective of how it seems, but that requires asking what or who does everything seem to ? We cant winkle ourselves out of our knowing. We have to judge how far, or even if, what we perceive is as we perceive it, and what we believe is true. In the third century bce , the Skeptikoi (enquirers) questioned whether we can know anything at all extreme, perhaps, but scepticism is essential to all philosophizing.