The Enlightenment Dared to Know
Finding 'Enlightenment' in my Whirld
Excerpted from A Whirld of Words: A Reader's Commonplace Dictionary. Find the LINK to the Introduction and WORKS CITED below.
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The Enlightenment
‘What is Enlightenment?’: ‘Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity’
I. Kant, 1784 (MacCulloch 2010) p. 803
what is said of the benefits and disadvantages of the Enlightenment can be well represented in a fable of fire. It is the soul of inorganic nature, its use in moderation makes life pleasant for us, it warms our winters and illuminates our nights. But that must be done with torches and candles: to illuminate the streets by setting fire to houses is a very ill form of illumination. Nor must children be allowed to play with it
(Lichtenberg 2000) p. 205
the abstracting of all primeval and invisible foundations of existence
(Burckhardt 1958) p. 237
the Enlightenment is the true and legitimate heir of the Renaissance. The crowning achievements of the French Enlightenment, viz. an advanced form of materialism and atheism, the conversion of the revolutionary system of ideals into plebeian practices, and, therewith, the prophetic emergence of its peculiar inner difficulties and contradictions
(Lukács 1969) p. 19, 165
the Enlightenment may be summed up in two words: criticism and power; when the Enlightenment had done most of its work, Kant (in 1784) defined it as man's emergence from his self-imposed tutelage, and offered as its motto Sapere aude – 'Dare to know'; 'If someone asks', he observed, 'are we living in an enlightened age today? the answer would be, No.' But, he immediately added, 'we are living in an Age of Enlightenment'
(Gay 1967) p. xi, 20
the Enlightenment dictum: Gnothi Seaton, ‘know thyself’
(Lichtenberg 2012) p. 5
according to philosopher A.N. Whitehead, ‘the safest and general characterization of the Enlightenment philosophy is that it consisted of a series of footnotes to Plato’
(Kelly 2016) p. 538
a mixture of classicism, impiety, and science
(Gay 1969) p. 125
we can date the Old World Enlightenment from the founding of the Royal Society in 1661, or perhaps from the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687. It died in the Terror. The American Enlightenment came half a century later – we can date it with some assurance from the founding of the American Philosophical Society in 1741. It lasted until the dramatic deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1826
(Commager 1982) p. 242
the notion that there exist eternal and unalterable truths, laws, rules of conduct which entail ends of life which any man might, in theory, have recognized in any time and in any place, and the discovery and pursuit of which is the sole and sufficient goal of all human behavior, is the central principle of the Enlightenment
(Berlin 2000) p. 165
the leaders of the French Enlightenment, the great popularizers of science, have rendered great service to mankind by the open war which they conducted against ignorance and obscurantism in every form, and in particular against brutality, stupidity, suppression of the truth, cynicism and disregard of human rights. Their fight for freedom and justice, even when they did not quite understand their own formulas, created a tradition to which a great many men owe their lives and liberties today. The ideal of a single, scientifically organized world system governed by reason was the heart of the program of the Enlightenment
(Berlin 2001) p. 159, 353
what particularly characterized the French Enlightenment, separating it sharply from other national manifestations of the same spirit, was its uncompromising freedom of religious thought, its clear, logical 'infidelity'
(Trevor-Roper 1957) p. 269
the Early Enlightenment was an impressively unified process across Europe, indeed a remarkable demonstration of the essential cohesion of European history. From its origins in the 1650s and 1660s, the philosophical radicalism of the European Early Enlightenment characteristically combined immense reverence for science, and for mathematical logic, with some form of non-providential deism, if not outright materialism and atheism along with unmistakably republican, even democratic tendencies. Two rival wings of the European Enlightenment, the moderate mainstream and the Radical Enlightenment. Spinoza and Spinozism were in fact the intellectual backbone of the European Radical Enlightenment everywhere. Primarily a crisis of élites – courtiers, officials, scholars, patricians, and clergy. Nothing caused more dismay than the ambivalence and corrosive skepticism of one of the most widely read and influential thinkers of the age, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) – the prime enigma; others, Locke and Vico
(Israel 2001) p. vi, 5, 10, 11, 12, 137
the European Enlightenment, admittedly, owes much to England. The Englishmen Bacon, Locke and Newton were its prophets; the English Revolution of 1688 was its political starting point; the English deists were its midwives
(Trevor-Roper 2010) p. 133
Montesquieu and Buffon, the two most celebrated and controversial figures of the Enlightenment, in seeking to address the instability of all being under the influence of chance and time, placed themselves at the forefront of an intellectual revolution whose implications are still being worked through in the human and natural sciences. Montesquieu transformed the study of human institutions, setting out the groundwork for the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and comparative politics; Buffon’s ideas on the influence of environment on the development of living beings inspired new thinking in such diverse fields as cosmology, the history of the earth, and embryonic development. He laid the basis for the establishment of the life sciences as distinct disciplines dealing with processes and relationships that did not permit precise predictions and were irreducible to universal laws. His insights into the influence of environment on living beings were as relevant to the emerging discipline of the philosophy of history as they were to natural science. The continuity between natural and human history is emphasized in his last work, Les époques de la nature (1788), which brings together his main ideas on geology, biology, and the cosmos in a detailed history of the earth and life on it. In their fascination with diversity, their insistence on the significance of difference, both thinkers were at odds with the universalizing spirit of their time
(Kelly 2016) p. 46
atheism
Spinoza's prime contribution to the evolution of early modern Naturalism, fatalism, and irreligion, as Bayle – and any who followed Bayle in this – stressed, was his ability to integrate within a single coherent or ostensibly coherent system, the chief elements of ancient, modern, and oriental 'atheism'. No one else in early modern times did this, or anything comparable, and it is primarily the unity, cohesion, and compelling power of his system, his ability to connect major elements of previous 'atheistic' thought into an unbroken chain of reasoning, rather than the novelty or force of any of his constituent concepts, which explains his centrality in the evolution of the whole Radical Enlightenment
(Israel 2001) p. 230
baroque
the baroque age is the era of cultural history which follows the Renaissance; which emerges out of the Renaissance, stealing upon us almost imperceptibly until we discover its distinct, individual character. It is recognizably a mutation of the Renaissance, not a foretaste of the Enlightenment. Perhaps we may call it the autumn of the Renaissance, and leave it at that. The baroque age was an age of inflation: indeed, the baroque might be defined as the Renaissance plus inflation, the Renaissance under the strain of inflation
(Trevor-Roper 1985) p. 223, 236
Bayle, Pierre
assuredly, the most enigmatic and controversial, as well as probably the single most widely read and influential thinker of the Early Enlightenment, was the 'philosopher of Rotterdam' – Pierre Bayle (1647-1706). His pivotal role in the onset of the European Enlightenment has never been doubted. Though banned in France and the rest of Catholic Europe, his works were read everywhere and by everyone who claimed any sort of acquaintance with contemporary European intellectual life. The son of a Reformed pastor, born in southern France, near the Spanish border, south of Toulouse, Bayle abandoned the faith of his upbringing at the age of 21, much to the distress of his family, in 1669, and, for a time, professed Catholicism. During this period he studied with the Jesuits at Toulouse, imbibing their Aristotelian scholasticism. After a short time he became disillusioned with Catholicism and the Jesuits, however, and since relapse from Catholicism to Protestantism was strictly forbidden in France, fled to Geneva, where he reverted to the Reformed faith and spent the period 1670-74. There he was also converted to Cartesianism and when, after returning to France, he was appointed to a professorship at the Huguenot academy of Sedan, he had to expound Aristotelianism to his students while adhering inwardly to Cartesianism. The suppression of the Huguenot academy of Sedan by decree of Louis XIV, in July 1681, led the already renowned 34-year-old scholar to emigrate to the United Provinces. Rotterdam became his permanent home and the scene, over more than a quarter of a century, of the rest of his spectacular philosophical career. The principal theme of Bayle's first major work, the Pensées diverses sur la comète (1682), is the prevalence throughout history of 'superstition' and 'idolatry' and the need to combat 'superstition' with philosophical reason. Arguably, this is also the central theme of his philosophical oeuvre as a whole. The occasion for writing the Pensées diverses was the unsettling stir throughout western Europe caused by several comets observed over the winter of 1680-1, a wave of anxiety fed by the ancient and deeply ingrained popular notion that comets are ill omens. On 30 October 1693 the burgomasters stripped Bayle of his professorship with immediate effect, as well as his pension, and withdrew permission for him to give private classes at home. Contrary to what is often said, Bayle is strictly speaking neither a sceptic nor a 'fideist'. His position is that philosophical reason is the only tool we have to separate truth from falsehood, the only secure criterion, and that, consequently, by its nature religious faith can never be based on reason. Bayle's was one of the most influential and sought-after of the dictionnaires. It went out of its way to point out the pervasive presence of atheistic, deistic, and materialistic philosophies throughout the whole history of human thought. Bayle's contention that 'Spinozism', in one form or another, has always infiltrated human minds. Relentless in demonstrating the incoherence and irrationality of every point of view, all systems were seemingly demolished by his corrosive rational criticism. Bayle relentlessly uncovers the inconsistencies of others
(Israel 2001) p. 134, 136, 331, 332, 333, 338
Christianity
the destruction of Spanish Judaism and Islam after 1492 had a major role in developing new forms of Christianity which challenged much of the early Church’s package of ideas, and also in fostering the mindset which led in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the Enlightenment in Western culture
(MacCulloch 2010) p. 4
dictionary
multi-volume encyclopaedias, dictionnaires, and lexicons were one of the most striking manifestations of the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment. The vogue began in 1674 with the publication of Louis Moréri's Grand Dictionnaire, gained momentum with Bayle's Dictionnaire of 1697, continued with Ephraim Chambers' two-volume Encyclopaedia of 1728, and culminated finally in the celebrated Grande Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert
(Israel 2001) p. 134
Encyclopédie
a great machine de guerre, epitomizing the Age of Enlightenment. The purpose of the Encyclopédie was to assemble knowledge scattered over the earth's surface
(Crocker 1966) p. 118, 257
English Revolution
what happened in England in the middle of the seventeenth century? Was it a ‘great rebellion’ as Clarendon believed, the last and most violent of the many rebellions against particularly unprepossessing or unpopular kings, that had been staged by dissident members of the landed classes century after century throughout the Middle Ages? Was it merely an internal war caused by a temporary political breakdown due to particular political circumstances? Was it the Puritan revolution of S.R. Gardiner, to whom the driving force behind the whole episode was a conflict of religious institutions and ideologies? Was it the first great clash of liberty against royal tyranny, as seen by Macaulay, the first blow for the Enlightenment and Whiggery, a blow which put England on the slow road to parliamentary monarchy and civil liberties? Was it the first bourgeois revolution, in which the economically progressive and dynamic elements in society struggled to emerge from their feudal swaddling clothes? This is how Engels saw it and how many historians of the 1930s, including R.H. Tawney and C. Hill, tended to regard it. Was it the first revolution of modernization, which is the Marxist interpretation in a new guise, now perceived as a struggle of entrepreneurial forces to remould the institutions of government to meet the needs of a more efficient, more rationalistic, and more economically advanced society? Or was it a revolution of despair, engineered by the decaying and backward-looking elements in rural society, the mere gentry of H.R. Trevor-Roper, men who hoped to recreate the decentralized, inward-looking, socially stable and economically stagnant society of their hopeless, anachronistic dreams
(Stone 1987) p. 215
existentialism
existentialism unfolds from this historical situation: alienation and estrangement; a sense of the basic fragility and contingency of human life; the importance of reason confronted with the depths of existence; the threat of Nothingness, and the solitary and unsheltered condition of the individual before this threat; the radical feeling of human finitude. Existentialism is the counter-Enlightenment come at last to philosophic expression; and it demonstrates beyond anything else that the ideology of the Enlightenment is thin, abstract, and therefore dangerous. The philosophy of the atomic age
(Barrett 1962) p. 36, 65, 274
Humanität
the claim of reason to determine the limits and conditions of knowledge and establish principles of conduct was seen increasingly as problematic, particularly in Germany. The German Aufklärung [Enlightenment] was influenced by the Pietist movement, which held that truth is encountered through the spontaneous promptings of the individual heart rather than the dogmas of organized religion or the desiccated reason of philosophy. The most potent threat to the authority of reason was opposed by the rise of historicism, as pioneered in Johann Gottlieb von Herder’s philosophy of history. In a radical departure from the traditional notion of a timeless and universal ideal of virtue, he asserted that the potentialities of human nature are ever changing and developing, and are fulfilled in different ways depending on circumstance. Societies and cultures are organic wholes, their values, institutions, and language inseparable from each other: they can be understood not by the analytical methods of the natural sciences nor from some external standpoint, but only by entering into their way of life through the kind of imaginative insight characteristic of artistic genius. Breaking with the traditional canons of art, Herder’s revolutionary aesthetics gave supreme significance to the artist’s personal vision, as the expression of the beliefs and values that constitute the distinctiveness of his people and culture. He argued that all historical periods, societies, and cultures are ends in themselves and must be judged in terms of their own purposes. But he also maintained that in their different ways they are striving to fulfill a common purpose: the achievement of Humanität – a vague term denoting an ideal of individual perfection as the full development of an individual’s powers and their integration in a harmonious whole. This historicist approach to the problem of self-realization was the central concern of a circle of writers who came together between 1797 and 1802 in Jena and Berlin, and whose discussions were the seedbed of German Romantic philosophy. They included the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg (known by his pen name Novalis), the philosopher Friedrich Schelling, and the theologian Ernst Schleiermacher. They feared the social atomization created by the French Revolution, the extremes of liberal individualism, and the competitive free-for-all of the emerging new Europe, and they emphasized the values of tradition and community. But despite their nostalgia for the corporate societies of medieval Europe, these early Romantics were not conservatives: while attacking the destructive consequences of rationalism, they championed the modern values of rational autonomy, free inquiry, tolerance, and individual liberty, and hoped that humans could regain their sense of unity with the social and natural worlds without forfeiting these values. Their motivating spirit was a quest for harmony. They aimed to integrate all fields of human activity – religion, philosophy, art, science, and politics – in an organicist vision of the self, society, history, and the cosmos that, by demonstrating the fundamental unity of all existence, would cure humanity of the “homesickness” (Heimweh) they saw as the curse of the modern age
(Kelly 2016) p. 9, 13
knowledge
in his pioneering work of 1725, Scienza Nuova, Giambattista Vico argued that the Cartesian paradigm of true knowledge excluded the human dimension of self-knowledge. There were no immutable laws valid for all peoples at all times, he claimed. Vico’s vision of the new science of human societies ran counter to the Enlightenment’s dominant faith in a fixed human nature that was able, through the universal attribute of reason, to formulate standards and ideals valid for all societies at all times
(Kelly 2016) p. 41
modernity
modernity had made history take on the task of demonstrating the progressive fulfillment of the promises of the Enlightenment. Postmodernists wished to free people from the burden of history. Postmodernists have seen themselves as agents of reckoning
(Breisach 2003) p. 14, 17
optimism
John Adams, probably the most caustic critic of fatuous optimism that the age of Enlightenment produced
(Gay 1969) p. 98
original sin
what the entire Enlightenment has in common is denial of the central Christian doctrine of original sin, believing instead that man is born either innocent and good, or morally neutral and malleable by education or environment, or, at worst, deeply defective and capable of radical and indefinite improvement by rational education in favorable circumstances, or by a revolutionary reorganization of society as demanded, for example, by Rousseau
(Berlin 2001) p. 20
postmodernism
in Lyotard's famous formulation, postmodernism is, above all, 'incredulity towards metanarratives'. Keith Jenkins defines grand narratives as 'overarching philosophies of history like the Enlightenment story of the steady progress of reason and freedom, or Marx's drama of the forward march of human productive capacities via class conflict culminating in proletarian revolution'
(Christian 2004) p. 514
postmodernists have predicted that life in postmodernity would render traditional historical understanding obsolete. As the postmodernists of the 1980s and 1990s have seen it, there must be a decisive, all-encompassing cultural revolution. The fortuitous agreement among most postmodernists that the Enlightenment must be seen perhaps not as the beginning point but as the ultimate defining moment for modernity and modernism. The postmodernist inclination to view modernity as a calamitous era
(Breisach 2003) p. 6, 11
progress
the idea of progress is contemporary with the age of enlightenment and with the bourgeois revolution
(Camus 1991) p. 194
Spinoza, Baruch
Spinoza was the supreme philosophical bogeyman of Early Enlightenment Europe. Admittedly, historians have rarely emphasized this. It has been much more common, and still is, to claim that Spinoza was rarely understood and had very little influence, a typical example of an abiding historiographical refrain which appears to be totally untrue but nevertheless, since the nineteenth century, has exerted an enduring appeal for all manner of scholars. In fact, no one else during the century 1650-1750 remotely rivaled Spinoza's notoriety as the chief challenger of the fundamentals of revealed religion, received ideas, traditions, morality, and what was everywhere regarded, in absolutist and non-absolutist states alike, as divinely constituted political authority. The claim that Nature is self-moving, and creates itself, became indeed the very trademark of the Spinosistes
(Israel 2001) p. 159, 160
Teutonic
as the French Revolution’s promise of universal liberation was transformed into Napoleonic imperialism, young Germans found consolation in a Romantic nationalism inspired by Herder’s rejection of the Enlightenment view that there is one right life for all and his belief that each people has its own ‘soul’, its distinctive values. They became fervently patriotic, glorifying the Middle Ages as a time when the people had been an organic community, untouched by the destructive forces of modern civilization. Pursuing the study of the Teutonic past in literature and art through folksongs and legends, they sought their roots in the simple people who expressed the authentic Volksseele. In his Lectures to the German Nation of 1807-1808, delivered to an eager audience in a Berlin under French occupation, Fichte confirmed that the freshness and purity of the German spirit, uncorrupted by alien influences, equipped them for their historical mission – the spiritual regeneration of mankind. This foundational text of German nationalism resonated with the Heimweh of talented young men who longed to identify with some larger whole that would give their lives a universal meaning and purpose
(Kelly 2016) p. 16
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WORKS CITED
Barrett, William (1962), Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday) 314.
Berlin, Isaiah (2000), Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton: Princeton University Press) xiii, 382.
--- (2001), Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press) liii, 419.
Breisach, Ernst (2003), On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and Its Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) ix, 243.
Burckhardt, Jacob (1958), Judgments on History and Historians (Boston: Beacon Press) xxiv, 280.
Camus, Albert (1991), The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (New York: Vintage Books) xii, 306.
Christian, David (2004), Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press) xxii, 642.
Commager, Henry Steele (1982), The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (New York: Oxford University Press) xii, 342.
Crocker, Lester G. (1966), Diderot (New York: Free Press) 420.
Gay, Peter (1967), The Rise of Modern Paganism: The Enlightenment, An Interpretation, 2 vols. (1; New York: Knopf) xviii, 555, xv.
--- (1969), The Science of Freedom: The Enlightenment, An Interpretation, 2 vols. (2; New York: Knopf) xxii, 705, xviii.
Israel, Jonathan I. (2001), Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (New York: Oxford University Press) xvi, 810.
Kelly, Aileen (2016), The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press) x, 592.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000), The Waste Books, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review Books) xxv, 235.
--- (2012), Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Philosophical Writings, trans. Steven Tester (Albany: State University of New York Press) xvi, 207.
Lukács, György (1969), Goethe and His Age (New York: Grosset and Dunlap) 252.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2010), Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking) xvii, 1161, 32 p. of pl.
Stone, Lawrence (1987), The Past and the Present Revisited (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul) xii, 440.
Trevor-Roper, H. R. (1957), Historical Essays (New York: Harper) viii, 324.
--- (1985), Renaissance Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) viii, 312.
--- (2010), History and the Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press) xxvi, 314.
Life lessons. Never heard of Volvatarie. This is a good life lesson especially, for myself. Romans, other people such as the first star gazer. More importantly the most important aspect to the universe. I have a big telescope 🔭 in my house 🏠. At least for me it is. Enlightened by the way that you are describing your experience.