18/9/07 - English Literature - Enlightenment and History: The Age of Reason

The so-called "Age of Reason" is a convenient periodicity, but it confounds scholars because it did not have an exact beginning of, say, 1700.

“The men of the Enlightenment were divided by doctrine, temperament, environment, and generations. And in fact the spectrum of their ideas, their sometimes acrimonious disputes, have tempted many historians to abandon the search for a single Enlightenment. What, after all, does Hume, who was a conservative, have in common with Condorcet, who was a democrat? Holbach, who ridiculed all religion, with Lessing, who practically tried to invent one? Diderot, who envied and despised antiquaries, with Gibbon, who admired and emulated them? Rousseau, who worshipped Plato, with Jefferson, who could not bring himself to finish the Republic?…. These questions have their uses, but mainly as a corrective: they keep historians from sacrificing variety to unity and help to free them from simplistic interpretations that have served them for so long and so badly – interpretations that treat the Enlightenment as a compact body of doctrine, an Age of Reason, and then take the vitalism of Diderot, the passion of Rousseau, or the skepticism of Hume, as foreign bodies, as harbingers of Romanticism. This is definition by larceny; it is to strip the Enlightenment of its wealth and then complain about its poverty…. I shall respect the differences among the philosophes which, after all, supplied the Enlightenment with much of its vigor, generated much of its inner history. Yet, mindful that general names are not Platonic ideas but baskets collecting significant similarities, I shall speak throughout of the philosophes, and call the totality of their ideas, their strategies, and their careers, the Enlightenment, and I shall use these terms to refer to what I shall call a family, a family of intellectuals united by a single style of thinking…. There were many philosophes in the eighteenth century, but there was only one Enlightenment. A loose, informal, wholly unorganized coalition of cultural critics, religious skeptics, and political reformers from Edinburgh to Naples, Paris to Berlin, Boston to Philadelphia, the philosophes made up a clamorous chorus, and there were some discordant voices among them, but what is striking is their general harmony, not their occasional discord. The men of the Enlightenment united on a vastly ambitious program, a program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom, above all, freedom in its many forms – freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one’s talents, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his own way in the world.”
[Walter Benjamin, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, "Preface" (1973)]

"'Enlightenment', in the eighteenth-century sense, is one of those useful but difficult terms, like ‘romantic’ or ‘classical’, which paradoxically are about as indefinable as they are indispensable. A good definition is that of Norman Hampson in The Enlightenment (Penguin, 1968), who suggests that there is a cluster of characteristic attitudes which, when they occur in a high enough concentration, we call the Enlightenment. Among such attitudes would be:
i) anticlericalism tending in certain cases to antireligion;
ii) a celebration of the pagan classical past as a healthy alternative to Christianity;
iii) a stress on the exercise of reason;
iv) a growing desire for the systematic, particularly scientific, investigation of nature;
v) a belief that such an investigation would reveal a set both of natural and moral laws;
vi) a deep distrust of excess;
vii) a delight in order brought about by a balance of competing forces."
[S. Eliot and B. Stern, The Age of Enlightenment (vol. 1, 1979, pp. 1-2)]

It could be said to start in the Islamic period because here the texts of philosophers were resurrected.


At this time was the corruption of the papacy. The Protestant Reformation could not have happened butt for the translation of the Bible. People hadn't previously read the Bible, they only took the word of the priest. However, after its translation people no longer needed an intervening power to preach to them. Instead there came liberation and access to knowledge. People who could read could therefore speak directly to God and He to them, giving empowerment. The Bible spoke of things that priests had not mentioned, e.g. kings slaughtering each other and fornicating. People were shocked about this, because this had not been told to them by the priests. The priests had simply taken out the parts that were protective of the papacy and the king. But now people could see that what they'd been told was false. They challenged powerful people and used the Bible as their sword, their gospel of liberation. This is enlightenment; the movement towards a popular monarchy.


In 1660 the monarchy was restored. The Quakers developed trade and education. They created a system wherefrom modernity occurred. This process was largely unrecorded. In 1694 the Bank of England was founded, and in 1695 the Bank of Scotland. This created the condition from which a market society could develop. 'Good' people opened up markets and developed trading republics; capitalism began. They made conditions right for the Enlightenment. Mathematical logic and experiments meant there was a boom of science. Reasonable procedures, knowledge, instruments of analysis were all key developments, which affected the way people reasoned and thought. Things had to be done properly, otherwise another person might dispute them and say that they were not being reasonable.


There were many different enlightenments happening at different moments all over the world: in Israel, in Scotland, in France, in Germany. The Enlightenment was real, it changed the way humans perceived the monarchy, language, the world and reason. This meant that superstition faded. Superstition was seen as irrational, not real materially, as an inhibition of intellectualism. Superstition was linked to religion and so people looked at structures of religious faith. Religion was also revealed as unrealistic, irrational, superstitious and unscientific, which greatly affected priesthood. However certain sects of Protestantism didn't hold with these theories. People such as David Hume analysed miracles and exposed them as chimera. Atheism was a dangerous word so other words were used instead, e.g. "sceptic", which only means "doubting." A form of religion, deism, was developed, which removed all the miraculous theories and took only the belief of an all-powerful being, a creator, or the "great Architect", "great Watchmaker", "great Designer." These terms involve reasonableness aned refer to methods of rational thinking.


Hume thought the Scots should be most acclaimed for the Enlightenment, for literature and for progression. The European Enlightenment was chiefly, but not solely, a Scottish invention. They had great intellectual power, with figures like Adam Smith, David Hume, William Robertson and Adam Ferguson. They took a materialist analysis of history, an imperialistic one. They explored questions such as how ideas shape language and the brain, how societies develop and how people interact.


In the eighteenth century history writing came of age using science, reason, logic, cause-and-effect connections and descriptions of real world developments. It looked at how things were; it became factually accurate.


The Banks gave people credit, they materialized people's fantasies. With credit, businesses could be set up by people who could perviously never have afforded to. "Fantastic project" and "the projecting age" are terms used by Daniel Defoe to describe the events of his time. While in an earlier age religion had moved mountains, now credit could build ships!


Newton changed scientific thought with optics and mathematics: he shows how a white light shining through a prism refracted into a rainbow, and he discovered gravity. This meant that the cosmos could be measured. The old 'being' and metaphors were no longer needed to explain the universe. They gave way to scientific, measurable rationality. Now we use language, we live in a hierarchical society. We can think our way through any problem.

There are many problems with the label 'Enlightenment'. For example, Hume was a historian, not a philosopher.

"In the text, only the reader speaks."
[Roland Barthes (S/Z, 1975, p. 151)]

"Always historicise!"
[Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [1981] (1989, p. 9)]

Theories of history brutalized the world, created the idea of colonization.

"There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism also taints the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another."
[Walter Benjamin ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ [thesis vii, 1940] in Illuminations (1969, p. 256)]

The Enlightenment had a dark side while freeing up human possibility.

"The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy."
[Quoting Francis Bacon (1561-1626)]

“The sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many things are reserved, which kings with their treasure cannot buy, nor with their force command; their spials [spies] and intelligencers can give no news of them, their seamen and discoverers cannot sail where they grow: now we govern nature in opinions, but we are in thrall unto her in necessity: but if we would be led by her in invention, we should command her in action.”
[Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer (Dialectic of Enlightenment [1947, reissued 1969], 1979, pp. 3-4)]

"The disenchantment of the world is the extirpation of animism."
[Dialectic, p. 5]

"The Enlightenment treats its own ideas of human rights exactly as it does the older universals. Every spiritual resistance it encounters serves merely to increase its strength."
[Dialectic, p. 6]

"The universality of ideas as developed by discursive logic, domination in the conceptual sphere, is raised up on the basis of actual domination. The dissolution of the magical heritage, of the old diffuse ideas, by conceptual unity, expresses the hierarchical constitution of life determined by those who are free."
[Dialectic, p. 14]