IMAGINING OTHER
How
Enlightened was the Enlightenment?
Links: Imagining Other Index page
Week
2: Introduction continued: Enlightenment values
Week 1 –
Introduction.
Summary of Contents: Bookmark link:
1. Definition of “The Enlightenment” and its
importance #Definition
2. What kind of movement was it? #Nature
of the Enlightenment
3. Criticisms from different points of view
(liberal, religious, conservative, feminist, romantic, ecological,
postmodernist). #Criticising or rejecting
4. References #References
5. Book reviews: The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters
by Anthony Pagden – review by Stuart Kelly,
The Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715, Paul Hazard #Reviews
Other Bookmarked topics:
#rights (see also notes on
Tom Paine and #footnote)
1. Definition: how did ‘The
Enlightenment’ see itself?
The
Enlightenment is the name given (by itself) to the new way of thinking that arose in the Eighteenth century, in
Todorov
(2006) [references are at section 4
below] is more specific about the time period: the ‘great upheaval that
took place in the three-quarters of a century prior to 1789’. O’Hara puts the
‘starting date’ as 1688 (the Glorious Revolution in
Within
these dates falls the period known in Britain as ‘Georgian’
(or Hanoverian) which commenced in 1714 with George I (and lasted until 1830
with George IV) – there was an exhibition at the British Library in 2013
marking three hundred years since the Georgian era began: Georgians Revealed:
Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain. Amanda Vickery’s review (Observer
26.10.13) sketches the different views of the period that have been dominant at
different times since:
-
‘Older
histories saw this as an epoch of toff rule, which was a good thing for
Protestant English liberties.
-
Lewis
Namier ‘concluded that high-minded rhetoric was a mask for selfish local
interests and grubby manoeuvring’ and E.P. Thompson ‘agreed with him, and
conjured up a pitiless elite of aristocratic whigs... all [customs,
conventions, rituals religion etc] was a performance calculated to overawe the
poor and extract deference’
-
Social
history meant that there was more emphasis on the ‘emotional and psychological
disorder’ that seethed ‘beneath the perfectly powdered wig’ (Roy Porter) and
there was a ‘roiling landscape of new ideas and opportunities’
-
In
the 19890s the power of the conservative establishment was stressed: ‘The
Georgians were not all freewheeling libertines or enlightened sceptics. After
all, the most published genre of the age was the sermon.’
The
exhibition, says Vickery, ‘confirms the polite and commercial road to modernity
story.’
It was “characterized by the emphasis on experience
and reason, mistrust of religion and traditional authority, and a gradual
emergence of the ideals of liberal, secular, democratic societies” (Simon
Blackburn, Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 1996).
As O’Hara
(2010) puts it: the Enlightenment was a move towards liberation from authority
– to search for intellectual freedom (and not to do this would be lazy,
cowardly): as the enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) argues - we
have an individual core which should dare
to know, argue and find out.
See Week 6 on Kant’s ethics. There
are two qualifications that need to be made when we look more closely at Kant:
1. we
cannot fully know the physical world, as its nature is different to our own
(physical vs. mental) – we are, however, morally free as creators of ourselves
(in the words of Lesley Chamberlain, New Statesman 3rd Jan 2011,
reviewing a book on Freud by Alfred J Taubler).
2. the
freedom to reason for oneself was restricted: we have roles to play in society,
and in these roles we should not
question or be critical. Kant’s example is that a clergyman must deliver
orthodox sermons (since he is answerable to the church to which he belongs, and
should not criticise its beliefs if he remains a member), but also as scholar
he must use his reason to test and question the orthodoxy…
For me, the
Enlightenment is characterised by the adoption
of a set of (‘modern’) values:
humanism
secularism
reason - based on experience and experiment
individual liberty
tolerance
a belief in progress
confidence in human powers.
We will
explore these values next week, but it is worth noting that the word ‘modern’
implies a break with values of a previous age – usually these are seen as religious,
conservative, deferential to authority (of the church and in society), and can
perhaps be summarised by the word ‘feudal’. People belonged to social orders,
and families/communities, and did not see themselves as ‘individuals’ in the
way we do in the ‘modern’ era. Again, some (on the conservative right mainly),
would argue that we have gone too far in abandoning these pre-modern values...
Todorov
adds that these values were held to be ‘universal’
– that is, they apply universally, to everyone – since every individual has the
ability to reason, and should have the freedom
to pursue their own reasoning. The
whole idea (sometimes attacked today… see #footnote) of ‘universal human rights’ starts here!!
Note that
these values are still being discussed today – for example the opening ceremony
of the Paralympics was called ‘enlightenment’ (and see Paul Nurse’s comments in
The Observer 02.09.12...). Some would say that recent (right-wing) movements
are trying to reverse the changes brought about by the Enlightenment. Thus Will
Hutton (Observer 08.01.12) – argues that the political right wing has abandoned
enlightenment values of progress, tolerance, reason and democratic values...
e.g. Rick Santorum, voted for by Iowa Republicans, is anti-abortion, anti-same
sex marriage, ferociously nationalistic, and socially conservative ‘all excused
by a twisted understanding of Christianity’... Tolerance is dismissed as an
indulgence and a lack of moral standards (or equated with relativism); progress
is suspected as a way of bringing social engineering, more state power, and
featherbedding of the feckless poor; reason too often identifies ‘problems’
that require collective action, increasing the dread power of the state; and
democracy means respecting opponents whose views you consider obnoxious – so
away with the whole damn thought system!
We are then
(whether ‘for’ or ‘against’!), inheritors of the Eighteenth Century European
Enlightenment, and (Todorov, 2006 p 2) ‘it
is … responsible for our present identity.’ He also says (p 151) that it is
‘the vocation of our species: to pick up the task of enlightenment with each
new day, knowing that it is interminable.’ In other words, the search to apply
these values to society is an ongoing one.
This is
similar to a point made at the time by Kant
in his 1784 essay: Was ist Aufklärung?
He said the ‘enlightenment’ was: ‘mankind’s final coming of age’ – his ‘release
from his self-incurred tutelage’ [Outram 2005 has ‘immaturity’], his
emancipation from ignorance, superstition and error. Sapere aude (from Horace): dare to know, was Kant’s statement of
the motto of the Enlightenment. However, in answer to the question from a
contemporary ‘do we live in an
enlightened age?’ Kant said ‘No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.’
Its aim can
be stated as: to create new forms of
knowledge to meet the needs of a new world (Preliminary Discourse - preface
- to the Encylopédie) (Porter 2001
Intro). The Goal: a science of man (chapter heading in Porter).
The Philosophes and the Encyclopédie:
The
intellectuals of the Enlightenment (particularly those in
The Encyclopédie was (says
O’Hara, 2010 p 18 ff) the ‘quintessence of enlightenment’. Knowledge was
regarded as a public good, not a private possession. Diderot and d’Alembert
were mainly in charge of this enormous undertaking: it first appeared in 1751,
and ran to 20 volumes over the next 20 years (with a further 10 volumes of
plates), written by a team of writers. It included articles on arts and crafts,
science and technology, industry and agriculture, as well as philosophy etc. It
was read by an educated elite – from the ‘upper professional classes’ members
of the literary academies and learned societies that were popular at the time.
(Porter p 43).
Clearly,
the enlightenment thinkers believed in the central importance of ideas – and some define the period as
starting with the German philosopher G.W. Leibniz (1646 – 1716) and ending with
Kant (* see above) - and the main focus of
this course will be to study and discuss these ideas. But of course ideas do
not appear in a vacuum, and note must be made of relevant aspects of the
social, political and historical context…
Initially we need to note that the
Enlightenment represents a part of a significant historical change:
We need to
recognise the differences between the pre-Enlightenment world and the ‘modern’
world – though the beginnings of the latter are to be found in the 16th
and 17th centuries (Renaissance, reformation, beginnings of science
– see pp6luthercalvinandthereformation.htm,
pp7machiavelli.htm.)
The
pre-Enlightenment period (the ‘middle ages’, medieval world, feudalism) was
much more bound by tradition and religion: everyone belonged to (because they
were born into) a part of the social
order, with clear responsibilities and rights; and this order was seen as
ordained by God. Answers to any questions, about the meaning or purpose of
life, the nature of the universe, what was right and wrong, were sought in the
Bible and the teachings of the Church.
This
(medieval) way of thinking – which lasted for one and a half millennia! – was eventually
replaced by a world which was based on values and beliefs we would recognise as
part of our own world:
2. What kind of a movement was it?
(A brief comment, to be explored each week in more detail).
2.1 Recent differences over the definition and/or
the significance of the enlightenment:
Although
there seems to be widespread agreement now that the values identified above are
good and right, there has been – and still is – debate over their meaning. Dan
Hind in a book called ‘The Assault on Reason’ argues that Enlightenment ideas
have been ‘hijacked’ (and over-simplified?) by such as Christopher Hitchens (in
‘God is Dead’). The way Hitchens and others use what they call ‘reason’ to
attack religion is not necessarily the same as what such Enlightenment figures
as Bacon and Kant meant when they used the word. We need, he argues, to go back
to the original thinkers.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/14/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview19
Gertrude
Himmelfarb (2008) makes a number of useful points in the ‘Prologue’ to her book
‘The Roads to Modernity’:
- first,
that there were several different
enlightenments: the British, French and American; also that there has been
(as she sees it) a tendency for the French to ‘dominate and usurp’ it.
(However, see O’Hara)
- she
re-asserts the importance of its central values – reason, rights, liberty,
equality, science and progress, My own approach
- second,
whilst everyone deals with the ‘Enlightenment values’ listed above, she says
that there is one that is usually missing, and it is what the British
(especially the Scottish) enlightenment thinkers were more
concerned with: the ‘social virtues’.
I like this argument, since I believe that Adam Smith and the Scottish ‘moral
philosophers’ should be better known. I especially identify with Smith’s idea
that we all have a ‘natural sympathy’ with each other, which is the basis of
our ‘moral sentiment’ (an innate feeling for what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’). As can
be seen elsewhere in this website, I like the radical ideas of such as Adam
Smith (on ethics – though not on economics!), William Blake, the anarchist
Godwin, and Rousseau. These thinkers all believed that we must be free to
imagine (and feel) differently in order to change the world and work together
in freedom and equality, and I am wary of the conservative rejection of the
radical aspects of the Enlightenment.
- thirdly,
she puts the enlightenment in the context of modern (and postmodern) thinking:
the enlightenment (everyone agrees) marks the beginnings of ‘modernity’ – and
because recent (and especially postmodern) thinking has either ‘decried’ or
even ‘denied’ the enlightenment (and ‘modernity’) - seeing it, for example, as ‘the embodiment of Western cultural
imperialism’ - she sets out to reclaim
it. As we shall explore over the next weeks:
-
for
conservatives, the rejection of tradition in the name of ‘reason and progress’
caused bloody revolutions;
-
for
socialists, ‘modernity’ is a cover for colonial exploitation;
-
for
environmentalists the reductionist use of science is destroying the
environment.
Todorov’s
(2006) book is entitled In Defence
[my emphasis] of the Enlightenment – though his arguments are not the same as
Himmelfarb’s.
Note also that there were important changes in
the arts (see week 10):
In poetry,
the writing of Donne, Henry Vaughan (dense, metaphorical) was replaced by such
as Pope, Dryden (poetry is ‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’),
with the emphasis on human matters, and wit.
The music
of Byrd, Palestrina (complex polyphony) was replaced by that of Bach, Handel
(lighter textures, more joyous). (Note from O’Hara 2010).
2.2 How unified?
Peter Gay (1960)
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation saw the different figures as part of one
movement, one ‘party of humanity’.
But Porter
says there was not ‘an’
Enlightenment? (See also O’Hara chapter 3: Enlightenments?) We have already
noted different national attitudes to enlightenment, also differences within
the movement, such as Rousseau’s disagreement with the others (especially on
‘reason’ when it was equated with atheism/materialism by such as Voltaire and
d’Holbach). Rousseau also asked whether civilisation was really making
progress? Wasn’t the ‘natural’ world of
‘uncivilised’ people preferable to the greed and hypocrisy of the bourgeois in
the 18th century? Is ‘reason’ superior to ‘feelings’? What about tradition?
Outram
(2205) also points out that there were differences
among Enlightenment thinkers as to the what was meant by ‘enlightenment’ - for
example Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 86) saw it as an
uncompleted process of education which would spread to everyone, and he
supported the movement for ‘popular philosophy’ which would ‘spread
Enlightenment ideas among lower social classes.’ As will also be mentioned
below, better-known figures such as Kant were more elitist in their outlook.
A recent
book by Anthony Pagden (‘The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters’) seems to
argue that there was nevertheless one Enlightenment, characterised by scepticism, by an ideal of universalism –
sometimes referred to as cosmopolitanism both here and in the period (the idea
that we are "citizens of the world") – and by scientism: the
view that universal human nature can be predictably and reliably analysed
by philosophy’ (from Stuart Kelly’s review which can be found at the end of
these notes – a useful read, as it mentions many thinkers and writers to be
covered here, and some that won’t be!). Kelly argues (and I would agree) that
this glosses over important differences between various Enlightenment thinkers.
.
Clearly
‘the Enlightenment’ had no programme, no constitution etc and it was rather
amorphous and diverse (was it a social movement then? See my notes at Introduction to social movements).
(Porter Ch 6 discusses the variety of voices within the enlightenment.)
2.3 An elite or a mass movement?
O’Hara
(2010) suggests (p13) that it was very much a top-down movement: even Condorcet, while recognizing that
atrocious things had been done during colonization, hoped that ‘the European population in [
Other
questions have been raised since: was it an elite movement (if we look at the
leading figures) – or was there a more popular version (i.e. ‘the common
coinage of fashionable polite society’ see Porter). Hence the question: how
much the movement changed the ancien
régime? Did the establishment become enlightened, or did the enlightenment
become established?
It is worth
noting that society in 18th century England and France was
characterised by inequality, with different ‘ranks’ and a lot of poverty. For a
flavour of this in a novel based on life in 18th century
Similar:
was it a militant tendency, or a broader ideology or mentalité (a way of thinking, state of mind, an outlook)? (Porter Ch. 6, 7).
O’Hara, on
the other hand, also says that this coming together of ‘people with no official
status… to talk of public affairs’ was a new phenomenon, marking the creation of what we now call ‘public opinion’ (or public space, or the public
sphere, civic society etc – even the big society??); and ‘The importance of
public opinion both for democracy and for fostering the revolutionary forces of
the age cannot be overstated.’ (p15)
2.4 How critical and radical?
How
critical was it really? Note the 18th century context/reality: empire,
industrialisation, class and social stratification. See O’Hara ch 6.
The
philosopher Isaiah
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/07/society4
As Porter
(2001) puts it: the Enlightenment ‘had its dark side… often supporting absolutism and holding the masses in contempt.’
He examines
the relationship to power (of the philosophes)
and points out that none were activists or politicians (except Edward Gibbon,
MP, who never made a speech!). Although Voltaire corresponded regularly with
Frederick II (The Great) of
O’Hara,
however, says that the Enlightenment changed politics in a number of ways – it
was a counterweight to the decisions or debates at court, and it put forward
the interests of a wider (bourgeois – not the ‘rabble’ but not yet the general
public either) class of people. Ruling classes came under attack for
‘rent-seeking’ (depriving the public of money by funding wars, raising tariffs
etc).
2.5 effects and overall assessment:
Some even
claim that the appeals to reason led to rulers increasing their power at the
expense of the poor etc. Quesnay and Mirabeau (physiocrats) argued for free
trade, but result was merchants profited, and the poor suffered. Did the attack
on religion lead to the moral nihilism of the French Revolutionary Terror?
(Porter)
But few now would say this was unambiguously a decisive stage in human
improvement, and it would be ‘folly’ to see it as a perfect programme for human
progress.
For Porter,
the important criterion is whether the enlightenment did get people – many people
if not most - to think anew. He suggests it saw the emergence of a ‘secular intelligentsia’…
Extra note:
‘secularism’ and
And for
more information on the modern Muslim woman: ‘Generation M: Young Muslims
Changing the World’, by Shelina Janmohamed, IB Taurus 2016. (Guardian Journal
3. What reasons – from different
points of view - have been given for criticising, or even rejecting, the
Enlightenment?
Note that
whilst most of these points have been made since the time, some – especially
Rousseau – raised them during the 18th century.
a. A recent
(liberal?) opinion: Roy Porter (2001) says it ‘had its dark side… often supporting absolutism and holding the
masses in contempt.’ How progressive was it, how elitist?
b. A
religious objection: the rejection of religion has produced materialism, and
hence greed and selfishness.
c. A conservative
objection: the values of tradition and community have been destroyed; the
emphasis on individual freedom, revolution, and abstract ‘rights’ has in
practice led to dictatorship (fascist or communist).
d. A
socialist objection: the real driving force was the accumulation of wealth by
the ruling classes, and the Enlightenment ideas only benefited them, at the
expense of workers, and people in developing countries.
e. A
feminist objection: it only benefited men. The ‘universal values’ it professed
were not universal but ‘patriarchal’. I like also the philosopher Mary
Midgley’s view, in a letter to the Guardian
f. A
romantic objection: everything has been subjected to a ‘mechanical’, scientific
point of view, which has taken the mystery and beauty out of society. Is
‘reason’ superior to ‘feelings’?
g. An
ecological objection: the belief in unlimited progress, together with a blind
faith in science, has led to the brink of destroying the natural
environment.
h. A
postmodernist view: the ‘universal’ values that it espoused were a cover for
the exploitation of the non-European world by the ‘developed’ world. These
values may be ‘ours’ but we have no right to impose them on others – they are
not universal as other cultures are based on other (equally defensible) values.
(Compare Rousseau and the ‘noble savage’ idea).
(See also
John Gray’s review of Joanna Bourke: What it means to be Human: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/26/what-it-means-human-review)
These ideas
will be explored in the next section - Introduction
part 2.
Himmelfarb,
Gertrude (2008): The Roads to Modernity, Vintage Books,
O’Hara,
Kieron (2010): The Enlightenment, Oneworld Publications,
Outram,
Dorinda (2nd edition 2005): The Enlightenment, Cambridge University
Press.
Porter,
Todorov,
Tzvetan (2006): In Defence of the Enlightenment,
This
study of a game-changing era is big but not deep
In 1783, Johann
Friedrich Zöllner, a theologian, posed a question that we are in some ways
no nearer to answering. "What", he asked in a footnote to an essay on
civil marriages, "is enlightenment?" Should we be discussing
"the" Enlightenment, as if it were a singular phenomenon,
or "enlightenments"? If there are plural schools of thought, to what
extent are they nationalistically inflected? What unites and what divides the
French Enlightenment of Voltaire, d'Alembert, Diderot, Condorcet, Montesquieu
and De Tocqueville from the Scottish Enlightenment of Hume, Smith, Kames,
Ferguson, Robertson and Hutcheson, from the German Aufklärung, dominated by
Kant, but also including Goethe, Stäudlin, Leibniz, Humboldt and Lichtenberg?
Was there an English Enlightenment, a tradition of rationalism stretching
from Bacon and Hobbes to Locke and Shaftesbury and eventually Paine and
Wollstonecraft? And even if we admit to several concurrent lines of thoughts in
different countries, how do we account for the vast contradictions within them
– is there common ground between, say, Rousseau and La Mettrie?
Anthony Pagden is very much of
the camp that believes an "Enlightenment", across several countries
and with broad similarities of purpose and method, did indeed occur. His is the
Enlightenment of the "long 18th century". It is typified by
scepticism, by an ideal of universalism – sometimes referred to as
cosmopolitanism both here and in the period (the idea that we are
"citizens of the world") – and by scientism: the view that
universal human nature can be analysed by philosophy with the same
precision and predictability as billiard balls ricocheting around the baize is by
Newtonian mechanics. In addition to these broad and contradictory areas
of similarity, Pagden also identifies an increasing trend towards what was
then called "freethinking" and is now called atheism. From Hobbes
reading the Bible with critical analysis (how could Moses be the author of the
Pentateuch if it recounts the death of Moses?) to Baron d'Holbach's Critical
History of Jesus Christ,
which identified the vicious circle of naive theology (how do we know the Bible
is true? Because the Bible, at II Timothy 3:16 says all scripture is God-breathed), there was a
perceptible burgeoning of distrust in religion, or at least conventional
religious authority.
Pagden does highlight that it is
naïve to conflate the Enlightenment with rationalism, citing Hume's idea that
"reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions", and
paying due attention to the contemporaneous cult of sensibility and concept of
sociability. But Pagden's selections from writers of the period are markedly
partial. Take scientism: it is understandable that Edmund Burke is presented in
a slightly villainous light here, but he wrote the following in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs: "No
universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or political subject. Pure
metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of
morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep
as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications."
This requires at least a counterargument, especially since a similar position
about the difference between geometry and philosophy can be found in Kant's Critique
of Pure Reason. Other branches of the Enlightenment were clearly not of
the universalising tendency: although Pagden is good on how both China and
Tahiti were figured in Enlightenment taxonomies (in fact, it is the best part
of the book), he barely mentions, for example, Adam Ferguson's less optimistic
investigations into international rivalry as a check on universal despotism. Of
course, it is possible to depict the Enlightenment as being inherently
sceptical, but only at the expense of ignoring the whole of Kant's project:
that which "roused him from his dogmatic slumbers" was an attempt to
find a solution to Hume's scepticism. Equally, the Enlightenment can be
typified as a predominantly secularising phenomenon as long as one omits the
theism of Kant, Voltaire, Priestley, Hutcheson and Berkeley as well as the more
typically theological writers such as Joseph Butler, Alexander Geddes and Moses
Mendelssohn.
Pagden's 18th century is long:
just not long enough. To assert, as he does, that "the entire
Enlightenment ambition" was "to create a historically grounded human
science which would one day lead to the creation of a universal
civilisation capable of making all individuals independent, autonomous, freed
of dictates from above and below, self-knowing and dependent solely
on each other for survival" without referencing Marx is to write the
history of ideas without ideas or history. He makes much of the various
pamphlets on universal peace – Kant's "Toward Perpetual Peace" but
also the work of William Penn, Pierre-André Gargaz, Jeremy Bentham and
Charles-Irénée Castel – without acknowledging that what did preserve the peace
in post-Napoleonic Europe was the far less philosophical, far grubbier and far
more pragmatic Congress system.
The final chapter is on the
"enemies" of Enlightenment, and continues the polemic first raised in
Pagden's equally broad-brush book Worlds At War: The 2,500 Year Struggle Between East and West.
He ends with a bizarre counterfactual on the Protestant Reformation and the
Enlightenment never happening, whereby Sultan Selim III of the Ottoman empire
marches into Paris in 1789. The chief enemy of Enlightenment here is the moral
philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, and it is curious that so little attention is
paid to non-Anglophone critiques of Enlightenment: there are a few glancing
references to Lyotard and Foucault, but nothing on Derrida, Ricoeur, Stirner, Deleuze or Virilio. It's worth
remembering that MacIntyre's work in After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is driven in part
by exposing the internal contradictions of Enlightenment moral philosophy. If
we take the Kantian categorical imperative seriously – that there could be a
moral code binding across space, time, agent and circumstance – then we will
have to deal, eventually, with the "Anne Frank dilemma". If, as it is
according to Kant, lying is always and absolutely a moral wrong, what do you
say to the Gestapo?
This is a big but not a deep
book. Compared to the affability, the clubbable nature of many of the thinkers
it describes, it is strident, partisan and always willing to overlook a fact in
favour of a thesis. Pagden asserts that the Enlightenment matters because it
has given rise to international law, "global justice" and human
rights legislation, while admitting that we see these at the moment but
through a glass darkly. Would this be the international law that
prosecutes some war criminals but not others;
the "global justice" that applies to Kentucky but not Kandahar;
the human rights that are suspended whenever enduring freedom needs a little
quiet shock and awe? That Pagden does not mention Toussaint Louverture at all means an important vector in thinking
about race, Enlightenment and a queasy sense of European presumed
superiority is absent.
Nevertheless there was one
moment when the book made me laugh out loud. Pagden quotes Adam Smith on
the occupation of Edinburgh by the Jacobites – "four or five thousand
naked Highlanders". He glosses this, in parentheses, with "the
Highlanders were famous for running into battle dressed only in their
shirts", which conjures a vision of a platoon of Wee Willie Winkies.
If I were being generous, I would consider this a spellchecking error and
assume that Pagden means "skirts", having shied away from the word
"kilts" – except that a horde of bellicose Highlanders sprinting
topless seems rather unlikely, too.
********************
This article was
published on the Guardian website at
12.19 BST on Wednesday 24 July 2013. A version appeared on p8 of the Guardian
review section of the
Guardian on Saturday
27 July 2013. It was last modified at 00.00 BST on Saturday 27 July 2013.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/24/enlightenment-why-still-matters-pagden-review
********************
Here is
another review of Pagden’s book, (comparing it with the ‘classic’ book by Paul
Hazard) by John Gray, from the New Statesman, 22nd June 2013.:
At the end
I make some comments of my own...
Sins of omission and myths of the Enlightenment.
The
Enlightenment: and Why It Still Matters
Anthony Pagden
Oxford University Press, 501pp, £29
The
Crisis of the European Mind 1680-1715
Paul Hazard
NYRB Classics, 481pp, £12.99
If debating the Enlightenment has
become tedious, one reason is that it has produced so many exercises in what
old-fashioned religious believers still describe as apologetics – the defence
of a pre-existing system of belief. Some of the many recent defences of the
Enlightenment are better argued than others. What all of them have in common is
that they aim to silence any doubt as to the truth of the creed. Mixing large
doses of soothing moral uplift with hectoring attacks on those who wilfully
turn their backs on the light, these secular sermons lack the flashes of humour
and scepticism that redeem more traditional types of preaching.
Adamant certainty is the
unvarying tone. Yet beneath the insistent didacticism of these apologists there
is more than a hint of panic that the world has not yet accepted the
rationalist verities that have been so often preached before. If the
Enlightenment really does embody humanity’s most essential hopes, why do so
many human beings persistently refuse to sign up to it?
The latest contribution to
Enlightenment apologetics begins with some reasonable caveats. The intellectual
shift generally described as the Enlightenment, Anthony Pagden notes, was no
more “a single, coherent movement any more than any other transformative
movement in history”. It is a mistake to suppose that the “philosophers,
essayists, historians, novelists, playwrights, poets” promoted a single view of
things. “No such heterogeneous group could ever be expected to agree upon
everything, to speak with the same voice, or even to share a common
intellectual stance.”
As Pagden writes, some historians
of ideas have gone further, suggesting that we should stop referring to “the
Enlightenment” and instead talk only of “Enlightenments”.
This could be a clarifying move.
Why lump together thinkers and movements as different as Thomas Paine and David
Hume, Jacobinism and liberalism into a single category? If we accepted that
there were many Enlightenment traditions we could distinguish between those
that were liberal and those that were not. We might even contemplate the
possibility that some versions of Enlightenment thinking have been implicitly
totalitarian.
For those who view Enlightenment
thinking as always liberating this is an intolerable idea and Pagden is having
none of it. If the Enlightenment has been implicated in modern crimes –
imperialist and racist, Soviet and Nazi – that can only be because its values
were misunderstood and misapplied, or else deliberately perverted. (note) Enlightenment thinkers, Pagden
writes, “spoke in many different voices, wrote in many different languages, and
used many different forms of expression, from poetry to biology. But for all
that, and though not one of them ever used the world, they all contributed to a
single ‘project’.” The unspoken implication is that this project has been and
continues to be quintessentially benign.
It is easy to see that this is a
fundamentalist (note) position.
Evangelical Christians will look at you with blank disbelief if you suggest
that Christian teachings played any part in the Inquisition, the early modern
witch craze or later forms of persecution. “How could a religion of love,” they
splutter, “possibly be responsible for such hateful crimes?” Similarly, today’s
Enlightenment evangelists respond to the fact that some of the worst modern
crimes have been committed by militant secular regimes with incredulity: “How
could a philosophy of reason and humanity possibly be involved in anything so
irrational and inhuman?”
These responses illustrate one of
the central tenets of fundamentalism: the pristine creed is innocent of all
evil. Any fact that runs counter to this conviction is screened out by what
Karl Popper – one of the more interesting 20th-century Enlightenment thinkers,
who along with Freud is absent from Pagden’s account – called a strategy of
immunisation. Just as any Christian who participated in hate crimes can’t
really be a Christian, anyone who took part in bloodthirsty political
experiments such as Jacobinism and communism can’t really belong in the
Enlightenment.
It is a childishly simple-minded evasion,
but Padgen follows an immunising strategy of this kind throughout the book.
Like many today he is a fierce critic of moral relativism and attributes its
wide influence to the Romantic movement. Reading him, you would never know that
one of the sources of modern moral relativism is in the writings on climate and
cultural difference of Montesquieu (1689-1755), one of the formative
Enlightenment thinkers. With its roots in ancient Greek scepticism and having
20thcentury exponents such as the sociologist Karl Mannheim, modern relativism
is at least as much a child of the Enlightenment as it is of the Romantic
Counter-Enlightenment.
In the same way, Pagden dismisses
the argument of the Frankfurt School neo-Marxian philosophers and refugees from
Nazism Marx Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno that Enlightenment thinking played a
vital part in the development of “scientific racism” and “scientific
socialism”. The Frankfurt critique may well be exaggerated. No chain of
inexorable cause and effect links Enlightenment thinking with the defining
20thcentury atrocities. If the First World War had not all but destroyed
European civilisation, if the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919 had been less
devoted to revenge and mutual recrimination or Lenin’s Bolsheviks defeated in
the Russian civil war, neither the Holocaust nor the Gulag might have occurred.
Even so, Horkheimer and Adorno were right in believing that the potential for
such crimes was latent in powerful strands of Enlightenment thinking.
It is a demonstrable fact that
the Nazis drew heavily on German biologists such as Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919),
who promoted a distorted version of Darwinism to suggest that racial
hierarchies were rooted in immutable biological differences. Certainly, the
science Haeckel and others invoked was bogus. But it was widely accepted at the
time and actively promoted by many who regarded themselves as developing an
Enlightenment “science of humanity”. In England, the psychologist and
eugenicist Francis Galton expounded similar theories of innate human
inequality. When racial pseudo-science was rejected it was not as a result of
any exercise in enlightened self-criticism but because the horrible
consequences of such ideas were exposed after the military defeat of Nazism.
“Scientific socialism” vanished not because the ideology was shown to be
nonsense – which Bertrand Russell demonstrated in his neglected masterpiece The
Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920) – but only when the Soviet state
collapsed, 70 years later.
A curious feature of Pagden’s
book is that while it is full of hyperbolic claims about the positive role of
the Enlightenment in the world today, his account of the movement stops short
around the end of the 18th century. Aside from a polemical introduction and
conclusion, the eight chapters of this book of over 500 pages deal almost
exclusively with thinkers of the 16th to 18th centuries, who are given credit
for the emergence of institutions that emerged centuries later, such as the
United Nations and a “united states of Europe”, which Pagden tell us sagely has
“come close to being (almost) a reality”. To be sure, he is aware that we are
still far from realising Enlightenment ideals. But if the modern age has been
something of a mixed bag – as even he must admit – he is convinced it can only
be because the lessons of the great Enlightenment thinkers have not been
properly applied.
You will learn nothing from him
of Kant’s racist references (note) to
Africans and Jewish religion, or Voltaire’s endorsement of the “pre-Adamite” theory
of human origins according to which earlier, more primitive anthropoid species
survive as Jews, “negroes” and other inferior human types.
Pagden’s Enlightenment seems to
have come into the world through a rationalist version of the Virgin Birth:
owing nothing whatever to western monotheism, it marks a rupture in human
history. In reality, some of the most influential strands of Enlightenment
thinking were inheritances from religion. Pagden devotes considerable space to
the thought of John Locke, whom he rightly regards as a formative Enlightenment
thinker, without ever considering Locke’s debts to Christianity.
At almost every important point
in his political theory, Locke relied on beliefs and assumptions taken from
medieval Christian doctrine. (note) His arguments for religious freedom in his A
Letter Concerning Toleration are nearly all theological and biblical. If you
wrench Locke’s liberal philosophy out of this religious context, it becomes
virtually incomprehensible. Since these facts do not fit with a simplistic view
of the Enlightenment as being intrinsically hostile to religion, Pagden does
not mention them. Carl Becker’s seminal The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth
Century Philosophers (1932), which traces the dependency of Enlightenment thinking
on Christianity, is ignored for the same reason.
Perhaps this is not at bottom a
book about the Enlightenment at all. Padgen praises Montesquieu for maintaining
against other Enlightenment thinkers that “what was truly significant about
China was not its illusory stability but its immobility”, and for all his talk
of universal sympathy, an undertone of contempt for non-western cultures runs
through the book. What we owe to the Enlightenment, he writes, is not only “the
science of human understanding” but “the ways in which we all, in the west,
live our political and social lives”. It is a telling formulation of the book’s
message. At a time when Europe has achieved the feat of combining immobility
with near-collapse, while unprecedented numbers of Americans languish in debt
and poverty, it is also strikingly absurd. In the world’s fast-developing
countries, there are very few who any longer think of looking to the west for a
model of society. If Pagden is presenting an argument for western supremacy, no
one is listening.
It is refreshing to turn to a
genuine work of intellectual history that is back in print in a new edition
published by New York Review Books. First published in France in 1935 and in
Britain in 1953, The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680-1715 by the
French intellectual historian Paul Hazard (1878-1944) has been justly
celebrated for its beautifully written and arrestingly vivid portraits of
Europe’s leading thinkers around the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Hazard shows how the Enlightenment
did not come out of nowhere, but continued earlier traditions of thought –not
least Pyrrhonism (the most radical form of classical Greek scepticism), which
was revived in early modern times by thinkers such as the Protestant Pierre
Bayle (1647-1706). Where Pagden struggles to represent Bayle as a prototype of
an all-too-familiar kind of secular humanist, Hazard focuses on Bayle’s
intellectual dynamism and inner conflicts, asking: “Did he reach the point of
absolute scepticism? He would have done had he suffered his mind to follow its
natural bent.” Unlike Pagden, Hazard understood that actual human beings –
including Enlightenment thinkers – have little in common with the abstractions
of Enlightenment philosophy. (note)
If you want to understand the Enlightenment
in its complexity and contradictions, read Paul Hazard’s stylish classic. If
you are looking for an intellectual sedative, a prophylactic against sceptical
doubt and moral panic, you will be happier plodding your way through Pagden’s
tract. There is clearly a niche in the market for books offering comfort and
reassurance to troubled Enlightenment fundamentalists, and Pagden’s book is
well placed to fill it.
John Gray is the New
Statesman’s lead book reviewer. His most recent book, “The Silence of Animals:
on progress and other modern myths” is published by Allen Lane (£18.99).
Ian’s Notes:
on John Locke and religion p.80
on
totalitarianism: Pagden argues that the emphasis on ‘reason’ that some drew out
as the main part of enlightenment thinking actually misses the many writers who
believed in ‘sympathy’ – why does Gray not mention this argument at all? It
seems to me to be the most importatn point in the book!
On ‘actual human
beings’ – this is surely the point of the discussion of ‘sympathy’...
On Kant and
racism see:
p 137 he writes
of the racism shown by Kant’s correspondent Blumenbach...
p 140.... ‘The
Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that arises above the
ridiculous’... and no blacks, even when freed from the deleterious efects of
the African climate has ever achieved anything... and p 178 Kant ‘excoriated
the Africans and had only amused disdain for the Japanese and Chinese’ but he
also said the best kind of ‘savages’ were the north American (Indians/natives)
‘the kind of men to whom Lycurgus gave laws’...
p 325 – where he
has said that Herder’s racism was based on a view that whilst there were
significant differences between races, this did not matter – and he contrasts
Kant ‘and ‘subsequently all the racial theorists of the nineteenth century’ who
saw physical differences as ‘the distinguishing features of individual races.’
p 332 points out
that Kant thought it impossible to have a mixing of ‘patrie’ and humanity –
i.e. a mixing of diverse peoples.
On
fundamentalism: the book concludes with the argument that today we are more
‘cosmopolitan’ than we used to be, and this is derived from enlightenment
thinkers. How is this ‘fundamentalist’? (see also note on racism...) Pagden
does consider other points of view... If the problem is that he won’t concede
he might be wrong on the essential nature of enlightenment thinking, viz:
humanism, the beginnings of ‘human science’, the importance of sympathy and
reciprocity as leading to civilisation and cosmpolitanism... why should he
concede? What would be left if he did? (What does John Gray believe???)
Is it significant
that Gray makes no mention of the discussion of stoicism vs epicureanism in the
early sections of the book?
p 321 discussion of
whether it is possible to detach reason from custom and habit is surely
relevant also
Source
URL: http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/06/sins-omission
May 2016: Anthony Lester wrote a powerful piece: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/16/human-rights-abuse-of-power-conservatives-bill-of-rights
“If the UK were to leave
the EU after next month’s referendum it would remove crucial rights protection
enshrined in EU law, but our fundamental rights would still be protected by the
convention – the jewel in the crown of the 47-nation Council of Europe, often confused
with the EU.
Fifty years ago, our judges
were executive-minded, interpreting acts of parliament narrowly. Discrimination
was prevalent and not unlawful. There was no positive right to free speech or
respect for privacy. Excessive official secrecy was deep-rooted in
For want of remedies at
home, vulnerable minorities needed the convention and
Our own courts could not
give remedies, until at last, in 1998, the Human Rights Act was
passed. This enables everyone to bring complaints of
March 2008: (28th) The West’s double standards on democracy: Kishore Mahbubani (author of The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, G 280308, following up foreign secretary David Miliband’s speech last month):
Three flaws in western discourse on world affairs:
1. inability to practise what it preaches, and to speak truth to power – no government has criticised Guantanamo, but Miliband praises those who stand up to the military in Burma; US citizens are losing their civil rights – Patriot Act… shows US behave just like others in repressing its people when it feels threatened
2. double standards in promoting democracy: no criticism of
3. when faced with choice between doing good and feeling
good West chooses latter: boycott and sanctions on
All this is very similar to Noam Chomsky’s points in Hegemony or Survival…
May 2006: The
Human Rights Act (1998):
Marcel Berlins points out (May 16th, Guardian) that the Act is increasingly being blamed for things that have nothing to do with it. For example, Anthony Rice was a rapist, released on licence, and who nine months later killed a woman. The mistake was that he was let out – nothing to do with the Human Rights Act; he wasn’t properly supervised once released – again nothing to do with the Act; the conditions of his release were criticised for paying too much attention to his rights, but this was not the central problem: he shouldn’t have been released, and should have been properly supervised!
Sometimes the Act does seem to conflict with public safety, e.g. over the non-return of Afghan hijackers to a country where they would be tortured or killed: but it also seems wrong to allow them to stay here after committing “an appalling criminal act.”
Blair was wrong,
Berlins also takes issue with the idea of withdrawing from the Human Rights Act: we could only do this by withdrawing from Europe altogether!
See also:
http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/index.php