The Enlightenment has always had, at least partially, the appearance of a marketing campaign. When the taciturn Prussian Immanuel Kant ventured to define the Enlightenment in the pages of Berlin Monthly in 1784, he famously said that it was “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” John Locke argued for the political primacy of “life, liberty, and property,” while the polymath Jean-Jacques Rousseau asked, “What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?” And so, to be skeptical of the general thrust of Western culture that began sometime in the 17th century and lasted until the 19th is apparently to come down on the side of death, tyranny, cruelty, and intellectual infancy. Or to paraphrase another successful ad campaign: Got Enlightenment?
But what was the Enlightenment really? According to University of Oxford professor Ritchie Robinson’s astonishingly rich work, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790, it is a mistake to think of the Enlightenment as one single thing. “In this book,” Robinson writes, “I try to present The Enlightenment not only as an intellectual movement but also as a sea change in sensibility, in which people became more attuned to other people’s feelings and more concerned for what we would call humane or humanitarian values.” So, what the major figureheads of the movement had in common, from Isaac Newton to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Voltaire to Jeremy Bentham, wasn’t a shared set of fixed philosophical commitments but a common sensibility and orientation toward human happiness. Robinson argues: “The Enlightenment declared the conviction that the goal of life was happiness, and that if this goal could be attained at all, it was to be found in the here and now, despite the manifold imperfections of earthly life.”
With such a broad commitment as “earthly happiness,” the Enlightenment was necessarily rich, complex, and often contradictory. Robinson’s doorstop of a book perfectly captures this variety, illustrating how the humane sensibilities of Enlightenment “philosophes,” as Robinson calls the leading figures of the time, were diffuse enough to affect not only philosophy but also science, commerce, and the arts. Newton might have been almost as fanatically religious as Voltaire was atheistic, but they shared a common faith in the ability of the human mind to make contact with reality and, through a combination of rationality and will, improve the human condition. That such a faith now strikes us as common sense is a testament to these thinkers’ influence.
The Enlightenment “philosophe,” Robinson writes, “does not claim that philosophy, or the exercise of reason, can solve every problem or provide a complete understanding of life. Rather, the ambitions of the philosophe are strikingly modest. … Believing with Locke that knowledge comes ultimately from the senses, and is thus empirical, not metaphysical, in origin, the philosophes do not profess to know what lies behind empirical phenomena.” In other words, they bracketed the question of why things exist at all in order to focus on the questions of how they work and the ways in which we can use this knowledge instrumentally for the betterment of the human condition.
The influence of this “modesty” can be seen most clearly in politics. Robinson pays much attention to French Enlightenment thinkers, but he considers Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding “one of the Enlightenment’s foundational texts,” and rightly so. In it, Locke argued in favor of a radical empiricism that made raw sensory experience the bedrock of human consciousness. The practical result of this argument was the metaphor of the human mind as a blank slate, or tabula rasa, which implied that the mind can be remade in new forms. This was a revolutionary idea, at odds with almost all previous classical and Christian thought, which had presupposed an at least partially fixed human nature, but it was, at heart, hopeful — it put faith in man’s ability to govern himself. Of course, anyone who has had the pleasure of raising a child from infancy can provide empirical evidence against Locke’s blank slate.
The quest for practical, earthly happiness also had a major impact on art. Robinson’s chapter on Enlightenment aesthetics, one of the strongest of the book, takes the seemingly simple statement “art gives pleasure” and deconstructs it to show how much we take each word for granted. First, the pre-Enlightenment notion of “the arts” had to somehow be compressed into the singular concept of “art” as something that encompasses what we would think of as all of the fine arts: painting, music, poetry, drama, etc. Then, there’s the question of whether art alone can give us happiness or whether, as ancient and medieval thinkers believed, it needs to be paired with some sort of larger ethical program. To answer these questions, Enlightenment thinkers created a new field of study: aesthetics. What set Enlightenment aesthetics apart from previous considerations of art was its emphasis on subjectivity. The artist was no longer a craftsman working almost anonymously within a defined tradition but an individual “genius” striving for uniqueness. Audiences likewise put a new emphasis on their own tastes. In short, the Enlightenment allowed us to talk and think about art independently of theological or even philosophical considerations.
Robinson has two goals in writing The Enlightenment: to explain the multifarious breadth of the Enlightenment as a historical phenomenon and to defend it as a political and philosophical project. He fails utterly at the latter. Aside from a few mentions of the Frankfurt School critics Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno toward the end, the book barely engages with modern thinkers critical of Enlightenment philosophy. Examples of those critics abound and reside all over the political spectrum. The conservative metaphysician D.C. Schindler argues that Locke, by separating freedom from an articulation of the good, turns it into a substitute for the good. The French political theorist Pierre Manent contends that the Enlightenment notion of a “blank slate” and its political corollary, the state of nature, strips humanity of “all complexity or inner fullness.” And the Italian publisher and writer Roberto Calasso has spent his career picking apart the anti-metaphysics of the philosophes, particularly Bentham, showing that they didn’t so much abandon metaphysical commitments as hide them. These are just a few examples of some of the more trenchant “conservative” critiques of the Enlightenment ignored by Robinson, to say nothing of the vast anti-Enlightenment tradition of the Left.
That said, The Enlightenment is a total success as a history of the period. He delightfully conveys the spirit of a complex age without resorting to abstruse terminology or dry academic language. He’s the rare historian who inhabits his subject from the inside and brings a little bit of its life back for us to enjoy. As such, The Enlightenment is not some marketing gimmick meant to confirm our assumptions but a serious work of history that glows, as Ezra Pound said of good poetry, “like a ball of light in the hand.”
Scott Beauchamp is an editor for Landmarks, the journal of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy. His most recent book is Did You Kill Anyone?
