The Enlightenment Arts and Humanities Through the Eras, 2005
THE BIG PICTURE.The Enlightenment was a broad and international movement in eighteenth-century Europe that aimed at placing science and knowledge derived through scientific methods of investigation at the heart of culture and civilization. It took its name from the idea that it represented: a process of bringing "the light of reason" to areas of darkness in human understanding. "Dare to know" was the banner call of the movement proclaimed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Contemporaries understood this call as an invitation to hunt down and root out every instance of ignorance that continued to stand in the way of human progress. In many instances, certainly in most Catholic lands, religion in general and the state church in particular were identified as the prime sources of such ignorance. As such, the Enlightenmentoften took on a definite anti-religious cast in these regions. In terms of real people and real events this means that the Enlightenment can be seen as the sum of a series of organized efforts on the part of secular intellectuals to institute their ideas, usually as alternatives to those of the church. TheEnlightenment was historically important in large part because these efforts proved to be successful over the long term. Enlightenment ideas, and the secular intellectuals who promoted these ideas, triumphed over existing social and cultural notions, most of which had long been dominated by traditional Christian orthodoxy. And while the idea that there was a positive value to cultural reforms based on science has not gone unchallenged in the modern era, those notions, born in the Enlightenment, have continued to be dominant in the West until contemporary times.
FOR GOOD OR FOR EVIL.Such a description of the Enlightenment, though, presents only the few points on which there is broad agreement among scholars. Everything else about the culture and philosophy of the movement has continued to remain disputed. In recent decades, the most agitated of these debates has been over the question of the social and cultural costs of the Enlightenment. Inspired primarily by the writings of the French thinker Michel Foucault (1926–1984), some scholars have argued that the Enlightenment simply substituted one sort of darkness with another. Science, they argue, became a justification for racism, sexism, and an entire host of other kinds of exploitation, just like religion had before it. Such criticism has not gone unchallenged, and others have countered that scientific investigation has, in fact, been a force for progress. While these figures readily admit that bad science has often been a dehumanizing force in the West, they have pointed out that its relentless pursuit of correct knowledge has been an overall positive force in the European tradition. Another debate, a debate that grew up in the Enlightenment itself, has also touched upon the moral consequences and costs of the movement itself. Critics approaching this problem from a religious perspective have pointed to the Enlightenment as the source for the rise of "secular humanism" and a moral relativism that it inspired. Champions of Enlightenment values, on the other hand, have pointed to Western society's traditionally repressive and intolerant nature before the eighteenth century. In this view, the Enlightenment has been seen as a force that helped to bring to an end centuries of religious hypocrisy in which only lip service had been paid to moral values. The Enlightenment may have fostered a moral relativism, they conclude, but it also allowed societies to recognize that humans are by nature different, and that they can be made to seem the same only through coercion.
PUBLIC OPINION.In recent years scholars have pushed their investigations of the origins of the Enlightenment backwards into the seventeenth century. They have begun to speak of the ideas of intellectuals like John Locke as the first wave of enlightened thought. The motivation behind this tendency is a desire to associate theEnlightenment with the development of empiricism. This desire has been prompted in large part by another trend of scholarship on the Enlightenment itself: a tendency to interpret that movement as an international phenomenon that followed very distinct paths in Europe's individual states. In this regard, the FrenchEnlightenment has now been revealed to have been very different from its German and English cousins. But if the Enlightenment was different everywhere, then what can be said about it as a general historical phenomenon? When the Enlightenment is viewed as an outgrowth of empiricism, its common features become more obvious, although there is no direct and simple equation between empiricism and the later development of Enlightenment. While it is true that many Enlightenment thinkers were empiricists, and that empiricism was the philosophical foundation for most of the new intellectual disciplines that emerged during the Enlightenment, it is also true that the thoughts of many of the movement's thinkers deny easy categorization as "empirical." One of the links between these figures, though, was their willingness to affirm the existence of something that modern scholars call "public opinion," and their tendency to appeal to this new social arena of judgment for justification for the various sorts of reforms they advocated. Everywhere in eighteenth-century Europe, social reformers framed their ideas by reference to public welfareor the common good, even as they branded those that opposed their ideas as "special interests" that were corrupt, intolerant, and fanatical. This common development is the best starting point for a discussion of theEnlightenment as a general phenomenon.
THE READING REVOLUTION.Behind the birth of "public opinion" was another cultural and social revolution that must be understood, a "reading revolution" that created new groups of readers and writers. In medieval Europe the "Republic of Letters"—the body of those that had used the written word to circulate their ideas—had an undeniably clerical cast. In the Renaissance, more and more lay people had acquired the ability to read and write, and they had begun communicating their ideas through the printed page. By the eighteenth century the vast majority of readers and writers were now lay people rather than clerics. This steady expansion in the number of society's readers inspired new genres of reading material, even as it also created new modes by which information and news spread in society. The eighteenth-century reading public was now vast, but also complex and differentiated along lines of social class, education, and taste. To entertain and inform these various groups of readers, older types of printed communications, like the news broadsheet or the polemical pamphlet, now underwent a steady evolution, while at the same time new forms of reading matter, like the newspaper and the journal, developed. To supply the articles, stories, and thought pieces that went into these publications, a new occupation—that of the professional writer or "man of letters"—emerged. From individuals who made their living writing and publishing their own local newspaper, to internationally famous writers whose books were immediately translated into other languages, these individuals all made their living by saying in print what this new group of readers wanted to hear.
THE COFFEEHOUSE.In the largest sense, these new groups of readers constituted the public opinion to which Enlightenmentthinkers appealed, but much eighteenth-century writing was geared, not to all readers generally, but to a new category of bourgeois readers, in particular. This class became a common fixture of the economic landscape in most European countries around 1700. By this date, rising economic prosperity had forged a new middle class that often lived off the interest that their investments provided. With plenty of free time on their hands, members of this group spent their days in a new type of commercial establishment, the café or coffeehouse. There they sipped cups of the new beverages, coffee and tea, which were sweetened by sugar, the new wonder condiment, and smoked pipes filled with "sot weed" or tobacco. These new venues had begun to appear in London in the years around 1650, and within two generations they had spread to most European cities. In English, they were often called "penny universities," because for a mere penny men could be admitted into a society where others shared their concerns. For this modest cost of admission, men were able to read from an assortment of books, newspapers, and journals coffee-houses made available to their patrons. The idea of leisure time reading is key here because it helps explain the second social development that amplified the impact of Enlightenment thought. In the eighteenth century talking became a pastime in many of the ways it remains today. Enlightenment-era thinkers were conscious of themselves as having come up with not just new ideas, but new ways of communicating those ideas. The "art" of conversation—conversation that connoted the exchange of information via polite discourse—was the subject of essays and discussions. The concern was to find ways to move beyond the social hierarchy that had constrained oral communication in the past. The ideal was to create situations where individuals, no matter their social rank, could exchange ideas as intellectual equals. In the twenty-first century both radio and television offer a myriad of talk shows aimed at informing the public of news and ideas while also providing their listeners with a particular "spin" on news and ideas. The origins of this incessant commentary stretch back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment world of the coffee-house. In that world the art of conversation was practiced, and leisure reading provided a steady inspiration for the enrichment of discussion. In this way, the goal of much of the writing that appeared in the Enlightenment was to elicit conversation. The letter of one frustrated exile from the Paris salons to a friend voiced a sentiment shared by all those who were participating in the new world of the Enlightenment: "Reading alone, with no one to talk to, to discuss things with or be witty with, to listen to or to listen to me, is impossible." Enlightenmentthinkers framed what they had to say in ways they hoped would get people talking, and the measure of success of a piece of writing was its power as a conversation starter. Many of the men whose ideas inspired the coffeehouse chatter of the eighteenth century may not have spent much time themselves in the new cafés, but their eminence as "great" writers derived in large part because their works became the subject of the new kinds of debate that the Enlightenment helped to sanction. And while "public opinion" did not reside solely in the coffeehouse, it still constituted an important element of the audiences thatEnlightenment thinkers hoped to influence.
SOURCESP. Gay, The Enlightenment; An Interpretation. 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1995).
L. Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973).
J. V. Melton, Cultures of Communication from Reformation to Enlightenment (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002).
—, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
R. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1982).
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, Cengage Learning.
Source Citation"The Enlightenment." Arts and Humanities Through the Eras. Ed. Edward I. Bleiberg, et al. Vol. 5: The Age of the Baroque and Enlightenment 1600-1800. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 304-306. Gale Student Resources In Context. Web. 11 Feb. 2013.
Document URL
http://ic.gale.pnw.orc.scoolaid.net/ic/suic/ReferenceDetailsPage/ReferenceDetailsWindow?failOver&query=&prodId=SUIC&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGroupName=Reference&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=false&displayGroups=&sortBy=&source=&search_within_results=&action=e&catId=&activity&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CCX3427400900&userGroupName=nort35466&jsid=990a16d472ac9d374234ac31f0117e3b
Gale Document Number: GALE|CX3427400900
THE BIG PICTURE.The Enlightenment was a broad and international movement in eighteenth-century Europe that aimed at placing science and knowledge derived through scientific methods of investigation at the heart of culture and civilization. It took its name from the idea that it represented: a process of bringing "the light of reason" to areas of darkness in human understanding. "Dare to know" was the banner call of the movement proclaimed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Contemporaries understood this call as an invitation to hunt down and root out every instance of ignorance that continued to stand in the way of human progress. In many instances, certainly in most Catholic lands, religion in general and the state church in particular were identified as the prime sources of such ignorance. As such, the Enlightenmentoften took on a definite anti-religious cast in these regions. In terms of real people and real events this means that the Enlightenment can be seen as the sum of a series of organized efforts on the part of secular intellectuals to institute their ideas, usually as alternatives to those of the church. TheEnlightenment was historically important in large part because these efforts proved to be successful over the long term. Enlightenment ideas, and the secular intellectuals who promoted these ideas, triumphed over existing social and cultural notions, most of which had long been dominated by traditional Christian orthodoxy. And while the idea that there was a positive value to cultural reforms based on science has not gone unchallenged in the modern era, those notions, born in the Enlightenment, have continued to be dominant in the West until contemporary times.
FOR GOOD OR FOR EVIL.Such a description of the Enlightenment, though, presents only the few points on which there is broad agreement among scholars. Everything else about the culture and philosophy of the movement has continued to remain disputed. In recent decades, the most agitated of these debates has been over the question of the social and cultural costs of the Enlightenment. Inspired primarily by the writings of the French thinker Michel Foucault (1926–1984), some scholars have argued that the Enlightenment simply substituted one sort of darkness with another. Science, they argue, became a justification for racism, sexism, and an entire host of other kinds of exploitation, just like religion had before it. Such criticism has not gone unchallenged, and others have countered that scientific investigation has, in fact, been a force for progress. While these figures readily admit that bad science has often been a dehumanizing force in the West, they have pointed out that its relentless pursuit of correct knowledge has been an overall positive force in the European tradition. Another debate, a debate that grew up in the Enlightenment itself, has also touched upon the moral consequences and costs of the movement itself. Critics approaching this problem from a religious perspective have pointed to the Enlightenment as the source for the rise of "secular humanism" and a moral relativism that it inspired. Champions of Enlightenment values, on the other hand, have pointed to Western society's traditionally repressive and intolerant nature before the eighteenth century. In this view, the Enlightenment has been seen as a force that helped to bring to an end centuries of religious hypocrisy in which only lip service had been paid to moral values. The Enlightenment may have fostered a moral relativism, they conclude, but it also allowed societies to recognize that humans are by nature different, and that they can be made to seem the same only through coercion.
PUBLIC OPINION.In recent years scholars have pushed their investigations of the origins of the Enlightenment backwards into the seventeenth century. They have begun to speak of the ideas of intellectuals like John Locke as the first wave of enlightened thought. The motivation behind this tendency is a desire to associate theEnlightenment with the development of empiricism. This desire has been prompted in large part by another trend of scholarship on the Enlightenment itself: a tendency to interpret that movement as an international phenomenon that followed very distinct paths in Europe's individual states. In this regard, the FrenchEnlightenment has now been revealed to have been very different from its German and English cousins. But if the Enlightenment was different everywhere, then what can be said about it as a general historical phenomenon? When the Enlightenment is viewed as an outgrowth of empiricism, its common features become more obvious, although there is no direct and simple equation between empiricism and the later development of Enlightenment. While it is true that many Enlightenment thinkers were empiricists, and that empiricism was the philosophical foundation for most of the new intellectual disciplines that emerged during the Enlightenment, it is also true that the thoughts of many of the movement's thinkers deny easy categorization as "empirical." One of the links between these figures, though, was their willingness to affirm the existence of something that modern scholars call "public opinion," and their tendency to appeal to this new social arena of judgment for justification for the various sorts of reforms they advocated. Everywhere in eighteenth-century Europe, social reformers framed their ideas by reference to public welfareor the common good, even as they branded those that opposed their ideas as "special interests" that were corrupt, intolerant, and fanatical. This common development is the best starting point for a discussion of theEnlightenment as a general phenomenon.
THE READING REVOLUTION.Behind the birth of "public opinion" was another cultural and social revolution that must be understood, a "reading revolution" that created new groups of readers and writers. In medieval Europe the "Republic of Letters"—the body of those that had used the written word to circulate their ideas—had an undeniably clerical cast. In the Renaissance, more and more lay people had acquired the ability to read and write, and they had begun communicating their ideas through the printed page. By the eighteenth century the vast majority of readers and writers were now lay people rather than clerics. This steady expansion in the number of society's readers inspired new genres of reading material, even as it also created new modes by which information and news spread in society. The eighteenth-century reading public was now vast, but also complex and differentiated along lines of social class, education, and taste. To entertain and inform these various groups of readers, older types of printed communications, like the news broadsheet or the polemical pamphlet, now underwent a steady evolution, while at the same time new forms of reading matter, like the newspaper and the journal, developed. To supply the articles, stories, and thought pieces that went into these publications, a new occupation—that of the professional writer or "man of letters"—emerged. From individuals who made their living writing and publishing their own local newspaper, to internationally famous writers whose books were immediately translated into other languages, these individuals all made their living by saying in print what this new group of readers wanted to hear.
THE COFFEEHOUSE.In the largest sense, these new groups of readers constituted the public opinion to which Enlightenmentthinkers appealed, but much eighteenth-century writing was geared, not to all readers generally, but to a new category of bourgeois readers, in particular. This class became a common fixture of the economic landscape in most European countries around 1700. By this date, rising economic prosperity had forged a new middle class that often lived off the interest that their investments provided. With plenty of free time on their hands, members of this group spent their days in a new type of commercial establishment, the café or coffeehouse. There they sipped cups of the new beverages, coffee and tea, which were sweetened by sugar, the new wonder condiment, and smoked pipes filled with "sot weed" or tobacco. These new venues had begun to appear in London in the years around 1650, and within two generations they had spread to most European cities. In English, they were often called "penny universities," because for a mere penny men could be admitted into a society where others shared their concerns. For this modest cost of admission, men were able to read from an assortment of books, newspapers, and journals coffee-houses made available to their patrons. The idea of leisure time reading is key here because it helps explain the second social development that amplified the impact of Enlightenment thought. In the eighteenth century talking became a pastime in many of the ways it remains today. Enlightenment-era thinkers were conscious of themselves as having come up with not just new ideas, but new ways of communicating those ideas. The "art" of conversation—conversation that connoted the exchange of information via polite discourse—was the subject of essays and discussions. The concern was to find ways to move beyond the social hierarchy that had constrained oral communication in the past. The ideal was to create situations where individuals, no matter their social rank, could exchange ideas as intellectual equals. In the twenty-first century both radio and television offer a myriad of talk shows aimed at informing the public of news and ideas while also providing their listeners with a particular "spin" on news and ideas. The origins of this incessant commentary stretch back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment world of the coffee-house. In that world the art of conversation was practiced, and leisure reading provided a steady inspiration for the enrichment of discussion. In this way, the goal of much of the writing that appeared in the Enlightenment was to elicit conversation. The letter of one frustrated exile from the Paris salons to a friend voiced a sentiment shared by all those who were participating in the new world of the Enlightenment: "Reading alone, with no one to talk to, to discuss things with or be witty with, to listen to or to listen to me, is impossible." Enlightenmentthinkers framed what they had to say in ways they hoped would get people talking, and the measure of success of a piece of writing was its power as a conversation starter. Many of the men whose ideas inspired the coffeehouse chatter of the eighteenth century may not have spent much time themselves in the new cafés, but their eminence as "great" writers derived in large part because their works became the subject of the new kinds of debate that the Enlightenment helped to sanction. And while "public opinion" did not reside solely in the coffeehouse, it still constituted an important element of the audiences thatEnlightenment thinkers hoped to influence.
SOURCESP. Gay, The Enlightenment; An Interpretation. 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1995).
L. Goldmann, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973).
J. V. Melton, Cultures of Communication from Reformation to Enlightenment (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002).
—, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
R. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1982).
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, Cengage Learning.
Source Citation"The Enlightenment." Arts and Humanities Through the Eras. Ed. Edward I. Bleiberg, et al. Vol. 5: The Age of the Baroque and Enlightenment 1600-1800. Detroit: Gale, 2005. 304-306. Gale Student Resources In Context. Web. 11 Feb. 2013.
Document URL
http://ic.gale.pnw.orc.scoolaid.net/ic/suic/ReferenceDetailsPage/ReferenceDetailsWindow?failOver&query=&prodId=SUIC&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGroupName=Reference&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=false&displayGroups=&sortBy=&source=&search_within_results=&action=e&catId=&activity&scanId=&documentId=GALE%7CCX3427400900&userGroupName=nort35466&jsid=990a16d472ac9d374234ac31f0117e3b
Gale Document Number: GALE|CX3427400900