Enlightenment philosophy - as in Age of Enlightenment, not the California New Agey kind

William Blake's artistic interpretation of Isaac Newton

I just read a little book called The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932) by historian Carl Becker. The book is devoted to discussing some of Becker's key idea about the philosophy of the European Enlightenment, which had such a great influence on the leaders of the American Revolution and shaped the Founders' conception of the world.

Enlightenment thinkers on whom he touches in this 168-page book include: John Locke (1632-1704); Isaac Newton (1643-1727); Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826); Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790); David Hume (1711-1776); Charles de Montesquieu (1689-1755); Francis Bacon (1561-1626); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1825); Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803); Voltaire (1694-1778); Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778); Denis Diderot (1713-1784); Claude Adrien Helvetius (1715-1771); Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716); and, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781).

It goes without saying that so short a book can't convey a lot about the philosophy of every one of those people. (Dead white guys all!)

But his focus is fairly specific. He argues that the Enlightenment thinkers continued much of the religious habit of thought of medieval thinkers, despite their general anticlerical leanings. They laid great store by Reason. But he argues that they also substituted concepts like history or posterity for the role played by God in the European Christian thought of earlier centuries.

Being innocent of any detailed knowledge of the philosophies of these gentlemen - Thomas Jefferson and Goethe excepted - Becker's argument on that point sounds sensible enough to me. At least if I take it to mean that this is how they conceptualized the world of science while establishing a continuity with the Christian philosophical thought on which much of their intellectual tradition was based.

I'm not sure it would hold up that well to close scrutiny, though. Jefferson certainly knew the difference between God and deified Reason, for instance. Isaac Newton was a conservative Protestant who expected to be remembered more for his voluminous writing on theology rather than for his revolutionary scientific work.

His continuation of the argument into the 19th-century, post-Enlightenment period is much less convincing. In fact, he recites from fairly conventional judgments that the political fanaticism of the French Revolution and its successors, which basically includes all the European democratic revolutions (successful and otherwise) as well as the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, essentially substituted their political faith for God, making their political ideologies into religions.

I understand the argument. But I think it carries so much baggage from the assumptions of secular historians of the 19th century who tended to discount or dismiss the role of religion in historical events, that it's not particularly useful as a way of understanding the events in question. People can be fanatical about many things, from religion to politics to sports to cars and lots of other things. But it doesn't mean that soccer games can be equated to cars, despite the emotional similarities in the fanaticism. Trying to define charismatic or fanatical political phenomenon as religion obscures at least as much as it explains.

But along the way, he makes some intriguing observations which sheds some light on some concepts and ways of understanding the world that help make sense of some of the Founders' ideas to people today.

He emphasizes how important it is to understand the prevailing understandings of the world that surrounded the Enlightenment thinkers, the "climate of opinion" of the time. In defining his own time in 1932, Becker manages to sound something like a stock market booster from the 1990s:

It is well known that the result of pursuing this restricted aim (the scientific method reduced to its lowest terms) has been astounding. It is needless to say that we live in a machine age, that the art of inventing is the greatest of our inventions, or that within a brief space of fifty years the outward conditions of life have been transformed. It is less well understood that this bewildering experience has given a new slant to our minds. Fresh discoveries and new inventions are no longer the result of fortunate accidents which we are expected to note with awe. They are all a part of the day's work, anticipated, deliberately intended, and brought to pass according to schedule. Novelty has ceased to excite wonder because it has ceased to be novelty; on the contrary, the strange, so habituated have we become to it, is of the very essence of the customary. There is nothing new in heaven or earth not dreamt of in our laboratories; and we should be amazed indeed if tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow failed to offer us something new to challenge our capacity for readjustment. Science has taught us the futility of troubling to understand the "underlying agency" of the things we use. We have found that we can drive an automobile without knowing how the carburetor works, and listen to a radio without mastering the secret of radiation. We really haven't time to stand amazed, either at the starry firmament above or the Freudian complexes within us. The multiplicity of things to manipulate and make use of so fully engages our attention that we have neither the leisure nor the inclination to seek a rational explanation of the force that makes them function so efficiently. (my emphasis)

This is by way of making his point that the more common 20th-century view of the world is oriented toward facts, where the Enlightenment worldview emphasized the role of Reason. But he also argues that these thinkers were far more influenced by Christian theology and philosophy than present-day readers tend to realize. As he puts it:

In spite of the rationalism and their humane sympathies, in spite of their aversion to hocus-pocus and enthusiasm and dim perspectives, in spite of their eager skepticism, their engaging cynicism, their brave youthful blasphemies and talk of hanging the last king in the entrails of the last priest - in spite of all of it, there is more of Christian philosophy in the writings of the Philosophes than has yet been dreamt of in our histories.

Natural law was a key concept of the Enlightenment. It made their way into the Declaration of Independence as the "laws of nature and of nature's God". The notion of natural law was that the world was governed by regular laws that could be observed and understood in nature, in the material world, though the ultimate source of these natural laws was God.

Not that the concept of natural law was unique or new to the Enlightenment. Becker argues that the Enlightenment brought what we might call a reversal of direction in understanding it. Instead of assuming that the world and nature were rational because an intelligent divine Creator made them, they assumed that because nature functioned according to laws that can be derived and understood by observing the outward world, God must be an intelligent Creator. This view integrated the findings of contemporary science into their world outlook along with the God of Christianity. Though the Christianity part wasn't universal among them. Goethe, for instance, was Christian only in the vaguest sense, holding a Romantic, semi-mystical, quasi-pagan worldview and some Enlightenment philosophers were atheists.

Becker illustrates with the example of Newton:

Newton did not doubt that the heavens declare the glory of God; but he was concerned to find out, by looking through a telescope and doing a sum in mathematics, precisely how they managed it. He discovered that every particle of matter, whether in the heavens or elsewhere, behaved as if it attracted every other particle with a force proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance. This was a new kind of "law of nature." Formerly, as the editor of the second edition of the Principia tells us, philosophers were "employed in giving names to things, and not in searching into things themselves." Newton himself noted the difference by saying: "These Principles I consider not as occult [hidden] Qualities, supposed to result from the specific Forms of Things, but as general Laws of Nature, by which the Things themselves are form'd." This was the new way to knowledge opened up by "natural philosophy": to "search into Things themselves," and then to formulate the "general Laws of Nature by which the Things themselves are form'd." (my emphasis)

But for all their rationalism and genuine attachment to science - still called "natural philosophy" in the 18th century - Becker finds the Enlightenment philosophers to be eager to make constructive changes in the world, not just to study and understand it:

We need not be deceived. In spite of their persiflage and wit, in spite of their correct manner and restrained prose, we can still hear, in the very accents of the saints, the despairing cry, "How long, O Lord, how long!"

That description certainly fits the American revolutionaries Jefferson and Franklin.

The Enlightenment philosophers considered history to be extremely important. Becker detects a tendency to look for a previous Golden Age that humanity needed to regain, a Golden Age not unlike Christian conceptions of the Garden of Eden or of the special event in the past when Jesus carried out his earthly ministry.

One twist for us now in understanding their perspective on history is that the Enlightenment emphasized that their time was a break with the past, a discontinuity in the flow of history. This, says Becker, is because:

... the eighteenth-century Philosphers were not primarily interested in stabilizing society, but in changing it. They did not ask how society had come to be what it was, but how it could be made better than it was. There is no more apt illustration of this slant of mind than the famous opening sentences of Rousseau's Social Contract. "Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains. ..."

Their successors in the 19th century, on the other hand, tended to emphasize the continuities of history, seeing history as a continuous flow of events and processes rather than one subject to "breaks in history" as the Enlightenment understood them.

This Enlightenment understand of history led people to look to history for moral lessons, a habit which has changed today in terms of our formal understanding of what history is, but is still awfully hard to break.

Becker's discussion of how the Enlightenment thinkers understood posterity casts some helpful light on how Americans of the early Republic saw their duties to subsequent generations. In his interpretation, the concept of posterity was a vision of a perfectible future, an appealing dream that functioned for the Enlightenment secularists much as the promise of Heaven in medieval times. It was a more congenial vision for that time's "climate of opinion" than the Christian notion which has been mocked by anticlerical reformers as "pie in the sky when you die." (Not necessarily the best way to mock it, since that actually sounds pretty appealing. But that's another story.)

With the emerging modern idea of progress, posterity would be the recipients and the realization of the Heavenly City here on earth:

No "return," no "rebirth" of classical philosophy, however idealized and humanized, no worship of ancestors long since dead, or pale imitations of Greek pessimism would suffice for a society that had been so long and so well taught to look forward to another and better world to come. Without a new heaven to replace the old, a new way of salvation, of attaining perfection, the religion of humanity [i.e., Enlightenment philosophy] would appeal in vain to the common run of men.

He uses a quotation from the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder that ties together the grand Enlightenment view of history with its aspirations for the future, for posterity:

Manifold is the problem of humanity, and everywhere the result of human striving this: "Upon reason and integrity depends the essence of our race, its end and its fate." No nobler use has history than this: it leads us as it were into the council of fate and teaches us to conform to the eternal laws of nature. While it shows us the defects and consequences of all unreason, it teaches us our place in that great organism in which reason and goodness struggle with chaotic forces, always however according to their nature creating order, and pressing forward on the path of victory.

That's a view of history that may be difficult for people today to appreciate, much less to adopt as our own.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784)

But it does give us a window into understanding one aspect of martyrdom, a phenomenon that more often takes a political form now rather than a religious one, though the latter is certainly not exclusively a thing of the past. Nor is it always so easy to cleanly separate political from religious martyrdom. The concept of being vindicated by posterity, though, is an important aspect of both. Writing of Denis Diderot, Becker says:

Whatever Diderot's intellect might say, the good heart of the man assured him that virtue was the most certain of realities; and since it was a reality there must be compensation for the practice of it. The only compensation Diderot could ever find was the hope of living forever in the memory of posterity. "Do you not see," he exclaims, "that the judgment of posterity anticipated is the sole encouragement, the sole support, the sole consolation ... of men in a thousand unhappy circumstances?" "If our predecessors have done nothing for us, and if we do nothing for our descendants, it is almost in vain that nature wills that man should be perfectible." "All these philosophers, these men of integrity who have been the victims of stupid people, of atrocious priests, of enraged tyrants, what consolation remains to them in the hour of death? This: that prejudice passes, and that posterity will transfer to their enemies the ignominy which they have suffered." It is significant that throughout this discussion Diderot employs the phrases "sentiment of immortality" and "respect for posterity." The "sentiment of immortality and respect for posterity move the heart and elevate the soul; they are two germs of great things, two promises as substantial as any others." The ideas, the phrases, are essentially religious, essentially Christian: for the worship of God, Diderot has substituted respect for posterity; for the hope of immortality in heaven, the hope of living in the memory of future generations. (my emphasis)

Tags: carl becker, diderot, enlightenment philosophy, isaac newton