(All Rights Reserved - James O.
Richards)
The
Enlightenment as the "Second Europe,"
1650 to 1789
Outline of Lecture
I.
Introduction
II.
The Second Europe
as the Ideas and Ideals of the Enlightenment
III.
"Crush the
Infamous Thing" : a Common Theme Uniting a Diverse Movement, 1650-1789
IV.
But Not Everyone
Agreed: Jean Jacques Rousseau
V.
Looking Forward
Introduction
The Enlightenment was the culmination of a search for new authorities
lasting from 1350 to 1650. By the middle of the 17th century Europe
as a culture entered its second phase as its basic elements--core beliefs,
ideas, and ideals about man, the world, God, society, and the future--took new
expressions and formulations. The strength and simplicity of this new outlook
sparked the second of two creative periods (so far) in the history of the West
(the other being the formation of the First Europe, or medieval outlook). The
term "Enlightenment" was coined by Immanuel Kant (1702-1804) who
wrote in 1784 "Have courage to use your own reason!- that is the motto of
enlightenment." (From What is
Enlightenment?.)
The Enlightenment was based on new views of man and the world developed
during the era 1350-1650. From the Renaissance came a boundless optimism about
man and his earthly possibilities. From the Reformation came the emphasis on
the individual as the starting point of the search for meaning. From the rise
of modern science the Enlightenment garnered a confidence in the order and
regularity of the world and its mastery by man if he used reason, observation,
and the experimental method. Unlike the First Europe, the Enlightenment was
secular in outlook. It viewed life as an end in itself, a life of unlimited
progress if man would only follow reason and experience and free himself from
superstition and oppression. Like the First Europe, it was based on faith: not
faith in a providential God, but in man and his reason and goodness. Also like
the First Europe, it was infused with optimism about the future: again, because
of man's capacity for goodness and rationality and for mastery of nature
through science, not because of confidence in God's victory over sin and evil.
We are still acting on and reacting against the Enlightenment outlook. The
dominant theme of this course is how men of the 19th and 20th
centuries have acted on and reacted against the Second Europe, asking, in
effect, whether Enlightenment beliefs and ideas are true. And the question I
ask at the end of our survey is whether, with the Enlightenment, Europe has run its course or is likely to extend itself
in a third stage.
The first part below examines the basic
principles of the Second Europe and attempts to show how those principles
continue broader themes of Europe as a
culture. Then we take up the Second Europe or Enlightenment in action, briefly
looking at the broad range of interests and representative figures of the
period 1650 to 1789. In later sections we will look specifically at four major
figures of the Enlightenment: Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, and
John Locke. When we conclude this first unit of the course we shall have set
the stage for the rest which takes up 19th and 20th
centuries reactions to the Enlightenment outlook.
The
Second Europe as the Ideas and Ideals of the
Enlightenment
In the introductory lecture of this course we examined the core of recurring
basic ideas, values, beliefs, and aspirations which have been Europe
as a culture through both its first and second phases:
(1) Man is a being of worth and dignity;
(2) The universe is orderly and purposeful and man can rationally know it
is so as well as believe it is so;
(3) There is an ethical, transcendent deity overseeing the universe and
human affairs;
(4) Institutions and the social order should reflect the ideal order
underlying the universe;
(5) The future can be and will be better for man than the present and the
past.
?
1. Your reaction to any of these basic elements of the culture "Europe"?
2. Would you state any of them differently? Add to them?
What was the Second Europe's version of this core outlook? First, a summary,
then a fuller discussion. Two words were central to the Enlightenment: Nature
and Reason. These words were basic to all else men believed. The world was a
vast machine of wonderful order and regularity, (the analogy used most often
was "clock") governed by laws inaugurated by God who created the
machine and set it going. It had since gone on without further need of God's
attention, regulating itself by fixed, immutable laws of nature. Robert Boyle, a contemporary of Isaac Newton, put it as well as anyone else
when he said that nature
is like a rare clock, such as may be that of
Strasbourg, where all things are so skillfully contrived, that the engine being
once set a moving, all things proceed, according to the artificer’s first
design, and the motions of the little statues, that at such hours perform these
or those things, do not require, like those of puppets, the peculiar
interposing of the artificer, or any intelligent agent employed by him, but
perform their functions upon particular occasions, by virtue of the general and
primitive contrivance of the whole engine.”[1]
Man, as part of the created order,
had the unique capacity to understand this world and all else if he used
Reason, to which the laws of nature adhered. As we shall see, this outlook
minimized the importance of God and all things supernatural. This world was
man's proper focus, not any world to come. And if man would use reason there
was no apparent limit to what he could achieve, both in enjoying the bounty of
this world and in perfecting himself.
?
1. Actually there was debate about the self-regulating nature of the
world. Isaac Newton himself believed God continued to be involved in the order
of things. Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz believed that Newton's work proved the opposite. Your
reaction?
2. In the 20th century a physicist named Werner Heisenberg formulated the
famous (Heisenberg)
Uncertainty Principle which essentially says that one can not know
objective truth about the physical world. We've come a long way since the
Enlightenment, haven't we?
Now for how Enlightenment man stated the core ideas and values of Europe. Man was indeed a being of worth and
dignity. He was basically good with the capacity for rational thinking.
Not every person displayed or enjoyed those powers yet. Much had to be done to free
man from that which enslaved him: ignorance, superstition, political
oppression, and economic servitude. Man was not inherently evil or sinful. The
evil he did was because of his environment which needed to be changed if he
were to achieve his potential as a human being. Social conditions needed to be
changed; corrupt and oppressive institutions needed to be overthrown. Man
needed Enlightenment, not Salvation. He needed freedom to develop his reason
and reform conditions so that he could progress (a word we shall
emphasize later) and make himself better morally as he bettered himself
materially. Man was limited, to be sure, as a creature within the natural
order. He had to understand his limits within the order determined by natural
law. But that required that man be free to choose. He had to be free to choose
those things which he thought good, to express himself, to worship as he
thought best, to pursue his economic interests as he chose, and to establish a
society in harmony with natural law. Hence spokesmen for this outlook promoted
a theory called "enlightened individualism."
?
1. What we have here is an essential statement about human nature and
human purpose. Is man basically flawed from the beginning or just the victim of
his environment? Your view?
2. Enlightenment or Salvation? Which? Both? Neither?
The universe is orderly and purposeful and man can rationally know it
is so as well as believe it is so. Enlightened man based his confidence
in Nature on the rise in modern scientific thinking which started in the 14th
century with new views of the world as infinite and continuous and gathered
steam in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries.
The development of new views of the world was discussed in the first half of
this western civilization sequence. You will want to look there for a fuller
discussion than I am going to give you here. Some of the highlights of this
story about the growing knowledge of astronomy are:
(1) Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) formulated a helio(sun)-centered theory
of the solar system in his work, On the Revolution of Celestial Bodies.
This work transformed the bases of scientific thought because his theory was
based on independent logic rather than accepted (Aristotelian) authority.
Copernicus said the heliocentric theory is true because it is simpler and
better harmonizes with the mathematics of planetary motion. This radical
departure from previous theory prepared the way for Galileo.
(2) Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) built a better telescope and proved Copernicus'
heliocentric theory. He also formulated three laws governing local motion
(mechanics).
(3) Isaac Newton (1642-1727) capped all these earlier discoveries with Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687) which defined the laws of celestial
mechanics (theory of gravitation) and so caught men's imaginations with the
wonder of a world system that he became the epitome of Enlightenment himself:
"God said, let Newton be and all was Light." (Alexander Pope)
These discoveries gave a new intensity to older traditional thinking that
the universe was orderly and purposeful. They excited the imagination in ways
that traditional knowledge derived from the Greeks and medieval western
philosophers had not been able to do. And it is the excitement of the imagination
that makes a difference here. Newton's
ideas transformed the thinking of his own and later generations so that science
achieved a new status which it has to this day as the most important of all
intellectual activities. This new vogue made it seem likely that all knowledge
was as open to man's searching mind as physical science and mathematics had
been to Newton's
mind. Looking back we can see that the promise of making a science of all areas
of human life has not been so simple and uncomplicated as men of the 18th
century believed. But they tried, in areas as diverse as political theory,
religion, education, and penal reform, just to name some.
?
1. What are the limits of scientific knowledge?
There is an ethical, transcendent deity overseeing the universe and
human affairs. This core belief was modified more drastically perhaps
than any of the others. For Enlightened man God might be said to be ethical and
transcendent (totally other), but those qualities did not matter in the
creation God had wrought. He was necessary as a creator, but unnecessary as a
sustainer of the marvelous machine-like world he had set in motion. He was
"Nature's God" as Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of
Independence (1776). This view was Deism or "natural religion". We
shall look more directly at Deism in the next section, but suffice it to say at
this point that Deism or "natural religion" better summed up
Enlightened man's outlook than traditional revealed religion. Having set the
world in motion, God, like a clock maker, left it to run by itself. Divine
intervention of any kind, for example a miracle, was unthinkable because it
violated immutable natural law. So Enlightened man turned to examine Scripture
critically and to want to de-mystify traditional Christianity. Thomas
Jefferson, for example, made his own version of the four Gospels, The Life and Morals of Jesus
which he cut from the Gospels, rearranged, and pasted to make rational sense of
Jesus' life without the mystical or the miraculous elements. This spirit was
the impetus which began the eighteenth century's critical textual examination
of the Bible, an enquiry which sought to discover what rationalist scholars
believed to be the real core of Christianity before the superstitious and
irrational elements were added to it. This was the beginning of modern critical
Biblical study. But more about Enlightenment religion later.
?
1. Your reaction to Deism?
Institutions and the social order should reflect the ideal order
underlying the universe. Enlightenment man affirmed this principle
wholeheartedly, but played down one of the two sources from which Europe had derived this conviction. The notion that a
just society would be one based on a perceived order underlying the universe
flowed from both Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian sources. The Greco-Roman
outlook spoke of the just society as being grounded in an eternal, rational,
divine (impersonal) order. The Judaeo-Christian tradition saw the ideal society
as something emanating from an transcendent God who revealed Himself as an
ethical personality; by existing He established order for both the world and man.
As the Enlightenment pushed God to the remote edge of the universe after He
created his marvelous world, so it virtually removed Him from consideration as
the basis for the ideal society. Instead, it was "the laws of Nature and
Nature's God" (notice the order of the words in the preamble to the
Declaration of Independence) to which the Enlightenment turned when it began to
think about what an ideal society should be. These men believed that the
rational basis for society was the Social Contract. If man is rational, and
naturally free, then he would have entered into society by giving his consent
to be governed. But he would retain his rights (life, liberty, and property)
under the government which he had freely created. He would give up the power to
be his own executive, judge and legislator, but he would keep the natural
rights with which he had been endowed by the laws of Nature and Nature's God.
And if the government he formed invaded his basic rights, he had the right to
alter or abolish it and form the type of government which would safeguard his
rights and enable him to seek his best interests. The ideal government for most
Enlightenment thinkers was something along the British model of limited
constitutional government with King and Parliament joining in exercising power.
But they realized that would be a big step for most peoples and so settled on
Enlightened despotism as the next best thing. If not all men were enlightened
enough yet for self-government, the benevolent, enlightened monarch could create
the necessary conditions to advance the rights and best interests of his
subjects.
?
1. Can one believe in natural rights without believing in objective
truth? If "truth" is what the person using the word means by it, (and
nothing more) what happens to such ideas as natural rights?
The future can be and will be better for man than the present and the
past. The Second Europe fervently believed in progress. But they
secularized the concept which came down through the Judaeo-Christian tradition
and the First Europe. The beatific life for man did not have to begin after
death but could begin in the here and now, if he only would follow Reason and
Nature. Enlightenment thinkers were imbued with a sense of mission to challenge
existing ideas and to educate and enlighten society at large to lead mankind
into a brighter future. Perhaps their aims were best expressed in two
activities:
(1) the goals of the thinkers known as philosophes who began and
carried on for twenty years the project known as the Encyclopedia (1751-1772)
under the leadership of Denis Diderot (1713-1784);
(2) the work of Marie Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), Sketch
for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1794).
The Encyclopedia had three objects:
(1) to be a reference work of knowledge and information.
(2) to educate and to instruct in both the theoretical and practical areas
of knowledge.
(3) to serve as a clearinghouse and forum for new ideas in all areas of
life.
Diderot stated the broader purpose as that of shaping public opinion as well
as expressing it: "to change the common way of thinking." The themes
of the massive publication were central to the Enlightenment: focusing on the
secular in knowledge and thought; affirming the goodness and perfectibility of
man; advocating reason, experience, science and progress as the means of
man's emancipation and betterment. Diderot and his colleagues saw themselves as
men with a cause: spreading knowledge to reform of society and promote progress
for mankind. As he wrote in an article for the work entitled
"Encyclopedia":
The aim of an encyclopedia is to assemble the knowledge
scattered over the face of the earth, to expound its general system to the men
with whom we live, and transmit it to the men who will come after us; in order
that the labors of past centuries will not have been in vain for the centuries
to come; that our children, better instructed than we, may at the same time
become more virtuous and happy, and that we may not die without having deserved
well of mankind.
What were the common beliefs of the philosophes as one could glean them from a reading of the Encyclopedia?
(1)
Men can be rendered happy by the adoption of an
enlightened system of laws.
(2)
Religion is a matter of private belief.
(3)
Speech and the press should be free.
(4)
Individual liberties should be protected.
(5)
Tyranny is abhorrent.
(6)
Equal protection before the law is the right of all.
(7)
Torture is abominable.
(8)
Punishment of crime should fit the offense and be a
rational deterrent.
(9)
War in its aggression and destruction is repulsive;
military glory is loathsome.
(10)
National borders should be open for commerce and
travel.
(11)
It is not necessary to threaten men with eternal
damnation to insure moral behavior; for most, natural goodness will do.
?
1. What made Diderot and the philosophes so committed to their
cause?
2. As you look over
the list of beliefs above, do you see their abiding quality? Are not these principles still essential in
our own discussions of human rights?
The second of the two examples of Enlightenment optimism about the future is
Condorcet's Sketch
for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Condorcet, an
aristocrat, mathematician, and official of the Academy of Sciences,
was the epitome of the Enlightenment. He wrote Progress of the Human Mind
while awaiting execution by the radical forces of the French Revolution. One
would have thought the prospect of the guillotine enough to cure anyone of
optimism, but not Condorcet whose enthusiasm for man's prospects remained
undimmed by his own predicament:
no bounds have been fixed to
the improvement of the human faculties; the perfectibility of man is absolutely
indefinite; the progress of this perfection, henceforth above the control of
every other power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of
the globe upon which nature has placed us.
A brief sketch of his ideas gives particularity and force to the special
kind of faith the Enlightenment found more compelling than traditional faith.
Condorcet based his optimism on science and the scientific method which he said
would continually develop and lead to greater and greater knowledge. More and
more people would be exposed to this growing body of knowledge as universal
education was gradually achieved. As knowledge expanded there would follow a
general improvement in the conditions of life; less effort would be needed to
produce more. He was not worried about mankind's misuse of resources or of too
great population growth; reason would cause men to exercise proper limits.
These conditions would lead, further, to the destruction of prejudice (for
example, the sexual prejudice which limited women). Finally, Condorcet said,
the momentum toward greater happiness and the perfectibility of man is assured.
Even the end to diseases and other conditions limiting life can be foreseen.
How bright his view! Naive? Especially for one awaiting death? Ask yourself
whether we have given up this vision today, at least where the activity of
science is concerned.
?
1. Have we given up the vision of a better world through reason and science?
2. Isaiah Berlin,
noted historian of ideas, wrote: "the European Enlightenment was divided
by a central contradiction between maintaining that men should be free to
choose and insisting that they should be only free to choose what it would be
rational to desire." Question: who defines what it would be rational to
desire?
Such in brief was the outlook of the Second
Europe or Enlightenment. We are going to take up four of the leading figures of
the movement and show how their work and ideas helped lay the foundation for
the Second Europe. Doing that, of course, minimizes the breadth and diversity
of the Enlightenment. You need to guard against the tendency to see the
Enlightenment as single-minded and homogeneous; reading your text will help in
that regard. And, before finishing, I also want to briefly mention other
figures and areas of the Second Europe which were important but which we are
not going to take up at length. I call this final section
"Crush
the Infamous Thing (Superstition)": A Common Theme Uniting a Diverse
Movement 1650-1789
Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) made the statement in the title
of this section, suggesting a theme that runs through a very far-reaching and
diverse endeavor. Enlightenment thinkers were interested in challenging and
changing all areas of life. They set their hands to work reforming education (Johann Heinrich
Pestalozzi) and the penal system (Cesare Bonesana
Beccaria). They proposed new aesthetics ideals (Gotthold
Lessing and Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe) and suggested new approaches to the study of history (Johann Gottfried Herder
and Voltaire). But it is their religious and economic theories I want to look
at briefly in this section. Deism, and in some cases outright skepticism,
resulted from their interest in cleansing religion of its superstitious
elements. And laissez-faire economics or classical capitalism followed from
their attention to economic theory.
Deism was the view that God was not the personal deity of Scripture but a
remote, impersonal Supreme Creator. One worshipped this God by imitating the virtues
of Jesus and by repenting of one's sins. For those who practiced these ethics
there were rewards now and in the hereafter; for the sinful, there were
punishments in this life and the next. This view followed from the vogue of
science and the stress on permanent, immutable laws governing the universe
which left no room in rational minds for divine intervention and the
supernatural. For Deists, you could not have it both ways: you believed in
physical natural laws or a God who intervened to work His will, but both could
not be true. Skeptics rejected the supernatural; some went all the way to
atheism and materialism, believing that the world had no creator and no
beginning or end. Deists, however, believed that God was necessary as the
creator and beginner of natural law. Afterwards, he had no further
significance; having created the best of all possible worlds, he would have no
further wish or need to intervene. Man's reason alone sufficed to discover the
bases for religious and moral behavior. And the Deist saw in the life of Jesus
a reasonable model for Enlightened man to follow, even allowing for a popular
acceptance of Jesus' divinity if that would make his moral teachings more
palatable. As the American sage, Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter to the
President of Yale University, Ezra Stiles, "I have . . . some doubts as to
(Jesus') divinity. . . . I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that
belief has the good consequence . . . of making his doctrines more respected
and more observed." But fear of God's wrath had no place as an inducement
to moral living: "I do not perceive, that the Supreme takes it amiss, by
distinguishing the unbeliever in his government of the world with any peculiar
marks of his displeasure."
?
1. Your reaction to Franklin's
statement?
Voltaire was responsible for spreading Deist ideas which had originated in England. In his
Letters on the English (1734) and
his Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (1738) he popularized in Europe the ideas of English writers such as Matthew
Tindall (1653-1733) who wrote the fundamental treatise on Deism, Christianity as Old as the
Creation (1730). Other Enlightenment thinkers were not so easily convinced,
showing that the outlook was more complex than one might think at first glance.
David Hume (1711-1776), the Scottish philosopher, believed that skepticism in
all things spiritual was the only sound approach and said so in Dialogues Concerning
Natural Religion (1779). Paul Henri Thiry, Baron Holbach (1723-1789) could
find no evidence at all for divine authority in the universe. His conclusion in
System of Nature
(1770) was that men were solely material beings with no free will living in a
universe governed by a chain of causation leaving no room for chance. One
wonders why he spent the effort advocating any of the political reforms or
enlightenment he offered up along with such a thoroughgoing atheist
materialism. Why bother?
?
1. Is thoroughgoing skepticism pointless? Why bother indeed?
Economic reform also attracted certain Enlightenment thinkers such as the
French Physiocrats and Adam Smith. These became interested in explaining
economic conditions such as why prices became inflated, why wages seemed to
rise only slowly, why money flowed from region to region, and, most important,
why depression and prosperity seemed to come in cycles. Their belief that laws
governed the world and ought to be seen as applicable to human activities as
well led them to propose theories which had far-reaching effects on the
centuries afterwards. The most important of the French Physiocrats, was Dr.
Francis Quesnay (1694-1774) who published in Diderot's Encyclopedia as
well as a separate major work entitled Economic Table
(1756). Quesnay and the Physiocrats argued that economic activity should follow
the natural order governing all things. They insisted that the only viable
activity was agriculture. It alone produced wealth and all else was derivative.
The problems in society could be attributed to the efforts of merchants and
industrialists to manipulate the wealth created by agriculture for their own
interests. Their solution to economic ills was to end mercantilism with its
controls and regulations which aimed to strengthen the state against its
competitors and allow individuals to pursue their own private interests. Thus
would a natural harmony of interests emerge and benefit society. This idea of
an "invisible hand" directing private interests to the general good
was adopted to greater ends by the next thinker, Adam Smith.
Smith (1723-1790) wrote the great Enlightenment treatise on economic theory,
The Wealth
of Nations (1776) to propound the full effects of laissez-faire (let it
alone) economics, arguing like the Physiocrats that natural law governed
economics as it did everything else. His work aimed to show the mechanism by
which the laws of the market operated so that the "invisible hand"
behind all self-seeking egotistic interests produced an end "which is most
agreeable to the interest of the whole society." He argued that all
artificial restraints such as tariffs and restrictive trade policies should be
removed. Government did have a right to impose restrictions when some national
interest was at issue, but he believed that the state should tend to its proper
role of keeping order, protecting life and property, and enforcing contracts,
and should leave individuals alone to choose their own best interests. In so
doing it allowed natural law to operate freely and thus promoted true national
wealth. Was economic control by the state a form of the Infamous
(superstition)? The answer is yes. Although it did not excite the hatred
Voltaire and Diderot felt for the Church, state economic control was a kind of
superstition to be banished. The issue in both religion and economics was
giving men freedom to choose what they thought best. Smith and the Physiocrats
thought laissez-faire best did that.
?
1. An "invisible hand" directing private interests to the general
good?
2. How much freedom should people have to choose what they think best? Large
families? Large automobiles? Fattening food? Smoking?
3. The question is whether undeveloped nations can achieve economic parity with
developed nations without wrecking the environment. The Greens say no. They
still believe the environment is headed to disaster, despite earlier failed
"scientific" predictions: (1) Prof. Paul Erlich in 1960 that 65
million Americans would starve to death in the 1980s and that millions more
would die in food riots; (2) the Scientific American in 1970 that the
world would run out of lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver in 20 years; (3) former
President Carter's 1980 "Global 2000" report predicting widespread
starvation and super plagues by 2000. The Greens seem to believe Thomas Hobbes
had it right when he said human life was "solitary, nasty, brutish, and
short." But the economist Deepak Lal
calls the Greens "doomsters" who have no scientific evidence to back
up their predictions of environmental disaster. In the linked article he also
calls the Greens "cultural imperialists" who want to deny undeveloped
countries the higher standard of living enjoyed by the developed nations. What
do you think?
But
Not Everyone Agreed: The Counter-Enlightenment as Seen in Jean Jacques Rousseau
At first look, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) does not
appear to be anti-Enlightenment. He
shared the optimism about human nature and man’s possibilities held by the philosophes. He too valued reason as a tool for knowing
what was wrong with man’s condition and how to fix it. He believed that existing societies could be
remade for the better and in so doing man could emerge as the good and free
being he naturally was. However, here the
similarity ended and the differences began.
If he valued reason, he esteemed feeling and sentiment more, much
more. His social contract, rather than
affirming the well-being of the individual as the reason society was
established, made him a pawn of the state.
In all these ways, Rousseau points the way to an assault on the Enlightenment
that would not reveal its full antagonism until the next century.
In his Confessions
Rousseau described his early life as “a thing of shreds and patches.” The son of a Geneva watchmaker and dancing master, he lost
his mother days after his birth. Several
influences shaped his early life. From
an indulgent father who read him stories of romance and adventure, he said he
acquired a “tremendous ease in reading and comprehending, but also an insight
into the passions quite unique in one of my age. . . . I understood nothing—I
felt everything.” Perhaps from his birth city, Geneva, with its strong Calvinist spirit, he
developed a strong awareness of morality and a powerful impulse to judge and
improve society. (His own life was not virtuous in the Calvinist sense. He stole and blamed another; he fathered and
abandoned five children. Nevertheless,
he could feel powerfully the viciousness of society and leap to the defense of
humanity suffering from that viciousness.)
Like his father, he could not consistently apply himself to
anything. He became a vagabond literally
as well as intellectually, wandering from place to place and educating himself
as he went. “I am not made like any one
that I have seen. I dare believe that no
one like myself exists; and, if I am not better, at least I am different.” Here is the Romantic hero long before
Romanticism: struggling against all
odds; esteeming himself as unique; vainly wearing his feelings for all to see;
assuming all the world will value him as he does, but not really caring if it
doesn’t. The story of his life up to 1749 is interesting but significant in
terms of his attack on the Enlightenment only in illustrating that he was a
social misfit. He knew
everyone—Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Holbach—and he frequented all the
salons in Paris which were the centers of intellectual activity that
disseminated the ideas of the Enlightenment.
But he got along with no one; his manners were too crude and his wit too
inadequate to hold his own in the free-for-all that was salon discourse.
Then in 1749 Rousseau became the talk of all France. In that year he saw the notice for an essay
contest conducted by the Dijon
Academy on the question
“Has the Revival of the Sciences and the Arts helped to Purify or to Corrupt
Morals?” The moment was akin to a
religious experience: “Instantly I saw the universe, and I became another man.” He continued:
If
ever anything has resembled a sudden inspiration, it was the movement which
occurred to me when I read these words.
All at once, my mind was dazzled by a thousand lights, by a crowd of
ideas presenting themselves together with such force and in such confusion that
I was thrown into inexpressible agitation. . . .I flung myself under a tree
where I lay for half an hour in such emotion that, or rising, I found my coat
soaked with tears which I had not been aware of shedding.
The work resulting from this
epiphany was The
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.
In this work Rousseau first voiced ideas he would later develop in Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality and in The
Social Contract. In general, his
answer to the question posed by the essay title was, no, man is not better off
because of the growth of the arts and sciences.
Man is by nature good and free.
But civilization has corrupted and stifled him. The arts and sciences have made the human
condition worse, not better. He would go
on to write other works which kept France and the rest of Europe buzzing. His
novel, Emile
or Education, advocated letting the child develop naturally, almost an
antithesis to the existing practice of treating the child as a young adult
(perhaps the most provocative injunction was that mothers suckle their own
children). His Confessions,
written earlier but withheld until after his death, completed the sensation by
revealing details of his life many wanted not to know in such intimate terms.
In his Discourse on Inequality
and Social Contract, Rousseau showed most clearly how far away from
Enlightenment assumptions he was.
Rousseau attacked all of the Enlightenment’s cherished truths: reason,
individualism, private property and free markets, the growth of science and
technology, even progress itself in the sense the philosophes saw it. In Discourse
on Inequality, he declared reason to be the original sin. In the state of nature men were easily
satisfied with what they had. When
awakened, however, reason led men to become dissatisfied and to want more,
competing with each other in a never-ending selfishness that divided and turned
men against each other. Property thus became
the main source of enmity among men. And
all the material advances of mankind made men less dependent on themselves and
utterly dependent on things. As the
process continued, men also became unequal because more things went to some
than others, leading to indifference by those who had to those who had not:
Reason is what engenders egocentrism and reflection
strengthens it. Reason is what turns man
in upon himself. Reason is what
separates him from all that troubles him and afflicts him. Philosophy is what isolates him and what
moves him to say in secret, at the sight of a suffering man, “Perish if you
will; I am safe and sound.”
What can be done to right things? Revolution, he declared in the Social
Contract: “clearing the air and putting aside the old materials . . . in
order to raise a good edifice later.”
The place to start is with a correct understanding of man’s nature. Man is a creature of passions, emotions, and
will. He properly wants to believe and
must be allowed to believe that “the world is governed by a powerful and wise
will.” Should religion be a matter for
individual conscience? Here is his
answer:
While
the state can compel no one to believe it can banish not for impiety, but as an
antisocial being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of
sacrificing, if needed, his life to his duty.
If, after having publicly recognized these dogmas, a person acts as if
he does not believe them, he should be put to death.
Society thus formed has a new rationale for being. The social contract does not exist for the
well-being of the individual, as in Locke and Jefferson, but for the common
good. “The individual particularity of
each contracting party is surrendered to a new moral and collective body which
has its own self, life, body, and will.”
In another sentence he says, “each of us puts in common his person and
his whole power under the supreme direction of society’s leaders.” These leaders express the “general will” for
the society which is so compelling that force is justified in securing its
acceptance by all: “Whoever refuses to obey the general will will be forced to
do so by the entire body; this means that he will be forced to be free.” If the leaders find it necessary to say “it
is expedient for the state that you should die, he should die.” In 1765, Rousseau got a chance to draft a Constitution for Corsica
and thus project his social contract theory onto reality. His social contract oath for Corsicans read
as follows: “I join myself—body, goods,
will and all my powers—to the Corsican nation, granting to her the full
ownership of me—myself and all that depends upon me.” Jefferson’s
comment is not recorded.
So not all were believers in the Enlightenment. As we look at Descartes, Newton, Pope, and Locke we need to remember
that.