The Enlightenment and Reason
The Enlightenment is also referred to as The Age of Reason, a time period that stems from the awakening of European interest in science in the Seventeenth Century and ends with the unreason of the French Revolution at the end of the Eighteenth Century. The importance of individual scientists, such as Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, and the significance of the voyages of world explorers, such as Captain Cook, indicate a cultural shift away from spiritual interests and toward worldly interests. The need for worldly answers to cosmic questions overtook the spiritual dogmas, and the desire to explore the real world for commercial purposes proved to be more compelling than religious revelation. Over time, it became impossible for educated persons to accept theological limitations of Church dogma and more difficult to explain the world as “God’s will.” Philosophy would take the place of established religion as a way to explain the world, and, by the Eighteenth Century, philosophy was tasked with the problem of establishing a new system of ontology (a theory of being) and epistemology (the ground of knowledge) to replace God’s plan for the world. Faced with the apparently irrefutable findings of scientific discoveries, philosophers developed contempt for religion and welcomed the new light into a world long shrouded in the darkness of misguided belief in a Deity.
If God, Voltaire declared, did not exist, we, the people, would have found it necessary to invent a supreme being. Voltaire’s cynical statement comes very close to the Modernist concept that all aspects of culture are constructed. Most of the Enlightenment philosophers and political thinkers were Deists. They believed in a God but rejected organized religion as superstition. Severing themselves from the comforts of certainty that religion brings caused pain. “I grieve,” Denis Diderot mourned, “that I can no longer believe in God.” The philosophers were at the beginning of a process that moved Western civilizations away from the received wisdom of religion to the relativism of philosophical systems. Because the Enlightenment was based upon the scientific model, there were earthly answers for everything. One conceived of a hypothesis and then tested the theory by employing empirical methods. The universe was conceived of as, not a heavenly realm, but a simple clock, a logical and rational mechanism. Human beings were mere cogs, and insignificant ones at that, in this vast impersonal, soulless, uncaring machine.
The notion of the universe as a gigantic machine reflected the new concern with new technologies that were connected to the Industrial Revolution. Human beings, not God, were in the center of this new universe. The philosophers were confident that God’s mercy, capricious as it was, could be replaced by human reason and rationality. The Enlightenment, in its own way, was based upon a belief system, every bit as powerful as the Christian system that was being phased out. The “faith” of the philosophers was based in Reason. “Dare to reason…Have the courage to use your own minds…is the motto of the Enlightenment,” Kant declared. Reason was the basis of science: one made logical deductions and accepted the inevitable conclusion. If the universe was rational, a machine, then society could also be rational and human beings could come to logical and orderly decisions on their own by reasoning like scientists. Philosophers assumed that there was a rational order of eternal truths and philosophy in the Age of Reason would seek to ground their deductions in universality and transcendence. They also assumed that human beings were perfectly able of recognizing the validity of these truths and that people would act accordingly. Reason was a certain kind of thinking based upon a logical progression from hypothesis to conclusion. It was “self-evident,” a favorite term of the philosophers, that humans would not only accept truths derived from the mechanism of Reason but would also act according to these truths in their everyday lives. The idea that people might act irrationally or counter to their best interests or that they might oppose “self-evident” truths was not an option.
Secular intellectuals believed that the time of Christianity had come and gone and that religion would be replaced by scientific, social and economic Progress. Progress was the logical outcome of the forces of Reason. Progress, the philosophers and scientists assumed, had been impossible when timeless spiritual values dominated society. From the Seventeenth Century, progress was the inevitable product of unstoppable technological advance fueled by scientific discoveries and inventions. The Age of Reason was grounded in an optimism that Progress would improve humanity, now cleansed of superstition. Rational thinking could create a regularized system for living, a system that was logical and produced social order. Rather than explained as a sudden strike from an angry God, natural events were understood as having a scientific explanation. Order came from laws that arose from Nature, not God. These laws were inevitable and irrefutable, or “self-evident” because they were, a priori, logical. French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau based his ideas about the human condition upon a Natural Law could be utilized to resolve conflicts so that humans could come together and freely negotiate a Social Contract.
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Tags: Diderot, Enlightenment, Kant, Reason, Rousseau, Voltaire