Age of Enlightenment 启蒙运动

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Age of Enlightenment 启蒙运动

The Age of Enlightenment, or simply The Enlightenment, is a term ud to describe

a time in Western philosophy and cultural life, centered upon the eighteenth century,

in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority.

[1]

Developing more or less simultaneously in Germany, France, Great Britain, the

Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, the movement spread through much of

Europe, including the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia and Scandinavia as

well as the United States. It could be argued that the signatories of the American

Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration

of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of

May 3, 1791, were motivated by "Enlightenment" principles.

A Historiographical Overview

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Enlightenment historiography draws its origins from the period itlf, from what

"Enlightenment figures" thought about themlves. Although their opinions naturally

varied, a dominant element was the intellectual angle they took. D'Alembert's

Preliminary Discour of l'Encyclopédie provides a history of the Enlightenment

which compris a chronological list of developments in the realm of knowledge – of

which the Encyclopédie forms the pinnacle.

[79]

A more philosophical example of this

was the 1783 essay contest (in itlf an activity typical of the Enlightenment)

announced by the Berlin newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift, which asked that very

question: “What is Enlightenment?” Jewish philosopher Mos Mendelssohn was

among tho who responded, referring to Enlightenment as a process by which man

was educated in the u of reason.

[80]

Immanuel Kant also wrote a respon,

referring to Enlightenment as “man's relea from his lf-incurred tutelage”,

tutelage being “man's inability to make u of his understanding without direction

from another”.

[81]

This intellectual model of interpretation has been adopted by

many historians since the eighteenth century, and is perhaps the most commonly

ud interpretation today.

Dorinda Outram provides a good example of a standard, intellectual definition of the

Enlightenment:

“Enlightenment was a desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality rather than by

faith, superstition, or revelation; a belief in the power of human reason to change society

and liberate the individual from the restraints of custom or arbitrary authority; all backed up

by a world view increasingly validated by science rather than by religion or tradition.”

As a historical period, it is bounded by the lives of two great philosophers: Gottfried

Wilhem Leibniz (1646–1716) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

[82]

Like the French Revolution, the Enlightenment has “long been hailed as the

foundation of modern Western political and intellectual culture”.

[83]

Not surprisingly

then, it has been frequently linked to the Revolution of 1789. However, as Roger

Chartier points out, it was perhaps the Revolution that “invented the Enlightenment

by attempting to root its legitimacy in a corpus of texts and founding authors

reconciled and united ... by their preparation of a rupture with the old world”.

[84]

In

other words, the revolutionaries elevated to heroic status tho philosophers, such

as Voltaire and Rousau, who could be ud to justify their radical break with the

Old Regime. In any ca, two nineteenth-century historians of the Enlightenment,

Hippolyte Taine and Alexis de Tocqueville, did much to solidly this link of

Enlightenment causing revolution and the intellectual perception of the

Enlightenment itlf.

In his l Régime (1876), Hippolyte Taine traced the roots of the French Revolution

back to French Classicism. However, this was not without the help of the “scientific

view of the world *of the Enlightenment+”, which wore down the “monarchical and

religious dogma of the old regime”.

[85]

In other words then, Taine was only

interested in the Enlightenment insofar as it advanced scientific discour and

transmitted what he perceived to be the intellectual legacy of French classicism.

Alexis de Tocqueville painted a more elaborate picture of the Enlightenment in

L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1850). For de Tocqueville, the Revolution was the

inevitable result of the radical opposition created in the eighteenth century between

the monarchy and the men of letters of the Enlightenment. The men of letters

constituted a sort of “substitute aristocracy that was both all-powerful and without

real power”. This illusory power came from the ri of “public opinion”, born when

absolutist centralization removed the nobility and the bourgeosie from the political

sphere. The “literary politics” that resulted promoted a discour of equality and was

hence in fundamental opposition to the monarchical regime.

[86]

From a historiographical point of view, de Tocqueville prents an interesting ca.

He was primarily concerned with the workings of political power under the Old

Regime and the philosophical principles of the men of letters. However, there is a

distinctly social quality to his analysis. In the words of Chartier, de Tocqueville

“clearly designates ... the cultural effects of transformation in the forms of the

exerci of power”.

[87]

Nevertheless, for a rious cultural approach, one has to wait

another century for the work of historians such as Robert Darnton (The Business of

Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800 – published in

1979).

In the meantime, though, intellectual history remained the dominant

historiographical trend. Ernst Cassirer is a perfect example, writing in his The

Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932 – English translation 1951) that the

Enlightenment was “ a part and a special pha of that whole intellectual

development through which modern philosophic thought gained its characteristic

lf-confidence and lf-consciousness”. Borrowing from Kant, he states that

Enlightenment was/is the process by which the spirit “achieves clarity and depth in

its understanding of its own nature and destiny, and of its own fundamental

character and mission”.

[88]

In short, the Enlightenment was a ries of philosophical,

scientific and otherwi intellectual developments that took place mostly in the

eighteenth century – the birthplace of intellectual modernity.

Only in the 1970s did interpretation of the Enlightenment allow for a more

heterogeneous and even extra-European vision. A. Owen Aldridge demonstrated

how Enlightenment ideas spread to Spanish colonies and how they interacted with

indigenous cultures, while Franco Venturi explored how the Enlightenment took

place in normally unstudied areas – Italy, Greece, the Balkans, Poland, Hungary, and

Russia.

[89]

More than any other, however it is Robert Darnton who most radically changed

Enlightenment historiography.

[citation needed]

Consider, for example, the following

citation from The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982) :

“Perhaps the Enlightenment was a more down-to-earth affair than the rarefied climate of

opinion described by textbook writers, and we should question the overly highbrow, overly

metaphysical view of intellectual life in the eighteenth century.”

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Indeed, in this book, Darnton examines the underbelly of the French book industry in

the eighteenth century, examining the world of book smuggling and the lives of

tho writers (the “Grub Street Hacks”) who never met the success of their

philosophe cousins. In short, rather than concerning himlf with Enlightenment

canon, Darnton studies “what Frenchmen wanted to read”, and who wrote,

published and distributed it.

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Similarly, in The Business of Enlightenment. A

Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800, Darnton states that there is no

need to further study the encyclopedia itlf, as “the book has been analyzed and

anthologized dozen of times: to recapitulate all the studies of its intellectual content

would be redundant”.

[92]

He instead, as the title of the book suggests, examines the

social conditions that brought about the production of the Encyclopédie. This is

reprentative of the social interpretation as a whole – an examination of the social

conditions that brought about Enlightenment ideas rather than a study of the ideas

themlves.

The work of Jürgen Habermas was central to this emerging social interpretation,

although his minal work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

(published under the title Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit in 1962) was only

translated into English in 1989. The book outlines the creation of the “bourgeois

public sphere” in eighteenth century Europe. Esntially, this public sphere describes

the new venues and modes of communication allowing for rational exchange that

appeared in the eighteenth century. Habermas argued that the public sphere was

bourgeois, egalitarian, rational, and independent from the state, making it the ideal

venue for intellectuals to critically examine contemporary politics and society, away

from the interference of established authority.

Habermas's work, though influential, has come under criticism on all fronts. While

the public sphere is generally an integral component of social interpretations of the

Enlightenment, numerous historians have brought into question whether the public

sphere was bourgeois, oppositional to the state, independent from the state, or

egalitarian.

[93]

The historiographical developments have done much to open up the study of

Enlightenment to a multiplicity of interpretations. In A Social History of Truth (1994),

for example, Steven Shapin makes the largely sociological argument that, in

venteenth-century England, the mode of sociability known as civility became the

primary discour of truth; for a statement to have the potential to be considered

true, it had to be expresd according to the rules of civil society.

Feminist interpretations have also appeared, with Dena Goodman being one notable

example. In The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment

(1994), Goodman argues that many women in fact played an esntial part in the

French Enlightenment, due to the role they played as salonnières in Parisians salons.

The salons “became the civil working spaces of the project of Enlightenment” and

women, as salonnières, were “the legitimate governors of *the+ potentially unruly

discour” that took place within.

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On the other hand, Carla Hes, in The Other

Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (2001), argues that “female

participation in the public cultural life of the Old Regime was ... relatively

marginal”.

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It was instead the French Revolution, by destroying the old cultural and

economic restraints of patronage and corporatism (guilds), that opened French

society to female participation, particularly in the literary sphere.

All this is not to say that intellectual interpretations no longer exist. Jonathan Israel,

for example, in Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the

Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752 (2006), constructs an argument that is primarily

intellectual in scope. Like many historians before him, he ts the Enlightenment

within the context of the French Revolution to follow. Israel argues that only an

intellectual interpretation can adequately explain the radical break with Old Regime

society.

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