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The Enlightenment — Reason against Tradition

Of the Age of Lights — A Discourse in XIII Plates

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Of the Age of Lights — A Discourse in XIII Plates Key sections include: THE ENLIGHTENMENT; Reason against tradition; A continent weary of dogma; John Locke — the blank slate; Voltaire — Écrasez l'infâme; Montesquieu — the architecture of liberty; The general will; Adam Smith — the moral economist; Sapere aude; L'Encyclopédie · 1751–1772.

Key sections

  • 01THE ENLIGHTENMENT
  • 02Reason against tradition
  • 03A continent weary of dogma
  • 04John Locke — the blank slate
  • 05Voltaire — Écrasez l'infâme
  • 06Montesquieu — the architecture of liberty
  • 07The general will
  • 08Adam Smith — the moral economist
  • 09Sapere aude
  • 10L'Encyclopédie · 1751–1772
  • 11Salons, coffeehouses, correspondence
  • 12The age of revolutions
  • 13Counter-currents
  • 14Further reading & viewing

Topics covered

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Slide outline
  1. 01THE ENLIGHTENMENT
  2. 02Reason against tradition
  3. 03A continent weary of dogma
  4. 04John Locke — the blank slate
  5. 05Voltaire — Écrasez l'infâme
  6. 06Montesquieu — the architecture of liberty
  7. 07The general will
  8. 08Adam Smith — the moral economist
  9. 09Sapere aude
  10. 10L'Encyclopédie · 1751–1772
  11. 11Salons, coffeehouses, correspondence
  12. 12The age of revolutions
  13. 13Counter-currents
  14. 14Further reading & viewing
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Presentation Transcript

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Slide 01

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

  • Of the Age of Lights — A Discourse in XIII Plates
  • ❦
  • Reason against tradition
  • MDCLXXXV — MDCCCXV · circa 1685 — 1815
  • Press → or click to advance · ← to retreat
Slide 02

A continent weary of dogma

  • Plate II · The Setting
  • A new heaven measured; an old earth at war with itself.
  • By the late seventeenth century, Europe had watched its sky redrawn. Galileo's telescope had cracked the Aristotelian cosmos; Newton's Principia (1687) showed that one mathematics governed apple and moon alike. Nature, it seemed, kept its books in equations.
  • Below that calm sky, the continent was hoarse. The Thirty Years' War (1618–48) had bled the German lands; the Wars of Religion had ended in fatigue rather than truth. If theology could not prove itself by argument or by sword, perhaps a different faculty — reason — might serve as common ground.
  • So began a project: to apply the methods of the new science not only to planets, but to law, to government, to the soul itself.
Slide 03

John Locke — the blank slate

  • Plate III · Anno 1689
  • An Essay Concerning Human Understanding · Two Treatises of Government
  • ❦
  • Against innate ideas Locke proposed the mind as tabula rasa — a blank tablet, written upon by experience. Knowledge is built from sensation and reflection; therefore, by changing what a mind encounters, one changes the person, the citizen, the world.
  • In politics he was equally radical. Government is not divinely imposed but a contract: legitimate only through the consent of the governed, dissolvable when it betrays life, liberty, or property.
  • Plate · Two Treatises
  • "Men being … by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent."
  • — Second Treatise, § 95
Slide 04

Voltaire — Écrasez l'infâme

  • Plate IV · François-Marie Arouet
  • Wit as weapon; tolerance as creed.
  • From exile and from court, Voltaire spent sixty years sharpening reason against superstition. A deist, he honored a clockmaker God but loathed the clergy who claimed His office. He campaigned for religious tolerance (the Calas affair, 1762) and for the dignity of doubt.
  • In Candide (1759) he laughs Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" out of the salon and ends with the only sober conclusion: "Il faut cultiver notre jardin." — we must tend our garden.
  • I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
  • — attributed, in spirit if not in ink
Slide 05

Montesquieu — the architecture of liberty

  • Plate V · De l'esprit des lois · 1748
  • ❦
  • Power, Montesquieu argued, must check power. By dissecting the constitutions of Rome, of England, of the despotic East, he diagnosed liberty's necessary anatomy: legislative, executive, and judicial branches kept distinct, each restraining the others.
  • The doctrine would walk straight out of The Spirit of the Laws and into Philadelphia and Versailles — the geometry of every modern constitution.
Slide 06

The general will

  • Plate VI · Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • Émile (1762) · Du contrat social (1762)
  • Where Locke trusted property and Voltaire trusted lumières, Rousseau trusted neither. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Civilization, he charged, had corrupted a naturally good creature; inequality was the wound that learning could not cleanse.
  • In the Social Contract the cure is collective: legitimate sovereignty rests in the general will — not the sum of private interests, but the people's common good. In Émile, the cure begins earlier, in an education that follows a child's nature rather than crushing it.
  • A romantic, a republican, and — for the philosophes who quarreled with him — an inconvenient conscience.
Slide 07

Adam Smith — the moral economist

  • Plate VII · Edinburgh, 1776
  • ❦
  • Theory of Moral Sentiments · 1759
  • Morality begins in sympathy — our capacity to imagine ourselves into another's place. The "impartial spectator" within us is conscience.
  • Wealth of Nations · 1776
  • The division of labour multiplies output; self-interest, channeled by competition, is led "as if by an invisible hand" toward public benefit.
  • The whole man
  • Smith is no apostle of greed. Markets work only inside a moral order — sympathy, justice, and prudence. Read both books, or neither.
  • A Scottish Enlightenment that paired with Hume, Ferguson, and Hutcheson; reason applied at last to commerce, that most worldly subject, with surprising tenderness.
Slide 08

Sapere aude

  • Plate VIII · Königsberg, 1784
  • "Have courage to use your own understanding."
  • Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.
  • Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.
  • — Immanuel Kant, Was ist Aufklärung?
  • For Kant the question was not what we know, but by what right. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) he asked how the mind itself shapes experience — space, time, and causality as the spectacles through which any world appears.
  • In ethics he put reason at the center again: act only on a maxim you could will to be a universal law. Human beings are ends, not means. The Enlightenment, in Kant, becomes a duty — the duty to think.
Slide 09

L'Encyclopédie · 1751–1772

  • Plate IX · A factory of knowledge
  • Diderot & d'Alembert · 28 volumes · 71,818 articles · 2,885 plates
  • Diderot's grand machine was nothing less than the systematic mapping of human knowledge — from aiguille (needle) to zéroué — written by hundreds of contributors, banned twice, smuggled past censors, and sold by subscription to a curious bourgeoisie.
  • Its plates dignified the artisan: a tanner, a printer, a glassblower drawn with the same care once given to saints. Its cross-references, often impish, undermined Church and Crown by simple proximity.
  • Knowledge as commons; reason as inheritance.
  • Vol. I1751 — Discours préliminaire by d'Alembert
  • 1759Pope Clement XIII places it on the Index
  • Vol. VIIIDiderot continues clandestinely after d'Alembert resigns
  • 1772Last plates printed; the project complete
  • 25,000copies in print before 1789
Slide 10

Salons, coffeehouses, correspondence

  • Plate X · The Republic of Letters
  • A network without nation; a hostess for a parliament.
  • The Salon
  • Hosted by women of wit — Madame Geoffrin, du Deffand, Necker — the Parisian salon staged a different kind of conversation: rank suspended, ideas weighed.
  • The Coffeehouse
  • From Lloyd's in London to the Café Procope in Paris: caffeine, gossip, gazettes, joint-stock prospectuses. Sober places to be seditious.
  • The Letter
  • The République des Lettres ran on postage. Voltaire alone wrote some 20,000 surviving letters — a private internet of footnotes and feuds.
  • Add cheap printing, lending libraries, Masonic lodges, and learned academies, and one has the infrastructure of a public sphere — the place where opinion, for the first time, claimed authority of its own.
Slide 11

The age of revolutions

  • Plate XI · Ideas in the street
  • ❦
  • In Philadelphia, 1776: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Locke's consent, Montesquieu's branches, Smith's commerce — bound into a constitution.
  • In Paris, 1789: the Bastille falls; the National Assembly issues the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Article 1: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights."
  • Reason had become a flag. It would also become, soon enough, a guillotine — a fact later critics would not allow us to forget.
  • REPUB.
  • LIBERA
  • 1776 · American Declaration
  • Jefferson borrows freely from Locke; Franklin, philosophe in Paris, lobbies the salons.
  • 1789 · Déclaration des droits
  • Lafayette drafts with Jefferson's help; reason inscribed in seventeen articles.
Slide 12

Counter-currents

  • Plate XII · The contested legacy
  • Reason itself put on trial.
  • Counter-Enlightenment
  • Burke (1790) on tradition's wisdom; de Maistre on the necessity of throne and altar. Reason without reverence, they warned, eats itself.
  • Romanticism
  • Goethe, Wordsworth, Blake: feeling, imagination, the sublime. The light of reason had cast a long shadow; poetry would walk into it.
  • Postmodern critique
  • Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment; Foucault on power-knowledge; postcolonial writers on universalism's empire.
  • And yet: human rights, science, secular law, public education, free press — the working furniture of any society we recognize as decent — come almost entirely from this two-century quarrel. Contested. Indispensable.
Slide 13

Further reading & viewing

  • Plate XIII · Finis
  • For the candle-lit student.
  • ❦
  • PrimaryLocke, Two Treatises of Government (1689) · Voltaire, Candide (1759) · Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762) · Kant, Was ist Aufklärung? (1784)
  • ReferenceDiderot & d'Alembert, Encyclopédie (1751–72)
  • ModernP. Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation · J. Israel, Radical Enlightenment · A. Pagden, The Enlightenment
  • CritiqueBurke, Reflections on the Revolution in France · Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
  • YouTubeenlightenment philosophy
  • YouTubefrench revolution causes
  • Ainsi finit la leçon. — So ends the lesson.
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