# The Enlightenment — Reason against Tradition Canonical URL: https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-philosophy-enlightenment Raw viewer URL: https://content.shipslides.com/d/catalog-philosophy-enlightenment/raw Category: Philosophy Slides: 14 Updated: 2026-05-17T20:55:50.589Z Tags: catalog, philosophy, enlightenment ## Summary 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. ## Slide Outline 1. THE ENLIGHTENMENT 2. Reason against tradition 3. A continent weary of dogma 4. John Locke — the blank slate 5. Voltaire — Écrasez l'infâme 6. Montesquieu — the architecture of liberty 7. The general will 8. Adam Smith — the moral economist 9. Sapere aude 10. L'Encyclopédie · 1751–1772 11. Salons, coffeehouses, correspondence 12. The age of revolutions 13. Counter-currents 14. Further reading & viewing ## Slide Transcript ### Slide 1: 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 2: 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 3: 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 4: 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 5: 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 6: 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 7: 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 8: 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 9: 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. ## Related Decks - [Aesthetics — What Makes a Thing Beautiful?](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-philosophy-aesthetics) - [Greek Philosophy — from Thales to the Stoics](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-philosophy-ancient-greek) - [Eastern Philosophy — The Long Traditions](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-philosophy-eastern) - [Epistemology — What can be known?](https://shipslides.com/d/catalog-philosophy-epistemology)