Reconstructing the Enlightenment - Essay Example

Reconstructing the Enlightenment Introduction Describing the Enlightenment has been traditionally a simple task. It was a cluster of French thinkers who alongside several inquisitive foreign tourists convened in Paris in the latter part of the eighteenth century to discuss and to write about means of developing the world. While the issues they talked about were numerous and diverse, they explained and communicated a common set of principles, famous among which were tolerance, freedom, liberty, humanity, and reason. In other words, the Enlightenment happened in a particular place and time, was characterized by a specific group of individuals, and was identified by particular concepts and insights. However, over the past three decades scholars have challenged almost all of these beliefs. The Enlightenment has been expanded outside France and from then on has been related to a broader array of intellectual concerns than those which created the foundation of the salons of Paris. Yet more attention has been given to noting down its social history, to determining the roles served by its publishers, to discussing its implication for women, and to expanding our awareness of its cultural and institutional milieus. As expected, the outcome of all this effort has been debates, to the extent where a large number of scholars currently attempt to find out whether it is valuable to keep on thinking in terms of an exclusive Enlightenment; and even scholars who remain eager to speak of the Enlightenment as an entirety perform so in a traditional and broad manner. Such a conflict between modern scholarly insight and conventional beliefs is apparently to be located in several disciplines of history. However, the dilemma appears specifically severe in the Enlightenment case. Different Enlightenment Assumptions Peter Gay, in his article Overture: The Enlightenment in its World, sums up the insights of the prominent thinkers and how they transformed humanity and the world. This article is a fusion and he starts with the link between the thinkers of the eighteenth century and the thinkers of the classical era. The thinkers of the Enlightenment, vigorous in the latter part of the eighteenth century, had an attachment to the periods of Greece and Rome, but sensed the current developments in science, the pursuit for scientific or empirical evidence, had permitted their own period to replace the achievements of the grand classical theorists. While the classical philosophers motivated the thinkers of the Enlightenment, these modern generations of philosophers were in general resentful of religion and they aimed to challenge it, to defy and to topple the philosophical ideas of the Christian and Hebrew philosophers who they perceived as their symbolic rivals in the war between faith and reason. Gay is an interesting author with a skill in combining a wide array of material. In this article he carefully sums up the work of the great philosophers: “… the philosophes wrote history with rage and with partisanship, and their very passion allowed them to penetrate into regions hitherto inaccessible to historical explorers. Yet it also made them condescending and oddly parochial: their sense of the past merged all too readily with their sense of the present” (Gay 1966, 13). Even though the philosophers’ perception of history was cynical and argumentative, they view the world “divided between ascetic superstitious enemies of the flesh, and men who affirmed life, the body, knowledge, and generosity; between mythmakers and realists, priests and philosophers” (Gay 1966, 18). The article of Gay thoroughly illustrates a period, the disagreements between philosophers of the enlightenment and history, their spheres of conflict and agreement and, their struggles with the debased Church of the period. Gay emphasizes how the thinkers made use of the intellect and education of the Christians against them. The period of the Enlightenment is not philosophy’s history, summing up the effort of each grand thinker, but a history of the manner that the insights and the conflict emerged in the era. In this article, Gay discusses the grand philosophes, such as Bentham, Lock, Rousseau, and others, synthesizing them in a sound description. He finishes the article with a useful bibliographical piece which will assist those who desire to do additional reading about the subject matter. Carefully written, in decisive, definite writing style, the article is a thorough and polished explanation of the individuals and insights that offered us the promise and blight of modernity. On the other hand, Immanuel Kant, in his article An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment have concentrated on religious issues in introducing his major argument regarding Enlightenment, such as the emergence of man from predetermined irresponsibility, initially because our leaders are not interested in taking over the part of their subordinates’ protectors with regard to the sciences and arts, and subsequently because that type of irresponsibility is both the most destructive and humiliating of all. However the way of thinking of a ruler who prefers spiritual enlightenment goes far beyond, because he believes that there is no threat to his law-making powers in permitting his subordinates to exercise reason openly and to introduce to the world their ideas regarding superior creations of his policies, although this requires straightforward criticism of laws presently in force. According to Kant, only a head of state who is enlightened and has not fear of darkness, but who at the same time has a trained, large army to sustain civil order, can declare what no nation may have the guts to do so, specifically: “Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!” (Kant 1784, 1) At this point away, when things are taken into account in wide-ranging standpoint, an unusual, surprising trend in human relations exposes itself, one where in virtually everything is ironic. A higher extent of civil liberty appears profitable to a population’s religious liberty; but the previously instituted impenetrable borders for the latter; on the other hand, a lesser extent of civil liberty offers sufficient room for all completely to improve their talents. Hence, “once nature has removed the hard shell from this kernel for which she has most fondly cared, (Kant 1784, 1)” specifically, the tendency to and art for liberal or enlightened thinking, the ‘kernel’ slowly responses on a population’s way of thinking, and it eventually even inspires the ideologies of states, which discovers that it can gain by treating individuals, who are presently greater than instruments, in harmony with their self-respect. On another level, David Bebbington, in his articles Preaching the Gospel: The Nature of Evangelical Religion and Knowledge of the Lord: The Early Evangelical Movement, claimed that there are a number of senses where in the concept ‘evangelical’ is applied nowadays as the world goes into the new millennium. One is to view all Christians as ‘evangelical’ who verify several major principles and practical ideas. Bebbington talks about evangelicalism from this point of view and emphasizes particular characteristics of evangelical religion: (1) crucicentrism, an emphasis on the Christ’s death on the cross; (2) Biblicism, a specific consideration of the Bible; (3) activism, an account of the gospel; and (4) conversionism, the conviction that lives have to be transformed (Bebbington 1992). Another sense is to view ‘evangelicalism as a natural set of activities and religious practices. Within this point of view ‘evangelical’ implies a method as much as a group of ideas. Consequently, populations as different as Southern Baptists, Catholic charismatics, Mennonites and Pentecostals, Dutch Reformed Churches, and black Baptists all belong to the evangelical sphere—explaining merely how varied the campaign actually is. The last sense of the concept is as the self-attributed name for a group that emerged during World War II. This coalition surfaced as a response against the believed argumentative, nationalist, and anti-intellectual character of the traditionalist campaign in the 1920s and 1930s. Significantly, its central figures, such as Billy Graham and Harold John Ockenga, foundations, such as Wheaton College, and associations, like the National Association of Evangelicals and Youth for Christ, have served a major function in providing the broader campaign a sense of solidarity that expands outside these ‘card-carrying evangelicals’ (Bebbington 1992, 63). Lastly, Jonathan Israel, in his article Early Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Modern Age, has formed an interesting claim on the side of the argument that philosophical assumptions form, or at least facilitate the formation of, human history. Nevertheless, what insights does he refer to? Israel introduces a particular group of concepts: “toleration, personal freedom, democracy, equality racial and sexual, freedom of expression, sexual emancipation, and the universal right to knowledge and ‘enlightenment’” (Israel 2006, 11), and claims that these are at the core of what determines our structure of contemporary Western principles. Simultaneously, he argues that we are indebted to these concepts wholly to a cluster of early modern liberal philosophers, who originally justified them based on a synthesis of anti-totalitarian and nonbeliever points of view directly connected to the ideas of Spinoza. However, Israel falls short in verifying either of these final arguments, even though it does merit drawing the attention of scholars and the public. Discussion and Conclusions The breadth, depth, and richness of old and current accounts of the Enlightenment make any effort to go back to the conventional perspective of it implausible. However if the consequences of this effort are to divide the Enlightenment into independent local components, dispossess it of intellectual characteristic, and trim it down to a tradition of sociability, can any exclusive explanation of the Enlightenment be formed? A large number of scholars would be indifferent, even bewildered, by the issue: an unconcerned pluralism emerges normally to the open-minded who are interested in the Enlightenment, and is engaged in the trendy contemporary ideas. The authors discussed above boldly makes a virtue of the challenge, preferring to illustrate the period of the Enlightenment as a sequence of disagreements, assuming diverse forms in various cultural and national settings, instead of a one-dimensional occurrence whose insights were produced by specific philosophers. With sections dedicated to science, gender and the foreign and also the social setting, state and religion, the outcome is a remarkable collection of the Enlightenment of contemporary erudition. If such a reinterpretation is to be carried out, it could be along these lines: first, the physical expansion of the Enlightenment does not have to result in its breakup. The power of an account of the Enlightenment as an exclusive intellectual campaign within the Old World is that its followers not merely had common purposes and interests, but were willing to communicate these to others, and of disseminating them beyond linguistic borders and obstacles. The skill to accomplish this was not out of the ordinary. The philosophers of the Enlightenment made their communication more challenging by making use of the lingua franca instead of Latin. However, it is possible that the Enlightenment required more contributors, and expanded outside the Old World, from Russia to the New World, than any earlier intellectual campaign not traditionally advocated by the churches. This aware form of participation in the Enlightenment was cultivated in a number of ways. Paris served a major function as an international hub, drawing in intellectually oriented guests and providing those who are unable to travel an instance of exhaustive discussion of latest knowledge. Nevertheless, the development of the printing press, the prevalent skill to understand French, and the growing regularity of conversion from one lingua franca into another made the ideas and the literature on the Enlightenment accessible to a much bigger audience. References Bebbington, David. “Preaching the Gospel: The Nature of Evangelical Religion”, “Knowledge of the Lord: The Early Evangelical Movement.” Bebbington, David. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992. 1-4, 50-74. Gay, Peter. "Oversture: The Enlightenment in its World." Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment, An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1966. 3-27. Israel, Jonathan. “Early Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Modern Age.” Israel, Jonathan. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 3-15, 26-42. Kant, Immanuel. “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html, 1784. Read More