The Enlightenment

1. The Enlightenment

2. The Enlightenment • Age of Reason. The Neo-Classical Period. • Emphasis on the power of the mind. • Turn to Roman past for models. • Change in the traditional social order: New commerce generated new wealth, new social class, new claims on social power. • Importance of the social group and shared values over the individual in 18th century society.

3. Main components • Possibility of the existence, beyond ourselves, of an entirely rational physical and moral universe. • The universe is fundamentally rational, it can be understood through the use of reason alone. • Truth can be arrived at through empirical observation, the use of reason, and systematic doubt. • Human experience is the foundation of human understanding of truth.

4. Main components • Experience preferred over Authority; • All human life, both social and individual, can be understood in the same way the natural world can be understood. • Once understood, human life can be manipulated or engineered in the same way the natural world can be manipulated or engineered. • Human beings can be improved through education and the development of their rational facilities.

5. Public vs. Private Life • Public life mattered more than private life. Designated the realm of government and diplomacy. • Occupations: encouraged oratory, travel, negotiation, exercise of political and economic power. • French "salons“. Gatherings for intellectual conversations. Women presided. • Role of women. They fill subordinate roles. • Women’s role is in the home. • Home life matters less than does public life. • Role of literature - to delight and instruct its readers.

6. Isaac Newton • Order of natural law. • The universe can be explained completely through the use of mathematics. • The universe operates in a completely rational and predictable way. • One need not appeal to religion or theology to explain any aspect of the physical phenomena of the universe. • Universe like a massive clock built by a god and set into motion.

7. Rene Descartes • The mind is the source of individual being. • One’s identity resides in one’s mind. • What you think is more important than the outside physical world. • Doubt everything. Basis of the scientific method. • Truth can be derived at through empirical observation, the use of reason, and systematic doubt.

8. Religion • Religious doctrines have no place in the understanding of the physical and human worlds • Deism: • No longer assumed God’s supervision of human affairs. • Universe created by a rational being, and left it alone. • One and only one God exists. • God endowed the universe with natural moral and physical laws. • Men endowed with rational nature.

9. Religion • Separation of ethics from religion. Ethics understood as a matter of reason. “He that thinks reasonably must think morally. (Samuel Johnson)” • Natural law requires man to lead moral life. The purest form of worship and the chief religious obligation is to lead a moral life. • Although God created the universe, he does not interfere in its day to day running. • Why Deism has not caught on as a major established view of religion?

10. Tolerance • The greatest human crimes, as far as the philosophes were concerned, have been perpetrated in the name of religion and the name of God. • A fair, just, and productive society absolutely depends on religious tolerance. • This means not merely tolerance of varying Christian sects, but tolerance of non-Christian religions as well (for some philosophes ).

11. Other issues • Every human being enters the world with all the same capacities. • Education above all else is responsible for forging the moral and intellectual characters of individuals. Education for every member of society. • This view of education still dominates Western culture to this day. • Human reason can be used to combat ignorance, superstition, tyranny, and dogma, and to build a better world.

12. Ancients vs. Moderns • Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns in England and France: • Value of permanence vs. value of change. Conservative vs. liberal in our time. • Ancients: Greece and Rome established standards applicable for all times and places. • Moderns: The new more valuable than the old. • Our view of the US Constitution?

13. Enlightenment in America • Enlightenment provided the philosophical basis of the American Revolution. • American Revolution was an enlightened concept of government. • Leaders of the American Revolution influenced by English and French Enlightenment. • Emphasis upon liberty, democracy, republicanism and religious tolerance. • Reconcile science and religion, which resulted in a widespread rejection of prophecy and miracles.

14. Enlightenment in America • Preference for Deism. • The God of the Declaration of Independence is the same deist God worshiped by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, not the God of the traditional churches. • Enlightenment thinking in Europe took place in the salons in Paris, the practical application of those ideas was carried out most vividly in the American colonies. • Franklin believed an appeal to reason would provide solutions to all human problems.

15. Enlightenment in America • Jefferson supported the separation of church and state. • Jefferson believed educating people was a good way to establish an organized society. • "A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical...It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government."