Introducing the Enlightenment - Lloyd Spencer

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Let There Be Light...

during the course of the 18th century

Centred in Paris

The Radiance of the Absolute Monarchs

The Enlightenment spoke French, literally its lingua franca. Anything published in French was immediately accessible to educated society all over Europe. Important works not originally written in French were soon translated into the universal language. Across the world “men of letters” declared themselves to be the disciples of French writers

Paris, the Capital of the Enlightenment

This was as true for David Hume and Adam Smith from Scotland as it was for Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson from the American colonies, or Cesare Beccaria from Milan. They knew they had “arrived” when they were accepted in the salons of Paris.

Beginnings of the Light

For much of the 17th century, Holland was the most liberal country in Europe. Amsterdam provided a refuge for freethinkers and religious dissidents of all kinds

England’s “Glorious Revolution”

Continued resistance to James II’s pro-Catholic activities caused the English parliament to invite the Dutch Protestant, William III of Orange (1650–1702) and his English wife Mary II (1662–94), to take over the English throne. They sailed from Holland and did so in the bloodless – hence “Glorious” – Revolution of 1688

established the sovereignty of the English parliament and gave England a “Bill of Rights

An Age of Revolutions

The two great cosmopolitan capitals, Paris and London, both grew dramatically during the 18th century. But England’s commercial muscle meant that London progressed much more.

Coffee-houses, Social Clubs and Journalism

Coffee-houses were the focal point of intellectual life in London. By 1740, there were more than 400 in the area of Westminster alone

Locke’s “Tabula Rasa”

John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).

Locke’s tabula rasa dogma that there are no “innate” ideas and that all knowledge is derived from experience.

Locke’s empiricism distinguished two different kinds of experience: external sensation and internal reflection.

The Language of the Self

Pierre Coste, who in 1700 translated Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, inserted a note to explain why he translated Locke’s term “consciousness” by the French conscience

The English word is consciousness ... In French we do not have, in my opinion, any words but sentiment & conviction which answer, in any significant way, to this idea

Understanding the Limits of Our Understanding

Locke launched a devastating critique of the schoolman’s “curious and unexplainable Web of perplexed Words” and set in motion the mapping out of a new continent of the interior.

We should observe how our ideas are formed and how they combine, one with another, and how the memory retains them

Psychology and the Novel

By the time Laurence Sterne (1713–68) was writing The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Locke’s Essay had infiltrated literary consciousness in a way quite unlike that of any other “philosophical” book.

Tristram Shandy

It is a history-book ... of what passes in a man’s own mind; and if you will say so much of the book, and no more, believe me, you will cut no contemptible figure in a metaphysical circle.

Locke’s Social Influence

The “ideas” of Locke had become one of the indispensable “properties” of the fashionable intelligentsia.

Fictions in the Service of Truth

The novel was uniquely suited to an age when an individual might make his or her own way in the world. An increasingly informed and curious readership awaited tales which were experimental and exemplary. Received ideas are put to the test of experience; literary conventions are measured against the imperatives of a disorderly reality. Characteristically, the Enlightenment novel focuses on a single individual and monitors the impact of an unpredictable world on that person’s experience.

The Adventures of ...

In many of these novels, we come upon the main character engaged in the midst of some moral dilemma or problem. Often we learn of each move they make, each impulse they suffer, through the spontaneous letters they write.

Philosophers’ Novels

some of the great novels of the age were written by its most important philosophers. The biggest bestseller of the 18th century was La Nouvelle Héloïse by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes and Voltaire’s Candide

Like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, but on a smaller scale, these tales are “thought experiments”.

Candide

In his novel Candide, or Optimism (1759), Voltaire satirized not only optimism but all forms of system, from Leibniz’s metaphysical one to the colonial and Church systems, and indeed the system of logic itself

The novel ends only when Candide has finally grasped that work is more profitable than vain speculation

Novels of the Enlightenment

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) was one of the first to earn his living by freelance writing. His more than 500 published works include political and religious journalism. In 1704, while employed as a government agent, he started his own newspaper, The Review. Journalism is the basis for some major works like A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Defoe was nearly 60 when he wrote his first work of fiction, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

technique of the epistolary novel was satirized by Henry Fielding (1707–54) in his Shamela

The bestselling work of fiction in late 18th century France was Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Héloïse (1761), an epistolary novel about the tribulations of frustrated love, which encouraged the fashion for sentimentality and excited “sensibility”. Dangerous Liaisons (1782) by Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803) tells the story of two unscrupulous seducers in subtle letters full of irony. The New Justine (1797), a novel by the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), is a revised and expanded version of his Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (1779), a detailed expression of sexual sadism, and was meant to evoke echoes of Rousseau’s title.

The Idea of the Noble Savage

In 1767, the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville (1729–1811) arrived in Tahiti. In 1769, Captain Cook (1728–79) stayed there four months to observe the transit of Venus. Bougainville, as a follower of Rousseau, found in the Tahitians all the qualities of the “noble savage”.

Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage used the perspective of the “innocent eye” of the Tahitian to highlight the strangeness of customs and manners considered “normal”. Soon the brightest wits of Paris and London were beginning to ask whether the word “civilization” was not more appropriate to the uncorrupted islanders of the South Seas than to the exceptionally corrupt society of 18th century Europe

The Persian Letters

Montesquieu (1689–1755

In 1721 he published (anonymously in Holland) what was to become one of the most influential anti-Establishment works of the 18th century, the Lettres Persanes (Persian Letters). The book consists of a series of letters written by two Persians, Usbek and Ricca, during their residence in Paris, and their travels in Europe, to a variety of correspondents at home. The Persians have set out on their version of the Grand Tour.

in ordinary novels, digressions are permissible only when they themselves form a new story ... But in using the letter form, in which neither the choice of characters, nor the subjects discussed, have to fit in with any preconceived intentions or plans, the author has taken advantage of the fact that he can include philosophy, politics, and moral discourse with the novel, and can connect everything together with a secret chain which remains, as it were, invisible.”

Montesquieu was able to make fun of the pillars of the Establishment, such as the church hierarchy

When the ecclesiastical authorities expressed their outrage, Montesquieu was able to say that the Persians simply displayed their ignorance.

Voltaire Flees to England

Voltaire was also notorious for satirical poems and lampoons of all kinds, and he spent nearly a year in the Bastille in 1717. Voltaire was impudent enough to challenge an aristocrat, the Chevalier de Rohan, to a duel

Letters on England

His Letters Concerning the English Nation, first published in England in 1733, appeared in France as Lettres Philosophiques (Philosophical Letters) the following year. I used the English model to attack the French system, French failings and abuses.

Voltaire’s Letters have been described as “the first bomb hurled against the Ancien Régime”. Surreptitious editions of the book appeared in France. Voltaire’s arrest was ordered. The book was officially burned and its sale absolutely forbidden

Voltaire on Religion in England

Voltaire’s book on the English begins with four letters “On the Quakers”. He was attracted by their simple, undogmatic ethos and their practical embodiment of spiritual and moral values. Although he pokes gentle fun at them, Voltaire was clearly deeply impressed by the fact that the Quaker faith was not dominated by a priesthood

Freedom of Conscience and the Commercial Spirit

Always a shrewd businessman and speculator, Voltaire was able to make enough money from his business ventures to ensure his intellectual independence and to finance a glittering lifestyle. “Commerce, which has enriched English citizens, has helped to make them free, and this freedom in its turn has extended commerce, and that has made the greatness of the nation.”

On Parliament

The English nation is the only one on earth which has succeeded in controlling the power of kings by resisting them, which by effort after effort has at last established this wise system of government in which the prince, all-powerful for doing good, has his hands tied for doing evil

Mr Shipping began his speech in the House of Commons with these words: The majesty of the English people would be hurt

The Patron Saints of the Enlightenment

three Englishmen: Francis Bacon, John Locke and Isaac Newton

The Father of Experimental Philosophy

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the English statesman and philosopher, widely acknowledged as the “father of experimental philosophy”

Bacon represented the divisions of knowledge as the branches of a tree. The main branches of this “tree of knowledge” were derived from the three main faculties of the mind: memory, imagination and reason.

John Locke’s Politics

The consent of the people is the sole basis of a government’s authority. Governments have no other duties beyond those for which they were first instituted: the preservation of life, liberty and property