Being Critical of Enlightenment Triumphalism Isn’t Always Wrong

“Having considered the evidence, it seems more accurate to say that the Enlightenment project presented itself as a savior from ignorance and poverty but was really a movement to dethrone the old social order rooted in hierarchies and aristocracies.”

There is a comforting narrative among centrists of the Pinkerian sort that in the 18th century, Europe saw the light of Reason burst upon the darkness of the land, passing over the water and illuminating the huddled masses toiling in poverty and penury. The Enlightenment is held up as the intellectual, decentralized savior of mankind as such, enabling first Europe and then the world to face down the forces of religious obscurantism. As the story goes, it also set in motion the wheels of Progress, driving forward a philosophical, political, social, scientific, and cultural awakening that brought the material and moral fruits of modernity to increasing numbers of people. Any dissent from this view is therefore seen as philosophical, social, and ultimately moral backsliding into darkness. For the Enlightenment’s defenders, any critics of this sacred secular movement deserve anathematization and cancellation. The only thing is that the Enlightenment claims too much for itself, was less original in its use of reason than its fans claim, and criticism of it is not always wrong.

Definition

First, what is the Enlightenment? This is not a simple question, and there are differing streams of thought about what, when, or where the Enlightenment took place. The historian Dorinda Outram claims a global reach for the Enlightenment from the beginning, while Jonathan Israel views the Enlightenment’s end by the 1740s. In his recent book The War on the West, Douglas Murray argues that the Enlightenment “produced a flourishing in politics, sciences, and the arts” and was “the movement, or set of movements, that occurred across Europe around the eighteenth century and saw some of the greatest leaps forward in human history, providing, among other things, the philosophical bases for the principles of toleration, the utility of reason, and the separation of church and state.” Going further back, Peter Gay argued in his magisterial two–volume treatise that, “the Enlightenment was united on a vastly ambitious program, a program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom.” Finally, and moving back to today, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states:

“the Enlightenment is conceived broadly. D’Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as ‘the century of philosophy par excellence,’ because of the tremendous intellectual and scientific progress of the age, but also because of the expectation of the age that philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes the natural and social sciences) would dramatically improve human life. Guided by D’Alembert’s characterization of his century, the Enlightenment is conceived here as having its primary origin in the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. The rise of the new science progressively undermines not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos, but also the set of presuppositions that had served to constrain and guide philosophical inquiry in the earlier times. The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world promotes philosophy from a handmaiden of theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles. Taking as the core of the Enlightenment the aspiration for intellectual progress, and the belief in the power of such progress to improve human society and individual lives, this entry includes descriptions of relevant aspects of the thought of earlier thinkers, such as Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Bayle, Leibniz, and Spinoza, thinkers whose contributions are indispensable to understanding the eighteenth century as ‘the century of philosophy par excellence.’”