HIST 102 #18 - The Enlightenment

Hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. Our topic today will be the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, in the 18th century.

We talked a little bit about politics during the 18th century and warfare, and now we want to talk about the Enlightenment. Basically, what this means, Dr. Bell, of course, will give this lecture on the Enlightenment, and he will give you more details. But basically, the Enlightenment means that people felt the universe could be understood, and it could be governed by natural and not supernatural forces. A lot of the superstitions of the 17th century, people started realizing that there were natural explanations for these things.

The Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment in the 18th century, subjected the, uh, not only politics but religion as well, to reason and to trying to be understood. Sometimes there are things that we simply cannot understand, but it, the people here in the 18th century tried to do so. Also, that the scientific method, the, the first Scientific Revolution that we've already discussed in a previous lecture, could answer all questions. In other words, everything could be understood. And another premise of the Enlightenment, that humans, the human race, could be educated and it could be improved. There's hope for us, according to the 18th century Enlightenment.

Now, we can actually see the roots of the Enlightenment in that Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. One, I guess you maybe want to call him a Godfather, okay, you could call him that, a grandfather of the Enlightenment, was a man named John Locke. He, of course, is also very important to American history. John Locke is, um, he believed that environment was a big factor in determining, uh, that you're basically a blank slate when you're born, and it's your environment that kind of shapes you as a person. So if he felt that if say, aristocrats could have better training, then they could, um, be actually better than others with their environment and with their training. Um, he also felt, John Locke, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or pursuit of property, eventually Thomas Jefferson is the pursuit of happiness.

Another Godfather, I guess, grandfather, you could say, of the Enlightenment, that lived in the 17th century, was a man named Isaac Newton. Remember Newton trying to explain, uh, he tries to give the, the universe a picture of an orderly universe that could be understood by applying reason. So we're starting to see the roots of what is known as the Enlightenment in the 18th century, beginning to start with some of these men like John Locke, like Sir Isaac Newton.

Religion, a lot of enlightened thinkers or philosophes, or philosophers, either way, felt that there, there was probably a God. So we're not talking atheist here, but that they believe these Enlightenment thinkers, called deism, that God was not, uh, didn't interfere in the affairs of mankind. Um, so, you know, prayers and miracles, they didn't really believe in that, because if God doesn't interfere, then well, how can you have a miracle? And why would you pray if God doesn't interfere? Uh, uh, deism was mostly what they adhered to. So that God existed, but that he had created this perfect universe that they just have to understand by applying reason, and he no longer took an active interest in it.

Now, the Enlightenment that takes place in Europe in the 18th century, or the 1700s, will affect the United States. Will affect America. A lot of our founding fathers were read these enlightened, enlightened thinkers, and, um, they were part of this environment of the 18th century. So obviously, it has a very profound effect on the development of the United States as well.

All right, so, uh, probably Dr. Bell will talk about different Enlightenment, uh, thinkers, philosophers, or philosophs of the time. Men like Montesquieu. Montesquieu is also important to the United States because he believed in a separation of power. His Spirit of the Laws, he wrote in 1748, and he, of course, admired English government. He admired the monarchy and the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and he felt like they, they were, uh, a good separation of power. And as you know, when the United States formed its government in the 18th century, that we, of course, our founding fathers felt it extremely important to have a balance and a separation of power, and Montesquieu, of course, is very important to that as well.

Uh, you'll learn more about that. Voltaire, very famous enlightened philosopher. Voltaire from France. He was extremely interesting. He, uh, had to flee France at one time because he didn't hold his words, so to speak. He was arrested at one time as well and put in the Bastille, a very famous prison, known, made famous with the French Revolution, the storming of the Bastille, another lecture, of course, because he criticized the government. That still wasn't a great thing to do. Voltaire and criticizing the French government, he eventually makes his way to England, and he also, like Montesquieu, is impressed with the English form of government. And in fact, Voltaire was like, also a critic of the French Church. He thought it was a church of privilege and that it persecuted dissent.

Uh, we'll learn more about Voltaire. Some other enlightened philosophers you may learn about, Diderot. Denis Diderot published the Encyclopedia. There was a Scottish philosopher by the name of David Hume. Adam Smith is another very important figure here in the 18th century, also because he's Scottish. He's a Scottish economist, and he will also influence the United States. He wrote a book in 1776, uh, called The Wealth of Nations, very most, some say it was the most important economic work of the Enlightenment period. He believed in laissez-faire, which means leave things alone, no changing economics. He opposed government intervention, um, and he believed that the states should intervene and help when it came to schools and armies and roads and and police, canals, that kind of thing. But as far as business is concerned, Adam Smith believed in laissez-faire, leave it alone, government should not interfere in that.

Oh, you'll probably hear about Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau from France. He had, he was an interesting figure as well, relied more on emotion and not so much reason in his, his thinking. So learn more about him as well. So those are just a few of the different Enlightenment thinkers that are very prominent during the 18th century.

So let's learn about a few of those. In 1784, Emanuel Kant, the great German philosopher, entered a competition that a newspaper had launched with the title being, "What is The Enlightenment?" In the 1700s, the term Enlightenment had been used quite a bit to describe the age in which everyone was living, but the term had been used so much, not everyone knew exactly what it meant. What did it mean to live in the Enlightenment? Well, Emanuel Kant wrote an essay that he submitted to the newspaper in this competition, and he actually won the competition. Perhaps it's not surprising, he's the great German philosopher, after all. But his answer was fairly short. Answer: "The Enlightenment consists in Having the Courage to Know." What I'm going to talk about today is Kant's answer to that question, "What is The Enlightenment?" and give some historical background to the Enlightenment and some of the key figures in the period. That is primarily the 18th century, but I'm going to begin not with Kant. I'm going to go back actually into the 17th century and begin with Rene Descartes.

Descartes is probably more known as a rationalist, and that's an important thing to know because the Enlightenment is also known as The Age of Reason. So if you look it up online, you'll see the Enlightenment, and it'll also be known as The Age of Reason. And Descartes is generally signaled as the first important philosopher of the modern tradition, or of modern philosophy. And there's one big reason for that, and the main reason for that is that he criticized authority. And by authority, I mean the authority of traditional philosophy. And, and in the 1600s, when Descartes was writing, that meant Aristotle. And Aristotle's philosophy had been, prior to the 1600s, the dominant philosophical tradition of the time. In fact, most philosophers prior to the 17th century simply referred to Aristotle as "The Philosopher" with a capital P. So if you said, "I'm reading The Philosopher," everyone would know you were reading Aristotle. And so if Aristotle said it, it had to be true. And, and so that's the sense in which Aristotle's authority was so dominant that no other philosophers could even basically challenge the legitimacy of, of the Aristotelian worldview.

But by the early 1600s, this began to be chipped away. A number of people began to question some of the assumptions that Aristotle made, and the scientific tradition, or the Scientific Revolution, as it's also come to be known, got started here as well. I'll give one well-known example to clarify how this sort of break with the Aristotelian worldview happened. One of the things that Aristotle claimed was that an object in motion will come back to rest. It was an object's natural state for Aristotle is at rest. So if you throw a ball down a field, what's going to happen? It will eventually come to rest. And so Aristotle would say, well, that's the natural state of things, at rest. So an object in motion will come to rest. Well, as all of you know who've taken physics, an object in motion will stay in motion. That notion of inertia. And Galileo formulated that idea as part of his theory that the Earth moves, which many people thought was ludicrous. So you look around, it doesn't look like the Earth is moving, but he argued, yes, yes, it is. And, uh, many people said, well, if the Earth is moving, then we should see things flying all over the place. If the Earth is moving, and he goes, well, let's do an experiment. And so he got on a carriage with some skeptics, and as the carriage was moving, he dropped a ball, and the ball fell straight down in the carriage. And he says, now, what do you think a person outside the carriage would see? And they wouldn't see the ball fall straight down. And so his point was that if someone was outside Earth watching the Earth move, everything, including the Earth and everything on it, would move. But from those on the Earth, things would fall straight down.

This was, as I said, an example of one of the ways in which Aristotle's traditional views began to be, um, challenged. And there's something else here that Galileo did, and that Descartes will pick up on as well, is that he did this experiment. He said, "See for yourself." Now, it's, "Do it for yourself and see what you see." And, uh, you do that experiment, what do you see? You see that objects fall straight down. Though someone outside the carriage will see you that it's moving. Well, Descartes picked up on this, and in his Meditations, he began with what he, what is generally referred to as a process of universal doubt. That's where he doubted everything that could possibly be doubted, including the philosophy of Aristotle. And what he proposed is that you go through the same process that he went through. And so he would doubt things like sense perceptions. If you've been deceived by your senses in the past, then you can't trust it now. It's, I've had a circumstance where I saw a friend at a restaurant, and I went across the restaurant as I was leaving, saying, "Hey John, how you doing?" Turned out it wasn't my friend, it was someone that looked very much like him, but it wasn't him. So this, and many other circumstances. I have a daughter who will claim that she sees a puddle of water on the road up ahead on a hot day, and I said, "No, no, no, that's just gas rising." "No, no, Daddy, it's water." And we get there, and sure enough, it's, it's not water. So there's been many circumstances where we think we see something, but it's not actually there. Or, and this is the other example that Descartes gives, what if we were dreaming? I mean, I've had circumstances where I was teaching, and it was all a dream. Descartes' doubt went basically all on and on until there was nothing that could be doubted, until he came to the conclusion that we are a mind, that we are something that thinks, because even in doubting that we think, we prove that there is something doing the doubting. And so that began to be the basis for what Descartes will end up doing in its philosophy, is that we have a mind and the powers of reason in order to think for ourselves and come to some truths about the way things are.

One of the consequences of Descartes' philosophy was that rather than relying on authority, whether the authority of Aristotle in the case of philosophy, or the authority of Galen in the case of medical science, there was a shift towards seeing for yourself the way things are and having your own ideas about how things are and testing them with experiments and evidence to see if that is indeed the way things are. The way this most commonly has played itself out is in what is generally referred to as empiricism. And empiricism is the view that everything we know, we know from experience.

And this brings me then to one of the first and primary figures of, of the Enlightenment, that is John Locke. And so I'll talk for a few minutes about John Locke. He is, in many ways, a successor and a suitable successor to, to Descartes, and he extends some of Descartes' notions to the subject of politics, which is an area that Descartes did not discuss. But first off, let me take the notion of the tabula rasa. That's one of the basic ideas of Locke. And Locke's idea is very simple: when we are born, we are basically born a blank slate, and everything we know, we know from experience. And so Locke said, for example, if you give me three children, I could raise any of those three children to be anything I want them to be, because it all depends upon the type of experience or the type of education I give them. So, for example, if you take a child and you raise them in China, they will be raised to speak Mandarin, they will have Chinese culture, customs, and so on. You raise someone in Louisiana, they might eat Boudin and speak with a Cajun accent and, and so on. So wherever you take someone, their experience very much molds who they are. And we all had recognized this. Locke would argue, we've, we've seen where people are raised will determine the language they speak. But he took that one step further and argued that everything we know, we also know through experience, which was an idea that went counter to Aristotle, because Aristotle claimed that there were certain truths out there that we simply knew innately. Now, there are certain truths that were simply inborn within us, and that there was some knowledge that we could get, uh, through, just reason alone, whereas Locke is arguing that we only can get it through experience.

This led to another, uh, conflict or contrast with respect to Locke, and one of the main ideas that goes from Aristotle up through Aquinas and on into the modern era was the notion of absolute monarchy or the divine right of kings. This basically goes back to the notion that God is the Creator and Lord of all, the Pope is the, the secular or the, the Church leader of all, and the king is the secular leader of all. So you've got this relationship between the one who has the power and the many who are under the thumb and powers of this, uh, leader. And what Locke did was that Locke argued that that was not true. And in one of his famous writings, he argued that the divine right of kings is not a justified philosophy. And his reason for it is fairly simple, because the basic idea, as Locke understood it, was that as God gave power to Adam over the world, so to the descendants of Adam have that power passed on to them, which justified a number of cultural customs and traditions throughout Europe, such as primogeniture, where power transferred to the firstborn son, and, and if the firstborn son died, then it'll go into the second born son, and it was men rather than women. So a number of these ideas were very dominant from throughout much of Western history. But what Locke argued, and again, he argued in an empiricist manner, is that experience doesn't support the notion that power easily transfers from father to son. For one reason, I mean, how do we know that it has been transferred correctly? I mean, so much of the past, so much of the past history is lost to our knowledge, that how can we say that it's been passed on to the correct person? And even if we knew that it had been passed on to the correct person, what gives the father any more power over their son than the fact that other, other than that they're just the father?

What Locke would argue is that, and this is, this becomes absolutely key and pivotal to, to the Enlightenment, is that a son owes respect and duty to the father, but that's it. At the point when the son becomes rational, or the age of majority, as he would put it, which is still true to this day, when you become 18, you're considered an adult, uh, when you get to the age of majority, then you can make decisions for yourself, and at that point in time, the father no longer has power or control over you. You have the power to make your own decisions because you possess the power of reason. Now, this emphasis upon reason had been along around in the philosophical tradition since the days of Plato and probably before. And in fact, it was crucial for making the distinction between animals and, and humans. Both Plato and Aristotle, and none through these philosophers since, had argued that what makes humans unique is the fact that they have the powers to reason. They can understand principles and rules and laws and act based upon that knowledge and understanding. So to that extent, Locke is in line with the tradition that emphasized the role and importance of, of reason. Where he differs is in emphasizing the limits of knowledge, the limits of what we can know. And in this regard, for Locke, the limits of what we can know are limited based on our experience. We don't have any privileged access to the truth.

And this, as you might imagine, in the late 17th century, was somewhat controversial because there was still a sense that in the late 17th century, there was divine revelation, that some truths can be revealed directly by God. And what Locke argued was that even if that were true, and he does admit that in some cases he thinks it was true, he cites for example the case of Moses being told to go free the slaves. The case of Moses, however, it wasn't simply Moses hearing God's voice tell him to go free the slaves, because as Locke tells it, Moses didn't believe it at first, and he only went on to actually do it once he had some empirical evidence to sort of validate the fact that that was a legitimate claim, the, the burning bush, for example, or the, the rod that turned into a serpent. So for Locke, then, divine revelation, unless it's supported by some operating empirical evidence and unless it's rational, now, it's according to Locke, God would not have us do anything irrational, and he wouldn't have us do something without giving us some empirical evidence or, or corroboration that this is indeed what he wants us to do, then it doesn't count as divine revelation.

So this was a big shift away from, uh, traditional views of the sort of a separation of the Heavenly and divine sphere of things and a sort of a divine knowledge that is transcendent of human knowledge, and that we may be by grace or divine revelation can have access to this knowledge. And then human knowledge, on the other hand, that's the sort of limited and frail and, and can't know too much. What Locke is arguing here, and this becomes one of the main themes of the Enlightenment, is that the entire cosmos, the entire universe, is rationally structured, and that we, through the use of our reason, can come to know the nature and structure of the world. And in fact, he, he reconciled this with Christianity by claiming that God is rational and created a rationally structured and ordered universe. And hence, the more we use our reason to understand this rationally structured and ordered universe, the more we know the nature of God. So in many ways, this became a justification for science. And indeed, science was really taking off at this point, because one of Locke's contemporaries was another important Enlightenment figure by the name of Isaac Newton. I'm sure most of you have heard of Isaac Newton, is the famous physicist known for his law of gravity. But the, the thing that's very important about Newton, besides obviously the, the contributions to physics that he made, was that when Newton discussed the laws of gravity, for example, he tore down the division that had stood up since the days of Aristotle and up through the medieval tradition, tore down the division between the Heavenly sphere above and the Earthly realm below.

Traditionally, for Aristotle, for example, if you looked up at the night sky, you were looking at eternity itself, because the stars did not change. I mean, one's ancestors and one's ancestors' ancestors looked at the same night sky that you do, and un into eternity, the same night sky will, will still be there. And so the night sky was, was basically the same as the Heavenly sphere. That's, in fact, how Aristotle referred to it. So what was going on in the night sky was basically what the eternal sphere itself, rotating around the Earth, because remember, the Earth was the center. Well, if something happened in the night sky, who knows if something changed? Because remember, that's the eternal, unchanging realm, then that usually was interpreted to be a sign of God, from God, that God was saying something, that it was he was delivering some message to us humans in the Earthly realm, where there is change, and we expect change, where ashes to ashes, dust to dust, so to speak. And so when a comet, for example, would pass through the night sky, we would take it to be a message from God that we ought to change our ways or not go to battle or any of a number of of things along those lines.

Well, with the rise of science and with what Newton was doing, Newton was arguing that the planets in the Heavenly sphere and all the objects in the Heavenly sphere are guided by and determined by the same laws of nature as something that I drop here on Earth. A ball rolling down a bowling alley is directed by and determined by the same natural laws as the sun's orbit through the Milky Way galaxy. And so what this led to then was this notion that the, that there is change in the natural universe, that there is no difference between what's going on here on Earth and what's going on in the night sky above. And so, for example, in the late 1600s, there was a controversy in Holland. This was during one of the appearances of Halley's Comet, which had been predicted some 30, 40 years before by Halley, hence the name Halley's Comet. He had predicted that this comet was on a 76-year cycle and that it would return in 1686, I think was the date. And lo and behold, when that date came around, the comet appeared. And so for many like Newton and others, they saw this as a validation of the kind of scientific mindset, the scientific worldview, that we could use our reason to understand the natural universe because it operates according to rational laws that we can understand.

Not everyone agreed, however. There was some, some who felt that it was still a message from God. And so there was a debate about whether a comet was a message from God or a natural phenomenon. Well, we all know who won that debate. And the debate, as it is today, stands very much in favor of the view that a comet is a natural phenomenon. Though there was, I think, a number of years ago, the Heaven's Gate cult, some of you might have heard of, who, a comet came by us in the 90s, I think, and they thought it was a sign from God, and they all killed themselves and went on a spaceship following this comet. So there's still some people out there that might think comets are divine messages. But for the most part, uh, since Locke and Newton and Galileo and Descartes, the modern view has become the one that reason can help us understand the natural world because the entire universe is rationally structured, and we, through our reason, can understand that.

Now, as I move into the 18th century, into the 1700s, that's when we really get into the sort of the high water mark of the Enlightenment period. And when you look up the Enlightenment, that's usually the period in time in which it's dated, 18th century. But as I've argued, it has its roots in the 17th century, in the 1600s, beginning with Descartes and going on through through Leibniz. In the 18th century, there's a number of important figures in the Enlightenment. I want to talk about one in particular, David Hume. And David Hume is a figure from, from Edinburgh, Scotland. He is part of what came to be called by the late 19th century, the Scottish Enlightenment. And in fact, another important Enlightenment figure, Voltaire, from France, argued that Scotland, and in particular Edinburgh, was the Athens of the North. And this is an important claim that Voltaire's making about Scotland, or in particular Edinburgh, being the Athens of the North, because at this point in time, there was a sense in which we were returning back to human power to understand the world on their own, and we're breaking with tradition and authority and kind of going back to our roots of how we can actually be in the world and know things through reason and so on. And Socrates was very often seen as the person who typified that philosophical approach. He went around not accepting an answer for true for true simply because the person who gave that answer was in a position of power or authority. Socrates would simply question them and question them until they either validated and justified their answer or, which is what inevitably happened, they contradicted themselves and it became obvious that they didn't know what they were talking about. So calling Scotland the Athens of the North was in some ways, uh, recognition of the fact that we were in a revitalized intellectual climate that had sort of thrown tradition and authority overboard and was relying more and more again on experience.

And in fact, Hume is an example of an empiricist in the same tradition as Locke. But where it's different is that what Hume began to do is he began to look at social interactions and politics in the same sort of light that he looked at the natural world. And one of the things that he argued was, and this, this became very influential in his day, was that he argued that free trade, for example, and freedom, is actually better for everyone rather than the restrictions that are placed upon people from governments up on high or up above. In other words, Hume was arguing for what his hits come to be called classic liberalism, meaning that what is most important are our liberties and our freedoms. The traditional concern, this was the mercantile view of, of politics and, and economy, was that if a state spent money buying, um, goods from another state, they were enriching that other state and impoverishing themselves. So it's all the money's going out to these other people, and none of it's coming back in. Um, Hume argued that that was false. And the classical mercantile approach was to set up colonies everywhere so that one only traded in-house, so to speak, and so that all the money basically shuffled within one's own country or within one's own territories. But what Hume argued was that if you trade with other countries by their goods, what happens is that their, the money you give them enriches them to the point where they can now begin to afford the things that you make. And so freedom of trade emerges as a very, very important theme for, for Hume.

And David Hume's good friend, Adam Smith, also from Scotland and part of this Scottish Enlightenment, picks up on this idea and develops what we have now come to be called economics and economic theory. And then, and, uh, Adam Smith met with many of the leaders of England and, and, and, and eventually convinced them, or they began to be convinced with evidence, became obvious that the mercantile system wasn't working. And this big, this emerged during the 19th century as the liberal doctrine of free trade and, and so on, which was with us still to this day, where emphasis upon free trade agreements and so on are very much, uh, part of our discourse about how we think about government, how we think about the economy, and how things should should operate. So rather than a top-down restrictive form of governmental intervention, uh, Hume and many of these figures in this Enlightenment period began to see and emphasize the role of liberty in both trade and in our, our actions with, with one another. Liberty becomes very important.

Another figure of discussion, Enlightenment, um, is William Robertson. William Robertson, I'm sorry, he, uh, was a famous historian. He wrote a history of the American colonies. So in many ways, he kind of really got the tradition of history off the ground. Chemistry, medical research, really got going in Scotland. And there's a good reason for the fact that medicine got off the ground, because just as Aristotle's authority had been challenged by Descartes and others in the Enlightenment tradition, so too was the authority of Galen and others being challenged. And, and the authority was so strong that many people, they could look at a cadaver during an autopsy and see that things weren't the way Galen said they were, but one couldn't challenge authority. And there's a lot of sociological studies about that too. There's a case in the 18th century, there was an admiral in the British Navy, and he was out at sea, and a lot of people got scurvy, which is basically a vitamin C deficiency disease that that strikes many people who had been at sea for a long time without fruits. And he did an experiment. He, he gave himself and the people on his ship of lemons and limes to eat, and none of the other ships in his squadron got any lemons or limes. And after several weeks at sea, people on the other ships began to get scurvy, but no one on his ship did. And so he then distributed the, the limes and lemons to the other ships, and sure enough, they were cured of the scurvy within a few days. Well, he went back to London and reported to his superior officers that what he had found, and you would think, oh, wow, here he had done this sort of classic experiment, I mean, he'd given these people lemons and limes, and it seemed to cure scurvy, but the superior officers listened to another superior officer, officer who said, "Oh, no, that's not, that's not what happened. So I've been sailing for years and never had problems with scurvy. That's, that's not the, that's not right." And so it took another 40 or 50 years before, before it was actually recognized that fruit would be a cure for, for scurvy at sea.

So my point here is that the, the power and sway of authority is very strong. And one of the hallmarks of Enlightenment philosophers is to kind of go against that grain, to go against that strong tradition of authority, despite the centuries of, of stability that had been within that tradition, because one of the ideas here, and another factor that's at play here, is that the economic activity was especially by the middle of the 18th century, changing life for many people very quickly. And as life began to change more quickly, people began to appreciate what was novel and what was new. And so there began to emerge an interest in fashion, an interest in what was new. In fact, newspapers emerged in the 18th century as a sort of form of mass media, mass culture, and it emphasized what was new, what was happening, that was recent. And there was actually a debate. Jonathan Swift and William Temple, a couple of Irish authors, many of you might know of Jonathan Swift from the tales of Gulliver's Travels, they took in a side in what was referred to as the Battle of the Books debate. And this was a battle between the new, the new tradition, the new philosophers like Locke, who we now refer to as the Enlightenment philosophers, Locke, and then later Hume and others, and the tradition, the traditional philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas. And Swift and others who were for tradition argued that there's a reason that these traditional authors are the traditional authors because they got the truth, they got it right. And they dismissed the, the new traditions and the emphasis upon novelty as just basically being fad following, fads and following trends and, and following stuff that just won't last. And if that sounds similar to the kinds of debates you'd have today, that's probably, that's probably one of the tensions that we have even in our society today. The things that have been around a long time, by virtue of there having been around a long time, gain a lot more stature and prestige in many people's minds. And, and there is certainly a tendency for people to just to follow something new because it's new.

Um, but for many like Hume and others in the Enlightenment tradition, uh, what was emerging was a sense that we have an incomplete knowledge of the world. And the only way we can come to have a more complete knowledge of the world is by continually questioning and looking for truths that we don't know right now. But when those truths are discovered, they are lo and behold going to be new to us. It's not going to be something that we are familiar with, and it might not be something that we're even readily willing to accept right off the bat. But if knowledge is going to progress, then it is going to be one of the things that's going to come along the way, that's something new will happen. And so they will admit that not all novelty is good novelty, and not all things that are new are going to be here to stay. But ultimately, if we are going to progress in our knowledge of the world, there will be novelties and new truths that come along the way. And so we look back now from the year 2011, look back at, uh, Newton, for example, and we can say, well, then came Einstein and the new truths that he brought that weren't known at the time of, of Newton. And now there's more recent developments in, in physics that may challenge or question some of Einstein's claims.

So one of the ideas here then is that what's emerging with the Enlightenment is the sense that, uh, of progress, the sense of progress to a greater wisdom and knowledge of the world, which is actually, I mean, we take it as a given today, this notion of progress, that things progress towards a greater and greater knowledge of reality. Let's say, but that wasn't the case through the classical tradition in, in philosophy. The classical tradition took that the truth was already there, and we could, in many instances, we already knew it. And much, and most of these truths were the eternal truths of heaven above, or the eternal truths or the essences of things we see. We already see these eternal truths when we look at something because we're seeing its essence right there. So there wasn't the sense of a progressive knowledge build-up over time. But with Descartes and on through the Enlightenment thinkers, this emerges as an important idea. And in fact, Kant is probably the first philosopher to actually even use the term progress in the way that we think of it today. So it's kind of, when you think about history and you think about intellectual history, it's important to, to always remember that the way the world was viewed back in the 18th, 17th centuries is not, in many instances, in, in many important matters, not the same as how we view it today. And progress, and the idea of progress, is one of those very, very important ideas.

And this leads me to one more, uh, important, uh, Enlightenment figure who's a sort of interesting Enlightenment figure, and he's also in some ways kind of an emergent anti-enlightenment figure at the same time, and that is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the more important of the political thinkers along with Locke, and I'll get back to Locke as well as I explain Rousseau of the Enlightenment period. And the basic notion here for, for Rousseau, like Locke, is that what legitimizes power and the authority of the state is not divine right of kings, but the will of the people. Now, there's a lot of debate among people who study Rousseau, what he meant by the general will is the term that, that Rousseau used. It, but as we have come to understand it today, we, we think of that as a popular vote, that is, is the way in which the will of the people gets expressed and represented and, and heard. Um, it's not clear if that's exactly what was so meant by the general will, but regardless, he certainly meant that it had to do with the people rather, the people who were governed have more say so or power over their own governance than those who governed. Uh, so in other words, rather than being a top-down structure where the top determines how things are to be, it was to be more a bottom-up, from the people and the general will to the powers that represent them. And this is an important part of the sort of the political ideas that emerged in the 17th century and really take hold in the 18th century. And the idea is basically expressed as the notion of the social contract.

Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher of the late mid-1600s, and then later John Locke and his Two Treatises of Government, will they will both set forth so a social contract theory, and Rousseau will as well. And the basic component of a social contract theory is that in the state of nature, we are without a state. There is no politics, there is no state. In, in the state of nature, we are just individuals out trying to fend for ourselves. Now, for Hobbes, the state of nature is a state of war, because we're all out either killing or being killed. And so, if, if I need to kill you in order to protect myself, then according to Hobbes, I have every right to do that. The problem with that is everyone else has that same right. And if everyone else has that same right, then everyone's going to be out killing everyone else. It's kind of a Lord of the Flies type situation where without the authority of law and rulers to enforce the law, we would all be out in a sort of killer be killed anarchy. That's how the state of nature is, according to Hobbes. Well, we possess enough reason on our own, according to Hobbes, to recognize that this is not a state that we want to stay in. And so what we do, according to Hobbes, is that we give up, in a contract situation, give up our right to do whatever we please in order to, to satisfy our self-interest, in exchange for the protection and security of law and peace. So what happens then is, with any contract, you give up something, whether it's money or time, but you get something in exchange. So what was given up here is the right we had by nature to do anything we are able to in our power for the sake of self-preservation. We give up that right, and we, so we limit our rights. But in exchange, we, we get a power or authority of the state and the ruler of the state to enforce those laws, to provide for peace and security. So that's where the state emerges. So, and so the authority of the state is based solely on a contractual agreement. In other words, so, uh, they're, the rulers of the state are contractually obligated, or their purpose is to provide security and safety for the people. That's what legitimizes their power. So in other words, we've moved far away from the divine right of kings and, and that form of justification of power, and we've moved now to a sense that it's the people agreeing to give you the power to keep us safe, that gives them power and authority.

Rousseau tells very much the same story. There's an important difference with Rousseau. Rousseau has this notion of the noble savage, that, uh, which is very much at odds with Hobbes. For Rousseau, in the state of nature, we are actually pretty peaceable and loving and getting along. And it's actually society and artificial needs and pressures and demands that society places upon us that creates the conflict and the tensions and the states of war that we see. So there is that big difference between Rousseau and, and Hobbes. But despite that difference, he still thinks that the state is, is founded upon a contractual, uh, agreement between the people and, and the rulers.

Well, with Locke, there was one quick step from a contractual agreement with rulers to the justification for revolution. Uh, now, is the justification for revolution is simple: it's a violation of contract. If a ruler fails to keep peace and security, if they fail in their contractually mandated mission, which is to maintain the safety and security of the people, then we can, they basically can be thrown out of, of work and find someone else who will fulfill the terms of that contract. The American Revolution and Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence has the ideas of Locke all through it. Some of you probably know the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" line from, uh, the Declaration of, of Independence. He gets Jefferson gets that from John Locke, who argued that we all have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property, which is how Locke had, had put it.

Well, as Jefferson goes on and writes his, not his, but the Declaration of, of Independence, it's really a laundry list of all the grievances and harms that the King of England has done against the people or the colonists of, of America. And if you look through that list, it's basically things that have to do with breaking our security, causing harm, infringing upon our rights, freedoms, etcetera, things that we have by nature a right to do, and which are to be protected, not harmed, by those in power, by those who are, who are given the authority to govern us. And in fact, authority of governance includes the power of life and death, right? Because the power of the state is the power to inflict the ultimate punishment, according to Locke. Uh, and so if they're going to have that much power, they need to have, do so in a manner that is justified. Well, for Jefferson, they'd basically violated the social contract. And so they therefore went on, what is their natural right, to find someone who will fulfill the terms of the contract, and therefore they declared independence and set out on a path that we all now know, the American Revolution, and towards independence from, from England.

The same pattern followed about a dozen years later in France with the French Revolution. And the French Revolution was similarly inspired by Enlightenment ideas of the social contract, of freedom, of being able to throw over the, the monarchy and the established authority and traditions of the monarchy, even though it had been around for centuries. The Enlightenment philosophers had shown that we can, by our own reason, understand the world fairly well on our own. And as Locke had argued, once we possessed the capacity to reason, we are no longer rightfully under the control of anyone else. This, these Enlightenment ideas will also become the source of a lot of the critique of slavery. This is another big difference between the Aristotelian tradition and the Enlightenment tradition, is that for Aristotle, slavery was a very natural part of society. Now, he did not think of slavery in any racial terms. Slavery was simply a relationship between those who possess reason and the capacity to make decisions, and those who do not. Those who do not possess the capacity to reason or make decisions are the ones who are best being told what to do. That was basically what a slave was. What Locke is now arguing is that all adults, maybe with a few exceptions, now possess the rational capacity on their own. And a logical extension of this argument is that therefore, no one ought to be the property of anyone else. Parents may make decisions for their children to the point where they develop the ability to reason on their own and think for themselves. But after that point, no one has the authority to tell them what they should do. And the same applies for rulers. There's no more paternalism in power. It should now be up to the people to use their reason to make decisions on their own for how they are to be governed and, and the direction that the state should take.

So these ideas were sweeping through, through Europe, and in the case of France, it led to the French Revolution. At first, after the French Revolution, many people saw this as a sort of.

a victory for the enlightenment, of victory for, uh, the spirit of reason and liberty and and and hope for emerging tolerance in in society. Because another one of the ideas that was part of the Enlightenment was a hoped-for solution to what seemed to be eternal conflicts in society.

One thing to remember when Descartes was doing his work, he did most of his work between 1618 and 1650 when he died in 1650. Between 1618 and 1648, we had the 30 Years' War, which was an extremely bloody and horrific war fought on religious grounds, Protestants versus Catholics. And there had been conflicts between the French and the English and many, many other conflicts in in European history. And in fact, one of the things that motivated Descartes to his meditations in the first place was a recognition that many people were dying for the sake of beliefs that may, in the end, not be true.

And so, one of the thinking, one of the ideas here then was, well, if we can come up with some sort of way of establishing consensus by way of reason, coming up with some sort of truths that we can all recognize as universal and valid and holding for everybody and regardless of race, nationality, and background, and if we could just be guided by these principles, then perhaps we can overcome all these conflicts and and all these, uh, troubles in our society. In some ways, that is the the Enlightenment ideal as it as it came to be expressed.

And so, when the French Revolution came along, there was a sense that this was the beginning of this sort of Enlightenment ideal coming to fruition in a place as important as as France. And and soon after, there was released the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And and so this this vision of a society that can be led by universal laws and universal principles and universal rights, uh, was felt that it would take hold.

Well, so in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, there was a tremendous amount of optimism about the Enlightenment. And it was during this period of time that Emanuel Kant entered that newspaper competition about the Enlightenment because there was a lot of discussion about the Enlightenment and what is it. And it was then that Kant proposed the notion that it's "have the courage to know" is the Latin. And what he argued was, and it's it ties in with many of the things that I've said, that the lack of courage to know basically means letting others tell you what to think and tell letting others tell you how things are or should be. Whereas the true Enlightenment, and what makes the Enlightenment distinctive, is that it is having the courage to use one's own reason, one's own capacities to know and understand the world. And if we would simply have the courage to do that and all work together to grasp and realize and work for the realization of universal laws and principles, all would go well.

In fact, one of, uh, Kant's famous essays is "Towards Perpetual Peace," and he basically talked about how if we were to set up, and he even called it a League of Nations, we could set up a society where it was guided by universal laws that were enforced by this League of Nations that would prevent wars between nations. His thinking here was that just as in states, we set up laws to try to prevent violence between individuals, so too a League of Nations, or what came to what we now know of as the United Nations, could do the same thing. And in fact, Woodrow Wilson, after World War I, he was a student, he was actually a professor of political science, had read Kant and was very influenced by Kant's Enlightenment ideas. And and he really had this vision, Woodrow Wilson did, of setting up this League of Nations as a way of ending all wars. And so that's why, you know, he said World War I can be the war to end all wars because he had hopes for implementing some Kantian Enlightenment notions about universal rights, universal laws being enforced by not a universal body, but an international league that oversaw or policed all other nations and prevented conflicts and wars from happening.

So, this Enlightenment project had continued on into the 20th century, obviously. And there's many people, I think today, that probably would still adhere to to the Enlightenment, uh, ideal as a viable ideal that we should hold to and continue to to try to realize. But going back to the French Revolution, as as you might know, the French Revolution didn't necessarily end very well. It ended with what we know of as the Reign of Terror, where there was tremendous bloodshed. People were killed simply for being from the aristocratic families. And and, uh, and there was a sort of horror and shock among many intellectuals as to what that signified, what that meant with respect to our Enlightenment. If if these people who were thought to be guided by these principles of reason and what is best for humanity and and liberty could could inflict such cruelty in this Reign of Terror, then, uh, what is that to say about the the Enlightenment?

Well, what this led to in the 19th century and the 1800s is it led to a counter movement. Now, as it led to, uh, to a number of intellectuals beginning to challenge and question the viability and legitimacy of the Enlightenment as a be-all and end-all solution for society. The most prominent of these critics, or the most prominent of these movements, is the Romanticist movement in the 19th century. And the Romanticists, who were best represented in literature like Goethe and and others, but also in music, uh, emphasize the importance of the passions and the emotions. And these passions and emotions are not always guided by reason. They aren't always rational passions and emotions. And sometimes they do get get the best of us. And yet, they also provide what is best in our our humanity as well. The love and the passion are also many things that we can't do without. And so there was this sense then that the Enlightenment, as important as these ideas and notions were, it was only telling half the story, or it was really leaving out an important segment or chunk of what it means to be human. It was leaving out the emotions and the passions.

Later in the 19th century, you'll end up with other critics of the Enlightenment such as Nietzsche and and others. And into the 20th century, even with Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations and his thought that, uh, the Enlightenment can still gain new life or new traction after the Holocaust of, uh, World War II and and all the the disasters and death of World War II, it led a whole new round of people in the post-World War era to again question the Enlightenment and even begin to question the whole sense of the importance of modern modernism itself. So the Enlightenment, as a as an as an intellectual tradition in intellectual history and in Western history, has been extremely important and extremely influential. And so, although it's been dated to the 18th century, trace its roots all the way back to Aristotle up into the 17th century, and we can still find continuations of it into our current society today. Thank you.

All right, so now that we've learned a little bit about the Enlightenment, our next topic will be enlightened absolutism. And we've already learned about absolutism and what that entails. So now we're going to explore there are some key rulers in Europe in the 18th century, uh, like Joseph II of Austria, Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and they were considered in some way or form at not total to be enlightened absolutists. So we'll learn more about enlightened absolute absolutism until next time.