May 20, 2015
The Culture of Criticism What do we owe the Enlightenment?
By Jacob Soll
The Enlightenment: History of an Idea
By Vincenzo Ferrone
By Vincenzo Ferrone
Wherever we look today in
academia, scholars are rushing to defend the Enlightenment ideas of
political and individual liberty, human rights, faith in scientific
reason, secularism, and the freedom of public debate. Why the worry?
These ideas are, after all, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. And yet,
to hear the defenders of the Enlightenment, they are under assault.
There is no shortage of enemies—from mullahs and Christian conservatives
to science deniers and left-wing post-modernists.
ADVERTISEMENT
Defending
the Enlightenment has become an academic cottage industry with various
camps hunkering down behind their own interpretations, and, in good
academic form, attacking others. But recently, a few leading scholars
have decided that it was necessary to present their defenses to a wider
audience. Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights: A History (2007)
was one of the first of such works; her argument made the case for
Enlightenment values and the “soft power of humanity” in light of the
use of torture by the U.S. government, but also, implicitly, because of
the rise of new superpowers, like China, which openly reject human
rights while embracing scientific progress. In The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (2013),
Anthony Pagden traced a history of Enlightenment philosophy, defending
it from “theocracies” and the “fringe of the Christian right” that deny
ideas of scientific progress, political liberty, and “global justice.”
These
books—and the overall defense—have some validity. In spite of the fact
that the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were founded on
Enlightenment ideas, it is not clear how many Americans understand the
relationship of the Enlightenment to such documents. Many
deists—believers in the Enlightenment idea of a post-Christian
mechanistic nature god, such as Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson,
Thomas Paine, and Ethan Allen—would, with their scorn of organized
religion, have a hard time getting elected in most parts of the United
States today. The abolition of torture and capital punishment, seen by
John Adams and Jefferson as central to Enlightened society, is now
political anathema in most of the United States. Even the scientific
explanation of natural phenomena is generally rejected or ignored, with
only 40 percent of Americans standing by the scientific finding that
global warming is man-made. When George W. Bush won the 2004 election,
Gary Wills characterized the victory as “the day the Enlightenment went
out.” The ideas of the Enlightenment are going through a crisis in the
very country founded on them.
All this makes Vincenzo Ferrone’s newly translated book, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea,
compelling: Ferrone claims that the importance of the Enlightenment has
not been its triumph, but its centrality in public debate. An Italian
historian of philosophy and a specialist on the influence of Isaac
Newton, Ferrone believes the Enlightenment must be defended not simply
as a secular, political idea, but, most importantly, as what Ferrone
calls a tradition of “critical thought.” Immanuel Kant defined the
Enlightenment as the “progress of mankind toward improvement” through
the “freedom to make public use of one’s reason on every point,” and
Ferrone claims it is this critical process that has driven public
opinion and politics, giving us the language of human rights, tolerance,
and individual liberty. The long philosophical engagement with the idea
of Enlightenment, from Voltaire in the eighteenth century down to our
own time, is, for Ferrone, one of the great intellectual legacies of the
Enlightenment itself. He allows that we can question the primacy of
science and secularism, but not critical debate. Many great figures of
philosophy who have been seen as critics of the Enlightenment are in
fact, Ferrone argues, defenders of the Enlightenment tradition.
CULTURE CLUB/GETTY IMAGES
Voltaire
The
Enlightenment began not only with books and pamphlets, but with an
earthquake. In 1755, an earthquake flattened Lisbon, set it aflame, and
then caused a massive tsunami that swept the Tagus River into the city,
killing more than 40,000 people. Theologians claimed the disaster was
divine retribution for earthly pride and sin.
The French
philosopher Voltaire argued, though, that it was simply nature’s systems
that had caused the movement of the earth’s crusts. He criticized the
Catholic Church for claiming God was behind the disaster rather than the
clock-maker master of the system of nature. Voltaire’s opinion led to a
famous international debate that helped him move public opinion away
from mystical explanations of natural phenomena and toward scientific
authority.
Ferrone’s model of an Enlightenment tradition comes
directly from Voltaire. He was one of the first to recognize the
Enlightenment as a distinct movement; he used the word lumières to describe philosophers seeking progress through criticism, and claimed that the new gens de lettres,
or “men of letters,” were super-scholars who, as living encyclopedias,
would master the arts, sciences, and, above all, literature. These
enlightened ones had a primarily social function: to critique in the
name of progress. Kant summed up Voltaire’s idea best when he said: “Our
age is the age of criticism to which all must be subjected.” The
ultimate goal of this critical movement was to create reason for the
betterment of society, and this reason would have to stand the “test of
free and public examination,” Kant said.
At least on the level of
creating a critical tradition, the Enlightenment project worked. Books,
pamphlets, journals, and papers proliferated during the eighteenth
century, and public debate, in turn, created public opinion that began
to stand as a counterauthority to kings, religious leaders, and states.
The great philosophers who followed Voltaire and Kant—Hegel and
Nietzsche in particular—might have questioned secularism, the power of
science, and human agency, but they always defended an ideal of
criticism.
Writing in the early nineteenth century, Hegel grappled
with the Enlightenment as a critic, not a proponent. The idea of
secular human progress, Hegel warned, was misguided in attempting to
bring “heaven” to the “earth below.” Hegel felt that this hubris, as
well as the loss of all Christian morality and the belief that humans
could build a secular paradise, had brought about the Terror of the
French Revolution. But he still saw the Enlightenment as the central
point of a philosophical inquiry steeped in skepticism and an abiding
belief in criticism. If one was to study human history, Hegel warned,
one could never be “passive,” for historians came with their own
predetermined “categories.” Only through the constant critique of
subjectivity and through dialectic argument could humans face the
challenges of earthly reason and science. It is this skepticism and
method of criticism of the Enlightenment itself, Ferrone claims, that
makes Hegel—the critic of progress and secularism—an Enlightenment
thinker.
Like Hegel, Nietzsche was skeptical of the Enlightenment
claims of progress and human utopia. Through an examination of the
Renaissance and Reformation, Nietzsche replaced the idea of
progress—which he thought “primitive” Germans, at least, could never
grasp—with his idea of the modern man’s “will to power.” If Nietzsche
embraced Voltaire as the great debunker of religion, he nonetheless
believed that secularism did not lead to the betterment of humankind,
but instead opened the door to nihilism. Ferrone, on the other hand,
presents Nietzsche as one of the guardians of the Enlightenment.
Nietzsche embraced Kant’s question, “What is Enlightenment?” as the
inspiration of his own philosophical progress. And even if nihilism
contradicted the optimism of the Enlightenment, it still adopted a model
of human rather than divinely inspired destiny, and for this, Ferrone
claims, Nietzsche held the “banner of Enlightenment.” This human
destiny, no matter how dark, would be attained through the criticism of
the illusions of both Christians and socialists.
THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NYC
Thomas Paine
The
Enlightenment faced perhaps its biggest challenge following the
Holocaust and Hiroshima as philosophers were forced to question ever
more deeply the idea of human progress. Even those who believed in
science now had to come to grips with the idea that it could be used as a
tool of mass extermination. On the one hand, the Enlightenment could
bring human progress through science, public debate, and a rational,
social state. On the other hand, these very forces—along with a twisted
idea of progress, and Nietzsche’s will to power—had been at the heart of
Nazi power and its ideology. The Nazis, warned German-Jewish
philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, had reduced and
“dehumanized” Enlightenment aspirations, and they had turned science
into “manipulation and administration” and reason into a nihilistic
scientific program of mass death. Enlightenment, they warned, could
bring liberty, but also a modern totalitarian system. What the Nazis had
done was to take Enlightenment discourses and rid them of their
critical element. The outcome was disastrous. Without the culture of
criticism, Hegel’s skeptical vision was realized, and only terror
reigned.
French philosopher Michel Foucault also reflected on the
Enlightenment and its pitfalls as a science of humanity in his famous
lecture, “What is Critique?—Critique and Enlightenment.” In the
tradition of Nietzsche, Foucault criticized modern scientific and legal
authority, as well as the entire Western system of sexual and social
norms, not as the product of a reasonable society, but as systems of
power. By studying hospitals, asylums, and prisons, Foucault showed the
underbelly of enlightened societies, and how institutions of so-called
modern reason could be turned into instruments of repression. In spite
of this ambivalence, he still felt a need to engage with the
Enlightenment by paring it down to the constant and unrelenting critique
of power itself. Critique, Foucault insisted, is the movement by which
individuals question all truths, especially those produced by powerful
authorities.
Where are the debates of the Enlightenment taking
place today? Foucault’s critique of power left many who read his work
skeptical of Enlightenment ideas of progress. This, in turn, has led to
fierce academic debates, but ones that take place less and less in the
realm of mass public opinion. The university debate, Ferrone argues, is
central to the continuation of the Enlightenment tradition. But Ferrone
has inflated the importance of modern historical works on the
Enlightenment; their engagement with the Enlightenment does not occupy
the central stage of public debate and opinion-making. Enlightenment
ideals were central driving points of the American Revolution. Yet what
U.S. politician campaigns by defending the ideals of the Enlightenment?
The
place of the Enlightenment in public debate has all but disappeared.
Renowned philosophers who do engage with criticism of the Enlightenment,
such as Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, do not catch the
imagination of a wide public in the way Foucault did 40 years ago. Even
the great scientists of NASA and Caltech, heirs of Isaac Newton, armed
with massive modern reams of data, cannot sway the majority of the
American public into believing that global warming is man-made. Instead
of major philosophers, entertainers like Bill Nye and Ken Ham debate
evolution at the Creation Museum (a museum that asserts the world came
about in a strict biblical chronology), with many in the audience
applauding the creationist.
If science is contested, the
Enlightenment, it seems, has become a relic. And yet the Enlightenment
is not forgotten everywhere. As Ferrone notes, Pope Benedict XVI has
spoken numerous times about the Enlightenment as an ongoing challenge to
the Catholic Church. Indeed, Benedict debated the idea of the
Enlightenment with Habermas in a work called “The Dialectics of
Secularization” when he was still Joseph Ratzinger—the first time a
future pope has sat down with a modern philosopher to discuss the
Enlightenment. Not surprisingly, Benedict regrets many secular values
and nonreligious government, yet at the same time he speaks of the
importance of the Enlightenment in bringing individuals the freedom to
believe and in asserting human rights in a global society. This doesn’t
make Benedict an Enlightenment philosopher, but it does make him the
most influential world figure to engage in the old dialectic.
We
are thus faced with a stunning paradox in the history of Enlightenment
debate. As the Enlightenment recedes from public consciousness, the
original foe of Voltaire, the Catholic Church, engages with the idea of
Enlightenment more prominently than many secular thinkers. Ferrone
worries that this is a “muddying of the waters” of the Enlightenment
debate. Yet Ferrone does not seem to recognize the challenges and
paradoxes that face the idea of Enlightenment in a world disengaged from
it.
If anything, Ferrone unintentionally shows that the old
secular model of progress is failing, or has evolved in a world that
embraces its products but not its central idea. If the Enlightenment is
to survive, its proponents must fight apathy along with enemies. The
public takes for granted complex debate and is often disconnected from
the arguments of the informed press. This was not the case in the past,
when the advocates of Enlightenment ideas and criticism were able to
muster the passions of large populations. It is clear, though, that the
Enlightenment will need great champions as well as critics to revive the
debate that is its internal motor. For the moment, with critics of the
Enlightenment the most engaged debaters, this looks unlikely.
Jacob Soll is the author of The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and The Rise And Fall of Nations.
