Issue Number: 93
‘Enlightenment,’ wrote Immanuel Kant in his 1784 essay What is Enlightenment? ‘is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere aude! [Dare to know!] Have the courage to use your own understanding! That is the motto of enlightenment.’
Age Of Reason An Encyclopdedia of the Age of Enlightenment by Adam Dant. An Encyclopdedia of the Age of Enlightenment by Adam Dant.
Neither Kant nor his eighteenth-century contemporaries believed that they lived in an enlightened age. By ‘enlightenment’, they meant a process: the lessening of darkness, the dawning of light. The human mind was liberating itself from traditional authority over thought and belief. ‘Nothing is required for enlightenment except freedom,’ wrote Kant, ‘and the freedom in question is the least harmful of all, namely, the freedom to use reason publicly in all matters.’
Kant and his fellow leaders of the Enlightenment were opposed to hegemonies, whether intellectual or political. ‘On all sides I hear: do not argue!’ Kant continues. ‘The officer says, “Do not argue, drill!” The taxman says, “Do not argue, pay!” The pastor says, “Do not argue, believe!”’ But, whereas the officer and the taxman serve authorities who dislike anyone questioning the political and social status quo, the pastor is a different matter: he represents the authority that dislikes any kind of questioning, and certainly not the kind that is sceptical about received wisdom.
The project that served as a flagship for enlightenment in the eighteenth century was the Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. A compendium of knowledge, its emphatic and rationalist war on the authority of past pieties was premised on the recognition of how obstinately they stood in the way of intellectual and social progress. In taking this stance, the Encyclopédists were following the lead of Voltaire who, with his battle-cry of Ecrasez l’infâme! (‘Wipe out the infamy’, by which he meant superstition), challenged tradition with weapons of logic and satire.
‘Have courage to free yourselves,’ Diderot exhorted his fellow men in words echoed by Kant, ‘Examine the history of all peoples in all times and you will see that we humans have always been subject to one of three codes: that of nature, that of society, and that of religion, and that we have been obliged to transgress all three in succession, because they could never be in harmony.’
In essence, the Enlightenment was a call to individuals to stand up for themselves in the light of reason. That meant understanding the world through philosophy and science, especially by applying the latter beyond physics and chemistry to the social world of politics, education and morality.
The Enlightenment had its negative aspects and consequences, no doubt, but it was motivated by a real desire for the improvement of humankind’s lot and, accordingly, represents a key moment in the progress of civilisation. One of the many results of its new ambition was a shift in portraiture: in Enlightenment painting and sculpture, individuals – be they citizens, members of families or clubs – share a place once exclusively occupied by saints and princes.
In its way, this represents the first dawning of the modern democratic spirit, and it would not have been possible without the Enlightenment’s belief in the universality of the human good and the ‘Rights of Man’.