Thinking Anew
What, precisely, changed in the 18th century?
OCT 5, 2015, VOL. 21, NO. 04 • BY JAMES M. BANNER JR.
When Immanuel Kant posed his celebrated question, “Was ist Aufklärung?” in 1784, little could he have supposed that he’d inaugurate an inquiry that has yet to end and is unlikely to end soon. Appropriately, Kant’s was a philosopher’s question, not that of a historian, a question that sought answers in general principles, not particular realities. A historian would more likely have asked “Was ist die Aufklärung?” with that concrete, definite article inserted into Kant’s interrogative. And that’s how historians pose the question now: What was the Enlightenment—the long, 18th-century recasting of European thought that we used to learn about in high school history courses?
IMMANUEL KANT
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The distinction between the philosopher’s and historian’s ways of going about answering Kant’s question, as well as the different answers they yield, is the theme of this erudite book. It’s very much the work of a historian, not of someone who wishes to enter the debate about whether the Enlightenment was or was not a Good Thing or whether the desacralization of life has brought progress or regress—questions, among many others, that continue to stir debate and disagreement in political as well as academic life. Ferrone’s central aim is to counter the argument that the Enlightenment can be reduced to “just one more chapter—however important—in the history of Western philosophy.”
For Ferrone as for everyone since the 1780s, Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment is the starting point for every history of it. Kant’s answer to his own question was a product of the very revolution of ideas from within which he spent his days and of which he was an unabashed champion. To him, enlightenment was a process, not an era or movement, a process characterized by rational progress in human affairs toward the goal of a “universal cosmopolitan condition.” The application of reason to the creation and protection of freedom was its central feature. Kant was clear in distinguishing between the work of “practicing empirical historians” and of philosophers who search for “an idea of world history which is to some extent based upon an a priori principle.” Since then, this distinction has typically characterized the separate paths taken by historians and philosophers in their thinking; and, as Ferrone insists, it continues to demarcate sharp differences within Enlightenment scholarship.
Such differences also mark the value scholars place on Kant and the Enlightenment’s arch-critic Hegel, who emphasized the “phenomenology of the spirit,” and by doing so, only deepened the divide between abstract philosophers and empirical historians of the Enlightenment. If thought was, in Hegel’s terms, “immanent,” then it couldn’t readily be explained historically—entangled in time and in the changes of human society.
This divide persists today, as Ferrone is at pains to show throughout his book, and that requires him to lead the reader through the thickets of Marx, Nietzsche, Horkheimer, Adorno, Foucault, Cassirer, Heidegger, and even to Pope Benedict XVI and his claims for a Catholic Enlightenment, as he explores the “history of an idea” of his subtitle. It also leads him into discussions about the important work of such recent Enlightenment scholars as Franco Venturi and Jonathan Israel.
American readers, however, are likely to knit their brows over the absence of any reference to the distinctive American Enlightenment that included figures as diverse as Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
For historians, the strength of Ferrone’s book is its insistence that the Enlightenment can’t be abstracted as a movement in Western thought and nothing more—as something standing outside the flow of the rest of history, a phenomenon regarded only as a development in formal thought. In Ferrone’s view, all thinking emerges from the convergence of events, perceptions, and thinking that constitute everyone’s days. Thinking can’t be isolated from its context. For instance, one can’t understand 18th century European thought without seeing it as linked dialectically against the ancien régime that it fought, and as responding to the new phenomenon of public opinion. Thought can’t be explained by itself. No historian will disagree. But it’s also testament to Ferrone’s learning that he acknowledges the importance of philosophers and theorists who’ve deepened our understanding of thought even while ignoring its contexts.
Given the aims of Ferrone’s book, therefore, readers should not expect to find in it a full history of the Enlightenment. Nor, however ably translated from the Italian by Elisabetta Tarantino, will its pages prove as easygoing to the uninitiated as the late Peter Gay’s robust two-volume work The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. This is a scholar’s book, filled with trenchant observations, about a thick literature as much as about the Enlightenment phenomenon itself.
Yet even when faced with the necessity of making sense of matters as taxing as Hegel’s glutinous thought, Ferrone manages to render some of his predecessors’ arguments into lucid Kantian statement, if not into Boswellian exuberance. It also helps that he restricts himself closely to the subject of his subtitle, and does so in snippets—16 short essays that repay consideration one at a time, given their erudition and the historical and philosophical complexity of the long historiography of le siècle des Lumières, as the French call the Enlightenment.
Those with an interest in the history of debate over the Enlightenment will be particularly interested in Ferrone’s two principal, stoutly argued, historical arguments. The first is that the Enlightenment must be understood in its basic independent manifestation—as a movement, stretching through the long 18th century, aimed at subjecting all previously received and conventional thought about religion, society, politics, and culture to reasoned examination free of previously held thinking and to stretch the boundaries of freedom beyond the male elite where it had been taken for millennia to reside.
To those who have mostly encountered the Enlightenment in courses on Western thought, such a position seems unremarkable. But to historians it’s a critical assertion. For if the Enlightenment is seen as a development within Western thought that stands on its own—as, in Ferrone’s words, “an epochal rift and cultural revolution of the ancien régime”—then it wasn’t the seed ground of the Terror, and the French Revolution was not the child of Voltaire, Condorcet, Rousseau, and other Enlightenment thinkers.
For some, the distinction is unnecessary; for others, it is central to their thought and politics. If the Enlightenment can be implicated in the excesses of the revolution and the revolution’s resulting Bonapartism, then at the very least it’s a stain on Western history, even if not the precursor to, say, National Socialism, as some have seen it. Such an argument as Ferrone’s—the Enlightenment as an independent development in Western thought—has always been a defense against those, especially those on the right, who hold the Enlightenment responsible for all the horrors of the modern world. Ferrone’s defense of the Enlightenment as a movement in and of itself is unlikely to still this debate, but it’s a strong entry into it.
His second argument is for the existence of a distinct, identifiable Late Enlightenment, “a self-contained period and original cultural system” of the 1770s and ’80s that deserves to be studied, as the larger Enlightenment itself should be, in its own right. The Late Enlightenment was a time when the “values, ideas, practices, and specialized vocabularies” of previously small circles “became objects of large-scale cultural consumption in salons, Masonic lodges, universities, academies, and in the courts.” They did so, he argues (following the arguments of Robert Darnton and others), “thanks to the publishing industry, the theatre, literature, painting, music, and the sciences.”
Nothing could be clearer in such arguments than Ferrone’s muscular commitment to the precedence of history over philosophy. Not only does he distinguish the material conditions of European society from those that gave birth to Enlightenment thought in the early years of the same century; he distinguishes the intellectual and cultural contents of this later phase from those of the earlier one. It was in the later decades of the 18th century, he believes, that was born “the modern concept of man’s liberty,” an idea so powerful that the Republic of Letters came to deeply influence high politics and, at least in the person of the so-called enlightened despots, led to reform from above.
While all of this is compelling, it’s not going to forestall skepticism on many fronts. If, as Ferrone writes, “the invention of the modern concept of man’s liberty” must be credited to the Enlightenment, then how can we deny that the welling up of revolt, then revolution, against the ancien régime, even the grotesque excesses of the Terror and the Vendée, owed nothing to Enlightenment thought? And while there’s surely much to be said for the distinctiveness of the Late Enlightenment, and thus to evaluating it in its own right, isn’t there something unnecessarily over-exquisite in such scholarly line-drawing—in effect, setting up yet another subspecialty in the current madhouse of academic specialties?
But rather than noting its shortcomings, let’s accept this book for what it certainly is: clarifying analysis of arguments, stretching back, more than 230 years, over the origins, contents, and significance of one of the most decisive developments in all of Western history.
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