In this introduction
“Enlightenment,” wrote Immanuel Kant in 1784, “is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity… Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!” The movement he described had many centres — Paris salons, Edinburgh clubs, Berlin academies, London coffee-houses, Philadelphia — and shared a faith: that reason, science and free inquiry could improve human life, and that superstition, tyranny and intolerance were their enemies.
The French Lumières
Voltaire fought “l’infâme” — fanaticism — with satire and campaigns for toleration. Diderot and d’Alembert edited the Encyclopédie (1751–72), seventeen volumes of “reasoned knowledge”. Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) proposed the separation of powers. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Enlightenment’s great internal critic, argued that civilization had corrupted human nature and that legitimate government must express the general will.
The Scottish Enlightenment
Edinburgh, “the Athens of the North”, produced David Hume‘s scepticism and science of human nature, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) and Theory of Moral Sentiments, Thomas Reid’s common-sense philosophy, and Adam Ferguson’s history of civil society.
The German Aufklärung
Lessing pleaded for religious toleration in Nathan the Wise; Moses Mendelssohn bridged Jewish and German culture; Kant put reason itself on trial.
Its critics
Hamann, Herder and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (the “Counter-Enlightenment”) defended faith, language and history against abstract reason; Romanticism prized feeling and nature; later, Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s Underground Man mocked the Crystal Palace, and twentieth-century critics (Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment) asked whether instrumental reason produced the very domination it opposed.
Map of Influence
who answered whom, inside this roomThinkers & Authors
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John Locke
Father of British empiricism and of liberalism — the mind begins as a blank slate, and government rests on the consent of the governed.
Voltaire
The wittiest man of the Enlightenment — playwright, historian, satirist and campaigner against intolerance — whose Candide demolished Leibnizian optimism and whose cry was “Écrasez l’infâme!”
David Hume
The great Scottish sceptic who showed that causation, the self, and induction cannot be justified by reason — and that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Genevan philosopher of nature, freedom and feeling — “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” — whose Social Contract inspired revolutionaries and whose Confessions invented modern autobiography.
Immanuel Kant
The philosopher who tried to end the war between rationalism and empiricism by asking what the mind itself contributes to experience — the “Copernican revolution” in philosophy.
Works
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Schools & Movements
1Coming to the Library
11 pages being writtenVoices
quotations from this traditionTwo things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüt mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je öfter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschäftigt: der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir.
I freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted my dogmatic slumber.
Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.
Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden.
I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.
Ich musste also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other… I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.
I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous.
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished?… To this I answer, in one word, from experience.