Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 117 views

    The Enlightenment: DR Lisa Pine

    Uploaded by

    Moderkay
    The Enlightenment was an 18th century intellectual movement that promoted reason, science, and individualism over tradition and religion. Key ideas included using reason to advance knowledge and promote tolerance, challenging traditional authorities through skepticism, and believing that progress could be achieved through science and reform. Major Enlightenment philosophers came from France, Britain, Germany, and America and spread ideas through writings and informal gatherings. The movement had both high-level intellectuals and also grassroots supporters who helped disseminate radical ideas challenging the existing social and political order.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    The Enlightenment: DR Lisa Pine

    Uploaded by

    Moderkay
    117 views25 pages
    The Enlightenment was an 18th century intellectual movement that promoted reason, science, and individualism over tradition and religion. Key ideas included using reason to advance knowledge and promote tolerance, challenging traditional authorities through skepticism, and believing that progress could be achieved through science and reform. Major Enlightenment philosophers came from France, Britain, Germany, and America and spread ideas through writings and informal gatherings. The movement had both high-level intellectuals and also grassroots supporters who helped disseminate radical ideas challenging the existing social and political order.

    Original Description:

    The Enlightenment - International Relations

    Original Title

    The Enlightenment

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    PPT, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    The Enlightenment was an 18th century intellectual movement that promoted reason, science, and individualism over tradition and religion. Key ideas included using reason to advance knowledge and promote tolerance, challenging traditional authorities through skepticism, and believing that progress could be achieved through science and reform. Major Enlightenment philosophers came from France, Britain, Germany, and America and spread ideas through writings and informal gatherings. The movement had both high-level intellectuals and also grassroots supporters who helped disseminate radical ideas challenging the existing social and political order.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as ppt, pdf, or txt
    117 views25 pages

    The Enlightenment: DR Lisa Pine

    Uploaded by

    Moderkay
    The Enlightenment was an 18th century intellectual movement that promoted reason, science, and individualism over tradition and religion. Key ideas included using reason to advance knowledge and promote tolerance, challenging traditional authorities through skepticism, and believing that progress could be achieved through science and reform. Major Enlightenment philosophers came from France, Britain, Germany, and America and spread ideas through writings and informal gatherings. The movement had both high-level intellectuals and also grassroots supporters who helped disseminate radical ideas challenging the existing social and political order.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as ppt, pdf, or txt
    You are on page 1of 25

    THE ENLIGHTENMENT

    Dr Lisa Pine
    What is Enlightenment?
    • ‘Enlightenment is man's release from his self-
    incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability
    to make use of his understanding without
    direction from another. Self-incurred is this
    tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of
    reason but in lack of resolution and courage
    to use it without direction from
    another. Sapere aude! "Have courage to use
    your own reason!"- that is the motto of
    enlightenment.’
    - Immanuel Kant, 1784
    The Enlightenment
    • Advancement of knowledge and use of
    reason, the defining characteristic of
    humanity.
    • A process of mental freedom or liberation
    from ignorance and error.
    • Emphasis on reason and tolerance.
    • The individual mind, deciding things for itself.
    • Nothing is to be immune from scrutiny.
    Enlightenment Values
    • Scepticism towards organised, traditional religion.
    • Distrust of established political authority and call for
    political reform.
    • Opposition to superstition, intolerance, prejudice,
    unthinking adherence to social custom.
    • Belief in science and experiment.
    • Belief that the application of reason will in itself
    create harmony and a better world.
    • Questioning traditional authority and a search for
    rational solutions/answers
    Background
    •The Enlightenment was an international movement, with its
    own local variants in many countries, including Scotland,
    England, France, North America, Germany.
    •It represented a rejection of the ‘ancien regime’ or old order
    dominated by hereditary monarchy and organised religion.
    •Enlightenment ‘philosophes’ (philosophers) sought to
    understand and to change the world for the better.
    •This was the Enlightenment project.
    •Diderot and d’Alambert defined a ‘philosophe’ as one who:
    ‘trampling on prejudice, tradition, universal consent, authority…
    dares to think for himself’.
    ‘Philosophes’
    • Core Enlightenment philosophers from France
    included the following:
    • Francois Marie Arouet aka Voltaire (1694-
    1778)
    • Charles Louis Montesquieu (1689-1755)
    • Denis Diderot (1713-84)
    • Jean d’Alambert (1717-83)
    • Marquis de Condorcet (1743-94)
    One of Montesquieu’s Immanuel Kant, 1724-
    Voltaire, 1694-1778
    works, De l’Esprit des 1804
    Loix, 1748
    Other key figures
    • British: David Hume (1711-76), John Locke
    (1632-1704) and Edward Gibbon (1737-94).
    • Swiss: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78).
    • German: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Baron
    d’Holbach (1723-89) and Johann Gottfried
    Herder (1744-1803).
    • American: Benjamin Franklin (1706-90).
    Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), John Adams
    (1735-1826).
    Key aspects of the Enlightenment
    • The understanding of human nature.
    • The search for knowledge.
    • The natural world, science and invention.
    • Political rights, responsibilities and the
    development of civil society.
    • Morality and punishment of crimes.
    • Art and architecture: William Hogarth ‘Beer
    Street’ (1751) and ‘Gin Lane’ (1751).
    Beer Street and Gin Lane
    Science/progress
    ‘The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting
    sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the
    height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man
    over matter. We may, perhaps, deprive large masses of their gravity,
    and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport.
    Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce: all diseases
    may by sure means be prevented or cured, (not excepting even that of
    old age,) and our lives lengthened at pleasure, even beyond the
    antediluvian standard.’

    Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley, 1780


    Jean Antoine Nollet, French
    monk & experimental scientist,
    (18th century engraving).
    Tolerance
    ‘What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity.
    We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon
    reciprocally each other's folly --- that is the first law of
    nature…..But it is clearer still that we ought to be
    tolerant of one another, because we are all weak,
    inconsistent, liable to fickleness and error. Shall a reed
    laid low in the mud by the wind say to a fellow reed
    fallen in the opposite direction: "Crawl as I crawl,
    wretch, or I shall petition that you be torn up by the
    roots and burned"?
    Voltaire, 1770
    Freedom
    ‘Some writers have so confounded society with
    government, as to leave little or no distinction between
    them; whereas they are not only different, but have
    different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and
    government by our wickedness; the former promotes our
    happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter
    negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages
    intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a
    patron, the last a punisher…Society in every state is a
    blessing, but government even in its best state is but a
    necessary evil; in its worst state an in tolerable one….’
    Tom Paine, 1776
    Reason and fairness
    ‘The torture of a criminal… is a cruelty consecrated by custom in most
    nations. … either to make him confess his crime, or to explain some
    contradictions into which he had been led during his examination, or
    discover his accomplices….or, finally, in order to discover other crimes of
    which he is not accused, but of which he may be guilty…No man can be
    judged a criminal until he be found guilty... What right, then, but that of
    power, can authorise the punishment of a citizen so long as there remains
    any doubt of his guilt?... If guilty, he should only suffer the punishment
    ordained by the laws, and torture becomes useless, as his confession is
    unnecessary, if he be not guilty, you torture the innocent.. that pain
    should be the test of truth… the robust will escape, and the feeble be
    condemned….’
    Cesare Beccaria, 1764
    Equality
    ‘Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole
    universe; discover your rights. The powerful empire of nature is no longer
    surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition, and lies. The flame of truth has
    dispersed all the clouds of folly and usurpation. Enslaved man has multiplied his
    strength and needs recourse to yours to break his chains. Having become free, he
    has become unjust to his companion. Oh, women, women! When will you cease to
    be blind? What advantage have you received from the Revolution? A more
    pronounced scorn, a more marked disdain. In the centuries of corruption you ruled
    only over the weakness of men. The reclamation of your patrimony, based on the
    wise decrees of nature-what have you to dread from such a fine undertaking? ’
    Olympe de Gouges, 1791
    The cage of the senses
    ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two
    sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone
    to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine
    what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right
    and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects,
    are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in
    all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to
    throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and
    confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their
    empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the
    while.’ - Jeremy Bentham, 1789
    Kant
    ‘Statutes and formulas, those mechanical tools
    of the rational employment or rather
    misemployment of his natural gifts, are the
    fetters of an everlasting tutelage. Whoever
    throws them off makes only an uncertain leap
    over the narrowest ditch because he is not
    accustomed to that kind of free motion.’
    Immanuel Kant, 1784
    ‘High’ and ‘Low’ Enlightenment
    • Roy Porter suggests that whilst key
    philosophers made up the ‘High
    Enlightenment’, there was also a ‘Low
    Enlightenment’.
    • This was made up of a wider range of
    articulate and cultured men and women, what
    Daniel Roche has called ‘gens de culture’
    (cultured people).
    Robert Darnton and the ‘Low
    Enlightenment’
    • Darnton: thinkers of the ‘Low Enlightenment’
    were more influential in eroding French royal
    power and spreading Enlightenment ideas
    • Writers of ‘Grub Street’ – impoverished
    citizens who resented the inequalities in
    French society and published pamphlets
    tarnishing the monarchy
    • Wanted to destroy oppressive tradition of
    absolutism, wanted equal political, social and
    civil rights
    Robert Darnton and the ‘Low
    Enlightenment’
    • Philosophes of the ‘High Enlightenment’: how
    influential were their ideas in practice? Only
    exclusive upper class had access to/could
    understand these ideas
    • ‘Grub Street’ pamphlets widely circulated
    among masses– polarized population and
    spread opposition to monarchy on larger scale
    • Cartoons: satire used to mock
    monarchy/upper classes
    Grub Street satirical cartoon Satire against Louis XVI: a peasant
    drawn by Herman Van Kruys holds a pig with the face of Louis XVI by
    in 1729. This image shows the a lead.
    Pope as an ape, suggesting
    the corruption of religion.
    Lunar Society of Birmingham
    • This was a lustrous Enlightenment gathering
    of intellectuals, doctors, inventors and
    entrepreneurs.
    • It included among its members the
    manufacturers Josiah Wedgwood and
    Matthew Boulton, the inventor James Watt
    and the scientists Erasmus Darwin and Joseph
    Priestley.
    Roy Porter on the Enlightenment
    • ‘Indeed, it may be helpful to see the
    Enlightenment as precisely that point in
    European history when, benefitting from the
    rise of literacy, growing affluence, and the
    spread of publishing, the secular intelligentsia
    emerged as a relatively independent social
    force.’
    Useful Books on the Subject:
    • Roy Porter: ‘The Enlightenment’
    • Colin Jones: ‘The Great Nation’
    • Margaret C. Jacob ‘The Enlightenment’
    • Robert Darnton: ‘The High Enlightenment and
    the Low-Life of Literature in Pre-Revolutionary
    France’
    • Geoffrey Treasure: ‘The Making of Modern
    Europe 1648-1780’

    You might also like