The philosophes' cosmopolitan mind
Review of The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters by Anthony Pagden
The principal argument of this book is that the Enlightenment philosophes established a new kind of mindset, one that was universally applicable to all human beings, hence cosmopolitan. The philosophes, according to Pagden, were instrumental in sweeping away all dogmatic or unquestionable belief systems – those based on religion, ideology, tradition, or class – in favor of an ambitious and open inquiry into the nature of man and society. By observation and experiment. Beyond our cultural and social constructs, the philosophes asked, were we all essentially the same? What governed our choices? Where did the sources of our differences originate? How did we formulate our religions, our societies, our systems of government?
Most importantly, the philosophes demolished the notion that there could be a single source of absolute and unassailable knowledge, such as the Bible. Developed over the previous centuries, the scholastics has taken the single-source explanation to its greatest extreme: their program was to systematically apply Aristotelian logic to explore God’s natural law, that is, the “means…by which God moves us to our ends or good”; the source of this knowledge was God’s word, as written in the Bible, explaining everything in the world as imbued with divine purpose. Indeed, as Thomas Aquinas expressed it, God had structured our minds with “first precepts”, the conceptual tools we needed to explain the world. In particular, this meant that humans were innately predisposed to brotherly love and community.
According to Pagden, there were two recent developments that had brought the Thomist vision of the world into question. On the one hand, the Reformation forever shattered the presumed intellectual unity, the consensus, of Christendom: Protestants and Catholics couldn’t both be right and following a series of savage religious wars, after 1648 the proponents more or less agreed to tolerate one another. On the other hand, as exploration of the globe progressed, Europeans came into contact with cultures and societies that appeared so completely alien that their certitudes were fatally shaken. For the first time, intellectuals began to question what was human and what made a society, some without presuming that their own (European, Christian, etc.) was superior or the only way.
The most significant early challenge to the scholastics’ notion of a community of brotherly love came from Thomas Hobbes, who argued that primitive humans could operate entirely without innate restraints: “no arts; no letters; no society [in] continual fear and danger of violent death;…life [was] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. In this view, the only remedy that could bring order and peace was a strong state, the “Leviathan”. While Pagden argues that this simplistic picture is intended not as a literal description of reality but as a thought experiment, Hobbes’ ideas proved hugely influential and controversial, including accusations of atheism. One of his principal influences was apparently Epicurianism, as expressed in De Rerum Natura, arguing for an atomistic theory, according to which matter and indeed life operated in reaction to outward stimulus without any further “innate” ideas, disposition or divine plan. John Locke extended this logic, arguing that the only reliable information was through our senses rather than canonical texts. Skepticism and observation were thenceforth the rule.
From this basis, an army of new thinkers began to attack what they believed were misconceptions in the Bible. Though few of them admitted to being atheists outright, Diderot and Voltaire wrote sarcastic essays about the fabrications, contradictions, and inaccuracies in the Bible, comparing them directly to widely ridiculed pagan mythologies. For an increasing number, there was no “benign or caring deity”. At a minimum, God could no longer serve as the prime mover or micromanager of nature and life’s events. Others argued that God was a kind of celestial watchmaker, the creator of everything – set in motion but no longer directly involved. This latter tendency led to deism, the supposed Christian ideology of the founding fathers.
The removal of God – either in his very existence or as an active agent – opened the flood gates to the study of man and society by direct observation and without a priori assumption. Pagden then goes into the theories being advanced in such great detail that they are impossible to encapsulate here. In addition to Hobbes, the most significant was Rousseau. Rather than a brutish view of “natural man”, he argued that primitive man lived in a happier, if simpler state than those that had to suffer under the obligations of religion, society and state, which he equated with a loss of freedom. For him, it was government and the construction and organization of society that were the problem. As with Hobbes, Pagden argues that this represented an ideal type, a thought experiment that should not be taken literally. Whatever the case, the study of institutions and other cultures began to flower: not just in the idyllic, as was erroneously claimed regarding Tahitian society, but in the refinement and even perfection of Chinese Confucianism as a model for government and civic behavior. While crude by modern standards, these efforts represented the beginnings of the social sciences.
The cosmopolitanism that resulted was highly idealistic, almost an aspiration to a rationalist utopia. The inevitable result of their methods and discoveries, the philosophes concluded, “would one day lead to the creation of a universal civilization capable of making all individuals independent, autonomous, freed of dictates from above and below, self-knowing, and dependent solely upon one another for survival”. The philosophes ardently believed that the Enlightened sovereigns would lead the way to better societies.
Though they were suspicious of the “rabble”, which they tended to view as too poorly educated to make rational decisions, many of them applauded the early, Republican stage of the French Revolution. It was only when it turned to the murderous purity of Robespierre’s single will that the conservative reaction against the Enlightenment set in. Edmund Burke and others argued that the philosophes had destroyed the old virtues of morality and brotherhood that were anchored in the monarchy and Christianity, freeing the poor and disinherited to seek revenge upon their betters. What was required, the conservative reaction argued, was a return to traditional values and institutions. Theirs was the road, Pagden believes, that led to nationalism, communism, and even totalitarianism.
Pagden concludes by arguing that the values of the Enlightenment – for universal human rights, global and equitable justice for all, respect for diversity, and open-minded decision making by reason – remain valid. Today, he sees them in the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Court of Justice. Indeed, he believes that the Enlightenment offers viable solutions to our current struggles against white nationalism, demagogic populism, and religious extremism. I feel skeptical about Pagden’s faith in reason and the construction of open and rational institutions, but the argument is worthy.
Pagden writes in a fluidly elegant style, but he gets lost in the details. If there is a single basic idea and the whole book is a proof of it, it still goes off on innumerable tangents – a fun ride, but the reader is not sure where they’re heading much of the time. I enjoyed many of the details, but the book was often too much for me: to digest it more deeply, I would have to read several more times, an effort for which few of us can find the time.
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