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The Enlightenment as Method: Rebirth, Science, Humanism, Reformation
On the long runway to take-off of the Enlightenment—and the modern world as we know it—were the intellectual movements of humanism, including the scientific revolution (late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), the Renaissance (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries), and the Protestant Reformation (sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries). Over roughly three centuries, human minds discovered experimental science and the lost Atlantis of classical culture and overturned the centuries-long monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church.
The fuel of the scintillant historical sunrise of the Renaissance was the rediscovery of Greek and Roman thought, culture, and arts. This meant the rediscovery of man—the human being on earth as the natural, appropriate object of study and improvement, the first concern of thought. Man, not the divine, was the proper study of man. As the name suggests, humanism refocused thought on human matters. After centuries of utter preoccupation with the divine and supernatural, European thought returned to the primacy of human beings, their needs, and how reason might address human problems.
Martin Luther (1483–1546), German genius of the Protestant Reformation, sought truth not in the Catholic Church’s teachings but in “primary sources”—that is, the Bible. In a sense, both the Renaissance and Reformation sought truth in authority—the Renaissance in classical culture and the Reformation in the Bible. Both contributed to breaking up the monopoly of the Church of Rome. Luther, to say the very least, was no advocate of reason. Hatred for reason drips from his words. And the two most influential champions of reason in history?
“ ‘Aristotle is the godless bulwark of the papists. He is to theology what darkness is to light. His ethics is the worst enemy of grace.’ He is a ‘rank philosopher,’ an ‘urchin who must be put in the pig-sty or donkey’s stable,’ ‘a shameless slanderer, a comedian, the most artful corrupter of minds. If he had not lived in flesh and bones, I should not scruple to take him for a devil.’ As for St. Thomas, ‘he never understood a chapter of the Gospel or Aristotle. . . . In short, it is impossible to reform the Church if Scholastic theology and philosophy are not torn out by the roots with Canon Law.’ ”
The contribution of Luther to the Enlightenment, in a nutshell (no invidious pun intended), was to join in breaking the Church of Rome’s monopolistic authority in dictating “truth” on all matters. The alternative authority was one all Europeans knew: the Bible itself. The individual mind was empowered to seek its own truth in that “primary source.” One result was a proliferation of Protestant sects continuing to today. The “bottom line,” as accountants say, is that religion—not immediately, but in ensuing centuries—lost the power to command politics, law, education, science, social mores, publishing, theater, and much more.
The Scientific Revolution
Humanism is identified with the experimental science of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and the mathematical investigations of René Descartes (1596–1650), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), and Isaac Newton (1642–1727). All except Newton are categorized as “precursors” of the Enlightenment because the achievements of natural science and mathematics earned for reason irresistible prestige across Europe (and later beyond). Sir Isaac Newton is viewed as the giant of the scientific revolution, with his seemingly “simple” mathematical laws to explain the movement of the earth and heavens; but he is deemed also a pillar of the Enlightenment.
Empowering Reason with Methodology
The “agenda” of the Enlightenment became to identify how reason could be applied with the same success achieved by physics and mathematics to other fields, other questions. What method of reasoning carried with it built-in validity? Proof in science and mathematics depended upon logic—broadly, induction (observation and generalization) and deduction (deriving conclusions from accepted premises by syllogistic reasoning).
The early geniuses of the seventeenth century built on the work of Newton and a few philosophers to advance the idea of the world’s calculable regularity and prove that reasoning, which they sought to model on the ideal of mathematical reasoning, could enable men to achieve certainty about the world—certainty not requiring the guarantee of divine revelation.
Newton comments repeatedly on the proper application of reason as well as its conclusions: “As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no Objections against the conclusions, but such as are taken from Experiments, or other certain Truths. For Hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy.”
Enlightenment Ideas and Religion
Riding, above all, on the enormous reputation of Newton—and later of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), Voltaire (1694–1778), Denis Diderot (1713–1784), and a few others—men in the seventeenth century and later in the eighteenth looked directly and with unconstrained minds at God, reason, nature, human thought, human societies and governments, and principles of production and trade—as well as at superstition, faith and dogma, the claims of all “authorities,” strictures of neoclassicism in the arts, what universities taught and with what justification, and the pretensions of “power.”
Nothing, in fact, was viewed by Enlightenment man as beyond questioning. But that unrestrained questioning brought down on them and their ideas laws, edicts, censorship, exclusion from “established” institutions, pillories, prisons, scaffolds, banishment and “transportation,” and social exclusion.
In an age erected on religious faith and its establishments, the new methodology of reason inevitably sought justification of doctrines of faith in reason and nature. Its first product, initially in England and France, then America, was deism, not so much a movement or cult as a few fundamental convictions. One God, the architect and mechanic of the orderly and calculable world—not the personal God of Christianity—had created for mankind rewards and punishments and an obligation to practice piety and virtue. All men, the deists maintained, could perceive these truths and agree without divine revelation, holy books, or a church to mediate their relationship with God. In America, leaders of the Enlightenment, men like Ethan Allen (1738–1789), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), and Thomas Paine (1737–1809) were deists. So, too, were many later French revolutionaries; but by then, reason’s application to religion had yielded positions like skepticism, atheism, and materialism.
Industrial, Political, and Romantic Revolutions
The Enlightenment produced intellectuals and new institutions in every field and in countries across Europe, then beyond. Broadly, in addition to creating modern philosophy, psychology, ethics, and natural and social sciences—to name but a few—the Enlightenment gave birth to the Industrial Revolution, political revolutions, and the Romantic revolution. In each, the methodology of reason dominated, setting standards of proof for truth, knowledge, and certainty.
Historians see the curtain on the Enlightenment in Europe as the French Revolution (1789–1799), which first thrilled men as the brilliant and infinitely promising triumph of Enlightenment theory and its application—and then, with the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, shattered their confidence in reason, rational men, rational systems, humanism, and progress itself.
Certainly, the spectacle of “Paris gone mad” (Edmund Burke), still under the banner of reason, ended the decades of unlimited confidence in reason and progress. The Enlightenment, of course, did not end; it lived on in the industrial, political, and Romantic movements; the momentum of the sciences; and the philosophy of the late Enlightenment in Germany, in particular.
In America, the nation born of the Enlightenment, its impact continued long into the nineteenth century.
Modern or Postmodern?
The Enlightenment had changed the world with its tenets of reason, secularism (including separation of church and state), science, political freedom, economic liberalism (including free trade), and far more. They remain foundational ideas of modernity, although, for more than a century, they have come increasingly under attack by counter-Enlightenment philosophy (originating and maturing in Germany) and its latest manifestation, postmodernism.
Professor Stephen Hicks, author of the modern classic Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, summarizes postmodernism: “Postmodernism became the leading intellectual movement in the late twentieth century. It has replaced modernism, the philosophy of the Enlightenment. For modernism’s principles of objective reality, reason, and individualism, it has substituted its own precepts of relative feeling, social construction, and groupism. This substitution has now spread to major cultural institutions such as education, journalism, and the law, where it manifests itself as race and gender politics, advocacy journalism, political correctness, multiculturalism, and the rejection of science and technology.”
Do not count on the future to be “modern.” That is an assumption easy to make because despite a century or more of anti-Enlightenment philosophy, and now postmodernism, the powerful methodology of reason that defined the Enlightenment—and won for us the modern world—has demonstrated its value almost beyond argument. But “argument”—reason, logic, evidence, and open debate—is not the method of postmodernism, which is the anti-Enlightenment.
"Kutoka kwa ""Ukumbusho"" hadi ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji"" na ""Ubadilishaji."""" Katika kipindi cha karne tatu, akili za wanadamu ziligundua sayansi ya majaribio na Atlantis iliyopotea ya utamaduni wa kale na kuangusha udhibiti wa karne nyingi wa Kanisa Katoliki la Kirumi. Chanzo cha mapambazuko hayo ya kihistoria ya Enzi ya Renaissance kilikuwa kugundua upya mawazo, utamaduni, na sanaa za Wagiriki na Waroma. Hii ilimaanisha kugundua tena mwanadamu - mwanadamu duniani kama kitu cha asili, sahihi cha utafiti na uboreshaji, wasiwasi wa kwanza wa mawazo. Mwanadamu, si mungu, alikuwa utafiti sahihi wa mwanadamu. Kama jina lake linavyodokeza, ubinadamu ulikazia tena fikira mambo ya kibinadamu. Baada ya karne nyingi za kujishughulisha kabisa na mambo ya kimungu na ya kienyeji, mawazo ya Ulaya yalirudi kwenye umuhimu wa wanadamu, mahitaji yao, na jinsi akili inaweza kushughulikia matatizo ya kibinadamu. Martin Luther (1483-1546) alikuwa mwanaharakati wa mapinduzi ya Kiprotestanti na hakutafuta ukweli katika mafundisho ya Kanisa Katoliki bali katika Biblia. Kwa njia fulani, Renaissance na Marekebisho ya Kidini vilitafuta ukweli katika mamlaka - Renaissance katika utamaduni wa kale na Marekebisho ya Kidini katika Biblia. Yote mawili yalisaidia kuvunja mamlaka ya Kanisa la Roma. Luther, kwa kusema kidogo sana, hakuwa mtetezi wa sababu. Chuki kwa sababu hutiririka kutoka kwa maneno yake. Na mabingwa wawili wenye uvutano mkubwa zaidi wa sababu katika historia? <unk> <unk>Aristotle ni ngome ya wapapa wasio na Mungu. Yeye ni kwa theolojia kile giza ni kwa nuru. Maadili yake ni adui mbaya zaidi wa neema. Yeye ni'mfalsafa wa cheo,''mchwa ambaye lazima awekwe katika ng'ombe-ng'ombe au punda-ng'ombe,''mchongezi asiye na aibu, mcheshi, mvunjaji wa akili mwenye ustadi zaidi. Kama asingekuwa hai katika nyama na mifupa, nisingekuwa na wasiwasi kumchukulia kuwa shetani. <unk> Kama kwa St. Thomas, <unk> yeye kamwe alielewa sura ya Injili au Aristotle. . . . Kwa kifupi, haiwezekani kurekebisha Kanisa ikiwa theolojia na falsafa ya Scholastic haijakatwa na mizizi na Sheria ya Canon. <unk> <unk> Mchango wa Luther kwa Uangaishaji, kwa ufupi (hakuna neno la wivu lililokusudiwa), ulikuwa kujiunga na kuvunja mamlaka ya monopolist ya Kanisa la Roma katika kuamuru <unk> ukweli <unk> juu ya mambo yote. Mamlaka nyingine ilikuwa moja ambayo Wazungu wote walijua: Biblia yenyewe. Akili ya mtu binafsi ilipewa uwezo wa kutafuta ukweli wake mwenyewe katika "chanzo hicho cha msingi". Matokeo moja yalikuwa kuenea kwa madhehebu ya Kiprotestanti yanayoendelea hadi leo. "Msingi", kama wasomi wa hesabu wasemavyo, ni kwamba dini - si mara moja, bali katika karne zilizofuata - ilipoteza nguvu ya kuongoza siasa, sheria, elimu, sayansi, desturi za kijamii, uchapishaji, ukumbi wa michezo, na mengi zaidi. Humanism ni utamaduni wa kisayansi wa Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) na Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), na utafiti wa hisabati wa René Descartes (1596-1650), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) na Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Wote isipokuwa Newton ni categorized kama <unk>precursors<unk> ya Enlightenment kwa sababu mafanikio ya sayansi ya asili na hisabati alishinda kwa sababu prestige irresistible kote Ulaya (na baadaye zaidi). Sir Isaac Newton anaonekana kama jitu la mapinduzi ya kisayansi, na sheria zake za hisabati zinazoonekana kuwa rahisi kuelezea harakati za dunia na mbingu; lakini pia anaonwa kuwa nguzo ya Enlightenment. "Agenda ya Enlightenment ilikuwa kutambua jinsi sababu inaweza kutumika kwa mafanikio sawa na mafanikio yaliyopatikana na fizikia na hisabati kwa nyanja nyingine, maswali mengine.""" Ni mbinu gani ya kusababu iliyokuwa na uhalali uliojengwa ndani yake? Uthibitisho katika sayansi na hisabati ilitegemea mantiki - kwa ujumla, induction (kuangalia na generalization) na deduction (kupata hitimisho kutoka premises kukubalika kwa syllogistic hoja). Wanasayansi wa karne ya kumi na saba walijenga juu ya kazi ya Newton na wanafalsafa wachache ili kuendeleza wazo la utaratibu wa ulimwengu unaoweza kuhesabiwa na kuthibitisha kwamba hoja, ambayo walijaribu kuiga mfano wa hoja ya hisabati, inaweza kuwawezesha watu kufikia uhakika kuhusu ulimwengu - uhakika ambao hauhitaji dhamana ya ufunuo wa kimungu. "Newton anasema hivi kuhusu matumizi sahihi ya akili na matokeo yake: ""Kama ilivyo katika hisabati, ndivyo ilivyo katika falsafa ya asili: uchunguzi wa mambo magumu kwa njia ya uchambuzi unapaswa kuwa kabla ya njia ya uundaji.""" Uchambuzi huu unatia ndani kufanya majaribio na uchunguzi, na kutoa hitimisho la jumla kutoka kwao kwa Induction, na kukiri hakuna pingamizi dhidi ya hitimisho, lakini kama vile ni kuchukuliwa kutoka majaribio au ukweli mwingine fulani. "Kwa sababu ya kuwa ""wafuasi wa mawazo"" wa Newton, na baadaye wa Thomas Hobbes (1588-1779), John Locke (1703-1708), Voltaire (1694-1778), Denis Diderot (1613-1784), na wengine wachache, watu katika karne ya kumi na saba na baadaye katika karne ya kumi na nane walimtazama moja kwa moja na bila vizuizi Mungu, sababu, asili, mawazo ya kibinadamu, jamii za kibinadamu na serikali, na kanuni za uzalishaji na biashara, pamoja na ushirikina, imani na dogma, madai ya mamlaka zote, masharti ya neoclassicism katika sanaa, vyuo vikuu na kwa sababu yoyote ile." Lakini kwamba maswali unrestrained kuletwa chini juu yao na mawazo yao sheria, amri, udhibiti, kutengwa kutoka "kuanzishwa" taasisi, pillories, magereza, scaffolds, uhamisho na "usafirishaji", na kutengwa kijamii. Katika enzi iliyojengwa juu ya imani ya kidini na taasisi zake, mbinu mpya ya sababu bila shaka ilitafuta uthibitisho wa mafundisho ya imani katika sababu na asili. "Mfano wa kwanza wa ""deism"" ulianza kuonekana katika Uingereza na Ufaransa, na baadaye katika Amerika, na haikuwa dini au dini bali ni imani chache za msingi." Mungu mmoja, mbunifu na mhandisi wa ulimwengu wenye utaratibu na unaoweza kuhesabiwa - si Mungu wa kibinafsi wa Ukristo - alikuwa ameumba kwa ajili ya wanadamu thawabu na adhabu na wajibu wa kufanya ibada na wema. Deists walidai kwamba watu wote wangeweza kutambua ukweli huu na kukubaliana bila ufunuo wa kimungu, vitabu vitakatifu, au kanisa kuingilia uhusiano wao na Mungu. Katika Amerika, viongozi wa Enlightenment, watu kama Ethan Allen (1738-1789), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), na Thomas Paine (1737-1809) walikuwa deists. Hivyo, pia, walikuwa wengi baadaye wavunjwaji wa Ufaransa; lakini kwa wakati huo, sababu ya matumizi ya dini alikuwa alitoa nafasi kama shaka, atheism, na materialism. Mapinduzi ya Viwanda, Siasa, na ya Kipenzi Uamsho ulizalisha wasomi na taasisi mpya katika kila uwanja na katika nchi kote Ulaya, kisha zaidi. Kwa ujumla, pamoja na kuunda falsafa ya kisasa, saikolojia, maadili, na sayansi ya asili na kijamii - kwa kutaja tu chache - Enlightenment ilizaa Mapinduzi ya Viwanda, mapinduzi ya kisiasa, na mapinduzi ya kimapenzi. Katika kila moja, mbinu ya sababu ilitawala, ikiweka viwango vya uthibitisho wa ukweli, ujuzi, na uhakika. "Wahistoria wanaona kwamba ""kifuniko"" cha Enlightenment huko Ulaya kilitokana na Mapinduzi ya Ufaransa (1789-1799), ambayo kwanza iliwafurahisha watu kama ushindi mzuri na wenye kuahidi sana wa nadharia ya Enlightenment na matumizi yake, na kisha, pamoja na Ugaidi na Vita vya Napoleon, kuvunja imani yao katika sababu, watu wenye busara, mifumo ya busara, ubinadamu, na maendeleo yenyewe." Bila shaka, maonyesho ya "Paris gone mad" (Edmund Burke), bado chini ya bendera ya sababu, kumalizika miongo ya imani isiyo na kikomo katika sababu na maendeleo. Uelewevu, bila shaka, haukukoma; uliendelea kuishi katika harakati za viwanda, kisiasa, na za kimapenzi; mwendo wa sayansi; na falsafa ya mwishoni mwa Uelewevu nchini Ujerumani, hasa. Katika Amerika, taifa lililozaliwa kutokana na Enlightenment, uvutano wake uliendelea kwa muda mrefu katika karne ya kumi na tisa. Je, Ni ya Kisasa au ya Baada ya Kisasa? Enlightenment ilibadilisha ulimwengu na kanuni zake za sababu, secularism (ikiwa ni pamoja na kutenganishwa kwa kanisa na serikali), sayansi, uhuru wa kisiasa, uhuru wa kiuchumi (ikiwa ni pamoja na biashara huru), na mengi zaidi. Mawazo hayo bado ni ya msingi ya kisasa, ingawa kwa zaidi ya karne moja, yamekuwa yakishambuliwa zaidi na falsafa ya Counter-Enlightenment (iliyoanzia na kukomaa nchini Ujerumani) na maonyesho yake ya hivi karibuni, postmodernism. "Profesa Stephen Hicks, mwandishi wa kitabu cha kisasa cha ""Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault,"" anaelezea hivi: ""Postmodernism ikawa harakati kuu ya kiakili mwishoni mwa karne ya ishirini." Imechukua mahali pa kisasa, falsafa ya Enlightenment. Kwa kanuni za kisasa za hali halisi ya kimakusudi, sababu, na ubinafsi, imebadilisha kanuni zake mwenyewe za hisia za jamaa, ujenzi wa kijamii, na kikundi. "Hii badala sasa imeenea kwa taasisi kuu za kitamaduni kama vile elimu, uandishi wa habari, na sheria, ambapo inaonekana kama jamii na jinsia siasa, uandishi wa habari, siasa sahihi, utamaduni, na kukataa sayansi na teknolojia. ""Usitegemee siku zijazo kuwa ""ya kisasa"" - Hiyo ni dhana rahisi kufanya kwa sababu licha ya karne au zaidi ya falsafa ya kupambana na Ujuzi, na sasa postmodernism, mbinu nguvu ya sababu ambayo ilivyoelezwa Ujuzi na alishinda kwa ajili yetu ulimwengu wa kisasa." Lakini <unk> hoja <unk> sababu, mantiki, ushahidi, na mjadala wa wazi <unk> si njia ya postmodernism, ambayo ni kupambana na Enlightenment.