The Enlightenment

The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790

Ritchie Robertson

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062410672
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Primordi della storia moderna

A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness. One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was "the best of all possible worlds". Ritchie Robertson goes back into the "long eighteenth century, " from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about.

Robertson returns to the era's original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness – in this world rather than the next – by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment.

In answering the question 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to "have the courage to use your own intellect". Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.

1

Happiness, Reason and Passion

The Enlightenment declared the conviction that the goal of life was happiness, and that if this goal could be attained at all, it was to be found in the here and now, despite the manifold imperfections of earthly life. As early as 1671, the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz defined wisdom as ‘the science of happiness’.¹ John Locke wrote in 1677: ‘The businesse of man [is] to be happy in this world by enjoyment of the things of nature subservient to life health ease and pleasure and by the comfortable hopes of another life.’² Locke publicly reaffirmed the priority of happiness in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), one of the Enlightenment’s foundational texts: ‘I lay it for a certain ground, that every intelligent being really seeks happiness, which consists in the enjoyment of pleasure, without any considerable mixture of uneasiness.’³ Alexander Pope, in the Essay on Man (1733–4), famously apostrophized ‘happiness! our being’s end and aim’.⁴ The ‘pursuit of happiness’ was, equally famously, among the basic human rights formulated by Thomas Jefferson in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776. But this pursuit was not confined to Western Europe and North America. Far away, in what is now Romania, Iosipos Moisiodax, head of the Princely Academy at Jassy (now Iaşi), defied the Orthodox Church by issuing a similar message in his Apology (1780): ‘Sound Philosophy . . . is a comprehensive theory, which investigates the nature of things always with an eye to their end, so that it preserves, it promotes the true happiness that mankind, as mankind, can enjoy upon the earth.’⁵

‘Happiness’ and its equivalents – bonheur, félicité, felicità, Glück, Glückseligkeit, lycksalighet – epitomize what one leading contemporary historian of the Enlightenment has called ‘the commitment to understanding, and hence to advancing, the causes and conditions of human betterment in this world’, which gave the Enlightenment its intellectual coherence.⁶ It was this aim that underlay the attention that Enlighteners gave to society, to the study of forms of government, to political economy, and to history, which was often understood as a narrative of development from the barbarism and anarchy of the early Middle Ages to the relative liberty and prosperity of modern commercial society. It helped to motivate not only the pursuit of scientific knowledge but also such practical endeavours as the improvement of farming techniques, the attempt to make punishment more humane and at the same time more effective, and the search for methods of education that would bring out pupils’ individuality and equip them to understand the world around them. The textual counterpart of these endeavours was the Encyclopédie, the compendium of knowledge, including crafts and techniques, compiled with enormous effort and against frequent official opposition by Denis Diderot and his collaborators. And the campaigns waged by some Enlighteners against the Churches – as well as the campaigns often undertaken within the Churches by believers who wanted to reconcile the doctrines of Christianity with the demands of common sense – were intended to demolish the falsehoods that kept people in unhappy intellectual immaturity and social subjection. A dimly imagined happiness might exist beyond the grave, but the prospect could not compensate for the shortcomings of this life. If happiness was possible – and that was far from certain – Enlighteners wanted to attain it before death. To them, happiness was not, as it often is in present-day discussions, simply a subjective state, such as might be induced by chemicals; it meant attaining the preconditions for personal happiness, including domestic affection, material sufficiency and a suitable degree of freedom.⁷

The original title-page of Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding. Despite bearing the date 1690, the book was actually published in 1689. The Latin quotation runs: ‘How fine to be willing to admit that one does not know what one does not know, instead of spewing out such nonsense and disgusting oneself!’ (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods).

Such a conviction was far from self-evident. It meant overcoming centuries of Christian teaching that represented this world as a mere vale of tears in which we had to earn the true happiness that could only be found in heaven. St Augustine, the theologian who more than any other shaped the character of medieval (and subsequent) Christianity, declared that, even for the righteous, true happiness was unattainable in our present life.⁸ The medieval pope Innocent III, in his much-read treatise on the wretchedness of life, observed: ‘We be all borne yelling and crying, to the end we may expresse our myserie’; after which things would only get worse, especially as, for most people, misery on earth was a mere prelude to much greater suffering in hell.⁹ The Enlightenment was only possible once such assumptions had been discarded. Hence, we must consider it not only as a philosophical movement aiming ultimately to increase earthly happiness, but also as part of a tectonic shift in outlook, a far-reaching change in mentality.

The belief that the purpose of human life is the attainment of happiness is called ‘eudaemonism’. But eudaemonism leaves open the question of what happiness is, and whether it is attainable at all. These were central questions for the Enlightenment, both in theory and (as we shall see in Chapter 8) in practice.

Is Happiness Possible?

On the possibility of happiness, the classical and Christian traditions disagreed. Many classical philosophers, and many of their Enlightenment successors, were eudaemonists: they assumed that happiness was the final end of human life.¹⁰ Horace’s poem beginning ‘Beatus ille’ attributes happiness to a simple and independent farmer; in a seventeenth-century translation:

Happy the Man whom bounteous Gods allow

With his own hands Paternal Grounds to plough!¹¹

Jesus, however, presented his hearers with the paradox that to be happy you had to be poor in this life, because then you would be amply recompensed in a future life: the Vulgate, using the same word as Horace, has him say ‘beati pauperes quia vestrum est regnum Dei’ (Luke 6:20), tendentiously translated in the Authorized Version not as ‘Happy are the poor’ but as ‘Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.’

In the ancient world, earthly happiness was thought to be attainable, and not just for the farmers nostalgically celebrated by Horace and Virgil. It might consist in the exercise of virtue, or in sensual pleasure. The philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE) taught people to abandon unnecessary fears: of the gods, who had no concern with humanity, and of death, which led merely to non-existence. Freed from these fears, the individual should not expect ‘supreme’ felicity, but could aim for ‘subalterne or graduall’ felicity,

a certain state, in which a man may be as Happy as the Frailty of his Nature will permit; or such, in which he may enjoy very much of necessary Goods, and suffer very little of Evils: and consequently, wherein He may spend his daies pleasantly, calmly, and permanently, so far forth as the Condition of his Country, Society, Course of life, Constitution, Age, and other Circumstances shall give leave.¹²

Freed from these fears, the individual could cultivate happiness, or at least minimize pain, by friendship, healthy living and moderate pleasures.

Insofar as Epicurus was known during the Middle Ages, he was thought to be an immoral sensualist. Dante placed him and his followers in the sixth circle of hell for claiming that the soul dies with the body. A better understanding of Epicurean philosophy gradually followed the rediscovery of his follower Lucretius, whose poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of the Universe, first century BCE) was unearthed in 1418 by the humanist Poggio Bracciolini. Early modern admirers of Epicurus had to express themselves cautiously, however, since he was in bad odour as an atheist and (unjustly) for supposedly advocating sensual self-indulgence (as Ben Jonson’s Sir Epicure Mammon does in The Alchemist).¹³

However, Enlighteners were also sharply aware of the difficulties – illness, bereavement, misfortunes of all kinds – that frustrated the individual’s desire for happiness. So they seldom ventured to aspire beyond the modest and prudent ambitions formulated by Epicurus. ‘Enquiries after Happiness, and Rules for attaining it,’ said Joseph Addison, ‘are not so necessary and useful to Mankind as the Arts of Consolation, and supporting one’s self under Affliction. The utmost we can hope for in this world is Contentment; if we aim at any thing higher, we shall meet with nothing but Grief and Disappointments.’¹⁴ David Hume advocated an even lower-key Epicureanism: ‘in general, no course of life has such safety (for happiness is not to be dreamed of) as the temperate and moderate, which maintains, as far as possible, a mediocrity, and a kind of insensibility, in every thing.’¹⁵

Despite such caution, most Enlighteners agreed not only that happiness was desirable, but that its attainment was provided for in the scheme of things. Even some pious Christians believed that God wanted people to be happy. ‘The production of Happiness seems to be the only motive that could induce infinite Goodness to exert infinite Power to create all things; for, to say truth, Happiness is the only thing of real value in existence,’ opined the conservative politician Soame Jenyns in 1757.¹⁶ Other thinkers, more remote from Christianity, ascribed the same intention to nature, as the philosopher and administrator Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot did when addressing the Sorbonne in 1750: ‘Nature has given all humanity the right to be happy: needs, passions, and a reason which is combined with these different principles in a thousand ways, are the forces she has given it to attain this goal.’¹⁷

Was happiness solely the concern of the individual, to be attained in isolation? One could certainly satisfy one’s sensual desires, as the materialist Julien Offray de La Mettrie notoriously advocated. A much-bruited but apocryphal story had him meet an appropriate death in 1751 by keeling over at a Berlin dinner-table after gorging on truffles.¹⁸ Or one might do the opposite: the physician George Cheyne, who ascribed depression, along with a wide range of illnesses, to over-indulgence in eating and drinking, in 1733 recommended temperance and virtue as the sure route to happiness: ‘for Virtue and Happiness are literally and really Causes and Effects’.¹⁹ Or one might conclude, with the scientist Émilie du Châtelet, that one should satisfy one’s passions so far as feasible – the most rewarding passion being that of study. Du Châtelet also recommends avoiding gloomy thoughts and cultivating pleasant illusions; the greatest pleasures come from love, although (or because) it includes illusion.²⁰ Her essay on happiness makes sad reading, for it was written at some time in the late 1740s during the breakdown of her long relationship with Voltaire, and is really an analysis of her own unhappiness.²¹

Acknowledging that individual happiness was hard to attain, the Enlightenment explored the concept of ‘public happiness’. The welfare, and hence the happiness, of the population could and should be the object of government. Princes therefore should not resemble Louis XIV, who had come close to beggaring France through such magnificent but exceptionally costly projects as Versailles and through expensive and destructive wars. An influential critique of such policies (published without the author’s consent) was Les Aventures de Télémaque (The Adventures of Telemachus, 1699), by François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai. In what was to become one of the most popular novels of the following century, the son of Ulysses learns the art of government by touring various countries around the Mediterranean. In the most famous episode, his tutor Mentor, who is the goddess Athena in disguise, undertakes to reform the kingdom of Salente, whose shortcomings recall those of France, in order to render its population happy: ‘Happy are these men, without ambition, distrust or deceit, provided the gods bestow upon them a virtuous king!’²²

A good king, whose first and all-absorbing concern was the happiness of his people, became the ideal of enlightened absolutism. There were classical models among the good Roman emperors, such as Alexander Severus, who, according to Edward Gibbon, combined wisdom with power so that ‘the people, sensible of the public felicity, repaid their benefactor with love and gratitude’.²³ Frederick the Great, king of Prussia from 1740 to 1786, said of princes that their ‘only function must be to work for the happiness of mankind...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Note on Translations
• 1: Happiness, Reason and Passion
• 2: The Scientific Revolution
• 3: Toleration
• 4: The Religious Enlightenment
• 5: Unbelief and Speculation
• 6: Science and Sensibility
• 7: Sociability
• 8: Practical Enlightenment
• 9: Aesthetics
• 10: The Science of Society
• 11: Philosophical History
• 12: Cosmopolitanism
• 13: Forms of Government
• 14: Revolutions
• Conclusion: The Battle over the Enlightenment
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher