The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy

Aaron Garrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317807919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The Eighteenth century is one of the most important periods in the history of Western philosophy, witnessing philosophical, scientific, and social and political change on a vast scale. In spite of this, there are few single volume overviews of the philosophy of the period as a whole.

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy is an authoritative survey and assessment of this momentous period, covering major thinkers, topics and movements in Eighteenth century philosophy. Beginning with a substantial introduction by Aaron Garrett, the thirty-five specially commissioned chapters by an outstanding team of international contributors are organised into seven clear parts:

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• Context and Movements
• Metaphysics and Understanding
• Mind, Soul, and Perception
• Morals and Aesthetics
• Politics and Society
• Philosophy in relation to the Arts and Sciences
• Major Figures.

Major topics and themes are explored and discussed, ranging from materialism, free will and personal identity; to the emotions, the social contract, aesthetics, and the sciences, including mathematics and biology. The final section examines in more detail three figures central to the period: Hume, Rousseau and Kant. As such The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth Century Philosophy is essential reading for all students of the period, both in philosophy and related disciplines such as politics, literature, history and religious studies.

Part I

CONTEXT AND MOVEMENTS

1

ENLIGHTENMENT, NATIONAL ENLIGHTENMENTS, AND TRANSLATION

Fania Oz-Salzberger

Preface

The Enlightenment has probably inspired more discussions and disagreements on its contents, purpose, and legacy than any other chapter in intellectual history. It was never launched as “a movement,” but many of its participants self-consciously reflected on the unique features of their era while gradually developing its recurring topics and distinctive terminology. A keen sense of a shared intellectual adventure ran across the Enlightenment’s numerous networks, beneath differentials of geography, politics, and faith.

Controversy begins with the very contours of the Enlightenment – its chronology, geography, and subject matter. Since the present volume is about philosophy, it would not be superfluous to remind oneself that the topic of this chapter only partially overlaps with the book’s. Enlightenment may have emerged from philosophy, included philosophers, and engendered philosophy, but it does not belong exclusively to the history of philosophy. Its most effective figures were not necessarily the greatest eighteenth-century philosophers, and its philosophes, Aufklärer, or men and women of letters, are closer to what a later age would dub “public intellectuals.” Moreover, not every eighteenth-century work of art, literature, or theory should automatically be placed within (or against) the Enlightenment (see Vierhaus 1995). Our field is narrower than that, but it is nevertheless huge.

The Enlightenment conjoined ideas, public aspirations, and social change in a novel way. Simply put, never before did so many writers openly promote the expansion of readership. Never before did so many writers set out to critique received wisdoms, augment human knowledge, ameliorate individual lives, and enhance the collective well-being of mankind by means of Reason and in the name of civil liberty. The light-spreading metaphor that accompanied many open declarations of this set of intentions drew from the previous century’s “natural light of Reason,” but its future-orientation, critical daring, and social-political reforming ambitions were new.

Moreover, the Enlightenment – we shall dwell on both critiques and justifications for this use of the definite article – was novel in its cosmopolitan, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic modes of conversation. Human interactions, correspondences, quotations, and above all translations were crucial for its development, self-understanding, and argumentative nature. As Silvia Sebastiani shows in Chapter 24 of this volume, the “unresolved tension between uniformity and diversity, regularity and singularity” is “constitutive of the Enlightenme nt itself.” The present chapter suggests that Enlightenment localities and the quest for universality, modified through processes of reception and translation, enabled the transformation of both European (or the partially synonymous “modern,” and eventually “Western”) and national forms of awareness.

Terminology developed alongside the theoretical and practical agendas. Pierre Bayle used the term “siècle éclairé” as early as 1684, and his contemporary Bernard de Fontenelle habitually referred to “les lumières.” These became standard idioms by the early eighteenth century (Roger 1968: 167ff.). In Britain, “our enlightened age” cropped up in the mid-eighteenth century, parallel to the growing awareness of its crucial difference from previous “enlightened ages” in its multiplicity of participants, critical spirit, public commitment, and distinctly modern discourse of liberty. British writers did not use the noun “Enlightenment” itself until well into the nineteenth century (Porter 2001: 5), but the vocabulary of “improvement,” “progress,” and “refinement,” in the “arts and sciences” as well as in politics and economy, was firmly linked to “our enlightened age” (for a representative periodical survey see Anon. 1769, Critical Memoires).

The German term Aufklärung gained prominence in 1783 in the form of a question, “Was ist Aufklärung?.” It was broached by the theologian J. F. Zöllner, discussed by the members of the Wednesday Society of Berlin literati, and became the 1784 prize essay topic in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift (Schmidt 1996, 2003; Oz-Salzberger 2003a). Immanuel Kant’s entry provided one of the best-known definitions of the Enlightenment, as “mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity,” namely “the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another” (Kant 1784: Ak VIII, 35; Schmidt 1996: 58). The German Enlightenment was emblematic of the era’s intellectual and terminological self-searching: the term Aufklärung gained public visibility as part of the polemic quest for its definition.

Twentieth-century scholars have hotly debated the Enlightenment’s contents and impacts, and their critiques and defenses often had sharp political edges. Major controversies focused on the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the primacy of reason, its universalist aspirations, its intellectual hubris, and its (often retrospectively demarcated) blind spots and deliberate biases. The exclusion or demeaning of women, the lower classes, Jews, non-Europeans, colonial subjects, and other “others” has been a staple of recent critiques. In particular, the Enlightenment’s rationalizing gaze was seen as oppressive by Frankfurt School neo-Marxists (Horkheimer and Adorno), deceitfully power-seeking and colonizing by postmodernists (Foucault, Said), and – by contrast – as a genuinely humane and laudably liberal-minded legacy (Gay, Berlin; Bronner 2004).

Other scholarly debates, less openly political but no less heated, pertain to the relative importance of the Enlightenment’s major players and ideas. Its “center” and “peripheries” have been disputed, alongside its “moderation” and “radicalism” and its “secularism” and “religiosity.” The very coherence and unison of the term “Enlightenment” is also under scrutiny: Does it denote an era, a process, or perhaps a “project”? Can one speak of the Enlightenment? Were there multiple Enlightenments? How did its different national, regional, cultural, and linguistic branches correspond and interact?

This chapter does not attempt to run the full gamut of Enlightenment thought, much of which is bound to overlap with other sections of the present volume. Instead, it offers a concise account of the Enlightenment’s time frame, personalities, and main themes. Since none of these items enjoys a consensus among scholars, the chapter also scans several recent and current debates on the Enlightenment’s importance, inner divisions, and present-day relevancies.

Such controversies encourage a fine-tuned attention to the Enlightenment authors’ own voices, and in this chapter several examples will be offered of the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers understood their own individual and collective aspirations. Finally, reflecting new research into the Enlightenment’s geographical and linguistic multivocality, the main trajectories of Enlightenment texts are discussed, along with the problems and profits involved in the transfer of ideas across linguistic and cultural barriers.

Historical and geographical contours

As a specific chapter in intellectual, social, and cultural history, the Enlightenment inhabits most of the eighteenth century, although some of its thinkers and texts hark back to the seventeenth century, and others spill over to the nineteenth.

Geographically, Enlightenment texts and ideas spread through metropolitan centers in western and central Europe: Paris, most famously, alongside Vienna, Milan, Naples, Edinburgh, and Berlin. This is by no means a conclusive list. Other cities, towns, universities, and country mansions played important roles in fostering Enlightenment thought, debate, and publication. Circulation grew thinner in eastern Europe, where writers linked to Enlightenment ideas were sparser, and readership more circumscribed. In North America, most notably in Philadelphia, authors and printers belonged to Enlightenment networks with strong European connections. As to the non-European world, while parts of it fascinated European thinkers, who made various intellectual uses of them – from Charles de Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (Persian Letters) (1721) to August Ludwig Schlözer’s NeujahrS’Qeschenk aus Jamaica in West Indien für ein Kind in Europa (New Year’s Qift from Jamaica in the West Indies for a Child in Europe) (1780) – its “exotic” societies were still considered inspirations rather than interlocutors. A serious and complex reception of Enlightenment ideas in the colonial and post-colonial world, let alone dialogical reciprocity, was a matter for future generations.

Geography and chronology often determine each other: the Dutch Enlightenment began in the seventeenth century, while the East European Jewish haskala was largely a nineteenth-century offshoot of the German-Jewish Enlightenment. Like other historical eras, the Enlightenment’s accepted time frame depends on the importance we attach to individual figures and cultural clusters within its broad range.

Many historians use the French Revolution as the Enlightenment’s convenient end-terminus, often also seen as its apogee or demise. Regardless of the undecided question whether the Revolution was derivative or deviant from mainstream Enlightenment thought, contemporaries and posterity have seen it as a decisive turn in cultural as well as political history. Nicolas de Condorcet in France, Immanuel Kant in Germany, and Dugald Stewart in Scotland can be seen as the Enlightenment’s last generation. These three thinkers also provided, in different ways, intellectual closures for the era. Condorcet died in a Revolutionary prison shortly after writing his optimistic Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind) (1795) in 1793/94. Kant not only offered deep reflection upon the term Aufklärung but also navigated its legacy into deeper philosophical waters and abandoned some of its cherished creeds. Stewart summed and transmitted Scottish moral philosophy and political economy to nineteenth-century audiences. His social-intellectual milieu, though spared the violence suffered by Continental contemporaries, experienced a similar major transformation of tenor and turf, shifting from cafes, salons, broad-ranging journals, and self-taught dilettantism into university lecture halls and academic specialization.

Charting the beginning of the Enlightenment is a more complex task. In the French context it was inspired by René Descartes, and more directly pioneered by Bayle. Its two great English mentors were John Locke and Isaac Newton. German thinkers looked back to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The Dutch Republic provides even earlier crucial predecessors: Enlightenment political thought hails from Hugo Grotius, while studies emphasizing the Enlightenment’s radical streak allot great significance to Baruch de Spinoza and other members of his generation.

Each of these thinkers may be considered a precursor of the Enlightenment, but some of them can also be seen as members of an “early Enlightenment.” Periodization varies according to intellectual and national/linguistic contexts: the Dutch Enlightenment may well have begun in mid-seventeenth century, but eastern-European upshots only took hold in the second half of the eighteenth century (van Bunge 2003; Venturi 1989).

Similarly, topical aspects dictate variegated starting points: the epistemological shift leading to the Enlightenment’s conceptualizing of knowledge may have begun with Descartes’s philosophy in the first half of the seventeenth century or with Locke’s work in the second half. Political ideas of civil liberty came into full swing with Locke and with the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, while German concepts of the well-governed state hail to Leibniz and Christian Wolff in the early eighteenth century. Theories of religious toleration hark back to Spinoza, Bayle, Locke, and Thomasius, and a wave of novel inquiries into aesthetics was set in motion by the mid-eighteenth century, ignited by the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten.

If we are to identify a specific “moment” in which the Enlightenment blossomed into a self-conscious movement of ideas, network of thinkers, and public sphere of readers, the years 1733–35 may serve as a convenient pointer. In 1733 Voltaire brought out his Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (also known as Lettres anglaises), a widely circulated panegyric of England’s political liberty, economic success, and scientific accomplishment. Then 1734 saw the publication of Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Qrandeur and Decadence of the Romans), and in the same year Benjamin Franklin issued the American version of the Constitution of the Freemasons (first published in London in 1723). The young David Hume traveled to France for the first time and began working on his path-breaking Treatise of Human Nature in the mid-1730s. Conjoining and at times interlocking, these biographical moments and intellectual accomplishments add up to a crucial turning point in the history of ideas.

During the same pivotal years, scientific work throughout western and central Europe was characterized by post-Newtonian ambition to expose the principles underlying the physical world and by a post-Baconian sense of communal interaction and networking. The Enlightenment powerfully linked technology to science: Britain reached a threshold of the Industrial Revolution with John Kay’s 1733 invention of the flying-shuttle loom. In Stockholm, Carl Linnaeus published his great Systema naturae (1735), sorting “the three kingdoms of nature, according to classes, orders, genera and species.” In Marburg, already famous for his long list of publications promoting rationalism Christian Wolff published his Psychologia rationalis in 1734. French scientist René Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur launched the science of entomology with the first of his six-volume Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the eclecticism of eighteenth-century philosophy
• Part I Context and movements
• Part II Metaphysics and understanding
• Part III Mind, soul, and perception
• Part IV Morals and aesthetics
• Part V Politics and society
• Part VI Philosophy in relation to the arts and sciences
• Part VII Major figures
• Index