Enlightenment and Romanticism
13 MARCH
ENLIGHTENMENT AND ROMANTICISM
DICTIONARY
TIME-LINES
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this assignment you should learn to define and discuss the following
terms:
- Natural Law, The Age of Enlightenment, The Age of Reason, Realist,
Nominalist, Rationalism, natural philosophers, Protestant Reformation, The
Clockwork Universe, Deists, Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, constitution, Lisbon
Earthquake of 1755, The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, Candide,
Voltaire, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, Emile, The Age of Romanticism, The
Age of Revolution, The Age of Liberalism, Napoleon Bonaparte.
You should also learn to discuss the following topics:
- How was the Scientific Revolution connected with the Age of Enlightenment?
- How is Natural Law basic to the Realist point of view?
- How did the Rationalists of the Enlightenment view God?
- What was the Rationalists' view of Government? Economics?
- What was the significance of the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755?
- What was the point of the novel Candide?
- What is the major defect in the Rationalist's view that human affairs are
governed by Natural Law?
- How did Jean-Jacques Rousseau exemplify the men and women of the
Enlightenment?
- Why did Westerners shift their thought from the principles of the
Enlightenment to those of the Age of Liberalism?
TEXT
We have viewed the Scientific Revolution as a movement involving a great
number of people over a relatively long period of time, but such movements do
not occur unless there is a consensus, a view shared by the majority of people
of the time. The view that was shared by many Europeans, although certainly not
all, during the period from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries was
that the universe was governed by natural law, a set of physical
laws that could be discovered by the use of reason even if those laws could not
be changed. With every new discovery, the number of people sharing that view
increased and their desire to learn even more about the physical world grew.
Moreover, many people concluded that natural laws governed human affairs and, if
humans could discover those laws, they could act in accordance with them and
create an orderly, equitable, and prosperous society. The period during which
these ideas dominated European thought is usually called The Age of
Enlightenment or, using a term made famous by Tom Paine, The Age
of Reason". From the point of view that we have been stressing in these
essays, it was an era in which the Realist point of view
prevailed, although those people who shared this view are called
Rationalists rather than Realists.
Naturally enough, organized religion opposed this viewpoint and upheld the
traditional Christian belief that the universe and everything that happened in
it was an expression of God's will. When ecclesiastical power was strong enough,
the speculations of the natural philosophers were limited by
force, and prominent advocates of the use of reason such as Roger Bacon,
Galileo, Rousseau, and Voltaire often failed prison, exile, or even the
possibility of death for publishing their beliefs. By 1525, however, the
universal Church of the Middle Ages had disintegrated in the Protestant
Reformation, and there was no unified Christian authority the curb the
rationalists. It was perhaps only natural that the rationalists came to view
established religion as an opponent of free speech, free inquiry, and free
thought. Moreover, they rejected the contention of the varieties of religion of
the time to be the possessors of knowledge that could not be known by reason but
only because it had been revealed to humanity by God. Many of the natural
philosophers increasingly became convinced that the entire universe and its
workings could be explained by natural law and that natural law could be
discovered through reason. Some of the artists and philosophers of the time
portrayed the universe as operating like the works of a perfect clock, and some
historians have called this view The Clockwork Universe. While
they were willing to believe that some creator had to have constructed the clock
and set it working, they believed that it now ran without the intervention or
tinkering of its creator. In short, they may have believed in God, but did not
believe that God intervened in human affairs, punished the wicked, answered
prayers, protected the innocent or did any of the other things that traditional
Christianity taught that the Deity did. Such people were called
deists, and Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and
many other eminent men and women of the time shared this view of things.
Turning to matters of politics, the rationalists denied the prevailing view
that the forms of government had somehow been instituted among men by God and
its was the Christian's duty "to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's...." The
historians among them noted that, throughout history, governments supposedly
instituted by God or the gods had always worked for the benefit of the powerful
few at the expense of the obedient many. Meanwhile, the travellers among them
reported that, despite the great differences among the peoples of the Earth,
their basic principles of justice and equity were quite similar regardless of
their religion. Based upon these and other considerations, they deduced that the
natural laws governing human communities were that the power of the law and the
legitimacy of the government was derived only from the consent of the community
as a whole. In addition, they held that the proper function of government was to
interfere with the individual as little as possible while still protecting his
natural rights to life and liberty.
Moreover, they concluded that every individual had the natural right to try
to acquire property, meaning by this that every individual had the right to
attempt to gain ownership of some means of production, whether it be a farm,
factory, or the tools of a trade. In the American Declaration of Independence of
1776, Thomas Jefferson carried these natural rights to their
logical conclusion by saying that the people should rebel against any government
that failed to act in accordance with those principles. The economic
significance of that position was obvious. Any government that tried to protect
the property of a favored class at the expense of others had no right to
continued existence. That view was expressed in greater detail by Adam Smith. In
The Wealth of Nations, Smith argued that, if left alone, people
would behave rationally and try to acquire property. The only was of acquiring
property, Smith held, were by making it or taking it from someone else. Since no
one could be satisfied simply by taking from each other, men would naturally
turn to the creation of property. This, in turn, would increase the total
production of goods to the benefit of all.
The idea that human beings were governed by the same laws as governed the
course of the stars and planets, and that by observing those same laws human
communities could move with the same order and regularity as the heavens was a
beguiling one. And so the era was one of governmental reform. On the Continent,
the rationalists believed that the best form of government was that governed by
a powerful but "enlightened" monarch; in England, the tendency was to create a
body of principles, a constitution (Great Britain has no written
constitution), embodying those expressions of natural law that the monarch was
to follow; and the British colonists in North America formed a representative
democracy in which the representatives of the people were limited by a written
body of principles.
The idea that humans could use their reason to discover and institute perfect
societies was, as we noted, beguiling. So beguiling, in fact, that people
continued through three centuries of increasingly savage and destructive wars to
believe that they were making progress. Many of the societies that they
established or influenced were not much different than those of the past. The
privileged and powerful still ruled and the masses still had little chance to
better themselves. Perhaps they were, in a way, ever more repressive than those
of earlier days. Dissidents, eccentrics, and anyone else who opposed the
existing order could be, and were, considered as behaving irrationally and a
threat to "public order". The Protestant churches, wherever they managed to
establish themselves, proved to be just as repressive as the old universal
Church had been, and both Catholic and Protestant Churches were led by the
threat of each other to adopt even more restrictive policies than had hitherto
been the case.
It is interesting to the historian how often ridicule will awaken people to
their self-delusions. One might remember the long fear of nuclear holocaust that
oppressed the American public and found expression in such novels and motion
pictures as "On the Beach" and "Fail Safe". This sense of the inevitability of
annihilation was finally dissipated by the motion picture "Dr. Strangelove", a
painstakingly hilarious parody of "Fail Safe". One could make a very good case
that the Age of Enlightenment began to end with the great Lisbon
Earthquake of 1755. Certainly there had been such disasters before, but
this one was so sudden and destructive that it made dramatic news throughout
Europe and caused many people to begin to wonder about natural law that could
govern the planets is their steady and mathematical course and could also
include sudden and unexplainable calamities. It began to see as if natural law
provided no assurance of order or of permanence.
The effect of this event has been memorialized in Oliver Wendell Holmes's
(1809- 1894) poem entitled "The Deacon's Masterpiece", but better known as
The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay. In this poem, Holmes describes a
seventeenth- century deacon who set out to make a perfect one-horse carriage. He
chose every piece with the utmost care and had the carriage built so that there
was no weak point anywhere in its design. He did his work so well that the
carriage outlasted him by many years. Exactly one hundred years later, the owner
was riding in this carriage when it suddenly fell apart into a pile of dust. No
single part of it had been weak, and so it had all broken at the same time. The
day that this happened was, of course, 1 November 1755 -- the day of the Lisbon
Earthquake. Holmes concluded the poem with the lines "End of the wonderful
one-hoss shay/ Logic is logic. That's all I say". The point was that a perfect
rational argument is like a balloon. If any one point fails, the entire argument
fails, and many people believe that the Lisbon Earthquake was the point at which
the argument upon which the Age of Reason was constructed failed.
This was much after the fact, however. The short novel Candide
by Voltaire (1694-1778), published in 1759, perhaps had more
influence at the time. The protagonist of the novel, Candide, is a naive young
man who is thrown out into the world and wanders through all of its savagery,
often in the company of his old tutor, Doctor Pangloss, who has convinced
himself by rational demonstration that "All is for the best in the best of all
possible worlds." Candide comes to believe that "Optimism is a mania for
maintaining that all is well when things are going badly." After a long series
of encounters with cruelty hypocrisy, stupidity, and every other form of human
viciousness, Candide retires to a small plot of land to cultivate and on which
to stay as far from idealists as possible. [Incidentally, Leonard Bernstein
composed a delightful opera on the theme of Candide that you should hear
if you get the opportunity.]
Candide pointed unerringly to the great defect in the idealism of The
Age of Enlightenment. Even if the universe were governed by natural law on the
basis of which humans might live in perfect peace and harmony, the fact of the
matter is that human beings do not always behave rationally. It would seem that,
in many if not most human beings, passions, personal desires, and just downright
silliness often prevail over the exercise of reason. We are quite capable of
thinking one way and then acting in quite a different, and often irrational,
way.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was one of the outstanding
figures of the Enlightenment and a quite despicable man. He extolled the virtues
of family life but slept with his servant girl for some twenty-three years
before getting around to marrying her. His novel Emile set forth
most of the principles of child-rearing that we observe today -- that parents
should teach by example rather than through punishment, that children pass
through stages of development and should not be forced to behave in manners of
which they are not capable, that children should be given time in the sun to
laugh and play, that children should be loved. Every time his girl had one of
his children, however, he had her leave it at a foundling home but continue to
draw the charity milk and bread given to new mothers. He enjoyed a nice bowl of
bread and milk. Even though his actions were reprehensible, we should admire his
ideals since they were the ideals upon which Thomas Jefferson drew in penning
the Declaration of Independence.
Then, too, there was a spirit of rebellion in the air. People, especially
young people, were less willing to accept the conformity and repression of
individuality that Enlightenment society required of its members, colonists were
less willing to accept their continual exploitation in the interests of the
mother country, ethnic minorities were less willing to subject themselves to
attempts to absorb them into the majority culture, workers and peasants were
less willing to admit the superiority of groups claiming special rights by the
laws of nature, travellers were less impressed by the accuracy and symmetry of
gardens such as those at Versailles, composers were less willing to construct
intricate works on the basis of the mathematical models that had guided Bach and
Mozart, and people in general were less willing to accept an ideal of society
that seem to value mediocrity. By the close of the eighteenth century, Europe
was entering a new era. In literature and music, it is called The Age of
Romanticism and was ushered in by Goethe and Beethoven; in government,
it is called The Age of Revolution, and witnessed a wave of
colonial rebellions that swept away the old sea-borne empires; and in politics
generally, it is called The Age of Liberalism, and gave rise to
the French Revolution and the twelve years in which Napoleon
Bonaparte dominated Europe and swept away many of the last remnants of
the old and discredited regimes of the Enlightenment.
ASSIGNMENTS
RECOMMENDED ASSIGNMENTS
Another survey site, The Enlightenment, is
worth your attention, and some of you may enjoy the life of the famous Catherine the Great.
Chinese
Ideas in the West focuses on an aspect of the Enlightenment not often
considered, but particularly interesting from the point of bview of World
History.
This text was produced by
Lynn H. Nelson,
Department of
History,
University of Kansas.
12 January 1998
Lawrence
KS
