Yesterday, writing about Anthony Pagden’s new book, I focused on the worldly side of the Enlightenment. No less important is the philosophical side. But if the dream of a cosmopolitan federation of states was fairly well sketched by the end of the Eighteenth Century, the Enlightenment’s intellectual objectives were, in retrospect, not entirely conscious, much less fully developed. Kant, as I mentioned, is the climactic Enlightenment thinker for Pagden on the subject of the cosmopolis. In my view, however — Pagden does not explore this as fully as he might have done — Kant is at odds with the French writers who preceded him. Although he was inspired by Hume to critique all previous philosophy, he composed his thoughts into three ponderous tomes that, if they were not quite the foundation of a systematic philosophy, inspired Hegel to sink that foundation, and to build a mighty metaphysical theory about history that would rival the complications of Ptolemy’s epicycles, giving us Marx into the bargain.

Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot detested systematic philosophy. The project of describing the universe in terms of a handful of axioms and working out the implications in those terms and in those terms only struck them as closed-ended and pointless. Systematic philosophy is beguiling because it appears to shut the door on ignorance: all will be explained! But this is to deny the possibility that its axioms might be faulty. The philosophes were writing in the aftermath of the fatal blow that the discovery of the New World, together with greater familiarity with the peoples of the East Indies, dealt to certain axioms of Christian theology.

There was little or nothing essentially Christian about these axioms, but they had worked their way into the central fabric of Catholic dogma, following a development that Pagden briskly summarizes.

Theology had begun … as an attempt to grasp the nature of the Christian God, through the scattered writing his adherents had left behind them. But since these writings offered little beyond a rudimentary ethics, Christian theologians had been forced to go elsewhere to find answers to the larger questions about the nature of the universe. Inevitably they had gone to Greek sources, the only ones they had, and in the process they transformed Christianity from what had been, in essence, a world-rejecting late Roman mystery cult into — to use a recent term — “Hellenized Judaism.”

This Hellenization married the sometimes contradictory ethics of Scripture to the systematic philosophy of Aristotle, the Mr Answer Man of classical antiquity. By the time Christian theology entered its final, “scholastic” phase, in the High Middle Ages, philosophers were no longer looking at or thinking about the world in which they lived. They were thinking only about their books.

The method employed by the scholastics was essentially what is called “hermeneutical.” That is, their science consisted in the painstaking reading and rereading of a canon of supposedly authoritative texts, which by the sixteenth century had been expanded from the Bible to include the writings of the early Greek and Latin theologians, known as the “Church Fathers,” and those of a select number of saints called “Doctors of the church” (there are thirty-three of them to date), together with a canon of classical Greek, and some Roman, authors. By far the most important of these was Aristotle, whose authority throughout most of the Middle Ages was such that he was commonly referred to simply as “the Philosopher.”

The Hellenization of Christianity, in other words, tied Catholic dogma to the constellation of Aristotelian axioms about the nature of the world, a union that remains to this day. Although the Church has developed a very sophisticated way of talking around the problem, its theology remains, essentially, that of the most illustrious scholastic philosopher (and perhaps the most fervent admirer of Aristotle), Thomas Aquinas. In effect, Christian theology was as worldly as the clerical interference in political affairs, because it professed an expertise about how the universe actually works. This expertise was challenged most famously by Galileo, whose sentence of house arrest, following his recantation of the heliocentric theory that, by the early Seventeenth Century, was already accepted by many leading minds, shocked intellectual Europe with the realization that the Church would henceforth stand in the way of learning and punish those who challenged its now discredited cosmology.

At this very moment — as what we now call the Scientific Revolution was gathering unstoppable momentum — the political system of Europe, fragmented by the Protestant breakaways, deteriorated into a continental war (fought mostly in Germany) that lasted for almost the Thirty Years for which it is named. (The last few years, largely peaceful, were occupied by negotiations that would produce the Peace of Westphalia.) The doctrine that emerged at the end of the war, cujus regio ejus religio (the religion of the prince determines the religion of his subjects) did not, obviously, stand for religious toleration within states, but only among them. Of the European powers, only one, France, prescribed internal toleration. Ironically, just as other states were testing the possibility of religious toleration, France turned her back on it. Revoking the Edict of Nantes, Louis XIV restored the Roman Catholic Church (albeit a church that he intended to control himself) as the official religion of France. This instantly made French universities hostile to the new thinking that was simmering throughout Europe. And it meant that genuine intellectual life would have to take place elsewhere. Hence the non-academic quality the Lumières, perhaps the aspect of the Enlightenment that appeals to me most. Elsewhere — in Prussia and Great Britain — academics were free to take up the Enlightenment, and, not coincidentally, the works of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant were of academic length and amplitude. The philosophes in France were more like journalists, following stories instead of working out theories.

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The intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment was, in my view, a matter of seeds, not fruit. When the season of open inquiry came to an end with the upheavals of the end of the Eighteenth Century, and European minds turned to the increasingly technological objectives of the new Industrial Revolution (entertaining themselves in the meantime with romantic rhapsodies that the philosophes would have found rather mushy), it does not seem that the Enlightenment had gotten much further than proclaiming a universal curiosity. The Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert — a gathering of all that was known about the world — revealed itself to be a project that could never be completed without being massively obsolete; so far as what we call hard science goes, the Scientific Revolution launched in the Seventeenth Century would not find its current foundations until the early Nineteenth, making most of what was “known” to the Encyclopédistes incomplete if not wrong. The utter transformation of chemistry effected by Lavoisier and Priestley in the 1780s was the singular achievement of eighteenth-century science; nothing else on that scale happened in the century of the Enlightenment.

The philosophes endure as critics, but it cannot be denied that they were as eager to ignore their own ignorance as any systematic philosopher. Voltaire in particular wished to be seen as something of a Mr Answer Man. It remains for us to work out the constructive role of critical ignorance.

We are right to expect experts — professionals — to command the knowledge of their specialties. The man or woman who takes up physics, or patent law, or neurosurgery, or aeronautics, is free to explore new possibilities, but is not free to ignore any established branch of the profession. In a professional, such ignorance is not just a bad thing but an impermissible one.

It is with respect to every other kind of knowledge that we are free, whatever our professions, to be critically ignorant. We may acknowledge that there is much that we don’t know, and we may speculate about it — critically. Critical speculation imposes a certain rigor and discipline on ignorance; very roughly, it binds us to follow lines of thought that comport with what we’re pretty sure about knowing. When reading history, for example — and history is a vast ocean of lost knowledge of which we are doomed to remain ignorant, dotted with archipelagos of facts upon which we construct our pictures of the past — we work hardest (as lay readers) at drawing inferences, from what is known (what was written down, generally), about what was felt and thought and intended by long-gone men and women. Our ignorance persists; all we can have are speculations. But when these speculations begin to conform to a broader picture — when a sermon in England helps us to understand a ministerial action in Vienna — then speculation begins to firm into something like knowledge.

But it is not knowledge, knowledge in the sense of professional knowledge (even for professional historians), and there is no need for it to be, for what we are trying to do, after all, is to understand the world, and that is emphatically not a profession. That is what the Enlightenment stands for in its opposition to the stranglehold of Catholic theology. “Throughout the Middle Ages,” Pagden writes at the top of the first paragraph quoted above, “and in some places as late as the eighteenth century, what today we would call moral philosophy, jurisprudence, epistemology, and psychology were studied as ancillary to theology.” He might have thrown in physics, astronomy and law as well. These “ancillaries” are all professions now. But the “science” of theology has been replaced by the Enlightenment of inquiry. We begin, not with the unmoved mover, but with our own ignorance. Slowly, we learn — even if, sometimes, it seems that we’re learning very quickly. But we learn only to the extent that we acknowledge our ignorance.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 18th, 2013 at 12:03 pm.