In Defense of the Enlightenment

This is an essay I wrote at uni (so a somewhat watered down expression of my sentiments expressed with more verbiage than necessary), the title:

On what grounds do some people consider the Enlightenment to be the source of so much that is wrong in modernity? Should we be persuaded by their criticism?

I don’t think we should be persuaded by their criticisms. I think more blame can be attributed to Christianity and Capitalism than to the Enlightenment and that we should focus on the complex interplay of causes rather than searching for a single source. To demonstrate this, I will outline the enlightenment and modernism, look at what the postmodern tradition sees as wrong in modernity and the conception of truth they see as underlying this before discussing how they connect it to the enlightenment. I will then show how this conception of truth predates the enlightenment, that the enlightenment was in many ways a reaction against this conception of truth and posit the transition from Paganism to Christianity as a more important source. Finally I will look at the changes in the structure of society which caused the propagation of modernist ideals – ignored by a postmodern tradition focused exclusively on ideas as causal factors.

Modernity is in many ways the product of the Enlightenment, so it may seem intuitive to lay the flaws of modernism at its feet. The essence of the critique is that it was the enlightenment which made instrumental reason the supreme arbiter of truth and instituted it as a major cultural value. A fetish for instrumental reason is considered to be the main cause of modernity’s woes.

The enlightenment occurred during what is referred to as the long eighteenth century. Kant described the process involved as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”, defining immaturity as “the inability to use ones understanding without guidance from another”1. It was believed that instrumental reason was the tool which would allow people to use their understanding without the ‘guidance’ traditionally provided by institutions such as the church.

In practical terms, the enlightenment began with the era of scientific revolutions, massive technological advances and the fundamentally new ways of understanding the world provided by thinkers such as Newton and Darwin. The massive successes of instrumental reason in the natural sciences became the key argument for the replacement of traditional authoritarian ‘guidance’ with a society of individuals guided by their own reason endeavouring to use their own understanding in all things.

Modernity is the cultural era we have been living in roughly since the enlightenment. Jean Francoise Lyotard identifies The Postmodern Condition as our current state of affairs. This is where the values of modernity, derived he claims from the enlightenment, have blindly perpetuated themselves beyond all proportion, begun to parody themselves and more importantly we are becoming aware of this. A philosophical tradition which considers the enlightenment the source of much that is wrong in modernity stems from Lyotard. Most who express it in these terms come from this tradition, though there are many who hold similar views expressed in different terms – such as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory.

What the postmodern tradition sees as wrong in modernity is primarily an obsession with representation and measurement. An inordinate focus on end product and an ignorance of process. This finds its expression in all facets of culture, an example would be education, where often league table results are everything and the subjective learning experiences of students nothing.

According to Lyotard, this all stems from a particular vision of truth which is prevalent in society. In this vision, all forms of knowledge are commensurable (ie compatible, that they can be perfectly expressed in each others terms), offering the prospect of a single, all embracing, theory or ‘metanarrative’. This metanarrative is expected to be based on the natural sciences, and this leads to the aggressive devaluing of the forms of knowledge which are less compatible with the natural sciences. The narrative, storytelling attempts to understand the world which have been prevalent throughout history, and which are the key means of knowing humans are evolved to use are in all instances rejected in favour of abstract logic and focus on precise measurement – those fields in which precise measurement is impossible or impractically difficult are ignored and devalued. This approach underlies the flaws of modernity and is seen to begin with, and follow from, the ideas of the enlightenment.

Lyotard instead proposes that we view different ways of knowing as (at the very least potentially) incommensurable, and instead of attempting to determine which is right and wrong wherever they disagree, focus on doing them all justice. He envisions a world of incommensurable ‘little stories’, all afforded respect. In much quoted summary he argues that Postmodern Knowledge “refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the experts homology, but the inventors paralogy”2. The last sentence seems to me almost exactly in the spirit of Kant’s unguided use of understanding – the experts homology being traditional guidance and paralogy (movement against established ways of reasoning) inevitably the result of people learning to use their understanding unguided by established approaches.

The idea of an all embracing truth and single right way of knowing (the experts homology) was stronger and more prevalent before the enlightenment than after – before the enlightenment it found its strongest, but by no means its only, expression in religion. This is acknowledged in the postmodern tradition, in the pre-modern era “little difference was seen or made between now strictly separated standards of human conduct, such as ‘usefulness’, ‘truth’, ‘beauty’, ‘propriety’. In the ‘traditional’ way of life, rarely looked upon from a distance and thus seldom reflected upon, everything seemed to float at the same level of importance, weighed on the same scales of ‘right’ versus ‘wrong’.”3.

However, it wasn’t always like this. Indeed a view of knowledge very similar to that advocated by Lyotard was once the norm – it was called Paganism. Lyotard was aware of this, and used the term Paganism to metaphorically refer to the new approach he proposed. In the pagan ancient world, religion was the primary means of knowing, however it was very different to religion as commonly practiced today. Very many, usually polytheistic, religions coexisted tolerantly. The knowledge they expressed was highly narrative (myths), their truth (in the sense understood by modern science) was not considered particularly important and neither was agreement on this truth (dogma).

With Christianity arose a completely different understanding of truth. The pagans lampooned it as a death cult for its focus on the literal (science style) truth of after death rewards and punishments, and it was made the official religion of an increasingly totalitarian roman state. Commensurable knowledge and consensus on dogma became the obsession of the early church hierarchy. Paganism was annihilated in what is to my knowledge the first recorded genocide, and our conception of knowledge transformed. This is to my mind a much more potent source of the flaws Lyotard and those he has influenced see than the enlightenment.

For over a thousand years the ruling Christians strove to impose their totalising vision of knowledge on all facets of culture, destroying by violence all that was incommensurable. Religion (and so our means of knowing) entwined itself with authoritarian politics to a degree unheard of in the pagan era. All knowledge was believed to be held by the church, and to claim to have discovered something new was heresy punishable by death. It was in, and in reaction to, an intellectual culture stripped barren by this process that the enlightenment occurred. In many respects, the enlightenment was a reaction against the totalising vision of knowledge. We see that as the natural sciences have progressed, they have moved in the direction advocated by Lyotard. They at first billed themselves as the search for universal ‘laws of nature’ which mirror the world. Such a view is rarely acceptable today. More modern philosophies of science, such as Popperian Falsificationism are very humble – seeing scientific knowledge as entirely contingent, just as (say) Richard Rorty does.

In my view, the idea of a totalising metanarrative based on the natural sciences should be seen as the product of an infant enlightenment justifying itself to, and piecing itself together from the unenlightened and their ideas. As something the enlightenment outgrew. A ‘god of reason’ was set up to express enlightenment ideas in the language of the old order, and give the project the strength to resist massive conservative opposition. This rhetoric was characteristic of promoters and interpreters of enlightenment thought, not so much the enlightenment thinkers themselves. Newtons oft quoted self evaluation: “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” 4

Nevertheless, the view of science as a totalising metanarative remains prevalent outside of advanced science. League table obsessed schools teach the findings of the natural sciences as if they were religious dogma, instilling a spirit diametrically opposed to that which led to those findings. The social sciences are continuously harassed and degraded by methodological criticisms rooted in long outdated and mind numbingly rigid visions of the scientific method (the doctrine of behaviourism was a particularly ugly example). Genuine Enlightenment ideals have been very selectively applied, and often perverted. Now why is this?

Here we come to what I see as the main flaw of the postmodern tradition – what Marx would call their idealism. By this I mean their focus on the ideas held by the minority intellectual elements of the population as causal agents in the development of society. Also their lack of focus on the structures and institutions in society which cause these ideas to propagate and develop, and of which prevailing ideas are often merely symptoms.

In his work The Great Transformation economic historian Karl Polanyi lays out a convincing and detailed explanation of the rise of modernity and the flaws the postmodern tradition sees in it (though he does not use the same terms). The enlightenment was closely followed by a cataclysmic change in the social structure of Europe – the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. This was made possible by the scientific and technological advances of the enlightenment.

The Great Transformation he refers to is the transition to a market society, which destroyed the old culture, social order and its associated values - things which had evolved to a great degree of subtlety over thousands of years. For Polanyi the key change was the subordination of all social institutions to the ‘self-regulating’ market. Whilst markets had existed long before Polanyi’s Great Transformation, they existed within, and were subordinate to, a social framework containing a wide array of values and motivations. This change was effected by the transformation of land and labour into simple commodities. In the market society all values and motivations are reduced to ‘rational’ economic calculation.

That which the postmodern tradition seeks to explain (ie the rise of modernism and its flaws) are things which permeate all sections of society and most facets of culture. However their explanations are entirely based upon ideas held and intellectual trends followed by a tiny minority. It is debated when the ‘modern era’ began, Lawrence Cahoone asks whether it was the sixteenth century with “the development of a humanistic scepticism epitomised by Erasmus and Montaigne? Or was it in the seventeenth century with the scientific revolution … Or with the republican political theories”5 in the eighteenth century? None of these events seriously affected the lifestyles of (or were likely even known to) the majority of the population. The event which brought most people into the modern era was the enclosure of the commons. The state made most of the previously common farmland the property of the aristocracy, rendering the subsistence farming lifestyle of most of the population impossible and forcing the widespread adoption of wage labour. It was this which did the most to change lifestyles, and cause most people to spend a serious amount of time in institutions dominated by modernist ideas (ie factories and other components of the new industrial economy).

In conclusion, while the demands of the economic system may cloak themselves in the rhetoric of the enlightenment, this is not their primary source, and not what determines the detail of their content. There is a complex interdependence between prevailing ideas and the structure of society. An effective attempt to explain modernism and its flaws must, in my view, be linked to historical and economic analysis detailing the changes in the structure of society which caused and assisted the propagation of modernist ideas. Further, the enlightenment cannot be understood in isolation, it need to be looked at in the context of the culture it developed from and was in discourse with. The conception of truth Lyotard takes issue with dates back much further than the enlightenment and the enlightenment weakened its influence.

Bibliography:

1 Kant, Immanuel (1784) An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment pp. 1, online here: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html
2 Lyotard, Jean-François (1979) The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge (Manchester University Press)
3 Bauman, Zygmunt (1998) Postmodern Ethics (Blackwell) pp. 4
4 (Quoted) Brewster, David (2001) Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Booksurge Publishing) pp.126
5 Cahoone, Lawrence (1996) From Modernism to Postmodernism: an anthology (Oxford: Blackwell), pp.12-13 5 Cahoone, Lawrence (1996) From Modernism to Postmodernism: an anthology (Oxford: Blackwell), pp.12-13