The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy

"This book gives us a glimpse of the world of the early Enlightenment period, when many prominent philosophers risked excommunication, exile, or even execution for their views. These were people who were writing, knowing very well that their views were considered heretical by the church, threatening by monarchs, and possibly even sacrilegious by the general public. Many of them were hounded from country to country. I’m thinking particularly of Rousseau—he wasn’t safe anywhere he went—but there are a number of philosophers in this book whose lives were seriously disrupted by threats from the church and the powers that be. “This was a world when it really was dangerous to think.” Locke went into a kind of self-imposed exile because of his political writing and associations; Hume was unable to get a job in a university because he was presumed to be an atheist or at least antagonistic to the church; Voltaire was at risk from various people at various times. This was a world when it really was dangerous to think. Kant described the Enlightenment as an age where people dared to think. The word ‘dare’ is important. It wasn’t just that they were being audacious in thinking for themselves, there was a real risk attached to it. To be a philosopher in that period—to be an original philosopher prepared to follow the arguments through like Spinoza did, for example—was an extremely brave thing to do, in the same sense that Socrates’s standing in Athens expressing views which his compatriots thought were heretical, was a brave thing to do, and resulted in his death. Anthony Gottlieb is a former executive editor of the Economist , and, not surprisingly, another very good writer. Writing in philosophy is very, very important because it can be difficult to read about philosophical ideas. Everything the writer does to help the reader is extremely valuable. This book is the sequel to his The Dream of Reason , which takes philosophy from the ancient Greek and Roman period, and then quickly through the medieval period. But either book can be read on its own. Gottlieb talks about philosophers from René Descartes through almost up to Kant. Rousseau is the last philosopher covered in detail in the book. It’s about the 16th to the 18th century basically, which, in many ways, was a second Golden Age for Western philosophy, following on from the flourishing in Athens of Plato and Aristotle and, before them, Socrates. I don’t know of a better survey of this period. What Gottlieb manages to do is to bring in just enough about the lives and background history to stimulate your understanding of the philosophy, and just enough of the philosophy not to get too technical or obscure. Again, it’s a book that required a very light touch to pull off in such a successful way. That’s probably invisible to somebody who hasn’t tried to do the same sort of thing. I’ve tried to write a history of philosophy: It is not as easy as it looks. There is also an original aspect to the book. There are some things I learned from it that I didn’t know. Take Spinoza, who was famously cursed by a herem— the Jewish equivalent of excommunication — because of his heretical views, which some took to be atheistic. He talked about ‘God or Nature:’ nature is God, effectively – not an orthodox view. It is commonly assumed that post-excommunication Spinoza lived from his earnings as a lens grinder. There’s a romantic idea of him in his room, grinding these lenses for early telescopes. Apparently that’s not quite right. Gottlieb draws on research that shows that that wasn’t his main source of income, though he did indeed grind lenses. A more important and unusual aspect of the book is that he’s devoted a whole chapter to Pierre Bayle, who doesn’t usually feature so prominently in these historical accounts. Gottlieb makes a good case for Bayle as a very interesting contributor to the Enlightenment, particularly in his advocacy of freedom of expression and toleration of other people’s ideas, the kind of thought that Voltaire is famous for. Not all of them are doing that explicitly. For instance, Descartes was, as far as we can tell, a devout Catholic. Leibniz, I think, was also religious. Rousseau was probably a deist. Deism was quite a common position for heretical thinkers. This is the idea that there isn’t a personal god, but there was a God who created the world, and there is evidence of God in the world. Rather than atheism, I think there is often a resistance to truth by authority. That’s one of the characteristics, I think, of the so-called Enlightenment. People were starting to get important empirical evidence from science; they were starting to reason about different societies and would get evidence from travellers’ accounts. The world didn’t have to be as it was described by religious authorities. So philosophers who were prepared to reason and argue and think about the nature of reality often came into conflict with the church, and some of them, like Voltaire, were particular antagonists of the church. Some scholars have argued that David Hume was definitely an atheist, but, from his writings, there’s still a case to say that he wasn’t quite an atheist as we would understand it. He was somebody who didn’t think he knew the answer and didn’t think that the people who thought they knew the answer knew the answer either, but who also believed there’s more and better evidence that God doesn’t exist than that he does, and who disliked the influence of the church. Personally, I think Hume was an atheist by the end of his life. The majority of thinkers in this book, though, probably weren’t out-and-out atheists. That was quite a rare position to adopt in the 18th century."