The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture

"I don’t think you’re being unfair. It’s a book which I don’t altogether like. I began by being rather hostile to it, though I feel more friendly towards it now. It’s by a scholar who is part Catholic theologian and is not particularly well disposed towards the Enlightenment, and especially not toward what I would call the Radical Enlightenment. If you read his sections on D’Holbach and Condorcet, although it’s quite interesting what he says about them, he’s fairly dismissive and not very positive. The closer you get to bringing faith and philosophy together, the more Dupré seems to warm up. He’s quite keen on Jacobi, for instance, one of the great critics of Spinoza — because Jacobi’s leap of faith and his insistence that philosophy only works if you make that leap of faith and combine it with religion is obviously a position to which Dupré is very sympathetic. Personally I’m not particularly sympathetic to that way of looking at things. But Dupré has a very vivid sense of the Enlightenment as an upheaval which transformed every aspect of intellectual life and culture. Historians have gone a long way from seeing the Enlightenment as part of the history of philosophy, that if we are talking about the Enlightenment we are talking about the way the entire intellectual, scientific, high cultural world is turned upside down. Dupré has a sense of how history writing is revolutionized, art criticism is revolutionized, philosophy is revolutionized. In this book, he sets it out in sections that contribute to my schema with these Five Books which is to show the Enlightenment in all its dimensions. This book shows how profoundly the Enlightenment upset and transformed all these different areas — and other areas which perhaps he doesn’t discuss in detail like economics. I agree with you, though, that Dupré hasn’t fully reconciled himself to the Enlightenment. He has a very vivid sense of the conflict between the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, and of the tension between the Enlightenment and religion. As an illustration of the continuing relevance of that today, Dupré is a very interesting study. I also find him quite important as a warning to those who have settled their view about some aspects of the Enlightenment — and I mean that as a criticism of myself. One is always in danger of thinking about something, making up your mind about it, and then not being critical enough in your thinking on that topic subsequently. So, for instance, when Dupré dismisses Condorcet’s conception of history and history writing, there is a challenge there to a secularist. He would say, supposing you’ve rejected faith and belief and have a secular view, so that everything that happens in history is caused purely by natural laws and circumstances. By removing the miraculous and the supernatural entirely from history, you’ve created the basic arena of modern history writing. You decide there must be a direction or a story to be told and you become so preoccupied with trying to look at the overall story of progress that firstly, you lose respect for detail. Secondly you reconcile yourself too easily to the idea that there have been centuries of superstition and of benightedness and in the future we’re going to have not just a much better understanding, but a much better and happier society, because it’s going to be based on better principles. But what about all those centuries that went before? Does that count for nothing? Even if some socialist program were to be marvelously successful, isn’t there something deeply disturbing about the fact that generations and generations and generations missed out on that and had miserable lives? Why should some other group have happier lives later, when there have been all these miserable generations? There is this moral problem attached to this way of thinking and Dupré is very good at making you consider it. No. I think a man of religion would feel that the secularists are too confident, but if there is no religious authority, no revelation and no guidance to rely on beyond science and philosophy then we’d better get the best science and philosophy we can. You wrote this marvelous article on how prone science and scientists are to mistakes . All of us are prone to mistakes. Still, some ways of looking at politics and society are better than others, we can all agree on that, at least. We’d better try to get the best outcomes that we can. Consider universal human rights, the need to emancipate the blacks from slavery and integrate them into society. There was an urgent need to correct a fundamental injustice and there were also many other injustices that needed correcting. Today we can still see that having less censorship and having more freedom of expression and freedom of thought is good — we know what societies run on the basis of censorship, what that implies. But we’ve forgotten many things. We don’t know really what it was like to live in an ancien régime , in an aristocratic society where the individual has no rights, where an aristocrat is so much more privileged and powerful than you are, that the ordinary solider or sailor or employee in a firm simply doesn’t have any protection against a person in a position of superiority. We have forgotten what that means. Is that an accusation, do you think? I can imagine that in Dupré it is, to some extent. But I don’t think the Enlightenment thought of itself as devising and imposing a European system on the rest of the world. It thought of itself as rejecting tradition and the existing status quo in Europe. The Enlightenment tried to look at the whole history of thought. It’s quite interesting, actually, to see the discussions about China and about Islam. You may say that they had oversimplified ideas, but they were well aware that all kinds of thinkers had developed important ideas that contributed to this advance of l’esprit humain , of human reason, and the making of a better society. At least the Radical Enlightenment did — and I must insist here on the distinction between the two kinds of Enlightenment, because universal human rights is not the invention of the Enlightenment as a whole but of the Radical Enlightenment. The idea of the essential unity of mankind and of democracy were radical ideas not subscribed to by Voltaire or Hume, nor Montesquieu, nor indeed most of the famous names of the Enlightenment. They were not interested in these ways of thinking. “The idea of the essential unity of mankind and of democracy were radical ideas not subscribed to by Voltaire or Hume, nor Montesquieu, nor indeed most of the famous names of the Enlightenment.” But, as is nowhere more clearly illustrated that in the American and French Revolutions, they were nevertheless a very, very powerful aspect of the Enlightenment which in the long-run had a bigger impact on the future than the Voltaires and Montesquieus had. It’s this stress on the unity of mankind, on the equivalence of each individual’s interests and happiness — whether they’re Chinese or Arabs or Europeans — which made it easier for these radical Enlighteners to see the history of philosophy as a global phenomenon in which all cultures had contributed. There’s no sense of Europe imposing something on the rest. Universal human rights had to begin somewhere and it happened to begin in Europe. It doesn’t mean that universal human rights is European, if it equalizes the status of everyone and works to the benefit of everyone. We should regard it not as being specifically European but global."