ENLIGHTENMENT. - A movement of ideas that shaped culture and philosophy from the last decades of the 17th century to the end of the 18th century and from which a particular phase of European civilization takes its name. Its etymology (German Aufklärung) is meant to signify an "illumination" of reality by the "lights of reason," an "enlightening," and an orientation in a progressive sense of the many aspects, including practical ones, of life; in its development: a struggle against the remnants of a mentality bound to the values consecrated by "tradition" (the construction of an abstract, universal, single reason; trust in the power of renovating reason; the demolition of medieval "barbarism" and, in its principal exponents, opposition to Christian metaphysics or to metaphysics altogether; economic and social reformism).
Having begun in England with Locke, the Enlightenment spread to France, where it took on a predominantly political character, to Germany, where it became associated with the awakening of national poetry, and to Italy, where it established itself above all in the field of the social disciplines. A multiplicity of currents contributed to its formation, currents whose origin may be sought even very far from the period in which the Enlightenment properly falls — the English Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789 — namely the currents of materialism, empiricism, rationalism, idealism and sensualism. Rationalism offers the Enlightenment the critical method aimed at establishing the clarity and evidence of reason; empiricism offers its processes of mechanism and associationism aimed at the reconstruction of all reality. Within the framework of the essential forces that molded Enlightenment philosophy and determined its fundamental concepts in the religious, historical, ethical, social spheres, etc., account must be taken above all of these two streams, rationalism and empiricism, into which all the others at a certain point merge; they inspire more or less directly the major exponents of the period and, even apart from individual doctrines, inform the entire mentality of the century. These currents do not signify a split, but only a subdivision, and a continuation of the philosophical currents proper to the country where they respectively flourish: the rationalist current seems to belong more properly to France, rich in the heritage of Descartes, and the empirical one is indebted to England, where the teaching of Bacon is alive.
Rationalism, after having fed on that lively desire for clarity in struggle against every "prejudice of tradition" (cf. P. Bayle, Oeuvres diverses Pens. div., sec. VII, XII, The Hague 1737, pp. 95 and 235), became grafted onto speculative life to the point of supplanting its essential values. Human reason is considered by it no longer merely as a bringer of cognition, but as the measure of all things, the single and supreme norm of life. Born of the individual, it now seeks to surpass him and to represent not so much the individual as the collectivity, to dominate intellectual and ethical life. Enlightenment rationalism restores to first place an abstract and reasoned conception of nature, in all fields, in the cognitive as in the volitional, in the social and political sciences, in law, in art, in ethics, in pedagogy, in religion, etc. It therefore repudiates history and tradition, opposes natural law to historical law, empirical-rationalist science to metaphysics. One notes a tendency to level, to confound qualitative differences, to suppress individual differences, to "embourgeois" the very life of the spirit; a tendency to formalism, inseparable from the cult of abstract reason. Enlightenment rationalism therefore banishes imagination, regards the affections and instinctive movements as subordinate, and conceives of nothing beyond the fact, nothing imponderable, nothing beyond reason, nothing spiritual.
The other Enlightenment motive, the empiricism of English derivation, before undergoing contaminations in France, represents the most expressive antithesis of Enlightenment rationalism, while accentuating in it the anti-metaphysical, anti-individualist and anti-spiritual position. While Enlightenment rationalism denies the historical sense, Enlightenment empiricism revalues it, intent as it is on the experience of phenomena; while rationalism abstracts itself in generalization, empiricism individualizes to the point of denying any possibility of abstraction. The compromise attempted by Locke and his followers between intellectualism, that is, the optimistic faith in the power of reason in the service of the world and of human life, and empirical sensualism, no longer holds, and it concludes in a position of positive rationalism, in that skepticism so strongly represented by Bayle and by Hume.
Through the empirical current the Enlightenment arrives at a negation of what it had at first supremely valued, namely the goddess reason, and reasserts, against the values of a cold abstraction far from experience, the value of instinct, of impulse, of passion. Currents of skepticism thus interweave, in this climate, with affirmations of the crudest materialism, and the desire to introduce the result of theory and experience into lived life, common both to the empirical and to the rationalist current, brings it about that this wave of thought, subversive of the past, pours into the ethical and religious domain: and all the more easily inasmuch as methods of exposition that were clear, popular, accessible to every category of persons were adopted, first in England and subsequently in France. With different tactics, from points of view that seem almost to diverge, the exaltation of the abstract and the exaltation of the positive, all institutions are undermined at their base, and every authority is to be taken away from custom, from religion, from the State. Declaring tradition false and maleficent, one cheers a new order that must destroy even the memory of the old order, one applauds progress, one exalts contingent values, one wants a reform of social institutions, one proclaims the rights of man (cf. A. Espinas, La philosophie sociale au XVIIe siècle, Paris 1908; M. Ferraz, La philosophie de la Révolution, ibid. 1900).
It is undeniable, nevertheless, that if the Enlightenment destroyed, it also sought to rebuild; in every sector it attempted, and not in vain, to erect, beside the ruins, a building, and to set a pillar next to the remnants of its work of corrosion. Indeed, one cannot deny the positive character of certain attitudes of the Enlightenment, which bore fruit even where they seemed only to demolish, if for no other reason than the vast and active awakening of intelligence, the impulse given to thought and to the sifting of everything through thought, that is, the scrutiny of what one believes, does and dreams, and of life in function of reason. Many aberrations of the century of lights are mixed with truth, and in its very errors there are ingenious and fruitful intuitions.
I. ENGLISH
It refers substantially back to Hobbes and to Locke; to Hobbes, who conceives religion as an instrumentum regni, and therefore a matter of human legislation, and regards as chimerical any existence that does not have the bulk and solidity of matter (cf. Elementorum philosophiae, sectio prima: de corpore, London 1655; sectio secunda: de homine, ibid. 1658; sectio tertia: de cive, Paris 1642); to Locke, who claims that critical knowledge is exhausted in sensory experience, thereby eliminating from the intelligible causality, substance, and the act of being (cf. Essay concerning human understanding, I. I). Locke's system is, as it were, the starting point of Berkeley's religious idealism, of Hume's scepticism, of the sensistic materialism of D. Hartley (v.) and of J. Priestley (v.); it inspires the speculative sensism of Condillac (v.), Voltaire's subtle irony against speculative constructions lacking the data of experience, the school of the French ideologues, and the sceptical current that runs from Bayle (v.) to Diderot (v.) and d'Alembert (v.) and gives rise, albeit indirectly, to deism (v.), the natural religion of the freethinkers (v.). The major exponents of English deism, which is a typically Enlightenment product, such as M. Tindal (v.), J. Toland (v.), A. Collins (v.) and H. Bolingbroke (v.), emphasize religious rationalism aimed at detaching, from Christian Revelation, the empiricist and sceptical motives that sustain the autonomy of natural religion. Alongside deism stands the current of "natural morality," which embraces three different orientations: the intellectual one, whose exponent is the theologian S. Clarke (v.), and which accepts the concept of divine transcendence, the immortality of the soul, final causes, etc.; sentimentalism, which has its head in Shaftesbury (v.), and founds morality no longer on reason but on sentiment, and compares the moral sense to the aesthetic sense; and idealism, represented by Berkeley (v.), by J. Norris (v.) and by Arthur Collier (v.).
II. THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT
The influence of English thought in France, which must be taken into account in order to study the origins of the Enlightenment in the homeland of Voltaire, must be reduced to its proper proportions, that is, not divorced from the subterranean currents that guided France in those years, and from the legacies that nourished its speculation; it suffices to recall that before the English freethinkers there had been the French libertines, "precursors" of Voltairianism, against whom Pascal had inveighed (cf. F. Strowski, Pascal et son temps, I, Paris 1907; P. Serini, Pascal, Turin 1942, pp. 85-114; M. F. Sciacca, Pascal, 2nd ed., Brescia 1945, pp. 44-51). The French Enlightenment takes its starting point from Descartes and Newton. The genuine vein of Enlightenment rationalism is in fact to be sought in Descartes, who lives again, under the aspect of mechanistic theories, due account being taken of Newton's influence, in the writings of La Mettrie (v.), Cabanis (v.), Bonnet (v.), and, under the aspect of anti-historicist theories, in Bayle, Diderot, Condorcet (v.), etc.
With Newton, but beyond his premises and his intentions, the French Enlightenment substitutes for the Cartesian ideal of deductive logic the ideal of inductive certainty, and for the metaphysics of the ego the systematic study of physical laws (a study that would ground science exclusively on experience and calculation in order to avoid the introduction of the supernatural into the domain of nature). Voltaire, who had noticed the affinity between Locke and Newton and the unifying tendency of English philosophy toward scientific rationalism, set out, with his Lettres sur les Anglais (Paris 1734), to spread in France the new philosophical framework of the English Enlightenment; and his appeal did not remain unfruitful in an environment that followed England with sympathy not only for the direction of its speculation, but also for its religious and political ideas. In France, however, the Enlightenment immediately shifted from the purely speculative and scientific terrain to the ideological one, and assumed an "extremist" character.
Among the French "founders" of the Enlightenment must be remembered P. Bayle, author of the Dictionnaire historique et critique (5th ed., Amsterdam 1734), who, through a meticulous work of critical revision of the entire past, demolishes, with his skepticism, the foundations of religious thought and of the ethical and social conception; Fontenelle (v.) who, casting a screen over all traditional constructions and theses, brings a charge against human credulity (cf. L'origine des fables; L'histoire des oracles, in Oeuvres, Amsterdam 1744). In this skeptical current are encountered almost all the dominant figures of the French Enlightenment, among whom nevertheless Voltaire (v.) stands out, who accentuates Bayle's anti-religious position, regards Providence and spirituality as absurd hypotheses, denies free will, brings the conception of the supernatural down to the plane of pure immanence, sets himself up as judge of Christianity, and dreams of a universal religion on the basis of the negation of every positive religion; a negation that is not as costly as in Holbach (v.) and the materialists, but finds perhaps more persuasive accents through the violence that inspires it (cf. Traité de la tolérance, in Oeuvres, Paris 1878; Traité de métaphysique, ibid., Homélie sur l'athéisme, ibid.). In the materialist and sensist current, which numbers names such as La Mettrie, Holbach, Helvétius, Condillac, Bonnet, Destutt de Tracy, Diderot, Cabanis, Robinet, etc., a conception makes headway which, attempting to rid itself of everything that is not the corporeal reality of Hobbes, eliminates the last residues of spiritualism that persisted in the skeptical current.
The ethics of the Enlightenment is also inspired by the irreligious, skeptical and materialist tendencies, marked by that note of hedonism that is found in the works of Voltaire, Helvétius, Holbach, etc. Once religion and transcendent morality are abolished, every transcendence of the political concept is likewise to be condemned; the empiricist and rationalist vision of life does not permit the acknowledgment of a morality hostile to nature, nor even a law hostile to natural instincts. One of the problems that the French Enlightenment posed most tenaciously is that of the relations between law and power; one of the dreams it most insistently cherished is that of a better society, reformed in its political hierarchy and in its economic foundations, striving toward the happiness of the individual and the well-being of the community (cf. H. Sée, L'évolution de la pensée politique en France au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1925). The tendency of enlightened despotism, that is, of rational absolutism for the good of peoples and of humanity, which places force at the service of reason and which finds many thinkers of the period in agreement, alternates with that deriving from English constitutional liberalism, which instead expresses confidence in the people and in the bourgeois class, desirous and capable of liberty. The major French exponent of this tendency is Montesquieu (v.). The fundamental literary work of the Enlightenment, not only French but European in general, is the Encyclopédie, directed by D'Alembert, to which the most eminent French philosophers and writers of the age contributed (for their thought v. ENCYCLOPÉDIE).
Still within French culture, but already on the margins of the movement, is Rousseau (v.), a son of the Enlightenment for the attitude he assumes before the historical and social problem, for the war he wages on tradition, for the eudemonism that inspires his morality and the naturalism that nourishes his religious conception; but anti-Enlightenment in his exaltation of sentiment and of natural spontaneity against the abstractness of Enlightenment reason (v. Confessions, part 1, bk. III) and pre-Romantic for the restlessness and passion that mark his activity.
III. THE GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT
The rationalistic demand of this period appears in Germany in the direction of Leibnizian philosophy and in the man who can be considered the founder of the German Enlightenment, C. Wolff (1679-1754), popularizer of Leibniz's system. It takes its place within the age of Frederick II, patron of philosophers, whose long reign (1740-86) spread and accelerated the movement. Precursors in a certain sense are Walter Tschirnhaus (1651-1708), who reaffirmed the tendency toward that philosophical mathematism which dominated unchallenged from Descartes to Leibniz to Wolff (cf. Medicina mentis seu artis inveniendi praecepta generalis, Amsterdam 1687) until it met with the decisive opposition of Kant; Samuel Pufendorf (v.) and Christian Thomasius (v.), who sought to restore man to his original rights and extended the individualistic aim so far as to justify revolution (Pufendorf) or to free natural law from all theological dependence (Thomasius). Wolff gave no new vision of the world, but his popularization of the master's doctrine allowed a broad and fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas within the German Enlightenment. To it belong in fact the disputes that flared up between Wolffians and anti-Wolffians over individual points of Leibniz's system, the criticisms of abstract rationalism that kept alive the demand to graft onto it the new sap of English empiricism, the conflicts arising in the field of physical cosmology over the acceptance or rejection of Newton's doctrine (among its supporters M. Knutzen, Kant's teacher; among its opponents the great physicist L. Euler); and the new way of approaching the problem of knowledge whereby J. H. Lambert (1728-1777) borrowed from the English empiricists a sense of objective reality more concrete than Wolff's, and J. N. Tetens (1736-1805) established that threefold division of feeling, intellect and will which preludes Kant's critical conception (cf. Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung, 2 vols., Leipzig 1777).
The encounter between Leibniz's philosophy and the English empiricism of Locke and Hume aroused in the German Enlightenment a lively interest in the aesthetic problem, and through the work of A. A. Baumgarten (v.) aesthetics was treated for the first time in the history of thought as a special part of philosophy. The encounter of Pietism (v.) with the current of English free-thinkers gave rise in Germany as well to deism, in two different directions: the one according to which positive religion in general and Christianity in particular coincide with reason; and the one according to which every religious creed is to be critically demolished. Exponent of the first direction is the so-called "popular philosophy" headed by Moses Mendelssohn (v.), who attributed to metaphysics the same evidence as mathematics and claimed for philosophy the necessity of occupying itself only with what is needed for human happiness (cf. Abhandlungen über die Evidenz in der metaphysischen Wissenschaft, Berlin 1764); exponent of the second, E. S. Reimarus (v.), who upheld the existence of God and the purposiveness of the world, but fought strenuously against the possibility of accepting any form of revelation (cf. Abhandlungen von den vornehmen Wahrheiten der natürlichen Religion, Hamburg 1754). To the current of worldly Enlightenment, of which Mendelssohn was a part, belongs also F. Nicolai (v.), writer, publisher and for many years editor of the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek which, if it did not have a circulation equal to that of the French Encyclopédie, was nevertheless of great importance for Germany. There emerges in the German Enlightenment the figure of Lessing (v.), critic, poet, philosopher, and in certain of his attitudes already a herald of the Romantic movement. The German Enlightenment, which unlike the English and French does not present itself in revolutionary forms and at least in its formal structure is faithful to tradition, continually betrays openings toward a spiritualist conception of the world that no longer belongs to the rationalism of the 18th century; and this explains the rich poetic production of Germany in those years. It seems to close with Kant, who gives full recognition to the clarifying function of reason, but at the same time wants the critical spirit to subject to its examination the very notion from which it proceeds.
IV. THE ITALIAN ENLIGHTENMENT
The Enlightenment also appears in Italy with well-defined characteristics of its own; it drew on the experimentalism of Newton, the empiricism of Locke, the sensism of Condillac, and the spirit of the Encyclopédie, but also linked itself back to the great traditions of the Renaissance. Hence the reaction that, in the full Enlightenment period, is noticeable in certain Italian philosophers against Cartesian rationalism, anti-historicism, abstractionism and anti-spiritualism, in favor of a religious, Platonizing, theistic or Christian conception which, although it had germinated on motives offered by the Enlightenment, already represents its antithesis and its overcoming.
In Italy the Enlightenment is concerned above all with social, economic, juridical and political questions. Its fundamental note is given by the awakening of civil consciousness which leads the writers of the age to study how to promote and elevate the relations of human coexistence, and to pose the problem of science not so much in terms of "well-being" (as the French Enlightenment thinkers wanted) as in terms of "civilization." Hence the reborn historical sense that appears in the Italian Enlightenment, the cult rather than the ostracism accorded to many values of the past, the effort to reconcile the new directions of speculation with the spirituality belonging to the Italian philosophical tradition, its interest, as in Germany, in literary and aesthetic questions, and finally a sense of humanism that runs through it all and leaves its mark on its historians, its jurists, its thinkers. Empiricism inspired Genovesi (v.) in Naples, and Soave in Parma (whose later disciples were Romagnosi and Gioia).
The study of political economy was cultivated by Genovesi and by Abbot Ferdinando Galiani (v.); juridical studies by Nicola Spedalieri (v.), who attempts a synthesis between the Enlightenment and Christianity by demonstrating that the rights of man proclaimed by the French Revolution were the very ones already announced to the world by Christianity; by Mario Pagano (1748-99), who compiled the constitution of the Parthenopean Republic and in his political essays strives to reconcile Vico and Rousseau; by Gaetano Filangieri (v.), who, polemicizing with Montesquieu, whom he nevertheless takes as his inspiration, seeks to reduce all legislation to strictly rational requirements, grounded not in an imaginative original state of nature but in the most perfect end of civil society. In the political and juridical field mention must be made of Giannone (v.), who upheld the claims of the State against the Church (he also worked with crude rationalism in the theological-dogmatic field with the Tirregno); of Cesare Beccaria (v.), who with his celebrated Dei delitti e delle pene exerted so much influence on the evolution of modern criminal law; and in the literary-political field, of all those who frequented the circle of the Verri brothers, where, nourished by the new rationalistic, humanitarian and liberal ideals of the European spirit, the rebirth of national consciousness was being prepared. In the more purely literary and historical field, mention must be made of Gravina, Muratori, Spalletti, Cesarotti, etc.
The Italian Enlightenment is dominated by the figure of G. B. Vico (v.); with his demands for religiosity and for a return to the values of tradition, which he constantly sets against the direction of the new philosophies, with his theses of historical recurrences and of Providence guiding the destinies of the human race, with his discovery of the imaginative moment, with his interpretation of language, poetry and myth, he not only goes beyond the scope of the thought of the century and anticipates certain views of Romantic idealism, but confers on the Italian Enlightenment tonalities that already fall outside the genuine Enlightenment conception.