ENLIGHTENMENT. – A movement of ideas that shaped culture and philosophy from the final decades of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, and from which a particular phase of European civilization takes its name. In its etymology (Ger. Aufklärung), the term signifies the “clarification” of reality through the “lights of reason,” “illumination,” and the progressive orientation of the manifold, including practical, aspects of life; in its development, it signifies a struggle against the remnants of a mentality bound to the values consecrated by “tradition” (the construction of an abstract, universal, single reason; faith in the power of reason as a force of renewal; the demolition of medieval “barbarism” and, among its principal exponents, opposition to Christian metaphysics or to metaphysics as such; economic and social reformism).
Beginning in England with Locke, the E. spread to France, where it assumed a predominantly political character; to Germany, where it was associated with the revival of national poetry; and to Italy, where it asserted itself above all in the field of the social disciplines. A multiplicity of tendencies contributed to its formation, whose origins may also be sought far from the period in which the E. properly took shape—that is, between the English Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789—including materialism, empiricism, rationalism, idealism, and sensationalism. Rationalism offered the E. the critical method intended to establish the clarity and evidence of reason; empiricism offered its processes of mechanism and associationism, directed toward the reconstruction of the whole of reality. Within the framework of the essential forces that shaped Enlightenment philosophy and determined its fundamental concepts in the religious, historical, ethical, social, and other spheres, particular account must be taken of these two currents, rationalism and empiricism, in which all the others are, at a certain point, subsumed; they directly or indirectly inspired the major exponents of the period and, quite apart from individual doctrines, informed the entire mentality of the century. These currents do not signify a rupture, but only a division and a continuation of the philosophical tendencies proper to the countries in which they respectively flourished: the rationalist tendency seems more properly to belong to France, rich in the legacy of Cartesius, while the empirical tendency is indebted to England, where the teaching of Bacon was alive.
Rationalism, after having been nourished by that lively desire for clarity in opposition to every “prejudice of tradition” (cf. P. Bayle, Oeuvres diverses Pens. div., sect. VII, XII, The Hague 1737, pp. 95 and 235), became grafted onto speculative life until it supplanted its essential values. Human reason was regarded by it no longer merely as the bearer of knowledge, but as the measure of all things, the sole and supreme norm of life. Born from the individual, it now seeks to transcend him and to represent not so much the individual as the collectivity, dominating intellectual and ethical life. Enlightenment rationalism places at the forefront an abstract and reasoned conception of nature in every field: in the cognitive as well as the volitional sphere, in the social and political sciences, in law, art, ethics, pedagogy, religion, and so forth. It therefore repudiates history and tradition, opposing natural law to historical law, and empirical-rationalist science to metaphysics. There is a tendency to level and confuse qualitative differences, to suppress individual differences, and to “bourgeoisify” spiritual life itself; a tendency toward formalism, inseparable from the cult of abstract reason. Enlightenment rationalism therefore banishes fantasy, regards the affections and instinctive movements as subordinate, and conceives nothing beyond fact that is imponderable, nor beyond reason that is spirit.
The other Enlightenment motive, empiricism of English derivation, before undergoing contaminations in France, represents the most expressive antithesis to Enlightenment rationalism, even while intensifying within it the anti-metaphysical, anti-individualist, and anti-spiritualist position. Whereas Enlightenment rationalism denies the historical sense, Enlightenment empiricism revalues it, being directed as it is toward experience of phenomena; whereas rationalism abstracts through generalization, empiricism individualizes to the point of denying every 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 human life—and empirical sensationalism no longer holds, and it ends in a position of positive rationalism, in that skepticism so powerfully represented by Bayle and Hume.
Through the empirical current, the E. arrives at a denial of what it had initially valued above all—the goddess Reason—and once again asserts, over the values of a cold abstraction remote from experience, the value of instinct, impulse, and passion. Currents of skepticism thus intertwine, in this climate, with affirmations of the crudest materialism; and the desire to introduce the results of theory and experience into lived life, common both to the empirical and the rationalist currents, causes this wave of thought, subversive of the past, to pour into the ethical and religious domain—all the more easily because methods of exposition that were clear, popular, and accessible to every category of person had been adopted, first in England and subsequently in France. By different tactics, from points of view that seem almost to diverge, the exaltation of the abstract and the exaltation of the positive undermine all institutions at their foundations, and seek to deprive custom, religion, and the State of every authority. Declaring tradition false and harmful, they acclaim a new order that must destroy even the memory of the old order; they applaud progress, exalt contingent values, demand a reform of social institutions, and proclaim 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, however, that although the E. destroyed, it also sought to reconstruct; in every sector it attempted, and not without success, to erect a building beside the ruins and to lay a pillar near the remains left by its work of corrosion. Indeed, the positive character of certain attitudes of the E. cannot be denied; they bore fruit even where they seemed merely to demolish, if only through the broad and active awakening of intelligence, the impulse given to thought and to the examination of everything through thought—that is, the control of what one believes, does, and dreams, and of life in accordance with reason. Many aberrations of the century of lights are mingled with truth, and even in its errors there are inspired and fruitful insights.
I.
I. ENGLISH
It derives essentially from Hobbes and Locke: from Hobbes, who conceives religion as an instrumentum regni, and therefore as a matter of human legislation, and considers every existence that does not possess the corporeality and solidity of matter chimerical (cf. Elementorum philosophiae, sectio prima: de corpore, London 1655; sectio secunda: de homine, ibid. 1658; sectio tertia: de cioè, Paris 1642); and from Locke, who claims that critical knowledge is exhausted in sensory experience, thereby eliminating causality, substance, and the act of being from the intelligible realm (cf. Essay concerning human understanding, I. I). Locke’s system is as it were the point of departure for Berkeley’s religious idealism, Hume’s scepticism, and the sensualist materialism of D. Hartley (v.) and J. Priestley (v.); it Condillac (v.), Voltaire’s subtle irony directed against speculative constructions lacking the data of experience, the school of the French ideologues, the Bayle (v.) DIDEROT, DENIS (v.) and d’Alembert (v.) and gives rise, even if indirectly, deism (v.), the natural religion of the freethinkers (v.). The principal representatives of English deism, which is a typically Enlightenment product—M. Tindal (v.), J. Toland (v.), A. Collins (v.), and H. Bolingbroke (v.)—accentuate religious rationalism, intended to detach from Christian Revelation the empiricist and sceptical motives that support the autonomy of natural religion. Alongside deism there develops the current of «natural morality», which embraces three different tendencies: the intellectual tendency, represented by the theologian S. Clarcke (v.), which accepts the concept of divine transcendence, the immortality of the soul, final causes, etc.; sentimentalism, MALMESBURY (v.), which bases morality no longer on reason but on feeling, and compares the moral sense to the aesthetic sense; and idealism, BERGER, ELIE (v.), J. Norris (v.), COLLERA (v.).II. FRENCH
The influence of English thought in France, which must be taken into account in studying the origins of the Enlightenment in the homeland of Voltaire, must be restored to its proper proportions, that is, not detached from the subterranean currents guiding France in those years, nor from the inheritances that nourished its speculation; suffice it 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 departure from Descartes and Newton. The genuine line of Enlightenment rationalism is in fact to be sought in Descartes, who, under the aspect of mechanistic theories, with due allowance for Newton’s influence, lives on La Mettrie (v.), Cabanis (v.), Bonnet (v.), and, under the aspect of antihistoricist theories, in Bayle, Diderot, Condorcet (v.), etc.With Newton, but going beyond his premises and intentions, the French Enlightenment replaces the Cartesian ideal of deductive logic with the ideal of inductive certainty, and the metaphysics of the self with the systematic study of physical laws (a study that seeks to ground science exclusively on experience and calculation, in order to prevent the supernatural from entering the domain of nature). Voltaire, who had noted the affinity between Locke and Newton and the unified tendency of English philosophy toward scientific rationalism, set out, through his Lettres sur les Anglais (Paris 1734), to spread the new philosophical orientation of the English Enlightenment in France; and his appeal did not fall on barren ground in an environment that followed England with sympathy not only because of the direction of its speculation, but also because of its religious and political ideas. In France, however, the Enlightenment immediately moved from the purely speculative and scientific sphere to the ideological sphere, and assumed an “extremist” character.
Among the French “founders” of the Enlightenment, mention must be made of P. Bayle, author of the Dictionnaire historique et critique (5th ed., Amsterdam 1734), who, through a detailed critical revision of the entire past, demolishes, with his skepticism, the foundations of religious thought and of ethical and social conceptions; FONTENELLE, BERNARD (v.), who, casting a screen over all traditional constructions and theses, puts human credulity on trial (cf. L'origine des fables; L'histoire des oracles, in Oeuvres, Amsterdam 1744). Almost all the leading figures of the French Enlightenment are encountered in this skeptical current; among them, however, Voltaire (v.) stands out. He intensifies Bayle’s antireligious position, regards Providence and spirituality as absurd hypotheses, denies free will, brings the conception of the supernatural down to the level of pure immanence, sets himself up as judge of Christianity, and dreams of a universal religion based on the negation of every positive religion; a negation that is Holbach (v.) and the materialists, but finds perhaps more persuasive accents in 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 sensationalist current, which includes such names as La Mettrie, Holbach, Helvétius, Condillac, Bonnet, Destutt de Tracy, Diderot, Cabanis, Robinet, etc., a conception gains ground which, attempting to rid itself of everything that is not Hobbes’s corporeal reality, eliminates the last remnants of spiritualism that persisted in the skeptical current.
The irreligious, skeptical, and materialist tendencies also inspire the ethics of the Enlightenment, marked by that note of hedonism found in the works of Voltaire, Helvétius, Holbach, etc. Once religion and transcendent morality have been 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 of a law hostile to natural instincts. One of the problems that the French Enlightenment posed most tenaciously is that of the relationship between law and power; one of the dreams it most insistently cherished was that of a better society, reformed in its political hierarchy and economic foundations, directed 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 orientation of enlightened despotism, that is, rational absolutism for the good of peoples and humanity, which places force at the service of reason and 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 freedom. The foremost French 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 period contributed (for their thought V. ENCYCLOPÉDIE).
Still within French culture, but already on the margins of the movement, Rousseau (v.), a child of the Enlightenment in the attitude he assumes toward the historical and social problem, in the war he wages against tradition, in the eudemonism that inspires his morality, and in the naturalism that nourishes his religious conception; but anti-Enlightenment in his exaltation of feeling and natural spontaneity against the abstractness of Enlightenment reason (v. Confessions, part 1, book III), and pre-Romantic in 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 person who may be regarded as the founder of the German Enlightenment, C. Wolff (1679–1754), popularizer of Leibniz’s system. It belongs to the age of Frederick II, patron of philosophers, whose long reign (1740–86) spreadand accelerated the movement. In a certain sense its precursors were Walter Tschirnhau (1651–1708), who reaffirmed the tendency toward that philosophical mathematism which dominated unchallenged from Descartes through Leibniz to Wolff (cf. Medicina mentis seu artis inveniendi praecepta generalis, Amsterdam 1687), until it encountered Kant’s determined opposition; PUFENDORF, SAMUEL VON (v.) REID, THOMAS (v.), who sought to restore man to his original rights and extended the individualistic aim to the point of justifying revolution (Pufendorf) or freeing natural law from every theological dependence (Thomas). Wolff offered no new vision of the world, but his popularization of his master’s doctrine allowed a broad and fruitful interweaving of ideas within the German Enlightenment. The disputes that arose between Wolffians and anti-Wolffians over individual points of Leibniz’s system, the criticisms of abstract rationalism that made the demand to graft onto it the new sap of English empiricism a living one, the conflicts that emerged in the field of physical cosmology over the acceptance or rejection of Newton’s doctrine (between its supporters and M. Knutzen, Kant’s teacher; among its opponents, the great physicist L. Euler), and the new approach to the problem of knowledge all belong to II. Through this approach, J. H. Lambert (1728–1777) borrowed from the English empiricists a sense of objective reality more concrete than that found in Wolff, while J. N. Tetens (1736–1805) established the threefold division into feeling, intellect, and will that foreshadowed 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 a lively interest in the aesthetic problem within the German Enlightenment and, through the work of A. A. BAUMGARTEN, MICHAEL (v.), aesthetics was treated for the first time in the history of thought as a special part of philosophy. Pietism (v.) and the movement of the English freethinkers also gave rise in Germany to deism, along two different lines: one according to which positive religion in general and Christianity in particular coincide with reason; and another according to which every religious creed was to be critically demolished. The representative of the first tendency was the so-called “popular philosophy,” MENDELLSSOHN, MOSES (v.), who attributed to metaphysics the same evidence as to mathematics and claimed for philosophy the necessity of concerning itself only with what is required for human happiness (cf. Abhandlungen über die Evidenz in der metaphysischen Wissenschaft, Berlin 1764); the representative of the second was E. S. Reimarus (v.), who upheld the existence of God and the purposiveness of the world, but vigorously contested the possibility of accepting any form of revelation (cf. Abhandlungen von den vornehmen Wahrheiten der natürlichen Religion, Hamburg 1754). F. NICOLAI, JEAN (v.), a writer, publisher, and for many years editor of the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, also belonged to the movement of the worldly Enlightenment, of which Mendelssohn was a part; although it did not achieve a circulation equal to that of the French Encyclopédie, it was nevertheless of great importance for Germany. Lessing (v.) stands out within the German Enlightenment: critic, poet, philosopher, and, in some of his attitudes, already a herald of the Romantic movement. The German Enlightenment, which unlike the English and French Enlightenments did not appear in revolutionary forms and, at least in its formal structure, remained faithful to tradition, continually reveals openings toward a spiritualist conception of the world that no longer belongs to the rationalism of the eighteenth century; this explains Germany’s rich poetic output in those years. It seems to conclude with Kant, who fully recognizes the clarifying function of reason, but at the same time wishes the critical spirit to subject to examination the very notion from which it proceeds.
IV. ITALIAN
The i. also appears in Italy with its own well-defined characteristics; it drew upon the experimentalism of Newton, the empiricism of Locke, the sensationalism of Condillac, and the spirit of the Encyclopédie, while also reconnecting with the great traditions of the Renaissance. Hence the reaction, during the height of the Enlightenment period, observable among certain Italian philosophers against Cartesian rationalism,anti-historicism, abstractness, and anti-spiritualism, in favor of a religious, Platonizing, theistic, or Christian conception which, although it had germinated from motives offered by the i., already represented its antithesis and transcendence.
In Italy, the i. is chiefly concerned with social, economic, juridical, and political questions. Its fundamental characteristic is provided by the awakening of civic consciousness, which leads the writers of the period to study ways of promoting and elevating the relations of human communal life, and to pose the problem of science not so much in terms of « well-being » (as the French philosophes wished) as in terms of « civilization ». Hence the renewed historical sense that appears in the Italian i., the esteem 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 entirely and leaves its mark upon its historians, jurists, and thinkers. GENESI (v.) in Naples and Soave in Parma (whose later pupils included Romagnosi and Gioia).
Studies in political economy were cultivated by Genovesi GALLIA (v.); Spedalieri (v.), who attempted a synthesis between i. and Christianity by demonstrating that the rights of man proclaimed by the French Revolution were those same rights already announced to the world by Christianity; by Mario Pagano (1748–99), who drafted the constitution of the Parthenopean Republic and in his political essays sought to reconcile Vico and Rousseau; FILANGIERI, GAETANO (v.), who, while polemicizing against Montesquieu, from whom he nevertheless drew inspiration, wished to reduce all legislation to strictly rational requirements grounded not in an imaginary original state of nature but in the more perfect condition of civil society. In the political and juridical field, Giannone (v.) must be remembered: he defended the claims of the State against the Church (he also worked with harsh rationalism in the theological-dogmatic field in the Tirregno); Cesare Beccaria (v.), whose celebrated Dei delitti e delle pene exerted such influence upon the development of modern criminal law; and, in the literary-political field, 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 revival of national consciousness was being prepared. In the more strictly literary and historical field, Gravina, Muratori, Spalletti, Cesarotti, and others should be remembered.
The Italian i. is dominated by the figure of G. B. Vico (v.); with his religious aspirations and his return to the values of tradition, which he constantly set against the direction of the new philosophies; with his theories of historical recurrences and of Providence guiding the destinies of the human race; with his discovery of the fantastic moment; and with his interpretation of language, poetry, and myth, he not only transcends the limits of the thought of the century and anticipates certain perspectives of Romantic idealism, but also gives the Italian i. tonalities that already depart from the genuine Enlightenment conception.
BIBLI. Ph. Damiron, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de la philosophie au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols., Paris 1858–64; L. Brunel, Les philosophes de l'Académie française au XVIIIe siècle, ibid. 1884; W. E. Lecki, History of the rise and influence of rationalism in Europe, 2 vols., London 1890; J. P. Belin, Le mouvement philosophique de 1748 à 1839, Paris 1913; W. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, II: Friedrich d. Gr. and die Aufklärung, Tübingen 1921; E. Cassirer, Gesch. des Erkenntnisproblems in d. Philos. u. Wissenschaft, 3 vols., Berlin 1922; id., Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, Tübingen 1932, Italian translation by E. Pecar, Florence 1944; O. Ewald, Die französische Aufklärungsphilosophie, Munich 1924; E. Codignola, La pedagogia rivoluzionaria, Florence 1925; R. Unger, Hermann u. die Aufklärung, Leipzig 1925; C. Brockdorff, Die deutsche Aufklärungsphilosophie, Munich 1926; C. Dentice d'Accadia, Il pre-i. in Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 8 (1927), pp. 1 ff., 170 ff., 256 ff., 432 ff.; A. Gerbi, La politica del Settecento, Bari 1928; D. Mornet, La pensée française au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1929; id., Les origines intellectuelles de la Révolution Française, ibid. 1933; H. Vessler, Das Zeitalter der Aufklärung in Frankreichs Kultur u. Sprache, Berlin 1929; G. De Ruggiero, Storia della filosofia: l'età dell'i., 2 vols., Bari 1939; C. Capone Braga, La filosofia italiana e francese del Settecento, 2 vols., Padua 1942; M. Petrocchi, Razionalismo architettonico e razionalismo storiografico, Rome 1947. — On the influence of English culture: G. Ascoli, La Grande-Bretagne devant l'opinion française au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols., Paris 1929; Marsden Price, The reception of english literature in Germany, University of California Press 1932. — On the religious attitude: P. Lanfrey, L'Eglise et les philosophes au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1879; E. Sayous, Les déistes anglais et le christianisme, principalement depuis Toland jusqu'à Chubb, ibid. 1882; J. Kremer, Das Problem der Theodizee in der Philosophie und Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 1909; J. M. Robertson, A short history of freethought ancient and modern, London 1915; Fr. Puaux, Les précurseurs français de la tolérance au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1915; M. Freund, Idee der Toleranz im England der grossen Revolution, Halle 1927; E. Pröclin, Les isomésistes au XVIIIe siècle, et la constitution civile du clergé, Paris 1929. — On political and social thought: C. Aubertin, L'esprit public au XVIIIe siècle, ibid. 1889; A. Lichtenberger, Le socialisme au XVIIIe siècle, ibid. 1895; A. Espinas, La philosophie sociale au XVIIIe siècle, ibid. 1898; H. Sée, Les idées politiques en France au XVIIIe siècle, ibid. 1923; G. Bonne, La constitution britannique devant l'opinion française au XVIIIe siècle, Univ. of California Press 1929; A. Gerbi, op. cit.; L. Becker, The heavenly city of the XVIII century philosophers, New Haven 1932; A. Le Flamant, Les utopies préévolutionnaires et la philosophie du XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1934. — On ethical thought: M. Pellisson, La sécularisation de la morale au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1903; J. Devaile, Essai sur l'histoire de l'idée de progrès à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, ibid. 1910; F. Lachèvre, Les derniers libertins, ibid. 1924; K. Löwith, Meaning in history, Chicago 1949. — For a more complete bibliography on the i., cf. B. Magnino, Alle origini della crisi contemporanea: i. e rivoluzione, Rome 1946, pp. 375–91; P. Hazard, La pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols., Paris 1946 (except vol. III, which consists of notes); and F. Venturi, Le origini della Enciclopedia, Florence 1946.