The Enlightenment began with the rise of modern science, culminated in the French Revolution and then dwindled in wave after wave of yearning, hope and doubt. It was characterised by a scepticism towards authority, a respect for reason, and an advocacy of individual freedom rather than divine command as the basis of moral and political order. The Enlightenment expressed itself in many ways, according to national character and local conditions; but it owes its most celebrated definition to Kant who, in 1784, described it as ‘the liberation of man from his self-imposed minority’, adding that this minority lies ‘not in lack of understanding, but in a lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another’.6 By the time of Kant’s words the Enlightenment was at its crisis. Herder’s advocacy of ‘culture’ against ‘civilisation’ was in part a reaction to Kant’s view of human nature, as formed from a single pattern and fulfilled in a single way – through reason, freedom and law. The ‘universalism’ advocated by Kant seemed to Herder to threaten all that is most precious in the human soul – namely, the local, the loyal and the rooted.
It would be absurd to suppose that the Enlightenment is one phenomenon, or that it can be defined in any way less vague than Kant’s. But it is worth identifying some of the intellectual, emotional and political transformations that occurred in the wake of the scientific revolution, since they affected all that came thereafter, and have left their indelible mark on modern culture.
First there is the transformation noticed by Herder. Enlightened people cease to define themselves in terms of place, history, tribe or dynasty, and lay claim instead to a universal human nature, whose laws are valid for all mankind. For Kant, tribal, racial and dynastic loyalties were to give way to a universal jurisdiction, which would guarantee peace by eroding the local jealousies that threaten it.
Then comes the retreat of the sacred. The gods and saints cease to haunt their shrines, the old ceremonies lose their divine authority, the sacred texts are put in question, and doubt is cast on all but the most abstract versions of religious doctrine. This process had begun with the Reformation and Luther’s ‘priesthood of all believers’. But it took a peculiar turn during the eighteenth century, as people began to look on the sacred texts and stories as metaphors rather than literal truths. The abstract deism of Voltaire and Kant sees religion as an unmediated relation between God and self. Knowledge of God comes through our own reasoning powers and through the exercise of moral choice, without the aid of images, texts or rituals.7 So defined, the line between deism and atheism is a fine one.
By the same token, inherited authority loses its grip. For the Enlightenment, nobody has a ‘divine right’ to obedience. All authority rests in the free choice of those who submit to it. No government is legitimate, therefore, until freely accepted by its subjects. Political organisation is envisaged as a ‘social contract’ between freely choosing individuals, rather than an inherited tie.
With the retreat of the gods and the loss of roots Enlightenment thinkers found themselves launched on a new quest – not for the divine, but for the natural. Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ has haunted Western literature ever since he stepped from his creator’s doubt-tormented brain. Man, in Rousseau’s account, has been corrupted by society. To rediscover our freedom we must measure every activity against its ‘natural’ counterpart. Not that we can return to our ‘natural’ state; the very idea of a state of nature is a philosophical abstraction. Nevertheless, in everything there is another way, an as yet undiscovered route to authenticity, which will allow us to do freely what we now do only by constraint. No existing institution should be accepted, therefore, just because it is existing. Every practice and custom should be questioned, measured against an a priori standard, and amended if it fails to come up to the mark.
Such ideas altered the cultural climate of Europe and America. The Enlightenment thereafter became a central preoccupation of sociology. Ferdinand Tönnies, for example, formulated a distinction between two kinds of society – Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft – the first based in affection, kinship and historic attachment, the second in division of labour, self-interest and free association by contract and exchange.8 Traditional societies, he argued, are of the first kind, and construe obligations and loyalties in terms of a non-negotiable destiny. Modern societies are of the second kind, and therefore regard all institutions and practices as provisional, to be revised in the light of our changing requirements. The transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft is part of what happened at the Enlightenment, and one explanation for the vast cultural changes, as people learned to view their obligations in contractual terms, and so envisage a way to escape them.
Max Weber wrote, in the same connection, of a transition from traditional to ‘legal-rational’ forms of authority, the first sanctioned by immemorial usage, the second by impartial law.9 To these two distinctions can be added yet another, due to Sir Henry Maine, who described the transition from traditional to modern societies as a shift from status to contract – i.e. a shift from inherited social position, to a position conferred by, and earned through, consent.10
Those sociological ideas are attempts to understand changes whose effect has been so profound that we have not yet come to terms with them. Still less had people come to terms with them in the late eighteenth century, when the French Revolution sent shock waves through the elites of Europe. The social contract seemed to lead of its own accord to a tyranny far darker than any monarchical excess: the contract between each of us became an enslavement of all. Enlightenment and the fear of Enlightenment were henceforth inseparable. Burke’s attack on the Revolution illustrates this new state of mind. His argument is a sustained defence of ‘prejudice’ – by which he meant the inherited store of human wisdom, whose value lasts only so long as we do not question it – against the ‘reason’ of Enlightenment thinking. But people have prejudices only when they see no need to defend them. Only an enlightened person could think as Burke did, and the paradox of his position is now a familiar sub-text of modern culture – the sub-text of conservatism.
Burke’s ‘prejudice’ corresponds more or less exactly to Herder’s ‘culture’. Both writers are attempting to define and endorse in retrospect the kind of social order that I described in the previous chapter – the order of sacred things. People bound by a common culture see the world as visited by benign and spiritual powers, who establish rights of territory and historic ties. In the wake of the French Revolution, and in reaction against it, nationalist movements attempted to revive these historic ties, but without their religious basis. The Nation assumed the authority that had been torn from the heads of kings, and the result was a new and dangerous form of idolatry. We should not blame Burke or Herder for this; they were merely lamenting what they foresaw, should the Enlightenment finally triumph over inherited attachments. And for the twentieth-century historian it is hard to tell which has been most destructive – the ‘particularist’ creeds of nationalist demagogues like Fichte, or the ‘universalist’ ideas of their revolutionary opponents, such as Marx.
It was Marx who developed the most popular explanation of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment saw itself as the triumph of reason over superstition. But the real triumph, Marx argued, lay not in the sphere of ideas but in the sphere of economics. The aristocratic order had been destroyed, and with it the feudal relations which bound the producers to the land and the consumers to the court. In place of the old order came the ‘bourgeois’ economy, based on the wage contract, the division of labour and private capital. The contractual view of society, the emphasis on individual freedom, the belief in impartial law, the attack on superstition in the name of reason – all these cultural phenomena are part of the ‘ideology’ of the new bourgeois order, contributions to the self-image whereby the capitalist class ratifies its usurpation.
The Marxist theory is a form of economic determinism, distinguished by the belief that fundamental changes in economic relations are invariably revolutionary, involving a violent overthrow of the old order, and a collapse of the political ‘superstructure’ which had been built on it. The theory is almost certainly false: nevertheless, there is something about the Marxian picture which elicits, in enlightened people, the will to believe. By explaining culture as a by-product of material forces, Marx endorses the Enlightenment view, that material forces are the only forces there are. The old culture, with its gods and traditions and authorities, is made to seem like a web of illusions – ‘the opiate of the people’, which quietens their distress.
Hence, in the wake of the Enlightenment, there came not only the reaction typified by Burke and Herder, and embellished by the romantics, but also a countervailing cynicism towards the very idea of culture. It became normal to view culture from outside, not as a mode of thought which defines our moral inheritance, but as an elaborate disguise, through which artificial powers represent themselves as natural rights. Thanks to Marx, debunking theories of culture have become a part of culture. And these theories have the structure pioneered by Marx: they identify power as the reality, and culture as the mask; they also foretell some future ‘liberation’ from the lies that have been spun by our oppressors.
Debunking theories of culture are popular for two reasons: because they are linked to a political agenda, and because they provide us with an overview. If we are to understand the Enlightenment, then we need such an overview. But ought it to be couched in these external terms? After all, the Enlightenment is part of us; people who have not responded to its appeal are only half awake to their condition. It is not enough to explain the Enlightenment; we must also understand it.
The distinction between explanation and understanding itself came to us from the Enlightenment. Vico hinted at it in his theory of history, as did Kant in his moral philosophy. Inspired by Kant’s account of practical reason, the romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that the interpretation of human actions can never be accomplished by the methods employed by the natural sciences. The human act must be understood as the act of a free subject, motivated by reason. The same is true of texts, which can be interpreted, thought Schleiermacher, only through an imaginative dialogue with their authors. Hermeneutics – the art of interpretation – involves the search for reasons rather than causes. We understand texts as expressions of rational activity, the very activity that is manifest in us as we interpret them.
A later Kantian philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey, extended Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical ‘method’ to the entire human world. We seek to understand human actions, he argued, not by explaining them in terms of external causes, but ‘from within’, by an act of rational self-projection that Dilthey called Verstehen. In understanding human life and action, we look for the concepts which inspire and guide it. Thus I understand your fear of speaking in a certain place, once I conceptualise it as you do, as somewhere ‘sacred’. This is not an act of scientific explanation, but an act of human sympathy, the outcome of an implied or actual dialogue.
It is not only individual human beings who are the objects of Verstehen. Understanding can be directed towards the entire human world – the world of institutions, customs, laws and culture. Verstehen is cultivated through those studies which look for reasons, meanings, and values, rather than causes: through the humanities rather than the natural sciences. And the end result is, or ought to be, an internal perspective on the life, thought and motivation of our fellow human beings, rather than a science of their behaviour. The human world is a world of significances, and no human significance can be fully grasped by science. Every expression must be returned to its social, historical and cultural context if its full meaning is to be revealed; hence Verstehen must be educated through comparison and critical analysis.
Those ideas are controversial, but they contain at least one indisputable truth, and one to which I have already drawn attention. Upon every culture there is an internal and an external perspective – the perspective of the tribesman and that of the anthropologist. Homer’s Odyssey enables us to share the internal perspective on an enchanted world. Thanks to such artists as Pope, Goethe and Mozart, we can acquire the same internal perspective on the sober world of the Enlightenment. They show us what it was like, to live through the loss of old authority, and to see the vision unfold of man in his freedom, with his dignity not yet degraded, and his religion not yet crumbled to dust. In art, literature and music, the Enlightenment gave content to its universalism, with stories, epics and operas that might be set in any place or time, each devoted to the human substance beneath the local colour. Its criticisms of old authority were accompanied by a fervent and pious attempt to retain the ethical view of man. In the very act of re-casting marriage as a contract and authority as a myth, the Enlightenment showed how men and women can re-dignify these things which have lost their sanctity, and make of them a lasting monument to human hopes. Such is the message of the Henriade and the Lettres Persanes, of Wilhelm Meister and The Magic Flute, and through such works we see that the Enlightenment was not the single and simple thing described by Marx. Nor was it merely a transitional period, with a before and after that are clearly distinct from it. The Enlightenment, we discover, is part of us. It belongs to the archaeology, rather than the pre-history, of modern consciousness.
But, as I noted in discussing Burke, Enlightenment goes hand in hand with the fear of it. From the very beginning hope and doubt have been intertwined. What if men needed those old authorities, needed the habit of obedience and the sense of the sacred? What if, without them, they should jettison all loyalties, and give themselves to a life of godless pleasure? In a penetrating view from within of the Enlightenment mentality – a view made possible by Mozart – Nicholas Till has shown us how real were these fears.11 Furthermore, the very aim for a universal culture, without time or place, brought a new kind of loneliness. Communities depend upon the force which Burke called prejudice; they are essentially local, bound to a place, a history, a language and a common culture. The Enlightened individualist, by forgoing such things, lives increasingly as a stranger among strangers, consumed by a helpless longing for an attachment which his own cold thinking has destroyed.
These conflicts within Enlightenment culture are part of its legacy to us. We too are individualists, believers in the sovereign right of human freedom, living as strangers in a society of strangers. And we too are beset by those ancient and ineradicable yearnings for something else – for a homecoming to our true community. The theme of homecoming is at the root of German romanticism, finds its highest expression in the poetry of Hölderlin, and dominates political thinking in the German tradition – both the revolutionary evangelism of Marx, with its promise of a ‘full communism’ in which man will be ‘restored to himself, and the reactionary nationalism of Fichte and Gierke, for whom the Volk and the Volksgeist were the primary objects of social hope. But if there is anything to be learned from the movements which those thinkers created, it is that there is no going back, that we must live with our enlightened condition and endure the inner tension to which it condemns us. And it is in terms of this tension, I believe, that we should understand both the splendours and the miseries of modern culture.