The World of the Philosophes

France, the dominant country in 18th-century Europe, was the center of the Enlightenment movement, and thus it is customary to refer to the leading exponents of the Enlightenment, regardless of where they lived, by the French term philosophe, meaning philosopher. In fact the term philosophe is slightly misleading inasmuch as hardly any of the philosophes were really philosophers in the sense of being highly original abstract thinkers. Rather, most were practically oriented publicists who aimed to reform society by popularizing the new scientific interpretation of the universe and applying dispassionate “scientific method” to a host of contemporary problems. They even expressed their ideas in the form of stories or plays rather than treatises.

By common consent the prince of the philosophes was the Frenchman born Francios Marie Arouet, who called himself Voltaire (1694-1778). Virtually the personification of the Enlightenment, Voltaire commented on an enormous range of subjects in a wide variety of literary forms. Probably his greatest single accomplishment lay in championing the cause of English empiricism in previously Cartesian France. Voltaire returned a thorough and extremely persuasive convert to the ideas of Bacon and Locke. Not only did this mean that he persuaded other French thinkers to accept Newton’s empirically verifiable scientific system, but he also encouraged them to be less abstract and theoretical in all their intellectual inclinations and more oriented toward the solving of everyday problems. To be sure, throughout the 18nth century France’s intellectual world remained more rationalistic than England’s, but Voltaire’s lifelong campaign on behalf of empiricism had a very salutary effect in making French thinkers more practically oriented than before.

Continually engaged in commenting on contemporary problems himself, Voltaire was an ardent spokesman for civil liberties. In his own words, he believed that “the individual who persecutes another because he is not of the same opinion is nothing less than a monster.” Accordingly, he wrote an opponent a line as the first principle of civil liberty: “I do not agree with a word you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Voltaire hatred religious bigotry most of all because it seemed based on silly superstitions: “the less superstition, the less fanaticism; and the less fanaticism, the less misery.” In particular, he thought that the English parliamentary system was preferable to French absolutism and that all states acted criminally when their policies resulted in senseless wars.

Although Voltaire exerted the greatest effect on his age as a propagandist for the basically optimistic Enlightenment principle that by “crushing infamy” humanity could take enormous strides forward, the only one of his works still widely read today, the satirical story Candide (1759), is typically subdued. Voltaire drew back in this work from some of his earlier faith that mankind by its own actions could limitlessly improve itself. In other words, according to him, life is not perfect and probably never will be, but humans will succeed best if they ignore vapid theorizing and buckle down to unglamorous but productive hard work.

In addition to Voltaire, the most prominent French philosophes were Montesquieu, Diderot, and Condorcet. The baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) was primarily a political thinker. In his major work, The Spirit of Laws (1748), Montesquieu sought to discover the ways in which differing environments and historical and religious traditions influence governmental institutions. Montesquieu throughout much of The Spirit of Laws seems to be saying that external conditions force humans to behave in different ways and that there is nothing they can do about this. But ultimately he was an idealist who preferred one particular political system, the English constitution, and hoped that all nations might overcome whatever environmental handicaps they faced to imitate it. For him, the greatest strength of the English system was that it consisted of separate and balanced powers – executive, legislative, and judicial: thus it guaranteed liberty inasmuch as no absolute sovereignty was given to any single-governing individual or group. This idealization of “checks and balances” subsequently influenced many other Enlightenment political theorists and played a particularly dominant role in the shaping of the United States Constitution in 1787.

Unlike Voltaire, who was not a very systematic thinker, and Montesquieu, who wrote in a somewhat ambiguous and primarily reflective mode, the most programmatic of the philosophes was Denis Diderot (1713-1784). As a young firebrand Diderot was clapped into solitary confinement for his attacks on religion and thereafter worked under the ever-present threat of censorship and imprisonment. Yet throughout his life he never shrank from espousing a fully materialistic philosophy or criticizing what he considered to be backwardness or tyranny wherever he found it. Although Diderot wrote on a wide range of subjects in numerous different forms, including stories and plays, he exerted his greatest influence as the organizer of and main contribution to an extremely ambitious publishing venture, the Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia first appeared between 1751 and 1772 in installments totaling seventeen large volumes and eleven more of illustrative plates. Whereas modern encyclopedias serve primarily as reference works, Diderot thought of his Encyclopedia as a set of volumes that people would read at length rather than merely using to look up facts. Therefore he hoped that it would “change the general way of thinking.” Above all, by popularizing the most recent achievements in science and technology, Diderot intended to combat “superstition” on the broadest front, aid the further advance of science, and thereby help alleviate all forms of human misery. As time went on the complete work became so popular that it was reprinted several times and helped spread the ideas of the philosophes not just in France but all over Europe.

One of the youngest of the contributors to the Encyclopedia, the marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), is customarily termed “the last of the philosophes” because his career, and the philosophes’ activities in general, were cut short by the excesses of the French Revolution. He is best known as the most extreme Enlightenment exponent of the idea of progress. In the 18th century, the conviction grew that the present had advanced in all aspects of human endeavor beyond the accomplishments of any earlier time, and that the future was bound to see unlimited further progress on all fronts. Condorcet’s Outline of the Progress of the Human Mind (1794) was the ultimate expression of this point of view. According to him, progress in the past had not been uninterrupted – the Middle Ages had been an especially retrogressive era – but, given the victories of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment, indefinite and uninterrupted progress in the future was assured.

Beyond France, philosophes in other countries also made significant contributions to the Enlightenment legacy. After France, the most “enlightened” country of Europe was Great Britain, where the most noteworthy philosophes were Gibbon, Hume, and Adam Smith. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) was a man of letters and historian whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) remains among the two or three most widely read history books of all time. It covers Roman and Byzantine history from Augustus to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. According to Gibbon, the Roman Empire was brought down by “the triumph of barbarism [i.e. the Germanic invasions] and religion [i.e. Christianity],” but the Europe of his day was no longer “threatened with a repetition of those calamities.” For him the rise of Christianity was the greatest calamity because “the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks” replaced Roman philosophy and science with a credulity which “debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind.”

The Scotsman David Hume (1711-1776) was a truly penetrating philosopher. He pushed skepticism so far in his major work, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1742), that he undermined all assurance that anyone knew anything for certain. Starting with the assumption that human knowledge derives from sense data alone rather than abstract reason – that “nothing is in intellect which was not first in sense” – Hume proposed that we have no way of ascertaining whether such knowledge really corresponds to objective truths lodged in the real world. Hume also proposed a philosophy of relativistic ethics: if we know nothing for certain, then there can be no absolute moral laws, and we must decide on proper courses of action from their contexts. Yet, he was by no means cynical; rather, he enthusiastically joined in Voltaire’s campaign to crush “infamy,” or what Hume called “stupidity, Christianity, and ignorance,” on the grounds that it is preferable to voyage amidst a sea of uncertainties than to dwell in a forest of supernatural shadows.

The most practically oriented of the leading British philosophes was the Scottish economist Adam Smith, whose landmark treatise, The Wealth of Nations (1776), is recognized as the classic expression of “laissez-faire” economics. Strongly opposed to mercantilism, Smith maintained that the prosperity of all could best be obtained by allowing individuals to pursue their own interests without competition from state-owned enterprises or legal restraints. The term laissez-faire comes from the French expression laissez faire la nature (let nature take its course), and Smith’s advocacy of laissez-faire economic doctrine reveals how deeply indebted he was to the Enlightenment’s idealization of both nature and human nature. Espousing “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” Smith believed that just as the planets revolve harmoniously in their orbits and are prevented from bumping into each other by the invisible force of gravity, so humans can act harmoniously even while pursuing their selfish economic interests if only “the invisible hand” of competitive, free-market forces is allowed to balance equitably the distribution of wealth. Ironically, his laissez-faire doctrine later became the favored theory of private industrial entrepreneurs who exploited the poor as much if not more than mercantilistic governments ever did. Nevertheless, Smith’s free-market economics certainly represented the wave of the future.

Elsewhere in Europe the circulation of Enlightenment ideas was by no means as widespread as in France and Britain, owing either to stiffer resistance from religious authorities, greater vigilance of state censors, or the lack of sufficient numbers of prosperous educated people to discuss and support progressive thought. Yet, a few prominent philosophes flourished in virtually every country in western Europe. In Italy, for example, the Milanese jurist Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), argued against arbitrary powers that oppressed humanity in the same spirit as the French philosophes. In his most influential writing, On Crimes and Punishments (1764), Beccaria asserted that no person has the right to punish another unless some useful purpose is served. He eloquently opposed the death penalty, then widely inflicted throughout Europe for the most trivial offenses. On Crimes and Punishments was so favorably received that it was quickly translated into a dozen languages. Owing primarily to its influence, most European countries by around 1800 abolished torture, reserved the death penalty for capital crimes, and made imprisonment rather than any form of maiming the main form of judicial punishment.

The most representative German philosophe was the literary critic and dramatist Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781), who wrote with great eloquence of the need for tolerance. In his play Nathan the Wise (1779) Lessing led the audience to see that nobility of character has no relation to religious affiliations, and in his On the Education of the Human Race (1780) he maintained that the development of each of the world’s great religions, Christianity included, was simply a step in the spiritual evolution of humanity, which would soon move beyond religion entirely toward pure rationality.

Far more difficult to classify is the greatest German philosopher of the 18th century – indeed one of the greatest philosophers of any nations of any time – Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). An unworldly intellectual who lived out his life far from the Enlightenment’s French center of gravity in a Prussian city, Kant addressed his two masterworks, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and The Critique of Practical Reason (1790), to criticizing fashionable Enlightenment skepticism as represented most persuasively by David Hume. One of Kant’s positions concerning reality and knowledge went so far against the grain of standard Enlightenment assumptions that it can hardly be called “Enlightened” at all. He maintained, in the spirit of Platonism, that the existence of a realm of absolute reality consisting of what he termed “things in themselves” cannot be doubted even though this realm remains unknowable to humans. Kant’s assumption of absolute but unknowable truth, which implicitly opened philosophy to mystery, was to prove extremely attractive to his German philosophical successors in the 19th century, collectively known as “Idealists.”

In fact, however, Kant did not propose to build an action-oriented system on the basis of his assumed world of “things in themselves”; to the contrary, the bulk of his practical philosophy was more typically Enlightened. He proposed that even though everyday knowledge begins in sense experience, the data of our senses is ordered by our rational minds in the here-and-now world of space and time in such a way as to provide us with reliable knowledge of appearances, or of what Kant called “phenomena.” In other words, Kant believed that humans could gain sufficient truth on a daily basis by a combination of sense and reason. Hence he insisted, much like Voltaire, that humans should use their learning faculties to inquire about nature, and, having done so, to improve upon it.

In taking final stock of the Enlightenment movement, historians customarily raise two major questions. One is whether the philosophes were mere elitists who had no influence on the masses. It is less surprising that Enlightenment ideas hardly percolated down to the masses than that they did have some effect on popular beliefs in France and England. The other major question is whether the philosophes were not hopelessly impractical “dreamers rather than doers.” Without ignoring the clear vein of utopianism in Enlightenment thought, the answer to this must surely be no. Yet even the most optimistic did not express utopian miracles to occur overnight. Often such agitation did lead to significant changes in the conduct of practical affairs, and in at least one case, that of the American Revolution, Enlightenment ideas were the main source of inspiration for constructing a fully new political system. Moreover, sometimes even when Enlightenment propagandizing did not have any immediate practical impact, it did help to accomplish change in the future. In short, then, it is impossible to deny that the philosophes as a class were among the most practical-minded and influential intellectuals who ever lived.

Although several of the philosophes were natural scientists as well as publicists, it is preferable to treat the progress of 18th-century science separately because science, being highly international, is best broached by means of a topical rather than geographical method of review. The three scientific areas that witnessed the greatest progress from around the time of Newton to the end of the 18th century were descriptive biology, electricity, and chemistry. Regarding the first, four great pioneers in the use of newly invented high-power microscopes made enormous advances in observing small creatures and plant and cell structures during the last decades of the 17th century – the Italian Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694), the Englishman Robert Hooke, and two Dutchmen, Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680) and Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723). Perhaps most fundamental was the work of the last, a self-taught scientist who discovered bacteria and wrote the first description of human sperm. Building on such accomplishments as well as on numerous observations of his own, the Swedish botanist Karl von Linne (1707-1778) – commonly known by his Latinized name of Linnaeus – formulated the basic system of plant and animal classification that remains in use today. In the “Linnean Order” there are three realms – animal, vegetable, and mineral – and within the first two there are classes, “genera,” and species. Furthermore, in Linnaeus’s system every plant and animal is given two scientific Latin names – the first denoting the genus and the second the species. Rivaling Linneus in 18th-century biology was the French naturalist Georges Buffon (1707-1788), whose massive Natural History, appearing in forty-four volumes from 1749 to 1778, was most advanced in its recognition of the close relationship between humans and other primates. Buffon admitted the possibility that the entire range of organic forms had descended from a single species and thus was a precursor of the evolutionism of Charles Darwin.

As opposed to developments in descriptive biology, around 1600 the Englishman William Gilbert, the “founding father” in the field of electricity, discovered the magnetic properties of lodestones and introduced the word electricity into the language. Yet because Gilbert worked before the triumph of mechanistic thought, he believed magnetism to be a purely occult force and therefore did not even dream of machines that could generate or harness electricity. Starting in the late 17th century, scientists from many different countries progressively began to master the science of electricity. In 1749 by using a kite-string to conduct lightning the American Benjamin Franklin charged a Leyden jar from a thunderstorm and thus was able to conclude that lightning and electricity are identical. This recognition allowed Franklin to invent the lightening rod, which saved houses from being destroyed in storms and is one of the best examples of the link between scientific theory and life-enhancing practice.

Probably the greatest theoretical breakthrough made in the second half of the 18th century lay in the field of chemistry, which had been languishing for about a century after the work of Robert Boyle. The reason for this delay lay most in the wide acceptance of errors and the most misleading error was the so-called phlogiston theory. The final blow to the phlogiston theory was administered by the Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), widely regarded as the greatest scientist of the 18th century, who lost his life in the French Revolution. Lavoisier proved that both combustion and respiration involve oxidation, the one being rapid and the other slow. He provided the names for oxygen and hydrogen, and argued that life itself is essentially a chemical process. But undoubtedly his greatest accomplishment was his discovery of the law of the conservation of mass. He found evidence that “although matter may alter its state in a series of chemical actions, it does not change in amount; the quantity of matter is the same at the end as at the beginning of every operation, and can be traced by its weight.” This “law” has, of course, been modified by later discoveries regarding the structure of the atom and the conversion of some forms of matter into energy. It is hardly too much to say, however, that as a result of Lavoisier’s genius chemistry became a true science.

Despite the notable scientific advances of the 17th and 18th centuries, the development of physiology and medicine progressed rather slowly during the same period for several reasons. One was the inadequate preparation of physicians. Another was the common disrepute in which surgery was held as a mere trade. Perhaps the most serious of all was the prejudice against dissection of human bodies for use in anatomical study. As late as 1750 medical schools which engaged in this practice were in danger of destruction by irate mobs. Despite these obstacles some progress was still possible. At approximately the same time an eminent physician of London, Thomas Sydenham, proposed a new theory of fever as a natural process by which diseased materials is expelled from the system.

Medical progress during the 18th century was somewhat more rapid. Among the noteworthy achievements were the discovery of blood pressure, the founding of histology or microscopic anatomy, and the development of the autopsy as an aid to the study of disease. But the chief milestones of medical advancement were the adoption of inoculation and the development of vaccination for smallpox. Information concerning its use was relayed to England in 1717 through the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador to Turkey. The first systematic application of the practice in the Western world, however, was due to the efforts of the American Puritan leader Cotton Mather in 1721..

Although the spirit of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment was reflected in certain great artistic monuments, there were no simple, one-to-one correspondences between intellectual and artistic trends in the late 17nth and 18th centuries. Artists and writers responded to a great variety of influences in addition to the new scientific view of the universe: national stylistic traditions, religious demands, differing political and sociological contexts, and the internal dynamics of artistic evolution within any given creative field.

As we have seen earlier, the dominant style in European art between about 1600 and the early 1700s was the Baroque. But a few countries resisted the dominance of Baroque influences – particularly France, Holland, and England. The French resistance was primarily nationalistic in inspiration. It seemed inappropriate for France to admit cultural inferiority by imitating the style of its political rivals. In opposition to the exuberant Baroque, French artists and architects cultivated restrained classicism. “Well-ordered” classicism continued to be the preferred style in France during the reign of Louis XIV for three reasons. First of all, Louis in particular was determined to make sure that France cultivated its own characteristic national style for reasons of state. Second, Louis’s own stylistic preferences tended toward the grand and sober. And third, the symmetrical qualities of classicism seemed to complement best the highly symmetrical natural order then being posited in France by Cartesian philosophers and scientists.

As classicism was the prevalent style in 17th-century French art, so too did it prevail in literature. This can be seen most clearly in the tragedies of Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) and Jean Racine (1639-1699). Both of these playwrights took as their subjects the heroes and heroines of classical mythology and history, and both strove as well to imitate the theoretical and structural principles of the classical Greek tragedians. Similarly, the great French writer of comedies, Jean Baptiste Moliere (1622-1673), took the Roman comedies of Terence and Plautus for his models and was so committed to symmetrical formalism as to have his characters speak in rhyming couplets. Yet, unlike Corneille and Racine, Moliere did set the action of his plays in the present because he believed that “the business of comedy is to represent in general all the defects of men and especially of the men of our time.” Accordingly, his work was also highly satirical. Yet for all his satire, Moliere had a measure of sympathy for the trials of human existence. Thus mixing sympathy and occasional melancholy with wit and searing scorn, Moliere was probably the most gifted European dramatic genius after Shakespeare.

Since Holland and England were Protestant, they naturally preferred to limit Baroque influences, there can be little doubt that artistic preferences had religious as well as nationalistic causes. The dominant stylistic commitment in England, after a brief flirtation with the Baroque was to a classicizing restraint. More classical still was the “Palladian revival” which dominated English architecture in the first half of the 18th century. Parallel to the artistic classicism and the English Palladians was the literary classicism which flourished in England from about 1660 to 1760. In fact, the writers of this period expressly called themselves “Augustans.” This they did for two reasons: first, the restoration of royalty in 1660 after the English Civil War seemed to presage an age of peace and civility similar to the one installed by Augustus after civil war in ancient Rome; and second, the favored poetic models of the English Augustans were the Augustan Romans – Virgil, Hormace, and Ovid. Still another reason why English literary taste became resolutely classical in the later 17th century was that the France of Louis XIV had enormous influence in setting fashions throughout Europe, and the English did not wish to be the slightest bit out of date in following the French lead. Finally, as in France, classicism appeared to be the one available style that came closest to being dispassionately “scientific.” In other words, just when the English leisured classes were celebrating the triumphs of Newtonianism and endeavoring to make their own contribution to scientific advance by collecting natural specimens or gazing through telescopes, they patronized a form of writing which seemed to resemble Newtonian methods and laws in stressing simplicity, clarity, and symmetry.

Of the numerous members of the English Augustan school, the most outstanding were the prose writer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and the poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744). The former, a scathing satirist, was atypical of Augustan thinking in his pessimism concerning the potentialities of human nature: in his masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels, humans at one point are dismissed as “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Yet Swift’s prose is fully Augustan in its economy and clarity; Swift insisted on locating, as he said, “proper words in proper places.” As for Pope, he was thoroughly Augustan in both style and thought – almost to a fault. A consistent exponent in highly regular rhyming verse of the naturalistic doctrines of the Enlightenment, Pope in such didactic poems as his Essay on Man and his Essay on Criticism held that humans must study and imitate nature if they were to bring any semblance of order into their affairs. Most necessary for mankind, in Pope’s view, was unblinking self-knowledge, which the poet believed could be obtained entirely apart from theology or metaphysics. Summing up the secularistic spirit of his age, Pope responded to Milton’s earlier poetic resolve to “justify the ways of God to man” in his most famous couplet: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;/ the proper study of Mankind is Man.”

As impressive as numerous artistic and literary productions of French and English classicism may have been, the classical movement self-evidently was not highly innovative. Two entirely separate developments of the 18th century, on the other hand, emphasized greater originality – namely, the emergence of the continental Rococo style in art, and the rise of the English novel. Regarding the former, the basic explanation for the emergence of Rococo art and architecture was the sense of relaxation experienced in France at the coming of peace and at the death of Louis XIV in 1715. In painting, the earliest and most gifted Rococo artist was Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), who was admitted into the French Academy of Fine Arts in 1717 for his masterpiece, The Embarkation for Cythera. Most of the rest of Europe was too straitlaced to imitate the lasciviousness of French Rococo painting, but French Rococo architecture soon became the dominant style throughout the Continent and remained such for most of the 18th century. Perhaps the easiest way to characterize the Rococo building style is to call it the “champagne of Baroque” or “Baroque with a French accent.” Both Baroque and Rococo buildings emphasize dynamic movement, but whereas Baroque style exudes force and passion, the Rococo communicates a sense of delicacy and playfulness. From the long-term perspective of art history the Rococo style was an end rather than a beginning inasmuch as it represented the final phase of the Baroque.

In contrast, the only really new development in the artistic and literary history of the Enlightenment period that had a promising future was the emergence of the novel. In treating the rise of the novel in 18th-century England it must be stressed that the English novel was not invented out of nothing. To the contrary, works of prose fiction known as romances had been composed in classical antiquity and throughout western Europe from the 12th century onward. Indeed, one European romance – Cervantes’s Don Quixote – atypically had many of the characteristics of the modern novel. Moreover, in France, where the word roman means both romance and novel, prose fictions were written without interruption from the Middle Ages to the recognizably modern novels of the 19th-century writers Balzac and Flaubert. Nevertheless, there were such major differences between the best English prose fictions of the 18th century and all that came before as to make it possible to say that the modern novel was invented in 18th-century England. The best way of characterizing the difference between the romance and the novel is that the former is patently a fabrication, whereas the latter purports to be a reliable account of how humans behave. A modern novel might stand up as excellent legal evidence, for in the novel, from the 18th-century English examples onward, experiences seem unique, plots and settings fully believable, and the manner of presentation dispassionately straightforward.

Two explanations may be offered for the emergence of the novel in 18th-century England. One is that the ideals of the Enlightenment unquestionably created the most conducive atmosphere for novel writing insofar as the “scientific,” methodical study of human experience was widely regarded as the order of the day. Yet, because Enlightenment thinking predominated in France even more than in England, it remains to ask why England in particular was the modern novel’s first home. The answer to this appears to relate to the distinctive nature of the English reading public. Specifically, England had a much larger non-aristocratic reading audience than France; this class preferred novels to romances because novels were written in a gripping rather than “elevated” style and the action of the novel’s more prosaic characters seemed more relevant to common, non-aristocratic experience. It was by no means irrelevant to the novelistic form in England that the majority of novel readers were not men but women.

By common consent the three most influential novelists of 18th-century England were Daniel Defoe (1660-1737), Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), and Henry Fielding (1660-1737). All three portrayed recognizable, non-aristocratic characters doing their best to make their way in a perilous world, unaffected by any hint of divine intervention for good or ill. In the novels of Defoe and Richardson the narrator is usually a character who participates in the action and thus knows the “truth” of one side directly, but of course cannot be expected to understand every other character’s point of view. On the other hand, in Fielding’s Tom Jones an “omnipotent narrator” stands apart from the action, and accordingly has a fuller view of it, but seems by his obtrusive presence to be creating a rather more artificial fiction.