The Debate About Enlightenment

A funny thing happened to the Enlightenment on the way to the 21^st Century: it became the object of scathing critique as the generator of what is most wrong with modern Western culture. A broad range of thinkers, from Adorno and Horkheimer (The Dialectic of Enlightenment to Foucault (Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality), developed a harsh challenge to the way the “age of Enlightenment” had seen itself, and the way others had understood it. I offer this critique, not because I accept it, but because it will offer a salutary way to question the idealistic concept of enlightenment embedded within our study of the several developers of “enlightenment communications”: Newton and Kant, Milton and Jefferson, Addison and Steele. It also will allow us to understand the dark side of Enlightenment evident in part II of our course, that devoted to “Colonial Correspondence.”

Critique of Enlightenment

According to these critics, the Enlightenment brought change all right—a change for the worse:

• Enlightenment science passes itself off as a disinterested search for the truth about nature, but in fact, by disenchanting Nature of her mysteries, nature becomes nothing more than a “standing reserve” of natural resources to be exploited.
• The Enlightenment political narrative is cast as a story of the movement toward freedom and democracy, but in fact, the modern state develops systems of control and bureaucratic administration that extend greater and greater control over the individual.
• Enlightenment economics glories in overcoming local and political obstacles to the free flow of labor, capital, and goods, but the enclosure of common lands and the improvements in agricultural production in 18^th century England empties villages of their ancient inhabitants, and fill the cities with rootless workers who must turn their labor into a living wage.
• Western countries glory in spreading enlightened religion, knowledge and technology to the backward native cultures, but this sense of the West’s enlightened superiority becomes an alibi for conquest and subjection of native peoples and cultures.
• Finally, while Enlightenment thinkers promised a steady progressive improvement in manner, morals, technology, and general social well-being, while the 19^th and 20^th century experienced unprecedented levels of state sponsored violence and economic exploitation.

For the critics of Enlightenment, the Enlightenment is most essentially about power: by making a succession of others (nature, religion, the self, other cultures) the object of Enlightenment knowledge, the Enlightenment subject-position subjects others to itself. When, for example, English farmers occupy Native American lands upon arrival at Plymouth, they strip Nature of the aura of mystery, the sacredness with which Native Americans invested it. The grid of Enlightenment rationalism is the crucial precondition for those techniques of surveying, map-making, and legal property division with which the English farmer divide and take possession of the American land.

The Example of The Declaration of Independence

How would this critique of Enlightenment allow us to “read” The Declaration of Independence?

The critique of the Declaration:

• The preamble to the Declaration speaks of its “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” and addresses itself explicitly to “the Supreme judge of the world”. However, the drafters of this document, and the leaders of the American Revolution were a relatively small group of white, tax-paying, literate, voting property owners, attempting to speak for all (servants, laborers, slaves, women, etc.).
• The crucial second paragraph outlines a universalist political philosophy around the notion that “all men are created equal” and have “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But both “equality” and these rights were claimed and extended to relatively few; and the high idealism of these values is actually motivated by the concrete economic benefits that independence would bring to the signers.
• The third paragraph claims to offer a list of facts; but the biased perspective asserted against King George III and the intemperate tone of the charges, suggests that this is a family feud, or Oedipal rebellion of the brothers against the father. The excessive anger of the signers suggests their disillusionment with a once idealized Father/ Country (England).
• While the Declaration presents itself as a rational response to particular grievances, it is also producing a new mythology around an emerging nation—the united States of America. The Declaration is the new secular scripture for a country that will become the new object of veneration for the People. In other words, the myth the Enlightenment claims to expel or surpass a primitive or benighted form of government (monarchy, with a child-like adoration of the King’s body), returns in new forms (President George replaces King George). Such a return of an apparently surpassed myth is suggested by the change way the new American Republic rewrites the patriotic strains of “God Save the King” as “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

Short Rejoinder in Defense of the Enlightenment strand in the Declaration

This text’s radical claims for equality and the rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness were first made by and on behalf of a privileged minority of the population. However, they became a verbal and conceptual model for subsequent efforts to expand the rights of slaves (in the Massachusetts’s Slave Petition, 1777), of Frenchmen (Declaration of Rights, 1789) and women (Seneca Fall Resolution, 1846). Viewed in this light, the Declaration helps to invent the terms for on ongoing, never completed, process of claiming legitimate rights. Even those who critique the historical effects of Enlightenment, accept the Enlightenment ideals of rational scrutiny, public exchange and personal liberty that ground the critique of Enlightenment.