Page 47 - History 2020

“The Enlightenment was what we think it was. Any general definition would have to

include so many qualifications and contradictions as to be virtually meaningless.”
(“The Enlightenment: An evaluation of its assumptions, attitudes and values” 1982).

Nonetheless a couple of hundred pages later, Hampson has a go at defining it: the
Enlightenment, he says:

• Challenges Christianity as an explanation for everything and rejects religious
persecution

• Says people have natural rights, such as freedom from arbitrary arrest and
freedom of speech

• Believed that reason was a better basis on which to organize society than

tradition

• Was not primarily a political movement: “it was disinterested intellectual
speculation rather than possible political action which really excited these
people. This was equally true of their readers.”

It is also surprising that people at the time didn’t talk about “the Enlightenment” at

all. The phrase is attributed to German philosopher, Immanuel Kant in an essay of
1784. Kant begins, “ENLIGHTENMENT is man’s emergence from his self-imposed
immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of
understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from
another. ‘Sapere Aude!’ [dare to know] ‘Have courage to use your own
understanding!’ - that is the motto of enlightenment.” This immaturity, he says, is

hard to break out of; it is encouraged by those in authority; it can become
comfortable.

He then says, “a public can only attain enlightenment slowly. Perhaps a revolution
can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression,
but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like
the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.” This
was fifteen years before the French Revolution. Clearly Kant expects the spread of

Enlightenment to be a long, gradual process, but humanity’s “essential destiny lies
precisely in such progress.”