Enlightenment: 'Humanising' the Arts
As the eighteenth-century rolled on, god’s divine light grew dimmer and the light of man’s reason, brighter. It was the beginning of a self-referential, human-derived and human-validated moral order. It was the beginning of the Enlightenment.
Man, it seemed, was finally emancipated: from superstition, from outdated traditions and dogmas, and – finally – from his own tyrannical self. Reason had delivered him from bondage, and his newfound freedom had given him legislative self-sufficiency. Beginning with the humanistic shift of the Renaissance, man had slowly usurped god as his own self-referential cosmic principle, his very own logos.
By the Enlightenment, the light of man’s Reason had acquired a divine status of its own. Suddenly the reasoning individual, not god, was the seat of all ethical certainty, the centre of the moral universe. And here, a century or so before god was declared officially dead, we see philosophy beginning to gradually phase him out of its moral conception of the world.
Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in fact, prominent thinkers – many of whom, in order to reconcile thought with faith, would at the same time desperately attempt to rework god into a system that needed him less and less – found alternative fonts to divine revelation for their moral superstructure. Descartes found it in our innate rational faculties; Locke, in our empirical observations of the world; Thomas Hobbes and Rousseau, in the social contract; Kant, in our ‘common human reason’.
In Art, man would become equally bent on legislative autonomy. The light of Reason, here wielded as a guide for the creative mind, would enable him to acquire a self-animating artistic logic that seemed to rely very little (if at all) on god’s truth for its force and meaning. In music, the newly developed diatonic system was taken to new heights of dazzling complexity.
In 1722 and 1742, Johann Sebastian Bach published the two books of his Well-Tempered Clavier: a set of 24 intricately contrapuntal preludes and fugues for keyboard in all major and minor keys. Mid-century, the serpentine, polyphonic idiom favoured in the high Baroque would briefly give way to the restrained elegance of the style galant, in which composers applied homophonic textures and balanced phrases to mirror the perfect order of the enlightened mind. These two divergent musical strands – ornamentation and purity, excess and poise – would then find their perfect synthesis in that late eighteenth century titan, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In his ‘Jupiter’ Symphony (1788), Mozart used melodic phrases of unassuming simplicity as his starting point for virtuosic thematic elaborations in his development sections.
In literature, a new form – the novel – would be employed to reinforce the liberal social ideals of Enlightenment philosophy. Two of the century’s most influential authors, Samuel Richardson and Rousseau, denounced class-based infringements on individual dignity in similarly titled epistolary works: Richardson, in his Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740); Rousseau, in his Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloise (1761). Beaumarchais’ comedy, The Marriage of Figaro (1786) brought similarly political themes to the stage. In painting, the neoclassicist Jacques-Louis David created epic canvases like The Oath of the Horatii (1784), which depict an enlightened commitment to civic duty by means of crisp, clear detailing, and a classically geometric composition.
Clarity of intent and form, crispness of execution, balance and restraint, logic and order: these were the primary ideals upon which the eighteenth-century artistic edifice was erected. And this was no coincidence; the human mind was seen, at the time, to be characterised by the very same attributes.
Like the medieval logos before it, human Reason had come to be considered, by scientist and thinker alike, as a thing of perfection, worthy of awe and veneration. For two hundred years, scientists had wielded it to unravel the mysteries of the physical world, and philosophers had studied it to uncover the secrets of human understanding. Man had proven capable, for the first time in history, of making scientific sense of the world around him, and throughout this momentous advancement, god had played an increasingly negligible role.
In Art, a similar process of ‘humanisation’ was unfolding. Man was no longer reliant on divine word for his natural and moral philosophy, and now he would banish it also from his conception of the aesthetically good and pure. If for the Renaissance artist Beauty had been part human, part divine – godly in its essence and derivation, but anthropomorphic in its concrete expression – for his enlightened successors, there was little of the divine left in it.
The logical order of man’s reasoning mind had acquired its own divinity, supplanting god’s, and the sturdy moral superstructure it afforded, which itself was a reflection of the cosmic order it had proven able to grasp, had come to dictate the manner and form of his artistic output. Beauty, too, had emancipated itself; shaken off the heavy shackles of dogma and superstition. Henceforth, it would be defined in human terms alone; as the absolute moral certainty conferred on the cosmos, not by god, but by man himself. A process that had been set in motion three centuries earlier, had thus reached its fulfilment.
Man was now his own self-sufficient aesthetic principle. Beauty was manmade and man-serving, like the reason-based moral world from which it derived and which it sought to emulate.
