Age of Reason
Captivated by the achievements of early modern science and the apparently endless reach of human understanding, philosophers became preoccupied, toward the mid seventeeth century, with the comprehensive study of the mechanisms underlying human knowledge.
Renaissance humanists had posited the existence of a divine spark within us. By employing it to observe the world around them, the men of science had confirmed it. But the spark itself still remained a mystery. How had we come to know what we suddenly knew about the universe? By what means does knowledge enter our awareness? How can we be certain of the truth of the ideas we possess? It would be the task of the Enlightenment to address these queries; to dissect man’s inner spark, understand it, and give it its proper name: Reason.
In his Discourse on the Method, philosopher René Descartes argued that it was upon man’s Reason alone that he could and must build his corpus of knowledge of the truth of world around him. Reason, he argued, was an innate human faculty; universally present in and equally distributed among all member’s of our species. Our senses are misleading and insidious. They warp our perceptions of reality in ways we don’t fully understand, and can therefore not serve as reliable indicators of truth.
Reason, on the contrary, is infallible – provided, of course, it is tapped into effectively, with the precise and foolproof analytical methodology that Descartes himself lays out. So important, for Descartes, was our ability to reason, that he laid it at the foundation of his philosophy. It was his first principle, and his irrefutable ontological proof; we know we exist, not because we can see, feel, hear and touch the world, but because we can think out it. Or, as he tersely worded it, “I think therefore I am”.
Reason enables us to conceive, combine and elaborate ideas about the world. And because these ideas arise independently of experience, within the consciousness itself, they are a priori. In other words, we have no need of explicit recourse to our senses or direct experience to establish their truthfulness.
Partly as a reaction to Descartes’ rationalism, empiricist John Locke set forth an opposing thesis some fifty years later. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke argued that there could be no innate ideas. If there were, they would perforce need to be universal, and all children and simpletons would possess them. And there is, patently, no such universally known idea.
We’re therefore born ‘tabula rasa’, bereft of innate knowledge of any kind. All notions we acquire first enter our thinking minds through our senses as a direct result of our experiences. In a nod to Newton, his close personal friend, Locke picked up on the particle theory of matter and applied it to his own theory of knowledge. Throughout our lives, we register units of sensory input as simple ideas, which, when combined together, come to form more complex ideas, in much the same way as particles, which constitute the smallest conceivable units of matter, combine to form larger, more complex physical structures.
The Newtonian influence may even have led Locke to elaborate his decidedly atomistic social philosophy, in which each individual in a collective is an invaluable part of the functioning whole, each being born equal by nature. In his Second Treatise of Government (1689), Locke laid out four fundamental liberties to which, he argued, we all have right on account of the mere fact that we are born thinking, reasoning beings: life, health, freedom and property. These natural rights are universal and inalienable; inherent in all of us irrespective of our social rank, and defensible against outside violations – should the necessity of such defence arise.
Considering the absolutist political institutions and conditions of the time, it was a timely advance in thought. For centuries, man had lived a fearful existence under the tyranny of monarchical rule. And the unchecked power the medieval sovereign had wielded over his subjects had been rendered legitimate, at least partly, by the medieval conception of man. But if suddenly man was no longer cosmically insignificant, but a dignified moral entity in his own right, animated by the light of reason, he could be argued to possess, by virtue of his humanity alone, an integrity worthy of defence from external encroachments.
Here, the humanism of Pico della Mirandola acquired an added nuance. No longer was mankind, as a collective entity, worthy merely of a deference distinct from that generally shown god; now each of its single members could also lay claim to the very same by virtue of his uniqueness and separateness from all others.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau would later render explicit this nascent individualism in his Social Contract (1762):
“As soon as the multitude is united thus in a single body, no one can injure any one of its members without attacking the whole, still less injure the whole without each member feeling it.”
It was the end of the rule of tyranny and the dawn of the age of Reason. The sovereign had no more right, now, to gratuitously undermine the dignity of the individual than god did the dignity of man – not by force, fear mongering, nor by any other means.
This idea would gather such momentous force throughout the century as to culminate in, arguably, the most significant political event in the West’s second millennium: the French Revolution of 1789. Humanity, 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’. As the Enlightenment 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.
