For the most part, this categorization of the era was done after the fact by scholars. For instance, when I saw Gordon Wood speak at the James Madison Program at Princeton, he noted, the Founders didn't self consciously say to themselves, (I'm paraphrasing Wood) "We are living in the age of Enlightenment." (He noted this when explaining the context of why America's Founders were the product of "Enlightenment.")
Yet they did commonly use enlightenment terminology. Terms and qualifiers like "benign" "benevolent," "sober," "rational," "reasonable," "liberal," "enlightened," to name of few. [I blogged about that here; also see Tom Van Dyke's summary of Philip Hamburger's article on a related matter.]
Read for yourself the search engine results when one puts the term "enlightened" into George Washington's extant corpus.
Or this particular quotation of Washington's speaking to the Swedenborgians:
We have abundant reason to rejoice that in this Land the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart. In this enlightened Age and in this Land of equal liberty it is our boast, that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States. [Bold mine.]
The first thinker to self consciously understand theirs was an "age of Enlightenment" -- I have found was Immanuel Kant. That is, apparently, where the meme originated.
9 comments:
I was noticing yesterday that Alexander Hamilton uses the term enlightened with some frequency in "First Report on the Public Credit" (1790). Although I did not track it carefully, I have the sense that his usage there often refers to individuals whose individual self-interest corresponds well with the national interest. The usage brought into my memory that single passage in The Wealth of Nations where Adam Smith deploys the term "hidden hand".
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Epoche'
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Mostly, our experiences are realized in the bracketed time frame in which we have them.
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I don't imagine the Founders were much different that the rest of us in this sense.
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Whether they used the term "enlightenment" or not, there was a general consensus at this time that civilization had greatly advanced over the last couple of centuries and could be expected to continue to advance. Samuel Johnson for example casually refers to Shakespeare having lived in a "barbarous" age. Voltaire was so fond of boasting of this advance in civilization that a later writer (I think Schlegel) sarcastically claimed that if you had faith in Voltaire as a historian you would conclude that all Europe was practicing cannibalism until the reign of Louis XV.
Jeffrey Kramer
One reason why I think the "enlightenment" discussion is important is technological advances. If one looks at the standard of living around the time of Christ and compare it to the time of the American Founding, though there were some advances, there really weren't a whole lot of differences. Fast forward two hundred years. But it all seemed to take off around 1800.
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Try it really "took off" with the advent of America's Civil War when it seems the intentions of the key Founders were finally brought to a place of reason in spite of the ideological Dixie cry that the South would never give up an that it will rise again.
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America seems to be engaged in that struggle one again.
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But when Johnson talked of the barbarous nature of Elizabethan life, he didn't mean that they were technologically backward; he meant that they enjoyed bearbaiting. The advancement he had in mind was in general knowledge and in refinement of mind: people were becoming more polite, generous, sensible. Newton's Principia was revered, not because it made led to technological progress that made material life better, but because it showed our growing capacity to understand nature and nature's God.
Jeffrey Kramer
Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken, themselves to errour. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull. If I could have allowed myself to gratify my vanity at the expence of truth, what fame might I have acquired. Every thing which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through my mind long before he wrote.---Dr Johnson
I love the "milk the bull" part.
Dr Johnson: the original "Commonsense Conservative." And still the only one I would willingly listen to. :-)
Jeffrey Kramer
Speaking of technology, more than any single idea or person it was the printing press that made it all happen. As printing became more sophisticated and wide spread it allowed the mass transfer, quickly and accurately, of knowledge and ideas. Much of the earlier science, math and philosophy that had largely been lost to the west, started trickling into Europe in the 12th & 13th centuries and certainly by the 15th-16th centuries. Disseminating these ideas eventually made modern science and technology, certainly on the scale we start seeing by the 19th century, possible.
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