Lumières

The Lumières (literally in English: ''The Lights'') was a cultural, philosophical, literary and intellectual movement beginning in the second half of the 17th century, originating in France, then western Europe and spreading throughout the rest of Europe. It included philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, John Locke, Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton. This movement is influenced by the Scientific Revolution in southern Europe arising directly from the Italian Renaissance with people like Galileo Galilei. Over time it came to mean the , in English the Age of Enlightenment.

Members of the movement saw themselves as a progressive élite, and battled against religious and political persecution, fighting against what they saw as the irrationality, arbitrariness, obscurantism and superstition of the previous centuries. They redefined the study of knowledge to fit the ethics and aesthetics of their time. Their works had great influence at the end of the 18th century, in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution.

This intellectual and cultural renewal by the Lumières movement was, in its strictest sense, limited to Europe. These ideas were well understood in Europe, but beyond France the idea of "enlightenment" had generally meant a light from outside, whereas in France it meant a light coming from knowledge one gained.

In the most general terms, in science and philosophy, the Enlightenment aimed for the triumph of reason over faith and belief; in politics and economics, the triumph of the bourgeois over nobility and clergy.

Philosophical themes

Scientific Revolution

Advances in scientific method

The Lumières movement was in large part an extension of the discoveries of Nicolas Copernicus in the 16th century, which were not well known during his lifetime, and more so of the theories of Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642). Inquiries to establish certain axioms and mathematical proofs continued as Cartesianism throughout the 17th century.

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646 – 1716) and Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) had independently and almost simultaneously developed the calculus, and René Descartes (1596 – 1650) the idea of monads. British philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and David Hume adopted an approach, later called empiricism, which preferred the use of the senses and experience over that of pure reason.

Baruch Spinoza took Descartes' side, most of all in his ''Ethics''. But he demurred from Descartes in ("On the Improvement of the Understanding"), where he argued that the process of perception is not one of pure reason, but also the senses and intuition. Spinoza's thought was based on a model of the universe where God and Nature are one and the same. This became an anchor in the Age of Enlightenment, held across the ages from Newton's time to that of Thomas Jefferson's (1743–1826).

A notable change was the emergence of a naturalist philosophy, spreading across Europe, embodied by Newton. The scientific method – exploring experimental evidence and constructing consistent theories and axiom systems from observed phenomena – was undeniably useful. The predictive ability of its resulting theories set the tone for his masterwork ''Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica'' (1687). As an example of scientific progress in the Age of Reason and the Lumières movement, Newton's example remains unsurpassed, in taking observed facts and constructing a theory which explains them a priori, for example taking the motions of the planets observed by Johannes Kepler to confirm his law of universal gravitation. Naturalism saw the unification of pure empiricism as practiced by the likes of Francis Bacon with the axiomatic, "pure reason" approach of Descartes.

Belief in an intelligible world ordered by a Christian God became the crux of philosophical investigations of knowledge. On one side, religious philosophy concentrated on piety, and the omniscience and ultimately mysterious nature of God; on the other were ideas such as deism, underpinned by the impression that the world was comprehensible by human reason and that it was governed by universal physical laws. God was imagined as a "Great Watchmaker"; experimental natural philosophers found the world to be more and more ordered, even as machines and measuring instruments became ever more sophisticated and precise.

The most famous French natural philosopher of the 18th century, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, was critical of this natural theology in his masterwork ''Histoire Naturelle''. Buffon rejected the idea of ascribing to divine intervention and the "supernatural" that which science could now explain. This criticism brought him up against the Sorbonne which, dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, never stopped trying to censor him. In 1751, he was ordered to redact some propositions contrary to the teaching of the Church; having proposed 74,000 years for the age of the Earth, this was contrary to the Bible which, using the scientific method on data found in biblical concordances, dated it to around 6,000 years. The Church was also hostile to his no less illustrious contemporary Carl von Linné, and some have concluded that the Church simply refused to believe that order existed in nature.

Individual liberty and the social contract

This effort to research and elucidate universal laws, and to determine their component parts, also became an important element in the construction of a philosophy of individualism, where everyone had rights based only on fundamental human rights. There developed the philosophical notion of the thoughtful subject, an individual who could make decisions based on pure reason and no longer in the yoke of custom. In ''Two Treatises of Government'', John Locke argued that property rights are not held in common but are totally personal, and made legitimate by the work required to obtain the property, as well as its protection (recognition) by others. Once the idea of natural law is accepted, it becomes possible to form the modern view of what we would now call political economy.

In his famous essay '' Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?'' (, ), Immanuel Kant defined the Lumières thus:

The Lumières' philosophy was thus based on the realities of a systematic, ordered and understandable world, which required Man also to think in an ordered and systematic way. As well as physical laws, this included ideas on the laws governing human affairs and the divine right of kings, leading to the idea that the monarch acts with the consent of the people, and not the other way around. This legal concept informed Jean-Jacques Rousseau's theory of the social contract as a reciprocal relationship between men, and more so between families and other groups, which would become increasingly stronger, accompanied by a concept of individual inalienable rights. The powers of God were moot amongst atheist Lumières.

The Lumières movement redefined the ideas of liberty, property and rationalism, which took on meanings that we still understand today, and introduced into political philosophy the idea of the free individual, liberty for all guaranteed by the State (and not the whim of the government) backed by a strong rule of law.

To understand the interaction between the Age of Reason and the Lumières, one approach is to compare Thomas Hobbes with John Locke. Hobbes, who lived for three quarters of the 17th century, had worked to create an ontology of human emotions, ultimately trying to make order out of an inherently chaotic universe. In the alternate, Locke saw in Nature a source of unity and universal rights, with the State's assurance of protection. This "culture revolution" over the 17th and 18th centuries was a battle between these two viewpoints of the relationship between Man and Nature.

This resulted, in France, in the spread of the notion of human rights, finding expression in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which greatly influenced similar declarations of rights in the following centuries, and left in its wake global political upheaval. Especially in France and the United States, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and freedom of thought were held to be fundamental rights.

Social values and manifests

Representation of the people

The core values supported by the Lumières were religious tolerance, liberty and social equality.
In England, America and France, the application of these values resulted in a new definition of natural law and a separation of political power. To these values may be added a love of nature and the cult of reason.

Philosophical goals

The ideal figure of the Lumières was a philosopher, a man of letters with a social function of exercising his reason in all domains to guide his and others' conscience, to advocate a value system and use it in discussing the problems of the time. He is a committed individual, involved in society, an (''Encyclopédie''; "Honest man who approaches everything with reason"), (Diderot, "Who concerns himself with revealing error").

The rationalism of the Lumières was not to the exclusion of aesthetics. Reason and sentiment went hand-in-hand in their philosophy. The thoughts of the Lumières were equally capable of intellectual rigour and sentimentality.

Despite controversy about the limits of their philosophy, especially when they denounced black slavery, many Lumières criticised slavery, or colonialism, or both, including Montesquieu in ''De l'Esprit des Lois'' (while keeping a "personal" slave), Denis Diderot in '' Supplément au voyage de Bougainville'', Voltaire in ''Candide'' and Guillaume-Thomas Raynal in his encyclopaedic ''Histoire des deux Indes'', the very model of 18th-century anticolonialism to which, among others, Diderot and d’Holbach contributed. It was stated without any proof that one of their number, Voltaire, had shares in the slave trade.

Encyclopaedic goals

At the time, there was a particular taste for compendia of "all knowledge". This ideal found an instance in Diderot and d'Alembert's ("Encyclopaedia, or Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts"), usually known simply as the ''Encyclopédie''. Published between 1750 and 1770 it aimed to lead people out of ignorance through the widest dissemination of knowledge.

Criticism

The Lumières movement was, for all its existence, pulled in two directions by opposing social forces: on one side, a strong spiritualism accompanied by a traditional faith in the religion of the Church; on the other, the rise of an anticlerical movement, critical of the differences between religious theory and practice, which was most manifest in France.

Anticlericism was not the only source of tension in France: some noblemen contested monarchical power and the upper classes wanted to see greater fruit from their labours. A relaxing of morals fomented opinion against absolutism and the Ancient Order. According to Dale K. Van Kley, Jansenism in France also became a source of division.

The French judicial system showed itself to be outdated. Even though commercial law had become codified during the 17th century, there was no uniform, or codified, civil law.

Voltaire

This social and legal background was criticised in works by the likes of Voltaire. Exiled in England between 1726 and 1729, he studied the works of John Locke and Isaac Newton, and the English monarchy. He became well known for his denunciation of injustices such as those against Jean Calas, Pierre-Paul Sirven, François-Jean de la Barre and Thomas Arthur, comte de Lally.

The Lumières philosophy saw its climax in the middle of the 18th century.

For Voltaire, it was obvious that if the monarch can get the people to believe unreasonable things, then he can get them to ''do'' unreasonable things. This axiom became the basis for his criticism of the Lumières, and led to the basis of romanticism: that constructions from pure reason created as many problems as they solved.

According to the Lumières philosophers, the crucial point of intellectual progress consisted of the synthesis of knowledge, enlightened by human reason, with the creation of a sovereign moral authority. A contrary point of view that developed, arguing that such a process would be swayed by social conventions, leading to a "New Truth" based on reason that was but a poor imitation of the ideal and unassailable truth.

The Lumières movement thus tried to find a balance between the idea of a "natural" liberty (or autonomy) and the freedom ''from'' that liberty, that is to say, the recognition that the autonomy found in nature was at odds with the discipline required for pure reason. At the same time, with various monarchs' reforms, there was a piecemeal attempt to redefine the order of society, and the relationship between monarch and subjects. The idea of a natural order was equally prevalent in scientific thought, for example, in the works of the biologist Carl von Linné.

Kant

In Germany, Immanuel Kant (like Rousseau, defining himself among the Lumières) heavily criticised the limitations of pure reason in his work ''Critique of Pure Reason'' (), but also that of English empiricism in ''Critique of Practical Reason'' (). Compared with the rather subjective metaphysics of Descartes, Kant developed a more objective viewpoint in this branch of philosophy.

Adam Smith

Great thinkers at the end of the Lumières movement (Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and even the young Goethe) adopted into their philosophy the ideas of self-organising and evolutionary forces. The Lumières' stance was then presented with reference to what was seen as a universal truth: that Good is fundamental in nature, but it is not self-evident. On the contrary, it is the advance of human reason that reveals this constant structure. Romanticism is the exact opposite of this stance.

Aestheticism

This resulted in reflections about urbanism. The Lumières' model town would be a joint effort between public provision and sympathetic architects, to create administrative or utilitarian buildings (town halls, hospitals, theatres, commissariats) all provided with views, squares, fountains, promenades, and so on.
The French Académie royale d'architecture was of the opinion that ("The beautiful is the pleasant"). For Abbé Laugier, on the contrary, the beautiful was that which was in line with rationality. The natural model for all architecture was the log cabin supported by four tree trunks, with four horizontal parts and a roof, respectively columns, entablature, and pediments. The model of a Greek temple was thus extended into the décor and the structure. This paradigm resulted in a change of style in the middle of the 18th century: Rococo was dismissed, Ancient Greece and Palladian architecture became the principal references for neoclassical architecture.

The University of Virginia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was founded by Thomas Jefferson. He drew up plans for parts of the campus based on the values of the Lumières.

The Place Stanislas at Nancy, France is the focus of an array of neoclassical urban buildings, and has been on the UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites in France