The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (review)

Reminiscent of his previous work, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (1993), Louis Dupré scores highly in this, his latest analysis of the Enlightenment epoch. "To investigate what is new in the basic concepts of this later period of modernity and to find out how it has affected our own culture has been the purpose of this study," he writes. Dupré's erudition saturates every page. There are few elements of the period he passes over—philosophy, science, history, aesthetics, social theory, religion, are all given a thorough inspection. What this yields is not simply an answer to the question, "Is the Enlightenment project still valid?" The question suggests, for Dupré, "that the problems of the Enlightenment are due not to a subsequent deviation from the original plan, but rather to an inadequate conception of that plan."

Central to these problems is the nature of the self, as both a "knowing subject and the substance to be known," a problem lifted up by Descartes and still with us today. How can we know ourselves? Locke altered the problem by asking how language related to meaning. To be sure, these are very old questions, and Dupré traces their genesis to Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas. But he also stipulates that "not before Herder and Hamann in the second half of the eighteenth century does the notion that language conditions thinking as much as thinking conditions language make its appearance." The role of symbol, not merely in language but especially in art, took on new form and the author's insight here is as penetrating as his exposition is elegant. In a poignant line describing Jean-Baptiste Chardin (1699-1779), Dupré calls the artist "the loving observer of ordinary objects and domestic intimacy," who "succeeds in directly conveying the touch of velvet, the shine of polished brass, the smell of freshly baked bread." Where Renaissance artists crafted their vision in accord with classical aspirations, the Enlightenment artist found inspiration in the familiar. Yet for thinkers like Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783), the creative impulses of these artists were hardly differentiated from more "scientific" inclinations since for many the sciences were classed by faculty—memory, reason, imagination. Rationalists chose to downplay imagination, including Samuel Johnson, who called it "a licentious and vagrant faculty." Nevertheless, the process and product of the imagination can often yield that which is beautiful and true. This led Dupré to delve into the aesthetic theory of Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713), for the connections between genius and the sublime.

The beautiful and the true are allied with the good, and Dupré takes up Kant's question of whether feelings can ever determine the course of moral life (for Kant, they cannot). Kant idealized the fullness of human being (Humanität), however unattainable. We are hemmed in by the vicissitudes of competing rights and the ebb and flow of history itself. Here Providence comes under scrutiny. Decades before Kant, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), asserted that the hand of the divine is in eternal history, an amalgamation of the cyclic histories of known civilizations. For Dupré, this arouses the suspicion that Vico was a theological determinist. "He who is not pious cannot be truly wise," Vico wrote in The New Science (1725). There are further echoes of this sentiment in Herder and, one might add, in the thought of the present pope.

Admittedly, this all too brief summary of this book's contents can hardly do justice to the grand sweep of Dupré's narrative, which amounts to mature reflections on the pantheon of heroes who, each in their own way, bequeath to the modern age all that gives life meaning, joy, and integrity.