The Enlightenment: What and Who?

The Enlightenment: What and Who? L E ST E R G. C R O C K E R zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCB The prob lemof interpreting the Enlightenment as a movement can serve as a classic example of the saw, “every man has his own history.” When we compare the major interpretive works —those of Tocqueville, Taine, Mornet, Hazard, Becker, Frankel, Cassirer, Diaz, Ehrard, Cobban, Gay, Gusdorf, Venturi, Voegelin, Horkheimer and Adorno, and (if I may) my own —it is obvious that they add up to discord. We cannot put them together, even eclectically, and emerge with some general or unified result. Each historian is observing the same phenomenon and seeing different things. We cannot easily separate meaningful facts from the context of the mind that observes them. All sensation undergoes interpretation, and nowhere more so than in historiography. It is not my purpose to examine and evaluate the above-mentioned studies, to specify their merits and shortcomings, both of which may be attributed to all of them. It is rather to discuss some basic or elementary problems of historiography which they make manifest by their vast diver­ gences and which deserve careful scrutiny. As in mathematics, elemen­ tary problems are often the most difficult ones, sometimes indeed unsolvable. I should like, then, to inquire into two such problems and to propose some tentative, not final answers. One is the meaning of the word “Enlightenment” itself and how we should go about finding that meaning. To put it differently, who were the men of the Enlightenment? The second problem, on which I shall touch only briefly, is the influence and value of the historical movement the word denotes. The first problem divides into two questions. 335 3 3 6 / C R O C K E R zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The first of these concerns the prob lemof defining the Enlightenment. “Enlightenment thought” and “eighteenth-century thought” are clearly not coextensive or covalent terms, or even chronologically coterminous.1 Whatever broad segment of the latter one may choose to define, “Enlight­ enment” presents so many diversities, contradictions and conflicts that no definition appears adequate or completely valid; all involve arbitrary exelusions and inclusions that defy definition. For some reason, a compulsion to define has been an attribute of Brit­ ish and American scholars particularly. Gay, in the Preface to his second volume, announces that it “completes my attempt at defining the Enlight­ enment.”3 His definition may be summarized by his titles: “The Rise of Modern Paganism” and “The Science of Freedom.” (I confess that I have never been able to attribute a meaning to the latter phrase.) Cobban is substantially close to Gay’s second title. Franklin Ford, obviously vexed by the problem, has attempted a “Useful Redefinition,” consisting of five items.4 Definitions are hard to maintain, especially in the writing of history, and we find “definitional” writers overflowing their definitions or strain­ ing to live within them. D’Alembert and Buffon had warned against defini­ tions. As D’Alembert said, they do not explain the character of things as they are, but only enumerate “des idees simples renfermees dans la no­ tion que nous formons de ces etres.”5 According to Buffon, definitions are “imperfect representations,” because they do not exhaust the phenome­ na or account for gradations. True knowlege, he says, cannot come from such arbitrary conventions, but only from descriptions.6 Hegel later wrote, “Definitions should be stated in universal terms, while to use them immediately exposes in all its nakedness what contradicts them.”7 Defini­ tions impose a restrictive order on phenomena, one with which historical reality usually does not coincide. History is recalcitrant to Linnaean clas­ sifications and clear distinctions that are satisfying because they help us to think. A certain stubbornness of the facts remains. We may apply to definitional approaches what Lawrence Stone says of “unilinear theories” of history: they ignore “the lack of uniformity of the directions of the trends,” the failures of the various trends “to synchronize in the way they ought if the definition is to fit.” They “reduce the enormous diversity ... to a conformity which has never existed in real life.”8 However, while we may not be able to fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA define Enlightenment...