Tag Archives: Enlightenment

Arts, History, Philosophy

Philosophy: On Reason and Experience

AGE OF REASON AND ENLIGHTENMENT

“Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” – George Washington (1732–1799)

IN the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason – characterised by thinkers such as Descartes, Hobbes and Locke during the seventeenth century – brought about a seismic shift in emphasis in philosophical thought. Massive advances were made in the natural sciences and this in turn led to a questioning of old certainties and a rush of new and often competing ideas concerning everything from how knowledge and truth can be acquired and tested to the first seedlings of notions of democracy, representation and civil liberties. The floodgates opened, characterised best by Kant’s imperative in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” The human mind was emerging from the darkness of infancy and maturing like that of an enquiring child, while Kant urged people to “dare to know”. Reason and experience became the watchwords in this new philosophy, which was more concerned with how things actually are rather than how they could or possibly should be.

However, not all enlightenment was positive. There were darker consequences of this new awakening, as evidenced by the reign of terror following the French Revolution and by the work of possibly the most morose thinker of all time, Arthur Schopenhauer, who once wrote in an essay that everyone should swallow a live toad for breakfast to guarantee they wouldn’t have to experience anything else quite as dispiriting again for the rest of the day. It would also be a mistake to think that the status quo embraced the new enlightenment with open arms. The preface quote for this article is taken from George Washington’s farewell address to the American people and illustrates that although there was an explosion in free-thinking in some quarters, the old guard – the protectors of religious-based morality – were deeply suspicious and frightened of these new ideas about how to live in and view the world.

Reading the great thinkers of reason and experience shouldn’t be difficult. Most of what they had to say seems pretty self-evident today, obvious even, yet somehow their arguments can be difficult to follow. This is largely due to the intellectual zeal with which they approached their investigations and their fervent search for one over-arching, all-encompassing system of thought. It didn’t help either that this spirit of competitiveness led to petty rivalries. The German philosopher Schopenhauer had a hatred of Hegel bordering on the pathological. This drove him to take up a position at the University of Berlin, where Hegel had a seat, just to try and prove his ideas were more popular with the students (but he failed spectacularly). Nonetheless, readers should appreciate that the philosophers of the ages of reason and enlightenment represent a pivotal point in the history of philosophy.

“Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond… Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

HEGEL

Hegel was a major figure in German idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality was revolutionary at the time and a major factor in the development of some radical threads of left-wing political thought.

Hegel was born on 27 August 1770, in Stuttgart, Germany. He studied philosophy and classics at Tubingen, and after graduation became a tutor and explored theology. Hegel taught at Heidelberg and Berlin, where he wrote and explored philosophical and theological concepts.

His major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit (or mind), was published in 1807 and his ideas developed in other deeply complex works until his death, from cholera, in 1831.

Almost everything that Hegel was to develop over the rest of his life is prefigured in the Phenomenology, but the work is far from systematic and generally accepted as difficult to read. The Phenomenology attempts to present human history, with all its revolutions, wars and scientific discoveries, as an idealistic self-development of an objective Spirit or Mind.

His mark on history has been profound, in that his influence has spread throughout both left- and right- wing political thought. In fact, the interpreters of Hegel split into “left” and “right” camps. Marx drew inspiration from Hegel by developing the idea that history and reality should be viewed dialectically and that the process of change – the struggle – should be seen as a transition from the fragmentary towards the complete. This is a skewed development of what Hegel tried to suggest in phenomenology. However, in practical terms it is likely that Hegel may have approved of Marx’s revolutionary interpretation, as he was witness at close hand to revolutionary Europe towards the end of the eighteenth century. It is even said that he celebrated Bastille Day every year.

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Arts, Education, History, Philosophy

The philosophy of John Locke

A STUDY & INSIGHT

John Locke

JOHN LOCKE was a seventeenth-century English philosopher, famous for developing the Lockean social contract. This includes ideas surrounding the “state of nature” (the theoretical state of society that preceded government), “government with the consent of the governed”, and the natural rights of life, liberty, and estate. Locke was also the first to fully develop the idea of the tabula rasa (the theory that we are born with a “blank slate” mind which is formed by experience and perception).

. See also The philosophy of Kant

Locke was, arguably, the first English empiricist and therefore the creator of a philosophy that was seen at the time as being quintessentially English. He was a great political thinker and his ideas on governance greatly influenced the creators of the American constitution. There was a thread of secularism running throughout his work, though he found a place for God within his thinking, making him, in effect, a deist (a belief in god but not in divine revelation).

Empiricists broadly believe that knowledge can be acquired only through experience, primarily sensory experience, and that this experience is processed (reasoned) via the brain. The “tabula rasa” referred to the blank state of the mind before it has received any sensory input from which to construct knowledge of the world. This was distinct from the contemporary beliefs of rationalists such as Descartes whose famous statement, Cogito, ergo sum (I think therefore I am), is an example of a conclusion reached a priori – in other words it is a deductive belief, knowable without any experience in the matter.

An empiricist might say that we construct our view of reality through forming simple assumptions, from which we can create more complex ideas. For example, the simple idea of “yellow” comes from experiencing yellow again and again. Once one has also experienced the ideas of a “circle” and “heat”, one might combine the three to form the more complex idea of the sun. A rationalist, however, might believe that we are hardwired to “know” yellow – and heat and form – and that we can reason the idea of the sun without having experienced it.

Put simply, John Locke’s epistemology (philosophy of knowledge) was a precursor to the nature/nurture dichotomy that still causes debate today. From sofa arguments about children “getting that behaviour from you” to social debates about the causes of homosexuality and the nature of women’s role in society – all are, in part, indebted to Locke’s rejection of Descartes’ rationalism and his secularisation of the process of the acquirement of knowledge.

 

HE was also deemed a “probable-ist”. Suggesting that nothing was absolute, nothing was certain, and we can only infer and refine through logical deduction, Hobbes believed that all evidence points to probable connections and helps lead us to probable beliefs only. This in essence is the English methodology and, via its popularity throughout the intellectual circles in which Locke mixed, it helped to codify the scientific method that is still used today; namely, that knowledge is gained through measured experience and refined through repetition.

As with much philosophical thought and doctrine this can all seem semantically confusing. One might best exemplify empiricism by references to where it has been used allegorically or metaphorically. For example, the novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe has been styled as the first (great) empirical prose work and can certainly be read through the prism of empiricism. The island itself where Crusoe is stranded could be interpreted as a physical metaphor, but the analogy is strongest when referring to the hero’s initial lack of understanding or comprehension of his predicament (tabula rasa). Crusoe then begins to refer in his narration to “discovering”, “feeling”, “finding” and “seeing” things, and subsequently to “understanding” new experiences. Eventually he forms an idea of how the island works and his place in it and, using his new knowledge, he creates more complex constructs such as “huts”, “materials” and “contraptions”, exploring how he might survive there. Eventually he comes to dominate and own the place. Whether or not one gives credence to this interpretation, it is fair to say that Robinson Crusoe – though ostensibly a simple adventure yarn – was one of the first English-language novels to come at the time of the development of empiricism and the scientific method. It is possible that Defoe was unconsciously channelling these ideas even if he wasn’t doing so explicitly.

 

LOCKE was born in Wrington, Somerset and educated at Oxford, where he seemed destined for a career in medicine. In 1666 he met Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the First Earl of Shaftesbury, who became his friend and patron. Locke supervised a major operation to remove a hydatid cyst from Shaftesbury’s liver in 1668; the wits of the time found it very amusing that Shaftesbury’s liver needed a silver tap for the rest of his life. From 1675 to 1679 Locke lived in France, where he studied the work of Descartes, among others. Shaftesbury, who had been much engaged with parliamentary opposition to the house of Stuart, fled to Holland in 1681. Locke followed in 1683, returning to England after the accession of William of Orange in 1688. Over the course of the next twelve months Locke’s major philosophical works, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Civil Government, as well as the Letter Concerning Toleration, were published, the latter two anonymously. Locke’s final years saw the publication of Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) and The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). He was given minor administrative functions by the government – and, lived out his life quietly at the house of Damaris, Lady Masham, in Essex.

Although he is famous as the senior figure of British empiricism, Locke’s philosophy is more complex than this suggests. He rejected any place for “innate ideas” in the foundations of knowledge, and, is, in that sense anti-rationalistic. This view puts experience, or ideas of sensation and reflection, firmly at the basis of human understanding. However, Locke allowed the idea that some of our knowledge of objects gained from measurable aspects of physical reality, such as number, shape and so on, do give us an adequate representation of the world around us. These are an object’s primary qualities, as distinct from its secondary qualities, which are more subjective – such as its colour, smell or taste. But the power to know things derives from the all-knowing God, and “we more certainly know that there is a god than that there is anything else without us”.

 

ALTHOUGH Locke is thought of as the first great English philosopher of the scientific revolution, he became ally and “under-labourer” for Boyle and Newton. He himself was doubtful whether such natural philosophy could ever aspire to the condition of a science. By this he meant an activity capable of yielding rational and adequate insight into the real essences of things, yet also yielding us god-like. The task of scientific epistemology is to display what we do know, the various sources of knowledge, the proper employment, and above all the limits and doubtful capacities of our minds. It is through this theme that Locke connected his epistemology with the defence of religious toleration. This radical doctrine, together with his work on property and on the relationship between government and consent, is his enduring legacy to political philosophy.

Locke’s greatness lies in his close attention to the actual phenomena of mental life, but his philosophy is in fact balanced precariously between the radical empiricism of followers such as Berkeley and Hume and the theological world of reliance on faith that underpinned the message of Christianity. His views that religion and morality should be as open to the demands of demonstration and proof as mathematics stamps him as a key Enlightenment figure, even as his insistence on the primacy of ideas opened the way to more radical departures from that climate.

Footnotes:

Allegorical – Story with an underlying message as well as the literal one.

Empiricism – Doctrine that all knowledge derives from experience.

Epistemology – Study of the source, nature and limitations of knowledge.

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Arts, Education, History

(Short Essay) The Agricultural Revolution

1730

ALONGSIDE the Industrial Revolution came a revolution in agriculture. When agriculture first began, selected grass seeds were sown so that gradually improved varieties with larger ears were produced; in this way wheat and barley were developed from grasses. In the same way livestock rearing used selection. The principle of selection and selective breeding was long established. It was only in the eighteenth century that they became scientific in approach, and then development became rapid. The first step in this new agricultural revolution was the invention of a seed drill by Jethro Tull in 1701. This simple device, which pioneered sowing in rows and facilitated weeding, was improved eighty years later by the addition of gears to ensure the even distribution of seed.

Charles Townshend resigned from the British government in May 1730, at the age of 56, to begin a new career as an agricultural improver. Townshend, who became known as “Turnip” Townshend, observed the progress that the Dutch farmers were making by using scientific methods, and applied what he learnt on his own estates. He found that he could keep livestock through the winter by feeding them on turnips. By reserving a field or two for growing turnips as a fodder crop, he eliminated the need to slaughter most of his flocks and herds each autumn. The animals could be kept alive through the winter and slaughtered as and when there was a demand. This development meant that for the first time within the British Isles fresh meat became available all the year round. It also reduced the need to use expensive spices to disguise the taste of rotting meat, improved the safety of food, and allowed the cattle to grow bigger. By 1732 the average bullock sold at Smithfield cattle market in London weighed 550 pounds, compared with 370 pounds in 1710. There were many gains from just one change in practice.

Selective breeding by Leicestershire farmer Robert Bakewell led to the creation of a new breed of sheep, the Leicester, in 1755. Five years later Bakewell started experimenting with selective breeding of beef cattle, and by 1770 he had produced animals with deeper, wider bodies on shorter legs, animals that carried much more meat. He worked on the simple idea that “like produces like”, each year only breeding from the most suitable stock.

Crop rotation was developed in a more scientific way, to ensure that each farm produced the maximum amount of food. This intensification of agriculture led to a marked increase in food production in Britain and other European countries following similar paths. By 1770, the UK was producing a surplus of potatoes for the first time. The potato had until that time been grown exclusively as a subsistence crop; now there was a surplus that was available for sale at markets and in shops.

In 1772 Thomas Coke started a programme of selective animal husbandry that would result in the creation of Devon Cattle, Suffolk pigs and Southdown sheep. By 1780 the agrarian revolution was well under way, with higher quality seed in general use, more scientific crop rotation (pioneered by Jethro Tull in 1720), more efficiently designed tools and generally increased productivity. Thomas Jefferson wrote rather apologetically in his Notes on Virginia about the extensive nature of agriculture in America at that time. “The indifferent state of agriculture among us does not proceed from a want of knowledge merely. It is from our having such quantities of land to waste as we please. In Europe the object is to make the most of their land, labour being abundant; here it is to make the most of our labour, land being abundant.”

In other words, it was the pressure of a high population density that produced the revolution, the intensification of agriculture in Europe. But the need to produce more food throughout the world would eventually come, as population levels rose.

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