What Is Enlightenment

[shakeel shaikh]

What is enlightenment?




By Prof Khwaja Masud


A DEBATING club, called the Berlin Wednesday Club, invited its members in 1783 to respond to the question: “What is enlightenment?”

A strenuous debate followed. The philosopher Immanuel Kant joined in the fray with his well-known essay: ‘An answer to the question, what is enlightenment?’ Kant defined it in simple words: “Enlightenment is man’s release from the self-incurred immaturity which is his inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Sapere aude! Having courage to use your own reason! — that is the motto of enlightenment”.

Kant’s call of Sapere aude is an invocation of a new standard of reason, meant to challenge all a priori truths that we accept without reasoning due to cultural conditioning or overt indoctrination. To begin with, the Enlightenment refers to the historical epoch which began with the English Revolution in 1688 and culminated in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789.

There was no one unified movement called the Enlightenment that swept through all of Europe simultaneously. There were, rather, a series of debates and critiques directed against the authority of inherited intellectual and religious traditions.

These were led by a new class of intellectuals, who made a living by writing for newspapers, periodicals and cheap novels; and by giving lectures on current sciences in coffee houses and pubs.

For all the national differences, the movements included in the rubric of the Enlightenment were marked by, to quote Alan Kors, the editor of a new Encyclopaedia of the Enlightenment, “an increasingly critical attitude towards inherited authority, a sense that armed with new methods and new powers, the human mind could re-examine claims upon it including the claims of religion.” Sapere aude — dare to know — was the motivating force behind the entire movement.

Finally Enlightenment is the precondition to any progressive politics. As Stephen Bronner writes in his book, Reclaiming the Enlightenment, nearly all aspects of modern life, especially the ideals of personal autonomy, tolerance, reason and secularism, developed against the backdrop of Enlightenment’s protest against the exercise of arbitrary power, the force of custom and ingrained prejudice that justified social misery.

On this reasoning, it was Enlightenment that made real the ideals of modernity that were only latent in the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. Enlightenment, that is Sapere aude (dare to know), is considered by many historians as the true beginning of modernity.

Against this background, let us once again return to Kant’s motto. Why did he make Sapere aude — the courage to use your own reason — the distinguishing mark of his times? After all the Age of Enlightenment was hardly the first to apply the power of reason to comprehend nature and society.

Human beings in all societies and in all epochs have exercised the powers of observation, logic and experimentation, along with imagination and insight, to understand and materially manipulate the force of nature. What was so special about reason in the Age of Enlightenment that Kant turned it into a rallying cry for freedom?

While the philosophers of Enlightenment exhorted their fellow citizens to live by the light of reason, they were simultaneously redefining reason by setting limits on what can legitimately be known, given the kind of sensatory apparatus and reasoning powers human beings are endowed with.

The philosophers and architects of the age of reason, from Locke and Hume to Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu, Kant, Lessing and Marx and Jefferson, Paine and Franklin were impressed by the success of the scientific revolution, especially the disciplined empiricism of Newton.

This, to the philosophers of Enlightenment, was in refreshing contrast to the method of the theologians.

Newton’s method became the paradigm of reason for the Age of Enlightenment. This was a monumental change. This was the philosophical core of Enlightenment, the rallying cry of enlightened human beings.

A rationalist offensive against superstition can only be meaningful if it is a part of a larger political movement that can meet people’s aspirations for existential security and justice in this life.

Iqbal is also a standard-bearer of Kantian Sapere aude. He says:

Cut your path with an axe of your own,

It is sin to tread the beaten path of others!

If you achieve something original and unique,

Even a sin becomes a virtue.

Once again, indeed over and over again, Iqbal never tires of proclaiming originality of thought and action.

A renaissance of national life!

It is a source of life’s miracles,

Transforming granite into the purest of pearls.

He sums up:

Would you ensnare the phoenix of knowledge,

Rely less on belief and learn to doubt.