De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 43

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[2011/1]

Enlightenment? Ideas, transfers, circles, attitudes, practices
Christophe Madelein

The papers in this issue of De Achttiende Eeuw were presented at a conference organized in Ghent on 22 and 23 January 2010 by the Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw and called Enlightenment? Ideas, transfers, circles, attitudes, practices. Its starting point was the persistent political and public interest in the classic question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ It is a question that has riddled scholars from the late Enlightenment itself to the late twentieth century, and, indeed, our own day.

Kant famously defined Enlightenment as mankind's emergence from self-imposed Unmündigkeit¹, while his contemporary Moses Mendelssohn - in a very similar vein - stressed the search for knowledge as a defining characteristic.² Closer to our own times Michel Foucault suggested - again, not all that differently from Kant's and Mendelssohn's interpretations - that we may envisage modernity, which he sees as the attempt to answer the famous question, as an attitude rather than as a period of history.³ Modernity, in this sense, is accompanied by a feeling of novelty and, more importantly, Enlightenment entails a permanent critique of our historical era. This critical attitude is expressed in a series of practices that are analysed along three axes: the axis of knowledge, the axis of power, the axis of ethics. All this implies that the Enlightenment project is continuing to this very day.⁴ It should therefore not surprise us that ‘Enlightenment’ emerges in present-day debates on basic cultural assumptions concerning knowledge, power relations, and ethics. Whether or not one agrees with Kant, or Mendelssohn, or Foucault, is not so much what is at stake in my present argument; what is important is that the question still remains unanswered. In his contribution to this volume John Robertson makes a distinction between Enlightenment scholarship and the public understanding of Enlightenment. And indeed, ‘Enlightenment’ has been invoked in recent public debates on, for instance, attitudes towards religion. The question remains relevant, and it is the scholar's task to reflect on the question,

1 Kant, ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’

2 Mendelssohn, ‘Über die Frage: was heißt aufklären?’ Both texts were responses to that question, posed by the Berlinische Monatschrift in 1784.

3 Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’

4 Note that Foucault's article asks what Enlightenment is, not what it was. The essay was not published during his lifetime, but it is usually dated 1984, the year of Foucault's death. It was first published in English in The Foucault Reader in that same year, the French original appeared in volume 4 of Dits et écrits.

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and provide answers.

However, this volume is not the umpteenth ‘definitive’ answer. Rather, the organizers proposed that contributors take the meaning of ‘Enlightenment’ as the starting point for debate. The conference sought to find an answer to the question what the Enlightenment was and still is. Ever since historians have begun searching for Enlightenments other than the French avant-garde of the eighteenth century, research has focused on various national contexts, on radical and moderate varieties, and also on various disciplinary contexts, such as the Enlightenment in theology, physics, or law. The speakers at the conference were invited to submit papers grounded in certain ideas, transfers, circles, attitudes, or practices, going beyond borders and disciplines, and providing a wider picture of the era. This was an attempt to find new entries into a period that is highly topical, but also overloaded by so many and often even contradictory interpretations that one should first ask which Enlightenment one means before starting the discussion. Should the Enlightenment be regarded as a contest of ideas, a communication process, a developing taste or lifestyle, an empowering culture, or just as a collection of experiences? Or is it to be seen as all of these?

The goal of the conference was to bring together the authors of some of the most prominent recent interpretations of Enlightenment culture and thus to stimulate debate on the very nature of eighteenth-century Enlightenment culture. Over the last few years several new interpretations of the Enlightenment have been launched, and it would be highly beneficial to current eighteenth-century research in the Low Countries to engage in this debate: the Dutch Enlightenment simply cannot be properly understood without taking into consideration the major shifts of paradigm taking place in the wider context of Enlightenment studies. The contributions in this volume are decidedly international in scope, or rather, as some would have it, transnational. They constitute a debate not so much on the intertwining of several national traditions as on the notion of an Enlightenment culture transcending national boundaries.

In his contribution John Robertson tries to overcome the fragmentation which Enlightenment research has witnessed. He asks: ‘Do we need more than one Enlightenment?’ Instead of studying several national varieties of Enlightenment thought, Robertson proposes for consideration a ‘transnational’ Enlightenment, a set of values and ideas that were discussed in the public sphere of Europe, a ‘Republic of Letters’ across national borders. Robertson is not the first to present this argument, but most of the other international

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views on the Enlightenment stress an opposition between Enlightenment on the one hand and religion on the other, as Jonathan Israel for example does in his much-debated book Radical Enlightenment. Robertson suggests that Enlightenment is not so much a rejection of religion as rather a willingness to re-think the study of man and nature independently of religion.

In an almost direct response to Robertson's claim regarding religion and Enlightenment, David Sorkin identifies ‘Four characteristics of the Religious Enlightenment’. He, too, refers to the plurality of Enlightenments: Israel's notion of a radical Enlightenment also entails a moderate Enlightenment, and a counter-Enlightenment. Still, Sorkin also stresses the need for ‘a multinational and comparative history of the religious Enlightenment that emphasizes similarities while recognizing, and explicating, differences’. The four characteristics that he singles out are reasonableness, toleration, the public sphere, and the state nexus. All in all, these do not contradict Robertson's notion of a transnational Enlightenment. Sorkin prefers to talk about an Enlightenment spectrum rather than a unitary project, but his basic assumption is a similar one: there is an Enlightenment in the singular.

Robertson and Sorkin stress the notion of an Enlightenment circulating in a public sphere: an important aspect of eighteenth-century culture is its sociability. Their Enlightenment, however, is an intellectual movement: it is rather elitist. Peter Clark presents another side of what he refers to as the ‘European Enlightenment’. While Robertson and Sorkin focus mainly on the ideas, and the notion of transfers and (intellectual) circles, Clark's approach favours practices. In his article, the notion of sociability is the starting point for an analysis of the circles in which cultural and leisure activity were deployed. More specifically, he delves into the clubs and societies that helped shape sports as we know them today. In that analysis, it becomes clear that the development and distribution of ideas and practices was ‘always uneven and patchy’. Clark lays bare both circuits and short-circuits in eighteenth-century Europe. Enlightenment, whatever shape it took, may have been a shared basic project, but its actual development cannot be regarded as a linear narrative.

In fact, the same could be said about the Society for the Encouragement of Learning, the subject of a case study that Alise Jameson presents. Again ‘Enlightenment’ refers to a set of values shared across several cultural and social boundaries. And again, sociability proves to be a crucial factor. Jameson offers ‘an illustration of how certain Enlightenment values, such as sociability, improvement, intellectualism, were put in practice’. In the wake

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of the introduction of copyright (1710), the Society for the Encouragement of Learning helped frame a new concept of authorship. But, as Jameson shows, the Society's seemingly noble intentions of emancipating authors and educating the reading public were economically motivated as well: the Society had to compete with booksellers on an already existing book market with its own market mechanisms. This economic stance naturally had its repercussions for the position of ‘the author’. In this intellectually elitist field, as in the socially non-elitist field discussed by Clark, complex and contradictory forces helped shape modern ideas and practices.

In the final contribution to this issue Hanco Jürgens returns to the question already posed by the Berlinische Monatschrift: What is Enlightenment? But, instead of offering an answer to that question, he aims to look at the question itself: how do we arrive at an answer to the question, how do we study Enlightenment? Jürgens does not present a strict answer, but compares the study of the Enlightenment to research on the historically, and perhaps also mentally, close 1960s. This not only reveals some remarkable parallels, it also emphasizes that historical research starts with a researcher, who is necessarily historically determined. Kant's and Mendelssohn's answers in 1784 are different from those of Foucault in 1984. And the answers proposed in the present volume differ again. Foucault opened his essay as follows:

Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to collect opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already; there is not much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth century, editors preferred to question the public on problems that did not yet have solutions. I don't know whether that practice was more effective, it was unquestionably more entertaining.⁵

This special issue deals with a subject everyone has an opinion about, but I believe Foucault is wrong on two counts: the reader of this volume will learn something new, and it certainly is entertaining.

5 Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, 32. ‘De nos jours, quand un journal pose une question à ses lecteurs, c'est pour leur demander leur avis sur un sujet où chacun a déjà son opinion: on ne risque pas d'apprendre grand-chose. Au XVIIIème siècle, on préférait interroger le public sur des problèmes auxquels justement on n'avait pas encore de réponse. Je ne sais si c'était plus efficace; c'était plus amusant’ (Foucault, ‘Qu'est-ce que les Lumières?’, 562).

About the author

Christophe Madelein (1978) works at the department of literature (section Dutch) of Ghent University. He is the author of Juigchen in den adel der menschlijke natuur.

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Het verhevene in de Nederlanden (1770-1830) (2011), a study of the sublime in the Netherlands. His current research is focused on national history in Dutch epics in the late eighteenth century, and on theories of historicity. E-mail: Christophe. [e-mail].

Literature

M. Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in: M. Foucault, The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.) (New York 1984) 32-50.

M. Foucault, ‘Qu'est-ce que les Lumières?’, in: M. Foucault, Dits et écrits IV (Paris 1994) 562-578.

I. Kant, ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’, in: I. Kant, Akademie Ausgabe VIII: Abhandlungen nach 1781 (Berlin 1912) 35-42.

M. Mendelssohn, ‘Über die Frage: was heißt aufklären?’, in: M. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften III (Hildesheim 1972) 399-403.